But I would recommend you to leave this disconsolate proconsul alone.  I do not agree with him when he says that South Africa is passing through a time of trial.  South Africa is emerging from her time of trial.  The darkest period is behind her.  Brighter prospects lie before her.  The improvement upon which we are counting is not the hectic flush of a market boom, but the steady revival and accumulation of agricultural and industrial productiveness.  Soberly and solemnly men of all parties and of both races in South Africa are joining together to revive and to develop the prosperity of their own country.  Grave difficulties, many dangers, long exertions lie before them; but the star of South Africa is already in the ascendant, and I look confidently forward to the time when it will take its place, united, federated, free, beside Canada and Australia, in the shining constellation of the British Empire.

When we have dealt with subjects which lie outside our own island, let us concentrate our attention on what lies within it, because the gravest problems lie at home.  I shall venture to-night to make a few general observations upon those larger trendings of events which govern the incidents and the accidents of the hour.  The fortunes and the interests of Liberalism and Labour are inseparably interwoven; they rise by the same forces, and in spite of similar obstacles, they face the same enemies, they are affected by the same dangers, and the history of the last thirty years shows quite clearly that their power of influencing public affairs and of commanding national attention fluctuate together.  Together they are elevated, together they are depressed, and any Tory reaction which swept the Liberal Party out of power would assuredly work at least proportionate havoc in the ranks of Labour.  That may not be a very palatable truth, but it is a truth none the less.

Labour!  It is a great word.  It moves the world, it comprises the millions, it combines many men in many lands in the sympathy of a common burden.  Who has the right to speak for Labour?  A good many people arrogate to themselves the right to speak for Labour.  How many political Flibbertigibbets are there not running up and down the land calling themselves the people of Great Britain, and the social democracy, and the masses of the nation!  But I am inclined to think, so far as any body of organised opinion can claim the right to speak for this immense portion of the human race, it is the trade unions that more than any other organisation must be considered the responsible and deputed representatives of Labour.  They are the most highly organised part of Labour; they are the most responsible part; they are from day to day in contact with reality.  They are not mere visionaries or dreamers weaving airy Utopias out of tobacco smoke.  They are not political adventurers who are eager to remodel the world by rule-of-thumb, who are proposing to make the infinite complexities of scientific civilisation and the multitudinous phenomena of great cities conform to a few barbarous formulas which any moderately intelligent parrot could repeat in a fortnight.