were, of public life and direct political action. His function and his mission must be that of the mentor, the director, the inspirer. He must act on the actors, furnishing them with new motives, new standpoints, new outlooks, with clearer thought and more rational ideas. That, however, is reform by culture, so that “through culture seems to lie our way not only to perfection but even to safety."

IV

And who with a candid eye, with a mind open to the facts of experience, will deny the force of such reasoning, in these days of all others, when politics tends less and less to be the noble science of the State's welfare and to become instead the ignoble exploitation of public interests for party and often for personal ends? An atmosphere of mutual jealousy and recrimination might seem to be essential to party politics. Since party government can only thrive so long as a nation allows itself to be divided into rival and antagonistic camps, to keep it so divided is the first business of the political manager, who can only thus perpetuate his rule. Hence the life of the individual politician is a life of perpetual motion and emotion. If he is not forming a society he is joining one, until no conceivable shade of political opinion, no conceivable object of political effort, lacks its full complement of propagandist machinery; while the recognised methods of party warfare are pelting one another

with catchwords, inflaming the masses by the passionate recital of their grievances, and expounding your own or pulverising your neighbour's "programme." In unscrupulous hands this species of politics becomes inevitably a hopelessly discreditable oocupation, yet where the public consciousness and the sense of State interest lack vigour the party system, even in hands which are held to be very far above suspicion, opens the way to endless procedure of a kind which no ingenuity can reconcile with the true welfare of the commonwealth.

The healthy tone of English political life has long been proverbial; it has, indeed, belonged to the nation's most valuable moral assets; yet the tendency to evade the old implicit obligations, whose very dignity consisted in the fact that they were a tradition and not a rigid law, to relax the old code of scrupulousness, to regard the honourable maxim, Noblesse oblige, as a picturesque survival, is a real danger of modern days. As the possession of office depends in the last resort upon the favour of the electors of least thought and lowest principle, the nondescripts who are everything by turn and nothing long, and who turn the scale in the majority of constituencies, political astuteness is held to consist in the skill and success with which a candidate or his leader manages to capture this irrational and largely illiterate residuum; and when one side has duly floated its line the other promptly endeavours to discover a more tempting bait.

Hence the continual offer of measures which are proved on examination to be impossible of realisation, a result creating disappointment in the electors who have been deluded, and a resolution on their part to be even with their deceivers by throwing their influence next time in the opposite scale, if only they can persuade the rival party to promise what their opponents withheld. One of the most alarming signs of the time is the pernicious and growing tendency to bribe not merely clearly defined classes of the population, but even such branches of the civil service as are believed to wield any considerable political influence. Still more sinister is the corruption which is practised by unprincipled politicians in the so-called Service constituencies, the suffrages of whose residents are now openly solicited, not on large public issues, but on the strength of consideration shown or not shown by the Government in power for their special interests, and even of the direct promise of higher wages and pleasanter conditions of employment.

But, in truth, Arnold's depreciation of the life of irrational activity and still more his warning against egoism and self-assertion have application not only for one phase of national life, but for every phase. In the industrial world it is no different. Neither on the side of capital nor of labour is there any longer a conscious recognition of the fact that the interests about which. they contend are not their own sectional interests, but in reality the interests of the entire community. What

we see is each side fighting for its own hand. While capital resorts to its combinations, its "trusts" and "rings," labour similarly strives for its rights equally regardless of any rights which may be possessed against it by society. It is not a question of what either capital or labour should in social justice have or do, but of what they may jointly or individually wrest from the community if they set in operation the machinery of organisation, monopoly, and pressure, direct and indirect, which lax laws and public impotence place at their command.

And, coming to religion, what is the huge system of sectarianism both without and within the Church but a manifestation on the grand scale of an exaggerated individualism which subordinates universal interests to individual wish, whim, and eccentricity, and pushes more and more into the background the ideal of disciplined unity of thought and action? Within the Establishment men risk the peace of the Church and the repute of religion, now by rebellion against lawful authority, now by frivolous disputation about unessential matters of doctrine and ritual. But we are in the right," say the Ritualists. Yet even if they were a thousand times more in the right than they are, the entire spirit of their agitation is anarchical, and anarchy is the antithesis of culture. The cure for Ritualism is not force, and not necessarily exclusion,—it is far simpler; it is the voluntary effacement of the ordinary self, and it is clear that the Nonconformists

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without the Church will never be reconciled either to absorption or amalgamation until the Nonconformists. within the Church set an example of such effacement. Outside the Establishment the principle of private judgment reigns still more supreme. The thirty-three sects of yesterday become thirty-four to-day, for some one has invented a new doctrine or unearthed an old one, and a church must be founded in which to enshrine it. One week a religious fanatic proclaims to a frenzied congregation that he is the "Messiah" come again to earth; the next week a new prophet appears on the scene, and shatters the nerves of the credulous and the weak-minded by predictions of imminent terrestrial doom. Why not? This is a free country, private judgment and doing as he likes are every man's inalienable rights, and what are rights good for if they be not asserted? So flourish fanaticism and flourish prophecy, though religion be dishonoured, and the national name be discredited in the eyes of other cultivated nations which, less convinced than we of the blessedness of unrestricted liberty, crown their fools with caps and bells and put their harmless lunatics under salutary restraint.

That in art and letters the same picture is offered of unwholesome eccentricity and unbridled licence may be learned from the last opened gallery and the last published novel. "Art for art's sake" is the device of modern realism, and the plea is held to justify everything that is crude, grotesque, and abnormal. Fiction,