It would not be very easy for us now, and perhaps it would not be particularly becoming at any time, to analyse the position that has been assigned to this Review in common esteem.  Those who have watched it from without can judge better than those who have worked within.  Though it has been open, so far as editorial goodwill was concerned, to opinions from many sides, the Review has unquestionably gathered round it some of the associations of sect.  What that sect is, people have found it difficult to describe with anything like precision.  For a long time it was the fashion to label the Review as Comtist, and it would be singularly ungrateful to deny that it has had no more effective contributors than some of the best-known disciples of Comte.  By-and-by it was felt that this was too narrow.  It was nearer the truth to call it the organ of Positivists in the wider sense of that designation.  But even this would not cover many directly political articles that have appeared in our pages, and made a mark in their time.  The memorable programme of Free Labour, Free Land, Free Schools, Free Church had nothing at all Positivist about it.  Nor could that programme and many besides from the same pen and others be compressed under the nickname of Academic Liberalism.  There was too strong a flavour of action for the academic and the philosophic.  This passion for a label, after all, is an infirmity.  Yet people justly perceived that there seemed to be a certain undefinable concurrence among writers coming from different schools and handling very different subjects.  Perhaps the instinct was right which fancied that it discerned some common drift, a certain pervading atmosphere, and scented a subtle connection between speculations on the Physical Basis of Life and the Unseen Universe, and articles on Trades Unions and National Education.

So far as the Review has been more specially identified with one set of opinions than another, it has been due to the fact that a certain dissent from received theologies has been found in company with new ideas of social and political reform.  This suspicious combination at one time aroused considerable anger.  The notion of anything like an intervention of the literary and scientific class in political affairs touched a certain jealousy which is always to be looked for in the positive and practical man.  They think as Napoleon thought of men of letters and savans:—­“Ce sont des coquettes avec lesquelles il faut entretenir un commerce de galanterie, et dont il ne faut jamais songer a faire ni sa femme ni son ministre.”  Men will listen to your views about the Unknowable with a composure that instantly disappears if your argument comes too near to the Rates and Taxes.  It is amusing, as we read the newspapers to-day, to think that Mr. Harrison’s powerful defence of Trades Unions fifteen years ago caused the Review to be regarded as an incendiary publication.  Some papers that appeared here on National Education were