The twentieth century

THE

NINETEENTH
CENTURY

A MONTHLY REVIEW

EDITED BY JAMES KNOWLES

VOL. XX.
JULY-DECEMBER 1886

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH. & CO.. I PATERNOSTER SQUARE

(Tlie rights of translation and of reproduction are reserved}

CONTENTS OF VOL. XX.

THE UNIONIST VOTE. By Edward Dicey ....
THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. By Gold win Smith .
THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE. By Sir Algernon Borthwick
MODERN CHINA. By J. N. Jordan . . . , "' .' "

TAINE : A LITERARY PORTRAIT. By Leopold Katscher
THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. By P. L. Sclater .
REVISION OF THE BIBLE. By Dr. G. Vance /Smith .
WHAT THE WORKING CLASSES READ. By Edward G. Salmon
FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES. By C. Kinloch Cooke .
RECREATIVE EVENING SCHOOLS. By Rev. Freeman Wills .
THE DISSOLUTION AND THE COUNTRY. By Frank II. Hill .
PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. By Professor Ray Lankester
NEW ZEALAND AND MR. FROUDE. By Edward Wakefield .
WANTED — A LEADER. By Julian Sturgis ....
IN AN INDIAN JUNGLE. By Prince Carl of Sweden and Norway .
ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS. By Dr. J. Burney Yeo
LETTERS AND LETTER- WRITERS. By Rev. Dr. Jessopp
BIRMINGHAM : A STUDY FROM THE LIFE. By John Macdonald
ARE ANIMALS HAPPY ? By Briggs Carlill ....
LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS : a Reply. By Frank Dillon

AL DEFENCE OF THE COLONIES. By Sir A. Cooper Key
THE UNIONIST- CAMPAIGN. By Edward Dicey
NOTE ON GENESIS AND SCIENCE, from W. E. Gladstone
THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS. By Goldwin Smith
COLLAPSE OF THE FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. By Lord Penzance .
BEFORE BIRTH. By Norman Pearson ....
THE HINDU WIDOW. By Devendra N. Das . .
A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. By St. George Mivart
How A PROVINCIAL PAPER is MANAGED. By Arnot Reid .
MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. By Lord BramweU
MERELY PLAYERS. By Mrs. D. M. Craik ....
'EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. By Andrew Lang
OUR SUPERSTITION ABOUT CONSTANTINOPLE. By //. 0. Arnold-

Forster ........

PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. By Justice Stephen

COMTE'S FAMOUS FALLACY. By the Bishop of Carlisle

THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A PROFESSION. By Benjamin Kidd

THE CHASE OF THE WILD FALLOW DEER. By Gerald Lascelles .

1

14

33

40

51

74

91
108
118
130
139-
149
171
183
194
201
215
234
255
270
284-^'
294-
304
305
332
340
364
374
391
403
416
423

vi CONTENTS OF VOL. XX.

PAGE

WHAT GIRLS READ. By Edward G. Salmon . . .515

OUR CRAFTSMEN. By Thomas Wright . . . .530

NOT AT HOME. By John O'Neill ..... 553

THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT. By J. G. Hubbard . .565

DISEASE IN FICTION. By Dr. Nestor Tirard . . . 579

• THE LIBERAL SPLIT. By G. Shaw Lefevre . . . .592

THE COMING WINTER IN IRELAND. By John Dillon . . 609

FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN. By Sir Rutherford Alcock . 617
EXHIBITIONS. By H. Trueman Wood .... 633

MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. By Frederic W. H. Myers . . 648

SISTERS-IN-LAW. By the Bishop of Oxford .... 667

DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. By Rev. Samuel A. Barnett . . 678

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND. By Mrs. Arthur Kennard 693
WORKHOUSE CRUELTIES. By Miss Louisa Twining . . 709

THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE ON COMTE. By Frederic Harrison . 715
THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. By Rev. Dr. Jessopp. . 724

EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. (With a Map.) By C. Kinloch Cooke . 742
ON THE SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. By Mr. Justice Stephen . 765
NOVA SCOTIA'S CRY FOR HOME RULE. By Mrs. Fellows . . 785

THE CLASSES, THE MASSES, AND THE GLASSES. By Sir Wilfrid

• Lawson ........ 794

THE ' HAMLET ' OF THE SEINE. By Lady Pollock . . . 805

BUYING NIAGARA. By J. Hampden Robb . . . .815

MASSAGE. By Lady John Manners . . + . .824

A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. By Rev. J. Guinness Rogers . . 829

RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. By Lord Edmond Fitz-

maurice and H. Herbert Smith ..... 844
A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. By Stuart C. Cumberland . 867
THE LOYALTY OF THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. By Sir William H.

Gregory ....... 886

A FLYING YISIT TO THE UNITED STATES. By Lord Brassey . 901

THE

NINETEENT H
CENTURY.

No. CXIIL— JULY 1886.

THE UNIONIST VOTE,

BUT a few months have come and gone since I, writing in these
pages on the eve of the last election, advised the moderate -Liberals
to vote for the Conservatives, so as to prevent the return of Mr. Glad-
stone to power. The plea I urged in defence of my advice amounted
chiefly to this. The Liberal party under Mr. Gladstone's leadership
had, as I held, deserted the true traditions of Liberalism, and had em-
barked on a line of policy inconsistent with the principles on which
the Liberal cause could alone be upheld. In fact, though not in
name, these traditions and these principles were, as I opined, far safer
in the hands of Lord Salisbury's Government than in those of any
Government which Mr. Gladstone could form. I therefore appealed to
those who shared my views to do what in them lay to retain Lord
Salisbury in office and to keep Mr. Gladstone out of office.

My advice, I admit frankly, was not adopted. Party bonds
proved too strong to be cast off on the grounds that were then
before the public. With few exceptions the moderate Liberals
threw in their lot with Mr. Gladstone and voted the Liberal
ticket. They may have wavered in their allegiance, they may
have been lukewarm in their advocacy. But yet they could not
make up their minds to part company with Mr. Gladstone, and in
consequence they allowed their names, their authority, and their in-
fluence to be used in order to secure the return of a Liberal majority
It is in the agricultural counties that the moderate Liberals are most
powerful, and it is in the counties that the Liberals gained their most
numerous and most decisive successes. The result was that office was
VOL. XX.— No. 113. B

2 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

once more brought within measurable distance of Mr. Gladstone's
attainment.

Had other — and as I deem wiser — counsels prevailed, the country
toight have been spared the danger of dismemberment. But it was
not to be. Lord Hartington, and the great mass of moderate Liberals
of whom he is the representative, agreed to accept the Hawarden
programme, and to follow Mr. Gladstone's leadership. The member
for Midlothian had, as they imagined, learnt wisdom by his late defeat,
and might be trusted not to repeat the errors which had upset his last
administration. They disliked the idea of a coalition with the
Conservatives, they distrusted the possibility of a fusion, they nattered
Jiemselves that if they stuck by their party their influence would
prove strong enough to keep the Liberals from any extreme measures.
Party ties, personal likes and dislikes, political prepossessions had
undoubtedly much to do with the decision of the moderate Liberals
to support Mr. Gladstone at the last election. But the dominant
cause of their so deciding lay in the fact that their confidence in
Mr. Gladstone, though shaken, had not then been destroyed.

Their confidence proved misplaced. The general election had
left the Parnellites in a position to decide whether the Liberals should
or should not return to office. Without their aid, the accession of a
Liberal Government was an impossibility ; with their aid it was a
certainty. The price of their aid was the concession of Home Rule.
That price Mr. Gladstone suddenly awoke to the necessity of paying.
I am not concerned with the question of Mr. Gladstone's motives.
Psychological problems have no great interest for me, and the extent
to which a man may deceive himself while deceiving others is a
consideration into which I have neither the wish nor the power to
enter. All I — or the world at large for that matter — have to deal
with are Mr. Gladstone's acts, not his motives. In the annals of
American politics it is recorded that, on a change of administration
at Washington, a Western editor who had supported the defeated
party was informed that the Government advertisements would be
withdrawn unless he defended the policy of the party in power. The
editor in question forthwith wired back, ' It is a sharp curve and
an ugly curve, but I'll take it.' If Mr. Gladstone was not con-
stitutionally incapable of ever using plain language to express plain
ideas, it is in such terms as this he might have given in his adhesion
to Home Rule. It was a very sharp curve, a very ugly curve indeed !
Not only had Mr. Gladstone throughout his long career set his face
against Home Rule, not only had he time after time declined to
consider it as coming within the domain of practical politics, but he
had distinguished himself above other English statesmen by the
vehemence with which he had denounced its champions and advocates.
If, as he now wishes us to believe, he had all along cherished a secret
regard for Home Rule, he had succeeded most admirably in conceal-

1886 THE UNIONIST VOTE. 3

ing his affection. Throughout his five years' tenure of office Mr.
Gladstone and his colleagues had contrived to make themselves so
exceptionally disliked and distrusted by the Irish Nationalists, that
the Irish vote had been given to the Conservatives, not because
much was expected from them, but because they were opposed to
Mr. Gladstone. The fact that this support had been so given had
been seized upon as an electioneering weapon by Mr. Gladstone, and
had been used unscrupulously by his followers. The mere suspicion
that some of the Conservative Ministers might be disposed to make
concessions to the Home Kule agitators in return for the Irish vote
had been urged as a grave offence against them upon every Liberal
platform. Mr. Gladstone himself had made a solemn appeal to the
constituencies imploring them to return a strong Liberal majority in
order to deprive the Home Kule vote of its importance. In fact, if
there was one point to which Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal party
stood committed by the course they adopted at the last election, it
was resistance to Home Rule.

Yet, as soon as it became clear that the Liberal party could not
return to office unless they could deprive the Conservatives of the
support they had hitherto received from the Parnellites, Mr. Gladstone
went over bag and baggage to the Home Rule camp. Negotiations
were opened between Mr. Parnell and Mr. Gladstone, and a compact
was entered into in virtue of which the Conservative Ministry were
thrown out on the first pretext that presented itself, and Mr. Gladstone
was placed in a position to resume office.

I am quite ready to believe that by this time Mr. Gladstone had
worked himself up into a genuine belief in the excellence of Home
Rule, just as on all previous occasions in his career he has always
held the most fervent conviction of the innate truth of any cause
which it has served his purpose to espouse. But the fact remains
the same that Mr. Gladstone, having defeated the Conservatives by
accusing them of parleying with Home Rule, became a convert to
Home Rule the moment that his conversion was shown to be the
condition of his return to office. Having obtained his majority, his
next step was to form his ministry. For this purpose it was essen-
tial to keep back the full extent of his conversion. It is obvious,
from what we know already, that the colleagues whose aid Mr.
Gladstone solicited towards the formation of his ministry were kept
utterly in the dark as to the policy on which he had determined, and
were only given to understand that in view of the recent manifesta-
tion of popular sentiment in Ireland something must be done to
satisfy the Irish demand for local self-government. It does credit to
the sagacity as well as to the public spirit of Lord Hartington and
his personal followers that, in spite of the assurances that were ten-
dered them, they declined to accept office in an administration which
was to be constructed on the basis of a coalition with the Parnellites.

B2

4 THE . NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

The Ministry was formed ; and then, without consulting with his
colleagues, Mr. Gladstone availed himself of Mr. Parnell's assistance
to concoct a scheme repealing the Act of Union and providing
Ireland with an independent parliament and a separate executive.

It is needless for my present purpose to repeat how the dis-
closure of this scheme broke up the Ministry. Nor am I concerned
to defend the absolute logical consistency of Mr. Chamberlain and
the Radicals who were willing to go a certain length in conceding
the principle of Home Rule, but who stopped short at the point
to which Mr. Gfladstone proposed to lead them. Their most valid
defence against the charge of inconsistency must be found in the
reply of an eminent American politician in the days of the secession
war, who was taunted at a public meeting because, having been a
Democrat all his life, he had joined the Republicans when the
Southern States seceded. His answer was this : 4 Gentlemen, — I
followed my party to the very steps of the gallows, but when it
came to putting my neck in the noose I thought it time to part
company.' When it came to the Repeal of the Union Mr. Chamber-
lain and Mr. Trevelyan drew back, and by so drawing back they
have vindicated themselves from the stain which will attach indelibly
to the ministers who consented to co-operate with Mr. Gladstone
after his programme had been disclosed. Nor is it incumbent on
me to do more than recall the expedients, devices, and subterfuges
by which the Ministry attempted alternately to cajole or coerce
the malcontent Liberals into accepting the fundamental principle of
the Bill. If they could only have been got to admit that Ireland
was henceforth to be administered by a parliament and an executive
of her own, there was no concession the Ministry were not prepared
to make, no assurance they were not ready to give, no engagement
into which they were not willing to enter. Happily the snare was
too apparent to be successful, and the malcontents stood firm. The
Bill was doomed unless the opposition of the Liberal secessionists
could be overcome, and to attain this end the Ministry stooped to
intrigues and expedients of which happily our political history has
had but scant experience. The Prime Minister of England was not
ashamed to appeal to the lowest instincts of the masses, and to
declare that the question at issue was one not to be decided by
reason or argument, but by class prejudices and class sympathies.
The whole organisation of the Liberal party was set in action to
coerce any Liberal member who dared, after Mr. Gladstone had
become a convert to Home Rule, to adhere to his own opinion.
Social, personal, and political influences of all kinds were brought
to bear upon every member whose vote was doubtful. Every art of
Parliamentary strategy was resorted to in order to secure the passing
of the Bill : no petty artifice, no device, however small, was re-
jected as unworthy of the occasion. And yet dodges, devices,

1886 THE UNIONIST VOTE. 5

artifices proved in vain, and Mr. Gladstone's own measure was rejected
in Mr. Gladstone's own Parliament by a majority of thirty. At any
other time and under any other Premier the Ministry would have
resigned. In face, however, of the fact that the present Parliament
was only elected six months ago, and elected on a programme in
which the Kepeal of the Union was not even mentioned, Mr. Gladstone
has declined to resign, and has appealed to the constituencies. It is
with the answer that should be given to this appeal that I have to
deal.

If ever there was a case in which the dead might be left to bury
their dead, it is that of Mr. Gladstone's Home Eule Bill. I have
dwelt upon its history simply and solely because it is necessary to
bear this history in mind in order to dispel a delusion which is likely
to produce a certain effect on the coming elections. In the organs
of the Ministry one meets frequently with the assumption that
whether Home Rule is right or wrong, wise or unwise, it is part of
the Liberal platform, and is therefore certain to be carried at no
distant date. Even granting the assumption, the conclusion may
well be disputed. But the assumption is utterly without foundation.
Up to the present time Home Rule has never even been submitted for
acceptance to the Liberal party, and still less accepted by them as
an article of the Liberal creed. It is Mr. Gladstone, not the party
he leads, whom Home Rule can claim as a convert. So much is
this the case, that if Mr. Gladstone were removed from the arena of
politics there are not fifty Liberal members who would vote for such
a measure as he has proposed ; not one of his own colleagues,
except Mr. John Morley, who would make himself responsible for its
authorship. Indeed, if Mr. Gladstone had not declared for Home
Rule, the assertion that the Liberal party was in favour of Home
Rule would have been treated, till only the other day, as a malignant
misrepresentation. No doubt the Liberal party, as a body, have not
repudiated Mr. Gladstone's leadership on account of his conversion
.to Home Rule. That they should not have done so shows how the
.party has become demoralised, how Liberalism has grown to repre-
sent names and individuals rather than ideas or principles. But
the fact that the Liberals as a body still remain faithful to Mr.
Gladstone does not prove that they are in favour of Home Rule.
All it shows is that they know Mr. Gladstone's influence tD be
essential to the maintenance of their political ascendency, and that
sooner than abandon that ascendency they are prepared to support
whatever Mr. Gladstone proposes. Whether Home Rule is or is
not to be adopted formally as part and parcel of the Liberal pro-
gramme depends entirely upon the result of the coming election.
If, as I believe and hope, the result shows that the country de-
clines absolutely to entertain the idea of any Repeal of the Union,
then we shall hear no more of Home Rule being an accepted article

6 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

of the Liberal programme. Whether this result is so shown depends
mainly upon the action of the moderate Liberals.

Now, preaching to the converted is a waste of labour. I may take
it for granted that the Liberals to whom this appeal of mine is once
more addressed share with me the view that the maintenance of the
Union is a matter of paramount importance. Granted this, it follows
that there is no sacrifice we should hot be prepared to make in order
to secure this object, supposing its attainment to be possible. The
arguments on which the partisans of the Ministry rely with most
confidence is that after what has come and gone the maintenance of
the Union is no longer within the limits of possibility ; that we who are
struggling against its disruption are only retarding for a brief period
the accomplishment of an inevitable event ; and that, as the cost of
our so retarding it, we are embittering the future relations between
England and Ireland, and are breaking up the Liberal party. Con-
sidering that the main difficulty in Upholding the Union is due to
the action of Mr. Gladstone, there is an almost sublime impudence
"in the supporters of the Ministry alleging that difficulty as a reason
for our accepting their policy. But the assumption so far rests on
assertion only. No rational person doubts that as a matter of fact
Great Britain can uphold the Union by force of arms if she is so
minded. It is more than doubtful whether the Irish Nationalists
are prepared to fight for a repeal of the Union ; if they do fight they
are certain to be defeated. It is, therefore, idle to say that we have
no choice except to acquiesce in the severance of the Union. If we
do acquiesce it will be because we are not willing to exercise our
power of resistance, and this, in as far as the argument in question
has any meaning at all, is what it really means. It is worth while
then to say something as to the reasons why it is alleged that we
should never, in practice, be able, or willing — for it comes to the
same thing in the end — to exercise our undoubted power.

We are told, then, by our self-constituted mentors that it is im-
possible in this age — when the triumph of oppressed nationalities
has become the order of the day — to resist the demands of the Irish
nation ; that the moral sense of the community will never tolerate
any prolonged exercise of coercion ; that the British democracy is at
one with the Irish democracy ; and that, even if this were not so, the
Home Rule contingent can in the present division of parties render
all Parliamentary government impossible, and thereby compel
England in the end to grant Home Rule as the price of securing the
control of her own affairs. Even if we shared the belief that Home
Rule must be granted sooner or later, we should say, in the interest
of the United Kingdom, the later the better. But the belief rests
upon assertions which, to say the least, are open to dispute. In the
first place, before you can claim for Ireland the status of an oppressed
nationality, you must show that there is such a thing in existence

1886 THE UNIONIST VOTE. 7

as an Irish nation, and that this nation, admitting its existence,
labours under oppression. Now, as a matter of fact, there never has
been an Irish nation. There never has been, there is not in Ireland now,
a united people, having a language, a religion, or a history of their
own. All you can say is that some two-thirds, at the outside, of the
population of Ireland would possibly prefer having a local government.
The remaining third — and the third, too, which in industry, pro-
sperity, and intelligence immeasurably outweighs the other two — is
passionately averse to any severance of the compact under which
Ireland is an integral part of the United Kingdom. The plea, there-
fore, of nationality falls to the ground. The plea of oppression
is even weaker. I confess that I am sceptical as to whether,
after all, Ireland was worse treated in bygone times than other
countries in a like position. In public as in private life it is
generally people's own fault if they are the victims of perpetual
wrong-doing at the hands of everybody with whom they come into
contact. Moreover, even admitting that Ireland has cause for
complaint as to the treatment she may have received from England
in days of old, there is obviously a statute of limitations for
offences of such a nature. There is no possible redress for wrongs
whose victims and whose perpetrators have alike faded away into the
far-off past. For the last hundred years Ireland has had no possible
ground to complain of oppression on the part of England. She has
enjoyed the same civil and religious rights as those possessed by
England. As popular liberties have been developed in England,
they have been developed in Ireland also, and at the present moment
there is in Ireland, as there has been for two generations, abso-
lute liberty of political and public life. Agitators against the Union
in the Southern States, Italian sympathisers in Nice and Savoy,
Scandinavian propagandists in Schleswig, would be only too grateful
for a tenth part of the immunity enjoyed by the Irish Nationalists
under the so-called tyranny of the Saxon oppressor.

Limits of space preclude my entering at any length on this
branch of the subject. I think, however, it would not be difficult to
prove that the Kepeal of the Union is not really desired by any
decisive majority of the population of Ireland. It would be still
more easy to prove that the concession of this desire, if it exists,
would not promote the welfare or the interests of Ireland. But I
attach the less value to any demonstration of the kind, as I admit
freely that even if I entertained an opposite opinion, and believed
that separation from England was ardently desired by a large
majority of Irishmen, and would prove a blessing instead of a curse
to Ireland, I should not waver for one moment in my view as to the
paramount necessity of upholding the Union. After all, the whole is
greater than the less. We, each of us, in as far as we possess any poli-
tical influence, hold that influence in trust for the United Kingdom.

8 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

We have not the right, even if we had the wish, to benefit any
one part of that kingdom to the detriment of the whole. If, as I
hold, and as those to whom I address myself hold also, the main-
tenance of the Union is essential to the well-being, the greatness,
and even the existence of the British Empire, then it is idle to talk
to us about the wish of Ireland for Home Rule, or of the advantages
she might possibly derive from the Repeal of the Union.

If, then, in order to maintain the Union it is necessary to employ
coercion, I fail to see why we should deem it necessary to find ex-
cuses for its employment. I fail also to see why we should assume
that the democracy are incapable of following a very simple process
of argument. If they deem it their interest and their duty to uphold
the Union, and if the employment of coercion can be shown to be
essential to the maintenance of the Union, then I feel convinced the
democracy will have as little scruple about employing coercion as the
most high-handed of autocrats. There is not a population in the world so
wedded to what I may call the commonplaces of Liberalism, so imbued
with respect for the stock shibboleths of democracy, as that of the
United States. Yet the moment this population awoke to the fact
that their Union was endangered, they flung all their favourite
theories and platitudes to the winds, and sanctioned the en-
forcement of such a system of coercion throughout the Southern
States as the most fanatical of Orangemen has never dreamt of
applying to the Irish secessionists. It is all very well to declare
beforehand that the British democracy will never consent to any
course of action ; but, in so far as my observation goes, our demo-
cracy are very like other Englishmen, fully determined to hold
their own, and in no wise particular as to the means by which
they so hold it. Moreover, though words go a long way with us,
there is amongst Englishmen of all classes a certain innate respect
for sober fact and plain common sense. * No Coercion ' is undoubtedly
a good election cry ; but when the masses learn, as they cannot fail to
learn before long, that coercion means nothing more nor less than
the enforcement of the law, the protection of individual liberty,
and the prevention of brutal crime and savage outrage, they will be
the first to call out for its employment. Humanitarianism, both for
good and bad, is the attribute of the well-to-do classes whose lives
are easy and cultured. A morbid dread of inflicting pain and a dis-
taste for rough and ready modes of punishment are not characteristic
of the masses who toil and labour.

The objection that if we refuse to grant Home Rule, the Home
Rulers will make our system of Parliamentary government unwork-
able, rests entirely on the assumption that the British Parliament
is willing to consent to its own extinction. If, as there is good
grounds to hope, the coming elections result in the return of a de-
cisive majority elected on a Unionist platform, this majority, so

1886 THE UNIONIST VOTE. 9

long as they remain united, can always defeat the Separatist
minority. Given the will, there is no difficulty in putting down
wilful obstruction, and if the Home Eulers attempted to repeat
in the new Parliament the tactics which they adopted in the last
Parliament but one, they would soon discover, to their cost, that
though the resources of obstruction may not be exhausted, the
resources of repression are still farther from exhaustion.

Thus all the arguments by which Liberals who disapprove of
Home Kule are exhorted not to manifest their disapproval, on the
ground that the Kepeal of the Union is a foregone conclusion, are
shown to be assumptions only. The future still lies within our own
hands, and it is for us to decide whether the Union shall be dissolved
or maintained. By our recent legislation the ultimate appeal in all
supreme issues lies to the masses. It is in the end, by their verdict,
that the Union must stand or fall. Now it would be idle to imagine
that the masses as a rule have any very distinct or intelligent con-
viction of their own as to the merits or demerits of the controversy
on which they are called to give judgment. It is our duty, as
Liberal Unionists, to bring home to them the conviction that we
hold ourselves. We have many cards in our favour.

The fact that the Home Eule Bill has been rejected by a decisive
majority in the most democratic Parliament England has ever
known, and that the opposition to Home Eule is supported by all the
most honoured and trusted members of the popular party, with the
solitary exception of Mr. Gladstone, cannot fail to influence public
opinion. Then, too, we have on our side the instincts of a ruling
race ; the religious sympathies which unite the men of Ulster with
the Protestants of Great Britain; the anti-Irish prejudices which
prevail so largely in our working classes. But all these influences
cannot be relied on with any confidence, unless we can convince the
masses that the question at issue is one of life and death to England,
one in comparison with which all political and party issues sink into
insignificance. In order to bring home this conviction we must
practise what we preach, we must teach by example as well as pre-
cept. And this brings me to the practical application of the various
considerations I have endeavoured to bring before my fellow-
Unionists.

Let us look at facts as they are ; not as we could wish them to
be. Now, as a matter of hard fact, the real strength and backbone
of the opposition to Home Eule lies in the Conservative party. The
Conservatives have voted as one man against the repeal of the
Union, and of the majority by whom the Home Eule Bill was thrown
out, over three-fourths were contributed by the Opposition. No
candid observer can doubt that the Conservatives have gained
ground very materially in public opinion by their attitude on this
question. Their conduct since they were turned out of office has

10 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

been honest, straightforward, and patriotic. With a public spirit
and a disregard of immediate party advantage, only too rare in our
political annals, they have given, and are prepared to give, a loyal
support to the Liberals who voted against Mr. Gladstone's Bill.
They have shown, in a way their countrymen will not fail to recog-
nise, that they have the welfare of England more deeply at heart
than the triumph of their party ; and by so showing they have done
all that in them lies to impress upon the public mind the conviction
that the question at issue is one on which the fate of England is at
stake.

It is by following this example the Unionist Liberals must
enforce the same lesson. If they show in their turn that they are
willing to subordinate their own party interests and preferences to
the return of a Unionist majority, they will teach the constituencies
that whether they are right or wrong in regarding Home Rule as
fatal to England's welfare, they are at any rate honest in their belief.
I, for my own part, say most sincerely that if the price of securing a
majority pledged to resist Home Rule was the forfeiture of every
single seat held by a Unionist Liberal, I would gladly consent to such
a bargain. So long as the candidate whom I am asked to support
is a Unionist, I care little or nothing whether he is called Liberal
or Conservative. All I require to know is that his chances as a can-
didate are not impaired by the political opinions he professes. This
point of view of mine should, I hold, be that also of all Liberal
Unionists who have the cause of the Union at heart.

It is folly in such a crisis as this to cherish delusions. And the
idea that it is possible to form an independent Liberal party which
will be able to hold its own without coalescing with the Ministerialists
on one hand or the Conservatives on the other seems to me an utter
delusion. The Liberal-Unionist movement is one with which I, for
one, sympathise most heartily, and which I have done what little lay
in my power to set on foot. I should be the last, therefore, to say a
word in its disparagement. But to misrepresent the nature of this
movement is to injure the cause it is intended to serve. I can see
no reason to suppose that the Liberal secessionists are likely to form
an independent party of their own. The secession is intended to
effect a definite object — the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule
policy ; and when once that object is accomplished I am at a loss
to understand what reason of existence the Liberal Unionists as a
party will possess. As a matter of argument, the Unionists may
be right in contending that it is not they who have seceded from
the Liberal party, but the Liberal party who has seceded from
them. Just in the same way, for aught I know, the Anglicans
may be right in saying it was not they who seceded from the
Catholic Church at the time of the Reformation, but the Catholics
who seceded from them. But in all such matters the public

1886 THE UNIONIST VOTE. 11

counts by results, and < 'somehow or other it is the Radicals, not
the Liberal seceders, who will popularly be regarded as the party
of progress. The. British public likes clear colours, not neutral
tints. Radicals it knows, and Conservatives it knows, but it is slow
at understanding .the "exact position of Liberals who are neither
Radicals nor Conservatives; The Liberals who voted against the
Ministerial measure, 'and; now seek re-election, have a clear and in-
telligible position; '• They have a fair claim to the votes, not only of
all Conservatives, who put ;the maintenance of the Union above
party interests, but i of their own Liberal supporters. They have
done nothing, they may reasonably urge, to forfeit the confidence
reposed in them only six months ago. But Liberal Unionists who
were not members of the last Parliament, and who come forward to
contest a seat held by a Ministerial Liberal on the strength of the
support they expect to receive from the Conservatives, occupy a very
different position* A Liberal who endeavours to defeat another
Liberal by the aid of the Conservative vote will always be popularly
regarded as a Conservative ; and in consequence of this impression
he will labour, however unjustly, under a certain disadvantage.

The reason why I dwell on these considerations is to point the
moral, that in all eases where the vote on which a Unionist
candidate must rely for his return contains a preponderating
Conservative element, the Liberals would do wisely to support a
Conservative candidate, instead of attempting to enlist the aid of
the Conservatives on behalf of a candidate of their own. The
assumption on which my whole argument is based is that the end
and aim of the Unionists should be to secure the return of a
majority pledged to uphold the Union, and that it is a matter
of comparative indifference in what proportion that majority is
composed of Liberals or Conservatives. Granted this assumption,
it is obvious that in constituencies where the mass of the Liberal
vote will go solid for the Government, a Conservative is more likely
to carry the seat with the aid of the malcontent Liberals, than a
malcontent Liberal if- supported by the Conservatives. My advice,
therefore, to Unionist Liberals, in all cases where a Home Rule
Liberal is opposed by a Conservative, especially in the rural con-
stituencies, is to canvass actively and vote steadily for the Con-
servative. If you wish the end, according to a French proverb, you
wish the means also. Now the best means to uphold the Union is to
strengthen the hands of the Conservative party ; and those Liberals
who hesitate about doing this have not really at heart the attainment
of their end.

Of course, it will be said that this advice of mine, if it were
followed, would lead to a permanent, in lieu of a temporary, dis-
ruption of the Liberal party. To this my answer would be that, in
the first instance, the maintenance of the Union is infinitely more

12 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

important, from my point of view, than the ascendency of any par-
ticular party ; and, in the second place, that the disruption which we
are implored to avert is already an accomplished fact. Even
Mr. Gladstone could never have induced the Liberal party to adopt
Home Kule as their platform unless the party had gradually been
indoctrinated with ideas which, whether right or wrong, are not in
accordance with the principles on which the old Liberal creed was
based. But for Mr. Gladstone's inordinate greed of power the
coalition between the Eadicals and the Home Kulers might have
been deferred for years. But even if, happily for himself and his
country, Mr. Gladstone had retired from public life last year, the
conclusion of such a coalition would always have been a possible,
and not a probable, contingency. Home Rule is, indeed, only the
logical development of the theories which find favour with Radicalism
as distinguished from Liberalism.

The plain truth is, that the Liberal party, as we have known it
hitherto, has well-nigh fulfilled its mission. All the important
political reforms, consistent with the existing political and social
institutions of the country, have been accomplished ; and it is im-
possible to advance much further than we have done already in the
way of democratic legislation without attacking the Constitution or
the established order of society. Whether such an advance is desir-
able or otherwise is not a question we need consider here. It is
enough for my present purpose to say that the Liberals, whom I am
now addressing, are anxious to preserve our existing Constitution,
and are opposed to all Socialist ideas. This being so, co-operation
with the Conservatives is a thing to be desired in itself, apart
from the immediate object this co-operation has in view — namely,
the maintenance of the Union. The Conservatives of to-day have
practically become converts to the principles which formerly were
associated with Liberalism. The Radicals, on the other hand, have
largely abandoned these principles. I should be loth here to say
a word against Mr. Chamberlain, whose manly attachment to the
Union has enlisted for him the sympathy of those who do not share
his political views. But truth compels the admission, that Liberals
of the class represented by Lord Hartington and Mr. Goschen have
much more in common with the views held by Lord Salisbury than
with those propounded by Mr. Chamberlain. If the fundamental
institutions of the country are to be secured against attack, if in-
dividual liberty and the rights of property are to be protected in the
future against the encroachments of Socialism, it must be by the
combined action of the Conservatives and the Liberals. Far, there-
fore, from regretting that the necessities of the present crisis have
led to a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberals, I re-
joice at the probability of this coalition leading to a permanent
fusion. Our old party names have ceased to represent facts. Whether

1886 THE UNIONIST VOTE. 13

as Unionists or Constitutionalists, or under whatever name fortune
may assign them, the friends of law and order and individual liberty
will soon have to form one united party. If, then, the alliance for
the defence of the Union should, as I hope, achieve this consumma-
tion, so much the better.

On the eve, therefore, of the new election I would once more repeat
the advice I proffered to Liberals, as opposed to Eadicals, at the last
election, and urge them to support the Conservatives openly and
loyally, as fellow-workers in the same cause with themselves. By
this policy alone can the Union be maintained. To uphold the
Union is the common duty of Liberals and Conservatives, and if the
fulfilment of a common duty by common action lead to a permanent
fusion between the two great sections of the party of law and order,,
I for one shall be well content.

EDWARD DICEY.

14 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA.

CANADA is the greatest of the self-governing colonies ; her political
history is the most important : she is trying an interesting experi-
ment in Confederation, a form of government to which attention is
just now specially directed ; and her example is being cited for
momentous legislation here in a manner which, I think, is mislead-
ing, and which, if it is misleading, is extremely dangerous. I be-
lieve that the Prime Minister is wrong in saying that she was ever
provoked to rebellion by the tyranny of the mother country. I am
sure that he is wrong in saying that she was satisfied, or that she
ever would be satisfied, with that which he proposes for Ireland.

Canada is called a British colony, and over all her provinces
waves the British flag. But as soon as you approach her for the
purpose of Imperial Federation you will be reminded that a large
part of her is French. Not only is it French, but it is becoming
more French daily, and at the same time increasing in magnitude.
The notion which seems to be prevalent here, that the French
element is dying out, is the very reverse of the fact. The French
are shouldering the British out of the city of Quebec, where not
more than six thousand British inhabitants are now left, and out of
the Eastern Townships, which have hitherto been a British district ;
they are encroaching on the British province of Ontario, as well as
overflowing into the adjoining states of the Union. The population
multiplies apace. There, as in Ireland, the Church encourages early
marriage, and does not teach thrift ; and were it not for the ready
egress into the States, we might have Irish congestion and misery in
French Canada. Had French Canada been annexed to the United
States, it would no doubt have been absorbed and assimilated, like
other alien nationalities, by that vast mass of English-speaking
population. As it is, instead of being absorbed or assimilated, the
French element rather 'absorbs and assimilates. Highland regiments
disbanded in French Canada have become French. In time, appar-
ently, there will hardly be anything British left in the province of
Quebec, except the commercial quarter of Montreal, where the more
energetic and mercantile race holds its ground. Had the conqueror
freely used his power at first, when the French numbered only about
sixty thousand, New France might have been made English ; but

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 15

its nationality has been fostered under the British flag, and in that
respect the work of conquest has been undone. It is difficult indeed,
if Canada remains separate from the United States, to see what the
limits of French extension will be.

French Canada (now the province of Quebec) is a curious remnant
of the France before the Revolution. The peasantry retain with
their patois the pre-revolutionary character, though, of the allegiance
once shared between the king, the seigneur, and the priest, almost
the whole is now paid to the priest. There were seigneuries with
vexatious feudal incidents ; but these have been abolished, not by
legislative robbery, in which the rude Canadian is inexpert, but by
honest commutation. The people are a simple, kindly, and courteous
race, happy on little, clad in homespun, illiterate, unprogressive,
pious, priest-ridden, and, whether from fatalism or from superstition,
averse to vaccination, whereby they brought upon themselves and
their neighbours the other day a fearful visitation of small-pox.
They are all small, very small farmers ; and, looking down from the
citadel of Quebec upon the narrow slips of land with their river
fronts on the St. Lawrence, you see that here, as in old France,
subdivision has been carried to an extreme.

It has been said that the Spaniards colonised for gold, the English
for freedom, the French for religion. New France, at all events, was
religious, and it has kept the character which the Jesuit missionary
impressed on it. The Church is very strong and very rich. Virtually
it is established, since to escape tithe you must avow yourself a
Protestant. Clerical influence is tremendously powerful. A French
Liberal at Montreal told me that as an advocate he had received a
retainer from a bitter personal enemy in a suit brought to break a
will for undue priestly influence, other advocates not daring to appear.
It is due to the clergy to say that they seem to make the people
moral, though in ecclesiastical fashion. What they deem immorality
they put down with a high hand ; they restrain dancing and thunder
against opera bouffe. The Church has a strong hold on the peasant's
heart through its ceremonial, which is the only pageantry or poetry
of peasant life. Till lately the Church of French Canada was Gallican,
and lived, like the old national Church of France, on perfectly good
terms with the State. But now comes the Jesuit, with the Ency-
clical and the declaration of Papal Infallibility in his hand. There
is a struggle between Jesuitism and Gallicanism under the walls of
the citadel of Gallicanism, the great Sulpician Seminary at Montreal.
The Jesuit, having all the influences of the day upon his side, prevails.
A new chapter of history is opened and troubles begin between Church
and State. My readers may perchance have heard of the Guibord
case. Guibord was a member of the Institut Canadien, which had
been excommunicated as a society for taking literature prohibited
by the Index. He died, and was about to be buried in his family

16 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

lot in the Eoman Catholic cemetery, when the Church interposed on
the ground that he was excommunicate. There was an appeal to
the Privy Council, which, dealing with the case as a religious case
might have been dealt with by a Roman proconsul, decided that
excommunication was personal, that a society could not be excom-
municated, and that Guibord consequently was entitled to burial in-
the consecrated ground. The Church seemed determined to resist;
a crisis was impending ; the militia were under orders ; a huge block
of granite was prepared to secure the body against exhumation j
when suddenly the Bishop of Montreal found a way of escape. He
solemnly unconsecrated the particular spot in which Guibord was to
be laid, leaving the rest of the cemetery consecrated as before, so
that the faithful might rest in peace. The operation was delicate,
since Madame Guibord had already been buried in the odour of
orthodoxy, in the same lot.

The conqueror might have suppressed French nationality. In-
stead of this, he preserved and protected it. He gave the conquered
a measure of his own liberty, and perhaps as large a measure as
at that time they who had known nothing but absolute govern-
ment could bear. He gave them a representative assembly, trial
by jury, Habeas Corpus, an administration generally pure in place of
one which was scandalously corrupt, deliverance from oppressive
imposts, and an appeal in case of misgovernment to Parliament
instead of Pompadour. He gave them liberty of opinion and intro-
duced among them the printing press. The one successful colony
of France owes its success to British tutelage. French writers are
fain to acknowledge this, and if some of them complain because the
half-measure of liberty was not a whole measure, and the conquering
race kept power in its own hands, the answer is that conquest is-
conquest, and that the monarchy of Louis the Fourteenth was neither
unaggressive nor invariably liberal to the vanquished. It is rather
the fashion now to traduce as well as to desert the country ; and we
are told, as an argument in favour of the dissolution of the Union,
that Englishmen, owing to their pride and want of sympathy, can
never get on well with any subject race.1 To get on well with a
subject race is not easy ; but, if the Englishman has not succeeded
in doing it, who has ? Has the Spaniard succeeded in doing it in
South America, or the Frenchman in Algeria ? The Eoman, we are
told, was popular with the vanquished. The Roman took the straight
road to popularity with the vanquished. Caesar began by putting a
million of Gauls to the sword ; no wonder he was popular with the
rest. The Englishman in Canada has in the main got on perfectly

1 Mr. Joseph Cowen despairs of seeing the English even get on well with the
Irish, because the Irish Celt is so poetic and the Englishman is so prosaic. The
Englishman has produced a greater body of first-rate poetry than has been produced
by any other nation, except perhaps the Greeks ; the Irish Celt has produced Tom
Moore.

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 17

well with the conquered Frenchman ; even if there has been some-
times political antagonism between them, their social relations have
been good. The French fought for England in the revolutionary
Avar, and again in the war of 1812. If the hostile attitude of the
Puritans of New England towards their religion decided them in the
first case, it can hardly have decided them in the second ; at least,
the rule under which they had lived in the interim can hardly
have been oppressive. It was one of their leaders, Etienne Tache,
who said that the last gun fired in favour of British dominion on the
continent would be fired by a French Canadian. The late Sir George
Cartier, the political chief of French Canada in his day, was proud
to call himself a British subject speaking French.

It is not easy to make conquest an instrument of civilisation ;
and we may doubt whether, by the nations most advanced in
morality, the attempt will ever be made again ; but where has it
been made in such good faith or with so much success as in British
India ? In British India there have been military mutinies, but
there has been no political insurrection. In an American review
the other day there appeared a furious invective against British rule
in India, penned by one of the set of people called, I believe, * culti-
vated Baboos,' who would be crushed like eggshells if the protection
of the Empire were withdrawn. The best answer to the Baboo was
that his invective could be published with impunity. If most has
been said against the British conqueror, it is because the British
conqueror has allowed most to be said against him. To accuse England
of having played the Turk or the Austrian to the least favoured of
her dependencies would surely be the grossest injustice.

There was a disastrous quarrel between the American colonies
and the Government of George the Third, arising out of the retention
by the Imperial Parliament of legal powers over the colonies, which
could not be practically exercised — a most dangerous relation, which
the proposed plan of reserving to the British Parliament powers
over the Irish Parliament \vould, in the teeth of experience, repro-
duce. George the Third was legally in the right, while morally
and politically he was in the wrong. The quarrel was inflamed, I
strongly suspect, by a Republican party at Boston and by Boston
merchants, who were suffering from the Imperial restrictions on trade.
But if it were asserted that the connection was regarded by the
colonists generally as oppressive, or that it was not affectionately
cherished by them, abundant evidence to the contrary might be
adduced. Washington himself, on taking the command, felt it
incumbent on him to declare, in answer to an address, that the
ultimate object of the war was the restoration of the connection on
a righteous footing.

There is, I believe, no feeling whatever among the French Cana-
dians against England. But French nationality grows daily more
VOL. XX.— No. 113. C

18 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

intense and daily finds more political as well as literary expression.
We had trouble with it the other day, when Quebec sympathised on
national grounds with the rising of the French half-breeds under
Riel in the North-West, as she had with previous attempts to secure
that vast realm for the French race and religion. Regiments from
Quebec were sent to the theatre of war, but they were not sent to the
front. The priests, of course, hate the French Revolution, and this
has hitherto retarded the renewal of the connection with the mother
country ; now, however, the connection is being renewed, and it can
hardly fail to affect both the relations of French Canada to British
Canada and the state of French Canadian opinion. From contact
with the American Republic also the priests have shrunk, fearing
democratic and sceptical contagion ; but the circulation of popula-
tion between French Canada and the States is beginning to introduce
American ideas into French Canadian villages. The ice in which the
pre-revolutionary France, like a Siberian mammoth, has been preserved
is likely soon to melt.

In the meantime the clergy are powerful in politics as well as in
other spheres, and the people, trained in religious submission, are
politically submissive also, and follow the political leaders who have
the confidence of the priests and represent the interests of French
Catholicism at Ottawa. Being thus under the control of an anti-
revolutionary Church, Quebec has naturally formed the basis of a
Conservative party. There is, however, in the province a party called
Rouge, but deserving of that name only by contrast with the extremely
sable hue of its opponents. Anywhere else it would be simply Liberal.
It can hardly fail to be strengthened by the increased intercourse
with Republican France.

British Canada, now the province of Ontario,2 was the asylum of
the Loyalists after the revolutionary war. Their last civil war the
Americans generously and wisely closed with an amnesty. Their
first civil war they closed not so generously or so wisely with Acts of
Attainder. The schism which time would have healed in the first
case, as it has in the second, was thus perpetuated in the form of a
territorial secession. No doubt the Loyalists had been guilty of
atrocities. Lord Cornwallis compares to them the Fencibles who
were guilty of atrocities in Ireland. They were largely of the poorest
and most unsettled class, the more respectable colonists having been
driven by the folly of the King and his commanders into the arms of
the rebellion. Still there were many of the better sort, and two
thousand exiles for loyalty's sake left the coast of Massachusetts
alone. If ever the balance of power with its evil consequences is

2 It may seem that here, and perhaps elsewhere, I am giving needless information.
But we have read a proclamation of the Privy Council, about the Colorado beetle,
beginning with these words : l Whereas intelligence has been received from Ontario,
Canada, that the country round tJiat town is being devastated,' &c.

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 19

introduced into America, the Americans will have themselves to
thank. England would probably have been willing to retire from the
continent altogether, as her wisest counsellors advised ; but she was
bound in honour to protect the Loyalists, and honour still had its
seat in the breasts of British statesmen in those days. The United
Empire Loyalists, as they are called, carried into exile hearts burning
with loyalty and vengeance ; they fought heroically for their new
home in 1812, and their descendants still form a sort of loyal league
cherishing and celebrating the memory of a glorious misfortune.

In her early days British Canada was well content to be ruled by
Royal governors. Her constitution was, in fact, what in theory and
according to Blackstone the British Constitution is : there was an
elective assembly, but the representative of the Crown chose his own
Ministers, determined his own policy, and governed as well as reigned.
The governors might sometimes make .mistakes and sometimes be
arbitrary in their behaviour ; but they were men of honour, and they
were under the control of a Parliamentary Government at home.
Their administration was far more economical than that of the party
politicians who have succeeded them, and perhaps practically as
good in most respects, both material and moral, for the people.
For a new settlement, at all events, it was about the best. There
was no trouble with the Indians in those days, and had the North-
West been under the rule of a governor like Simcoe, instead of being
a field for the exercise of patronage by a party Government at Ottawa,
we should have had no half-breed rebellion. During the French
war and in the period immediately following, while Toryism reigned
in the mother country, it prevailed also in the colony ; all the more
because British Canada was a Tory settlement. But the great tidal
wave of Liberalism which afterwards set in extended in course of
time to the colony. To the Loyalist exiles had now been added
settlers of a different origin and temper, Presbyterians from Scotland
and Americans from the other side of the line. At the same time
discontent was provoked by an oligarchy of office nicknamed the
Family Compact, which kept political power and pelf to itself,
though its corruption has probably been overstated, since nothing
is more certain than that none of its members left large fortunes,
while the land, to which they seem to have freely helped themselves,
was a drug in those days. An agitation commenced for responsible
government, in other words for the transfer of supreme power from
the governor and his council to the representative assembly. The
oligarchy of course fought hard for its system and its places, and
colonial politicians not being carpet-knights in those days, a good
many rough things were said and some rough things were done.
The contest raged for some time in the assembly and the courts of
law ; at last, owing partly to the mismanagement of Sir Francis
Head, it assumed the form of a petty civil war. A similar outbreak

c 2

20 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

took place at the same time in French Canada, where, however, it
was mainly nationalist in its character, the less numerous but
dominant race having taken to itself the lion's share of power and
pelf. The two movements were simultaneous and sympathetic, but
distinct. Both outbreaks were easily suppressed, that in British
Canada mainly by the loyal settlers themselves. I have called them
petty civil wars, and I am persuaded that they had much more of that
character than of the character of rebellions against the tyranny of
the Imperial country. One of the leaders in Lower Canada expressly
disavowed any rebellious feeling against the Home Government, and
Mackenzie, the leader in Upper Canada, spoke most respectfully of
the Colonial Office. The immediate cause of the outbreak in Upper
Canada was not any act of the governor or the Colonial Office, but
the defeat of the popular party in a general election by bribery and
corruption, as they averred, on the part of their opponents. The
Colonial Office was, at all events, guilty of nothing worse than being
very distant and rather hard of hearing.

Then came Lord Durham, sent forth by the Whig Ministry as an
angel of reform and pacification. He brought with him Charles
Buller, who drew up the Keport in favour of Eesponsible Government
which forms an epoch in the constitutional history of Canada.
Kesponsible government was conceded. Under the guise of an
announcement that Ministers thenceforth were to hold their places
not permanently but during pleasure, which was understood to mean
during the pleasure of the assembly, supreme power was transferred
from the representative of the Crown to Parliament and to Ministers
designated by the majority. The representative of the Crown reigned,
but governed no more. Thenceforth Canada enjoyed legislative
independence. To make people content with your rule by altogether
ceasing to rule over them is a notable device of statesmen, for proof
of the efficacy of which they may no doubt appeal with reason to the
example of Canada. But if they mean that the continuance of
legislative union can be combined with legislative separation, they
will appeal to the example of Canada in vain.

The two Canadas, British and French, were at the same time
united, and the Parliament became, as it still is, bilingual, speeches
being made and the records kept in both languages, though English
decidedly prevails in the debates, and is spoken by most of the French
members. The union was a very questionable step, as soon appeared ;
but probably a vain hope was still cherished of Anglicising French
Canada.

The new system commenced brusquely. The Liberals, having
now the majority in Parliament, passed an Act compensating for
losses in the rebellion people whom the Tories classed with rebels.
The Tories then rose, burned the Parliament House at Montreal,
and'pelted the Governor. But Lord Elgin was wise, and allayed the

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 21

storm. Some corollaries of the Revolution followed. The Anglican
Church was disestablished, and the reserves of land whicli formed its
endowment were secularised. It might, perhaps, have kept them if
it would have gone shares with the Presbyterians ; but privileged
bodies and orders usually prefer suicide to concession. The pro-
vincial University of Toronto was also thrown open to Nonconformists,
unluckily not before the practice of chartering sectarian institutions
had been introduced, and Canada had been saddled with the system
of petty local universities — ' one-horse ' universities, as they are
called — which is the bane of high education there, as it is in the
United States.

An attempt to recover a portion of the royal power was made by
Sir Charles Metcalfe, who had been sent out as governor by Lord
Stanley, the Colonial Secretary of the Government of Conservative
reaction. Sir Charles had been a Liberal in India ; but his training
there had been bureaucratic, and he did not understand reigning
without governing. His attempt failed, and has never been re-
peated. Sir Edmund Head refused a dissolution, and his act was
denounced, and continues to be denounced, as arbitrary and flagitious
by the party to the leader of which the dissolution was refused ; but
I am persuaded that it was constitutional, even if no special allow-
ance be made for any difference with regard to the exercise of a
dubious prerogative between the circumstances of the mother country
and those of a colony. Of all the encroachments of prime ministers
on the rights of the Crown, the seizure of this prerogative is about
the most objectionable.

This series of struggles over, the parties, after some complicated
shifting and intriguing, formed again upon the issue of Representa-
tion by Population, or, as it was commonly called, Rep. by Pop.
When the legislative Union took place, the same number of repre-
sentatives had been assigned to each province, though the population
of French Canada was larger than that of British Canada. But
when the proportion of population was reversed, British Canada
demanded a rectification. The political struggle was envenomed by
the religious hatred which the strong Protestants of Upper Canada
bore to the Roman Catholics and their priesthood. Numbers being
equally balanced, a Ministry subsisted on a majority of one. At
last there was a deadlock. From this an escape was sought in a
Confederation of all the provinces of British North America. For
that purpose the leaders of parties coalesced, and sat for a time
scowling at each other in a Confederation Cabinet. Such was the
main cause of Canadian Confederation. There was another, analogous
to that by which previous confederations — the Achsean, the Swiss,
the Dutch, and the American — had been brought about. The Trent
affair had frightened the colonists, set them all drilling, and disposed
them to seek increase of military strength in confederation.

22 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

The polity thus founded may be described as a Federal Eepublic
with a false front of monarchy. The pseudo-monarchical element is
represented by a governor-general, who is a figure-head, and dele-
gates his impotence to a lieutenant-governor of each province
nominally appointed by him, but really by the Minister. The con-
stitutional forms of the British monarchy are observed ; there is a
faint imitation of its state ; but to introduce etiquette has been
found impossible, and an order to wear low dresses at a viceregal
reception was flouted by a caricature representing an Irish servant-
girl, bare-legged, asking the master of the ceremonies whether
nudity below would not do as well as nudity above. King's
speeches, penned by the Minister, are delivered both by the governor
and the lieutenant-governors ; and if a lieutenant-governor happens
to have belonged to the party opposed to that of the provincial
Minister, he is sometimes made to slap himself in the face.

The Dominion Parliament has two Chambers, and the state of
the Senate is a warning of the danger which attends the use of
constitutional fictions as well as the use of falsehood of other kinds.
If it had been simply proposed that the members of one branch of
the Legislature should be nominated by the leader of the party in
power, everybody would have recoiled. But nobody recoiled when
it was proposed that they should be nominated by the leader of the
party in power under the alias of ' the Crown.' The nominations
are used as rewards for old partisans, and three-fourths of the House
are at this time the nominees of a single man who has long held
power. No attempt has been made to give the Senate the character
which it was probably intended to have, and which in some measure
the Napoleonic Senate had, of a representation of general eminence
and of interests unconnected with party. It is little better than a
cipher : its debates are seldom reported, and it confesses its inability
to initiate by habitually adjourning at the opening of the Session to
wait for the arrival of Bills from the Commons. Its only special
function is to hear divorce cases, like the House of Lords in former
days, French Catholicism forbidding the establishment of a Divorce
Court. Its members, though, being appointed for life, they are
independent of public opinion, are not, or are not believed to be,
independent of influences of other kinds. As a check on the popular
House the Senate is powerless : still more powerless would it be as a
barrier against the tide of revolution. It is in the interest of Con-
servatism that a change is needed. Most of the Provincial Legisla-
tures have two Houses, but that of Ontario has only one, and I am
not' aware that the Upper House is missed. Two elective Houses, on
the other hand, are apt to produce deadlocks, as they did in Victoria,
as they are now doing in the United States, where there is a
paralysis of legislation, owing to the predominance of different parties
in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Has this system of

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 23

two Chambers, let me once more ask, any more rational origin than
a misconception about the House of Lords, which is taken for a
Senate, when it is really an old estate of the realm ? Can any answer
be given to the question, which must be settled before the mode of
election or appointment can be determined, of what special material
the Upper House is to be composed? If it is a House of old men,
will it not be impotent ? If it is a House of the rich, will it not be
odious ? If it is a House of the best men, will it not deprive the
popular assembly, where power after all must centre, of leadership
and control? A single Chamber directly elected by universal or
nearly universal suffrage would no doubt be revolutionary, if not
anarchic, as from the condition of the House of Commons is begin-
ning too plainly to appear. But a single Chamber elected on a
principle sufficiently Conservative, and with a procedure sufficiently
guarding against haste, still appears likely to prevail over other forms
in the end, if elective government continues. The project of dividing
a single Chamber into two orders with vetoes on each other's action,
in the manner proposed by the Irish Government Bill, needs no
discussion. It is nothing but a pair of handcuffs, and very ineffectual
handcuffs, for the Irish propensity to confiscation.

There can be no doubt that of Canadian Confederation generally
the model is American. But in one most important respect the
model is British. The Executive, instead of being a president,
elected by the people, holding his office for a term certain, irrespec-
tive of parties in the legislature and appointing his own Ministers of
State, is, as in England, a party Cabinet, with a prime minister at
its head, always dependent for its continuance in office on a majority
in the Legislature. Thus we have a thoroughly party, and con-
sequently in its own nature a thoroughly unstable, government.
Party is everywhere alike, in a state of apparently hopeless disin-
tegration ; it is everywhere breaking up into sections, which multiply
as independence of mind increases, and are severally incapable of
affording a basis for a government. Even in England sectionalism
has visibly set in at last. The consequence is universal instability,
the only exception in Europe being the government of Bismarck, who
disregards party, and makes up a majority as he can.

When, the list of organic questions having been exhausted, as in
Canada it has been, and no real line of division being left, party
allegiance has no rational or moral basis, parties can be held together
only by corruption and the Caucus. Of the Caucus it is enough to
say that, if we may judge from Canadian or American experience,
where it prevails electoral freedom worthy of the name must cease to
exist.

The Canadian Constitution gives more power than the American
to the central government. The central government in Canada has
the command of all the militia, the appointment of all the judges,

24 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

and a veto on provincial legislation, while to the central legislature
belongs the criminal law : the civil law was withheld from it by the
separation of Quebec, who clings to her French law. The Canadian
statesmen fancied that American secession had been produced by
want of power in the central government. In this they were
mistaken. The cause of American secession was slavery, and slavery
alone. If anything, it was not the want of power in the Federal
Government, but the apprehension of its power to interfere with the
domestic institutions of the South, that led the South to revolt. The
strength of Federation lies in respect for State right. Nobody will
rebel against a mere immunity from external danger and internal
discord, such as a Federal government, confined to its proper objects,
affords. So long as a Federal government is confined to its proper
objects, there seems to be no reason why a Federation should ever
break up, or why it should not embrace any extent of territory or even
great varieties of population. But if subjects are assigned to the
Federal government about which there are sectional divisions, and
which may give rise to violent agitation, there will always be a danger
of disruption.

The instrument of Federation, which is the British North America
Act, gives the principal details, but refers for general guidance in
working to the well-understood principles of the British Constitution.
All very well, so long as the understandings are preserved by a group
of political families, or by statesmen who pass their whole lives in
the public service. But understandings are not likely to be preserved
or respected by democratic politicians who are always being changed.
The power of dissolution is still subject to some understood restric-
tions here, though even here it has been greatly abused ; but in
Canada it is becoming a power vested in a party premier of
bringing on a general election whenever the chances seem good for
his party ; so that members of Parliament hold their seats, not for
the legal term, but during the pleasure of the prime minister — a
system manifestly subversive of legislative independence. Written
constitutions strictly defining and limiting all powers will surely be
found necessary for all democracies, including the British. In the
United States the Constitution as a revered and almost sacred
document has a strong Conservative influence.

For the decision of questions between the Dominion and the
provinces or between one province and another, Canada has the
Privy Council, a tribunal perfectly impartial, thoroughly trusted, and
backed by the force of the Empire. The United States have the
Supreme Court appointed by a president, who is himself elected by
the whole Union. For the decision of questions between the Imperial
Parliament and the proposed Parliament at Dublin, what tribunal
would there be ? There would be no arbiter but the bayonet.
Even the Supreme Court of the United States, though absolutely

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 25

impartial in cases which are strictly legal, is not in all cases abso-
lutely impartial. The judgment in the Dred Scott case was political.
The judgment in favour of the Legal Tender Act was political, since
'the Act, though supposed to be a financial necessity by the Govern-
ment, was a clear violation of that article of the Constitution which
forbids legislation subversive of the faith of contracts, inasmuch as it
practically enabled a debtor to repudiate half his debt. I was present
when President Lincoln, discussing with a friend an appointment to the
Supreme Court, avowed that the man should not, if he could help it,
be unsound on the great political question of the day. If the
Federal system is to be adopted for these islands, care will have to
be taken in the constitution of a tribunal which is to stand between
the nation and civil war.

The Colonial Office has still a legal vote ; but Canada, I repeat,
enjoys to all intents and purposes full legislative independence.
Fiscally, she legislates for the protection of Canadian against British
goods. Her militia also is in her own hands, though the Crown still
appoints a commander- in- chief, not, however, without reference to
Canadian wishes. It is needless to say that she neither pays nor
would consent to pay any sort of tribute. The parallel which
has been drawn between Canadian self-government and the vassal
and tributary Parliament proposed for Ireland is therefore totally
futile. Besides, Canada is three thousand miles off, and so friendly
that, invest her with what power you will, she never can be a thorn
in the side of Great Britain. That any analogy should have
been supposed to exist between the cases is most strange. Was
Canada a part of the United Kingdom ? Had she, at the time of
the so-called rebellion, a full share of the representation at West-
minster ?

Two excellent things Canada has inherited from the mother
country — a judiciary not elected, but appointed for life, and a per-
manent Civil Service. To any State an independent judiciary is an
inestimable blessing ; to a democracy it is a blessing unspeakable :
and hitherto, in Canada, party has tolerably spared the appointments,
though we now begin to fear that they are going into the all-
devouring maw. Party nibbles at the Civil Service ; but, so far, we
have in great measure escaped that particular kind of corruption
from which President Cleveland is so nobly and bravely struggling
to rescue the American Eepublic.

To place the political capital of the Dominion at Ottawa, a remote
village subsisting on the lumber trade, was a mistake, like that which
has been committed in placing the political capitals of several large
States of the Union in second-rate towns. The politicians of a young
and crude democracy need all the tempering, liberalising, and ele-
vating influences which general society and a well-filled strangers'
gallery can afford. The fear of mob-violence in a great city was

26 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

futile, notwithstanding the burning, by the exasperated Tories, of
the Parliament House at Montreal. Equally futile was the notion
that military security could be obtained by going two or three days'
march from the frontier. The enemy, if he came, would be resistless ;
but he will never come.

