2

LIFE OF OORDEN, {oHAP

18358. with eloquent contempt for the aristocratic philosophy of
Ar. 81-2. treadmills, gibbets, and thirty-nine Acts of Parliament ¢ for
the shooting of partridges alone,” but showing no more
definite way for national redemption than lay through the
too vague words of Education and Emigration. Finally,
in the same decade, the early novels of Charles Dickens
brought into vivid prominence among the objects of popular
interest mach types of social outlawry as the parish apprentice,
 the debtor in prison, the pauper in the workhouse, the
criminal by profession, and all the rest of that pitiful
gellery. Dickens had hardly any solution beyond a mere
Christmas philanthropy, but he stirred the sense of
humanity in his readers, and from great imaginative writers
we have no right to insist npon more.
Notwithstanding their wide diversity of language and of
method, still to all of these rival schools and men of genius
the ultimate problem was the same. With all of them the
aim to be attained was social renovation. Even the mystics
 of Anglo-Catholicism, ag I have said, had in the inmost
recesses of their minds a clear belief that the revival of
sacramental doctrine and the assertion of apostolic succession
 would quicken the moral life of the nation, and meet
social needs mo less than it would meet spiritual needs.
Far apart as Cobden stood from these and all the other
sections of opinion that I have named, yet his early pamphlets
 show that he discerned as keenly as any of them that
the hour had come for developing new elements in public
life, and setting up a new standard of public action. To
Cobden, as to Arnold or to Mill, the real meaning of his
activity was, in a more or less formal and conscigus way, the
hope of supplying a systematic foundation for higher social
order, and the wider diffusion of a better kind of well
being.
He had none of the pedantry of the doctrinaire. but he