For the Equality which Mr Arnold here champions is not English but French equality; not political and judicial equality before the law, but social equality enforced by the law.  He himself admits, and perhaps even a little exaggerates, his attitude of Athanasius contra mundum in this respect, amassing with relish expressions, in the sense opposite to his own, from such representative and yet essentially diverse authorities as Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone, Sir Erskine May, Mr Froude, and Mr Lowe.  Against them he arrays Menander and George Sand—­a counter-championship not itself suggestive of Equality.  This may be “only his fun”—­a famous utterance which it is never more necessary to keep in mind than when speaking or writing of Mr Arnold, for his fun, such as it was, was pervading, and occasionally rather cryptic.  But the bulk of the paper is perfectly serious.  Social equality, and its compulsory establishment by a law against free bequest or by public opinion, these are his themes.  He asserts that the Continent is in favour of them; that the English colonies, ci-devant and actual, are in favour of them; that the Greeks were in favour of them; that the Bible is in favour of them.  He cites Mr Hamerton as to the virtues of the French peasant.  He renews his old tilt at the manners of the English lower-middle class, at Messrs Moody and Sankey, at the great “Jingo” song of twenty years ago (as to which, by the way, a modern Fletcher of Saltoun might have something to say to-day), at the Puritans, at Mr Goldwin Smith, at many things and many persons.

I feel that history has given me at the moment rather an unfair advantage over Mr Arnold here.  One could always pick plenty of holes in “Equality,” could suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very good thing of it with their equality (which included slavery); that the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton’s rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr Arnold’s own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French towns with the commis voyageur have not found his manners so greatly superior to those of the English bagman.  But just at this moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible.  Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political effect of French Equality even at that time:  but one need not confine oneself to politics.  At the end of the nineteenth century France has enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory division of estates, for a hundred years and more.  Perhaps equality has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful example, fit to warn England to flee to the