from Liberalism than from Toryism.  He insisted that all our political reform was mere machinery; that the end and object of politics was Social Reform; and that the promise of the future was for those who should help us to be better, wiser, and happier; for those who concerned themselves rather with the product of the machine than with the machine itself; who were not satisfied by eternally taking it to pieces and putting it together again, but who wanted to know what sort of stuff it was, when perfected, to turn out.  He suggested that “the present troubled state of our social life” had at least something to do with “the thirty years’ blind worship of their idols by our Liberal friends,” and that it threw some doubt on “the sufficiency of their worship.”  “It is not,” he said, “fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for Free Trade, Extension of the Suffrage, and Abolition of Church Rates, instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, with our social condition what it is, that they have performed a great, a heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty years, with these Liberal nostrums.”

And, while our new critic was thus disdainful of much that we held sacred, of political machinery and logical government, and individual liberty of speech and action, he recalled our attention to certain objects of reverence which we, or at least some of us, had forgotten.  He insisted on the immense value of history and continuity in the political life of a nation.  He extolled (though the words were not his) the “institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead.”  He affirmed that external beauty, stateliness, splendour, gracious manners, were indispensable elements of civilization, and that these were the contributions which Aristocracy made to the welfare of the State.  He reminded us that the true greatness of a nation was to be found in its culture, its ideals, its sentiment for beauty, its performances in the intellectual and moral spheres—­not in its supply of coal, its volume of trade, its accumulated capital, or its multiplication of railways.  Above all—­and this was to some of our Party the unkindest cut—­he asserted for Religion the chief place among the elements of national well-being.  We were just then living at the fag-end of an anti-religious time.  The critical, negative, and utilitarian spirit which had seized on Oxford after the apparent defeat and collapse of Newman’s movement had profoundly affected the Liberal Party.  It was an essential characteristic of the political Liberals to pour scorn on that “retrograding transcendentalism” which was “the hardheads’ nickname for the Anglo-Catholic Symphony."[29] The fact that Gladstone was so saturated with the spirit of that symphony was a cause of mistrust which his genius and courage could barely overcome; and, even when it was overcome, a good many of his Party followed him as reluctantly