e animals--without culture, without
leisure, without poetry, almost without thought--destitute of morality,
with only a sort of magic for religion; and if we compare that imagined
life with the actual life of Europe now, we are overwhelmed at the wide
contrast--we can scarcely conceive ourselves to be of the same race as
those in the far distance. There used to be a notion--not so much
widely asserted as deeply implanted, rather pervadingly latent than
commonly apparent in political philosophy--that in a little while,
perhaps ten years or so, all human beings might, without extraordinary
appliances, be brought to the same level. But now, when we see by the
painful history of mankind at what point we began, by what slow toil,
what favourable circumstances, what accumulated achievements, civilised
man has become at all worthy in any degree so to call himself--when we
realise the tedium of history and the painfulness of results--our
perceptions are sharpened as to the relative steps of our long and
gradual progress. We have in a great community like England crowds of
people scarcely more civilised than the majority of two thousand years
ago; we have others, even more numerous, such as the best people were a
thousand years since. The lower orders, the middle orders, are still,
when tried by what is the standard of the educated "ten thousand,"
narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious. It is useless to pile up
abstract words. Those who doubt should go out into their kitchens. Let
an accomplished man try what seems to him most obvious, most certain,
most palpable in intellectual matters, upon the housemaid and the
footman, and he will find that what he says seems unintelligible,
confused, and erroneous--that his audience think him mad and wild when
he is speaking what is in his own sphere of thought the dullest
platitude of cautious soberness. Great communities are like great
mountains--they have in them the primary, secondary, and tertiary
strata of human progress; the characteristics of the lower regions
resemble the life of old times rather than the present life of the
higher regions. And a philosophy which does not ceaselessly remember,
which does not continually obtrude, the palpable differences of the
various parts, will be a theory radically false, because it has omitted
a capital reality--will be a theory essentially misleading, because it
will lead men to expect what does not exist, and not to anticipate that
which they