The writer justifies this rather broad generalisation by quoting three instances of such provocation, which I will take one by one.

Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are exactly alike.

Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer offers the massive generalisation that savages do not possess a language enabling a man to say 'I dreamed that I saw,' instead of 'I saw' ('Principles of Sociology,' p. 150).

On the whole, it seems that the number of tunes known to us are too few, in comparison with the large body of lyric poetry existing, to permit any generalisation upon the question.

And he pours into our country every year a fresh supply of gentlemanly cricketing youths, gapingly unpreparedunless they have picked up a broad generalisation or so from some surreptitious Socialist pamphletfor the immense issues they must control, and that are altogether uncontrollable if they fail to control them.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, indeed, attempted to turn a single hasty generalisation from the history of biological evolution into a complete social philosophy of his own, and preached a 'beneficent private war' which he conceived as exactly equivalent to that degree of trade competition which prevailed among English provincial shopkeepers about the year 1884.

But he attacked her generalisation.

You critical and logical intellects, who silence all comers and cannot be answered, and can show everybody to be in the wronginto what monstrous and manifest paradoxes are you not betrayed, blind to the humble facts which upset your generalisations, not even seeing that dulness itself can pronounce you mistaken!

But I suppose most of them will prove under examination either to be, or to lead to, or to imply very distinctly this generalisation that if most of the intelligent and active people in the Empire want it to continue it will, and that if a large proportion of such active and intelligent people are discontented and estranged, nothing can save it from disintegration.