attack many more at the same time. This is a caricature of the real
teaching of the Historic Method, of which we shall have to speak
presently; but it is one of those caricatures which the natural sloth in
such matters, and the indigenous intellectual haziness of the majority
of men, make them very willing to take for the true philosophy of
things.


Then there is the newspaper press, that huge engine for keeping
discussion on a low level, and making the political test final. To take
off the taxes on knowledge was to place a heavy tax on broad and
independent opinion. The multiplication of journals 'delivering brawling
judgments unashamed on all things all day long,' has done much to deaden
the small stock of individuality in public verdicts. It has done much to
make vulgar ways of looking at things and vulgar ways of speaking of
them stronger and stronger, by formulating and repeating and
stereotyping them incessantly from morning until afternoon, and from
year's end to year's end. For a newspaper must live, and to live it must
please, and its conductors suppose, perhaps not altogether rightly, that
it can only please by being very cheerful towards prejudices, very
chilly to general theories, loftily disdainful to the men of a
principle. Their one cry to an advocate of improvement is some sagacious
silliness about recognising the limits of the practicable in politics,
and seeing the necessity of adapting theories to facts. As if the fact
of taking a broader and wiser view than the common crowd disqualifies a
man from knowing what the view of the common crowd happens to be, and
from estimating it at the proper value for practical purposes. Why are
the men who despair of improvement to be the only persons endowed with
the gift of discerning the practicable? It is, however, only too easy to
understand how a journal, existing for a day, should limit its view to