r. To be piquant counts
for much, and the interest of seeing on the drawing-room tables of
devout Catholics and high-flying Anglicans article after article,
sending divinities, creeds, and Churches all headlong into limbo, was
indeed piquant. Much of all this elegant dabbling in infidelity has
been a caprice of fashion. The Agnostic has had his day with the fine
ladies, like the black footboy of other times, or the spirit-rapper
and table-turner of our own. What we have been watching, after all,
was perhaps a tournament, not a battle.

It would not be very easy for us now, and perhaps it would not be
particularly becoming at any time, to analyse the position that has
been assigned to this Review in common esteem. Those who have watched
it from without can judge better than those who have worked within.
Though it has been open, so far as editorial goodwill was concerned,
to opinions from many sides, the Review has unquestionably gathered
round it some of the associations of sect. What that sect is, people
have found it difficult to describe with anything like precision. For
a long time it was the fashion to label the Review as Comtist, and
it would be singularly ungrateful to deny that it has had no more
effective contributors than some of the best-known disciples of Comte.
By-and-by it was felt that this was too narrow. It was nearer the
truth to call it the organ of Positivists in the wider sense of that
designation. But even this would not cover many directly political
articles that have appeared in our pages, and made a mark in their
time. The memorable programme of Free Labour, Free Land, Free Schools,
Free Church had nothing at all Positivist about it. Nor could that
programme and many besides from the same pen and others be compressed
under the nickname of Academic Liberalism. There was too strong a
flavour of action for the academic and the philosophic. This passion
for a label, after all, is an infirmity. Yet people justly perceived
that there seemed to be a certain undefinable concurrence among
writers coming from different schools and handling very different
subjects. Perhaps the instinct was right which fancied that it
discerned some common drift, a certain pervading atmosphere, and
scented a subtle connection between speculations on the Physical Basis
of Life and the Unseen Universe, and articles on Trades Unions and
National Education.

So far as the Review has been more specially identified with one set