its own sphere, with the highest respect; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious.  But what is law in one place is not law in another; what is law here to-day is not law even here to-morrow; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man’s conscience is not binding on another’s.  The old woman[28] who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles’s Church at Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be permitted to remain strangers.  But the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchanging, of universal validity; to count by tens is the easiest way of counting—­that is a proposition of which every one, from here to the Antipodes, feels the force; at least I should say so if we did not live in a country where it is not impossible that any morning we may find a letter in the Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absurdity.  That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pure reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how little of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men.  In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power; it is,—­it will probably long remain,—­the greatest, the most animating event in history.  And as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite barren of good, France has reaped from hers one fruit—­the natural and legitimate fruit though not precisely the grand fruit she expected:  she is the country in Europe where the people is most alive.

But the mania for giving an immediate political and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal.  Here an Englishman is in his element:  on this theme we can all go on for hours.  And all we are in the habit of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth.  Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionize this world to their bidding,—­that is quite another thing.  There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.  A member of the House of Commons said to me the other day:  “That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no objection to it whatever.”  I venture to think he was wrong; that a thing is an anomaly is an objection to it, but absolutely and in