specting his opponent's position and arguments which are
contradicted by the plainest facts.

Persons who, like myself, have spent their lives outside the political
world, yet take a mild and philosophical concern in what goes on in
it, often find it difficult to understand what our neighbours call the
psychological moment of this or that party leader, and are,
occasionally, loth to believe in the seeming conditions of certain
kinds of success. And when some chieftain, famous in political
warfare, adventures into the region of letters or of science, in full
confidence that the methods which have brought fame and honour in his
own province will answer there, he is apt to forget that he will be
judged by these people, on whom rhetorical artifices have long ceased
to take effect; and to whom mere dexterity in putting together
cleverly ambiguous phrases, and even the great art of offensive
misrepresentation, are unspeakably wearisome. And, if that weariness
finds its expression in sarcasm, the offender really has no right to
cry out. Assuredly ridicule is no test of truth, but it is the
righteous meed of some kinds of error. Nor ought the attempt to
confound the expression of a revolted sense of fair dealing with
arrogant impatience of contradiction, to restrain those to whom "the
extreme weapons of controversy" come handy from using them. The
function of police in the intellectual, if not in the civil, economy
may sometimes be legitimately discharged by volunteers.

* * * * *

Some time ago in one of the many criticisms with which I am favoured,
I met with the remark that, at our time of life, Mr. Gladstone and I
might be better occupied than in fighting over the Gadarene pigs. And,
if these too famous swine were the only parties to the suit, I, for my
part, should fully admit the justice of the rebuke. But, under the
beneficent rule of the Court of Chancery, in former times, it was not
uncommon, that a quarrel about a few perches of worthless land, ended
in the ruin of ancient families and the engulfing of great estates;
and I think that our admonisher failed to observe the analogy--to note
the momentous consequences of the judgment which may be awarded in the
present apparently insignificant action _in re_ the swineherds of
Gadara.

The immediate effect of such judgment will be the decision of the
question, whether the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the
demonology of the me