life, Chillingly."

"I might if I were an ultra-Radical, a Republican, a Communist, a
Socialist, and wished to upset everything existing, for then the
strife would at least be a very earnest one."

"But could not you be equally in earnest against those revolutionary
gentlemen?"

"Are you and your leaders in earnest against them? They don't appear
to me so."

Thetford was silent for a minute. "Well, if you doubt the principles
of my side, go with the other side. For my part, I and many of our
party would be glad to see the Conservatives stronger."

"I have no doubt they would. No sensible man likes to be carried off
his legs by the rush of the crowd behind him; and a crowd is less
headlong when it sees a strong force arrayed against it in front. But
it seems to me that, at present, Conservatism can but be what it now
is,--a party that may combine for resistance, and will not combine for
inventive construction. We are living in an age in which the process
of unsettlement is going blindly at work, as if impelled by a Nemesis
as blind as itself. New ideas come beating into surf and surge
against those which former reasoners had considered as fixed banks and
breakwaters; and the new ideas are so mutable, so fickle, that those
which were considered novel ten years ago are deemed obsolete to-day,
and the new ones of to-day will in their turn be obsolete to-morrow.
And, in a sort of fatalism, you see statesmen yielding way to these
successive mockeries of experiment,--for they are experiments against