tion and uncivilisedness' of the populace in Glasgow and the East of London. He held that the French Revolution, by promoting equality, had raised the lower classes of France to a marked superiority in civilisation above the corresponding class in England. Democracy, he admitted, might get too much of its own way in England. The remedy was to be sought in a stronger action of the central power. We have not, he complains, the notion, so familiar on the Continent and to antiquity, of the State; and the English hatred of all authority has tended to make us drift towards mere anarchy.[1] When Fawcett preached self-help, Arnold held that to exhort to self-help in England was to carry coals to Newcastle. It was the parrot-like repetition of old formulae that made our liberalism barren. Our danger was all the other way, the danger of exaggerating the blessings of self-will and self-assertion.[2] I do not quote Arnold's view to show that he was right, or to claim foresight for his predictions. I doubt, for example, whether any one would say now that we hear too much of self-help, or that there is no danger on the opposite side, or whether Arnold himself would have been attracted by State Socialism
- ↑ Culture and Anarchy, p. 36.
- ↑ Irish Essays, p. 96.
