ugliness of our
streets, the falsity of our ornamentation, the vulgarity of our
upholstery, have not something to do with those bad tempers which
breed false conclusions?

The address to workingmen which George Eliot put into the mouth of Felix
Holt is a suggestive and valuable piece of political writing. Tradition is
therein presented as a moral and political influence. The spiritual
treasures mankind possesses she says are the products of tradition, and
these must be preserved. This can be done only by keeping the old
institutions and forms until they can be organically supplanted by others.
All the various portions of society are mutually dependent, and the
destruction of any one of them will be to the injury of all. This she says
to workingmen as a reason why they should not antagonize the social orders
above them, whose work is as important as their own. The organs of society
are the various social classes of which it is composed, and society is to
be improved by turning class interests into the functions by which Humanity
is to be developed. The spiritual treasures of the past are only to be
preserved by order and good government; hence all revolutionary methods are
suicidal. Life is to be advanced by giving social influence into the hands
of the wisest. True principles must regulate society, and these George
Eliot would have rest on science and altruism.

Such are some of the ideas of this remarkable essay, one of the most
suggestive and instructive of all she wrote. The emphasis she laid on
retribution, tradition, heredity and duties appears here in all its force.
Perhaps nothing else she wrote so clearly brings out some of the
characteristics of her mind. Her intense distrust of individualism does not
permit her to say a single word of the _rights_ of the laboring classes.
The right of rebellion and revolution is totally disregarded, rather it is
not recognized that any rights whatever exist. The workingman is not to
think of himself or his class, but of society and humanity; he is to become
an altruistic worker for the common good. While this is fine in theory, yet
history indicates that the aristocratic classes have yielded to the broader
social spirit only when they have been compelled to do so. The concessions
must come from above, not from beneath. George Eliot's political
philosophy, if carried into actual life, would keep the proletariate where
they are, and strengthen the social power of th