One sees an evidence of this wholesome state
of affairs in our courts of law. There is less
ingenious quibbling there than there used to
be. How seldom we hear now of what used
to be called "splendid defences." How much
more it is a question of facts on both sides in a
trial now, than of eloquence, special pleading,
and general mystification. We shall live,
perhaps—some of us—to see even greater
improvement here.

Two very disastrous tendencies of the human
mind, are a tendency to tyrannise and a tendency
to over-systematise. They are both fraught with
ruin to any community among whose members
they prevail. In this country we are content to
live, to a certain extent, in "a muddle." We
are venturesome, careless, trustful. We make
dreadful mistakes. We allow all kinds of
things to exist that would be forbidden in other
countries. We are taken in. All sorts of
things are mismanaged—but still we prosper.
The liberal hand is made fat. The open hand
fills. All over the world our institutions are
being slowly imitated, and the principles from
which those institutions grew are being adopted.

As to the Future, this much seems pretty
certain. Every day the voice of Reason and
Common Sense is more respectfully listened to;
every day Prejudice and Superstition lose more
and more of their hold upon us. Slowly, most
slowly, half a grain a year, the cause of
Republicanism—of real and right Republicanism
—makes advance, an advance that is all the more
sure for its tardy progress, and for the stout
battle that is fought by those who would keep
it back. Slowly, so slowly that the movement
is hardly appreciable in a period so short as a
lifetime, the aristocratic element loses ground,
and nearer by an infinitesimal degree, but still
nearer, comes the moment when that
picturesque and much-loved institution shall languish
and die out for ever.

In the new countries and the new colonies
that element does not exist. Those new
communities are constructed without it, just as in
our new neighbourhoods the houses are built
without those extinguishers for torches which
we see attached to the railings of some of the
mansions in Portland-place and ancient Berkeley-
square. In America—for the moment under
a cloud, but not under a cloud for ever—in
America, passing through a great trouble, which
it needed, and which will do it good—there is
no aristocracy. There is none in any of our
colonies. These things affect us, reluctant though
we may be to admit it. The old aristocracy of
the Faubourg St. Germain and of our own
Mayfair will ultimately disappear from the world as
the swords have disappeared from the sides
of its members, and the powder from their
ailes de pigeon. No man with an eye for the
picturesque and the poetical can do other
than regret this, even while he acknowledges
that it must be. Somewhere on the borderland
of France there is an old castle standing, where
everything is kept as it was in the old feudal
time, and all the old usages carefully
preserved. Antiquarians and travellers go to the
place, and revel in what they find there, while
the other ancient buildings of the time show
in mere ruins, that hint at, rather than
proclaim, their former splendour. Just so I can
fancy, ages hence, the men and women of
an advanced period pointing out some old and
decrepid personage as the last descendant of
an ancient house, or describing the habits of
some family, living retired from the world,
and keeping up all the customs of the
aristocratic times, and even calling each other by
their titles.

For the rest, this is a perfectly safe prophesy
to make, seeing that its accomplishment will
require some four or five hundred years. In the
mean time, I suppose it would be a fair question
to ask on what such a prediction as this is
founded. First of all then, and principally, on
the fact mentioned just now, that those countries
which most fairly represent progress, those
countries where all sorts of new fashions, to use
a familiar phrase, are set, this element is wanting.
Then, again, the tendency of the age is
towards the abandonment of what is irrational
and useless, and the adoption of what is reasonable
and useful. For instance, I should imagine
that the time cannot be very far distant when
the barrister will find that he can transact business
just as well without a mass of horsehair on
the top of his head as with it, and that the
aid of two oblong pieces of cambric tied on
underneath his chin may safely be dispensed
with. The bishops have already got rid of
their wigs—there is one irrational thing gone
from them, and perhaps a few more may be
going.

It is difficult to enlarge the glance so as to
take in more objects than the few in our
immediate neighbourhood. Because the aristocratic
element is just now very much "up" in England,
and the democratic cause, in consequence of
what is going on in America, very much "down,"
many rush to the conclusion—regardless of the
History of the Past, and the light which such
history throws on the distant Future—that these
two elements occupy finally and for ever the
places which they just now hold. Things look well
for the aristocratic cause at this particular
moment, and ill for that of democracy. At no time,
probably, in the history of the bravest and most
servile people under the sun, has there been seen
a more slavish worship of the titled classes than
is to be seen going on day after day at this
present time. The public—at least a portion
of it—gazes with the vitreous eye of an almost
senile infatuation on the coroneted panels of the
carriages in the Ring, and the interest—most
natural and becoming—which was excited by
that royal wedding—already described in these
pages as a most beautiful and impressive thing—
is in some danger of degenerating into an
idolatry of two young people humiliating to
witness, and, one would imagine, painful to
receive. In this country we invite the titled
classes to be insolent, and it is a noble
testimony to their sense and virtue that the