ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 67 



edge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such a 

 consummation can be arranged. We have got to learn 

 that statesmanship is the most complicated of all arts, 

 and to come back to the apprenticeship-system too hastily 

 abandoned. At present, we trust a man with making 

 constitutions on less proof of competence than we. should 

 demand before we gave him our shoe to patch. We have 

 nearly reached the limit of the reaction from the old 

 notion, which paid too much regard to birth and station 

 as qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme 

 point in the opposite direction, putting the highest of 

 human functions up at auction to be bid for by any 

 creature capable of going upright on two legs. In some 

 places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society 

 is no longer possible, and already another reaction has 

 begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards fit 

 ness either from natural aptitude or special training. 

 But will it always be safe to let evils work their own 

 cure by becoming unendurable ? Every one of them 

 leaves its taint in the constitution of the body-politic, 

 each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet all together powerful 

 for evil. 



But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were 

 not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be continually 

 reminded that, though we should boast that we were the 

 Great West till we were black in the face, it did not bring 

 us an inch nearer to the world's West-End. That sacred 

 enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy 

 Alliance did not inscribe us on its visiting-list. The Old 

 World of wigs and orders and liveries would shop with 

 us, but we must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to 

 awaken the more august clamors of the knocker. Our 

 manners, it must be granted, had none of those graces 

 that stamp the caste of Vere de Vere, in whatever mu- 

 seum of British antiquities they may be hidden. In 

 short, we were vulgar. 



