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LECTURES AND ESSAYS

BY

GOLDWIN SMITH

PREFATORY NOTE.

These papers have been reprinted for friends who sometimes ask for the back numbers of periodicals in which they appeared. The great public is sick of reprints, and with good reason.

The volume might almost have been called Contributions to Canadian Literature, for of the papers not originally published in Canada several were reproduced in Canadian journals. Political subjects have been excluded both to keep a volume intended for friends free from anything of a party character and because the writer looks forward to putting the thoughts scattered over his political essays and reviews into a more connected form.

The papers on 'The Early Years of the Conqueror of Quebec,' 'A Wirepuller of Kings,' 'A True Captain of Industry' and 'Early Years of Abraham Lincoln' can hardly pretend to be more than accounts of books to which they relate, but they interested some of their readers at the time and there are probably not many copies of the books in Canada. All the papers have been revised, so that they do not appear here exactly as they were in the periodicals from which they are reprinted.

TORONTO, Feb. 16, 1881

CONTENTS.

THE GREATNESS OF THE ROMANS (Contemporary Review)

THE GREATNESS OF ENGLAND (Contemporary Review.)

THE GREAT DUEL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (Canadian Monthly)

THE LAMPS OF FICTION (A Speech on the Centenary of the Birth of Sir
Walter Scott)

AN ADDRESS TO THE OXFORD SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ART

THE ASCENT OF MAN (Macmillan's Magazine.)

THE PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR RELIGION (Macmillan's Magazine.)

THE LABOUR MOVEMENT (Canadian Monthly.)

WHAT IS CULPABLE LUXURY? (Canadian Monthly.)

A TRUE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY (Canadian Monthly.)

A WIREPULLER OF KINGS (Canadian Monthly.)

THE EARLY YEARS OF THE CONQUEROR OF QUEBEC (Toronto Nation.)

FALKLAND AND THE PURITANS (Contemporary Review.)

THE EARLY YEARS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (Toronto Mail)

ALFREDUS REX FUNDATOR (Canadian Monthly)

THE LAST REPUBLICANS OF ROME (MacMillan's Magazine)

AUSTEN LEIGH'S MEMOIR OF JANE AUSTEN (New York Nation)

PATTISON'S MILTON (New York Nation)

CLERIDGE'S LIFE OF KEBLE (New York Nation)

THE GREATNESS OF THE ROMANS

Rome was great in arms, in government, in law. This combination was the talisman of her august fortunes. But the three things, though blended in her, are distinct from each other, and the political analyst is called upon to give a separate account of each. By what agency was this State, out of all the States of Italy, out of all the States of the world, elected to a triple pre-eminence, and to the imperial supremacy of which, it was the foundation? By what agency was Rome chosen as the foundress of an empire which we regard almost as a necessary step in human development, and which formed the material, and to no small extent the political matrix of modern Europe, though the spiritual life of our civilization is derived from another source? We are not aware that this question has ever been distinctly answered, or even distinctly propounded. The writer once put it to a very eminent Roman antiquarian, and the answer was a quotation from Virgil—

"Hoc nemus, hunc, inquit, frondoso vertice clivum
Quis deus incertum est, habitat Deus; Arcades ipsum
Credunt se vidisae Jovem cum saepe nigrantem
AEgida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret."

This perhaps was the best answer that Roman patriotism, ancient or modern, could give; and it certainly was given in the best form. The political passages of Virgil, like some in Lucan and Juvenal, had a grandeur entirely Roman with which neither Homer nor any other Greek has anything to do. But historical criticism, without doing injustice to the poetical aspect of the mystery, is bound to seek a rational solution. Perhaps in seeking the solution we may in some measure supply, or at least suggest the mode of supplying, a deficiency which we venture to think is generally found in the first chapters of histories. A national history, as it seems to us, ought to commence with a survey of the country or locality, its geographical position, climate, productions, and other physical circumstances as they bear on the character of the people. We ought to be presented, in short, with a complete description of the scene of the historic drama, as well as with an account of the race to which the actors belong. In the early stages of his development, at all events, man is mainly the creature of physical circumstances; and by a systematic examination of physical circumstances we may to some extent cast the horoscope of the infant nation as it lies in the arms of Nature.

That the central position of Rome, in the long and narrow peninsula of Italy, was highly favourable to her Italian dominion, and that the situation of Italy was favourable to her dominion over the countries surrounding the Mediterranean, has been often pointed out. But we have yet to ask what launched Rome in her career of conquest, and still more, what rendered that career so different from those of ordinary conquerors? What caused the Empire of Rome to be so durable? What gives it so high an organization? What made it so tolerable, and even in some cases beneficent to her subjects? What enabled it to perform services so important in preparing the way for a higher civilization?

About the only answer that we get to these questions is race. The Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race. "They were the wolves of Italy," says Mr. Merivale, who may be taken to represent fairly the state of opinion on this subject. We are presented in short with the old fable of the Twins suckled by the She-wolf in a slightly rationalized form. It was more likely to be true, if anything, in its original form, for in mythology nothing is so irrational as rationalization. That unfortunate She-wolf with her Twins has now been long discarded by criticism as a historical figure; but she still obtrudes herself as a symbolical legend into the first chapter of Roman history, and continues to affect the historian's imagination and to give him a wrong bias at the outset. Who knows whether the statue which we possess is a real counterpart of the original? Who knows what the meaning of the original statue was? If the group was of great antiquity, we may be pretty sure that it was not political or historic, but religious; for primaeval art is the handmaid of religion; historic representation and political portraiture belong generally to a later age. We cannot tell with certainty even that the original statue was Roman: it may have been brought to Rome among the spoils of some conquered city, in which case it would have no reference to Roman history at all. We must banish it entirely from our minds, with all the associations and impressions which cling to it, and we must do the same with regard to the whole of that circle of legends woven out of misinterpreted monuments or customs, with the embellishments of pure fancy, which grouped itself round the apocryphal statues of the seven kings in the Capitol, aptly compared by Arnold to the apocryphal portraits of the early kings of Scotland in Holyrood and those of the mediaeval founders of Oxford in the Bodleian. We must clear our minds altogether of these fictions; they are not even ancient: they came into existence at a time when the early history of Rome was viewed in the deceptive light of her later achievements; when, under the influence of altered circumstances, Roman sentiment had probably undergone a considerable change; and when, consequently, the national imagination no longer pointed true to anything primaeval.

Race, when tribal peculiarities are once formed, is a most important feature in history; those who deny this and who seek to resolve everything, even in advanced humanity, into the influence of external circumstances or of some particular external circumstance, such as food, are not less one-sided or less wide of the truth than those who employ race as the universal solution. Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history? The case is still stronger if we take races more remote from each other, such as the English and the Hindoo. But the further we inquire, the more reason there appears to be for believing that peculiarities of race are themselves originally formed by the influence of external circumstances on the primitive tribe; that, however marked and ingrained they may be, they are not congenital and perhaps not indelible. Englishmen and Frenchmen are closely assimilated by education; and the weaknesses of character supposed to be inherent in the Irish gradually disappear under the more benign influences of the New World. Thus, by ascribing the achievements of the Romans to the special qualities of their race, we should not be solving the problem, but only stating it again in other terms.

But besides this, the wolf theory halts in a still more evident manner. The foster-children of the she-wolf, let them have never so much of their foster-mother's milk in them, do not do what the Romans did, and they do precisely what the Romans did not. They kill, ravage, plunder— perhaps they conquer and even for a time retain their conquests—but they do not found highly organized empires, they do not civilize, much less do they give birth to law. The brutal and desolating domination of the Turk, which after being long artificially upheld by diplomacy, is at last falling into final ruin, is the type of an empire founded by the foster-children of the she-wolf. Plunder, in the animal lust of which alone it originated, remains its law, and its only notion of imperial administration is a coarse division, imposed by the extent of its territory, into satrapies, which, as the central dynasty, enervated by sensuality, loses its force, revolt, and break up the empire. Even the Macedonian, pupil of Aristotle though he was, did not create an empire at all comparable to that created by the Romans. He overran an immense extent of territory, and scattered over a portion of it the seed of an inferior species of Hellenic civilization, but he did not organize it politically, much less did he give it, and through it the world, a code of law. It at once fell apart into a number of separate kingdoms, the despotic rulers of which were Sultans with a tinge of Hellenism, and which went for nothing in the political development of mankind.

What if the very opposite theory to that of the she-wolf and her foster- children should be true? What if the Romans should have owed their peculiar and unparalleled success to their having been at first not more warlike, but less warlike than their neighbours? It may seem a paradox, but we suspect in their imperial ascendency is seen one of the earliest and not least important steps in that gradual triumph of intellect over force, even in war, which has been an essential part of the progress of civilization. The happy day may come when Science in the form of a benign old gentleman with a bald head and spectacles on nose, holding some beneficent compound in his hand, will confront a standing army and the standing army will cease to exist. That will be the final victory of intellect. But in the meantime, our acknowledgments are due to the primitive inventors of military organization and military discipline. They shivered Goliath's spear. A mass of comparatively unwarlike burghers, unorganized and undisciplined, though they may be the hope of civilization from their mental and industrial qualities, have as little of collective as they have of individual strength in war; they only get in each other's way, and fall singly victims to the prowess of a gigantic barbarian. He who first thought of combining their force by organization, so as to make their numbers tell, and who taught them to obey officers, to form regularly for action, and to execute united movements at the word of command, was, perhaps, as great a benefactor of the species as he who grew the first corn, or built the first canoe.

What is the special character of the Roman legends, so far as they relate to war? Their special character is, that they are legends not of personal prowess but of discipline. Rome has no Achilles. The great national heroes, Camillus, Cincinnatus, Papirius, Cursor, Fabius Maximus, Manlius are not prodigies of personal strength and valour, but commanders and disciplinarians. The most striking incidents are incidents of discipline. The most striking incident of all is the execution by a commander of his own son for having gained a victory against orders. "Disciplinam militarem," Manlius is made to say, "qua stetit ad hanc diem Romana res." Discipline was the great secret of Roman ascendency in war. It is the great secret of all ascendency in war. Victories of the undisciplined over the disciplined, such as Killiecrankie and Preston Pans, are rare exceptions which only prove the rule. The rule is that in anything like a parity of personal prowess and of generalship discipline is victory. Thrice Rome encountered discipline equal or superior to her own. Pyrrhus at first beat her, but there was no nation behind him, Hannibal beat her, but his nation did not support him; she beat the army of Alexander, but the army of Alexander when it encountered her, like that of Frederic at Jena, was an old machine, and it was commanded by a man who was more like Tippoo Sahib than the conqueror of Darius.

But how came military discipline to be so specially cultivated by the Romans? We can see how it came to be specially cultivated by the Greeks: it was the necessity of civic armies, fighting perhaps against warlike aristocracies; it was the necessity of Greeks in general fighting against the invading hordes of the Persian. We can see how it came to be cultivated among the mercenaries and professional soldiers of Pyrrhus and Hannibal. But what was the motive power in the case of Rome? Dismissing the notion of occult qualities of race, we look for a rational explanation in the circumstances of the plain which was the cradle of the Roman Empire.

It is evident that in the period designated as that of the kings, when Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and country, a great and wealthy city. This is proved by the works of the kings, the Capitoline Temple, the excavation for the Circus Maximus, the Servian Wall, and above all the Cloaca Maxima. Historians have indeed undertaken to give us a very disparaging picture of the ancient Rome, which they confidently describe as nothing more than a great village of shingle-roofed cottages thinly scattered over a large area. We ask in vain what are the materials for this description. It is most probable that the private buildings of Rome under the kings were roofed with nothing better than shingle, and it is very likely that they were mean and dirty, as the private buildings of Athens appear to have been, and as those of most of the great cities of the Middle Ages unquestionably were. But the Cloaca Maxima is in itself conclusive evidence of a large population, of wealth, and of a not inconsiderable degree of civilization. Taking our stand upon this monument, and clearing our vision entirely of Romulus and his asylum, we seem dimly to perceive the existence of a deep prehistoric background, richer than is commonly supposed in the germs of civilization,—a remark which may in all likelihood be extended to the background of history in general. Nothing surely can be more grotesque than the idea of a set of wolves, like the Norse pirates before their conversion to Christianity, constructing in their den the Cloaca Maxima.

That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain. We can hardly doubt that she was a seat of industry and commerce, and that the theory which represents her industry and commerce as having been developed subsequently to her conquests is the reverse of the fact. Whence, but from industry and commerce, could the population and the wealth have come? Peasant farmers do not live in cities, and plunderers do not accumulate. Rome had around her what was then a rich and peopled plain; she stood at a meeting-place of nationalities; she was on a navigable river, yet out of the reach of pirates; the sea near her was full of commerce, Etruscan, Greek, and Carthaginian. Her first colony was Ostia, evidently commercial and connected with salt-works, which may well have supplied the staple of her trade. Her patricians were financiers and money-lenders. We are aware that a different turn has been given to this part of the story, and that the indebtedness has been represented as incurred not by loans of money, but by advances of farm stock. This, however, completely contradicts the whole tenor of the narrative, and especially what is said about the measures for relieving the debtor by reducing the rate of interest and by deducting from the principal debt the interest already paid. The narrative as it stands, moreover, is supported by analogy. It has a parallel in the economical history of ancient Athens, and in the "scaling of debts," to use the American equivalent for Seisachtheia, by the legislation of Solon. What prevents our supposing that usury, when it first made its appearance on the scene, before people had learned to draw the distinction between crimes and defaults, presented itself in a very coarse and cruel form? True, the currency was clumsy, and retained philological traces of a system of barter; but without commerce there could have been no currency at all.

Even more decisive is the proof afforded by the early political history of Rome. In that wonderful first decade of Livy there is no doubt enough of Livy himself to give him a high place among the masters of fiction. It is the epic of a nation of politicians, and admirably adapted for the purposes of education as the grand picture of Roman character and the richest treasury of Roman sentiment. But we can hardly doubt that in the political portion there is a foundation of fact; it is too circumstantial, too consistent in itself, and at the same time too much borne out by analogy, to be altogether fiction. The institutions which we find existing in historic times must have been evolved by some such struggle between the orders of patricians and plebeians as that which Livy presents to us. And these politics, with their parties and sections of parties, their shades of political character, the sustained interest which they imply in political objects, their various devices and compromises, are not the politics of a community of peasant farmers, living apart each on his own farm and thinking of his own crops: they are the politics of the quick-witted and gregarious population of an industrial and commercial city. They are politics of the same sort as those upon which the Palazzo Vecchio looked down in Florence. That ancient Rome was a republic there can be no doubt. Even the so-called monarchy appears clearly to have been elective; and republicanism may be described broadly with reference to its origin, as the government of the city and of the artisan, while monarchy and aristocracy are the governments of the country and of farmers.

The legend which ascribes the assembly of centuries to the legislation of Servius probably belongs to the same class as the legend which ascribes trial by jury and the division of England into shires to the legislation of Alfred. Still the assembly of centuries existed; it was evidently ancient, belonging apparently to a stratum of institutions anterior to the assembly of tribes; and it was a constitution distributing political power and duties according to a property qualification which, in the upper grades, must, for the period, have been high, though measured by a primitive currency. The existence of such qualifications, and the social ascendency of wealth which the constitution implies, are inconsistent with the theory of a merely agricultural and military Rome. Who would think of framing such a constitution, say, for one of the rural districts of France?

Other indications of the real character of the prehistoric Rome might be mentioned. The preponderance of the infantry and the comparative weakness of the cavalry is an almost certain sign of democracy, and of the social state in which democracy takes its birth—at least in the case of a country which did not, like Arcadia or Switzerland, preclude by its nature the growth of a cavalry force, but on the contrary was rather favourable to it. Nor would it be easy to account for the strong feeling of attachment to the city which led to its restoration when it had been destroyed by the Gauls, and defeated the project of a migration to Veii, if Rome was nothing but a collection of miserable huts, the abodes of a tribe of marauders. We have, moreover, the actual traces of an industrial organization in the existence of certain guilds of artisans, which may have been more important at first than they were when the military spirit had become thoroughly ascendant.

Of course when Rome had once been drawn into the career of conquest, the ascendency of the military spirit would be complete; war, and the organization of territories acquired in war, would then become the great occupation of her leading citizens; industry and commerce would fall into disesteem, and be deemed unworthy of the members of the imperial race. Carthage would no doubt have undergone a similar change of character, had the policy which was carried to its greatest height by the aspiring house of Barcas succeeded in converting her from a trading city into the capital of a great military empire. So would Venice, had she been able to carry on her system of conquest in the Levant and of territorial aggrandisement on the Italian mainland. The career of Venice was arrested by the League of Cambray. On Carthage the policy of military aggrandisement, which was apparently resisted by the sage instinct of the great merchants while it was supported by the professional soldiers and the populace, brought utter ruin; while Rome paid the inevitable penalty of military despotism. Even when the Roman nobles had become a caste of conquerors and proconsuls, they retained certain mercantile habits; unlike the French aristocracy, and aristocracies generally, they were careful keepers of their accounts, and they showed a mercantile talent for business, as well as a more than mercantile hardness, in their financial exploitation of the conquered world. Brutus and his contemporaries were usurers like the patricians of the early times. No one, we venture to think, who has been accustomed to study national character, will believe that the Roman character was formed by war alone: it was manifestly formed by war combined with business.

To what an extent the later character of Rome affected national tradition, or rather fiction, as to her original character, we see from the fable which tells us that she had no navy before the first Punic war, and that when compelled to build a fleet by the exigencies of that war, she had to copy a Carthaginian war galley which had been cast ashore, and to train her rowers by exercising them on dry land. She had a fleet before the war with Pyrrhus, probably from the time at which she took possession of Antium, if not before; and her first treaty with Carthage even if it is to be assigned to the date to which Mommsen, and not to that which Polybius assigns it, shows that before 348 B.C. she had an interest in a wide sea-board, which must have carried with it some amount of maritime power.

Now this wealthy, and, as we suppose, industrial and commercial city was the chief place, and in course of time became the mistress and protectress, of a plain large for that part of Italy, and then in such a condition as to be tempting to the spoiler. Over this plain on two sides hung ranges of mountains inhabited by hill tribes, Sabines, AEquians, Volscians, Hernicans, with the fierce and restless Samnite in the rear. No doubt these hill tribes raided on the plain as hill tribes always do; probably they were continually being pressed down upon it by the migratory movements of other tribes behind them. Some of them seem to have been in the habit of regularly swarming, like bees, under the form of the Ver Sacrum. On the north, again, were the Etruscan hill towns, with their lords, pirates by sea, and probably marauders by land; for the period of a more degenerate luxury and frivolity may be regarded as subsequent to their subjugation by the Romans; at any rate, when they first appear upon the scene they are a conquering race. The wars with the AEqui and Volsci have been ludicrously multiplied and exaggerated by Livy; but even without the testimony of any historian, we might assume that there would be wars with them and with the other mountaineers, and also with the marauding Etruscan chiefs. At the same time, we may be sure that, in personal strength and prowess, the men of the plain and of the city would be inferior both to the mountaineers and to those Etruscan chiefs whose trade was war. How did the men of the plain and of the city manage to make up for this inferiority, to turn the scale of force in their favour, and ultimately to subdue both the mountaineers and Etruscans? In the conflict with the mountaineers, something might be done by that superiority of weapons which superior wealth would afford. But more would be done by military organization and discipline. To military organization and discipline the Romans accordingly learnt to submit themselves, as did the English Parliamentarians after the experience of Edgehill, as did the democracy of the Northern States of America after the experience of the first campaign. At the same time the Romans learned the lesson so momentous, and at the same time so difficult for citizen soldiers, of drawing the line between civil and military life. The turbulent democracy of the former, led into the field, doffed the citizen, donned the soldier; and obeyed the orders of a commander whom as citizens they detested, and whom when they were led back to the forum at the end of the summer campaign they were ready again to oppose and to impeach. No doubt all this part of the history has been immensely embellished by the patriotic imagination, the heroic features have been exaggerated, the harsher features softened though not suppressed. Still it is impossible to question the general fact. The result attests the process. The Roman legions were formed in the first instance of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength. When, to keep up the siege of Veii, military pay was introduced, a step was taken in the transition from a citizen soldiery to a regular army, such as the legions ultimately became, with its standing discipline of the camp; and that the measure should have been possible is another proof that Rome was a great city, with a well-supplied treasury, not a collection of mud huts. No doubt the habit of military discipline reacted on the political character of the people, and gave it the strength and self-control which were so fatally wanting in the case of Florence.

The line was drawn, under the pressure of a stern necessity, between civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of late growth. We may say the same of departmental distinctions altogether. The executive, the legislative, the judicial power, civil authority and military command, all lie enfolded in the same primitive germ. The king, or the magistrate who takes his place, is expected to lead the people in war as well as to govern them in peace. In European monarchies this idea still lingers, fortified no doubt by the personal unwillingness of the kings to let the military power go out of their hands. Nor in early times is the difference between the qualifications of a ruler and those of a commander so great as it afterwards became; the business of the State is simple, and force of character is the main requisite in both cases. Annual consulships must have been fatal to strategical experience, while, on the other hand, they would save the Republic from being tied to an unsuccessful general. But the storms of war which broke on Rome from all quarters soon brought about the recognition of special aptitude for military command in the appointment of dictators. As to the distinction between military and naval ability, it is of very recent birth: Blake, Prince Rupert, and Monk were made admirals because they had been successful as generals, just as Hannibal was appointed by Antiochus to the command of a fleet.

At Preston Pans, as before at Killiecrankie, the line of the Hanoverian regulars was broken by the headlong charge of the wild clans, for which the regulars were unprepared. Taught by the experience of Preston Pans, the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden formed in three lines, so as to repair a broken front. The Romans in like manner formed in three lines— hastati, principes, and triarii—evidently with the same object. Our knowledge of the history of Roman tactics does not enable us to say exactly at what period this formation began to supersede the phalanx, which appears to have preceded it, and which is the natural order of half-disciplined or imperfectly armed masses, as we see in the case of the army formed by Philip out of the Macedonian peasantry, and again in the case of the French Revolutionary columns. We cannot say, therefore, whether this formation in three lines is in any way traceable to experience dearly bought in wars with Italian highlanders, or to a lesson taught by the terrible onset of the Gaul. Again, the punctilious care in the entrenchment of the camp, even for a night's halt, which moved the admiration of Pyrrhus and was a material part of Roman tactics, was likely to be inculcated by the perils to which a burgher army would be exposed in carrying on war under or among hills where it would be always liable to the sudden attack of a swift, sure-footed, and wily foe. The habit of carrying a heavy load of palisades on the march would be a part of the same necessity.

Even from the purely military point of view, then, the She-wolf and the Twins seem to us not appropriate emblems of Roman greatness. A better frontispiece for historians of Rome, if we mistake not, would be some symbol of the patroness of the lowlands and their protectress against the wild tribes of the highlands. There should also be something to symbolize the protectress of Italy against the Gauls, whose irruptions Rome, though defeated at Allia, succeeded ultimately in arresting and hurling back, to the general benefit of Italian civilization which, we may be sure, felt very grateful to her for that service, and remembered it when her existence was threatened by Hannibal, with Gauls in his army. Capua, though not so well situated for the leadership of Italy, might have played the part of Rome; but the plain which she commanded, though very rich, was too small, and too closely overhung by the fatal hills of the Samnite, under whose dominion she fell. Rome had space to organize a strong lowland resistance to the marauding highland powers. It seems probable that her hills were not only the citadel but the general refuge of the lowlanders of those parts, when forced to fly before the onslaught of the highlanders, who were impelled by successive wars of migration to the plains. The Campagna affords no stronghold or rallying point but those hills, which may have received a population of fugitives like the islands of Venice. The city may have drawn part of its population and some of its political elements from this source. In this sense the story of the Asylum may possibly represent a fact, though it has itself nothing to do with history.

Then, as to imperial organization and government. Superiority in these would naturally flow from superiority in civilization, and in previous political training, the first of which Rome derived from her comparative wealth and from the mental characteristics of a city population; the second she derived from the long struggle through which the rights of the plebeians were equalized with those of the patricians, and which again must have had its ultimate origin in geographical circumstance bringing together different elements of population. Cromwell was a politician and a religious leader before he was a soldier; Napoleon was a soldier before he was a politician: to this difference between the moulds in which their characters were cast may be traced, in great measure, the difference of their conduct when in power, Cromwell devoting himself to political and ecclesiastical reform, while Napoleon used his supremacy chiefly as the means of gratifying his lust for war. There is something analogous in the case of imperial nations. Had the Roman, when he conquered the world been like the Ottoman, like the Ottoman he would probably have remained. His thirst for blood slaked, he would simply have proceeded to gratify his other animal lusts; he would have destroyed or consumed everything, produced nothing, delivered over the world to a plundering anarchy of rapacious satraps, and when his sensuality had overpowered his ferocity, he would have fallen in his turn before some horde whose ferocity was fresh, and the round of war and havoc would have commenced again. The Roman destroyed and consumed a good deal; but he also produced not a little: he produced, among other things, first in Italy, then in the world at large, the Peace of Rome indispensable to civilization, and destined to be the germ and precursor of the Peace of Humanity.

In two respects, however, the geographical circumstances of Rome appear specially to have prepared her for the exercise of universal empire. In the first place, her position was such as to bring her into contact from the outset with a great variety of races. The cradle of her dominion was a sort of ethnological microcosm. Latins, Etruscans, Greeks, Campanians, with all the mountain races and the Gauls, make up a school of the most diversified experience, which could not fail to open the minds of the future masters of the world. How different was this education from that of a people which is either isolated, like the Egyptians, or comes into contact perhaps in the way of continual border hostility with a single race! What the exact relations of Rome with Etruria were in the earliest times we do not know, but evidently they were close; while between the Roman and the Etruscan character the difference appears to have been as wide as possible. The Roman was pre-eminently practical and business- like, sober-minded, moral, unmystical, unsacerdotal, much concerned with present duties and interests, very little concerned about a future state of existence, peculiarly averse from human sacrifices and from all wild and dark superstitions. The Etruscan, as he has portrayed himself to us in his tombs, seems to have been, in his later development at least, a mixture of Sybaritism with a gloomy and almost Mexican religion, which brooded over the terrors of the next world, and sought in the constant practice of human sacrifice a relief from its superstitious fear. If the Roman could tolerate the Etruscans, be merciful to them, and manage them well, he was qualified to deal in a statesmanlike way with the peculiarities of almost any race, except those whose fierce nationality repelled all management whatever. In borrowing from the Etruscans some of their theological lore and their system of divination, small as the value of the things borrowed was, the Roman, perhaps, gave an earnest of the receptiveness which led him afterwards, in his hour of conquest, to bow to the intellectual ascendency of the conquered Greek, and to become a propagator of Greek culture, though partly in a Latinized form, more effectual than Alexander and his Orientalized successors.

In the second place, the geographical circumstances of Rome, combined with her character, would naturally lead to the foundation of colonies and of that colonial system which formed a most important and beneficent part of her empire. We have derived the name colony from Rome; but her colonies were just what ours are not, military outposts of the empire, propugnacula imperii. Political depletion and provision for needy citizens were collateral, but it would seem, in early times at least, secondary objects. Such outposts were the means suggested by Nature, first of securing those parts of the plain which were beyond the sheltering range of the city itself, secondly of guarding the outlets of the hills against the hill tribes, and eventually of holding down the tribes in the hills themselves. The custody of the passes is especially marked as an object by the position of many of the early colonies. When the Roman dominion extended to the north of Italy, the same system was pursued, in order to guard against incursions from the Alps. A conquering despot would have planted mere garrisons under military governors, which would not have been centres of civilization, but probably of the reverse. The Roman colonies, bearing onwards with them the civil as well as the military life of the Republic, were, with the general system of provincial municipalities of which they constituted the core, to no small extent centres of civilization, though doubtless they were also to some extent instruments of oppression. "Where the Roman conquered he dwelt," and the dwelling of the Roman was, on the whole, the abode of a civilizing influence. Representation of dependencies in the sovereign assembly of the imperial country was unknown, and would have been impracticable. Conquest had not so far put off its iron nature. In giving her dependencies municipal institutions and municipal life, Rome did the next best thing to giving them representation. A Roman province with its municipal life was far above a satrapy, though far below a nation.

Then how came Rome to be the foundress and the great source of law? This, as we said before, calls for a separate explanation. An explanation we do not pretend to give, but merely a hint which may deserve notice in looking for the explanation. In primitive society, in place of law, in the proper sense of the term, we find only tribal custom, formed mainly by the special exigencies of tribal self- preservation, and confined to the particular tribe. When Saxon and Dane settle down in England side by side under the treaty made between Alfred and Guthurm, each race retains the tribal custom which serves it as a criminal law. A special effort seems to be required in order to rise above this custom to that conception of general right or expediency which is the germ of law as a science. The Greek, sceptical and speculative as he was, appears never to have quite got rid of the notion that there was something sacred in ancestral custom, and that to alter it by legislation was a sort of impiety. We in England still conceive that there is something in the breast of the judge, and the belief is a lingering shadow of the tribal custom, the source of the common law. Now what conditions would be most favourable to this critical effort, so fraught with momentous consequences to humanity? Apparently a union of elements belonging to different tribes such as would compel them, for the preservation of peace and the regulation of daily intercourse, to adopt some common measure of right. It must be a union, not a conquest of one tribe by another, otherwise the conquering tribe would of course keep its own customs, as the Spartans did among the conquered people of Laconia. Now it appears likely that these conditions were exactly fulfilled by the primaeval settlements on the hills of Rome. The hills are either escarped by nature or capable of easy escarpment, and seem originally to have been little separate fortresses, by the union of which the city was ultimately formed. That there were tribal differences among the inhabitants of the different hills is a belief to which all traditions and all the evidence of institutions point, whether we suppose the difference to have been great or not and whatever special theory we may form as to the origin of the Roman people. If the germ of law, as distinguished from custom, was brought into existence in this manner, it would be fostered and expanded by the legislative exigencies of the political and social concordat between the two orders, and also by those arising out of the adjustment of relations with other races in the course of conquest and colonization.

Roman law had also, in common with Roman morality, the advantage of being comparatively free from the perverting influences of tribal superstition. [Footnote: From religious perversion Roman law was eminently free: but it could not be free from perverting influences of a social kind; so that we ought to be cautious, for instance, in borrowing law on any subject concerning the relations between the sexes from the corrupt society of the Roman Empire.] Roman morality was in the main a rational rule of duty, the shortcomings and aberrations of which arose not from superstition, but from narrowness of perception, peculiarity of sphere, and the bias of national circumstance. The auguries, which were so often used for the purposes of political obstruction or intrigue, fall under the head rather of trickery than of superstition.

Roman law in the same manner was a rule of expediency, rightly or wrongly conceived, with comparatively little tincture of religion. In this again we probably see the effect of a fusion of tribes upon the tribal superstitions. "Rome," it has been said, "had no mythology." This is scarcely an overstatement; and we do not account for the fact by saying that the Romans were unimaginative, because it is not the creative imagination that produces a mythology, but the impression made by the objects and forces of nature on the minds of the forefathers of the tribe.

A more tenable explanation, at all events, is that just suggested, the disintegration of mythologies by the mixture of tribes. A part of the Roman religion—the worship of such abstractions as Fides, Fortuna, Salus, Concordia, Bellona, Terminus—even looks like a product of the intellect posterior to the decay of the mythologies, which we may be pretty sure were physical. It is no doubt true that the formalities which were left—hollow ceremonial, auguries, and priesthoods which were given without scruple, like secular offices, to the most profligate men of the world—were worse than worthless in a religious point of view. But historians who dwell on this fail to see that the real essence of religion, a belief in the power of duty and of righteousness, that belief which afterwards took the more definite form of Roman Stoicism, had been detached by the dissolution of the mythologies, and exerted its force, such as that force was, independently of the ceremonial, the sacred chickens, and the dissipated high priests. In this sense the tribute paid by Polybius to the religious character of the Romans is deserved; they had a higher sense of religious obligation than the Greeks; they were more likely than the Greeks, the Phoenicians, or any of their other rivals, to swear and disappoint not, though it were to their own hindrance; and this they owed, as we conceive, not to an effort of speculative intellect, which in an early stage of society would be out of the question, but to some happy conjunction of circumstances such as would be presented by a break-up of tribal mythologies, combined with influences favourable to the formation of strong habits of political and social duty. Religious art was sacrificed; that was the exclusive heritage of the Greek; but superior morality was on the whole the heritage of the Roman, and if he produced no good tragedy himself, he furnished characters for Shakespeare and Corneille.

Whatever set the Romans free, or comparatively free, from the tyranny of tribal religion may be considered as having in the same measure been the source of the tolerance which was so indispensable a qualification for the exercise of dominion over a polytheistic world. They waged no war on "the gods of the nations," or on the worshippers of those gods as such. They did not set up golden images after the fashion of Nebuchadnezzar. In early times they seem to have adopted the gods of the conquered, and to have transported them to their own city. In later times they respected all the religions except Judaism and Druidism, which assumed the form of national resistance to the empire, and worships which they deemed immoral or anti-social, and which had intruded themselves into Rome.

Another grand step in the development of law is the severance of the judicial power from the legislative and the executive, which permits the rise of jurists, and of a regular legal profession. This is a slow process. In the stationary East, as a rule, the king has remained the supreme judge. At Athens, the sovereign people delegated its judicial powers to a large committee, but it got no further; and the judicial committee was hardly more free from political passion, or more competent to decide points of law, than the assembly itself. In England the House of Lords still, formally at least, retains judicial functions. Acts of attainder were a yet more primitive as well as more objectionable relic of the times in which the sovereign power, whether king, assembly, or the two combined, was ruler, legislator, and judge all in one. We shall not attempt here to trace the process by which this momentous separation of powers and functions was to a remarkable extent accomplished in ancient Rome. But we are pretty safe in saying that the praetor peregrinus was an important figure in it, and that it received a considerable impulse from the exigencies of a jurisdiction between those who as citizens came under the sovereign assembly and the aliens or semi-aliens who did not.

Whether the partial explanations of the mystery of Roman greatness which we have here suggested approve themselves to the reader's judgment or not, it may at least be said for them that they are verae causae, which is not the case with the story of the foster-wolf, or anything derived from it, any more than with the story of the prophetic apparitions of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.

With regard to the public morality of the Romans, and to their conduct and influence as masters of the world, the language of historians seems to us to leave something to be desired. Mommsen's tone, whenever controverted questions connected with international morality and the law of conquest arise, is affected by his Prussianism; it betokens the transition of the German mind from the speculative and visionary to the practical and even more than practical state; it is premonitory not only of the wars with Austria and France, but of a coming age in which the forces of natural selection are again to operate without the restraints imposed by religion, and the heaviest fist is once more to make the law. In the work of Ihne we see a certain recoil from Mommsen, and at the same time an occasional inconsistency and a want of stability in the principle of judgment. Our standard ought not to be positive but relative. It was the age of force and conquest, not only with the Romans but with all nations; hospes was hostis. A perfectly independent development of Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Phoenicians, and all the other nationalities, might perhaps have been the best thing for humanity. But this was out of the question; in that stage of the world's existence contact was war, and the end of war was conquest or destruction, the first of which was at all events preferable to the second. What empire then can we imagine which would have done less harm or more good than the Roman? Greek intellect showed its superiority in speculative politics as in all other departments of speculation, but as a practical politician the Greek was not self-controlled or strong, and he would never have bestowed on the provinces of his empire local self- government and municipal life; besides, the race, though it included wonderful varieties in itself, was, as a race, intensely tribal, and treated persistently all other races as barbarians. It would have deprived mankind of Roman law and politics, as well as of that vast extension of the Roman aedileship which covered the world with public works beneficent in themselves and equally so as examples; whereas the Roman had the greatness of soul to do homage to Greek intellect, and, notwithstanding an occasional Mummius, preserved all that was of the highest value in Greek civilization, better perhaps than it would have been preserved by the tyrants and condottieri of the Greek decadence. As to a Semitic Empire, whether in the hands of Syrians or Carthaginians, with their low Semitic craft, their Moloch-worships and their crucifixions,—the very thought fills us with horror. It would have been a world-wide tyranny of the strong box, into which all the products of civilization would have gone. Parcere subjectis was the rule of Rome as well as debellare superbos; and while all conquest is an evil, the Roman was the most clement and the least destructive of conquerors. This is true of him on the whole, though he sometimes was guilty of thoroughly primaeval cruelty. He was the great author of the laws of war as well as of the laws of peace. That he not seldom, when his own interest was concerned, put the mere letter of the social law in place of justice, and that we are justly revolted on these occasions by his hypocritical observance of forms, is very true: nevertheless, his scrupulosity and the language of the national critics in these cases prove the existence of at least a rudimentary conscience. No compunction for breach of international law or justice we may be sure ever visited the heart of Tiglath-Pileser. Cicero's letter of advice to his brother on the government of a province may seem a tissue of truisms now, though Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey would hardly have found it so, but it is a landmark in the history of civilization. That the Roman Republic should die, and that a colossal and heterogeneous empire should fall under the rule of a military despot, was perhaps a fatal necessity; but the despotism long continued to be tempered, elevated, and rendered more beneficent by the lingering spirit of the Republic; the liberalism of Trajan and the Antonines was distinctly republican nor did Sultanism finally establish itself before Diocletian. Perhaps we may number among the proofs of the Roman's superiority the capacity shown so far as we know first by him of being touched by the ruin of a rival. We may be sure that no Assyrian conqueror even affected to weep over the fall of a hostile city however magnificent and historic. On the whole it must be allowed that physical influences have seldom done better for humanity than they did in shaping the imperial character and destinies of Rome.

