ch in some
degree or other capital will always possess, and any one who remembers
the assistance which Reform derived from the Hyde Park rows will see at
once that mischief on the large scale might be made in this way an
important factor in political questions.

Ambition has yet a wider sphere of action than even mischief in this
poetic use of wealth. A London preacher recently drew pointed attention
to the merely selfish use of their riches by great English nobles, and
contrasted it with the days when Elizabeth's Lords of the Council
clubbed together to provide an English fleet against the Armada, or the
nobles of Venice placed their wealth on every great emergency at the
service of the State. But from any constitutional point of view there is
perhaps nothing on which we may more heartily congratulate ourselves
than on the blindness which hides from the great capitalists of England
the political power which such a national employment of their wealth
would give them--a blindness which is all the more wonderful in what is
at once the wealthiest and the most political aristocracy which the
world has ever seen. What fame the mere devotion of a quarter of a
million to public uses may give to a quiet merchant the recent example
of Mr. Peabody abundantly showed. But the case of the Baroness Burdett
Coutts is yet more strictly to the point. The mere fact that she has
been for years credited with a wide and unselfish benevolence has given
her a power over the imagination of vast masses of the London poor which
no one who is not really conversant with their daily life and modes of
thinking could for an instant imagine. Her bounty is enlarged in the
misty air of the slums of Wapping or Rotherhithe to colossal dimensions,
and the very quietness and unobtrusiveness of her work gives it an air
of mystery which tells like romance on the fancy of the poor.

It was characteristic of the power which such a use of wealth may give
that the mobs who smashed the Hyde Park railings stopped to cheer before
the house of Lady Burdett Coutts. Luckily none of our political nobles
has ever bethought himself of the means by which the great Roman leaders
rose habitually to influence or won over the labouring masses by "panem
et Circenses." But a nobler ambition might find its field in a large
employment of wealth for public ends of a higher sort. Something of the
old patrician pride might have spurred the five or six great Houses who
own half Londo