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brought up with your aristocracy, they have been too much influenced by it, have taken, half insensibly, an aristocracy's material standard, and do not believe in ideas; certain it is that their intelligence has no ardour, no plan, leads them nowhere; it is ineffectual. Your intellect is at this moment, to an almost unexampled degree, without influence on the intellect of Europe."

our affairs, and fortune seemed as if she was going to give, as she often does give, the anti-theorists a triumph. The Italian plot,' cried The Times, ' has failed. The Emperor and his familiars knew not the moral strength which is still left in the enlightened communities of Europe. To the unanimous and indignant reprobation of English opinion is due the failure of the imperial plots. While this was being said, I noticed an While silence and fear reign everywhere Italian, who was one of our party, fumbling abroad, the eyes and ears of the Conwith his pocket-book, from whence he tinent are turned continually to these presently produced a number of gray news- Islands. English opinion has been erected paper slips, which I could see were Eng- into a kind of Areopagus. Our business lish. แ Now just listen to me for a moment," went forward again, and your English he cried, "and I will show you what makes opinion grew very stern indeed. 'Sardinia,' us say, on the Continent, that you English said The Times, is told very plainly that she have no sense for logic, for ideas, and that has deserted the course by which alone she your praise and blame, having no substantial could hope either to be happy or great, and foundation, are worth very little. You abandoned herself to the guidance of fatal remember the famous French pamphlet delusions, which are luring her on to debefore our war began in 1859: Napoleon struction. By cultivating the arts of peace the Third and Italy. The pamphlet appealed, she would have been solving, in the only in the French way, to reason and first possible way, the difficult problem of Italian principles; the upshot of it was this: The independence. She has been taught by treaties which bind governments would be France to look instead to the acquisition of invariable only if the world was immovable. fresh territory by war and conquest. She A power which should intrench itself has now been told with perfect truth by the behind treaties in order to resist modifica- warning voice of the British Parliament tions demanded by general feeling would that she has not a moment to lose in retrahave doubtless on her side an acquired right, cing her steps, if indeed her penitence be but she would have against her moral not too late.” Well, to make a long story right and universal conscience.' You Eng- short, we did not retrace our steps; we lish, on the other hand, took your stand on went on, as you know; we succeeded; and things as they were: If treaties are made,' now let us make a jump from the spring to says your Times, they must be respected. the autumn. Here is your unanimous EngTear one, and all are waste paper.' Very lish opinion, here is your Areopagus, here well; this is a policy, at any rate, an aristo- is your Times, in October: 'It is very ircratical policy; much may be said for it. regular (Sardinia's course), it is contrary The Times was full of contempt for the to all diplomatic forms. Francis the Second French pamphlet, an essay, as it called it, can show a thousand texts of international 'conveying the dreams of an agitator ex-law against it. Yes; but there are expressed in the language of an academician.' It said: No one accustomed to the pithy comments with which liberty notices passing history, can read such a production without complacency that he does not live in the country which produces it. To see the heavy apparatus of an essay brought out to solve a question on which men have corresponded and talked and speculated in the funds, and acted in the most practical manner possible for a month past, is as strange as if we beheld some spectral review, and so on. Still very well; there is the strong practical man despising theories and reveries. 'The sentiment of race is just now threatening to be exceedingly troublesome. It is to a considerable extent in our days a literary revival.' That is all to the same effect. Then came a hitch in

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tremities beyond all law, and there are laws which existed before even society was formed. There are laws which are implanted in our nature, and which form part of the human mind,' and so on. Why, here you have entirely boxed the compass and come round from the aristocratical programme to the programme of the French pamphlet, the dreams of an agitator in the language of the rhetorician!" And you approved not only our present but our past, and kindly took off your ban of reprobation issued in February. How great a change has been effected by the wisely courageous policy of Sardinia ! The firmness and boldness which have raised Italy from degradation form the enduring character of a ten years' policy. King Victor Emmanuel and his sagacious counsellor have achieved

