better than cure, and practical politicians know too well that a scientific treatment of social maladies is out of the question in this country.  Others become fanatics, that is to say, worldlings who are too narrow and violent to understand the world.  The root of the evil is that a whole range of the higher values is inaccessible to the majority, because they know nothing of intellectual wealth.  And yet the real wealth of a nation consists in its imponderable possessions—­in those things wherein one man’s gain is not another man’s loss, and which are not proved incapable of increase by any laws of thermo-dynamics.  An inexhaustible treasure is freely open to all who have passed through a good course of mental training, a treasure which we can make our own according to our capacities, and our share of which we would not barter for any goods which the law of the land can give or take away.  “The intelligent man,” says Plato, “will prize those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness and wisdom, and will less value the others.”  The studies which have this effect are those which teach us to admire and understand the good, the true and the beautiful.  They are, may we not say, humanism and science, pursued in a spirit of “admiration, hope and love.”  The trained reason is disinterested and fearless.  It is not afraid of public opinion, because it “counts it a small thing that it should be judged by man’s judgment”; its interests are so much wider than the incidents of a private career that base self-centred indulgence and selfish ambition are impossible to it.  It is saved from pettiness, from ignorance, and from bigotry.  It will not fall a victim to those undisciplined and disproportioned enthusiasms which we call fads, and which are a peculiar feature of English and North American civilisation.  Such reforms as are carried out in this country are usually effected not by the reason of the many, but by the fanaticism of the few.  A just balance may on the whole be preserved, but there is not much balance in the judgments of individuals.

Matthew Arnold, whose exhortations to his countrymen now seem almost prophetic, drew a strong contrast between the intellectual frivolity, or rather insensibility, of his countrymen and the earnestness of the Germans.  He saw that England was saved a hundred years ago by the high spirit and proud resolution of a real aristocracy, which nevertheless was, like all aristocracies, “destitute of ideas.”  Our great families, he shows, could no longer save us, even if they had retained their influence, because power is now conferred by disciplined knowledge and applied science.  It is the same warning which George Meredith reiterated with increasing earnestness in his late poems.  What England needs, he says, is “brain.”