he _class_ to rise; hence
social restlessness, social change, revolution, and its hazards. For
revolutions are produced but by the aspirations of one order, and the
resistance of the other. Consequently, legislative improvement differs
widely from individual amelioration; the same principle, the same
agency, that purifies the small body, becomes destructive when applied
to the large one. Apply the flame to the log on the hearth, or apply it
to the forest, is there no distinction in the result? The breeze that
freshens the fountain passes to the ocean, current impels current, wave
urges wave, and the breeze becomes the storm."

"Were there truth in this train of argument," replied De Montaigne, "had
we ever abstained from communicating to the Multitude the enjoyments and
advantages of the Few, had we shrunk from the good, because the good is
a parent of the change and its partial ills, what now would be society?
Is there no difference in collective happiness and virtue between the
painted Picts and the Druid worship, and the glorious harmony, light,
and order of the great English nation?"

"The question is popular," said Maltravers, with a smile; "and were
you my opponent in an election, would be cheered on any hustings in the
kingdom. But I have lived among savage tribes,--savage, perhaps, as the
race that resisted Caesar; and their happiness seems to me, not perhaps
the same as that of the few whose sources of enjoyment are numerous,
refined, and, save by their own passions, unalloyed; but equal to
that of the mass of men in States the most civilized and advanced. The
artisans, crowded together in the fetid air of factories, with physical
ills gnawing at the core of the constitution, from the cradle to the
grave; drudging on from dawn to sunset and flying for recreation to
the dread excitement of the dram-shop, or the wild and vain hopes of
political fanaticism,--are not in my eyes happier than the wild Indians
with hardy frames and calm tempers, seasoned to the privations for which
you pity them, and uncursed with desires of that better state never to
be theirs. The Arab in his desert has seen all the luxuries of the pasha
in his harem; but he envies them not. He is contented with his barb, his
tent, his desolate sands, and his spring of refreshing water.

"Are we not daily told, do not our priests preach it from their pulpits,
that the cottage shelters happiness equal to that within the palace? Yet
what the distinc