From first to last, he professed himself, and no doubt believed himself, to be on the Liberal side.  At the General Election of 1868 he urbanely informed a Tory Committee, which asked for the advantage of his name, that he was “an old Whig,” nurtured in the traditions of Lansdowne House.  “Although,” he said in 1869, “I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement.”  In 1878 he described himself as a “sincere but ineffectual Liberal”:  in 1880, as “a Liberal of the future rather than a Liberal of the present.”  A year later, he spoke smilingly of “all good Liberals, of whom I wish to be considered one”; and as late as 1887 he declared himself “one of the Liberals of the future, who happen to be grown, alas! rather old.”

But, though he believed himself to be a Liberal, he had the most lively disrelish for the Liberalism of that great Middle Class which, during the greater part of his life, played so large a part in Liberal politics.  In 1882, reviewing, in his favourite manner, the various classes of English Society, and discussing their adequacy to fulfil the ideal of perfect citizenship, he wrote—­

“Suppose we take that figure we know so well, the earnest and non-conforming Liberal of our Middle Classes, as his schools and his civilization have made him.  He is for Disestablishment; he is for Temperance; he has an eye to his Wife’s Sister; he is a member of his local caucus; he is learning to go up to Birmingham every year to the feast of Mr. Chamberlain.  His inadequacy is but too visible.”

Certainly Arnold’s Liberalism had nothing in common with the Liberalism of the great Middle Class.  Indeed, so far as theory is concerned, it had a democratic basis, inasmuch as he believed that democracy was a product of natural law, and that our business was to adapt our political and social institutions to it.  “Democracy,” he said, “is trying to affirm its own essence:  to live, to enjoy, to possess the world, as aristocracy has tried, and successfully tried, before it.”

The movement of Democracy he regarded as being an “operation of nature,” and, like other operations of nature, it was neither to be praised nor blamed.  He was neither a “partisan” of it, nor an “enemy.”  His only care was, if he could, to guide it aright, and to secure that it used its predominant power in human affairs at least as wisely as the aristocracy which had preceded it.  Of aristocratic rule in foreign countries—­of such rule as preceded the French Revolution—­he thought as poorly as most men think; but for the aristocracy of England he had a singular esteem.  It is true that he gave it a nickname; that he poked fun at its illiteracy and its inaccessibility to ideas; that he was impatient of “immense inequalities of condition and property,” and huge estates, and irresponsible landlordism; that he contemned the “hideous English toadyism” and “immense vulgar-mindedness” of the Middle Class when confronted with “lords and great people.”