Page:Eminent Victorians.djvu/225

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DR. ARNOLD
197

opinions upon a large number of topics; and he enunicated them—based as they were almost invariably upon general principles—in pamphlets, in prefaces, and in magazine articles, with an impressive self-confidence. He was, as he constantly declared, a Liberal. In his opinion, by the very constitution of human nature, the principles of progress and reform had been those of wisdom and justice in every age of the world—except one: that which had preceded the fall of man from Paradise. Had he lived then. Dr. Arnold would have been a Conservative. As it was, his liberalism was tempered by an "abhorrence of the spirit of 1789, of the American War, of the French Economistes, and of the English Whigs of the latter part of the seventeenth century"; and he always entertained a profound respect for the hereditary peerage. It might almost be said, in fact, that he was an orthodox Liberal. He believed in toleration, too, within limits; that is to say, in the toleration of those with whom he agreed. "I would give James Mill as much opportunity for advocating his opinion," he said, "as is consistent with a voyage to Botany Bay." He had become convinced of the duty of sympathising with the lower orders ever since he had made a serious study of the Epistle of St. James; but he perceived clearly that the lower orders fell into two classes, and that it was necessary to distinguish between them. There were the "good poor"—and there were the others. "I am glad that you have made acquaintance with some of the good poor," he wrote to a Cambridge undergraduate; "I quite agree with you that it is most instructive to visit them." Dr. Arnold himself occasionally visited them, in Rugby; and the condescension with which he shook hands with old men and women of the working classes was long remembered in the neighbourhood. As for the others, he regarded them with horror and alarm. "The disorders in our social state," he wrote to the Chevalier Bunsen in 1834, "appear to me to continue unabated. You have heard,