phe. Woe
be to the garrison who hoist a white flag to an enemy that gives no
quarter.' Yet Southey had a deep feeling for the misery of the lower
classes at this period of widespread distress. In his belief in the
power of Government to remedy social evils, he was much nearer the
accepted line of later public opinion than Macaulay, who would have
confined the State's business to the maintenance of order, the defence
of property, and the practice of departmental economy. And when
Southey, following Coleridge and preceding Gladstone, insisted upon
the vital importance of religion as a principle of State policy,
neither he nor Gladstone deserved all the ridicule cast upon them by
Macaulay in his brilliant essays; for at any rate no first-class
Government in Europe has hitherto ventured upon dissolving connection
with the Church.

For his philosophy, Mr. Stephen tells us, Southey was in the habit of
referring to Coleridge, whose hostility to the Utilitarians went on
different and deeper grounds. Coleridge had convinced himself that all
the errors of the time, and their political dangers, arose from a
false and godless empiricism. He declared that revolutionary periods
have always been connected with the popular prevalence of abstract
ideas, and that the speculative principles of men between twenty and
thirty are the great source of political prophecy. He developed this
view in a singular letter upon the state of affairs and opinions which
he also, like Southey, addressed to Lord Liverpool in 1817, and which
somewhat bewildered that veteran statesman. With the moderns, he said,
'nothing grows, all is made'; whereas growth itself is but a disguised
mode of being made by the superinduction of the _jam data_ on the _jam
datum_; and he insisted that 'the flux of individuals at any moment in
existence in a country is there for the value of the State, far more
than the State for them, though both positions are true
proportionately.' In other words, Coleridge pressed the evolutionary
view against the sharp set, shortsighted Utilitarian propositions; and
he would have agreed that antiquated prejudices are absurd only to
those who have not looked back to their origin, when they can be found
to proceed in logical order from natural causes. He had not been
always a resolute opponent of the Utilitarian theory of morals; but,
like other philosophers, he had become alarmed at the consequence of
being shut up within the prison of finite s