New Brunswick came at once and of her own free will into the
Confederation. Nova Scotia was dragged in, her political leader having
been, as everybody believed, bought, and she has been restless ever
since. The little colony of Prince Edward's Island came in after the
dignified delay due to its greatness. The Dominion has since in-
corporated the vast hunting-ground of the Hudson's Bay Company,
called the North-West ; and if that territory becomes peopled in pro-
portion to its size and fertility, to it the centre of power must in time
shift, supposing the Confederation endures. Confederations are not
made so easily as omelets. In the operation all the centrifugal
forces of rivalry, jealousy, and sectional interest, as well as the centri-
petal forces, are called into play. If you are going to dissolve the
Union of these kingdoms to make raw materials for a Federation, take
care that you do not break the eggs and fail to make your omelet
after all. The people of the several States must be, as Professor
Dicey well expresses it, desirous of union, but not of unity. More-
over, the group of States must be pretty well balanced in itself ; at
least there ought to be no State of such overweening power as to
give constant cause of jealousy to the rest, and tempt them to com-
bine against it. A Confederation of England, Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales would probably be a standing cabal of Scotland, Ireland,
and Wales against England. The territory, as I have said, may, so
long as the Federal principle is observed, be indefinite in extent ;
but it must at least be in a ring-fence, and it must have in a reason-
able degree unity and distinctness of commercial interest. The terri-
tory of the Canadian Dominion can barely be said to be in a ring-fence,
still less can it be said that there is unity and distinctness of com-
mercial interest. The Dominion is made up of four perfectly separate
blocks of territory lying in a broken line along the northern edge of
the habitable and cultivable continent. The maritime provinces,
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, are severed from Old Canada by a
wide and irreclaimable wilderness. Old Canada is severed from the
North-West by another wilderness and by a fresh-water sea four
hundred miles in length ; the North- West from British Columbia by
a triple range of mountains. Old Canada is moreover divided be-
tween two nationalities, British and French, of the amalgamation of
which there is not the slightest hope. Each of the four territories
is connected commercially, not with its political partners, but with
the States of the Union to the south of it. A grand effort is being
made to bind the four together by political railroads ; but commerce
will not follow merely political lines, and the Intercolonial Eailroad,

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 27

which cost forty millions of dollars, hardly takes up a passenger or a
bale of freight over the greater part of its long course. There are
even doubts whether it will not some day be abandoned.

The disjointed and heterogeneous character of the elements of
which the Dominion is made up, while it renders the continued exist-
ence of Confederation itself precarious, has had the curious effect of
producing an apparent stability of government, which it would be a
mistake to set down to the credit of party. The parties not only are
destitute of any basis in the shape of dividing principles, but they
have never really extended beyond the two provinces of Canada which
are their native seat. The government has been really personal,
almost as personal as that of Bismarck. One man has held power
with little interruption for forty years by his skill, ever increasing
with practice, in holding together miscellaneous interests of all kinds,
provincial, sectional, and personal, and in forming them into a motley
basis for his government. He has no doubt made his address go as
far as it would, and it has gone a long way ; but he has also been com-
pelled to have recourse to corruption in all its protean forms and in
all its varied applications, though his own hands are believed by all
to have remained clean. Probably no fisher of votes ever had a
stranger medley of fishes in his net. Roman Catholics and
Orangemen go to the poll for him together. An effective opposition
to him cannot be formed simply because there is nothing for it to
be formed upon. He stands not upon principle, but upon manage-
ment. In management he has no rival, and counter principle there
can be none. It is needless to say that the system is demoralising as
well as expensive. Its existence depends on the life of a man past
seventy, after whom there is a fair prospect of political chaos.

In the governments and legislatures of Ontario and Quebec the
Dominion parties prevail; though in Quebec, for reasons already
mentioned, the dominant party is Conservative, or, as it might more
truly be called, Macdonaldite, while in Ontario the Liberal or Anti-
Macdonaldite party has the upper hand. In the other local legisla-
tures local interests mainly prevail.

At the outset there was what might be roughly called a freehold
suffrage, reasonable and safe enough. But in Canada, as in England,
demagogues dish each other by extensions of the franchise, and extend
it blindly, not revising the Constitution to see that its Conservative
portions will be strong enough to bear the additional strain. It has
come at last to giving votes to the Red Indians, as though self-
government were a blessing to a savage. The question is no trifling
one. The agricultural freeholders are Conservative, especially on the
subject of property. The mechanics are beginning to be infected
with communism, which, though mostly imported, not native, is, as
you see, already breeding trouble, and seems likely to breed more.

In the minds of the British statesmen who promoted Confedera-

28 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

tion it was probably a step towards independence. In fact, if it was
not a step towards independence, where was the use of it ? The
Colonies were already united under the Empire, and might at any
time have combined their forces for mutual defence. Freedom of
internal intercourse, the other great object of Confederation, was also
secured, and any questions arising from time to time might have
been settled by delegation and conference. It would be difficult, I
am afraid, clearly to show that the provinces had actually gained
anything by the operation, except a vast development of faction,
demagogism, corruption, expenditure, and debt.

We have had since Confederation some political incidents illus-
trative of the working of the system. The Pacific Eailway scandal
fatally illustrated the character of the expedients to which party
government, resting on no principle, is reduced for support. The
enormity of the scandal awakened for a moment the moral sense of
the country, and the Government fell. The same affair illustrated
the constitutional position of the governor-general ; for Lord
Dufferin felt himself bound to take the advice of his Ministers
regarding their own trial for corruption, prorogued Parliament at
their instance, and. allowed them to transfer the inquiry from the
House of Commons, which was already seised of it, to a Eoyal Com-
mission of their own appointment. Lord Lome subsequently, after
a faint struggle, consented to the removal of a lieutenant-governor,
his own representative, for no assignable offence, merely to gratify
party vengeance, which the lieutenant-governor had provoked by
the dismissal of a provincial Ministry connected with the party
dominant at Ottawa. When it has come to this, one is inclined to
ask whether a personal representation of monarchy is of any use at
all, and whether a stamp to be affixed to public documents would
not do as well. The fiction, as has been already said, is not only
futile but mischievous ; it masks the necessity, which is most urgent,
of real Conservative safeguards and of substantial securities for the
stability of government.

Illustrative of the legislative independence of Canada is the
adoption of the new fiscal system called the National Policy, which
is now avowedly protective against British as well as American goods,
and which takes Canada definitively out of the commercial unity of the
Empire. There has been no remonstrance on the part of the Home
Government, and the author of the measure has since received the
Grand Cross of the Bath. There is now a perceptible gravitation
towards commercial union with the United States, which would
allow the commercial life of the continent to circulate freely through
the veins of Canada, and would at once enhance the value of all
Canadian property. There are some who think that commercial
union would necessarily bring political union in its train. For my
part, I can see no such necessity. Eather, I think, the removal of

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 29

the Customs line, and the enjoyment of freedom of trade with the
rest of the continent, would tend to make Canadians contented with
the political system as it is. A nationality must, at all events, be
weak if it depends on a Customs line. There can be no doubt that,
as it is, the action of economical forces, which draw Canada towards
the great mass of English-speaking population on her continent, is
strong. It cannot be too often repeated that to speak of the colonies
and their destinies in the gross is most fallacious. Australia is in
an ocean by herself. Canada is a part of a continent inhabited by
people of the same race and language ; and a young Canadian thinks
no more of going to push his fortunes at New York or Chicago than
a Scotch or Yorkshire youth thinks of going to push his fortunes in
London. The accuracy of the statistics of Canadian emigration into
the United States is a constant subject of dispute ; but it is certain
that New York and Chicago are full of Canadians, and that there is
also a considerable emigration of Canadian farmers to Dakota and
other western States.

Not only has Canada asserted her complete fiscal independence
by the adoption of the National Policy, but she has begun practically
to claim the privilege of making her own commercial treaties, through
the High Commissioner who acts as her ambassador, though osten-
sibly under the authority of the British Foreign Office. Negotiations
have been opened with France and Spain, while overtures for the
renewal of reciprocity are made from time to time to the United
States.

The thread of political connection is wearing thin. This England
sees, and the consequence is a recoil which has produced a movement
in favour of Imperial Federation. It is proposed not only to arrest
the process of gradual emancipation, but to reverse it and to reab-
sorb the colonies into the unity of the Empire. No definite plan
has been propounded ; indeed, any demand for a plan is deprecated,
and we are adjured to embrace the principle of the scheme and leave
the details for future revelation — to which we must answer that the
principle of a scheme is its object, and that it is impossible to deter-
mine whether the object is practically attainable without a working
plan. There is no one in whose eyes the bond between the colonies
and the mother country is more precious than it is in mine.
Yet I do not hesitate to say that, so far as Canada is con-
cerned, Imperial Federation is a dream. The Canadian people
will never part with their self-government. Their tendency is
entirely the other way. They have recently, as has been shown,
asserted their fiscal independence, and by instituting a Supreme
Court of their own, they have evinced a disposition to withdraw as
much as they can of their affairs from the jurisdiction of the Privy
Council. Every association, to make it reasonable and lasting,
must have some practical object. The practical objects of Imperial

30 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

Federation would be the maintenance of common armaments and the
establishment of a common tariff. But to neither of these, I am per-
suaded, would Canada ever consent ; she would neither contribute to
Imperial armaments nor conform to an Imperial tariff. Though her
people are brave and hardy, they are not, any more than the people of
the United States, military, nor could they be brought to spend their
earnings in Asiatic or African wars. The other day when there
was talk of sending a regiment to the Soudan, the most Conservative
and Imperialist journals anxiously assured their readers that no ex-
penditure of Canadian money on such an object was contemplated or
need be feared. Eemember that Canada is only in part British. The
commercial and fiscal circumstances of the colony again are as differ-
ent as possible from those of the mother country. Canadian
statesmen visiting England, and finding the movement popular in
society here, are naturally disposed to prophesy smooth things ; but
not one of them, so far as I know, advocates Imperial Federation in
his own country, nor am I aware that any powerful journal has even
treated the question as serious. It is right to be frank upon this
subject. A strong delusion appears to be taking hold of some minds
and leading them in a perilous direction. It would be disastrous
indeed if the United Kingdom were broken up or allowed to go to
pieces in expectation of an ampler and grander unity, and the ampler
and grander unity should prove unattainable after all.

Why not leave the connection as it is? Because, reply the
advocates of Imperial Federation, the connection will not remain as
it is ; the process of separation will go on and the attenuated tie will
snap. Apart from this not unreasonable apprehension, there are, so
far as I know, only two reasons against acquiescence in the present
system. One of these may be thought rather vague and intangible.
It is that the spirit of a dependency, even of a dependency enjoying
the largest measure of self-government, is never that of a nation, and
that we can make Englands only in the way in which England herself
was made. The other is more tangible, and is brought home to us
at this moment by the dispute with the Americans about the Fisheries.
The responsibility of Great Britain for the protection of her distant
colony is not easily discharged to the distant colony's satisfaction. To
Canadians, as to other people, their own concerns seem most important ;
they forget what the Imperial country has upon her hands in all parts
of the globe ; they have an unlimited idea of her power ; and they
expect her to put forth the whole force of the Empire in defence of
Canadian fishing rights, while perhaps at the same moment Australians
are calling upon her to put forth the whole force of the Empire in
defence of their claims upon New Guinea. Confiding in Imperial
support, they perhaps take stronger ground and use more bellicose
language than they otherwise would. But the more democratic
England becomes, the more impossible will it be to get her people to

1886 THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF CANADA. 31

go to war for any interests but their own. The climax of practical
absurdity would be reached if England were involved in war by some
quarrel arising out of the Canadian customs duties, imposed partly
to protect Canadian manufactures against British goods. Trusting
to the shield of the Empire, Canada has no navy of her own, and
though she has a militia numbering forty thousand, it is not likely
that more than two or three regiments at the very outside could be
got ready for the field within the time allowed by the swift march of
modern war. Again, if England were involved in a war with Russia,
or any other maritime power, the mercantile marine of Canada
would be cut up in a quarrel about an Afghan frontier or some-
thing equally remote.1 Nothing could be more calamitous to the
colony than a rupture with the mother country. The separation
of the American colonies from Great Britain was inevitable ;
their violent separation was disastrous. The Republic was launched
with a revolutionary bias which was just what it did not want, and it
was left without a history to steady and exalt the nation. Both in
freedom from revolutionary bias and in the possession of a history
Canada has a great advantage over her mighty neighbour. On
these points opinions and sentiments differ. For my own part, I
attach little value to the mere political bond. I should not mourn
if nothing were left of it but mutual citizenship without necessity of
naturalisation, which might remain even when the governments and
legislatures had been finally separated from each other and diplomatic
responsibility had ceased. This part of the political connection is little
noticed, yet it seems to me the most valuable as well as the most
likely to endure.

But, let what may become of the political connection, the nobler
dominion of the mother country over her colony, and over all her
colonies on that continent, those which have left her side as well
as those which still remain with her, is assured for ever. The flag
of conquering England still floats over the citadel of Quebec ; but it
seems to wave a farewell to the scenes of its glory, the historic rock, the
famous battle-field, the majestic river which bore the fleet of England
to victory, the monument on which the chivalry of the victor has
inscribed together the names of Wolfe and Montcalm. For no
British redcoats muster round it now. The only British redcoats
left on the continent are the reduced garrison of Halifax. That
morning drum of England, the roll of which, Webster said, went
round the world with the sun, is now, so far as Canada is concerned,
a memory of the past. But in blood and language, in literature and
history, in laws and institutions, in all that makes national character
and the higher life of nations, England, without beat of drum, is there.
Nor — if one may be believed who has lived much among Americans
and watched the expression of their feelings — is the day far distant
when the last traces of the revolutionary feud will have disappeared,

32 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

when the hatred which the descendants of British colonists have been
taught to cherish against their mother country will cease to exist,
even in the most ignoble breast, and when Westminster Abbey and
Westminster Hall will again be the sacred centre of the whole race.
This is that realm of England beyond the Atlantic which George the
Third could not forfeit, which Canadian independence if it comes
cannot impair, upon which the Star of Empire, let it wend as far
westward as it will, can never shed a parting ray.

GOLDWIN SMITH.

1886 33

THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE.

MANY seek to know the origin and purposes of the Primrose
League, and how it has come to possess a Creed, a Prophet, and a
Symbol, and to be a distinct and vivifying factor in the politics of
England.

It is the manifestation of the latent strength inherent in the
patriotic and constitutional party. The old Tory had become too
fossilised to march with the age, while the Conservative as he existed
a few years ago was sadly deficient in vigour. To the Radical cry of
' Peace, retrenchment, and reform ' he could only respond that he was
more peaceful, more disposed to retrenchment and to reform. At the
battles of the hustings men haggled at words and were supported on
either side by endless arrays of figures. The contest waxed fierce
about small measures and raged about still smaller persons, till the
bewilderment of the newly enfranchised voter was complete. To
remedy this state of things on the Eadical side, Birmingham called
the Caucus into existence. This new institution does not pretend to
enlighten, but only to control the elector. It compels him to dele-
gate his choice to a select few, who in their turn are subordinate to a
central authority, which imposes its will both upon the constituency
and the representative. The Primrose League, on the contrary, inter-
feres neither with the choice of electors nor with the candidates. It
seeks to educate the masses and to organise them, so that they shall
voluntarily vote for the cause of order.

In October 1883, when the fortunes of the party were at their
lowest ebb, a few friends met in a private room of the Carlton Club,
to discuss the depressing subject of Conservative apathy, and to listen
to a scheme which had sprung from the brain of Sir Henry Drummond
Wolff. This was a project for enlisting the young men of various
classes, who hitherto had borne no active part, in some body
which should replace with advantage the paid canvassers, abolished,
and wholesomely abolished, by Sir Henry James's new Act. It was
thought that if the opportunity were offered, there was abundance
of active spirits willing and ready to enrol themselves in small clubs
of friends, and to take up the work of aiding registration, promoting
sound principles, and generally encouraging the nearest Conservative
association. The ' Habitation ' or club scheme was founded on the
VOL. XX.— No. 113, D

34 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

probability that a strong spirit of emulation would be developed
among the members and also among the Habitations. There was ample
ground for believing that recruits might be obtained with ease, by
appealing to the veneration with which the memory of Lord Beacons-
field was cherished. Gifted as that statesman was with marvellous
political instinct, he had touched chords which did not cease to
vibrate when he expired, and he left to his countrymen a legacy of
convictions which only needed expression in a formula. Of the
profound regard in which the memory of Benjamin Disraeli was held
we had ocular demonstration every nineteenth day of April, the
anniversary of his death, when all classes in numberless thousands
bore the primrose. It was obvious that if the young and energetic
of these multitudes, instead of wearing the flower for the day, were
to take it as a permanent badge of brotherhood, a confraternity
might be established with an unlimited future.

The principles of Lord Beaconsfield and of the constitutional
cause were pre-eminently those opposed to the spread of atheism and
irreligious teaching, to the revolutionary and republican tendencies
of Eadicalism, and to the narrow and insular mode of thought which,
despised our colonies and found utterance in the words 'Perish India.'
The creed of the League, therefore, was set forth as ' the maintenance
of religion, of the Constitution of the realm, and of the Imperial
ascendency of Great Britain,' or, in shorter form, < Keligion, Constitu-
tion, and Empire.'

At first the intention prevailed of shrouding the appearance of the
League under a certain veil of mystery. Those who belonged to it
were to have grades, but ' the Euling Councillor ' was not to be publicly
named. There were several excellent reasons for this. Never was
an important undertaking more modestly begun. We did not ap-
proach the chiefs of the party. We did not communicate with the
men of leading or even with the rank and file, because we knew — and
it proved so for a long year and more — that so novel a conception
would not find favour amongst those wedded to old methods of pro-
cedure until it should command attention by success.

The League was started in a somewhat dismal and dilapidated
second floor in Essex Street, Strand, where the original band of
enthusiasts met constantly. A paragraph in a newspaper and a few
advertisements at once awakened public curiosity and interest, and
adherents speedily sent in their names.

The very class for which the League was instituted was the first
to respond, and only a few weeks had elapsed when already some
hundreds had joined, and the work of forming Habitations was in full
swing. The hundreds soon swelled to thousands, and a grand ban-
quet in Freemasons' Tavern marked the first public appearance of
the League upon the world's stage. Since that day it has increased
by hundreds and tens of hundreds until this moment, when a thou-

1886 THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE. 35

sand a day is the average entry of new members. It is needless to
say that the offices necessary for conducting so gigantic a business
have expanded into extensive premises (in Victoria Street), with a
vast staff of employes, occupied in sorting and attempting to cope with
masses of correspondence from all parts of the country. The chiefs
of the party -have been glad to accept the highest honours of the
League, and have testified to the great results achieved. Many and
many a public man, who laughed at first at our ' strange nomencla-
ture,' and was incredulous of our success, has since eagerly sought
our aid in founding Habitations in his county or borough, and has
largely benefited by the work done by the Knights, Dames, and
Associates.

Perhaps the simplest key to a comprehension of the procedure of
the Primrose League is to state the conditions and mode of conduct
of a Habitation.

Any person can join the League by sending his name to the
central office in Victoria Street, with a ' crown ' — half-a-crown being
his entrance fee, and half-a-crown his year's tribute. Upon his sign-
ing a declaration of fidelity to the principles of the League, he
receives his diploma of Knight Harbinger, and provided with this he,
with not less than twelve other knights, can apply for a * warrant '
to form a Habitation. After this follows the election of a Ruling
Councillor, the appointment of secretary, treasurer, wardens, and other
officials. Great latitude is allowed to all Habitations so long as they
are careful to keep within the strict statutes of the parent League.
They may admit associates and fix their tribute at sixpence or what-
ever sum they deem proper, and they may keep within small limits
or extend themselves, as some have done, to .thousands, according to
the necessities of the town or county in which they are situate. The
first and most obvious business of a Habitation is to attend to Regis-
tration. I could name counties, such as Suffolk and Hampshire, where
the network of Habitations is so complete that every vote in every
house in the various electoral divisions is accounted for. The
members of Habitations volunteer to take some small district or half
a street, and to notify all deaths, departures, or arrivals, so that the
Registration may be carefully kept up by the Conservative Associa-
tion to which they communicate these results. The next duty is to
maintain a permanent canvass by means of individual persuasion or
public meeting, and to be ready to canvass out-voters at times of by-
elections. E.g. an election comes off at York or Devonport; the
election agent sends to the central Conservative office at Westminster
the names of out-voters resident in London, Leamington, Brighton,
&c. The central office sends in the names and addresses to the
Grand Council in Victoria Street. They are at once classified and
sent to Habitations in the towns named, and the various districts of
London ; and each local Habitation has it at once in its power to

D 2

36 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

•send voluntary canvassers for each name sent in. Of course, when
an election comes on, all Habitations, following the example of the
Conservative Associations, suspend their existence, and can take no
corporate action. But the individual members, acting no longer as
members of the Primrose League, but as individuals, can volunteer
to join the committees organised by the election agent. And in these
days, when expenses are curtailed and it is no small difficulty to meet
the demands of an election from the exiguous sums allowed by the
law, the services of volunteers are invaluable, when, as in elections I
could name, a number of ladies undertake to write out the addresses
on thousands of envelopes, or when scores of young men volunteer
two hours a day each for the purpose of delivering circulars, &c., all
of which reach their destination, since it is a point of honour to hand
them in — a very different state of matters from that which obtained
in the days of paid agents and messengers.

Excepting at the election period, the Habitation can organise
public meetings, invite able speakers, or obtain from the central
office some of their staff of lecturers to explain and develope the
objects of the League and further its spread. One of the chief
duties incumbent on every Primrose centre is to combat and destroy
the Eadical fallacy that in modern politics classes are antagonistic.
The League, on the contrary, brings all classes together. All vote
on a footing of absolute equality, and all meet on terms of the truest
fraternity. To this end, it is best that all social gatherings should
be held in some public hall, where every knight, dame, or associate
can contribute of his knowledge or talent to the instruction and
amusement of the evening. We have seen hundreds of such
meetings where the enunciation of sound constitutional principles
has been varied by ballad-singing and instrumental performances
volunteered by those best qualified to please.

Within its limits the Habitation preserves strict order and disci-
pline. It obeys the precepts of the Grand Council, and annually
sends delegates to Grand Habitation, which is held in London on or
near the 1 9th of April, on which occasion the Grand Council renews
its members and its life by the votes of those present. On the last
occasion, besides spectators, there were 2,500 delegates present.
Important statutes and ordinances were framed or modified, for, as-
this new institution grows, many are the new requirements to meet
its vast expansion, as well as to satisfy the demands for progress and
improvement which are put forward from active centres.

The Habitation such as it has been described is bound to take
heed of precepts issued by the Grand Council, such as, for instance,
the suspension of its functions during election time ; but in all other
matters it is left a wide liberty, and frames its own by-laws subject
to superior approval, which is rarely withheld. No questions of the
smaller current politics disturb its deliberations. These should tend

1886 THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE. 37

only to the upholding of religion, constitution, and empire, and neces-
sarily embrace men of different tenets, united firmly in support of
these cardinal principles.

The members of the League work for the return of constitutional
candidates whenever they present themselves, irrespective of their
professions on minor points. Only when the question of the day
touches one of its three great principles does the League take distinct
action. When the honour of the Empire was at stake with the life
of the heroic Gordon, every Habitation sent up a petition for his
rescue ; and now again, when the existence of the United Kingdom
is menaced, the League has been active in the defence of our im-
perilled Constitution.

The most remarkable feature, however, of this stirring political
development has been that for the first time in our history women
have taken an active part in controversies hitherto reserved to men.
The reason of this, in the first place, is the novelty and suddenness of
the Eadical and Fenian onslaught. Women, with an instinct pecu-
liarly their own, divined at once the dangers involved in the new
doctrines and theories — perceived that if churches were to be over-
thrown, education divorced from religion, property held to ransom,
the Constitution to be riven asunder, England must be in pre-
sence of as serious a revolution as ever threatened social order or
preceded a Eeign of Terror. The women of England speedily adopted
the Primrose banner, and the dames, armed with sweet influence and
persuasive eloquence, boldly came forward to take their share in the
labours of the organisation. Their aid has proved invaluable. Many
a lady well known in the world has spoken at meetings, chiefly of
friends and neighbours, who have surrendered to the expressions of
heartfelt conviction. Many another has devoted all her time and
energy to the formation of Habitations in her county or borough ; while
the working woman has not been behind her sister in enthusiasm or
self-sacrifice. The first badge of honour for special service given by
the League was conferred on a woman in the West of England, whose
daily bread depended on her labour, but who had devoted all her
spare time to the cause, and who had richly deserved the honour by
her conspicuous services. The ladies have an Executive Committee
of their own — meeting every week — working in conjunction with the
chief authority ; and in business capacity, attention to their manifold
duties and powers of management, they have proved themselves in
every respect fitted for the responsible duties they have undertaken.
The ladies have a fund of their own, and employ it well in the
distribution of Primrose literature.

The reader of the London and country press, on taking up almost
any newspaper, will see what constant activity is everywhere dis-
played by the dames, who in every parish in England are endeavour-
ing to promulgate the fundamental principles necessary for the

38 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

safety of the commonwealth. No ranting pothouse politician, full of
fallacies, can compete with the men and women who, stepping out
from the accustomed reserve of their own homes, come forward to
meet their fellows in fraternal intercourse, and to discuss with them
the origin of error and the ways of truth. The enormous increase in
the number of the League dates especially from the time when the
ladies first took up their place in its organisation, and it is only due
to them to acknowledge in how large a measure the great success
achieved has been owing to their efforts.

When the first Festival was held in 1884, after the newborn
institution had been nine months in existence, there were a few
thousand members, chiefly knights. By Primrose Day 1885, more
dames had joined, and 2,000 associates, and our muster-roll was
upwards of 11,000. Before and after the election of 1885, the
League expanded so rapidly that it was difficult at headquarters to
keep pace with the demand for diplomas and warrants. On Primrose
Day 1 886, the third hundred thousand was reached ; while to-day there
are more than 350,000 knights, dames, and associates banded together
in an enterprise that may now be esteemed a permanent institution.

In round numbers there may be said to be 50,000 knights,
30,000 dames, and 280,000 associates. The knights pay a tribute
of half-a-crown yearly ; so also do the dames, with the exception of
those belonging to the Dames' Grand Council, who pay a guinea.
The associates pay nothing to the Grand Council, but a small tribute,
generally sixpence, to their own Habitation. The books and balance-
sheets of the League have been audited by public accountants, and
were approved by a committee of delegates at the last Grand Habita-
tion. It is not usual to publish the accounts of political associations.
Three years ago opponents would have laughed at the poverty of
the League ; now they carp at its wealth. But with the money it
receives it has to maintain an organisation that has become very
large. It issues millions of tracts and leaflets ; provides thousands of
lectures where local eloquence is deficient or timid ; maintains a large
staff that necessarily increases with the work, and finds, for instance,
that a thousand pounds does not cover the year's postage. Of the
Grand Council, which meets once a fortnight with an average at-
tendance of thirty, there is hardly a man of whom it may not be em-
phatically said that he is a man'of business, and the best interests
of the League are therefore closely looked after. It may be mentioned
that already a portion of the tribute is remitted to Habitations to
aid them in maintaining and perfecting their individual organisation.

Some sorry sneers have been directed against the nomenclature
and decorations of the Primrose League, but the answer to these is
found in the fact that all are proud to bear the titles which testify to
their energy and chivalrous work. The badges are of enormous value,
for they are not only a certificate of membership but an absolute

1886 THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE. 39

introduction into all Primrose circles, and thus give every member
the opportunity of using his talents and influence in every part of
the country. They afford also the opportunity of promotion in rank,
and are accompanied by the distinction of clasps conferred for good
service. Every associate can earn promotion, without fee or tribute,
to high rank, upon representation by the Habitation to which he
belongs that he is deserving of the honour.

And here occurs the obvious reflection that any man making his
way to distinction through the grades of the Primrose League has
the road open to him for all political eminence. He who cares to
study public affairs and to cultivate his talents, with a view to the
persuasion of others and the defence of approved principle, will soon
make his mark and be welcomed as one of those who can guide men
aright.

The people have sought for a new faith in these times of change
and turmoil. Many were led astray by the loud outcry of Radicals
and Revolutionists. But a true doctrine has now been propounded.
It is based on the highest traditions of British statesmanship as
handed down by Pitt and Palmerston and Beaconsfield. The symbol
is the popular flower, that suggests lessons of patience through
the winter time, and breathes all the bright promise of spring ;
that blossoms beneath the imperial oak, and to all Englishmen
speaks of home. It appeals to a people the most adventurous that
the world has ever seen, ready to quit the mansion or the cottage
at the call of the country on its world-encircling mission of colonisa-
tion and empire. It reminds all of the blessings of constitutional
government and true liberty based on the choice and the devotion
of the people.

' Peace with honour,' ' Imperium et Libertas,'' and many another
glorious motto are emblazoned on our banners. They will be carried
to victory with all that determination and tenacity which has ever
characterised the nation. The land of all the great kings and states-
men who have guided us from small beginnings to our high estate will
certainly vindicate their memories, and take care that under the reign
of our illustrious Sovereign, her realm shall suffer no loss, but shall
be maintained and extended and consolidated as a glorious heritage
for our children, a blessing to civilisation, and an example to man-
kind.

ALGERNON BORTHWICK.

40 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

MODERN CHINA.

CHINA is rather a vast field to cover in a single article, and I cannot
pretend to do more than touch upon a few prominent features of that
hoary and time-honoured country. A land which contains at the
least computation some 250,000,000 of the human race must surely
be destined to play no unimportant part in the history of the world.
China is no longer the isolated nation she once was, and now that she
has frequent communication with Europe, her people may hope to be
better understood in the West. Until quite lately everything Chinese
was the butt of ridicule : a nation whose mourning garb was white,
whose books were read from right to left, and whose every action was
almost the exact opposite of ours, was naturally considered somewhat
eccentric. Closer acquaintance has, however, gradually removed
earlier impressions, and Europeans are now beginning to realise that
in the far East there exists an empire which was civilised when their
ancestors were rude savages, and whose language, civilisation, and
morality, surviving the wreck of centuries, have stilt much that will
bear comparison with modern Europe. It is only within the last
forty years that our knowledge of China has attained any degree of
accuracy. For a century or more before that a sort of desultory
intercourse had been maintained with Southern China, but the move-
ments of Europeans were so restricted and hampered that there were
few opportunities of acquiring knowledge. England's only repre-
sentatives were the members of the East India Company who lived
and traded in Canton, while France had her missionaries in Peking,
and to the latter we owe almost all we know of China before 1 840,
the year of our first war with China, the war which Mr. Justin
McCarthy calls the Opium War, but of which opium was only one
of the many causes. English bayonets soon gained what years of
diplomacy had failed to attain, and China consented to admit Euro-
peans on terms of equality with her own subjects. Twenty years
passed away, and in 1860 we were again involved in a war with
China. With the help of the French we reached Peking, and, striking
a blow at the very heart of the Government, we sacked and levelled
to the ground one of the most magnificent palaces in the world, and
concluded a treaty which still forms the charter of all our privileges

1886 MODERN CHINA. 41

in China. Since then things have gone on fairly smoothly, and
China's respect for Western nations, especially the English, has con-
siderably increased.

That China did not receive us at first with much eagerness is
scarcely to be wondered at, nor is it strange that she still at times
shows a desire to revert to her former state of isolation. China pro-
duces in abundance all that its people require ; the Chinese are of an
eminently conservative turn of mind, and for some three thousand years
they had got on tolerably well without us. Dynasties had been over-
thrown and revolutions often attempted ; emperors had passed away
by the score, and rebellions past number had swept over the face of
the country, but still their old institutions, their moral codes, their
language, and their habits of thought had scarcely been affected all
through the centuries. All at once they found the European trader
obtruding himself with his go-ahead notions of material progress,
and saw looming up in the distance visions of the steam-engine, the
electric telegraph, and all the other accompaniments of modern civili-
sation. All these things jarred sorely with their ideas of a philosophic
life. Confucius, who lived 500 years before Christ, and whose teach-
ings and precepts form the Chinese Bible, held worldly advancement
of little account, and sought to attain rather the moral than the
material elevation of mankind. Even now, few Chinese will admit
that the European standard of morality is equal to their own.

Christianity they consider to be a good enough religion in as far
as, like Buddhism and other native cults, it teaches men to do good,
but they cannot see that in practice it has made much impression
upon the nations of Europe. Their own country has seldom waged
an offensive war, while all Europe appears to them an armed encamp-
ment. England prides herself upon her religion and her big ships of
war ; France sends her missionaries far into the interior, and her •
torpedo boats cruise round the coast and sink all the unoffending
junks that come in their way. This is, of course, the unfavourable
side of European character as it presents itself to the ordinary
Chinaman. He does not, however, fail to discern our good as well as
our bad points. That we are truthful he knows well by experience,
and that no bribe will ever tempt an Englishman is a thing he often
regrets, but never fails to admire. Though he does not altogether
accept our ideas of progress, still he is willing to adopt some of our
inventions. Steamers are rapidly supplanting the clumsy junks, and
one very large and flourishing line is entirely supported by native
capital and conducted by native talent.

Telegraph lines connect the principal cities in the Empire, and
even Peking itself now condescends to hold communication through
this medium with the rest of the world. To the introduction of
railroads, however, China has hitherto offered a most decided opposi-
tion. Their history in China is a brief one, but not without interest

42 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

One was constructed about ten years ago from Shanghai to Woosung,
a distance of about eight miles. The land was purchased by a British
firm under the pretext of making an ordinary carriage-road, and the
goodwill of the local officials having been secured, the railway was
in working order before the Peking authorities got wind of what was
going on. When it became known that the ' fire-carriage ' was
actually running and puffing on the Flowery Land, and that natives
were flocking from all parts to have a ride on the mysterious flying
coach, the indignation of the Peking Government passed all bounds.
Efforts were made to move the British press on the subject, and a
Chinaman having been killed on the line, it was suspected that he had
been induced by the payment of a sum of money to his family to for-
feit his life for the purpose of involving the company. Human life is,
it must be remembered, sometimes a marketable commodity in China.
At all events the British engine-driver was indicted for manslaughter,
and at last things became so bad that the British company consented,
on the payment of a heavy indemnity, to give the line over to the
Chinese Government. The latter no sooner assumed possession than
they tore it up and carted away all the material. It now lies
crumbling to decay in the forests of Formosa, and the track is only
frequented by wheelbarrows and pedestrians. Such is the history
of the first and only passenger line of rail that has yet existed in
China.

The Chinese are by no means blind to the advantages of railways,
but they see many obstacles to their introduction at present. Foreign
engineers and foreign capital would be required for the purpose, and
they prefer to wait until they are in a position to command the men
and money themselves.

The water communication is excellent in most parts of the Empire,
and the sudden introduction of railways would, they imagine, throw
a vast number of people out of employment, and cause an economic
shock which might lead to a general rebellion — a comparatively
frequent occurrence in China.

There are silent influences at work which impel China onward in
the path of progress, and foremost amongst these in the future will
be the teaching of the native press. As in most other things, China
is a standing anomaly in the matter of newspapers. She can boast of
having the oldest paper in the world, and altogether she has only three
at the present day — the Peking Gazette, which was first issued nearly
eight hundred years ago, and two papers published at Shanghai, both
of which are of very recent origin. The Peking Gazette, as it is called
in Europe, can scarcely be considered a newspaper in our modern
sense of the term. Like the London Gazette, it is purely an official
publication, containing little but imperial decrees and memorials
from the high provincial authorities on State affairs. It is the
source from which we get our most reliable knowledge of the working

1886 MODERN CHINA. 43

of the national machinery, of the financial condition of the country,
of the movements of officials, and of the whole government of China.
As all the documents it contains have been presented to the Emperor,
its phraseology is extremely stilted and formal. The first two or
three pages generally open with Court announcements and Imperial
decrees which are couched in a very commanding and majestic tone,
for the Emperor does not spare his abuse in dealing with his servants.
The highest Viceroy in the Empire may rise one morning and find
that his imperial master has decreed his removal from office, or some
obscure country girl may learn with surprise and pleasure that
imperial honours have been showered upon her for having tended
her aged parents during a long illness. Her name will be handed
down among the brilliant examples of filial devotion, and no young
lady in this country could be prouder of her university degrees than
her Chinese sister is of this mark of imperial favour. In times of
national calamity the Emperor often issues a special decree, dwelling
upon his own shortcomings and the great crime he has committed
in failing to secure the favour of Heaven for his suffering people.
Despotic as the Chinese Government is, the right of freedom of
speech is well recognised, and there is a class of officers stationed at
Peking whose special duty it is to keep watch over the doings of the
Emperor and all his Court, and their representations seldom go un-
heeded. Foreign affairs rarely find any mention in the Gazette, and
all secret documents are carefully excluded from its pages. Of late,
however, the Gazette has been less reticent than usual, and during
the recent crisis with France the Emperor frequently used it as a
medium for letting the French know his opinion of them as a nation.
When Mr. Margary was murdered in 1875, the British Government
made it a condition of the settlement of the case that the apology
tendered to the Queen of Great Britain should be inserted in the
Gazette ; and no more effectual means could have been taken of in-
forming the Chinese people of the humiliating position their Govern-
ment had been obliged to assume.

About ten years ago an enterprising Englishman in Shanghai
started a newspaper with the object of educating the Chinese on
European matters. The experiment proved a decided success, and
has now become a very valuable property. This paper has its corre-
spondents and agents in most of the principal cities of the Empire,
and for variety of information and curious details respecting the life
of the people it is a mine of wealth to the foreign student. Its
publication is, however, a thorn in the side of the official classes, for
it often contains disclosures of a nature little complimentary to them.
The Empress is said to peruse its columns daily, and to learn there-
from a deal about the conduct of her servants in the provinces. No
other publication has done so much to stir up the inert mass of
Chinese indifference. The Shenpao and the Hupao, another native

44 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

paper recently established under still more favourable auspice?, stand
alone as the pioneers of journalism in a country whose population
numbers nearly a third of the human race !

It is now perhaps time to glance at the social life of the people,
and here our knowledge is necessarily very scanty. The separation of
the sexes is rigidly maintained in China, and no Chinese gentleman
would ever dream of introducing his wife or daughters to his most
intimate male friend. That would be a shocking breach of etiquette
which no respectable family would tolerate. When the last Chinese
Minister to the Court of St. James, H. E. Kuo Sung-t'ao, returned to
his native country, it was made a serious charge against him that,
while in Europe, he had allowed himself to be photographed, and had
encouraged his wife to move in the society of barbarian lands. Every
house in China has a special wing called the inner hall, which is
exclusively appropriated by the ladies. Here they spend their days
in such occupations as become their sex, and nothing more shocks a
Chinaman's sense of propriety than to see a foreign lady dancing a
quadrille, mounting a horse, riding a tricycle, pulling an oar, or even
playing an innocent game of tennis. Europeans, with their deference
to the weaker sex, seem to them to be the slaves of their women.
Despite the drawbacks attending their sex, Chinese women occasionally
display remarkable ability, and some of the most accomplished minds
the country has produced were among the female sex. At the present
moment the destinies of the Empire are guided by the Empress
Dowager, and few women have shown greater skill in statecraft. As
a rule, however, girls are supposed to make better wives without any
training, except in needlework and housekeeping.

Marriage is a very important element in Chinese family life, and
is arranged in a manner which would scarcely satisfy European notions.
Lovers' sighs, hidden interviews, and all the other preliminaries
which go to swell the romance of courtship in more civilised lands,
are quite unknown in China. A very prosaic arrangement takes their
place. In every village and town there is a class of women, generally
widows, who act as intermediaries in these delicate questions. A girl
generally gets married about seventeen, a man about twenty. A
father, for instance, has a son whom he wants to see settled in life ;
he looks around among his acquaintances, and comes to the conclusion
that So-and-so's daughter would form an eligible partner. Etiquette
forbids him broaching the question directly to the girl's parents, and
so he employs one of these lady intermediaries to undertake the task.
She is furnished with full particulars in writing of the boy's antece-
dents and prospects, and, armed with these, she goes to the young
lady's parents, and presses the suit with all the persuasion that long
practice in such matters confers. If successful, the parents meet and
arrange the details, and the parties most interested in the whole affair
generally see each other for the first time on the wedding-day, to live,

1886 MODERN CHINA. 45

it is to be hoped, happily ever after. Often the first proposal comes
from the girl's family, and in that case a direct refusal is never given.
A previous engagement is always pleaded, and regret expressed that
such a fine offer cannot be accepted. Marriages are most expensive
ceremonies in China, and it often takes a man a long while to clear off'
the debts he has contracted on this festive occasion. I have known
men who were earning about 21. a month spending as much as
4.01. or 501. over the affair.

The Chinese have a firm belief in marriages being made in
heaven. A certain deity, whom they call ' the Old Man of the Moon,'
links with a silken cord, they say, all predestined couples. Early
marriage is earnestly inculcated, and one of "their maxims states that
there are three cardinal sins, and that to die without offspring is the
chief. As in other countries, spring is the time when young people's
minds turn to thoughts of love, and most marriages are celebrated in
February when the peach-tree blossoms appear. Among the marriage
presents are live geese, which are supposed to be emblematical of the
concord and happiness of the married state. A Chinaman may divorce
his wife for seven different reasons, and in the list are ill-temper and
a talkative disposition. The birth of a son is the occasion of much
rejoicing, for without sons a man lives without honour and dies un-
happy, with no one to worship at his grave and none to continue the
family line. The boy is lessoned in good behaviour from his earliest
years, and commences to read at the age of four or five. The Chinese
language is by far the most difficult in the world, and even Chinese
boys make but slow progress in its acquisition. All the sacred books
composed by Confucius, Mencius, and other sages of the past, have
to be committed to memory, and commentaries without end have to
be waded through, analysed, and carefully digested. After days and
nights of weary study a Chinese youth is fortunate if he gets his first
degree at the age of twenty. This gives him only an honorary title,
and if he aspires to a more substantial rank, he must compete again
at the provincial capital against some thousands of his fellow pro-
vincials. When he gets through this, as he seldom does until after four
or five trials, another and still more severe ordeal awaits him. He
works hard for three years more, and goes to Peking to pit himself
against all the rising talent of the Empire. There some ten thousand
of the ablest students from all parts of the country are closeted in
separate cells in an immense hall for nine days, during which they
undergo all the agony attending the severest examination in the
world. The list of successful candidates appears a few days later, and
some three hundred out of the large number who have entered find
themselves the fortunate possessors of a degree which at once opens
up to them the path of official distinction. The first on the list is a
far greater celebrity in his own country than a senior wrangler of
Cambridge is with us, and if he is not a mere bookworm, he is pretty

46 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

certain to rise in the course of years to be the ruler of millions of his
fellow-subjects. There is no limit of age for the examination, and
instances have occurred where the grandfather, father, and son were
all candidates at the same time. At nearly every one of these exami-
nations one or more deaths occur amongst the candidates, and so
strict are the regulations against unfair practices that the dead body
is lowered by a rope from the wall of the building to prevent any
ingress or egress. A few years ago one of the examiners went mad
during the holding of the examination, and rather upset things gene-
rally.

The Chinese attach the greatest importance to ceremonial obser-
vances, and the impetuous European whose duties bring him frequently
into contact with them finds it often rather irksome to go through a
good quarter of an hour's bowing and scraping before proceeding to
discuss business. If your visitor be an official whom you are meeting for
the first time, and of whom you may have heard little or nothing before,
Chinese politeness requires you to open the conversation by assuring
him that his great reputation has reached your ears, and that you
have been long yearning to see him. He returns the compliment by
observing that your younger brother deems himself highly honoured
by being admitted within your stately mansion, and expresses delight
at the prospect of being a recipient of your instruction. You then
ask his honourable surname, to which he replies that the debased one
is called Chang. How many young gentlemen his family contains
may elicit the rejoinder that he has seven young brats at home ; and
so the conversation continues until the stock of terms is exhausted.
Jf the interview is an official one, a table has been laid containing a
certain number of dishes according to the rank of the guest. After
a little while tea is brought in, and on receiving your cup you rise,
walk round to your guest, and, raising it up in both hands, present it
to him in as respectful a manner as possible. He repeats the same
ceremony to you with the cup which has been handed to him, but
your position as host makes it incumbent upon you to offer a show of
opposition to such a proceeding on his part. A favourite exclamation
on such an occasion is : 4 Do you really, my dear sir, consider your-
self a stranger, that you treat me thus in my own house ? '

After these preliminaries, business commences, and then the real
word-fencing is called into play. The business may be of the simplest
nature, still it cannot be transacted without a great deal of finessing.
Let us take as a common instance the following : — The Chinese
employe of a British firm has absconded with a lot of dollars, and
you go to demand his arrest. The man's name is Chang, and he
belongs to the district of Lo. There are in all probability half-a-
dozen places in the district called Lo, and after a careful scrutiny, in
which the Chinese official gives little help, you find the identical one
to which the guilty Chang belonged. The difficulty does not end

1886 MODERN CHINA. 47

here, for you will find that there are at least a dozen Changs in
the place, all of -whom, according to their own account, have led
highly respectable lives from their youth upwards. If you persevere
still further, you may find at last the real and veritable Chang, but
not the dollars, for these have been spent in bribing the officials
to screen him so long from punishment.

Prince Bismarck complained not long ago of the way our Foreign
Office inundated him with despatches, but even the writing powers of
Downing Street would not be a patch upon those of Chinese states-
men. A masterly policy of inaction is there studied to perfection,
and it is rare that any case is settled until reams of paper have been
covered in threshing out every detail. A Chinese despatch must be
written in a certain stereotyped form, and in acknowledging a despatch
you must first begin by quoting in extenso all the documents to which
you are replying. This system of reproducing all the previous corre-
spondence proves very cumbersome as the case gradually develops.
Like a lady's letter, however, the pith of a Chinese communication
generally lies in the postscript, and a practised hand will grasp the
meaning at a glance. The viceroy of a Chinese province peruses
some hundreds of these documents every day, and attaches a minute
to each in a business-like style which is not excelled by our best
organised departments at home.

In social life Chinese officials are pleasant companions, and are often
only too glad to make their escape from work and have a chat with
a foreigner who takes an interest in their country. No official is
allowed to be seen walking on foot within his own jurisdiction, and as
their only mode of locomotion is by covered sedan-chairs, their range
of vision is somewhat limited. Often they learn little things from
the foreigner which would never have reached their ears in the
manipulated reports of their subordinates. They are generally deeply
read in the history and literature of their own country ; and when it is
stated that China has been a country of book-making for thousands of
years, and that the art of printing was introduced there several
centuries before it was known in Europe, it can easily be imagined
that Chinese literature is far more bulky than that of any other
nation. As an instance of the size of a single book, I may mention
that, when leaving Peking some years ago, I brought down an ency-
clopaedia, which formed a cargo for two moderately sized boats, as far
as Tientsin, whence it was shipped to the British Museum. The
Chinaman makes a laudable effort to meet the foreigner halfway.
As a rule, he knows no European language, but he makes up for the
defect by evincing the deepest interest in the student of his own
tongue. If you are reading a Chinese work and have stumbled upon
a disputed passage, you have only to mention your difficulty to an
educated native, and he will take no end of trouble to assist you.
When you quote the passage, his eye brightens and a smile passes

48 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

over his whole countenance to find that an outer barbarian is dipping
into his own favourite studies. He not only throws light upon the
difficulty under review, but treats you to a long disquisition, quoting
passage after passage in a way that makes one surprised at the
tenacity of the human memory.

No notice of China would be considered complete in this country did
it not contain some reference to opium, pigtails, and small feet. At
home mention of China seems always to suggest visions of opium, and
the very vastness of opium literature has given rise to rather confused
opinions on the subject. Several eminent medical authorities both
in India and China maintain that the use of opium is a comparatively
harmless enjoyment, while others, whose opinions deserve equal
respect, hold that it is the cause of untold evil to the Chinese. As
usual in such cases, the truth probably lies between the two extremes.
In China I have visited scores of opium shops, have seen hundreds of
smokers in all stages of intoxication, and observation has convinced
me that physically they are an inferior class. The sunken eye,
haggard look, and lack-lustre expression of countenance too often
clearly mark the habitual smoker ; still, withal, he is certainly no
worse than the dram-drinker in this country, and it may be as well to
commence at home and put our own house in order before trying to
reform that of our Chinese friend at a distance. It must be
remembered that, opium apart, the Chinese are eminently a sober
race, and few are the people who have no indulgence. Whatever may
have been the case in the past, the British Government can now no
longer be charged with forcing its Indian opium on the Chinese.
The Chinese Government receives a very handsome revenue from the
import of the article, which it has frequently shown a desire to retain
and increase as far as possible. The amount of opium grown in China
equals, if it does not exceed, the total imported from India, and were
the trade stopped to-morrow, the only result would be an immense
increase in the cultivation of the poppy in China. The Chinese
Grovernment, fully appreciating the importance of establishing a good
reputation in the West, does not object to pose as a martyr in the
matter of opium before the British public, and this explains the
contributions which its officers occasionally send to the Anti- Opium
Society's publications. There are, it must be admitted, a few states-
men in China, like H. E. Chang Chih-tung, who are earnestly anxious
to put a stop to the consumption of opium of every kind, but their
action has no more influence on the policy of the Grovernment than
has that of the advocates of total abstinence in the direction of affairs
in England. The practice of opium-smoking is undoubtedly increas-
ing. Chinese will tell you that twenty years ago no respectable
person would be seen smoking ; now every fashionable young fellow
prides himself on his pipe, and no social meeting would pass off well
without it. High and low, nearly all take a whiff of the seductive

1886 MODERN CHINA. 49

drug. Some members of the imperial family are said to be hard
smokers, many of the royal princes smoke, the majority of officials
do the same, and working men squander a good deal of their hard
earnings in the opium shop.

Of small feet and pigtails it is not necessary to say much. Both
are considered ornaments in their way, and a nation whose sons wear
bell-toppers, and whose daughters go in for a variety of distortions,
must be chary of criticising other people's peculiarities. Pigtails, it
may not generally be known, are not in their origin Chinese. When
the present rulers of China, who are Manchus, seized upon the
Empire over two centuries ago, they issued an edict commanding
all Chinese to shave their heads and grow a tail like themselves.
There was a good deal of trouble at first in enforcing such an order, but
the Chinese have long ago forgotten that the appendage of which
they are now so proud is a badge of conquest. It would be hard to find
anywhere a more submissive subject or a more thoroughly good-
natured being than the Chinese peasant. His hard struggle for
existence scarcely leaves him time to grumble with his lot. No
mechanical inventions have yet relieved him from the burden of toil.
His rice-fields have to be irrigated by the old-fashioned water-wheel,
the fields themselves are ploughed by a primitive wooden plough
which he carries home on his shoulder when his day's work is over,
and his crop is reaped with the rudest of sickles, and brought to the
stackyard on wheelbarrows. Night and morning he worships the
tablets of his ancestors, and twice in^the year — once in spring and once
in autumn — he repairs to the graves of his family, and communes in
spirit with the forefathers of his race. His knowledge of the world
extends only to the next market town. No newspaper brings him
intelligence from other lands, and to him China is the first and only
nation in existence. All other countries are subordinate to the
Emperor of China, and all the princes of the earth owe allegiance to
the Court of Peking. Tell an ordinary countryman in the North that
there are nations in Europe independent of China, and he smiles at
your thinking him so innocent as to believe such a story. Peking
itself still remains the head-quarters of Celestial ignorance and preju-
dice. Nearly every state in Europe has its representative there, and
in the streets you meet jolly, broad-faced, grinning Mongolians from
the bleak North, stately yellow-robed Lamas from Thibet, the puny
white-clad Corean from his forbidden land in the East, Anamese
and Siamese from the South, and Nepaulese from the confines of our
Indian Empire. The spectacle presented by such a motley variety
of all nationalities only confirms the ordinary native in the belief that
they have, one and all, come to pay their respects and offer their
tribute to the * Lord of all under heaven.' In Southern China know-
ledge is a little more widely diffused, for emigration has there intro-
duced a slight leavening of foreign influence. Still, its effect has
VOL. XX.— No. 113. E

50 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

been minimised as much as possible, and the natural prejudices of the
people too often assert themselves on their return to the Flowery
Land. The Cantonese go in large numbers to America and Australia ;
while abroad they dress as foreigners, but once they set foot again
on their native soil the foreign dress is discarded, and the returned
exile, with his loose trousers and flowing garments, meets his friends
with as much ease and grace as if his limbs had never been encased
in the tight-fitting barbarian costume. No length of residence abroad
ever naturalises a Chinaman. High and low, rich and poor, they all
long to get back to China and have their bones mixed with those of
their ancestors. About two years ago I came across a Chinaman who
had left his native village when a boy of ten, and had returned a
wealthy man after thirty years' residence in Boston, having almost
entirely forgotten his native dialect. At first he despised his native
surroundings and boasted of American freedom, but after a few
months he settled down to the life of his neighbours, took great pains
to cultivate a pigtail, married, Christian though he was, a couple of
wives, and became a model citizen of the Celestial Empire. Ex uno
discite omnes.

J. N. JORDAN.

1886 51

TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT.

I.

TAINE'S real name is Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, but he is usually
called ' Henri Taine,' which he himself, in a letter to me, attributes
to a whim of the Editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was
born on the 21st of April, 1828, at Vouziers, a small town between
Champagne and the Ardennes. His family may be counted among
the intellectual aristocracy of France ; all were well educated and
also in fairly prosperous circumstances, though not exactly rich.
Some were members of the Chamber of Deputies ; his grandfather
was Sous-prefet. His father, a very learned man, taught Hippolyte
Latin ; an uncle, who had resided for a long time in America, made
him familiar with the English language. All that was English
fascinated him from an early period ; even as a boy he found delight
in reading books in the language of Shakespeare. While French
novels were forbidden fruit to the young people, foreign literature
was thrown open to them without any restrictions, and their elders
rejoiced when a youth showed a disposition to acquaint himself in
this way with the languages of other countries. Our hero devoted
himself to the study of English classics, and thus at an early age
laid the foundation of the accurate knowledge of English literature
to which he afterwards owed a large amount of his celebrity.

The promising boy was only thirteen when he lost his father. A
year later his mother brought him to Paris, where she at first placed
him as boarder in an excellent private school. Not long after he
entered the College de Bourbon (now Lycee de Condorcet), where he
distinguished himself above all his schoolfellows by ripeness of in-
telligence, by industry and success. At the same time he was the
constant object of tender care and unremitting watchfulness on the
part of his admirable mother, a woman of warm affections, who did
all in her power to bestow a thorough education on her children. In
the year 1847 he obtained the first prize for a Latin essay on rhetoric,
in 1848 two prizes for philosophical treatises. These achievements
threw open to him the doors of the so-called Normal School, a kind
of seminary in which the pupils were trained for professional chairs
in the universities. This higher preparatory course of study is, how-

E 2

52 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

ever, utilised by many only as a stepping-stone to a literary career.
Many celebrated writers were Taine's colleagues at the Normal
School ; Edmond About, Prevost-Paradol, J. J. Weiss, Francisque
Sarcey — these all were professors only for a short time, and soon
embraced definitely the career of literature and journalism.

At the Normal School,1 which Taine attended for three years,
the soundness of his judgment and solidity of his intelligence met
with universal recognition. His companions bowed before his
superiority, did not venture to address him otherwise than as
4 Monsieur Taine,' and called him in as umpire in their quarrels.
He had the wonderful gift of being able to study more in a week
than others in a month. As the pupils were free to read what they
pleased, he devoted the leisure obtained by his rapid work to the
study of philosophy, theology, and the Fathers. He went through
all the more valuable authors on these topics, and discussed with his
colleagues the questions which arose out of them. It was one of his
enjoyments to test them, to ascertain their ideas and to penetrate
into their minds. The method of instruction pursued in the college
was admirably calculated to stimulate the intellectual activity of the
students. Ample nourishment was provided for the mental energies
of the ardent youths. The debates were carried on with the greatest
freedom, every question was submitted to the touchstone of reason,
and worked out according to the requirements of logic. Day by day
the most varied opinions, political, aesthetic, and philosophical, came
into collision in these youthful circles, without any restrictions
imposed by the liberal professors, among whom were such men as
Jules Simon and Vacherot. On the contrary, they encouraged the
utmost freedom of expression in the enunciation of individual views.
Their own system of teaching was not so much in the form of lectures
as of discussions with the students, who themselves had to deliver
orations, followed by a general debate, at the close of which the
professors gave a resume of all that had been said. Thus Taine had
once to read a paper on Bossuet's mysticism, About one on his
politics. Due attention was also given to physical exercise ; there
were frequent open-air excursions and occasional dances in the
evening in the domestic circle, one of the students acting as musician.
It is needless to say that under such circumstances as these the years
spent in the Ecole Normale sped on pleasantly and profitably. The
advantages of the intellectual gymnastics as practised there were
enormous, and far outweighed the slight drawbacks, such as a tendency
to hyperbole observable in the elite of those who issued from that
fertile, effervescent, genuinely French mode of education. But none
of the pupils of the Normal School did it so much honour as Taine,
who had the good fortune to be there at precisely the right time, for

1 For the deseription'of the then life at this school I am principally indebted to
Mr. W. Fraser Rae's biographical sketch of Taine.

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 53

after his departure in the year 1851 the establishment suffered an
organic transformation in the opposite direction. The collegians
had imbibed so strong a feeling of intellectual independence that it
was not to be wondered at if they were little inclined to bear the yoke
of spiritual oppression. Unfortunately, the times upon which they
had fallen were not propitious to freedom of thought, for the 'uncle's
nephew ' was at the helm. The third Napoleon had attained the goal
by the aid of the clergy, and was bound to give them the promised
reward. The ' strong hand ' of the Buonapartist government did its
utmost to chicane those whose ideas were not acceptable in high
places. Anyone who, when put to a certain test, was ready to sign
a political and religious confession of faith consonant with the views
of the reigning powers, obtained an easy and lucrative post. Taine
was rejected, because it was found that his philosophic theories
indicated ' erroneous ' and ' mischievous ' tendencies. But Guizot
and Saint-Marc Girardin, who took a warm interest in the talented
young man, engaged themselves on his side, and endeavoured to
procure at least a modest post for him. They succeeded ; but, to
show how reluctantly the wishes of even such advocates were granted,
Taine's petition that he might be sent to the north for his mother's
sake was disregarded, and he was sent to the south, to Toulon.

Only four months afterwards he was transferred to Nevers, where
again he was only allowed to remain four months; then he was
removed to Poitiers. His salary was exceedingly small, but by
strict economy he contrived to make it suffice. He devoted his
leisure hours to the pursuit of his philosophical studies ; he had a
special preference for Hegel. The authorities kept an eye upon him
as a ' suspect ; ' from time to time calumnies were not spared him.
Great offence arose out of the fact of his declining to follow the
suggestion of the chaplain, that he should write a Latin ode or a
French dithyramb in honour of the bishop. This disrespectful
refusal was regarded as a confirmation of the charges which had been
raised against the objectionable professor, and drew upon him the
censure of the Minister of Public Instruction, who threatened him
with summary dismissal if such an act of insubordination should
occur again. He began to feel uneasy, and when, some months after,
he received a decree from the Government appointing him master of
a primary school at Besancon, he took this unmistakable hint to
heart, and accepted it as a sign that it was time to give up a struggle
in which he always came off second best. Was it worth while for
the State to bring up young giants, and afterwards set them to collect
firewood instead of felling oaks ? Taine was relieved of this post by
his own request, threw off the yoke of State education, and made his
way to Paris. It was no bad exchange, for he at once obtained an
advantageous professorship in a superior private school. But the
persecutions of the Government were unremitting ; he was obliged to

54 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

give up his situation, and had a hard struggle to earn his daily bread.
In order to be able to wield his pen independently of the tyranny of
public authorities, the much-tormented man betook himself to giving
lessons in private families. At the same time he threw himself
eagerly into new studies, chiefly of a mathematical, medical, and
philosophical character. He frequented the lectures at the Sorbonne,
the Ecole de Medecine, and the Natural History Museum. But his
special predilection was for modern languages, a considerable number
of which he learned.

