candidates--and they are important people, because nearly every
Englishman with any ambition is a parliamentary candidate, actual or
potential--that grave anxiety, that sober rigour, that immense caution,
which are all so really laughable, because so many of those men are only
anxious lest they should make a mistake in finding out what the
majority of their constituents would like them to think; only rigorous
against those who are indiscreet enough to press a principle against the
beck of a whip or a wire-puller; and only very cautious not so much lest
their opinion should be wrong, as lest it should not pay.


Indolence and timidity have united to popularise among us a flaccid
latitudinarianism, which thinks itself a benign tolerance for the
opinions of others. It is in truth only a pretentious form of being
without settled opinions of our own, and without any desire to settle
them. No one can complain of the want of speculative activity at the
present time in a certain way. The air, at a certain social elevation,
is as full as it has ever been of ideas, theories, problems, possible
solutions, suggested questions, and proffered answers. But then they are
at large, without cohesion, and very apt to be the objects even in the
more instructed minds of not much more than dilettante interest. We see
in solution an immense number of notions, which people think it quite
unnecessary to precipitate in the form of convictions. We constantly
hear the age lauded for its tolerance, for its candour, for its openness
of mind, for the readiness with which a hearing is given to ideas that
forty years ago, or even less than that, would have excluded persons
suspected of holding them from decent society, and in fact did so
exclude them. Before, however, we congratulate ourselves too warmly on
this, let us be quite sure that we are not mistaking for tolerance what
is really nothing more creditable than indifference. These two attitudes