One  may  wish  that  England  had  never  had  a  "  manu-
facturing system,"  and  so  had  escaped  the  minor
curses  of  irregular  employment,  occasional  distress,
and  dangerously  unequal  distribution  of  wealth,  as
well  as  the  major  disfigurement  of  land  and  life,  and  the
maximum  abomination  of  Trades  Unions.  But  that
it  was  a  great  deed,  if  not  a  good  one,  to  establish  that
system  itself,  nobody  can  deny  who  possesses  any
catholic  estimate  of  greatness.  Some  people  may  have
a  horror  of  aristocracy,  and  others  may  regard  repre-
sentative government  as  the  vainest  of  vain  inventions  ;
but,  again,  no  one  with  brains,  and  knowledge,  and  some
faculty  of  detachment,  can  deny  that,  with  its  astonish-
ingly illogical  practicality  and  its  marvellously  practical
want  of  logic,  the  English  eighteenth  century  made  the
best  of  both  these  things,  and  of  the  one  through  the
other,  in  a  fashion  which  is  unparalleled  in  the  history
of  the  world,  though  unfortunately  the  achievement
has  led  half  the  world  into  mischief  by  clumsy  attempts
at  once  to  rival  and  to  spoil  it.
The  charge  of  defect  of  Idealism  is,  again,  one  which
it  would  be  absurd  to  deny  simpliciter,  or  indeed  to


CONCLUSION  377

deny  at  all.  But  it  is  one  which,  for  the  particular
purpose  of  this  book,  it  is  specially  proper  to  examine.
