It had rested on two assumptions which experience was showing to be ...

It had rested on two assumptions which experience was showing to be untenable: that the production of wealth by the few, meant, somehow, and in the long run, welfare for the many; and that conventional behavior grounded on a traditional creed was enough to satisfy all right demands of humanity.

At our distance in time we can see the agnostic and feminist turn impending: we can understand the connection, peculiar to England, between the socialist and aesthetic movements of the next age. But life was too leisurely and secure for agitation.

The reforms of the forties satisfied the aspirations of the poor and the consciences of the rich, until a new tide

set in and carried us forward again

with the Education Act of 1870, and the legislation of Disraeli's Government, with which Young England, now grown grey, redeemed the promise of its far-off fantastic youth. In the fifties the main current of Utilitarianism was running in the channels which the great administrators had dug for it: the springs of religious feeling opened by the Evangelicals had been led over the new fields which Newman, Arnold, and Carlyle-miraculous confederacy-had won or recovered for English thought; and Economic Evangelicalism was no more than a barren stock.

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