vanity, insolence, poverty, ambition, escaping from every kind of restraint, ranging over the world, and turning it topsy-turvy as it pleased.  All Europe exhibits the result—­a mass of ruin, terror, and despair.”  Matthew Arnold, young and ardent, and in some ways democratic, wrote in a different vein:  “The hour of the hereditary peerage, and eldest sonship, and immense properties, has, I am convinced, as Lamartine would say, struck.”  Seventy years ago!  And that “hour” has not struck yet!

The “dissolving throes” were lulled again, and I scarcely made themselves felt till 1866, when a mild attempt to admit the pick of the artisans to the electoral privileges of the middle class woke the panic-stricken vehemence of Robert Lowe.  “If,” he asked, “you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and the means of intimidation; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, and violent people, where will you go to look for them—­to the top or to the bottom?” Well might Bishop Wilberforce report to a friend, “It was enough to make the flesh creep to hear Bob Lowe’s prognostications for the future of England.”

Next year the artisans got the vote, though the great Lord Shaftesbury, who knew more than most of his peers about working-men, plainly told the House of Lords that “a large proportion of the working classes have a deep and solemn conviction that property is not distributed as property ought to be; that some checks ought to be kept upon the accumulation of property in single hands; and that to take away by legislation that which is in excess with a view to bestowing it on those who have less, is not a breach of any law, human or Divine.”

Yet once more.  When in 1885 the agricultural labourers (of whom a Tory M.P. said that they were no fitter for a vote than the beasts they tended), were admitted to the franchise, the same terrors shook the squirearchy.  We were warned that the land would soon be broken up into small holdings; that sport would become impossible; and that “the stately homes of England” must all be closed, for lack of money to keep them open.  The country, we were told, had seen its best days, and “Merry England” had vanished for ever.

I only recall these “dissolving throes,” real or imaginary, because I fancy that just now they are again making themselves felt, and perhaps with better reason than ever before in our history.  People who venture to look ahead are asking themselves this question:  If this war goes on much longer, what sort of England will emerge?  Some are looking forward with rapture to a new heaven and a new earth; others dread the impending destruction “of a social order they loved.”  Can we not trace something of this dread in Lord Lansdowne’s much-canvassed letter?  He is one of the most patriotic and most experienced men in public life; he “looks on the rushing decay of the times which sheltered his youth”; and it may well be that he is striving to avert what seems to him a social catastrophe.