cal expediency as of the public good.

Have nations, like individuals, an intuitive sense or presentiment of
something to come? If they have, then there has been perhaps no period
in our history when that faculty was more keenly alive than towards the
close of the last century. From the beginning of the French Revolution
to the advent of the Victorian Era constitutes what may be called the
great transition period in our domestic, social, and economic life and
customs. Indeed, so far as the great mass of the people were
concerned, it was really the dawn of social life in England; and, as
the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so were the earlier
years of the above period to the people of these Realms. Before the
people of England at the end of the 18th century, on the horizon which
shut out the future, lay a great black bank of cloud, and our great
grandfathers who gazed upon it, almost despairing whether it would ever
lift, were really in the long shadows of great coming events.

Through the veil which was hiding the new order of things,
occasionally, a sensitive far-seeing eye, here and there caught
glimpses from the region beyond. The French, driven just then
well-nigh to despair, caught the least glimmer of light and the whole
nation was soon on fire! A few of the most highly strung minds caught
the inspiration of an ideal dream of the regeneration of the world by
some patent process of redistribution! All the ancient bundle of
precedents, and the swaddling bands of restraints and customs in which
men had been content to remain confined for thousands of years, were
henceforth to be dissolved in that grandiose dream of a society in
which each individual, left to follow his unrestrained will, was to be
trusted to contribute to the happiness of all without that security
from wrong which, often rude in its operation, had been the fundamental
basis of social order for ages! The ideal was no doubt pure and noble,
but unfortunately it only raised once more the old unsolved problem of
the forum whether that which is theoretically right can ever be
practically wrong. The French Revolution did not, as a matter of fact,
rest with a mere revulsion of moral forces, but as the infection
descended from moral heights into the grosser elements of the national
life, men soon {3} began to fight for the new life with the old
weapons, until France found, and others looking on saw, the beautiful
dream of liberty tighten