are
homogeneous enough, but which have next to nothing to do with each
other. But even in the non-literary essays we are out of "The
Wilderness" in its worst sense. Most of the essays had, as has just
been shown, appeared in different periodicals, while "Equality" was
also delivered as a lecture during the years 1877 and 1878. The
exception was the paper called "Democracy," which he reprinted from
his first work on Foreign Schools in 1861, where it had appeared as an
Introduction. The juxtaposition is by no means uninteresting or
uninstructive, though perhaps it is not entirely favourable to the
idea of Mr Arnold's development as a _zoon politicon_. It has
been said before that his earliest political writing is a good deal
less fantastic and more sane than that of his middle period, and
though "the last of life for which the first was made" was now
restoring to him much of his power in this direction, yet he was
always much joined to idols in matters political. In grasp "Democracy"
does not quite come up to its rather ambitious title; and a moment's
thought will show why. In 1861 Democracy was a very academic subject.
All projects for further Parliamentary Reform had failed utterly in
England; and nobody dreamt of what the next five or six years would
bring. In France there was what looked like a crushing military
despotism: in other Continental countries the repression which had
followed the outbreaks of 1848-49 was only just being relaxed, or not
relaxed at all. American democracy had not had its second baptism of
Civil War. The favourite fancies about the respective _ethos_ of
aristocracy, of the middle-class, and of the lower do indeed appear,
but for the most part Mr Arnold confines himself to the simple
question of State interference, for which in his own subject of
education he was so anxious, and which he would gladly have seen
extended. It has been more than once remarked already that he may
justly be regarded as a politician of more seriousness than he has
here been represented as possessing, if espousing the cause of the
things which actually happen is taken as the criterion. For State
interference has grown and is growing every day. But then it may be
held--and as a matter of principle he would not himself have contested
it--that a man's politics should be directed, not by what he thinks
will happen, but by what he thinks ought to happen. And some of us,
while not in love by any means with the middle-class L