“Democracy,” which he reprinted from his first work on Foreign Schools in 1861, where it had appeared as an Introduction.  The juxtaposition is by no means uninteresting or uninstructive, though perhaps it is not entirely favourable to the idea of Mr Arnold’s development as a zoon politicon.  It has been said before that his earliest political writing is a good deal less fantastic and more sane than that of his middle period, and though “the last of life for which the first was made” was now restoring to him much of his power in this direction, yet he was always much joined to idols in matters political.  In grasp “Democracy” does not quite come up to its rather ambitious title; and a moment’s thought will show why.  In 1861 Democracy was a very academic subject.  All projects for further Parliamentary Reform had failed utterly in England; and nobody dreamt of what the next five or six years would bring.  In France there was what looked like a crushing military despotism:  in other Continental countries the repression which had followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being relaxed, or not relaxed at all.  American democracy had not had its second baptism of Civil War.  The favourite fancies about the respective ethos of aristocracy, of the middle-class, and of the lower do indeed appear, but for the most part Mr Arnold confines himself to the simple question of State interference, for which in his own subject of education he was so anxious, and which he would gladly have seen extended.  It has been more than once remarked already that he may justly be regarded as a politician of more seriousness than he has here been represented as possessing, if espousing the cause of the things which actually happen is taken as the criterion.  For State interference has grown and is growing every day.  But then it may be held—­and as a matter of principle he would not himself have contested it—­that a man’s politics should be directed, not by what he thinks will happen, but by what he thinks ought to happen.  And some of us, while not in love by any means with the middle-class Liberal ideas of 1830-1860, think that the saving grace of that day that is dead was precisely its objection to State interference.

“Equality,” which follows, and which starts what might be called at the time of the book its contemporary interest, is much more far-reaching and of greater curiosity; indeed, it may perhaps be held to be the most curious, in a certain sense, of all its author’s writings, and to give, in a not fully satisfactory but suggestive fashion, a key to his complex character which is supplied by no other of his essays.  That there was (in no silly or derogatory sense of an often absurdly used word) a slightly un-English side to that character, few acute judges would deny.  But its results, in the greater part of the works, are so diffused, and, as it were, subterranean, that they are difficult to extract and concentrate.  Here we seem to get the spirit much nearer proof.