It is not to be supposed, however, that the people would choose any better than kings and parliaments; on the contrary,--[294] “The Thirty at Athens were at least tyrants. They were marked men. But the obscure majority, who, under our present constitution, are destined to govern England, are as secret as a Venetian conclave. Yet on their dark voices all depends.” The trend of the succeeding novelists is toward a modified liberalism, but Meredith is the only one to satirize the reactionary attitude as such. The others throw the emphasis elsewhere. Besides, even such humanitarians as Dickens, Gaskell, Reade, and Kingsley, are dubious as to the remedial power of popular government, and seem inclined toward Carlyle’s view of Chartism. What Chesterton says of one of them would not be untrue applied to the rest:[295] “All his grumblings through this book of _American Notes_, all his shrieking satire in _Martin Chuzzlewit_, are expressions of a grave and reasonable fear he had touching the future of democracy.” But the humanitarianism itself is sounded in a harmonious chord, whose overtone is a ridicule, more grim than gay, of the delinquents;--those who lack the spirit of humanity, yet are the very ones, on the principle of _noblesse oblige_, in whom it should well up most abundantly. If they fail through that ignorance and mental limitation from which not even the aristocracy are always exempt, the blow is tempered accordingly; but it falls more heavily when the roots of the evil are the black ones of selfishness and perversity. Lady Lufton, for instance, is a kind soul, who would have made an excellent Providence, though scarcely adequate to cope with the mismanagement of the Providence already installed over human affairs:[296] “She liked cheerful, quiet, well-to-do people, who loved their Church, their country, and their Queen, and who were not too anxious to make a noise in the world. She desired that all the farmers round her should be able to pay their rents without trouble, that all the old women should have warm flannel petticoats, that the workingmen should be saved from rheumatism by healthy food and dry houses, that they should all be obedient to their pastors and masters--temporal as well as spiritual. That was her idea of loving her country. She desired also that the copses should be full of pheasants, the stubble-field of partridges, and the gorse covers of foxes; in that way, also, she loved her country.” These are as amiable sentiments for a lady as Victor Radnor’s for a gentleman. He is introduced as regretting his fall on London Bridge chiefly because it led to an unpleasant altercation with a member of the mob.[297]