would be no such thing as sound; and all our opinions on all subjects
whatsoever are equally subjective. Lord Tennyson's opinions and Mr.
Gladstone's opinions reveal to us only the nature and texture of their
own minds, which have been affected in this way or that way. The scale
has not been made in which we can weigh the periods in a nation's life,
or measure them one against the other. The past is gone, and nothing but
the bones of it can be recalled. We but half understand the present, for
each age is a chrysalis, and we are ignorant into what it may develop.
We do not even try to understand it honestly, for we shut our eyes
against what we do not wish to see. I will not despond with Lord
Tennyson. To take a gloomy view of things will not mend them, and modern
enlightenment may have excellent gifts in store for us which will come
by-and-by. But I will not say that they have come as yet. I will not say
that public life is improved when party spirit has degenerated into an
organised civil war, and a civil war which can never end, for it renews
its life like the giant of fable at every fresh election. I will not say
that men are more honest and more law-abiding when debts are repudiated
and law is defied in half the country, and Mr. Gladstone himself
applauds or refuses to condemn acts of open dishonesty. We are to
congratulate ourselves that duelling has ceased, but I do not know that
men act more honourably because they can be called less sharply to
account. 'Smuggling,' we are told, has disappeared also, but the wrecker
scuttles his ship or runs it ashore to cheat the insurance office. The
Church may perhaps be improved in the arrangement of the services and in
the professional demonstrativeness of the clergy, but I am not sure that
the clergy have more influence over the minds of men than they had fifty
years ago, or that the doctrines which the Church teaches are more
powerful over public opinion. One would not gather that our morality was
so superior from the reports which we see in the newspapers, and girls
now talk over novels which the ladies' maids of their grandmothers might
have read in secret but would have blushed while reading. Each age would
do better if it studied its own faults and endeavoured to mend them,
instead of comparing itself with others to its own advantage.

This only was clear to me in thinking over what Mr. Gladstone was
reported to have said, and in thinking of his own achievements and
ca