'Coningsby found that he was born in an age of infidelity in all things, and his heart assured him that a want of faith was a want of nature. He asked himself why governments were hated and religions despised, why loyalty was dead and reverence only a galvanised corpse. He had found age perplexed and desponding, manhood callous and desperate. Some thought that systems would last their time, others that something would turn up. His deep and pious spirit recoiled with disgust and horror from lax chance medley maxims that would, in their consequence, reduce men to the level of brutes.' He falls in with all varieties of men bred in the confusion of the old and the new. An enthusiastic Catholic landlord tries to revive the customs of his ancestors, supported by his faith, but perplexed by the aspect of a world no longer apparently under supernatural guidance. 'I enter life,' says Mr. Lyle, 'in the midst of a convulsion in which the very principles of our political and social system are called in question. I cannot unite myself with the party of destruction. It is an operative cause alien to my being. What, then, offers itself? The duke talks to me of Conservative principles, but he does not inform me what they are. I observe, indeed, a party in the State whose rule it is to consent to no change until it is clamorously called for, and then instantly to yield: but those are concessionary, not Conservative, principles. This party treats our institutions as we do our pheasants. They preserve only to destroy them. But is there a statesman among these Conservatives who offers us a dogma for a guide, or defines any great political truth which we should aspire to establish? It seems to me a barren thing, this Conservatism; an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of politics, that engenders nothing.' Coningsby had saved the life of a son of a Northern mill-owner at Eton. They became attached friends, though they were of opposite creeds. Coningsby's study of the social problem carries him to Manchester, where he hears from Millbank the views entertained in the industrial circles of the English aristocracy. Mr. Millbank dislikes feudal manners as out of date and degenerate.