prevails with respect to many other public men, even those who have lived, as so many public men do, to an advanced age.
This idea that popular agitation, especially in the form of public speaking, is injurious to the health, is, I think, except in the case of particularly weak and excitable men, an erroneous one, and is not supported by the testimony of political biography. On the contrary, the evidence goes to show that platform agitation, even when it takes the form of arduous indoor and outdoor speaking, day after day, is on the whole beneficial rather than harmful to both body and mind. Politicians and preachers are comparatively a long-lived class of men. Talleyrand, Lord John Russell, M. Guizot, M. Thiers, Lord Beaconsfield, John Bright, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Sir Charles Dilke, Lord Halsbury, M. Clemenceau, and Dr. John Clifford, who are among the most active public men in recent history, all have lived to a ripe old age. And even if we turn to the more democratic class of agitators, who have spent the greater part of their lives in popular (or perhaps I should say unpopular) agitation, often having to undergo great strain and hardship in constant travelling and speaking in all sorts of conditions and seasons, do we not find the same testimony? Robert Owen; John Wesley in his eighty-ninth year; George Jacob Holyoake lived till nearly ninety; and Mr. Robert Applegarth, the veteran Trade Union leader, is still with us at over eighty years. And have we not the striking instance of Mrs. Besant, who when a young woman was, as she herself tells us, consumptive and was told by her doctor that public lecturing would either kill or cure her? It cured her, and she is still alive and splendidly energetic though well over seventy years.
It would seem, therefore, that the notion that public agitation is inimical to health is a delusion.
Nor does it appear to me that the belief that Morris' health was undermined by the wear and tear of his work in the Socialist movement is well founded. Indeed, I am
