Mr. Churchill’s second proposition is the correlative of the first.  How shall this imposing fabric of industrial security be reared and made safe?  The answer is, by modifying, without vitally changing, the basis of taxation.  The workman cannot be asked to pay for everything, as under Protection he must pay.  In any case, he must pay for something.  But if he is asked for too much, the sources of physical efficiency are drained, and the main purpose of the new Liberalism—­the ideal of an educated, hopeful, and vigorous people—­is destroyed.  Now Liberalism, in ceasing to rely on indirect taxation as its main source of revenue, has opened up for contribution not merely the superfluities of society, the “accumulations of profit,” as Mr. Churchill calls them, but those special forms of wealth which are “social” in origin, which depend on some monopoly of material agents, on means not of helping the community but of hindering it, not of enriching its powers and resources, but of depleting them for private advantage.  In other words, the State in future will increasingly ask the taxpayer not only “What have you got?” but “How did you get it?” No one contends that such an analysis can be perfect; but, on the other hand, can a community desirous of realising what Goethe calls “practical Christianity,” ignore it?  And if in this process it enters the sphere of morals, as Ruskin long ago urged it to do, as well as the path of economic justice, is the step a wrong one?  Has it not already been taken not only in this Budget, but in its predecessor, in which the Prime Minister made the memorable distinction between earned and unearned income?  Those who answer these questions in the Liberal sense will find in these speeches a body of vigorous and persuasive reasoning on their side.

It is therefore the main purpose of these speeches to show that Liberalism has a message of the utmost consequence to our times.  They link it afresh with the movement of life, which when it overtakes parties condemns and destroys them.  They give it an immediate mission and an outlook on the wider moral domain, which belongs to no single generation.  This double character is vital to a Party which must not desert the larger ways in which the spirit of man walks, while it quits at its peril the work of practical, everyday service to existing society.

A word as to the literary quality of these addresses, widely varied as they are in subject.  The summit of a man’s powers—­his full capacity of reason, comparison, expression—­are not usually reached at so early a point in his career as that which Mr. Churchill has attained.  But in directness and clearness of thought, in the power to build up a political theory, and present it as an impressive and convincing argument, in the force of rhetoric and the power of sympathy, readers of these addresses will find few examples of modern English speech-making to compare with them.  They revive the almost forgotten art of oratory, and they connect it with ideas born of our age, and springing from its conscience and its practical needs, and, above all, essential to its happiness.