thought to indicate a deliberate plot for suppressing the Holy Scriptures in the land.  Extravagant misjudgment of this kind has passed away.  But it was far from being a mistake to suppose that the line taken here by many writers did mean that there was a new Radicalism in the air, which went a good deal deeper than fidgeting about an estimate or the amount of the Queen’s contribution to her own taxes.  Time has verified what was serious in those early apprehensions.  Principles and aims are coming into prominence in the social activity of to-day which would hardly have found a hearing twenty years ago, and it would be sufficient justification for the past of our Review if some writers in it have been instrumental in the process of showing how such principles and aims meet the requirements of the new time.  Reformers must always be open to the taunt that they find nothing in the world good enough for them.  “You write,” said a popular novelist to one of this unthanked tribe, “as if you believed that everything is bad.”  “Nay,” said the other, “but I do believe that everything might be better.”  Such a belief naturally breeds a spirit which the easy-goers of the world resent as a spirit of ceaseless complaint and scolding.  Hence our Liberalism here has often been taxed with being ungenial, discontented, and even querulous.  But such Liberals will wrap themselves in their own virtue, remembering the cheering apophthegm that “those who are dissatisfied are the sole benefactors of the world.”

This will not be found, I think, too lofty, or too thrasonical an estimate of what has been attempted.  A certain number of people have been persuaded to share opinions that fifteen years ago were more unpopular than they are now.  A certain resistance has been offered to the stubborn influence of prejudice and use and wont.  The original scheme of the Review, even if there had been no other obstacle, prevented it from being the organ of a systematic and constructive policy.  There is not, in fact, a body of systematic political thought at work in our own day.  The Liberals of the Benthamite school surveyed society and institutions as a whole; they connected their advocacy of political and legal changes with carefully formed theories of human nature; they considered the great art of Government in connection with the character of man, his proper education, his potential capacities.  Yet, as we then said, it cannot be pretended that we are less in need of systematic politics than our fathers were sixty years since, or that general principles are now more generally settled even among members of the same party than they were then.  The perplexities of to-day are as embarrassing as any in our history, and they may prove even more dangerous.  The renovation of Parliamentary government; the transformation of the conditions of the ownership and occupation of land; the relations between the Government at home and our adventurers abroad in contact with inferior