gland lost much of her old
prestige in the eyes of the world, and felt that she had lost it. But
nothing would have been more unphilosophical than to have assumed that
England was degenerate or decrepit. It was only that her training had
been for so long exclusively mechanical and peaceful. The terrible, but
glorious, experience of the Indian Rebellion showed that Englishmen
still possessed in as full measure as ever those noble characteristics
on which they justly pride themselves, and of which a nation of kindred
blood would be the last to deny them the praise. When the heroic
qualities found their occasion, they were not wanting.

We do not say this as unduly sensitive to the unfriendly, often
insulting and always unwise, criticisms of a large proportion of the
press and the public men of England. In ordinary times we could afford
to receive them with a good-natured smile. The zeal of certain new
converts to Adam Smith in behalf of the free-trade principles whose
cross they have assumed, their hatred and contempt for all heretics to
what is their doxy and therefore according to Dean Swift orthodoxy, and
the _naive_ unconsciousness with which they measure and weigh the
moral qualities of other nations by the yards of cotton or tons of
manufactured iron which they consume for the benefit of Manchester and
Sheffield, are certainly as comic as anything in Aristophanes. The
madness of the philosopher who deemed himself personally answerable for
the obliquity of the ecliptic has more than its match in the sense of
responsibility shown by British journalists for the good conduct of the
rest of mankind. All other kingdoms, potentates, and powers would seem
to be minors or lunatics, and they the divinely appointed guardians
under bonds to see that their unhappy wards do no harm to themselves or
others. We confess, that, in reading the "Times," we have been sometimes
unable to suppress a feeling of humorous pity for the young man who
_does_ the leading articles, and who finds himself, fresh from Oxford
or Cambridge and the writing of Latin verses, called suddenly to the
autocracy of the Universe. We must pardon a little to the _imperii
novitas_, to the necessity of having universal misinformation always on
tap in his inkstand. He summons emperors, kings, ministers, even whole
nations, to the inexorable blackboard. His is the great normal school of
philosophy, statesmanship, political economy, taste, and deportment. He
must hel