The change of opinion wrought by Mr. Beecher in England is far less easy to estimate; indeed, we shall never have the means of determining what it may have been.  The organs of opinion which have been against us will continue their assaults, and those which have been our friends will continue to defend us.  The public men who have committed themselves will be consistent in the right or in the wrong, as they may have chosen at first.  To know what Mr. Beecher has effected, we must not go to Exeter Hall and follow its enthusiastic audience as they are swayed hither and thither by his arguments and appeals; we must not count the crowd of admiring friends and sympathizers whom he, like all personages of note, draws around him:  the fire-fly calls other fire-flies about him, but the great community of beetles goes blundering round in the dark as before.  Mr. Cobden has given us the test in a letter quoted by Mr. Beecher in the course of his speech at the Brooklyn Academy.  “You will carry back,” he says, “an intimate acquaintance with a state of feeling in this country among what, for [want of] a better name, I call the ruling class.  Their sympathy is undoubtedly strongly for the South, with the instinctive satisfaction at the prospect of the disruption of the great Republic.  It is natural enough.”  “But,” he says, “our masses have an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the States,—­the United States.  It is true that they have not a particle of power in the direct form of a vote; but when millions in this country are led by the religious middle class, they can go and prevent the governing class from pursuing a policy hostile to their sympathies.”

This power of the non-voting classes is an idea that gives us pause.  It is one of those suggestions, like Lord Brougham’s of the “unknown public,” which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history.  This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—­before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante.  This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and all the defenders of true American principles.  It absorbs intelligence as melting ice renders heat latent; there is no living power directly generated with which we can move pistons and wheels, but the first step in the production of steam-force is to make the ice fluid.  No intellectual thermometer can reveal to us how much ignorance or prejudice has melted away in the fire of Mr. Beecher’s passionate eloquence, but by-and-by this will tell as a working-force.  The non-voter’s conscience will reach the Privy Council, and the hand of the ignorant, but Christianized laborer trace its own purpose in the letters of the royal signature.

We are living in a period, not of events only, but of epochs.  We are in the transition-stage from the miocene to the pliocene period of human existence.  A new heaven is forming over our head behind the curtain of clouds which rises from our smoking battle-fields.  A new earth is shaping itself under our feet amidst the tremors and convulsions that agitate the soil upon which we tread.  But there is no such thing as a surprise in the order of Nature.  The kingdom of God, even, cometh not with observation.