At Nevers he had occupied himself very much with a new method
of psychological criticism, which he steadily followed out in Paris.
His literary and biographical essays in the Revue des Deux Mondes,
the Journal des Debats, and the Revue de V Instruction Publique
created attention by the novel theories upon which they were founded.
In the year 1853 our author took his degree as Docteur es lettres,
on which occasion, in addition to the ordinary Latin doctorial dis-
sertation (De personis Platonicis], he wrote a French treatise on
Lafontaine's Fables, the diametrical opposite to a regulation acade-
mical thesis. He worked it up afterwards with due attention to the
hints of criticism, and published it as a book with the title Lafon-
taine and his Fables, in which form it has already passed through
nine editions. This literary outburst of the young doctor created
much stir, and no wonder, for the public before whom Taine presented
himself were utterly unaccustomed to such originality of treatment,
such fecundity of expression, so rich a flow of ideas, such individuality
of views, such elegance of style, such thoroughness and versatility of
information. * It was,' says Karl Hillebrand, ' a philosophico-historical
carnival after weeks long of fasting ; ' the whole reading world threw
itself upon it with avidity.

In this essay on the great fabulist, Taine started new canons of
criticism, set up a bold paradox, and .illustrated it from the life and
works of Lafontaine. He submits to an exhaustive analysis the
causes which co-operated to make him a poet, as well as the method
by which he constructed his fables and the aims which he pursued
in them. Lafontaine's native place and the peculiarities of its in-
habitants are described. Then it is demonstrated that Lafontaine
in his own person combined the most prominent characteristics of
this race, and that these characteristics were intensified in him by
the climate, the quality of the soil, and the scenery of Champagne.
From all these constituents he supposes him to have derived the
light and unfettered versification which he employs so skilfully in
his fables. To the same causes he attributes the failure of Lafon-
taine's attempts to imitate the ancient poets. As he possessed, to-
gether with these qualifications, an intimate acquaintance with the
necessities of his age and his country, he could not fail to become a
really popular national poet. Taine analyses every innermost recess

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 55

•of Lafontaine's brain, every feature in his poetry ; Lafontaine him-
self would have been amazed, could he have read the book, to find
himself credited with aims and purposes of which he in reality had
not the faintest conception when he wrote his fables, to hear himself
proclaimed to be the representative and mirror of his time, to dis-
cover, finally, that he owed his achievements, not to his own genius
and abilities, but to the united co-operation of all the conditions and
circumstances in the midst of which he lived.

That every human being is born with certain tendencies peculiar
to his race, which guide his thoughts and actions ; that all his ideas
-and his deeds, whether good or evil, are to be traced to these innate
tendencies, as a river to its sources, — these are the views which Taine,
since his Lafontaine debut, has ever and everywhere asserted, main-
tained, and, according to his own conviction, established.

Established ! yes, that is the crucial point. As a rule it is
admitted that the critic can do no more than express his own opinion.
He fulfils his duty when he carefully studies his subject and deals
with it dispassionately and as impartially as possible. More is not,
and cannot be, demanded from him. Every critic judges according
to his circumstances, his experiences, his degree of culture, his fancy,
his prejudices, expectations, and sympathies ; hence each single
•criticism remains in every respect an expression of individual opinion.
If a criticism commends itself to a majority of men as true and just,
it is adopted ; but it is not necessarily competent to establish the real
worth or worthlessness of the subject under discussion. Quite dif-
ferent are Taine's views of criticism. He deems it possible to bring
certainty into criticism; he insists upon endowing criticism, like
physics and mathematics, with the fixedness of scientific formulas,
hedging it round with irrefragable dogmas. His point of view is
that criticism must no longer be unreliable, its results no longer
fluctuating. At the age of five-and-twenty he springs, a modern
Pallas, into literature, ready aimed at all points with a critical system,
a philosophy, and last, not least, a style of his own. All that he has
more minutely developed in the course of several decades is already
to be found in his maiden work on Lafontaine. The novelty of the
theories, as well as the fresh, forcible, vivacious style of the young
-doctor won him many friends among the public. ' Nothing venture,
nothing have.'

It was not long before another opportunity offered of making his
voice heard and applying his theories afresh. In the year 1854
the French Academy offered a prize for the best essay on Livy.
The life of the historian was to be related, the circumstances under
which he wrote, and the principles according to which he planned
his history, were to be discussed, and his place in the ranks of his-
torians was to be determined. None of the essays sent in was
considered worthy of the prize, but Taine's was pronounced the best ;

56 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

only the stricture was added, that it betrayed 'a deficiency in serious-
ness and in admiration for the brilliant name and the genius of the
distinguished man whom he had to criticise.' Taine re-wrote his
paper, sent it in again, and this time obtained the prize. Villemaini,
as spokesman of the Committee of Adjudicators, commended the
work in the highest terms, though he was not in harmony with the
contents, and said : * We feel bound to congratulate the author on
this creditable debut on the territory of classical learning, and only
wish that we may find similar competitors for all our other offers of
prizes, and that we may have such teachers in our schools ; ' a sarcastic
allusion which drew a gentle smile from the dignified Immortals.

The happy author published his prize essay under the title of
Essai sur Tite-Live, with a preface which was an unpleasant surprise
to some of the members of the Academy, and made them wish it
were possible to retract their eulogiums and distinctions. In it
Taine pushed farther the consequences of his new theories. He
maintained with Spinoza that the relation of man to nature is not
that of an vmperium in imperio, but that of a part to the whole ;
that the mind of man is, like the outer world, subject to laws ; that
a dominant principle regulates the thoughts and urges on the human
machine irresistibly and inevitably. In a word, our author regards
man as a ' walking theorem.' Naturally he was charged with deny-
ing freedom of will and being a fatalist. His opponents also, and
not unreasonably, pointed out the necessary irreconcilability of the
ideas represented by two such different names as Livy and Spinoza,
and showed how paradoxical it was to cite the writings of the Koman
historian in support of the philosophical speculations of the Dutch
Jew. But paradox is Taine's element. As to the book itself, it was
received with universal applause. The reading public sympathised
as little with the author's speculations concerning the historian as
with those on Lafontaine, but they appreciated the undeniable merits
of both works. Taine contends that the birthplace and mode of life
of Livy, the time in which he lived, the events of which he was
witness, the direction of his taste and of his studies — that all these
co-operated to make him an ' oratorical historian.' The want of
method in the arrangement of his great work, the sentiments ex-
pressed in it, the prevailing tone and style, the frequency of the
speeches occurring in it — all these things are adduced by Taine in
support of his hypothesis, and he goes so far as to assert this to be
incontestable certainty. Now everyone will allow that the ' surrounding-
circumstances,' which Taine makes the foundation of his deductions
respecting Lafontaine, Livy, and others — time, place, conditions of
life, &c. — are valuable and weighty factors in forming a decision
about individuals and peoples ; but nobody can allow them to consti-
tute infallible certainty in questions of criticism, least of all when
we are discussing persons and races long gone by, and whose ' sur-
rounding circumstances ' we have not before our eyes, but are obliged

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 57

to construct in a great measure ; such a necessarily inductive criticism
must ever remain hypothetical. It does not follow that it must be
erroneous ; it may quite as possibly be correct ; but Taine's con-
clusions with regard to Livy are not only hypothetical and fallible,
but actually false. His argument is that Livy was rather a great
orator than a great historian. He holds him not to be a good his-
torian because he wields the pen as an orator ; he calls him an * ora-
torical historian,' and attributes the beauties as well as the defects of
his historical style to the preponderantly rhetorical character of his
mind. The principle on which he bases this estimate of Livy is
evidently erroneous, for Montesquieu, Macaulay, Gibbon, and others
were no contemptible historians, notwithstanding their very eminent
oratorical power. The same method by which Taine stamps Livy as
an ' oratorical ' historian might lead to the conclusion, equally hypo-
thetical, that Livy was capable of writing the History of Rome only
because he was endowed with the genius of a painter or poet. The
logical premisses which Taine holds to be unassailable are by no
means so. He tries to prove too much, and in his impatience to
reach his conclusion, overlooks many things which make against his
point of view. The fact that Livy — in contradistinction to the
philosophical Thucydides and the practical Tacitus — neglects the
grouping of incidents, the consultation of original authorities, and
places characteristic expressions in the mouths of his personages^
proves, not that he was an ' oratorical ' historian, but that he was a
careless writer. Facts are in direct opposition to Taine's hypothesis ;
he has only maintained, but not proved, that the absence of philo-
sophical generalisations and of diligent research is the character-
istic of an orator, and that therefore Livy deserves to be called an
' oratorical historian.' Many great orators, as we have said, have
been admirable historians, and have exhibited remarkable powers of
research. Taine seems to demand from Livy what is simply an im-
possibility : faultless, absolutely perfect writing of history.

Much more might be alleged against the propositions maintained
in the Essai sur Tite-Live ; suffice it to emphasise once more that the
effort to constitute criticism an exact science has been as unsuccessful
here as in the book on Lafontaine. In spite of diligent and careful
application of the demonstrative method, criticism remains fallible
and individual. By the repetition of ' because ' and ' therefore ' a
case may be made clearer and less unreliable, but that is not equiva-
lent to proof. As a result of Taine's process we have only a series
of paradoxes and generalisations, which, indeed, are always most
ingeniously carried out, testify to earnestness and ardent pursuit
of truth, and are worthy of the highest recognition, but unfor-
tunately are not always infallible. While this clever mode of
generalisation in Taine's hands served to enhance the poetic inspiration
of Lafontaine, it served also to depreciate the historical endowment
of Livy.

58 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

II.

Shortly after the publication of the Essai sur Tite-Live an obsti-
nate affection of the throat compelled our author to seek the healing-
influence of the Pyrenean baths. The course of treatment extended
through two years. For a short time he even lost his voice. During
this journey in search of health his favourite study was Spencer's
Faerie Queene, which perhaps no other Frenchman had at that time
read. This explains the high praise which Taine bestowed on the
great Elizabethan poet at a later period in his History of English
Literature. The life among the mountains furnished the invalid
with material for fresh literary work. The result was a book entitled
Voyage aux Pyrenees, which was afterwards- enriched with admirable
illustrations by Crustave Dore. To judge by the number of editions,
this would seem to be the most popular of all Taine's works. In this
he avails himself freely of the opportunity of employing his critical
method in a new sphere : the art of travelling. His colleague,
Edmond About, h'as also written valuable books of travel, but the
author of A B 0 du Travailleur regards things from an entirely differ-
ent point of view. He directs his attention rather to administrative
questions, organisations, taxation, lighting, pavement, in short all that
concerns modern civilisation. Taine, on the other hand, dwells more
on the intellectual and artistic side of things ; he surveys all with
the eye of the learned critic ; he compares the present with the
past, and loves beautiful picturesque scenery. Lest he may become
dry and stray too far from the subject in hand, he adopts the plan,
instead of clothing his views in the didactic garb, of introducing
persons who are to give expression to them, and others to advance
opposite opinions. As we should naturally expect, right is always
on the side of the author. ' Monsieur Paul ' is always right ; hence
Monsieur Paul evidently represents Monsieur Taine. This being so,
the following portraiture of Paul may be taken for an autograph
description — intentional or otherwise — of the author himself : —

A daring traveller, an eccentric lover of painting, who believes in nobody but
himself. A raisonneur much addicted to paradoxes with extreme opinions. His
brain is always in a state of effervescence with some new idea which pursues him.
He seeks truth in season and out of season. In spirit he is usually about a
hundred miles in advance of other people. He enjoys being contradicted, but
still more enjoys the pleasure of contradicting. Occasionally his pugnacious tem-
perament leads him astray. In his egoism he regards the world as a puppet-show,
in which he is the only spectator.

The book now under consideration showed Taine in a new light :
as a descriptive writer of the first order. Hitherto he had been
known as an acute critic and an original philosopher ; but now it
was discovered that in him lay also a fanciful poet, a profound
observer of men and manners, a genial and amusing raconteur, a
close observer and interpreter of Nature. Books of travel may be

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 59

divided generally into two classes : the first pretentious, in which the
author decides dogmatically upon all that comes across him, without
possessing the necessary information and capabilities ; these books
overflow with stupidity, vanity, and shallowness. The second class
are less pretentious, but equally valueless : the author contents him-
self with transcribing from his guide-books descriptions of what he
has seen, with some slight modifications, and giving a tolerably
accurate list of the hotels in which the best beds, the cheapest
dinners, and the lowest fees are to be secured. The only travels
worthy of notice are included in neither of these two classes ; among
these Taine's works on the Pyrenees and Italy take a foremost place.
He looks not so much on the external aspect of things as on their
inner, their psychology ; he only occupies himself with the outward
so far as is necessary to draw from it arguments for the demonstra-
tions and ratiocinations which he applies to all that he sees and
observes. If he describes a landscape — and he does it in the most
effective and picturesque manner — he at the same time analyses its
separate constituents, and makes it clear how and why their combina-
tion produces the impression of beauty. He seeks to explain why
many things appear beautiful to us to-day which formerly passed for
ugly, and vice versa. He inquires into the influence of civilisation
on the inhabitants of a region, and the changes which take place in
the course of time in the condition of these inhabitants, as well as in
their physical and moral constitution. He traces all things up to
their causes, and endeavours to investigate all, even the geological,
botanical, and climatic conditions of the Pyrenees, but he dwells only
so long upon them as to instruct the general reader without boring
the initiated. He draws delicate pictures of the customs of the people
and the tourist life. No doubt there may be errors and mis-state-
ments in his travelling descriptions, as they are made subordinate to
the illustration of his theories. But on the whole they are of con-
siderable merit and the reverse of superficial.

His next publication was, The French Philosophers of the
Nineteenth Century (1856), a witty, telling, acute analysis of 'official
philosophy,' a positivist irruption into the reigning school of the
Eclectics, an attack upon that rhetorical spiritualism which, in the
eyes of the authorities, had the advantage of giving no umbrage to
the clergy, in the eyes of thinkers the disadvantage of tripping airily
over the difficulties which it undertook to clear up and do away with,
or else of evading them altogether. Taine slays the tenets of five
men with the sacrificial knife of ridicule on the altar of sound human
reason. Here also he excels in treating a dry subject in an amusing
manner. Thanks to his clearness and his esprit the public found
itself surprised into taking interest in a scientific tournament.
Why did Taine select Cousin, Laromiguiere, Eoyer-Collard, Maine
de Biran, and Jouffroy for his target ? Apparently because he found

60 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

most to censure in them. However, we are far from being ready to
endorse the whole contents of the book. Victor Cousin, the high
priest of the Eclectics, is the most fiercely handled of all ; Taine
denounces him as a charlatan, and satirises him vigorously in five
long chapters. This specimen of Taine's polemics excited great
attention. Cousin's enemies applauded vehemently, and even his
friends rejoiced secretly while they condemned openly. If we are to
give credit to Mr. Fraser Rae, the distinguished man himself cherished
henceforth a more than merely scientific antipathy to his young
assailant ; he could not forgive the former student of the Ecole
Normale for this shock to his throne hitherto held sacred. At the
close of the volume, which had originally appeared serially in the
Revue de ^Instruction Publique, the writer gives a sketch of his
own method of pursuing philosophic investigations ; for this purpose
he again adopts the form of a dialogue between ' Peter ' and ' Paul.'

In 1858 Taine republished a collection of articles, which had
formerly appeared in magazines, on Macaulay, Thackeray, Dickens
(these three were afterwards incorporated in the History of English
Literature), Flechier, Ghiizot, Plato, Saint-Simon, Madame de
Lafayette, Montalembert, and Michelet under the title of Essais de
critique et d'histoire. His method is here the same as in his larger
works. Seven years later he followed this up with a similar volume
of New Critical and Historical Essays, in which the articles on
Balzac, La Bruyere, Racine, Jefferson, and Marcus Aurelius are
conspicuous for their merit. In the interval he had made his first
journey to England, in order to become more closely acquainted with
this country, for which he had always had a great predilection, and
to pursue his studies of English literature in the reading-room of
the British Museum. He met with the most hearty reception and
enjoyed intercourse with the most eminent personages. During his
somewhat protracted stay he contributed a series of letters to the
Paris Temps, afterwards published in book form as Notes sur VAngle-
terre (1861), and again with considerable revision in 1871 after his
second visit (the eighth edition appeared in 1884) ; these are admirable
pictures of the social, political, and domestic life of the English.
Taine is very favourably disposed towards them without flattering
them ; he censures what appears to him deserving of censure, but never
degenerates into incivility. This work, Mr. W. F. Rae's translation of
which has obtained great popularity in England, would be his best book
of travels had he not so often allowed himself to be misled by his
inductive process into superficial and inaccurate conclusions. He
methodically and with exaggerated acumen ascribes influences to
* surrounding circumstances,' which anyone acquainted with England,
and unbiassed by foregone conclusions, sees to be purely imaginary.
Numerous are the erroneous generalisations founded on superficial
and imperfect comprehension of facts. We are sometimes reminded

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 61

•of the traditional traveller who, finding a red-haired chambermaid
at an inn in Alsace, recorded in his journal ' Alsatian women have
all red hair,' or the other who saw some wandering gipsies making
nails by the roadside, and drew the inference that the inhabitants
of the country led a nomad life and subsisted by manufacturing
quincaillerie. But such slips are too trifling to militate against the
reputation of the author as an exceptional traveller, delicate observer,
and master of descriptive style. He is the ideal of the ' intelligent
foreigner.'

In the year 1863 Taine was appointed examiner in the German
language and French literature at the Military Academy of St. Cyr ;
when he was removed from this post in 1865, the press raised
so vigorous a protest that he was recalled a few days after-
wards. In October 1864 he was made professor of aesthetics and the
history of art at the ' Ecole des Beaux- Arts ' in Paris. Here he found
a rich field for his activity, as is proved by the works, Philosophy of
Art, The Ideal in Art, Philosophy of Art in Italy, Philosophy of
Art in Greece, Philosophy of Art in the Netherlands. He travelled
through these countries in the Sixties. We recognise all through
the learned, delicate, animated critic. Every ["sentence bears the
stamp of originality and is full of suggestive meaning. Taine does
not need to repeat what others have said before him, he thinks for
himself. He never writes without a special purpose. He always
says what he believes to be true, and not what people like to hear —
and that means something in France. As in the above-named books
he applies his consistently defended * method ' even in the domain of
art, they were as vehemently attacked as his philosophico-historical
works. Apart from numerous essays, there is a whole array of
pamphlets and lesser books which are directed against Taine's critical
method. On the other hand, it is held in high esteem in certain
quarters, as, for example, in three issues of Sainte-Beuve's Nouveaux
Lundis, in Emile Zola's paper Taine as an Artist (Mes Haines], &c.

Now we arrive at a very remarkable and characteristic book. We
are only half agreed with its contents ; yet it is so charmingly
written, so bright, fascinating, and flowing in its style, that in
spite of all differences of opinion we felt impelled to translate it
into German. We allude to Taine's chief work, the History of
English Literature, the first three volumes of which appeared in
1863, while the fourth followed a year later, and under the title of
Contemporaries contains monographs of Macaulay, Dickens, Carlyle,
Mill, Thackeray, and Tennyson, in which he takes six of the greatest
authors of the time as representative types of their different classes
of literature, and in the most bkilful manner uses them as illustra-
tions of his subject. This history is the best which a foreigner has
yet written on English Literature. In France also it created great
excitement. The author tendered it to the Academy, which handed

62 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

it over to a committee appointed to decide upon the bestowal of a
special prize of four thousand francs. Each member of this committee
read the book, and each declared it to be worthy of the prize which had
been founded ' for historical works which show talent.' Yet an un-
precedented occurrence took place — this unanimous decision was
thrown out by the full assembly of the Academy. The majority con-
fessed indeed to not having read the work which was the object of
contention, yet they left unheeded the representations of the spokes-
man— the aged Villemain, who himself had written so well about
England. The Bishop of Orleans pronounced the book irreligious
and immoral, because the author denied free will, preached fatalism,
slighted the Fathers of the Church, and distinctly commended the
Anglican Book of Common Prayer. In short, Monseigneur Dupanloup
denounced Monsieur Taine as a heretic in religion and a sceptic in
philosophy. Victor Cousin seized this favourable opportunity, on the
one side to show that he was completely reconciled with the Church,
on the other to avenge himself on his assailant. The learned
assembly lent an ear to these two distinguished speakers ; without
proceeding to a closer examination, they denied the prize to Taine,
although its founder had demanded simply talent and not the defence
of particular views. A year before, they had refused to admit Littre
into the ranks of the Forty. Since that time there has been a consider-
able change in the spirit and in the constituent members of the
Academy. Littre and Alexandre Dumas took their seats in the halls
of the Immortals, and a few years ago the gates of the palace on the
Quai Conti were thrown open to Taine himself. As a drawback,
however, he, who had ever exercised the full rights of free criticism
with regard even to the highest intellects, was compelled by the rules
of the Academy to pronounce, on this occasion, the panegyric of his
somewhat mediocre predecessor, M. de Lomenie.

Exceptions, numerous and justifiable, may be taken to the History
of English Literature, but its importance can never be denied. The
fact is, Taine builds up his system with such a loyal striving for
accuracy, that it is impossible to refuse our attention to it, even
though we may consider that the desired accuracy has not been
attained. Emile Zola designates the History of English Literature
* a delicately and finely constructed valuable work of art.' Any
reader who takes up the work with the expectation of finding a
methodical history of literature will be disappointed, but not dis-
agreeably so, for instead of a history he will be introduced to a series
of portraits on a large scale. He will miss much which appertains to
an actual history of literature; many an estimable work 'and many
an author of eminence is barely named or even altogether omitted ;
hardly any regard is paid to chronology ; all literature since Byron,
with the exception of the six great portraits above mentioned, is
passed over in silence, or only acknowledged by a stray mention of

1886 TA1NE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 63

isolated names ; nor is there the slightest allusion to the periodical
literature which plays so conspicuous a part in the modern life of
England. With all these omissions, however, what remains is suffi-
cient to bring clearly before our eyes the rich treasures to be found in
the field of British authorship. The main reason, however, why this
masterpiece of Taine's fails to deserve the title of History of Litera-
ture lies in the prominence which it gives to the treatment of the
psychology of England. He uses literature only as a delicate, sensi-
tive apparatus, with the aid of which he measures the gradations and
variations of a civilisation, seizes all the characteristics, peculiarities,
and nuances of the soul of a people. In short, he applies his ' method '
— an ingenious conglomerate of the Hegel-Condillac-Taine inductive
philosophy — to the literature of a nation as a whole, as he has hitherto
applied it to individual men, to individual works, to art and to obser-
vations by the way. The book has met with universal appreciation,
but even its admirers cannot overlook its faults. It would no doubt
have been easier to disarm opposition, if Taine had given to the
work a title more corresponding to its contents, such as ' Psycho-
logy of the History of English Culture illustrated by Portraits from
Literature ; ' or, as a somewhat less long-winded title, ' Psychology of
English Literature ; ' Sainte-Beuve suggested ' Histoire de la race
et de la civilisation anglaises par la litterature.'

Here as elsewhere Taine shows himself to be an acute critic, and even
his errors reveal the subtle thinker. But he is something besides that —
he is also a true artist. He wields, indeed, not the brush, nor the chisel,
nor a musical instrument, nor does he write verses or novels ; his art
is that of treating learned and scientific subjects attractively and
beautifully, of raising them to a high level, especially in the History
of English Literature. As a rule, those who have to deal with a dry
theme, think they have done quite enough if they have expressed
their ideas and views with perspicuity and in appropriate language,
and how frequently they do not even succeed in that ! The possi-
bility of working up the material and arranging it so as to pro-
duce the greatest possible effect did not enter the mind of many
writers before Taine. He understands better than most how to im-
part not only instruction but literary enjoyment at the same time.
If only for this reason, his English Literature, as we have said,
remains, in spite of all deficiencies, a remarkable and unique work.

After its completion Taine began to suffer the ill-effects of over-
exertion, in the form of total intellectual paralysis. For a considera-
ble time he was incapable of study, of writing, of concentrating his
thoughts ; even the reading of a newspaper was too much for him.
It was not till after a' long period of absolute rest from every kind
of intellectual effort that he recovered permanently. He afterwards
published Jean Graindorge ; or, Notes on Paris, a very amusing and
popular book satirising modern customs in the French capital ;

64 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

Universal Suffrage, a little brochure ; a French translation of the
English work, A Residence in France from 1792 till 1795; La
Raison (1870), two volumes in which he transfers his method to a
purely philosophical domain. In 1868 Taine married a daughter
of the rich merchant Denuelle ; since that event he spends the sum-
mer and autumn of every year at his country seat at Menthon, in
Savoy, the winter and spring in Paris. Just before the outbreak of the
last Franco-German war he travelled through Germany, apparently
with the intention of producing a work on that country, which, how-
ever, he did not do, perhaps in consequence of the hostile attitude
towards everything German which his countrymen assumed after
Sedan. He is a great admirer of German culture and literature, and
has read a good deal of German ; a large share of his intellectual
tendencies are rooted in German soil. In France, as Paul Janet
remarks, ' he generally passes for an interpreter of German ideas,
especially as a follower of Hegel and Spinoza.' He himself has no
objection to be called a Hegelian, though he stated some years ago,
in a private letter to me, that he owed his ideas specially to Montes-
quieu and Condillac. Hillebrand classes him as nearly allied intel-
lectually with Herder. In two points Taine bears a certain resem-
blance to Hegel ; over-haste in drawing conclusions, and fearlessness
in starting, combined with wit in maintaining, the most extravagant
assertions.

III.

The latest and also the most considerable work of our author is
Les origines de la France contemporaine. It certainly bristles
with all Taine's peculiarities, but with this difference, which we gladly
acknowledge, that in this case he applies his method with much
greater caution and moderation than hitherto, and consequently
stumbles into fewer hasty and illogical paradoxes and generalisa-
tions than on former occasions. This is a great advantage, and adds
to the charm which we find in the book.

Taine is first and foremost a psychologist and historian of civili-
sation, or we may say a psychological historian of civilisation. He
dissects English literature in order to lay open the essence of contem-
porary English society. He writes the social history of France with the
object of deducing from it the essential character of contemporary
France. The first section of the comprehensive work now before us
issued from the press in the beginning of 1876. The first volume
of the second section happened to appear shortly before the centen-
ary of the death of the sponsors of the great Revolution — Voltaire
and Rousseau — therefore immediately before the appearance of Renan's
Caliban (1878), which is neither more nor less than a treatment of
the same theme in the same sense, only in a dramatic, poetic form,
instead of that of dry analysis. The second part of the second section
appeared in 1882, the third in January 18H5.

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 65

It may be said generally that in this work Taine allows himself
to be guided chiefly by an accurate study of facts. He plods with
incredible patience through archives and libraries, deeds, reports,
correspondences, and memoirs. His work is strong, solid, and trust-
worthy, so far as the term is applicable in speaking of historical
research, because it is eminently conscientious and founded on well-
authenticated contemporary records. As soon as we open the first
volume (P re-revolutionary France, or ISancien regime} we observe
at the first glance what a difference lies between the manner in which
Taine regards and handles these themes, and the way in which they
have been treated by Carlyle, Thiers, Mignet, Louis Blanc, Michelet,
and others. The most striking circumstance is that Taine has no
political sympathies or antipathies whatever. Facts are more impor-
tant to him than theories. Instead of attaching himself to a party,
his chief concern is to fathom the causes of events, to inquire into
their connection with other events, and to reveal the results arising
out of them.

A. de Tocqueville in his valuable work L'ancien regime et la
Revolution has treated the very same subject as Taine. But there
is no kind of similarity between the methods of treatment followed
by the two authors, although both occasionally arrive at the same
conclusions. Taine cannot be denied the merit of being more original
than most other modern authors. His style here is as brilliant and
pithy as in any of his works. Tocqueville's dry facts become in his
hands living and real. In the arrangement of his material Taine is
immeasurably superior to his famous predecessor, whom, however, he
highly esteems and frequently quotes. In contradistinction to Tocque-
ville, Taine divides his subject-matter into compact, well marked-off
sections, thus securing an exactitude and clearness which afford great
help to the reader. On the other hand, he is inferior to Tocqueville
in the point of discretion in the choice of citations and in loftiness of
reflection. He often loses freedom of vision in his attention
to detail, and thus fails to command a large horizon and large
fields of view. He forgets Michelet's warning that the micro-
scope may become a snare to the writer of history — « It is only too
easy to mistake low mosses and fungi for high woods, or insects
for giants.'

The author of the Origines de la France contemporaine has his
own Ariadne clue through the labyrinth of controversy on the ques-
tion of the great Revolution. He holds that no nation can attain to
a stable form of government if it entirely detaches itself from the
past, neglects the problem set before it by history, founds a constitu-
tion upon theories, and in its experiments treats men as if they were
the pawns on a chess-board. He says that modern France, instead of
being governed according to its natural requirements, has constantly
been supplied with alien and artificial constitutions. ' The coat is
VOL. XX.— No. 113. F

.66 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

not fitted to the man, but the man must accommodate himself to the
coat.' Naturally the man is uneasy under these circumstances.
Abbe Sieyes said he would undertake to draw up a constitution with-
out knowing anything of the country beforehand, and Rousseau's
Contrat Social bears witness to a thorough ignorance of history and
its lessons. Taine cannot reconcile himself to such ' constitution-
mongers,' and insists that the framing of a constitution must be
preceded by an intimate familiarity with the character of the people
for whom it is designed. For this purpose the study of the past is
indispensable.

In the first section of the Origines Taine introduces us to French
society, as it was immediately before 1789. He shows that the edifice
of the State, which had been maintained at such enormous expense,
was so shaken to the very foundation that it could not but fall. The
representative of the pre-revolutionary regime was the absolute mon-
arch surrounded by a privileged class. One half of this class belonged
to the ecclesiastical order. The manner in which the latter came
into possession of its privileges is set forth with lucidity. At a time
when society in France was disintegrated and brute force prevailed,
Christian priests taught their religion and founded the Church.
They terrified barbarous warriors with vividly drawn pictures of
future torments, and threatened with the horrors of hell all who
refused obedience to the Divine commands, while the faithful were to
be rewarded with eternal bliss in heaven. Other priests cultivated
the ground, and taught the people improved modes of agriculture.
The monks showed a perseverance and industry which could not
fail to bring success, and which gave them an actual superiority over
others. It was only natural that the priests who won rich harvests
from the soil and the priests who were the spiritual guides of the
leaders in war, should soon become powerful, honoured, and wealthy.
They deserved the position which they had gained, for they were bene-
factors to the people ; their successors, however, the inheritors of their
brilliant position in society, became unworthy of it, but unfortunately
without forfeiting it. The same holds good of the other half of the
privileged class — the nobles. They also began by being benefactors
of a people deficient in natural leaders. A man, stronger than the
rest, built himself a castle and enforced peace and quiet in the terri-
tory which he was pleased to call his own. Peasant and merchant
found protection from robbers under the shadow of the castle walls ;
the lord levied a tax upon them for his own subsistence, but they
paid it willingly, coming off cheaper after all than if they had been
plundered, and being secure of protection besides. This was the origin of
feudal rights, which the feudal lords transmitted to their descendants.
In the same manner in which the nobility acquired lordship over
small districts, the power of a king de^jeloped till he became lord
over all France. He again exercised the right of the stronger, till in

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 67

course of time he was acknowledged to be absolute master of the
nobility and the peasant class. His claim was enforced by the
declarations of the mediaeval doctors of law that the king was the
only representative of the nation, and by those of the theologians
that he was consecrated and crowned by * the grace of Grod.' Taine
paints in glowing colours the privileged classes in the days of their
glory ; the time when the feudal lords ceased to be men of the people
and became courtiers after a long struggle against the tyranny of the
crown ; the time when they enjoyed all their hereditary privileges
without rendering the former counter-services to their vassals, when
they even forsook their feudal castles and crowded to Versailles to
swell the train of the monarch.

Taine judges and illustrates the spirit of the eighteenth century
in a masterly manner ; he develops clearly and criticises ably the
theories of Rousseau and Voltaire. The most remarkable chapters
are those on the condition of the people towards the close of the
ancien regime ; this portion of the book is at once the saddest and
the most interestingly written. Weighed down by taxation, in
danger of imprisonment for every slight offence, dying of hunger
in consequence of bad harvests, Taine calculates that from 1672 to
1715 about one-third of the poor people died of hunger; the < tiers
etat ' had no other consolation than the very dubious one that * all
would be better if only the truth could reach the king's ears.' The
peasants led a life not a whit removed from that of the lower animals.
It is, therefore, no wonder that they behaved like wild beasts when
their turn of power came ; that they held the 4 rights of man ' to be
identical with the right to murder and to rob, and brought back the
savage condition of the fourth century.

The first section shows us, then, how and from what causes the.
Revolution originated ; it was inevitable, and inevitable also was its
violence and fury. * In ten years revenge was taken for thirteen
centuries of sufferings, humiliations, and nameless cruelties.'

The delineation of this violence and rage of the Revolution forms
the subject of the three volumes of the second section. From a
purely literary point of view this differs considerably from the first.
Whereas L'ancien regime contains many artistic brilliant descriptions
of the Salon life, of the Court, of the so-called French ' classicism,'
of the customs of the time, &c., which, apart from the psychological
and historical interest of the book, afford most interesting and
stimulating reading, all this is absent in La Revolution ; this section
is veritably dry — i.e. purely scientific and analytical ; bare facts are
recorded in it and knit together by philosophico-psychological com-
ments strictly pertinent to the subject in hand. We do not miss the
long spun-out metaphors and the like which stamp Taine's literary
style with so unique a character ; but not much actual description
is to be found ; on the contrary, the author often oppresses us with

F2

68 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

the weight of his evidence ; the excessive multiplication of minute
details — however valuable they may be for his purpose — becomes
wearisome at last. His study of original sources is here more
thorough, more careful, and more comprehensive than ever. His
judgments betoken such practical wisdom and sound common sense
as is rarely found in abstract thinkers like Taine — more especially in
those who, like Taine, have never taken an active share in politics.

It is almost impossible for one who has not lived in France, and
does not know what an enthusiastic veneration most Frenchmen —
above all most French writers — cherish for the Eevolution of 1789,
to realise what courage it requires to raise one's voice against it ; and
this is what Taine does. He dares to confess that he has arrived at
the same conclusions as Burke ; he dares, through many stout volumes,
to give in his adhesion to Burke's views on the great Kevolution ; he
dares to pronounce Burke's Reflections, which Michelet called a
* miserable piece of declamation,' ' a masterpiece and a prophecy.'
What daring ! Who could have expected it from an author avowedly
liberal, equally denounced by the reactionary party and the clericals ?
Only one who has kept himself immaculate, who enjoys such a repu-
tation for political impartiality, scientific accuracy, and literary con-
scientiousness, only one who stands so absolutely independent as a
man, a thinker, and an investigator as Taine does, can venture to
permit himself such heresy without incurring grave suspicions on
the part of liberally minded people. He is certainly no Le Maistre,
but a man of the modern type, with a leaning to positivism, an open
enemy of positive religions.

And this man (remarks Karl Hillebrand) declares the great Revolution to be
a group of historical facts, in which evil passions, senseless notions, and purposeless
actions far outweigh noble-mindedness, depth, and common sense. If up to this
time modern men blamed the Revolution, it was only the Convention, whose-
terrorism and enactments they painted in dark colours, in order to place the year
1789 and the Constituent Assembly in a favourable light. But now Taine comes
forward, throws to the winds all that thousands before him, and side by side with
him, have maintained, and says, ' I determined to institute my own researches,
instead of consulting historians; I determined to obtain my information from un-
prejudiced eye-witnesses, and I have come to the conviction that the chief calamity
dates not from 1792 but from 1789.'

The results of his investigations are expressed more clearly in the
following passage : —

During the three years subsequent to the storming of the Bastille, France offers
us a singular spectacle ; in the speeches of orators reign the purest humanity, in
the laws the fairest symmetry, but in deeds the most savage roughness, in affairs
the direst confusion. Surveyed from a distance this system seems to be the triumph
of philosophy ; closely inspected, it unmasks itself as a Carlovingian anarchy.

He speaks of the street mob giving itself the airs of the < sovereign
nation ' with a contempt and in language which unconsciously remind

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 69

us of Shakespeare's ' Coriolanus.' He compares * le peuple-roi ' and
its rule with Milton's hell-monsters : —

Black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
And shook a dreadful dart ; what seemed his head,
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

In short, he shatters the ideal of his compatriots in the most
•cruel and reckless fashion, and does not leave the Revolution a leg
to stand on.

That Taine, despite his well-known antecedents, could come to
such conclusions, can only be explained by what we may call his
boundless impartiality. He is so free from bias, and forgets himself
so completely in the handling of his subject, that many a reader,
taking up La Revolution, without any previous acquaintance with
his method and his earlier writings, would take him for a Conserva-
tive ; while there are some passages which, severed from the context,
might mislead a superficial reader of reviews into the supposition
that he was even a reactionary. In truth there can be no question here
of tendency in one direction or another. Taine is, as he always has
been, without political bias, but he is sufficiently free from prejudice
to desire a good government for his country ; and as his investigations
have convinced him — not in accordance with his inclinations, but in
defiance of them — that France was ill governed under the Revolution,
he makes no secret of his conviction. He quite sees how desirable it
was that the miserable state of things under the ancien regime should
be improved to the advantage of the people, but he fails to see this
•desirable improvement in the changes introduced in 1789 ; he even
considers that they made things worse. He looks upon the contrat
social as a very beautiful ideal, but sees the impossibility of its being
carried out in practical life, so long as men remain what they always
have been and still are. He proves himself through the whole course
of his attack upon the constitution of 1791 to be thoroughly ac-
quainted with human nature. To say that Taine wrote against the
Revolution in order to ensure his election to the Academy — as was
suggested by his recently deceased ' friend ' and schoolfellow, About —
is nonsense. Taine's impartiality and love of truth are evident and
indubitable to everyone who is familiar with his literary character on
one side, and on the other with the later literature of the Revolution.
The truth lies in the following words of Taine : ' J'ai trace le portrait
[of revolutionary France] sans me preoccuper de mes debats presents ;
j'ai ecrit comme si j'avais eu pour sujet les revolutions de Florence
ou d'Ath&nes. Ceci est de 1'histoire, rien de plus.' This may probably
prove unsatisfactory to some one-sided French Chauvinists. But the
•unbiassed foreigner — however radical his tendencies — is not obliged
to take umbrage at it, and he must be allowed to rejoice that there
are historians who deal with their subject as the anatomist with his,

70 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

using the dissecting-scalpel dispassionately. It does not follow that
such historians are infallible — nor do we endorse Taine's conclu-
sions as to the French^Revolution — but at least they are worthy of
more respect than the fanatical sort, or those who overcharge their
colouring.

Taine insists on justice above all and in all things, and it is all
the same to him whether it is violated towards the people or the
jdng, towards one rank or party or another. This standpoint is
certainly a noble, a truly liberal one, and hence it is that he, the
free-thinker, enters the lists for the clergy and the Church, for the
king and the nobility, wherever injustice is dealt out to any of these
powers. In the first volume he sets forth the encroachments of the
higher classes and the sufferings of the people. Why should he be
forbidden in the second to describe the encroachments of the people
and the injuries inflicted on the upper classes ? Doubtless his
speculations will be distasteful to theorists, and politicians will
condemn him for having no political views on points which usually
call forth party strife ; doubtless he refuses to allow either to monarchs
or to philosophers the right to rule despotically, to model the world
according to their respective fancies, and his impartiality may be
censured as lukewarmness by partisans, but it is precisely for these
very reasons that his book will awaken the interest and secure the
confidence of unprejudiced readers.

A definitive judgment must be deferred till the whole completed
work lies before us. The concluding volume may be expected in the
year 1887; it will treat of 'Post-revolutionary France' — i.e. the
various changes which have befallen Taine's fatherland during the
present century.

IV.

While discussing Taine's works individually, we have taken occa-
sion to explain his critical method ; let us now attempt a general
survey of this method as running through them all.

When we invite a critic to pass judgment on a book, a picture,
an author, a nation, a school of painting, a style of architecture, a
national literature — what course will lie pursue ? He will either
compare the object submitted to his criticism with a pattern of the
same nature held to be standard or classical, and pronounce it to be
good, very good, bad, very bad, second rate, &c., according as it
approaches the pattern or diverges from it more or less. Or else he
will estimate the worth of the object to be appraised according to
the personal impression which it has made on him — i.e. he will only
consult his own approval or disapproval. In the former case he is
in danger of blaming, in the latter of praising, extravagantly. Now
arise the questions how the person of the critic is to be kept apart
from his decisions, whether there is a third mode of criticism, and

1886 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 71

whether it is possible to attribute convincing force to a critical judg-
ment, instead of regarding it as an opinion or a view. In short, can
criticism be made an exact science with absolute and incontrovertible
conclusions ? One would suppose, considering what human nature
is, that an application of the critical faculty in a uniformly
mechanical manner, without any regard to the individual feelings of
the critic, was an impossibility. But Taine thinks otherwise. He
not only believes that this apparently incredible feat can be per-
formed, but even thinks that the results of criticism may be as cer-
tain as those of a mathematical problem. And how is this mighty
end to be attained ? All we have to do — suppose that it is an author
who is the subject of criticism — after having read through his works,
is to draw up three groups of questions :

(a) Where was the man born? Who were his parents and
ancestors ? What were the root ideas of his race ?

(6) Under what conditions and circumstances was he educated ?
What position did he hold in society ? To what influences was he
exposed ? How did the spirit of the age affect him ?

(c) What were the peculiarities and tendencies of his time, and
how did they manifest themselves ?

Having obtained certainty on all these points (as if that were so
easy !) we shall find the faculte maitresse of the intellect of the
author, the fundamental quality which underlies his capabilities and
gives them their peculiar direction, and which, therefore, supplies the
key for a definitive adjudication of his merits.

Let us take for example Milton's Paradise Lost. Addison, a
critic coming under the first category of those mentioned above,
compares Milton's verse with the requirements of Aristotle, and
finds that it so answers to them, that this epic is worthy of the
highest commendation. Macaulay, a critic of the other category,
does not undertake an exact or detailed criticism ; he gives glowing
praise to the richness of the imagery, the diction, and versification ;
he is enchanted with the poem, and his judgment is in unison with
the favourable impression which it has made on him. And now,
how does Taine proceed ? After having by the application of his
method answered his three test-questions — 'Eace, period of time,
surrounding circumstances' — and having thence deduced that Milton's
faculte maitresse is ' the sense of the sublime,' he seeks to prove by
examples how this quality finds expression in his life and works.
Milton is compared with Shakespeare as a poet; the difference
between the two is said to be that Shakespeare is the poet of
impulse, Milton of reason. Then Taine goes on to point out, as a
consequence of this assumed fact, that Milton's prose writings and
minor poems are admirable, whereas the Paradise Lost is a ' sublime
but incomplete ' poem, a series of reasonings alternating with beau-
tiful images. The leading personages, who were to bear the stamp of

72 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

their own individuality, are said to be impersonations of contem-
poraries ; God and the first human pair are transformed into orthodox
persons. The genius of the poet, he says, stands out only when he
describes monsters and landscapes, or speaks through the mouth of
Satan in the tone of a stern republican. If we look closely into the
question, we shall find Taine's mode of criticism quite as subjective
as Macaulay's. Only the latter confesses his criticism to be sub-
jective, whereas Taine holds his to be objective, which, however, it is
only in the sense of ' impartial,' and not in the sense of ' unprejudiced'
or of * scientifically incontrovertible.'

Were Taine's method really perfect, objective, and infallible,
it would necessarily yield the same results in the hands of others
as in his own ; as in the case of the exact sciences, all difference
of opinion would be at an end. But in reality another, armed
with Taine's capability of analysis, his keen critical faculty, his
comprehensive knowledge, and his charming and effective style,
might with the very same method consistently obtain quite opposite
results. Taine frequently delights to compare himself to the anato-
mist wielding the scalpel, to the botanist, or the zoologist. But in
the first place these men of science, when they institute their re-
searches, lay aside all human passions, personal predilections, national
prejudices, and individual feelings, whereas the critic who can divest
himself of all these things in pronouncing judgment is not yet born,
and is not likely ever to be born, so long as men remain only human.
And, secondly, the anatomist, the zoologist, the botanist can actually
make good what he demonstrates in concrete form, for he has the
objects bodily before him, while the critic who has to deal with
abstract conceptions — such as beauty, goodness, &c. — can only con-
jecture or surmise, as conceptions are almost always open to various
interpretations. Taine's critical method is then not a science, his
conclusions are not proofs, they are, on the contrary, often fallacious.
Nevertheless his process has, as we have already remarked, the advan-
tage of enhancing the reliability of criticism by continuous grouping
of facts and constant endeavour to obtain certainty.

On the other hand, this virtue is apt to degenerate into a fault.
The effort to prove too much frequently misleads Taine to wander
into false paths. He eagerly sweeps along all that serves his purposes,
and thus not infrequently falls into self-contradiction. It happens
sometimes that he brings forward the same evidence to confirm one
assertion, at another time a quite opposite one. By high-sounding
generalisations he magnifies phenomena and occurrences, which appear
to anyone else quite harmless or unimportant, into weighty and por-
tentous records. He ascribes much too great and wide-reaching an
influence to his three forces or ' surrounding circumstances.' However
much, as everyone must admit, this influence of race, of sphere, and
of the spirit of the age may operate on the life and the activity of

1836 TAINE: A LITERARY PORTRAIT. 73

the man, we cannot go so far as to assume that it alone moulds
individuality. If so, how does it happen that brothers and sisters
can be so unlike one another ? Taine is too inductive by half. He
appears to set about his reading with all his preconceived theories
and foregone conclusions mustered before him, and to note all that
seems to .him to confirm them, while he ignores all that tells against
them. But this is the direct opposite of objectivity, which can only
be approached by the deductive process.

But however far we may be from finding ourselves on the whole
in harmony with Taine the philosopher, or rather the anatomist, we
must adjudge the highest praise to Taine the writer, the artist. In
the former capacity he is, as Zola aptly remarks, a ' thought-mathe-
matician,' a systematician, a slave to the consistent application of
his own theories ; and the reading of his works often conveys the im-
pression that we are attending the lectures of a professor of geometry.
This side of his nature is the result of his erudition, it is not the
side from which we can fairly judge our author. The real Taine
must be sought in the other direction — in his style, his pictures, his
descriptions, his narrations. The merits which he unfolds here are
his own, and are not due to study. The poet Taine, the man of flesh
and blood, is far preferable to the cold mechanician Taine. Stripped
of the * method,' his writings would be all the more beautiful ; indeed,
this method would play but a miserable part in the hands of a less
skilful and gifted writer ; it is only Taine's style that holds it above
water. In this clear, trenchant, vivid, glowing, luxuriant style stands
revealed, as Zola says in Mes Haines, ' the prodigality and love of
splendour which characterise a fine gentleman.' This style is de-
liberately unequal and unpolished, in order to produce the more
powerful effect. We see that nothing is undesigned, that the author
has his pen well in hand. It possesses all the glow and inspiration
of fancy, though fettered by a ' method ' which directly tends to the
suppression of fancy. His highly finished diction always accommo-
dates itself to the subject under discussion. Apart from the too
frequent heaping up of epithets and metaphors a la Shakespeare,
Spenser, Milton, and Bunyan, we are as much surprised by their
suitability as by the ease with which they flow from his pen. This
is attributable in great measure to the amount of reading, in which
he rivals Macaulay, and the assimilatory power of his memory, akin
to that of Buckle. His method is mechanical, analytical ; his literary
individuality, on the other hand, synthetic in its character. Karl
Hillebrand says very gracefully in his Profiles — ' In Taine philosophy
is only the frame in which the . . . always lifelike pictures of times
and men are set. It is a pity that in the artist's eyes the frame is
more important than the picture, that the latter seems to exist only
for the sake of the frame.' It is no exaggeration to call Taine an
artist in style.

LEOPOLD KATSCHER.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA.

IF we consider Australia as a continent, New Guinea, or Papua as it is
better to call it, is the largest island in the world. It lies outstretched
across the northern frontier of Australia, between 130° and 150°
East longitude, and reaches from near the Equator to about 12°
South latitude. By recent computations it is estimated to contain
an area of about 306,000 square miles — that is, as much as England and
France put together. In striking contrast to the parched-up plains of
Australia, New Guinea is traversed throughout by ranges of lofty
mountains, whence flowing and abundant rivers find their way into the
surrounding ocean. It is consequently covered by a luxuriant vegetation ;
and although large districts are low and swampy, there can be no doubt
that the uplands will eventually be found to supply large areas of
fertile land suitable for European colonisation.

For reasons that I shall presently enter upon, Papua is of special
interest to the naturalist, and, more than one fourth of its vast area
having now definitely passed under the sovereignty of Great Britain, a
sketch of its fauna, so far as this is known to us, will probably be
the more acceptable to English readers. Before, however, I enter
upon a discussion of the animals of New Guinea, I propose to give a
short account of the principal scientific expeditions whereby our present
knowledge of its fauna has been obtained.

The period and merit of the actual discovery of New Guinea are,
like many other events of the same nature, a matter of dispute between
the earlier Portuguese and Spanish navigators.1 But the first naturalist
who has given us any particulars as to its fauna is undoubtedly
Sonnerat,2 a Frenchman. It is, however, doubtful, to say the least,
whether Sonnerat ever himself landed on the mainland of New
Guinea, and it is even affirmed that he advanced only as far as the
Papuan island of Guebe, or the adjoining island of Waigion. Here
he may have obtained from native traders the skins of the Paradise
birds and other undoubtedly Papuan species, which he subsequently
figured and described in his Voyage a la Nouvelle Guinee.

Passing by Carteret and Bougainville, who in 1767 and 1768
touched at certain points on the north coast, we come to our

1 Antonio de Abreu in 1511, and Alvaro de Saavedra in 1528.

2 Voyage a la Nouvelle Guinee 2 vols. Paris, 1776.

1886 THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 75

countryman Forrest, who, so far as we know, was the first discoverer
in 1774 of the afterwards celebrated 'Havre Dorey ' in the bay of
Geelvink, so called after the Dutch ship (' Geelvink '= Yellow-finch ')
by which it was first entered. At Havre Dorey in 1824, scientific
naturalists of the present epoch first put their feet on Papuan soil.
From the 26th -of July to the 9th of August of that year, the French
discovery-ship ' La Coquille ' remained at anchor at this well-known
harbour in the bay of Geelvink. The celebrated naturalist, Lesson,
was attached to the expedition, with his companion Garnot. During
their twelve days' stay examples of many new Papuan animals were
procured, and afterwards described in their joint work on the Zoology
of the voyage of the ' Coquille.' 3 M. Lesson's "other works, his
Traite and Manuel d'Ornithologie and Histoire des Paradisiers, like-
wise contain many interesting notices arising from observations made
on this occasion.

Three years later, in 1827, a second French discovery-ship, the
4 Astrolabe,' under the command of Dumont d'Urville, passed another
twelve days in the same place. The additional animals obtained
on this occasion were afterwards described and figured in the Zoology
of the voyage of the < Astrolabe.' 4

The next event to be recorded in the scientific history of Papua
sprang from the energy of a different people. A few months after the
visit of the 'Astrolabe' to Havre Dorey, in the beginning of 1828,
the Government of the Netherlands sent the corvette ' Triton ' and
schooner * Iris ' from Batavia to found a permanent settlement on the
coast of New Guinea. The expedition had on board a royal com-
missioner and several other members of the scientific expedition
which was then engaged in the exploration of the Dutch possessions
in the East Indies. They first traversed the Dourga Strait on the
southern coast, and, thence returning northwards, discovered in the
district called Lobo what they describe as a deep and spacious bay,
shut in by elevated land, and of a picturesque aspect. Here they
constructed a fort, and, on the 24th of August 1828, took formal pos-
session of the whole coast with the usual solemnities in the name of
the King of the Netherlands. The bay was named ' Triton's Bay,'
and the strait leading to it ' Iris Strait,' to commemorate the names
of the two vessels. After several years' occupation ' Fort Dubus ' was
evacuated (about 1835) on account of the unhealthiness of the
locality, and is now said to be in ruins. But the two naturalists,
Macklot and Miiller, were by no means idle during their stay, and it
was to their energy that the National Museum of Leyden is mainly

3 Voyage autour du Monde, execute par ordre du Roi sur la corvette de sa Majeste
la Coquille, Sfc. Zoologie, par MM. Lesson et Garnot. Paris, 1826.

4 Voyage de dccouvertes de V Astrolabe, execute par ordre du Roi pendant les
annees 1826-29, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont d'Urville. Zoologie, par
MM. Quoy et Gaimard. Paris, 1830.

76 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

indebted for a splendid series of Papuan animals which remained
for many years unrivalled in Europe. It is much to be regretted
that no complete account has ever been given of the discoveries of
Macklot and Miiller. In the magnificent work in which the labours
of the Eoyal Scientific Commission were reported,5 it is stated that
examples of 119 species of birds were obtained in New Guinea, but
no complete list is added of them, though several important mono-
graphs are given on various groups of Papuan animals, and many
new species are shortly described in footnotes attached to the Ethno-
graphical volume of the series.

In 1839 again a French discovery-ship touched at Triton's Bay
and other spots on the south-west coast of New Guinea. This was
the 'Astrolabe,' under her former commander M. Dumont d'Urville,
on her way to the Antarctic seas. Messrs. Hombron and Jacquinot,
the naturalists of this celebrated expedition, commonly known as the
1 Voyage au Pole Sud,' made on this occasion several additions to our
knowledge of Papuan animals, which were described in the subse-
quently published account of the Zoology of the voyage.6

In 1842 H.M.S. < Fly,' under the command of Captain Blackwood,
made a survey of about 140 miles of the southern coast of New
Guinea bordering on Torres Straits, and discovered the mouths of the
' Fly ' river afterwards ascended by D'Albertis. The well-known natu-
ralist Jukes was on board the ' Fly,' 7 and made considerable collections
in natural history, which were deposited in the British Museum.

The l Fly ' was succeeded in Torres Straits by the still more im-
portant surveying expedition of the ' Kattlesnake,' under Captain
Owen Stanley, which left England in 1846. During this expedition,
which lasted until Captain Stanley's death at Sydney in 1850, the

1 Owen Stanley ' range of mountains!, several of the summits of which
exceed 10,000 feet in altitude, was discovered, and the heights of the
more important peaks were determined. John Macgillivray was the
naturalist, and wrote the subsequently issued narrative of the expedi-
tion.8 The collections were sent to the British Museum.

We now come to 1858, in which year, on the llth of April, our
well-known countryman, Mr. A. K. Wallace, was landed by a Dutch
trading vessel at Havre Dorey 9 for a three months' sojourn in this
famous spot. Mr. Wallace, however, emphatically asserts that Havre
Dorey is * not a good collecting station for the naturalist.' The

5 Verliandelingen ocer de Natuurlyke Gesch'wdenis der Nederlandsc-Jie overzeesche
Bezittingen, $c., uitgegeven door C. J. Temminck. Leyden, 1839-1844.

6 Voyage au Pole. Sud et dans V Oceanic sur les Corvettes V Astrolabe et la Zelee,
sous le comrtiandement de M. Dumont d'Urville. Zoologie. Paris, 1812-53.

7 See his Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of Jf.M.S. Fly, 2 vols. London,
1847.

8 Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Jlattlesnake, Sfc. By John Macgillivray

2 vols. London, 1852.

9 See Mr. Wallace's Malay Archipelago (London, 1869), vol. ii. ch. xxxiv.

1886 THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 77

ground is low and swampy, birds and butterflies are scarce, and even
inferior objects of scientific interest are not too abundant. Mr.
Wallace sums up his experiences at Havre Dorey in the following
pregnant passage : —

On the 22nd of July the schooner ' Hester Helena ' arrived, and five days after-
wards we bade adieu to Dorey, without much regret, for in no place which I have
visited have I encountered more privations and annoyances. Continual rain, con-
tinual sickness, little wholesome food, with a plague of ants and flies, surpassing
anything I had before met with, required all a naturalist's ardour to encounter ;
and when they were uncompensated by great success in collecting, became all the
more insupportable. This long-thought-of and much-desired voyage to New Guinea
had realised none of my expectations. Instead of being far better than the Aru
Islands, it was in almost everything much worse. Instead of producing several of
the rarer Paradise birds, I had not even seen one of them, and had not obtained one
superlatively fine bird or insect. I cannot deny, however, that Dorey was very
rich in ants. One small black kind was excessively abundant. Almost every
shrub and tree was more or less infested with it, and its large papery nests were
everywhere to be seen. They immediately took possession of my house, building-
a large nest in the roof, and forming papery tunnels down almost every post. They
swarmed on my table as I was at work setting out my insects, carrying them off
from under my very nose, and even tearing them from the cards on which they
were gummed, if I left them for an instant. They crawled continually over my
hands and face, got into my hair, and roamed at will over my whole body, not
producing much inconvenience till they began to bite, which they would do on
meeting with any obstruction to their passage, and with a sharpness which made
me jump again and rush off to undress and turn out the offender. They visited my
bed also, so that night brought no relief from their persecutions ; and I verily
believe that during my three and a half months' residence at Dorey I was never for
a single hour free from them. They were not nearly so voracious as many other
kinds, but their numbers and ubiquity rendered it necessary to be constantly on
guard against them.

The flies that troubled me most were a large kind of blue-bottle or blow-fly.
These settled in swarms on my birdskins when first put out to dry, filling their
plumage with masses of eggs, which, if neglected, the next day produced maggots.
They would get under the wings or under the body where it rested on the drying-
board, sometimes actually raising it up half an inch by the mass of eggs deposited
in a few hours ; and every egg was so firmly glued to the fibres of the feathers as
to make it a work of much time and patience to get them oft" without injuring the
bird. In no other locality have I ever been troubled with such a plague as this.

We shall, however, see that subsequent explorers, who were able to
penetrate further into the interior, give by no means so unfavourable
an account of this district.

Dr. H. A. Bernstein, a well-known German naturalist, visited New
Guinea in 1863 and the following year, and collected for the Leyden
Museum on the north coast and in the islands adjoining the western
extremity.10 Dr. Bernstein died at Batanta in 1865.

C. H. B. von Bosenberg, who succeeded Bernstein, was long in
the service of the Government of the Netherlands, and besides minor
excursions to New Guinea made a prolonged exploration of the bay

10 See Tijdsehrift v. Intl. Taal-, Land-, en VolkenTtunde, vols. xiv. and xvii. (1864
and 1869).

78 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

of Geelvink in 1869-70, of which he has published an interesting
account.11 To Bernstein and Von Kosenberg the Leyden Museum
is indebted for a large number of most valuable zoological specimens
from New Guinea.

A few years later two travellers from another European nation,
which had not previously interested itself in the exploration of this
distant land, appeared on the scene, and achieved undoubted success.
Signer L. M. d'Albertis, of Genoa, left Italy in 1872, in company with
the distinguished traveller and botanist, Dr. Beccari. In the following
year, after visiting several points on the southern and western coasts
of New Guinea, the travellers finally fixed their quarters at the village
of Andai, situated a little inland from Havre Dorey. Hence in
November 1872 D'Albertis succeeded in ascending the slopes of
Mount Arfak, which rises above the low-lying shore to a height, it is
said, of some 10,000 feet. D'Albertis's furthest point was the village
of Hatam, about 3,500 feet above the sea-level, and in the midst of
the forests inhabited by the finest and rarest Birds of Paradise. On
the 9th of September 1872, the very day after his arrival at Hatam,
D'Albertis succeeded in shooting specimens of both the Shielded and
Six-shafted Birds of Paradise, and shortly afterwards obtained examples
of a new and ^beautiful species, remarkable for its curved bill, which
was subsequently named, after its discoverer, Drepanomis Albertisi,
besides many other zoological novelties of all kinds.

Three years subsequently Mount Arfak was again ascended to a
height of 6,700 feet by Dr. Beccari, and upon this occasion again
large collections in zoology and botany 12 were made, and the singular
playing places made by the Gardener Bower-bird (Amblyornis
inornata) 13 were discovered and described.

Signer d'Albertis returned to Europe in 1874, but left again at
the close of the same year with the intention of exploring the
southern portion of New Guinea. In March of the following year
he settled in Yule Island, on the southern shore of the south-western
peninsula, and resided there some six months, making large collec-
tions in natural history, but not succeeding in reaching even to the
foot of the range of lofty mountains which towered above him.

