monwealth whose political institutions were informed by the Christian spirit. Nor, great as was his dislike of Jack-Cadeism in every form, did he shrink from the prospect of giving to the poor a special preference in any future readjustment of the relationships between property and poverty. "Who cannot see," he asks, "that the idea of the common good is acquiring amongst us, at the present day, a force altogether new? that, for instance, in cases where, in the framing of laws and in the interpretation of them by tribunals, regard to property and privilege used to be, one may say, paramount, and the idea of the common good hardly considered at all, things are now tending quite the other way; the pretensions of property and privilege are severely scrutinised, the claims of the common good entertained with favour." At the same time he points out that the duty of pursuing the common good rests quite as much upon the poor as the rich. "Nay, the surest means to restore and perpetuate the reign of the selfish rich, if at any time it may have been menaced or interrupted, is cupidity, envy, and hatred in the poor. And this, again, is a witness to the infallibility of the line of Jesus. We must come, both rich and poor, to prefer the common good, the interest of 'the body of Christ,'-to use the Gospel phrase, -the body of Christ of which we are members, to private possession and personal enjoyment."

Ruskin has told us how it was the sight and knowledge of London's social enormities - its hideous

over-crowding, squalor, poverty, and misery-which sent him from art to human nature, and made him a social reformer against his will. It was London likewise which gave Arnold his text when there was a social moral to point, a social principle to affirm. "We are all of us included in some religious organisation or other," he writes in Culture and Anarchy (chap. i.); "we all call ourselves, in the sublime and aspiring language of religion children of God. Children of God:-it is an immense pretension!-and how are we to justify it? By the works which we do, and the words which we speak. And the work which we collective children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have builded for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable external hideousness, and with its internal canker of publicè egestas, privatim opulentia-to use the words which Sallust puts into Cato's mouth about Rome-unequalled in the world!" Words like these are one of two things -they are either the empty rhetoric of a dilettante philosophy or the sincere utterance of an ardent human sympathy. No one will misjudge them who has tried, with whatever success, to enter into their author's spirit, ideals, and scheme of life.

When, therefore, we are told that Arnold was no social reformer in the merely conventional sense, we shall do well to admit it, but we shall contend that he was more; for important though the function and high though the desert of the disinterested practical poli

tician, he renders to mankind a still greater service who lays down permanent principles of action always applicable and always fruitful. To those who harshly judged his assumed lack of social sympathies Arnold might well have rejoined with Socrates that not obloquy but the honour of the prytaneum would have been his just reward.

IT

which Arnold held upon political questions would dispose him to think lightly, if not meanly, of party machinery, party ties, and still more of party shibboleths. "I do not profess to be a politician," he writes in his essay on "Irish Catholicism and British Liberal

ism," ," "but simply one of a disinterested class of observers who, with no organised and embodied set of supporters to please, set themselves to observe honestly and to report faithfully the state and prospects of our civilisation.'

When challenged, however, to descend from the Olympian heights of serene contemplation, he professes to a preference for Liberalism, though with reservations. "I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture." " He held that by party ties the true teacher of his age must not incumber himself; he must turn neither to right nor to left, must Culture and Anarchy: Introduction.

1 Mixed Essays.

have no prejudices and no tendencies; he must be one thing to all men-the impartial voice of wisdom and verity.

"The free spontaneous play of consciousness with which culture tries to float our stock habits of thinking and acting is by its very nature disinterested. Sometimes the result of floating them may be agreeable to this party, sometimes to that; now it may be unwelcome to our so-called Liberals, now to our so-called Conservatives; but what culture seeks is, above all, to float them, to prevent their being stiff and stark pieces of petrifaction any longer."

The little we know, from his published Letters, of Arnold's Lehrjahre convinces us that the political instinct was then very strong in him. He tells how he attended a Chartist convention in London in April, 1848, and was "much struck with the ability of the speakers." The revolutionary movements which were shaking thrones on the Continent at that time had in this country a feeble echo in street rioting, innocent, however, of anti-dynastic significance. Yet to young Arnold, lately become private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, a member of Lord John Russell's Ministry, the political auguries of the time were startling enough. "It will be rioting here only" (as it was), he writes March 7, 1848, "still, the hour of the hereditary peerage and eldest sonship and immense properties has, I am convinced, as Lamartine would say, struck!" The

1 Culture and Anarchy, chapter vi.