Years ago Matthew Arnold put the right names on the two more creditable and powerful sections of English society. The aristocracy he set down for Barbarians, the middle class for Philistines. The aristocracy were inaccessible to ideas, he said; the middle class admired and loved the aristocracy. It is so to this day, and so to an extent which is in entire consonance with the circumstance that for sheer stupidity the Englishman of the upper class is without parallel, while the Englishman of the middle class cannot be paralleled for snobbishness. Arnold's complaint that neither class was a reading class or at all devoted to the higher matters still holds. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman whom Tennyson sang and at whom Arnold gibed is still with us. That he is as great and as broad-shouldered and as genial as ever nobody will deny. And, broadly speaking, his outlook upon life remains exactly what it was. To be ruddy and healthy, to go out mornings with dogs, to dine hilariously and dance evenings, to be generous to the poor, and to honour oneself and the King are the rule of his life if he be a Barbarian; and to ape these things and consider them gifts of price, if he be a Philistine. Since Arnold, however, the Englishman, egregious though he undoubtedly was, has taken unto himself a new and altogether alarming demerit. Out of his love of health and ease and security and pleasure and well-ordered materialism there has sprung up a trouble which is like to cost him exceeding dear--a trouble, in fact, which, if he be not careful, will go far to emasculate him, if not wholly to destroy him. Of the higher matters, as has been said, he has taken but the smallest heed. Writer fellows, painter fellows, philosopher Johnnies, and so forth are not of his world, except in so far as they may entertain his women-folk, or deck his halls with commercial canvas, or assist him in the eking out of his small talk before dessert. It is not to be expected of him that he should take to his heart persons whom he cannot by any possibility understand. Even Arnold could forgive him that failing. It was the build of the man, the breed and constitution of him, that justified him. But since, being English, he has found his way to the unpardonable sin. It was well that he should despise persons who, however much they might think, did little and got little for doing it. It was well that brains which could not sit a horse, and preferred bed to the moors, and had no rent-roll, should be despised. It would have been well, too, if that other kind of brains, which, beginning with nothing, ends in millionairedom and flagrant barbarianism, might also have continued to be despised and to be kept at arm's-length. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, however, has succumbed. Park Lane has become a Ghetto; my lord's house parties reek of gentlemen with noses, and names ending in "baum"; and the English Houses of Parliament, the finest club in