the front rank for their patriotic or intellectual virtues, they would receive the deference, the courteous reverence, which is the due of high station and character. The fierce light that beats on cabinets no longer permits this reverential attitude. No sooner is a politician in high office than we all constitute ourselves his censors. A thousand newspaper writers every day in the year, whether in passionate rebuke or in friendly criticism, alike constitute themselves his superiors. In telling him what he should do or not do, they imply that they could do better in his place. The wisest man that ever lived could not keep his position or retain the sweet voices' on which ministerial power now reposes while subject to so continuous a stream of depreciation. The entire atmosphere becomes impregnated with his faults. Those who are conscious how small is the real value of such a censorship are not proof against its influence. We cannot see a man bespattered daily with insinuations and insults, or bedaubed with dishonest panegyrics, without universally ourselves despising him. If he does not merit what is said of him, the un

6

worthy thought arises that no

honourable man would consent to stand in such a pillory. He himself, unless he is more than mortal, will lose confidence in an integrity which he finds universally discredited; and end, perhaps, in deserving the contempt which was once uncalled for.

Thus the class of persons who form our administrations is insensibly deteriorating. They cannot act on their own judgment, and, therefore, only those who are willing to act on the judgment of others, which they do not approve, will consent to hold office. They are public property, and targets for impertinence; and, therefore, those alone, who more or less deserve impertinence, are inclined to sub

mit to the ordeal. Being no longer allowed to rule, but appointed only to carry into effect the wishes of their master the people, they lie under a constant temptation to watch the prevailing current, and reinstate their popularity by some startling political somersault, knowing well that if they content themselves with the unpopular duties which form the more important part of the business of Government, their official lives may be briefer than a butterfly's.

Such, then, being the condition of those who are called our leaders, we must look to ourselves; and before plunging into the whirl and business of another year, take stock of a situation which presents at once a singular feature. We never remember a time when there was so much vague misgiving or so much political dissatisfaction, with so little cause for uneasiness as to our general interests, or so little producible ground of offence in the active measures of the Administration. It may be that, having demanded household suffrage, and got it, the burning of Paris has brought repentance too late; and seeing the reins lie loose on the horses' backs we should prefer that some firm hand should gather them up. However it be, the aspect of things at home, and the state of our relations abroad, are, for the moment, in every way reassuring. Trade was never more vigorous; the demand for employment never more active. The export and import lists already take away our breath, and still the double torrent grows. It used to be said that the misfortune of one country was the misfortune of all. The disasters which stopped the mills in Alsace and Lyons, and the disturbance of industry in Germany, have only multiplied the demands on Birmingham, Manchester, and Sheffield. The American carrying trade, which was flung into our hands by the civil war, re

mains with us; and the cotton which we had lost has returned. Pauperism is ebbing at last; the supply of work falls behind the demand, and the artisans have shortened their labour hours without sacrifice to themselves or hurt to their masters. So far as employment and rising wages can give content, England had never better cause to anticipate a quiet year. How long we may count on the sunshine continuing is another question; but it is no longer our nature to anticipate changes in the future; and when we are uneasy, it is not from future possibilities, but from something consciously and actively amiss. What is it? Not certainly our relations abroad. With the Continent our connections are merely commercial. France and Russia are the only countries with which we could be entangled in a dangerous war. France, on account of Belgium, or as a legacy of old animosities; Russia, from conflicting interests in the East. But France is prostrate. When she recovers, she has another enemy to deal with before she meddles with us. Nor is it likely that under any circumstances ground of quarrel could rise between two countries so circumstanced as France and England. Having allowed Russia to tear up the Treaty of Paris, we shall not be tempted into another war with her, whatever she does, unless she attacks us in India-a danger which our generation may fairly think too remote to deserve consideration.

With America, both Government and people, we are on better terms than we have been at any time since the Declaration of Independence. They have taught Europe to fear their strength and admire their character. The irritating criticisms with which, in a somewhat unworthy jealousy, we continued for so many years to wound their selfrespect, will not be heard any more

among us. In their civil war we took sides as they did themselves, and we gave the winning party cause to complain of us. We have acknowledged our fault and shaken hands, and the popularity of the present President in the United States them

selves, which will insure his re-election, is due, above all other causes, to the reconciliation which he has assisted in bringing about between the two great English-speaking nations. Henceforth, in any trouble in which we may be involved we may count America for a friend, and each year will see new links of confederation binding us closer to each other and undoing the effects of Lord North's and his master's obstinacy.

We have difficulties with Indian finance, difficulties with Ireland, difficulties about our army, difficulties about education, and a somewhat tempestuous quarrel brewing with the Licensed Victuallers. But we have encountered a thousand worse perplexities than these in past years without disturbance of our equanimity. What is going on among us to account for the unusual yet universal sense of instability, like the feeling described by Humboldt as the first experience of an earthquake ?

