nd many persons.

I feel that history has given me at the moment rather an unfair
advantage over Mr Arnold here. One could always pick plenty of holes
in "Equality," could suggest that the Greeks did not make such a very
good thing of it with their equality (which included slavery); that
the Biblical point is far from past argument; that M. Zola, for
instance, supplies an interesting commentary on Mr Hamerton's
rose-coloured pictures of the French peasantry; that whatever Mr
Arnold's own lot may have been, others who have lived in small French
towns with the _commis voyageur_ have not found his manners so
greatly superior to those of the English bagman. But just at this
moment, and, in fact, in an increasing degree ever since Mr Arnold
wrote, the glorification of France has become difficult or impossible.
Sir Erskine May, it seems, had warned him in vain about the political
effect of French Equality even at that time: but one need not confine
oneself to politics. At the end of the nineteenth century France has
enjoyed the blessings of social equality, enforced by compulsory
division of estates, for a hundred years and more. Perhaps equality
has nothing to do with the decadence of her literature, with that
state of morals which Mr Arnold himself deplored with almost Puritan
emphasis, with the state of religion which he holds up as an awful
example, fit to warn England to flee to the refuge of his own
undogmatic _Nephelococcygia_, with the ineffable scandals of
Panama and the Dreyfus case, with the mixture of blind illucidity and
febrile passion which characterises the French press. Only, what is
left? Where are the improvements due to this great influence? They
are, according to Mr Arnold, in the amiable dignity of the French
peasant and the polished refinement of the French middle-class.
Frankly, one may prefer Hodge and Bottles.

"Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism" has less actuality, and,
moreover, it belongs to a group of which enough has been said in
reference to the _Irish Essays_. But "Porro Unum est Necessarium"
possesses not merely an accidental but a real claim to fresh
attention, not merely at the moment when there is at last some chance
of the dream of Mr Arnold's life, the interference of the State in
English secondary education, being realised, but because it is one of
the expressions of that dream which was in his life so important. It
consists partly of statistics and partly of a moan over the fa