Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/225

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EDWARD SPENCER BEESLY.
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opinions, acts, and historical writings, which are one and all penetrated through and through by the principles and spirit of his master, Comte. They have all for their central idea or governing principle the far-reaching Comtian dictum, "The working-class is not, properly speaking, a class at all, but constitutes the body of society. From it proceed the various special classes which we regard as organs necessary to that body." Woe to the aforesaid special classes if they cease to be necessary organs! Woe to Mr. Gladstone, woe to Earl Beaconsfield, woe to Parliament, woe to all men who are unduly friendly to special classes! Let them but show their baneful partiality, and the professor will smite them with remorseless impartiality. To him the Trojan Whig and the Tyrian Tory have ever been much alike. Nay, he has even been known to speak disrespectfully of parliamentary institutions themselves, as Sydney Smith said Lord Jeffrey once spoke depreciatingly of the equator. He has scoffed at the respectability of our middle class, and treated our greatest plutocrats as if they were nobodies. In all things he is pre-eminently un-English, affirming, as he does, the immense superiority of Frenchmen and French institutions over Englishmen and English institutions. England' s function among the nations is merely to play the part of the "horrible example." She will do nothing at home that is not base and hypocritical; nothing abroad that is not tyrannical and suicidal. The cup of her iniquities is almost full to overflowing.

Mr. Beesly would give up India to-morrow, to say nothing, of course, of Afghanistan. He would make an ample apology to Cetewayo, and replace him on the throne of Zululand. He would surrender Gibraltar to