the self-reliance, the public spirit of its citizens, and
yet be able to count on these qualities whenever the government itself
may have broken down, and left the country to make the best of such
resources as are left after so severe and prolonged a drain. This is the
sense in which morality is the nature of things. The system of the
Second Empire was in the same sense an immoral system. Unless all the
lessons of human experience were futile, and all the principles of
political morality mere articles of pedantry, such a system must
inevitably bring disaster, as we might have seen that it was sowing the
seeds of disaster. Yet because the catastrophe lingered, opinion in
England began to admit the possibility of evil being for this once good,
and to treat any reference to the moral and political principles which
condemned the imperial system, and all systems like it, beyond hope or
appeal, as simply the pretext of a mutinous or Utopian impatience.

This, however, is only one of the more superficial influences which have
helped and fallen in with the working of profounder causes of weakened
aspiration and impoverished moral energy, and of the substitution of
latitudinarian acquiescence and faltering conviction for the
whole-hearted assurance of better times. Of these deeper causes, the
most important in the intellectual development of the prevailing forms
of thought and sentiment is the growth of the Historic Method. Let us
consider very shortly how the abuse of this method, and an unauthorised
extension and interpretation of its conclusions, are likely to have had
something to do with the enervation of opinion.

The Historic Method may be described as the comparison of the forms of
an idea, or a usage, or a belief, at any given time, with the earlier
forms from which they were evolved, or the later forms into which they
were developed, and the establishment, from such a comparison, of an
ascending and descending order among the facts. It consists in the
explanation of existing parts in the frame of society by connecting them
with corresponding parts in some earlier frame; in the identification of
present forms in the past, and past forms in the present. Its main
process is the detection of corresponding customs, opinions, laws,
beliefs, among different communities, and a grouping of them into
general classes with reference to some one common feature. It is a
certain way of seeking answers to various questions of origin,