talent to do anything else but live by them.  It is amongst these that we must look to see what such principles really result in; and of these we must choose not those who would welcome license, but those who long passionately to live by law.  It is the condition of such men that I have been just describing.  Its characteristics are vain self-reproach, joyless commendation, weary struggle, listless success, general indifference, and the prospect that if matters are going thus badly with them, they will go even worse with their children.

Such a spectacle certainly is not one that has much promise for the optimist; and the more we consider it, the more sad and ominous will it appear to us.  Indeed, when the present age shall realise its own condition truly, the dejection of which it is slowly growing conscious may perhaps give way to despair.  This condition, however, is so portentous that it is difficult to persuade ourselves that it is what it seems to be, and that it is not a dream.  But the more steadily we look at it, the more real will its appalling features appear to us.  We are literally in an age to which history can show no parallel, and which is new to the experience of humanity; and though the moral dejection we have been dwelling on may have had many seeming counterparts in other times, this is, as it were, solid substance, whereas they were only shadows.  I have pointed out already in my first chapter how unexampled is the state in which the world now finds itself; but we will dwell once again upon its more general features.  Within less than a century, distance has been all but annihilated, and the earth has practically, and to the imagination, been reduced to a fraction of its former size.  Its possible resources have become mean and narrow, set before us as matters of every-day statistics.  All the old haze of wonder is melting away from it; and the old local enthusiasms, which depended so largely on ignorance and isolation, are melting likewise.  Knowledge has accumulated in a way never before dreamed of.  The fountains of the past seem to have been broken up, and to be pouring all their secrets into the consciousness of the present.  For the first time man’s wide and varied history has become a coherent whole to him.  Partly a cause and partly a result of this, a new sense has sprung up in him—­an intense self-consciousness as to his own position; and his entire view of himself is undergoing a vague change:  whilst the positive basis on which knowledge has been placed, has given it a constant and coercive force, and has made the same change common to the whole civilised world.  Thought and feeling amongst the western nations are conforming to a single pattern:  they are losing their old chivalrous character, their possibilities of isolated conquest and intellectual adventure.  They are settling down into a uniform mass, that moves or stagnates like a modern army, and whose alternative lines of march have been mapped out beforehand.  Such is the condition of the