too bitterly in my eagerness; that a rash word might have
discouraged some of you; I was very far from meaning that: what I
wanted to do, what I want to do to-night is to put definitely before
you a cause for which to strive.

That cause is the Democracy of Art, the ennobling of daily and
common work, which will one day put hope and pleasure in the place
of fear and pain, as the forces which move men to labour and keep
the world a-going.

If I have enlisted any one in that cause, rash as my words may have
been, or feeble as they may have been, they have done more good than
harm; nor do I believe that any words of mine can discourage any who
have joined that cause or are ready to do so: their way is too
clear before them for that, and every one of us can help the cause
whether he be great or little.

I know indeed that men, wearied by the pettiness of the details of
the strife, their patience tried by hope deferred, will at whiles,
excusably enough, turn back in their hearts to other days, when if
the issues were not clearer, the means of trying them were simpler;
when, so stirring were the times, one might even have atoned for
many a blunder and backsliding by visibly dying for the cause. To
have breasted the Spanish pikes at Leyden, to have drawn sword with
Oliver: that may well seem to us at times amidst the tangles of to-
day a happy fate: for a man to be able to say, I have lived like a
fool, but now I will cast away fooling for an hour, and die like a
man--there is something in that certainly: and yet 'tis clear that
few men can be so lucky as to die for a cause, without having first
of all lived for it. And as this is the most that can be asked from