No doubt to a large division of English society at this very day, that sort of dinner and discussion, and indeed, the whole manner of life and conversation here suggested by Mrs. Hutchinson’s narrative, will seem both natural and amiable, and such as to meet the needs of man as a religious and social creature.  You know the conversation which reigns in thousands of middle-class families at this hour, about nunneries, teetotalism, the confessional, eternal punishment, ritualism, disestablishment.  It goes wherever the class goes which is moulded on the Puritan type of life.  In the long winter evenings of Toronto Mr. Goldwin Smith has had, probably, abundant experience of it.  What is its enemy?  The instinct of self-preservation in humanity.  Men make crude types and try to impose them, but to no purpose. “L’homme s’agite, Dieu le mene,"[477] says Bossuet.  “There are many devices in a man’s heart; nevertheless the counsel of the Eternal, that shall stand."[478] Those who offer us the Puritan type of life offer us a religion not true, the claims of intellect and knowledge not satisfied, the claim of beauty not satisfied, the claim of manners not satisfied.  In its strong sense for conduct that life touches truth; but its other imperfections hinder it from employing even this sense aright.  The type mastered our nation for a time.  Then came the reaction.  The nation said:  “This type, at any rate, is amiss; we are not going to be all like that!” The type retired into our middle class, and fortified itself there.  It seeks to endure, to emerge, to deny its own imperfections, to impose itself again;—­impossible!  If we continue to live, we must outgrow it.  The very class in which it is rooted, our middle class, will have to acknowledge the type’s inadequacy, will have to acknowledge the hideousness, the immense ennui of the life which this type has created, will have to transform itself thoroughly.  It will have to admit the large part of truth which there is in the criticisms of our Frenchman, whom we have too long forgotten.

After our middle class he turns his attention to our lower class.  And of the lower and larger portion of this, the portion not bordering on the middle class and sharing its faults, he says:  “I consider this multitude to be absolutely devoid, not only of political principles, but even of the most simple notions of good and evil.  Certainly it does not appeal, this mob, to the principles of ’89, which you English make game of; it does not insist on the rights of man; what it wants is beer, gin, and fun."[479]

That is a description of what Mr. Bright[480] would call the residuum, only our author seems to think the residuum a very large body.  And its condition strikes him with amazement and horror.  And surely well it may.  Let us recall Mr. Hamerton’s account of the most illiterate class in France; what an amount of civilization they have notwithstanding!  And this is always to be understood, in hearing or