could not swim against it.

It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions to
this truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions at
all. A whole series of national defects were exposed and
ridiculed in the literature as in the oratory of that day; but
they were defects which the mass of men secretly delighted to
hear denounced and of which each believed himself to be free.

They loved to be told that they were of a gross taste in art,
for they connected such a taste vaguely with high morals and
with successful commerce. There was no surer way to a large
sale than to start a revolution in appreciation every five years,
and from Ruskin to Oscar Wilde a whole series of Prophets
attained eminence and fortune by telling men how something new
and as yet unknown was Beauty and something just past was to be
rejected, and how they alone saw truth while the herd around them
were blind. But no one showed us how to model, nor did any one
remark that we alone of all Europe had preserved a school of
water-colour.

So in politics our blunders were a constant theme; but no one
marked with citation, document, and proof the glaring progress
of corruption, or that, for all our enthusiasm, we never once
in that generation defended the oppressed against the oppressor.
There was a vast if unrecognised conspiracy, by which whatever
might have prevented those extreme evils from which we now suffer
was destroyed as it appeared. Efforts at a thorough purge were
dull, were libellous, were not of the "form" which the Universities
and the public schools taught to be sacred. They were rejected as