NATURE AND NURTURE 

 THE PROBLEM OF THE FUTURE 



When I was requested last year to take up the very 

 honourable office of President of the Social and Political 

 Education League, my thoughts naturally turned on how 

 I could best fulfil my function as your annual lecturer. 

 My reminiscences of the League extended back to thirty 

 years ago, when, fresh from the University, I was a 

 member and a frequent lecturer at the various working- 

 men's clubs, political, social, and occasionally revolu- 

 tionary, which then abounded in London. Looking back 

 on that period now, it still appears to me one of very 

 great intellectual activity. Clifford was only just dead, 

 Huxley was still in the fighting line, Karl Marx was 

 finishing Das Kapital and organizing outpost skirmishes 

 of the revolutionary party. It was possible to be present, 

 if not to assist, at the birth of the Social Democratic 

 Federation ; or, again, to hear a little later the mournful 

 farewell of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, when 

 a section of their comrades preferred the Fabian policy of 

 discussing to that of practising socialism. Much has 

 survived from that day, something has gone under. But it 

 still seems to me to have been a period of exceptional intel- 

 lectual activity and of very widespread enthusiasms. The 

 working man wanted to know about Darwin, he wanted 

 to know about Lassalle, and he wanted to discover the 

 bearing of the scientific and the theological, or, if you will, 

 anti-theological, thought of the day on his own social and 



