concern, as it never was before and has not been since. The dominions beyond the seas were being peopled up and consolidated. At home education was spreading, liberty was increasing, and the light taxes were raised with an ease which fortunately for ourselves we no longer even remember. Principles seemed to have been discovered which guaranteed a further advance in almost every direction, intellectual as well as material. For that was the great age of British science; and most branches of literature were flourishing. Hope told a flattering tale, and optimism became a sort of religion.

Nevertheless, such complacency was bound to produce a violent protest. Disraeli, whose well-remembered warning about ‘the two nations’ has already been quoted, described the age as one which by the help of mechanical inventions had mistaken comfort for progress. And comfort, as another critic of social science has said, is more insidious than luxury in hampering the higher development of a people. The literature of social indignation was contemporaneous with the literature of complacency. Carlyle and Ruskin were its chief prophets; but we must not forget the novels of Dickens, Charles Reade and Kingsley.

Carlyle and Ruskin both denounced the age with the vehemence of major prophets—vehemence was in fashion at that time in English literature—but they did not approach the ‘condition of England question’ from quite the same angle. Carlyle was a Stoic, or in other words a Calvinist without dogmas; he had also learned to be a mystic from his studies of German idealism. He represents one phase of the anti-French reaction; he hated most of the ideas of 1789, as displayed in their results. He hated the scepticism of the Revolution, its negations, its love of claptrap rhetoric and fine phrases, and above all its anarchism. He wished to see society well ordered, under its wisest men; he wished to overcome materialism by idealism, and loose morality by industry and the fear of God. Justice, he declared, is done in this world; right is might, if we take long views. Institutions collapse when they become shams, and no longer fulfil their function. The sporting squires ought to be founding colonies instead of preserving game. As for the new industrialism, he disliked it with the fervour of a Scottish peasant.

Ruskin was a Platonist, steeped in the study of Plato, and bound to him by complete sympathy. We cannot separate Ruskin the art-critic from Ruskin the social reformer. His great discovery was the close connection of the decay of art with faulty social arrangements. Ugliness in the works of man is a symptom of social disease. He could not avert his eyes from the modern town, as Wordsworth did, because the modern town meant a great deal to him, and all of it was intolerable. He observed that the disappearance of beauty in human productions synchronised with the invention of machinery and the development of great industries, and he could not doubt that the two changes were interconnected. We sometimes forget that until the reign of George III a town was regarded as improving a landscape. A city was a glorious and beautiful thing, an object to be proud of. The hill of Zion is a fair place, the joy of the whole earth, because it had the holy city built upon it. Never since civilisation began has such ugliness been created as the modern English or American town. Ruskin saw in these structures a true index of the mind of their builders and inhabitants, and the sight filled him with horror. He read with entire approval what Plato wrote of industrialised Athens. ‘The city of which we are speaking,’ he says in the Laws, ‘is some eighty furlongs from the sea. Then there is some hope that your citizens may be virtuous. Had you been on the sea, and well provided with harbours, and an importing rather than a producing country, some mighty saviour would have been needed, and lawgivers more than mortal, if you were to have even a chance of preserving your State from degeneracy. The sea is pleasant enough as a daily companion, but it has a bitter and brackish quality, filling the streets with merchants and shopkeepers, and begetting in the souls of men uncertain and dishonest ways, making the State unfaithful and unfriendly to her own children and to other nations.’ Like Plato, Ruskin would fain have returned to a much simpler social structure, when each country, and even to a great extent each village, was sufficient to itself. He did not show how such a return is possible without blowing up the great towns and their inhabitants; but he quite seriously regarded the Industrial Revolution as a gigantic blunder, and believed that England would never be healthy or happy until what his contemporaries called progress had been somehow swept away with all its works. How this was to be done he hardly considered. Like a true Platonist, he set before his countrymen, in glowing language, the beauty of the eternal Ideas or absolute Values, pleaded that there was no necessary connection between equality of production and equality of remuneration, and instituted various experiments, not all unsuccessful, in restoring the old handicrafts and the temper which inspired them.

The problem of mending or ending industrialism, foolishly called capitalism, remains unsolved. Ruskin’s own artistic life would have been impossible without the paternal sherry and the rich men who drank it; and Morris’ exquisite manufactures depended absolutely on the patronage of the capitalists whom he denounced. But the indignation which these Victorian social reformers exhibited had much justification, even after the worst abuses had been partially remedied.

A mixture of rapid progress and extreme departmental inefficiency is one of the characteristics of the earlier part of the reign. Lord Justice Bowen has written an instructive sketch of the administration of the Law between 1837 and 1887. There were two systems of judicature, Law and Equity, with a different origin, different procedure, and different rules of right and wrong. One side of Westminster Hall gave judgments which the other side restrained the successful party from enforcing. The bewildered litigant was driven backwards and forwards. Merchants were hindered for months and years from recovering their dues. The fictitious adventures of John Doe and Richard Roe, the legal Gog and Magog, played an important part in trials to recover possession of land. Arrears accumulated year by year. The Court of Chancery was closed to the poor, and was a name of terror to the rich. It was said by a legal writer that ‘no man can enter into a Chancery suit with any reasonable hope of being alive at its termination, if he has a determined adversary.’ Bowen says that Dickens’ pictures of the English law ‘contain genuine history.’ The horrors of the debtors’ prison are well known, and nearly 4000 persons were sometimes arrested for debt in one year. In 1836, 494 persons were condemned to death, though only 34 were hanged. Public executions continued to 1867. If a farmer’s gig knocked down a foot passenger in a lonely lane, two persons were not allowed to speak in court—the farmer and the pedestrian. Most of these abuses were rectified long before the end of the reign.

The Universities were slowly emerging from the depths to which they had sunk in the eighteenth century, when they neither taught nor examined nor maintained discipline. We all remember Gibbon’s description of the Fellows of his College, ‘whose dull but deep potations excused the brisker intemperance of youth.’ These gentlemen were most of them waiting for College livings, to which they were allowed to