of the people and the duties of the privileged
classes, and thereby tend to teach greed to those for whom we labour,
and goodness to those whom we condemn. The task that lies before us is
plain: we want the welfare of the people as a whole. But we fail to
grasp the complex social elements together, and our very remedies tend
to sunder them. We know that the public good will not be obtained by
separating man from man, securing each unit in a charmed circle of
personal rights, and protecting it from others by isolation. We must
find a place for the individual within the social organism, and we know
now that this organism has not, as our fathers seemed to think, the
simple constitution of a wooden doll. Society is not put together
mechanically, and the individual cannot be outwardly attached to it, if
he is to be helped, He must rather share its life, be the heir of the
wealth it has garnered for him in the past, and participate in its
onward movement. Between this new social ideal and our attainment,
between the magnitude of our social duties and the resources of
intellect and will at our command, there lies a chasm which we despair
of bridging over.

The characteristics of this epoch faithfully reflect themselves in the
pages of Carlyle, with whose thoughts those of Browning are immediately
connected. It was Carlyle who first effectively revealed to England the
continuity of human life, and the magnitude of the issues of individual
action. Seeing the infinite in the finite, living under a continued
sense of the mystery that surrounds man, he flung explosive negations
amidst the narrow formulae of the social and religious orthodoxy of his
day, blew down the blinding walls of ethical individualism, and, amidst
much smoke and din, showed his English readers something of the
greatness of the moral world. He gave us a philosophy of clothes,
penetrated through symbols to the immortal ideas, condemned all
shibboleths, and revealed the soul of humanity behind the external modes
of man's activity. He showed us, in a word, that the world is spiritual,
that loyalty to duty is the foundation of all human good, and that
national welfare rests on character. After reading him, it is impossible
for any one who reflects on the nature of duty to ask, "Am I my
brother's keeper?" He not only imagined, but knew, how "all things the
minutest that man does, minutely influence all men, and the very look of
his face blesses or curses whom-so it