In February, 1866, there appeared in the Cornhill Magazine an essay called “My Countrymen.”  In this essay Arnold, fresh from one of his Continental tours, tried to show English people what the intelligent mind of Europe was really thinking of them. “’It is not so much that we dislike England,’ a Prussian official, with the graceful tact of his nation, said to me the other day, ‘as that we think little of her.’” Broadly speaking, European judgment on us came to this—­that England had been great, powerful, and prosperous under an aristocratic government, at a time when the chief requisite for national greatness was Action, “for aristocracies, poor in ideas, are rich in energy”; but that England was rapidly losing ground, was becoming a second-rate power, was falling from her place in admiration and respect, since the Government had passed into the hands of the Middle Class.  What was now the chief requisite for national greatness was Intelligence; and in intelligence the Middle Class had shown itself signally deficient.  In foreign affairs—­in its dealings with Russia and Turkey, Germany and America—­it had shown “rash engagement, intemperate threatenings, undignified retreat, ill-timed cordiality,” in short, every quality best calculated to lower England in the esteem of the civilized world.

In domestic affairs, the life and mind of the Middle Class were thus described by the foreign critic.  “The fineness and capacity of man’s spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Class has an enjoyment in its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money; but beyond that?  Drugged with business, your Middle Class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except Religion; it has a religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive....  What other enjoyments have they?  The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere, but which your Middle Class consumes by the hundred thousand, and in their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on Teetotalism or Nunneries.  Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more unenviable?...  Your Middle Class man thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour.  He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.”  And, as to political and social reform, “Such a spectacle as your Irish Church Establishment you cannot find in France or Germany.  Your Irish Land Question you dare not face.”  English Schools, English vestrydom, English provincialism—­all alike stand in the most urgent need of reform; but