his former envious antipathy to the more fortunate aristocrat. Like some man in a club, having forced himself in, his great object now is to keep others out."

Yes. It is a coarsely executed and signally unflattering caricature; but beneath it no doubt you can recognise the Tory, or what is left of him in these days. It is a portrait in which every harsh and repellent feature has been exaggerated and every softening lineament omitted. Not I think maliciously; for nothing, indeed, it may be said in passing, is more remarkable than the crude materialism, so to speak, the blankly prosaic character of the writer's theorisings upon politics. He never seems to suspect that the "inwardness" of the individual, his spirit and temperament, his theories of the world and of human nature, his beliefs about deeper and more permanent things than "questions" of the hour have anything to do with the formation or adoption of his political creed. Our critic's impartiality in the matter is, it is true, unquestionable, for he does not trouble himself even about the ideals of Democracy, such as they are; and we cannot complain therefore, if into the composition of his typical Tory there enter no such ingredients as reverence for antiquity, respect for great traditions, pious care for all the noble and gracious bequests from the past-bequests not only of political institutions which Democracy is bent on subverting but of human virtues with which, as with loyalty, modesty, contentment, obedience, renunciation, Democracy openly boasts itself at war.

By the simple process of replacing all those higher elements of Toryism which this writer has so coolly eliminated, one could easily turn the caricature he presents to us into a passable portrait. But for the moment I am concerned with it only in its character of hard, crude, unsympathetic statement of Tory" opinions." It is evidently a faithful account of what he has found, or thinks he has found, in such specimens of the man-of-the-world Tory as he has studied; and it may be of use to enlighten him as to the extent to which Toryism of this type prevails outside Parliament and throughout certain preoccupied, non-political, and undemonstrative bodies of his fellowcountrymen among whom he has probably not prosecuted any very extensive researches.

Let me assure him then, that the creed which he has caricatured is, allowing for the exaggeration of caricature, the creed held by probably seventy-five per cent. of the middle-class as a whole, and assuredly by ninety-nine out of every hundred men belonging to the upper-that is the more educated-stratum of that class, and that it is the avowed creed of all those among them who are not directly or indirectly engaged in the party game. No doubt, there has at all times been a Tory majority to be found among this class, but, at no time so preponderant as it is now, it grows more and more

overwhelming every year. And if the author of "Tories or Opportunists?" wishes to understand the causes of this increase let him know that it is the creation of the same causes as have made "Tories or Opportunists" possible as a serious-if at least it be a serious-contribution to contemporary politics. If the man-of-the-world Tory has less and less "sympathy with sentiment" and feels more and more "distrust of enthusiasm" it is because he has continually before him the spectacle of two parties talking sham democratic sentiment and pumping-up insincere democratic enthusiasm one against the other. If, to such a man, "ideas, crusades, movements, are objects of suspicion," it is because he sees six hundred and seventy gentlemen, most of them members of his own class, tumbling over each other in their eagerness to be the appropriators of some idea, the promoters of some movement, in which not one in ten of them-as he invariably finds when he catches them in some after-dinner Palace of Truth has a jot more belief than he has himself.

I am willing, as indeed it would be only polite, to assume that the author of "Tories or Opportunists?" is an exception; and that of his charity he believes most of his political associates to be in the same case. This, indeed, would seem to be implied in the delightful naïreté of his complaints of Conservative "inconsistency." One Conservative candidate backs trade unions and all their works, and another denounces them as tyrannies. So they are tyrannies; and that was probably as much the conviction of the former as of the latter. One let out what the other kept to himself, that is all! "Inconsistency quotha! It is the "inconsistency" of Jemmy Twitcher when he "blew the gaff" on his pal. "Hardly a debate passes [in the London County Council] but some Moderate member attacks the principle of a standard rate of wage which the Moderate party has formally approved, and then the Progressists say the truth is coming out.' Uncharitable Progressists! They should shut their eyes when the bag is opened, and not open them again till the cat is out of sight. Still, if this was not a case of the truth coming out, what was it? And how does our critic suppose that these things are regarded by the "man-of-the-world Tory," who is not " in the swim" with these gentlemen, except, perhaps involuntarily, an unwilling earthen pipkin between two brazen pots. Can one wonder that the sight of these contending cheap-jacks, some of them calling themselves Conservatives, some Liberal, but all engaged in a competition for the supply of political wares for the quality of which their contempt is as profound as his own, should not only intensify the Toryism of the "man-of-the world-Tory," but impart to it an element of militancy and bitterness to which it was formerly a stranger?

The many-counted charge of "disliking the working classes," of "not seeing distress, of wishing to enslave the employed to the employer," of being "always on the side of the strong against the

weak," is, of course, largely nonsense pure and simple: but I have no doubt that what our critic has amiably mistaken for this morose and ill-conditioned temper is nothing but the natural soreness which a long course of political maltreatment has begotten in the mind of the middle-class Tory. Abused as he has been by one party, and fleeced impartially by both for years past, it is a little too much to expect him to look unvaryingly pleasant under the operation. Take his so-called "dislike for the working classes." What does it mean? What evidence is there of it? Well, the evidence when you come to examine it amounts to this: that contemporary criticisms of the "masses" by the "classes" (to employ Mr. Gladstone's logically most absurd, politically most mischievous, but colloquially most convenient, classification) are of a much more severe and unfavourable character than they were wont to be. Some of these criticisms I believe to be just, others may be unjust, all are eminently natural. No one has suggested that the British workman was born with a double dose of original sin. But he would have to be sine labe conceptus, born without even a single dose of it, to have passed through his experiences of the present generation morally unscathed. It is not in human nature to escape demoralization from them. For thirty years save one-from 1867 down to the present hour-he has been the object of grosser adulation than any Oriental despot ever received from his court. His virtue, his intelligence, his independence, his lofty ideals, his superiority to the sectional self-seeking which is assumed to characterize all other classes save his own, have been the theme of politicians, not of one party only, and of journalists of more than one colour throughout the period named; and during the last half of it, the continuous tribute of empty praise has been accompanied by ever-increasing largesses of solid pudding. Legislation devoted to his progressive relief from every public and private burden borne by other classes of the community, has for years been the order of the day; and the working classes have been simultaneously plied with the flattery which depraves a ruler, and the bribery that corrupts a people.

