us out of our vulgarity and brutality, if we chance to be vulgar and brutal to start with; it will rather feed them and be fed by them.  So that when Mr. Gladstone invites us to call our love of inequality “the complement of the love of freedom or its negative pole, or the shadow which the love of freedom casts, or the reverberation of its voice in the halls of the constitution,” we must surely answer that all this mystical eloquence is not in the least necessary to explain so simple a matter; that our love of inequality is really the vulgarity in us, and the brutality, admiring and worshipping the splendid materiality.

Our present social organization, however, will and must endure until our middle class is provided with some better ideal of life than it has now.  Our present organization has been an appointed stage in our growth; it has been of good use, and has enabled us to do great things.  But the use is at an end, and the stage is over.  Ask yourselves if you do not sometimes feel in yourselves a sense, that in spite of the strenuous efforts for good of so many excellent persons amongst us, we begin somehow to flounder and to beat the air; that we seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be threatened with a sort of standstill.  It is that we are trying to live on with a social organization of which the day is over.  Certainly equality will never of itself alone give us a perfect civilization.  But, with such inequality as ours, a perfect civilization is impossible.

To that conclusion, facts, and the stream itself of this discourse, do seem, I think, to carry us irresistibly.  We arrive at it because they so choose, not because we so choose.  Our tendencies are all the other way.  We are all of us politicians, and in one of two camps, the Liberal or the Conservative.  Liberals tend to accept the middle class as it is, and to praise the nonconformists; while Conservatives tend to accept the upper class as it is, and to praise the aristocracy.  And yet here we are at the conclusion, that whereas one of the great obstacles to our civilization is, as I have often said, British nonconformity, another main obstacle to our civilization is British aristocracy!  And this while we are yet forced to recognize excellent special qualities as well as the general English energy and honesty, and a number of emergent humane individuals, in both nonconformists and aristocracy.  Clearly such a conclusion can be none of our own seeking.

Then again, to remedy our inequality, there must be a change in the law of bequest, as there has been in France; and the faults and inconveniences of the present French law of bequest are obvious.  It tends to over-divide property; it is unequal in operation, and can be eluded by people limiting their families; it makes the children, however ill they may behave, independent of the parent.  To be sure, Mr. Mill[486] and others have shown that a law of bequest fixing