justify temporising and compromise.  They had strong feelings about Parliamentary Reform, because they were penetrated by the principle that the possession of political power by the bulk of a society is the only effective security against sinister government; or else by the principle that participation in public activity, even in the modest form of an exercise of the elective franchise, is an elevating and instructing agency; or perhaps by the principle that justice demands that those who are compelled to obey laws and pay national taxes should have a voice in making the one and imposing the other.

It may be said that the very fate of these aspirations has had a blighting effect on public enthusiasm and the capacity of feeling it.  Not only have most of them now been fulfilled, and so passed from aspiration to actuality, but the results of their fulfilment have been so disappointing as to make us wonder whether it is really worth while to pray, when to have our prayers granted carries the world so very slight a way forward.  The Austrian is no longer in Italy; the Pope has ceased to be master in Rome; the patriots of Hungary are now in possession of their rights, and have become friends of their old oppressors; the negro slave has been transformed into an American citizen.  At home, again, the gods have listened to our vows.  Parliament has been reformed, and the long-desired mechanical security provided for the voter’s freedom.  We no longer aspire after all these things, you may say, because our hopes have been realised and our dreams have come true.  It is possible that the comparatively prosaic results before our eyes at the end of all have thrown a chill over our political imagination.  What seemed so glorious when it was far off, seems perhaps a little poor now that it is near; and this has damped the wing of political fancy.  The old aspirations have vanished, and no new ones have arisen in their place.  Be the cause what it may, I should express the change in this way, that the existing order of facts, whatever it may be, now takes a hardly disputed precedence with us over ideas, and that the coarsest political standard is undoubtingly and finally applied over the whole realm of human thought.

The line taken up by the press and the governing classes of England during the American Civil War may serve to illustrate the kind of mood which we conceive to be gaining firmer hold than ever of the national mind.  Those who sympathised with the Southern States listened only to political arguments, and very narrow and inefficient political arguments, as it happened, when they ought to have seen that here was an issue which involved not only political ideas, but moral and religious ideas as well.  That is to say, the ordinary political tests were not enough to reveal the entire significance of the crisis, nor were the political standards proper for measuring the whole of the expediencies hanging in the balance.  The conflict could not be adequately