THE GREATNESS OF ENGLAND

[Footnote: The writer some time ago gave a lecture before the Royal Institution on "The Influence of Geographical Circumstances on Political Character," using Rome and England as illustrations. It may perhaps be right to say that the present paper, which touches here and there on matters of political opinion, is not identical with the latter portion of that lecture.]

Two large islands lie close to that Continent which has hitherto been selected by Nature as the chief seat of civilization. One island is much larger than the other, and the larger island lies between the smaller and the Continent. The larger island is so placed as to receive primaeval immigration from three quarters—from France, from the coast of Northern Germany and the Low Countries, and from Scandinavia, the transit being rendered somewhat easier in the last case by the prevailing winds and by the little islands which Scotland throws out, as resting-places and guides for the primaeval navigator, into the Northern Sea. The smaller island, on the other hand, can hardly receive immigration except through the larger, though its southern ports look out, somewhat ominously to the eye of history, towards Spain. The western and northern parts of the larger island are mountainous, and it is divided into two very unequal parts by the Cheviot Hills and the mosses of the Border. In the larger island are extensive districts well suited for grain. The climate of most of the smaller is too wet for grain and good only for pasture. The larger island is full of minerals and coal, of which the smaller island is almost destitute. These are the most salient features of the scene of English history, and, with a temperate climate, the chief physical determinants of English destiny.

What, politically speaking, are the special attributes of an island? In the first place, it is likely to be settled by a bold and enterprising race. Migration by land under the pressure of hunger or of a stronger tribe, or from the mere habit of wandering, calls for no special effort of courage or intelligence on the part of the nomad. Migration by sea does: to go forth on a strange element at all, courage is required; but we can hardly realize the amount of courage required to go voluntarily out of sight of land. The first attempts at ship-building also imply superior intelligence, or an effort by which the intelligence will be raised. Of the two great races which make up the English nation, the Celtic had only to pass a channel which you can see across, which perhaps in the time of the earliest migration did not exist. But the Teutons, who are the dominant race and have supplied the basis of the English character and institutions, had to pass a wider sea. From Scandinavia, especially, England received, under the form of freebooters, who afterwards became conquerors and settlers, the very core and sinews of her maritime population, the progenitors of the Blakes and Nelsons. The Northman, like the Phoenician, had a country too narrow for him, and timber for ship-building at hand. But the land of the Phoenician was a lovely land, which bound him to itself; and wherever he moved his heart still turned to the pleasant abodes of Lebanon and the sunlit quays of Tyre. Thus he became a merchant, and the father of all who have made the estranging sea a highway and a bond between nations, more than atoning by the service thus rendered to humanity, for his craft, his treachery, his cruelty, and his Moloch- worship. The land of the Scandinavian was not a lovely land, though it was a land suited to form strong arms, strong hearts, chaste natures, and, with purity, strength of domestic affection. He was glad to exchange it for a sunnier dwelling-place, and thus, instead of becoming a merchant, he became the founder of Norman dynasties in Italy, France, and England. We are tempted to linger over the story of these primaeval mariners, for nothing equals it in romance. In our day Science has gone before the most adventurous barque, limiting the possibilities of discovery, disenchanting the enchanted Seas, and depriving us for ever of Sinbad and Ulysses. But the Phoenician and the Northman put forth into a really unknown world. The Northman, moreover, was so far as we know the first ocean sailor. If the story of the circumnavigation of Africa by the Phoenicians is true, it was an astonishing enterprise, and almost dwarfs modern voyages of discovery. Still it would be a coasting voyage, and the Phoenician seems generally to have hugged the land. But the Northman put freely out into the wild Atlantic, and even crossed it before Columbus, if we may believe a legend made specially dear to the Americans by the craving of a new country for antiquities. It has been truly said, that the feeling of the Greek, mariner as he was, towards the sea, remained rather one of fear and aversion, intensified perhaps by the treacherous character of the squally AEgean; but the Northman evidently felt perfectly at home on the ocean, and rode joyously, like a seabird, on the vast Atlantic waves.

Not only is a race which comes by sea likely to be peculiarly vigorous, self-reliant, and inclined, when settled, to political liberty, but the very process of maritime migration can scarcely fail to intensify the spirit of freedom and independence. Timon or Genghis Khan, sweeping on from land to land with the vast human herd under his sway, becomes more despotic as the herd grows larger by accretion, and the area of its conquests is increased. But a maritime migration is a number of little joint stock enterprises implying limited leadership, common counsels, and a good deal of equality among the adventurers. We see in fact that the Saxon immigration resulted in the foundation of a number of small communities which, though they were afterwards fused into seven or eight petty kingdoms and ultimately into one large kingdom, must, while they existed, have fostered habits of local independence and self-government. Maritime migration would also facilitate the transition from the tribe to the nation, because the ships could hardly be manned on purely tribal principles; the early Saxon communities in England appear in fact to have been semi-tribal, the local bond predominating over the tribal, though a name with a tribal termination is retained. Room would scarcely be found in the ships for a full proportion of women; the want would be supplied by taking the women of the conquered country; and thus tribal rules of exclusive intermarriage, and all barriers connected with them, would be broken down.

Another obvious attribute of an island is freedom from invasion. The success of the Saxon invaders may be ascribed to the absence of strong resistance. The policy of Roman conquest, by disarming the natives, had destroyed their military character, as the policy of British conquest has done in India, where races which once fought hard against the invader under their native princes, such as the people of Mysore, are now wholly unwarlike. Anything like national unity, or power of co- operation against a foreign enemy, had at the same time been extirpated by a government which divided that it might command. The Northman in his turn owed his success partly to the want of unity among the Saxon principalities, partly and principally to the command of the sea which the Saxon usually abandoned to him, and which enabled him to choose his own point of attack, and to baffle the movements of the defenders. When Alfred built a fleet, the case was changed.

William of Normandy would scarcely have succeeded, great as his armament was, had it not been for the diversion effected in his favour by the landing of the Scandinavian pretender in the North, and the failure of provisions in Harold's Channel fleet, which compelled it to put into port. Louis of France was called in as a deliverer by the barons who were in arms against the tyranny of John; and it is not necessary to discuss the Tory description of the coming of William of Orange as a conquest of England by the Dutch. Bonaparte threatened invasion, but unhappily was unable to invade: unhappily we say, because if he had landed in England he would assuredly have there met his doom; the Russian campaign would have been antedated with a more complete result, and all the after-pages in the history of the Arch-Brigand would have been torn from the book of fate. England is indebted for her political liberties in great measure to the Teutonic character, but she is also in no small measure indebted to this immunity from invasion which has brought with it a comparative immunity from standing armies. In the Middle Ages the question between absolutism and that baronial liberty which was the germ and precursor of the popular liberty of after-times turned in great measure upon the relative strength of the national militia and of the bands of mercenaries kept in pay by overreaching kings. The bands of mercenaries brought over by John proved too strong for the patriot barons, and would have annulled the Great Charter, had not national liberty found a timely and powerful, though sinister, auxiliary in the ambition of the French. Prince Charles I. had no standing army, the troops taken into pay for the wars with Spain and France had been disbanded before the outbreak of the Revolution; and on that occasion the nation was able to overthrow the tyranny without looking abroad for assistance. But Charles II. had learned wisdom from his father's fate; he kept up a small standing army; and the Whigs, though at the crisis of the Exclusion Bill they laid their hands upon their swords, never ventured to draw them, but allowed themselves to be proscribed, their adherents to be ejected from the corporations, and their leaders to be brought to the scaffold. Resistance was in the same way rendered hopeless by the standing army of James II., and the patriots were compelled to stretch their hands for aid to William of Orange. Even so, it might have gone hard with them if James's soldiers, and above all Churchill, had been true to their paymaster. Navies are not political; they do not overthrow constitutions; and in the time of Charles I. it appears that the leading seamen were Protestant, inclined to the side of the Parliament. Perhaps Protestantism had been rendered fashionable in the navy by the naval wars with Spain.

A third consequence of insular position, especially in early times, is isolation. An extreme case of isolation is presented by Egypt, which is in fact a great island in the desert. The extraordinary fertility of the valley of the Nile produced an early development, which was afterwards arrested by its isolation, the isolation being probably intensified by the jealous exclusiveness of a powerful priesthood which discouraged maritime pursuits. The isolation of England, though comparatively slight, has still been an important factor in her history. She underwent less than the Continental provinces the influence of Roman Conquest. Scotland and Ireland escaped it altogether, for the tide of invasion, having flowed to the foot of the Grampians, soon ebbed to the line between the Solway and the Tyne. Britain has no monuments of Roman power and civilization like those which have been left in Gaul and Spain, and of the British Christianity of the Roman period hardly a trace, monumental or historical, remains. By the Saxon conquest England was entirely severed for a time from the European system. The missionary of ecclesiastical Rome recovered what the legionary had lost. Of the main elements of English character political and general, five were brought together when Ethelbert and Augustine met on the coast of Kent. The king represented Teutonism; the missionary represented Judaism, Christianity, imperial and ecclesiastical Rome. We mention Judaism as a separate element, because, among other things, the image of the Hebrew monarchy has certainly entered largely into the political conceptions of Englishmen, perhaps at least as largely as the image of Imperial Rome. A sixth element, classical Republicanism, came in with the Reformation, while the political and social influence of science is only just beginning to be felt. Still, after the conversion of England by Augustine, the Church, which was the main organ of civilization, and almost identical with it in the early Middle Ages, remained national; and to make it thoroughly Roman and Papal, in other words to assimilate it completely to the Church of the Continent, was the object of Hildebrand in promoting the enterprise of William. Roman and Papal the English Church was made, yet not so thoroughly so as completely to destroy its insular and Teutonic character. The Archbishop of Canterbury was still Papa alterius orbis; and the struggle for national independence of the Papacy commenced in England long before the struggle for doctrinal reform. The Reformation broke up the confederated Christendom of the Middle Ages, and England was then thrown back into an isolation very marked, though tempered by her sympathy with the Protestant party on the Continent. In later times the growth of European interests, of commerce, of international law, of international intercourse, of the community of intellect and science, has been gradually building again, on a sounder foundation than that of the Latin Church, the federation of Europe, or rather the federation of mankind. The political sympathy of England with Continental nations, especially with France, has been increasing of late in a very marked manner, the French Revolution of 1830 told at once upon the fortunes of English Reform, and the victory of the Republic over the reactionary attempt of May was profoundly felt by both parties in England. Placed too close to the Continent not to be essentially a part of the European system, England has yet been a peculiar and semi-independent part of it. In European progress she has often acted as a balancing and moderating power. She has been the asylum of vanquished ideas and parties. In the seventeenth century, when absolutism and the Catholic reaction prevailed on the Continent, she was the chief refuge of Protestantism and political liberty. When the French Revolution swept Europe, she threw herself into the anti-revolutionary scale. The tricolor has gone nearly round the world, at least nearly round Europe; but on the flag of England still remains the religious symbol of the era before the Revolution.

The insular arrogance of the English character is a commonplace joke. It finds, perhaps, its strongest expression in the saying of Milton that the manner of God is to reveal things first to His Englishmen. It has made Englishmen odious even to those who, like the Spaniards, have received liberation or protection from English hands. It stimulated the desperate desire to see France rid of the "Goddams" which inspired Joan of Arc. For an imperial people it is a very unlucky peculiarity, since it precludes not only fusion but sympathy and almost intercourse with the subject races. The kind heart of Lord Elgin, when he was Governor- General of India, was shocked by the absolute want of sympathy or bond of any kind, except love of conquest, between the Anglo-Indian and the native, and the gulf apparently, instead of being filled up, now yawns wider than ever.

It is needless to dwell on anything so obvious as the effect of an insular position in giving birth to commerce and developing the corresponding elements of political character. The British Islands are singularly well placed for trade with both hemispheres; in them, more than in any other point, may be placed the commercial centre of the world. It may be said that the nation looked out unconsciously from its cradle to an immense heritage beyond the Atlantic. France and Spain looked the same way, and became competitors with England for ascendancy in the New World, but England was more maritime, and the most maritime was sure to prevail. Canada was conquered by the British fleet. To the commerce and the maritime enterprise of former days, which were mainly the results of geographical position, has been added within the last century the vast development of manufactures produced by coal and steam, the parents of manufactures, as well as the expansion of the iron trade in close connection with manufactures. Nothing can be more marked than the effect of industry on political character in the case of England. From being the chief seat of reaction, the North has been converted by manufactures into the chief seat of progress. The Wars of the Roses were not a struggle of political principle; hardly even a dynastic struggle; they had their origin partly in a patriotic antagonism to the foreign queen and to her foreign councils; but they were in the main a vast faction-fight between two sections of an armed and turbulent nobility turned into buccaneers by the French wars, and, like their compeers all over Europe, bereft, by the decay of Catholicism, of the religious restraints with which their morality was bound up. Yet the Lancastrian party, or rather the party of Margaret of Anjou and her favourites, was the more reactionary, and it had the centre of its strength in the North, whence Margaret drew the plundering and devastating host which gained for her the second battle of St. Albans and paid the penalty of its ravages in the merciless slaughter of Towton. The North had been kept back in the race of progress by agricultural inferiority, by the absence of commerce with the Continent, and by border wars with Scotland. In the South was the seat of prosperous industry, wealth, and comparative civilization, and the banners of the Southern cities were in the armies of the House of York. The South accepted the Reformation, while the North was the scene of the Pilgrimage of Grace. Coming down to the Civil War in the time of Charles I., we find the Parliament strong in the South and East, where are still the centres of commerce and manufactures, even the iron trade, which has its smelting works in Sussex. In the North the feudal tie between landlord and tenant, and the sentiment of the past, preserve much of their force, and the great power in those parts is the Marquis of Newcastle, at once great territorial lord of the Middle Ages and elegant grand seigneur of the Renaissance, who brings into the field a famous regiment of his own retainers. In certain towns, such as Bradford and Manchester, there are germs of manufacturing industry, and these form the sinews of the Parliamentarian party in the district which is headed by the Fairfaxes. But in the Reform movement which extended through the first half of the present century, the geographical position of parties was reversed; the swarming cities of the North were then the great centres of Liberalism and the motive power of Reform; while the South, having by this time fallen into the hands of great landed proprietors, was Conservative. The stimulating effect of populous centres on opinion is a very familiar fact; even in the rural districts it is noticed by canvassers at elections that men who work in gangs are generally more inclined to the Liberal side than those who work separately.

In England, however, the agricultural element always has been and remains a full counterpoise to the manufacturing and commercial element. Agricultural England is not what Pericles called Attica, a mere suburban garden, the embellishment of a queenly city. It is a substantive interest and a political power. In the time of Charles I. it happened that, owing to the great quantity of land thrown into the market in consequence of the confiscation of the monastic estates, which had slipped through the fingers of the spendthrift courtiers to whom they were at first granted, small freeholders were very numerous in the South, and these men like the middle class in the towns, being strong Protestants, went with the Parliament against the Laudian reaction in religion. But land in the hands of great proprietors is Conservative, especially when it is held under entails and connected with hereditary nobility; and into the hands of great proprietors the land of England has now entirely passed. The last remnant of the old yeomen freeholders departed in the Cumberland Statesmen, and the yeoman freeholder in England is now about as rare as the other. Commerce has itself assisted the process by giving birth to great fortunes, the owners of which are led by social ambition to buy landed estates, because to land the odour of feudal superiority still clings, and it is almost the necessary qualification for a title. The land has also actually absorbed a large portion of the wealth produced by manufactures, and by the general development of industry; the estates of Northern landowners especially have enormously increased in value, through the increase of population, not to mention the not inconsiderable appropriation of commercial wealth by marriage. Thus the Conservative element retains its predominance, and it even seems as though the land of Milton, Vane, Cromwell, and the Reformers of 1832, might after all become, politically as well as territorially, the domain of a vast aristocracy of landowners, and the most reactionary instead of the most progressive country in Europe.

Before the repeal of the Corn Laws there was a strong antagonism of interest between the landowning aristocracy and the manufacturers of the North, but that antagonism is now at an end; the sympathy of wealth has taken its place; the old aristocracy has veiled its social pride and learned to conciliate the new men, who on their part are more than willing to enter the privileged circle. This junction is at present the great fact of English politics, and was the main cause of the overthrow of the Liberal Government in 1874. The growth of the great cities itself seems likely, as the number of poor householders increases, to furnish Reaction with auxiliaries in the shape of political Lazzaroni capable of being organized by wealth in opposition to the higher order of workmen and the middle class. In Harrington's "Oceana," there is much nonsense, but it rises at least to the level of Montesquieu in tracing the intimate connection of political power, even under elective institutions, with wealth in land.

Hitherto, the result of the balance between the landowning and commercial elements has been steadiness of political progress, in contrast on the one hand to the commercial republics of Italy, whose political progress was precocious and rapid but shortlived, and on the other hand to great feudal kingdoms where commerce was comparatively weak. England, as yet, has taken but few steps backwards. It remains to be seen what the future may bring under the changed conditions which we have just described. English commerce, moreover, may have passed its acme. Her insular position gave Great Britain during the Napoleonic wars, with immunity from invasion, a monopoly of manufactures and of the carrying trade. This element of her commercial supremacy is transitory, though others, such as the possession of coal, are not.

Let us now consider the effects of the division between the two islands and of those between different parts of the larger island. The most obvious effect of these is tardy consolidation, which is still indicated by the absence of a collective name for the people of the three kingdoms. The writer was once rebuked by a Scotchman for saying "England" and "English," instead of saying "Great Britain" and "British." He replied that the rebuke was just, but that we must say "British and Irish." The Scot had overlooked his poor connections.

We always speak of Anglo-Saxons and identify the extension of the Colonial Empire with that of the Anglo-Saxon race. But even if we assume that the Celts of England and of the Scotch Lowlands were exterminated by the Saxons, taking all the elements of Celtic population in the two islands together, they must bear a very considerable proportion to the Teutonic element. That large Irish settlements are being formed in the cities of Northern England is proved by election addresses coquetting with Home Rule. In the competition of the races on the American Continent the Irish more than holds its own. In the age of the steam- engine the Scotch Highlands, the mountains of Cumberland and Westmoreland, of Wales, of Devonshire, and Cornwall, are the asylum of natural beauty, of poetry and hearts which seek repose from the din and turmoil of commercial life. In the primaeval age of conquest they, with seagirt Ireland, were the asylum of the weaker race. There the Celt found refuge when Saxon invasion swept him from the open country of England and from the Scotch Lowlands. There he was preserved with his own language, indicating by its variety of dialects the rapid flux and change of unwritten speech; with his own Christianity, which was that of Apostolic Britain; with his un-Teutonic gifts and weaknesses, his lively, social, sympathetic nature, his religious enthusiasm, essentially the same in its Calvinistic as in its Catholic guise, his superstition, his clannishness, his devotion to chiefs and leaders, his comparative indifference to institutions, and lack of natural aptitude for self-government.

The further we go in these inquiries the more reason there seems to be for believing that the peculiarities of races are not congenital, but impressed by primaeval circumstance. Not only the same moral and intellectual nature, but the same primitive institutions, are found in all the races that come under our view; they appear alike in Teuton, Celt, and Semite. That which is not congenital is probably not indelible, so that the less favoured races, placed under happier circumstances, may in time be brought to the level of the more favoured, and nothing warrants inhuman pride of race. But it is surely absurd to deny that peculiarities of race, when formed, are important factors in history. Mr. Buckle, who is most severe upon the extravagances of the race theory, himself runs into extravagances not less manifest in a different direction. He connects the religious character of the Spaniards with the influence of apocryphal volcanoes and earthquakes, whereas it palpably had its origin in the long struggle with the Moors. He, in like manner, connects the theological tendencies of the Scotch with the thunderstorms which he imagines (wrongly, if we may judge by our own experience) to be very frequent in the Highlands, whereas Scotch theology and the religious habits of the Scotch generally were formed in the Lowlands and among the Teutons, not among the Celts.

The remnant of the Celtic race in Cornwall and West Devon was small, and was subdued and half incorporated by the Teutons at a comparatively early period; yet it played a distinct and a decidedly Celtic part in the Civil War of the seventeenth century. It played a more important part towards the close of the following century by giving itself almost in a mass to John Wesley. No doubt the neglect of the remote districts by the Bishops of Exeter and their clergy left Wesley a clear field; but the temperament of the people was also in his favour. Anything fervent takes with the Celt, while he cannot abide the religious compromise which commends itself to the practical Saxon.

In the Great Charter there is a provision in favour of the Welsh, who were allied with the Barons in insurrection against the Crown. The Barons were fighting for the Charter, the Welshmen only for their barbarous and predatory independence. But the struggle for Welsh independence helped those who were struggling for the Charter; and the remark may be extended in substance to the general influence of Wales on the political contest between the Crown and the Barons. Even under the House of Lancaster, Llewellyn was faintly reproduced in Owen Glendower. The powerful monarchy of the Tudors finally completed the annexation. But isolation survived independence. The Welshman remained a Celt and preserved his language and his clannish spirit, though local magnates, such as the family of Wynn, filled the place in his heart once occupied by the chief. Ecclesiastically he was annexed, but refused to be incorporated, never seeing the advantage of walking in the middle path which the State Church of England had traced between the extremes of Popery and Dissent. He took Methodism in a Calvinistic and almost wildly enthusiastic form. In this respect his isolation is likely to prove far more important than anything which Welsh patriotism strives to resuscitate by Eisteddfodds. In the struggle, apparently imminent, between the system of Church Establishments and religious equality, Wales furnishes a most favourable battle-ground to the party of Disestablishment.

The Teutonic realm of England was powerful enough to subdue, if not to assimilate, the remnants of the Celtic race in Wales and their other western hills of refuge. But the Teutonic realm of Scotland was not large or powerful enough to subdue the Celts of the Highlands, whose fastnesses constituted in geographical area the greater portion of the country. It seems that in the case of the Highlands, as in that of Ireland, Teutonic adventurers found their way into the domain of the Celts and became chieftains, but in becoming chieftains they became Celts. Down to the Hanoverian times the chain of the Grampians which from the Castle of Stirling is seen rising like a wall over the rich plain, divided from each other two nationalities, differing totally in ideas, institutions, habits, and costume, as well as in speech, and the less civilized of which still regarded the more civilized as alien intruders, while the more civilized regarded the less civilized as robbers. Internally, the topographical character of the Highlands was favourable to the continuance of the clan system, because each clan having its own separate glen, fusion was precluded, and the progress towards union went no further than the domination of the more powerful clans over the less powerful. Mountains also preserve the general equality and brotherhood which are not less essential to the constitution of the clan than devotion to the chief, by preventing the use of that great minister of aristocracy, the horse. At Killiecrankie and Prestonpans the leaders of the clan and the humblest clansman still charged on foot side by side. Macaulay is undoubtedly right in saying that the Highland risings against William III. and the first two Georges were not dynastic but clan movements. They were in fact the last raids of the Gael upon the country which had been wrested from him by the Sassenach. Little cared the clansman for the principles of Filmer or Locke, for the claims of the House of Stuart or for those of the House of Brunswick. Antipathy to the Clan Campbell was the nearest approach to a political motive. Chiefs alone, such as the unspeakable Lovat, had entered as political condottieri into the dynastic intrigues of the period, and brought the claymores of their clansmen to the standard of their patron, as Indian chiefs in the American wars brought the tomahawks of their tribes to the standard of France or England. Celtic independence greatly contributed to the general perpetuation of anarchy in Scotland, to the backwardness of Scotch civilization, and to the abortive weakness of the Parliamentary institutions. Union with the more powerful kingdom at last supplied the force requisite for the taming of the Celt. Highlanders, at the bidding of Chatham's genius, became the soldiers, and are now the pet soldiers, of the British monarchy. A Hanoverian tailor with improving hand shaped the Highland plaid, which had originally resembled the simple drapery of the Irish kern, into a garb of complex beauty, well suited for fancy balls. The power of the chiefs and the substance of the clan system were finally swept away, though the sentiment lingers, even in the Transatlantic abodes of the clansmen, and is prized, like the dress, as a remnant of social picturesqueness in a prosaic and levelling age. The hills and lakes—at the thought of which even Gibbon shuddered—are the favourite retreats of the luxury which seeks in wildness refreshment from civilization. After Culloden, Presbyterianism effectually made its way into the Highlands, of which a great part had up to that time been little better than heathen; but it did not fail to take a strong tinge of Celtic enthusiasm and superstition.

Of all the lines of division in Great Britain, the most important politically has been that which is least clearly traced by the hand of nature. The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and kingdoms across the border. In the name of the Scotch capital we have a monument of a union before that of 1603. That the Norman Conquest did not include the Saxons of the Scotch Lowlands was due chiefly to the menacing attitude of Danish pretenders, and the other military dangers which led the Conqueror to guard himself on the north by a broad belt of desolation. Edward I., in attempting to extend his feudal supremacy over Scotland, may well have seemed to himself to have been acting in the interest of both nations, for a union would have put an end to border war, and would have delivered the Scotch in the Lowlands from the extremity of feudal oppression, and the rest of the country from a savage anarchy, giving them in place of those curses by far the best government of the time. The resistance came partly from mere barbarism, partly from Norman adventurers, who were no more Scotch than English, whose aims were purely selfish, and who would gladly have accepted Scotland as a vassal kingdom from Edward's hand. But the annexation would no doubt have formidably increased the power of the Crown, not only by extending its dominions, but by removing that which was a support often of aristocratic anarchy in England, but sometimes of rudimentary freedom. Had the whole island fallen under one victorious sceptre, the next wielder of that sceptre, under the name of the great Edward's wittold son, would have been Piers Gaveston. But what no prescience on the part of any one in the time of Edward I. could possibly have foreseen was the inestimable benefit which disunion and even anarchy indirectly conferred on the whole island in the shape of a separate Scotch Reformation. Divines, when they have exhausted their reasonings about the rival forms of Church government, will probably find that the argument which had practically most effect in determining the question was that of the much decried but in his way sagacious James I., "No bishop, no king!" In England the Reformation was semi-Catholic; in Sweden it was Lutheran; but in both countries it was made by the kings, and in both Episcopacy was retained. Where the Reformation was the work of the people, more popular forms of Church government prevailed. In Scotland the monarchy, always weak, was at the time of the Reformation practically in abeyance, and the master of the movement was emphatically a man of the people. As to the nobles, they seem to have thought only of appropriating the Church lands, and to have been willing to leave to the nation the spiritual gratification of settling its own religion. Probably they also felt with regard to the disinherited proprietors of the Church lands that "stone dead had no fellow." The result was a democratic and thoroughly Protestant Church, which drew into itself the highest energies, political as well as religious, of a strong and great-hearted people, and by which Laud and his confederates, when they had apparently overcome resistance in England, were as Milton says, "more robustiously handled." If the Scotch auxiliaries did not win the decisive battle of Marston Moor, they enabled the English Parliamentarians to fight and win it. During the dark days of the Restoration, English resistance to tyranny was strongly supported on the ecclesiastical side by the martyr steadfastness of the Scotch till the joint effort triumphed in the Revolution. It is singular and sad to find Scotland afterwards becoming one vast rotten borough managed in the time of Pitt by Dundas, who paid the borough-mongers by appointments in India, with calamitous consequences to the poor Hindoo. But the intensity of the local evil perhaps lent force to the revulsion, and Scotland has ever since been a distinctly Liberal element in British politics, and seems now likely to lead the way to a complete measure of religious freedom.

Nature to a great extent fore-ordained the high destiny of the larger island, to at least an equal extent she fore-ordained the sad destiny of the smaller island. Irish history, studied impartially, is a grand lesson in political charity; so clear is it that in these deplorable annals the more important part was played by adverse circumstance, the less important by the malignity of man. That the stronger nation is entitled by the law of force to conquer its weaker neighbour and to govern the conquered in its own interest is a doctrine which civilized morality abhors; but in the days before civilized morality, in the days when the only law was that of natural selection, to which philosophy, by a strange counter-revolution seems now inclined to return, the smaller island was almost sure to be conquered by the possessors of the larger, more especially as the smaller, cut off from the Continent by the larger, lay completely within its grasp. The map, in short, tells us plainly that the destiny of Ireland was subordinated to that of Great Britain. At the same time, the smaller island being of considerable size and the channel of considerable breadth, it was likely that the resistance would be tough and the conquest slow. The unsettled state of Ireland, and the half-nomad condition in which at a comparatively late period its tribes remained, would also help to protract the bitter process of subjugation; and these again were the inevitable results of the rainy climate, which, while it clothed the island with green and made pasture abundant, forbade the cultivation of grain. Ireland and Wales alike appear to have been the scenes of a precocious civilization, merely intellectual and literary in its character, and closely connected with the Church, though including also a bardic element derived from the times before Christianity, the fruits of which were poetry, fantastic law-making, and probably the germs of scholastic theology, combined, in the case of Ireland, with missionary enterprise and such ecclesiastical architecture as the Round Towers. But cities there were none, and it is evident that the native Church with difficulty sustained her higher life amidst the influences and encroachments of surrounding barbarism. The Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland was a supplement to the Norman conquest of England; and, like the Norman conquest of England, it was a religious as well as a political enterprise. As Hildebrand had commissioned William to bring the national Church of England into complete submission to the See of Rome, so Adrian, by the Bull which is the stumbling-block of Irish Catholics, granted Ireland to Henry upon condition of his reforming, that is, Romanizing, its primitive and schismatic Church. Ecclesiastical intrigue had already been working in the same direction, and had in some measure prepared the way for the conqueror by disposing the heads of the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the Norman soldiery, and the formal submission of their chiefs was easily extorted, the conquest was neither complete nor final. In their hills and bogs the wandering Septs easily evaded the Norman arms. The Irish Channel was wide; the road lay through North Wales, long unsubdued, and, even when subdued, mutinous, and presenting natural obstacles to the passage of heavy troops; the centre of Anglo-Norman power was far away in the south-east of England, and the force of the monarchy was either attracted to Continental fields or absorbed by struggles with baronial factions. Richard II., coming to a throne which had been strengthened and exalted by the achievements of his grandfather, seems in one of his moods of fitful ambition to have conceived the design of completing the conquest of Ireland, and he passed over with a great power; but his fate showed that the arm of the monarchy was still too short to reach the dependency without losing hold upon the imperial country. As a rule, the subjugation of Ireland during the period before the Tudors was in effect left to private enterprise, which of course confined its efforts to objects of private gain, and never thought of undertaking the systematic subjugation of native fortresses in the interest of order and civilization. Instead of a national aristocracy the result was a military colony or Pale, between the inhabitants of which and the natives raged a perpetual border war, as savage as that between the settlers at the Cape and the Kaffirs, or that between the American frontierman and the Red Indian. The religious quarrel was and has always been secondary in importance to the struggle of the races for the land. In the period following the conquest it was the Pale that was distinctively Romanist; but when at the Reformation the Pale became Protestant the natives, from antagonism of race, became more intensely Catholic, and were drawn into the league of Catholic powers on the Continent, in which they suffered the usual fate of the dwarf who goes to battle with the giant. By the strong monarchy of the Tudors the conquest of Ireland was completed with circumstances of cruelty sufficient to plant undying hatred in the breasts of the people. But the struggle for the land did not end there, instead of the form of conquest it took that of confiscation, and was waged by the intruder with the arms of legal chicane. In the form of eviction it has lasted to the present hour; and eviction in Ireland is not like eviction in England, where great manufacturing cities receive and employ the evicted; it is starvation or exile. Into exile the Irish people have gone by millions, and thus, though neither maritime nor by nature colonists, they have had a great share in the peopling of the New World. The cities and railroads of the United States are to a great extent the monuments of their labour. In the political sphere they have retained the weakness produced by ages of political serfage, and are still the debris of broken clans, with little about them of the genuine republican, apt blindly to follow the leader who stands to them as a chief, while they are instinctively hostile to law and government as their immemorial oppressors in their native land. British statesmen, when they had conceded Catholic emancipation and afterwards Disestablishment, may have fancied that they had removed the root of the evil. But the real root was not touched till Parliament took up the question of the land, and effected a compromise which may perhaps have to be again revised before complete pacification is attained.

In another way geography has exercised a sinister influence on the fortunes of Ireland. Closely approaching Scotland, the northern coast of Ireland in course of time invited Scotch immigration, which formed as it were a Presbyterian Pale. If the antagonism between the English Episcopalian and the Irish Catholic was strong, that between the Scotch Presbyterian and the Irish Catholic was stronger. To the English Episcopalian the Irish Catholic was a barbarian and a Romanist; to the Scotch Presbyterian he was a Canaanite and an idolater. Nothing in history is more hideous than the conflict in the north of Ireland in the time of Charles I. This is the feud which has been tenacious enough of its evil life to propagate itself even in the New World, and to renew in the streets of Canadian cities the brutal and scandalous conflicts which disgrace Belfast. On the other hand, through the Scotch colony, the larger island has a second hold upon the smaller. Of all political projects a federal union of England and Ireland with separate Parliaments under the same Crown seems the most hopeless, at least if government is to remain parliamentary; it may be safely said that the normal relation between the two Parliaments would be collision, and collision on a question of peace or war would be disruption. But an independent Ireland might be a feasible as well as natural object of Irish aspiration if it were not for the strength, moral as well as numerical, of the two intrusive elements. How could the Catholic majority be restrained from legislation which the Protestant minority would deem oppressive? And how could the Protestant minority, being as it is more English or Scotch than Irish, be restrained from stretching its hands to England or Scotland for aid? It is true that if scepticism continues to advance at its present rate, the lines of religious separation may be obliterated or become too faint to exercise a great practical influence, and the bond of the soil may then prevail. But the feeling against England which is the strength of Irish Nationalism is likely to subside at the same time.

Speculation on unfulfilled contingencies is not invariably barren. It is interesting at all events to consider what would have been the consequences to the people of the two islands, and humanity generally, if a Saxon England and a Celtic Ireland had been allowed to grow up and develop by the side of each other untouched by Norman conquest. In the case of Ireland we should have been spared centuries of oppression which has profoundly reacted, as oppression always does, on the character of the oppressor; and it is difficult to believe that the Isle of Saints and of primitive Universities would not have produced some good fruits of its own. In the Norman conquest of England historical optimism sees a great political and intellectual blessing beneath the disguise of barbarous havoc and alien tyranny. The Conquest was the continuation of the process of migratory invasions by which the nations of modern Europe were founded, from restless ambition and cupidity, when it had ceased to be beneficent. It was not the superposition of one primitive element of population on another, to the ultimate advantage, possibly, of the compound; but the destruction of a nationality, the nationality of Alfred and Harold, of Bede and AElfric. The French were superior in military organization; that they had superior gifts of any kind, or that their promise was higher than that of the native English, it would not be easy to prove. The language, we are told, is enriched by the intrusion of the French element. If it was enriched it was shattered; and the result is a mixture so heterogeneous as to be hardly available for the purposes of exact thought, while the language of science is borrowed from the Greek, and as regards the unlearned mass of the people is hardly a medium of thought at all. There are great calamity in history, though their effects may in time be worked off, and they may be attended by some incidental good. Perhaps the greatest calamity in history were the wars of Napoleon, in which some incidental good may nevertheless be found.