Signor d'Albertis afterwards made three successive voyages up
the Fly Eiver, the first in the mission steamer ' Elian Gowan,' and
the two others in the ' Neva,' a small steam launch lent to him by
the Governor of New South Wales. In the second of these voyages
(in 1876) D'Albertis penetrated far into the centre of the great

11 Reistockten naar de Geelririkbaai op Nien-Guinea in dc jaren 1869 en 1870,
door C. B. H. von Rosenberg. The Hague, 1875.

12 Dr. Beccari's Malesia (Genoa, 1877-84), published in fascicules, contains an
account of his principal botanical discoveries.

11 See Gould's Birds of Ne'fc Guinea, pt. ix., for a figure of this remarkable bird
and its playing place.

1886 THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 79

southern mass of New Guinea, and reached a hilly country, but only
succeeded in getting a few glimpses of the great central range, which
he named, as in duty bound, the Victor Emmanuel Mountains, after
the then reigning King of Italy.14

While these expeditions were proceeding in the south, another
traveller from Europe was again attacking the northern peninsula of
New Guinea.

In March 1873 Dr. A. B. Meyer, now director of the Museum of
Dresden, who was at that time travelling in the East Indies, arrived
at Dorey and spent some months at that station and at other points
in the bay of Geelvink and its various islands. Dr. Meyer, according
to his own narrative,15 succeeded in crossing the mainland of New
Guinea from the shores of the bay of Geelvink, over a mountain chain
of some 2,000 feet in altitude, to the head of McCluer Inlet on the
west coast — a feat previously unaccomplished. Dr. Meyer also made
large collections of natural history, and added much to our know-
ledge of the Papuan fauna.

Keturning to the southern coast, we find that Captain Moresby's
surveys of the south-eastern extremity of New Guinea in 1873 and
1874 in H.M.S. ' Basilisk ' added vastly to our knowledge of the correct
outline of this peninsula. Captain Moresby showed that the extreme
point of New Guinea in this direction terminates in a huge fork, the
lower prong of which ends in an archipelago of islands. Between
these new islands and the projection formed by the northern penin-
sula lies a magnificent sheet of water forty-five miles long, which
Captain Moresby named Milne Bay,16 while the new and convenient
passage thus discovered round the south-eastern extremity of New
Guinea is designated ' China Straits.' Dr. Comrie, the medical
officer of the * Basilisk ' under Captain Moresby, made considerable
zoological collections, amongst which were a new Paradise-bird and
other novelties.17

In February 1875, the ' Challenger ' passed along the northern
coast of New Guinea and made an attempt to visit Humboldt's Bay,
which was frustrated by the hostility of the natives, so that very few
specimens of natural history were obtained.18 But Humboldt's Bay
had been previously visited successfully by the Dutch on more than
one occasion.

Beginning in 1875, numerous expeditions were sent out from

14 For a full account of D'Albertis's various expeditions see Nieiv Guinea : what I
did and what I saw. By L. M. d'Albertis. 2 vols. London, 1880.

15 See ' Dr. Meyer's Expedition to New Guinea," Nature, vol. ix. p. 77.

18 See Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and the I)' Entrecasteaux Islands,
$c. By Captain J. Moresby, E.N. London, 1876.

17 See article ' on the birds collected by Dr. Comrie,' by P. L. Sclater, P. Z, S.
1876, p. 459.

18 See Narrative of the Voyage of the Challenger, vol. i, p. 681 (1885).

80 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

Sydney to the Torres Straits and the southern peninsula of New
Guinea.

The most noticeable of these, from a scientific point of view, was that
of Mr. William Macleay in the 'Chevert' in 1875. Mr. Macleay took
with him two other naturalists, Mr. Masters and Mr. Brazier, and
two well-known Sydney collectors, Messrs. Spalding and Pettard, and
was absent five months. Large collections were made in every
branch of zoology, and the results have been published in the Journal
of the Linnean Society of New South Wales.19 of which society Mr.
Macleay is the president. This part of New Guinea has been also for
some time a field of missionary enterprise. In 1871 a mission was
first established at Darnley Island in Torres Straits, and branches were
subsequently sent out to Redscar Bay and Port Moresby. In 1874
the Rev. W. G. Lawes, who has made valuable collections in several
branches of natural history, took charge of the last-named station.
Missions have been likewise established as far west as the mouths of
the Fly River, and at various other intermediate points. By the aid
of the missionaries several energetic collectors from Sydney have
obtained access to the interior of this part of the island, and have
thrown considerable light on its fauna and flora. Amongst these I
may specially mention the names of Dr. James (who was killed by
the natives at Hall Sound in 1876), Mr. Broadbent, Mr. Goldie, and
Mr. Huntstein. The collections of birds thus formed have been
described partly by Mr. R. B. Sharpe in the Journal of the Linnean
Society of London, and partly by Mr. E. P. Ramsay and other natu-
ralists in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales.

But we must not close the list of scientific explorers of New
Guinea without alluding to the name of the intrepid Russian
traveller, Nicholaieff Miklucho-Maclay, who has made three or four
expeditions to different portions of the coast in search of anthropo-
logical information. Mr. Miklucho-Maclay's first point was on the
north-eastern coast, near Astrolabe Bay, or what is now called the
'Maclay Coast,' where he resided alone amongst the natives for
fifteen months. In 1873 he visited the south-western coast of New
Guinea at a place called Papua-Koviay, situated somewhere near
Triton's Bay, and again stayed among the natives for several months.
In 1876 Maclay returned to the north-eastern coast and made a
second stay of seventeen months amongst his former friends. Besides
these long visits, two other shorter excursions were made by this
energetic traveller to New Guinea. It is a great pity that no con-
nected account of his travels has as yet been published.

Finally, a few words may be said about the recent annexation of a
large slice of New Guinea to the British Empire. In April 1883 Mr.
H. M. Chester, the police magistrate on Thursday Island in Torres

19 See Journ. Linn. Soc. ]\r. S. Wales, vol. \. p. 36, for a general account of the
expedition, and that and succeeding volumes for other papers.

THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 81

Straits, acting under instructions from the Government of Queens-
land, took formal possession of all New Guinea and its islands lying
west of the 141st meridian, the supposed limit of the portion claimed
by the Government of the Netherlands. This act was disapproved of
by the Home Government, but, after various negotiations with the
Australian colonies, on the 6th of November 1884 a British protec-
torate was proclaimed over the southern coast of New Guinea by the
commodore of the Australian Station, and shortly afterwards Major-
General (afterwards Sir Peter) Scratchley was appointed special
Commissioner for the Government of the new Protectorate. At the
close of the last year the German Government took similar steps on
the northern coast of this portion of New Guinea and the adjacent
islands, Dr. Otto Finsch, the well-known naturalist (who was already
well acquainted with this part of the world from his previous travels),
having been previously sent out by the Imperial Government as
special adviser on this subject. After much discussion between the
English and German Governments, the difficulty as to the limits of
the rival protectorates was finally settled by the division of New
Guinea west of 141° East longitude into two nearly equal portions,
of which the southern half was assigned to England, the northern
half to Germany. Germany, we are told, has already named her
newly acquired territory on the mainland ' King William's Land,'
and the adjacent islands the * Bismarck Islands.' I am not aware
that any name has yet been assigned by our Government to the por-
tion left to us by Prince Bismarck's politeness. But I venture to
suggest that 'Torresia' would be a much better name for the newly
acquired protectorate, bordered as it is on its southern frontier by
Torres Straits, than any such term as ' British New Guinea.'

Before discussing the results as to the zoology of New Guinea to
be arrived at from the information amassed by the explorers above
spoken of, and others which I have not had occasion to specify, let us
consider for a few minutes the general conformation of New Guinea.
It is an elongated piece of land stretching from north-west to south-
east through some twenty degrees of longitude. There can be little
doubt that a continuous chain of mountains, of varying altitudes
from 16,000 to 2,000 feet, traverses the interior throughout. In
the northern peninsula these are known as the ' Arfak mountains,'
and rise, it is said, to a height of 10,000 feet, though I am not
aware that this estimate is founded upon anything but guess-work.
These mountains have been partly ascended by D'Albertis and
Beccari, as already mentioned. Further south at the head of
McCluer's Inlet the range is stated to have been crossed by Dr.
Meyer at a height of about 2,000 feet. We then come to the southern
point of the great bay of Geelvink, where a series of altitudes along
the ' Charles Louis range ' have been approximately ascertained by the
Dutch. According to their reports the highest of these are covered
VOL. XX.— No. 113. G

82 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

by perpetual snow, and attain an elevation of over 16,000 feet. Passing
on to the interior of the main mass of New Guinea, what is probably
a continuation of the Charles Louis range was sighted by D'Albertis
at the highest point attained on the Fly River in 1876, and named
the ' Victor Emmanuel range.' This is again, no doubt, continuous
with the Owen Stanley range which traverses the south-eastern
peninsula, and of which Mount Owen Stanley (13,200 feet) is, so far
as is yet known, the highest summit.

Besides this principal chain several other ranges of mountains
occur in New Guinea. The whole northern coast from Point d'Urville
to Huon Gulf is bordered by mountains of considerable altitude,
which have been called the ' Cyclops ' range at their western end, and
the 'Finisterre' mountains, said to be about 10,000 feet in altitude,
and ' Rawlinson ' range, above Huon Gulf. In the peninsula of Onin
are also mountains at the back of Triton's Bay, but we have as yet
received but few particulars about them.

The principal river-basins of New Guinea, so far as they are known
to us, are those of the * Fly,' the ' Amberno,' and the ' Wa-Samson.'
The Fly River, which seems to drain the main mass of southern New
Guinea, rises no doubt in the Victor Emmanuel mountains, which, as
already mentioned, D'Albertis sighted and named when he ascended
the Fly River in 1876.

The Amberno or Mamberan river probably rises on the northern
slopes of the same range, and drains the country lying between that
and the north coast range, flowing into the sea by many mouths at
the eastern end of the great bay of Geelvink. Of the importance of
this river and of the magnitude of its outfall we may form some idea
from the facts ascertained by the officers of the ' Challenger ' when
they traversed the ocean off Point d'Urville in 1875.

On the 22nd of February of that year, when about seventy miles
off land, the specific gravity of the surface water was found to be
lower than usual, and the ship was surrounded by large quantities of
drift wood, so that the propeller had to be stopped lest it should be
fouled. Amongst the logs around them were many whole uprooted
trees, one of which was two feet in diameter. Other objects showing
the force of the freshwater current were midribs of palms, stems of
large cane-grasses, fruits and seeds of trees, of which the surface scum
was so full that they could be scooped up in quantities with a fine
net. These phenomena, observed at seventy miles distant from the
shore, leave no possible doubt as to the magnitude of the current of
the Amberno River.

The third principal river of New Guinea is the Wa-Samson, which
rises probably on the western slopes of Mount Arfak, and, after
draining the greater part of the Onin Peninsula, runs into the sea at
Dam pier Straits, at the north-western extremity of the island. The
Wa-Samson was visited by Dr. Beccari in 1875. After exploring the

1886 THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 83

mountains east of Sorong, he crossed the coast range rather further
east, at an altitude of 1,200 feet, and descended to the banks of the
river, which is described as about twenty yards wide, and flowing with
a strong current. The natives have a story that the Wa-Samson passes
under a kind of natural tunnel before it reaches the sea.

Long as the list of scientific explorers of New Guinea, as above
given, may seem to be, we cannot suppose that anything like a
thorough knowledge of its zoology has been as yet acquired. But
sufficient information has been attained to enable an outline to be
given of the principal groups of animals that inhabit this strange
country.

As regards the mammals of New Guinea, on which subject our
best authority is an article by Dr. Peters and the Marquis Doria,
published in the Annals of the Museo Civico of Genoa for 1880,20
the total number of this class of animals as yet ascertained to occur
in New Guinea is about fifty-three, as will be been by the following
table : —

Mammals of Papua.

1

Bats:

Fruit-bats

, 6

Insectivorous .

. 13

—

19

Rodents :

, 5

Uromys (Peculiar)

. 4

Hydromys (Australian) . . . .

1

—

10

Marsupials :

Dasyures

. 6

, 3

Phalangers ........

. 7

Kangaroos

. 5

21

2

53

In New Guinea it is at once manifest that all the higher and
specially developed groups of mammals are altogether absent. As in
Australia, the main mammal population consists of Bats, Rodents,
and Marsupials. Of the great group of Ungulates, which in most
parts of the world supply such abundant and nutritious food to man-
kind, only one single representative occurs in New Guinea. This is
the pig, which, although certainly also met with in a wild state in New
Guinea, is a semi-domestic animal among the natives, and may very
probably have been introduced by mankind from the great islands of

20 ' Enumerazione del Mammiferi raccolti da C. Beccari, L. M. d'Albertis e
A. A. Bruijn nella Nuova Guinea propriamente detta.' Ann. Mus. Civ. dl Geneva, xvi.
1880, pp. 665-707, pts. v-xviii.

G2

84 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

the Eastern Archipelago, where several species of the genus Sus are
known to be indigenous. A small dog is also, according to Mr. W.
Macleay,kept in a domestic state by the natives in southern New Guinea.

Of the flying order of bats about nineteen species are known to
have occurred in New Guinea, thirteen of which belong to the insecti-
vorous division of the group, while six are fruit- bats. Bats, however,
it may be remarked, are nearly cosmopolitan, and have a ready means
of migration by flight from one land to another. The presence of
bats, therefore, does not enable us to draw any very definite conclu-
sions as to the general character of a fauna.

The Kodents of New Guinea hitherto recognised are about ten in
number. Five of these belong to the cosmopolitan genus Mus ; four
to an allied genus, Uromys, peculiar to Papua and the adjoining
islands ; whilst a single Hydromys, a genus allied to the mice, but
hitherto only known in Australia, has been recently met with in New
Guinea.

We now come to the Marsupial order, so well known to us as the
prevalent form of mammal life in Australia, where it is represented
by five differently organised groups, which constitute so many natural
families. Of 'these five families, four, as will be seen by our table, are
also met with in New Guinea. The. Carnivorous Dasyures, or ' Native
Cats,' as they are called by our colonists in Australia, have at least
five representatives in New Guinea, two of which belong to the typi-
cal genus Dasyurus and the others to Phascologale, or one of its sub-
genera. The Bandicoots of Australia are represented by three species
in New Guinea, and the Phalangers by seven. The Kangaroos, so
well known as one of the most marked features of animal life in
Australia, are represented in New Guinea by two different types.
The terrestrial genus Macropus, so highly developed in Australia, and
to which all the largest and finest species of ' Boomers ' and ' Walla-
roos ' are referable, is also found in New Guinea, together with several
members of an allied genus (Dorcopsis} which is peculiar to Papua
and its islands. But besides these, one of the characteristic features
of the fauna of New Guinea is the existence of a form of kangaroo
specially modified for arboreal life. It might have been thought that
of all known terrestrial mammals, a kangaroo would be one of the least
likely to adopt such a mode of existence. But just as in South
America Gallinaceous birds, which ordinarily inhabit the ground,
have so far altered their habits as to live in the highest trees of the
forest, as, in the contrary direction, certain woodpeckers in the Pampas
of Buenos Ayres are found to live entirely on the ground, and never to
climb a tree, so in the forest-clad hills of New Guinea kangaroos have
in the course of long ages become habituated to desert the earth
and to live in trees. Two very distinct species of tree-kangaroo
(Dendrolagus) are found in the forests of New Guinea. It has

1886 THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 85

lately been discovered that a third species of the same genus occurs in
Northern Queensland.21

Another strong link to connect New Guinea with Australia has
been forged by the discovery in the Arfak Mountains of New Guinea
of a gigantic representative of the order Monotremata, the lowest of
all existing mammals, which are devoid of teeth and lay eggs like a
bird. Until lately the Echidna and the Duckbill of Australia were the
sole known forms of this peculiar group, and were believed to be
entirely restricted to the Australian continent. But among the
spoils from Mount Arfak obtained by Mr. Bruijn and his energetic
hunters in 1876 were some bones of an animal that were subse-
quently proved to belong to a larger form of the Australian Echidna,
recognisable not only by its great size, but by having only three
toes on its fore limbs. Besides this a slightly modified form of the
smaller Australian Echidna is also met with in the south of New
Guinea,22 so that two Monotremes properly appertain to the Papuan
fauna, although no traces of the still more extraordinary Duckbill
(Ornithorhynchus) have as yet been met with outside the area of
Australia.

The beauty and variety of the birds of New Guinea have greatly
attracted the attention of travellers, and many of the explorers of its
forests have devoted their energies specially to collecting specimens
of this class. It has consequently come to pasrf that the birds of New
Guinea are much better known to us than the mammals. Moreover,
Count Salvadori's excellent monograph of the birds of Papua and the
Moluccas 23 is one of the best ornithological works of recent days,
and contains, it is hardly necessary to say, a complete account of
all that was known of the birds of New Guinea up to the period
of its completion. The subjoined table shows the numbers
of species of each of the nine orders to which Count Salvadori
assigns the 1,028 birds hitherto met with in Papua and the
Moluccas.

Table of Birds of Papua and the Moluccas.

1. Accipitres ....... 64

2. Psittaci 102

3. Picarise 113

4. Passeres 501

5. Columbse 108

6. Gallinae 20

7. Grallatorea 70

8. Natatores 41

9. Struthiones 9

Total 1,028

21 Dendrolagus Lumlwldtzi, discovered by the Norwegian naturalist whose name it
bears. See P.Z.S. 1884, p. 387.

22 Echidna acideata Lamesi, Thomas, P.Z.S. 1885, p. 329.

23 Salvadori, Ornltologia della Papuaxia e delle Moliicche. 3 vols. 4to. Torino,
1880-82.

86 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

The Parrots of New Guinea are numerous, the greater number of
the 102 species mentioned in Count Salvadori's work being met with
within its area. As specially characteristic of the Papuan Avifauna
I may mention the great Black Cockatoo (^Microglossus) with its
enormous bill, the dwarf Leaf Parrots (Nasiterna) with their curious
spiny tails, and the extraordinary Dasyptilus with its naked head and
harsh plumage. Brush-tongued Lories of the most brilliant colours
abound, and are especially characteristic of the Papuan Avifauna,
although by no means restricted to it. Count Salvador! includes no
less than forty species of this group in his work. The Picarian order in
New Guinea is composed mainly of Cuckoos and Kingfishers, both of
which groups are well represented. There is but a single Hornbill and
a single Bee-eater. On the other hand it should be remarked that,
as in Australia, woodpeckers are altogether absent. We now come to
the great array of Passeres, of which no less than 501 species are in-
cluded in Count Salvadori's work. Amongst these Flycatchers,
Caterpillar-eaters, and Shrikes play an important part, as might have
been expected where insect life is so abundant. The Honey-eaters
(Meliphagidce), a group specially characteristic of Australia, are like-
wise highly developed in New Guinea ; Count Salvador! enumerates
eighty-nine species. But the greatest glory of the Papuan Avifauna is
the family of Paradise-birds. These are, in fact, a group of crows, in
which the male sex is decked out in the most gaudy and varied
plumage, and extraordinary ornamental feathers of the most remark-
able forms are developed from different parts of the body. Taking
the group of Paradise-birds as understood by Count Salvador!, that is
to include the Bower-birds, we find about forty species attributed to
Papua and the Moluccas, and one or two brilliant additions have been
made to the group since Count Salvadori's work was finished.24 It
is certain from the investigations of recent observers that some of the
most brilliant kinds of Paradise-birds are confined to the more
elevated mountains, and one of the reasons for predicating a con-
tinuous range of high land between Mount Arfak in the north
and the Owen Stanleys in the south is that some of the Birds
of Paradise previously only known to exist in the highlands of
the Onin Peninsula have been lately obtained on the Owen Stanley
Kange.

The order of Pigeons (Columbce) which succeeds the Passeres in
Count Salvadori's volumes is likewise highly developed in New
Guinea. Count Salvadori assigns no less than 108 species to Papua
and the Moluccas, of which about half belong to the fruit-pigeons
(Ptilopus and Carpophaga), and are of the most gorgeous and varied
plumage.

44 A recent letter from Dr. Finsch informs me of the discovery, high on the Owen
Stanley range, of a fine new form of Paradise-bird in which the prevailing colour is
Hue. This is quite a new tint among the Paradises.

1886 THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 87

The remaining orders of the Papuan Avifauna may be passed over
with little notice as not containing forms of special significance. I
must, however, make an exception in favour of the Gallinaceous family
of Megapodes, of which New Guinea and its islands may be con-
sidered as the metropolis. Count Salvadori includes fourteen species
of Megapodes in his work. These birds have huge feet and lengthened
toes which adapt them for an exclusively terrestrial life. They are
remarkable for depositing their eggs in enormous mounds formed of
vegetable matter, sand or earth, and leaving them to be hatched out
(like those of tortoises, and crocodiles) without incubation by either
parent.

To the last constituent division of the Papuan Avifauna, called
by Count Salvadori ' Struthiones,' special attention must be given.
The Cassowaries form one of the most important and characteristic
elements of the Papuan Avifauna. In New Guinea itself at least
three different species have been met with ; the other six recognised
by Count Salvadori are distributed over the adjacent islands, whilst
a tenth species of the genus is an inhabitant of the northern portion
of Queensland. The Cassowaries, together with the Emu of Australia,
form a most distinct group of the ' Katite ' sub-class of birds, quite
different from the Ostriches of Africa and the Eheas of America, and
entirely confined to the great Australian region. The Cassowaries
and Paradise-birds may be appropriately selected as two of the
leading ornithic types of the Papuan sub-region.

Before leaving the subject of the birds of New Guinea mention
should be made of the splendid series of illustrations of the
Avifauna of New Guinea and the adjacent islands contained in
Gould's Birds of New Guinea. 25 This fine work commenced by the
late Mr. Gould is now being continued by Mr. E. B. Sharpe, and has
already reached its nineteenth number, supplying lifelike pictures of
upwards of 200 species.

The Reptiles of New Guinea, although presenting many features
of interest, need pot detain us so long as the birds : the best account
of them is that given by the late Dr. Peters and Marquis Doria
in their catalogue of the specimens of this group collected by the
travellers Beccari, D'Albertis and Bruijn.26 From this we estimate
that the known reptiles of New Guinea are already upwards of sixty
in number, whilst it is certain that many more remain to be dis-
covered.

The following table gives a summary of the principal group.

25 The Birds of New Guinea and the adjacent Papuan Islands. By John Gould.
London, 1875-85.

-6 See their ' Catalogo del Eettili e Batraci raccolti da 0. Beccari, L. M. d'Albertis
ed A. A. Bruijn nella Nuova Guinea propriamente detta.' Ann. Mus. Civ. di Geneva,
ariii. ry 323 (1878).

88 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

Table of Papuan Reptiles and Batravhians.

a. REPTILES.

I. Crocodiles 1

II. Tortoises 1

III. Lizards

1. Monitors 4

2. Skinks 21

3. Geckoes 7

4. Agamids . . . . . . . .8

40

IV. Serpents

(1. Colubrines 7
2. Acrochordians 1
3. Boas . . 7

Venomous. 4. Elapines ...... 0

21

63

b. BATRACHIAXS (Tail-less) ... 12

Crocodiles seem to be fortunately rare on the coasts of New
Guinea, and but one species has yet been recorded from the northern
shores, though it is highly probable that a second may exist on the
southern shores adjacent to Australia. Of Tortoises also, exclusive of
the Marine Turtles, only one species seems to have been yet discovered.
The Lizards hitherto recognised have been referred to about forty species,
and belong mostly to groups likewise prevalent in Australia. Finally,
of serpents about twenty-one species are now known to occur in New
Guinea, of which six belong to the venomous, and fifteen to the non-
venomous group of the order. When we consider the serpents of New-
Guinea more in detail, we shall be again struck with the resemblances
which they present to the herpetology of Australia. Amongst the
Boas, for example, we find in New Guinea nearly allied representatives
of the Carpet-snake (Morelia) of Australia. Again, like Australia,
New Guinea is entirely free from the true venomqus serpents with
perforated poison-fangs, the six venomous snakes hitherto met with
within its area being all referable to Elapine genera with grooved
poison teeth, which are also prevalent in Australia. It is thus evident
that an examination of the reptiles of New Guinea induces conclu-
sions like those derived from a study of its mammals and birds, that
the fauna of New Guinea is essentially of the same type as that of
Australia.

The Batrachians of New Guinea hitherto recognised are not nume-
rous, consisting only of about twelve species of the tailless division,
which contains our well-known toads, frogs, and tree-frogs. One of
these may be noticed as constituting a very peculiar Papuan type
(XENOBATRACHUS) ; of the remainder, the majority are of marked
Australian character, although many of the species are peculiar.

1886 THE ANIMALS OF NEW GUINEA. 89

The Fishes of New Guinea are not well known in this country,
although our national collection contains, as might have been expected,
numerous specimens from the adjoining seas. But the late Dr. Bleeker,
a distinguished ichthyologist of Holland, has published many memoirs
on Papuan ichthyology in various Dutch periodicals.27 And Mr.
William Macleay, of Sydney, who, as already mentioned, carried out a
special scientific expedition to Torres Straits and New Guinea in the
4 Chevert' in 1875, made on this occasion, and subsequently, through
his collectors, a considerable collection of fishes, and has contributed
a series of articles on them to the Proceedings of the Linnean Society
of New South Wales.

The Land-Mollusks of New Guinea were likewise diligently col-
lected during the * Chevert Expedition,' and the results published by
Mr. John Brazier, of Sydney, in the same journal, whilst in Europe
Signor Tapparone-Canefri has examined the collection of Land-Shells
made by M. Kaffray on the northern coast.28 Signor Tapparone-Canefri
has also recently issued an elaborate and important memoir on the
Land-Mollusks of New Guinea and its adjoining islands,29 which takes
up a whole part of the Annals of the Museo Civico of Genoa.

But, without descending further into the scale of animal life, I
think that what has been above stated is quite sufficient to enable
us to arrive at very reliable results concerning the general fades of
the fauna of New Guinea.

Taking, first of all, the mammals as our guide, we observe that
the leading feature of the Papuan Mammal-fauna consists in the
almost entire absence of all the more highly organised forms of
mammal life, and the prevalence of marsupials. This is likewise the
case in Australia.

Again, in New Guinea the very low and abnormal forms of mammal-,
life called * Monotremes ' occur. This is another clear proof of the
intimate connection of New Guinea with Australia.

Passing on to the birds, it will be found that a study of the
Papuan elements,of this class will lead to exactly the same conclusion.
The prevalence of lories, kingfishers, honey-eaters, fruit-pigeons, and
megapodes is only paralleled in Australia, which also, like New Guinea,
has no woodpeckers. At the same time there is a strong element of
individuality in the Papuan Avifauna exhibited in the following three
ways. (1) By the large number of species in New Guinea, which,
although belonging to Australian genera, are themselves peculiar to
Papua. (2) By the existence in New Guinea of such families as the
Paradise-birds and Cassowaries, which, although feebly represented in

27 See list of his papers in Mr. E. C. Rye's Bibliography of Nem Guinea, p. 290.

28 M. Raffray visited Havre Dorey and Amberbaki in 1877, having been sent out
on a scientific mission by the French Minister of Public Instruction. See his report
in Bull. Koc. Gcogr. p. 385. Paris, 1878.

29 ' Fauna Malacologica della Nuova Guinea e delle isole adiacenti. Parte I :
Molluschi estramarini.' Ann. Mus. Civ. di Genova, vol. xix.

90 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

Australia, are in the main restricted to New Guinea and its islands.
(3) By the presence in New Ghiinea of a few forms characteristic of
the adjacent oriental region, which embraces Southern Asia and the
great Sunda Islands.30 These may be looked upon, like Sus among
mammals, as recent intruders from the north. An examination of
other groups of Papuan animals, so far as they are known to us, will
only serve to strengthen the conclusions already pointed to, which may
be shortly summarised as follows :

1. New Guinea belongs essentially to the Australian region of
the world's surface.

2. New Guinea has nevertheless certain types peculiar to itself or
feebly represented in Australia.

3. New Guinea has also a slight but appreciable oriental element
in its fauna.

It follows that New Guinea and the adjacent islands may be con-
sidered as constituting a particular subdivision of the primary
Australian Region, characterised by the possession of certain special
forms, and a slight mixture of oriental elements, which may be appro-
priately called the ' Papuan Sub-region.'

80 Such as Suceros, Ewpetes, and Gracula.

P. L. SCLATER.

1886 91

REVISION OF THE BIBLE.

THE honourable and arduous task undertaken by the Old Testament
Revision * Company ' has been long in hand — necessarily so, it may
be, partly from the often minute and difficult character of the work,
but more perhaps from the number of persons engaged upon it.
For although * in the multitude of counsellors ' there is sometimes
1 safety,' there is also very often too much of hindrance, through
differences of opinion and frequent discussions leading to nothing,
or to worse. The work, however, has been completed at last ; and in
one respect it is more fortunate than its predecessor of the New
Testament. It has been received with something more of welcome,
or at least with fewer hard words, than were often dealt to the latter.
This indeed is a point on which it may as yet be premature to speak
positively. It is true that no such vehement onslaught has been
hitherto made upon the new text as that which, from different sides,
awaited the companion work. But this may be only because the
attack is not yet ready to deliver. Even a Dean or a Baronet
who may be eager for the fight, however much at home he may
be in the Greek Testament, may deem it expedient to take
time to prepare his weapons for the less familiar field of Hebrew
criticism. This knotty point will no doubt be speedily settled. Mean-
while, and failing objections of a weightier kind than have yet
appeared, the ordinary reader may be satisfied that the Revised Version,
as now before us, is really deserving of the moderate amount of praise
which has thus far been bestowed upon it, although it is by no
means all that it might have been.1

The reader's first impressions as to the general character of the
result must, we apprehend, be wholly favourable. Yet, to those who
are able to look below the surface, such impressions will hardly fail
to be somewhat disturbed by a little continuous examination. This,
however, is said with the utmost respect for the Revisers, whose
collective wisdom ought certainly to outweigh the judgment of any
single individual. Nevertheless, truth has been found to lie even

1 It is proper to mention that the present paper was written before the publication
of the article on the subject in a recent Quarterly Review. That article, as was to
be expected, is severely hostile to the new version : but its peculiar animvs is such as
goes far to deprive it of value as a critical judgment.

92 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

with a minority of one ! But, not to presume upon this, every
thing advanced in the present paper is offered with all due submission
— and it will no doubt be received, by those who may favour it with
their notice — for no more than it is worth.

However this may be, it is allowable to point out that a large
proportion of the changes contained in the revised pages were simply
matters of course, and could not have been missed by any competent
hand. In no small degree they have, in substance, been anticipated
by previous revisers of whom the world has heard but little. A great
merit of the Kevision is that it has usually left unspoiled the style
and rhythm of the venerable Authorised. There are indeed instances
to the contrary, which the reader may find in familiar passages in the
Psalms for example, but such cases are not numerous any more than
are those in which change may be said to have been made for mere
changing's sake. Too many instances, however, occur in which a close
adherence to the Hebrew idiom has injured the English, and even
left the sense obscure ; and places are also met with in which archaic
or obsolete words have been retained — words which, in accordance
with American suggestions, had better have been allowed quietly to
drop into disuse.

On such points as these, much has been written by others, and it
is not requisite here to enter into details respecting them. Making
due allowance for such instances, it remains substantially true that
the revised text as a whole, not only reads well, but also forms
for those who read it a more faithful representative of the ori-
ginal than that which has hitherto commonly been in their hands.
The faults of the Revised largely consist of faults retained from the
Authorised. In regard to these it is no worse than the Authorised,
while in innumerable cases it is better, as of course it ought to be.

One who judges thus should not forget to allow something for the
difficulties under which the Eevisers may be said to have worked. In
this remark we refer to the Rules prescribed to them by Convocation
as well as to the regard which, avowedly or not, had naturally to be
paid to the received theologies of the day. "What more precisely is
intended by these observations will be seen as we proceed — and, in
the first place, may be noticed several of the points to which attention
is especially invited by the Revisers in their Preface.

(1) The Hebrew Text adopted as the basis of the Revision is, we
are told, the Masoretic ; the text, that is, which was in the keeping of
the Rabbins of the early Christian centuries, and which had been
handed down to them (as the term Masoretic implies) from still
earlier ages. This text of the original, carefully preserved and no
doubt corrected from time to time, where thought defective, was at
length in the sixteenth century committed to the press, and since that
time has existed in a tolerably fixed and unvaried form. We may be
reasonably certain that, allowing for accidental and unimportant

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 93

variations, we have now in our hands the sacred text much as it was
in the New Testament times. At any rate, we have no other, so it
may be as well to speak kindly of what we possess. An extreme
regard for the letter has characterised Hebrew copyists and commen-
tators in all ages. Hence the result, that a remarkable uniformity
runs through all existing texts of the Hebrew, both manuscript and
printed, attesting the care with which the books have been kept — the
Rabbins even painfully counting, as they did, paragraphs and words
and even letters. Hence too it is that no critical scholar would now
think of correcting the Hebrew at all extensively, so as to bring it into
agreement either with the Septuagint or with any other textual autho-
rity— such, for example, as the Greek of Venice, or the Samaritan
Pentateuch.

The ordinary, received, or Masoretic text, then, as found in the
printed editions, was used by the Revisers as the basis of their work.
Only, as they inform us, ' in some few instances of extreme difficulty '
they have adopted a reading on the authority of the ancient versions,
recording in the margin this departure from their standard. In other
instances, variations possessed of a certain probability have been
placed in the margin, and the reader will often find that these are
not without interest, though but rarely of any substantial importance.

In thus adhering to a definite form of text already established,
the Revisers would find their work much simplified, as compared
with the laborious task which the Greek revisers undertook, of form-
ing (virtually) a new text for themselves. In truth no other course
was open to the 0. T. Company. The materials for the formation of
a new Hebrew text hardly exist, at least in any available form ; or,
again, so far as they exist, they would, if applied, scarcely yield
results worth the labour that would be required for utilising them.
Any one may see this, who will compare the collection of Hebrew
readings formed long ago, with wonderful pains and industry, by
Kennicott, or the much more recent small collection by Dr. S.
Davidson. Some Hebrew manuscripts of much earlier date than any
previously known are stated to have been recently brought to light
in Egypt. We are not aware that these have as yet been carefully
examined, or whether even these oldest of Hebrew manuscripts are
likely to afford new readings of any importance. The recent and
important 4 Masorah ' of Dr. Ginsburg ought not to be overlooked in
this connection, although the writer has had no opportunity of con-
sulting it.

(2) The Revisers proceed to say how they have borne in mind the
duty not to make a new translation, but only to revise one already in
existence, which has held the position of a classic in the language for
more than two centuries. No doubt it was well to keep this carefullv
in view ; but opinions will differ as to whether the Rule may not
have been at times too strictly and even unwarrantably adhered to.

94 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

Many renderings of importance in which the Authorised has been
allowed to stand, out of deference it may be presumed to this rule,
are extremely doubtful, to say the least, and to some of them a mar-
ginal note has not been added, as it ought to have been, to apprise
the reader as to the uncertainty attending the words. For example,
in the word ' son,' in Psalm ii. 12 ; here, indeed, the margin states
that ' some ancient versions render Lay hold of (or Receive) instruc-
tion, others Worship in purity ' : but it does not state that the
rendering ' son ' is altogether doubtful, or more than doubtful. The
Hebrew word bar in the sense of son is an Aramaic word of late use.
It occurs in the Chaldee of Ezra and Daniel, but only in one place in
the Hebrew books, namely Proverbs xxxi. 2, where it may be taken
as indicative of the comparatively late composition of this part of
that book. On the other hand, the word (that is, the consonants br)
occurs several times in the older Hebrew in the sense of clear, pure ;
as in Psalm xxiv. 4, ' pure of heart.' It may be used in Psalm ii. 1 2,
in the adverbial sense of purely, that is, sincerely, or with reverence.
The meaning therefore may be, Kiss, pay the homage expressed by
kissing the garment of Jehovah's anointed king, purely, sincerely,
with the reverence due. Against the rendering ' the son,' is the
conclusive objection that the original has no Article, which, with such
a signification, could not have been absent. Hence the rendering
' son ' is inadmissible, or at best extremely doubtful, and this ought
at any rate to have been noted. But then this Psalm is usually con-
sidered a Messianic Psalm, and very probably it is thought by most
readers to refer to Christ, and taken to be a very definite and par-
ticular prophecy of Him that was to be Son in the later Christian
sense. Nothing can be more ingenious, or more fallacious, than
these dogmatic interpretations often are ; and it must be added,
there are too many of them, even in this revised Old Testament.

Another such case, and one which has probably been determined
under a similar influence, may be found in Genesis xlix. 10, * until
Shiloh come.' Here either the first or the second margin is far more
probable than the words kept in the text. The words should read
therefore, ' until he come to Shiloh,' or else, ' until that which is his
shall come.' If, however, the rendering given is to stand, and if
Shiloh denotes the Messiah, how strange that the word is never used
again throughout the Bible ; and that there is nowhere in the New
Testament, with all its references to the Old, any allusion to this
verse as a prophecy of Christ. Moreover, the prediction, if it be one,
is absolutely untrue, and was falsified by the whole later course of
Jewish history. The sceptre and the ruler's staff had passed from
Judah generations or centuries before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth ;
so that from every point of view the rendering which has been allowed
to stand was, and is, inadmissible.

A third case of this kind may be found in Proverbs viii. 22, ' The

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 95

Lord possessed me.' Here there can hardly be a question that the
rendering should be ' created me,' as indeed is recognised in the
margin, ' Or, formed? This meaning of the verb is perfectly well
established, as in Genesis xiv. 19, and other places. In Proverbs
viii. 22, the word is thus rendered in the Septuagint (SKTHTS fjus], as it
is in Gen. xiv. 19, and as in more than one ancient oriental text.
But then, let it be observed, the Authorised corresponds to the
theological idea of which Dr. Liddon has made so much in his second
Bampton Lecture, to the effect that the personified Wisdom of Prov.
viii. is identical with the Logos of the fourth Gospel ; — that the
personified Wisdom of Proverbs was therefore a kind of anticipation
of that future personage in whom the Logos (in its origin, it should
be remembered, a conception not of Christianity, but of Greek
philosophy) was to become incarnate ; — an anticipation, again, which
was unknown and unheard of until some of the ancient Fathers began
to speculate about it, long after it could have been of any evidential
use as a prophetic anticipation applicable to Christ! This idea,
baseless and extravagant as it is, would no doubt find many defenders
at the present day ; and it may possibly have been the real, though
unavowed, reason for the retention of the word l possessed.' We
would not for a moment suggest any intentional deviation from
the straight path of exact translation ; but clearly a strong bias was
likely to arise from such ideas and to sway the mind occupied with
them, almost without its own knowledge. While this is true, it is also
to be admitted that instances occur in which the meaning ' possessed *
is found. It is adopted by the Eevised (without much' sense and
against the parallelism) in Psalm cxxxix. 13, and elsewhere. Still it
is not difficult to understand that where a meaning usually deemed
heretical comes into a sort of competition with one of the opposite
kind, the latter, in the Jerusalem Chamber, will be most likely to be
preferred. Accordingly, the Revision retains 'possessed,' while
' formed ' is consigned to the margin, and the full meaning produced,
created, expressed by the Septuagint as well as by the Targum and
the Syriac, is altogether ignored. The margin, however, affords at
least some hint of the true state of the case, and for this the reader
should not be ungrateful. Instances like Gen. xxxvii. 3, ' coat of
many colours,' are rather different from the foregoing, but equally
unjustifiable.

The Rule imposed by Convocation requiring a two-thirds majority
for altering the Authorised manifestly tended to preserve old render-
ings, even against the judgment of very decided majorities of the
revising body. A vote of 7 to 4, or 11 to 6, or 15 to 8, would, with
such a rule, have no force. The rule was thus, in effect, an ingenious
device of conservative obstruction, tending and perhaps designed to
give the translators of 1611 a great advantage over the more ample
knowledge and less dogmatic spirit of the nineteentlTcentury. From

96 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

this source have probably proceeded many faulty renderings of the
revised text.

(3) The next subject of importance to which the Preface calls
attention is the way in which the word denoting the Sacred Name has
been rendered — the Hebrew word, that is to say, which, as found in
the Masoretic text, has given origin to the English form JEHOVAH.
In reference to this important word, the following particulars should
be kept in view.

The Jews from very ancient times, probably long before the Christian
era, have refrained from uttering the divine name. Nor is that name
now pronounced in the synagogue reading of the Hebrew scriptures.
The consequence is that the true pronunciation of this word has long
been lost, and is probably now irrecoverable. In the printed Bibles
the original JHVH is pointed, that is to say, vocalised, so as to be pro-
nounced adonai (Lord), and in the synagogue reading the same word
adonai is read instead of it (with some exceptions in which the word
GOD is substituted, and on which we need not dwell). What the origin,
the pronunciation, or the meaning of the name Jhvh may have been,
can now only be matter of speculation, and the subject need not here
occupy much of our attention. We are told by great authorities that
the word should be vocalised as Jahve (Yahve), or Jahveh, and that it
signifies in effect the Giver of Life ; more literally, He that causeth to
live. A slightly different account would explain it as simply expressive
of existence, as though it meant, He that exists, the Self-existent One, or
the Eternal, as rendered by the Jewish translator Benisch. This ex-
planation is closely related to yet another, which is perhaps only an old
Rabbinical fancy. It detects in the form Jehovah an abbreviation for the
future and past tenses as well as the present participle of the Hebrew
verb of existence. According to this the meaning would again be, The
Eternal, He who was, who is and who shall, be. This is almost too
ingenious ; but it is not without support, as in Revelation i. 4,
where the strongly Hebraising writer gives in Greek a designation of
the Almighty which closely corresponds to this last stated derivation
of Jhvh. Support for the same view has been found in an inscription
on the temple of Isis, quoted by Gresenius from Plutarch, which may
be Englished, ' I am that which was and is and shall be.' The most
recent discussion of the subject may be seen in the works mentioned
below.2

Leaving these uncertain points, we have next to notice a fact on
which there is no doubt or question whatever. The ancient transla-
tors of the Septuagint, about 220 B.C., following the sentiment and
usage of their people, refrained from translating, as no doubt they
refrained from uttering, the sacred name. They had the word Jhvh
indeed in their Hebrew manuscripts ; but, not attempting any trans-

2 Hebrew Words and Synonyms, Part I. By Rev. Edward G. King, B.D. 1884.
Comp. Prof. Driver's Essay on the Tetragrammaton, in Studia Biblica. 1885.

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 97

lation of it, they too fell back upon the word adonai. This, however,
they rendered in their Greek version by the Greek Kvpios (Lord).
Thus Kvpios came by a kind of accident to stand in the Septuagint
as the representative of the sacred and unutterable Jhvh — not as being
a translation of it (for it was never translated, any more than it was
ever uttered), but simply as its substitute or representative. Hence
again from the Septuagint version in which this first occurred, the
word Lord (Dominus) came into the Latin, and from this again into
nearly all modern versions, and more particularly into the Authorised
English of 1611. To this must now be added the Ee vised Version of
1885.

The Eevisers observe, ' It has been thought advisable in regard
to the word ' JEHOVAH ' to follow the usage of the Authorised Version
and not to insert it uniformly in place of ' LORD ' or 'GoD,' which,
when printed in small capitals, represent the words substituted by
Jewish custom for the ineffable Name, according to the vowel points
by which it is distinguished.' This statement is certainly surprising
and was hardly to be expected from a revising Company of our day —
except indeed under the constraining influence of long-descended
theological prepossessions. For let the reader further observe and
weigh the following considerations : the word Jhvh, whatever may have
been its lost pronunciation, is a proper name. Probably no one who
knows anything about it would think of disputing this. It is every-
where used as a proper name, quite as truly so as the words Moses,
Abraham, Isaiah, or any other of the numerous personal names of the
Old Testament. Now, Christian revisers may be supposed to be free
from the excessive reverence of the Jews, ancient or modern, in
regard to this sacred word. Why, therefore, should they not express
it as what it really is, a proper name ? The only reason that can be
suggested is this — that we do not know how it was pronounced. But
are we therefore at liberty to alter it entirely, to deprive it of its
character of a personal name, and in effect banish it from our English
Bible ? They who would take this course should remember that we
do not know how the names Moses, Abraham, Isaiah, and a hundred
others were pronounced ; any more than we know how the name Jhvh
was pronounced. Yet no translator or reviser either, whether under
the influence of Convocation or not, would think of representing these
names by a totally different set of words, words altogether different
from their originals both in sound and in etymological sense.

It follows from all this that the true representative of the Tetra-
grammaton is the name itself, whether the form preferred be Jahveh,
or the venerable and euphonious JEHOVAH. It is at least to be hoped
that the barbarous-looking Yahveh or Yahweh will not become a
permanent word of the language. The form Jehovah may in reality
be not far from the ancient sound of the word, though formed ap-
parently by the mere adaptation of the vocalisation of adonai, and
VOL. XX.— No. 113. H

98 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

although, in this form, of comparatively modern origin. There is
nothing improbable in the supposition that the common form as
pointed may preserve something of the ancient sound, handed down
traditionally from pre-Christian times to the Masoretic punctuators,
and by them transmitted to their successors with the vowels of adonai.
At any rate the form Jehovah has just the same right to be used as
the representative of the unutterable name, as the word Moses or any
other name of Hebrew history to be retained as the designation
of the person to whom it is given. The exact pronunciation of these
personal names is no more known than is that of * Jehovah,' but yet
no one hesitates to employ them as they stand.

In the recent translation of the Hebrew Scriptures by Mr. Samuel
Sharpe the form Jehovah is everywhere consistently employed. This
is done with excellent effect ; for the word is itself one of expressive
and interesting form and sound, and is in no way unworthy to stand
as the representative of the Name of Names.

The Revisers must therefore be held to have acted arbitrarily in
their treatment of this word ; and we are left to the conjecture that
here again reasons of the theological kind have had more to do with this
adherence to the term ' Lord,' than they would themselves care to
admit. The following considerations will illustrate this conclusion.
The Kvpiosof the Septuagint, the representative in that version of the
untranslated Jhvh, is also perpetually recurring in the Christian
scriptures. And is not this, some will ask, most significant ? Does
it not suggest, adumbrate, foretell, anticipate, even though with
singular obscurity, the mysterious fact of the identity of the Person
denoted by the word Kvptos in the two Testaments ? — thus showing
prophetically the real nature of Him to whom the Christian Church
owes its existence and has given the name of Lord ? Against this
ingenious theory there is the fatal objection before alluded to,
namely, that the idea of the supposed identity was unknown and
never thought of until the ingenuity of the Church Fathers had
begun to speculate about the Logos, long after the date when the
coincidence might have been useful as a proof of anything. Yet the
theory is one which is by no means out of favour with English
theologians of a certain school. It may be found in the writings
even of eminent preachers and scholars like Dr. Liddon and Professor
Kennedy of Cambridge. The latter, in his Christmas Day sermon
(1882) before the University, expressly makes use of this argument,
quite easily assuming that the Lord of the Old Testament must needs
be the Lord of the New. Nevertheless, this old fancy of the Fathers,
though advanced anew by these eminent scholars, is about as ground-
less as other ingenious things to be met with in the same ancient
writers — their statements for instance about demoniacal possessions
and their attendant marvels.

The mode of dealing with this word in the Old Testament will

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 99

remind some readers of the somewhat analogous way in which the
New Testament Revisers have treated the term Trvsvpa, in some places
rendering it by ' Spirit,' in others by the word ' Ghost ' ; this too in
bold defiance of their own principle of uniformity of rendering, so
very faithfully applied in small and unimportant cases. According
to this in itself very proper principle the same Greek word, wherever
the sense and context admit, should always be rendered by the same
English. But why, then, was not this done in so weighty a case as
this of the word Trvsv/^a ? — why, except that to have applied it con-
sistently would have been to leave a great word of the Creeds out of
the New Testament? — and that would have been heresy indeed.
Accordingly the rendering ' Ghost ' must be retained, at whatever
sacrifice of consistency, and even though so excellent a word as
4 Spirit ' with its depth and richness of signification could so easily
and so rightly have been substituted for it — this, too, in every case
without a single exception.

Before taking leave of this subject it may be well to notice the way
in which the Revisers have sometimes dealt with the word adonai.
Strictly and properly, the form is 4 my lord,' or ' my master ' ; a term
of deference and respect used of and to a superior, like Kvpios fre-
quently in the New Testament. So it is in the case of Abraham's
servant speaking of his master, Gen. xxiv. 12, 27. In some cases,
however, the word has been given by the Revision as ' the Lord '
(Gen. xviii. 27, 30, 32 ; Ps. ii. 4 ; compare Ps. ex. 1, 5), as if it were
the word Jehovah, only not in small capitals. The consequence is
that, whereas Abraham speaking to Jehovah addresses him in the
familiar form of ' my lord ' (just as he might have done with any
human personage), the Revision makes it appear (or rather follows
the Authorised, in leaving it to appear) as if the higher title * the
Lord,' with its religious associations, were employed by Abraham in
this familiar conversation with Jehovah. The meaning ' my lord,' is
properly adopted by the Revision in Gen. xviii. 3, xix. 19 ; but here,
as if with the purpose of going as far from the exact meaning as
possible, a margin has been added, ' Or, 0 Lord.' Why has this in-
accurate margin been added ? The Hebrew word does not mean ' 0
Lord,' but simply « my lord,' or, at most, ' 0 my lord,' as in numerous
cases throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. Have we merely an over-
sight in this margin ; or is it a result of the same tendency to make
the Old Testament correspond as much as possible to ideas of the
popular theology of our day ?

The proposal has been made by an over-zealous person, and made
we believe to the Revisionists, to print all adjectives and pronouns in
immediate connection with the Divine name with initial Capitals, in
the manner of the Sermons and other Compositions of a certain
modern School of Theologians. Happily this attempt to modernise
the Old Testament and make it speak the language of a sect has not

H2

100 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

thus far succeeded, and probably it was not even entertained by the
Revision Company. But some of the facts commented upon in the
foregoing pages exhibit too much of the dogmatic spirit which
dictated this proposal.

(4) In regard to the difficult word Sheol, rendered in the Authorised
by * grave,' ' pit,' or ' hell,' the mode of proceeding appears to be on
the whole not injudicious. The word is very probably a proper name,
like the Greek Hades, denoting the under-world, or abode of the souls
of the dead. ' Under- world ' is scarcely admissible as an English word ;
otherwise, it might have been used as the equivalent of Sheol.
' Grave,' and l pit ' are either of them too insignificant to stand as its
sole representative. ' Hell,' considering the ideas commonly asso-
ciated with the term, is decidedly wrong, but the Revisers have left it
in one passage, in which the context, as they think, sufficiently sug-
gests and guards the signification intended. But this may be doubted,
and with ignorant or unthoughtful readers, such as we have in Sunday
Schools as well as in congregations, the popular meaning of the word
is pretty sure to be understood. Would it not then have been better,
in Isaiah xiv., to have rendered ' The world beneath is moved for
thee,' with ' Sheol ' in the margin ? The Revision would thus have been
rid of the objectionable ' hell ' altogether ; as this word ought also to
have been removed from the New Testament, as a term which, in its
mediaeval and still living acceptation, goes so far beyond the real
meaning of the original. The revisers have left ' grave ' or * pit ' in
the text (they tell us) in historical narratives — but have used the
original word itself in the poetical books. This may pass, but it is
not easy to see why * pit ' should have been introduced in place of
* hell,' in such a passage as Psalm Iv. 15, 'Let them go down alive
into the pit,' when Sheol would have read equally well, and has in so
many other places been substituted. In such cases there is perhaps
simply oversight ; but everywhere it is well that the original Sheol
is found noted in the margin, when not used in the text. This gives
at least the suggestion of uniformity which is due to the Hebrew ;
and it enables a reader to detect and correct the inconsistency of the
Revision. In many places too the word * grave ' would have been a
more poetical and melodious word than the unfamiliar Sheol ; as in
Job xi. 8, ' Deeper than the grave, what canst thou know ? '

The Revisers would have preferred the word ' hell,' they tell us,
as the usual rendering of ' Sheol,' could the former c have been taken
in its original sense, as used in the Creeds.' This is a strange and
surely an inconsiderate statement. Can there be a doubt that the
word hell, ' as used in the Creeds,' by those who in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries imposed or re-imposed the Creeds upon the
English Church, was intended to be understood in the mediaeval sense
as ' the place of torment ' ? The Fathers of English orthodoxy, as in
was then established, were devout believers in a hell of the most uc-

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 101

questionable kind, one of fire and brimstone, devils and lost souls.
Such then, there can be no doubt, was intended to be the ' hell ' of
the Creeds. From a Sheol of this description, it is at least satisfactory
to see that the Revisers so evidently shrink, in common most probably
with all thoughtful religious persons of our day.

(5) The reader of the revised New Testament will be prepared
to find that the revisers of the Old, while retaining the numbering of
the chapters and verses, have arranged their text in paragraphs, and
at the same time have abandoned the chapter and page headings.
This latter course was unavoidable, in the hands of honest and capable
workmen. The headings of the Authorised are too often a confused
and strange medley, tending only to put the reader off the true
historical interpretation of a passage. This is more especially the
case in the prophetical books. The headings are in truth wholly
without authority, and nobody can say with any certainty from whose
hand they proceeded. But one thing is clear enough, namely, that
they correspond to the theological belief of King James's revisers,
and the century to which they belonged, and if we are not to regard
such persons as infallible, there is no reason for adhering to their
ideas of the meaning of passages, unless independent inquiry should
sanction them, as no doubt, in historical books, it often does. It is
a pity that our popular preachers do not sometimes give their people
more information than they commonly do give, on more than one of
the points just touched.

(6) More questionable is the style of printing adopted by the
Revisers, in order to exhibit the parallelism which is characteristic of
Hebrew poetry. To some extent, a degree of parallelism is character-
istic of Hebrew prose also, for this too has a constant tendency to run
into the style designated by that term. Everywhere, however, this
form of composition, where it exists, speaks for itself and asserts
itself. It was therefore unnecessary, for the sake of exhibiting it to
the eye, to print the English version in lines so often broken and
unsightly. The text is greatly disfigured by this arrangement,
especially in pages or columns of small size, where so often the
sentence cannot be put into one line, and where therefore there is a
constant overrunning of words, and a breaking up of the lines into
unequal parts. What can be more unpleasant in this way than the
appearance of many portions of Job, for example ? — or the greater
part of Psalm xviii. ? — or much of Psalm Ixxxix. ? In such cases and
as a rule, nothing would have been lost, and much space would have
been saved, by printing the lines in the ordinary prose manner, and
leaving the parallelism to speak for itself, as it would mostly do.
Moreover, there is at times in the English a sort of pretence of
parallelism to which the sense does not correspond — that is to say,
there is no true parallelism, while yet the words are printed as if
there were.

102 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

The inexpediency of this mode of printing is tacitly acknowledged
by the Revisers when they come to the prophetical books, which
although poetical in their language and spirit and abounding in
instances of the most beautiful parallelism, as in Isaiah i. 2 seq., are
printed as prose. It is to be regretted that the same mode of printing
has not been followed throughout.

(7) The Preface further speaks of the relations of the English
revisers with the American 0. T. Company, which, as in the case of the
New Testament, appear to have been of an advantageous and har-
monious character. The Americans, it will strike many persons, have
shown themselves more free from hampering influences than their
English co-workers, and have proposed various changes, the rejection
of which many readers will regret. Among these is the suggestion
to introduce the word Jehovah, wherever it occurs in the Hebrew
text. This proposal, with many others of less consequence, was
rejected by the English revisers, no doubt on consideration, but, so far
as appears, without reason given. The reader has nevertheless, the
advantage of seeing the American suggestions in the Appendix to
each volume of the Revised Version.

Passing on from the Preface, a few additional observations may
now be made on detached passages of special interest ; and these will
occupy the remainder of this paper.

The words of Exodus iii. 14 are interesting both in themselves
and because of the persistent attempts which have been made to con-
nect them with John viii. 58. 'And (rod said unto Moses, I am that
I am : ' the margin properly recognises the fact that the tense here
used is really a future in form, and that the words may be rendered,
' I will be that I will be.' The Authorised rendering to which the
revisers have adhered may have had its origin from the Septuagint,
imitated, though not closely, by the Vulgate, and so received into
modern versions. The Septuagint reads syco SI/JLI, 6 <wz/, I am the
existing one ; or better, I am he who is. This is little more than a
loose paraphrase and not by any means a close rendering of the
Hebrew ; and it was departed from by the ancient translators Aquila
and Theodotion, who were both of them Jews, or Jewish converts,
and well acquainted with Hebrew. Both of these translators are
remarkable for the literal character of their Greek renderings from
the Hebrew. They translate the words before us by the future I'cro/iat
OSSCTO/JMI, I will be what I will be ; and this was followed by Luther, by
early English translators, by Dathe, Castalio, Greddes, Wellbeloved, and
others. The purport of the words, in either rendering, it is not so easy
to perceive. In the one case, it may be eternity of existence,
suggesting the connection of the phrase with the name Jehovah;3
in the other case, it may be faithfulness to promises, as though the

3 The words are perhaps simply equivalent to 'Jehovah ' expressed, as it were, in
the first person.

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 103

Speaker would say, My name shall be, i I will be faithful to the pro-
mises made of old to the fathers and now to you the people of Israel.'

In either case, the want of connection with John viii. 58 is clear
enough. Here, a totally different reference, that namely to the Logos
idea of the Gospel, is what most probably unlocks the meaning of the
passage : or otherwise the ' I am ' of John is the same as the * I am '
of Mark xiii. 6, and is found also in other places of the fourth Gospel.
The meaning, therefore, may be ' I am he,' that is to say, the expected
Messiah. We venture to think that the margin, in this case as in
•others, ought to have stood in the text ; but to put it in this place of
•honour was more perhaps than ought to be asked for.

In Exodus vi. 2, the new text has been bold enough to adopt the
form JEHOVAH instead of * the LORD.' From the nature of the context
it could not have done otherwise. The same form recurs no less than
four times in this chapter (vv. 2, 3, 7, 8) ; then after this unwonted
adherence to the original, the rendering weakly goes back (v. 11) to
the old form, ' the LORD.' Such is the inconsistency put upon our
Revisers, or a preponderating minority of them, by the tyranny of
long-descended usage — just as it must be held to have been in the
New Testament in the case of the word * Ghost,' and in several others
of equal importance.

Passing on to the Book of Isaiah, we come to some other
examples of the same inability to respond to the requirements of
an independent and purely historical revision. Isaiah vii. 14,

* Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his
name Immanuel,' is the first case in point. The Revisers have here
adhered to the old rendering, in the face of the very plainest and
most incontestable Hebrew. This, literally rendered, runs thus : —

* Behold the maiden (or young woman) is with child and beareth a
son and calleth his name Immanuel.' The article before ' maiden '
has been left unacknowledged, except, in the margin. The word
rendered < virgin,' it is well ascertained, is a word of elastic import,
and may here denote what the words immediately following suggest,
probably a young woman whose state was known to the prophet, and
who was therefore, it may be inferred, the prophet's own wife. The
word which the Revisers have rendered by ' shall conceive,' is not a
verb but a verbal adjective, denoting an existing condition, not a
future one. It is the identical word which occurs in connection with
Hagar, Genesis xvi. 11, where it is correctly given by the Revision,

* Behold, thou art with child.' "Why, then, is there such a deviation
from the Hebrew in the rendering of the words of Isaiah ? — why,
except, consciously or unconsciously, to suit a foregone theological
theory as to the child of which Isaiah speaks ? The margin, it may
be said, apprises the reader of the true form of the Hebrew. But
then, it should be remembered, the margin will not usually be read
from the pulpit. The result therefore to the great public of church

104 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

and chapel-goers will be much the same as if the Kevision had
adopted the bolder course of altogether keeping out of sight the
exact full meaning of the prophet's words.

The necessity of close and careful rendering in this case is easily
shown. It depends entirely on the translation whether the English
reader is to accept the passage in its obvious historical sense, or in
the imported, artificial sense of a mysterious and obscure prophecy
relating to the distant future, having little connection with Isaiah's
own day. The latter is what the text as it now stands will be
popularly held to suggest, and would seem to have been intended to
suggest ; but this is altogether without warrant, if we are to be
guided by the prophet's words and their context.

