ough is just asserting his personal
liberty a little, going where he likes, assembling where he likes,
bawling as he likes, hustling as he likes.... He sees the rich, the
aristocratic class, in occupation of the executive government; and so,
if he is stopped from making Hyde Park a bear-garden or the streets
impassable, he cries out that he is being butchered by the
aristocracy.'"

Now, in spite of all this banter and sarcasm, these passages express a
real dread which, at the time when Household Suffrage was claimed and
conceded, really possessed Arnold's mind. He came with the lapse of
years to see that it was illusory, and that the working-classes of
England are as steady, as law-abiding, as inaccessible to ideas, as
little in danger of being hurried into revolutionary courses, as
unwilling to jeopardize their national interests and their stake in the
country, as the Aristocracy and the Middle Class. But at the period
which we are considering, when the dread of popular violence had really
laid hold of him, it is interesting to mark the direction in which he
looked for social salvation. He did not turn to our traditional
institutions; to the Church or the Throne or the House of Lords: to a
military despotism, or an established religion, or a governing
Aristocracy: certainly not to the Middle Class with its wealth and
industry--least of all to the Populace, with its "bright powers of
sympathy." In an age which made an idol of individual action, and warred
against all collectivism as tyranny, he looked for salvation to the
State. But the State, if it was to fulfil its high function, must be a
State in which every man felt that he had a place and a share, and the
authority of which he could accept without loss of self-respect. "If
ever," Arnold said in 1866, "there comes a more equal state of society
in England, the power of the State for repression will be a thousand
times stronger." He was for widening the province of the State, and
strengthening its hands, and "stablishing it on behalf of whatever
great changes are needed, just as much as on behalf of order." And,
forasmuch as the State, in its ideal, was "the organ of our collective
best self," our first duty was to cultivate, each man for himself, what
in himself was best--in short, Perfection. "We find no basis for a firm
State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our
_best self_." And so we come back to the governing idea of the book
before