he
State--that is, the whole people. But the distance between the common
sense of Danton and the mere ecstasy of Herbert Spencer marks the
English way of colouring and altering the revolutionary idea. The
English people as a body went blind, as the saying is, for interpreting
democracy entirely in terms of liberty. They said in substance that if
they had more and more liberty it did not matter whether they had any
equality or any fraternity. But this was violating the sacred trinity of
true politics; they confounded the persons and they divided the
substance.

Now the really odd thing about England in the nineteenth century is
this--that there was one Englishman who happened to keep his head. The
men who lost their heads lost highly scientific and philosophical heads;
they were great cosmic systematisers like Spencer, great social
philosophers like Bentham, great practical politicians like Bright,
great political economists like Mill. The man who kept his head kept a
head full of fantastic nonsense; he was a writer of rowdy farces, a
demagogue of fiction, a man without education in any serious sense
whatever, a man whose whole business was to turn ordinary cockneys into
extraordinary caricatures. Yet when all these other children of the
revolution went wrong he, by a mystical something in his bones, went
right. He knew nothing of the Revolution; yet he struck the note of it.
He returned to the original sentimental commonplace upon which it is
forever founded, as the Church is founded on a rock. In an England gone
mad about a minor theory he reasserted the original idea--the idea that
no one in the State must be too weak to influence the State.

This man was Dickens. He did this work much more genuinely than it was
done by Carlyle or Ruskin; for they were simply Tories making out a
romantic case for the return of Toryism. But Dickens was a real Liberal
demanding the return of real Liberalism. Dickens was there to remind
people that England had rubbed out two words of the revolutionary motto,
had left only Liberty and destroyed Equality and Fraternity. In this
book, _Hard Times_, he specially champions equality. In all his books he
champions fraternity.

The atmosphere of this book and what it stands for can be very
adequately conveyed in the note on the book by Lord Macaulay, who may
stand as a very good example of the spirit of England in those years of
eager emancipation and expanding wealth--the years in which Libe