Bernstein himself, on the other hand, has to choose whether he ought to try to keep open the common use of the name Socialist, or whether in the end he will have to abandon it, because his claim to use it merely creates bad feeling and confusion of thought.
Sometimes a man of exceptional personal force and power of expression is, so to speak, a party--a political entity--in himself.

He may fashion a permanent and recognisable mask for himself as 'Honest John' or 'The Grand Old Man.' But this can as a rule only be done by those who learn the main condition of their task, the fact that if an individual statesman's intellectual career is to exist for the mass of the present public at all, it must be based either on an obstinate adherence to unchanging opinions or on a development, slow, simple, and consistent.
The indifferent and half attentive mind which most men turn towards politics is like a very slow photograph plate.

He who wishes to be clearly photographed must stand before it in the same attitude for a long time.

A bird that flies across the plate leaves no mark.
'Change of opinion,' wrote Gladstone in 1868, 'in those to whose judgment the public looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course which they know to be wrong.

It is not always to be blamed.