“frontiersmen of all the world.”[1] But below this large kingdom, which for more than half a century has stood for “England,” stretches a huge and unexplored region which seems destined in the next half-century to progress towards articulate voice, and to demand an increasing power. It is the class of which Matthew Arnold, with the agreeable insolence of his habitual attitude, declared himself to be the discoverer, and to which he gave the name of the “Populace.” “That vast portion of the working class,” he defined it, nearly forty years ago, “which, raw and half-developed, has long been half hidden amid its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bending what it likes, breaking what it likes.” “To this vast residuum,” he adds, “we may with great propriety give the name of Populace.” To most observers from the classes above, this is the Deluge; and its attainment of power--if such attainment ever were realised--the coming of the twilight of the gods. They see our civilisation as a little patch of redeemed land in the wilderness; preserved as by a miracle from one decade to another. They behold the influx, as the rush of a bank-holiday crowd upon some tranquil garden: tearing up the flowers by the roots, reeling in drunken merriment on the grass plots, strewing the pleasant landscape with torn paper and broken bottles. This class--in the cities--cannot be accused of losing its religion. It is not losing its religion, because it had never gained a religion. In the industrial centres of England, since the city first was, the old inherited faiths have never been anything but the carefully preserved treasure of a tiny minority. It is a class full of sentiment which the foreigner is apt to condemn as sentimentality. Amusing examples are familiar of its uncalculating kindliness. An immense traffic is held up for considerable time because a sheep--on its way to immediate slaughter--is entangled between two tramcars. The whole populace cheerfully submit to this inconvenience, sooner than consummate the decease of the unfortunate animal. In a certain pottery manufactory, the apparatus has been arranged for the baking process, and the fires are about to be lighted, when the mewing of a cat is heard from inside the kiln. The men refuse to proceed with the work. A whole day is spent in an endeavour to entice the cat out again; and, on this proving fruitless, in the unloading of the kiln, in order to rescue the creature. When it is liberated, it is immediately hurled--with objurgations--into the river. The men were exasperated with the trouble which had been caused and the time wasted; but they could not allow the cat to be roasted alive.