To the influences of geographical position, soil, and race is to be added, to complete the account of the physical heritage, the influence of climate. But in the case of the British Islands we must speak not of climate, but of climates, for within the compass of one small realm are climates moist and comparatively dry, warm and cold, bracing and enervating, the results of special influences the range of which is limited. Civilized man to a great extent makes a climate for himself; his life in the North is spent mainly indoors, where artificial heat replaces the sun. The idea which still haunts us, that formidable vigour and aptitude for conquest are the appanage of Northern races, is a survival from the state in which the rigour of nature selected and hardened the destined conquerors of the Roman Empire. The stoves of St. Petersburg are as enervating as the sun of Naples, and in the struggle between the Northern and Southern States of America not the least vigorous soldiers were those who came from Louisiana. In the barbarous state the action of a Northern climate as a force of natural selection must be tremendous. Of the races which peopled the British Islands the most important had already undergone that action in their original abodes. They would, however, still feel the beneficent influence of a climate on the whole eminently favourable to health and to activity; bracing, yet not so rigorous as to kill those tender plants of humanity which often bear in them the most precious germs of civilization, neither confining the inhabitant too much to the shelter of his dwelling, nor, as the suns of the South are apt to do, drawing him too much from home. The climate and the soil together formed a good school for the character of the young nation, as they exacted the toil of the husbandman and rewarded it. Of the varieties of temperature and weather within the island the national character still bears the impress, though in a degree always decreasing as the assimilating agencies of civilization make their way. Irrespectively of the influence of special employments, and perhaps even of peculiarity of race, mental vigour, independence, and reasoning power are always ascribed to the people of the North. Variety, in this as in other respects, would naturally produce a balance of tendencies in the nation conductive to moderation and evenness of progress.

The islands are now the centre of an Empire which to some minds seems more important than the islands themselves. An empire it is called, but the name is really applicable only to India. The relation of England to her free colonies is not in the proper sense of the term imperial, while her relation to such dependencies as Gibraltar and Malta is military alone. Colonization is the natural and entirely beneficent result of general causes, obvious enough and already mentioned, including that power of self-government, fostered by the circumstances of the colonizing country, which made the character and destiny of New England so different from those of New France.

Equally natural was the choice of the situation for the original colonies on the shore of the New World. The foundation of the Australian Colonies, on the other hand, was determined by political accident, compensation for the loss of the American Colonies being sought on the other side of the globe. It will perhaps be thought hereafter that the quarrel with New England was calamitous in its consequences as well as in itself, since it led to the diversion of British emigration from America, where it supplied, in a democracy of mixed but not uncongenial races, the necessary element of guidance and control, to Australia, where, as there must be a limit to its own multiplication, it may hereafter have to struggle for mastery with swarming multitudes of Chinese, almost as incurable of incorporation with it as the negro. India and the other conquered dependencies are the fruits of strength as a war power at sea combined with weakness on land. Though not so generally noticed, the second of these two factors has not been less operative than the first. Chatham attacked France in her distant dependencies when he had failed to make any impression on her own coasts. Still more clearly was Chatham's son, the most incapable of war ministers, driven to the capture of sugar islands by his inability to take part, otherwise than by subsidies, in the decisive struggle on the Continental fields. This may deserve the attention of those who do not think it criminal to examine the policy of Empire. Outlying pawns picked up by a feeble chessplayer merely because he could not mate the king do not at first sight necessarily commend themselves as invaluable possessions. Carthage and Venice were merely great commercial cities, which, when they entered on a career of conquest, were compelled at once to form armies of mercenaries, and to incur all the evil consequences by which the employment of those vile and fatal instruments of ambition is attended. England being, not a commercial city, but a nation, and a nation endowed with the highest military qualities, has escaped the fell necessity except in the case of India; and India, under the reign of the Company, and even for some time after its legal annexation to the Crown, was regarded and treated almost as a realm in another planet, with an army, a political system, and a morality of its own. But now it appears that the wrongs of the Hindoo are going to be avenged, as the wrongs of the conquered have often been, by their moral effect upon the conqueror. A body of barbarian mercenaries has appeared upon the European scene as an integral part of the British army, while the reflex influence of Indian Empire upon the political character and tendencies of the imperial nation is too manifest to be any longer overlooked. England now stands where the paths divide, the one leading by industrial and commercial progress to increase of political liberty; the other, by a career of conquest, to the political results in which such a career has never yet failed to end. At present the influences in favour of taking the path of conquest seemed to preponderate, [Footnote: Written in 1878.] and the probability seems to be that the leadership of political progress, which has hitherto belonged to England and has constituted the special interest of her history, will, in the near future, pass into other hands.

THE GREAT DUEL OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

[Footnote: In this lecture free use has been made of recent writers— Mitchell, Chapman, Vehse, Freytag and Ranke, as well as of the older authorities. To Chapman's excellent Life of Gustavus Adolphus we are under special obligations. In some passages it has been closely followed. Colonel Mitchell has also supplied some remarks and touches, such as are to be found only in a military writer.]

AN EPISODE OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.

The Thirty Years' War is an old story, but its interest has been recently revived. The conflict between Austria and German Independence commenced in the struggle of the Protestant Princes against Charles V., and, continued on those battle-fields, was renewed and decided at Sadowa. At Sadowa Germany was fighting for unity as well as for independence. But in the Thirty Years' War it was Austria that with her Croats, the Jesuits who inspired her councils, and her Spanish allies, sought to impose a unity of death, against which Protestant Germany struggled, preserving herself for a unity of life which, opened by the victories of Frederick the Great, and, more nobly promoted by the great uprising of the nation against the tyranny of Napoleon, was finally accomplished at Sadowa, and ratified against French jealousy at Sedan. Costly has been the achievement; lavish has been the expenditure of German blood, severe the sufferings of the German people. It is the lot of all who aspire high—no man or nation ever was dandled into greatness.

The Thirty Years' War was a real world-contest. Austria and Spain drew after them all the powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. In the mines of Mexico and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the struggle, long remained the Public Law of Europe.

Half religious, half political, in its character, this war stands midway between the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the political wars of the eighteenth. France took the political view; and, while she crushed her own Huguenots at home, supported the German Protestants against the House of Austria. Even the Pope, Urban VIII., more politician than churchman, more careful of Peter's patrimony than of Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd the scene rise at least two grand forms.

In a military point of view, the Thirty Years' War will bear no comparison with that which has just run its marvellous course. The armies were small, seldom exceeding thirty thousand. Tilly thought forty thousand the largest number which a general could handle, while Von Moltke has handled half a million. There was no regular commissariat, there were no railroads, there were no good roads, there were no accurate maps, there was no trained staff. The general had to be everything and to do everything himself. The financial resources of the powers were small: their regular revenues soon failed; and they had to fly for loans to great banking houses, such as that of the Fuggers at Augsburgh, so that the money power became the arbiter even of Imperial elections. The country on which the armies lived was soon eaten up by their rapine. Hence the feebleness of the operations, the absence of anything which Von Moltke would call strategy: and hence again the cruel length of the war, a whole generation of German agony.

But if the war was weak, not so were the warriors. On the Imperial side especially, they were types of a class of men, the most terrible perhaps, as well as the vilest, who ever plied the soldier's trade: of those mercenary bands, soldados, in the literal and original sense of the term, free companions, condottieri, lansquenets, who came between the feudal militia and the standing armies of modern times. In the wars of Italy and the Low Countries, under Alva and Parma and Freundsberg, these men had opened new abysses of cruelty and lust in human nature. They were the lineal representatives of the Great Companies which ravaged France in the time of Edward III. They were near of kin to the buccaneers, and Scott's Bertram Risingham is the portrait of a lansquenet as well as of a rover of the Spanish Main. Many of them were Croats, a race well known through all history in the ranks of Austrian tyranny, and Walloons, a name synonymous with that of hired butcher and marauder.

But with Croats and Walloons were mingled Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, outcasts of every land, bearing the devil's stamp on faces of every complexion, blaspheming in all European and some non-European tongues. Their only country was the camp; their cause booty; their king the bandit general who contracted for their blood. Of attachment to religious principle they had usually just enough to make them prefer murdering and plundering in the name of the Virgin to murdering and plundering in the name of the Gospel, but outcasts of all nominal creeds were found together in their camps. Even the dignity of hatred was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour, embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of its articles the duel with all the forms—an improvement at any rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide the soldier's fate. Having no home but the camp, he carried with him his family, a she wolf and her cubs, cruel and marauding as himself; and the numbers and unwieldiness of every army were doubled by a train of waggons full of women and children sitting on heaps of booty. It was not, we may guess, as ministering angels that these women went among the wounded after a battle. The chiefs made vast fortunes. Common soldiers sometimes drew a great prize; left the standard for a time and lived like princes; but the fiend's gold soon found its way back to the giver through the Jews who prowled in the wake of war, or at the gambling table which was the central object in every camp. When fortune smiled, when pay was good, when a rich city had been stormed, the soldier's life was in its way a merry one; his camp was full of roystering revelry; he, his lady and his charger glittered with not over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city stoutly, when the money-kings refused to advance the war kings any more gold, the soldier shared the miseries which he inflicted, and, unless he was of iron, sank under his hardships, unpitied by his stronger comrades; for the rule of that world was woe to the weak. Terrible then were the mutinies. Fearful was the position of the commander. We cannot altogether resist the romance which attaches to the life of these men, many a one among whom could have told a tale as wild as that with which Othello, the hero of their tribe, won his Desdemona, in whose love he finds the countercharm of his wandering life. But what sort of war such a soldiery made, may be easily imagined. Its treatment of the people and the country wherever it marched, as minutely described by trustworthy witnesses, was literally fiendish. Germany did not recover the effects for two hundred years.

A century had passed since the first preaching of Luther. Jesuitism, working from its great seminary at Ingoldstadt, and backed by Austria, had won back many, especially among the princes and nobility, to the Church of Rome; but in the main the Germans, like the other Teutons, were still Protestant even in the hereditary domains of the House of Austria. The rival religions stood facing each other within the nominal unity of the Empire, in a state of uneasy truce and compromise, questions about ecclesiastical domains and religious privileges still open; formularies styled of concord proving formularies of discord; no mediating authority being able to make church authority and liberty of private judgment, Reaction and Progress, the Spirit of the Past and the Spirit of the Future lie down in real peace together. The Protestants had formed an Evangelical Union, their opponents a Catholic League, of which Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, a pupil of the Jesuits, was chief. The Protestants were ill prepared for the struggle. There was fatal division between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, Luther himself having said in his haste that he hated a Calvinist more than a Papist. The great Protestant princes were lukewarm and weak-kneed: like the Tudor nobility of England, they clung much more firmly to the lands which they had taken from the Catholics than to the faith in the name of which the lands were taken; and as powers of order, naturally alarmed by the disorders which attended the great religious revolution, they were politically inclined to the Imperial side. The lesser nobility and gentry, staunch Protestants for the most part, had shown no capacity for vigorous and united action since their premature attempt under Arnold Von Sickingen. On the peasantry, also staunch Protestants, still weighed the reaction produced by the Peasants' war and the excesses of the Anabaptists. In the free cities there was a strong burgher element ready to fight for Protestantism and liberty; but even in the free cities wealth was Conservative, and to the Rothschilds of the day the cause which offered high interest and good security was the cause of Heaven.

The smouldering fire burst into a flame in Bohemia, a kingdom of the House of Austria, and a member of the Empire, but peopled by hot, impulsive Sclavs, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their Protestant faith—Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed along the electric chain of common universities by which mediaeval Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the Hussite war. In that romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St. John Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay in jealous neighbourhood, Protestantism supported by the native nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II., the Protestants had obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor, Ferdinand II., was the Philip II. of Germany in bigotry, though not in cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life. He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal, and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian kings, Martiniz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures, were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion, and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc. Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as Jesuitism averred,—as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance, of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him. Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was hope in resistance, yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor quelled his scruples. Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp, the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty- four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the more far-reaching eye of history it may seem to have been an assurance that, dark as the sky then was, the flood of Reaction should no more cover the earth. But dark the sky was: the counter-reformation rode on the wings of victory, and with ruthless cruelty, through Bohemia, through Moravia, through Austria Proper, which had shown sympathy with the Bohemian revolt. The lands of the Protestant nobility were confiscated, the nobility itself crushed; in its place was erected a new nobility of courtiers, foreigners, military adventurers devoted to the Empire and to Catholicism, the seed of the Metternichs.

For ten years the tide ran steadily against Protestantism and German Independence. The Protestants were without cohesion, without powerful chiefs. Count Mansfeldt was a brilliant soldier, with a strong dash of the robber. Christian of Brunswick was a brave knight errant, fighting, as his motto had it, for God and for Elizabeth of Bohemia. But neither of them had any great or stable force at his back, and if a ray of victory shone for a moment on their standards, it was soon lost in gloom. In Frederick, ex-king of Bohemia, was no help; and his charming queen could only win for him hearts like that of Christian of Brunswick. The great Protestant Princes of the North, Saxony and Brandenburgh, twin pillars of the cause that should have been, were not only lukewarm, timorous, superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was divided in will, the nation being enthusiastically for Protestantism and Elizabeth of Bohemia, while the Court leant to the side of order and hankered after the Spanish marriage. France was not divided in will: her single will was that of Richelieu, who, to weaken Austria, fanned the flame of civil war in Germany, as he did in England, but lent no decisive aid. Bethlem Gabor, the Evangelical Prince of Transylvania, led semi- barbarous hosts, useful as auxiliaries, but incapable of bearing the main brunt of the struggle; and he was trammelled by his allegiance to his suzerain, the Sultan. The Catholic League was served by a first-rate general in the person of Tilly; the Empire by a first-rate general and first-rate statesman in the person of Wallenstein. The Palatinate was conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth, restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the last seventy years. Over all Germany, Jesuits and Capuchins swarmed with the mandates of reaction in their hands. The King of Denmark tardily took up arms only to be overthrown by Tilly at Lutter, and again at Wolgast by Wallenstein. The Catholic and Imperial armies were on the northern seas. Wallenstein, made Admiral of the Empire, was preparing a basis of maritime operations against the Protestant kingdoms of Scandinavia, against the last asylum of Protestantism and Liberty in Holland. Germany, with all its intellect and all its hopes, was on the point of becoming a second Spain. Teutonism was all but enslaved to the Croat. The double star of the House of Austria seemed with baleful aspect to dominate in the sky, and to threaten with extinction European liberty and progress. One bright spot alone remained amidst the gloom. By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn, in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe, of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed at Penemunde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to give thanks to God for his safe passage; then showed at once his knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp. Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause, hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in general character and habits of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations were discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age could be, a school of humanity and self-control. In religion he was himself not an ascetic saint, there is one light passage at least in his early life: and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is still struck with the prayer and hymn which open and close the march of the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.

Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that age, wrote of Gustavus to James I.—"The king hath solemnly protested that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase), and glory will contend with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were fitted for the times. Certainly, ambit fortunam Caesaris: he thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige prosperity."

Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a technical casus belli. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it.

"A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and diplomacy, that his melting would be slow. Richelieu at last ventured on a treaty of alliance. Charles I., now on the throne of England, and angry at having been jilted by Spain, also entered into a treaty, and sent British auxiliaries, who, though soon reduced in numbers by sickness, always formed a substantial part of the armies of Gustavus, and in battle and storm earned their full share of the honour of his campaigns. Many British volunteers had already joined the standard of Mansfeldt and other Protestant chiefs; and if some of these men were mere soldiers of the Dugald Dalghetty type, some were the Garibaldians of their day, and brought back at once enthusiasm and military skill from German battlefields to Marston and Naseby. Diplomacy, aided by a little gentle pressure, drew Saxony and Brandenburgh to the better cause, now that the better cause was so strong. But while they dallied and haggled one more great disaster was added to the sum of Protestant calamity. Magdeburgh, the queen of Protestant cities, the citadel of North German liberty, fell—fell with Gustavus and rescue near—and nameless atrocities were perpetrated by the ferocious bands of the Empire on innocents of all ages and both sexes, whose cry goes up against bloodthirsty fanaticism for ever. A shriek of horror rang through the Protestant world, not without reproaches against Gustavus, who cleared himself by words, and was soon to clear himself better by deeds.

Count Tilly was now in sole command on the Catholic and Imperial side. Wallenstein had been dismissed. A military Richelieu, an absolutist in politics, an indifferentist in religion, caring at least for the religious quarrel only as it affected the political question, he aimed at crushing the independence of all the princes, Catholic as well as Protestant, and making the Emperor, or rather Wallenstein in the name of the Imperial devotee, as much master of Germany as the Spanish king was of Spain. But the disclosure of this policy, and the towering pride of its author had alarmed the Catholic princes, and produced a reaction similar to that caused by the absolutist encroachments of Charles V. Aided by the Jesuits, who marked in Wallenstein a statesman whose policy was independent of theirs, and who, if not a traitor to the faith, was at least a bad persecutor, Maximilian and his confederates forced the Emperor to remove Wallenstein from command. The great man received the bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality, showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian over Ferdinand, slightly glanced at the Emperor's weakness, then withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded, so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the dagger. There he lay, watching the storm that gathered in the North, scanning the stars and waiting for his hour.

When the Swedes and Saxons, under Gustavus and the Elector of Saxony, drew near to the Imperial army under Tilly, in the neighbourhood of Leipsic, there was a crisis, a thrill of worldwide expectation, as when the Armada approached the shores of England; as when the allies met the forces of Louis XIV. at Blenheim, as when, on those same plains of Leipsic, the uprisen nations advanced to battle against Napoleon. Count Tilly's military genius fell short only of the highest. His figure was one which showed that war had become a science, and that the days of the Paladins were past. He was a little old man, with a broad wrinkled forehead, hollow cheeks, a long nose and projecting chin, grotesquely attired in a slashed doublet of green satin, with a peaked hat and a long red feather hanging down behind. His charger was a grey pony, his only weapon a pistol, which it was his delight to say he had never fired in the thirty pitched fields which he had fought and won. He was a Walloon by birth, a pupil of the Jesuits, a sincere devotee, and could boast that he had never yielded to the allurements of wine or women, as well as that he had never lost a battle. His name was now one of horror, for he was the captor of Magdeburg, and if he had not commanded the massacre, or, as it was said, jested at it, he could not be acquitted of cruel connivance. That it was the death of his honour to survive the butchery which he ought to have died, if necessary, in resisting sword in hand, is a soldier's judgment on his case. At his side was Pappenheim, another pupil of the Jesuits, the Dundee of the thirty years' war, with all the devotion, all the loyalty, all the ferocity of the Cavalier, the most fiery and brilliant of cavalry officers, the leader of the storming column at Magdeburg.

In those armies the heavy cavalry was the principal arm. The musket was an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had introduced a more open order—he had lightened the musket, dispensed with the rest, given the musketeer a cartridge box instead of the flapping bandoleer. He had trained his cavalry, instead of firing their carbines and wheeling, to charge home with the sword. He had created a real field artillery of imperfect structure, but which told on the Imperial masses.

The harvest had been reaped, and a strong wind blew clouds of dust over the bare autumn fields, when Count Tilly formed the victorious veterans of the Empire, in what was called Spanish order—infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks—upon a rising ground overlooking the broad plain of Breitenfeldt. On him marched the allies in two columns—Gustavus with the Swedes upon the right, the Elector with his Saxons on the left. As they passed a brook in front of the Imperial position, Pappenheim dashed upon them with his cavalry, but was driven back, and the two columns deployed upon the plain. The night before the battle Gustavus had dreamt that he was wrestling with Tilly, and that Tilly bit him in the left arm, but that he overpowered Tilly with his right arm. That dream came through the Gate of Horn, for the Saxons who formed the left wing were raw troops, but victory was sure to the Swede. Soldiers of the old school proudly compare the shock of charging armies at Leipsic with modern battles, which they call battles of skirmishers with armies in reserve. However this may be, all that day the plain of Breitenfeldt was filled with the fierce eddies of a hand-to-hand struggle between mail- clad masses, their cuirasses and helmets gleaming fitfully amidst the clouds of smoke and dust, the mortal shock of the charge and the deadly ring of steel striking the ear with a distinctness impossible in modern battle. Tilly with his right soon shattered the Saxons, but his centre and left were shattered by the unconquerable Swede. The day was won by the genius of the Swedish king, by the steadiness with which his troops manoeuvred, and the promptness with which they formed a new front when the defeat of the Saxons exposed their left, by the rapidity of their fire and by the vigour with which their cavalry charged. The victory was complete. At sunset four veteran Walloon regiments made a last stand for the honour of the Empire, and with difficulty bore off their redoubtable commander from his first lost field. Through all Protestant Europe flew the tidings of a great deliverance and the name of a great deliverer.

On to Vienna cried hope and daring then. On to Vienna; history still regretfully repeats the cry. Gustavus judged otherwise—and whatever his reason was we may be sure it was not weak. Not to the Danube therefore but to the Main and Rhine the tide of conquest rolled. The Thuringian forest gleams with fires that guide the night march of the Swede. Frankfort the city of empire opens her gates to him who will soon come as the hearts of all men divine not as a conqueror in the iron garb of war but as the elect of Germany to put on the imperial crown. In the cellars of the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wurtzburg the rich wine is broached for heretic lips. Protestantism everywhere uplifts its head, the Archbishop of Mainz, chief of the Catholic persecutors becomes a fugitive in his turn. Jesuit and Capuchin must cower or fly. All fortresses are opened by the arms of Gustavus, all hearts are opened by his gracious manner, his winning words, his sunny smile. To the people accustomed to a war of massacre and persecution he came as from a better world a spirit of humanity and toleration. His toleration was politic no doubt but it was also sincere. So novel was it that a monk finding himself not butchered or tortured thought the king's faith must be weak and attempted his conversion. His zeal was repaid with a gracious smile. Once more on the Lech Tilly crossed the path of the thunderbolt. Dishonoured at Magdeburg, defeated at Leipsic, the old man seems to have been weary of life, his leg shattered by a cannon hall he was borne dying from the field and left the Imperial cause headless as well as beaten. Gustavus is in Augsburgh, the queen of German commerce, the city of the Fuggers with their splendid and romantic money kingdom, the city of the Confession. He is in Munich, the capital of Maximilian and the Catholic League. His allies the Saxons are in Prague. A few marches more and he will dictate peace at Vienna with all Germany at his back. A few marches more the Germans will be a Protestant nation under a Protestant chief and many a dark page will be torn from the book of fate.

Ferdinand and Maximilian had sought counsel of the dying Tilly. Tilly had given them counsel bitter but inevitable. Dissembling their hate and fear they called like trembling necromancers when they invoke the fiend upon the name of power. The name of Wallenstein gave new life to the Imperial cause under the very ribs of death. At once he stood between the Empire and destruction with an army of 50,000 men, conjured, as it were, out of the earth by the spell of his influence alone. All whose trade was war came at the call of the grand master of their trade. The secret of Wallenstein's ambition is buried in his grave, but the man himself was the prince of adventurers, the ideal chief of mercenary bands, the arch contractor for the hireling's blood. His character was formed in a vast political gambling house, a world given up to pillage and the strong hand, an Eldorado of confiscations. Of the lofty dreamer portrayed in the noble dramatic poem of Schiller, there is little trace in the intensely practical character of the man. A scion of a good Bohemian house, poor himself, but married to a rich wife, whose wealth was the first step in the ladder of his marvellous fortunes, Wallenstein had amassed immense domains by the purchase of confiscated estates, a traffic redeemed from meanness only by the vastness of the scale on which he practised it, and the loftiness of the aim which he had in view. Then he took to raising and commanding mercenary troops, improving on his predecessors in that trade by doubling the size of his army, on the theory, coolly avowed by him, that a large army would subsist by its command of the country, where a small army would starve. But all was subservient to his towering ambition, and to a pride which has been called theatrical, and which often wore an eccentric garb, but which his death scene proves to have been the native grand infirmity of the man. He walked in dark ways and was unscrupulous and ruthless when on the path of his ambition; but none can doubt the self sustaining force of his lonely intellect, his power of command, the spell which his character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince- Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies of the House of Austria,—to this height had the landless and obscure adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains and hearts were strong. Highest he stood among the uncrowned heads of Europe, and dreaded by the crowned. We wonder how the boisterous soldiers can have loved a chief who was so far from being a comrade, a being so disdainful and reserved, who at the sumptuous table kept by his officers never appeared, never joined in the revelry, even in the camp lived alone, punished intrusion on his haughty privacy as a crime. But his name was victory and plunder; he was lavishly munificent, as one who knew that those who play a deep game must lay down heavy stakes, his eye was quick to discern, his hand prompt to reward the merit of the buccaneer; and those who followed his soaring fortunes knew that they would share them. If he was prompt to reward, he was also stern in punishment, and a certain arbitrariness both in reward and punishment made the soldier feel that the commander's will was law. If Wallenstein was not the boon companion of the mercenaries, he was their divinity, and he was himself essentially one of them—even his superstition was theirs, and filled the same void of faith in his as in their hearts; though, while the common soldier raised the fiend to charm bullets, or bought spells and amulets of a quack at Nuremburg or Augsburg, Seni, the first astrologer of the age, explored the sympathizing stars for the august destiny of the Duke of Friedland. Like Uriel and Satan in Paradise Lost, Gustavus and Wallenstein stood opposed to each other. On one side was the enthusiast, on the other the mighty gamester, playing the great game of his life without emotion, by intensity of thought alone. On one side was the crusader, on the other the indifferentist, without faith except in his star. On the one side was as much good, perhaps, as has ever appeared in the form of a conqueror, on the other side the majesty of evil. Gustavus was young, his frame was vigorous and active, though inclined to corpulence, his complexion fair, his hair golden, his eye blue and merry, his countenance frank as day, and the image of a heart which had felt the kindest influences of love and friendship. Wallenstein was past his prime, his frame was tall, spare, somewhat bowed by pain, his complexion dark, his eye black and piercing, his look that of a man who trod slippery paths with deadly rivals at his side, and of whose many letters not one is to a friend. But, opposites in all else, the two champions were well matched in power. Perhaps there is hardly such another duel in history. Such another there would have been if Strafford had lived to encounter Cromwell.

The market for the great adventurer's services having risen so high, the price which he asked was large—a principality in hand, a province to be conquered, supreme command of the army which he had raised. The court suggested that if the emperor's son, the King of Hungary, were put over Wallenstein's head, his name would be a tower of strength, but Wallenstein answered with a blasphemous frankness which must have made the ears of courtiers tingle. He would be emperor of the army; he would be emperor in the matter of confiscations. The last article shows how he won the soldier's heart. Perhaps in framing his terms, he gave something to his wounded pride. If he did, the luxury cost him dear, for here he trod upon the serpent that stung his life.

The career of Gustavus was at once arrested, and he took shelter against the storm in an entrenched camp protected by three hundred cannon under the walls of Nuremberg—Nuremberg the eldest daughter of the German Reformation, the Florence of Germany in art, wealth and freedom, then the beautiful home of early commerce, now its romantic tomb. The desolation of her grass-grown streets dates from that terrible day. The Swedish lines were scarcely completed when Wallenstein appeared with all his power, and sweeping past, entrenched himself four miles from his enemy in a position the key of which were the wooded hill and old castle of the Altenberg. Those who chance to visit that spot may fancy there Wallenstein's camp as it is in Schiller, ringing with the boisterous revelry of its wild and motley bands. And they may fancy the sudden silence, the awe of men who knew no other awe, as in his well-known dress, the laced buff coat with crimson scarf, and the grey hat with crimson plume, Wallenstein rode by. Week after week and month after month these two heavy clouds of war hung close together, and Europe looked for the bursting of the storm. But famine was to do Wallenstein's work; and by famine and the pestilence, bred by the horrible state of the camp, at last his work was done. The utmost limit of deadly inaction for the Swedes arrived. Discipline and honour gave way, and could scarcely be restored by the passionate eloquence of Gustavus. Oxenstiern brought large reinforcements; and on the 24th August Wallenstein saw— with grim pleasure he must have seen—Gustavus advancing to attack him in his lines. By five hundred at a time—there was room for no more in the narrow path of death—the Swedes scaled the flashing and thundering Altenberg. They scaled it again and again through a long summer's day. Once it was all but won. But at evening the Nurembergers saw their hero and protector retiring, for the first time defeated, from the field. Yet Gustavus had not lost the confidence of his soldiers. He had shared their danger and had spared their blood. In ten hours' hard fighting he had lost only 2,000 men. But Wallenstein might well shower upon his wounded soldiers the only balm for the wounds of men fighting without a country or a cause. He might well write to the emperor: "The King of Sweden has blunted his horns a good deal. Henceforth the title of Invincible belongs not to him, but to your Majesty." No doubt Ferdinand thought it did.

Gustavus now broke up and marched on Bavaria, abandoning the great Protestant city, with the memory of Magdeburg in his heart. But Nuremberg was not to share the fate of Magdeburg. The Imperial army was not in a condition to form the siege. It had suffered as much as that of Gustavus. That such troops should have been held together in such extremity proves their general's power of command. Wallenstein soon gladdened the eyes of the Nurembergers by firing his camp, and declining to follow the lure into Bavaria, marched on Saxony, joined another Imperial army under Pappenheim and took Leipsic.

To save Saxony Gustavus left Bavaria half conquered. As he hurried to the rescue, the people on his line of march knelt to kiss the hem of his garment, the sheath of his delivering sword, and could scarcely be prevented from adoring him as a god. His religious spirit was filled with a presentiment that the idol in which they trusted would be soon laid low. On the 14th of November he was leaving a strongly entrenched camp, at Naumberg, where the Imperialists fancied, the season being so far advanced, he intended to remain, when news reached his ear like the sight which struck Wellington's eye as it ranged over Marmont's army on the morning of Salamanca. [Footnote: We owe the parallel, we believe, to an article by Lord Ellesmere, in the Quarterly Review.] The impetuous Pappenheim, ever anxious for separate command, had persuaded an Imperial council of war to detach him with a large force against Halle. The rest of the Imperialists, under Wallenstein, were quartered in the villages around Lutzen, close within the king's reach, and unaware of his approach. "The Lord," cried Gustavus, "has delivered him into my hand," and at once he swooped upon his prey.

"Break up and march with every man and gun. The enemy is advancing hither. He is already at the pass by the hollow road." So wrote Wallenstein to Pappenheim. The letter is still preserved, stained with Pappenheim's life-blood. But, in that mortal race, Pappenheim stood no chance. Halle was a long day's march off, and the troopers, whom Pappenheim could lead gallantly, but could not control, after taking the town had dispersed to plunder. Yet the Swede's great opportunity was lost. Lutzen, though in sight, proved not so near as flattering guides and eager eyes had made it. The deep-banked Rippach, its bridge all too narrow for the impetuous columns, the roads heavy from rain, delayed the march. A skirmish with some Imperial cavalry under Isolani wasted minutes when minutes were years; and the short November day was at an end when the Swede reached the plain of Lutzen.

No military advantage marks the spot where the storm overtook the Duke of Friedland. He was caught like a traveller in a tempest off a shelterless plain, and had nothing for it but to bide the brunt. What could be done with ditches, two windmills, a mud wall, a small canal, he did, moving from point to point during the long night; and before morning all his troops, except Pappenheim's division, had come in and were in line.

When the morning broke a heavy fog lay on the ground. Historians have not failed to remark that there is a sympathy in things, and that the day was loath to dawn which was to be the last day of Gustavus. But if Nature sympathized with Gustavus, she chose a bad mode of showing her sympathy, for while the fog prevented the Swedes from advancing, part of Pappenheim's corps arrived. After prayers, the king and all his army sang Luther's hymn, "Our God is a strong tower"—the Marseillaise of the militant Reformation. Then Gustavus mounted his horse, and addressed the different divisions, adjuring them by their victorious name, by the memory of the Breitenfeld, by the great cause whose issue hung upon their swords, to fight well for that cause, for their country and their God. His heart was uplifted at Lutzen, with that Hebrew fervour which uplifted the heart of Cromwell at Dunbar. Old wounds made it irksome to him to wear a cuirass. "God," he said, "shall be my armour this day".

Wallenstein has been much belied if he thought of anything that morning more religious than the order of battle, which has been preserved, drawn up by his own hand, and in which his troops are seen still formed in heavy masses, in contrast to the lighter formations of Gustavus. He was carried down his lines in a litter being crippled by gout, which the surgeons of that day had tried to cure by cutting into the flesh. But when the action began, he placed his mangled foot in a stirrup lined with silk, and mounted the small charger, the skin of which is still shown in the deserted palace of his pride. We may be sure that confidence sat undisturbed upon his brow; but in his heart he must have felt that though he had brave men around him, the Swedes, fighting for their cause under their king, were more than men; and that in the balance of battle then held out, his scale had kicked the beam. There can hardly be a harder trial for human fortitude than to command in a great action on the weaker side. Villeneuve was a brave man, though an unfortunate admiral, but he owned that his heart sank within him at Trafalgar when he saw Nelson bearing down.

"God with us," was the Swedish battle cry. On the other side the words "Jesu-Maria" passed round, as twenty-five thousand of the most godless and lawless ruffians the world ever saw, stood to the arms which they had imbrued in the blood not of soldiers only, but of women and children of captured towns. Doubtless many a wild Walloon and savage Croat, many a fierce Spaniard and cruel Italian, who had butchered and tortured at Magdeburg, was here come to bite the dust. These men were children of the camp and the battlefield, long familiar with every form of death, yet, had they known what a day was now before them, they might have felt like a recruit on the morning of his first field. Some were afterwards broken or beheaded for misconduct before the enemy; others earned rich rewards. Most paid, like men of honour, the price for which they were allowed to glut every lust and revel in every kind of crime.

At nine the sky began to clear, straggling shots told that the armies were catching sight of each other, and a red glare broke the mist, where the Imperialists had set fire to Lutzen to cover their right. At ten Gustavus placed himself at the head of his cavalry. War has now changed; and the telescope is the general's sword. Yet we cannot help feeling that the gallant king, who cast in his own life with the lives of the peasants he had drawn from their Swedish homes, is a nobler figure than the great Emperor who, on the same plains, two centuries afterwards, ordered to their death the masses of youthful valour sent by a ruthless conscription to feed the vanity of a heart of clay. The Swedes, after the manner of war in that fierce and hardy age, fell at once with their main force on the whole of the Imperial line. On the left, after a murderous struggle, they gained ground and took the enemy's guns. But on the right the Imperialists held firm, and while Gustavus was carrying victory with him to that quarter, Wallenstein restored the day upon the right. Again Gustavus hurried to that part of the field. Again the Imperialists gave way, and Gustavus, uncovering his head, thanked God for his victory. At this moment it seems the mist returned. The Swedes were confused and lost their advantage. A horse, too well known, ran riderless down their line, and when their cavalry next advanced, they found the stripped and mangled body of their king. According to the most credible witness, Gustavus who had galloped forward to see how his advantage might be best followed up, got too near the enemy, was shot first in the arm, then in the back, and fell from his horse. A party of Imperial cuirassiers came up, and learning from the wounded man himself who he was, finished the work of death. They then stripped the body for proofs of their great enemy's fate and relics of the mighty slain. Dark reports of treason were spread abroad, and one of these reports followed the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg, who was with Gustavus that day, through his questionable life to his unhappy end. In those times a great man could scarcely die without suspicion of foul play, and in all times men are unwilling to believe that a life on which the destiny of a cause or a nation hangs can be swept away by the blind, indiscriminate hand of common death.

Gustavus dead, the first thought of his officers was retreat; and that thought was his best eulogy. Their second thought was revenge. Yet so great was the discouragement that one Swedish colonel refused to advance, and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar cut him down with his own hand. Again the struggle began, and with all the morning's fury. Wallenstein had used his respite well. He knew that his great antagonist was dead, and that he was now the master-spirit on the field. And with friendly night near, and victory within his grasp, he directed in person the most desperate combat, prodigal of the life on which, according to his enemies, his treasonable projects hung. Yet the day was again going against him, when the remainder of Pappenheim's corps arrived, and the road was once more opened to victory by a charge which cost Pappenheim his own life. At four o'clock the battle was at its last gasp. The carnage had been fearful on both sides, and as fearful was the exhaustion. For six hours almost every man in both armies had borne the terrible excitement of mortal combat with pike and sword; and four times that excitement had been strained by general charges to its highest pitch. The Imperialists held their ground, but confused and shattered; their constancy sustained only by that commanding presence which still moved along their lines, unhurt, grazed and even marked by the storm of death through which he rode. Just as the sun was setting, the Swedes made the supreme effort which heroism alone can make. Then Wallenstein gave the signal for retreat, welcome to the bravest, and as darkness fell upon the field, the shattered masses of the Imperialists drew off slowly and sullenly into the gloom. Slowly and sullenly they drew off, leaving nothing to the victor except some guns of position; but they had not gone far when they fell into the disorganization of defeat.

The judgment of a cause by battle is dreadful. Dreadful it must have seemed to all who were within sight or hearing of the field of Lutzen when that battle was over. But it is not altogether irrational and blind. Providence does not visibly interpose in favour of the right. The stars in their courses do not now fight for the good cause. At Lutzen they fought against it. But the good cause is its own star. The strength given to the spirit of the Swedes by religious enthusiasm, the strength given to their bodies by the comparative purity of their lives, enabled them, when the bravest and hardiest ruffians were exhausted in spirit and body, to make that last effort which won the day.

