To turn from the stark, forbidding dogmas of Jesse Mill on Government ...

To turn from the stark, forbidding dogmas of Jesse Mill on Government to the humorous wisdom of Bagehot's English Constitution, with its large allowances for the idleness, stupidity, and good nature of mankind, is to enter another world of thought, at once less logical and more real, and the contrast not unfairly represents the change that had come over England in thirty years. In the general movement of the English mind few episodes are so instructive as the revulsion which in the fifties reduced the Economic Evangelicalism of 1830 from dominant philosophy to middle-class point of view, and so prepared the way for the teaching of Pater and Arnold, the practice of Morris and Toynbee, the recognition, after years of derision or neglect, of Ruskin and Browning.

'Nothing', Bagehot once wrote, 'is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, is of necessity repulsive,' and in the fifties England was becoming keenly aware of the narrowness and meagreness of her middle-class tradition. A process very like that which was stratifying the proletariate into the Respectable and the Low, was creating out of the upper levels of the middle class a new participate, mixed of birth, wealth, and education, which might be Liberal or Conservative in politics, Christian or nothing in religion, but was gradually shedding the old middle-class restraints on enjoyment and speculation.

And of this readjustment of classes and values, if the basis was security and prosperity, the principal agents were the Universities and the public schools.