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raised their country to an unprecedented height of greatness, but had also saved our foolish and obstructive aristocracy from being emptied into the Thames. As it was, however, what I had urged, or rather what I had borrowed from Mr. Lowe, seemed to me exceedingly forcible, and I looked anxiously for its effect on my hearers. They did not appear so much disconcerted as I had hoped. "Undoubtedly," they said, "the coming of your middle class to power was a natural, salutary event, to be blessed, not anathematised. Aristocracies cannot deal with a time for intelligence; their sense is for facts, not ideas. The world of ideas is the possible, the future; the world of aristocracies is the established, the past, which has made their fortune, and which they hope to prolong. No doubt, too, your middle class found a great deal of commercial and social business waiting to be done, which your aristocratic governments had left undone, and had no talents for doing. Their talents were for other times and tasks; for curbing the power of the Crown when other classes were too inconsiderable to do it; for managing (if one compares them with other aristocracies) their affairs and their dependants with vigour, prudence, and moderation, during the feudal and patriarchal stage of society; for wielding the force of their country against foreign powers with energy, firmness, and dignity. But then came the modern spirit, the modern time; the notion, as we say, of making human life more natural and rational, -or, as your philosophers say, of getting the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Have you suc.

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ceeded, are you succeeding, in this hour of the many; as your aristocracy succeeded in the hour of the few! You say you are: you point to 'the noble work, the heroic work which the House of Commons has performed within these last thirty-five years; everything that was complained of, everything that had grown distasteful, has been touched with success and moderation by the amending hand.' Allow us to set claptrap on one side; we are not at one of your public meetings. What is the modern problem? to make human life, the life of society, all through, more natural and rational; to have the greatest possible number of one's nation happy. Here is the standard by which we are to try ourselves and one another now, as national grandeur, in the old regal and aristocratical conception of it, was the standard formerly. Every nation must have wished to be in England in 1815, tried by the old standard: must we all wish to be England, in 1865, tried by the new standard 1 Your aristocracy, you say, is as splendid, as fortunate, as enviable as ever: very likely; but all the world cannot be aristocracy. What do you make of the mass of your society, of its vast middle and lower portion? Are we to envy you your common people; is our common people to wish to change places with yours; are we to say that you, more than we, have the modern secret here? Without insisting too much on the stories of misery and degradation which are perpetually reaching us, we will say that no one can mix with a great crowd in your country, no one can walk with his eyes and ears open through the poor

quarters of your large towns, and not feel that your common people, as it meets one's eyes, is at present more raw, to say the very least, less enviable-looking, further removed from civilised and humane life, than the common people almost anywhere. Well, then, you are not a success, according to the modern standard, with your common people. Are you a success with your middle class? They have the power now; what have they made of themselves? what sort of a life is theirs? A life more natural, more rational, fuller of happiness, more enviable, therefore, than the life of the middle classes on the Continent? Yes, you will say, because the English middle class is the most industrious and the richest. But it is just here that you go a great deal too fast, and so deceive yourselves. What brings about, or rather tends to bring about, a natural, rational life, satisfying the modern spirit? This: the growth of a love of industry, trade, and wealth; the growth of a love of the things of the mind; and the growth of a love of beautiful things. There are body, intelligence, and soul all taken care of. Of these three factors of modern life, your middle class has no notion of any but one, the first. Their love of industry, trade, and wealth, is certainly prodigious ; and their example has done us a great deal of good; we, too, are beginning to get this love, and we wanted it. But what notion have they of anything else? Do but look at them, look at their lives. Some of us know your middle class very well; a great deal better than your own upper class in

general knows them. Your middle class is edu cated, to begin with, in the worst schools of your country, and our middle class is educated in the best of ours. What becomes of them after that! The fineness and capacity of a man's spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your middle class has an enjoy ment in its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money; but beyond that? Drugged with business, your middle class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except religion; it has a religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive. All sincere religion does something for the spirit, raises a man out of the bondage of his merely bestial part, and saves him; but the religion of your middle class is the very lowest form of intelligential life which one can imagine as saving. What other enjoyments have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere, but which your middle class consumes, they say, by the hundred thousand; and in their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on teetotalism or nunneries. Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more unenviable? Compare it with the life of our middle class as you have seen it on the Rhine this summer, or at Lausanne, or Zurich. The world of enjoyment, so liberalising and civilising, belongs to the middle classes there, as well as the world of business; the whole world is theirs, they possess life; in England the highest class seems

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to have the monopoly of the world of enjoyment, the middle class enjoys itself, as your Shakspeare would say, in hugger-mugger, and possesses life only by reading in the newspapers, which it does devoutly, the doings of great people. Well, then, we do not at all want to be as your middle class; we want to learn from it to do business and to get rich, and this we are learning a great deal faster than you think; but we do not, like your middle class, fix our consummation here: we have a notion of a whole world besides, not dreamed of in your middle class's philosophy; so they, too, like your common people, seem to us no success. They may be the masters of the modern time with you, but they are not solving its problem. They cannot see the way the world is going, and the future does not belong to them. Talk of the present state of development and civilisation of England, meaning England as they represent it to us! Why, the capital, pressing danger of England, is the barbarism of her middle class; the civilisation of her middle class is England's capital, pressing want."

'Well, but," said I, still catching at Mr. Lowe's powerful help, "the Parliament of this class has performed exploits unrivalled not merely in the six centuries during which Parliament has existed, but in the whole history of representative assemblies. The exploits are there; all the reforms we have made in the last five-and-thirty years."

"Let us distinguish," replied the envious foreigners, "let us distinguish. We named three powers,-did we not?—which go to spread that rational humane

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