Te Deum was sung at Vienna and Madrid, and with good reason. For Vienna and Madrid the death of Gustavus was better than any victory. For humanity, if the interests of humanity were not those of Vienna and Madrid, it was worse than any defeat. But for Gustavus himself, was it good to die glorious and stainless, but before his hour? Triumph and empire, it is said, might have corrupted the soul which up to that time had been so pure and true. It was, perhaps, well for him that he was saved from temptation. A deeper morality replies that what was bad for Gustavus' cause and for his kind, could not be good for Gustavus; and that whether he were to stand or fall in the hour of temptation, he had better have lived his time and done his work. We, with our small philosophy, can make allowance for the greater dangers of the higher sphere; and shall we arrogate to ourselves a larger judgment and ampler sympathies than we allow to God? Yet Gustavus was happy. Among soldiers and statesmen, if there is a greater, there is hardly a purer name. He had won not only honour but love, and the friend and comrade was as much bewailed as the deliverer and the king. In him his Sweden appeared for the first and last time with true glory on the scene of universal history. In him the spirit of the famous house of Vasa rose to the first heroic height. It was soon to mount to madness in Christina and Charles XII.

Not till a year had passed could Sweden bring herself to consign the remains of her Gustavus to the dust. Then came a hero's funeral, with pomp not unmeaning, with trophies not unbecoming the obsequies of a Christian warrior, and for mourners the sorrowing nations. In early youth Gustavus had loved the beautiful Ebba Brahe, daughter of a Swedish nobleman, and she had returned his love. But etiquette and policy interposed, and Gustavus married Eleanor, a princess of Brandenburg, also renowned for beauty. The widowed Queen of Gustavus, though she had loved him with a fondness too great for their perfect happiness, admitted his first love to a partnership in her grief, and sent Ebba with her own portrait the portrait of him who was gone where, if love still is, there is no more rivalry in love.

The death of Gustavus was the death of his great antagonist. Gustavus gone, Wallenstein was no longer indispensable, and he was far more formidable than ever. Lutzen had abated nothing either of his pride or power. He went forth again from Prague to resume command in almost imperial pomp. The army was completely in his hands. He negotiated as an independent power, and was carrying into effect a policy of his own, which seems to have been one of peace for the empire with amnesty and toleration, and which certainly crossed the policy of the Jesuits and Spain, now dominant in the Imperial councils. No doubt the great adventurer also intended that his own grandeur should be augmented and secured. Whether his proceedings gave his master just cause for alarm remains a mystery. The word, however, went forth against him, and in Austrian fashion, a friendly correspondence being kept up with him when he had been secretly deposed and his command transferred to another. Finding himself denounced and outlawed, he resolved to throw himself on the Swedes. He had arrived at Eger, a frontier fortress of Bohemia. It was a night apt for crime, dark and stormy, when Gordon, a Scotch Calvinist, in the Imperial service (for Wallenstein's camp welcomed adventurers of all creeds), and commandant of Eger, received the most faithful of Wallenstein's officers, Terzka, Kinsky, Illo and Neumann, at supper in the citadel. The social meal was over, the wine cup was going round; misgiving, if any misgiving there was, had yielded to comradeship and good cheer, when the door opened and death, in the shape of a party of Irish troopers, stalked in. The conspirators sprang from the side of their victims, and shouting, "Long live the Emperor," ranged themselves with drawn swords against the wall, while the assassins overturned the table and did their work. Wallenstein, as usual, was not at the banquet. He was, indeed, in no condition for revelry. Gout had shattered his stately form, reduced his bold handwriting to a feeble scrawl, probably shaken his powerful mind, though it could rally itself, as at Lutzen, for a decisive hour; and, perhaps, if his enemies could have waited, the course of nature might have spared them the very high price which they paid for his blood. He had just dismissed his astrologer, Seni, into whose mouth the romance of history does not fail to put prophetic warnings, his valet was carrying away the golden salver, on which his night draught had been brought to him, and he was about to lie down, when he was drawn to the window by the noise of Butler's regiment surrounding his quarters, and by the shrieks of the Countesses Terzka and Kinsky, who were wailing for their murdered husbands. A moment afterwards the Irish Captain Devereux burst into the room, followed by his fellow-assassins shouting, "Rebels, rebels!" Devereux himself, with a halbert in his hand, rushed up to Wallenstein, and cried, "Villain, you are to die!" True to his own majesty the great man spread out his arms, received the weapon in his breast, and fell dead without a word. But as thought at such moments is swift, no doubt he saw it all—saw the dark conclave of Italians and Spaniards sitting at Vienna—knew that the murderer before him was the hand and not the head—read at once his own doom and the doom of his grand designs for Germany and Friedland. His body was wrapped in a carpet, carried in Gordon's carriage to the citadel, and there left for a day with those of his murdered friends in the court-yard, then huddled into a hastily constructed coffin, the legs of the corpse being broken to force it in. Different obsequies from those of Gustavus, but perhaps equally appropriate, at least equally characteristic of the cause which the dead man served.

Did Friedland desire to be more than Friedland, to unite some shadow of command with the substance, to wear some crown of tinsel, as well as the crown of power? We do not know, we know only that his ways were dark, that his ambition was vast, and that he was thwarting the policy of the Jesuits and Spain. Great efforts were made in vain to get up a case against his memory; recourse was had to torture, the use of which always proves that no good evidence is forthcoming; absurd charges were included in the indictment, such as that of having failed to pursue and destroy the Swedish army after Lutzen. The three thousand masses which Ferdinand caused to be sung for Wallenstein's soul, whether they benefited his soul or not, have benefited his fame, for they seem like the weak self-betrayal of an uneasy conscience, vainly seeking to stifle infamy and appease the injured shade. Assassination itself condemns all who take part in it or are accomplices in it, and Ferdinand, who rewarded the assassins of Wallenstein, was at least an accomplice after the fact. Vast as Wallenstein's ambition was, even for him age and gout must have begun to close the possibilities of life, and he cannot have been made restless by the pangs of abortive genius, for he had played the grandest part upon the grandest stage. He had done enough, it would seem, to make repose welcome, and his retirement would not have been dull. Often in his letters his mind turns from the camp and council to his own domains, his rising palaces, his farms, his gardens, his schools, his manufactures, the Italian civilization which the student of Padua was trying to create in Bohemian wilds, the little empire in the administration of which he showed that he might have been a good Emperor on a larger scale. Against his Imperial master he is probably entitled at least to a verdict of not proven, and to the sympathy due to vast services requited by murder. Against accusing humanity his plea is far weaker, or rather he has no plea but one of extenuation. If there is a gloomy majesty about him the fascination of which we cannot help owning, if he was the noblest spirit that served evil, still it was evil that he served. The bandit hordes which he led were the scourges of the defenceless people, and in making war support war he set the evil example which was followed by Napoleon on a greater scale, and perhaps with more guilt, because in a more moral age. If in any measure he fell a martyr to a policy of toleration, his memory may be credited with the sacrifice. His toleration was that of indifference, not that of a Christian; yet the passages of his letters in which he pleads for milder methods of conversion, and claims for widows an exemption from the extremities of persecution, seem preserved by his better angel to shed a ray of brightness on his lurid name. Of his importance in history there can be no doubt. Take your stand on the battle field of Lutzen. To the North all was rescued by Gustavus, to the South all was held till yesterday by the darker genius of Wallenstein.

Like the mystic bark in the Mort d'Arthur, the ship which carried the remains of Gustavus from the German shore bore away heroism as well as the hero. Gustavus left great captains in Bernard of Weimar, Banner, Horn, Wrangel and Tortensohn; in the last, perhaps, a captain equal to himself. He left in Oxenstierna the greatest statesman and diplomatist of the age. But the guiding light, the grand aim, the ennobling influence were gone. The Swedes sank almost to the level of the vile element around, and a torture used by the buccaneers to extract confessions of hidden treasure bore the name of the Swedish draught. The last grand figure left the scene in Wallenstein. Nothing remained but mean ferocity and rapine, coarse filibustering among the soldiers, among the statesmen and diplomatists filibustering a little more refined. All high motives and interests were dead. The din of controversy which at the outset accompanied the firing of the cannon, and proved that the cannon was being fired in a great cause, had long since sunk into silence. Yet for fourteen years after the death of Wallenstein this soulless, aimless drama of horror and agony dragged on. Every part of Germany was repeatedly laid under heavy war contributions, and swept through by pillage, murder, rape and arson. For thirty years all countries, even those of the Cossack and the Stradiot, sent their worst sons to the scene of butchery and plunder. It may be doubted whether such desolation ever fell upon any civilized and cultivated country. When the war began Germany was rich and prosperous, full of smiling villages, of goodly cities, of flourishing universities, of active industry, of invention and discovery, of literature and learning, of happiness, of progress, of national energy and hope. At its close she was a material and moral wilderness. In a district, selected as a fair average specimen of the effects of the war, it is found that of the inhabitants three-fourths, of the cattle four-fifths had perished. For thirty years the husbandman never sowed with any confidence that he should reap; the seed-corn was no doubt often consumed by the reckless troopers or the starving peasantry; and if foreign countries had been able to supply food there were no railroads to bring it. The villages through whole provinces were burnt or pulled down to supply materials for the huts of the soldiery; the people hid themselves in dens and caves of the earth, took to the woods and mountains, where many of them remained swelling the multitude of brigands. When they could they wreaked upon the lansquenets a vengeance as dreadful as what they had suffered, and were thus degraded to the same level of ferocity. Moral life was broken up. The Germany of Luther with its order and piety and domestic virtue, with its old ways and customs, even with its fashions of dress and furniture, perished almost as though it had been swallowed by an earthquake. The nation would hardly have survived had it not been for the desperate tenacity with which the peasant clung to his own soil, and the efforts of the pastors, men of contracted views, of dogmatic habits of mind, and of a somewhat narrow and sour morality, but staunch and faithful in the hour of need, who continued to preach and pray amidst blackened ruins to the miserable remnants of their flocks, and sustained something of moral order and of social life.

Hence in the succeeding centuries, the political nullity of the German nation, the absence of any strong popular element to make head against the petty despotism of the princes, and launch Germany in the career of progress. Hence the backwardness and torpor of the Teutonic race in its original seat, while elsewhere it led the world. Hence, while England was producing Chathams and Burkes, Germany was producing the great musical composers. Hence when the movement came it was rather intellectual than political, rather a movement of the universities than of the nation.

At last, nothing being left for the armies to devour, the masters of the armies began to think of peace. The diplomatists went to work, and in true diplomatic fashion. Two years they spent in formalities and haggling, while Germany was swarming with disbanded lansquenets. It was then that old Oxenstierna said to his son, who had modestly declined an ambassadorship on the ground of inexperience, "Thou knowest not, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed." The object of all the parties to the negotiations was acquisition of territory at the expense of their neighbours, and the treaty of Westphalia, though, as we have said, it was long the Public Law of Europe, was an embodiment, not of principles of justice or of the rights of nations, but of the relative force and cunning of what are happily called the powers. France obtained, as the fruit of the diplomatic skill with which she had prolonged the agony of Germany, a portion of the territory which she has recently disgorged. The independence of Germany was saved; and though it was not a national independence, but an independence of petty despotisms, it was redemption from Austrian and Jesuit bondage for the present, with the hope of national independence in the future. When Gustavus broke the Imperial line at Lutzen, Luther and Loyola might have turned in their graves. Luther had still two centuries and a half to wait, so much difference in the course of history, in spite of all our philosophies and our general laws, may be made by an arrow shot at a venture, a wandering breath of pestilence, a random bullet, a wreath of mist lingering on one of the world's battlefields. But Luther has conquered at last. Would that he had conquered by other means than war— war with all its sufferings, with all its passions, with the hatred, the revenge, the evil pride which it leaves behind it. But he has conquered, and his victory opens a new and, so far as we can see, a happier era for Europe.

THE LAMPS OF FICTION

Spoken on the Centenary of the Birth of Sir Walter Scott

Ruskin has lighted seven lamps of Architecture, to guide the steps of the architect in the worthy practice of his art. It seems time that some lamps should be lighted to guide the steps of the writer of Fiction. Think what the influence of novelists now is, and how some of them use it! Think of the multitudes who read nothing but novels, and then look into the novels which they read! I have seen a young man's whole library consisting of thirty or forty of those paper-bound volumes, which are the bad tobacco of the mind. In England, I looked over three railway book-stalls in one day. There was hardly a novel by an author of any repute on one of them. They were heaps of nameless garbage, commended by tasteless, flaunting woodcuts, the promise of which was no doubt well kept within. Fed upon such food daily, what will the mind of a nation be? I say that there is no flame at which we can light the Lamp of Fiction purer or brighter than the genius of him in honour to whose memory we are assembled here to-day. Scott does not moralize. Heaven be praised that he does not. He does not set a moral object before him, nor lay down moral rules. But his heart, brave, pure and true, is a law to itself; and by studying what he does we may find the law for all who follow his calling. If seven lamps have been lighted for architecture, Scott will light as many for fiction.

I. The Lamp of Reality.—The novelist must ground his work in faithful study of human nature. There was a popular writer of romances, who, it was said, used to go round to the fashionable watering-places to pick up characters. That was better than nothing. There is another popular writer who, it seems, makes voluminous indices of men and things, and draws on them for his material. This also is better than nothing. For some writers, and writers dear to the circulating libraries too, might, for all that appeals in their works, lie in bed all day, and write by night under the excitement of green tea. Creative art, I suppose, they call this, and it is creative with a vengeance. Not so, Scott. The human nature which he paints, he had seen in all its phases, gentle and simple, in burgher and shepherd, Highlander, Lowlander, Borderer, and Islesman; he had come into close contact with it, he had opened it to himself by the talisman of his joyous and winning presence; he had studied it thoroughly with a clear eye and an all-embracing heart. When his scenes are laid in the past, he has honestly studied the history. The history of his novels is perhaps not critically accurate, not up to the mark of our present knowledge, but in the main it is sound and true—sounder and more true than that of many professed historians, and even than that of his own historical works, in which he sometimes yields to prejudice, while in his novels he is lifted above it by his loyalty to his art.

II. The Lamp of Ideality.—The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation. But they must pass through the crucible of the imagination; they must be idealized. The artist is not a photographer, but a painter. He must depict not persons but humanity, otherwise he forfeits the artist's name, and the power of doing the artist's work in our hearts. When we see a novelist bring out a novel with one or two good characters, and then, at the fatal bidding of the booksellers, go on manufacturing his yearly volume, and giving us the same character or the same few characters over and over again, we may be sure that he is without the power of idealization. He has merely photographed what he has seen, and his stock is exhausted. It is wonderful what a quantity of the mere lees of such writers, more and more watered down, the libraries go on complacently circulating, and the reviews go on complacently reviewing. Of course, this power of idealization is the great gift of genius. It is that which distinguishes Homer, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott, from ordinary men. But there is also a moral effort in rising above the easy work of mere description to the height of art. Need it be said that Scott is thoroughly ideal as well as thoroughly real? There are vague traditions that this man and the other was the original of some character in Scott. But who can point out the man of whom a character in Scott is a mere portrait? It would be as hard as to point out a case of servile delineation in Shakespeare. Scott's characters are never monsters or caricatures. They are full of nature; but it is universal nature. Therefore they have their place in the universal heart, and will keep that place for ever. And mark that even in his historical novels he is still ideal. Historical romance is a perilous thing. The fiction is apt to spoil the fact, and the fact the fiction; the history to be perverted and the romance to be shackled: daylight to kill dreamlight, and dreamlight to kill daylight. But Scott takes few liberties with historical facts and characters; he treats them, with the costume and the manners of the period, as the background of the picture. The personages with whom he deals freely, are the Peverils and the Nigels; and these are his lawful property, the offspring of his own imagination, and belong to the ideal.

III. The Lamp of Impartiality.—The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party. He must see everywhere the good that is mixed with evil, the evil that is mixed with good. And this he will not do, unless his heart is right. It is in Scott's historical novels that his impartiality is most severely tried and is most apparent; though it is apparent in all his works. Shakespeare was a pure dramatist; nothing but art found a home in that lofty, smooth, idealistic brow. He stands apart not only from the political and religious passions but from the interests of his time, seeming hardly to have any historical surroundings, but to shine like a planet suspended by itself in the sky. So it is with that female Shakespeare in miniature, Miss Austen. But Scott took the most intense interest in the political struggles of his time. He was a fiery partisan, a Tory in arms against the French Revolution. In his account of the coronation of George IV. a passionate worship of monarchy breaks forth, which, if we did not know his noble nature, we might call slavish. He sacrificed, ease, and at last life, to his seignorial aspirations. On one occasion he was even carried beyond the bounds of propriety by his opposition to the Whig chief. The Cavalier was his political ancestor, the Covenanter the ancestor of his political enemy. The idols which the Covenanting iconoclast broke were his. He would have fought against the first revolution under Montrose, and against the second under Dundee. Yet he is perfectly, serenely just to the opposite party. Not only is he just, he is sympathetic. He brings out their worth, their valour, such grandeur of character as they have, with all the power of his art, making no distinction in this respect between friend and foe. If they have a ridiculous side he uses it for the purposes of his art, but genially, playfully, without malice. If there was a laugh left in the Covenanters, they would have laughed at their own portraits as painted by Scott. He shows no hatred of anything but wickedness itself. Such a novelist is a most effective preacher of liberality and charity; he brings our hearts nearer to the Impartial Father of us all.

IV. The Lamp of Impersonality.—Personality is lower than partiality. Dante himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without apparent ground, that he puts into hell all the enemies of the political cause, which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God. A legend tells that Leonardo da Vinci was warned that his divine picture of the Last Supper would fade, because he had introduced his personal enemy as Judas, and thus desecrated art by making it serve personal hatred. The legend must be false, Leonardo had too grand a soul. A wretched woman in England, at the beginning of the last century, Mrs. Manley, systematically employed fiction as a cover for personal libel; but such an abuse of art as this could be practiced or countenanced only by the vile. Novelists, however, often debase fiction by obtruding their personal vanities, favouritisms, fanaticisms and antipathies. We had, the other day, a novel, the author of which introduced himself almost by name as a heroic character, with a description of his own personal appearance, residence, and habits as fond fancy painted them to himself. There is a novelist, who is a man of fashion, and who makes the age of the heroes in his successive novels advance with his own, so that at last we shall have irresistible fascination at seven score years and ten. But the commonest and the most mischievous way in which personality breaks out is pamphleteering under the guise of fiction. One novel is a pamphlet against lunatic asylums, another against model prisons, a third against the poor law, a fourth against the government offices, a fifth against trade unions. In these pretended works of imagination facts are joined in support of a crotchet or an antipathy with all the license of fiction; calumny revels without restraint, and no cause is served but that of falsehood and injustice. A writer takes offence at the excessive popularity of athletic sports; instead of bringing out an accurate and conscientious treatise to advocate moderation, he lets fly a novel painting the typical boating man as a seducer of confiding women, the betrayer of his friend, and the murderer of his wife. Religious zealots are very apt to take this method of enlisting imagination, as they think, on the side of truth. We had once a high Anglican novel in which the Papist was eaten alive by rats, and the Rationalist and Republican was slowly seethed in molten lead, the fate of each being, of course, a just judgment of heaven on those who presumed to differ from the author. Thus the voice of morality is confounded with that of tyrannical petulance and self-love. Not only is Scott not personal, but we cannot conceive his being so. We cannot think it possible that he should degrade his art by the indulgence of egotism, or crotchets, or petty piques. Least of all can we think it possible that his high and gallant nature should use art as a cover for striking a foul blow.

V. The Lamp of Purity—I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens—Thackeray himself. We may all thank Heaven for the purity of one still greater than either, Sir Walter Scott. I say still greater morally, as well as in power as an artist, because in Thackeray there is cynicism, though the more genial and healthy element predominates; and cynicism, which is not good in the great writer, becomes very bad in the little reader. We know what most of the novels were before Scott. We know the impurity, half-redeemed, of Fielding, the unredeemed impurity of Smollett, the lecherous leer of Sterne, the coarseness even of Defoe. Parts of Richardson himself could not be read by a woman without a blush. As to French novels, Carlyle says of one of the most famous of the last century that after reading it you ought to wash seven times in Jordan; but after reading the French novels of the present day, in which lewdness is sprinkled with sentimental rosewater, and deodorized, but by no means disinfected, your washings had better be seventy times seven. There is no justification for this; it is mere pandering, under whatever pretence, to evil propensities; it makes the divine art of Fiction "procuress to the Lords of Hell," If our established morality is in any way narrow and unjust, appeal to Philosophy, not to Comus; and remember that the mass of readers are not philosophers. Coleridge pledges himself to find the deepest sermons under the filth of Rabelais; but Coleridge alone finds the sermons while everybody finds the filth. Impure novels have brought and are bringing much misery on the world. Scott's purity is not that of cloistered innocence and inexperience, it is the manly purity of one who had seen the world, mingled with men of the world, known evil as well as good; but who, being a true gentleman, abhorred filth, and teaches us to abhor it too.

VI. The Lamp of Humanity.—One day we see the walls placarded with the advertising woodcut of a sensation novel, representing a girl tied to a table and a man cutting off her feet into a tub. Another day we are allured by a picture of a woman sitting at a sewing-machine and a man seizing her behind by the hair, and lifting a club to knock her brains out. A French novelist stimulates your jaded palate by introducing a duel fought with butchers' knives by the light of lanterns. One genius subsists by murder, as another does by bigamy and adultery. Scott would have recoiled from the blood as well as from the ordure, he would have allowed neither to defile his noble page. He knew that there was no pretence for bringing before a reader what is merely horrible, that by doing so you only stimulate passions as low as licentiousness itself—the passions which were stimulated by the gladiatorial shows in degraded Rome, which are stimulated by the bull- fights in degraded Spain, which are stimulated among ourselves by exhibitions the attraction of which really consists in their imperilling human life. He knew that a novelist had no right even to introduce the terrible except for the purpose of exhibiting human heroism, developing character, awakening emotions which when awakened dignify and save from harm. It is want of genius and of knowledge of their craft that drives novelists to outrage humanity with horrors. Miss Austen can interest and even excite you as much with the little domestic adventures of Emma as some of her rivals can with a whole Newgate calendar of guilt and gore.

VII. The Lamp of Chivalry.—Of this briefly. Let the writer of fiction give us humanity in all its phases, the comic as well as the tragic, the ridiculous as well as the sublime; but let him not lower the standard of character or the aim of life. Shakespeare does not. We delight in his Falstaffs and his clowns as well as in his Hamlets and Othellos, but he never familiarizes us with what is base and mean. The noble and chivalrous always holds its place as the aim of true humanity in his ideal world. Perhaps Dickens is not entirely free from blame in this respect; perhaps Pickwickianism has in some degree familiarized the generation of Englishmen who have been fed upon it with what is not chivalrous, to say the least, in conduct, as it unquestionably has with slang in conversation. But Scott, like Shakespeare, wherever the thread of his fiction may lead him, always keeps before himself and us the highest ideal which he knew, the ideal of a gentleman. If anyone says these are narrow bounds wherein to confine fiction I answer there has been room enough within them for the highest tragedy, the deepest pathos, the broadest humour, the widest range of character, the most moving incident, that the world has ever enjoyed. There has been room within them for all the kings of pure and healthy fiction—for Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Scott. "Farewell Sir Walter," says Carlyle at the end of his essay, "farewell Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen. Scotland has said farewell to her mortal son. But all humanity welcomes him as Scotland's noblest gift to her and crowns him as on this day one of the heirs of immortality."

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED TO THE OXFORD SCHOOL OF SCIENCE AND ART AT THE DISTRIBUTION OF PRIZES

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,

You will not expect me, in complying with the custom which requires your Chairman to address a few words to you before distributing the prizes, to give you instruction about Art or Science. One who was educated, as I was, under the old system, can hardly see without a pang the improvement that has been made in education since his time. In a public school, in my day, you learned nothing of Science, Art, or Music. Having received nothing, I have nothing to give. Fortunately, the only thing of importance to be said this evening can be said without technical knowledge of any kind. The School of Art needs better accommodation. The financial details will be explained to you by those who are more conversant with them than I am. I will only say that parsimony in this matter on the part of the government or other public bodies will, in my humble opinion, be unwise. I am not for a lavish expenditure of public money, even on education. It would be a misfortune if parental duty were to be cast on the State, and parents were to be allowed to forget that they are bound to provide their children with education as well as with bread. But it seems that at this moment the soundest and even the most strictly commercial policy would counsel liberality in providing for the National Schools of Art and Science. England is labouring under commercial depression. Of the works in the manufacturing districts, many are running half time, and some, I fear, are likely, if things do not mend, to stop. When I was there the other day gloom was on all faces. Some people seem to think that the bad time will pass away of itself, and that a good time will come again like a new moon. It is a comfortable but a doubtful doctrine. And suppose the good time does not come again, the outlook for those masses and their employers is dark. A friend of mine, who is a manufacturer, said to me the other day that he had been seeing the ruins of a feudal castle, and that the sight set him thinking if factories should ever, like feudal castles, fall into decay, what their ruins would be like? They would be unromantic no doubt, even by moonlight. But much worse than the ruins of buildings would be the ruin among the people. Imagine these swarming multitudes, or any large proportion of them, left by the failure of employment without bread. It would be something like a chronic Indian famine. The wealth of England is unparalleled, unapproached in commercial history. Add Carthage to Tyre, Venice to Carthage, Amsterdam to Venice, you will not make anything like a London. Ten thousand pounds paid for a pair of china vases. A Roman noble under the Empire might have rivalled this, but the wealth of the Roman nobles was not the fruit of industry, it was the plunder of the world. You can hardly imagine how those who come fresh from a new country like Canada, or parts of the United States—a land just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires—are impressed, I might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. This country, too, has an immense capital invested in the funds and securities of foreign nations, and in this way draws tribute from the world, though, unhappily, we are being made sensible of the fact that money lent to a foreign government is lent to a debtor on whom you cannot distrain. But the sources of this fabulous prosperity, are they inexhaustible? In part, we may hope they are. A maritime position, admirably adapted for trading with both hemispheres, a race of first- rate seamen, masses of skilled labour, vast accumulations of machinery and capital—these are advantages not easily lost. And there is still in England good store of coal and iron. Not so stable, however, is the advantage given to England by the effects of the Napoleonic war, which for the time crushed all manufactures and mercantile marines but hers. Now, the continental nations are developing manufactures and mercantile marines of their own. You go round asking them to alter their tariffs, so as to enable you to recover their markets, and almost all of them refuse; about the only door you have really succeeded in getting opened to you is that of France, and this was opened, not by the nation, but by an autocrat, who had diplomatic purposes of his own. The Times, indeed, in a noteworthy article the other day, undertook to prove that a great manufacturing and trading nation might lose its customers without being much the worse for it, but this seems too good to be true; I fancy Yorkshire and Lancashire would say so. Is it not that very margin of profit of which The Times speaks so lightly, which, being accumulated, has created the wealth of England? Your manufacturers are certainly under the impression that they want markets, and the loss of the great American market seems to them a special matter of concern. It is doubtful whether that market would be restored to them even by an alteration of the tariff. The coal in the great American coal fields is much nearer the surface, and consequently more cheaply worked, than the coal in England; iron is as plentiful, and it is near the coal; labour, which has been much dearer there, is now falling to the English level. Tariff or no tariff, America will probably keep her own market for the heavier and coarser goods. But there is still a kind of goods, in the production of which the old country will long have a great advantage. I mean the lighter, finer, and more elegant goods, the products of cultivated taste and of trained skill in design—that very kind of goods, in short, the character of which these Schools of Art are specially intended to improve. Industry and invention the new world has in as ample a measure as the old; invention in still ampler measure, for the Americans are a nation of inventors; but cultivated taste and its special products will long be the appanage of old countries. It will be long before anything of that kind will pass current in the new world without the old world stamp. Adapt your industry in some degree to changed requirements; acquire those finer faculties which the Schools of Design aim at cultivating, but which, in the lucrative production of the coarser goods, have hitherto been comparatively neglected, and you may recover a great American market; it is doubtful whether you will in any other way. Therefore, I repeat, to stint the Art and Science Schools would seem bad policy. I may add that it would be specially bad policy here in Oxford, where, under the auspices of a University which is now extending its care to Art as well as Science, it would seem that the finer industries, such as design applied to furniture, decoration of all kinds, carving, painted glass, bookbinding, ought in time to do particularly well. If you wish to prosper, cultivate your speciality; the rule holds good for cities as well as for men.

There are some, perhaps, who dislike to think of Art in connection with anything like manufacture. Let us, then, call it design, and keep the name of art for the higher pursuit. Your Instructor presides, I believe, with success, and without finding his duties clash, over a school, the main object of which is the improvement of manufactures, and another school dedicated to the higher objects of aesthetic cultivation. The name manufacture reminds you of machines, and you may dislike machines and think there is something offensive to artists in their products. Well, a machine does not produce, or pretend to produce, poetry or sculpture; it pretends to clothe thousands of people who would otherwise go naked. It is itself often a miracle of human intellect. It works unrestingly that humanity may have a chance to rest. If it sometimes supersedes higher work, it far more often, by relieving man of the lowest work, sets him free for the higher. Those heaps of stones broken by the hammer of a poor wretch who bends over his dull task through the weary day by the roadside, scantily clad, in sharp frost perhaps or chilling showers, are they more lovely to a painter's eye than if they had been broken, without so much human labour and suffering, by a steam stone-crusher? No one doubts the superior interest belonging to any work however imperfect, of individual mind; but if we were not to use a pair of tongs that did not bear the impress of individual mind, millionaires might have tongs, but the rest of us would put on coals with our fingers. After all, what is a machine but a perfect tool? The Tyrian loom was a machine, though it was worked by hand and not by steam; and if the Tyrian had known the power loom, depend upon it he would have used it. Without machines, the members of this School might all be grinding their corn with hand mills, instead of learning Art. Common humanity must use manufactured articles; even uncommon humanity will find it difficult to avoid using them, unless it has the courage of its convictions to the same extent as George Fox, the Quaker, who encased himself in an entire suit of home-made leather, bearing the impress of his individual mind; and defied a mechanical and degenerate world. The only practical question is whether the manufactures shall be good or bad, well-designed or ill; South Kensington answers, that if training can do it, they shall be good and well designed.

