But they have lived in a narrow world of their own, without openness and flexibility of mind, without any notion of the variety of powers and possibilities in human life. They know neither man nor the world; and on all the arduous questions presenting themselves to our age,-political questions, social questions, the labour question, the religious question -they have at present no light, and can give none. I say, then, they cannot fill their right place as they are now; but you, and I, and every man in this country, are interested in their being able to fill it.

Our

How are they to be made able? Well, schools are something. Schools are not everything; and even public schools, when you get them, may be far from perfect. Our public elementary schools are far from perfect. But they throw into circulation year by year among the working classes,—and here is the great merit of Mr. Forster's Act,—a number of young minds trained and intelligent, such as you never got previously; and this must tell in the long run. public secondary schools, when we get them, may be far from perfect. But they will throw into circulation year by year, among the middle classes, a number of young people with minds instructed and enlarged as they never are now, when their schools are, both socially and intellectually, the most inadequate that fall to the lot of any middle class among the civilised nations of Europe. And the improvement so wrought must tell in the end, and will gradually fit the middle. classes to understand better themselves and the world, and to take their proper place, and to grasp and treat real politics, politics far other than their politics of Dissent, which seem to me quite played out. This will be a work of time. Do not suppose that a great change of this kind is to be effected off hand. But we may make a beginning for it at once,

and a good beginning, by public schools for the middle classes.

For twenty years I have been vainly urging this upon the middle classes themselves. Now I urge it upon you. Comprehend, that middle-class education is a great democratic reform, of the truest, surest, safest kind. Christianity itself was such a reform. The kingdom of God, the grand object of Jesus Christ, the grand object of Christianity, is mankind raised, as a whole, into harmony with the true and abiding law of man's being, living as we were meant to live. Those of old who had to forward this work found the Jewish community,-to whom they went first,narrow, rigid, sectarian, unintelligent, of impracticable temper, their heads full of some impossible politics of their own. Then they looked around, and they saw an immense world outside the Jewish community, a world with a thousand faults, no doubt, but with openness and flexibility of mind, new and elastic, full of possibilities;-and they said: We turn to the Gentiles! Do not be affronted at being compared to the Gentiles; the Gentiles were the human race, the Gentiles were the future. Mankind are called in one body to the peace of God; that is the Christian phrase for civilisation. We have by no means reached that consummation yet; but that, for eighteen centuries, we have been making way towards it, we owe to the Gentiles and to those who turned to them. The work, I say, is not nearly done yet; and our Judaic and unelastic middle class in this country is of no present service, it seems, for carrying it forward. Do you, then, carry it forward yourselves, and insist on taking the middle class with you. You will be amply repaid for the effort, in your own fuller powers of life and joy, in any event. We may get in our

time none of the great reforms which we have been talking about; we may not even get public schools for the middle classes. But we are always the better, all of us, for having aimed high, for having striven to see and know things as they really are, for having set ourselves to walk in the light of that knowledge, to help forward great designs, and to do good. "Consider whereunto ye are born! ye were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge."

IV.

THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM.

A PUBLIC man, whose word was once of great power and is now too much forgotten by us, William Cobbett, had a humorous way of expressing his contempt for the two great political parties that between them govern our country, the Whigs and Tories, or Liberals and Conservatives, and who, as we all know, are fond of invoking their principles. Cobbett used to call these principles, contemptuously, the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke. Instead of taking, in the orthodox style, the divinised heroes of each party, and saying the principles of Mr. Pitt, the principles of Mr. Fox, he took a Whig and a Tory Chancellor, Lord Camden and Lord Hardwicke, who were more of lawyers than of politicians, and upon them he fathered the principles of the two great parties in the State. It is as if a man were now to talk of Liberals and Conservatives adhering, not to the principles of Mr. Gladstone, the principles of Lord Beaconsfield, but to the principles of Roundell Palmer, the principles of Cairns. Eminent as are these personages, the effect of the profession of faith would be somewhat attenuated; and this is just what Cobbett intended. He meant to throw scorn on both of the rival parties in the State, and on their profession of principles; and

so this great master of effect took a couple of lawyers, whose names lent themselves happily to his purpose, and called the principles contending for mastery in Parliament, the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke !

Cobbett's politics were at bottom always governed by one master-thought,-the thought of the evil condition of the English labourer. He saw the two great parties in the State inattentive, as he thought, to that evil condition of the labourer,-inattentive to it, or ignorantly aggravating it by mismanagement. Hence his contempt for Whigs and Tories alike. And perhaps I may be allowed to compare myself with Cobbett so far as this: that whereas his politics were governed by a master-thought, the thought of the bad condition of the English labourer, so mine, too, are governed by a master-thought, but by a different one from Cobbett's. The master-thought by which my politics are governed is rather this,-the thought of the bad civilisation of the English middle class. But to this object of my concern I see the two great parties in the State as inattentive as, in Cobbett's regard, they were to the object of his. I see them inattentive to it, or ignorantly aggravating its ill state by mismanagement. And if one were of Cobbett's temper, one might be induced, perhaps, under the circumstances, to speak of our two great political parties as scornfully as he did; and instead. of speaking with reverence of the body of Liberal principles which recommend themselves by Mr. Gladstone's name, or of the body of Conservative principles which recommend themselves by Lord Beaconsfield's, to call them gruffly the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke.

Cobbett's talent any one might well desire to have, but Cobbett's temper is far indeed from being