act, to go along, as they do, with the ordinary self of those on
whose favour they depend, to adopt as their own its desires, and to
serve them with fidelity, and even, if possible, with impulsiveness.
This is the more easy for them, because there are not wanting,--and
there never will be wanting,--thinkers like Mr. Baxter, Mr. Charles
Buxton, and the Dean of Canterbury, to swim with the stream, but to
swim with it philosophically; to call the desires of the ordinary
self of any great section of the community edicts of the national
mind and laws of human progress, and to give them a general, a
philosophic, and an imposing expression. A generous statesman may
[lv] honestly, therefore, soon unlearn any disposition to put his
tongue in his cheek in advocating these desires, and may advocate
them with fervour and impulsiveness. Therefore a plan such as that
which we have indicated does not seem a plan so likely to find favour
as a plan for abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the
Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments.

But to tell us that our fond dreams are on that account shattered is
inexact, and is the sort of language which ought to be addressed to
the promoters of intelligence through public meetings and a
commendable interest in politics, when they fail in their designs,
and not to us. For we are fond stickers to no machinery, not even
our own; and we have no doubt that perfection can be reached without
it,--with free churches as with established churches, and with
instrumental statesmen as with creative statesmen. But it can never
be reached without seeing things as they really are; and it is to
this, therefore, and to no machinery in the world, that culture
sticks fondly. It insists that men should not mistake, as they are
prone to mistake, their natural taste for the bathos for a relish for
the sublime; and if statesmen, either [lvi] with their tongue in