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still. I have no instruction to give you, and you would not thank me for wasting your time with rhetorical praise of art, even if I had all the flowers of diction at my command. To me, as an outer barbarian, it seems that some of the language on these subjects is already pretty high pitched. I have thought so even in reading that one of Mr. Addington Symond's most attractive volumes about Italy which relates to Italian art. Art is the interpreter of beauty, and perhaps beauty, if we could penetrate to its essence, might reveal to us something higher than itself. But Art is not religion, nor is connoisseurship priesthood. To happiness Art lends intensity and elevation; but in affliction, in ruin, in the wreck of affection how much can Phidias and Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there." It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own perfection, to need religion—not a system of dogma, but a faith. This, probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of Assisi or in the Arena Chapel at Padua. Perhaps those paintings also gain something by being in the proper place for religious art, a Church. Since the divorce of religious art from religion, it has been common to see a Crucifixion hung over a sideboard. That age was an age of faith; and so most likely was the glorious age of Greek art in its way. Ours is an age of doubt, an age of doubt and of strange cross currents and eddies of opinion, ultra scepticism penning its books in the closet while the ecclesiastical forms of the Middle Ages stalk the streets. Art seems to feel the disturbing influence like the rest of life. Poetry feels it less than other arts, because there is a poetry of doubt and Tennyson is its poet. Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express. In the pictures at our exhibitions there may be great technical skill; I take it for granted there is; but in the subject surely there is a void, an appearance of painful seeking for something to paint, and finding very little. When you come to a great picture of an Egyptian banquet in the days of the Pharaohs, you feel that the painter must have had a long way to go for something to paint. Certainly this age is not indifferent to beauty. The art movement is in every house; everywhere you see some proof of a desire to possess not mere ornament but something really rare and beautiful. The influence transmutes children's picture books and toys. I turned up the other day a child's picture book of the days of my childhood; probably it had been thought wonderfully good in its time; and what a thing it was. Some day our doubts may be cleared up; our beliefs may be settled; faith may come again; life may recover its singleness and certainty of aim; poetry may gush forth once more as fresh as Homer, and the art of the future may appear. What is most difficult to conceive, perhaps, is the sculpture of the future; because it is hardly possible that the moderns should ever have such facilities as the ancients had for studying the human form. In presence of the overwhelming magnificence of the sculpture in the museums of Rome and Naples, one wonders how Canova and Co. can have looked with any complacency on their own productions. There seems reason by the way to think that these artists worked not each by himself, but in schools and brotherhoods with mutual aid and sympathy; and this is an advantage equally within the reach of modern art. Meantime, though the Art of the future delays to come, modern life is not all hideous. There are many things, no doubt, such as the Black Country and the suburbs of our cities, on which the eye cannot rest with pleasure. But Paris is not hideous. There may be in the long lines of buildings too much of the autocratic monotony of the Empire, but the city, as a whole, is the perfect image of a brilliant civilization. From London beauty is almost banished by smoke and fog, which deny to the poor architect ornament, colour, light and shadow, leaving him nothing but outline. No doubt besides the smoke and fog there is a fatality. There is a fatality which darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National Gallery; to temper the grandeurs of Westminster by the introduction of the Aquarium, with Mr. Hankey's Tower of Babel in the near distance; to guard against any too-imposing effect which the outline of the Houses of Parliament might have by covering them with minute ornament, sure to be blackened and corroded into one vast blotch by smoke; to collect the art wonders of Pigtail Place; to make the lions in Trafalgar Square lie like cats on a hearth-rug, instead of supporting themselves on a slope by muscular action, like the lions at Genoa; to perch a colossal equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, arrayed in his waterproof cape, and mounted on a low-shouldered hack instead of a charger, on the top of an arch, by way of perpetual atonement to France for Waterloo; and now to think of planting an obelisk of the Pharaohs on a cab-stand. An obelisk of the Pharaohs in ancient Rome was an august captive, symbolizing the university of the Roman Empire, but an obelisk of the Pharaohs in London symbolizes little more than did the Druidical ring of stones which an English squire of my acquaintance purchased in one of the Channel Islands and set up in his English park. As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper. If the house is less beautiful the home is more so. Even a house in what Tennyson calls the long unlovely street is not utterly unlovely when within it dwell cultivated intellect, depth of character and tenderness of affection. However the beauty of English life is in the country and there it may challenge that of Italian palaces. America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious. As it is in society so it is in architecture. America is best when she is content to be herself. An American city with its spacious streets all planted with avenues of trees with its blocks of buildings far from unimpeachable probably in detail yet stately in the mass with its wide spreading suburbs where each artizan has his neat looking house in his own plot of ground and light and air and foliage with its countless church towers and spires far from faultless yet varying the outline might not please a painters eye but it fills your mind with a sense of well rewarded industry of comfort and even opulence shared by the toiling man of a prosperous, law-loving, cheerful, and pious life. I cannot help fancying that Turner, whose genius got to the soul of everything, would have made something of even in American city. The cities of the Middle Ages were picturesquely huddled within walls for protection from the violence of the feudal era, the cities of the New World spread wide in the security of an age of law and a continent of peace. At Cleveland in Ohio there is a great street called Euclid Avenue, lined with villas each standing in its own grounds and separated from each other and from the street only by a light iron fencing instead of the high brick wall with which the Briton shuts out his detested kind. The villas are not vast or suggestive of over-grown plutocracy, they are suggestive of moderate wealth, pleasant summers, cheerful winters and domestic happiness. I hardly think you would call Euclid Avenue revolting. I say it with the diffidence of conscious ignorance but I should not be much afraid to show you one or two buildings that our Professor of Architecture at Cornell University has put up for us on a bluff over Cayuga Lake, on a site which you would certainly admit to be magnificent. If I could have ventured on any recommendation concerning Art, I should have pleaded before the Royal Commission for a Chair of Architecture here. It might endow us with some forms of beauty; it might at all events endow us with rules for building a room in which you can be heard, one in which you can breathe, and a chimney which would not smoke. I said that in America the most pretentious buildings were the worst. Another source of failure in buildings, in dress, and not in these alone, is servile imitation of Europe. In northern America the summer is tropical, the winter is arctic. A house ought to be regular and compact in shape, so as to be easily warmed from the centre, with a roof of simple construction, high pitched, to prevent the snow from lodging, and large eaves to throw it off,—this for the arctic winter, for the tropical summer you want ample verandas, which, in fact, are the summer sitting rooms. An American house built in this way is capable at least of the beauty which belongs to fitness. But as you see Parisian dresses under an alien sky, so you see Italian villas with excrescences which no stove can warm, and Tudor mansions with gables which hold all the snow. It is needless to say what is the result, when the New World undertakes to reproduce not only the architecture of the Old World, but that of classical Greece and Rome, or that of the Middle Ages. Jefferson, who was a classical republican, taught a number of his fellow citizens to build their homes like Doric temples, and you may imagine what a Doric temple freely adapted to domestic purposes must be. But are these attempts to revive the past very successful anywhere? We regard as a decided mistake the revived classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There is our own museum; the best, I suppose, that could be done in the way of revival; the work of an architect whom the first judges deemed a man of genius. In that, ancient form and modern requirements seem everywhere at cross purposes. Nobody can deny that genius is impressed upon the upper part of the front, which reminds one of a beautiful building in an Italian city, though the structure at the side recalls the mind to Glastonbury, and the galaxy of chimneys has certainly no parallel in Italy. The front ought to stand in a street, but as it stands in a field its flanks have to be covered by devices which are inevitably weak. What is to be done with the back always seems to me one of the darkest enigmas of the future. The basement is incongruously plain and bare, in the street it would perhaps be partly hidden by the passengers. Going in, you find a beautiful mediaeval court struggling hard for its life against a railway station and a cloister, considerately offering you a shady walk or shelter from the weather round a room. Listen to the multitudinous voices of Science and you will hear that the conflict extends to practical accommodation. We all know it was not the fault of the architect, it was the fault of adverse exigencies which came into collision with his design, but this only strengthens the moral of the building against revivals. Two humble achievements, if we had chosen were certainly within our reach,—perfect adaptation to our object and inoffensive dignity. Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches. For my part I look up with admiration, as fervent as any one untrained in art can, to those divine creations of old religion which soar over the smoke and din of our cities into purity and stillness and seem to challenge us, with all our wealth and culture and science and mechanical power, to produce their peer till the age of faith shall return. Not Greek Art itself springing forth in its perfection from the dark background of primaeval history, seems to me a greater miracle than these. How poor beside the lowliest of them in religious effect in romance, in everything but size and technical skill, is any pile of neo-paganism even I will dare to say, St. Peter's. Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church. I will even own that, except where restoration rids us of the unchristian exclusiveness of pews, I prefer the unrestored churches, with something of antiquity about them, to the restored. There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages. You may hear pinings for the return of an age of force from gentle aestheticists, who, if the awe of force did return, would certainly be crushed like eggshells. There is a well-known tale by Hans Andersen, that great though child-like teacher, called the "Overshoes of Fortune." A gentleman, at an evening party, has been running down modern society and wishing he were in the heroic Middle Ages. In going away he unwittingly puts on the fairy overshoes, which have the gift of transporting the wearer at once to any place and time where he wishes to be. Stepping out he finds his own wish fulfilled—he is in the Middle Ages. There is no gas, the street is pitch dark, he is up to his ankles in mud, he is nearly knocked into the kennel by a mediaeval bishop returning from a revel with his roystering train, when he wants to cross the river there is no bridge; and after vainly inquiring his way in a tavern full of very rough customers, he wishes himself in the moon, and to the moon appropriately he goes. Mediaevalism can hardly be called anything but a rather enfeebling dream. If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication. You would be drawn by the steam engine to lecture against steam; you would send eloquent invectives against printing to the press, and you would be subsisting meanwhile on the interest of investments which the Middle Ages would have condemned as usury. If you were like some of the school, you would praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the mould. But the mould is broken, and it is broken for ever. Through aesthetic pining for a past age, we may become unjust to our own, and thus weaken our practical sense of duty, and lessen our power of doing good. I will call the age bad when it makes me so, is a wise saying, and worth all our visionary cynicism, be it never so eloquent. To say the same thing in other words, our age will be good enough for most of us, if there is genuine goodness in ourselves. Rousseau fancied he was soaring above his age, not into the thirteenth century, but into the state of nature, while he was falling miserably below his own age in all the common duties and relations of life; and he was a type, not of enthusiasts, for enthusiasm leads to action, but of mere social dreamers. Where there is duty, there is poetry, and tragedy too, in plenty, though it be in the most prosaic row of dingy little brick houses with clothes hanging out to dry, or rather to be wetted, behind them, in all Lancashire. We have commercial fraud now, too much of it; and the declining character of English goods is a cause of their exclusion from foreign markets, as well as hostile tariffs; so that everything South Kensington can do to uphold good and genuine work will be of the greatest advantage to the English trade. But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him. There was fraud beneath the cross of the Crusader, and there was forgery in the cell of the Monk. In comparing the general quality of work we must remember that it is the best work of those times that has survived. I think I could prove from history that mediaeval floors sometimes gave way even when there was no St. Dunstan there. You will recollect that the floor miraculously fell in at a synod, and killed all St. Dunstan's opponents; but sceptics, who did not easily believe in miracles, whispered that the Saint from his past habits, knew how to handle tools. We are told by those whose creed is embodied in "Past and Present" that this age is one vast anarchy, industrial and social; and that nothing but military discipline—that is the perpetual cry—will restore us to anything like order as workers or as men. Well, there are twenty thousand miles of railway in the three kingdoms, forming a system as complex as it is vast. I am told that at one junction, close to London, the trains pass for some hours at the rate of two in five minutes. Consider how that service is done by the myriads of men employed, and this in all seasons and weathers in overwhelming heat, in numbing cold, in blinding storm, in midnight darkness. Is not this an army pretty well disciplined, though its object is not bloodshed? If we see masses full of practical energy and good sense, but wanting in culture, let us take our culture to them, and perhaps they will give us some of their practical energy and good sense in return. Without that Black Country industry, all begrimed and sweaty, our fine culture could not exist. Everything we use, nay, our veriest toy represents lives spent for us in delving beneath the dark and perilous mine, in battling with the wintry sea, in panting before the glowing forge, in counting the weary hours over the monotonous and unresting loom, lives of little value, one could think, if there were no hereafter. Let us at least be kind. I go to Saltaire. I find a noble effort made by a rich man who kept his heart above wealth, Titus Salt— he was a baronet, but we will spare him, as we spare Nelson, the derogatory prefix—to put away what is dark and evil in factory life. I find a little town, I should have thought not unpleasant to the eye, and certainly not unpleasant to the heart, where labour dwells in pure air, amidst beautiful scenery, with all the appliances of civilization, with everything that can help it to health, morality, and happiness. I find a man, who might, if he pleased, live idly in the lap of luxury, working like a horse in the management of this place, bearing calmly not only toil and trouble, but perverseness and ingratitude. Surely, aesthetic culture would be a doubtful blessing if it made us think or speak unsympathetically and rudely of Saltaire. Four hundred thousand people at Manchester are without pure water. They propose to get it from Thirlmere. For this they are denounced in that sort of language which is called strong, but the use of which is a sure proof of weakness, for irritability was well defined by Abernethy as debility in a state of excitement. Let us spare, whenever they can be spared, history and beauty; they are a priceless part of the heritage of a great industrial nation, and one which lost can never be restored. The only difference I ever had with my fellow-citizens in Oxford during a pretty long residence, arose out of my opposition to a measure which would have marred the historic character and the beauty of our city, while I was positively assured on the best authority that it was commercially inexpedient. If Thirlmere can be spared, spare Thirlmere; but if it is really needed to supply those masses with a necessary of life, the loveliest lake by which poet or artist ever wandered could not be put to a nobler use. I am glad in this to follow the Bishop of Manchester, who is not made of coarse clay, though he cares for the health as well as for the religion of his people. A schism between aesthetic Oxford and industrial Lancashire would be a bad thing for both; and South Kensington, which, while it teaches art, joins hands with industry, surely does well. It is needless to debate before this audience the question whether there is any essential antagonism between art or esthetic culture, and the tendencies of an age of science. An accidental antagonism there may be, an essential antagonism there cannot be. What is science but truth, and why should not truth and beauty live together? Is an artist a worse painter of the human body from being a good anatomist? Then why should he be a worse painter of nature generally, because he knows her secrets, or because they are being explored in his time? Would he render moonlight better if he believed the moon was a green cheese? Art and Science dwelt together well enough in the minds of Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. In the large creative mind there is room for both; though the smaller and merely perceptive mind being fixed on one may sometimes not have room for the other. True, the perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science, may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. But nothing hinders that, in working for a prize as in working for your bread, you may, at the same time, be working from sense of duty and love of the subject, and though co-operation may be our final state, competition is our present. Here the competition is at least fair. There can hardly be any doubt that the prize system often calls into activity powers of doing good work which would otherwise have lain dormant, and if it does this it is useful to the community, though the individual needs to be on his guard against its drawbacks in himself. In reading the Life of Lord Althorp the other day I was struck with the fact, for a fact, I think, it evidently was, that England had owed one of her worthiest and most useful statesmen to a college competition, which aroused him to a sense of his own powers, and of the duty of using them, whereas he would otherwise never have risen above making betting books and chronicling the performances of foxhounds. Perhaps about the worst consequence of the prize system, against which, I have no doubt, your Instructor guards, is undue discouragement on the part of those who do not win the prize. And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish you were to receive your rewards from a hand which would lend them any additional value. But though presented by me they have been awarded by good judges; and as they have been awarded to you, I have no doubt you have deserved them well.

THE ASCENT OF MAN.

Science and criticism have raised the veil of the Mosaic cosmogony and revealed to us the physical origin of man. We see that, instead of being created out of the dust of the earth by Divine fiat, he has in all probability been evolved out of it by a process of development through a series of intermediate forms.

The discovery is, of course, unspeakably momentous. Among other things it seems to open to us a new view of morality, and one which, if it is verified by further investigation, can hardly fail to produce a great change in philosophy. Supposing that man has ascended from a lower animal form, there appears to be ground at least for surmising that vice, instead of being a diabolical inspiration or a mysterious element of human nature, is the remnant of the lower animal not yet eliminated; while virtue is the effort, individual and collective, by which that remnant is being gradually worked off. The acknowledged connection of virtue with the ascendency of the social over the selfish desires and tendencies seems to correspond with this view; the nature of the lower animals being, so far as we can see, almost entirely selfish, and admitting no regard even for the present interests of their kind, much less for its interests in the future. The doubtful qualities, and "last infirmities of noble minds," such as ambition and the love of fame, in which the selfish element is mingled with one not wholly selfish, and which commend themselves at least by their refinement, as contrasted with the coarseness of the merely animal vices, may perhaps be regarded as belonging to the class of phenomena quaintly designated by some writers as "pointer facts," and as marking the process of transition. In what morality consists, no one has yet succeeded in making clear. Mr. Sidgwick's recent criticism of the various theories leads to the conviction that not one of them affords a satisfactory basis for a practical system of ethics. If our lower nature can be traced to an animal origin, and can be shown to be in course of elimination, however slow and interrupted, this at all events will be a solid fact, and one which must be the starting-point of any future system of ethics. Light would be at once thrown by such a discovery on some parts of the subject which have hitherto been involved in impenetrable darkness. Of the vice of cruelty for example no rational account, we believe, has yet been given; it is connected with no human appetite, and seems to gratify no human object of desire; but if we can be shown to have inherited it from animal progenitors, the mystery of its existence is at least in part explained. In the event of this surmise being substantiated, moral phantasms, with their mediaeval trappings, would for ever disappear; individual responsibility would be reduced within reasonable limits; the difficulty of the question respecting free will would shrink to comparatively narrow proportions; but it does not seem likely that the love of virtue and the hatred of vice would be diminished; on the contrary, it seems likely that they would be practically intensified, while a more practical direction would certainly be given to the science of ethics as a system of moral training and a method of curing moral disease.

It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions. Our general histories will apparently have to be almost rewritten from that point of view. It is only to be noted, with regard to the treatment of history, that the mere introduction of a physical nomenclature, however elaborate and apparently scientific, does not make anything physical which before was not so, or exclude from human actions, of which history is the aggregate, any element not of a physical kind. We are impressed, perhaps, at first with a sense of new knowledge when we are told that human history is "an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." But a little reflection suggests to us that such a philosophy is vitiated by the assumption involved in the word "matter," and that the philosophy of history is in fact left exactly where it was before. The superior complexity of high civilization is a familiar social fact which gains nothing in clearness by the importation of mechanical or physiological terms.

We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself. What is the origin of the movement, and by what power the order of development is prescribed, are questions yet unsolved by physical science. That the solution, if it could be supplied, would involve anything arbitrary, miraculous, or at variance with the observed order of things, need not be assumed; but it might open a new view of the universe, and dissipate for ever the merely mechanical accounts of it. In the meantime we may fairly enter a caveat against the tacit insinuation of an unproved solution. Science can apparently give no reason for assuming that the first cause, and that which gives the law to development, is a blind force rather than an archetypal idea. The only origination within our experience is that of human action, where the cause is an idea. Science herself, in fact, constantly assumes an analogous cause for the movements of the universe in her use of the word "law," which necessarily conveys the notion, not merely of observed co-existence and sequence, but of the intelligent and consistent action of a higher power, on which we rely in reasoning from the past to the future, as we do upon consistency in the settled conduct of a man.

Unspeakably momentous, however, we once more admit, the discovery is, and great is the debt of gratitude due to its illustrious authors. Yet it seems not unreasonable to ask whether in some respects we are not too much under its immediate influence, and whether the revolution of thought, though destined ultimately to be vast, may not at present have somewhat overpassed its bounds. Is it not possible that the physical origin of man may be just now occupying too large a space in our minds compared with his ulterior development and his final destiny? With our eyes fixed on the "Descent," newly disclosed to us, may we not be losing sight of the Ascent of man?

There seems in the first place, to be a tendency to treat the origin of a being as finally decisive of its nature and destiny. From the language sometimes used, we should almost suppose that rudiments alone were real, and that all the rest was mere illusion. An eminent writer on the antiquities of jurisprudence intimates his belief that the idea of human brotherhood is not coeval with the race, and that primitive communities were governed by sentiments of a very different kind. His words are at once pounced upon as a warrant for dismissing the idea of human brotherhood from our minds, and substituting for it some other social principles, the character of which has not yet been definitely explained, though it is beginning in some quarters pretty distinctly to appear. But surely this is not reasonable. There can be no reason why the first estate of man, which all allow to have been his lowest estate, should claim the prerogative of furnishing his only real and indefeasible principles of action. Granting that the idea of human brotherhood was not aboriginal—granting that it came into the world at a comparatively late period, still it has come, and having come, it is as real and seems as much entitled to consideration as inter-tribal hostility and domestic despotism were in their own day. That its advent has not been unattended by illusions and aberrations is a fact which does not cancel its title to real existence under the present conditions, and with the present lights of society, any more than in annuls the great effects upon the actions of men and the course of history which the idea has undeniably produced. Human brotherhood was not a part of a primaeval revelation; it may not have been an original institution; but it seems to be a real part of a development, and it may be a part of a plan. That the social principles of certain anti- philanthropic works are identical with those which governed the actions of mankind in a primaeval and rudimentary state, when man had only just emerged from the animal, and have been since worked off by the foremost races in the course of development, is surely rather an argument against the paramount and indefeasible authority of those principles than in favour of it. It tends rather to show that their real character is that of a relapse, or, as the physiologists call it, a reversion. When there is a vast increase of wealth, of sensual enjoyment, and of the selfishness which is apt to attend them, it is not marvellous that such reversions should occur.

Another eminent writer appears to think that he has put an end to metaphysical theology, and perhaps to metaphysics and theology altogether, by showing that "being," and the cognate words, originally denoted merely physical perceptions. But so, probably, did all language. So did "spirit," so did "geist," so did "power," so did even "sweet reasonableness," and "the not us which makes for righteousness." Other perceptions or ideas have gradually come, and are now denoted by the words which at first denoted physical perceptions only. Why have not these last comers as good a claim to existence as the first? Suppose the intellectual nature of man has unfolded, and been brought, as it conceivably may, into relations with something in the universe beyond the mere indications of the five bodily senses—why are we bound to mistrust the results of this unfolding? We might go still further back, and still lower, than to language denoting merely physical perceptions. We might go back to inarticulate sounds and signs; but this does not invalidate the reality of the perceptions afterwards expressed in articulate language. It seems not very easy to distinguish, in point of trustworthiness of source, between the principles of metaphysics and the first principles of mathematics, or to say, if we accept the deductions in one case, why we should not accept them in the other. It is conceivable at least, we venture to repeat, that the development of man's intellectual nature may have enabled him to perceive other things than those which he perceives by means of his five bodily senses; and metaphysics, once non-existent, may thus have come into legitimate existence. Man, if the doctrine of evolution is true, was once a creature with only bodily senses; nay, at a still earlier stage, he was matter devoid even of bodily sense; now he has arrived—through the exercise of his bodily senses it may be—at something beyond bodily sense, at such notions as being, essence, existence: he reasons upon these notions, and extends the scope of his once merely physical vocabulary so as to comprehend them. Why should he not? If we are to be anchored hard and fast to the signification of primaeval language, how are we to obtain an intellectual basis for "the not us which makes for righteousness?" Do not the anti-metaphysicists themselves unconsciously metaphysicize? Does not their fundamental assumption—that the knowledge received through our bodily senses alone is trustworthy—involve an appeal to a mental necessity as much as anything in metaphysics, whether the mental necessity in this case be real or not?

Again, the great author of the Evolution theory himself, in his Descent of Man, has given us an account of morality which suggests a remark of the same kind. He seems to have come to the conclusion that what is called our moral sense is merely an indication of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions. Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self- sacrifice; to say nothing of spiritual life with its hopes and aspirations, its prayers and fanes. Such an account even of the origin of morality seems rather difficult to receive. Surely, even in their most rudimentary condition, virtue and vice must have been distinguished by some other characteristic than the relative permanency of two different sets of impressions. There is a tendency, we may venture to observe, on the part of eminent physicists, when they have carefully investigated and explained what seems to them the most important and substantial subjects of inquiry, to proffer less careful explanations of matters which to them seem secondary and less substantial, though possibly to an intelligence surveying the drama of the world from without the distinctly human portion of it might appear more important than the rest. Eminent physicists have been known, we believe, to account summarily for religion as a surviving reminiscence of the serpent which attacked the ancestral ape and the tree which sheltered him from the attack, so that Newton's religious belief would be a concomitant of his remaining trace of a tail. It was assumed that primaeval religion was universally the worship of the serpent and of the tree. This assumption was far from being correct; but, even if it had been correct, the theory based on it would surely have been a very summary account of the phenomena of religious life.

However, supposing the account of the origin of the moral sense and of moral life, given in The Descent of Man, to be true, it is an account of the origin only. Though profoundly significant, as well as profoundly interesting, it is not more significant, compared with the subsequent development, than is the origin of physical life compared with the subsequent history of living beings. Suppose a mineralogist or a chemist were to succeed in discovering the exact point at which inorganic matter gave birth to the organic; his discovery would be momentous and would convey to us a most distinct assurance of the method by which the governing power of the universe works: but would it qualify the mineralogist or the chemist to give a full account of all the diversities of animal life, and of the history of man? Heroism, self- sacrifice, the sense of moral beauty, the refined affections of civilized men, philanthropy, the desire of realizing a high moral ideal, whatever else they may be, are not tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; nor are they adequately explained by reference to the permanent character of one set of impressions and the occasional character of another set. Between the origin of moral life and its present manifestation has intervened something so considerable as to baffle any anticipation of the destiny of humanity which could have been formed for a mere inspection of the rudiments. We may call this intervening force circumstance, if we please, provided we remember that calling it circumstance does not settle its nature, or exclude the existence of a power acting through circumstance as the method of fulfilling a design.

Whatever things may have been in their origin, they are what they are, both in themselves and in regard to their indications respecting other beings or influences the existence of which may be implied in theirs. The connection between the embryo and the adult man, with his moral sense and intelligence, and all that these imply, is manifest, as well as the gradual evolution of the one out of the other, and a conclusive argument is hence derived against certain superstitions or fantastic beliefs; but the embryo is not a man, neither is the man an embryo. A physiologist sets before us a set of plates showing the similarity between the embryo of Newton and that of his dog Diamond. The inference which he probably expects us to draw is that there is no essential difference between the philosopher and the dog. But surely it is at least as logical to infer, that the importance of the embryo and the significance of embryological similarities may not be so great as the physiologist is disposed to believe.

So with regard to human institutions. The writer on legal antiquities before mentioned finds two sets of institutions which are now directly opposed to each other, and between the respective advocates of which a controversy has been waged. He proposes to terminate that controversy by showing that though the two rival systems in their development are so different, in their origin they were the same. This seems very clearly to bring home to us the fact that, important as the results of an investigation of origins are, there is still a limit to their importance.

Again, while we allow no prejudice to stand in the way of our acceptance of Evolution, we may fairly call upon Evolution to be true to itself. We may call upon it to recognise the possibility of development in the future as well as the fact of development in the past, and not to shut up the hopes and aspirations of our race in a mundane egg because the mundane egg happens to be the special province of the physiologist. The series of developments has proceeded from the inorganic to the organic, from the organic upwards to moral and intellectual life. Why should it be arrested there? Why should it not continue its upward course and arrive at a development which might be designated as spiritual life? Surely the presumption is in favour of a continued operation of the law. Nothing can be more arbitrary than the proceeding of Comte, who, after tracing humanity, as he thinks, through the Theological and Metaphysical stages into the Positive, there closes the series and assumes that the Positive stage is absolutely final. How can he be sure that it will not be followed, for example, by one in which man will apprehend and commune with the Ruler of the Universe, not through mythology or dogma, but through Science? He may have had no experience of such a phase of human existence, nor may he be able at present distinctly to conceive it. But had he lived in the Theological or the Metaphysical era he would have been equally without experience of the Positive, and have had the same difficulty in conceiving its existence. His finality is an assumption apparently without foundation.

By Spiritual Life we do not mean the life of a disembodied spirit, or anything supernatural and anti-scientific, but a life the motives of which are beyond the world of sense, and the aim of which is an ideal, individual and collective, which may be approached but cannot be attained under our present conditions, and the conception of which involves the hope of an ulterior and better state. The Positivists themselves often use the word "spiritual," and it may be assumed that they mean by it something higher in the way of aspiration than what is denoted by the mere term moral, though they may not look forward to any other state of being than this.

We do not presume, of course, in these few pages to broach any great question, our only purpose being to point out a possible aberration or exaggeration of the prevailing school of thought. But it must surely be apparent to the moral philosopher, no less than to the student of history, that at the time of the appearance of Christianity, a crisis took place in the development of humanity which may be not unfitly described as the commencement of Spiritual Life. The change was not abrupt. It had been preceded and heralded by the increasing spirituality of the Hebrew religion, especially in the teachings of the prophets, by the spiritualization of Greek philosophy, and perhaps by the sublimation of Roman duty; but it was critical and decided. So much is admitted even by those who deplore the advent of Christianity as a fatal historical catastrophe, which turned away men's minds from the improvement of their material condition to the pursuit of a chimerical ideal. Faith, Hope, and Charity, by which the Gospel designates the triple manifestation of spiritual life, are new names for new things; for it is needless to say that in classical Greek the words have nothing like their Gospel signification. It would be difficult, we believe, to find in any Greek or Roman writer an expression of hope for the future of humanity. The nearest approach to such a sentiment, perhaps, is in the political Utopianism of Plato. The social ideal is placed in a golden age which has irretrievably passed away. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, even if it were a more serious production than it is, seems to refer to nothing more than the pacification of the Roman Empire and the restoration of its material prosperity by Augustus. But Christianity, in the Apocalypse, at once breaks forth into a confident prediction of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, and of the realization of the ideal.

The moral aspiration—the striving after an ideal of character, personal and social, the former in and through the latter—seems to be the special note of the life, institutions, literature, and art of Christendom. Christian Fiction, for example, is pervaded by an interest in the development and elevation of character for which we look in vain in the Arabian Nights, where there is no development of character, nothing but incident and adventure. Christian sculpture, inferior perhaps in workmanship to that of Phidias, derives its superior interest from its constant suggestion of a spiritual ideal. The Christian lives, in a manner, two lives, an outward one of necessary conformity to the fashions and ordinances of the present world; an inner one of protest against the present world and anticipation of an ideal state of things; and this duality is reproduced in the separate existence of the spiritual society or Church, submitting to existing social arrangements, yet struggling to transcend them, and to transmute society by the realization of the Christian's social ideal. With this is necessarily connected a readiness to sacrifice present to future good, and the interests of the present to future good, and the interests of the present world to those of the world of hope. Apart from this, the death of Christ (and that of Socrates also), instead of being an instance of "sweet reasonableness," would be out of the pale of reason altogether.

It is perhaps the absence of an ideal that prevents our feeling satisfied with Utilitarianism. The Utilitarian definition of morality has been so much enlarged, and made to coincide so completely with ordinary definitions in point of mere extent, that the difference between Utilitarianism and ordinary Moral Philosophy seems to have become almost verbal. Yet we feel that there is something wanting. There is no ideal of character. And where there is no ideal of character there can hardly be such a thing as a sense of moral beauty. A Utilitarian perhaps would say that perfect utility is beauty. But whatever may be the case with material beauty, moral beauty at all events seems to contain an element not identical with the satisfaction produced by the appearance of perfect utility, but suggestive of an unfulfilled ideal.

Suppose spiritual life necessarily implies the expectation of a Future State, has physical science anything to say against that expectation? Physical Science is nothing more than the perceptions of our five bodily senses registered and methodized. But what are these five senses? According to physical science itself, nerves in a certain stage of evolution. Why then should it be assumed that their account of the universe, or of our relations to it, is exhaustive and final? Why should it be assumed that these are the only possible organs of perception, and that no other faculties or means of communication with the universe can ever in the course of evolution be developed in man? Around us are animals absolutely unconscious, so far as we can discern, of that universe which Science has revealed to us. A sea anemone, if it can reflect, probably feels as confident that it perceives everything capable of being perceived as the man of science. The reasonable supposition, surely, is that though Science, so far as it goes, is real, and the guide of our present life, its relation to the sum of things is not much more considerable than that of the perceptions of the lower orders of animals. That our notions of the universe have been so vastly enlarged by the mere invention of astronomical instruments is enough in itself to suggest the possibility of further and infinitely greater enlargement. To our bodily senses, no doubt, and to physical science, which is limited by them, human existence seems to end with death; but if there is anything in our nature which tells us, with a distinctness and persistency equal to those of our sensible perceptions, that hope and responsibility extend beyond death, why is this assurance not as much to be trusted as that of the bodily sense itself? There is apparently no ultimate criterion of truth, whether physical or moral, except our inability, constituted as we are to believe otherwise; and this criterion seems to be satisfied by a universal and ineradicable moral conviction as well as by a universal and irresistible impression of sense.

We are enjoined, some times with a vehemence approaching that of ecclesiastical anathema, to refuse to consider anything which lies beyond the range of experience. By experience is meant the perceptions of our bodily senses, the absolute completeness and finality of which, we must repeat, is an assumption, the warrant for which must at all events be produced from other authority than that of the senses themselves. On this ground we are called upon to discard, as worthy of nothing but derision, the ideas of eternity and infinity. But to dislodge these ideas from our minds is impossible; just as impossible as it is to dislodge any idea that has entered through the channels of the senses; and this being so, it is surely conceivable that they may not be mere illusions, but real extensions of our intelligence beyond the domain of mere bodily sense, indicating an upward progress of our nature. Of course if these ideas correspond to reality, physical science, though true as far as it goes, cannot be the whole truth, or even bear any considerable relation to the whole truth, since it necessarily presents Being as limited by space and time.

Whither obedience to the dictates of the higher part of our nature will ultimately carry us, we may not be able, apart from Revelation, to say; but there seems no substantial reason for refusing to believe that it carries us towards a better state. Mere ignorance, arising from the imperfection of our perceptive powers, of the mode in which we shall pass into that better state, or of its precise relation to our present existence, cannot cancel an assurance, otherwise valid, of our general destiny. A transmutation of humanity, such as we can conceive to be brought about by the gradual prevalence of higher motives of action, and the gradual elimination thereby of what is base and brutish, is surely no more incredible than the actual development of humanity, as it is now, out of a lower animal form or out of inorganic matter.

What the bearing of the automatic theory of human nature would be upon the hopes and aspirations of man, or on moral philosophy generally, it might be difficult, no doubt, to say. But has any one of the distinguished advocates of the automatic theory ever acted on it, or allowed his thoughts to be really ruled by it for a moment? What can be imagined more strange than an automaton suddenly becoming conscious of its own automatic character, reasoning and debating about it automatically, and coming automatically to the conclusion that the automatic theory of itself is true? Nor is there any occasion here to entangle ourselves in the controversy about Necessarianism. If the race can act progressively on higher and more unselfish motives, as history proves to be the fact, there can be nothing in the connection between our actions and their antecedents inconsistent with the ascent of man. Jonathan Edwards is undoubtedly right in maintaining that there is a connection between every human action and its antecedents. But the nature of the connection remains a mystery. We learn its existence not from inspection, but from consciousness, and this same consciousness tells us that the connection is not such as to preclude the existence of liberty of choice, moral aspiration, moral effort, moral responsibility, which are the contradictories of Necessarianism. The terms cause and effect, and others of that kind, which the imperfection of psychological language compels us to use in speaking of the mental connection between action and its antecedents, are steeped from their employment in connection with physical science, in physical association, and the import with them into the moral sphere the notion of physical enchainment, for which the representations of consciousness, the sole authority, afford no warrant whatever.

Another possible source of serious aberration, we venture to think, will be found in the misapplication of the doctrine of survivals. Some lingering remains of its rudimentary state in the shape of primaeval superstitions or fancies continue to adhere to a developed, and matured belief; and hence it is inferred, or at least the inference is suggested, that the belief itself is nothing but a "survival," and destined in the final triumph of reason to pass away. The belief in the immortality of the soul, for example, is found still connected in the lower and less advanced minds with primaeval superstitions and fancies about ghosts and other physical manifestations of the spirit world, as well as with funeral rites and modes of burial indicating irrational notions as to the relations of the body to the spirit. But neither these nor any special ideas as to the nature of future rewards and punishments or the mode of transition from the present to the future state, are really essential parts of the belief. They are the rudimentary imaginations and illusions of which the rational belief is gradually working itself clear. The basis of the rational belief in the immortality of the soul, or, to speak more correctly, in the continuance of our spiritual existence after death is the conviction, common, so far as we know, to all the higher portions of humanity, and apparently ineradicable, that our moral responsibility extends beyond the grave; that we do not by death terminate the consequences of our actions, or our relations to those to whom we have done good or evil; and that to die the death of the righteous is better than to have lived a life of pleasure even with the approbation of an undiscerning world. So far from growing weaker, this conviction appears to grow practically stronger among the most highly educated and intelligent of mankind, though they may have cast off the last remnant of primitive or medieval superstition, and though they may have ceased to profess belief in any special form of the doctrine. The Comtists certainly have not got rid of it, since they have devised a subjective immortality with a retributive distinction between the virtuous and the wicked; to say nothing of their singular proposal that the dead should be formally judged by the survivors, and buried, according to the judgment passed upon them, in graves of honour or disgrace.

With regard to religion generally there is the same tendency to exaggerate the significance of "survivals," and to neglect, on the other hand, the phenomena of disengagement. Because the primitive fables and illusions which long adhere to religion are undeniably dying out, it is asserted, or suggested, that religion itself is dying. Religion is identified with mythology. But mythology is merely the primaeval matrix of religion. Mythology is the embodiment of man's childlike notions as to the universe in which he finds himself, and the powers which for good or evil influence his lot; and, when analysed, it is found beneath all its national variations to be merely based upon a worship of the sun, the moon, and the forces of Nature. Religion is the worship and service of a moral God and a God who is worshipped and served by virtue. We can distinctly see, in Greek literature for instance, religion disengaging itself from mythology. In Homer the general element is mythology, capable of being rendered more or less directly into simple nature- worship, childish, non-moral, and often immoral. But when Hector says that he holds omens of no account, and that the best omen of all is to fight for one's country, he shows an incipient reliance on a Moral Power. The disengagement of religion from mythology is of course much further advanced and more manifest when we come to Plato; while the religious faith, instead of being weaker, has become infinitely stronger, and is capable of supporting the life and the martyrdom of Socrates. When Socrates and Plato reject the Homeric mythology, it is not because they are sceptics but because Homer is a child.

But it is in the Old Testament that the process of disengagement and the growth of a moral out of a ceremonial religion are most distinctly seen:—

"'Wherewith shall I come before Jahveh,
And bow myself down before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
With the sacrifice of calves of a year old?
—Will Jahveh be pleased with thousands of rams,
With ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?'
'—He hath showed thee, O man, what is good,
And what Jahveh doth require of thee;
What but to do justly to love mercy,
And to walk humbly with thy God?'"

Here no doubt is a belief in the efficacy of sacrifice, even of human sacrifice, even of the sacrifice of the first-born. But it is a receding and dying belief; while the belief in the power of justice, mercy, humility, moral religion in short, is prevailing over it and taking its place.

So it is again in the New Testament with regard to spiritual life and the miraculous. Spiritual life commenced in a world full of belief in the miraculous, and it did not at once break with that belief. But it threw the miraculous into the background and anticipated its decline, presaging that it would lose its importance and give place finally to the spiritual. "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing…. Charity never faileth; but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." Clearly the writer of this believes in prophecies, in tongues, in mysteries. But clearly, also, he regards them as both secondary and transient, while he regards charity as primary and eternal.

It may be added that the advent of spiritual life did at once produce a change in the character of the miraculous itself, divested it of its fantastic extravagance, and infused into it a moral element. The Gospel miracles, almost without exception, have a moral significance, and can without incongruity be made the text of moral discourses to this day. An attempt to make Hindoo or Greek miracles the text of moral discourses would produce strange results.

Compared with the tract of geological, and still more with that of astronomical time, spiritual life has not been long in our world; and we need not wonder if the process of disengagement from the environments of the previous state of humanity is as yet far from complete Political religions and persecution, for instance, did not come into the world with Christ; they are survivals of an earlier stage of human progress. The Papacy, the great political Church of mediaeval Europe, is the historical continuation of the State religion of Rome and the Pontificate of the Roman emperors. The Greek Church is the historical continuation of the Eastern offset of the same system. The national State Churches are the historical continuations of the tribal religions and priesthoods of the Northern tribes. We talk of the conversion of the Barbarians, but in point of fact it was the chief of the tribe that was converted, or rather that changed his religious allegiance, sometimes by treaty (as in the case of Guthrum), and carried his tribe with him into the allegiance of the new God. Hence the new religion, like the old, was placed upon the footing of a tribal, and afterwards of a state, religion; heresy was treason; and the state still lent the aid of the secular arm to the national priesthood for the repression of rebellion against the established faith. But since the Reformation the process of disengagement has been rapidly going on; and in the North American communities, which are the latest developments of humanity, the connection between Church and State has ceased to exist, without any diminution of the strength of the religious sentiment

Whether there is anything deserving of attention in these brief remarks or not, one thing may safely be affirmed: it is time that the question as to the existence of a rational basis for religion and the reality of spiritual life should be studied, not merely with a view of overthrowing the superstitions of the past, but of providing, if possible, a faith for the present and the future. The battle of criticism and science against superstition has been won, as every open-minded observer of the contest must be aware, though the remnants of the broken host still linger on the field. It is now time to consider whether religion must perish with superstition, or whether the death of superstition may not be the new birth of religion. Religion survived the fall of Polytheism; it is surely conceivable that it may survive the fall of Anthropomorphism, and that the desperate struggle which is being waged about the formal belief in "Personality," may be merely the sloughing off of something that when it is gone, will be seen to have not been vital to religion.

There are some who would deter us from inquiring into anything beyond the range of sensible experience, and especially from any inquiry into the future existence of the soul, which they denounce as utterly unpractical, and compare with obsolete and fruitless inquiries into the state of the soul before birth. We have already challenged the exclusive claim of the five bodily senses to be the final sources of knowledge; and we may surely add that it is at least as practical to inquire into the destiny as it is to inquire into the origin of man.

