It may be worth while (taking the usual chronological licence for the sake of logical coherence) to say a few words on the other political and quasi-political pieces reprinted with Irish Essays—­the address to Ipswich working men, Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes, the Eton speech on Eutrapelia, and the ambitious Future of Liberalism[2] The first is a curious but not very important appeal to the lower class to educate the middle, with episodic praises of “equality,” “academies,” and the like, as well as glances at a more extensive system of “municipalisation,” which, not to the satisfaction of everybody, has come about since.  The second contains some admirable remarks on classical education, some still more admirable protests against reading about the classics instead of reading the classics, and the famous discourse on Eutrapelia, with its doctrine that “conduct is three-fourths of life,” its denunciation of “moral inadequacy,” and its really great indications of societies dying of the triumph of Liberalism and Conservatism respectively.  A discourse quite admirable in intention, though if “heckling” had been in order on that occasion, a sharp youth might have put Mr Arnold in some difficulty by asking where the canons of “moral adequacy” are written.

But The Future of Liberalism, which the Elizabethans would have called a “cooling-card” after the Liberal triumph of 1880, exhibits its author’s political quiddity most clearly.  Much that he says is perfectly true; much of it, whether true or not, is, as Mr Weller observes, “wery pretty.”  But the old mistake recurs of playing on a phrase ad nauseam—­in this case a phrase of Cobbett’s (one of the greatest of phrase-makers, but also one of the chief of the apostles of unreason) about “the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke.”  It was, of course, a capital argumentum ad invidiam, and Mr Arnold frankly adopted it.  He compared himself to Cobbett—­a compliment, no doubt; but one which, I fear, Cobbett, who hated nothing so much as a university man, would not have appreciated.  Cobbett thought of nothing but the agricultural labourer’s “full belly”—­at least this is how he himself put it; and it would have enforced Mr Arnold’s argument and antithesis had he known or dared to use it.  Mr Arnold thought of nothing but the middle classes’ empty mind.  The two parties, as represented by the rather small Lord Camden and the rather great Lord Hardwicke, cared for neither of these things—­so “the principles of Pratt, the principles of Yorke” comes in as a refrain.  To the average Briton quotation is no more argument than, on higher authority, is blank verse.  Still it might do for ornament, if not for argument,—­might help the lesson and point it at least.  So we turn to the lesson itself.  This “Liberal of the future,” as Mr Arnold styles himself, begins, with orthodoxy if not with philosophy, by warning the Tories off entirely.  “They cannot