Isaiah is speaking with immediate reference to the events of his
day, and to persons there standing before him. He wishes to inspire
the king and his attendants with confidence, and he gives them a
visible sign by which they may be informed and guided. He refers
to a person of whom he has knowledge whose child is shortly to be
born. This child shall have a significant name given to it, and in
this name is the main strength of the prophecy. The child shall be
called ' Immanuel ' (God is with us), and thus he shall be a visible sign
that Jehovah has not forgotten his people, but will be with them to
deliver them. The word rendered ' a virgin ' may properly have
the meaning 'young woman,' as Gesenius has shown. In this he is
followed by Ewald, who however regards the words as Messianic.
There is no necessity for so considering them and little probability in
so doing, unless we are to suppose that Isaiah expected the birth of
the Messiah within a few months of the time at which he was speak-
ing. On the other hand it is observable that this prophet is fond of
these significant names. In two cases he gives such names to his
children, Shear-jashub and Maher-shalal-hash-baz (vii. 3, viii. 1, 3).
In this case of the child Immanuel, we have a third case of the kind ;
all the three therefore bearing special reference to the political cir-
cumstances of the time, and being intended to express the prophet's
confidence in the future fortunes of his people, in spite of the adver-
sities which for the moment seem to be overwhelming them. The
words of the prophecy respecting Immanuel were, however, in later
times, and especially among the Christians, read and applied in the
Messianic sense, as is seen by the quotation of the verse in Matthew .
i. 23, where the writer (in Greek) of the Gospel, more faithful to the
original scripture than the English revisers, has not omitted to render
the article ; although (probably following the Septuagint) he has used
future tenses for his verbs. These tense forms, however, are not in
the Hebrew ; for, as before said, in the one case we have a verbal
adjective, denoting a present condition, while in the two other cases we
have participial forms which are present, not future, in signification.
Another of these significant names occurs in a remarkable and

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 105

usually misapplied verse, Isaiah ix. 6 — * Unto us a child is born, unto
us a son is given ; and the government shall he upon his shoulder ;
and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.' The more literal rendering is,
— ' His name shall be called Wonder, Counsel-giver, mighty (rod [or
hero], Father of duration, Prince of peace.' Ought these terms to be
regarded as forming one long compound name, like Maher-shalal-
hash-baz, only twice as long? or ought they to be translated as sepa-
rate words, as in the Authorised followed by the Revised ? Shear-
jashub, Maher-shalal-hash-baz, Immanu-el, are given untranslated,
as proper names. It would almost seem that consistency of treat-
ment would have dictated a similar course in regard to this longer
form of name. The result would be certainly unique and somewhat
fantastic perhaps in appearance ; but if it correspond to the facts of
the case, appearances are of but small consequence. ' His name
shall be called Peleh-Joetz-El-gibbor-Abi-ad-Sbar-shalom ' ; — allow-
able, perhaps, and at any rate in harmony with the other significant
names in the immediate context and with the usage of Isaiah. But
this course would have been a bold one, and perhaps the Revisers have
done better to keep the rendering as it was.

One other passage in this book deserves especial notice, for the care
with which the Revisers have treated it. We allude to the great
prophecy formed by Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 12. One little defect of the
Revision may be pointed out. These fifteen verses do not sufficiently
appear to stand together as one connected piece, which they unques-
tionably are. To show this, there ought to have been more of a
break in the lines, between verses 12 and 13 of chapter lii. ; whereas,
as the passage stands, the reader has no intimation given him whether
he is to consider verses 13, 14, 15, as belonging to chapter lii. and
forming its conclusion, or as belonging to liii. and forming its com-
mencement. The latter is, however, very clearly the case, and it might
have been indicated to the reader by the insertion of the word ' ButJ
at the beginning of liii. 1.

Next may be observed the historical character given to this
passage, probably not intentionally, but only as an incidental conse-
quence of the careful rendering of the tenses. Down to liii. 10, we
have the statement of what may be termed the ground of the prophetic
anticipations which follow. The tenses are here historical, and are
so rendered throughout. The translation is indeed as close as it well
can be, perhaps a little too much so, in one or two places, and the
effect is consistent and harmonious. The result of the sufferings of
the Servant of Jehovah shall be, for his people, prosperity, redemption,
expiation of their sins — in accordance with the ancient and widely
spread idea that by suffering, even the suffering of others, sin may
be atoned for and put away. The ' Servant ' shall see the fruits of
his work, of his past endurance and faithfulness, in the future happi-

106 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

ness of Israel, in their deliverance from Babylon and restoration to
their own land.

The inquiry as to the person to whom the prophet is thus referring,
is not one to be here entered upon at any length. But several
sections of this part of the Book (from chapter xl. onwards), in which
the Servant of Jehovah is introduced, very plainly indicate that what
the prophet has in his mind can be no other than the collective Israel,
especially the more faithful portion of the nation, who stood firm in
their adherence to the service and worship of Jehovah amidst the
misfortunes of the Captivity. In several instances the Servant is
expressly named as 'Jacob' and as < Israel ' (xli. 8, 14 ; xliv. 1 ; xlv. 4;
xlix. 3) ; and is evidently not one individual but a plurality of
individuals : * But thou Israel my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen,
the seed of Abraham my friend. . . . Thou art my servant, I have
chosen thee and not cast thee away. . . . Fear not, thou worm Jacob,
and ye men of Israel ; I will help thee, saith Jehovah' (xli. 8, 9, 14).
The import of such expressions is too plain to be missed, and it might
seem that only the most devoted allegiance to a foregone conclusion
could prevent a man from seeing what the prophet intends to denote
under this often recurring phrase. So then, he commences the section,
lii. 13-liii. 12, by naming this ideal person in the usual way as the

* Servant,' and goes on to say that, notwithstanding his adversities and
sufferings,' he shall prosper and see the reward of his faithfulness.

In the wording of the passage, which indeed required but little
correction, two or three of the marginal alterations appear to suit
the main drift of the whole better than the words actually placed in
the text. On these we must not dwell, except only to observe that
the word ' deaths ' in the margin of liii. 9 corresponds to the plurality
of the ideal object in the prophet's thoughts; and that the word

* rich ' in the same verse should at least have had a margin. In
scriptural usage this word is at times synonymous with proud,
oppressive, tyrannical — as indeed the rich men of those times so often
were. The word, therefore, may here denote the Babylonian masters
and oppressors of Jehovah's Servant. "With them, in the midst of
them, his grave has been made, far away from his own land. This
explanation is favoured or required by the parallel ' wicked.' An alter-
native rendering would have served to warn readers off the notion of
a reference to the sepulchre of Joseph of Arimathea. This, however,
with many expositors would be a good reason for omitting such a
margin.

But to these small corrections and strictures there might obvi-
ously be no end. Such books as Isaiah, Job, and the Psalms present
matter and occasion for comment in endless variety. And each critic
may easily -bring out a different set of suggestions— for indeed
Hebrew words are too often vague and elastic as well as obscure
enough to allow of very different renderings. And so, from all this it

1886 REVISION OF THE BIBLE. 107

follows that the ordinary or unlearned reader may be fairly satisfied
with the Old Testament Eevised as it is now put into his hands ; and
may receive it as the best that is for the present attainable — at least
under the auspices of so numerous and distinguished a * company.'

It follows again that it will be the duty of English people who
* profess and call themselves Christians,' to make use of this Old Testa-
ment ! They, at least, who say that they value the Bible as the very
' Word of Grod,' will not surely be satisfied to read from their pulpits,
or give to their children, an inferior and often misleading representative
of the Divine Word, when a more adequate and correct form of it is at
their command. Have they even a right to do this, supposing they
have the power? Theological bias and long-established custom have
indeed in such a question enormous influence. But with reasonable
people, capable of forming an intelligent judgment on these subjects,
mere sentiment and use or even the dogmatic systems of churches,
ought not to be allowed to override the dictates of common sense, so
as to render fruitless the appeal of sound learning, as virtually made in
this Eevised Version — proceeding as it does from earnest and competent
scholars. Indifference and neglect such as this are not to be justi-
fied, hardly to be expected. But alas, in the case of the New Testa-
ment the vast majority, both of churches and ministers, have hitherto
shown that they belong to the class of which the irreconcilable old
monk was a distinguished member. Like him in reading his Latin
manuscript, they too have largely preferred to cling to their ancient
mumpsimus, or rather its English equivalent, merely because they
have been accustomed to it, and even when the right word is placed
before their eyes. Whether, and how far, this will be done in the case
of the Old Testament too, time will show ; and for the present no
very sanguine expectation can be entertained on the point.

NOTE.

In the foregoing remarks on ' the Servant of Jehovah ' and some kindred topics,
it is not intended to imply that the Hebrew prophets, or some of them, did not look
forward to a wide diffusion of their religion, ' the knowledge of Jehovah ' (Isaiah
xi. 9) among the nations. There can be no doubt that they did so. But that their
anticipation had the definite personal form attributed to it by later Christian inter-
preters, and commonly assumed in the popular theologies of our time, is more than
questionable.

Gr. VANCE SMITH.

108 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

V/HAT THE WORKING CLASSES READ.

A GREAT deal is said and written nowadays about the education and
enlightenment of the masses. The working man, as compared with
his ancestor, is regarded as a prodigy of learning. Nearly every
newspaper is conducted with a view, if not to finding favour with ' the
people,' at least to avoid giving the people offence. Publications of
all kinds — religious, political, philanthropic, social — are started in
their interests. Periodicals edited especially to meet the wants of the
British working man and his wife are launched in legions upon the
bookseller's stall, and cheap editions innumerable take the field
almost hourly. To cast one's eye over the pile of papers and serials
in the first stationer's one comes to is to receive the impression that
the working classes must be the most omnivorous devourers of mental
food ever known. A. market which a century since was exclusively
controlled' by the aristocracy is now open to the democrat or the
socialist equally with the most blue-blooded of peers. ' A Workman '
gets his letter to the editor printed in the Times ; and the national
newspaper even advocates the cause of the all-prescient proletariat.
The monthly reviews print articles from representatives of trade-
unions, and the venerable and stately quarterlies undertake to criticise
the doings of the democracy only in the most conciliatory, not to say
nattering, spirit. Now and again some austere political misanthrope
ventures to characterise this pandering to the popular palate as
' venal rubbish,' but it is a protest against a condition of things sup-
ported by general acclamation. As with the most reactionary of
politicians, so with the most prejudiced of newspaper and magazine
editors. The working classes, it is believed, must be ' won over,' or
success is impossible. How universal is this impression a very cursory
glance at the broadsheets and handy volumes of the present day will
demonstrate. Demos, in fact, having acquired full command of
Parliamentary power, is now rapidly becoming the spoilt child of the
press. What is the motive of the journalist ? Is it utilitarian or
mercenary ? or has he merely fallen a victim to popular super-
stition ?

In some cases, doubtless, it is utilitarian ; in many more, purely
mercenary ; in all an affirmative reply to the last question would
explain the phenomenon. When the duty on paper was removed, it

1886 WHAT THE WORKING CLASSES READ. 109

is hardly a figure of speech to say that the literary floodgates were
opened, and the land was swamped with publications of every degree
of pretension and worth. Great Britain was to be socially, morally,
and politically regenerated by means of the printing press. Enter-
prising publishers started papers appealing to all varieties of taste.
The brothers Chambers, with skilful fingers, turned the hose of their
genius upon the kingdom ; every educated hand seemed anxious to
join in the good work, and societies for the dissemination of useful
knowledge attained a luxuriant profusion in the new-born crusade
against the darkness, the ignorance, the degradation of centuries. A
sacred fire possessed the organisers of the people's press, and in the
latter half of the nineteenth century the full force of the injunction
4 Let there be light ' seemed to be borne in upon the soul of wide-
awake journalists. In right good earnest they set to work to lift the
lowly from the quagmires and cesspools in which their earthly lives
were supposed to be plunged, and — is it libellous to add ? — to make
money. Few philanthropic movements are more hollow in their aims
than the philanthropy of the press. Take up almost any paper,
unless it be a so-called ' society ' journal, or a journal appealing
exclusively to the drawing room, and it is difficult to resist the ex-
clamation, ' How disinterested ! ' Apparently the broadsheet was
started and is maintained solely in the cause of the people. If the
upper classes are so fortunate as to escape being rated on their ill-
gotten affluence and unwarranted social or political eminence, neither
are the lower classes any longer the butt for the satire and contempt
of the leader-writer. The operations of the pen-and-ink purgatory
go briskly forward. Directly any abuse in the ranks of the masses is
discovered, an article is secured on it in one of the papers, and an
organisation started for its removal. Never was cynicism wrapped in
such a garb of solicitude. The explanation is obvious. The daily
press is conducted in the interests of the people, because it is
believed the people read the daily press. The belief rests on very
slender grounds. The working classes concern themselves little
about any newspapers save those issued on the Sabbath.

The great daily papers do not fall much into the hands of the
masses. Many working men, doubtless, buy the Daily Telegraph
and the Daily Chronicle, but they buy them chiefly for their adver-
tisements. To say, however, that the working men do not read the
more influential dailies would not be true. They read them at their
clubs, their eating-houses, and the public-house, whilst, in some
•establishments where several men — tailors for instance — are employed
in a separate room, the whole number subscribes towards one or two
morning papers and the time lost by one man, who, for an hour or
more, will read aloud, the others listening as they work. Working-
men's clubs of course take those papers which advocate the political
cause to which they are attached. Publicans, as a rule, take the

110 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

Times or the Morning Advertiser, the Daily Telegraph, and the
special edition of the Evening Standard. Coffee-shops generally
patronise the Standard, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Chronicle,
the Daily News, and the special Evening Standard. All these
broadsheets are glanced at during meal times at the coffee -tavern,
or at the public-house bar of an evening, but they exercise little
effect politically. There are only two daily papers in London which
exclusively appeal to and are almost exclusively bought by the man
who earns his livelihood by manual toil. These are the Echo and
the Evening News. For years the former held undisputed pos-
session of the ground, and, as was assumed, of the popular taste
also. The Echo, Eadical and revolutionary in its tendency, was
believed faithfully to represent the views of the working classes.
As a matter of fact, it did nothing of the kind, and except in
the case of an infinitesimal minority, had no influence, and was
purchased merely for its record of events. The Evening News has
come rapidly into favour, and has proved itself a formidable rival to
the Echo. For my own part, I do not know a single working man
who buys the Echo, but I do know several who buy and read the
Evening News. A careful examination of the aims of the two papers
would now induce one to believe that there must be a very strong
Conservative feeling latent in the breasts of the working classes, and
that it was only necessary for an enterprising Conservative to start
* an evening halfpenny ' to dissipate the illusion that the people were
Radical to the backbone. This conclusion is as unsound as that con-
cerning the Echo. The Evening News is read in preference to the
Echo because it is the more amusing. That, and that alone, is the
secret.

It is, as has been hinted, significant of the particular time devoted
to reading by the working classes that the papers which they most
largely purchase are issued on the Sabbath. How voracious their
reading must be then, all dwellers in the metropolis who, soon after
breakfast every Sunday morning, are disturbed by the newsboy's cry,
will have formed a shrewd conception. Few working-class homes in
England fail to * take in ' some kind of paper on the day of rest. In
point of sale, Lloyd's Weekly London Newspaper occupies the first
place. The total number of copies disposed of weekly is said to be little
short of three-quarters of a million. It professes Liberalism, and it is
now the most reliable of its class. Among its Liberal contemporaries it
is decidedly the most patriotic and loyal. If the papers read by the
working classes have any political influence deserving of the name,
there need be little fear that the democracy will consent to sever
the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland. Lloyd's
has made a stand against Home Rule as determined as that of any
of the Conservative journals, and its lead is followed, however half-
heartedly, by most of the other Radical and Liberal weeklies. One

1886 WHAT THE WORKING CLASSES READ. Ill

thing is remarkable about Lloyd's in comparison with several of the
more prominent of its companions. First in the field as a Sunday
newspaper, it lacks any sort of relief in the way of light and amusing
general sketches. What Lloyd's has not in this respect the Weekly
Dispatch is famous for. Mr. G. E. Sims's papers on the lives of the
poor which have appeared from time to time in the Dispatch are
among the best things secured by the weekly press. The Dispatch,
from the time when, published at sixpence, it was read in turns by
half the population of nearly every village in England, each reader
subscribing towards the cost of the whole, has always shown great
enterprise. Like Lloyd's, it has a supreme horror of anything
savouring of aristocratic red-tapeism or privilege, and indulges periodi-
cally in tirades against the oppression of the many by the few. Its
judgments are, on the whole, characterised by a spirit of fairness, and
are not of the intolerant and Eepublican type of Reynolds' s Newspaper.
Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Chamberlain, equally with Lord Salisbury and
Lord Kandolph Churchill, come under the not very keen lash of this
latter journal if they do not act consistently in accordance with its
doctrines about capitalists and landlords. Its antipathy to the
monarchy is ludicrous in its extravagance. One instance may be
given of this which occurred not long ago. A company of foremen
tailors held a dinner in St. James's. When the Queen's health
was proposed, two of the company hissed and in various ways evinced
their Eepublican sentiments. This the loyal foremen of the sartorial
profession resented, and in a very little time the offenders were
bundled, in a free fight, headlong out of the room. The comment
of Reynolds's on this incident was that the two anti-monarchists
were evidently the only two sober people in the room ! Another
paper, similar politically to Reynolds's, is the erewhile Weekly Times.
This journal has recently been incorporated with the Weekly Echo,
which, though issued by the proprietors of the Echo did not prove
a success.

The Conservative cause is very poorly supported in the Sabbati-
cally distributed press. The Sunday Times, admirably conducted and
full of amusing matter as it is, is not purchased to any large extent
by working men and women. England is so meagre in its news, so
intolerant and intolerable in its denunciations of everything Eadical,
and so bent on publishing little more than those facts which tend to
the discredit of the Liberal party, that its failure to reach the masses
is not surprising. The People must carry off the palm as a Conser-
vative weekly intended for the people. It acts thoroughly up to its
title, and is one of the most valuable Conservative organs appealing
to the true democracy. The Referee cannot properly be called a
working-man's paper, though many artisans and shop assistants look
forward to its perusal on Sunday morning as regularly as they look
forward to their breakfast. Mr. Sims's ' Mustard and Cress ' is to

112 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

this class of readers quite as entertaining a feature in the paper as are
its sporting opinions. The Penny Illustrated Paper, under the
guidance of the son of the editor of the Illustrated London News, has
secured a well-merited popularity with every class. It has practically
no rival. It sells in its hundreds of thousands weekly, and is im-
partial in its pictorial delineations of all kinds of matters interesting to
the proletariat. Now it is a battle, now a shipwreck ; one week there is
a batch of Conservative portraits given, another a batch of Liberal.
Whatever of interest that takes place during the week and lends itself
to treatment in a pen-and-ink sketch is brought before the admiring
gaze of the multitude by the Penny Illustrated, whilst the world in
general is rallied good-humouredly on its faults and foibles by the
editor in the person of the Showman. In addition to these papers
there are published weekly a legion of religious or semi-religious
newspapers — for instance, the Christian Million, the Christian
World, and the Family Circle — a bare mention of the names of
which would fill a page. The majority of the readers of these are not
to be found among the working classes. Further, there exists a host
of local journals, published at a halfpenny or a penny, and an equally
overwhelming array of organs devoted to particular trades.

An important constituent in the mental food — or rather poison —
of the people is the penny novelette. There can be no doubt that
this class of fiction has much deteriorated in point of literary merit.
The London Journal is not what it was years ago. Its stories
are frequently the veriest trash, and its illustrations are on a par
with its stories. A couple of decades since, when All the Year Round
and Chambers's Journal were the leading spirits of nearly every
well-to-do and of many poor homes, the London Journal occupied a
far more dignified position than it has since taken up. It has lost
much of its ancient prestige, and is in many ways inferior to the
Family Herald. While such stories as ( The House on the Marsh '
enliven the pages of the latter, it will soar far ahead of the London
Journal. We come next to the penny novelettes. Some of these
are positively vicious ; others are foolish. All may be characterised
as cheap and nasty. They are utterly contemptible in literary
execution ; they thrive on the wicked baronet or nobleman and
the faithless but handsome peeress, and find their chief supporters
among shop-girls, seamstresses, and domestic servants. It is hardly
surprising that there should exist in the impressionable minds of the
masses an aversion more or less deep to the upper classes. If one
•of their own order, man or woman, appears in the pages of these
unwholesome prints, it is only as a paragon of virtue, who is
probably ruined, or at any rate wronged, by that incarnation of
evil, the sensuous aristocrat, standing six feet, with his dark eyes,
heavy moustache, pearl-like teeth, and black hair. Throughout the
story the keynote struck is highborn scoundrelism. Every social

188G WHAT THE WORKING CLASSES READ. 113

misdemeanour is called in to assist the progress of the slipshod
narrative. Crime and love are the essential ingredients, and the
influence exercised over the feminine reader, often unenlightened
by any close contact with the classes whom the novelist pretends
to portray, crystallises into an irremovable dislike of the upper
strata of society. The same dish is served up again and again ;
and the surprising thing is that the readers do not tire of the
ceaseless record of wrong-doing on the part of the wealthy which
forms the staple of these nonsensical, if not nauseating, stories.

Half-way between the penny novelette and the Leisure Hour or
the Sunday at Home stands Household Words. This journal, pub-
lished at a penny, no more resembles its parent and namesake than
Zola resembles Scott. It is not indeed intended to do so, though
many of its readers among the poorer classes, misled by the nomen-
clature alike of the paper and its editor, frequently believe they
are purchasing the magazine founded by the great novelist. Its
stories, generally printed anonymously, are of a much higher order
than the love-and-murder concoctions of many of its contemporaries,
and useful papers on the household and household management are
published every week. Neither All the Year Round nor Chambers's
Journal is much read by the masses. Three-halfpence is just one
third too high a price to induce the people to purchase a weekly
publication.

Of the more religious magazines which find favour in the eyes
of the working classes, the two chief are the Leisure Hour and
the Sunday at Home. Both occupy a higher place in the popular
estimation than either Good Words, the Sunday Magazine, or the
Quiver, and certainly than CasselVs Family Magazine. Neither has
Home Chimes, fighting courageously against adverse fortune, won
the hearts of the people. A sign of the times is the popularity of such
papers as Great Thoughts, Tit-Bits, Rare Bits, and CasselVs Saturday
Journal. Any one of these journals might appropriately be called an
old curiosity sheet. Brief and good is its motto. Great Thoughts culls
from master works some of the choicest ideas ever given to the world,,
and both Rare Bits and Tit-Bits collect all they can find of interest
in any volume they can lay their hands on. Like CasseWs Saturday
Journal, they offer prizes for literary competitions, and as these
competitions are largely entered into by their readers, they may fairly
claim to discharge a very important function in educating the people.
It may be objected that the reading of the scraps printed in these
papers tends to develop a habit of loose reading. The answer is
that, whatever habit it engenders, if the working classes did not read
these papers they would read hardly anything save the novelette or
the weekly newspaper ; and, even though gained in a disjointed
fashion, it is surely better for them to acquire pieces of historical
information thuswise than never to acquire them at all. The two
VOL. XX.— No. 113. I

114 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

comic papers most popular with the working classes are founded on
the Tit-Bit principle. Scraps and Ally Sloper 's Half-Holiday have
nothing to recommend them artistically, but they contain sketches,
literary and pictorial, characterised by rollicking fun and broad
caricature.

Only the more prominent periodical publications which reach
the masses have now been indicated. Sufficient, however, has been
said to convey a definite idea of what the working classes read either
in the way of newspapers or novelettes. In both departments
England will compare favourably with America or France. With one
or two exceptions, the popular literature — the literature, that is, which
finds its way into the homes of the labourer and the artisan — has not
sunk to the low and vicious level of much of that born in New York
and Paris. The papers which the working man of either of these
cities is invited to peruse are vulgar, sensuous, and unwholesome. It
is to be regretted that several public-houses in London subscribe to
these exotic journals for the especial edification of their customers.
The English papers as a rule are more silly than vicious. If they are
not calculated to raise the moral tone of their readers above that
which poverty and overcrowding may have engendered, they at least
are not calculated to do any very grave mischief. The worst that can
be urged against them is that they do help to keep the moral tone
of their readers low. Occasionally the editors of penny novelettes are
so fortunate as to secure a story from such writers as Miss Florence
Marryat and Miss Jean Middlemass. These ladies are probably not
aware of the exact nature of the pages which their name will do much
to make popular.

The penny novelette has probably much more effect on the
women members of the working classes than the newspaper has on
the men. As in the former case, so in the latter. In the majority
of instances the objects held up to the derision of the people are the
aristocracy, the plutocracy, and sometimes even the monarchy itself.
Anyone who, being ignorant of the English working man, should
take up the chief Sunday papers published for him would probably
jump to the conclusion that he was Eadical to the backbone. With
the exception of the Conservative weeklies, every working-man's
paper resorts to the coarsest attacks on the wealthy and high-placed.
Capital and birth are the two themes on which the democratic
journalist never tires of expatiating. By deriding the governing
classes he hopes to arouse the enthusiasm of his public. He is,
however, victim to the delusion that the democracy is primarily
moved by enmity towards the aristocracy. If the influence of the
working-man's paper was as great as many imagine, the whole fabric
of British wealth and society would be immediately undermined,
destroyed, and reorganised on a socialist, or semi-socialist, basis. In
truth that influence is small. Instead of acting up to the teachings

18S6 WHAT THE WORKING CLASSES READ. 115

of their papers and effecting a revolution, the English labourer
either reads the political articles and fails to act up to them, or does
not read them at all. Nothing is more common than to hear a
•working man extol some particularly bitter onslaught on his social
betters. < Splendid attack on So-and-so,' he will say. * Quite true ;
So-and-so has had his way too long ; ' but apparently it never enters
his head to rise in rebellion against the object of his animadversion.
His ideas are more abstract than practical. Possibly, too, he recog-
nises that the journalist has written not from conviction of the
soundness of the position he supports, but because he believes that
it is the position which the working classes will approve and appre-
ciate. It is, moreover, as he knows, much easier to examine a thing
and attack its anomalies as a whole than to examine its parts and
foundation and discover whether its heart is sound. The efforts of
the journalist are thus entirely wasted. Again, for one man who
reads the political section of the paper, half-a-dozen study the latest
* mystery ' and the police news, while another half-dozen devote their
chief attention to the general sketches. The newspapers which
appeal to the working classes would do real good if, instead of pick-
ing holes in the characters of the high-born and criticising in a spirit
of narrow and mistaken economy the national estimates, they were
to devote some time to matters which exclusively concern the work-
ing population of the country. For instance, it is rare to find a
working-man's newspaper pointing out the advantages of the colonies
to the people and the best way to emigrate, or the adverse side of
Free Trade. The Eadical section of these newspapers is bigoted in
its democratic sentiments, and supports every anti-capitalist or anti-
landlord utterance, however wild, from Messrs. Cobden and Bright
down to Messrs. Chamberlain and Morley. Luckily, as I have said,
the superficial views usually current in the Sunday broadsheet have
not yet succeeded in ingratiating themselves with the masses. It
will be an ill day for this country when the literary pedagogue of the
Sabbath can induce the democracy to believe in his infallibility.

In the shape of books the working classes read very little. Years
ago, had one walked into almost any poor but respectable man's room
in the kingdom, one would probably have found two books at least —
the Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress. Both were held in extreme
veneration. Now it is to be feared that very few working men and
women read the Pilgrim's Progress, and the Bible is far from being
what it was — the book of the home. For this the propagation of
Sunday newspapers is largely to blame. The weary toiler now
spends his Sunday afternoons smoking his pipe and digesting the
week's record of criminalities. Formerly, if not addicted to drinking
or wasting his hours with boon companions, he became one of the
family gathering, whilst his wife or daughter, or perchance he him-
self, read a chapter from the Book of books. I do not intend to say

12

116 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

that the working classes do not read the Bible now ; what I do say
and believe is that they do not read it as extensively and regu-
larly as they did a generation or two previously. It is not easy to
indicate precisely what other books they read. There can be no
question, however, that when they read books they usually read good
books. They do not read many, but what they read are of a high
order. Cheap editions have brought standard works within their
reach, and though the privilege is not largely availed of, it is not
altogether neglected. No idea of the reading of the working classes
can be arrived at by comparing it with the reading of the upper
classes. The latter read everything possible of nearly every author.
The former read one or two works in a lifetime, but they usually
re-read them several times. Such a method may tend to narrowness ;
it at least tends to thoroughness, as far as it goes. Lots of work-
ing men have studied with great care one or two of Shakespeare's
plays ; others know one or two of Dickens's works almost by heart.
One working man I knew claimed to have read carefully only two
books — the Bible and Shakespeare. To say nothing of what it would
mean to acquire an adequate perception — and of course he had not
done so — of all the glories of these two glorious works, how many
people of culture have ever read both, word by word? Another
member of the democracy had plunged into the deep waters of
Paradise Lost, and gone from cover to cover. At the same time
there are working men who will devour every book they can buy or
can secure from friends, and a curious undigested, if not indiges-
tible, mass they do sometimes get hold of. Hundreds, on the other
hand, have never read a line of a book.

The chief difficulty about literature for the working classes is to
reach them. If the literature were lying on their table they would
often read, but they seldom sally forth into the highways and by-
ways of the literary world to discover what they shall purchase.
Beyond doubt they have become possessors of thousands of cheap
volumes, but the working men and women of England do not number
thousands, but millions, and it is matter for regret that, with the
many means of disseminating among them the masterpieces of the
English language, more energy is not exerted in bringing home to
them the inherent attractions of Shakespeare, Scott, Marryat,
Dickens, Lytton, Eliot. The working classes read the Sunday news-
paper as largely as they do because it is left at their door. What
religious organisations have done in the distribution of tracts which
the working classes do not read, surely some other organisation
might do for the distribution of works of a wholesome character and
of abiding interest which they would read. Without underrating
their beneficial action, it may safely be said that free libraries have
not done all that was expected of them in the way of bringing the
literary gems of the world within the reach of the son of toil. The

1886 WHAT THE WORKING CLASSES READ. 117

elementary education now received by every child at least gives him
a power of reading not always possessed by his fathers, but such
power is not necessarily employed. He might read more if books
were brought to his home. Between the free library and his home,
morally and materially, stands the public-house.

Taking cognisance of the working classes as a whole, there is one
thing which I believe to be indisputable — viz. that the instruction
imparted through the Board School has not superinduced any large
amount of reading, except in a shape contemptible and worthless.
Neither the newspaper nor the novelette contains any element
•calculated to carry peace and contentment to the working man's door.
There is nothing in it to elevate, to ennoble, to inspire with a desire
for truth and right-living. And if, as men and women, the masses
have a particular liking for such reading, the disposition is not sur-
prising when we consider what they read as children. The periodical
literature of the poor is in every respect inferior to the periodical litera-
ture of the well-to-do ; the Sunday newspaper is not comparable for
a moment in its knowledge of politics with the daily newspaper, and
is apparently equally ignorant of the ways of men generally. The
working classes, in point of fact, are written down to. This is the
mistake frequently made by educated men who take up subjects and
deal with them for the uneducated. It will, of course, be urged
that the Sunday newspaper is a business concern, and that the
journalist produces what he finds is read. The excuse is unworthy
and unwarranted. The working classes have made no demand for the
ephemeral matter placed before them on Sunday mornings, and it is
well to bear in mind that one can scarcely look to the working classes
to raise the tone of their press. Eather ought we to look to the
press to ply the weapons in its hands with all the energy and talent
possible, with a view to awakening the working classes to higher
ideals and the virtues of self-reliance and self-restraint, and not to
court popularity by unmeasured and unjustifiable criticism of people
who have made their position by conscientious industry, or of things
which, if not of Utopian perfection, are yet not so black as interested
agitators paint them. Whatever influence the working-class press
may have exercised in the past, one thing is certain — as the masses
open their eyes more and more to facts, that influence will probably
expand. It is, then, the bounden duty of the press which finds its
chief patrons among the labourers, the artisans, and the mechanics
of England to beware of leading them astray, morally, politically, or
socially.

EDWARD Gr. SALMON.

118 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES.

ANNEXATION in the Pacific is fast becoming a momentous problem,
the solution of which bristles with difficulties and imperils the
entente cordiale at present existing between Great Britain and
foreign Powers. The subject is not only playing a prominent part
in the great diplomatic drama of European politics, but is tend-
ing to shake the confidence that for more than half a century has-
existed between the Australian Colonies and the mother country.

Important as the question is to the prestige of Great Britain and
the future welfare of Australasia, it is looked at by the Imperial
authorities and by the Colonial communities from somewhat diffe-
rent standpoints.

This is not unnatural, for while the annexing or giving up of
islands in the Pacific may involve the Imperial Government in.
awkward questions of foreign policy, to our Colonies the matter is
one of domestic importance, affecting not only the trade of their
country, but the future safety of their shores.

France already possesses very considerable influence in the Pacific.
In the great maritime highway between Panama and Auckland,
commonly called the Eastern Pacific, the French possessions com-
prise the Marquesas, the Tahitian Archipelago, and the Leeward
Islands.

(1) The Marquesas, a group of eleven islands, were ceded to France
by a treaty with Admiral Dupetit-Thouars in May 1 842. Here for some
time a military garrison was kept up, but the French Government
finding such an establishment more expensive than necessary, finally
abandoned it on the 1st of January, 1859.

The Tahitian Archipelago may be subdivided thus :

(a) Tahiti Moorea, Tetiaroa, Meetia, Tubai, Kaivavae, the
Gambier islets, and Rapa, an important island, not so much from a
commercial point of view as on account of its harbour, which has
been described — possibly by an enthusiast — as ' one of the finest
natural harbours in the world.'

(6) The Low Archipelago, also known as the Paumotu group, a vast
collection of coral islands extending over sixteen degrees of longitude,
numbering seventy-eight islands, and 'covering an area of 6,600
square kilometres, chiefly valuable for their mother-of-pearl trade.

1886 FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES. 119

Admiral Thouars seized Tahiti in August 1842, and during the
following year this island was, at the request of its queen and
principal chiefs, placed under a French protectorate. On the 29th
of May, 1880, King Pomare the Fifth handed over the administration
of Tahiti and its dependencies to M. Chesse, commissioner of the
Kepublic. The cession was duly ratified by the Chamber of Deputies
and the Senate, and on the 30th of September, 1880, the President
of the French Eepublic declared :

(a) The island of Tahiti and the archipelagoes depending upon it
to be French colonies.

(6) French nationality to be conferred in full upon all the former
subjects of the king of Tahiti.

Tahiti is now the centre of government of the French l establish-
ments in the Eastern Pacific.

(3) The Leeward Islands. Soon after the establishment of the
French protectorate over Tahiti in 1843, a dispute arose between
Great Britain and France relative to the islands of Huahine, Eaiatea,
and Borabora, three large islands in the vicinity of the Society group,
commonly called the Leeward Islands. The matter was definitely
settled between Lord Palmerston and Comte de Jarnac by the Treaty
of 1 847, in which the two Governments reciprocally engaged :

1. Formally to acknowledge the independence of the islands Huahine, Raiatea,
Borabora (to the leeward of Tahiti), and of the small islands adjacent to and
dependent upon those islands.

2. Never to take possession of the said islands, nor of any one or more of them,
either absolutely or under the title of a protectorate, or in any other form whatever.

3. Never to acknowledge that a chief or prince reigning at Tahiti can at the
same time reign in any one or more of the other islands above mentioned, nor, on
the other hand, that a chief or prince reigning in any one or more of those other
islands can reign at the same time in Tahiti, the reciprocal independence of the
islands above-mentioned and of the island of Tahiti and its dependencies being
established as a principle.

In 1882, however, in direct contravention of articles 1 and 2 of
this declaration, the French flag was hoisted at Eaiatea, and a pro-
visional protectorate assumed over that island by the French authori-
ties of Tahiti. True, this proceeding was disavowed by the French
Government, but Sir Charles Dilke, in answer to a question put to
him in the House of Commons on this point, admitted that the
French authorities had seized the opportunity to open negotiations
for the abrogation of the Treaty of 1847 in consideration of adequate
concessions on our part in connection with other pending questions.
How far the much-vexed question of the Newfoundland fisheries
was allowed to enter into the settlement of this matter I am not in
a position to determine. One thing is certain, that the French flag is

1 The population of the French establishments in the Eastern Pacific is over
25,000.

120 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

still flying at Raiatea, and these three important islands, declared
independent in 1847, are now regarded as French possessions.

In the Western Pacific, the trade route of the future, between
Vancouver Island and Sydney, is intercepted, 720 miles north-east of
Queensland, by French New Caledonia, 200 miles long and 30 broad,
possessing the two secure harbours of Port Balade and Port St.
Vincent, and by the adjacent group of the Loyalty Islands, which
were annexed by France in 1864. Not content with the influence they
already possess in these waters, France now seeks to annex the New
Hebrides, an important group of islands west of the Fijis, distant
only 900 miles from New Zealand and 1,200 from Australia, and
lying in the great commercial highway of our vessels, and those of
New Zealand, on the American, Japanese, and Chinese routes.2

Mr. Stout, the Premier of New Zealand, in a letter to the Agent-
General of that colony, dated the 27th of February, 1886, graphically
interprets the designs of France :

It has been apparent to me for some time that the cost of New Caledonia to
France must have been great, and no doubt the French Government now see that
there is little hope of reducing the expenditure. New Caledonia can produce little,
her mines have failed, and her soil is not so fertile as to enable her to rely on vege-
table products. The convicts who have served their time are unable to maintain
themselves in the colony. They have either to leave, seeking a home in Australasia
or Fiji, or else they commit some fresh crime, and are again kept at the expense of
the State. Colonisation in any proper sense of the term is impossible. The French
officials, no doubt, have seen that what is required to make New Caledonia approach
a self-supporting position is some outlet for settlement of the convicts and emi-
grants. This wish can only be obtained by the annexation of the New Hebrides.
These islands are rich in soil, and will maintain a considerable population. They
are near New Caledonia, and the French have several settlements amongst them.
It is only natural, therefore, that France should try and obtain possession of the
New Hebrides.

So little is known in this country even by the political exponents
of our Pacific policy respecting these islands that, before discussing
the subject of their annexation either by France or England, it will
be as well to acquaint my readers with some particulars concerning
their position and people. The New Hebrides lie between 13° 16'
and 20° 15' south latitude, and 166° 40' and 170° 20' east longitude,
and are included in the new division of the Western Pacific.3 The
group consists of over thirty inhabited islands of volcanic origin,
which extend 400 miles NNW. and SSE., and have an estimated
population of 150,000.

Espiritu Santo, the most northern island, has the largest area, sixty-
six miles long and twenty-two broad. Quiros, a Spanish explorer,
first discovered its existence in 1606. Subsequently Bougainville

2 The trade between the Australian Colonies and the Western Pacific Islands
between 1871 and 1880 amounted to the value of 6,486,9362.

3 I allude to the new definition of the Western Pacific given in the Declaration
signed between Great Britain and German y, the 6th of April, 1886.

1886 FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES. 121

visited it, and some of the surrounding islands in 1768, but the
complete discovery of the group was reserved for our own great
navigator Cook, in 1774.

Aneiteum, situated at the extreme south, is about forty miles in
circumference, and has a native population over two thousand, all
of whom are Christians. Every person above five years old can
read, more or less, and attends school. Crime is rare, life and
property are secure. Cotton grows well ; hurricanes are frequent
and severe ; but the chief distinction of Aneiteum consists in its
harbour, which is spacious and sheltered from all points except
the west. The entrance is wide and free from obstruction, and safe
anchorage for vessels of any size is obtainable.

Tanna, sixteen miles from Aneiteum, about twenty- five miles long
and twelve broad, is considered the richest and most beautiful. The
population is between ten and twenty thousand. Its unique attraction
is a volcano, which has been in a constant state of activity since
1774. Port Eesolution, situated at the extreme north-east of the
island, is a fair harbour. North of Tanna lies the less fertile but
equally mountainous island of Erromanga, triangular in shape, with
a sea-board of nearly seventy-five miles. It was here the great mis-
sionary John Williams was murdered.

Vate,4 or Sandwich Island, thirty-five miles long and about fifteen
broad, is situated fifty- four miles north of Erromanga ; the climate is
rather damp. The great features of this island are its magnificent
bays and harbours. The finest harbour is Havannah, formed by the
mainland of Vate and two other islands. South of Vate is the large
island of Api, fertile, wooded, and thickly populated.

Mallicollo, the second largest island of the group, situated between
Api and Espiritu Santo, is covered with cocoanut trees, and has a good
landing-place on its western side, with deep water close to the beach.
St. Esprit island is a very convenient place for watering, as boats can
easily pull into the river Jordan, which flows into the bay of St. Philip.
The ordinary trade-winds blow beautifully fresh and cool over the land,
and cause the temperature to be about four degrees lower than the
other islands. The remaining islands of any importance are Pente-
cost, possessing two good watering-places towards the south-west
end of the island ; Lepers Island, with a magnificent mountain
rising to the height of 4,000 feet ; Aurora and Ambrym, the latter a
perfect gem.

The natives of the New Hebrides are dark in colour and of
moderate stature ; their weapons are clubs, spears, bows, arrows,
and tomahawks. The dry season lasts, however, from May to
October, both months inclusive, and the wet season from November
to April ; occasionally much rain falls in the dry season, generally
accompanied by a change of wind from eastward. The normal
4 Sometimes called Efate.

122 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

direction of the trade-winds is from ESE., but the stronger winds,
which very often succeed calms, are from SE., and may be expected
when the wind veers round to E. or NE.

Under the Charter of 1840 the group originally formed part of
New Zealand, and in 1845 it was so indicated in the Commission
which appointed Sir George Grey governor of that colony ; this fact
I look upon as being most material to the present issue. In 1863
the boundaries of New Zealand were altered and declared to
be 162° east longitude, and 175° west longitude, and 33° and 53°
south latitude, a fact which Sir George Grey somewhat aptly re-
marks, and I agree with him, does not affect the status of the islands
as being a possession of the Crown, which they may still remain,
although they have ceased to be a part of the colony of New Zealand.
Sir Arthur Gordon evidently understood his authority as High Com-
missioner extended over them, for he appointed Captain Cyprian
Bridge, E.N., to be a deputy commissioner there, and it was in that
character that Captain Bridge went to the islands. Anyhow, it is
now a matter of history that for fifteen years the independence of
these islands was respected by France and not interfered with by
Great Britain. However, in 1877 events happened which but too
plainly showed to those on the spot that it was the desire, if not the
intention, of France to annex the New Hebrides. The colonies, not
unnaturally preferring the presence of a friendly rather than a pos-
sibly hostile power in their midst, began to petition the Queen to
annex the islands, and towards the close of the year 1877 public
opinion in Australia ran so high on the subject, and the tone of the
colonial press so alarmed the French Government, that their Ambas-
sador sent the following letter to Lord Derby, then Lord Beaconsfield's
Foreign Minister : —

The Marquis cFHarcourt to the Earl of Derby.

Ambassade de France : le 18 Janvier 1878.

M. le Comte, — II s'est 6tabli entre 1'ile de la Nouvelle-Cale'donie et le grouped es
Nouvelles-H6brides des rapports d'ordre commercial qui se sont rapidement
de"veloppe"s, en raison de leur voisinage, et qui pre"sentent pour la prosperity de
notre 6tabtissement colonial une importance considerable.

Mon Gouvernement, qui attache beaucoup de prix a ce que ces relations continuent
sur le meme pied, se preoccupe dans une certaine mesure d'un mouvement d'opinion
qui se serait produit en Australie dans ce dernier temps.

Les journaux de ce pays auraient denie 1'intention qu'ils attribuent a la
France de r^unir les Nouvelles-Hebrides a ses possessions, et demanderaient
qu'afin de prevenir cette eVentualite", 1'arcbipel dont il s'agit fut place sous la
souverainete" de la couronne d'Angleterre.

Sans attacber a ce mouvement de 1'opinion une tres-grande importance, mon
Gouvernement tient toutefois a declarer que pour ce qui le concerne il n'a pas le
projet de porter atteinte a 1'independance des Xouvelles-Hebrides, et il serait
beureux de savoir que de son cote le Gouvernement de Sa Majeste" est e"galernent
dispos6 a la respecter.

Veuillez, &c.,

D'HAKCOTJKT.
S.E. le Comte de Derby, &c.

1886 FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES. 123

In answer to this, Lord Derby (with the concurrence of the Colonial
Office) gave to the French Government the famous assurance of the
1st of February, 1878, ' that Her Majesty's Government have no in-
tention of proposing any measures to Parliament with a view of
changing the condition of independence which the New Hebrides
now enjoy,' an understanding Sir Michael Hicks-Beach lost no time
in signifying to the Australian Colonies.

Thus was brought about the Anglo-French Agreement of 1878,
which has been, and still is, interpreted by the Imperial authorities
as preventing any interference either by Great Britain or Australia
in the condition of the New Hebrides.

On the 20th of April, 1883, it was officially announced by the
Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs that neither France nor
Britain intended to take possession of the New Hebrides — an 'engage-
ment which was renewed by Comte d'Aunay, the French Charge
d'Affaires, on the part of France, by the ' Note Verbale ' 5 of the 9th
of July, 1883, and publicly referred to the following night by Lord
Granville in the House of Lords ; yet, in spite of M. Ch. Lacour's
expression of cordiality, and his expressed anxiety to receive a written

5 Note Verbale du Qjuillct 1883.

Vers la fin du mois dernier, le Kepr£sentant de la France a Londres a entretenu
le Principal Secretaire d'etat de la Keine de la demarche faite recemment par les
colonies australiennes en vue de provoquer la reunion & la Couronne de divers groupes
d'iles du Pacifique, et notamment des Nouvelles-Hebrides.

En ce qui concerne les Nouvelles-Hebrides, la question avait ete, des 1878, posee
dans les memes termes ; elle avait alors fourni 1'occasion d'un ^change de notes, dans
lesquelles chacun des deux gouvernements avait declare' qu'en ce qui le concernait, il
n'avait pas 1'intention de porter atteinte a 1'inde'pendance de 1'archipel.

II n'est survenu depuis lors aucun incident qui parut de nature a modifier cet
accord de vues. Le fait meme que Lord Lyons a era devoir, au mois de mars dernier,
remettre sous les yeux du Ministre des Affaires 6trangeres & Paris le texte des notes
susmentionnees attestait qu'a ce moment encore le gouvernement de Sa Majeste
Britannique y attachait la meme valeur et persistait dans les m&nes dispositions.

Cependant, dans le recent entretien, dont la demarche des colonies australiennes
a fait le sujet, le Principal Secretaire d'fitat s'est borne' & dire que le gouvernement
anglais n'avait encore pris aucune decision relativement & la reponse qui leur serait
faite. Les autres membres du gouvernement qui ont eu depuis a traiter de la ques-
tion au Parlement, se sont meme montres plus reserves et n'ont fait aucune mention
des d6clarations de 1878. Des cette epoque, le gouvernement francais avait fait
connaitre le prix qu'il attachait, en raison des rapports etablis entre ses 6tablissements
de la Nouvelle-Caledonie et les Nouvelles-Hebrides, & ce qu'aucun changement ne fut
apport6 si, la situation politique dejce dernier groupe d'iles. Loin de diminuer 1'impor-
tance de ces rapports, ceux-ci n'ont, depuis lors, cesse de s'accroltre : ils presentent
aujourd'hui pour notre colonie un interet de premier ordre.

Le gouvernement de la Republique a, par suite, le devoir de s'assurer si les declara-
tions de 1878 ont pour le gouvernement de la Eeine, comme pour lui, conserv6 toute
leur valeur, et d'insister, s'il y a lieu, pour le maintien de 1'etat actuel des choses.

Le Cabinet de Londres ne sera pas surpris qu'en presence du mouvement d'opinion
auquel la demarche des colonies australiennes a donne lieu, et des manifestations qui
pourraient en rSsulter inopinement de part ou d'autre, le gouvernement fransais
tienne & etre fixe, a bref delai, sur la maniere dont la question est envisagee par le
gouvernement de Sa Majeste' Britannique.

124 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

confirmation G of Lord Granville's answer to the Note Verbale, current
events but too plainly indicate that France is playing the same game
with the 1878 understanding as she did with the Treaty of 1847.
Just as the settlement of certain pending questions were to act as a set-
off against the surrender of Eaiatea and the surrounding islands, so the
bribe of no more transportation of French criminals to the Pacific is
offered as compensation to the Australian Colonies for their share in
the loss of the New Hebrides. True, the island of Eapa is to be
thrown in if the bargain is struck ; but the possession of a compara-
tively unknown port in the midst of French territory in the Eastern
Pacific hardly compensates us for the loss of a magnificent group of
islands, possessing fine harbours, in the immediate vicinity of our
valuable colonies in the Western Pacific.

The remarks of the present Premier of New Zealand on this
arrangement are significant:

The proposal made to the English Secretary of Foreign Affairs (says Mr. Stout)
of sending no more convicts to the Pacific if these islands are obtained by France
has no doubt been thought by the French authorities to be one that will be pleasing
to the colonies.

I do not deny that it is a great concession, for, no doubt, having New Caledonia
as the French depot for recidivistes is much worse than having New Caledonia and
New Hebrides as French colonies for moral people. I am only expressing my own
views : still I am of opinion that in New Zealand, and, I believe, in the Australian
Colonies, there will be no assent made to the proposition of the French Ambassador.

Mr. Osborne Morgan, speaking officially on this subject the other
night in the House of Commons, said that the Government attached
the greatest importance to the opinion of the Australian Colonies.
A well-meant statement, no doubt, but one which will be received
in Australasia with some amount of credulity, seeing the weight
-colonial opinion had in the recent settlement of the New Guinea
-difficulty between Great Britain and Germany. Let us hope that the
shilly-shallying policy then displayed by the Home authorities will
not again be repeated in the question of the New Hebrides, and that
Mr. Service, then Premier of Victoria, may not have occasion to repeat
what he said to me in Melbourne, that the colonial policy of Lord
Derby had done ' a lasting injury to the Australian Colonies.'

A proposof the telegram of June 16, announcing the hoisting of
the French flag at the New Hebrides, I would here call attention
to the remarks of M. Gabriel Charmes when discussing in the Journal
des Debats the contingent possibility of the colonial policy of France
bringing her into collision with England. I give the translation,
laid before the Victorian Parliament : —

6 ' Les explications fournies au Parlement anglais nous donnent la confiance cue
la reponse du Gouvernement de Sa Majeste Britannique a notre derniere com-
munication ne tardera pas a constater, definitivement, 1'accord qui parait subsister
dans les intentions des deux pays, relativement a 1'Arcbipel des Nouvelles-Hebridec.'
(Paris, le 16 Juillet 1883. M. Ch. Lacour to Lord Lyons.)

1886 FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES. 125

The English papers threaten us with, the possible hostility of England. They must
pardon us for doubting it. The enmity of England we should of course be sorry
to incur. But tve knoiu our neighbours well enoughto see the wide difference there exists
between their words and their deeds.

Now what is the opinion of the colonies on the subject. New
Zealand has been credited with approving the scheme suggested by
the Government, and it was so stated by Mr. Osborne Morgan in the
House of Commons only a few weeks since. That such, however, is
not the case the following letter plainly shows :—

The Premier of Neio Zealand to the Premier of Victoria.

Premier's Office, Wellington : March 5, 1886.

Sir, — I have the honour to inform you that on receipt of your secret and con-
fidential telegram on the 26th of February, and as my colleagues were not then
available for consultation, I addressed a letter to our Agent-General, in it giving
my views on the subject of the New Hebrides, the part of the letter dealing with
which I now enclose for your information. Since then the Cabinet has fully
endorsed my action, and it only remains, therefore, for me to convey to you the
assurances of this Government of their willingness to co-operate with you and the
other Australian Governments in the endeavour to prevent so undesirable a result
as the acquisition of New Hebrides by France. — I have, &c.

(Signed) ROBERT STOTTT.
The Hon. the Premier, Melbourne, Victoria.

The reasons that will induce the colonies to refuse their assent to
the present proposal are thus summarised by Mr. Stout in his letter
to the Agent-General for New Zealand, dated the 27th of February,
1886:—

1. The New Hebrides have been practically looked upon as a British possession.
'2. They have been the seat of the Presbyterian Mission in the Pacific, and any
advance they have made in civilisation has been due to that Church.

3. It is well known that whilst the French Government at home allows abso-
lute freedom in religious matters — indeed is thought to be opposed to the Catholic
Church — yet abroad, and in the Pacific especially, occupation by France is thought
to mean the granting of privileges to the Roman Catholic Church that are not
granted to any other religious body.

4. There is also a strong feeling in the colonies that they should protest against
any further occupation by foreign Powers of the Pacific Islands.

5. The islanders themselves are strongly opposed to French occupation.

6. The labour question will complicate the issue, for it is apparent to me the
getting of labourers in the islands for plantations in Fiji and elsewhere is attended
with great and increasing difficulties.

Victoria, now as before, takes the lead in opposing any scheme
by which these islands may become a French possession.

When 7 it was reported in Melbourne that French annexation
was imminent, Mr. Service prophetically pointed out that, unless
prompt and united action was taken by the colonies, the matter
would soon be un fait accompli. After communicating his fear to
the other colonies, they unanimously agreed by their various ministers
that it might prove a fault, to be ever deplored, but never to be

7 June 1883.

126 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

remedied, if Australia, through supineness, were to allow the New
Hebrides, in the important strategic position which they occupy
towards her, to fall without an effort into the hands of a foreign
Power. These views were telegraphed to Lord Derby, who appeared
impressed with the gravity of the question, and requested that the
views of the colonies might be embodied in a joint paper to be
submitted to the Cabinet. This was accordingly done, and on the
20th of July, 1883, the Agents-General submitted an able and ex-
haustive memorandum on the subject, which, however, was not
signed by Sir Arthur Blyth, the Agent-General for South Australia,
as his government had instructed him that they did not coincide
with the views of the other colonies with regard either to annexation
or the establishment of a protectorate over the New Hebrides.

On the 24th of February, 1886, Mr. Murray Smith sent the
following telegraphic intimation of the French proposals to the
Premier of Victoria: —

[In secret cypher. Secret and Confidential] London, 24th February, 1886.

Had an interview with the Secretary of State for the Colonies. All the Agents
accompanied by Canadian Commissioner. Received express assurances Her Majesty's
Government are determined to strictly adhere to pledge that nothing shall be done
to change position of New Hebrides without previously consulting colonial
Governments, but he requests us to inform Governments confidentially that the
French Ambassador has offered Secretary of State Foreign Affairs France will
cease transportation altogether in the Pacific if she is allowed have New Hebrides
— whereon he has replied nothing shall be done without consulting the colonies,
•which -was recognised by the Ambassador. Secretary of State for the Colonies
then said that these proposals might be more acceptable if Rapa were given to
England, and now Granville invites Governments to consider the proposals of
French Ambassador, and to communicate result as soon as convenient, consistent
with the importance of subject. Rights British subjects, missionaries, guaranteed.
Communicate to other Governments.

R. MURRAY SMITH.

Various telegrams have passed between Victoria and London in
reply. When, however, it became evident that the question was to
be compromised, Mr. Gillies, the Victorian Premier, telegraphed
his ultimatum to Mr. Murray Smith, who hesitated at first to lay
it literally before Lord Granville.

To the Agent-General, London. Melbourne, March 24, 1886.

To-day's Age states English politicians favour cession New Hebrides France,
condition no transportation, and that Agents-General have no hope successfully
opposing this proposal, and are privately convinced France will win. Can this
impression prevail ? Colonies cannot protest more than they have done. Surely
their interests and wishes must be more to England than French aggrandisement.
The feeling in colonies is that if Germany or France had Australia peopled by their
own, neither would tolerate foreign Power seizing any of islands, New Hebrides
least of all, under the circumstances. "What would be the use speaking of Imperial
federation in face of an act which would proclaim stronger than any language con-
temptuous indifference for our wishes and future prospects ?

Should English Ministers give away, or allow to be taken, New Hebrides to-
day, Australasia will assuredly take them back when able.

D. GILLIES.

1886 FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES. 127

Queensland agrees with Victoria, and the views of this colony
are contained in the following telegram, which was settled in con-
ference between Mr. Griffith, Premier of Queensland, and Mr. Gillies
on the 13th of March last, and afterwards submitted to the other
federated colonies :

' Colonies in Federal Council, except Fiji, -which cannot be communicated with,
have insuperable objections any alterations in status New Hebrides in direction
sovereignty of France. They adhere to the resolution Sydney convention and
address of Federal Council 5th February. In their opinion very strong reason to
believe that if France cannot get an increase of territory she will have very
soon to wholly relinquish to deport prisoners Pacific. Should she not, legislative
powers Australian colonies must be exercised to protect their own interests by
exclusion. Under the circumstances no advantage will be derived from accepting
proposals, but only very considerable injury.'8

D. GILLIES.

South Australia may be opposed to annexing or protecting the
New Hebrides, but Mr. Downer, the Premier, has plainly indicated that
the desire of his government is to act in co-operation with Victoria
in the present matter, and upon Mr. Gillies communicating the
proposed telegram to the Agent-General, the South Australian Prime

Minister replied : —

Adelaide, March 16.

I agree to whole of telegram.

J. W. DOWNER.

New South Wales apparently approves of the compromise and
refuses to interfere. The temptation to get rid of the awkward
rfoidiviste question has proved too much for the colony, and Sir
Patrick Jennings, the Premier, is already making inquiries through
his Agent-General as to ( within what period the occupation of
colonies in the Pacific as penal settlements of France will cease.' Sir
Henry Parkes and his friends, however, take an opposite view, and
so the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales may be said to be
divided upon this important point.

When the whole matter of annexation of the neighbouring islands
in the Western Pacific was discussed at the Intercolonial Convention,
held at Sydney in 1883, by representatives from the governments of
all the British Colonies of Australasia, it was unanimously resolved : —

That, although the understanding of 1878 between Great Britain and France re-
cognising the independence of the New Hebrides appears to preclude the Convention
from making any recommendation inconsistent with that understanding, the Con-
vention urges upon Her Majesty's Government that it is extremely desirable that
such understanding should give place to some more definite engagement which
shall secure those islands from falling under any foreign dominion. At the same
time the Convention trusts Her Majesty's Government will avail itself of any oppor-
tunity that may arise for negotiating with the Government of France with the
object of obtaining the control of these islands and the interests of Australasia.

8 See, in connection with this, evidence of Barriere, Governor of New Caledonia
p. 17, Parliamentary paper C 4584.

128 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

And the delegates then and there engaged to recommend measures for
defraying the cost incurred in giving effect to the resolution, having
regard of course to the importance of Imperial and Australasian
interests.

It will, therefore, be seen that if the present Government of New
South Wales is ready to coincide with Great Britain in giving up
the New Hebrides to France, the late Sir Alexander Stuart, Mr.
Gfeorge Dibbs, and Mr. Bede Dally, who represented that colony at the
Convention of 1883, though opposed to annexation, entertained strong
views against the islands falling into the hands of a foreign Power.

Tasmania and Western Australia agree more or less with Victoria.

The missionaries too are not favourable to French annexation,
and their opinion should carry weight, seeing the present civilised
condition of the New Hebrides is chiefly due to their heroic conduct
and self-denying efforts.

Dr. Steel of Sydney says : —

the population of natives in the New Hebrides is rapidly declining, and these
islands will certainly be annexed by some Power, as they are well fitted to grow
all kinds of tropical spices and other fruits. They were discovered for the most part
by British navigators, traded with by British vessels, regularly visited by Her
Majesty's ships of war, and justice frequently administered by Her Majesty's naval
officers, and finally evangelised by the labours and munificence of British subjects.

Mr. Paton, senior missionary of the New Hebrides Mission, thus
expresses himself: —

The sympathy of the New Hebrides natives are all with Great Britain, hence
they long for British protection ; while they fear and hate the French, who appeal-
eager to annex the group, because they have seen the way the French have treated
the native races of New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, and other South Sea Islands.

All the men, and all the money (over 140,000/.) used in civilising and Chris-
tianising the New Hebrides, have been British. Now fourteen missionaries, and
the ' Dayspring ' mission ship, and about 150 native evangelists and teachers, are
employed in the above work on this group, in which over 6,0001. yearly of British
and British colonial money is expended, and certainly it would be unwise to let any
other Power now to take possession and reap the fruits of all this British outlay.
All the imports of the New Hebrides are from Sydney and Melbourne and British
colonies, and all its exports are also to British colonies.