If the belief in God and in a Future State is true, it will prevail. The cloud will pass away and the sun will shine out again. But in the meantime society may have "a bad quarter of an hour." Without exaggerating the influence of the belief in Future Reward and Punishment, or of any form of it, on the actions of ordinary men, we may safely say that the sense of responsibility to a higher power, and of the constant presence of an all-seeing Judge, has exercised an influence, the removal of which would be greatly felt. Materialism has in fact already begun to show its effects on human conduct and on society. They may perhaps be more visible in communities where social conduct depends greatly on individual conviction and motive, than in communities which are more ruled by tradition and bound together by strong class organizations; though the decay of morality will perhaps be ultimately more complete and disastrous in the latter than in the former. God and future retribution being out of the question, it is difficult to see what can restrain the selfishness of an ordinary man, and induce him, in the absence of actual coercion, to sacrifice his personal desires to the public good. The service of Humanity is the sentiment of a refined mind conversant with history; within no calculable time is it likely to overrule the passions and direct the conduct of the mass. And after all, without God or spirit, what is "Humanity"? One school of science reckons a hundred and fifty different species of man. What is the bond of unity between all these species and wherein consists the obligation to mutual love and help? A zealous servant of science told Agassiz that the age of real civilization would have begun when you could go out and shoot a man for scientific purposes. Apparent dirae facies. We begin to perceive, looming through the mist, the lineaments of an epoch of selfishness compressed by a government of force.

PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR RELIGION

There appears to be a connection between the proposed substitutes for religion and the special training of their several authors. Historians tender us the worship of Humanity, professors of physical science tender us Cosmic Emotion. Theism might almost retort the apologue of the specter of the Brocken.

The only organized cultus without a God, at present before us, is that of Comte. This in all its parts—its high priesthood, its hierarchy, its sacraments, its calendar, its hagiology, its literary canon, its ritualism, and we may add, in its fundamentally intolerant and inquisitorial character—is an obvious reproduction of the Church of Rome, with humanity in place of God, great men in place of the saints, the Founder of Comtism in place of the Founder of Christianity, and even a sort of substitute for the Virgin in the shape of womanhood typified by Clotilde de Vaux. There is only just the amount of difference which would be necessary in order to escape servile imitation. We have ourselves witnessed a case of alternation between the two systems which testified to the closeness of their affinity. The Catholic Church has acted on the imagination of Comte at least as powerfully as Sparta acted on that of Plato. Nor is Comtism, any more than Plato's Republic and other Utopias, exempt from the infirmity of claiming finality for a flight of the individual imagination. It would shut up mankind for ever in a stereotyped organization which is the vision of a particular thinker. In this respect it seems to us to be at a disadvantage compared with Christianity, which, as presented, in the Gospels, does not pretend to organize mankind ecclesiastically or politically, but simply supplies a new type of character, and a new motive power, leaving government, ritual and organization of every kind to determine themselves from age to age. Comte's prohibition of inquiry into the composition of the stars, which his priesthood, had it been installed in power, would perhaps have converted into a compulsory article of faith, is only a specimen of his general tendency (the common tendency, as we have said, of all Utopias) to impose on human progress the limits of his own mind. Let his hierarchy become masters of the world, and the effect would probably be like that produced by the ascendency of a hierarchy (enlightened no doubt for its time) in Egypt, a brief start forward followed by consecrated immobility for ever.

Lareveillere Lepaux, a member of the French Directory, invented a new religion of Theo-philanthropy which seems in fact to have been an organized Rousseauism. He wished to impose it on France but finding that in spite of his passionate endeavours he made but little progress he sought the advice of Talleyrand. "I am not surprised" said Talleyrand "at the difficulty you experience. It is no easy matter to introduce a new religion. But I will tell you what I recommend you to do. I recommend you to be crucified and to rise again on the third day." We cannot say whether Lareveillere made any proselytes but if he did their number cannot have been much smaller than the reputed number of the religious disciples of Comte. As a philosophy, Comtism has found its place and exercised its share of influence among the philosophies of the time but as a religious system it appears to make little way. It is the invention of a man not the spontaneous expression of the beliefs and feelings of mankind. Any one with a tolerably lively imagination might produce a rival system with as little practical effect. Roman Catholicism was at all events a growth not an invention.

Cosmic Emotion, though it does not affect to be an organized system, is the somewhat sudden creation of individual minds set at work apparently by the exigencies of a particular situation and on that account suggestive prima facie of misgivings similar to those suggested by the invention of Comte.

Now is the worship of Humanity or Cosmic Emotion really a substitute for religion? That is the only question which we wish in these few pages to ask. We do not pretend here to inquire what is or what is not true in itself.

Religion teaches that we have our being in a Power whose character and purposes are indicated to us by our moral nature, in whom we are united and by the union made sacred to each other, whose voice conscience however generated, is whose eye is always upon us, sees all our acts, and sees them as they are morally, without reference to worldly success or to the opinion of the world, to whom at death we return, and our relations to whom, together with his own nature, are an assurance that according as we promote or fail to promote his design by self improvement and the improvement of our kind, it will be well or ill for us in the sum of things. This is a hypothesis evidently separable from belief in a revelation, and from any special theory respecting the next world, as well as from all dogma and ritual. It may be true or false in itself, capable of demonstration or incapable. We are concerned here solely with its practical efficiency, compared with that of the proposed substitutes. It is only necessary to remark, that there is nothing about the religious hypothesis as here stated, miraculous, supernatural, or mysterious, except so far as those epithets may be applied to anything beyond the range of bodily sense, say the influence of opinion or affection. A universe self-made, and without a God, is at least as great a mystery as a universe with a God; in fact the very attempt to conceive it in the mind produces a moral vertigo which is a bad omen for the practical success of Cosmic Emotion.

For this religion are the service and worship of Humanity likely to be a real equivalent in any respect, as motive power, as restraint, or as comfort? Will the idea of life in God be adequately replaced by that of an interest in the condition and progress of Humanity, as they may affect us and be influenced by our conduct, together with the hope of human gratitude and fear of human reprobation after death, which the Comtists endeavor to organize into a sort of counterpart of the Day of Judgment?

It will probably be at once conceded that the answer must be in the negative as regards the immediate future and the mass of mankind. The simple truths of religion are intelligible to all, and strike all minds with equal force, though they may not have the same influence with all moral natures. A child learns them perfectly at its mother's knee. Honest ignorance in the mine, on the sea, at the forge, striving to do its coarse and perilous duty, performing the lowliest functions of humanity, contributing in the humblest way to human progress, itself scarcely sunned by a ray of what more cultivated natures would deem happiness, takes in as fully as the sublimest philosopher the idea of a God who sees and cares for all, who keeps account of the work well done or the kind act, marks the secret fault, and will hereafter make up to duty for the hardness of its present lot. But a vivid interest—such an interest as will act both as a restraint and as a comfort—in the condition and future of humanity can surely exist only in those who have a knowledge of history sufficient to enable them to embrace the unity of the past, and an imagination sufficiently cultivated to glow with anticipation of the future. For the bulk of mankind the humanity worshippers point of view seems unattainable at least within any calculable time.

As to posthumous reputation good or evil it is and always must be the appendage of a few marked men. The plan of giving it substance by instituting separate burial places for the virtuous and the wicked is perhaps not very seriously proposed. Any such plan involves the fallacy of a sharp division where there is no clear moral line besides postulating not only an unattainable knowledge of men's actions but a knowledge still more manifestly unattainable of their hearts. Yet we cannot help thinking that on the men of intellect to whose teaching the world is listening this hope of posthumous reputation, or to put it more plainly, of living in the gratitude and affection of their kind by means of their scientific discoveries and literary works exercises an influence of which they are hardly conscious, it prevents them from fully feeling the void which the annihilation of the hope of future existence leaves in the hearts of ordinary men.

Besides so far as we are aware no attempt has yet been made to show us distinctly what humanity is and wherein its holiness consists. If the theological hypothesis is true and all men are united in God, humanity is a substantial reality, but otherwise we fail to see that it is any thing more than a metaphysical abstraction converted into an actual entity by philosophers who are not generally kind to metaphysics. Even the unity of the species is far from settled, science still debates whether there is one race of men or whether there are more than a hundred. Man acts on man no doubt, but he also acts on other animals, and other animals on him. Wherein does the special unity or the special bond consist? Above all what constitutes the holiness? Individual men are not holy, a large proportion of them are very much the reverse. Why is the aggregate holy? Let the unit be a complex phenomenon, an organism or whatever name science may give it, what multiple of it will be a rational object of worship?

For our own part we cannot conceive worship being offered by a sane worshipper to any but a conscious being, in other words to a person. The fetish worshipper himself probably invests his fetish with a vague personality such as would render it capable of propitiation. But how can we invest with a collective personality the fleeting generations of mankind? Even the sum of mankind is never complete, much less are the units blended into a personal whole, or as it has been called a colossal man.

There is a gulf here, as it seems to us, which cannot be bridged, and can barely be hidden from view by the retention of religious phraseology. In truth, the anxious use of that phraseology betrays weakness, since it shows that you cannot do without the theological associations which cling inseparably to religious terms.

You look forward to a closer union, a more complete brotherhood of man, an increased sacredness of the human relation. Some things point that way; some things point the other way. Brotherhood has hardly a definite meaning without a father; sacredness can hardly be predicated without anything which consecrates. We can point to an eminent writer who tells you that he detests the idea of brotherly love altogether; that there are many of his kind whom, so far from loving, he hates, and that he would like to write his hatred with a lash upon their backs. Look again at the severe Prussianism which betrays itself in the New Creed of Strauss. Look at the oligarchy of enlightenment and enjoyment which Renan, in his Moral Reform of France, proposes to institute for the benefit of a select circle, with sublime indifference to the lot of the vulgar, who, he says, "must subsist on the glory and happiness of others." This does not look much like a nearer approach to a brotherhood of man than is made by the Gospel. We are speaking, of course, merely of the comparative moral efficiency of religion and the proposed substitutes for it, apart from the influence exercised over individual conduct by the material needs and other non-theological forces of society.

For the immortality of the individual soul, with the influences of that belief, we are asked to substitute the immortality of the race. But here, in addition to the difficulty of proving the union and intercommunion of all the members, we are met by the objection that unless we live in God, the race, in all probability, is not immortal. That our planet and all it contains will come to an end appears to be the decided opinion of science. This "holy" being, our relation to which is to take the place of our relation to an Eternal Father, by the adoration of which we are to be sustained and controlled, if it exist at all, is as ephemeral compared with eternity as a fly. We shall be told that we ought to be content with an immortality extending through tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years. To the argumentum ad verecundiam there is no reply. But will this banish the thought of ultimate annihilation? Will it prevent a man, when he is called upon to make some great sacrifice for the race, from saying to himself, that, whether he makes the sacrifice or not, one day all will end in nothing?

Evidently these are points which must be made quite clear before you can, with any prospect of success, call upon men either to regard Humanity with the same feelings with which they have regarded God, or to give up their own interest or enjoyment for the future benefit of the race. The assurance derived from the fondness felt by parents for their offspring, and the self-denying efforts made for the good of children, will hardly carry us very far, even supposing it certain that parental love would remain unaffected by the general change. It is evidently a thing apart from the general love of Humanity. Nobody was ever more extravagantly fond of his children, or made greater efforts for them, than Alexander Borgia.

It has been attempted, however, with all the fervour of conviction, and with all the force of a powerful style, to make us see not only that we have this corporal immortality as members of the "colossal man," but that we may look forward to an actual though impersonal existence in the shape of the prolongation through all future time of the consequences of our lives. It might with equal truth be said that we have enjoyed an actual though impersonal existence through all time past in our antecedents. But neither in its consequences nor in its antecedents can anything be said to live except by a figure. The characters and actions of men surely will never be influenced by such a fanciful use of language as this! Our being is consciousness; with consciousness our being ends, though our physical forces may be conserved, and traces of our conduct—traces utterly indistinguishable—may remain. That with which we are not concerned cannot affect us either presently or by anticipation; and with that of which we shall never be conscious, we shall never feel that we are concerned. Perhaps if the authors of this new immortality would tell us what they understand by non-existence, we might be led to value more highly by contrast the existence which they propose for a soul when it has ceased to think or feel, and for an organism when it has been scattered to the winds.

They would persuade us that their impersonal and unconscious immortality is a brighter hope than an eternity of personal and conscious existence, the very thought of which they say is torture. This assumes, what there seems to be no ground for assuming, that eternity is an endless extension of time; and, in the same way, that infinity is a boundless space. It is more natural to conceive of them as emancipation respectively from time and space, and from the conditions which time and space involve; and among the conditions of time may apparently be reckoned the palling of pleasure or of existence by mere temporal protraction. Even as we are, sensual pleasure palls; so does the merely intellectual: but can the same be said of the happiness of virtue and affection? It is urged, too, that by exchanging the theological immortality for one of physical and social consequences, we get rid of the burden of self, which otherwise we should drag for ever. But surely in this there is a confusion of self with selfishness. Selfishness is another name for vice. Self is merely consciousness. Without a self, how can there be self-sacrifice? How can the most unselfish motive exist if there is nothing to be moved? "He that findeth his life, shall lose it; and he that loseth his life, shall find it," is not a doctrine of selfishness, but it implies a self. We have been rebuked in the words of Frederick to his grenadiers—"Do you want to live for ever?" The grenadiers might have answered, "Yes; and therefore we are ready to die."

It is not when we think of the loss of anything to which a taint of selfishness can adhere—it is not even when we think of intellectual effort cut short for ever by death just as the intellect has ripened and equipped itself with the necessary knowledge—that the nothingness of this immortality of conservated forces is most keenly felt: it is when we think of the miserable end of affection. How much comfort would it afford anyone bending over the deathbed of his wife to know that forces set free by her dissolution will continue to mingle impersonally and indistinguishably with forces set free by the general mortality? Affection, at all events, requires personality. One cannot love a group of consequences, even supposing that the filiation could be distinctly presented to the mind. Pressed by the hand of sorrow craving for comfort, this Dead Sea fruit crumbles into ashes, paint it with eloquence as you will.

Humanity, it seems to us, is a fundamentally Christian idea, connected with the Christian view of the relations of men to their common Father and of their spiritual union in the Church. In the same way the idea of the progress of Humanity seems to us to have been derived from the Christian belief in the coming of the Kingdom of God through the extension of the Church, and to that final triumph of good over evil foretold in the imagery of the Apocalypse. At least the founders of the Religion of Humanity will admit that the Christian Church is the matrix of theirs so much their very nomenclature proves and we would fain ask them to review the process of disengagement and see whether the essence has not been left behind.

No doubt there are influences at work in modern civilisation which tend to the strengthening of the sentiment of humanity by making men more distinctly conscious of their position as members of a race. On the other hand the unreflecting devotion of the tribesman which held together primitive societies dies. Man learns to reason and calculate and when he is called upon to immolate himself to the common interest of the race he will consider what the common interest of the race when he is dead and gone will be to him and whether he will ever be repaid for his sacrifice.

Of Cosmic Emotion it will perhaps be fair to say that it is proposed as a substitute for religious emotion rather than as a substitute for religion since nothing has been said about embodying it in a cult. It comes to us commended by glowing quotations from Mr. Swinburne and Walt Whitman and we cannot help admitting that for common hearts it stands in need of the commendation. The transfer of affection from an all loving Father to an adamantine universe is a process for which we may well seek all the aid that the witchery of poetry can supply. Unluckily we are haunted by the consciousness that the poetry itself is blindly ground out by the same illimitable mill of evolution which grinds out Virtue and affection. We are by no means sure that we understand what Cosmic Emotion is even after leading an exposition of its nature by no ungifted hand. Its symbola so to speak are the feelings produced by the two objects of Kant's peculiar reverence—the stars of heaven and the moral faculty of man. But after all these are only like anything else aggregations of molecules in a certain stage of evolution. To the unscientific eye they may be awful because they are mysterious, but let science analyse them and then awfulness disappears. If the interaction of all parts of the material universe is complete we fail to see why one object or one feeling is more cosmic than another. However we will not dwell on that which as we have already confessed we do not feel sure that we rightly apprehend. What we do clearly see is that to have cosmic emotion or cosmic anything you must have a cosmos. You must be assured that the universe is a cosmos and not a chaos. And what assurance of this can materialism or any non theological system give? Law is a theological term, it implies a lawgiver or a governing intelligence of some kind. Science can tell us nothing but facts, single or accumulated as experience, which would not make a law though they had been observed through myriads of years. Law is a theological term, and cosmos is equally so, if it may not rather be said to be a Greek name for the aggregate of laws. For order implies intelligent selection and arrangement. Our idea of order would not be satisfied by a number of objects falling by mere chance into a particular figure, however intricate and regular. All the arguments which have been used against design seem to tell with equal force against order. We have no other universe wherewith we can compare this, so as to assure ourselves that this universe is not a chaos, but a cosmos. Both on the earth and in the heavens we see much that is not order, but disorder; not cosmos, but acosmia. If we divine, nevertheless, that order reigns, and that there is design beneath the seemingly undesigned, and good beneath the appearance of evil, it is by virtue of something not dreamed of in the philosophy of materialism.

Have we really come to this, that the world has no longer any good reason for believing in a God or a life beyond the grave? If so, it is difficult to deny that with regard to the great mass of mankind up to this time Schopenhauer and the Pessimists are right, and existence has been a cruel misadventure. The number of those who have suffered lifelong oppression, disease, or want, who have died deaths of torture or perished miserably by war, is limited though enormous; but probably there have been few lives in which the earthly good has not been outweighed by the evil. The future may bring increased means of happiness, though those who are gone will not be the better for them; but it will bring also increase of sensibility, and the consciousness of hopeless imperfection and miserable futility will probably become a distinct and growing cause of pain. It is doubtful even whether, after such a raising of Mokanna's veil, faith in everything would not expire and human effort cease. Still we must face the situation: there can be no use in self-delusion. In vain we shall seek to cheat our souls and to fill a void which cannot be filled by the manufacture of artificial religions and the affectation of a spiritual language to which, however persistently and fervently it may be used, no realities correspond. If one of these cults could get itself established, in less than a generation it would become hollower than the hollowest of ecclesiasticisms. Probably not a few of the highest natures would withdraw themselves from the dreary round of self mockery by suicide, and if a scientific priesthood attempted to close that door by sociological dogma or posthumous denunciation the result would show the difference between the practical efficacy of a religion with a God and that of a cult of "Humanity" or "Space."

Shadows and figments, as they appear to us to be in themselves these attempts to provide a substitute for religion are of the highest importance, as showing that men of great powers of mind, who have thoroughly broken loose not only from Christianity but from natural religion and in some cases placed themselves in violent antagonism to both, are still unable to divest themselves of the religious sentiment or to appease its craving for satisfaction. There being no God, they find it necessary, as Voltaire predicted it would be, to invent one, not for the purposes of police (they are far above such sordid Jesuitism), but as the solution of the otherwise hopeless enigma of our spiritual nature. Science takes cognizance of all phenomena, and this apparently ineradicable tendency of the human mind is a phenomenon like the rest. The thoroughgoing Materialist, of course, escapes all these philosophical exigencies, but he does it by denying Humanity as well as God and reducing the difference between the organism of the human animal and that of any other animal to a mere question of complexity. Still, even in this quarter, there has appeared of late a disposition to make concessions on the subject of human volition hardly consistent with Materialism. Nothing can be more likely than that the impetus of great discoveries has carried the discoverers too far.

Perhaps with the promptings of the religious sentiment there is combined a sense of the immediate danger with which the failure of the religious sanction threatens social order and morality. As we have said already, the men of whom we specially speak are far above anything like social Jesuitism. We have not a doubt but they would regard with abhorrence any schemes of oligarchic illuminism for guarding the pleasures of the few by politic deception of the multitude. But they have probably begun to lay to heart the fact that the existing morality, though not dependent on any special theology, any special view of the relations between soul and body, or any special theory of future rewards and punishments, is largely dependent on a belief in the indefeasible authority of conscience, and in that without which conscience can have no indefeasible authority—the presence of a just and all-seeing God. It may be true that in primaeval society these beliefs are found only in the most rudimentary form, and, as social sanctions, are very inferior in force to mere gregarious instincts or the pressure of tribal need. But man emerges from the primaeval state, and when he does, he demands a reason for his submission to moral law. That the leaders of the anti- theological movement in the present day are immoral, nobody but the most besotted fanatic would insinuate; no candid antagonist would deny that some of them are in every respect the very best of men. The fearless love of truth is usually accompanied by other high qualities; and nothing could be more unlikely than that natures disposed to virtue, trained under good influences, peculiarly sensitive to opinion and guarded by intellectual tastes, would lapse into vice as soon as the traditional sanction was removed. But what is to prevent the withdrawal of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the morality of the mass of mankind? The commercial swindler or the political sharper, when the divine authority of conscience is gone, will feel that he has only the opinion of society to reckon with, and he knows how to reckon with the opinion of society. If Macbeth is ready, provided he can succeed in this world, to "jump the life to come," much more ready will villainy be to "jump" the bad consequences of its actions to humanity when its own conscious existence shall have closed. Rate the practical effect of religious beliefs as low and that of social influences as high as you may, there can surely be no doubt that morality has received some support from the authority of an inward monitor regarded as the voice of God. The worst of men would have wished to die the death of the righteous; he would have been glad, if he could, when death approached, to cancel his crimes; and the conviction, or misgiving, which this implied, could not fail to have some influence upon the generality of mankind, though no doubt the influence was weakened rather than strengthened by the extravagant and incredible form in which the doctrine of future retribution was presented by the dominant theology.

The denial of the existence of God and of a Future State, in a word, is the dethronement of conscience; and society will pass, to say the least, through a dangerous interval before social science can fill the vacant throne. Avowed scepticism is likely to be disinterested and therefore to be moral; it is among the unavowed sceptics and conformists to political religions that the consequences of the change may be expected to appear.

But more than this, the doctrines of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest are beginning to generate a morality of their own, with the inevitable corollary that the proof of superior fitness is to survive—to survive either by force or cunning, like the other animals which by dint of force or cunning have come out victorious from the universal war and asserted for themselves a place in nature. The "irrepressible struggle for empire" is formally put forward by public writers of the highest class as the basis and the rule of the conduct of this country towards other nations; and we may be sure that there is not an entire absence of connection between the private code of a school and its international conceptions. The feeling that success covers everything seems to be gaining ground and to be overcoming, not merely the old conventional rules of honour, but moral principle itself. Both in public and private there are symptoms of an approaching failure of the motive power which has hitherto sustained men both in self- sacrificing effort and in courageous protest against wrong, though as yet we are only at the threshold of the great change, and established sentiment long survives, in the masses, that which originally gave it birth. Renan says, probably with truth, that had the Second Empire remained at peace, it might have gone on forever; and in the history of this country the connection between political effort and religion has been so close that its dissolution, to say the least, can hardly fail to produce a critical change in the character of the nation. The time may come, when, as philosophers triumphantly predict, men, under the ascendancy of science, will act for the common good, with the same mechanical certainty as bees; though the common good of the human hive would perhaps not be easy to define. But in the meantime mankind, or some portions of it, may be in danger of an anarchy of self-interest, compressed for the purpose of political order, by a despotism of force.

That science and criticism, acting—thanks to the liberty of opinion won by political effort—with a freedom never known before, have delivered us from a mass of dark and degrading superstitions, we own with heartfelt thankfulness to the deliverers, and in the firm conviction that the removal of false beliefs, and of the authorities or institutions founded on them, cannot prove in the end anything but a blessing to mankind. But at the same time the foundations of general morality have inevitably been shaken, and a crisis has been brought on the gravity of which nobody can fail to see, and nobody but a fanatic of Materialism can see without the most serious misgiving.

There has been nothing in the history of man like the present situation. The decadence of the ancient mythologies is very far from affording a parallel. The connection of those mythologies with morality was comparatively slight. Dull and half-animal minds would hardly be conscious of the change which was partly veiled from them by the continuance of ritual and state creeds; while in the minds of Plato and Marcus Aurelius it made place for the development of a moral religion. The Reformation was a tremendous earthquake: it shook down the fabric of mediaeval religion, and as a consequence of the disturbance in the religious sphere filled the world with revolutions and wars. But it left the authority of the Bible unshaken, and men might feel that the destructive process had its limit, and that adamant was still beneath their feet. But a world which is intellectual and keenly alive to the significance of these questions, reading all that is written about them with almost passionate avidity, finds itself brought to a crisis the character of which any one may realize by distinctly presenting to himself the idea of existence without a God.

THE LABOUR MOVEMENT

(This Lecture was delivered before the Mechanics' Institute of Montreal, and the Literary Society of Sherbrooke, and published in the CANADIAN MONTHLY, December, 1872. The allusions to facts and events must be read with reference to the date.)

We are in the midst of an industrial war which is extending over Europe and the United States, and has not left Canada untouched. It is not wonderful that great alarm should prevail, or that, in panic-stricken minds, it should assume extravagant forms. London deprived of bread by a bakers' strike, or of fuel by a colliers' strike, is a serious prospect; so is the sudden stoppage of any one of the wheels in the vast and complicated machine of modern industry. People may be pardoned for thinking that they have fallen on evil times, and that they have a dark future before them. Yet, those who have studied industrial history know that the present disturbance is mild compared with the annals of even a not very remote past. The study of history shows us where we are, and whither things are tending. Though it does not diminish the difficulties of the present hour, it teaches us to estimate them justly, to deal with them calmly and not to call for cavalry and grapeshot because one morning we are left without hot bread.

One of the literary janissaries of the French Empire thought to prove that the working class had no rights against the Bonapartes, by showing that the first free labourers were only emancipated slaves. One would like to know what he supposed the first Bonapartes were. However though his inference was not worth much, except against those who are pedantic enough, to vouch parchment archives for the rights and interests of humanity, he was in the right as to the fact. Labour first appears in history as a slave, treated like a beast of burden, chained to the door- post of a Roman master, or lodged in the underground manstables (ergastula) on his estate, treated like a beast, or worse than a beast, recklessly worked out and then cast forth to die, scourged, tortured, flung in a moment of passion to feed the lampreys, crucified for the slightest offence or none. "Set up a cross for the slave," cries the Roman matron, in, Juvenal. "Why, what has the slave done?" asks her husband.

One day labour strikes; finds a leader in Spartacus, a slave devoted as a gladiator to the vilest of Roman pleasures; wages a long and terrible servile war. The revolt is put down at last, after shaking the foundations of the state. Six thousand slaves are crucified along the road from Rome to Capua. Labour had its revenge, for slavery brought the doom of Rome.

In the twilight of history, between the fall of Rome and the rise of the new nationalities, we dimly see the struggle going on. There is a great insurrection of the oppressed peasantry, under the name of Bagaudae, in Gaul. When the light dawns, a step has been gained. Slavery has been generally succeeded by serfdom. But serfdom is hard. The peasantry of feudal Normandy conspire against their cruel lords, hold secret meetings, the ominous name commune is heard. But the conspiracy is discovered and suppressed with the fiendish ferocity with which panic inspires a dominant class, whether in Normandy or Jamaica. Amidst the religious fervour of the Crusades again breaks out a wild labour movement, that of the Pastoureaux, striking for equality in the name of the Holy Spirit, which, perhaps, they had as good a right to use as some who deemed their use of it profane. This is in the country, among the shepherds and ploughmen. In the cities labour has congregated numbers, mutual intelligence, union on its side; it is constantly reinforced by fugitives from rural serfdom; it builds city walls, purchases or extorts charters of liberty. The commercial and manufacturing cities of Italy, Germany, Flanders, become the cradles of free industry, and, at the same time, of intellect, art, civilization. But these are points of light amidst the feudal darkness of the rural districts. In France, for example, the peasantry are cattle; in time of peace crushed with forced labour, feudal burdens, and imposts of all kinds; in time of war driven, in unwilling masses, half-armed and helpless, to the shambles. Aristocratic luxury, gambling, profligate wars—Jacques Bonhomme pays for them all. At Crecy and Poictiers, the lords are taken prisoners; have to provide heavy ransoms, which, being debts of honour, like gambling debts, are more binding than debts of honesty. But Jacques Bonhomme's back is broad, it will bear everything. Broad as it is, it will not bear this last straw. The tidings of Flemish freedom have, perhaps, in some way reached his dull ear, taught him that bondage is not, as his priest, no doubt, assures him it is, a changeless ordinance of God, that the yoke, though strong, may be broken. He strikes, arms himself with clubs, knives, ploughshares, rude pikes, breaks out into a Jacquerie, storms the castles of the oppressor, sacks, burns, slays with the fury of a wild beast unchained. The lords are stupefied. At last they rally and bring their armour, their discipline, their experience in war, the moral ascendency of a master-class to bear. The English gentlemen, in spite of the hostilities, only half suspended, between the nations, join the French gentlemen against the common enemy. Twenty thousand peasants are soon cut down, but long afterwards the butchery continues. Guillaume Callet, the leader of the Jacquerie, a very crafty peasant, as he is called by the organs of the lords, is crowned with a circlet of red-hot iron.

In England, during the same period serfdom, we know not exactly how, is breaking up. There is a large body of labourers working for hire. But in the midst of the wars of the great conqueror, Edward III., comes a greater conqueror, the plague called the Black Death, which sweeps away, some think, a third of the population of Europe. The number of labourers is greatly diminished. Wages rise. The feudal parliament passes an Act to compel labourers, under penalties, to work at the old rates. This Act is followed by a train of similar Acts, limiting wages and fixing in the employers' interest the hours of work, which, in the pages of imaginative writers, figure as noble attempts made by legislators of a golden age to regulate the relations between employer and employed on some higher principle than that of contract. The same generous spirit, no doubt, dictated the enactment prohibiting farm labourers from bringing up their children to trades, lest hands should be withdrawn from the land-owner's service. Connected with the Statutes of Labourers, are those bloody vagrant laws, in which whipping, branding, hanging are ordained as the punishment of vagrancy by lawgivers, many of whom were themselves among the idlest and most noxious vagabonds in the country, and the authors of senseless wars which generated a mass of vagrancy, by filling the country with disbanded soldiers. In the reign of Richard II., the poll tax being added to other elements of class discord, labour strikes, takes arms under Wat Tyler, demands fixed rents, tenant right in an extreme form, and the total abolition of serfage. A wild religious communism bred of the preachings of the more visionary among the Wycliffites mingles in the movement with the sense of fiscal and industrial wrong. "When Adam delved and Eve span, where was then the gentleman?" is the motto of the villeins, and it is one of more formidable import than any utterance of peasant orators at Agricultural Labourers' meetings in the present day. Then come fearful scenes of confusion, violence and crime. London is in the power of hordes brutalized by oppression. High offices of state, high ecclesiastics are murdered. Special vengeance falls on the lawyers, as the artificers who forged the cunning chains of feudal iniquity. The rulers, the troops, are paralyzed by the aspect of the sea of furious savagery raging round them. The boy king, by a miraculous exhibition of courageous self- possession, saves the State; but he is compelled to grant general charters of manumission, which, when the danger is over, the feudal parliament forces him by a unanimous vote to repudiate. Wholesale hanging of serfs, of course, follows the landlords' victory.

The rising under Jack Cade, in the reign of Henry VI., was rather political than industrial. The demands of the insurgents, political reform and freedom of suffrage, show that progress had been made in the condition and aspirations of the labouring class. But with the age of the Tudors came the final breakup in England of feudalism, as well as of Catholicism, attended by disturbances in the world of labour, similar to those which have attended the abolition of slavery in the Southern States. This is the special epoch of the sanguinary vagrancy laws, the most sanguinary of which was framed by the hand of Henry VIII. The new nobility of courtiers and upstarts, who had shared with the king the plunder of the monasteries, were hard landlords of course; they robbed the people of their rights of common, and swept away homesteads and cottages, to make room for sheep farms, the wool trade being the great source of wealth in those days. By the spoliation of the monasteries, the great alms-houses of the Middle Ages, the poor had also been left for a time without the relief, which was given them again in a more regular form by the Poor Law of Elizabeth. Hence in the reign of Edward VI., armed strikes again, in different parts of the kingdom. In the West, the movement was mainly religious; but in the Eastern countries, under Kett of Norfolk, it was agrarian. Kett's movement after a brief period of success, during which the behaviour of the insurgents and their leader was very creditable, was put down by the disciplined mercenaries under the command of the new aristocracy, and its suppression was of course followed by a vigorous use of the gallows. No doubt the industrial conservatives of those days were as frightened, as angry, and as eager for strong measures as their successors are now: but the awkwardness of the newly liberated captive, in the use of his limbs and eyes, is due not to his recovered liberty, but to the narrowness and darkness of the dungeon in which he has been immured.

In Germany, at the same epoch, there was not merely a local rising, but a wide-spread and most terrible peasants' war. The German peasantry had been ground down beyond even an hereditary bondsman's power of endurance by their lords generally, and by the Prince Bishop and other spiritual lords in particular. The Reformation having come with a gospel of truth, love, spiritual brotherhood, the peasants thought it might also have brought some hope of social justice. The doctors of divinity had to inform them that this was a mistake. But they took the matter into their own hands and rose far and wide, the fury of social and industrial war blending with the wildest fanaticism, the most delirious ecstacy, the darkest imposture. Once more there are stormings and burnings of feudal castles, massacring of their lords. Lords are roasted alive, hunted like wild beasts in savage revenge for the cruelty of the game laws. Munzer, a sort of peasant Mahomet, is at the head of the movement. Under him it becomes Anabaptist, Antinomian, Communist. At first he and his followers sweep the country with a whirlwind of terror and destruction: but again the lords rally, bring up regular troops. The peasants are brought to bay on their last hill side, behind a rampart formed of their waggons. Their prophet assures them that the cannon-balls will fall harmless into his cloak. The cannon-balls take their usual course: a butchery, then a train of torturings and executions follows, the Prince Bishop, among others, adding considerably to the whiteness of the Church's robe. Luther is accused of having incited the ferocity of the lords against those, who, it is alleged, had only carried his own principles to an extreme. But in the first place Luther never taught Anabaptism or anything that could logically lead to it; and in the second place, before he denounced the peasants, he tried to mediate and rebuke the tyranny of the lords. No man deserves more sympathy than a great reformer, who is obliged to turn against the excesses of his own party. He becomes the object of fierce hatred on one side, of exulting derision on the other; yet he is no traitor, but alone loyal to his conscience and his cause.

The French Revolution was a political movement among the middle class in the cities, but among the peasantry in the country it was an agrarian and labour movement, and the dismantling of chateaux, and chasing away of their lords which then took place were a renewal of the struggle which had given birth to the Jacquerie, the insurrection of Wat Tyler, and the Peasants' War. This time the victory remained with the peasant, and the lord returned no more.

In England, long after the Tudor period, industrial disturbances took place, and wild communistic fancies welled up from the depths of a suffering world of labour, when society was stirred by political and religious revolution. Under the Commonwealth, communists went up on the hill side, and began to break ground for a poor man's Utopia; and the great movement of the Levellers, which had in it an economical as well as a political element, might have overturned society, if it had not been quelled by the strong hand of Cromwell. But in more recent times, within living memory, within the memory of many here there were labour disturbances in England, compared with which the present industrial war is mild. [Footnote: For the following details, see Martineau's "History of the Peace.">[ In 1816, there were outbreaks among the suffering peasantry which filled the governing classes with fear. In Suffolk nightly fires of incendiaries blazed in every district, thrashing machines were broken or burnt in open day, mills were attacked. At Brandon large bodies of workmen assembled to prescribe a maximum price of grain and meat, and to pull down the houses of butchers and bakers. They bore flags with the motto, "Bread or Blood". Insurgents from the Fen Country, a special scene of distress, assembled at Littleport, attacked the house of a magistrate in the night, broke open shops, emptied the cellars of public-houses, marched on Ely, and filled the district for two days and nights with drunken rioting and plunder. The soldiery was called in; there was an affray in which blood flowed on both sides, then a special commission and hangings to close the scene. Distressed colliers in Staffordshire and Wales assembled by thousands, stopped works, and were with difficulty diverted from marching to London. In 1812, another stain of blood was added to the sanguinary criminal code of those days by the Act making death the penalty for the destruction of machinery. This was caused by the Luddite outrages, which were carried on in the most systematic manner, and on the largest scale in Nottingham and the adjoining counties. Bodies of desperadoes, armed and disguised, went forth under a leader, styled General Ludd, who divided them into bands, and aligned to each band its work of destruction. Terror reigned around; the inhabitants were commanded to keep in their houses and put out their lights on pain of death. In the silence of night houses and factories were broken open, machines demolished, unfinished work scattered on the highways. The extent and secrecy of the conspiracy baffled the efforts of justice and the death penalty failed to put the system down. Even the attempts made to relieve distress became new sources of discontent and a soup kitchen riot at Glasgow led to a two days conflict between the soldiery and the mob. In 1818, a threatening mass of Manchester spinners, on strike came into bloody collision with the military. Then there were rick burnings, farmers patrolling all night long, gibbets erected on Pennenden heath, and bodies swinging on them, bodies of boys, eighteen or nineteen years old. Six labourers of Dorsetshire, the most wretched county in England, were sentenced to seven years' transportation nominally for administering an illegal oath, really for Unionism. Thereupon all the trades made a menacing demonstration, marched to Westminster, thirty thousand strong, with a petition for the release of the labourers. London was in an agony of fear, the Duke of Wellington prepared for a great conflict, pouring in troops and bringing up artillery from Woolwich. In 1840, again there were formidable movements, and society felt itself on the crust of a volcano. Threatening letters were sent to masters, rewards offered for firing mills, workmen were beaten, driven out of the country, burned with vitriol, and, there was reason to fear, murdered. Great masses of operatives collected for purposes of intimidation, shopkeepers were pillaged, collisions again took place between the people and the soldiery. Irish agrarianism meanwhile prevailed, in a far more deadly form than at present. And these industrial disturbances were connected with political disturbances equally formidable, with Chartism, Socialism, Cato Street conspiracies, Peterloo massacres, Bristol riots.

