a certain charmed spectacle which imposes on the many, and guides their fancies as it will.  As a rustic on coming to London finds himself in presence of a great show and vast exhibition of inconceivable mechanical things, so by the structure of our society, he finds himself face to face with a great exhibition of political things which he could not have imagined, which he could not make—­to which he feels in himself scarcely anything analogous.

Philosophers may deride this superstition, but its results are inestimable.  By the spectacle of this august society, countless ignorant men and women are induced to obey the few nominal electors--the Ll0 borough renters, and the L50 county renters—­who have nothing imposing about them, nothing which would attract the eye or fascinate the fancy.  What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.  And the greatest of these results is this wonderful spectacle of society, which is ever new, and yet ever the same; in which accidents pass and essence remains; in which one generation dies and another succeeds, as if they were birds in a cage, or animals in a menagerie; of which it seems almost more than a metaphor to treat the parts as limbs of a perpetual living thing, so silently do they seem to change, so wonderfully and so perfectly does the conspicuous life of the new year take the place of the conspicuous life of last year.  The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the most imposing personages of a splendid procession:  it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer.  The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks about them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendour of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

It is quite true that this imaginative sentiment is supported by a sensation of political satisfaction.  It cannot be said that the mass of the English people are well off.  There are whole classes who have not a conception of what the higher orders call comfort; who have not the prerequisites of moral existence; who cannot lead the life that becomes a man.  But the most miserable of these classes do not impute their misery to politics.  If a political agitator were to lecture to the peasants of Dorsetshire, and try to excite political dissatisfaction, it is much more likely that he would be pelted than that he would succeed.  Of Parliament these miserable creatures know scarcely anything; of the Cabinet they never heard.  But they would say that, “for all they have heard, the Queen is very good”; and rebelling against the structure of society is to their minds rebelling against the Queen, who rules that society, in whom all its most impressive part—­the part that they know—­culminates.  The mass of the English people are politically contented as well as politically deferential.