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answer: We have got the lead, no thanks to you, and we mean to astonish the world without you.' Unless you change, unless your middle class grows more intelligent, you will tell upon the world less and less, and end by being a second Holland. We do not hold you cheap for saying you will wash your hands of all concerns but your own, that you do not care a rush for influence in Europe; though this sentence of your Lord Bolingbroke is true:

success by remembering that fortune favours | blunders dispose the Americans, who are the bold. There you may see why the very shrewd, and who have been succeedmind of France influences the Continent so ing as steadily as you have been failing, to much and the mind of England so little. France has intelligence enough to perceive the ideas that are moving, or are likely to move, the world; she believes in them, sticks to them, and shapes her course to suit them. You neither perceive them nor believe in them, but you play with them like counters, taking them up and laying them down at random, and following really some turn of your imagination, some gust of liking or disliking. When I heard some of your countrymen complaining of Italy opinion of mankind, which is fame after and her ingratitude for English sympathy, death, is superior strength and power in I made, to explain it, the collection of those life.' We hold you cheap because you extracts and of a good many more. They are all at your service; I have some here from the Saturday Review, which you will find exactly follow suit with those from The Times." "No, thank you," I answered, "The Times is enough. My relations with the Saturday Review are rather tightstretched, as you say here, already; make me a party to none of your quarrels with them."

After this my original tormentor once more took up his parable. "You see now what I meant," he said, " by saying that you did better in the old time, in the day of aristocracies. An aristocracy has no ideas, but it has a policy, -to resist change. In this policy it believes, it sticks to it; when it is beaten in it, it holds its tongue. This is respectable, at any rate. But your great middle class, as you call it, your present governing power, having no policy, except that of doing a roaring trade, does not know what to be at in great affairs, blows hot and cold by turns, makes itself ridiculous in short. It was a good aristocratical policy to have helped Austria in the Italian war; it was a good aristocratical policy to have helped the South in the American war. The days of aristocratical policy are over for you; with your new middle-class public opinion you cut, in Italy, the figure our friend here has just shown you; in America you scold right and left, you get up a monster memorial to deprecate the further effusion of blood; you lament over the abridgment of civil liberty by people engaged in a struggle for life and death, and meaning to win; and when they turn a deaf ear to you and win, you say, Oh, now let us be one great united Anglo-Saxon family and astonish the world.' This is just of a piece with your threatening Germany with the Emperor of the French. Do you not see that all these

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show so few signs, except in the one department of industry, of understanding your time and its tendencies, and of exhibiting a modern life which shall be a signal success. And the reaction is the stronger, because, after 1815, we believed in you as now-adays we are coming to believe in America. You had won the last game, and we thought you had your hand full of trumps, and were going to win the next. Now the game has begun to be played, and we have an inkling of what your cards are; we shrewdly suspect you have scarcely any trumps at all."

I am no arguer, as is well known, "and every puny whipster gets my sword." So, instead of making bad worse by a lame answer, I held my tongue, consoling myself with the thought that these foreigners get from us, at any rate, plenty of Rolands for any stray Oliver they may have the luck to give us. I have since meditated a good deal on what was then said, but I cannot profess to be yet quite clear about it. However, all due deductions made for envy, exaggeration, and injustice, enough stuck by me of these remarks on our logic, criticism, and love of intelligence, to determine me to go on trying (taking care, of course, to steer clear of indecency) to keep my mind fixed on these, instead of singing hosannahs to our actual state of development and civilization. The old recipe, to think a little more and bustle a little less, seemed to me still the best recipe to follow. So I take comfort when I find the Guardian reproaching me with having no influence; for I know what influence means, a party, practical proposals, action; and I say to myself: "Even suppose I could get some followers, and assemble them, brimming with affectionate enthusiasm, in a commiteeroom at some inn; what on earth should I say to them? what resolutions could I

