habituate herself to parliamentary institutions, and her history in the
years 1887 to 1893 is largely that of a succession of political scandals
and screechy recriminations, from the time of the Grevy-Wilson affair to
the loathsome end of the Panama Company. In the United Kingdom the
wheels of progress lurched along heavily after the year 1886, when
Gladstone made his sudden strategic turn towards the following of
Parnell. Thus it came about that the parties of progress found
themselves almost helpless or even discredited; and the young giant of
Democracy suddenly stooped and shrivelled as if with premature decay.

The causes of this seeming paralysis were not merely political and
dynamic: they were also ethical. The fervour of religious faith was
waning under the breath of a remorseless criticism and dogmatic
materialism. Already, under their influence, the teachers of the earlier
age, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Browning, had lost their joyousness and
spontaneity; and the characteristic thinkers of the new age were chiefly
remarkable for the arid formalism with which they preached the gospel of
salvation for the strong and damnation to the weak. The results of the
new creed were not long in showing themselves in the political sphere.
If the survival of the fittest were the last word of philosophy, where
was the need to struggle on behalf of the weak and oppressed? In that
case, it might be better to leave them to the following clutch of the
new scientific devil; while those who had charged through to the head of
the rout enjoyed themselves with utmost abandon. Such was, and is, the
deduction from the new gospel (crude enough, doubtless, in many
respects), which has finally petrified in the lordly egotism of Nietzche
and in the unlovely outlines of one or two up-to-date Utopias.

These fashions will have their day. Meanwhile it is the duty of the
historian to note that self-sacrifice and heroism have a hard struggle
for life in an age which for a time exalted Herbert Spencer to the
highest pinnacle of greatness, which still riots in the calculating
selfishness of Nietzsche and raves about Omar Khayyam.

Seeing, then, that the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century in
Europe were almost barren of great formative movements such as had
ennobled the previous decades, we may well leave that over-governed,
over-drilled continent weltering in its riches and discontent, its
militarism and moral weakness, in order to survey e