Now the present movement even in England, where there is so much suffering and so much ignorance, has been marked by a comparative absence of violence, and comparative respect for law. Considering what large bodies of men have been out on strike, how much they have endured in the conflict, and what appeals have been made to their passions, it is wonderful how little of actual crime or disturbance there has been. There were the Sheffield murders the disclosure of which filled all the friends of labour with shame and sorrow, all the enemies of labour with malignant exultation. But we should not have heard so much of the Sheffield murders if such things had been common. Sheffield is an exceptional place; some of the work there is deadly, life is short and character is reckless. Even at Sheffield, a very few, out of the whole number of trades, were found to have been in any way implicated. The denunciation of the outrages by the trades through England generally, was loud and sincere; an attempt was made, of course, to fix the guilt on all the Unions, but this was a hypocritical libel. It was stated, in one of our Canadian journals, the other day, that Mr. Roebuck had lost his seat for Sheffield, by protesting against Unionist outrage. Mr. Roebuck lost his seat for Sheffield by turning Tory. The Trades' candidate, by whom Mr. Roebuck was defeated, was Mr. Mundella, a representative of whom any constituency may be proud, a great employer of labour, and one who has done more than any other man of his class in England to substitute arbitration for industrial war, and to restore kindly relations between the employers and the employed. To Mr. Mundella the support of Broadhead and the criminal Unionists was offered, and by him it was decisively rejected.

The public mind has been filled with hideous fantasies, on the subject of Unionism, by sensation novelists like Mr. Charles Reade and Mr. Disraeli, the latter of whom has depicted the initiation of a working man into a Union with horrid rites, in a lofty and spacious room, hung with black cloth and lighted with tapers, amidst skeletons, men with battle axes, rows of masked figures in white robes, and holding torches; the novice swearing an awful oath on the Gospel, to do every act which the heads of the society enjoin, such as the chastisement of "nobs," the assassination of tyrannical masters, and the demolition of all mills deemed incorrigible by the society. People may read such stuff for the sake of amusement and excitement, if they please; but they will fall into a grave error if they take it for a true picture of the Amalgamated Carpenters or the Amalgamated Engineers. Besides, the Sheffield outrages were several years old at the time of their discovery. They belong, morally, to the time when the unions of working men being forbidden by unfair laws framed in the masters' interest were compelled to assume the character of conspiracies; when, to rob a union being no theft, unionists could hardly be expected to have the same respect as the better protected interests for public justice; when, moreover, the mechanics, excluded from political rights, could scarcely regard Government as the impartial guardian of their interests, or the governing classes as their friends. Since the legalization of the unions, the extension of legal security to their funds and the admission of the mechanics to the suffrage there has been comparatively little of unionist crime.

I do not say that there has been none. I do not say that there is none now. Corporate selfishness of which Trade Unions after all are embodiments seldom keeps quite clear of criminality. But the moral dangers of corporate selfishness are the same in all associations and in all classes. The Pennsylvanian iron master who comes before our Commissions of Inquiry to testify against Unionist outrage in Pennsylvania where a very wild and roving class of workmen are managed by agents who probably take little thought for the moral condition of the miner—this iron master I say is himself labouring through his paid organs in the press, through his representatives in Congress, and by every means in his power to keep up hatred of England and bad relations between the two countries at the constant risk of war because it suits the interest of his Protectionist Ring. The upper classes of Europe in the same spirit applauded what they called the salvation of society by the coup d'etat, the massacre on the Boulevards and the lawless deportation of the leaders of the working men in France. In the main however I repeat the present movement has been legal and pacific and so long as there is no violence, so long as no weapons but those of argument are employed, so long as law and reason reign, matters are sure to come right in the end. The result may not be exactly what we wish because we may wish to take too much for ourselves and to give our fellow men too little, but it will be just and we cannot deliberately desire more. If the law is broken by the Unionists, if violence or intimidation is employed by them instead of reason, let the Government protect the rights of the community and let the community strengthen the hands of the Government for that purpose.

Perhaps you will say that I have forgotten the International and the Commune. There is undoubtedly a close connection between the labour movement and democracy, between the struggle for industrial and the struggle for political emancipation, as there is a connection between both and Secularism, the frank form assumed among the working men by that which is concealed and conformist Scepticism among the upper class. In this respect the present industrial crisis resembles those of the past which as we have seen were closely connected with religious and political revolutions. In truth the whole frame of humanity generally moves at once. With the International, however, as an organ of political incendiarism, labour had very little to do. The International was, in its origin, a purely industrial association, born of Prince Albert's International Exhibition, which held a convention at Geneva, where everybody goes pic-nicing, for objects which, though chimerical, were distinctly economical, and free from any taint of petroleum. But a band of political conspirators got hold of the organization and used it, or at least, so much of it as they could carry with them, for a purpose entirely foreign to the original intent. Mark, too, that it was not so much labour or even democracy that charged the mine which blew up Paris, as the reactionary Empire, which, like reaction in countries more nearly connected with us than France, played the demagogue for its own ends, set the labourers against the liberal middle class, and crowded Paris with operatives, bribed by employment on public works. I detest all conspiracy, whether it be that of Ignatius Loyola, or that of Karl Marx- -not by conspiracy, not by dark and malignant intrigue, is society to be reformed, but by open, honest and kindly appeals to the reason and conscience of mankind. Yet, let us be just, even to the Commune. The destruction of the column at the Place Vendome was not a good act; but if it was in any measure the protest of labour against war, it was a better act than ever was done by the occupant of that column. On that column it was that, when Napoleon's long orgy of criminal glory was drawing to a close, the hand of misery and bereavement wrote "Monster, if all the blood you have shed could be collected in this square, you might drink without stooping." Thiers is shooting the Communists; perhaps justly, though humanity will be relieved when the gore ceases to trickle, and vengeance ends its long repast. But Thiers has himself been the literary arch-priest of Napoleon and of war: of all the incendiaries in France, he has been the worst.

The Trade Unions are new things in industrial history. The guilds of the Middle Ages, with which the unions are often identified, were confederations of all engaged in the trade, masters as well as men, against outsiders. The Unions are confederations of the men against the masters. They are the offspring of an age of great capitalists, employing large bodies of hired workmen. The workmen, needy, and obliged to sell their labour without reserve, that they might eat bread, found themselves, in their isolation, very much at the mercy of their masters, and resorted to union as a source of strength. Capital, by collecting in the centres of manufacture masses of operatives who thus became conscious of their number and their force, gave birth to a power which now countervails its own. To talk of a war of labour against capital generally would, of course, be absurd. Capital is nothing but the means of undertaking any industrial or commercial enterprise, of setting up an Allan line of steamships or setting up a costermonger's cart. We might as well talk of a war of labour against water power.

Capital is the fruit of labour past, the condition of labour present, without it no man could do a stroke of work, at least of work requiring tools or food for him who uses them. Let us dismiss from our language and our minds these impersonations, which though mere creatures of fancy playing with abstract nouns end by depraving our sentiments and misdirecting our actions, let us think and speak of capital impersonally and sensibly as an economical force and as we would think and speak of the force of gravitation. Relieve the poor word of the big c, which is a greatness thrust upon it, its tyranny, and the burning hatred of its tyranny will at once cease. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a working man standing alone, and without a breakfast for himself or his family, is not in a position to obtain the best terms from a rich employer, who can hold out as long as he likes or hire other labour on the spot. Whether Unionism has had much effect in producing a general rise of wages is very doubtful. Mr. Brassey's book, "Work and Wages," goes far to prove that it has not, and that while, on the one hand, the unionists have been in a fool's paradise, the masters, on the other, have been crying out before they were hurt. No doubt the general rise of wages is mainly and fundamentally due to natural causes: the accumulation of capital, the extension of commercial enterprise, and the opening up of new countries, which have greatly increased the competition for labour, and consequently, raised the price, while the nominal price of labour as well as of all other commodities has been raised by the influx of gold. What Unionism, as I think, has evidently effected, is the economical emancipation of the working man. It has rendered him independent instead of dependent, and, in some cases almost a serf, as he was before. It has placed him on an equal footing with his employer, and enabled him to make the best terms for himself in every respect. There is no employer who does not feel that this is so, or whom Mr. Brassey's statistics, or any statistics, would convince that it is not.

Fundamentally, value determines the price the community will give for any article, or any kind of work, just so much as it is worth. But there is no economical deity who, in each individual case, exactly adjusts the price to the value; we may make a good or a bad bargain, as many of us know to our cost. One source of bad bargains is ignorance. Before unions, which have diffused the intelligence of the labour market, and by so doing have equalized prices, the workman hardly knew the rate of wages in the next town. If this was true of the mechanic, it was still more true of the farm labourer. Practically speaking, the farm labourers in each parish of England, ignorant of everything beyond the parish, isolated and, therefore, dependent, had to take what the employers chose to give them. And what the employers chose to give them over large districts was ten shillings a week for themselves and their families, out of which they paid, perhaps, eighteen-pence for rent. A squire the other day, at a meeting of labourers, pointed with pride, and no doubt, with honest pride, to a labourer who had brought up a family of twelve children on twelve shillings a week I will venture to say the squire spent as much on any horse in his stables. Meat never touched the peasant's lips, though game, preserved for his landlord's pleasure, was running round his cottage. His children could not be educated, because they were wanted, almost from their infancy, to help in keeping the family from starving, as stonepickers, or perambulating scarecrows. His abode was a hovel, in which comfort, decency, morality could not dwell; and it was mainly owing to this cause that, as I have heard an experienced clergyman say, even the people in the low quarters of cities were less immoral than the rural poor. How the English peasants lived on such wages as they had, was a question which puzzled the best informed. How they died was clear enough; as penal paupers in a union workhouse. Yet Hodge's back, like that of Jacques Bonhomme, in France, bore everything, bore the great war against Republican France; for the squires and rectors, who made that war for class purposes, got their taxes back in increased rents and tithes. How did the peasantry exist, what was their condition in those days when wheat was at a hundred, or even a hundred and thirty shillings? They were reduced to a second serfage. They became in the mass parish paupers, and were divided, like slaves, among the employers of each parish. Men may be made serfs, and even slaves by other means than open force, in a country where, legally, all are free, where the impossibility of slavery is the boast of the law. Of late benevolence has been, abroad in the English parish, almsgiving and visiting have increased, good landlords have taken up cottage improvements. There have been harvest-homes, at which the young squires have danced with cottagers. But now Hodge has taken the matter into his own hands, and it seems not without effect. In a letter which I have seen, a squire says, "Here the people are all contented; we (the employers) have seen the necessity of raising their wages." Conservative journals begin to talk of measures for the compulsory improvement of cottages, for limiting ground game, giving tenant right to farmers, granting the franchise to rural householders. Yes, in consequence, partly, at least of this movement, the dwellings and the general conditions of the English peasantry will be improved, the game laws will be abolished; the farmers pressed upon from below, and in their turn pressing upon those above, will demand and obtain tenant right; and the country, as well as the city householders will be admitted to the franchise, which, under the elective system, is at once the only guarantee for justice to him and for his loyalty to the State. And when the country householder has the suffrage there will soon be an end of those laws of primogeniture and entail, which are deemed so Conservative, but are in fact most revolutionary, since they divorce the nation from its own soil. And then there will be a happier and a more United England in country as well as in town: the poor law, the hateful, degrading, demoralizing poor law will cease to exist; the huge poor- house will no longer darken the rural landscape with its shadow, in hideous contrast with the palace. Suspicion and hatred will no more cower and mutter over the cottage hearth, or round the beer-house fire: the lord of the mansion will no longer be like the man in Tennyson slumbering while a lion is always creeping nearer. Lord Malmesbury is astonished at this disturbance. He always thought the relation between the lord and the pauper peasant was the happiest possible; he cannot conceive what people mean by proposing a change. But then Lord Malmesbury was placed at rather a delusive point of view. If he knew the real state of Hodge's heart he would rejoice in the prospect of a change, not only for Hodge's sake, but, as he is no doubt a good man, for his own. England will be more religious, too, as well as happier and more harmonious, let the clergy be well assured of it. Social injustice especially when backed by the Church, is unfavourable to popular religion.

The general rise of wages may at first bring economical disturbance and pressure on certain classes, but, in the end, it brings general prosperity, diffused civilization, public happiness, security to society, which can never be secure while the few are feasting and the many are starving. In the end, also, it brings an increase of production, and greater plenty. Not that we can assent, without reserve, to the pleasant aphorism, that increase of wages, in itself, makes a better workman, which is probably true only where the workman has been under-fed, as in the case of the farm labourers of England. But the dearness of labour leads to the adoption of improved methods of production, and especially to the invention of machinery, which gives back to the community what it has paid in increased wages a hundred or a thousand fold. In Illinois, towards the close of the war, a large proportion of the male population had been drafted or volunteered, labour had become scarce and wages had risen, but the invention of machinery had been so much stimulated that the harvest that year was greater than it had ever been before. Machinery will now be used to a greater extent on the English farms; more will be produced by fewer hands, labourers will be set free for the production of other kinds, perhaps for the cultivation of our North-West, and the British peasant will rise from the industrial and intellectual level of a mere labourer to that of the guider of a machine. Machinery worked by relays of men is, no doubt, one of the principal solutions of our industrial problems, and of the social problems connected with them. Some seem to fancy that it is the universal solution; but we cannot run reaping machines in the winter or in the dark.

High wages, and the independence of the labourers, compel economy of labour. Economize labour, cries Lord Derby, the cool-headed mentor of the rich; we must give up our second under-butler. When the labourer is dependent, and his wages are low, the most precious of commodities, that commodity the husbanding of which is the chief condition of increased production, and of the growth of national wealth, is squandered with reckless prodigality. Thirty years the labourers of Egypt wrought by gangs of a hundred thousand at a time to build the great Pyramid which was to hold a despot's dust. Even now, when everybody is complaining of the dearness of labour, and the insufferable independence of the working class, a piece of fine lace, we are told, consumes the labour of seven persons, each employed on a distinct portion of the work; and the thread, of exquisite fineness, is spun in dark rooms underground, not without injury, we may suppose, to the eyesight or health of those employed. So that the labour movement does not seem to have yet trenched materially even on the elegancies of life. Would it be very detrimental to real civilization if we were forced, by the dearness of labour, to give up all the trades in which human life or health is sacrificed to mere fancy? In London, the bakers have struck. They are kept up from midnight to noon, sometimes far even into the afternoon, sleepless, or only snatching broken slumbers, that London may indulge its fancy for hot bread, which it would be much better without. The result of the strike probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, which has already been in part conceded, a more wholesome kind of bread, such as will keep fresh and palatable through the day, and cleaner baking; for the wretchedness of the trade has made it vile and filthy, as is the case in other trades besides that of the bakers. Many an article of mere luxury, many a senseless toy, if our eyes could be opened, would be seen to bear the traces of human blood and tears. We are like the Merchant Brothers in Keats:—

"With her two brothers this fair lady dwelt,
Enriched from ancestral merchandize,
And for them many a weary hand did swelt
In torch-lit mines and noisy factories,
And many once proud-quivered loins did melt
In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes
Many all day in dazzling river stood
To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood."

"For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,
And went all naked to the hungry shark;
For them his ears gushed blood; for them in death
The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark
Lay pierced with darts; for them alone did seethe
A thousand men in troubles wide and dark:
Half ignorant, they turned an easy wheel
That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel."

Among other economies of labour, if this movement among the English peasantry succeeds and spreads to other countries, then will come an economy of soldiers' blood. Pauperism has been the grand recruiting serjeant. Hodge listed and went to be shot or scourged within an inch of his life for sixpence a day, because he was starving; but he will not leave five shillings for sixpence. Even in former days, the sailor, being somewhat better off than the peasant, could only be forced into the service by the press gang, a name the recollection of which ought to mitigate our strictures on the encroaching tendencies of the working class. There will be a strike, or a refusal of service equivalent to a strike in this direction also. It will be requisite to raise the soldier's pay; the maintenance of standing armies will become a costly indulgence. I have little faith in international champagne, or even in Geneva litigation as a universal antidote to war: war will cease or be limited to necessary occasions, when the burden of large standing armies becomes too great to be borne.

The strike of the English colliers again, though it causes great inconvenience, may have its good effect. It may be a strong indication that mining in England is getting very deep, and that the nation must exorcise a strict economy in the use of coal, the staple of its wealth and greatness. The lot of the colliers, grubbling all day underground and begrimed with dirt, is one of the hardest; the sacrifice of their lives by accidents is terribly large; and we may well believe that the community needs a lesson in favour of these underground toilers, which could be effectually taught only by some practical manifestation of their discontent.

To the labour movement, mainly, we owe those efforts to establish better relations between the employer and the employed, which are known by the general name of co-operation. The Comtists, in the name of their autocrat, denounce the whole co-operative system as rotten. Their plan, if you get to the bottom of it, is in fact a permanent division of the industrial world into capitalists. And workmen; the capitalists exercising a rule controlled only by the influence of philosophers; the workmen remaining in a perpetual state of tutelage, not to say of babyhood. A little acquaintance with this continent would probably dissipate notions of a permanent division of classes, or a permanent tutelage of any class. It is true that great commercial enterprises require the guidance of superior intelligence with undivided counsels as well as a large capital, and that co-operative mills have failed or succeeded only in cases where very little policy and very little capital were required. As to co-operative stores, they are co-operative only in a very different sense: combinative would be a more accurate term; and the department in which they seem likely to produce an alteration, is that of retail trade, an improvement in the conditions of which, economical and moral, is assuredly much needed. But if we are told that it is impossible to give the workmen an interest in the enterprise, so as, to make him work more willingly avoid waste and generally identify him self with his employer the answer is that the thing has been done both in England and here. An artisan working for him self and selling the produce of his individual skill has an interest and a pride in his work for which it would seem desirable to find if possible some substitute in the case of factory hands whose toil otherwise is mere weariness. The increased scale of commercial enterprise however is in itself advantageous in this respect. In great works where an army of workmen is employed at Saltaire or in the Platt works at Oldham there must be many grades of promotion and many subordinate places of trust and emolument to which the workmen may rise by industry and probity without capital of his own.

The general effect of the labour movement has been as I have said the industrial emancipation of the workmen. It has perhaps had an effect more general still. Aided by the general awakening of social sentiment and of the feeling of social responsibility, it has practically opened our eyes to the fact that a nation and humanity at large is a community the good things of which all are entitled to share while all must share the evil things. It has forcibly dispelled the notion in which the rich indolently acquiesced that enjoyment leisure culture refined affection high civilization are the destined lot of the few while the destined lot of the many is to support the privileged existence of the few by unremitting coarse and jobless toil. Society has been taught that it must at least endeavour to be just. The old ecclesiastical props of privilege are gone. There is no use any longer in quoting or misquoting Scripture to prove that God wills the mass of mankind to be always poor and always dependent on the rich. The very peasant has now broken that spell and will no longer believe the rector if he tells him that this world belongs to the squire and that justice is put off to the next. The process of mental emancipation has been assisted by the bishop who was so rash as to suggest that rural agitators should be ducked in a horse pond. Hodge has determined to find out for himself by a practical experiment what the will of God really is. No doubt this is an imperfect world and is likely to remain so for our time at least; we must all work on in the hope that if we do our duty it will be well for us in the sum of things and that when the far off goal of human effort is at last reached, every faithful servant of humanity will have his part in the result; if it were not so, it would be better to be a brute, with no unfulfilled aspirations, than a man. But I repeat, the religion of privilege has lost its power to awe or to control, and if society wishes to rest on a safe foundation, it must show that it is at least trying to be just.

Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any encroachment of the labour movement on its rights. When did it command such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous object for miles round. Its lord was, I daresay, consuming the income of some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him. The thought that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six hundred labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a heart and a brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest house, the biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social homage, public honours, political power, is ready at his command. Does he fancy a seat in the British House of Commons, the best club in London, as it has been truly called? All other claims, those of the public service included, at once give way. I remember a question arising about a nomination for a certain constituency (a working man's constituency, by the way), which was cut short by the announcement that the seat was wanted by a local millionaire. When the name of the millionaire was mentioned, surprise was expressed. Has he, it was asked, any political knowledge or capacity, any interest in public affairs, any ambition? The answer was "None." "Then why does he want the seat?" "He does not want it." "Then why does he take it?" "Because his wife does." Cleopatra, as the story goes, displayed her mad prodigality by melting a pearl in a cup, out of which she drank to Antony. But this modern money-queen could throw into her cup of pleasure, to give it a keener zest, a share in the government of the greatest empire in the world.

If the movement, by transferring something from the side of profits to that of wages, checks in any measure the growth of these colossal fortunes, it will benefit society and diminish no man's happiness. I say it without the slightest feeling of asceticism, and in the conviction that wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that runs from the mountain side.

Real chiefs of industry have generally a touch of greatness in them and no nobleman of the peerage clings more to his tinsel than do nature's noblemen to simplicity of life. Mr. Brassey with his millions never could be induced to increase his establishment his pride and pleasure were in the guidance of industry and the accomplishment of great works. But in the hands of the heirs of these men colossal fortunes become social nuisances waste labour breed luxury create unhappiness by propagating factitious wants too often engender vice and are injurious for the most part to real civilization. The most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in England by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. No really high nature covets such a position as that of a luxurious and useless millionaire. Communism as a movement is a mistake but there is a communism which is deeply seated in the heart of every good man and which makes him feel that the hardest of all labour is idleness in a world of toil and that the bitterest of all bread is that which is eaten by the sweat of another man's brow.

The pressure is hardest not on those who are really rich but on those who have hitherto on account of their education and the intellectual character of their callings been numbered with the rich and who are still clinging to the skirts of wealthy society. The best thing which those who are clinging to the skirts of wealthy society can do is to let go. They will find that they have not far to fall and they will rest on the firm ground of genuine respectability and solid comfort. By keeping up then culture they will preserve their social grade far better than by struggling for a precarious footing among those whose habits they cannot emulate and whose hospitalities they cannot return. Then income will be increased by the whole cost of the efforts which they now make it the sacrifice of comforts and often of necessaries to maintain the appearances of wealth. British grandees may be good models for our millionaires but what most of us want are models of the art of enjoying life thoroughly and nobly without ostentation and at a moderate cost. It is by people of the class of which I am speaking that the servant difficulty that doleful but ever recurring theme is most severely felt. Nor would I venture to hold out much hope that the difficulty will become less. It is not merely industrial out social. There is a growing repugnance to anything like servitude which makes the female democracy prefer the independence of the factory to the subordination of the kitchen, however good the wages and however kind the mistress may be. We must look to inventions for saving labour, which might be adopted in houses to a greater extent than they are now. Perhaps when the work has been thus lightened and made less coarse, families may find "help," in the true sense, among their relatives, or others in need of a home, who would be members of the family circle. Homes and suitable employment might thus be afforded to women who are now pining in enforced idleness, and sighing for Protestant nunneries, while the daily war with Bridget would be at an end.

I would not make light of these inconveniences or of the present disturbance of trade. The tendency of a moment may be good, and yet it may give society a very bad quarter of an hour. Nor would I attempt to conceal the errors and excesses of which the unions have been guilty, and into which, as organs of corporate selfishness, they are always in danger of running. Industrial history has a record against the workingman as well as against the master. The guilds of the Middle Ages became tyrannical monopolies and leagues against society, turned callings open to all into mysteries confined to a privileged few, drove trade and manufactures from the cities where they reigned to places free from their domination. This probably was the cause of the decay of cities which forms the burden of complaint in the preambles to Acts of Parliament, in the Tudor period. Great guilds oppressed little guilds: strong commercial cities ruled by artisans oppressed their weaker neighbours of the same class. No one agency has done so much to raise the condition of the workingman as machinery; yet the workingman resisted the introduction of machinery, rose against it, destroyed it, maltreated its inventors. There is a perpetual warning in the name of Hargreaves, the workingman who, by his inventive genius, provided employment for millions of his fellows, and was by them rewarded with outrage and persecution.

Flushed with confidence at the sight of their serried phalanxes and extending lines, the unionists do like most people invested with unwonted power; they aim at more than is possible or just. They fancy that they can put the screw on the community, almost without limit. But they will soon find out their mistake. They will learn it from those very things which are filling the world with alarm—the extension of unionism, and the multiplication of strikes. The builder strikes against the rest of the community, including the baker, then the baker strikes against the builder and the collier strikes against them both. At first the associated trades seem to have it all their own way. But the other trades learn the secret of association. Everybody strikes against everybody else, the price of all articles rises as much as anybody's wages, and thus when the wheel has come full circle, nobody is much the gainer. In fact long before the wheel has come full circle the futility of a universal strike will be manifest to all. The world sees before it a terrible future of unionism ever increasing in power and tyranny, but it is more likely that in a few years unionism as an instrument for forcing up wages will have ceased to exist. In the meantime the working classes will have impressed upon themselves by a practical experiment upon the grandest scale and of the most decisive kind the fact that they are consumers as well as producers, payers of wages as well as receivers of wages, members of a community as well as workingmen.

The unionists will learn also after a few trials that the community cannot easily be cornered, at least that it cannot easily be cornered more than once by unions any more than by gold rings at New York or pork rings at Chicago. It may apparently succumb once being unable to do without its bread or its newspapers or to stop buildings already contracted for and commenced, but it instinctively prepares to defend itself against a repetition of the operation. It limits consumption or invents new modes of production, improves machinery, encourages non union men, calls in foreigners, women, Chinese. In the end the corner results in loss. Cornering on the part of workingmen is not a bit worse than cornering on the part of great financiers; in both cases alike it is as odious as anything can be, which is not actually criminal; but depend upon it a bad time is coming for corners of all kinds.

I speak of the community as the power with which the strikers really have to deal. The master hires or organizes the workmen, but the community purchases their work; and though the master when hard pressed may in his desperation give more for the work than it is worth rather than at once take his capital out of the trade the community will let the trade go to ruin without compunction rather than give more for the article than it can afford. Some of the colliers in England, we are informed, have called upon the masters to reduce the price of coal, offering at the same time to consent to a reduction of their own wages. A great fact has dawned upon their minds. Note too that democratic communities have more power of resistance to unionist extortion than others, because they are more united, have a keener sense of mutual interest, and are free from political fear. The way in which Boston, some years ago, turned to and beat a printers' strike, was a remarkable proof of this fact.

Combination may enable, and, as I believe, has enabled the men in particular cases to make a fairer bargain with the masters, and to get the full market value of their labour, but neither combination nor any other mode of negotiating can raise the value of labour or of any other article to the consumer, and that which cannot raise the value cannot permanently raise the price.

All now admit that strikes peaceably conducted are lawful. Nevertheless, they may sometimes be anti-social and immoral. Does any one doubt it? Suppose by an accident to machinery, or the falling in of a mine, a number of workmen have their limbs broken. One of their mates runs for the surgeon, and the surgeon puts his head out of the window and says— "the surgeons are on strike." Does this case much differ from that of the man who, in his greed, stops the wheel of industry which he is turning, thereby paralysing the whole machine, and spreading not only confusion, but suffering, and perhaps starvation among multitudes of his fellows? Language was held by some unionist witnesses, before the Trades Union Commission, about their exclusive regard for their own interests, and their indifference to the interests of society, which was more frank than philanthropic, and more gratifying to their enemies than to their friends. A man who does not care for the interests of society will find, to his cost, that they are his own, and that he is a member of a body which cannot be dismembered. I spoke of the industrial objects of the International as chimerical. They are worse than chimerical. In its industrial aspect, the International was an attempt to separate the interests of a particular class of workers throughout the world from those of their fellow workers, and to divide humanity against itself. Such attempts can end only in one way.

There are some who say, in connection with this question, that you are at liberty to extort anything you can from your fellow men, provided you do not use a pistol; that you are at liberty to fleece the sailor who implores you to save him from a wreck, or the emigrant who is in danger of missing his ship. I say that this is a moral robbery, and that the man would say so himself if the same thing were done to him.

A strike is a war, so is a lock out, which is a strike on the other side. They are warrantable, like other wars, when justice cannot be obtained, or injustice prevented by peaceful means, and in such cases only. Mediation ought always to be tried first and it will often be effectual, for the wars of carpenters and builders, as well as the wars of emperors, often arise from passion more than from interest, and passion may be calmed by mediation. Hence the magnitude of the unions, formidable as it seems, has really a pacific effect; passion is commonly personal or local, and does not affect the central government of a union extending over a whole nation. The governments of great unions have seldom recommended strikes. A strike or lock-out, I repeat, is an industrial war, and when the war is over there ought to be peace. Constant bad relations between the masters and the men, a constant attitude of mutual hostility and mistrust, constant threats of striking upon one side, and of locking out upon the other, are ruinous to the trade, especially if it depends at all upon foreign orders, as well as destructive of social comfort. If the state of feeling and the bearing of the men toward the masters, remain what they now are in some English trades, kind-hearted employers who would do their best to improve the condition of the workman, and to make him a partaker in their prosperity, will be driven from the trade, and their places will be taken by men with hearts of flint who will fight the workman by force and fraud, and very likely win. We have seen the full power of associated labour, the full power of associated capital has yet to be seen. We shall see it when instead of combinations of the employers in a single trade, which seldom hold together, employers in all trades learn to combine.

We must not forget that industrial wars, like other wars, however just and necessary, give birth to men whose trade is war, and who, for the purpose of their trade are always inflaming the passions which lead to war. Such men I have seen on both sides of the Atlantic, and most hateful pests of industry and society they are. Nor must we forget that Trade Unions, like other communities, whatever their legal constitutions may be, are apt practically to fall into the hands of a small minority of active spirits, or even into those of a single astute and ambitious man.

Murder, maiming and vitriol throwing are offences punishable by law. So are, or ought to be, rattening and intimidation. But there are ways less openly criminal of interfering with the liberty of non-union men. The liberty of non-union men, however, must be protected. Freedom of contract is the only security which the community has against systematic extortion; and extortion, practised on the community by a Trade Union, is just as bad as extortion practised by a feudal baron in his robber hold. If the unions are not voluntary they are tyrannies, and all tyrannies in the end will be overthrown.

The same doom awaits all monopolies and attempts to interfere with the free exercise of any lawful trade or calling, for the advantage of a ring of any kind, whether it be a great East India Company, shutting the gates of Eastern commerce on mankind, or a little Bricklayers' Union, limiting the number of bricks to be carried in a hod. All attempts to restrain or cripple production in the interest of a privileged set of producers; all trade rules preventing work from being done in the best, cheapest and most expeditious way; all interference with a man's free use of his strength and skill on pretence that he is beating his mates, or on any other pretence, all exclusions of people from lawful callings for which they are qualified; all apprenticeships not honestly intended for the instruction of the apprentice, are unjust and contrary to the manifest interests of the community, including the misguided monopolists themselves. All alike will, in the end, be resisted and put down. In feudal times the lord of the manor used to compel all the people to use his ferry, sell on his fair ground, and grind their corn at his mill. By long and costly effort humanity has broken the yoke of old Privilege, and it is not likely to bow its neck to the yoke of the new.

Those who in England demanded the suffrage for the working man, who urged, in the name of public safety, as well as in that of justice, that he should be brought within the pale of the constitution, have no reason to be ashamed of the result. Instead of voting for anarchy and public pillage, the working man has voted for economy, administrative reform, army reform, justice to Ireland, public education. But no body of men ever found political power in their hands without being tempted to make a selfish use of it. Feudal legislatures, as we have seen, passed laws compelling workmen to give more work, or work that was worth more, for the same wages. Working men's legislatures are now disposed to pass laws compelling employers, that is, the community, to give the same wages for less work. Some day, perhaps, the bakers will get power into their hands and make laws compelling us to give the same price for a smaller loaf. What would the Rochdale pioneers, or the owners of any other co- operative store, with a staff of servants say if a law were passed compelling them to give the same wages for less service? This is not right, and it cannot stand. Demagogues who want your votes will tell you that it can stand, but those who are not in that line must pay you the best homage in their power by speaking the truth. And if I may venture to offer advice never let the cause of labour be mixed up with the game of politicians. Before you allow a man to lead you in trade questions be sure that he has no eye to your votes. We have a pleasing variety of political rogues but perhaps, there is hardly a greater rogue among them than the working man's friend.

Perhaps you will say as much or more work is done with the short hours. There is reason to hope that it in some cases it may be so. But then the employer will see his own interest, free contract will produce the desired result, there will be no need of compulsory law.

I sympathize heartily with the general object of the nine hours movement, of the early closing movement, and all movements of that kind. Leisure well spent is a condition of civilization, and now we want all to be civilized, not only a few. But I do not believe it possible to regulate the hours of work by law with any approach to reason or justice. One kind of work is more exhausting than another, one is carried on in a hot room, another in a cool room, one amidst noise wearing to the nerves, another in stillness. Time is not a common measure of them all. The difficulty is increased if you attempt to make one rule for all nations disregarding differences of race and climate. Besides how in the name of justice, can we say that the man with a wife and children to support, shall not work more if he pleases than the unmarried man who chooses to be content with less pay and to have more time for enjoyment? Medical science pronounces, we are told, that it is not good for a man to work more than eight hours. But supposing this to be true and true of all kinds of work, this as has been said before is an imperfect world and it is to be feared that we cannot guarantee any man against having more to do than his doctor would recommend. The small tradesman, whose case receives no consideration because he forms no union, often perhaps generally has more than is good for him of anxiety, struggling and care as well as longer business hours, than medical science would prescribe. Pressure on the weary brain is, at least, as painful as pressure on the weary muscle; many a suicide proves it; yet brains must be pressed or the wheels of industry and society would stand still. Let us all, I repeat, get as much leisure as we fairly and honestly can; but with all due respect for those who hold the opposite opinion, I believe that the leisure must be obtained by free arrangement in each ease, as it has already in the case of early closing, not by general law.

I cannot help regarding industrial war in this new world, rather as an importation than as a native growth. The spirit of it is brought over by British workmen, who have been fighting the master class in their former home. In old England, the land of class distinctions, the masters are a class, economically as well as socially, and they are closely allied with a political class, which till lately engrossed power and made laws in the interest of the employer. Seldom does a man in England rise from the ranks, and when he does, his position in an aristocratic society is equivocal, and he never feels perfectly at home. Caste runs from the peerage all down the social scale. The bulk of the land has been engrossed by wealthy families, and the comfort and dignity of freehold proprietorship are rarely attainable by any but the rich. Everything down to the railway carriages, is regulated by aristocracy; street cars cannot run because they would interfere with carriages, a city cannot be drained because a park is in the way. The labourer has to bear a heavy load of taxation, laid on by the class wars of former days. In this new world of ours, the heel taps of old-world flunkeyism are sometimes poured upon us, no doubt; as, on the other hand, we feel the reaction from the old-world servility in a rudeness of self assertion on the part of the democracy which is sometimes rather discomposing, and which we should be glad to see exchanged for the courtesy of settled self- respect. But on the whole, class distinctions are very faint. Half, perhaps two-thirds, of the rich men you meet here have risen from the ranks, and they are socially quite on a level with the rest. Everything is really open to industry. Every man can at once invest his savings in a freehold. Everything is arranged for the convenience of the masses. Political power is completely in the hands of the people. There are no fiscal legacies of an oligarchic past. If I were one of our emigration agents, I should not dwell so much on wages, which in fact are being rapidly equalized, as on what wages will buy in Canada—the general improvement of condition, the brighter hopes, the better social position, the enlarged share of all the benefits which the community affords. I should show that we have made a step here at all events towards being a community indeed. In such a land I can see that there may still be need of occasional combinations among the working men to make better bargains with their employers, but I can see no need for the perpetual arraying of class against class or for a standing apparatus of industrial war.

