He admired the fine manners, the governing faculty, the reticent and dignified habit, of the Aristocracy.  He deplored its limitations and its obduracy, its “little culture and no ideas.”  He made fun of it when its external manifestations touched the region of the ludicrous—­“Everybody knows Lord Elcho’s[24] appearance, and how admirably he looks the part of our governing classes; to my mind, indeed, the mere cock of his lordship’s hat is one of the finest and most aristocratic things we have.”  In a more serious vein he taught—­and enraged the Guardian by teaching—­that, “ever since the advent of Christianity, the prince of this world is judged”; and that wealth and rank and dignified ease are bound to justify themselves for their apparent inconsistency with the Christian ideal.  He pitied the sorrows of the “people who suffer,” the “dim, common populations,” the “poor who faint alway”; but he pitied them from above.  He certainly did not enter into their position; did not share their ideas, or feel their sorrows as part of his own experience.  In an amazing passage he says that, when we snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion, when we long to crush an adversary by sheer violence, when we are envious, when we are brutal, when “we add our voices to swell a blind clamour against some unpopular personage,” when “we trample savagely on the fallen,” then we find in our own bosom “the eternal spirit of the Populace.”  That a spirit so hideous, so infernal as is here described, is the eternal spirit of fallen humanity may be painfully true; but to say that it is the special or characteristic spirit of “the Populace” is to show that one has no genuine sympathy and no real acquaintance with the life and heart of the poor.  So far, then, his account of his own transition is true.  He had “broken with the ideas of his own class, and had not come much nearer to the ideas and works of Aristocracy or the Populace.”  But the work of his life had brought him into close and continuous contact with the great Middle Class, which practically had the whole management of Elementary Education in its hands.  He knew the members of that class, as he said, “experimentally.”  He slept in their houses, and ate at their tables, and observed at close quarters their books, their amusements, and their social life.  Thus he judged of their civilization by intimate acquaintance, and found it eminently distasteful and defective.  From 1832 to 1867 the Middle Class had governed England, manipulating the Aristocracy through the medium of the House of Commons; and the Aristocracy, though still occupying the place of visible dignity, had its eye nervously fixed on the movement, actual and impending, of the Middle Class.  This system of government by the predominance of the Middle Class, was not only distasteful to culture, but was actually a source of danger to the State when it came to be applied to Foreign Affairs.  “That makes the difference between Lord Grenville