is that everybody has more liberty of action and of speaking here than anywhere else in the Old World.”  We come again here upon Mr. Roebuck’s celebrated definition of happiness, on which I have so often commented:  “I look around me and ask what is the state of England?  Is not every man able to say what he likes?  I ask you whether the world over, or in past history, there is anything like it?  Nothing.  I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last.”  This is the old story of our system of checks and every Englishman doing as he likes, which we have already seen to have been convenient enough so long as there were only the Barbarians and the Philistines to do what they liked, but to be getting inconvenient, and productive of anarchy, [131] now that the Populace wants to do what it likes too.  But for all that, I will not at once dismiss this famous doctrine, but will first quote another passage from The Times, applying the doctrine to a matter of which we have just been speaking,—­education.  “The difficulty here” (in providing a national system of education), says The Times, “does not reside in any removeable arrangements.  It is inherent and native in the actual and inveterate state of things in this country.  All these powers and personages, all these conflicting influences and varieties of character, exist, and have long existed among us; they are fighting it out, and will long continue to fight it out, without coming to that happy consummation when some one element of the British character is to destroy or to absorb all the rest.”  There it is; the various promptings of the natural taste for the bathos in this man and that amongst us are fighting it out; and the day will never come (and, indeed, why should we wish it to come?) when one man’s particular sort of taste for the bathos shall tyrannise over another man’s; nor when right reason (if that may be called an element of the British character) shall absorb and [132] rule them all.  “The whole system of this country, like the constitution we boast to inherit, and are glad to uphold, is made up of established facts, prescriptive authorities, existing usages, powers that be, persons in possession, and communities or classes that have won dominion for themselves, and will hold it against all comers.”  Every force in the world, evidently, except the one reconciling force, right reason!  Sir Thomas Bateson here, the Rev. W. Cattle on this side, Mr. Bradlaugh on that!—­pull devil, pull baker!  Really, presented with the mastery of style of our leading journal, the sad picture, as one gazes upon it, assumes the iron and inexorable solemnity of tragic Destiny.