I cannot for a moment _not_ believe in a Supreme
Being, and I cannot for a moment doubt that His arrangement
must be right and wise and benevolent. But I
cannot also for a moment feel confident in any doctrines
or opinions I could form on this great question.[9]

The same impossibility of classification meets us in his politics. He
was certainly, in a philosophic sense, a Conservative; he was
anti-popular and anti-democratic. Yet he was an ardent champion of the
popular and democratic principle of Nationalities; he was all for the
Greeks and Bulgarians against the Turks, and all for the Hungarians and
Italians against the Austrians.[10] Nor had he any sympathy with the old
ordering of society as such. He had no zeal, as far as one can see, for
an hereditary peerage and an established church. He threw himself into
the memorable battle of the Reform Bill of 1832 with characteristic
spirit and energy. His ideal, like that of most literary thinkers on
politics, was an aristocracy, not of caste, but of education, virtue,
and public spirit. It was the old dream of lofty minds from Plato down
to Turgot. Every page of Greg's political writing is coloured by this
attractive vision. Though as anxious as any politician of his time for
practical improvements, and as liberal in his conception of their scope
and possibility, he insisted that they could only be brought about by an
aristocracy of intellect and virtue.[11] But then the great controversy
turns on the best means of securing sense and probity in a government.
The democrat holds that under representative institutions the best
security for the interests of the mass of the community is, that the
mass shall have a voice in their own affairs, and that in proportion as
that security is narrowed and weakened, the interests of the mass will
be subordinate to those of the class that has a decisive voice. Mr. Greg
had no faith in the good issues of this rough and spontaneous play of
social forces. The extension of the suffrage in 1867 seemed to him to be
the ruin of representative institutions; and when that was capped by the
Ballot in 1872, the cup of his dismay was full. Perhaps, he went on to
say, some degree of safety might be found by introducing the Ballot
inside the House of Commons. De Tocqueville wrote Mr. Greg a long and
interesting letter in 1853, which is well worth reading to-day in
connection with _scrutin de liste_ and the Ballot.[12] De Tocqueville was
for