try is both just and
admirable. But he manifestly underrates the corresponding relations of
the landowners, and wholly omits to show, even if the artisan's state
were the greatest, how his opinions are likely to be most valuable. To
suppose that a man is necessarily the best judge in whatever concerns
him most is a sad _non-sequitur_; for if self-interest ensured wisdom,
no one would ever go wrong in anything. Every man would be his own
minister, and every invalid would be his own best physician. The wounded
limbs of the community are the best judges of the pain they suffer; but
it is the wise heads of the community that best can apply a remedy that
best can cure the wound without causing it to break out in another
quarter. Poverty is blind; but the upper classes "education has
enlightened, and habit made foreseeing."'

We live in times great from the events and little from the character of
the actors. Every month summons us to the spectacle of some new perfidy
in the leaders of parties and the most conspicuous public servants; and
the profligacy which we charge upon the statesmen of the seventeenth
century has revolved in full measure upon our own days.

_Justifications of Novels._--The two following justifications of novels
occur to me. Firstly, that if some dreadful crisis awaited a ship of
passengers at the line--where equally the danger was mysterious and
multiform, the safety mysterious and multiform--how monstrous if a man
should say to a lady, 'What are you reading?' 'Oh, I'm reading about our
dreadful crisis, now so near'; and he should answer, 'Oh, nonsense! read
something to improve your mind; read about Alexander the Great, about
Spurius Ahala, about Caius Gracchus, or, if you please, Tiberius.' But
just such nonsense it is, when people ridicule reading romances in which
the great event of the fiction is the real great event of a female
life.

There are others, you say--she loses a child. Yes, that's a great event.
But that arises out of this vast equinoctial event.

Secondly, as all things are predisposed to the natures which must be
surrounded by them, so we may see that the element of social evolution
of character, manners, caprices, etc., has been adapted to the vast mass
of human minds. It is a mean element, you say. The revelations of Albert
Smith, Dickens, etc., are essentially mean, vulgar, plebeian, not only
in an aristocratic sense, but also in a philosophical sense. True, but
the minds tha