a great deal of their subsequent
conduct. But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case
of the general truth: that the great ideals of the past failed not by
being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived
enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind
has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian
ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult;
and left untried.

It is, of course, the same in the case of the French Revolution. A great
part of our present perplexity arises from the fact that the French
Revolution has half succeeded and half failed. In one sense, Valmy was
the decisive battle of the West, and in another Trafalgar. We have,
indeed, destroyed the largest territorial tyrannies, and created a free
peasantry in almost all Christian countries except England; of which we
shall say more anon. But representative government, the one universal
relic, is a very poor fragment of the full republican idea. The theory
of the French Revolution presupposed two things in government, things
which it achieved at the time, but which it has certainly not bequeathed
to its imitators in England, Germany, and America. The first of these
was the idea of honorable poverty; that a statesman must be something of
a stoic; the second was the idea of extreme publicity. Many imaginative
English writers, including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine how it
was that men like Robespierre and Marat were ardently admired. The best
answer is that they were admired for being poor--poor when they might
have been rich.

No one will pretend that this ideal exists at all in the haute politique
of this country. Our national claim to political incorruptibility is
actually based on exactly the opposite argument; it is based on the
theory that wealthy men in assured positions will have no temptation to
financial trickery. Whether the history of the English aristocracy,
from the spoliation of the monasteries to the annexation of the mines,
entirely supports this theory I am not now inquiring; but certainly
it is our theory, that wealth will be a protection against political
corruption. The English statesman is bribed not to be bribed. He is born
with a silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never afterwards be
found with the silver spoons in his pocket. So strong is our faith in
this protection by plutocracy, that we are more and more trus