and forms until they can be organically supplanted by others.  All the various portions of society are mutually dependent, and the destruction of any one of them will be to the injury of all.  This she says to workingmen as a reason why they should not antagonize the social orders above them, whose work is as important as their own.  The organs of society are the various social classes of which it is composed, and society is to be improved by turning class interests into the functions by which Humanity is to be developed.  The spiritual treasures of the past are only to be preserved by order and good government; hence all revolutionary methods are suicidal.  Life is to be advanced by giving social influence into the hands of the wisest.  True principles must regulate society, and these George Eliot would have rest on science and altruism.

Such are some of the ideas of this remarkable essay, one of the most suggestive and instructive of all she wrote.  The emphasis she laid on retribution, tradition, heredity and duties appears here in all its force.  Perhaps nothing else she wrote so clearly brings out some of the characteristics of her mind.  Her intense distrust of individualism does not permit her to say a single word of the rights of the laboring classes.  The right of rebellion and revolution is totally disregarded, rather it is not recognized that any rights whatever exist.  The workingman is not to think of himself or his class, but of society and humanity; he is to become an altruistic worker for the common good.  While this is fine in theory, yet history indicates that the aristocratic classes have yielded to the broader social spirit only when they have been compelled to do so.  The concessions must come from above, not from beneath.  George Eliot’s political philosophy, if carried into actual life, would keep the proletariate where they are, and strengthen the social power of the aristocratic classes.  These words may indicate the drift of the essay: 

But I come back to this:  that, in our old society there are old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our commerce and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional skill.  Just as in that case I spoke of before, the irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed or it will bear no crop; these are the old channels, the old banks and the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered.  But it would be fool’s work to batter down a pump only because a better might be made, when you have no machinery ready for a new one:  it would be wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it.  Now the only safe