s imagination, and has become
powerless to guide conduct, then how does the circumstance that it
happens not to be wholly and unredeemedly bad in its influence, relieve
our dissident from all care or anxiety as to the points in which, as we
have seen, he does count it inadequate and mischievous? Even if he
thinks it does more good than harm--a position which must be very
difficult for one who believes the common supernatural conception of it
to be entirely false--even then, how is he discharged from the duty of
stigmatising the harm which he admits that it does?

Again, take the case of the English monarchy. Grant, if you will, that
this institution has a certain function, and that by the present chief
magistrate this function is estimably performed. Yet if we are of those
who believe that in the stage of civilisation which England has reached
in other matters, the monarchy must be either obstructive and injurious,
or else merely decorative; and that a merely decorative monarchy tends
in divers ways to engender habits of abasement, to nourish lower social
ideals, to lessen a high civil self-respect in the community; then it
must surely be our duty not to lose any opportunity of pressing these
convictions. To do this is not necessarily to act as if one were anxious
for the immediate removal of the throne and the crown into the museum of
political antiquities. We may have no urgent practical solicitude in
this direction, on the intelligible principle that a free people always
gets as good a kind of government as it deserves. Our conviction is not,
on the present hypothesis, that monarchy ought to be swept away in
England, but that monarchy produces certain mischievous consequences to
the public spirit of the community. And so what we are bound to do is to
take care not to conceal this conviction; to abstain scrupulously from
all kinds of action and observance, public or private, which tend ever
so remotely to foster the ignoble and degrading elements that exist in a
court and spread from it outwards; and to use all the influence we have,
however slight it may be, in loading public opinion to a right attitude
of contempt and dislike for these ignoble and degrading elements, and
the conduct engendered by them. A policy like this does not interfere
with the advantages of the monarchy, such as they are asserted to be,
and it has the effect of making what are supposed to be its
disadvantages as little noxious as possible. The q