moreover, they tend directly and indirectly to detach effort from social aims and the promotion of the common weal, to the attainment of mean and unwholesome individual ambitions. From this point of view, we should have to regard the acquisition of colonies, for instance, which was one of the chief objects of Lord Chatham’s policy, as the mischievous transfer, in the interests of commercial cupidity, of an activity, hopefulness, and power, that ought to have been devoted to the solution of the growing social difficulties of Europe; and that ought to have been bent from a profoundly mean egotism, in the nation and the traders whose interest was the key of the policy, into a generous feeling for the public order. There is, however, another and a very different way of looking at all this. You cannot be sure, it is said, that the method of social advance is to be a return upon the old framework and the old lines; to be sure of this implies an impatient confidence that social forms have all been exhausted, or else an unsupported assumption that the present transitory form is so full of danger to the stability of civilisation, as to make the acceptance of almost any firm order better than the prolonged endurance of a social state which, on that theory, ought hardly to be accounted much better than the social state of Bedouin Arabs. Is it not far better and safer to refrain from committing ourselves to a given type of social reconstruction, and to work forward patiently upon the only principle that can be received with entire assurance; namely, that faithful cultivation of the intelligence, and open-minded investigation of all that the intelligence may present to us, is the only certain method of not missing the surest and quickest road to the manifold improvements of which the fundamental qualities of human nature, as well as the relations of man in society, are susceptible? There is no good ground for supposing that this steadfast regard to the fruitfulness and variety of the individual intelligence tends specially to lead to the concentration of energy upon individual aims. For what lesson does free intelligence teach us more constantly or more impressively than that man standing alone is impotent, that every unsocial act or sentiment tends to overthrow that collectivity of effort to which we owe all, and, most important of all, that this collectivity is most effectively secured by the just culture of the impulses and affections? No degree nor kind of organisation could lead us further than this, and ought it not to be the prime object and chief hope of those who think about society, that this truth shall stand rooted in every one’s own reason? If it does not so stand, you have no security for your spiritual organisation, and if it does, then you have no necessity. It is to the spread of this conviction, by the ever-pressing consciousness of urgent social circumstances, that we must look to suffuse industrial and egotistic