As I look round on this assemblage, and think of all that it
represents, I cannot choose but be moved to the soul by the troubles
of the life of civilised man, and the hope that thrusts itself
through them; I cannot refrain from giving you once again the
message with which, as it seems, some chance-hap has charged me:
that message is, in short, to call on you to face the latest danger
which civilisation is threatened with, a danger of her own breeding:
that men in struggling towards the complete attainment of all the
luxuries of life for the strongest portion of their race should
deprive their whole race of all the beauty of life: a danger that
the strongest and wisest of mankind, in striving to attain to a
complete mastery over nature, should destroy her simplest and
widest-spread gifts, and thereby enslave simple people to them, and
themselves to themselves, and so at last drag the world into a
second barbarism more ignoble, and a thousandfold more hopeless,
than the first.

Now of you who are listening to me, there are some, I feel sure, who
have received this message, and taken it to heart, and are day by
day fighting the battle that it calls on you to fight: to you I can
say nothing but that if any word I speak discourage you, I shall
heartily wish I had never spoken at all: but to be shown the enemy,
and the castle we have got to storm, is not to be bidden to run from
him; nor am I telling you to sit down deedless in the desert because
between you and the promised land lies many a trouble, and death
itself maybe: the hope before you you know, and nothing that I can
say can take it away from you; but friend may with advantage cry out
to friend in the battle that a stroke is coming from this side or
that: take my hasty words in that sense, I beg of you.