material goods per se. He wished for equality a real, solid, material equality, let us repeat, no mere figment such as is offered by the ballotbecause he believed, honestly and as the result of his best thought, that only in such a soil could the graces of life and the noblest joys of life flourish.

This clear-cut position of Arnold's — a position as radical in its way as a modern labor-agitator could desire came at a significant point. It marked the climax of a long line of social thought, and it pointed the view toward the future. The period that succeeded Arnold was to be full of eager discussion, gathering largely around this very matter. Economic equality was to be demanded more vigorously than ever before; but chiefly by men whose hearts throbbed at the sight of the misery of the poor, and who longed for readjustments of material possessions to relieve material distress. Them the children of sweetness and light were to answer by many voices, insistent, clamorous. They were to assert with frequency, if not with unanimity, that equality would destroy all incentive toward higher social good; that the material deprivations of the majority were the necessary and just price of the romance, color, vigor, and charm which only inequalities could preserve; that culture was the prerogative of an aristocracy; and that the invasion of the multitudes into conscious self-expression and self-government was the deathsignal to learning and the arts. And while they have been talking, the words of their acknowledged leader abide at the threshold of the era, reiterating

with calm assurance: "The men of culture are the chief apostles of equality."

Arnold's later writings show more and more strongly his belief that to the people, as full democracy understands the term, belongs the future. In one of his last essays, "Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes," he expresses his whole mind. The essay is an address delivered to the Ipswich Workingmen's College, and the title speaks for itself. Weary of pleading with the middle class, hopeless of the aristocracy, Arnold turned to the Gentiles, to the workers. "Do not be affronted at being compared to the Gentiles," he says to them. "The Gentiles were the human race, the Gentiles were the future." One must be familiar with the tone of contemporary literature fully to appreciate the almost prophetic quality of the essay. For it seeks to awaken in the working-people the initiative impulse, not only to move toward their own salvation, but also to become an active force in realizing the common national good. The exact plea does not matter. The significant thing is that the appeal should be made at all, and that to the coolest and most far-sighted critic of our times should have come the thought that the working-people might be an instrument through whom the nobler collective life of society should be realized.

"Ecce, convertimur ad gentes." It must have seemed to Arnold the counsel of despair: but it was to be a watchword of the next generation. For the time came when democratic theories, despite all withholdings and misgivings, prevailed. Their

terror was to be mitigated though not destroyed, and their inspiration set free, by the correlative development of practical fellowship between classes, and of an heroic faith in the power of society to shape its life as it would.

CHAPTER XII

TOWARD AUTHORITY

AUTHORITY and democracy are two words which the early nineteenth century would have found hard to couple. To the common thought, democracy meant a society swayed purely by popular impulse and the instinct of personal liberty. This was natural. The gigantic egotism of the Napoleonic wars and of Byronic poetry were early results of the same impulse, in the spheres of fact and fancy. Other results were the immense industrial expansion, the consequent rapid rise of a self-made bourgeoisie to power, and the varying schools of speculative thought that swiftly appeared.

Yet a second impulse flowed from the mighty source of the young democracy: the social impulse for the common life and the common duty. In 1848, this impulse measured itself against individualism, and fled, routed. Its time had not come, for individualism had not spent its force. Drama, poetry, novel, essay, continued after brief interruption the claim and quest for personal self-realization, flung a challenge at conventions in the name of private freedom, or sought, as the one worthy aim of art, to penetrate the secrets of temperament and personality. Free competition continued to gov

ern the industrial system. The very centre of the individualist position was England, where John Bull took with especial kindliness to the assertion of his own rights.

It was, then, no wonder that Carlyle and Ruskin hated democracy as they saw it. From self-assertion and from mob-law they turned away their eyes. "Liberty," cries Carlyle, "requires new definitions." 1 "All freedom is error," says Ruskin. "You hear every day greater numbers of foolish people speaking about liberty as if it were such an honorable thing: so far from being that, it is on the whole and in the broadest sense dishonorable, and an attribute of the lower creatures. No human being, however great and powerful, was ever so free as a fish. . . . You will find, on fairly thinking of it, that it is his Restraint which is honorable to man, not his Liberty. The sun has no liberty, a dead leaf has much. The dust of which you are formed has no liberty. Its liberty will

The reaction from individualism allied itself in both Carlyle and Ruskin with a strong attraction for the feudal past. But the time was to come when the desire for authority should look no longer to the past, but to the future for its fulfillment: when democracy and authority should be recognized as friends, not foes. Matthew Arnold was perhaps one of the first English writers to abandon the old connections, and to combine the outcry against

1 Past and Present, book iii. ch. xiii.

2 The Two Paths.