Life, gentlemen—­the life of society, the life of the world—­has constantly to be fed from the bottom.  It has to be fed by those great sources of strength which are constantly rising in new generations.  Red blood has to be pumped into it.  New fiber has to be supplied.  That is the reason I have always said that I believed in popular institutions.  If you can guess beforehand whom your rulers are going to be, you can guess with a very great certainty that most of them will not be fit to rule.  The beauty of popular institutions is that you do not know where the man is going to come from, and you do not care so he is the right man.  You do not know whether he will come from the avenue or from the alley.  You do not know whether he will come from the city or the farm.  You do not know whether you will ever have heard that name before or not.  Therefore you do not limit at any point your supply of new strength.  You do not say it has got to come through the blood of a particular family or through the processes of a particular training, or by anything except the native impulse and genius of the man himself.  The humblest hovel, therefore, may produce you your greatest man.  A very humble hovel did produce you one of your greatest men.  That is the process of life, this constant surging up of the new strength of unnamed, unrecognized, uncatalogued men who are just getting into the running, who are just coming up from the masses of the unrecognized multitude.  You do not know when you will see above the level masses of the crowd some great stature lifted head and shoulders above the rest, shouldering its way, not violently but gently, to the front and saying, “Here am I; follow me.”  And his voice will be your voice, his thought will be your thought, and you will follow him as if you were following the best things in yourselves.

When I think of an association of Christian young men I wonder that it has not already turned the world upside down.  I wonder, not that it has done so much, for it has done a great deal, but that it has done so little; and I can only conjecture that it does not realize its own strength.  I can only imagine that it has not yet got its pace.  I wish I could believe, and I do believe, that at seventy it is just reaching its majority, and that from this time on a dream greater even than George Williams[F] ever dreamed will be realized in the great accumulating momentum of Christian men throughout the world.  For, gentlemen, this is an age in which the principles of men who utter public opinion dominate the world.  It makes no difference what is done for the time being.  After the struggle is over the jury will sit, and nobody can corrupt that jury.