ue the happier you would be. On
the contrary, if you were condemned to live among a multitude of idiots,
dumb, distorted and malicious, you would not be happy in the constant
sense of your own superiority. Thus all real joy and power of progress
in humanity depend on finding something to reverence; and all the
baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain. Now, by
general misgovernment, I repeat, we have created in Europe a vast
populace, and out of Europe a still vaster one, which has lost even the
power and conception of reverence;[139]--which exists only in the
worship of itself--which can neither see anything beautiful around it,
nor conceive anything virtuous above it; which has, towards all goodness
and greatness, no other feelings than those of the lowest
creatures--fear, hatred, or hunger a populace which has sunk below your
appeal in their nature, as it has risen beyond your power in their
multitude;--whom you can now no more charm than you can the adder, nor
discipline, than you can the summer fly.

It is a crisis, gentlemen; and time to think of it. I have roughly and
broadly put it before you in its darkness. Let us look what we may find
of light.

Only the other day, in a journal which is a fairly representative
exponent of the Conservatism of our day, and for the most part not at
all in favor of strikes or other popular proceedings; only about three
weeks since, there was a leader, with this, or a similar, title--"What
is to become of the House of Lords?" It startled me, for it seemed as if
we were going even faster than I had thought, when such a question was
put as a subject of quite open debate, in a journal meant chiefly for
the reading of the middle and upper classes. Open or not--the debate is
near. What _is_ to become of them? And the answer to such question
depends first on their being able to answer another question--"What is
the _use_ of them!" For some time back, I think the theory of the nation
has been, that they are useful as impediments to business, so as to give
time for second thoughts. But the nation is getting impatient of
impediments to business; and certainly, sooner or later, will think it
needless to maintain these expensive obstacles to its humors. And I
have not heard, either in public, or from any of themselves, a clear
expression of their own conception of their use. So that it seems thus
to become needful for all men to tell them, as our one quite
clear-sighted t