to the illustrious catalogue
of English singers, he has been driven by the impetuosity of his
sympathies to attack the scientific side of social questions in an
imaginative and highly emotional manner. Depth of benevolent feeling is
unhappily no proof of fitness for handling complex problems, and a fine
sense of the picturesque is no more a qualification for dealing
effectively with the difficulties of an old society, than the
composition of Wordsworth's famous sonnet on Westminster Bridge was any
reason for supposing that the author would have made a competent
Commissioner of Works.

Why should society, with its long and deep-hidden processes of growth,
its innumerable intricacies and far-off historic complexities, be as an
open book to any reader of its pages who brings acuteness and passion,
but no patience nor calm accuracy of meditation? Objects of thought and
observation far simpler, more free from all blinding and distorting
elements, more accessible to direct and ocular inspection, are by
rational consent reserved for the calmest and most austere moods and
methods of human intelligence. Nor is denunciation of the conditions of
a problem the quickest step towards solving it. Vituperation of the fact
that supply and demand practically regulate certain kinds of bargain, is
no contribution to systematic efforts to discover some more moral
regulator. Take all the invective that Mr. Carlyle has poured out
against political economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according to
M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire inadequateness of political
economy to sum up the laws and conditions of a healthy social state--and
no one more than the present writer deplores the mischief which the
application of the maxims of political economy by ignorant and selfish
spirits has effected in confirming the worst tendencies of the
commercial character--yet is it not a first condition of our being able
to substitute better machinery for the ordinary rules of self-interest,
that we know scientifically how those rules do and must operate? Again,
in another field, it is well to cry out: 'Caitiff, we hate thee,' with a
'hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the
scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and
disappearance from the scene of things.'[2] But this is slightly vague.
It is not scientific. There are caitiffs and caitiffs. There is a more
and a less of scoundrelism, as there is a more a