he
strong light it turned on the hideous and grotesque illusions of
middle-class Protestantism,--who will estimate how much all these
contributed to swell the tide of secret dissatisfaction which has mined
the ground under self-confident liberalism of the last thirty years, and
has prepared the way for its sudden collapse and supersession? It is in
this manner that the sentiment of Oxford for beauty and sweetness
conquers, and in this manner long may it continue to conquer!

In this manner it works to the same end as culture, and there is plenty
of work for it yet to do. I have said that the new and more democratic
force which is now superseding our old middle-class liberalism cannot
yet be rightly judged. It has its main tendencies still to form. We hear
promises of its giving us administrative reform, law reform, reform of
education, and I know not what; but those promises come rather from its
advocates, wishing to make a good plea for it and to justify it for
superseding middle-class liberalism, than from clear tendencies which it
has itself yet developed. But meanwhile it has plenty of
well-intentioned friends against whom culture may with advantage
continue to uphold steadily its ideal of human perfection; that this is
_an inward spiritual activity, having for its characters increased
sweetness, increased light, increased life, increased sympathy_. Mr.
Bright, who has a foot in both worlds, the world of middle-class
liberalism and the world of democracy, but who brings most of his ideas
from the world of middle-class liberalism in which he was bred, always
inclines to inculcate that faith in machinery to which, as we have seen,
Englishmen are so prone, and which has been the bane of middle-class
liberalism. He complains with a sorrowful indignation of people who
"appear to have no proper estimate of the value of the franchise"; he
leads his disciples to believe--what the Englishman is always too ready
to believe--that the having a vote, like the having a large family, or
a large business, or large muscles, has in itself some edifying and
perfecting effect upon human nature. Or else he cries out to the
democracy,--"the men," as he calls them," upon whose shoulders the
greatness of England rests,"--he cries out to them: "See what you have
done! I look over this country and see the cities you have built, the
railroads you have made, the manufactures you have produced, the cargoes
which freight the ships of the greates