ed as current coin;
hence it was their interest to oppose every attempt to establish a more
natural test. The aristocracy ceased to be the thinkers of the age.
From the middle classes came the men whose words and deeds we will not
willingly let die. Shakspere, Milton, and Cromwell shew what of genius,
and power, and divine aim, at one time the middle classes contained.

And now, once more, is there not an upheaving of humanity from beneath?
and over society as it is, does not once more loom the shadow of a coming
change? Does not middle-class civilization in its mode of utterance and
thought, betoken symptoms of decay? Look at it as it does the genteel
thing, and sleeps an easy hour in Episcopalian church or Dissenting
chapel--as it faintly applauds a world-renovating principle, and
gracefully bows assent to a divine idea. Ask it its problem of life, its
mission, and it knows no other than to have a good account at the bank,
and to keep a gig; possibly, if it be very ambitious, it may, in its
heart of hearts, yearn for a couple of flunkeys and a fashionable square.
It is very moral and very religious. Much is it attached to morality and
religion in the abstract; but to take one step in their behalf--to cut
the shop, for their sake, for an hour--is a thing it rarely does. Often
is it too much trouble for it to vote at a municipal election--to employ
the franchise to which it has a right--to support the man or the paper
that advocates its principles. That is, it refuses to grapple with the
great principle of ill with which man comes into this world to make war;
and, rather than lose a pound, or sacrifice its respectability, or depart
from the routine of formalism into which it has grown, it will let the
devil take possession of the world.

Looked at from a right point of view, the world's history is a series of
dissolving views. We have had the gorgeous age of nobility, the
money-making one of the middle-classes--lower still we must go. Truth
lies at the bottom of the well; the pearls, whose lustre outshine even
beauty's eye are hidden in the deep. The men who now stamp their impress
on the age--whose thought is genuine and free--who shew the hollowness of
shams--who demand for the common brotherhood of man their common
rights--who herald a coming age--who are its teachers and
apostles--originally laboured in coal-mines, like Stephenson; or mended
shoes, like Cooper; or plied the shuttle, like Fox; or stood, as