The thirteen islands of this group, on which life and property are now compara-
tively safe, the 8,000 professed Christians on the group, and all the churches
formed among them, are, by God's blessing, the fruits of the labours of British
missionaries, who, at great toil, expense, and loss of life, have translated, got
printed, and taught the natives to read the Bible, in part, or in whole, in nine dif-
ferent languages of this group, while 70,000 at least are longing and ready for the
Gospel. On this group twenty-one members of the mission family died, or were
murdered by the savages in beginning God's work among them, not including good
Bishop Paterson, of the Melanesian mission, and we fear all this good work would
be lost if the New Hebrides fell into other than British hands.

Mr. Macdonald gives the following account of the Presbyterian
Mission in the New Hebrides : —

It has now fourteen European missionaries, together with about 150 native
Christian teachers, who maybe regarded as the hope of their race both as to Chris-

1886 FRANCE AND THE NEW HEBRIDES. 129

tianity and civilisation. The mission is carried on at an annual expense of about
6,000/. of British home and colonial money. The natives to a man are as much in
favour of British as they are opposed to French annexation. There is not com-
mercially a richer or more fertile group than the New Hebrides in the Pacific.

Several memorials and petitions have been addressed from time
to time to the Queen, praying for a protectorate or annexation of the
New Hebrides.

In 1862 the chiefs of Tanna sent a petition to Sir John Young,
governor of New South Wales, for a protectorate.

In 1868 one was presented by the New Hebrides Mission through
Lord Belmore, and the same year another was presented by the
Keformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland to Lord Stanley.

In 1872 one was sent to Lord Kiniberley by the same religious
body.

In 1874 Victoria petitioned, and also the natives of Vate, through
Mr. Carey, of H.M.S. « Conflict.'

In 1877 the Presbyterian Church of Victoria and New South
Wales, the Free Church of Scotland, and the New Hebrides Mission,
all petitioned Great Britain for annexation.

And, in 1882, all the Presbyterian Church of Australasia, assembled
in Conference at Sydney, entreated for the annexation of the group.

In face of this information, I venture to think the postponement
of the settlement of this much-vexed question in order to convert
the colonies to the Imperial view is fraught with much danger both
to their interests and our own, and if some more immediate action
is not now taken, we shall find ourselves checkmated by France.

While the 1878 understanding nominally remains in force, annex-
ation by either France or England of the New Hebrides is impossible
without disturbing the entente cordiale at present existing between
the two nations.

Some alteration in the present condition of these affairs must, in
the interests of Great Britain and Australasia, take place.

Having regard to the important work done in these islands by our
own missionaries, and the expressed opinion of our Australian Colonies,
any compromise that would place the New Hebrides under the control
of France cannot be considered. The interests of British subjects in
Australasia require that there should exist in the New Hebrides some
form of government which can insure protection of life and property,
and otherwise facilitate commercial intercourse, which it is but too
evident that the Western Pacific Order in Council of 1877 fails to
effect.

What I suggest is, that a Government, representing native,
colonial, French, and British interests, should be formed, and diplo-
matically recognised by the interested Powers as authoritative.

C. KIXLOCH COOKF.
VOL. XX.— No. 113. K

130 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

RECREATIVE EVENING SCHOOLS.

UNDER this title a work has lately been begun in London, which has
as yet attracted little attention.

Before the public knew anything about it, a representative body
of working men, the London Trades Council, had proposed it to the
School Board of London, and the Board, almost without variation,
adopted the proposals of the Council. Recreative evening schools
had been tried in Nottingham, where Dr. Paton, the originator of the
scheme, had influence enough to induce the local board to make the
experiment, and they had been proved a success.

The scheme was not therefore a castle in the air — it was practical
and workable, and adopted at once on this guarantee by the London
Board. The thing was settled in principle before the general public
had even heard of it. For my own part, when I first saw the circular
of the London Trades Council appealing to us all to come and take
their young people in hand, and by the means suggested help to com-
plete their imperfect education and gather them in from the streets,
I felt overwhelmed. It was too delightful to be readily believed.
All our poor little efforts here and there by clubs and institutes had
small and partial results ; they left such vast masses outside becoming
more and more beyond control, and exercising a great force of attrac-
tion on those inside our little folds, that one struggled on against a
disposition to despair. It was worse than our work being small, that
it could not be thorough in the midst of such a world. The very
sen e of humour in the people was vitiated ; that which pleased and
amused the youths set the nerves of the cultured on edge ; vulgarity
could go no further. Through such a deflection of taste it seemed
hopeless to bring it back. People who thought to do it by a ballad
concert or some nice penny readings here and there, no doubt had a
reward in themselves ; but they might as well try to sweeten the
pestiferous concourse of the drains of London at Barking Reach by
dropping into it a few rose-leaves. When, therefore, the leaders of
the working men, who are apt, some of us fancy, to confine themselves
too exclusively to dreams of a millennium politically achieved, and not
to try enough what may be done for the people by the people without
any Parliament-made laws, suddenly began thus to arouse themselves

1886 RECREATIVE EVENING SCHOOLS. 131

and to look at home, the world seemed to grow brighter. One had
been longing and praying that parents would appear to care a little
more what became of their big boys and big girls, and keep a tighter
hand upon them and take an interest in bringing them up decently
and giving them better education ; but at the same time there had
been no denying how much excuse was to be made under the existing
conditions of London life. But suddenly, after years of working
without help or even much apparent sympathy from parents, there
arose this voice from the people themselves, demanding what we had
longed for, and the antiphon of the London School Board.

The way was opened at once to a great and united movement, in
which all men of good-will might and must join to bring back these
lost tribes of uneducated children. For the fact confronts us that
much of the thirteen millions spent annually on elementary education
is barren of results of real value, owing to education coming to a dead
stop for almost all children at the age of twelve or thirteen. At that
age a child has just mastered the mechanical acquirement of the arts
of reading, writing, and arithmetic ; it has been entrusted with the keys
of knowledge, but does not enter in ; it has arrived at the starting-
point of education, and there it stops — that is to say, education ends
where it ought to begin. Thus, at a tremendous expenditure, over
which we are always growling, we give the national progeny an edu-
cation which we allow to be wasted and turned to no account. The
enormity of the waste may be gathered from the fact that nearly
half a million of children leave school every year and only about five
per cent., it is calculated, pursue their education in any way from the
point where it is dropped ; and of the two and a half millions who
are between the age for leaving school and eighteen, but twenty-seven
thousand attend evening schools in the course of the year — many out
of this small number only for a short time. Of course we may be
met by ignorant optimists with the comfortable assumption that there
is much home education and self-education going on ; but those who
know will say that this is a vain confidence.

Since education became compulsory and the enforcement of school
attendance a matter of police ; since the State stepped in between
the parent and the child, and made the period of school attendance
a sort of penal servitude, it is rarely that study is voluntarily continued
or resumed when that period is terminated. An intense reaction sets in.
The policeman's hand off its collar, the child naturally runs away ;
the parent considers the duty of educating fulfilled. Then the labours
of life begin ; and ten hours in a factory tax the child's physical
powers to the utmost. There is no appetite for books when the
crowd of fagged boys escapes from the long daily bondage, or the girls,
cramped up at their work so many hours, get out into the streets.

Nor in London, where 84,000 leave school every year, have many
of them homes in which, if they were ever so well-disposed, they

K 2

132 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

could sit down comfortably to study. It is not the exception for
parents to be out with the door-keys in their pockets ; and these
poor children in vast numbers roam the streets, and, instead of con-
tinuing and improving their education, are quickly turning aside
from all the good they have learned, and losing the grace of their
schooldays. For the last four years evening classes have been opening
in the Board Schools as they did long before in others ; but what can
be expected ? — only failure. This is illustrated by the total evening
school attendance already stated. We might as well expect a re-
leased convict to return of his own accord to prison as for those weary
children to go back to school. For the immense majority, education
absolutely ceases when they leave school, and the slight impression is
soon obliterated. Just at the time when they would acquire a taste
for study — when it would cease to be a mechanical drudgery, when
they would understand the value of instruction, the whole process
ceases, and all that has gone before and for each child cost the country
and its parents so much money, is rendered to a great degree, if not
entirely, valueless.

True there is a literature specially provided for the vast amount
of raw material annually flung out of our schools ready for manufac-
ture. It is to enable the two million and a half of boys and girls in
transition to be laid hold upon by this horrible scoundrel-making
machinery that we have taught them to read. This kind of literature,
of which I see a good deal, represents the world through a distorting
medium of false sentiment, infamous hero-worship, vicious love ; a
world devoted to burglaries, highway robberies, murders, and other
crimes of every depth of dye. Instead of teaching anything of sterling
worth, this literature depraves and warps the ideas of youths, and
makes them long for highly spiced criminal excitements. Surely this is
a bad use for the treasure of the country to be applied to, providing a
market for such garbage. Regarded simply from the lowest ratepayer's
point of view, it is a frightful and intolerable waste of revenue.

Many of these children, doing children's work, when they grow
up will be without trades. Instead of developing in them — in this
middle term when they are practically working for others, not for
themselves — aptitudes which would conduct them to well-being, if not
to fortune, and create new elements of productive force, and of future
prosperity to the country, we allow them to relapse into almost total
ignorance. We do not bring them on far enough to take advantage
of technical education, even if it were offered them free. With the
immense advances of knowledge, there are processes in every industry
for which much intelligence is needed to make a thorough workman.
In all the subdivisions of trade a general insight is not acquired save
by those who are educated enough to obtain it for themselves.
Without it the individual is helpless and at the mercy of others ; he
knows only his own minute part of a puzzle which he cannot put

1886 RECREATIVE EVENING SCHOOLS. 133

together. Nor can he, without a knowledge of principles, improve on
old methods.

So the farther invention and discovery go ahead, the farther the
ignorant workman is left behind, and reduced to a state of impotency.
His ignorance becomes intenser ignorance as light and knowledge
increase. Some change of process which affects his minute subdivision
throws him out of work and reduces him to pauperism. The industrial
mechanism acquires an extreme delicacy when this is the case ; it is
disorganised and reduced to helplessness by the slightest change as
it could not have been in primitive times, when each mechanic was
master of a trade — not merely of a small portion of it. He could
formerly, as he cannot now, adapt himself to altered circumstances.

The material loss is great, but the political and moral loss im-
measurable. These are the future electors who will exercise so much
influence on the world's destiny. The constituents of an imperial race,
they ought to be educated with a view to the power they will wield.
Every Englishman ought to know something about the dependencies
of England, as one of the heirs of such a splendid inheritance ; he
should understand English interests, something about her commerce,
her competitors, the productions and trade of other lands. He ought
to know his country's historical as well as her geographical position. He
cannot, with safety to the empire, be allowed to be so ignorant as to be
unfit for his political trust, like loose ballast in a vessel, liable, in any
agitation that may arise, to roll from side to side and so to destroy
national stability.

For the individual those years are decisive between thirteen and
eighteen. They form the character ; they regulate the habits of a
lifetime ; they stamp the features. Nevermore can those years be
overtaken. Each year half a million cross the rubicon of life and
leave behind the power to change. We speak and write about ' the
residuum ' and ' scum '—mixed in metaphor and ideas — throwing the
blame on ' this last ' whose educational opportunities have been but
as one hour to the twelve of his betters ; and we forget it is to our own
shame that, in a day of great enlightenment, intenser shadow falls upon
the masses. The Education Act of 1870, which was looked upon as
the Abolition of Ignorance, has failed to achieve its object ; it has
left darkness grosser by the revolt of those educated under compul-
sion. The education it has enforced is worthless ; it is like a fair
woman without discretion — as a pearl in a swine's snout — this mere
capacity to read which leaves its possessor brutal and uncultured.
How is this shortcoming to be remedied ? We have gone as far as
we dare in the direction of cramming the greatest amount of teaching
possible into the shortest span of a child's life. The question of
overpressure is one about which doctors and educational pundits
differ ; but I can testify that I have seen children driven dull by
overwork. At this moment, as I write, a woman has called with her

134 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

little girl, who has got ' St. Viper's Dance ' from working and worrit-
ing before the examinations ; it is a fact that children's sleep is
disturbed by the nightmare pressure which makes them cry out in
their dreams ; and I have stated elsewhere that one of my teachers
was sent for lately to calm the agony of mind of a little girl, on her
death-bed, at being absent from the impending school inspection,
that she might, as her mother said, die in peace. Considering the
miserable results we do get up to the age of thirteen, the listless pro-
gress, in spite of driving, that children of a languid temperament, from
under-feeding and other sanitary causes, make, it is hard to see how we
can diminish aught of the tale that is exacted; but the responsibility
would be perilous of crowding more than is already imposed upon it
on that narrow ledge of childhood. We cannot ask less, and we dare
not ask more.

There are strong objections to other expedients — to making school
attendance compulsory to a more advanced age, or evening-school at-
tendance compulsory, as in Switzerland and in certain of the German
States. The former would be hard on the parents, the latter harder
on the children. There is a demand for cheap labour ; and at the
present moment, when the number of men unemployed is so formid-
able, the wages of their children are the only support of multitudes.
It may be true, if they were driven to school there would be more
work for men ; but, on the other hand, it is by children's labour that
a good deal of work is kept in the country which would otherwise go
abroad. The working man is — perhaps fortunately — inconsistent in
this, that while he will not himself work below a certain standard he
considers fair for a man's labour, he will allow his boys to do the same
work for a much less wage.

But however this may be — whether in the long run it would, or
would not, be better for the working man if his children were kept at
school to fourteen or fifteen, instead of being sent prematurely to
labour, and, though bringing in a few shillings, cheapening the whole
labour market — there can be no doubt that there are many poor women
dependent on their boys' earnings. Even as it is, magistrates are
loth to convict in such cases.

Among the working lads with whom I associate, no few are the
chief support of their mothers : and the lives of self-denial led by
many of these poor fellows — unattractive, perhaps, in exterior, rough
in manners, often far from choice in language — must, where sterling
and unconscious merit is weighed, be deemed noble. The effect of
taking away such innumerable props from humble life would be to
considerably increase the pauperism of the country and aggravate the
distresses of the poorer classes. Certainly it is no time to do this.

But to compel school attendance after all those weary hours
imposed on the young toiler, for whom Nature has intended youth as
the playtime of life — mental drudgery coming upon the top of bodily

1886 RECREATIVE EVENING SCHOOLS. 135

drudgery — would be to inflict an intolerable wrong — to make these
lads more discontented and defiant than they are, and to affect most
injuriously the physique of the rising generation — bad enough
already. Besides, it would be found very hard in this country to
enforce school attendance upon working boys. But the possibility of
doing so, it is hardly Worth discussing, for the electorate would never
allow such a tyrannical Act to pass. Compulsory education, even of
school children, is unpopular enough, and the country would not
stand compulsion being applied beyond the existing limits.

Out of this dilemma the success of the new movement will release
us. Its method is to make the evening school a place of welcome, of
pleasure and recreation, mixed with solid usefulness and educational
work. I hope that the Board will, as it is seen how the experiment
works, allow more recreation to be interwoven by the voluntary
teachers into the code subjects taught by its own paid teachers ; and
that the latter will enter into the spirit of the method and infuse
into their own teaching more life and reality, and make it bear more
on the concerns of the boys' and girls' daily life. This will be all the
more needful as, from having, this first session of the experiment, only
those who are students for pure study's sake, we begin to gather in
those who are less eager for knowledge and more bent on recreation.

The work begun during this winter is no test ; but it has prevented
schools from dying out as they generally do at the end of the session,
and in some instances added to them. But our sound has not yet
gone out ; our specific has not been tried on the roving street boys
and street girls whom we want to attract in ; and it is on the ultimate
power of the system to draw in these outsiders that its claims will rest.

It is for the prodigals of education that we want the windows of
our house to be full of light and suggestion of entertainment. We
want the stream borne outward of song, and the music of the drill,
and the running of many feet in the maze, and the clinking of dumb-
bells, and the inspiriting word of command, and the shadow of grace-
ful movements, to bring in those young wasters of their youth. Then
we shall show them our pictures vivid with colour, and bring them
round Greater Britain, and make them travelled, and teach them of
science and art, and carry their minds far back into the realms of
history and show them many wonders. And their minds will glow
like the pictures and begin to teem with new thoughts and ideas ; and
they will slowly understand why it was they were dragged to school as
little children, spite of tears and often with poor little empty stomachs.
The drawing class will impart a new delight, and in the other art
classes, carving wood and modelling — that strange making power of
man — the likeness of the Highest will begin to develop, and the G&ist
to come into eyes till now dull and defiant. Thus our new leaven
will work until the whole mass is leavened ; and those weird crowds
of haggard boys and wild, unkempt girls have disappeared from the

136 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

highway ; for the servant abroad has gathered and compelled them
to come in by the best compulsion, the irresistible attraction within,
to the house of wisdom.

It may possibly be assumed that there is something antagonistic
in this movement to work of a similar kind actually going on in
church schools and clubs. So far from that being the case, the new
association will gladly help, where help is needed, to fill with a fuller
life the work being carried on through those channels. But the
main reason why so much is undone is that the Board Schools, which
form a large part of the educational system, have had no organ such
as church schools have for assimilating children of a larger growth.

They have no clergy to shepherd the children and follow them
out into life, to retain their affections and collect them to social
gatherings, and by the combination of the simple pleasures of their
lives with religious duties to bind them together. They have no
guilds, no homes in the country. There has been nothing hitherto
but the bare, hard machinery of education, without the faintest hold
of love or interest beyond code work. And yet these schools stand
where schools were needed most, and where, as child life is thickest,
so boy and girl life is thickest also, and they are the only fostering
wings that ever the pupils passing through them know. Those
hundreds of thousands have never consequently been affiliated to any
religious body, but, having passed through and had their wretched
portion of education divided to them, they get no more care and are
lost in the sea of human life. But there stand those splendid palaces
of education through which they have gone, forming a vast network
over the whole of the world-like city, and provided, for those past
scholars, under the new evening-school code, with a staff of paid
teachers, always on the spot to maintain discipline ; with all their
apparatus ; with playgrounds — oases in the mighty deserts of London.

All that is needed is to bring them the organised life and friend-
ship which religious workers supply in the denominational schools.
The local secretary and the body of voluntary helpers, with the evening-
school managers, will form the soul of the new body, which will
grow from term to term, and attract to itself more and more of the
lost children of the schools. Religious work, far from being hindered
by taking these young people out of the streets, will be made by
degrees possible among them. Decency, order, good taste, are not anti-
religious, but the best handmaids of religion. Those boys and girls
who have received the shade of thought and refinement, and had the
roughness and studied brutality of the streets removed, will be touched
by the Old Story as they could not have been in the former days.
Music will find its way into their souls, and the beauty of religious art
and pageantry will exercise its glamour. There will be the imagina
tion to climb above vulgar thing?, eyes to see, and ears to hear.

The idea, then, is not only to make the evening school bright with

1886 RECREATIVE EVENING SCHOOLS. 137

song, with gymnastic exercise set to music like the soldier's march,
with vivid pictures awakening the dull imagination, bounded hitherto
by the bricks and mortar and dustbins in courts and alleys, to scenes
of travel and history, and natural phenomena, and the wonders of nature
and science ; not only to set young fingers carving and drawing and
modelling, and fill empty heads, but also to fill empty hearts ; to
give friends to those boys and girls ; to give them right hands of
fellowship ; to go with them to the cricket-field, to the swimming-
bath, on country rambles. To pilot a party of London boys through
the forest is a new experience ; the world becomes fresh to old eyes
from theirs. Wonder inexpressible as a pair of jays dart out before
us, chattering down the long avenues ; or the wood-pigeons persuade,
or the cuckoos are recognised as the original of the cuckoo-clock.
The commonest things are gathered as if they were enchanted, until
the freight they intended to bring home grows beyond bounds,
and the discovery of Nature's prodigality at last makes them throw
all away save some little branch or flower, as an evidence that fairy-
land exists. Then we can have botanical and entomological excursions,
and open their minds and imaginations by these country dips.
Gradually the life of the evening school will become corporate ; it
will not dissolve at the end of each session ; by the grace of the
Board we shall keep all that we have gained, and wind refining influ-
ences round our young people, and implant a purer taste, which will
begin to reflect itself on public amusements. ' The Grreat ' and * the
Jolly,' and all the other unspeakable vulgarians at whom men
cacchinated, will be hissed off, and real humour will return to its
deserted abode ; and real singing, and beautiful dancing, and true
sentiment, and business good and true to art and nature of all kinds,
will again be appreciated. Time will develop our plans. Those
lordly schools will still be our centres ; their paid and regular staff,
the great dependence and permanent strength of the work, will enter
into it with all their hearts when they come to understand it fully, and
see its ends and aims ; our voluntary work will be a graft on the strong
stem, to make it fruitful ; but all the fruit will not be on this little
grafted bough ; the whole tree will be glorious with fruit and blossom.
Then we shall begin to extend our work still further ; to make
provision that once in the year the country sun shall bronze pale
faces ; to draft our girls and boys away to hospitable country houses
or cottages where the Squire will make them the welcome guests of
the villagers for a happy week or two — halcyon days in their toiling,
noisy, ugly lives — days that will illuminate and sweeten the year by
pleasant recollections and joyful hope. Then, linked with our school
life-centres — and who can tell but that the Board, backed up by public
opinion, may take this up ? — we shall establish higher and technical
schools, not barred with golden bars against the poor, but open with-
out payment to needy talent. So, having found out in our first grade

138 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

evening schools the natural resources of the country, we shall pass
them on and develop them ; and apprentices whom their masters
teach grudgingly and of necessity, trying to spin out teaching to the
last, lest they should know too much and possibly break away, and so
prevent them from ever becoming thorough workmen, we shall, in
these universal technical schools, teach the highest and fullest and
best, without regard to their selfish masters' scruples and fears.

From the mass, submitted to the test of simple art classes, talent
will be separated and handed on to a more advanced training. Every
boy may have friends, opportunities, possibilities opened to him,
horizons of hope. He will by his teachers be linked to a world of
greater culture than his own, and also have his eyes and heart opened
to the fact that he is not overlooked, not uncared-for, in this vast
crowd of human beings. Plans will thus widen out, and, through
unsatisfactory results and many impediments, we must look forward
and see the day of great things through the day of small beginnings.
It will need continuous well-directed energy and order to work out a
system, and there must be no carpet-knights in posts of trust and
responsibility. Away through the evening the children of light must
speed, with unflinching punctuality and the sense of a great trust.
Nothing must make them fail or weary to realise the great ends
which will be gained by the faithful discharge of small duties, and
the vastness of the scheme, in which they are links, will stimulate
them and quicken their pulses. There are many looking on who are
profound unbelievers in voluntary work and workers, and prophesy,
' They won't stick to it.' But I believe that when we get the right
men — as we shall in course of time — and get rid of the wrong ones
— weed out our mistakes — there is something so distinct, so hopeful,
and so approaching to a new faith and the light and heat of en-
thusiasm its passage generates in this movement, that there is no
room for fear of our voluntary workers failing. I do not depend on
the ' upper classes ' alone — this is a working-men's movement.
Young workmen I have found throw themselves into it heartily ;
they are willing to go long distances ; and I think to see teachers of
their own class among them has a great influence on the taught. Here
there is no suspicion of condescension, no instruction from a superior's
point of view ; but one of themselves, entirely on their own level, who
comes in a brotherly way to make them happier or better. This is
the feeling we must all aim at imparting to those we teach ; and we
must try in this work, as much as possible, to get rid of the dis-
advantages of birth, ' gentility,' difference of sphere, to drop on our
side all ideas about difference of station. We shall not really derogate
thereby from any respect to which we are duly entitled, but it will
be given freely and even lovingly.

FREEMAN WILLS.

1886 139

THE DISSOLUTION AND THE COUNTRY.

•IN the debate rising out of the defeat of Mr. Disraeli's Government
on the Irish Church resolutions in 1868, Mr. Gladstone stated what
were the conditions which in his view justified a Minister in making
an appeal 'to the country by way of dissolution against an adverse
Parliamentary vote. There must, he said, be in the first place an
adequate issue of public policy. There must, in the second, be a
reasonable probability that the decision of the country will reverse
that of the House of Commons. Both these conditions certainly
exist now. Mr. Gladstone, in his latest manifesto, stated that the
issue before the nation is the gravest which has been submitted
to it during the past half-century. He might probably have said
with truth that it is the gravest which has been submitted to the
country since the Act of Union with Ireland was passed. There
is no ground for doubting that not only Her Majesty's Ministers, but
the parties and groups of parties allied against them, hold, the one
with alarm, the others with hope, that there is a fair chance of the
country refusing to countenance the vote against Home Eule for
Ireland. Both sides are eager, but both sides feel that the result is
supremely uncertain. Mr. Gladstone mentioned another condition
which had been alleged to justify dissolution of Parliament, but of
which he denied the force. A Ministry may not dissolve simply for
the purpose of obtaining from the country a vote for its own con-
tinuance in office. Usually this disallowed consideration is insepar-
able from the others. Whatever may be the definite issue before
them, the constituencies will ordinarily vote less upon that than
upon the general character of the Administration which makes
appeal to them. Certainly this will be so in the elections which are
now impending. The country, if it returns a Ministerial majority
to the new Parliament, will vote more for Mr. Gladstone than for
Home Rule. It will vote for Home Eule because it is proposed by
Mr. Gladstone, and not for Mr. Gladstone because he proposes Home
Rule. If his attitude on the subject had been the reverse of what
it is, if the provisions and machinery of his Bills had been wholly
dissimilar from what they were, there is no reason to doubt that the
members of Parliament who went with him into the lobby on the
8th of June would still have accompanied him thither, and that,
with the exception perhaps of Mr. John Morley, his Cabinet would

140 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

have adhered to him with glutinous tenacity. If Mr. Gladstone had
proposed Mr. Chamberlain's scheme, Mr. Chamberlain's scheme would
now command the assent of the majority of the Liberal party. If,
in the exercise of his own freedom of judgment, Mr. Chamberlain
had propounded a counter-scheme identical with that which Mr.
Gladstone has put forward, he would be scouted and denounced as a
traitor, animated by motives of jealousy and personal rivalry.

Mr. Gladstone is not himself responsible for this state of feeling
among large classes of his fellow-subjects, possibly among a majority
of the people of these islands. But it imposes an immense responsi-
bility on him. The statesman who is sure that any scheme which
he may devise will be accepted by half, or nearly, or more than, half
of the nation simply because he has devised it, is bound to be very
careful in his proposals — to think once, to think twice, to think
thrice before he lays them before the world, and to think three times
more before he refuses to modify them. The dictum of the old
saint and sage, bidding his readers to consider the things said and
not the person saying them, is a counsel of perfection to which the
weakness of human nature can seldom be equal. But the more the
hearers consider the person who speaks or writes, the more the
person speaking or writing is bound to consider the things spoken or
written. The jealous scrutiny, the minute and sceptical examination
which they decline to exercise on him, he must exercise on himself.
Mr. Gladstone has written much on the influence of authority in
matters of opinion : it cannot be excluded from them. People will
believe because the evidence has convinced somebody else. They
assent to the conclusions of a man of thought or action without
understanding his premisses or his processes. The wielders of an
authority such as Mr. Gladstone exercises in England are invested
with a power and a responsibility compared with which those of a de-
spotic sovereign or a dictator are slight. Mr. Gladstone submits his
scheme to the judgment of the country ; and a large part of the
country is prepared to submit its judgment to Mr. Gladstone's
scheme.

Mr. Gladstone could not have gained such a position as this
without being as well entitled to it as any human being could possibly
be. But then no human being is entitled to such a position, or can
occupy it with safety to himself or to those who submit themselves
to his guidance. It is dangerous to his own reputation, and dimi-
nishes the services which he might render his country. The
excessive confidence of large masses of his countrymen arouses in
others a distrust as exaggerated and more blind. One of the
denunciations of which he has lately been made the object is the
familiar one of fomenting social discord, of inflaming the poor and
ignorant against the rich and cultivated, of setting up uninformed
sentiment against reasoned conviction. The accusation is unjust.

1886 THE DISSOLUTION AND THE COUNTRY. Ul

The antagonists of Mr. Gladstone's Home Eule scheme — for which
I am not pleading, which, as I have endeavoured to point out in the
pages of this Keview, approaches the subject from a point of view
and deals with it by methods essentially faulty — are not content to
argue against it or to suggest amendments in it. They boast that
the rank, the riches, the leisure, and the culture of England are
hostile to it. When Mr. Gladstone says, ' I sorrowfully admit this/
the reply is, 'You are setting class against class. You are en-
deavouring to incite ignorance and poverty against station, title, and
wealth, to drown social influence in numbers, to subject the instructed
judgment of the professions to the crude sentiment of the labouring
classes.' It is impossible to imagine anything more mischievous
than this discrimination, whether for exaltation or disparagement, of
certain classes in the nation against the great body of the nation
itself. The classes do not exist apart from the nation ; the nation
is the aggregate of classes. The blame of this dangerous way of
speaking and writing must rest in the main with those who set the
example of it, and only in a secondary way, though still really, with
those who retort it. There is fallacy in the argument on both sides
— if that can be called argument which is rather an appeal by ques-
tion-begging phrases to intellectual or moral Pharisaism. The
words ' education ' and ' culture ' are much abused in this connection.
Leisure and wealth and rank undoubtedly present opportunities of edu-
cation and culture. But opportunity without stimulus is often barren.
The number of persons belonging to the privileged and wealthy
classes who achieve personal distinction is relatively few. The man
who, born to affluence and social consideration, is content to work as if
he had these things to gain, whom the love of fame or other worthy
motive prompts to ' scorn delights and live laborious days,' is a very ex-
ceptional being, as is shown by the exceptional praise which he receives
whenever he makes his appearance. The great body of what is called
educated opinion is simply fashionable opinion. People who wish to be
considered socially what they ought to be flock in herds after the society
statesman and the pet political hero of the day, as they run after
the pet actor, the pet painter, the pet lecturer, even the pet mon-
strosity, the last dwarf, or the latest two-headed nightingale of the
season. This imitative and servile movement of fashion is dignified
by the name of the tendency of educated opinion. Even when the
education and culture are real, they should be appropriate to the
subject-matter on which their authority is cited. The successful
soldier of fortune, the court poet, the Albemarle Street lecturer
who makes science, not popular, but fashionable, may be profound
politicians, but the arts in which they are eminent do not give any
presumption even of political capacity. There is a great run just
now on the writings of Burke, which have become a sort of Holy
Scriptures of politics, and of which, as of the Bible, it may be said :

142 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

' This is the book where each his doctrine seeks, and this the book
where each his doctrine finds.' ' It cannot escape observation,' says
Burke, ' that where men are too much confined to professional and
faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the concurrent employ-
ment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than qualified
for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience
in mixed affairs, or a comprehensive connected view of the various
complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation
of that multifarious thing called a State.' We may set this passage
against the often-quoted sentence of Jesus the son of Sirach : ' How
can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and glorieth in the goad,
that driveth oxen and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is
of bullocks ? ' To be in close and vital contact for existence' sake with
the essential realities of life is often a more copious source of that
moral and practical wisdom which is the basis of politics than the
exclusive pursuit of special arts or sciences, or than a dilettante
trifling with them. It is, however, pertinent to remark that the
author of Ecclesiasticus was not speaking of Parliamentary govern-
ment, Home Eule, or the agricultural labourer's vote. As a matter
of fact, the tribunal has been constituted by the consent of Liberals
and Conservatives alike. To endeavour to discredit its moral com-
petence is idle, and is very bad tactics besides. An advocate who
should denounce the jury he addresses as unintelligent and ignorant,
would stand a small chance of getting a verdict. To begin by setting
the Court against you is a blunder into which an old forensic hand
would not fall.

That the labouring classes are the best judges of the question
which will be at issue in the coming election is not so much a true, or
a false, as an idle proposition. They are more under the influence of
feeling and less under the influence of fashion than persons in easier
social circumstances. But sometimes feeling may be wrong, and
occasionally fashion may be right. They have a strong instinct of
justice and fair play when their own real or supposed interests are
not too directly involved ; but that instinct, it may be hoped, and that
qualification of it, it is to be feared, are common to Englishmen of all
ranks. A wise statesmanship will appeal to the conscience and
judgment of the country as a whole, endeavouring to enlighten the
one and to stimulate the other, and will avoid disparaging the selfish
prepossessions of the classes to the people, or the ignorance of
the people to the classes. The commencement of this crimination
and recrimination has been with the partisans of rank, wealth, and
leisure as the guides of political conduct. History warns us. The
distinction drawn between the optimates and the populares in Eome,
in the days before the republican constitution perished, under the
demagogic ' one-man rule ' of Julius Caesar, corresponded very closely
with that which imprudent persons are drawing now between the

1886 THE DISSOLUTION AND THE COUNTRY. 143

cultivated and the ignorant. The optimates consisted, we are told
by one of their partisans, of the senate, the better and larger part of
the equestrian order, and such of the plebeians as were unaffected
by pernicious counsels — the upper and upper-middle classes, that is
to say, with a sprinkling of the conservative working men. As con-
trasted with the populares, they were made up of the men and classes
* qui neque nocentes sunt, nee natura improbi, nee furiosi, nee malis
domesticis impediti.' The distinctions which were drawn in Imperial
Eome between the honestiores and the humiliores, between the ' fat
people ' and the ' lean people ' in some of the Italian republics of
the Middle Ages, between the aristocrats and the populace under
the first French Revolution, and in later revolutions between the
labourers and capitalists, suggest caution to persons inclined to
insist .on similar distinctions for purposes of political warfare in Eng-
land. This method of controversy will raise directly far more serious
questions than any which it may be employed indirectly to settle.

As the election proceeds, the language of intellectual and social
scorn now used towards the great body of the electors will be abated.
It will be well if it be not exchanged for coarse and fulsome flattery.
Horace Walpole mentions that Lord Talbot, addressing the House of
Lords on some matter connected with the King, was misled into
calling the peers 'your majesties ' instead of 'your lordships.' He
withdrew the phrase as an oversight, but said he should have used
it by design if addressing the people. The people, the legal people
as the French phrase has it, are sovereign in fact, and not merely in
rhetoric ; the ultimate appeal is to them ; the Crown, the two Houses
of Parliament, the Ministry, the rival parties in the State, submit to
their decision as final. It is vitally important that the issue which
they have to decide should be correctly apprehended. Apart from
that, the most righteous feeling will help but little to the solution.
Mr. Gladstone presents it in the question, * Will you govern Ireland
by coercion, or will you let her manage her own affairs ? ' If the
controversy were simply between himself and Lord Salisbury, this
might be enough. Lord Salisbury now denies — and of course everyone
will accept his disclaimer — that when he spoke of twenty years of
resolute government, he meant twenty years of coercion. Unfor-
tunately he spoke of coercion in the sentence in which, according to
his later account, he was not thinking of it. He mentioned the
repeal at the end of the twenty years of the coercive laws of which
he had not dreamed, and the introduction then of the local liberties
which he was ready to grant now. Moreover, Lord Salisbury had
made a commencement of his resolute policy while he was yet Prime
Minister, in the framing of a Bill for the suppression of the National
League. It is satisfactory to know now that he did not mean what
he seemed to say. When, however, a man talks of twenty years of
resolute policy, he almost deprives himself of title to rank among

144 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

statesmen. If Lord Salisbury were infallible, a policy chosen once
for all might be usefully persisted in ; Lord Salisbury being fallible,
he is just as likely at the very beginning to be wrong as he is to be
right, and the resolute policy would in this case be blind obstinacy.
The faculty of adapting methods of government to constantly changing
circumstances, of varying the means because the end is the same, is
the mark of capable statesmanship ; while persistence in the maxims
and rules of government once for all adopted is a stupid pedantry.
The issue, however, is not simply between the policy of coercion
and the policy of allowing Ireland to manage her own affairs. If a
majority is given to Mr. Gladstone at the elections, it will, in spite
of vague disclaimers, be understood as sanctioning the particular
scheme which he has already devised for enabling Ireland to manage
her own affairs. That scheme, as I endeavoured to point out in this
Eeview, tends not only to the complete Parliamentary independence
of Ireland, but to its ultimate severance from the Crown of England.
Mr. Gladstone properly claims for all parties and sections of parties
in Great Britain, that they are Unionists in intention. The word
Unionists, however, has its own defined meaning in Anglo-Irish
politics. It means supporters of the Act of Union, those whom Mr.
Gladstone calls paper Unionists. He contrasts with them the pro-
moters of real union of heart and affection. Does this necessarily
mean more than such a bond of cordial regard as now exists between
the United Kingdom and the United States, and between the severed
kingdoms of Holland and Belgium ? Such a union is obviously com-
patible with complete political separation. It is a phrase of senti-
ment and not of politics.

The people of England and Scotland are animated by two convic-
tions and determinations in this matter. The first and most vital
of them is that the Imperial Parliament shall remain the Parliament
of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, that the three
countries shall be represented in it fairly in proportion to their
numbers, and that representation shall be continuous for all of them.
The mere turning, from time to time, of the representatives of
Ireland, or some of them, into a Parliament in its ordinary condition
consisting exclusively of the members for England and Scotland,
would simply confuse public business and would probably make its
transaction impossible. The Imperial politics, domestic and foreign,
in which Irish members are to bear their part, cannot be shoved off
into particular weeks and months, of which formal notice shall be
given. The essence of Parliamentary vigilance and control is that they
shall be always attentive and active. From day to day, and from hour
to hour, almost, events occur which suggest questions and which call
for Ministerial explanations. Members who are not continuously
following the course of events and discussions, and taking part in the
Parliamentary business which rises incidentally out of them, cannot

1886 THE DISSOLUTION AND THE COUNTRY. 145

be tumbled into the House of Commons at stated periods with any
good effect: they will have lost the thread of the transactions.
While, however, this arrangement would make the participation of
Irish members in Imperial business nugatory, it would enable them
to interfere with purely English and Scotch affairs, by improperly
protracting Imperial discussions, so as to thrust other business aside.
They would be able, upon some Imperial question, to defeat with
the aid of Conservative or Liberal allies, as the case might be, a
ministry bent on English or Scotch legislation which they did not
approve. They might thus displace through intrusive Irish votes a
British Government possessing the confidence of the majority of British
members, because its legislation on some purely British subject was
distasteful, let us say, to English Conservatives and Irish Catholics re-
siding in England. By Mr. Gladstone's Bill, as it stands, excluding
Irish members from St. Stephen's, the Parliamentary union between
Great Britain and Ireland is abolished. The occasional admission
of Irish members on stated occasions would, I repeat, destroy
its efficiency both as the Imperial Parliament and as the insular
Parliament of Great Britain. The only way in which Home Rule
can be reconciled with the maintenance of the Parliamentary union
between Great Britain and Ireland is by the fair and continuous
representation of Ireland in the United Parliament, and the banish-
ment of purely English, Welsh, and Scotch business to legislative
bodies dealing with it, and with it alone. In this way a place may be
found for Home Eule under the shelter of the United Parliament.
If this arrangement is not yet practicable, we must wait until it
becomes so, and be content in the meantime to remain as we are.
But if Mr. Gladstone chose to adopt it, it would become practicable.
By placing Ireland, on all matters which affect the internal unity
as well as the external safety of the United Kingdom, on all matters
except those reserved as specially Irish, under the authority of the
Imperial Parliament and Executive, the Land Purchase Bill would
become superfluous and the Ulster difficulty would disappear. The Irish
Protestants of the North would not be transferred to a rule distasteful
to them ; they would still be represented directly in the United
Parliament, and be under its direct protection. At the same time
they would be brought, on purely Irish business, into direct relations
with their Roman Catholic fellow-subjects of the south and west.
They would be forced to find a means of living on peaceful and
friendly terms with them. It is the great evil of the system which
has hitherto prevailed that it has made the Protestants of Ulster
consider themselves the fellow-countrymen rather of the English
and Scotch across the sea than of the men with whom geographically
and territorially they are associated, and with whom indeed they are
inextricably intermingled. The light phrase about the two Irelands
conveys an historic reproach. The tendency of Home Rule, duly
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146 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July

guarded by the authority of the Imperial Parliament and Executive,
which need no more conflict with the Irish Legislature and Executive
than the organisation of the Federal Government at Washington
does with the State Governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania,
would be to merge the English garrison into the surrounding people.
If Mr. Gladstone sees his way to the modification of his scheme in
the sense indicated, he would probably bring back to his ranks
three-fourths of the Liberal dissentients whom he calls seceders.
He would avert the painful conflict and the not less painful alliances
now impending, and would restore the union of the Liberal party,
otherwise shattered as a potent instrument of usefulness for many
years. All that is legitimate in Home Eule is compatible with the
maintenance of the Parliamentary Union. The Parliamentary L'nion
would be stronger for the common purposes of the United Kingdom
if Home Rule were granted to its several parts. The divided
sections of the Liberal party are looking at different sides of the
shield. The aims of each are consistent with the aims of the other,
and indeed are mutually dependent for their effective realisation.
There cannot be a real, as opposed to a mere paper, union without
Home Rule ; there cannot be orderly Home Rule except under
the safeguard of the Parliamentary Union. It is for Mr. Gladstone
now to make overtures to the followers who have reluctantly quitted
his standard. If, the opportunity presenting itself, he fails to make
use of it> — and the opportunity is present to him whenever he may
choose to seize it — the responsibility will rest mainly with him of
increasing the chances of Lord Salisbury's resolute policy, and of
disabling by its divisions the Liberal party, which alone can effec-
tually resist that policy.

It is possible that in the interval between these pages quitting
the hands of the writer and reaching those of the public, unequivocal
declarations may clear the controversy of its ambiguities. At present,
all that can be said is that Mr. Gladstone's language does not close
the door to the chances of a settlement. He is a great deal less
peremptory than Mr. John Morley, or Lord Rosebery, or Mr. Childers.
Mr. Gladstone is content to say that the two Bills which he intro-
duced are dead, and that there is not a clause or a detail in them
which those who support the principle that Ireland in matters
purely Irish shall govern herself may not dispute. Mr. John
Morley, speaking at Newcastle on Monday, the 21st of June, said
practically that the Home Rule Bill is not dead, but only sleeping ;
that it will revive not merely in principle, but in the main conse-
quences, the main methods, and the main applications of that prin-
ciple. He emphatically repudiated the idea of making Home Rule
subordinate to the full and continuous representation of Ireland in
the United Kingdom. Mr. Childers has spoken to the same purport.
Ireland is to have the entree of the Imperial Parliament when
Imperial and revenue topics are under discussion, an arrangement

1886 THE DISSOLUTION AND THE COUNTRY. 147

more impracticable, and more mischievous if it were practicable, than
statesmanship of the Abbe Sieyes order has ever devised. Lord
Eosebery, while asserting that this country will vote not for or
against the Government measure, but on the simple proposition tha
a separate Irish legislature is desirable, yet says that 'wherever,
in whatsoever place, before whatsoever assembly, the project for the
government of Ireland may be proposed, our scheme — the scheme of
Mr. Gladstone — will loom up as much of a landmark as the great
pyramid itself.' That is to say, that Mr. Gladstone's scheme will
loom up in the new House of Commons when it meets. In other
words, it would seem that Mr. Gladstone's Bills are dead for the
purposes of the general election, but are not dead for legislative purposes
if the new Parliament shows a Ministerial majority. The real ques-
tion, however, is not what Mr. John Morley, Lord Rosebery, or Mr.
Childers says, but what Mr. Gladstone means, and their language may
have very little relation to his intentions. The passages which we have
quoted may be unauthorised glosses on the sacred text. Mr. Glad-
stone is his own interpreter, and it is to be hoped he will make it
plain. He does not, like Mr. Morley, venture to ask the country to
approve the Home Kule principle in the consequences, methods, and
applications which were given to it in the Bill which the House
of Commons rejected. He disowns the Bill because he knows the
country, like the late Parliament, is not prepared to accept it. But
if Mr. Gladstone made a faulty application last spring of a principle
sound in itself, who can feel sure that he will make a wiser application
of it next autumn ? In fact the principle of Home Rule is sound or
unsound as it is applied ; and before the confidence of the country can
properly be given to any Minister, as advocating a principle, the use
which he is going to make of that principle should be explicitly stated.
It will not be enough for Mr. Gladstone, in conjunction with
Mr. Parnell, to have a majority in the next House of Commons. He
refused to propose Home Rule until Ireland had declared with what
he considered practical unanimity 'for it, until five-sixths of its
Parliamentary representatives were pledged in its favour. But the
rule which holds good on one side of the Channel, holds good on the
other too ; and if Ireland ought to be practically unanimous, so ought
Great Britain. To repeal the Parliamentary Union — for this is what
Mr. Gladstone's defunct Bill practically proposed to do — against the
will of a majority of the English and Scotch representatives, or even
against the will of a large minority of them, would be monstrous. It
would be against Mr. Gladstone's own principle. It would, moreover,
be impossible. The questions of a second Chamber, and the fitness of
the House of Lords to discharge the functions of a second Chamber, are
open. But so long as the House of Lords exists, it would be bound, by
every acknowledged principle, and by a usage almost adopted into
the constitution, not to give effect to a measure of the character
feugge&ted and in the circumstances supposed. Mr. Gladstone cannot

148 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. July 1886

obtain a majority morally adequate for his purposes — he may not be
able to obtain a majority at all — unless by assenting to the principle
of maintaining the full and continuous representation of Ireland in
the United Parliament he heals the breach between himself and the
dissentient Liberals. If the Home Kule Liberals become Unionists,
the Unionist Liberals may become Home Rulers ; and another union
— the union between the different sections of the Liberal party — may
be restored. Nor is this all. Looking less at Lord Salisbury's recent
declarations than at his earlier action and language, there is some
reason to hope that he might be brought into this combination. If
the concordant action of Mr. Parnell's followers and of the Conserva-
tive party up to the general election, including Lord Salisbury's New-
port and Guildhall speeches, was not concerted, it was pursued in
obedience to a mysteriously pre-established harmony. Lord Carnar-
von's appointment to the viceroyalty of Ireland was as significant of a
disposition on the part of Lord Salisbury to come to an understanding
with Mr. Parnell as Mr. John Morley's appointment to the Chief Secre-
taryship was of Mr. Gladstone's. Lord Salisbury has not yet denied
that he was cognisant beforehand and approved of Lord Carnarvon's
interview with Mr. Parnell — that he was told afterwards what passed
between them ; and if this be so, he will not allege that the interview
was of a purely speculative kind and did not mean business. The
Cabinet, it is said — and this is the main point of the denial— never
considered the subject. But cabinets are kept a good deal in the
dark by prime ministers nowadays. Mr. Chamberlain has his grounds
of complaint on this head. They are ignorant of the knowledge till
they approve the deed. If the Conservative and Parnellite parties
had been in a sufficient majority of the whole House, probably the
Cabinet would have heard of the matter. The result possibly would
have been seen in a scheme of Home Rule better than that which
Mr. Gladstone has proposed, because maintaining the continuous
representation of Ireland in the Imperial Parliament. This is, how-
ever, speculation on the might have been, though it comes closely
to the would have been. One thing is certain, that if the practical
unanimity of Ireland is the condition on which alone Home Rule
can properly be proposed, the practical unanimity of Great Britain
is the condition on which alone Home Rule can legitimately be
accepted. If Mr. Gladstone is to carry a measure giving Ireland
control over affairs exclusively Irish, he must reunite the Liberal
party under his leadership. If Mr. John Morley speaks for the
Government, this hope must be abandoned.

FRANK H. HILL.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTUEY cannot undertake
to return unaccepted MSS.

THE

NINETEENTH
CENTURY.

No. CXIY.— AUGUST 1886.

PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA.

THE public has very naturally and very rightly shown deep interest
in the investigations into the nature and possible cure of hydro-
phobia now being conducted by the great French naturalist, Louis
Pasteur. Those investigations not only have a special value on
account of the terrible nature of the malady which there is good
reason to believe will be brought within the range of curative treat-
ment as a consequence of their prosecution, but also are of extreme
interest to those engaged in the task of ascertaining the laws of
natural phenomena, and to all who wish to understand the methods
by which a great discoverer in science arrives at his results.

M. Pasteur is no ordinary man ; he is one of the rare individuals
who must be described by the term * genius.' Having commenced
his scientific career and attained great distinction as a chemist,
M. Pasteur was led by his study of the chemical process of fermenta-
tions to give his attention to the phenomena of disease in living
bodies resembling fermentations. Owing to a singular and fortunate
mental characteristic he has been able not simply to pursue a rigid
path of investigation dictated by the logical or natural connection,
of the phenomena investigated, but deliberately to select for inquiry
matters of the most profound importance to the community, and to
bring his inquiries to a successful practical issue in a large number
of instances. Thus he has saved the silk-worm industry of France
and Italy from destruction, he has taught the French wine-makers
to quickly mature their wine, he has effected an enormous improve-
ment and economy in the manufacture of beer, he has rescued
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150 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the sheep and cattle of Europe from the fatal disease ' anthrax,'
and it is probable — he would not himself assert that it is at pre-
sent more than probable — that he has rendered hydrophobia a
thing of the past. The discoveries made by this remarkable man
would have .rendered him, had he patented their application and
disposed of them according to commercial principles, the richest
man in the world. They represent a gain of some millions sterling
annually to the community. It is right for those who desire that
increased support for scientific investigation should be afforded by
the Governments of civilised States to point with emphasis to the
definite utility and pecuniary value of M. Pasteur's work, because
it is only in rare instances that the discovery of new knowledge
and the practical application of that knowledge go hand in hand.
M. Pasteur has afforded several of these rare instances. They should
enable the public and our statesmen to believe in the value of
scientific investigation even when it is not immediately followed by
practical commercial results. These discoveries should excite in the
minds of all those devoted to scientific research the profoundest
gratitude towards M. Pasteur, since, by the direct practical application
which his genius has enabled him to give to the results of his
inquiries, he has done more than any living man to enable the un-
learned to arrive at a conception of the possible value of the vast
mass of scientific results — items of new knowledge — which must be
continually gathered by less gifted individuals and stored for the
future use of inventors and of those doubly-gifted men who, like
M. Pasteur, are at once discoverers and inventors — discoverers of a
scientific principle and inventors of its application to human require-
ments.

M. Pasteur's first experiment in relation to hydrophobia was made
in December 1880, when he inoculated two rabbits with the mucus
from the mouth of a child which had died of that disease. As his
inquiries extended he found that it was necessary to establish by
means of experiment even the most elementary facts with regard to
the disease, for the existing knowledge on the subject was extremely
small, and much of what passed for knowledge was dnly ill-founded
tradition.

So little was hydrophobia understood, and to so small an extent
had it been studied, previously to M. Pasteur's investigations, that it
was regarded by a certain number of highly competent physicians and
physiologists (although this was not the general view) as a condition of
the nervous system brought about by the infliction of a punctured
inflammatory wound in which the action of a specific virus or poison
took no part ; it was, in fact, by some physicians regarded as a variety
of lock-jaw or tetanus.

The number of cases of hydrophobia reported in England, France,

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 151

Germany, and Austria has varied a good deal each year since the
time when statistics of disease were instituted by the Governments
of these several countries ; but its occurrence is sufficiently frequent
at certain periods to excite the greatest anxiety and alarm. In
England as many as thirty-six persons died from the disease in 1866 ;
in France 288 persons were its victims in 1858, and in Prussia and
Austria it is more frequent than in England.

The general belief, both among medical men and veterinary
surgeons, as well as the public, has been that the condition known as
hydrophobia in man does not follow from any ordinary bite or injury,
but that in order to produce it the human subject must be bitten by
a dog, wolf, pig, or other animal which is suffering from a well-marked
disease known as 'rabies.' What it is which starts 'rabies' amongst
dogs is not known, and has not even been guessed at, but the condition
so named is communicated by ' rabid ' or ' mad ' dogs to other dogs,
to pigs, to cattle, and to horses, and to all warm-blooded animals —
even birds. Any animal so infected is capable by its bite of commu-
nicating the disease to other healthy animals. Eabies in a dog is recog-
nised without difficulty by the skilled veterinarian. The disease has
two varieties, known as ' dumb madness ' and ' raving madness ; ' and it
is held by veterinarians to have two modes of origin — viz. spontaneous,
and as the result of infection from another rabid animal. It is quite
permissible to doubt the spontaneous generation of rabies in any given
case, although it must be admitted that the disease had a beginning,
and that it is not improbable that whatever conditions favoured its
first origin are still in operation, and likely to result in a renewed
creation of the disease from time to time. The disease was well
known in classical antiquity, and is of world-wide distribution, occur-
ring both in the tropics and in the arctic regions, though much com-
moner in temperate regions than in either of the extremes of climate.
There are some striking cases of certain well-peopled regions of the
earth's surface in which it is at present unknown : no case appears
to be on record of its occurrence in Australia, Tasmania, or New
Zealand. It is a mistake to suppose that the disease is commoner in
very hot weather than in cooler weather, or that great cold favours it.
Climate, in fact, appears to have nothing to do with it, or rather, it
should be said, is not shown to have anything to do with it.

Professor Fleming, in his admirable treatise on Kabies and Hydro-
phobia (London, 1872), says:

It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that the disease (in the dog) com-
mences with signs of raging madness, and that the earliest phase of the malady is
ushered in with fury and destruction. The first perceptible or initial symptoms of
rabies in the dog are related to its habits. A change is observed in the animal's
aspect, behaviour, and external characteristics. The habits of the creature are
anomalous and strange. It becomes dull, gloomy, and taciturn ; seeks to isolate
itself, and chooses solitude and obscurity — hiding in out-of-the-way places, or
retiring below chairs and other pieces of furniture ; whereas in health it may have

M 2

152 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

been lively, good-natured, and sociable. But in its retirement it cannot rest ; it is
uneasy and fidgety, and betrays an unmistakable state of malaise ; no sooner has it
lain down and gathered itself together in the usual fashion of a dog reposing than
all at once it jumps up in an agitated manner, walks hither and thither several
times, again lies down, and assumes a sleeping attitude, but has only maintained it
for a few minutes when it is once more moving about, ' seeking rest but finding
none.' Then it retires to its obscure corner — to the deepest recess it can find — and
huddles itself up in a heap, with its head concealed beneath its chest and its fore-
paws. This state of continual agitation and inquietude is in striking contrast with
its ordinary habits, and should, therefore, attract the attention of mindful people.
Not unfrequently there are a few moments when the creature appears more lively
than usual, and displays an extraordinary amount of affection. Sometimes in pet
dogs there is evinced a disposition to gather up small objects, such as straws,
threads, bits of wood, &c., which are industriously picked iip and carried away.
A tendency to lick anything cold, as iron, stones, &c., is also observed in many
instances. At this period no propensity to bite is observed ; the animal is docile
with its master, and obeys his voice, though not so readily as before, nor with the
same pleased countenance. If it shakes its tail the act is more slowly performed
than usual, and there is something strange in the expression of the face ; the voice
of its master can scarcely change it for a few seconds from a sullen gloominess to
its ordinary animated aspect ; and when no longer influenced by the familiar talk
or presence it returns to its sad thoughts, for — as has been well and truthfully
said by Bouley — ' the dog thinks and has its own ideas, which for dogs' ideas are,
from its point of view, very good ideas when it is well.'

The animal's movements, attitudes, and gestures now seem to indicate that it
is haunted by and sees phantoms ; it snaps at nothing and barks as if attacked by
real enemies. Its appearance is altered ; it has a gloomy and somewhat ferocious
aspect.

In this condition, however, it is not aggressive so far as mankind is concerned,
but is as docile and obedient to its master as before. It may even appear to be
more affectionate towards those it knows, and this it manifests by the greater desire
to lick their hands and faces.

This affection, which is always so marked and so enduring in the dog, dominates
it so strongly in rabies that it will not injure those it loves, not even in a paroxysm
of madness ; and even when its ferocious instincts are beginning to be manifested,
and to gain the supremacy over it, it will yet yield obedience to those to whom it
has been accustomed.

The mad dog has not a dread of water, but, on the contrary, will greedily
swallow it. As long as it can drink it will satisfy its ever-ardent thirst ; even when
the spasms in its throat prevent it swallowing, it will nevertheless plunge its face
deeply into the water and appear to gulp at it. The dog is, therefore, not hydro-
phobic, and hydrophobia is not a sign of madness in this animal.

It does not generally refuse food in the early period of the disease, but some-
tunes eats with more voracity than usual.

"When the desire to bite, which is one of the essential characters of rabies at a
certain stage, begins to manifest itself, the animal at first attacks inert bodies —
gnawing wood, leather, its chain, carpets, straw, hair, coals, earth, the excrement of
other animals or even its own, and accumulates in the stomach the remains of all
the substances it has been tearing with ita teeth.

An abundance of saliva is not a constant symptom in rabies in the dog. Some-
times its mouth is humid, and sometimes it is dry. Before a fit of madness the
secretion of saliva is normal ; during this period it may be increased, but towards
the end of the malady it is usually decreased.

The animal often expresses a sensation of inconvenience or pain during the
spasm in its throat by using its paws on the side of its mouth, like a dog which has
a bone lodged there.

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 153

In ' dumb madness ' the lower jaw is paralysed and drops, leaving the mouth
open and dry, and its lining membrane exhibiting a reddish-brown hue ; the tongue
is frequently brown or blue-coloured, one or both eyes squint, and the creature is
ordinarily helpless and not aggressive.

In some instances the rabid dog vomits a chocolate or blond-coloured fluid.

The voice is always changed in tone, and the animal howls or barks in quite a
different fashion to what it did in health. The sound is husky and jerking. In
' dumb madness ' this very important symptom is absent.

The sensibility of the rabid dog is greatly blunted when it is struck, burned, or
wounded ; it emits no cry of pain or sign as when it suffers or is afraid in health.
It will even sometimes wound itself severely with its teeth, and without attempting
to hurt any person it knows.

The mad dog is always very much enraged at the sight of an animal of its own
species. Even when the malady might be considered as yet in a latent condition,
as soon as it sees another dog it shows this strange antipathy and appears desirous
of attacking it. This is a most important indication.

It often flees from home when the ferocious instincts commence to gain an
ascendency, and after one, or two, or three days' wanderings, during which it has
tried to gratify its mad fancies on all the living creatures it has encountered, it
often returns to its master to die. At other times it escapes in the night, and after
doing as much damage as its violence prompts it to, it will return again towards
morning. The distances a mad dog will travel, even in a short period, are some-
times very great.

The furious period of rabies is characterised by an expression of ferocity in the
animal's physiognomy, and by the desire to bite whenever an opportunity offers.
It always prefers to attack another dog, though other animals are also victims.

The paroxysms of fury are succeeded by periods of comparative calm, during
which the appearance of the creature is liable to mislead the uninitiated as to the
nature of the malady.

The mad dog usually attacks other creatures rather than man when at liberty.
When exhausted by the paroxysms and contentions it has experienced, it runs in
an unsteady manner, its tail pendant and head inclined towards the ground, its
eyes wandering and frequently squinting, and its mouth open, with the bluish-
coloured tongue, soiled with dust, protruding.

In this condition it has no longer the violent aggressive tendencies of the
previous stage, though it will yet bite every one — man or beast — that it can reach
with its teeth, especially if irritated.

The mad dog that is not killed perishes from paralysis and asphyxia. To the
last moment the terrible desire to bite is predominant, even when the poor creature
is so prostrated as to appear to be transformed into an inert mass.

Such is the pathetic account of the features of this terrible
malady as seen in man's faithful companion. Let us now for a
moment look at the symptoms and course of the disease as exhibited
in man — where it produces a condition so terrible and heart-rending
to the on-looker that it becomes a matter of astonishment that man-
kind has ever ventured to incur the risk of acquiring this disease by
voluntarily associating with the dog, and a matter of the most urgent
desire that some great deliverer should arise and show us how to
remove this awful thing from our midst.

In both the dog and man the disease is traced to the infliction
of a bite or scratch at a more or less distant period by an animal
already suffering from rabies. The length of time which may elapse

154 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

between the bite and the first symptoms of ' rabies ' in the dog or of
' hydrophobia,' as it is termed, when developed in man, varies. Briefly,
it may be stated that the interval in the dog varies from seven to one
hundred and fifty days, and is as often a longer as a shorter period.
In man, on the other hand, two-thirds of the cases observed develope
within five weeks of the infliction of the infecting bite ; hydrophobia
may show itself as early as the eighth day after the infection ; it is
very rare indeed, though not unknown, that this period of incubation
is extended to a whole year. The reputed cases of an ' incubation
period ' of two, five, or even ten years may be dismissed as altogether
improbable and unsupported by evidence. The uncertainty which this
well-known variation in the incubation period produces is one of the
many distressing features of the disease in relation to man, for often
the greatest mental torture is experienced during this delay in
persons who after all have not been actually infected.

