But the fashions of this world, whether good or evil, pass away.  In the eighteenth century we find parents becoming more humane, though still keeping their offspring pretty stiffly bitted.  They shared in the general melioration of the age.  The father was “honored sir,” and was not too familiar with his boys.  The great outbreak at the close of the century did much for the emancipation of the young; and by the time that the present century had advanced to a third of its years, youth had so far got the best of the conflict, and treated their elders with so little consideration, that it was thought the latter were rather presumptuous in remaining on earth after fifty.  Youth began to organize itself.  Young Germany, Young France, and Young England became powers in the world.  Young Germany was revolutionary and metaphysical, and nourished itself on bad beer and worse tobacco.  Young France was full-bearded and decidedly dirty, and so far deferred to the past as to look for models in ’93; and it had a strong reverence for that antique sentiment which exhibited itself in the assassination of kings.  Young England was gentlemanly and cleanly, its leaders being of the patrician order; and it looked to the Middle Ages for patterns of conduct.  Its chiefs wore white waistcoats, gave red cloaks and broken meat to old women, and would have lopped off three hundred years from Old England’s life, by pushing her back to the early days of Henry viii., when the religious houses flourished, and when the gallows was a perennial plant, bearing fruit that was not for the healing of the nations.  Some of the cleverest of the younger members of the aristocracy belonged to the new organization, and a great genius wrote some delightful novels to show their purpose, and to illustrate their manner of how-not-to-do-it in grappling with the grand social questions of the age.  In “Coningsby” they sing canticles and carry about the boar’s head; in “Sibyl” they sing hymns to the Holy Virgin and the song of labor, and steal title-deeds, after setting houses on fire to distract attention from their immediate object; and in “Tancred” they go on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, by way of reviving their faith.  All this is so well done, that Young England will survive in literature, and be the source of edification, long after there shall be no more left of the dust of its chiefs than there is of the dust of Cheops or Caesar.  For all these youths are already vanished, leaving no more traces than you would find of the flowers that bloomed in the days of their lives.  Young Germany went out immediately after the failure of the revolutionists of 1848-9.  Young France thought it had triumphed in the fall of the Orleans monarchy, but had only taken the first long step toward making its own fall complete; and now some of its early members are of the firmest supporters of the new phase of imperialism, the only result of the Revolution of February that has given signs of endurance.  Young England went