it perfectly manifest that no more in the working-class than in the aristocratic and middle classes can one find an adequate centre of authority,—­that is, as culture teaches us to conceive our required authority, of light,—­let us again follow, with this class, the method we have [86] followed with the aristocratic and middle classes, and try to bring before our minds representative men, who may figure to us its virtue and its excess.  We must not take, of course, Colonel Dickson or Mr. Beales; because Colonel Dickson, by his martial profession and dashing exterior, seems to belong properly, like Julius Caesar and Mirabeau and other great popular leaders, to the aristocratic class, and to be carried into the popular ranks only by his ambition or his genius; while Mr. Beales belongs to our solid middle-class, and, perhaps, if he had not been a great popular leader, would have been a Philistine.  But Mr. Odger, whose speeches we have all read, and of whom his friends relate, besides, much that is favourable, may very well stand for the beautiful and virtuous mean of our present working-class; and I think everybody will admit that in Mr. Odger, as in Lord Elcho, there is manifestly, with all his good points, some insufficiency of light.  The excess of the working-class, in its present state of development, is perhaps best shown in Mr. Bradlaugh, the iconoclast, who seems to be almost for baptizing us all in blood and fire into his new social dispensation, and to whose [87] reflections, now that I have once been set going on Bishop Wilson’s track, I cannot forbear commending this maxim of the good old man:  “Intemperance in talk makes a dreadful havoc in the heart.”  Mr. Bradlaugh, like Sir Thomas Bateson and the Rev. W. Cattle, is evidently capable, if he had his head given him, of running us all into great dangers and confusion.  I conclude, therefore,—­what, indeed, few of those who do me the honour to read this disquisition are likely to dispute,—­that we can as little find in the working-class as in the aristocratic or in the middle class our much-wanted source of authority, as culture suggests it to us.

Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there?  Every one of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly any one of us has the idea of the State, as a working power.  And why?  Because we habitually live in our ordinary selves, which do not carry us beyond the ideas and wishes of the class to which we happen to belong.  And we are all afraid of giving to the State too much power, because we only conceive of the State [88] as something equivalent to the class in occupation of the executive government, and are afraid of that class abusing power to its own purposes.  If we strengthen the State with the aristocratic class in occupation of the executive government, we imagine we are delivering ourselves up captive to the ideas and wishes of Sir Thomas Bateson;