used without intention, employ them constantly from habit, as they decorate their speech with oaths, whilst only purists refrain from them altogether. An aristocracy may be very narrow and intolerant, but it can only exclude from its own pale, whereas when a democracy is intolerant it excludes from all human intercourse. Our own aristocracy, as a class, rejects Dissenters, and artists, and men of science, but they flourish quite happily outside of it. Now try to picture to yourself a great democracy having the same prejudices, who could get out of the democracy? All aristocracies are intolerant with reference, I will not say to religion, but, more accurately, with reference to the outward forms of religion, and yet this aristocratic intolerance has not prevented the development of religious liberty, because the lower classes were not strictly bound by the customs of the nobility and gentry. The unwritten law appears to be that members of an aristocracy shall conform either to what is actually the State Church or to what has been the State Church at some former period of the national history. Although England is a Protestant country, an English gentleman does not lose caste when he joins the Roman Catholic communion; but he loses caste when he becomes a Dissenter. The influence of this caste-law in keeping the upper classes within the Churches of England and of Rome has no doubt been very considerable, but its influence on the nation generally has been incomparably less considerable than that of some equally decided social rule in the entire mind of a democracy. Had this rule of conformity to the religion of the State been that of the English democracy, religious liberty would have been extinguished throughout the length and breadth of England. I say that the customs and convictions of a democracy are more dangerous to intellectual liberty than those of an aristocracy, because, in matters of custom, the gentry rule only within their own park-palings, whereas the people, when power resides with them, rule wherever the breezes blow. A democracy that dislikes refinement and good manners can drive men of culture into solitude, and make morbid hermits of the very persons who ought to be the lights and leaders of humanity. It can cut short the traditions of good-breeding, the traditions of polite learning, the traditions of thoughtful leisure, and reduce the various national types of character to one type, that of the _commis-voyageur_. All men of refined sentiment in modern France lament the want of elevation in the _bourgeoisie_. They read nothing, they learn nothing, they think of nothing but money and the satisfaction of their appetites. There are exceptions, of course, but the tone of the class is mean and low, and devoid of natural dignity or noble aspiration. Their ignorance passes belief, and is accompanied by an absolute self-satisfaction. "La fin de la bourgeoisie," says an eminent French author, "commence parcequ'elle a les sentiments de la