fallen heir, and a prudent investor to place the wealth which has descended to it at interest for the good of its children? Behind all the political phantasmagoria of the hour, these are the questions that with ominous countenance are pressing for a reply. It is on a right answer to them that it depends whether England shall decay, as other great nations have done, or shall go on to future achievements which will rival those of her glorious past.

The answer is given in the closing words of Arnold's farewell address to the students of Oxford, which have a freshness of application to-day :

"Culture does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords; but it seeks to do away with classes, to make all live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, and use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely-to be nourished and not bound by them. This is the social idea; and men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time, who have laboured to divest

knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive-to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source therefore of sweetness and light. Such a man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century, and their services to Germany were inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany, and yet their names will fill a German with reverence and enthusiasm such as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. Because they humanised knowledge, because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence, because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and light, and to make reason and the will of God prevail.”

When that is done for our countrymen which Abelard and Lessing and Herder did in their day, the spirit of the nation will be other than it is now. It will be impossible for any ambitious man to array the masses against the classes, as if the true

interests of all classes did not point in the same direction. A spiritual brotherhood will be formed that will permeate with its healing and cementing virtue the entire nation. Variety of condition will lose its offensiveness when it is found to be compatible with unity of spirit. The old order of class jealousy and narrow-mindedness will yield place to the new order of national sympathy and manly breadth of view; and the day will draw nigh, with freedom broadening smoothly down from precedent to precedent, when none will be for party but all be for the State.

This is no Utopia. What Matthew Arnold spoke from the Chair of Culture at Oxford, John Bright expressed in a career more eloquent by its moral heroism than even his unrivalled oratory in the House of Commons and on the platform. A statesmanship superior to that of the parliamentary tactician, and which scorns the limitations of party warfare, is no impracticable ideal. The noble figure who has just passed away was in his stainless career an incarnation of such statesmanship. Any greatness that belongs to Mr Gladstone's political life was achieved when he was safely moored to the moral anchorage of John Bright. In principle firm as a rock, yet as one that had the property of moving

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onward in the true current of ethical progress, it was the silent strength of John Bright that steadied the policy of Mr Gladstone in days when he really rode on the flowing tide, although the great leader may have been as unconscious of being led then as he is now. The successes of the Liberal party, which were so loudly ascribed to the parliamentary leader and the skilful rhetorician, were inspired by the modest hero who was contented to do his duty and leave the praise to others. Mr Gladstone has changed his mooring from a rock to a quicksand-from John Bright to Mr Morley. No student of Mr Morley's career and writings can fail to see that he is the veritable Moses of the recent Exodus from sound political principle, the true author in spirit if not in the letter of the wonderful Gladstonian policy of Home Rule. An able specimen of a magazine philosopher, he has, by a profession of moral strength which his latter career too surely belies, obtained a dangerous influence over the failing leader, and he is mainly responsible for the eclipse of a great career and the all but ruin of his country. That is all he has gained by quitting his proper functions in the editorial chair, where even his opinions would have been harmless, to consort with "sovereigns and statesmen." The "political spirit,"

against which he wrote so strongly in his book on Compromise, has in these latter days been incarnated in him. It was not so with him whom the English people have such good cause to mourn. With an eye whose keenness was due in large degree to the moral light within, he saw the real needs of his country and the right means to meet them. He was not immaculate. His upbringing in a dissenting home made him unable to do justice to the National Church. His faith in the omnipotence of the weapons of peace was at least a failing on virtue's side. But on what other public question did his moral instinct err? He never took his opinions from leader or from party. They came from a higher source. They were held firmly amid the jeers of parliamentary witlings. They stood the test of popular applause and of popular vituperation. Like two Homeric heroes, his friend Cobden and he went forth and slew the landlord monopoly of bread. He stood on the side of right against a nation in arms in the Crimean war. He pleaded the cause of Ireland in days when those who now lick the hand of Mr Parnell were deaf to her cry of distress. The compass he ever steered by was justice. The goal of his endeavours was the good of his country. His rich reward has been and will be the triumph of the