It was just one of those crises in one’s life in which nothing is so useful, or healthy, for one, as coming into direct and constant contact with an intellect stronger than one’s own, which looks at the same subjects from a widely different standpoint. Now, in the Anti-Corn-Law agitation the leaders of the League were in the habit of using very violent language. Their speeches were full of vehement attacks on the landlords and farmers of England, and of pictures of country life as an inert mass of selfishness, tyranny, and stupidity. My brother’s hatred of exaggeration and unfairness revolted against all this wild talk; and his steady appeal to facts known to us both often staggered my new convictions. On the general economical question, imperfectly as I understood it, I think I often staggered him. But, on the other hand, when he appealed to the example of a dozen landlords whom I knew (including your grandfather), and made me look at the actual relations between them and their tenants and their labourers, and ask myself whether these statements were not utterly untrue in their case and in the county we knew; whether they were not probably just as untrue of other counties; and, if that were so, whether a cause which needed such libels to support it could be a just one, I was often in my turn sadly troubled for a reply. Again, though Arnold’s life influenced him quite as powerfully as it did me, it was in quite a different direction, strengthening specially in him the reverence for national life, and for the laws, traditions, and customs with which it is interwoven, and of which it is the expression. Somehow, his natural dislike to change, and preference for the old ways, seemed to gain as much strength and nourishment from the teaching and example of our old master, as the desire and hope for radical reforms did in me. As for democracy, not even Arnold’s dictum could move him. “The Demos” was for him always, the fatuous old man, with two oboli in his cheek, and a wide ear for the grossest flatteries which Cleon or the Sausage-seller could pour into it. Those of you who have begun Aristophanes will know to what I allude. Now, if he had been a man who had any great reverence for rank or privilege, or who had no sympathies with or care for the poor, or who was not roused to indignation by any act of oppression or tyranny, in the frame of mind I was in I should have cared very little for anything he might have urged. But, knowing as I did that the fact was precisely the reverse—that no man I had ever met was more indifferent to rank and title, more full of sympathy and kindliness to all below him, or more indignant at anything which savoured of injustice—I was obliged to admit that the truth could not be all on my side, and to question my own new faith far more carefully than I should have done otherwise.