lishment. It goes wherever the class goes which is moulded on
the Puritan type of life. In the long winter evenings of Toronto Mr.
Goldwin Smith has had, probably, abundant experience of it. What is its
enemy? The instinct of self-preservation in humanity. Men make crude
types and try to impose them, but to no purpose. "_L'homme s'agite, Dieu
le mene_,"[477] says Bossuet. "There are many devices in a man's heart;
nevertheless the counsel of the Eternal, that shall stand."[478] Those
who offer us the Puritan type of life offer us a religion not true, the
claims of intellect and knowledge not satisfied, the claim of beauty not
satisfied, the claim of manners not satisfied. In its strong sense for
conduct that life touches truth; but its other imperfections hinder it
from employing even this sense aright. The type mastered our nation for
a time. Then came the reaction. The nation said: "This type, at any
rate, is amiss; we are not going to be all like _that!_" The type
retired into our middle class, and fortified itself there. It seeks to
endure, to emerge, to deny its own imperfections, to impose itself
again;--impossible! If we continue to live, we must outgrow it. The very
class in which it is rooted, our middle class, will have to acknowledge
the type's inadequacy, will have to acknowledge the hideousness, the
immense ennui of the life which this type has created, will have to
transform itself thoroughly. It will have to admit the large part of
truth which there is in the criticisms of our Frenchman, whom we have
too long forgotten.

After our middle class he turns his attention to our lower class. And of
the lower and larger portion of this, the portion not bordering on the
middle class and sharing its faults, he says: "I consider this multitude
to be absolutely devoid, not only of political principles, but even of
the most simple notions of good and evil. Certainly it does not appeal,
this mob, to the principles of '89, which you English make game of; it
does not insist on the rights of man; what it wants is beer, gin, and
_fun_."[479]

That is a description of what Mr. Bright[480] would call the residuum,
only our author seems to think the residuum a very large body. And its
condition strikes him with amazement and horror. And surely well it may.
Let us recall Mr. Hamerton's account of the most illiterate class in
France; what an amount of civilization they have notwithstanding! And
this is always to be understood,