aid but distort and arrest the general mind; while the State-churches administering them, come to be instruments for subsidising conservatism and repressing progress.  Old schemes of education, incarnated in public schools and colleges, continue filling the heads of new generations with what has become relatively useless knowledge, and, by consequence, excluding knowledge which is useful.  Not an organisation of any kind—­political, religious, literary, philanthropic—­but what, by its ever-multiplying regulations, its accumulating wealth, its yearly addition of officers, and the creeping into it of patronage and party feeling, eventually loses its original spirit, and sinks into a mere lifeless mechanism, worked with a view to private ends—­a mechanism which not merely fails of its first purpose, but is a positive hindrance to it.

Thus is it, too, with social usages.  We read of the Chinese that they have “ponderous ceremonies transmitted from time immemorial,” which make social intercourse a burden.  The court forms prescribed by monarchs for their own exaltation, have, in all times and places, ended in consuming the comfort of their lives.  And so the artificial observances of the dining-room and saloon, in proportion as they are many and strict, extinguish that agreeable communion which they were originally intended to secure.  The dislike with which people commonly speak of society that is “formal,” and “stiff,” and “ceremonious,” implies the general recognition of this fact; and this recognition, logically developed, involves that all usages of behaviour which are not based on natural requirements, are injurious.  That these conventions defeat their own ends is no new assertion.  Swift, criticising the manners of his day, says—­“Wise men are often more uneasy at the over-civility of these refiners than they could possibly be in the conversation of peasants and mechanics.”

But it is not only in these details that the self-defeating action of our arrangements is traceable:  it is traceable in the very substance and nature of them.  Our social intercourse, as commonly managed, is a mere semblance of the reality sought.  What is it that we want?  Some sympathetic converse with our fellow-creatures:  some converse that shall not be mere dead words, but the vehicle of living thoughts and feelings—­converse in which the eyes and the face shall speak, and the tones of the voice be full of meaning—­converse which shall make us feel no longer alone, but shall draw us closer to another, and double our own emotions by adding another’s to them.  Who is there that has not, from time to time, felt how cold and flat is all this talk about politics and science, and the new books and the new men, and how a genuine utterance of fellow-feeling outweighs the whole of it?  Mark the words of Bacon:—­“For a crowd is not a company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.”