ve to make them; which have to create
institutions which must generate loyalty by conspicuous utility. This
matter-of-factness is the growth even in Europe of the two greatest and
newest intellectual agencies of our time. One of these is business. We
see so much of the material fruits of commerce that we forget its
mental fruits. It begets a mind desirous of things, careless of ideas,
not acquainted with the niceties of words. In all labour there should
be profit, is its motto. It is not only true that we have "left swords
for ledgers," but war itself is made as much by the ledger as by the
sword. The soldier--that is, the great soldier--of to-day is not a
romantic animal, dashing at forlorn hopes, animated by frantic
sentiment, full of fancies as to a lady-love or a sovereign; but a
quiet, grave man, busied in charts, exact in sums, master of the art of
tactics, occupied in trivial detail; thinking, as the Duke of
Wellington was said to do, MOST of the shoes of his soldiers; despising
all manner of eclat and eloquence; perhaps, like Count Moltke, "silent
in seven languages". We have reached a "climate" of opinion where
figures rule, where our very supporter of Divine right, as we deemed
him, our Count Bismarck, amputates kings right and left, applies the
test of results to each, and lets none live who are not to do
something. There has in truth been a great change during the last five
hundred years in the predominant occupations of the ruling part of
mankind; formerly they passed their time either in exciting action or
inanimate repose. A feudal baron had nothing between war and the
chase--keenly animating things both--and what was called "inglorious
ease". Modern life is scanty in excitements, but incessant in quiet
action. Its perpetual commerce is creating a "stock-taking" habit--the
habit of asking each man, thing, and institution, "Well, what have you
done since I saw you last?"

Our physical science, which is becoming the dominant culture of
thousands, and which is beginning to permeate our common literature to
an extent which few watch enough, quite tends the same way. The two
peculiarities are its homeliness and its inquisitiveness; its value for
the most "stupid" facts, as one used to call them, and its incessant
wish for verification--to be sure, by tiresome seeing and hearing, that
they are facts. The old excitement of thought has half died out, or
rather it is diffused in quiet pleasure over a life instead