he maintenance of a common body of
social ethics; what was left of it was repression of a class, not the
discipline of a nation. Opinion ceased to regard social institutions
and economic activity as amenable, like personal conduct, to moral
criteria, because it was no longer influenced by the spectacle of
institutions which, arbitrary, capricious, and often corrupt in their
practical operation, had been the outward symbol and expression of the
subordination of life to purposes transcending private interests. That
part of government which had been concerned with social administration,
if it did not end, became at least obsolescent. For such democracy as
had existed in the Middle Ages was dead, and the democracy of the
Revolution was not yet born, so that government passed into the
lethargic hand of classes who wielded the power of the State in the
interests of an irresponsible aristocracy. And the Church was even
more remote from the daily life of mankind than the State.
Philanthropy abounded; but religion, {12} once the greatest social
force, had become a thing as private and individual as the estate of
the squire or the working clothes of the laborer. There were special
dispensations and occasional interventions, like the acts of a monarch
who reprieved a criminal or signed an order for his execution. But
what was familiar, and human and lovable--what was Christian in
Christianity had largely disappeared. God had been thrust into the
frigid altitudes of infinite space. There was a limited monarchy in
Heaven, as well as upon earth. Providence was the spectator of the
curious machine which it had constructed and set in motion, but the
operation of which it was neither able nor willing to control. Like
the occasional intervention of the Crown in the proceedings of
Parliament, its wisdom was revealed in the infrequency of its
interference.

The natural consequence of the abdication of authorities which had
stood, however imperfectly, for a common purpose in social
organization, was the gradual disappearance from social thought of the
idea of purpose itself. Its place in the eighteenth century was taken
by the idea of mechanism. The conception of men as united to each
other, and of all mankind as united to God, by mutual obligations
arising from their relation to a common end, which vaguely conceived
and imperfectly realized, had been the keystone holding together the
social fabric, ceased to be impressed upon