Where do we stand to-day at the end of our fourth year of office?  I put it plainly to you to consider, whether one is not justified in saying that we occupy a position of unexampled strength at the present time.  The Government is strong in its administrative record, which reveals no single serious or striking mistake in all the complicated conduct of affairs.  There have been no regrettable incidents by land or sea and none of those personal conflicts between the high officials that used to occur so frequently under a late dispensation.  We have had no waste of public treasure and no bloodshed.  We are strong in the consciousness of a persistent effort to sweep away anomalies and inequalities, to redress injustice, to open more widely to the masses of the people the good chances in life, and to safeguard them against its evil chances.  We also claim that we are strong in the support and enthusiasm of a majority of our fellow-countrymen.  We are strong in the triumph of our policy in South Africa; most of all we are strong in the hopes and plans which we have formed for the future.

It is about this future that I will speak to you this afternoon.  And let me tell you that when I think about it, I do not feel at all inclined to plead exhaustion in consequence of the exertions we have made, or to dwell upon the successes which we have had in the past, or to survey with complacency the record of the Government or to ask you to praise us for the work which we have done.  No; when I think of the work which lies before us, upon which we have already entered, of the long avenues of social reconstruction and reorganisation which open out in so many directions and ever more broadly before us, of the hideous squalor and misery which darken and poison the life of Britain, of the need of earnest action, of the prospects of effective and immediate action—­when I dwell upon this, it is not of feelings of lassitude or exhaustion that I am conscious, but only of a vehement impulse to press onwards.

The social conditions of the British people in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without deep anxiety.  The anxiety is keen because it arises out of uncertainty.  It is the gnawing anxiety of suspense.  What is the destiny of our country to be?  Nothing is settled either for or against us.  We have no reason to despair; still less have we any reason to be self-satisfied.  All is still in our hands for good or for ill.  We have the power to-day to choose our fortune, and I believe there is no nation in the world, perhaps there never has been in history, any nation which at one and the same moment was confronted with such opposite possibilities, was threatened on the one hand by more melancholy disaster, and cheered on the other by more bright, yet not unreasonable hopes.  The two roads are open.  We are at the cross-ways.  If we stand on in the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and