propose ? I could only propose the old Soc- the modern spirit will be more and more ratic commonplace, Know thyself; and how felt among us, it will spread, it will preblank they would all look at that!" No; vail. Nay," this enthusiast often continues, to inquire, perhaps too curiously, what that getting excited as he goes on, "The Times present state of English development and itself, which so stirs some people's indignacivilization is, which according to Mr. Lowe tion - what is The Times, but a gigantic is so perfect that to give votes to the work- Sancho Panza, to borrow a phrase of your ing class is stark madness; and, on the friend Heine; a gigantic Sancho Panza, other hand, to be less sanguine about the following by an attraction he cannot resist divine and saving effect of a vote on its pos- that poor, mad, scorned, suffering, sublime ensessor than my friends in the commitee- thusiast, the modern spirit; following it, inroom at the "Spotted Dog," - that is my deed, with constant grumbling, expostulainevitable portion. To bring things under tion, and opposition, with airs of protection, the light of one's intelligence, to see how of compassionate superiority, with an incesthey look there, to accustom oneself simply sant by-play of nods, shrugs, and winks to regard the Marylebone Vestry, or the addressed to the spectators; following it, in Educational Home, or the Irish Church short, with all the incurable recalcitrancy Establishment, or our railway management, of a lower nature, but still following it?" or our Divorce Court, or our gin-palaces When my friend talks thus, I always shake open on Sunday and the Crystal Palace my head, and say that this sounds very like shut, as absurdities that is, I am sure, the transcendentalism which has already invaluable exercise for us just at present. brought me into so many scrapes. Let all persist in it who can, and steadily set their desires on introducing, with time, a little more soul and spirit into the too, too solid flesh of English society,

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I have a friend who is very sanguine, in spite of the dismal croakings of these foreigners, about the turn things are even now taking amongst us. "Mean and ignoble as our middle class looks," he says, "it has this capital virtue, it has seriousness. With frivolity, cultured or uncultured, you can do nothing; but with seriousness there is always hope. Then, too, the present bent of the world towards amusing itself, so perilous to the highest class, is curative and good for our middle class. A piano in a Quaker's drawing-room is a step for him to more humane life; nay, perhaps, even the penny gaff of the poor East-Londoner is a step for him to more humane life; it is what example shall we choose?—it is Strathmore, let us say, -it is the one-pound-eleven-andsixpenny gaff of the young gentlemen of the clubs and the young ladies of Belgravia, that is for them but a step in the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire. Besides, say what you like of the idealessness of aristocracies, the vulgarity of our middle class, the immaturity of our lower, and the poor chance which a happy type of modern life has between them, consider this: Of all that makes life liberal and humane, of light, of ideas, of culture, every man in every class of society who has a dash of genius in him is the boon friend. By his bringing up, by his habits, by his interest, he may be their enemy; by the primitive, unalterable complexion of his nature, he is their friend. Therefore, the movement of

I have another friend again (and I am grown so cowed by all the rebuke my original speculations have drawn upon me that I find myself more and more filling the part of a mere listener), who calls himself Anglo-Saxon rather than English, and this is what he says: "We are a small country," he says, "and our middle class has, as you say, not much gift for anything but making money. Our freedom and wealth have given us a great start, our capital will give us for a long time an advantage; but as other countries grow better-governed and richer, we must necessarily sink to the position to which our size and our want of any eminent gift for telling upon the world spiritually, doom us. But look at America; it is the same race; whether we are first or they, Anglo-Saxonism triumphs. You used to say that they had all the Philistinism of the English middle class from which they spring, and a great many faults of their own besides. But you noticed, too, that, blindly as they seemed following in general the star of their god Buncombe, they showed, at the same time, a feeling for ideas, a vivacity and play of mind, which our middle class has not, and which comes to the Americans, probably, from their democratic life, with its ardent hope, its forward stride, its gaze fixed on the future. Well, since these great events have lately come to purge and form them, how is this intelligence of theirs developing itself? Now they are manifesting a quick sense to see how the world is really going, and a sure faith, indispensable to all nations that are to be great, that greatness is only to be reached by going that way and no other? And then, if you talk of culture,

look at the culture their middle, and even is a series of waves, coming gradually to a their working class is getting, as compared head and then breaking, and that, as the with the culture ours are getting. The successive waves come up, one nation is trash which circulates by the hundred thou- seen at the top of this wave, and then ansand among our middle class has no readers other of the next, I ask myself, counting all in America; our rubbish is for home-con- the waves which have come up with Engsumption; all our best books, books which land on the top of them: When the great are read here only by the small educated wave which is now mounting has come up, class, are in America the books of the great will she be at the top of it? Illa nihil, néc reading public. So over there they will ad- me quærentem vana moratur. vance spiritually as well as materially; and if our race at last flowers to modern life there, and not here, does it so much matter?" So says my friend, who is, as I premised, a devotee of Anglo-Saxonism; I, who share his pious frenzy but imperfectly, do not feel quite satisfied with these plans of vicarious greatness, and have a longing for this old and great country of ours to be always great in herself, not only in her progeny. So I keep looking at her, and thinking of her, and as often as I consider how history

Yes, we arraign her; but she,
The weary Titan, with deaf
Ears, and labour-dimm'd eyes,
Regarding neither to right
Nor left, goes passively by,
Staggering on to her goal;
Bearing, on shoulders immense,
Atlantéan, the load,
Wellnigh not to be borne,
Of the too vast orb of her fate.

