'gained most is the poorest, the most dependent, and the most 'defenceless.

'The general effect of the evidence seems hardly to admit of doubt. Yet, in spite of evidence, many will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live. It may at first sight seem strange that society, while constantly moving 'forward with eager speed, should be constantly looking back 'with tender regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in 'which we actually are. That impatience while it stimulates us 'to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful in us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is 'constantly improving. But, in truth, there is constant improvement, precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present, we should cease to labour, to contrive, and to save with a view to the future. And it is natural that, being dissatisfied with the present, we 'should form a too favourable estimate of the past.

In truth we are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveller in the Arabian desert. Beneath the 'caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters. The pilgrims hasten forward, and find nothing but sand, where, an hour before, they had seen a lake. They turn their eyes and see 'a lake where, an hour before, they were toiling through sand. A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest 'degrees of opulence and civilisation. But, if we resolutely 'chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion 'to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen 'were destitute of comforts, the want of which would be in'tolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers 'breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when men died faster in the 'purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential 'lanes in our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana. We, 'too, shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with fifteen 'shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive

'ten shillings a day; that labouring men may be as little used 'to dine without meat as they now are to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and medical discoveries may have added several 6 more years to the average length of human life; that numerous ⚫ comforts and luxuries which are now unknown, or confined to a few, may be within the reach of every diligent and thrifty working man. And yet it may then be the mode to assert that the increase of wealth and the progress of science have ⚫ benefited the few at the expense of the many; and to talk of the reign of Queen Victoria as the time when England was truly merry England, when all classes were bound together by brotherly sympathy, when the rich did not grind the faces of the poor, and when the poor did not envy the splendour of the rich.' (Vol. i. p. 426.)

But the impression of which we speak is not only incorrect; it is noxious, as all incorrect conceptions are. It was a profound remark of Augustus Schlegel's, The illusion of a past golden age is one of the greatest hinderances to the approach of the golden age that should come. If the golden age is past, ' it was not genuine.' The idea that we are degenerating-that our national evils and our social maladies are increasing upon us -can scarcely fail to have a paralysing influence upon our energies. If the exertions of the last generation-which, though often misdirected, were sincere, indefatigable, and sometimes almost gigantic-failed to mitigate the intensity or arrest the progress of these ills, there is reason enough to drive the boldest among us to despair. What are we, that we should hope to succeed where predecessors, at least as able, as strenuous, as benevolent as ourselves, have utterly and signally failed! But the truth is, that the efforts of these our predecessors were crowned with an appropriate measure of success. So have been our own. And it is only by cherishing this faith, that we can effectually nerve ourselves for the further toils and struggles of our continued war with evil.

But this incorrect impression as to the remoter past is injurious in another way. It misdirects our efforts. It disposes us to try back. If our ancestors were really happier, wiser, more successful than we, if the condition of the people were really more satisfactory in those days than in these, there would be a powerful argument for attempting to retrace our steps, and striving to replace society in the position it occupied in generations past. A double blunder, this: for not only would the operation prove an impossible one-but, if achieved, would be only an aggravation of our difficulties. As long as these ideas are confined to secluded and speculative thinkers, they produce

merely feeble poetry and faulty philosophy. When, however, as in our days, they penetrate the arena of actual statesmanship, and endeavour to force their way into life and action, they not only divert attention from a sounder channel, but lead to practical mistakes of the worst kind. The crude and boyish theories, the vague and declamatory language, of the Young England section of our legislators, have given us the measure at once of the wild impracticability and unsoundness of their views, and of the mischievous confusion which might be anticipated if they were to take strong hold of the national mind. The error of these men is, that they carry the conceptions of poetry into the unsuitable atmosphere of public life. Policy, with them, is not a matter of science, but of taste; and their opinions are selected according as they harmonise with fancy, not as they square with fact. They dream of a beautiful past which had no existence- and would compel the actual present into conformity with that unreal and shadowy vision.

Moreover, this erroneous notion of our deterioration has a further mischievous operation, it puts us in a hurry. It generates the impression that there is no time to be lost; that evils are increasing upon us with such frightful rapidity that, if we do not act at once, action will come too late; that there is no space nor leisure for deliberation, for experiment, for caution. To speak colloquially, the public gets into a fuss. We act hastily, and therefore we act wrong. In statesmanship, more than in any other branch of practical science, is the most patient and profound deliberation needed; for in none is a false step so difficult to be retraced; in none are its consequences so ramified, so far reaching, and so irreparable.