They would be more than human if they had not suffered from this treatment, and the man-of-the-world Tory blurts bluntly out his conviction that they have suffered. He declares that the British workman's character has sensibly deteriorated under the enervating attentions of these political courtiers and financial patrons; that not only is he a less industrious, less skilled, less conscientious handicraftsman than he was wont to be; but that his personal, like his professional, qualities have undergone a change for the worse; that while he is more "independent," as it is called, in his manners, he has less real independence of character, and that he is altogether a more bumptiously self-assertive, and at the same time a more selfish, more envious, more cantankerous, a far less genial, straightforward, and likeable

fellow, than his "old-style" forerunner "come in to do a job of work," with whom many of us remember having "chummed" as children. These are the charges of the man-of-the-world Tory, some of them just beyond all dispute, others, it may be, open to question; but all in the circumstances eminently natural, eminently plausible. And it is simply because the man-of-the-world Tory says what nineteen-twentieths of his fellows think; it is simply because he rebels against and denounces the conspiracy of humbug which politicians anxious about votes, and newspapers solicitous about circulation, cannot afford to repudiate, that he is, forsooth, to be held up as the special enemy of the class about whom he has the courage to tell the truth.

As to his view "that the employed should be at the disposal of the employer," and his "lingering respect for slavery," the first is a mere piece of platform claptrap, unworthy of notice, and for the second sentiment, if he "unwillingly lets it out," he might shelter himself under the authority of that typical middle-class-and-man-of-theworld Tory, Thomas Carlyle; unless, indeed, he prefers the bolder defence, that almost any other relation between employer and employed would be a more wholesome, more human relation, and one more conducive to the mutual respect of the two parties for each other, than that which obtains to-day between them, not in industry alone, but in the household also.

As to his dislike of the working man being probably “due to a kind of contempt for anything less fortunate than himself, a contempt which had its counterpart in his former envious antipathy to the more fortunate aristocrat "-why what wild hitting is this? If his contempt is aroused by "anything less fortunate than himself," how comes it to alight on the working man, and to miss the needy "black coat," far worse off than the workman, position for position, and saddled with the additional burden of paying for the education of the workman's children? And why "former envious antipathy," &c.? The "more fortunate aristocrat" remains more fortunate, and there seems no reason why the envious antipathy of the Tory should have been handed on by him to the Radical, who now enjoys the monopoly of it.

But the gem of the indictment is the charge of being "always on the side of the strong against the weak." The strong! the weak! O giusto cielo! as the chorus of Italian opera exclaims in moments of agitation, with what bitter amusement will these words be read by members of the absolutely weakest order in the community! Unorganized, disunited, undefined, broken up into a hundred callings, divided by a hundred interests, overlapping the petite bourgeoisie at one end and the aristocracy at the other, the middle class is the weakest, because the least homogeneous class in the country. Our critic in one place remarks cheerfully that "the artisans and labourers look like doing for the middling folk much as they did for the aristocracy."

Why they did that thirty years ago. In 1867 the middling folk suffered all that the aristocracy suffered in 1832, namely, political effacement; but they are now, and have long been, suffering very much more. They are being slowly bled to death. It is upon the middle class that the chief burden of all our boon-distributing eleemosynary legislation falls. They have seen indirect taxation reduced, and again reduced, till the workman has almost ceased to be a contributor to the revenue, while their own income-tax, now raised to the height of a war impost is not likely, financial authorities coolly tell them, ever again to be lowered to a reasonable figure. The monstrous and evermounting education charge presses heaviest upon them. Their rates swell with every fresh experiment in "ameliorating the lot of the people." They are mulcted to enable the London County Council to increase the workmen's income artificially by means of the "standard rate of wage."

And the victims of this slow but by no means painless process of extinction are powerless to resist it. Elections do not help us; thereby we only exchange one set of operators for another. We do not agitate or start a Middle-class Protection League, partly perhaps because our foes are of our own or an adjoining household. The ambitious noble ready to tax himself to any amount to obtain political power lives so to speak next door to us; the pushing capitalist eager to buy his way on the same terms through politics to "honours "— he and the men whose business begins and ends with the party game are dwellers under our very roof; and it is between the upper millstone of this combination, and the nether millstone of the proletariate which they co-operate or compete with each other in bribing, that the English middle-class-that class whose strength, welfare, and contentment were supposed by obsolete political theorists to be essential to the stability of States-is being ground to powder.

It is among these neglected citizens that the author of "Tories or Opportunists?" should look for his Tory, if, which I cannot help doubting, he really wishes to find him. He may say that, on my own showing, the Tory of this description deserves to be neglected in the sense in which a mathematician "neglects" unimportant fractions. Perhaps so; but though his Toryism has ceased to exist as a force, it seems rather hard to make him out a consenting party to his own undoing, by pretending that it has become extinct even as opinion. Extinct it may be on the green benches and among the rival parties striving so gallantly to "put each other off-side"; but these gentlemen may rest assured that wherever there is a middle-class Englishman who resents their systematic exploitation of his order, abhors the cynical party competition in which it is practised, and revolts at the political cant by which they seek to justify it-there a genuine, a thorough-going, or if they prefer the expression, a "fossil " Tory is assuredly to be found. H. D. TRAILL.