"[145]
There is balm in Philistia as well as in Gilead. A chosen circle of
children of the modern spirit, perfectly emancipated from prejudice and
commonplace, regarding the ideal side of things in all its efforts for
change, passionately despising half-measures and condescension to human
folly and obstinacy,--with a bewildered, timid, torpid multitude
behind,--conducts a country to the government of Herr von Bismarck. A
nation regarding the practical side of things in its efforts for change,
attacking not what is irrational, but what is pressingly inconvenient,
and attacking this as one body, "moving altogether if it move at all,"
[146] and treating children of light like the very harshest of
step-mothers, comes to the prosperity and liberty of modern England. For
all that, however, Philistia (let me say it again) is not the true
promised land, as we English commonly imagine it to be; and our
excessive neglect of the idea, and consequent inaptitude for it,
threatens us, at a moment when the idea is beginning to exercise a real
power in human society, with serious future inconvenience, and, in the
meanwhile, cuts us off from the sympathy of other nations, which feel
its power more than we do.
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