to nourish lower social ideals, to lessen a high civil self-respect in the community; then it must surely be our duty not to lose any opportunity of pressing these convictions.  To do this is not necessarily to act as if one were anxious for the immediate removal of the throne and the crown into the museum of political antiquities.  We may have no urgent practical solicitude in this direction, on the intelligible principle that a free people always gets as good a kind of government as it deserves.  Our conviction is not, on the present hypothesis, that monarchy ought to be swept away in England, but that monarchy produces certain mischievous consequences to the public spirit of the community.  And so what we are bound to do is to take care not to conceal this conviction; to abstain scrupulously from all kinds of action and observance, public or private, which tend ever so remotely to foster the ignoble and degrading elements that exist in a court and spread from it outwards; and to use all the influence we have, however slight it may be, in loading public opinion to a right attitude of contempt and dislike for these ignoble and degrading elements, and the conduct engendered by them.  A policy like this does not interfere with the advantages of the monarchy, such as they are asserted to be, and it has the effect of making what are supposed to be its disadvantages as little noxious as possible.  The question whether we can get others to agree with us is not relevant.  If we were eager for instant overthrow, it would be the most relevant of all questions.  But we are in the preliminary stage, the stage for acting on opinion.  The fact that others do not yet share our opinion, is the very reason for our action.  We can only bring them to agree with us, if it be possible on any terms, by persistency in our principles.  This persistency, in all but either very timid or very vulgar natures, always has been and always will be independent of external assent or co-operation.  The history of success, as we can never too often repeat to ourselves, is the history of minorities.  And what is more, it is for the most part the history of insurrection exactly against what the worldly spirits of the time, whenever it may have been, deemed mere trifles and accidents, with which sensible men should on no account dream of taking the trouble to quarrel.

‘Halifax,’ says Macaulay, ’was in speculation a strong republican and did not conceal it.  He often made hereditary monarchy and aristocracy the subjects of his keen pleasantry, while he was fighting the battles of the court and obtaining for himself step after step in the peerage.’  We are perfectly familiar with this type, both in men who have, and men who have not, such brilliant parts as Halifax.  Such men profess to nourish high ideals of life, of character, of social institutions.  Yet they never think of these ideals, when they are deciding what is practically attainable.  One would like to ask them what purpose is served by an