But we are told to wait a bit; the Socialist Party in Germany is only three millions.  How many will there be in ten years’ time?  That is a fair argument.  I should like to say this.  A great many men can jump four feet, but very few can jump six feet.  After a certain distance the difficulty increases progressively.  It is so with the horse-power required to drive great ships across the ocean; it is so with the lifting power required to raise balloons in the air.  A balloon goes up quite easily for a certain distance, but after a certain distance it refuses to go up any farther, because the air is too rarefied to float it and sustain it.  And, therefore, I would say let us examine the concrete facts.

In France, before the Revolution, property was divided among a very few people.  A few thousand nobles and priests and merchants had all the wealth in the country; twenty-five million peasants had nothing.  But in modern States, such as we see around us in the world to-day, property is very widely divided.  I do not say it is evenly divided.  I do not say it is fairly divided, but it is very widely divided.  Especially is that true in Great Britain.  Nowhere else in the world, except, perhaps, in France and the United States, are there such vast numbers of persons who are holders of interest-bearing, profit-bearing, rent-earning property, and the whole tendency of civilisation and of free institutions is to an ever-increasing volume of production and an increasingly wide diffusion of profit.  And therein lies the essential stability of modern States.  There are millions of persons who would certainly lose by anything like a general overturn, and they are everywhere the strongest and best organised millions.  And I have no hesitation in saying that any violent movement would infallibly encounter an overwhelming resistance, and that any movement which was inspired by mere class prejudice, or by a desire to gain a selfish advantage, would encounter from the selfish power of the “haves” an effective resistance which would bring it to sterility and to destruction.

And here is the conclusion to which I lead you.  Something more is needed if we are to get forward.  There lies the function of the Liberal Party.  Liberalism supplies at once the higher impulse and the practicable path; it appeals to persons by sentiments of generosity and humanity; it proceeds by courses of moderation.  By gradual steps, by steady effort from day to day, from year to year, Liberalism enlists hundreds of thousands upon the side of progress and popular democratic reform whom militant Socialism would drive into violent Tory reaction.  That is why the Tory Party hate us.  That is why they, too, direct their attacks upon the great organisation of the Liberal Party, because they know it is through the agency of Liberalism that society will be able in the course of time to slide forward, almost painlessly—­for the world is changing very fast—­on to a more even and a more equal foundation.  That is the mission that lies before Liberalism.  The cause of the Liberal Party is the cause of the left-out millions; and because we believe that there is in all the world no other instrument of equal potency and efficacy available at the present time for the purposes of social amelioration, we are bound in duty and in honour to guard it from all attacks, whether they arise from violence or from reaction.