500 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxxi 



I cannot say. that I am in the slightest degree impressed by 

 your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not 

 grandeur, territory does not make a nation. The great issue, 

 about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhang- 

 ing fate, is, what are you going to do with all these things ? . . . 



The one condition of success, your sole safeguard, is the 

 moral worth and intellectual clearness of the individual citizen. 

 Education cannot give these, but it can cherish them and bring 

 them to the front in whatever station of society they are to be 

 found, and the universities ought to be and may be, the fortresses 

 of the higher life of the nation. 



This address was delivered under circumstances of pecul- 

 iar difficulty. The day before,, an expedition had been made 

 to Washington, from which Huxley returned very tired, 

 only to be told that he was to attend a formal dinner and 

 reception the same evening. " I don't know how I shall 

 stand it," he remarked. Going to his room, he snatched an 

 hour or two of rest, but was then called upon to finish his 

 address before going out. It seems that it had to be ready 

 for simultaneous publication in the New York papers. Now 

 the lecture was not written out; it was to be given from 

 notes only. So he had to deliver it in extenso to the re- 

 porter, who took it down in shorthand, promising to let him 

 have a longhand copy in good time the next morning. It 

 did not come till the last moment. Glancing at it on his 

 way to the lecture theatre, he discovered to his horror that 

 it was written upon " flimsy " from which he would not be 

 able to read it with any success. He wisely gave up the 

 attempt, and made up his mind to deliver the lecture as 

 best he could from memory. The lecture as delivered was 

 very nearly the same as that which he had dictated the 

 night before, but with some curious discrepancies between 

 the two accounts, which, he used to say, occurring as they 

 did in versions both purporting to have been taken down 

 from his lips, might well lead the ingenious critic of the 

 future to pronounce them both spurious, and to declare that 

 the pretended original was never delivered under the cir- 

 cumstances alleged.* 



* Cp. the incident at Belfast, p. 444. 



