PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 673 



the maintenance of stability is the counterpart of the growing conviction that 

 with the world-wide development of industry the causes of fluctuations and 

 irregularity are becoming continually more incalculable and their effects more 

 unavoidable by unaided individual effort. 



Is this tendency to exalt security as an end a healthy tendency, or ought 

 it to fill us with apprehension ? 



The ideal of security may not at first sight seem a very heroic aim to put 

 before a country whose economic traditions form a veritable romance of adventure 

 full of the joy of risks encountered and dangers overcome. Some may think with 

 misgiving that the conscious pursuit of a policy of safety implies that we have 

 passed the stage of economic youth and expansion and are entering on the dusk 

 of old age. They may feel as when at Rome we contemplate Aurelian's great 

 wall which for centuries withstood the inroads of barbarians, but the building of 

 which none the less marked the definite close of the period of the fearless and 

 aggressive supremacy of Rome. Are the nations of Europe being invited to enter 

 with the old gods into the fortress of Valhalla, there to await in well-planned 

 security but in growing gloom their inevitable decline ? The question is cogent 

 and searching, and modern nations must find the true answer at their peril, for if 

 the two ideals of free adventure and economic security admit of no reconciliation, 

 then the fate of our civilisation is only a matter of time. 



But fortunately it is not necessary to admit the essential opposition of these 

 two ideals rightly conceived. For as it seems to me there is a noble as well as an 

 ignoble ideal of adventure, and, corresponding thereto, there is a noble as well as 

 an ignoble ideal of security, and the great problem that lies before us in the future 

 is to distinguish rightly between them and to direct our national policy 

 accordingly. 



The first step towards making this distinction k to recognise that ignoble as 

 well as noble results are produced by exposure to ristcs. If fearless resolution and 

 foresight in encountering and combating danger and risk produced the race of 

 Elizabethan mariners and explorers, and to-day gives us a Shackleton or a 

 Sven Hedin, we know also the craven and panic-stricken population which lives 

 on the slopes of a volcano, exposed every day to incalculable risks against which 

 no precautions can avail. 



It is, I think, a definite induction from history and observation that when risk 

 falls outside certain limits as regards magnitude and calculability, when in short 

 it becomes what I may call a gambler's risk, exposure thereto not only ceases to 

 act as a bracing tonic, but produces evil effects of a very serious kind. 



It is to the general interest, and it tends to the building up and strengthening 

 of the national character, that everyone should have as strong a motive as possible 

 to guard against risks which can be avoided by reasonable precautions on the part 

 of the individual, and it is also to the general intei j st that within certain limits 

 the individual should have sufficient resisting power and reserve strength to 

 encounter without the support of his fellows the ordinary minor ups and downs 

 of life which it is not within his power to avoid. What these limits are cannot 

 be laid down dogmatically : they vary widely from nation to nation, from class to 

 class, and from age to age. Vicissitudes which mean famine to the savage pass 

 quite unnoticed in advanced industrial communities, and classes who are accus- 

 tomed to yearly salaries are unconcerned with fluctuations which bring privation 

 to the weekly wage earner. But within any given nation and class the limits 

 probably change but slowly, and though different schools of social observers will 

 certainly fix the limits at somewhat different points, and there is no doubt a 

 neutral zone within which the relative public advantages and disadvantages of 

 exposure to risk are fairly equally balanced, or at least may be open to legitimate 

 debate, I am disposed to think that the majority of fair-minded men would not 

 differ very widely in the principles governing the demarcation between the spheres 

 of individual and of social protection against economic risk. To take, for example, 

 the risks of unemployment, I think most people would agree that the personal risk 

 of losing employment through bad work, irregular attendance, or drunken habits 

 is one which it is absolutely necessary in the public interest to leave attached in all 

 its force to the individual workman. For the community to guarantee employ- 

 ment to all irrespective of personal effort or efficiency would necessarily impair 

 the national character and lower the national standard. This ie, therefore, a risk 