It is, therefore, our firm belief that our present, with all its gloomy shadows and its difficult enigmas, is yet a marked improvement on the past; and that one of the surest signs and proofs of this, is our sensitiveness to, and our impatience under, those disorders and distresses which our ancestors either did not observe, or acquiesced in as normal, unavoidable, or unimportant. And it is with a profound conviction that our progress hitherto has been, on the whole, satisfactory, and that it depends only on ourselves to make our future advance far more rapid, steady, and illimitable, that we venture to point out a few of the mistakes which have rendered many of our efforts less fruitful of good than they might appear to have deserved. Zealous, energetic, indefatigable benevolence is extant in overflowing abun

* Lord Melbourne used to say that the only thing that thoroughly alarmed him was, to hear people say, 'Something must be done.'

VOL. XC. NO. CLXXXII.

LL

dance. It needs only the guidance of sound principle to produce effects of which statesmen and philanthropists scarcely yet dare to dream.

The great difficulty is happily got over already. Our attention is fully awakened on the subject; our sympathies are almost nervously alive; our ears are eagerly open to any suggestions even from the most incapable and inexperienced; for both our fears and our humanity are effectually alarmed.

But, unfortunately, though an eminently humane, we are not in general a philosophic, nor a systematic people. In this respect we and our neighbours the French are at the opposite poles of the intellectual world. Their minds are scientific and mathematical to a fault; ours are practical and empiric to a fault. They are for ever recurring to first principles on the most trivial occasions ; we eschew all reference to such, even in the most momentous matters, with a shrinking instinct which partakes of conscious incapacity. In the common arrangements of their household or their family, in the conduct of the most paltry cases in their courts of law, in the formation or amendment of their constitutions, the French proceed by line and square, to a degree which appears to an Englishman to savour both of the pedant and the schoolboy. They love to have every thing in seipso totus, teres, atque rotundus. In all discussions upon social questions the Frenchman starts from the laws of nature' and the rights of 'man.' The Englishman seldom goes further back than the precedents which his own history can furnish him. He is afraid to adopt the most valuable and incontestable improvement unless he can find some warrant for it in the past; and the surest way of inducing him to go forward, is to persuade him that he is going backward. The French commence their national ameliorations ab initio, and upon principle; we attack our social maladies zealously indeed, but singly and empirically, not scientifically. We dread all systematic steps; we mistrust every thing that proceeds upon, or seems to confirm, a theory. We are not only satisfied with, but actually partial to, patchwork; and are for ever putting a new piece into an old garment. Of two extremes this is unquestionably the safest and the best: but still it is an extreme, and therefore an error. We attack each evil as it arises or rather, as it first strikes our view, as if it stood single and isolated, without reference either to its causes or its context. We seldom dream of tracing back, as we easily might do, a host of social mischiefs to one common source or seed, and then, by removing that, leave the manifold consequences to die out for want of nourishment. The plan we adopt is the idle, shallow, and wasteful proceeding of cutting off

each head of the ever-growing hydra as it appears. Hence the voluminous, confused, and contradictory character of much of our remedial legislation. We have ten edicts where one would have sufficed; we have many that are inconsistent with each other, and many that aggravate the virulence, while they suppress or vary the symptoms, of the disease.

The particular tendency to error apparent in the prevalent social philosophy of the day, to which we wish to direct special attention, lies in the unsound, exaggerated, and somewhat maudlin tenderness with which it is now the fashion to regard the criminal and the pauper. This feeling is in itself so amiable, so Christian (on a superficial glance at least), and has so much of justice and rectitude for its foundation, that not only has it a natural aptitude to degenerate into excess, but we are disposed to regard the excess itself as a virtue, and are therefore little likely to guard against it. Selfishness is so instinctively felt to be the besetting sin, the epidemic malady of human nature' -that it is peculiarly difficult to persuade ourselves that we can ever be acting wrong when we know that we are acting unselfishly. And gentleness to the errors, and compassion towards the sufferings of others, are such adorning excellencies in the individual, and in domestic life, that we listen with impatience and mistrust to the moralist who would teach us that these sentiments, when carried into public affairs and systematised in legislation, may often become eminently mischievous, and therefore highly culpable. Yet it is unquestionable that; though individuals may allow charity and compassion to guide them without going very far astray, yet the State, if it wishes to maintain a straight and safe career, must act upon principles as stern, as steady, and as comprehensive as those of Nature herself. And while, with pardonable pride and self-gratulation, we contrast the prying and impatient humanity of the present day with the hard and brutal indifference which characterised a former age, we are prone to forget or to ignore how much of selfish tenderness to our own feelings may lurk in this morbid and pampered sensitiveness to the inevitable or the medicinal wretchedness of those around us.

It is pleasing to reflect' (says Mr. Macaulay, i. 424.) ‘that the public mind of England has softened while it has ripened; and that we have, in the course of ages, become not only a wiser, but also a kinder people. There is scarcely a page of the history or lighter literature of the seventeenth century which does not contain some proof that our ancestors were less humane than their posterity. The discipline of workshops, of schools, of private families, though not more efficient than