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lating, upon none has he spoken to his countrymen more aptly and more seasonably-one wishes it might with equal truth be added, more persuasivelythan upon culture. 'English civilisation," he writes in one place, "the humanising, the bringing into one. harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society-that is what interests me." Certainly that is what interested him pre-eminently. It is possible that the distinction cannot be claimed for him that he enounces truths hitherto unregarded, but next to the creation of new ideals no higher service can be done for mankind than to bring old ideals to light. This was his great and worthy achievement. Culture has had its apostles, its saints, even its martyrs, in every era-men who have themselves resolutely lived the life of the spirit and have affirmed unwearyingly its claims and its high dignity. Nor has there ever been a period

in our own history, since the torch of progress was lighted at the Renaissance, when culture has ceased to be regarded as a supreme national concern. Successive ages may have applied themselves to the pursuit of knowledge with varying degrees of ardour and absorption, but where the movement of civilisation has been temporarily impeded or threatened the hindrances have, as a rule, been external rather than developments of the national life itself.

What, then, gave Arnold's advocacy of culture its peculiar timeliness and value? Chiefly the occurrence and the influence of two antecedent events, one political and the other social, which have contributed very largely to the making and moulding of modern England. The first was the change in the balance of political power brought about by franchise legislation early in the 'thirties, and the other was the concurrent final triumph of industrialism. The Reform Act of 1832 may be said to have discovered the middle class, as a supplementary statute of the 'eighties brought into full light the working class. Before that Act was passed the middle class was neither worse nor better, neither less intelligent nor more, than after it, yet it played but a secondary and feeble part on the visible stage of the national life. Commercially it was of some account; socially it was still negligible; politically its chief interest for the ruling class hitherto had been its serviceability in perpetuating, in a day when voters were everywhere few and most men had their price,

the aristocratic basis of government. But while the middle class was thus comparatively impotent in public affairs, it was, thanks to its instinct for trade and industry, winning for itself an economic position of growing influence. The factory system, which in the absence of regulative laws was being built up upon the physical wreck and the moral degradation of the manual workers, evolved an essentially modern type of life and character, a type in which elemental energy and rude force of will were combined with an engrossing material ambition which set no bounds to its endeavour. Side by side with the new industrialists grew also in numbers and in strength the old trading and merchant class, stimulated by expanding markets at home and the discovery of fresh fields to conquer abroad, and from the natural alliance of these two social elements, drawn together by common interests and ideals, proceeded a new and homogeneous middleclass consciousness which was destined to influence powerfully the national life and thought in many directions.

But while the mercantile middle class was accumulating wealth with a rapidity unknown before, and while it was thus acquiring a unique political standing, in education it still kept deplorably behind. More and more power was passing from the aristocratic class to the class below, yet the new wealth lacked the old refinement, the new repository of political and social influence lacked the balance, the dignity, the

suavity of manner which made the aristocracy, in spite of its limitations, a civilising agency of conspicuous value. On the Continent the industrial movement had barely begun to take root, and there the thought and energy of the Western Governments and nations at least were concentrated upon the development of their educational systems. While England was building factories Germany and France were building schools, and the English industrialist, thriving upon his growing trade with these benighted countries, which could not even make their own cotton and cloth, reflected with pride upon his own superior enterprise, and thanked fate that he was not as the foreigners. He did not know that these despised foreigners were all the time making brains, and that in the end it was the school and not the factory which would tell in the race even for commercial leadership and mastery.

In the sagacious survey of English life which he published the year after the passing of the great Reform Act, under the title England and the English, and in which he anticipated by a generation much of Arnold's best criticism of the national thought and character, manners and morals, Lord Lytton deplored the narrow education of the trading classes of that day. "English themes," he writes, "usually make a part of their education instead of Latin Sapphics; but as critical lectures do not enlighten and elevate the lesson, the utmost acquired is a style tolerably grammatic. Religion is more attended to; and explanations of the

Generally

Bible are sometimes a weekly lesson. . . speaking, all schools intended to form the trader pay more attention to religion than those that rear the gentleman. Religion may not be minutely explained, but it is much that its spirit is attended to, and the pupil carries a reverence for it in the abstract through life, even though, in the hurry of commercial pursuits, he may neglect its principles. But if the spirit of religion is more maintained in their education, the science of morals in its larger and abstruser principles is equally neglected. Moral works, by which I mean. the philosophy of morals, make no part of their general instruction; they are not taught, like the youth of Germany, to think-to reflect-so that goodness may sink, as it were, into their minds and pervade their notions as well as command their vague respect. Hence they are often narrow and insulated in their moral views, and fall easily in after life into that great characteristic error of considering appearances as the substance of virtues."

Written without special tendency, this criticism, nevertheless, brings into relief the very deficiencies which, in Arnold's view, the era of industrial ascendency had imposed upon middle-class England:-an education narrow and starved, manners neglected, materialism victorious, a religious life crude, warped, and barren, in short, a more or less superficial ethic of conduct set up as a complete substitute for the culture which includes both manners and morality, as well as