In many respects (says Professor Fleming) there is a striking similarity in the
symptoms manifested in the hydrophobic patient and the rabid dog, while in others
there is a wide dissimilarity. These resemblances and differences we will note as
we proceed to briefly sketch the phenomena of the disease in our own species.

The period of incubation or latency has been already alluded to, and it has also
been mentioned that not unfrequently in man and the dog the earliest indication of
approaching indisposition is a sense of pain in or near the seat of the wound,
extending towards the body, should the injury have been inflicted on the limbs.
If not acute pain there is some unusual sensation, such as aching, tingling, burning,
coldness, numbness, or stiffness in the cicatrix ; which usually, in these circum-
stances, becomes of a red or lurid colour, sometimes opens up, and if yet unhealed
assumes an unhealthy appearance, discharging a thin ichorous fluid instead of pus.
In the dog, as we have observed, the peculiar sensation in the seat of the inocula-
tion has at times caused the animal to gnaw the part most severely.

With these local symptoms some general nervous disturbance is generally
experienced. The patient becomes dejected, morose, irritable, and restless ; he
either does not suspect his complaint, or, if he remembers having been bitten,
carefully avoids mentioning the circumstance, and searches for amusement away
from home, or prefers solitude ; bright and sudden light is disagreeable to him ;
his sleep is troubled, and he often starts up ; pains are experienced in various
parts of the body ; and signs of digestive disorder are not unfrequent. After the
continuance of one or more of these preliminary, or rather premonitory, symptoms
for a period varying from a few hours to five or six days, and, though very rarely,
without all or even many of them being observed, the patient becomes sensible of
a stiffness or tightness about the throat, rigors supervene, and in attempting to
swallow he experiences some difficulty, especially with liquids. This may be con-
sidered as really the commencement of the attack in man.

The difficulty in swallowing rapidly increases, and it is not long before the act
becomes impossible, unless it is attempted with determination ; though even then
it excites the most painful spasms in the back of the throat, with other indescribable
sensations, all of which appeal to the patient, and cause him to dread the very
thought of liquids. Singular nervous paroxysms or tremblings become manifest,
and sensations of stricture or oppression are felt about the throat and chest. The
breathing is painful and embarrassed, and interrupted with frequent sighs or a
peculiar kind cf sobbing movement ; and there is a sense of impending suffocation
and of necessity for fresh air. Indeed, the most marked symptoms consist in a
horribly violent convulsion or spasm of the muscles of the larynx and gullet, by

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 155

which swallowing is prevented, and at the same time the entrance of air to the
windpipe is greatly retarded. Shuddering tremors, sometimes almost amounting
to general convulsions, run through the whole frame ; and a fearful expression of
anxiety, terror, or despair is depicted on the countenance.

The paroxysms are brought on by the slightest causes, and are frequently asso-
ciated with an attempt to swallow liquids, or with the recollection of the sufferings
experienced in former attempts. Hence anything which suggests the idea of
drinking to the patient will throw him into the most painful agitation and convul-
sive spasms. . . . This is particularly observed when the patient carries water to
his lips ; then he is seized with the terrors characteristic of the disease, and with
those convulsions of the face and the whole of the body which make so deep an
impression on the bystanders. He is perfectly rational, feels thirsty, tries to drink,
but the liquid has no sooner touched his lips than he draws back in terror, and
sometimes exclaims that he cannot drink ; his face expresses pain, his eyes are
fixed, and his features contracted; his limbs shake and body trembles. The
paroxysm lasts a few seconds, and then he gradually becomes tranquil ; but the
least touch, nay, mere vibration of the air, is enough to bring on a fresh attack — so
acute is the sensibility of the skin in some instances. ... A special difference
between rabies and hydrophobia is the frequent dread of water in the latter, as well
as the hyperaesthesia of the skin and exaltation of the other senses. . . . Another
characteristic feature of the disease in man is a copious secretion of viscid, tenacious
mucus in the fauces, the ' hydrophobic slaver ; ' this the patient spits out with a
sort of vehemence and rapidity upon everything around him, as if the idea of
swallowing occasioned by the liquid induced this eager expulsion of it, lest a drop
might pass down the throat. This to a bystander is sometimes one of the most
striking phenomena of the case. . . . The mind is sometimes calm and collected in
the intervals between the paroxysms, and consciousness is generally retained ; but
in most cases there is more or less irregularity, incessant talking, excitement, and
occasionally fits approaching to insanity come on. The mental aberration is often
exhibited in groundless suspicion or apprehension of something extraneous, which
is expressed on the face and in the manner of the patient. In comparatively rare
instances he gives way to a wild fury, like that of a dog in one of its fits of
rabies ; he roars, howls, curses, strikes at persons near him, rends or breaks every-
thing within his reach, bites others or himself, till, at length exhausted, he sinks
into a gloomy, listless dejection, from which another paroxysm rouses him. . . ,
Paralytic symptoms manifest themselves before death in a few instances, as in the
dog. . , . Remissions of the symptoms sometimes occur in the course of the com-
plaint, during which the patient can drink, though with some difficulty, and take
food. Towards the close such a remission is not uncommon, with an almost com-
plete absence of the painful symptoms ; so that the patient and the physician begin
to entertain some hope. But if the pulse is now felt it is found to be extremely
feeble, and sometimes almost, if not quite, imperceptible. During this apparent
relaxation of the disease the patient occasionally falls into a sleep, from which he
only awakes to die.

Death results from spasm of the respiratory muscles, the patient
dying asphyxiated. The desire to bite is rare. The disease invari-
ably, as in the dog and other animals, terminates fatally, and usually
between the second and fifth day after the symptoms have been first
observed, though it sometimes runs on to the ninth day.

It is held by veterinaries that * rabies ' in a dog is invariably
fatal, and one test of the presence of the disease is a fatal termination
to the symptoms. Inasmuch as it is very usual to kill dogs suspected
of rabies without waiting to actually prove that they suffer from this

156 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

disease, and further, inasmuch as dogs not suffering from rabies are
nevertheless frequently savage or snappish and bite human beings,
thus leading to the assumption that the person bitten has incurred
the risk of developing hydrophobia, there is necessarily a complete
absence of trustworthy statistical information as to (1) the actual
number of dogs annually affected with rabies in any given country,
and (2) as to the number of persons effectively bitten by really rabid
dogs, who acquire hydrophobia as a consequence. The dogs are
killed before it is proved that they suffer from rabies, and the
human beings bitten are treated by caustics and excision of in-
jured surfaces before it is proved that they really are in danger of
developing hydrophobia, and it is not known in case of escape
whether the danger was ever really incurred. The extreme anxiety
to avoid the awful consequences not unfrequently following the bite
of a rabid dog has produced a course of action which, whilst it is
undoubtedly accompanied by the destruction of many innocent dogs,
and by the infliction of acute pain and mental anguish upon human
beings, who, could they know the truth, have no cause for alarm, has
also at the same time necessarily prevented the acquisition of accurate
knowledge with regard to the disease in important respects, especially
as to the conditions of its communication from dog to man. Accord-
ingly, we find great uncertainty as to the conclusions which are to be
drawn from statistics in regard to the effect on human beings of the
bites of dogs suffering from rabies. According to the lowest estimate
where care has been taken to exclude cases in which there is insufficient
reason for supposing the offending dog to have suffered from rabies,
of every six persons bitten, one dies — that is to say, one develops
hydrophobia ; for recovery after the development of the hitherto
recognised symptoms of hydrophobia is unknown. This is a mor-
tality of 16*66 per cent.; other estimates range from 15 to 25 per
cent. The large proportion of escapes as compared with deaths is
attributed to the wounds inflicted not having been sufficiently deep
to introduce the poison into the system, also to timely surgical treat-
ment having the same effect, and to the fact that the dog, in spite
of probabilities to the contrary, may in a certain proportion of cases
have been wrongly suspected of suffering from 'rabies.'

At the same time there is no doubt that animals (and hence
presumably man) are sometimes endowed with an immunity from
rabies. This has been proved experimentally by repeatedly inocu-
lating a dog with the saliva of rabid dogs which proved fatal to
other individuals which were experimented upon at the same time,
whilst the particular dog in question always proved refractory or
non-liable to the disease. No estimate has been at present formed
of the proportion of dogs which are thus free from liability to the
disease, but it must be very small, perhaps not 1 per cent. On the
other hand, it is undeniable that there is a high probability that such

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 157

immunity exists among human beings, and it is possible that the
proportion of individuals liable to the infection as compared with
those ' immune,' ' refractory,' or ' non-liable ' is less amongst human
beings than among dogs. Such a constitutional immunity may,
therefore, possibly explain to a certain extent the fact that out of
100 cases of dog-bite, the dog being supposed, but not demonstrated,
to be rabid, only 16 acquire hydrophobia.

The result of M. Pasteur's experimental study of rabies and hydro-
phobia has been so far to place several matters of practical import-
ance, which were previously liable to be dealt with by vague guesses
and general impression, in the position of facts capable of accurate
experimental determination ; and secondly, to introduce a method of
treating animals and men infected with the poison of rabies in a way
which, there is strong evidence to show, will arrest or altogether
prevent the development of the disease.

Owing to the eagerness of newspaper correspondents, and the
peculiar circumstances of the investigation which is still actually
in progress, M. Pasteur's work has been not quite fairly represented
to the public, and various astonishing criticisms and expressions
of individual opinion have been indulged in, with regard to what
M. Pasteur is doing, by persons who, however gifted, have no ade-
quate comprehension of the task which the great experimenter has
set before himself.

It must be distinctly remembered, on the one hand, that the
results which M. Pasteur has himself published, and for which he
has made himself responsible, have been obtained by accurate and
demonstrative experiments upon animals ; they are results which
can be repeated and verified. On the other hand, M. Pasteur has
now advanced into a much more difficult field — namely, the applica-
tion of his experimentally ascertained results to the treatment of
human beings. He is actually in course of carrying out his inquiries
in regard to the efficacy of his treatment, and it is probable that at
no distant date he will himself give us a detailed account of the
conclusions to which these inquiries lead. But he has not yet
formulated any such conclusion.

We cannot and have not the remotest desire to experiment
upon human beings, as in the more enlightened parts of Europe we
are permitted, for good purposes, to experiment upon dogs. It is not
possible to exactly arrange experimentally the conditions of a human
being who is to be the subject of inquiry in regard to hydrophobia.
You cannot make sure by the inoculation in the most effective way of a
dozen healthy men that they have started on the path leading to hydro-
phobia, and then treat six by a remedial process, and leave six without
such treatment, in order to see whether the remedial process has an

158 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

effect or not. This is the kind of difficulty which is met with in all
attempts to take a step forward in medical treatment. Nevertheless,
although such definite experimental arrangement of the subject of
inquiry is not possible where human beings are concerned, there is
another method — extremely laborious, and less decisive in the results
which it affords — by which a more or less probable conclusion may
be arrived^at in regard to the effect of treatment of diseased human
beings. This method consists in bringing together for experimental
treatment a very large number — some thousands — of cases in which
the disease under investigation has, independently of the experi-
menter, been acquired, or is supposed to have been acquired, and
then to compare the proportion of cases of recovery obtained under
the new treatment with the proportion of recoveries in cases not
subjected to this treatment.

Hydrophobia presents peculiar difficulties in the application of
this method, and the treatment which M. Pasteur is now testing is
also one which in its essence renders the statistical method difficult
of application. M. Pasteur's treatment has to be applied before the
definite symptoms of hydrophobia have developed in the patient.
Accordingly, there is no certain indication in the patient himself that
he has really been infected by the virus of rabies ; the inference that
he has been so infected is based on the knowledge of the condition
of the dog that bit the patient, and on the extent of the injury in-
flicted ; but the knowledge of the actual state of the dog which inflicted
the bite upon a person who, therefore, has reason to fear an attack of
hydrophobia is often wanting. It is often merely ' feared ' or ' sup-
posed ' that the dog was rabid, and has not been actually proved that
such was the case. In many cases the only proof that the dog really
was rabid would be found in the development of hydrophobia in the
man bitten by the dog, the dog itself having been destroyed. This,
too, would be the only definite proof possible that the patient had
received a sufficiently profound wound to carry the poison into the
system, or, again, that the patient is not naturally ' immune ' or
'refractory ' to the poison. Accordingly, it has been necessary forM.
Pasteur to test his treatment upon a very large number of cases, so
as to obtain a statistical result which may be compared with the
general statistics of the effects following the bite of reputed rabid
dogs. Also, it is possible out of a large number of cases for M.
Pasteur to select, without any other determining motive, those cases
in which the dog which inflicted the bite was actually proved to be
suffering from rabies, either by the result of its bite on other indi-
viduals, or by experiment made by inoculating other animals from it
after its death. Such a selection of his cases has, it is stated, already
been made by M. Pasteur. We have yet to await from M. Pasteur's
own hand a critical account of the results obtained in the whole-
sale treatment of patients by him in Paris. Until he has himself

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 159

published that account, we ought to be very careful about coming
to an absolute conclusion either for or against the efficacy of his
treatment in regard to men.

On the other hand, the fundamental results of his study of rabies
and hydrophobia stand in no such position, but are sharp, experi-
mental demonstrations, which he has publicly announced before the
scientific world, and has verified in the most important instance
before a commission appointed by the Government.

Let us note some of these results.1 They have been obtained by
experimentally inoculating dogs, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and monkeys.
The experiments have been performed by M. Pasteur himself and
his experienced and highly skilled assistants, MM. Chamberland and
Eoux. Precautions which a thorough knowledge of the subject
suggested have been taken. Thus, for instance, in his very first ex-
periments, M. Pasteur cleared the ground considerably by distinguish-
ing a kind of blood-poisoning, due to the presence of a certain
bacterium in human saliva, which is liable to be introduced with the
saliva of a hydrophobic patient when this is made use of for the
purpose of setting up rabies experimentally in a rabbit, and is also
present in normal saliva. Not feeling sure that some rabbits thus
treated had really died from rabies, and suspecting that they might
have died from a blood-poisoning due to other virus present in the
hydrophobic saliva, M. Pasteur tested his rabbits by inoculating
dogs with the saliva and blood of the rabbits. The dogs did not
develope rabies, and thus M. Pasteur was able to establish the conclu-
sion confirmed by other observations — that the disease, produced in
this instance by the inoculation of the rabbits with saliva was not
rabies. This is merely an example of the careful method in which
it is M. Pasteur's habit to correct and solidly build up his conclu-
sions.

The first result of great practical moment established by M. Pas-
teur is that not only, as shown by previous experimenters, can rabies
be communicated from animal to animal by the introduction, of the
saliva of a rabid animal into the loose tissue beneath the skin of a
healthy animal, or by injection of the same into the veins of a healthy
animal, but that the ' virus,' or poison, which carries the disease
resides in its most active form in the nervous tissue of a rabid
animal, and that the most certain method of communicating rabies
from one animal to another is to introduce a piece of the spinal cord
or of a large nerve of a rabid animal on to the surface of the brain of
a healthy animal, the operation of exposing the brain being performed
with the most careful antiseptic methods, so as to prevent blood-
poisoning.

1 I am indebted to an excellent report by my friend Dr. Vignal, of the College
de France, published in the JSritish Medical Journal, for the chief facts relative to
M. Pasteur's published results.

160 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

In this way Pasteur found that he could avoid the complications
•which sometimes result from the presence of undesired poisonous
matters — not related to rabies — in the saliva of rabid animals.

This discovery is the starting-point of all Pasteur's further work.
It enabled him to experiment with sufficient certainty as to results.
It has rendered it possible for him to determine whether a dog is
really affected with rabies or not, by killing it and inoculating the
brain of a second dog with the spinal cord of the dead dog, and
similarly to determine whether a human being has really died of
hydrophobia (rabies hominis) or not. It has also enabled him to
propagate with certainty the disease from rabbit to rabbit through
ninety successive individuals — extending over a period of three years —
and to experiment on the result of varying the quantity of virus
introduced as well as on the result of passing the virus from one
species of animal to another, and back again to the first species
(e.g. rabbit as the first and monkey as the second species). Before
Pasteur's time Rossi, confirmed by Hertwig, had used nerve-tissue
for inoculation with less definite results. Pasteur has the merit of
establishing this method as the really efficient one in experimenting
on the transmission of rabies.

Using the nerve tissue, Pasteur has determined by several ex-
periments that when a large quantity of virus (that is to say, of the
medulla oblongata of a rabid rabbit pounded up in a perfectly
neutral or sterilised broth) is injected into the veins of a dog, the
incubation period is seven or eight days ; by using a smaller quantity
he obtained an incubation period of twenty days, and by using a
yet smaller quantity one of thirty-eight days. It is very important
to note that by using a still smaller dose Pasteur found that the dog
so treated escaped the effect of the poison altogether.

A very interesting and important result is that in the cases in
which the largest amount of poison was used, and the quickest
development of the disease followed, the form which the disease took
was that of paralytic or ' dumb rabies,' in which the animal neither
barks nor bites ; whilst with the smaller dose of poison and longer
incubation period ' furious rabies ' was developed. Moreover, by
directly inoculating on the surface of the brain and spinal cord,
Pasteur has been led to the conclusion that the nature of the attack
can be varied by the part of the central nervous system which is
selected as the seat of inoculation.

Certain theories which have been held as to the mode in which
inoculation with the attenuated virus of such diseases as small-pox
and anthrax acts, so as to protect an animal from the effect of
subsequent exposure to the full strength of the poison, might lead
us to expect that the dogs which were inoculated byM. Pasteur with
a quantity of rabid virus just small enough to fail in producing the
symptoms of rabies would be ' protected ' by that treatment from

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 161

the injurious effects of subsequent inoculation with a full dose. This,
however, Pasteur found was not the case. Such dogs, when subse-
quently inoculated with a full dose, developed rabies in the usual way.
When the virus of rabies is introduced from a dog into a rabbit,
and is cultivated through a series of rabbits by inoculating the brain
with a piece of the spinal cord of a rabid animal, Pasteur has found
that the virulence of the poison is increased. The incubation period
becomes shorter, being at first about fifteen days. After being
transmitted from rabbit to rabbit through a series of twenty-five
individuals, the period of incubation becomes reduced to eight days,
and the virulence of the poison is proportionately increased. After
a further transmission through twenty-five individuals, the incubation
period is reduced to seven days, and after forty more transmissions
Pasteur finds an indication of a further shortening of the incubation
period, and a proportionate increase of virulence in the spinal cord of
the rabbit extracted after death and used for inoculating other
animals. Thus Pasteur found it possible to have at his disposal
simultaneously rabid virus of different degrees of activity.

It is curious that Pasteur found, on the other hand, that the
virus from a rabid dog, when transmitted from individual to indi-
vidual through a series of monkeys, gradually lost its activity, so-
that after passing through twenty (?) monkeys it became incapable
of producing rabies in dogs. Thus a portion of the spinal cord of
such a monkey, itself dead of rabies, when pounded in broth and
injected beneath the skin of a dog, failed to produce rabies, and even
when applied to the dog's brain after trephining failed to produce
rabies.

Pasteur makes the very important statement that the dogs thus
treated with the virus which had been weakened by cultivation in
monkeys, although they did not develop any symptoms of rabies,
were rendered refractory to subsequent inoculations with strong virus
— that is, were ' protected.'

Thus we note a contrast between the effect obtained by inoculating
an animal with a virus weakened by cultivation and those resulting
from using a minute quantity of the virus. The latter proceeding-
does not result in protection, but the former does.

The fresh spinal cord of an animal that has died of rabies is
apparently full of the rabid virus, and it will, if kept so as to prohibit
putrefaction, retain for some days its rabies-producing property.
Nevertheless it gradually, without any putrefactive change, loses,
according to Pasteur's observations, its virulence, which finally dis-
appears altogether. So that it is possible to obtain cord of a very
low degree of virulence, and all intermediate stages leading up to
the most active, by the simple process of suspending a series of cords
at definite intervals of time in glass jars containing dry air.

There are thus two ways of bringing the virus of rabies taken

162 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

from a dog into a condition of diminished activity — the one by culti-
vation in monkeys or some other animal, the other by exposing the
spinal cord to dry air whilst preventing it from putrefying.

It was found by Pasteur that dogs inoculated with the virus
weakened by cultivation in monkeys were protected from the effects
of subsequent inoculation with strong virus. Hence he proceeded
to experiment in the direction so indicated. He inoculated dogs
with a very weak virus taken from a rabbit — that is, a virus having
a long incubation period — and at the same time he inoculated also a
rabbit. When the second rabbit went mad and died, the dogs were
again inoculated from it, and a third rabbit was also inoculated
from it. When this rabbit died the process was repeated with the
dogs and with a fourth rabbit, and so on until the virus had become
(as above stated to be the case) greatly increased in activity, its
incubation period being reduced to eight days. The dogs were not
rendered rabid by the first inoculations ; they certainly would have
been by the last, had they not undergone the earlier. The harm-
less virus rendered the dogs insusceptible to the rabies-producing
quality of the second dose introduced, the second did the same
for the third, the third for the fourth, and so on until the dogs were
able to withstand the strongest virus.

It would seem that this method of using a graduated series of
poisons was not intentional on Pasteur's part at first, but merely
arose from the convenience of the arrangement, since the effect of
the previous inoculation could be tested and a new inoculation to act
as a preventive could be made at one and the same time. Never-
theless, Pasteur has retained for reasons, which it is possible to
imagine but have not been given as yet by him, this method of
repeated doses of graduated increasing strength in his subsequent
treatment.

In 1884 a Commission was appointed at M. Pasteur's request by
the Minister of Public Instruction to examine the results so far
obtained by him in regard to a treatment by which dogs could be
rendered refractory to rabies. The Commission comprised some of
the ablest physiologists in France ; it consisted of MM. Beclard,
Paul Bert, Bouley (the celebrated veterinarian), Tisserand, Villemin,
and Vulpian. Their report contained the following statement : —

The results observed by the Commission may be thus summarised. Nineteen
control dogs (i.e. ordinary dogs not treated by Pasteur) were experimented on.
Among six of these bitten by mad dogs, three were seized with rabies. There were
six cases of rabies among eight of them subjected to venous inoculations, and five
cases of rabies among five which were inoculated by trephining on the brain. The
twenty-three dogs treated (by Pasteur) and then tested all escaped rabies.2

2 I have ascertained that of these twenty-three dogs some had been already
treated by Pasteur before the appointment of the Commission, and a minority were
treated by him for the first time in the presence of the Commission. Ten of these

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 163

Subsequently to the experiments witnessed by the Commission
M. Pasteur carried out experiments in which, instead of using
virus of increasing strength taken from living rabbits, he made use
of the fact discovered by him that the spinal cord of a rabid animal
when preserved in dry air retains its virulent property for several days,
whilst the intensity of the virulence gradually diminishes. Pasteur
used for this purpose cords of rabbits affected with rabies of great
virulence, determined by a long series of transmissions, and having
only an eight days' incubation period. He injected a dog on the
first day with a cord which, when fresh, was highly virulent, but had
been kept for ten days, and hence was incapable of starting rabies in
the dog ; on the second day he used a cord kept for nine days, on the
third day a cord kept for eight days, and so on until on the tenth day
a cord kept for only one day was used. This was found to cause rabies
in a dog not previously treated, and yet had no such effect on the
dog subjected to the previous series of inoculations. The dog had
been rendered refractory to rabies. In this way M. Pasteur states
that he rendered fifty dogs of all ages and races refractory to (or
' protected against ') rabies without one failure. Virus Was inocu-
lated under the skin and even on the surface of the brain after
trephining, and rabies was not contracted in a single case.

Why M. Pasteur makes use of a gradually increasing strength
of virus, or how he supposes this treatment to act so as to give the
remarkable result of protection, he has not explained. The experi-
menter very probably has his own theory on the subject, which guides
him in his work ; but whilst he is still experimenting and observing
he does not commit himself to an explanation of the results obtained.
We may look in the future for a full consideration of the subject and
a definite statement of the evidence at his hands. Meanwhile, it
must be remembered that the notes published by M. Pasteur are, as
it were, bulletins from the field of battle, briefly announcing failures
and successes, and are not to be regarded as a history of the cam-
paign or a statement of its scheme and final result.

Having arrived at this point in his experimental results, M.
Pasteur was prepared to venture on to the far more delicate ground
of treatment of human beings who had incurred the risk of hydro-
phobia.

The period of incubation of hydrophobia being usually four or
five weeks, it seemed to M. Pasteur not impossible that he might
succeed by the method which he had carried out in dogs in rapidly
producing in human subjects a state of refractoriness to the poison
of rabies by using a virus of rapid activity, and so, as it were, overtake

dogs are still in M. Pasteur's hands, and have been inoculated three times on the
surface of the brain with rabid virus : not one has developed rabies

164 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the more slowly acting virus injected into the system by the bite of
a mad dog.

Whatever may have been his theoretical conceptions, M. Pasteur
determined to have recourse to the one great and fertile source of
new knowledge — experiment.

It is known that inoculation with vaccine virus during the latent
period of small-pox has an effect in modifying the disease in a
favourable direction, and so in any case it was to be expected that
•the inoculation of individuals during the latent period of hydrophobia
might produce favourable results. M. Pasteur had every reason to
believe that, at any rate, the inoculation which he proposed would
not have injurious results. He could proceed to the trial with a
clear conscience, feeling sure that he was in any case giving the
bitten person a better chance of recovery than he would have if
left untreated.

The first human being treated by Pasteur was the child Joseph
Meister, who was sent from Alsace by Dr. Weber and arrived in M.
Pasteur's laboratory on the 6th of July, 1885. This child had been
bitten a few days previously, in fourteen different places, by a mad
dog, on the hands, legs, and thighs. MM. Vulpian and Grancher,
two eminent physicians, considered Meister to be almost certain to die
of hydrophobia. M. Pasteur determined to treat the child by the
method of daily injection of the virus of a series of rabbits' spinal cords,
beginning with one kept so long as to be ineffective in the produc-
tion of rabies even in rabbits, and ending with one so virulent as to
produce rabies in a large dog in eight days.

On the 6th of July, 1885, M. Pasteur inoculated Joseph Meister,
under the skin, with a Pravaz's syringe half full of sterilised broth (this
is used merely as a diluent), mixed with a fragment of rabid spinal cord
taken from a rabbit which had died on the 21st of June. The cord had
since that date been kept in ajar containing dry air — that is, fifteen
days. On the following days, Meister was inoculated with spinal cord
from rabid rabbits kept for a less period. On the 7th of July, in
the morning with cord of fourteen days ; in the evening with cord of
twelve days ; on the 8th of July, in the morning with cord of eleven
days, in the evening with cord of nine days ; on the 9th of July,
with cord of eight days ; on the 10th of July, with cord of seven
days ; on the 1 1th of July, with cord of six days ; on the 12th of July,
with cord of five days ; on the 13th of July, with cord of four days ; on
the 14th of July, with cord of three days; on the 15th of July, with
cord of two days ; on the 16th of July, with cord of one day. The
fluid used for the last inoculation was of a very virulent character. It
was tested and found to produce rabies in rabbits with an incubation
period of seven days ; and in a normal healthy dog it produced rabies
with an incubation period of ten days.

It i? now twelve months since Joseph Meister was bitten by the

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 165

mad dog. and he is in perfect health. Even if we set aside the
original infection from the mad dog, we have the immensely impor-
tant fact that he has been subjected to the inoculation of strong rabid
virus by M. Pasteur and has proved entirely insusceptible to any
injurious effects, such as it could and did produce in a powerful dog.

M. Pasteur now proceeded, immediately after Meister's case, to
apply his method to as many persons as possible who had reason to
believe that they had been infected by the virus of a mad dog or other
rabid animal. It must be remembered that Pasteur does not attempt
to treat a case in which hydrophobia has actually made its appear-
ance, and that he would desire to begin his treatment as soon after
the infection or bite as possible ; the later the date to which the
treatment is deferred, the less is the chance — naturally enough — of
its proving effective. He now omits the first three inoculations of
weakest quality used in the case of Joseph Meister, and makes only
ten inoculations (beneath the skin on the abdomen), one every day
for ten days, the strength of the virus being increased as above
explained. Probably, Pasteur is varying and improving his method
in regard to certain details. He himself has made no statement of
a conclusive nature during the year. He is observing and collecting
his facts. But Dr. G rancher, who is at present Pasteur's chief assist-
ant in carrying on the inoculations of human patients, has recently
published a rough analysis of the cases treated.

It appears that between the 6th of July, 1885, and the 10th of June,
188 6, the number of patients treated by Pasteur's method was 1,335. In
order to eliminate cases of which the final issue is uncertain, Dr. Grrancher
omits those treated subsequently to the 22nd of April, 1886. Of the
cases treated within the period thus defined, there were ninety-six in
which the patients had been bitten by dogs which were absolutely
demonstrated to be suffering from rabies. This demonstration was
afforded either by the fact that other, animals bitten by them became
rabid or by an experiment in which a portion of the dog's brain being
placed in contact with the brain of a living rabbit was found to cause
the death of that rabbit with indisputable symptoms of rabies. A
second class of cases were those of persons who were bitten by dogs
certified to be rabid by the veterinary practitioners of the locality in
which the bite took place. Of these there were 644. Lastly, there
were 232 cases in which the dog which had inflicted the bite had run
off and not been seen again, leaving it entirely doubtful as to whether
the dog had really been rabid or not.

For the purpose of judging of the efficacy of Pasteur's method
the last group of cases should be put aside altogether. In the first
two classes there are 740 cases. These we can compare with the
most carefully formed conclusions as to the result of bites of rabid
dogs when Pasteur's treatment has not been adopted. In the first
part of this article it was stated that the inquiries of the most
VOL. XX.— No. 114 N

166 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

experienced veterinarians lead to the conclusion that 16 per cent, of
human beings who are bitten by dogs which are certified to be rabid
by veterinary surgeons skilled in that disease, develope hydrophobia
and die. This estimate is a low one ; by some authorities 25 per
cent, has been regarded as nearer the true average. Taking the
lower estimate, there should have died amongst Pasteur's 740 patients
no less than 118.

What, then, is the difference resulting (so far as we can judge at
present) from the application to these persons of Pasteur's method
of treatment ?

Instead of 118 deaths, there have been only 4, or a death-rate
of one-half per cent, instead of 16 per cent. In less than one
year, it seems, Pasteur has directly saved 114 lives. When we
remember what a death it is from which apparently he has saved
those hundred and more men, women, and children, who can
measure the gratitude which is due to him or the value of the studies
which have led him to this result ?

Nevertheless, let us be cautious. It is very natural that we
should hasten to estimate the benefit which has been conferred on
mankind by this discovery ; on the other hand, the method of testing
its value by comparative statistics is admittedly liable to error.
Whilst the figures so far before us justify us in entertaining the
most sanguine view, a longer series of cases will be needful, and
'minute examination of each case., before a final judgment can be
pronounced. We have not before us at present the data for a more
minute consideration of the separate cases. But one of the most
hopeful features in M. Grancher's statement is that he records only
one death out of the ninety-six persons who were bitten by dogs
experimentally proved to be rabid — proved, that is, by the communi-
cation of rabies by the dogs to other animals.

Another extremely important series of cases is afforded by the
forty-eight cases of wolf bites treated by Pasteur's method. Owing
to the fact that the rabid wolf attacks the throat and face of the
man upon whom it rushes, the virus is not cleared from its teeth by
their passage through clothing, as undoubtedly occurs in many cases
of rabid dogs' bite. It is probable that this, together with the
greater depth and extent of the wounds inflicted by wolves, accounts
for the fact that whilst only 16 per cent, of the persons bitten
by rabid dogs die, as many as 66-5 per cent, of the persons bitten by
rabid wolves have hitherto succumbed. Pasteur has reduced this
percentage in the forty-eight cases of wolf bites treated by him to
14; seven of his cases died. But it is important to remember
that some of these cases were treated a long while (three weeks or
more) after the bite ; and also that the bites themselves, apart from
the virus introduced into them, were of a very dangerous nature in
some cases. On the other hand, it is equally true that we do not

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 167

know, until some very much more complete record is placed before
us than we have at present, how many cases of very slight injury,
mere nips or scratches, may have been included among the forty-eight
cases of wolf bite.

Pasteur is still observing : he himself has not pronounced his
method to be final, nor that its efficacy is actually so great as the
figures above given would seem to indicate. Time will show ; mean-
while it is clear that the treatment is in itself harmless, and gives
such reasonable hope of benefit that the great experimenter is
abundantly justified in allowing its fame to be spread through all
lands, in order that it may be tried on as large a number of unfortu-
nate victims of dog bite as possible. It is also clear that there is
not the slightest warrant for those who would pronounce an adverse
judgment on Pasteur's treatment and compare him to the quacks
who deal in ' faith-healing ' and such-like methods.

What is above all things desirable at the present moment is, that
thorough and extended researches should be made by independent
scientific experts in this country on the lines travelled over by M.
Pasteur. This, alas ! is impossible. Our laws place such impediments
in the way of experiments upon animals, that even a rich man, were
he capable, could not obtain the licenses necessary for the 'inquiry ;
and secondly, the men who are most likely to be capable of inquiring
into the matter are not in a position to give up the whole of their
time to it, and to pay competent assistants. No one in this country
is given a salary by the State, and provided with laboratory and
assistants, for the purpose of making such new knowledge as that by
which Pasteur has brought the highest honour to France "and in-
estimable blessing to mankind at large. On the other hand, it is in
consequence and as the direct result of such a position that Pasteur
has been able to develope his genius.

Pasteur himself has not explained what theory he has formed as
to the actual nature of the virus of rabies, and as to the way in which
his inoculations act, so as to protect an animal from the effects of the
virus, even after the virus has been introduced into the system.
Possibly he has no precise theory on the subject, but has arrived at
his results by an unreasoned exploring method of experimentation.
Such a method is not permissible to the ordinary man ; but in the
hands of a great thinker and experimentalist it sometimes leads to
great results. Charles Darwin once spoke to the present writer of
experiments, not dictated by any precise anticipation of a special
result, but merely undertaken ' to see in a general way what will
happen ' — as ' fool's experiments,' and added that he was very fond of
such * fool's experiments,' and often made them. When the indivi-
dual who occupies the place of the ' fool ' is a man saturated with

168 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

minute knowledge of the subject on which the experiment is to be
tried, it is likely enough that, unconsciously, he frames hypotheses
here and there without taking note of what is going on in his own
mind, and so is unable to state clearly how he came to make trial of
this or that experimental condition.

Whether Pasteur has worked in this way, trusting to the instinct
due to his vast experience, or whether he has reasoned step by step, we
do not know. It is nevertheless possible for the bystander to consider
the various theories which may be regarded as tending to explain
the results obtained by Pasteur in the cure of hydrophobia.

The general fact that the ill-effects of some diseases due to
specific virus or poisons can be averted by inoculating a patient
with the virus in a modified condition — as, for instance, when vac-
cination is used as a preventive of small-pox in man — may be ex-
plained more or less satisfactorily by three different suppositions.
The first supposition is that the virus is a living matter which grows
and feeds when introduced into the body of the inoculated animal,
and that it exhausts the soil — that is to say, uses up something in
the blood necessary for the growth of the virus ; accordingly, when
the soil has been exhausted by a modified and mild variety of the
virus, there is no opportunity for the more deadly virus, when it
gains access, to feed and multiply. A second supposition is that the
virus does not exhaust the soil, but as it grows in the animal body
produces substances which are poisonous to itself, and these substances,
remaining in the body after they have been formed there by a
modified virus, act poisonously upon the more deadly virus when
that gains access, and either stop its development altogether or
greatly hinder it. An analogy in favour of this supposition is seen
in the yeast plant, which produces alcohol in saccharine solutions
until a limited percentage of alcohol is present, then the alcohol acts
as a poison to the yeast plant, and neither it nor any other yeast plant
of the kind can grow further in that solution. A third supposition is
that, whether the virus be a living thing or not, the protective result
obtained by introducing the modified virus into the body of an
animal is due to the education of the living protoplasmic cells of
which the animal consists. If you plunge a mussel from the sea
into fresh water, making sure that its shell is kept a little open, the
animal will be killed by the fresh water. But if you treat the
mussel first with ' modified ' fresh water — that is, with brackish water
— and then after a bit introduce it to fresh water, the fresh water will
have no injurious effect, and the mussel may be made to permanently
tolerate fresh water. So too by commencing with small doses,
gradually increased, the human body may be made to tolerate an
amount of arsenic and of other poisons which are deadly to the
uneducated.

Any one of these three suppositions would at first sight seem to

1886 PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA. 169

offer a possible explanation of the protective inoculation against
rabies and hydrophobia. It is not known that the virus of rabies is
a separate parasitic organism ; at the same time it is possible that
it is. If it is not, the last of the three above-named hypotheses
would seem to meet the case, and, whether the virus is a living thing
or not, has an appearance of plausibility.

But how are we to suppose that the inoculation of modified
rabbit's virus acts upon a man so as to cut short the career of a dog's
virus which has already been implanted in the man's system by a
bite?

To form any plausible conception on this matter we ought to
have some idea as to the real significance of * the incubation period,'
and this we are not yet able to form satisfactorily. Most diseases
which are propagated by a virus — as, for instance, small-pox, scarlet
fever, typhoid, syphilis — have a fixed and definite ' incubation period.'
What is going on in the victimised animal or man during that
incubation period ? On the supposition that the virus is a living
thing, we may imagine that the virus is slowly multiplying during
this period, until it is sufficiently abundant to cause poisonous effects
in the animal attacked. It is difficult to suggest an explanation of
the incubation period if we do not assume that the virus is a living
thing which can grow.

The poisonous effects are, at any rate, deferred during this incuba-
tion period. If you could introduce a modified and mild form of the
same virus with a shorter incubation period into the animal which
has been infected with a stronger virus with a long incubation
period, you might get the protoplasm of the infected animal accus-
tomed first to mild and then gradually to stronger doses of the
poison before the critical period of the long and strong virus arrived ;
and so, when the assumed hour of deadly maturity of the latter was
reached, the animal tissues would exhibit complete indifference,
having in the meantime learnt to tolerate without the slightest
tremor of disorganisation the poison (or it may be the vibration !)
which, previous to their education, would have been rapidly fatal.
Almost equally well we may figure to ourselves the state of prepara-
tion brought about if we choose to employ the terms of the first or
of the second supposition above given. The point of importance to
ascertain, if such a conception is to be applied to Pasteur's treatment
of hydrophobia, is whether the dog's and wolf's virus is longer in
incubation and stronger in poisonous quality than that of the rabbit's
cords as modified by hanging up in dry air. A general principle appears
to be — according to M. Pasteur — that, in regard to rabies, the longer
the incubation period the less the virulence of the virus, and the
shorter the incubation period the greater the virulence. The virus
in the cord of the rabbits used by M. Pasteur for preventive inocula-
tion is stated by him to be, when fresh, much more intense than

170 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

that taken from a mad dog; it produces rabies in a dog, when
injected into its veins, in eight or ten days. By hanging in dry air
for a fortnight this cord loses its virulence. But it has not yet
been stated by Pasteur what are the indications that this virulence
is lost, and whether the loss of ' virulence ' is in this case measured
by an increase of incubation period. We have no information from
Pasteur on this point. It would certainly seem that the virus of the
dried rabbits' cords ought not to lose its short incubation period if it
is to get beforehand with the dog-bite virus, which has a period of
five or six weeks.3 And presumably, therefore, there must be two
distinct qualities in which the virus can vary : one, its incubation
period, and the other its intensity of action, apart from time, but in
reference to its actual capability or incapability of causing disease in
this or that species of animal.

It is useless to speculate further on the subject at present. The
secret is for the moment locked in Pasteur's brain. Had we in
this country a State Laboratory or any public institution whatsoever
in which research of the kind was provided for, the fundamental
statements of Pasteur as to his results with dogs would ere this
have been strictly tested with absolute independence and impartiality
by English physiologists retained by the State to carry on continu-
ously such inquiries. Similarly, we should have independent know-
ledge on the points above raised as to the modification of the virus
in rabbits, and the public anxiety on the whole matter would be in
a fair way towards being allayed. At the same time, in all proba-
bility similar treatment in regard to other diseases would ere this
have been devised by * practical ' English experimenters. As it is,
owing to our repressive laws and the State neglect of scientific
research, we have to remain entirely at the mercy of the distinguished
men who are nurtured and equipped by the State agencies of our
continental neighbours. All that we are in a position to say with
regard to Pasteur's treatment of hydrophobia is, that unless the
accounts which have been published in his name and by his assistants
are not merely erroneous but wilful frauds of incredible wickedness,
that treatment is likely to prove a success so extraordinary and so
beneficent as to place its author in the first rank of men of genius of
all ages. That is the position, and there is no reason why the former
alternative should even for a moment be entertained.

3 The incubation period of five weeks ordinarily observed in the case of men
bitten by rabid dogs may be due to the smallness of the dose, since Pasteur has shown
that small doses of rabid virus give longer incubation periods than large doses. How
far a dose of weakened virus can be made to attain the rapid action of strong virus,
by increasing the quantity of the weaker virus injected, has not been stated by
Pasteur.

E. KAY LANKESTER.

1886 171

NEW ZEALAND AND MR. FROUDE.

THERE are probably no people in the world so sensitive to what is
written about them as British colonists. This is not mere vanity or
thinness of skin. There are good reasons for it, and they are rather
honourable to colonists than otherwise. The people of these won-
derful young countries, where the process of civilisation which occu-
pied twelve centuries in England has been completely achieved in
fifty years, are self-conscious, just as boys and girls are in whom the
mental and physical powers are prematurely and exceptionally deve-
loped. They feel themselves ' the heirs of all the ages,' in a sense
and in a degree which can scarcely be realised at all by the inhabi-
tants of old, slow-growing lands. Themselves discerning and aston-
ished by the almost miraculous success of colonisation, they imagine
the nations of the earth are watching them with an interest and
astonishment equal to their own.

Hence it is that when any famous writer undertakes to give the
world an account of the Colonies from his own observation, all
good colonists await the publication of his book with feverish impa-
tience, and when it appears, each of them takes praise or blame as
personal to himself, and is elated or depressed in proportion as his
Colony is represented in a favourable or an unfavourable light. Mr.
Bryce, a New Zealand colonist, has recently taken a voyage to England,
and recovered 5,000£. damages from the author of a foolish and pon-
derous work called The History of New Zealand for an attack on
him which he would never have noticed if the whole book had not
been an attack on the Colony. Mr. Bryce has just returned, and the
people are hastening everywhere to receive him with demonstrations
of joy and gratitude, as one who has rendered a great public service.

Macaulay declared that the contemptuous manner in which the
Americans were written about in England did more than wars or
tariffs to alienate them ; and we Australasians are now at the same
sensitive stage that they were at a hundred years ago ; but we are
beginning to get over it, for the reason that we are beginning to
discover that famous writers often write great nonsense, and that
it really does not matter two straws whether they think well or ill
of us. Anthony Trollope was the first to awaken us to these two
facts. We were terribly nervous about what he was going to put in

172 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

his book, but when it came out we only got a little angry at first,,
then laughed at the silly parts, yawned over the dull parts, and soon
forgot all about it. Since then we had been made to see ourselves
through the eyes of famous writers of all sorts and sizes, and we
had come to be very callous to the opinions of any of them. But a
greater than these was at hand.

When it became known the year before last that James Anthony
Froude was about to pay a visit to Australia and New Zealand for
the express purpose of writing a book about them, we were more
agitated than we should have been, I believe, by the advent of any
other man. Froude — he is always called Froude here, just as we
never speak of Mr. Carlyle or Mr. Shakespeare — is as well known and
as highly honoured in the Colonies as he is at home. We are familiar
with his histories, we admire his inimitable Ccesar, we marvelled at
and deplored his Carlyle with as much interest as if we dwelt at the
West End of London instead of in a village in Cook Strait. And
when we heard he was coming, we said : ' Ah, this is a very different
sort of man from the others. Now at last we shall have a work on
the Colonies which will be neither a dismal Blue-book nor a mass of
slip-slop. Now at last a place in history will be given to the Colonies
by one who has the ordering of those things.' He came, and he was
treated like the sovereign prince of literature we had imagined him.
The deference and hospitality, both public and private, which he
met with everywhere fairly bewildered him.

If the Delphic oracle in person had made a tour of the Greek
Colonies in the Mediterranean, the honours that were paid to Froude
in Australasia could hardly have been exceeded. He spent just two
months here, during which time he visited South Australia, Victoria,
New South Wales, and New Zealand. He then returned to England
by the American route, and wrote Oceana. Before the book
reached the Colonies we had received a note of warning that it con-
tained some rather startling statements, and certain extracts from it
which were soon afterwards published gave the impression that it
was simply a hoax — a bad joke compared with which the Carlyle
business was a trifle. We have now received the book, read it, re-read
it, puzzled over it, discussed it, argued over it, sworn at it, and the
only conclusion we can come to regarding it, is that how such a man
as Mr. Froude can ever have written such a book as Oceana is one
of those unfathomable mysteries which are destined never to be
solved. It is certainly the worst book which has ever been written
on these Colonies ; which is the severest thing I can think of to say
against it.

No man ever had such opportunities as Mr. Froude had to write
a book about Australasia which would have been a valuable addition
to history and an important acquisition to mankind. He came here
at a most interesting time, at the very moment when the strength

1886 NEW ZEALAND AND MR. FROUDE. 173

of the union of the Colonies to the Empire was put to the most con-
vincing test. I happened to be travelling in Australia when he was
there, and I had the privilege of spending some days in his charming
and instructive society, as a guest of Sir Henry Loch, the Governor
of Victoria. I believe I am the ' New Zealand Member of Council '
mentioned at page 143 of Oceana. There is no such title as
Member of Council known in these Colonies, by-the-bye ; but that
is nothing, except as a trifling instance of Mr. Froude's almost in-
credible inaccuracy. What I wished to say is, that I myself saw with
great satisfaction how all the avenues of information were opened to
the Oracle, and opened in such a way that any man of his capacity
who had brought the right spirit to the work might have found
through them with ease the materials for a book which would have
gained for him the respectful gratitude of three millions of colonists,
and exercised an influence for good on generations to come. The
strangest thing is that Mr. Froude himself seems to have fully dis-
cerned all this. In the preface and the opening pages of Oceana he
treats the task he had set himself as one of the gravest significance.
It was his high and holy mission to solve the problem of Imperial
Federation, to bring about the realisation of Sir James Harrington's
dream of Oceana. Thousands of colonists have read his first chapter,
so wise and true, so learned, so liberal, so splendidly eloquent, with
breathless emotion, with a beating heart. Here is the greatest
historian and the noblest prose writer of our age, deliberately apply-
ing himself to the beneficent object of interpreting the Colonies to
the Mother Country in the language of eternal truth and in words of
fire. But it never goes any further. The first chapter is an essay,
a monograph. But the rest of the book — except the chapter on the
Cape — bears no adequate relation to it whatsoever. It seems to
have been written by another hand, at another time, for another
purpose. It is like a wooden shanty, run up anyhow on foundations
that had been laid for a mighty temple.

Mr. Froude takes not even one step from the sublime to the
ridiculous. He places nothing but a leaf of paper between them.
On one side, in Chapter I., we soar with him over continents and
oceans, and through ages of time, in contemplation of the growth of
empires and the mysterious destiny of nations. On the other side,
in Chapter II., we are sickened by the twaddle of the cuddy of the
s.s. ' Australasian.' Mr. Froude absolutely has no mercy on us. If
there is a bore on this earth, it is a man who will talk about the
details of life on board ship. In these Colonies, where pretty nearly
every one has made several sea voyages, that subject is strictly
tabooed in all rational society. To dilate upon it is to betray a
* new chum ' — what they call in Australia a ' lime juice.' Yet, will
it be believed, about one-fourth of Oceana is occupied by the most
trivial narrative of every-day occurrences on steamers, the sort of

174 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

stuff that a hobbledehoy who has never been abroad before would
write home to his little sisters. Mr. Froude tells us about his own
state of health and his son's, about the advertisements of the packets,
the passenger accommodation, the doctor and his pretty newly married
wife, the cook, the breakfasts, dinners, luncheons, the bread, the
porridge, the captain's ' blue, merry eyes,' the construction of the
engines, ' the wild cry of the sailors hauling ropes or delivering
orders,' and so on and so on, page after page, till we feel inclined to
throw him overboard or jump overboard ourselves. Sudden death
should be his portion who talks such rubbish in this enlightened
and vivacious age ; but what should be done to him who solemnly
writes it, prints it, publishes it ! ' But,' it may be asked, ' is it not
very interesting to get the reflections of such a man as Mr. Froude
on the wonders of the deep ? ' I reply that he seems never to have
noticed any of the wonders of the deep, but to have given his atten-
tion wholly to the most commonplace human incidents. Whenever
he does mention natural objects, his remarks upon them are absurd.
For instance, he says the Mother Carey's chicken is a kind of gull.
I thought every child knew it is a kind of petrel, the stormy petrel.

But let us get Mr. Froude ashore, and see how he fares there-
I pass over his chapters on the Cape Colony, for these reasons. They
have nothing to do with the main subject of the book, consisting
as they do of an examination of the affairs of an inland country and
foreign peoples. They are manifestly written with knowledge and
from materials gained many years before this book was projected.
Finally, my criticisms on the book generally have no application to
them, which are written as the rest of the book ought to have been
written — that is to say, with care and thought and a due sense of
responsibility. They contain the most lucid and serviceable discus-
sion of the South African question that I have met with, and published
separately would form a valuable text-book or State paper. But
they are quite out of place in Oceana, though I admit they are the
best thing in it.

Mr. Froude knows all about the Cape. He never took the
smallest trouble to learn anything about Australasia. He arrived
at Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, on the 18th of January,
1885, and stayed there one day; and as his description of it is
typical of his whole book, I will examine it somewhat in detail.
His chapter en South Australia only occupies ten pages. Yet he
contrives to compress so many inaccuracies and even gross misstate-
ments into that space, that it is difficult to believe he ever really
went there at all. He says, ' the broad Murray falls into the sea at
no great distance to the westward.' The Murray reaches the sea
sixty miles to the eastward of Adelaide, and when Mr. Froude was there
its mouth had been blocked by sand for two months. Describing
Port Adelaide, he says ' the harbour was full of ships : great steamers,

1886 NEW ZEALAND AND MR. FROUDE. 175

great liners, coasting schooners, ships of all sorts.' Port Adelaide is
not accessible by large vessels. The ocean steamers lie many miles
off. He says he saw in the port ' a frigate newly painted,' and

a port official growled out ' there is our harbour defence ship, which the English
Government insists on our maintaining ; it is worth nothing and never will be.
Our naval defences cost us 25,000/. a year. We should pay the 2o,00(W. a year to
the Admiralty and let them do the defence for us. They can manage such things
better than we can.'

Now, either Mr. Froude dreamt all this, or else he was blind and
the port official was poking fun at him. There is not and never was
a frigate at Port Adelaide. At the Semaphore, in the outer harbour,
there is a gun-vessel called the t Protector,' which the South Aus-
tralian Government maintain entirely of their own free will, at a cost,
not of 25,000£. a year, but of about 10,OOOL, the latter amount
being the whole charge for naval defence.

Of Adelaide itself he says : —

We rose slightly from the sea, and at the end of the seven miles we saw below
us in a basin, with a river winding through it, a city of a hundred and fifty thousand
inhabitants, not one of whom has ever known, or will know, a moment's anxiety
as to the recurring regularity of his three meals a day.

Adelaide is not in a basin, but on the highest land in the neigh-
bourhood. There is no river winding through it, for the little
Torrens has long since been dammed up and converted into a lake
in the park lands. The population of Adelaide with all its suburbs
never exceeded seventy-five thousand, and when Mr. Froude was there
great numbers of them were leaving daily, starved out by the failure
of the harvest, the drought, and the commercial depression. I also
was there in January 1885, and I saw more poverty and worse
poverty than I ever saw before in twenty-five years' life in the
Colonies. I purposely attended a sitting of the Benevolent Relief
Committee, and learnt something about the anxiety of some of the
inhabitants of Adelaide as to the recurring regularity of their three
meals a day. Since then Government House has been mobbed by
multitudes of people clamouring for the means of subsistence. Mr.
Froude had a grand chance when he was at Adelaide to study a
wealthy colony in a state of profound, if temporary, distress ; and
that is the use he made of it.

He cannot be reasonably accurate even about the most striking
peculiarities of the country. He says, ' The laughing jackass is the
size of a crow, with the shape of a jay.' The laughing jackass is no
more like a jay than it is like an owl. It is neither more nor less
than a gigantic kingfisher. He says, ' In the woods its chief amuse-
ment is to seize hold of snakes and bite their heads off.' This is a
habit which the most vigilant naturalist has not yet observed. There
is a popular tradition in Australia that the laughing jackass kills
snakes by carrying them up in the air and letting them drop ; but I

176 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

never saw it done, and I never met anybody who had. The bird is
no match for a snake * in the woods ' or anywhere else.

But I need not dwell longer on Mr. Froude's inaccuracy. He ad-
mits that he has a bad memory, and that he does not hear very well, and
he says the flies affected his eyes. To these causes I am quite willing
to attribute his having recorded, on every other page of his book,
sights or sayings which nobody else ever saw or heard in Australasia.
But if he is lacking in memory and in some of the external senses,
he has a vigour of imagination which more than compensates those
defects. Amongst other things he imagined that the public mind
throughout the Colonies, and even the private and personal mind of
individual colonists, is mainly occupied and powerfully excited by the
problem of Federation ; and accordingly he gives us whole chapters
on that subject, from which it might be supposed that the colonists
are in a brooding state of melancholy, bordering on despair, and that
it is touch and go whether they may not separate from the Empire
any day. On that point I can only say that I was in Australia
during the whole time of Mr. Froude's visit, and two months longer;
that I went there as a public man and a public writer to meet public
men and study public questions ; and that I never met anybody,
except two or three politicians at Melbourne, who took more than
a languid, theoretical interest in the subject of Federation.

As for Mr. Froude's notion that the colonists — ' our poor kindred *
as he arrogantly and absurdly calls us — are suffering under a deep
and burning sense of wrong on account of the slights of the
Imperial Government, it is such utter moonshine that colonists are
positively at a loss to know what he is driving at. For example,
he will have it that the colonists are not allowed to fly the British
flag, but are compelled to use some rag of their own, and he declares
that they feel this as ' a bar sinister over their scutcheon, as if they
were bastards, and not legitimate,' and he goes on to talk about
' treacherous designs to break the Empire into fragments.' He even
affirms that Mr. Dalley, the able Attorney-General and acting Premier
of New South Wales, spoke strongly to him about this, and exclaimed,
4 We must have the English flag again ! ' Now, I am a born colonist.
From my boyhood I have been either in the public service or in
Parliament. Yet I never knew that we colonists were forbidden to
fly the British flag until I read Oceania. I do not believe it yet.
I have abundant evidence to the contrary, for I see the British flag
flying all round me every day.

I remember some years ago, fifteen or twenty perhaps, an order
was made that Colonial Government vessels should not fly the white
ensign or the blue ensign without a ' difference,' for the obvious
reason that it might cause confusion through their being mistaken
for men-of-war or ships of the Naval Eeserve. Each Colony, I fancy,
was allowed to select its own * difference,' and we in New Zealand

1386 NEW ZEALAND AND MR. FROUDE. 177

chose a suggestive and tasty design, the four stars of the Southern
Cross in white on the fly of the blue ensign. As I write our yacht,
the * Hinemoa,' is coming up the harbour with our star-spangled
banner floating astern, and an enormous Union Jack at the mast-
head. We have hitherto been rather proud of our Southern Cross
than otherwise, when we thought anything about it ; and it was
reserved for Mr. Froude to tell us it was a grievance and a brand of
bastardy. It is the old story of the needy knife-grinder over again.
When I was at Sydney last year, just about the time when Mr.
Froude was there, I went to Manly with my friend Mr. Keid, formerly
Minister of Education in the Stuart-Dalley Government, and he
pointed out to me Mr. Dalley's castellated mansion — which Mr.
Froude describes — surmounted by a wonderful sort of white ensign
with a blue cross. I said, ' What is that extraordinary flag he has
flying from his tower ? ' ' That,' replied Mr. Keid, laughing, ' is the
Australian standard.' It was the first time I had ever seen it or heard
of it ; and I supposed it was a whim of Mr. Dalley's, knowing him
to be the most intensely patriotic of born Australians. I was indeed
surprised to learn from Oceana that Mr. Dalley is yearning to ' get
the English flag back.' There is nothing to prevent him from
hoisting three English flags, one above the other, if he chooses.

Apart from these depressing discourses on the prospects or possi-
bilities of Federation, and on the imaginary wrongs or sentimental
grievances of the colonists — speculations which are wholly based on
misconception — Mr. Froude's narrative of his travels and experiences
in Victoria and New South Wales is very pleasant reading, though
curiously superficial, and unquestionably calculated to mislead
readers not acquainted with the Colonies. He everywhere mistakes
the individual for the general, and often enough adopts as types
what are but rare exceptions. Mr. Froude seems altogether to have
forgotten, or not to have understood, that he was a very distinguished
visitor, who naturally found himself sought after, and perhaps a
little bit flattered, by the leading personages in the Colonies.
He goes into superlatives over every Grovernor or Lieutenant-
Grovernor or Premier or high official or wealthy settler who showed
him any attention. Each one in turn is described as * a most
remarkable man,' a statesman of the first order, an Admirable Crich-
ton, an incomparable genius, quite equal to the leading European
statesmen or literati. Yet, singularly enough, Mr. Froude thinks
very poorly of the political system which has produced so many
great men in so short a time, and has the gravest misgivings as
to the future of a society whose particular members he so much
admires. The plain truth is, he saw nothing of the Colonies or the
colonists, but was contented to spend the five weeks of his visit
exclusively among the chosen few, the creme de la creme, who had
the gratification of entertaining him. These, of course, did their

178 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

utmost to make themselves agreeable to him ; but they were no
doubt less anxious that he should obtain correct impressions of the
Colonies than that he should retain pleasant impressions of them-
selves. What should we think of a writer who should spend a week
with the Queen at Osborne, a week with the Prince of Wales at
Sandringham, a fortnight among the Dukeries, and a week in being
feted by two or three Mayors and Corporations, and should then go
away, and from the experience and information thus gained write a
pretentious and professedly authoritative book about England, her
people, her institutions, her characteristics, her aspirations, her
destiny ? Could anything be more laughable ? Yet that is, by
analogy, precisely what Mr. Froude did with respect to Australia.

But if he has treated the continental Colonies lightly, he has
treated New Zealand positively scurvily. Of all the Colonies New
Zealand takes the longest to see, and is the hardest to understand ;
for the reasons that, stretching from north to south a thousand miles,
it displays an unique variety of climate and formation ; and that it
is divided into two totally different islands and into nine separate
settlements having little more in common with one another than the
states of the Union have. It is a country nearly as large as Great
Britain and Ireland, with a population of 600,000 souls, about one-
seventh of the population of London, scattered about it pretty evenly
in little cities, towns, villages, and sparse rural communities. The
people of the north scarcely know the people of the south, while the
inhabitants of Westland, half Irish, half Cornish, half Catholic, half
Protestant, have actually a closer connection with Victoria, 1,200
miles over sea to the westward, than with their fellow-colonists only
a hundred miles to the eastward of them, across the Southern Alps.
It will readily be understood that this is a country which demands
a good deal of studying, if any knowledge is to be gained of it at all.
Let us see how Mr. Froude studied it. In his preface he says :
' The object of my voyage was not only to see the Colonies themselves,
but to hear the views of all classes of people there. Very well.
How did he set about attaining that object in New Zealand ? He
arrived at Auckland on the 4th of March, 1886. He made himself com-
fortable at the Northern Club for two days, during which time, as he
says, he ' did Auckland,' a town of fifty thousand people and one of the
most beautiful and curious in the world. He then made the regular
humdrum, cut- and-dried tour of the hot lakes, in the regular humdrum,
cut-and-dried way, just as more than two thousand other tourists did
last summer ; and noted down the most shallow remarks, probably of
what he saw or did not see, of any that were made by those two thousand
casual sightseers. That took a week. He then went to Kawau, a secluded
island off the coast of Auckland, where Sir George Grey lives in solitary
state, and he stayed a week there, speaking to nobody except Sir George
Grey, his visitors and servants, and a family in a farmhouse on the

1886 NEW ZEALAND AND MR. FROUDE. 179

mainland,, whither he was blown whilst on a boating excursion. He
then returned to Auckland, slept at the club, caught the steamer for
Honolulu and San Francisco — and so ended his visit to and his study
of New Zealand.

