prevail, they become fainter and fainter, till the crude material standard seems at times to be left almost in solitude, to appeal in blank candor to the children of the world.

The most impressive point of agreement among our authors is their sense of impending change; for the sense of flux and instability in the social order deepens as the century goes on. The men of 1830 believed that the revolution was past; the men of 1840, of 1860, of 1870, are at one in believing that it is to come. They live facing its approach. Of its nature they are not sure: how to meet it, they are pathetically uncertain; but that a more searching and subversive social change than the world has ever known is imminent, they are with one accord completely assured. Again and again they lift their warning note. Every five years, every ten, into a civilization feverishly and helplessly developing a competitive system, ignorant of its own tendencies, comes a cry of protest and of fear. Carlyle reiterates in every book the note of "Sartor Resartus." "There must be a new world, if there is to be any world at all, "1 wrote he in 1850. His emotional rhetoric seemed a little hysterical to the average man; but Arnold, the cool, the collected, twenty years later, took up the same strain. The very title of his most important book, "Culture and Anarchy," showed the construction placed by him upon the present order. His feeling for the gravity of the situation is all the more impressive from his habitual air of understatement: "Our

1 Latter Day Pamphlets, "The Present Time."

N

present social organization has been an appointed stage in our growth; it has been of good use, and has enabled us to do great things. But the use is at an end, and the stage is over. Ask yourselves if you do not sometimes feel in yourselves a sense that in spite of the strenuous efforts for good of so many excellent persons among us, we begin somehow to flounder, and to beat the air; that we seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be threatened with a kind of standstill. It is that we are trying to live on with a social organization of which the day is

There is something either ludicrous or sinister, as one chooses to take it, in this steady insistence on imminent danger, during half a century of outward quietude. One call of warning and of fear echoes down the decades, and if not wearied we must be awed by the iteration. We may well ask whether it has any significance; whether the social revolution is nearer in 1900 than in 1840 or 1860. Men asked a similar question at intervals through the eighteenth century; they were asking it in 1788, one year before the Bastille was taken.

1 Essay on Equality.

CHAPTER V

THE NEW INTUITION

SOMETIMES, in the history of the race, a new intuition appears. When this happens, it puts to flight the wrangling of generations. Power to create such an intuition is the final test of any theory; to prepare for it is well worth the strife of ages: once created, it conquers; but its formation is out of the ken and range of conscious human effort. With opinions or reasoning it has nothing to do; it underlies all reasoning, and is the evidence that an opinion has sunk below discussion into being.

Such was that instinct for religious toleration now almost universal. It took centuries to evolve. It had many and excellent arguments as well as brute force marshaled against its pleading. It fought, endured, was routed, replied, but won its final victory in subconscious regions, till men slowly woke to recognize that the controverted principle had become a master-impulse, before which discussion was of no avail. It had entered life, it had shaped new types of character; and when this happens, the victory of a principle is assured.

Assumptions are premature; yet it would surely seem that the same process is going on to-day in another province. The belief that all the mani

fold gifts of life should be equally open to all liv. ing was not even a theory two hundred years ago. In the Athenian democracy, the bondage of many slaves made possible the exquisite freedom of the citizen. In Christian ages, no pure democracy has existed. But let us never forget that just behind the nineteenth century lies a new social ideal, mighty, destructive, creative. The remembered is the immortal. Once trusted to race-memory, that most subtle and compelling force, an idea can bide its time. The poets might suddenly abandon their fervors for liberty; the Church might extend sedate hands of benediction over the children of the established fact; a travesty of freedom, based on the prosperity of the bourgeois and the extension of the ballot, might speciously conceal the real control of that grim task-master, competition. Yet not all the apathy and delusion bemoaned by our social prophets could wholly or forever befog the radiant vision of a spiritual democracy. Ideals, when ignored, have a way of turning to threats. From all the noblest and deepest thinkers of the age, we have heard the solemn and insistent note of social warning; modern events also, as they proceeded, offered many sinister hints of danger. Manchester insurrections, bread-riots, Chartism, Tradesunionism in its early violence and later efficiency, strikes, lockouts, all the phases and episodes of industrial struggle, have had plenty to say to those who would hear. Yet not by such means may we mark the true advance of the social ideal, nor predict its destiny, but rather by a secret and inward

change wrought in the souls of men. "The meek shall inherit the earth" was a word spoken nineteen hundred years ago, and forgotten during centuries, while people insisted that it was quite enough for the meek to cherish the hope of inheriting the heavens. A hundred years ago, the old word was reasserted, with a note of renewed resolution in its prophecy. Since then it has been discussed, ridiculed, analyzed, denied, defended, — and unrealized; nor can we say that its cause is as yet intellectually either lost or won. Meanwhile, the demand that the earth-heritage be thrown open on equal terms to all men has been sinking deep into the hearts of quiet people, till here and there, to him who has the gift to see secret things and hidden forces, appears something more striking than battalioned arguments, or workmen: a man or woman to whom this demand has become no longer a theory to be pressed, but an intuition to be followed. Conviction has become faith, and faith, in the end, achieves all things. Even to the mountain of social prejudice and class-interest it may say: "Be thou removed, and cast into the sea of oblivion." When once a theory has changed into a regulating instinct, feeling its way toward conduct, the day of its victory is at hand. The quiet assumptions of the simple are thus the record of the intellectual conflicts of the strong.

In an age marked by a deliberate assertion that no man is his brother's keeper, and that "laissez faire" is the right continuance of natural law, has been heard the "Ave" of a great Annunciation.