the heavenly sunlight."

That is, in a figure, the vision for which we must hope and pray.

III

"_DISSOLVING THROES_"

I borrow my title from a poet.

"He grew old in an age he condemned;
He looked on the rushing decay
Of the times which had sheltered his youth;
Felt the dissolving throes
Of a social order he loved."

It seems odd that Matthew Arnold should have spoken thus about
Wordsworth; for one would have expected that the man who wrote so
gloriously of the French Revolution, "as it appeared to enthusiasts
at its commencement," would have rejoiced in the new order which it
established for all Europe. But the younger poet knew the elder
with an intimacy which defies contradiction; and one must, I suppose,
number Wordsworth among those who, in each succeeding age, have
shed tears of useless regret over the unreturning past. Talleyrand
said that, to know what an enjoyable thing life was capable of
being, one must have been a member of the _ancienne noblesse_ before
the Revolution. It was the cynical and characteristic utterance
of a nature singularly base; but even the divine Burke (though he
had no personal or selfish interests in the matter) was convinced
that the Revolution had not only destroyed political freedom, but
also social welfare, and had "crushed everything respectable and
virtuous in the nation." What, in the view of Burke and Talleyrand,
the Revolution did for France, that, by a curious irony of fate,
our attempt to defeat the Revolution did for England. Burke forced
us into the Revolutionary War, and that war (as Gladstone once said
in a letter to the present writer) "almost unmade the liberties,
the Constitution, even the material interests and prosperity, of our
country." Patriots like William Cobbett and Sydney Smith, though
absolutely convinced that the war was just and necessary, doubted
if England could ever rally from the immense strain which it had
imposed on her resources, or regain the freedom which, in order
to beat France, she had so lightly surrendered.

At a time when Manchester was unrepresented and Gatton sent two
Members to Parliament, it was steadily maintained by lovers of the
established order that the proposed enlargement of the electorate
was "incompatible with a just equality of civil rights, or with the
necessary restraints of social obligation." If it were carried,
religion, morality, and property would perish together, and our
venerable Constit