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.'

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, contemptously, 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 masterthought, 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 masterthought 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 a temper of mildness and sweet reason, and must be eschewed by whoever makes it his study 'to liberate,' as Plato bids us, 'the gentler element in himself.' And therefore I will most willingly consent to call the principles of the Liberal and Conservative parties by their regular and handsome title of the principles of Mr. Gladstone, the principles of Lord Beaconsfield, instead of disparagingly styling them the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke. Only, while conceding with all imaginable willingness to Liberals and Conservatives the use of the handsomest title for their principles, I have never been able to see that these principles of theirs, at any rate as they succeed in exhibiting

them, have quite the value or solidity which their professors themselves suppose.

It is but the other day that I was remarking to confident Conservatives, at the very most prosperous hour of Conservative rule, how, underneath all external appearances, the country was yet profoundly Liberal. And eight or ten years ago, long before their disaster of 1874 came, I kept assuring confident Liberals that the mind of the country was grown a little weary of their stock performances upon the political stage, and exhorting my young Liberal friends not to be for rushing impetuously upon this stage, but to keep aloof from it for a while, to cultivate a disinterested play of mind upon the stock notions and habits of their party, and to endeavour to promote, with me, an inward working. Without attending to me in the least, they pushed on towards the arena of politics, not at that time very successfully. But they have, I own, been much more fortunate since; and now they stand in the arena of politics, not quite so young as in those days when I last exhorted them, but full of vigour still, and in good numbers. Me they have left staying outside as of old; unconvinced, even yet, of the wisdom of their choice, a Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present, disposed to think that by its actual present words and works the Liberal party, however prosperous it