In the first place, the world cannot move as rapidly as it has been going for the last forty years without those who are being whirled along upon its surface losing their breath. Though the stream be smooth, the sensation of being hurried on at an accelerating rate by a current which the weakest and the strongest equally powerless to resist cannot but at times produce misgiving; and questions more or less anxious. inevitably present themselves as to what sort of a country the flood is carrying us. The old landmarks are passing out of sight. New men, new thoughts, new rules, new ideas about what we are or where we

are

came from appear for a moment, pass away, and give place to others. A great many of us, it is true, see nothing but improvement, illusions vanishing, truth and justice taking the place of chimeras and folly. The optimist view of things is so comfortable that we accept those who profess it most loudly for our most trusted guides. The stare super antiquas vias is out of fashion. Even were it possible, which it obviously is not, there is no standing now; we can glissade only over snow slopes which we hope may not be split by crevasses, or rush at express speed into darkness on a line which is progress towards a something in which without seeing we believe. Such confidence may indicate a pious frame of mind, but like all beliefs in the invisible, is apt to turn the heads of those who surrender themselves to ideas. So sure are we becoming that all old things were wrong, that to prove the antiquity of any custom or institution is its sufficient condemnation. Antiquitas sæculi juventus mundi. The wisdom of our ancestors is now seen to have been the crude speculation of youth and inexperience. Our beards are grown we must put away childish things. All that we have inherited, whether good or bad, must be made anew, as it will not suit our present advanced necessities.

We have reformed our Parliament, and reformed our public offices. Our army has gone into the caldron to come out spick-and-span on an improved pattern. The Universities are turned upside down. Education is remodelled. Local usages, local authorities, class privileges, are swept away. Every strap is cut or threatened which interfered, or seemed to interfere, with personal freedom. Churches are disestablished or about to be disestablished, and the stage levelled smooth for rights of con

science, which belong equally to fool and sage. So omnipotent is the mania for change, that nothing from greatest to lowest is safe from it.

Some things, it still seems indisputable, our forefathers could do as well as we-or better. A modern Archbishop's occasional prayer,' the cattle upon a thousand hills,' and such like, contrast unfavourably with the Liturgy. The houses in Bloomsbury will be standing in sound condition when Grosvenor Place has become a rubbish heap. The chairs and tables of 1700 will be good for use a century or two after the choicest articles of the Baker Street Bazaar have turned to dust and ashes. And the Reynoldses and Gainsboroughs, from some superiority either in the artist or his subject, or both, have not yet been eclipsed by Mr. Millais or Mr. Watts.

Yet exceptive phenomena of this kind suggest no practical misgivings as to our vast essential superiority. If there was one thing left among us which for its own inherent majesty might have been considered sacred-if there was one thing which, on mere prudential reasons, it might have been thought unwise to disturb, it was the English translation of the Bible. Later theologians, from Lowth downwards, who have tried their hand at mending the text, have succeeded only in emptying it of its beauty and reducing it to the level of the baldest prose. Yet the revisors are busy at work in the Jerusalem Chamber, and we are to have a new edition according to the best lights of modern scholarship. To pass from the most sublime subject to the most paltry, even the poor Latin grammar, and Latin pronunciation, cannot be left alone. Latin having ceased to be a spoken language, and the change being of no longer any practical value, we are

adopting the vowel sounds of the Continent. For some inconceivable reason the grammar has been metamorphosed on principles purely original; and cases, numbers, moods, tenses, and voices have been twirled and twisted and rearranged in mere wanton delirium of conceit. Mathematics fare no better. A geometry class at South Kensington, in their first elementary lesson, were put on their guard lately against the mistakes of Euclid, the lecturer, a distinguished wrangler, bewildering their astonished brains with speculative paradoxes, and explaining how parallel lines, said by Euclid never to meet, yet, without ceasing to be parallel, somehow do meet in infinity.

We mention such phenomena as these, not as serious in themselves, or as anything but pitifully absurd. They are, however, flying leaves showing which way the wind is blow ing. They are indicators of the unsettled and unsettling spirit abroad among us, for which nothing is too high and nothing too trivial; which insists on thinking out over again for itself every question from the bottom; on popularising all knowledge, and teaching the modern goose to sit in judgment on the wisest who have gone before him; to form his own opinions, and be sure, at all events, if he wishes to be right, to come to conclusions different from his father's. An exaggerated conservatism may have entailed a temper of this kind, as a natural recoil. Vanity may work its own cure in time, but none the less while it lasts plays curious pranks, and has plenty of material lying still before it to work its will upon before its day will be over. Nations, empires, constitutions, remain stable so long as the men and women who compose them are governed by strong leading convictions and settled principles; so long as habit prescribes rules of thought and action; where the great social land

marks are regarded as eternal ordinances of nature or Providence ; and the religious propositions on which morality depends are held as indisputable truths, which even the sinner acknowledges while he disobeys. Religion has now become an open question; morality is resolved into utility, and the law of God into a sentimental obligation to forward other people's happiness. Our fathers believed that we were made for a special purpose by a spiritual Creator, and had an eternity before us of life or death. Many intelligent and high-minded men believe now that we grew somehow out of apes, and the apes originally out of jellyfish; that a future life is an illusion, and God Almighty a name for the universe.

Minds slow to move may adhere to their old convictions; but it is impossible, in the nature of things, to regard the anciently received views about man and his destiny with absolute, undoubting certainty, when the general sense of educated men allows them to be denied without imprinting any note of foolishness on the novel theories, or regarding them as ignorant or criminal. Questions on which those who are acknowledged competent to form an opinion think differently, are, in the nature of the case, made doubtful; and until the old convictions re-establish themselves in authority, or mankind come to a common agreement on the obligations of morality independent of the foundations on which it has hitherto rested, society will have to exist as it can without moral cement to hold it together.

A disintegrating power of this kind is, beyond question, at work among us. We are living at present on the traditions of Puritanism, on the pious convictions, the reverence for truth and right, the abhorrence of lies and wrong, which were burnt into the blood of the English nation centuries ago. The emotions remain long after the