hanging, whence he looks into space which is a strange experience to him, he being dismayed and lost and stammering out broken words is laughed at, not by Thracian handmaidens such as laughed at Thales, or by any other uneducated persons, for they have no eye for the situation, but by every man who has been brought up as a true freeman.' Our practical politicians and men of the world, carried up by the course of time and change into a new air, and still ruefully trying there to gasp out their formulas, such as 'Freedom of contract,' or 'The Liberal party has emphatically condemned religious endowment,' or 'Our traditional, existing, social arrangements,' could not be better hit off. The man of the world, with his utter astonishment that the Irish tenants should stop the hunting, when the hunting 'caused the noble master of the hounds to spend among them ten thousand a year!' the man of the world, with his mournful and incessant cries of 'Revolution!' Yes, we are in a revolution; a revolution,' as the late Duke of Wellington said, 'by due course of law.' And one of the features of it is, that the Irish tenants prefer to stop the hunting of those whom they regard as a set of aliens encamped amongst 6 them for sporting purposes, who have in the past treated them and spoken to them as if they were slaves, and who are disposed, many of them, to treat them and speak to them as if they were slaves still,-the Irish people had rather stop this hunting, than profit by an expenditure upon it to the tune of ten thousand a year. The man of the world has had and has one formula for attaching neighbours and tenants to us, and one only, expenditure. And now he is drawn into upper air,' and has to hear such new and strange formulas as this, for example, of the most charming of French moralists:-Pour gagner l'humanité, il faut lui plaire; pour lui plaire, il faut être aimable. Or, if the man of the world can stand Holy Writ, let him hear the :-- Psalmist Mansueti possidebunt terram, the gentle shall possess the earth.' Indeed we are at the end of a period, and always at the end of a period the word goes forth: 'Now is the judgment of this world.' The 'traditional, existing, social arrangements,' which satisfied before, satisfy no longer ; the conventions and phrases, which once passed without question, are challenged. That saying of the saints comes to be fulfilled: Peribit totum quod non est ex Deo ortum. Each people has its own periods of national life, with their own characters. The period which is now ending for England is that which began, when, after the sensuous tumult of the Renascence, Catholicism being discredited and gone, our serious nation desired, as had been foretold, 'to see one of the days of the Son of Man and did not see it'; but men said to them, See here, or See there, and they went after the blind guides and followed the false direction; and the actual civilisation of England and of America is the result. A civilisation with many virtues! but without lucidity of mind, and without largeness of temper. And now we English, at any rate, have to acquire them, and to learn the necessity for us 'to live,' as Emerson says, 'from a greater depth of being.' The sages and the saints alike have always so-called practical people preached this necessity; the and men of the world have always derided it. In the present collapse of their wisdom, we ought to find it less hard to rate their stock ideas and stock phrases, their claptrap and their catchwords, at their proper value, and to cast in our lot boldly with the sages and with the saints. Sine ut mortui sepeliant mortuos suos, sed tu vade adnuntia regnum Dei. |