Warn her, Bard, that Power is pressing
    Hotly for his dues this hour,
  Tell her that no drunken blessing
    Stops the onward march of Power,
  Has she ears to take forewarnings,
    She will cleanse her of her stains,
  Feed and speed for braver mornings
    Valorously the growth of brains. 
  Power, the hard man knit for action
    Reads each nation on the brow;
  Cripple, fool, and petrifaction
    Fall to him—­are falling now.

And again: 

  She impious to the Lord of hosts
  The valour of her off-spring boasts,
  Mindless that now on land and main
  His heeded prayer is active brain.

These faithful prophets were not heeded, and we have had to learn our lesson in the school of experience.  She is a good teacher but her fees are very high.

The author of Friendship’s Garland ended with a despairing appeal to the democracy, when his jeremiads evoked no response from the upper class, whom he called barbarians, or from the middle class, whom he regarded as incurably vulgar.  The middle classes are apt to receive hard measure; they have few friends and many critics.  We must go back to Euripides to find the bold statement that they are the best part of the community and “the salvation of the State”; but it is, on the whole, true.  And our middle class is only superficially vulgar.  Vulgarity, as Mr Robert Bridges has lately said, “is blindness to values; it is spiritual death.”  The middle class in Matthew Arnold’s time was no doubt deplorably blind to artistic values; its productions survive to convict it of what he called Philistinism; but it is no longer devoid of taste or indifferent to beauty.  And it has never been a contemptible artist in life.  Mr Bridges describes the progress of vulgarity as an inverted Platonic progress.  We descend, he says, from ugly forms to ugly conduct, and from ugly conduct to ugly principles, till we finally arrive at the absolute ugliness which is vulgarity.  This identification of insensibility to beauty with moral baseness was something of a paradox even in Greece, and does not fit the English character at all.  Our towns are ugly enough; our public buildings rouse no enthusiasm; and many of our monuments and stained glass windows seem to shout for a friendly Zeppelin to obliterate them.  But we British have not descended to ugly conduct.  Pericles and Plato would have found the bearing of this people in its supreme trial more “beautiful” than the Parthenon itself.  The nation has shaken off its vulgarity even more easily and completely than its slackness and self-indulgence.  We have borne ourselves with a courage, restraint, and dignity which, a Greek would say, could have only been expected of philosophers.  And we certainly are not a nation of philosophers.  We must not then be too hasty in calling all contempt for intellect vulgar.  We have sinned by undervaluing the life of reason; but we are not really a vulgar people.  Our secular