d to strengthen Parliament, the supreme organ of the
national will, by reforming the House of Lords; though he strongly
dissented from a scheme of reform just then in vogue. "One can hardly
imagine sensible men planning a Second Chamber which should not include
the Archbishop of Canterbury, or which should include the young
gentlemen who flock to the House of Lords when pigeon-shooting is in
question. But our precious Liberal Reformers are for retaining the
pigeon-shooters and for expelling the Archbishop of Canterbury."[23]

Even in the full flood of Liberal victory which followed the General
Election of 1880, he saw what was coming. "What strikes one is the
insecureness of the Liberals' hold upon office and upon public favour;
the probability of the return, perhaps even more than once, of their
adversaries to office, before that final and happy consummation is
reached--the permanent establishment of Liberalism in power." And, while
he saw what was coming, he thus divined the cause. The official and
commanding part of the Liberal Party was at the best stolidly
indifferent to Social Reform; at the worst, viciously angry with the
idea and those who propagated it. The commercialism of the great Middle
Class had covered the face of England with places like St. Helens, which
the capitalists called "great centres of national enterprise," and
Cobbett called "Hell-Holes." In these places life was lived under
conditions of squalid and hideous misery, and the inhabitants were
beginning to find out, in the words of one of their own class, that
"free political institutions do not guarantee the well-being of the
toiling class." Under these circumstances it was natural that the
toilers, having looked for redress to the Liberal Party and looked in
vain, should, when next they had the chance, try a spell of that
Democratic Toryism which at any rate held out some shadowy hope of
social betterment. Arnold's misgivings about the future of the Liberal
Party were abundantly made good by the General Election of 1885; but
enough has now been said about his contribution to the practical
politics of his time. A much larger space must be given to the influence
which he brought to bear on Society by methods not political--by
criticism, by banter, by literary felicities, by "sinuous, easy,
unpolemical" methods.

England had known him first as a poet, then as a literary critic. Next
came a rather hazy impression that he was an educational reforme