self-government. How natural, in reply to such proposals, very likely
improper or ill-timed, to go a little beyond the mark and to say
stoutly, "Such a race of people as we stand, so superior to all the
world! The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world! I
pray that our unrivalled happiness may last! I ask you whether, the
world over or in past history, there is anything like it?" And so long
as criticism answers this dithyramb by insisting that the old
Anglo-Saxon race would be still more superior to all others if it had no
church-rates, or that our unrivalled happiness would last yet longer
with a six-pound franchise, so long will the strain, "The best breed in
the whole world!" swell louder and louder, everything ideal and refining
will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will
remain in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in
which spiritual progression is impossible. But let criticism leave
church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit,
without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with
our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper
immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck:--

"A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl
named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young
illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly
Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody."

Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of
Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are
those few lines! "Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole
world!"--how much that is harsh and ill-favored there is in this best!
_Wragg!_ If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of "the best in the
whole world," has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our