Democratic Equality. 123 spondingly back into their own condition? Can any one deny, that the knowledge how poor and insignificant the best condition of improvement and culture attainable by them must be esteemed by a class incomparably richer-endowed, tends to cheapen this modest possible amelioration in the account of those classes also for whom it would be relatively a real progress, and to disen chant their imaginations with it? It seems to me impossible to deny this. And therefore a philosophic observer,' with no love for democracy, but rather with a terror of it, has been constrained to remark, that 'the common people is more uncivilised in aristocratic countries than in any others;' because there 'the lowly and the poor feel themselves, as it were, overwhelmed with the weight of their own inferiority.' He has been con strained to remark,2 that 'there is such a thing as a manly and legitimate passion for equality, prompting men to desire to be, all of them, in the enjoyment of power and consideration.' And, in France, that very equality, which is by us so impetuously decried, while it has by no means 1 M. de Tocqueville. See his Démocratie en Amérique (edit. of 1835), vol. i, p. II. 'Le peuple est plus grossier dans les pays aristocratiques que partout ailleurs. Dans ces lieux, où se rencontrent des hommes si forts et si riches, les faibles et les pauvres se sentent comme accablés de leur bassesse; ne découvrant aucun point par lequel ils puissent regagner l'égalité, ils désespèrent entièrement d'eux-mêmes, et se laissent tomber au-dessous de la dignité humaine.' 2 Démocratie en Amérique, vol. i, p. 60. improved (it is said) the upper classes of French society, has undoubtedly given to the lower classes, to the body of the common people, a self-respect, an enlargement of spirit, a consciousness of counting for something in their country's action, which has raised them in the scale of humanity. The common people, in France, seems to me the soundest part of the French nation. They seem to me more free from the two opposite degradations of multitudes, brutality and servility, to have a more developed human life, more of what distinguishes elsewhere the cultured classes from the vulgar, than the common people in any other country with which I am acquainted.— Mixed Essays. SURELY it is easy to see that the shortcomings in our English civilisation are due to our inequality; or, in other words, that the great inequality of classes and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we maintain because we have the religion of inequality,—that this constitution of things, I say, has the natural and necessary effect, under present circumstances, of materialising our upper class, vulgarising our middle class, and brutalising our lower class. And this is to fail in civilisation.-Mixed Essays. Our Middle-class Education. 125 ARMINIUS ON THE MIDDLE-CLASS ERA. "THE era of aristocracies is over,' said Arminius; 'nations must now stand or fall by the intelligence of their middle class and their people. The people with you is still an embryo; no one can yet quite say what it will come to. You lean, therefore, with your whole weight upon the intelligence of your middle class. And intelligence, in the true sense of the word, your middle class has absolutely none.'-Friendship's Garland. OUR MIDDLE-CLASS EDUCATION. NEITHER is the secondary and superior instruction given in England so good on the whole, if we regard the whole number of those to whom it is due, as that given in Germany or France, nor is it given in schools of so good a standing. Of course, what good instruction there is, and what schools of good standing there are to get it in, fall chiefly to the lot of the upper class. It is on the middle class that the injury, such as it is, of getting inferior instruction, and of getting it in schools of inferior standing, mainly comes. This injury, as it strikes one after seeing attentively the schools of the Continent, has two aspects. It has a social aspect, and it has an intellectual aspect. The social injury is this. On the Continent the upper and middle class are brought up on one and the same plane. In England the middle class, as a rule, is brought up on the second plane. One hears many discussions as to the limits between the middle and the upper class in England. From a social and educational point of view these limits are perfectly clear. Ten or a dozen famous schools, Oxford or Cambridge, the church or the bar, the army or navy, and those posts in the public service supposed to be posts for gentlemen,-these are the lines of training, all or any of which give a cast of ideas, a stamp or habit, which make a sort of association of all those who share them; and this association is the upper class. Except by one of these modes of access, an Englishman does not, unless by some special play of aptitude or of circumstances, become a vital part of this association, for he does not bring with him the cast of ideas in which its bond of union lies. This cast of ideas is naturally in the main that of the most powerful and prominent part of the association, the aristocracy. The professions furnish the more numerous but the less prominent part; in no country, accordingly, do the professions so naturally and generally share the cast of ideas of the aristocracy as in England. Judged from its bad side, this cast of ideas is characterised by over-reverence for things established, by an estrangement from the powers of reason and science. Judged from its good side, it is characterised by a high spirit, by dignity, by a just sense of the greatness of great affairs, all of them governing qualities; and the professions have accordingly long recruited the governing Our Middle-class Education. 127 But force of the aristocracy, and assisted it to rule. they are separate, to a degree unknown on the Continent,. from the commercial and industrial classes with which in social standing they are naturally on a level. So we have amongst us the spectacle of a middle class cut in two in a way unexampled anywhere else; of a professional class brought up on the first plane, with fine and governing qualities, but disinclined to rely on reason and science; while that immense business class, which is becoming so important a power in all countries, on which the future. so much depends, and which in the great public schools of other countries fills so large a place, is in England brought up on the second plane, cut off from the aristocracy and the professions, and without governing qualities. If only, in compensation, it had science, systematic knowledge, reason! But here comes in the intellectual mischief of the bad condition of the mass of our secondary schools. In England the business class is not only inferior to the professions and aristocracy in the social stamp of its places of training; it is actually inferior to them, maimed and incomplete as their development of reason is, in its development of reason. Short as the offspring of our public schools and universities come of the idea of science and systematic knowledge, the offspring of our middle-class academies probably come, if that be possible, even shorter. What these academies fail to give |