riots, in which certain leaders of the working-men played conspicuous parts.  The mob carried all before it, and the railings of Hyde Park were broken.  The Tory Government behaved with the most incredible feebleness.  The Home Secretary shed tears.  The whole business, half scandalous and half ridiculous, furnished Arnold with an illustration for his sermon on “Doing What One Likes.”  Reviewing, three years after their occurrence, the events of July, 1866, he wrote thus:  “Everyone remembers the virtuous Alderman-Colonel or Colonel-Alderman, who had to lead his militia through the London streets; how the bystanders gathered to see him pass; how the London roughs, asserting an Englishman’s best and most blissful right of doing what he likes, robbed and beat the bystanders; and how the blameless warrior-magistrate refused to let his troops interfere.  ‘The crowd,’ he touchingly said afterwards, ’was mostly composed of fine, healthy, strong men, bent on mischief; if he had allowed his soldiers to interfere, they might have been overpowered, their rifles taken from them and used against them by the mob; a riot, in fact, might have ensued, and been attended with bloodshed, compared with which the assaults and loss of property that actually occurred would have been as nothing.’  Honest and affecting testimony of the English Middle Class to its own inadequacy for the authoritative part which one’s convictions would sometimes incline one to assign to it!  ‘Who are we?’ they say by the voice of their Alderman-Colonel, ’that we should not be overpowered if we attempt to cope with social anarchy, our rifles taken from us and used against us by the mob, and we, perhaps, robbed and beaten ourselves?  Or what light have we, beyond a freeborn Englishman’s impulse to do as he likes, which would justify us in preventing, at the cost of bloodshed, other freeborn Englishmen from doing as they like, and robbing and beating as much as they please?’ And again, ’the Rough is just asserting his personal liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes, bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes....  He sees the rich, the aristocratic class, in occupation of the executive government; and so, if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a bear-garden or the streets impassable, he cries out that he is being butchered by the aristocracy.’”

Now, in spite of all this banter and sarcasm, these passages express a real dread which, at the time when Household Suffrage was claimed and conceded, really possessed Arnold’s mind.  He came with the lapse of years to see that it was illusory, and that the working-classes of England are as steady, as law-abiding, as inaccessible to ideas, as little in danger of being hurried into revolutionary courses, as unwilling to jeopardize their national interests and their stake in the country, as the Aristocracy and the Middle Class.  But at the period which we are considering, when the dread of popular violence had really laid