noble oratory, the old story, how to the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the people of great towns we owe all our improvements in the last thirty years, and how these improvements have hitherto consisted in Parliamentary reform, and free trade, and abolition of Church rates, and so on; and how they are now about to consist in getting rid of minority-members, and in introducing a free breakfast-table, and in abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the Nonconformists’ antipathy to establishments, and much more of the same kind.  And though our pauperism and ignorance, and all the questions which are called social, seem now to be forcing themselves upon his mind, yet he still goes on with his glorifying of the great towns, and the Liberals, and their operations for the last thirty years.  It never [xxix] seems to occur to him that the present troubled state of our social life has anything to do with the thirty years’ blind worship of their nostrums by himself and our Liberal friends, or that it throws any doubts upon the sufficiency of this worship.  But he thinks what is still amiss is due to the stupidity of the Tories, and will be cured by the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the great towns, and by the Liberals going on gloriously with their political operations as before; or that it will cure itself.  So we see what Mr. Bright means by thoughtfulness and intelligence, and in what manner, according to him, we are to grow in them.  And, no doubt, in America all classes read their newspaper and take a commendable interest in politics more than here or anywhere else in Europe.

But, in the following essay, we have been led to doubt the sufficiency of all this political operating of ours, pursued mechanically as we pursue it; and we found that general intelligence, as Monsieur Renan calls it, or, in our own words, a reference of all our operating to a firm intelligible law of things, was just what we were without, and that we were without it because we worshipped our machinery [xxx] so devoutly.  Therefore, we conclude that Monsieur Renan, more than Mr. Bright, means by reason and intelligence the same thing as we do; and when he says that America, that chosen home of newspapers and politics, is without general intelligence, we think it likely, from the circumstances of the case, that this is so; and that, in culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us all, falls short.

And,—­to keep to our point of the influence of religious establishments upon culture and a high development of our humanity,—­ we can surely see reasons why, with all her energy and fine gifts, America does not show more of this development, or more promise of this.  In the following essay it will be seen how our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.  This leaves the Philistines for the great bulk of the nation;—­a livelier