n slavery. In our England it is plainer every
day that the character of the people is changing. Individual men are
obedient, brave to the death, self-sacrificing, just as they always were
even in our darkest times; but, none the less, it is too plain that
authority ordained by law is dying, and that authority which rests on
vague and fluctuating sentiment gains power with steady swiftness. The
judges sit and retain all their old confidence; the magistrates sentence
daily their batches of submissive culprits; the policeman rules supreme
over the streets--he scares the flower-girl, and warns the pensive
burglar with the staccato thunder of his monarchical foot. All seems
very firm and orderly; and our largest crowds maintain their attitude of
harmless good-humour when no inflammatory talkers are there. But the
hand has written, and true discipline cannot survive very much longer
unless we rouse ourselves for a dead-lift effort. Take Parliament at the
crown of the social structure, and the School--the elementary school--at
the foundation, and we cannot feel reassured. All between the highest
and the lowest is moderately sound; the best of the middle-classes are
decent, law-abiding, and steady; the young men are good fellows in a
way; the girls and young women are charming and virtuous. But the
extremities are rotten, and sentiment has rotted them both. Parliament
has become a hissing and a scorn. No man of any party in all broad
England could be found to deny this, and many would say more. The
sentimentalist has said that loutishness shall not be curbed, that a
bawling ruffian who is silenced is martyred, that every man shall talk
as he likes, and the veto of the Polish Assembly which enabled any one
man to ruin the work of a session is revived in sober, solid England. So
it is that all has gone to wreck; and an assembly once the noblest on
earth is treated with unhidden contempt by the labourer in his field and
the mechanic at his bench. And all this has arisen from lack of
discipline.

In the School--the lower-class school--things are much worse. The lowest
of the low--the beings who should be kept in order by sharp, firm
kindness and justice--have been taught to mock at order and justice and
to treat kindness as a sign of weakness. The lads will all soon be ready
to aid in governing the country. May the good powers defend us! What a
set of governors! The son of the aristocrat is easily held in order,
because he knows th