From our narrowness we
flattered ourselves that we were able to imagine a life more
broadly based than theirs, or at least a life from which theirs
must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man feels within
himself the prompting to be something better or higher than he
is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery
dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a
nobility supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty
supported again by a proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether;
with a system of government kept, by assent so general that the
dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared,
if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and
thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip makes its
whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a
charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive
misery never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn
and ingrained that all things English seem righteous because
English; with a willingness to share the general well-being quite
to the verge, but never beyond the verge, of public control of
the administration--with all this, the thing must strike the
unbelieving observer as desperately perfect.
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