There is one more point which must be touched with tenderness but which cannot be honestly passed over in silence. It could nowhere be mentioned less invidiously than under the roof of an institution which is at once an effort to create high tastes in working men and a proof that such tastes can be created. The period of transition from high to low wages and from incessant toil to comparative leisure must be one of peril to masses whom no Mechanics Institute or Literary Society as yet counts among its members. It is the more so because there is abroad in all classes a passion for sensual enjoyment and excitement produced by the vast development of wealth and at the same time as I suspect by the temporary failure of those beliefs which combat the sensual appetites and sustain our spiritual life. Colliers drinking champagne. The world stands aghast. Well, I see no reason why a collier should not drink champagne if he can afford it as well as a Duke. The collier wants and perhaps deserves it more if he has been working all the week underground and at risk of his life. Hard labour naturally produces a craving for animal enjoyment and so does the monotony of the factory unrelieved by interest in the work. But what if the collier cannot afford the champagne or if the whole of his increase of wages is wasted on it while his habitation remains a hovel, everything about him is still as filthy, comfortless and barbarous as ever and (saddest of all) his wife and children are no better off, perhaps are worse off than before? What if his powers of work are being impaired by debauchery and he is thus surely losing the footing which he has won on the higher round of the industrial ladder and lapsing back into penury and despair? What if instead of gaining he is really losing in manhood and real independence? I see nothing shocking in the fact that a mechanic's wages are now equal to those of a clergyman, or an officer in the army who has spent perhaps thousands of dollars on his education. Every man has a right to whatever his labour will fetch. But I do see something shocking in the appearance of the highly paid mechanic, whenever hard times come, as a mendicant at the door of a man really poorer than himself. Not only that English poor-law, of which we spoke, but all poor-laws, formal or informal, must cease when the labourer has the means, with proper self-control and prudence, of providing for winter as well as summer, for hard times as well as good times, for his family as well as for himself. The tradition of a by-gone state of society must be broken. The nominally rich must no longer be expected to take care of the nominally poor. The labourer has ceased to be in any sense a slave. He must learn to be, in every sense, a man.

It is much easier to recommend our neighbours to change their habits than to change our own, yet we must never forget, in discussing the question between the working man and his employer, or the community, that a slight change in the habits of the working men, in England at least, would add more to their wealth, their happiness and their hopes, than has been added by all the strikes, or by conflicts of any kind. In the life of Mr. Brassey, we are told that the British workman in Australia has great advantages, but wastes them all in drink. He does this not in Australia alone. I hate legislative interference with private habits, and I have no fancies about diet. A citizen of Maine, who has eaten too much pork, is just as great a transgressor against medical rules, and probably just as unamiable, as if he had drunk too much whisky. But when I have seen the havoc—the ever increasing havoc— which drink makes with the industry, the vigour, the character of the British workman, I have sometimes asked myself whether in that case extraordinary measures might not be justified by the extremity of its dangers.

The subject is boundless. I might touch upon perils distinct from Unionism, which threaten industry, especially that growing dislike of manual labour which prevails to an alarming extent in the United States, and which some eminent economists are inclined to attribute to errors in the system of education in the common schools. I might speak of the duties of government in relation to these disturbances, and of the necessity, for this as well as other purposes, of giving ourselves a government of all and for all, capable of arbitrating impartially between conflicting interests as the recognised organ of the common good. I might speak, too, of the expediency of introducing into popular education a more social element, of teaching less rivalry and discontent, more knowledge of the mutual duties of different members of the community and of the connection of those duties with our happiness. But I must conclude. If I have thrown no new light upon the subject, I trust that I have at least tried to speak the truth impartially, and that I have said nothing which can add to the bitterness of the industrial conflict, or lead any of my hearers to forget that above all Trade Unions, and above all combinations of every kind, there is the great union of Humanity.

"WHAT IS CULPABLE LUXURY?"

A phrase in a lecture on "The Labour Movement," published in the Canadian Monthly, has been the inconsiderable cause of a considerable controversy in the English press and notably of a paper by the eminent economist and moralist Mr. W.R. Greg, entitled "What is Culpable Luxury?" in the Contemporary Review.

The passage of the lecture in which the phrase occurred was: "Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any encroachment of the Labour Movement on its rights. When did it command such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous object for miles round. Its lord was I dare say consuming the income of some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him. The thought that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six hundred labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a heart and a brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest house, the biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social homage, public honour, political power, is ready at his command" &c, &c.

The words in italics have been separated from the context and taken as an attack on wealth. But the whole passage is a defence of labour against the charge of encroachment brought against it by wealth. I argue that, if the labouring man gets rather more than he did, the inequalities of fortune and the privileges of the rich are still great enough. In the next paragraph I say that "wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that runs from the mountain side." An invidious turn has also been given to the expression "the income of six hundred labouring families," as though it meant that the wealthy idler is robbing six hundred labouring families of their income. It means no more than that the income which he is spending on himself is as large as six hundred of their incomes put together.

Mr. Greg begins with what he calls a retort courteous. He says that if the man with L30 000 is doing this sad thing so is the man with L3000 or L300 and everyone who allows himself anything beyond the necessaries of life; nay, that the labouring man when he lights his pipe or drinks his dram is as well as the rest consuming the substance of one poorer than himself. This argument appears to its framer irrefutable and a retort to which there can be no rejoinder. I confess my difficulty is not so much in refuting it as in seeing any point in it at all. What parallel can there be between an enormous and a very moderate expenditure or between prodigious luxury and ordinary comfort? If a man taxes me with having squandered fifty dollars on a repast is it an irrefutable retort to tell him that he has spent fifty cents? The limited and rational expenditure of an industrious man produces no evils economical, social or moral. I contend in the lecture that the unlimited and irrational expenditure of idle millionaires does; that it wastes labour, breeds luxury, creates unhappiness by propagating factitious wants, too often engenders vice and is injurious for the most part to real civilization. I have observed and I think with truth that the most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle between classes have been generated by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. It would of course be absurd to say this of a man living on a small income in a modest house and in a plain way.

If I had said that property or all property beyond a mere sustenance is theft there would be force in Mr. Greg's retort, but as I have said or implied nothing more than that extravagant luxury is waste and contrasted with surrounding poverty grates on the feelings, especially when those who waste are idle and those who want are the hardest working labourers in the world, I repeat that I can see no force in the retort at all.

Mr. Greg proceeds to analyse the expenditure of the millionaire and to maintain that its several items are laudable.

First he defends pleasure grounds, gardens, shrubberies and deer parks. But he defends them on the ground that they are good things for the community and thereby admits my principle. It is only against wasteful self indulgence that I have anything to say. No doubt, says Mr. Greg, if the land of a country is all occupied and cultivated, and if no more land is easily accessible, and if the produce of other lands is not procurable in return for manufactured articles of exchange, then a proprietor who shall employ a hundred acres in growing wine for his own drinking, which might or would otherwise be employed in growing wheat or other food for twenty poor families who can find no other field for their labour, may fairly be said to be consuming, spending on himself, the sustenance of those families. If, again, he, in the midst of a swarming population unable to find productive or remunerative occupation, insists upon keeping a considerable extent of ground in merely ornamental walks and gardens, and, therefore, useless as far as the support of human life is concerned, he may be held liable to the same imputation—even though the wages he pays to the gardeners in the one case, and the vine-dressers in the other, be pleaded in mitigation of the charge. Let the writer of this only allow, as he must, that the moral, social and political consequences of expenditure are to be taken into account as well as the economical consequences, and he will be entirely at one with the writer whom he supposes himself to be confuting. I have never said, or imagined, that "all land ought to be producing food." I hold that no land in England is better employed than that of the London parks and the gardens of the Crystal Palace, though I could not speak so confidently with regard to a vast park from which all are excluded but its owner. Mr. Greg here again takes up what seems to me the strange position that to condemn excess is to condemn moderation. He says that whatever is said against the great parks and gardens of the most luxurious millionaire may equally be said against a tradesman's little flower-garden, or the plot of ornamental ground before the cottage windows of a peasant. I must again say that, so far from regarding this argument as irrefutable, I altogether fail to discover its cogency. The tradesman's little bit of green, the peasant's flower- bed, are real necessities of a human soul. Can the same thing be said of a pleasure-ground which consumes the labour of twenty men, and of which the object is not to refresh the weariness of labour but to distract the vacancy of idleness?

Mr. Greg specially undertakes the defence of deer-parks. But his ground is that the deer-forests which were denounced as unproductive have been proved to be the only mode of raising the condition and securing the well-being of the ill-fed population. If so, "humanitarians" are ready to hold up both hands in favour of deer-forests. Nay, we are ready to do the same if the pleasure yielded by the deer-forests bears any reasonable proportion to the expense and the agricultural sacrifice, especially if the sportsman is a worker recruiting his exhausted brain, not a sybarite killing time.

From parks and pleasure-grounds Mr. Greg goes on to horses; and here it is the same thing over again. The apologist first sneers at those who object to the millionaire's stud, then lets in the interest of the community as a limiting principle, and ends by saying: "We may then allow frankly and without demur, that if he (the millionaire) maintains more horses than he needs or can use, his expenditure thereon is strictly pernicious and indefensible, precisely in the same way as it would be if he burnt so much hay and threw so many bushels of oats into the fire. He is destroying human food." Now Mr. Greg has only to determine whether a man who is keeping a score or more of carriage and saddle horses, is "using" them or not. If he is, "humanitarians" are perfectly satisfied.

Finally Mr. Greg comes to the case of large establishments of servants. And here, having set out with intentions most adverse to my theory, he "blesses it altogether." "Perhaps," he says, "of all the branches of a wealthy nobleman's expenditure, that which will be condemned with most unanimity, and defended with most difficulty, is the number of ostentatious and unnecessary servants it is customary to maintain. For this practice I have not a word to say. It is directly and indirectly bad. It is bad for all parties. Its reflex action on the masters themselves is noxious; it is mischievous to the flunkies who are maintained in idleness, and in enervating and demoralizing luxury; it is pernicious to the community at large, and especially to the middle and upper middle classes, whose inevitable expenditure in procuring fit domestic service—already burdensomely great—is thereby oppressively enhanced, till it has become difficult not only to find good household servants at moderate wages, but to find servants who will work diligently and faithfully for any wages at all."

How will Mr. Greg keep up the palaces, parks, and studs, when he has taken away the retinues of servants? If he does not take care, he will find himself wielding the bosom of sumptuary reform in the most sweeping manner before he is aware of it. But let me respectfully ask him, who can he suppose objects to any expenditure except on the ground that it is directly and indirectly bad; bad for all parties, noxious to the voluptuary himself, noxious to all about him, and noxious to the community? So long as a man does no harm to himself or to anyone else, I for one see no objection to his supping like a Roman Emperor, on pheasants' tongues, or making shirt-studs of Koh-i-noors.

"It is charity," says Mr. Greg, hurling at the system of great establishments his last and bitterest anathema—"It is charity, and charity of the bastard sort—charity disguised as ostentation. It feeds, clothes, and houses a number of people in strenuous and pretentious laziness. If almshouses are noxious and offensive to the economic mind, then, by parity of reasoning, superfluous domestics are noxious also." And so it would seem, by parity of reasoning, or rather a fortiori, as being fed, clothed, and housed far more expensively, and in far more strenuous and pretentious laziness, are the superfluous masters of flunkeys. The flunkey does some work, at all events enough to prevent him from becoming a mere fattened animal. If he is required to grease and powder his head, he does work, as it seems to me, for which he may fairly claim a high remuneration.

As I have said already, let Mr. Greg take in the moral, political, and social evils of luxury, as well as the material waste, and I flatter myself that there will be no real difference between his general view of the responsibilities of wealth and mine. He seems to be as convinced as I am that there is no happiness in living in strenuous and pretentious laziness by the sweat of other men's brows.

Nor do I believe that even the particular phrase which has been deemed so fraught with treason to plutocracy would, if my critic examined it closely, seem to him so very objectionable. His own doctrine, it is true, sounds severely economical. He holds that "the natural man and the Christian" who should be moved by his natural folly and Christianity to forego a bottle of champagne in order to relieve a neighbour in want of actual food, would do a thing "distinctly criminal and pernicious." Still I presume he would allow, theoretically, as I am very sure he would practically, a place to natural sympathy. He would not applaud a banquet given in the midst of a famine, although it might be clearly proved that the money spent by the banqueters was their own, that those who were perishing of famine had not been robbed of it, that their bellies were none the emptier because those of the banqueters were full, and that the cookery gave a stimulus to gastronomic art. He would not, even, think it wholly irrational that the gloom of the work-house should cast a momentary shadow on the enjoyments of the palace. I should also expect him to understand the impression that a man of "brain," even one free from any excessive tenderness of "heart," would not like to see a vast apparatus of luxury, and a great train of flunkeys devoted to his own material enjoyment—that he would feel it as a slur on his good sense, as an impeachment of his mental resources, and of his command of nobler elements of happiness, and even as a degradation of his manhood. There was surely something respectable in the sentiment which made Mr. Brassey refuse, however much his riches might increase, to add to his establishment. There is surely something natural in the tendency, which we generally find coupled with greatness, to simplicity of life. A person whom I knew had dined with a millionaire tete-a-tete, with six flunkeys standing round the table. I suspect that a man of Mr. Greg's intellect and character, in spite of his half-ascetic hatred of plush, would rather have been one of the six than one of the two.

While, however, I hope that my view of these matters coincides practically with that of Mr. Greg far more than he supposes, I must admit that there may be a certain difference of sentiment behind. Mr. Greg describes the impressions to which I have given currency as a confused compound of natural sympathy, vague Christianity, and dim economic science. Of the confusion, vagueness and dimness of our views, of course we cannot be expected to be conscious; but I own that I defer, in these matters, not only to natural feeling, but to the ethics of rational Christianity. I still adhere to the Christian code for want of a better, the Utilitarian system of morality being, so far as I can see, no morality at all, in the ordinary sense of the term, as it makes no appeal to our moral nature, our conscience, or whatever philosophers choose to call the deepest part of humanity. Of course, therefore, I accept as the fundamental principle of human relations, and of all science concerning them, the great Christian doctrine that "we are every one members one of another" As a consequence of this doctrine I hold that the wealth of mankind is morally a common store; that we are morally bound to increase it as much, and to waste it as little, as we can, that of the two it is happier to be underpaid than to be overpaid; and that we shall all find it so in the sum of things. There is nothing in such a view in the least degree subversive of the legal rights of property, which the founders of Christianity distinctly recognised in their teaching, and strengthened practically by raising the standard of integrity; nothing adverse to active industry or good business habits; nothing opposed to economic science as the study of the laws regulating the production and distribution of wealth; nothing condemnatory of pleasure, provided it be pleasure which opens the heart, as I suppose was the case with the marriage feast at Cana, not the pleasure which closes the heart, as I fear was the case with the "refined luxury" of the Marquis of Steyne.

If this is superstition, all that I can say is that I have read Strauss, Renan, Mr. Greg on the "Creed of Christendom," and all the eminent writers I could hear of on that side, and that I am not conscious of any bias to the side of orthodoxy, at least I have not given satisfaction to the orthodox classes.

Christianity, of course, in common with other systems, craves a reasonable construction. Plato cannot afford to have his apologues treated as histories. In "Joshua Davidson," a good man is made to turn away from Christianity because he finds that his faith will not literally remove a mountain and cast it into the sea. But he had omitted an indispensable preliminary. He ought first to have exactly compared the bulk of his faith with that of a grain of Palestinian mustard seed. Mr. Greg makes sport of the text "He that hath two coats let him impart to him that hath none," which he says he heard in his youth, but without ever considering its present applicability. Yet in the next paragraph but one he gives it a precise and a very important application by pronouncing that a man is not at liberty to grow wine for himself on land which other people need for food. I fail to see how the principle involved in this passage, and others of a similar tendency which I have quoted from Mr. Greg's paper, differ from that involved in Gospel texts which, if I were to quote them would grate strangely upon his ear. The texts comprise a moral sanction; but Mr. Greg must have some moral sanction when he forbids a man to do that which he is permitted to do by law. Christianity, whatever its source and authority, was addressed at first to childlike minds, and what its antagonists have to prove is not that its forms of expression or even of thought are adapted to such minds, but that its principles, when rationally applied to a more advanced state of society, are unsound. Rightly understood it does not seem to me to enjoin anything eccentric or spasmodic, to bid you enact primitive Orientalism in the streets of London, thrust fraternity upon writers in the Pall Mall Gazette, or behave generally as if the "Kingdom of God" were already come. Your duty as a Christian is done if you help its coming according to the circumstances of your place in society and the age in which you live.

Of course, in subscribing to the Christian code of ethics, one lays oneself open to "retorts corteous" without limit. But so one does in subscribing to any code, or accepting any standard, whether moral or of any other kind.

I do not see on what principle Mr. Greg would justify, if he does justify, any sort of charitable benefactions. Did not Mr. Peabody give his glass of champagne to a man in need? He might have spent all his money on himself if he had been driven to building Chatsworths, and hanging their walls with Raffaelles. How will he escape the reproach of having done what was criminal and pernicious? And what are we to say of the conduct of London plutocrats who abetted his proceedings by their applause though they abstained from following his example? Is there any apology for them at all but one essentially Christian? Not that Christianity makes any great fuss over munificence, or gives political economy reasonable ground for apprehension on that score. Plutocracy deifies Mr. Peabody; Christianity measures him and pronounces his millions worth less than the widow's mite.

In my lecture I have applied my principles, or tried to apply them, fairly to the mechanic as well as to the millionaire. I have deprecated, as immoral, a resort to strikes solely in the interest of the strikers, without regard to the general interests of industry and of the community at large. What has my critic to say, from the moral point of view, to the gas stokers who leave London in the dark, or the colliers who, in struggling to raise their own wages, condemn the ironworkers to "clamm" for want of coal?

I would venture to suggest that Mr. Greg somewhat overrates in his paper the beneficence of luxury as an agent in the advancement of civilization. "Artificial wants," he says, "what may be termed extravagant wants, the wish to possess something beyond the bare necessaries of existence; the taste for superfluities and luxuries first, the desire for refinements and embellishments next; the craving for the higher enjoyments of intellect and art as the final stage—these are the sources and stimulants of advancing civilization. It is these desires, these needs, which raise mankind above mere animal existence, which, in time and gradually, transform the savage into the cultured citizen of intelligence and leisure. Ample food once obtained, he begins to long for better, more varied, more succulent food; the richer nutriment leads on to the well-stored larder and the well-filled cellar, and culminates in the French cook." The love of truth, the love of beauty, the effort to realize a high type of individual character, and a high social ideal, surely these are elements of progress distinct from gastronomy, and from that special chain of gradual improvement which culminates in the French cook. It may be doubted whether French cookery does always denote the acme of civilization. Perhaps in the case of the typical London Alderman, it denotes something like the acme of barbarism, for the barbarism of the elaborate and expensive glutton surely exceeds that of the child of nature who gorges himself on the flesh which he has taken in hunting: not to mention that the child of nature costs humanity nothing, whereas the gourmand devours the labour of the French cook and probably that of a good many assistants and purveyors.

The greatest service is obviously rendered by any one who can improve human food. "The man is what he eats," is a truth though somewhat too broadly stated. But then the improvement must be one ultimately if not immediately accessible to mankind in general. That which requires a French cook is accessible only to a few.

Again, in setting forth the civilizing effects of expenditure, Mr. Greg, I think, rather leaves out of sight those of frugality. The Florentines, certainly the leaders of civilization in their day, were frugal in their personal habits, and by that frugality accumulated the public wealth which produced Florentine art, and sustained a national policy eminently generous and beneficent for its time.

Moreover, in estimating the general influence of great fortunes, Mr. Greg seems to take a rather sanguine view of the probable character and conduct of their possessors. He admits that a broad-acred peer or opulent commoner "may spend his L30,000 a year in such a manner as to be a curse, a reproach, and an object of contempt to the community, demoralizing and disgusting all around him, doing no good to others, and bringing no real enjoyment to himself." But he appears to think that the normal case, and the one which should govern our general views and policy upon the subject, is that of a man "of refined taste and intellect expanded to the requirements of his position, managing his property with care and judgment, so as to set a feasible example to less wealthy neighbours; prompt to discern and to aid useful undertakings, to succour striving merit, unearned suffering, and overmatched energy." "Such a man," he says, in a concluding burst of eloquence, "if his establishment in horses and servants is not immoderate, although he surrounds himself with all that art can offer to render life beautiful and elegant though he gathers round him the best productions of the intellect of all countries and ages, though his gardens and his park are models of curiosity and beauty, though he lets his ancestral trees rot in their picturesque mutility instead of converting them into profitable timber, and disregards the fact that his park would be more productive if cut up into potato plots though, in fine he lives in the very height of elegant, refined and tasteful luxury—I should hesitate to denounce as consuming on himself the incomes of countless labouring families, and I should imagine that he might lead his life of temperate and thoughtful joy quietly conscious that his liberal expenditure enabled scores of these families as well as artists and others to exist in comfort and without either brain or heart giving way under the burdensome reflection."

It must be by a slip of the pen such as naturally occurs amidst the glow of an enthusiastic description that the writer speaks of people as enabling others to subsist by their expenditure. It is clear that people can furnish subsistence to themselves or others only by production. A rich idler may appear to give bread to an artist or opera girl but the bread really comes not from the idler but from the workers who pay his rents; the idler is at most the channel of distribution. The munificence of monarchs who generously lavish the money of the taxpayer is a familiar case of the same fallacy. This is the illusion of the Irish peasant whose respect for the spendthrift "gentleman" and contempt for the frugal "sneak" Mr. Greg honours with a place among the serious elements of an economical and social problem.

But not to dwell on what is so obvious how many let me ask, of the possessors of inherited wealth in England or in any other country, fulfil or approach Mr. Greg's ideal? I confess that, as regards the mass of the English squires the passage seems to me almost satire. Refined taste and expanded intellect, promptness to discern and aid striving merit and unearned suffering, life surrounded with all that art can do to render it beautiful and elegant, the best productions of intellect gathered from all intellects and ages—I do not deny that Mr. Greg has seen all this, but I can hardly believe that he has seen it often, and I suspect that there are probably people not unfamiliar with the abodes of great landowners who have never seen it at all. Not to speak of artists and art, what does landed wealth do for popular education? It appears from the Popular Education Report of 1861 (p. 77) that in a district taken as a fair specimen, the sum of L4,518, contributed by voluntary subscription towards the support of 168 schools, was derived from the following sources:

169 clergymen contributed L1,782 or L10 10 0 each 399 landowners " 2,127 " 5 6 0 " 2l7 occupiers " 200 " 18 6 " 102 householders " 181 " 1 15 6 " 141 other persons " 228 " 1 12 4 "

The rental of the 399 landowners was estimated at, L650,000 a year. Judging from the result of my own observations, I should not have been at all surprised if a further analysis of the return had shown that not only the contributions of the clergy but those of retired professional men and others with limited incomes were, in proportion, far greater than those of the leviathans of wealth.

To play the part of Mr. Greg's ideal millionaire, a man must have not only a large heart but a cultivated mind; and how often are educators successful in getting work out of boys or youths who know that they have not to make their own bread?

In my lecture I have drawn a strong distinction, though Mr. Greg has not observed it, between hereditary wealth and that which, however great, and even, compared with the wages of subordinate producers, excessive, is earned by industry. Wealth earned by industry is, for obvious reasons, generally much more wisely and beneficially spent than hereditary wealth. The self-made millionaire must at all events, have an active mind. The late Mr. Brassey was probably one man in a hundred even among self-made millionaires; among hereditary millionaires he would have been one in a thousand. Surely we always bestow especial praise on one who resists the evil influences of hereditary wealth, and surely our praise is deserved.

The good which private wealth has done in the way of patronizing literature and art is, I am convinced, greatly overrated. The beneficent patronage of Lorenzo di Medici is, like that of Louis XIV., a chronological and moral fallacy. What Lorenzo did was, in effect, to make literature and art servile and in some cases to taint them with the propensities of a magnificent debauchee. It was not Lorenzo, nor any number of Lorenzos, that made Florence, with her intellect and beauty, but the public spirit, the love of the community, the intensity of civic life, in which the interest of Florentine history lies. The decree of the Commune for the building of the Cathedral directs the architect to make a design "of such noble and extreme magnificence that the industry and skill of men shall be able to invent nothing grander or more beautiful," since it had been decided in Council that no plan should be accepted "unless the conception was such as to render the work worthy of an ambition which had become very great, inasmuch as it resulted from the continued desires of a great number of citizens united in one sole will."

I believe, too, that the munificence of a community is generally wiser and better directed than that of private benefactors. Nothing can be more admirable than the munificence of rich men in the United States. But the drawback in the way of personal fancies and crochets is so great that I sometimes doubt whether future generations will have reason to thank the present, especially as the reverence of the Americans for property is so intense that they would let a dead founder breed any pestilence rather than touch the letter of his will.

Politically, no one can have lived in the New World without knowing that a society in which wealth is distributed rests on an incomparably safer foundation than one in which it is concentrated in the hands of a few. British plutocracy has its cannoneer; but if the cannoneer happens to take fancies into his head the "whiff of grapeshot" goes the wrong way.

Socially, I do not know whether Mr. Greg has been led to consider the extent to which artificial desires, expensive fashions, and conventional necessities created by wealth, interfere with freedom of intercourse and general happiness. The Saturday Review says:

"All classes of Her Majesty's respectable subjects are always doing their best to keep up appearances, and a very hard struggle many of us make of it. Thus a mansion in Belgrave Square ought to mean a corpulent hall-porter, a couple of gigantic footmen, a butler and an under-butler at the very least, if the owner professes to live op to his social dignities. If our house is in Baker or Wimpole street, we must certainly have a manservant in sombre raiment to open our door, with a hobbledehoy or a buttons to run his superior's messages. In the smart, although somewhat dismal, small squares in South Kensington and the Western suburbs, the parlourmaid must wear the freshest of ribbons and trimmest of bows, and be resplendent in starch and clean coloured muslins. So it goes on, as we run down the gamut of the social scale; our ostentatious expenditure must be in harmony throughout with the stuccoed facade behind which we live, or the staff of domestics we parade. We are aware, of course, as our incomes for the most part are limited, and as we are all of us upon our mettle in the battle of life that we must pinch somewhere if appearances are to be kept up. We do what we can in secret towards balancing the budget. We retrench on our charities, save on our coals, screw on our cabs, drink the sourest of Bordeaux instead of more generous vintages, dispense with the cream which makes tea palatable, and systematically sacrifice substantial comforts that we may swagger successfully in the face of a critical and carping society. But with the most of us if our position is an anxious one; it is of our own making and if we dared to be eccentrically rational it might be very tolerable."

Nor is this the worst. The worst is the exclusion from society of the people who do not choose to torture and degrade themselves in order to keep up appearances and who are probably the best people of all. The interference of wealth and its exigencies with social enjoyment is I suspect a heavy set off against squirearchical patronage of intellect and art.

Those who believe that the distribution of wealth is more favourable to happiness and more civilizing than its concentration will of course vote against laws which tend to artificial concentration of wealth such as those of primogeniture and entail. This they may do without advocating public plunder though it suits plutocratic writers to confound the two. For my own part I do not feel bound to pay to British plutocracy a respect which British plutocracy does not pay to humanity. Some of its organs are beginning to preach doctrines revolting to a Christian and to any man who has not banished from his heart the love of his kind and we have seen it when its class passions were excited show a temper as cruel as that of any Maratist or Petroleuse. But so far from attacking the institution of property [Footnote: The Saturday Review some time ago charged me with proposing to confiscate the increase in the value of land. I never said anything of the kind nor anything I believe that could easily be mistaken for it.] I have as great a respect for it as any millionaire can have and as sincerely accept and uphold it as the condition of our civilization. There is nothing inconsistent with this in the belief that among the better part of the race property is being gradually modified by duty or in the surmise that before humanity reaches its distant goal property and duty will alike be merged in affection.

A TRUE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY.

The vast works of the railway and steamboat age called into existence, besides the race of great engineers, a race of great organizers and directors of industry, who may be generally termed Contractor. Among these no figure was more conspicuous than that of Mr. Brassey, a life of whom has just been published by Messrs. Bell and Daldy. Its author is Mr. Helps, whose name is a guarantee for the worthy execution of the work. And worthily executed it is, in spite of a little Privy Council solemnity in the reflections, and a little "State Paper" in the style. The materials were collected in an unusual way—by examining the persons who had acted under Mr. Brassey, or knew him well, and taking down their evidence in shorthand. The examination was conducted by Mr. Brassey, jun., who prudently declined to write the biography himself, feeling that a son could not speak impartially of his father. The result is that we have materials for a portrait, which not only is very interesting in itself but, by presenting the image of beneficence in an employer, may help to mediate between capital and labour in a time of industrial war.

Mr. Helps had been acquainted with Mr. Brassey, and had once received a visit from him on official business of difficulty and importance. He expected, he says, to see a hard, stern, soldierly sort of person, accustomed to sway armies of working-men in an imperious fashion. Instead of this he saw an elderly gentleman of very dignified appearance and singularly graceful manners—"a gentleman of the old school." "He stated his case, no, I express myself wrongly; he did not state his case, he understated it; and there are few things more attractive in a man than that he should be inclined to understate rather than overstate his own case." Mr. Brassey was also very brief, and when he went away, Mr. Helps, knowing well the matter in respect to which his visitor had a grievance, thought that, if it had been his own case, he should hardly have been able to restrain himself so well, and speak with so little regard to self-interest, as Mr. Brassey had done. Of all the persons whom Mr. Helps had known, he thought Mr. Brassey most resembled that perfect gentleman and excellent public man, Lord Herbert of Lea.

Mr. Helps commences his work with a general portrait. According to this portrait, the most striking feature in Mr. Brassey's character was trustfulness, which he carried to what might appear an extreme. He chose his agents with care, but, having chosen them, placed implicit confidence in them, trusting them for all details, and judging by results. He was very liberal in the conduct of business. His temperament was singularly calm and equable, not to be discomposed by success or failure, easily throwing off the burden of care, and, when all had been done that could be done, awaiting the result with perfect equanimity. He was very delicate in blaming, his censure being always of the gentlest kind, evidently reluctant, and on that account going more to the heart. His generosity made him exceedingly popular with his subordinates and work-men, who looked forward to his coming among them as a festive event; and, when any disaster occurred in the works, the usual parts of employer and employed were reversed—the employer it was who framed the excuses and comforted the employed. He was singularly courteous, and listened to everybody with respect; so that it was a marked thing when he went so far as to say of a voluble and empty chatterer, that "the peas were overgrowing the stick." His presence of mind was great; he had in an eminent degree, as his biographer remarks, what Napoleon called "two o'clock in the morning courage," being always ready, if called up in the middle of the night, to meet any urgent peril; and his faculties were stimulated, not overcome, by danger. He had a perfect hatred of contention, and would not only refuse to take any questionable advantage, but would rather even submit to be taken advantage of—a generosity which turned to his account. In the execution of any undertaking, his anxiety was that the work should be done quickly and done well. Minor questions, unprovided for by specific contract, he left to be settled afterwards. In his life he had only one regular law-suit. It was in Spain, about the Mataro line, and into this he was drawn by his partner against his will. He declared that he would never have another, "for in nineteen cases out of twenty you either gain nothing at all, or what you do gain does not compensate you for the worry and anxiety the lawsuit occasions you." In case of disputes between his agents and the engineers, he quietly settled the question by reference to the "gangers."

In order to find the key to Mr. Brassey's character, his biographer took care to ascertain what was his "ruling passion." He had none of the ordinary ambitions for rank, title, or social position. "His great ambition—his ruling passion—was to win a high reputation for skill, integrity, and success in the difficult vocation of a contractor for public works; to give large employment to his fellow-countrymen; by means of British labour and British skill to knit together foreign countries; and to promote civilization, according to his view of it, throughout the world." "Mr. Brassey," continues Mr. Helps, "was, in brief, a singularly trustful, generous, large-hearted, dexterous, ruling kind of personage; blessed with a felicitous temperament for bearing the responsibility of great affairs." In the military age he might have been a great soldier, a Turenne or a Marlborough, if he could have broken through the aristocratic barrier which confined high command to the privileged few; in the industrial age he found a more beneficent road to distinction, and one not limited to the members of a caste.

Mr. Brassey's family is stated by his biographer to have come over with the Conqueror. If Mr. Brassey attached any importance to his pedigree (of which there is no appearance) it is to be hoped that he was able to make it out more clearly than most of those who claim descent from companions of the Conqueror. Long after the Conquest—so long, indeed, as England and Normandy remained united under one crown—there was a constant flow of Norman immigration into England, and England swarms with people bearing Norman or French names, whose ancestors were perfectly guiltless of the bloodshed of Hastings, and made their entrance into the country as peaceful traders, and, perhaps, in even humbler capacities. What is certain is that the great contractor sprang from a line of those small landed proprietors, once the pillars of England's strength, virtue and freedom, who, in the old country have been "improved off the face of the earth" by the great landowners, while they live again on the happier side of the Atlantic. A sound morality, freedom from luxury, and a moderate degree of culture, are the heritage of the scion of such a stock. Mr. Brassey was brought up at home till he was twelve years old, when he was sent to school at Chester. At sixteen he was articled to a surveyor, and as an initiation into great works, he helped, as a pupil, to make the surveys for the then famous Holyhead road. His master, Mr. Lawton, saw his worth, and ultimately took him into partnership. The firm set up at Birkenhead, then a very small place, but destined to a greatness which, it seems, Mr. Lawton had the shrewdness to discern. At Birkenhead Mr. Brassey did well, of course; and there, after a time, he was brought into contact with George Stephenson, and by him at once appreciated and induced to engage in railways. The first contract which he obtained was for the Pembridge Viaduct, between Stafford and Wolverhampton, and for this he was enabled to tender by the liberality of his bankers, whose confidence, like that of all with whom he came into contact, he had won. Railway-making was at that time a new business, and a contractor was required to meet great demands upon his organizing power; the system of sub-contracts, which so much facilitates the work, being then only in its infancy. From George Stephenson Mr. Brassey passed to Mr. Locke, whose great coadjutor he speedily became. And now the question arose whether he should venture to leave his moorings at Birkenhead and launch upon the wide sea of railroad enterprise. His wife is said, by a happy inspiration, to have decided him in favour of the more important and ambitious sphere. She did so at the sacrifice of her domestic comfort; for in the prosecution of her husband's multifarious enterprises they changed their residence eleven times in the next thirteen years, several times to places abroad; and little during those years did his wife and family see of Mr. Brassey.

A high place in Mr. Brassey's calling had now been won, and it had been won not by going into rings or making corners, but by treading steadily the steep path of honour. Mr. Locke was accused of unduly favouring Mr. Brassey. Mr. Helps replies that the partiality of a man like Mr. Locke must have been based on business grounds. It was found that when Mr. Brassey had undertaken a contract, the engineer-in-chief had little to do in the way of supervision. Mr. Locke felt assured that the bargain would be not only exactly but handsomely fulfilled, and that no excuse would be pleaded for alteration or delay. After the fall of a great viaduct it was suggested to Mr. Brassey that, by representing his case, he might obtain a reduction of his loss. "No," was his reply, "I have contracted to make and maintain the road, and nothing shall prevent Thomas Brassey from being as good as his word."

As a contractor on a large scale, and especially as a contractor for foreign railroads, Mr. Brassey was led rapidly to develop the system of sub-contracting. His mode of dealing with his sub-contractors, however, was peculiar. They did not regularly contract with him, but he appointed them their work, telling them what price he should give for it. They were ready to take his word, knowing that they would not suffer by so doing. The sub-contractor who had made a bad bargain, and found himself in a scrape, anxiously looked for the coming of Mr. Brassey. "Mr. Brassey," says one of the witnesses examined for this biography, "came, saw how matters stood, and invariably satisfied the man. If a cutting taken to be clay turned out after a very short time to be rock, the sub- contractor would be getting disheartened, yet he still persevered, looking to the time when Mr. Brassey should come. He came, walking along the line as usual with a number of followers, and on coming to the cutting he looked round, counted the number of waggons at the work, scanned the cutting, and took stock of the nature of the stuff. "This is very hard," said he to the sub-contractor. "Yes, it is a pretty deal harder than I bargained for." Mr. Brassey would linger behind, allowing the others to go on, and then commence the following conversation: "What is your price for this cutting?" "So much a yard, Sir." "It is very evident you are not getting it out for that price. Have you asked for any advance to be made to you for this rock?" "Yes, sir, but I can make no sense of them." "If you say that your price is so much, it is quite clear that you do not do it for that. I am glad that you have persevered with it; but I shall not alter your price, it must remain as it is; but the rock must be measured for you twice. Will that do for you?" "Yes, very well indeed, and I am very much obliged to you, Sir." "Very well, go on; you have done very well in persevering, and I shall look to you again." One of these tours of inspection would often cost Mr. Brassey a thousand pounds."