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MATTHEW ARNOLD.

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From the Spectator, 17 Feb. NAPOLEON AND ROME.

THE weary observers who, tired with the long supremacy of wrong, declare, like Macaulay, that the Papacy is eternal, have this week received new aliment. It is no longer possible to doubt that the Emperor of the French, in spite of all hints and professions, and even promises, has decided that the temporal power shall continue to exist. When the Convention of September 15 was first announced to the world, it was believed even in Italy that Rome was in September, 1866, to be finally left to itself. The French garrison was to be withdrawn and the Italian army to stand aloof, and the Papacy and the Romans to be left for the first time since 1848 face to face. No one doubted what the result would be. The Romans, in whom hatred of their priestly rulers is scarcely so much an impulse as an instinct, who regulate their lives, and their education, and their occupations with a secret reference to an animosity, would instantly appeal to force, and either expel the Pope, or force him to avoid expulsion by an appeal to Italian arms. The temporal power would end, and Italy regain, if not absolute possession of her capital, at least a practical sovereignty which in time would harden into a right. From the first, however, observers doubted whether this were Napoleon's real design, whether he would so utterly break with the priesthood, so completely relax his grasp upon the throat of the nation he has set free. He was understood to remember keenly the vote of December, 1852, when the peasantry marched in bands with the curés at their head to place him upon the throne. He was understood to dread, though he does not share, the intense dislike of French politicians to the possible growth of a strong and united Italy, able perhaps to enfranchise the Mediterranean, and affect the whole current of European policy in the East. It was known that the idea of federation which produced the treaty of Zurich lies very close to his heart, and Reds, who disbelieve him, pronounced from the first that the Convention was a snare, that its object was to guarantee and not to menace the autonomy of the Papal peculium. As time went on this idea was strengthened by the construction of great works at Čivita Vecchia, by the immense collections permitted in France for Peter's Pence, and by the favour shown to Papal projects for the levy of an international garrison for Rome. It was whispered even that the favour ex

tended by Napoleon to La Marmora's Government had its root in the same design, that he upheld that combination in fear lest the supreme moment should find Ricasoli at the helm, and himself compelled to choose between the independence of Italy or an invasion of her territory.

The publication of the Yellow Book of France and the Red Book of Spain has set all theories at rest. It appears from the despatches of the Spanish Ambassador in Paris that the Catholic Powers had at once foreseen the course of the Roman people, and addressed to the Emperor urgent demands for explanation. To all they received substantially the same reply. The French Government, annoyed to savageness with the Encyclical—which has embarrassed them to a degree almost unintelligible to Protestants - refused to inform its questioners as to its course in the event of the Pope making concessions to his people, demanded an absolute liberty of action, but declared that it looked to a separate sovereignty in Rome as indispensable. It pointed significantly to the sacrifices made during sixteen years to protect the Papal chair as proof sufficient of the permanent policy of France. Indeed if M. Mon may be trusted, the Foreign Minister on one occasion went further, and declared that if the temporal power were upset by the Revolution, France would return to Rome; but it is not necessary to rely on a perhaps misapprehended conversation. Late in 1865 the French Government grew alarmed at the result of the Italian elections, which seemed to foreshadow a Chamber resolute to obtain Rome. The Emperor accordingly addressed a new despatch to Florence, and on the 2nd of January of this year M. Sartiges reports the result of his interview with the Italian Premier in the midst of the Cabinet erisis produced by S. Sella's fall. The Premier indignantly repudiated any intention of departing from the Convention, but M. de Sartiges informed him nevertheless that the Parliamentary history of the previous few days - La Marmora had just been turned out had excited in the, calmest minds fears for the future of Italy, that " "power seemed about to pass into less conservative hands," and that it was "possible the execution of the Convention might be entrusted to men who had resisted that international act." It was therefore necessary to repeat the inevitable obligations of the Convention, the more so as the Italian press persisted in misrepresenting them. "I stated once more that, contrary to the daily statements of the Italian press, we had in

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