For there are, in the present times, two opinions; not, as in former ages, the true and the false, but the outside and the inside; the opinion of the public voiced by the politicians and the newspapers, and the opinion of the politicians, the journalists and the civil servants, upstairs and backstairs and behind–stairs, expressed in limited circles. In time of war it became a patriotic duty that the two opinions should be as different as possible; and some seem to think it so still. This is not entirely new. But there has been a change. Some say that Mr. Gladstone was a hypocrite; yet if so, he dropped no mask in private life. The high tragedians, who once ranted in the Parliaments of the world, continued it at supper afterwards. But appearances can no longer be kept up behind the scenes. The paint of public life, if it is ruddy enough to cross the flaring footlights of to–day, cannot be worn in private,—which makes a great difference to the psychology of the actors themselves. The multitude which lives in the auditorium of the world needs something larger than life and plainer than the truth. Sound itself travels too slowly in this vast theater, and a true word no longer holds when its broken echoes have reached the furthest listener. Those who live in the limited circles and share the inside opinion pay both too much and too little attention to the outside opinion; too much, because, ready in words and promises to concede to it everything, they regard open opposition as absurdly futile; too little, because they believe that these words and promises are so certainly destined to change in due season, that it is pedantic, tiresome, and inappropriate to analyze their literal meaning and exact consequences. They know all this nearly as well as the critic, who wastes, in their view, his time and his emotions in exciting himself too much over what, on his own showing, cannot possibly happen. Nevertheless, what is said before the world is, still, of deeper consequence than the subterranean breathings and well–informed whisperings, knowledge of which allows inside opinion to feel superior to outside opinion, even at the moment of bowing to it.