every day that the character of the people is changing.  Individual men are obedient, brave to the death, self-sacrificing, just as they always were even in our darkest times; but, none the less, it is too plain that authority ordained by law is dying, and that authority which rests on vague and fluctuating sentiment gains power with steady swiftness.  The judges sit and retain all their old confidence; the magistrates sentence daily their batches of submissive culprits; the policeman rules supreme over the streets—­he scares the flower-girl, and warns the pensive burglar with the staccato thunder of his monarchical foot.  All seems very firm and orderly; and our largest crowds maintain their attitude of harmless good-humour when no inflammatory talkers are there.  But the hand has written, and true discipline cannot survive very much longer unless we rouse ourselves for a dead-lift effort.  Take Parliament at the crown of the social structure, and the School—­the elementary school—­at the foundation, and we cannot feel reassured.  All between the highest and the lowest is moderately sound; the best of the middle-classes are decent, law-abiding, and steady; the young men are good fellows in a way; the girls and young women are charming and virtuous.  But the extremities are rotten, and sentiment has rotted them both.  Parliament has become a hissing and a scorn.  No man of any party in all broad England could be found to deny this, and many would say more.  The sentimentalist has said that loutishness shall not be curbed, that a bawling ruffian who is silenced is martyred, that every man shall talk as he likes, and the veto of the Polish Assembly which enabled any one man to ruin the work of a session is revived in sober, solid England.  So it is that all has gone to wreck; and an assembly once the noblest on earth is treated with unhidden contempt by the labourer in his field and the mechanic at his bench.  And all this has arisen from lack of discipline.

In the School—­the lower-class school—­things are much worse.  The lowest of the low—­the beings who should be kept in order by sharp, firm kindness and justice—­have been taught to mock at order and justice and to treat kindness as a sign of weakness.  The lads will all soon be ready to aid in governing the country.  May the good powers defend us!  What a set of governors!  The son of the aristocrat is easily held in order, because he knows that any infraction of discipline will be surely punished; the son and daughter of the decent artizan cause little trouble to any teacher, because they know that their parents are on the side of order, and, even if the children are inclined to be rebellious, they dare not defy the united authority of parents and teacher.  But the child of the thief, the costermonger, the racecourse swindler, the thriftless labourer, is now practically emancipated through the action of sentimental persons.  He may go to school or not, as he likes; and, while the decent and orderly poor are harried by School Board