Ludlow's reviewing and his activities on behalf of the Working Men's College were hardly an adequate expression of his own vocation, for in them he was following the lead of others. It was in his concern with certain political and social issues of the Free Trade world, then being linked together by science and commerce, that he made his most original contribution to the age and, in doing so, won a sufficient reputation to end up in a position of some importance in the Civil Service.

In the light of this modest success we may be tempted to feel that the latter part of his career forms something of an anticlimax to what had gone before. The heavens did not apparently open to him again in quite the same way as they had done in 1848. There was only one more spiritual crisis to come. His steady upward progress achieved by hard work would have won the esteem of Samuel Smiles, had he known about it, but was, it may be argued, more edifying than exciting.

This however is an altogether oversimplified view of what happened to Ludlow; for he himself was quite unaware, during what he described as the bitterest years in his life, of the reasonably happy ending the future had in store for him. Many times, too, he took the unpopular, minority point of view which seemed doomed to failure.