If he had candidly admitted that he saw nothing and learnt
nothing of New Zealand, that he was tired and bored when he got
there, and instead of making himself acquainted with the Colony,
went for a holiday at the lakes with Lord Elphinstone and enjoyed
an intellectual lounge with Sir George Grey, and then was glad to
get home, it would have been easy to enter into his feelings, and to
respect his straightforwardness. But he does nothing of the sort.
Having deliberately shirked the duty of seeing the Colony and
meeting its people, he, nevertheless, presumes to give an elaborate
account of it, and to pass a critical judgment upon them. He not
only draws a picture of New Zealand which is equally offensive and
preposterous, but he publishes statements about its inhabitants, so
injurious that it was seriously considered whether some public means
of refuting them should not be taken. Where did he get his in-
formation from ? Did he ' see the Colony and hear the views of all
classes of people there?' No, he saw the Northern Club and Kawau,
and he heard the views of Sir Greorge Grey and his servants, a Mr.
Aldis, and some man whose name he did not catch, or forgot, in the
smoking-room at the club. But mainly, and for all practical purposes
solely, he heard and adopted the views of Sir George Grey. Mr.
Froude lost his head completely about Sir George Grey, and the
things he says of him, while they make all sensible colonists chuckle
with satiric glee, or burn with prosaic indignation, must even have
made Sir George himself blush, if he have not lost the faculty of
blushing by long disuse. Mr. Froude, on the strength of a week's
acquaintance, pronounces Sir George Grey the greatest, ablest,
noblest, wisest, most pious, and beneficent man who ever deigned to
waste his God-given qualities on a wretched colony.

Now, Sir George Grey is a perfectly well-known personage. Mr.
Froude did not discover him. When I first saw Sir George Grey I
was eight years old, and I have known him ever since, quite inti-
mately enough to form as good a judgment as anybody of his public
character, at all events ; and of his private character I am quite
sure Mr. Froude can know absolutely nothing, for he is the most in-
scrutable of men. He is an exceedingly polished man and is an in-
comparable host in his paradise of an island home, especially when
he has his own reasons for wishing to make himself agreeable to a
guest. His venerable bearing, the prestige of his early career, his
grace and dignity of manner, his impressiveness of silence when he
is silent, his golden-mouthed eloquence when he speaks, his haughty
seclusion contrasted by his affability when he appears in public, have
given him a great measure of personal popularity. He is acknowledged

180 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

to be the most distinguished public man who ever took part in
the public affairs of a colony. But to make him out to be only
so very little lower than the angels, as Mr. Froude does, is sheer
nonsense.

Sir George Grey was a troublesome Governor, clever at taking
a Ivantage of other's mistakes, but always in hot water with his
ministers, with the military, and with the Colonial Office. It ended
by his being summarily removed from the Government in 1867,
because the Colonial Office saw no other way of terminating the
chronic and futile feud which had so long caused an ill feeling
between the Colony and the Mother Country. He went home and
tried to get into Parliament, but only succeeded in keeping Sir
Henry Storks out ; and, having offended Whigs and Tories in turn,
got the cold shoulder from both. He returned to the Colony
thoroughly soured, and shut himself up in gloomy solitude in his
lovely island of Kawau. In 1875 he determined to enter colonial
politics, and easily got a seat in the House of Kepresentatives and
the leadership of a considerable party. In 1877 he became Prime
Minister, and he ruled the Colony with almost absolute power for two
years. It was the darkest period in the political history of New
Zealand.

Immediately on the assembling of Parliament in 1879 a resolution
affirming that Sir George Grey's Ministry ' had so mismanaged and
maladministered the affairs of the country that they no longer
possessed the confidence of this House ' was carried in the House of
Representatives by the largest vote ever recorded on a Ministerial
question. Sir George Grey appealed to the country, but the con-
stituencies endorsed the decision of the House, and he was compelled
to relinquish the power he had used so ill. His successors found the
Treasury without a shilling in it, and deficiency bills for 200,000?.
were voted nem. con. for paying salaries and meeting other pressing
demands of administration. The payment in London of the interest
on the public debt and other engagements of the utmost importance
to the public credit had been left unprovided for, and the Govern-
ment had to telegraph to the Agent-General to raise a loan of five
millions on any terms whatsoever. The public expenditure was
reduced by an enormous sum, and a heavy property tax was imposed
in addition to an increase of 50 per cent, of the ad valorem customs
duties. The state of native affairs was such that a serious disturbance
was only averted by the most stringent measures on the part of the
native minister, Mr. Bryce, and by the most active efforts of the
Commissioners, Sir William Fox and Sir Dillon Bell. The Colony
was saved ; but from that day to this Sir George Grey has never
exercised any share of political influence.

At the next general election he only saved his own seat by fourteen
votes ; his nephew, whom Mr. Froude mentions, was defeated ; and

1886 NEW ZEALAND AND MR. FROUDE. 181

his party were annihilated. His personal popularity, as a patron of
literature and art, as the shadow of a great name, is undiminished ;
but in politics he stands alone, without a single follower. He is in
chronic opposition to every ministry, and usually moves two or three
motions of want of confidence every session, without being able to
get anybody to go into the lobby with him. Sometimes, as was the
case last session, he leaves the House himself, and lets his motion
go on the voices. He is the ame damnee of New Zealand politics.
Yet this is the man on whose sole, unsupported word Mr. Froude
deliberately formed his judgment of the public men and the public
life of this Colony ; and even on less responsible authority than his,
if it were possible, he calmly promulgated the astounding invention
that we intend to repudiate the public debt.

It was Sir George Grey again whose jaundiced and distorted
views on every topic of public interest he deliberately accepted as
the views of the great body of intelligent and unprejudiced people
throughout the Colony. He swallowed everything he was told hoht>s
bolus, and probably invented or imagined as much as he was told.

For instance, he makes the astounding statement that the colonial
debt is thirty-two millions and the municipal debts are * at least as
much more.' The municipal debts, including harbour loans, some
of which are at 25 per cent, premium, do not exceed four and a half
millions. But twenty or thirty millions more or less are neither
here nor there to Mr. Froude. Neither are such statements as that
representative institutions have failed in New Zealand, whereas there
is no country in the world where they work more smoothly ; or that
nobody can buy less than twenty acres of Crown land — this on the
authority of one of Sir George Grey's servants — whereas every facility
is afforded for buying the smallest areas, or acquiring them without
payment on terms of occupancy and improvement ; or, finally, that
New Zealand politicians are a set of needy, self-seeking adventurers,
whereas the Colony glories in such public men as Sir Frederick
Weld, Sir Edward Stafford, Sir Frederick Whitaker, Sir Dillon Bell,
Sir William Fox, Sir John Hall, Major Atkinson, Mr. Eolleston, Mr.
Bryce, and last but not least Mr. Stout, the present learned Premier,
who is as capable and high-minded a public man as any one of those
over whom Mr. Froude went into such raptures in Australia.

But it is futile to go on picking holes in a book which, like the
Irishman's coat, is more holes than stuff. Suffice it to say that a
perusal of Oceana gives us a totally new conception of how history
is written. If this is the sort of work Mr. Froude produces from the
utmost abundance of exact, recent, and throughly trustworthy in-
formation, from facts patent to his own knowledge, from persons in
contact with him, from events progressing under his own eyes, what
are we to think of those monumental productions of his which have
VOL. XX.— No. 114. 0

182 THE NINETEENTH CENTURA. Aug.

been compiled on dubious surmises and vague conclusions, drawn
from ancient and abstruse documents, or from second-hand sources,
corrupted or obscured by a thousand errors or misconstructions ? If
Oceana is his story of the Australasian Colonies in our own day,
beware of his books on old countries in old times.

EDWARD WAKEFIELD

(Member of the House of Representatives of New Zealand').

1886

183

WANTED— A LEADER.

SOME fifteen years ago I was an undergraduate at Oxford, member of
a college which was held to be full of intelligence, and which was
certainly full of zeal for political and social reforms. With two or
three of my best friends, who were no less keen than I, I used to
discuss the good time coming. I will not set down here the larger
visions which we loved. To us it seemed as if a fairer day was close
at hand ; even the bitter war in France might be no more than a
thunderstorm to clear the air ; and beyond the tramp of armies and
cries of battle we heard the promise of mutual help between nations,
of a brotherhood of European States. But I will not write of these
larger visions. Even then, though in our more sanguine moods we
saw the skies already rosy with the dawn, we confessed to each other
that a new Europe with a new international morality might be the
work of years. We felt exceedingly prudent ; we told each other (I
remember well our boyish solemnity) that we were in the midst of a
great peaceful revolution ; we looked (how pathetic seems our
innocence !) to the practical politicians of the day to lead us as fast
as might be on the desired path of reform.

Fifteen years have gone, and what has been accomplished ? I say
nothing of the Europe of our dreams, for which even we were pre-
pared to wait ; but there were little obvious reforms, which the next
session of Parliament was to see — and where are they ? They did
not excite us much ; we preferred the grander schemes, the larger
pictures ; we merely mentioned the little absurdities which were to
be put right ; we told each other that all intelligent persons had been
agreed about them for years, and that even the most obstructive
politicians would not fight seriously in their defence. It was as
absurd, for instance, that land should be hampered by the remnants
of a dead feudalism as that the worthy citizen who had bought an
estate in Hampshire should do homage therefor to his liege lord,
and come bumping up to court with a helmet on his good bald head,
and his stable retainers behind him on the jobbed carriage horses.
We did believe that the time had gone by when the poor landowner,
ironically so called, would be content to stand with hands in empty
pockets, gazing ruefully at the squalling tenant in tail male, and
telling himself that more than twenty years must yet go by before,

02

184 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

with the acquiescence of this mottled infant, after due examination
of his title for the last sixty years, and by means of an indenture
made mysteriously impressive by polysyllabic medisevalisms, he could
obtain some sorely needed money for a few superfluous acres. We
did believe the custom of entail was to be made at once and for ever
illegal, and that land duly registered would be bought and sold by
honest buyers and sellers (not vendors and purchasers any more)
as easily as cabbages, and without the intervention of at least two
lawyers.

This abolition of entail seemed to us a small matter, but one
from which much good might come. The impoverished landlord, we
said, is forced to extract the utmost possible rent from his tenant
farmers ; the farmers, that they may pay the rent, are forced to pay
the lowest possible wages to their labourers ; while neither landlord
nor tenant farmer has a penny to spare for the improvement of the
crumbling cottages in which the labourers live.

Entail, we said, will be abolished at once ; landlords, who cannot
afford to be generous about rent in bad years, and who cannot afford
(and this was our keenest interest) to build decent cottages for the
labourers on their estates, will sell to richer men, who wilt have
no excuse if the labourers are not decently housed, as their tenant
farmers, themselves generously treated when times are bad, will have
no excuse if the labourers are not fairly paid. We were not afraid
to say ' fairly paid ; ' we had freed ourselves in part, even at that
early age, from the terrors of the old-fashioned economists.

Moreover, we thought that, when the buying and selling of land
had become a plain matter, which any bucolic intelligence could
understand, and as cheap as it was plain, a labourer here and there
might become the owner of the patch before his cottage door. It
did not seem a great thing to give him a chance of working for him-
self, when his day's work was done ; but it brings hope into hopeless
lives, and that seemed to us no small thing. The patch might grow,
when the possession of land was no longer a mystery ; and we looked
forward to seeing the difficult question of the prosperity of peasant
proprietors answered for us by the slow natural accumulations of the
most thrifty of the wage-earning labourers.

i' There were other obvious reforms which seemed to us as good as
accomplished. Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, not yet a judge, was offering
to codify the English law, and we supposed that his offer would be
accepted. Even we allowed a few years for this great work of simpli-
fication, which would make law clearer and cheaper for all, and
enable us to deny at last that justice is the luxury of the rich. A
scheme, too, crept into an obscure corner of some paper for dealing
with the slums of cities, and a rumour came with it that it was
approved by Lord Salisbury, and some of us said that we would
become Tories on the instant, if we could see prompt and resolute

1886 WANTED— A LEADER. 185

dealing with these hideous evils. We thought that these evils had
only to be shown to the generous Briton and he would demand their
removal ; we thought that a Government, to whom such a demand
was made, would deal more strongly with this, which was the shame
of us all, than the trustees of Mr. Peabody could deal, or the agents
of Sir Sydney Waterlow. And there were other dreams, not the
great visions of a purer world in which our souls delighted, but
pleasant dreams which were so soon to be realities ; and among these
there was none so cool and pleasant as the vision of abundant water.
Clean and abundant water was to be poured into our filthy London ;
the annual cleaning of the family filter would be no longer necessary ;
sound and wholesome water-butts in poor men's yards would be filled
with pleasant refreshment, the true stream of life. And our well-
loved river, too, in which we swam, on which we rowed, the silver
Thames of Spenser — was it too much to hope that it might be made
pure again and cease to meet the salt tide of the sea degraded and
ashamed, a creeping sewer of all defilements ?

Fifteen years have gone, and what have we gained ? Something
has been done to make it easier for a tenant for life to sell the
family real estate ; but the transfer of land still remains a mysterious
business, involving solicitors' examinations, opinions of conveyancers,
general legal expenses. Some progress has been made, I believe,
in a new arrangement of statutes, but we hoped that by this time
the huge formless chaos of conflicting precedents, which is the
boasted law of England, would have been shaped anew into an
orderly and intelligible code. To-day, as fifteen years ago, behind
our highly respectable street there is a piece of ground which
belongs to a millionaire, and which is covered with rotting and
poisonous houses, while in the picturesque village where we go
sketching in the summer an open sewer runs gaily by the cottage
door to bear its tribute of dishonour to our polluted Thames. As
for the London water, the old system prevails ; but, if we are dis-
contented therewith, shall we not remember that it has done a much
greater thing than get itself reformed ? It has turned out a Govern-
ment. What is the health and cleanliness of our city in comparison
with a party victory ?

After all, then, are we not forgetting the chief good which poli-
ticians have afforded us in these fifteen years ? Each year of the
fifteen we have been spectators, as it were, of an exciting contest.
Each year the champions of the two great political parties have
appeared at Westminster and engaged in a series of contests, thrill-
ing as the combats in * Ivanhoe ' or the fight between Sayers and
Heenan. Indeed, since the decay of prize-fighting there has been
no show which has had such permanent power of attraction. Fights
of Sayers, they may indeed be called by the unduly frivolous ; and
we are never tired of comparing these rhetorical champions, slily

186 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

noting their tactical dodges and applauding to the echo their
stupendous exhibitions of staying power. The veteran, who has
spoken for three hours without drawing breath, has moved our
admiration as it was moved by the first pedestrian who walked a
thousand miles in a thousand hours ; and the rising young man of
the political arena, who has neatly cleared an argumentative impedi-
ment, has gained as great applause as if he had jumped six feet high
in the University sports. Each London season has brought some
lighter novelties to please us for a day ; but each recurring season
has brought back to us the old parliamentary game, of which we are
never tired. For the players it is as absorbing as cricket ; and the
accounts of its best nights are almost as interesting to the reader as
the detailed reports of an Anglo-Australian match at Lord's. ' If I
were not a Grace,' some lover of Dickens might say, ' I would be a
Gladstone ; if I were not a Spofforth, I would be a Churchill.' We
love to watch the struggles of oratorical gladiators, to see the old
parliamentary retiarius curl the net, and to mark the neat evasions
of the light lordly secutor. Perhaps it is unreasonable of us not to
be content though the result of the tremendous battles be but
small. Perhaps we should acknowledge that the game is an end in
itself, and that this is the chief good which we have a right to
expect from the existence of the Liberal and Conservative parties.

Indeed such small matters as cleansing of slums or arranging of
laws are not the subjects suitable for the big debates in which we all
take interest. Egypt, Afghanistan, Ireland, these are the matter
for abundant oratory. These furnish the war-cries, with which party
warrior tilts against party warrior under the eyes of the imprisoned
fair and the quick pencils of the reporting troubadours. Fragments
of ancient Hansards hurtle in the air, recriminations, misrepresenta-
tions, howls and groans. What did the right honourable gentleman
say in 1860? And if it comes to that, what did the member for
Tooting himself say in 1870? With the permission of the House I
will now quote the words which were spoken by the Prime Minister
no later than Tuesday last. And I in reply will quote the ipsissima
verba of the noble Lord at last week's majestic celebration on
Primrose Hill. It was your fault. No ; it was you who began it. So
the combat roars in our ears ; the gentle passage of arms lasts some
fourteen nights or so ; great are the deeds of heroes ; and who are we
that we should dare complain of muddled law and mouldy water-butt ?
There is, then, much to be said from a sporting point of view for
the existence of the grand old parties ; and yet to some of us, who
were full of zeal some fifteen years ago, it seems a pity that so little
effect has come from these exciting contests, little effect on our lives
and on those of our poorer friends and neighbours. Effects of a kind
there have been indeed — the bullying and coaxing of the Afghan, the
coaxing and the bullying of the Boer ; the bombardment of Alexandria,

1886 WANTED— A LEADER. 187

the defeat of Egyptian reformers, the annual shooting-parties from.
Suakiin, the death of Gordon, and the Stewarts, and Earle, the death
of thousands of brave men of every complexion which the sun has seen.
Negroes, Zulus, Afghans, Arabs, Dutch Boers, and English soldiers
have been sacrificed to the demands of party wire-pullers or the
reputation of right honourable gentlemen. * For Brutus is an
honourable man. So are they all right honourable men.'

Grim effects have followed debates in Parliament; bloody fights
have parodied the glib combats of Westminster. But we are not
content with such effects as these — nor even, so hard to please are
we, with the state of Ireland, after all the cooling and heating experi-
ments which have been made on that unhappy country. Our old
zeal, our old hopefulness has gone ; we have been driven to a cheerless
cynicism. Nor do we hold it a sufficient explanation of our unhappy
state that, as Mr. Herbert Gladstone has suggested, we have been
cultivated to too high a pitch. On the contrary, it is as plain men, who
looked for some plain result from the incessant speaking of politicians,
that we are discontented. And who are you, it may be asked, and
what does it matter if you are discontented ? Well, I, who write,
am moved to write because I believe myself to be one of many men
who have taken from boyhood a keen interest in politics, and who
to-day find it hard to take any part with any zeal in any political
struggle.

Whither shall we go, and where is faith possible ?

Shall we join the Conservative party ? Shall we find among them
the plain dealers and plain speakers, devisers of simple remedies for
obvious evils ? The Conservative party is not reactionary ; it is not
even stagnant. Its late leader extended the franchise ; its present
chief helped in the making of the last Kedistribution Bill. Lord
Salisbury has shown interest in the dwellings of the poor; Lord
Beaconsfield suggested the cry of sanitary reform — ' Sanitas, omnia
sanitas,' said Lord Beaconsfield, feeling in himself for a moment the
union of the Hebrew and the Greek : vyialvsiv pJsv fjisyio-rov. The
health of the people, if it were no more, were at least a thrilling party
cry. How much might be done by a straightforward Conservative leader,
with a single eye to the health of the people, and not afraid of the
necessary interference with the rights of property, where these rights
have been proved the causes of filth and of disease ! But here is the
reason why we do not find rest for our perturbed spirits in the bosom
of the Conservative party. We hold it to be still a party of reformers
in spite of themselves. And we hold it to be still to too great an
extent a party of landlords. Its able and experienced leader is never
so incisive and effective as when he is pointing out the difficulties
of some much-needed change. He is a pessimist, and full of scorn.
We seem to hear him say to his followers, ' Let us throw them this,
which is as little as possible, lest more should be wrung from us.'

188 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

And again, * Eeforms in England mean something to be got from the
landlord.'

And yet is it not clear — would it not be clear to a young Disraeli
of to-day — that a policy of simple and sensible reforms, founded on a
study of history, growing naturally and adapting itself to the chang-
ing state of things, with no rude severance of historical continuity,
should be the policy of the modern Conservative party ? To love of
this they should educate the new bucolic voter, and contrast it in his
honest eyes with brand-new experiments, of which no man can pre-
dict the effect. The cautious Briton as a rule would rather see his
ancient homestead adapted to his new wants than a new edifice run
up by an architect full of fads ; but, on the other hand, he prefers
plain remedies for plain evils to enactments full of exceptions and
sub-clauses and made mysterious by all the subtleties of all the
lawyers. The Conservative party is full of ability and full of merit.
Its foreign policy at least has been less spasmodic, less playful, less
bloody than that of its rival ; but we do not think that it will do
our business for us so long as it can find anything else for our
amusement. Big bow-wow debates, however they end, are not un-
satisfactory to the most Conservative members of the Conservative
party. Most of us have * panem ' of some sort ; and the big bow-
wow debates are our * Circenses.'

If it were well that Conservative leaders should look less grudg-
ingly on moderate reforms, were it not well too that they should
begin to guard themselves most carefully from looking at proposed
changes with landlords' eyes alone ? It has been said a thousand
times that Conservatism is not confined to a class, but is to be found
in all classes ; and yet we feel that, when a practical matter is under
consideration, the interest of the Conservative working-man, who
pays a ruinous rent for an inadequate lodging, is of small weight in
comparison with the fear of interference with the Conservative peer,
who owns the court in which that lodging is situated. But land-
lords should have learned a lesson by this time. The doctrine
that property in land differs from other property was discussed
fifteen years ago (in the days of our enthusiasm) by economists in
libraries : to-day by Mr. George and others it has been brought into
the market-place. Plain folk, who have a wholesome respect for
property, begin to say to each other that land has always been
treated, and always must be treated, as different from other kinds of
property, and that they may advocate State-interference with land-
lords and yet not incur the charge, so fearful to the average Briton,
of Socialism.

It is time for the Conservative party, as guardian of the interests
of the landlords, to make the transfer of land easy and cheap, lest
more be required of them. It is time for the landowner who cannot
do justice to his land to sell, lest some fine day he be deprived of it

1886 WANTED— A LEADER. 189

with inadequate compensation. Are not the sands running in the
glass for him also ? Is Ireland so very far away ? Already our
eternal Ucalegon is in flames, and the breeze sets this way across the
narrow sea.

The landlords of England have done great work for England in
the past, and to-day too they are, most of them, honest and able and
as generous as their means will allow them to be. But it is time
that they, who ought to understand the matter best, become land-
reformers, lest men more ignorant and more violent than they take
the task from their hands, and reform be lost in revolution. Let
them free the land and encourage the growth of a free peasantry.
There will still be room for parks and pleasure-grounds and covert for
the pheasant and the fox.

If in these fifteen years the Conservative party has given us no
great cause for hope, what shall we say of the Liberal party, in whom
we trusted ?

It gave us the ballot, but that is no matter for cheering. Secret
voting at the best is no more than a necessary evil. It gave us
board schools, and, in spite of the occasional overworking of the
underfed, we are grateful for the spread of education. It is well
that those who vote should be able to read, though we may well hope
that their reading will not be confined to party speeches. Reading
is only a means to an end ; and small wisdom will the rustics gain by
reading, as they now hear, the denunciations of the ins by the outs,
and the denunciations of the outs by the ins. Of the experiments of
the Liberal party in foreign parts no more need be said. And
Ireland ? It is with Ireland that the great Liberal party has been
mainly occupied ; and after years of judicious mixtures, after floods
of rhetoric, now for coercion, now for conciliation, after three big
measures, three messages of peace sent with appropriate perorations
on the goodwill which was to follow, the great Liberal policy has
come at last to this : We can't govern Ireland. Let us see if she
can govern herself. If she make a mess of it, as is only too likely,
we can walk in and smash her.

All that we can hope of the old Liberal party, in which we placed
the innocent trust of youth, is that it is dead. It was a fraud.
Economist before all, it has taxed us like a wringing-machine.
Loud-voiced friend of the working-man, it has thrust down his
hungry throat fragments of that old political economy which to suit
a party need was sent packing with a shout and a scoff to the
problematical population of Saturn. Dove-eyed prophet of peace,
it has been fighting like a wild cat in every corner of the world.
With mouth full of the finest morality and the purest motives, it has
given high office because coal or iron was low, and has been not a
whit behind the most cynical of Tories in appropriating secret
service money to assist the election of its candidates. Nay, though

190 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

guns burst and inventors clamoured for inquiry, it has not even
reformed the Ordnance Department.

The Liberal party has answered us with many voices. We
wanted one thing done : the official Liberal has regretted that it
was contrary to the traditions of the party. We wanted another
thing, and the Laissez-faire Liberal has pointed out that the duty
of Government was confined to protecting a man from his neighbours.
We asked yet a third boon ; and we were crushed by the Economical
Liberal, who referred us to a manual of that Political Economy
which had returned for our confusion from its short absence in
another planet.

The Liberal party for years past has included all sorts of men,
from the most truly conservative of all active politicians to the most
vehemently radical. There were the born Liberals, who were liberal
because their great-grandfathers were not worth buying ; and the
historical Liberals, who had read Macaulay. There were the jealous
guardians of Liberty, who had absorbed the simple doctrine of Mill's
Essay ; and the passionate suppliants for constant promotion of
popular well-being by the State. There were many faces and conflict-
ing voices, many policies inconsistent as their authors ; till the union,
already reduced to an umbrella, has been rent asunder to the satis-
faction of mankind. Whom are we to follow ? For whom are we
to vote? The attitude of cynical abstention from politics is not
pleasing to us. We are eager for a leader whom we can trust. Is
he in Downing Street, or at Devonshire House, or in any division
of Birmingham ? Or will he appear a new man from a new quarter ?
At least we feel the pleasure of a revival of hope,

Let our leader, whencesoever he come, be a plain man ! Let his
look on life be simple and true ; let his words be simple and clear ! We
are sick to death of ingenious ambiguities and the explanations of
explanations. Let the good of his countrymen be dearer to his
heart than even the triumphs of his party or the salary of his office.
Let him give the best powers of his mind to study of the real wants
of all classes of the people, and reserve for his lighter hours the
examination of the party machine.

Let him be more eager to teach the people than to flatter them,
to show them the objects most worthy of their pursuit than to
make his competitors for office hideous and ludicrous in their eyes.

Is such a man impossible in political life ? He is visible enough
here and there in other professions ; and if he is impossible among
successful politicians, then politics, as certain cynics have said, are
at best a dirty business.

But we hope that such a leader is not only possible but existent
somewhere for our good — how widely different from that Minister so
firmly drawn by Mr. John Morley in his preministerial days, ' a
Minister who waits to make up his mind whether a given measure is

1886 WANTED— A LEADER. 191

in itself and on the merits desirable, until the official who runs
diligently up and down the backstairs of the party tells him that
the measure is practicable and required in the interests of the band ! '

Surely there must be many people in England who would prefer
our leader, if they could find him, to this typical minister of Mr.
John Morley ; and surely an honest and able Briton with a sound
political faith, whose actions are reasonably consistent and whose
words are easily understood — surely this good plain man is not so
hard to find.

Of such a leader we shall know where he was yesterday, where he
is to-day, and where he will be to-morrow. We shall no longer sit
trembling with our eyes on the weathercock, or crouching at the
mouth of ^Eolus' cave wondering which wind will next be loosed
upon us. Our leader, happily free from the impulsive enthusiasm
of age, will move on the way which he has pointed out to the
completion of much-needed reforms — to the freeing of the land, the
cleansing of the slums, the helping of the labouring poor.

Our leader will be sure of himself, and will not have forgotten
his self of the week before last. He will know what he wants and
what the people want. He will have freed his mind from cant of
all kinds ; he will not quote to-day the old political economy, and
to-morrow whistle it down the wind ; he will not busy himself to-day
with social reforms, and to-morrow denounce his opponents for the
crime of Socialism. To him we may hope that it will be clear that
the laws of the old political economy are not rules of conduct, and
that you cannot break them as you may break the ten command-
ments. The laws of political economy are statements of cause and
effect like the laws of Nature. They are not true of human nature,
but only of a single motive. They are the laws of the desire to be
rich — a very strong motive, but happily no more the only motive of
man than the stomach is his only organ. Among the complicated
motives of humanity there is one which in the average Briton at
least is not much weaker than self-interest itself — the love of fair
play.

Let our leader appeal to the love of fair play which is found in
every class of Englishmen. Let him show that it is neither a moral
duty nor a physical necessity to pay the lowest possible wages, nor
to extract the greatest possible rent ; and let him ask if it is fair
that an honest, hard-working man should have no chance of anything
between the cradle and the grave but life in a pigsty and death in
the workhouse. The fair-minded well-to-do Briton will answer that
he would like to help his poor neighbour to a chance, even if it cost
him a trifle. So of the foul courts of our cities it is fair to deal
strongly with them, and fair, too, to compensate ground landlords
for your strong dealing with their property. Love of fair play will
uphold our leader in dealing with such evils as are a disgrace to the

192 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

country, and he will smile superior to the accusation of Socialism.
It is a government of Socialists which carries our letters for us and
which limits the work of infants in our factories. It is not to be con-
founded with Communism, which preaches an impossible community
of goods, and in pursuit of phantoms has realised battle and murder,
the blood of women and children, and the grossest tyranny which the
modern world has seen. We abhor revolution ; we want a few obvious
reforms. If the State can do the work best, in Heaven's name let the
State do it. Here, surely, is the proper limit of State-interference.

But, it will be said, nobody cares for your little reforms now, for
politicians are exclusively concerned with Ireland. The elections
will turn on Ireland. Poor Ireland, food for elections, subject of big
bow-wow debates, lever for the turning out of parties — that has been
her fate, for how many years ? And now, once again, she has been
made the victim of Mr. John Morley's backstairs official, who
announced this time that a Home Kule Bill was ' practicable, and
required in the interests of the band.' Ireland more than England
or Scotland, perhaps more than any place in the world, needs such a
leader as we have asked for — a man of a consistent and intelligible
policy, who may be trusted to stand and fall with his policy, and
who will try to act fairly to Catholic and Protestant alike.

It may be that when these two last fantastic measures for the
glory and comfort of Ireland are finally dead — dead, beyond all re-
modelling and reconstruction, dead, with all their lines, their main
lines and their main outlines — it may be that then the question of
Irish management of Irish business will be merged in the wider
question of local government for England, Scotland, and Ireland. It
certainly seems that the Imperial Parliament, even if a stop could be
put to organised obstruction — even if a limit could be put to super-
fluous oratory — would still be unable to get through all its work.
After all it is no small Empire which demands the attention of the
Imperial Parliament ; and it might well be relieved from the con-
sideration of the precise hour at which the thirsty traveller in Eutland
may procure beer on a Sunday. But let us not suppose that any
change of machinery will give us wise and good government. In
small council-chambers, as in great, it is the quality of the men that
is important. Though the scheme of local governments be the most
symmetrical in the world, of what worth will it be if in every local
government the interest of the public be still of no importance in
comparison with a party victory — if the men who lead have still no
time to study the wants of the people, so busy are they with the
calculations of the strength of sections and the duty of cutting their
policy to fit the last report of Mr. John Morley's backstairs official ?

1 The education of chiefs by followers,' wrote Mr. Morley, ' and of
followers by chiefs, into the abandonment in a month of the traditions
of centuries, or the principles of a lifetime, may conduce to the rapid

1886

WANTED— A LEADER.

193

and easy working of the machine. It certainly marks a triumph
of the political spirit which the author of The Prince might have
admired. It is assuredly mortal to habits of intellectual self-respect
in the society which allows itself to be amused by the cajolery and
legerdemain and self-sophistication of its rulers.'

We, at least, are amused no more. We hail with renewed hope
the spectacle of a hundred Liberal members refusing to be educated
by their followers. We have had enough of legerdemain, enough of
self-sophistication. Give us, we pray, a plain man to lead us, with a
plain policy and a plain speech. So shall we be saved — and thou-
sands of Mr. Herbert Gladstone's over-cultivated persons will be
saved with us — from sitting with the shade of Machiavelli, and
admiring with a cynical sneer the ingenious dodges of party poli-
ticians.

JULIAN STURCHS.

194 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

IN AN INDIAN JUNGLE:
A LEAF FROM MY DIAR Y.

WE were at Hyderabad. It was the night of January 27, 1883 ; the
most remarkable day of my journey in India was approaching, but
my sleep was disturbed by disagreeable dreams and nasty mosquitos,
the latter penetrating the delusive net.

As early as half-past four o'clock in the morning, however, we
are seated in our carriages, on the road to the residence of Salar
Yung, the Premier, who had preceded us, evidently to perform the
ride more at ease than it would have been possible in our company,
he being far from a ' light weight.' It is still night, but a bright,
cheerful moon is lighting our way to the rendezvous of the sports-
men. As soon as we are divided into the light carriages in waiting
the start is made. The streets are silent and deserted, only through
some half-opened balcony door a faint flickering light struggles into
the street, the reflection of some nocturnal orgie within, whence the
notes of a guitar or banjo, acompanied by the light tread of the
nautch-girls, issue in the dead silence of night. Shortly the violent
bumpings of the carriages indicate that we have quitted the precincts
of the town ; and as we proceed the road becomes worse and worse,
great boulders and deep holes threatening every moment to upset the
vehicles or cause the slender springs to snap.

The scenery, however, is here, as everywhere around the city,
very striking, the undulating ground being strewn with huge blocks
of stone, as if they had been tossed hither and thither by nature in
some capricious mood. Some of the blocks are piled upon each other
in such a manner as to cause a lively imagination to fancy them
giants and trolls barring the way. According to Indian folk-lore, these
blocks were brought hither, some 4,000 years ago, in this manner.
The monkeys, which in the earliest of times in great numbers
inhabited the lands beyond the Himalayas, seized on the remarkable
idea of building a bridge between the mainland and Ceylon, and,
headed by their leaders, they left their settlements in great numbers
for the south, carrying with them from their mountains materials for
their gigantic bridge. But the road became too long for them, and
they were obliged, on reaching the spot where Hyderabad now stands,

1886 IN AN INDIAN JUNGLE. 195

to throw their loads away, and here they lie to-day. Such is the
Hindoo tradition.

However that may be, these gigantic blocks, illuminated by the
pale moon, were weirdly effective, and imparted to the landscape a
grand and striking appearance.

As the moon becomes paler and paler the scenery around becomes
more and more awe-inspiring. But in a few moments its light dies
away as a gorgeous purple in the eastern sky heralds the coming of
another morn. Suddenly a crimson tint spreads over the land — a
light which involuntarily recalls to my mind the Valpurgis night in
Faust. It is a rapid transformation scene I witness. A little lake
on my left looks as if on fire, and every moment one expects to see
Mephistopheles' spirits of the deep ascend, to tread their weird whirl-
dance on the rocky shore.

The nocturnal scene was grand in the extreme, and in harmonious
accord with the opening of a tiger-hunt in an Indian jungle.

Dawn, as well as twilight, in India, are as short as they are
brilliant, so that when we reached the spot where we were to mount
our horses it was already broad daylight. In a few moments Ali
Beg has distributed a number of fiery Arab steeds among us, and
the cavalcade is in motion. We proceed at a gallop, headed by the
stately Ali Beg, who reminds us that the day is short, and time is
precious to a tiger-hunter. We soon overtook Salar Yung and his
Hindoo retinue, the great Minister's horse evidently feeling the
weight of its precious burden in no small degree.

At a gallop we penetrate further and further into the desolate
jungle, until the road is but a stony path distinguished by white-
painted slabs. He who does not follow must take care of himself,
with the far from pleasant prospect before him of losing his way in
the wilderness, a prospect which causes us not to lose sight of Ali
Beg and his guides, though the ride seemed to afford those unac-
customed little pleasure. However, to most of us it was delicious
to gallop in the fresh morning air, and not least to me. There was
no question of halt or trot ; at a gallop one mile was covered after
the other. What a delicious sensation to gallop thus across limit-
less tracts on horses unable to make a false step, and whose spirited
bounds bespoke inexhaustible strength !

After a ten-mile ride there was a change of horses, but some of
us, among whom myself, had to use the same until the next station.
When this was reached my horse had covered twenty English miles
in less than one hour and three-quarters. I had never had an idea
of horses possessing such stamina. Indeed when I now think of
this ride it seems almost incredible to me. Fancy what services a
regiment of cavalry mounted on such horses could render a general
at the present day !

During the five minutes' halt here, whilst fresh horses were

196 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

saddled, we inspected a camp of nomad natives close by. These
people have no fixed residences, but lead, like our Lapps, a roaming
life, supported by the great herds of cattle accompanying them.

During the ten miles remaining the road became so bad that we
had to slacken our headlong speed, though on descending the rocky
bridle-path leading down to our camp the horses proved to be as
clever climbers as they previously had been racers.

From this height we have an opportunity of admiring the grand
solitude of an Indian jungle : on all sides, as far as the eye can
reach, but an immense ocean of thickets and long grass. There is
something remarkably imposing in the sight : magnificent in all its
.sombre desolateness.

In the meantime some of our party, among whom was my brother
Oscar, being somewhat behind, had lost their way on our left,
our shouts failing to meet with any response ; but on approaching
the camp they reappeared, and Oscar, who had lost his way, said
that he had seen the trail of a tiger, which was confirmed by a
4 shikarie ' who came up and brought us the welcome tidings of a

* tiger-kill ' the very same night only a mile and a half from the
camp.1 At a quick gallop we rode up to the splendid white tents
visible between the tall shrubs.

No time was to be lost ; in an hour we were to be ready to mount
the elephants — such was the order. The unusual opportunity of
catching the tiger so to speak ' in bed,' after its nocturnal marauding
expedition, should not be lost for one moment ; and already at 10.30
a troop of twelve elephants left the camp, in whose ' howdas ' we
were seated thus : First came Salar Yung, followed by Captain
Sundstrom and Oscar, on a very great elephant; then Count
Adelborg and myself on one nearly as big ; behind which came
Lieutenant Ribbing with Colonel Dobbs ; and, last, Dr. Holmer, ac-
companied by a Hindoo, terrible to behold, whose function was ' to
bring us luck,' as we were told that when he was present no sports-
man ever missed fire.

In silence and solemnity the procession moved towards the jungle,
in order not to awake the sleeping tiger. In spite of it being the

* cold season,' I suffered tremendously from the heat under my broad-
brimmed Indian hat. But who could have time to complain of the
heat then, though one could hardly breathe and was bathed in
perspiration ?

After a while a flock of soaring vultures indicates that we are
approaching the spot where the tiger consumed its nocturnal meal,
and behind a ridge, strewn with blocks of stone, and which seemed
only 500 yards off, the slain bullock had been tied up. The native

1 Perhaps I ought to explain that by a 'tiger-kill ' is meant the slaying by a tiger
of some animal tied up in the jungle to attract its attention preparatory to a hunting
party being arranged.

1886 IF AN INDIAN JUNGLE. 197

huntsmen maintained that the tiger must be near, as the birds
continued to soar restlessly over the spot, without daring to descend
to their prey, in all probability from fear of the tiger slumbering close
by. Shortly after, we have reached the northern slope of the ridge
referred to, where the elephants are ranged in a semicircle, at a
distance of some 250 yards from the top, the position for each
elephant being indicated to the f mahout ' by an old grey-haired
shikarie, who evidently is quite at home in the jungle. Adelborg
and myself are stationed on a little mound in the jungle, whence we
have a fairly good view all around. Low shrubs, in some places
forming to the eye impenetrable thickets, surround the spot in
which our elephant stands hidden behind a couple of great blocks of
stone, and a similar jungle covers the slope in the direction whence
we expect the beaters. A ravine runs on our right, along the bottom
of which we are told the tiger should come. On the other side of
the ravine Oscar and Sundstrom are posted ; next to them, an
elephant with some of the suite of the Minister ; then Salar Yung
himself with Ali Beg ; whilst farthest on the left wing Holmer is
stationed, and to our left Ribbing and the Colonel.

After a while's anxious waiting, yells and loud sounds of drums
and cymbals are heard in the distance, and in a few moments one
dusky figure after another appears on the brow of the hill. We now
rise in the howda and, cocking our express rifles, scan every shrub in
front of us. It is becoming exciting. But still no tiger is visible,
and the beaters begin to separate and break the line. Adelborg and
myself have just agreed that there is no tiger within the line, when
suddenly the report of a gun is heard from Salar Yung's elephant,
indicating there is something up. It is Ali Beg who has shot at
a tiger, which is attempting to break through at the side of his
elephant. This is immediately followed by a shot from the elephant
carrying the attendants of the Minister, and in the next few seconds
the retreating tiger is subjected to a veritable peppering from that
quarter. We double our attention, but fail to see anything except
the smoke of the guns. The beaters again collect, but a number of
frightened coolies run terrified in all directions, and even the ele-
phants show signs of fright, stamping and swinging their trunks to
and fro. What an animated scene indeed ! And the moments of
the greatest excitement, whilst prepared to encounter the attack of
the wounded tiger every second, will hardly ever fade from my
recollection.

In the meantime, however, Ali Beg seems to call us by waving
his hat, and we beckoned to our mahout to urge the elephant for-
ward, delighted at the thought that there might still be something
for us to do ; and in a few moments we are alongside Ali Beg, who
instantly jumps from his own elephant into our howda. The usually
calm and dignified man trembled in every limb with excitement. He

VOL. XX.— No. 114. P

198 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

informs us in a brief sentence that the tiger is wounded, and orders
a pursuit. But having advanced a few steps our elephant absolutely
refused to go further, when Ali Beg pointed to a thicket right in
front of us, urging me to fire ; but in spite of the greatest efforts
I could not discover the tiger, which the experienced eye of the
native had detected at once. Adelborg saw the animal sneak away
just as the elephant suddenly turned round and retreated. However,
a few well-directed prods with the pike of the mahout soon brought
the terrified animal round again, and now I detected the black-barred
tawny skin of a tiger, lying under a low bush close by, ready to
spring. I pulled the trigger just as the animal was on the point of
springing, at all events so it seemed to me. It was followed by a
shot from Adelborg's gun, and supplemented by one from my left barrel,
both of which hit the animal. In the meantime the other elephants
had advanced concentrically towards the spot where the tiger was
supposed to lie hidden, and in a moment shot followed upon shot
from all sides. The tiger attempted once more to rise, but fell
immediately backwards. The King of the Jungle lay dead at our
feet!

When we shortly afterwards gathered round the fallen monarch,
everybody had fired, and everybody tried, with more or less success, to
trace his deadly bullet. Our booty was a fine male tiger, measuring
nine and a half feet in length.

Shortly afterwards we were told that a female tiger with two cubs
had succeeded in breaking through the line, in a south-westerly direc-
tion, and although the chances seemedj'against us, it was decided to
attempt a drive a little distance from where we were, around a cave,
whither it was assumed that they had escaped. But the attempt
proving fruitless, we returned to our camp. Thus ended my first tiger
hunt. I had not indeed succeeded in beholding the King of the
Jungle move freely, and in full view, but the excitement of expecting
every moment an attack from the infuriated animal was in itself a
keen delight to a sportsman.

We were splendidly accommodated in the magnificent tents. On
one side we Swedes were quartered, opposite our Hindoo friends, and
midway between us stood the enormous assembly and dining tents.
Although we were nearly forty miles^from any human habitation, in
fact, in a wilderness, we enjoyed every luxury as, for instance, beds with
mosquito nets, carpets, dressing tables, chairs, baths, and every other
requisite in abundance. Oscar and myself inhabited a tent which
would have furnished ample accommodation for a regiment of soldiers.
At least a thousand men must have been engaged in transporting
our camp to this spot, partly on their backs and partly on carts, the
long way through the jungle, a striking illustration of how little these
Oriental magnates value labour and money when bent upon grati-
fying a cherished pursuit.

1886 IN AN INDIAN JUNGLE. 199

A little after our return to the camp the air was rent with deafen-
ing cries — wild shouts of joy mingled with||the sound of drums
and cymbals. And in a few minutes the slain tiger is seen approach-
ing, stretched on the back of an elephant and surrounded by all the
shikarie swinging a trophy over its head. Our royal victim enjoyed
all the honours of a triumphal entry into the camp.

Dinner was, as may be imagined, consumed in the best of spirits,
and the champagne bottle circulated freely among us Europeans,
but the law of the Prophet inhibited our Hindoo friends from par-
taking of the forbidden juice, especially before infidels. I have,
however, a strong suspicion that our hospitable entertainers made
up for their abstention after dinner, and enjoyed the fluid, in privacy,
like good Christians.

During the night some thirty bullocks were exposed as ' kills,'
and when we awoke the next morning the returning shikarie re-
ported that three of them had been killed by panthers. Of these,
however, it was only possible to pursue one, as the trail of the rest
led to unapproachable mountain fastnesses. It was, therefore,
decided to attempt driving this panther out of the narrow ravine in
which it was supposed to lie hidden.

Shortly afterwards we are again seated on our elephants, in the
order of the previous day, and as the hiding-place of the animal is
only a little distance from the camp, the attack may be made at
once. We had, however, been seated a long while before discovering
anything unusual. But suddenly the long black line of beaters
comes to a halt, breaks, and sways backwards, the shouts of the men
being redoubled. As quick as lightning Ali Beg throws himself on
his horse and gallops to the spot, and we soon learn that the en-
raged panther had attacked the beaters several times, who, therefore,
refused to move forward. One man, we were told, had been killed,
but whether this was really so we never could ascertain.

However, the elephants are quickly moved forward, and we are
soon collected on both sides of the ravine in which the beast lies
hidden. As the ravine was only thirty yards wide and about five
yards deep we were close upon the panther, though we could not see
it. Now the question arose, what were we to do next ? The beaters
were too frightened to be of any further use, and the animal showed
no sign of willingly leaving its hiding-place. Salar Yung as well as
Colonel Dobbs urged us most earnestly not to move the elephant
into the thicket, as the panther would without doubt attack the first
who dared to approach it. As the panther is more active it is more
dangerous than the tiger, and when enraged it takes the offensive,
sometimes jumping at one bound into the howda, whereas the tiger
cannot reach higher than the elephant's neck or shoulder. Under
such circumstances, however, the game is equal, the result depending
upon the coolness of the sportsman and his practice in handling his

r 2

200 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

gun. But if the elephant, which is often the case, rushes to either
side, in order to escape the attack, the sportsman is almost lost.
The elephant is then of no use, and if there be a tree in its path,
the rider will be swept off its back, and perhaps trampled to death
by the terrified animal mistaking him for the pursuing panther.
Then there is no longer any sport, for one has no more the least
control over one's fate.

This was the reason why we naturally listened to the advice of
our experienced friends, and waited outside whilst Ali Beg cautiously
approaches the hiding-place of our terrible foe. It is a moment of
breathless suspense. Every second we expect that the panther will
rush out and attack us, when suddenly the report of a gun is heard,
and Ali Beg's unerring bullet has disabled the panther at the very
moment it is about springing upon him. Oscar and I gave the
tenacious beast its coup de grace.

The next day there was no hunt, as the ground round the
* panther kill ' reported in the morning was too unfavourable to permit
of any hunting. We, therefore, had some target practice in the
morning, and it was arranged that later on we should have some
beats through the jungle for the shooting of * small game,' such as
jungle-sheep, peacocks, partridges, hares, &c. But this was not to
be, as we soon got something else to think of; for about two o'clock
a shout arose that the cholera had broken out in the camp ! A man
had just died, and lay under a tree close to the tents. It was de-
cided at once to break up the camp and return to Hyderabad without
delay. Quite a panic reigned within it, and when I shortly after-
wards looked out of my tent I beheld Salar Yung with his retinue
depart in hot haste.

Three-quarters of an hour later we too were in the saddle, gal-
loping in the direction of the city, with a little more calmness
than our Hindoo host, but nevertheless fast enough to cover, under
a scorching sun and suffocating dust, the thirty miles of jungle in
three hours, when we reached the spot where the carriages were
awaiting us.

At eight o'clock we were again seated at the hospitable dinner-
table of the English Eesident at Hyderabad.

CARL.

1886 201

ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS.

AN English minister at a foreign court once remarked to a young
English physician who had been introduced to him : * There are two
things you English doctors do not understand : you do not under-
stand waters, and you do not understand wines ! ' This reproach
was perhaps not altogether unmerited. The habit of resorting to
mineral springs for the relief of chronic ailments is certainly not so
widely diffused in this country as it is in Germany and France ;
while the ability to judge of wines presumes a familiarity with the
different varieties, and in these days of temperance, and total absti-
nence, such a familiarity is not likely to be widely spread, nor need
we wish that it should be.

But the study and understanding of mineral waters have made
considerable progress of late years amongst English physicians, and
a visit to one or more of the principal foreign spas often forms
an indispensable part of their summer holiday ; while the diffusion
of what may be called * bath literature ' has attained proportions
which are truly embarrassing. A feeling has, however, arisen of late
years, and has been freely expressed, that in recommending English
invalids to resort to one or other of the various Continental spas,
English physicians have been unduly and unjustly neglecting the
precious resources in the way of ' healing springs ' which their own
country affords.

It may, therefore, be both interesting and useful, especially at
this season of the year, to make a brief inquiry into the respective
merits of English and foreign spas, and to compare and examine
their claims to be regarded as efficient remedial agents.

In the first place, I would desire it to be understood that I by
no means admit the justice of the accusation, that we have greatly
neglected or unjustly despised our own resources. These are, it
must be honestly admitted, extremely limited compared with those of
such countries as Germany and France. The universal presence on
our dinner tables of such waters as St. Galmier, Giesshubler, and
Apollinaris is a sufficient acknowledgment of our own poverty in
mineral springs. No amount of patriotic advocacy can alter the fact,
that we have no sparkling gaseous chalybeate springs like those of
Schwalbach, Spa, and St. Moritz ; no hot sulphur springs like those

202 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

of Aix, Luchon, or Eaux Bonnes ; no acidulated alkaline springs like
those of Vichy or Vals ; no gaseous salt waters like those of Homburg
and Kissingen; no hot alkaline aperient springs like those of
Carlsbad ; and even the common, non-gaseous, aperient, so-called
' bitter ' waters we are obliged to import from abroad, as is witnessed
by the large consumption in this country of Friedrichshall, Hunyadi,
Pullna, and JEsculap waters.

Of natural hot springs which abound in certain parts of Europe
we have but two, Bath and Buxton, and the springs at the latter
place have a temperature of only 82° F.

All the springs at Harrogate, which are probably the most im-
portant in this country, are cold. If to these three — Bath, Buxton,
and Harrogate, the only considerable spas we possess — we add
Droitwich, Woodhall Spa, Cheltenham, Leamington, Tunbridge Wells,
Llandrindod, Matlock, Moffat, Strathpeffer, and Dinsdale, we have
very nearly exhausted our available spas.

In some of these the supply of water is so insignificant in quantity
as to render a large bathing establishment impossible ; while in others,
as in Tunbridge Wells for example, the quality of the water is so
decidedly inferior to that of analogous foreign springs as to render
it practically useless. At Harrogate one of the milder chalybeate
springs is artificially impregnated with carbonic acid gas in order to
make it approach in quality some of the Continental iron springs ;
but this is then no longer a natural water, though it may possibly
be found, in some instances, to answer the same purpose.

Then, again, the great number and variety of the Continental spas
and the immense richness of their supply of water have led to a
specialisation of many of them, which undoubtedly increases their
popularity and renders selection easy.

I will only name from among many other instances the following :
the treatment of biliary obstructions and the plethoric forms of gout at:
Carlsbad ; of atonic gout at Koyat ; the treatment of calculous disorders
at Vichy and Contrexeville ; the treatment of chronic articular rheu-
matism and gout at Aix-les-Bains ; the treatment of diabetes at
Neuenahr and Carlsbad ; the treatment of obesity at Marienbad ; the
treatment of gouty and catarrhal dyspepsia at Homburg and Kissingen ;
the treatment of ansemia at Schwalbach and St. Moritz ; the treat-
ment of asthma at Mont Dore ; the treatment of throat affections at
Cauterets and Eaux Bonnes; of scrofulous glandular affections at
Kreuznach ; of the great variety of chronic skin affections at Aix-
la-Chapelle, Cannstadt, La Bourboule, and Uriage.

Further, a glance at the classification of the various mineral
waters into groups according to their composition will also serve to
show the very limited range of choice afforded us by our own spas.

1 . In the first place there are the simple thermal waters — the
simple hot springs which are so numerous on the Continent. They

1883 ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS. 203

are distinguished by their high temperature, ranging from 80° to
150° Fahrenheit, or even higher; by the very small amount of
mineral substances contained in them — in some instances, as at
Pfaeffers, which may be taken as a type of this class, there are but
2^ grains of solid constituents in 7,680 grains of water ; and by their
softness.

These are often termed ' indifferent springs ' on account of the
absence in them of any special mineral substances. The Germans
also call them ' Wild-bdder ' because they often rise in wild, romantic,
wooded districts, and one of the most renowned spas of this class is
that known as Wildbad, situated in the Wiirtemberg portion of the
Black Forest. Gastein, Teplitz, Schlangenbad, and Plombieres are
also examples of this class, as are also Bath and Buxton in our
own country. The waters of 'this class are chiefly used as baths,
and when administered internally they are simply given with a view
of exercising the same purifying solvent influence that might be
obtained from drinking pure hot water — a subject I propose to return
to by-and-by.

As baths they are considered to produce their curative effects,
first, by cleansing and softening the skin and so promoting perspira-
tion ; secondly (according to the temperature at which they are em-
ployed), by equalising or diminishing the loss of heat from the body,
or preventing it altogether, or even giving heat to it ; thirdly, by
promoting the circulation in the peripheral vessels and so improving
the nutrition and tone of the skin ; fourthly, by gently stimulating
the organic functions and so promoting tissue change ; fifthly, by
allaying muscular and nervous irritability through the exercise of a
soothing influence on the peripheral nerves; and lastly, by promoting
the absorption of inflammatory, rheumatic, and gouty exudations.

It is usual to employ these waters as local douches to affected
parts, and to associate with them the curative effects of frictions and
massage. All these processes have long been introduced into practice
at Bath and also at Buxton, and the good effects derivable from this
class of waters, apart from considerations of climate, can be obtained
at either of those British spas.

The maladies in which these ' indifferent ' thermal springs have
been found to be of the greatest efficacy are cases of chronic
rheumatism, articular and muscular ; chronic gouty inflammation of
joints ; sciatica, and other forms of neuralgia ; hysterical and hyper-
sesthetic states of the nervous system ; old painful wounds and
cicatrices ; and cases of loss of muscular power (paralysis) when not
dependent on disease of the nervous centres.

This mode of treatment is essentially soothing and gentle, and
can usually be tolerated by the most sensitive and delicate constitu-
tions. It has been found by experience advantageous to combine
with this mode of treatment the tonic influence of forest air or a sub-

204 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

Alpine climate, such as that of Wildbad, Grastein, or Bagneres de
Bigorre in the case of highly nervous and hypersesthetic sufferers ;
and, as a rule, the more bracing the climate the higher the tempera-
ture at which the baths can be borne with impunity.

2. Some of the most popular springs fall under the head of ' com-
mon salt waters.' Common salt (chloride of sodium) is one of the
ingredients of most frequent occurrence in mineral springs, but it is
only when it occurs in a spring in altogether preponderating propor-
tions that it belongs to this class. The strength of these common
salt springs varies greatly ; that at Eeichenhall, which is one of the
strongest, contains twenty-four per cent, of chloride of sodium, that
at Wiesbaden only six per cent. In some spas of this class it is
customary to fortify the weaker natural springs by the addition of
concentrated mutter lye (bittern), as at Kreuznach ; while at others
the stronger springs, too strong and exciting for most purposes, are
diluted with pure water, as at Reichenhall.

Some of these springs contain also a considerable amount of free
carbonic acid, and this greatly increases their stimulating effect on
the skin when used as baths (Nauheim and Eehme), and modifies
the action of the chloride of sodium when taken internally (Homburg,
Kissingen). The carbonic acid acts as a sedative on the nerves of the
stomach, promotes secretion and absorption, and augments peristaltic
action. It distinctly increases the activity of the water, besides
making it more palatable.

Used as baths, these springs stimulate the peripheral vessels and
nerves, and promote capillary circulation. They improve the tone
and nutrition of the skin, and indirectly stimulate tissue change, that
* pulling down ' and * building up,' upon the due regulation and
activity of which the maintenance and perfection of healthy life
depend.

Internally these waters act as stimulants and indirectly as tonics
to the organs of digestion and assimilation. They increase the
secretions of the alimentary canal and promote its muscular activity,
and improve the abdominal and the general circulation. By their
stimulating action on the circulation and on the change of tissue
they lead to the absorption and removal of morbid deposits.

It is necessary, however, to bear in mind that in persons with
highly sensitive mucous membranes they may ca,use irritation and
discomfort, especially if given in too large doses. It is important
also to remember that the warmer they are drunk the more rapidly
they are absorbed, so that their local effect is diminished and their
constitutional effect increased.

The cases in which those common salt waters are found beneficial
are very various ; amongst others they are employed as baths with
advantage in cases of hypersensitiveness of the skin (' weakness of
skin '), giving rise to a tendency to ' catch cold,' and therefore to

1886 ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS. 205

attacks of bronchial catarrh and acute and chronic rheumatism ; in
some forms of retarded convalescence from acute disease ; in scrofulous
and other inflammatory enlargement of joints ; and the stronger kinds
locally in chronic glandular enlargements of scrofulous origin, in the
chronic hypertrophies of certain organs. In some parts of the
Continent these baths take the place of hot and cold sea baths, with
which they have much in common.

Internally the milder kinds of common salt springs, when charged
also abundantly with carbonic acid (Homburg and Kissingen), are
especially beneficial in cases of atonic dyspepsia and chronic gastric
catarrh, conditions frequently associated with haemorrhoids and
' torpid liver,' and what is termed in Germany abdominal plethora.
They are valuable also in those ' cachexias,' or low states of health,
contracted often by prolonged residence in tropical climates.

In certain forms of anaemia, where regulation of the bowels is a
primary consideration, they often do more good than pure, non-
aperient iron waters, for many of these springs contain an appreciable
amount of iron which gives to them a tonic property (Harrogate).

As examples of this class, the stronger ones are represented
abroad by Kreuznach, Nauheim, Reichenhall, Ischl, and Rehme ; the
milder ones by Homburg, Kissingen, and Wiesbaden ; in this country
Droitwich has very strong salt springs, and can furnish brine baths
as strong as any of those to be obtained on the Continent, and they
are applicable to the same cases. The water of the Droitwich springs
is conveyed in tanks by rail to Great Malvern, where brine baths
can also be obtained.

Woodhall Spa, near Horncastle in Lincolnshire, possesses a spring
which may be regarded as a moderately strong common salt water,
containing also an unusually large proportion of bromides and iodides,
and is suitable to the treatment of the same class of cases as are
sent to Kreuznach. Harrogate possesses not only sulphur springs,
which contain a large proportion of common salt, but also chalybeate
waters containing common salt in proportions which liken them in
some respects to the springs of Homburg and Kissingen. They are,
however, more unpleasant to drink, owing in part to the absence of
carbonic acid, which renders them more difficult of digestion to
some persons.

3. The next is also an important class of waters — the alkaline
waters — of which we have no representative in this country. The
chief constituent of these waters is carbonate of soda ; they also
contain free carbonic acid in varying amount.

The water of the various springs at Vichy may be taken as a
type of this class.

Some of these alkaline springs also contain an appreciable
quantity of chloride of sodium, and this circumstance has led to the
subdivision of this class into —

206 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

a. Simple alkaline waters, and 6. Muriated alkaline waters (i.e.
alkaline waters containing common salt).

Of the simple alkaline division some are hot springs, as those of
Vichy and Neuenahr ; and some are cold, as those of Vals, Apollinaris,
and Bilin ; the same is the case with the muriated alkaline division,
the springs of Ems and Royat being hot and those of Selters and
Rossbach cold. Most of the common so-called * table waters ' are
examples of cold, weak, muriated alkaline springs, the most gaseous
being the most popular.

Many of the springs of this class are found to be most valuable
curative agents. They are all taken internally. They are also used
as baths, but not very largely, although, in some spas, they are
greatly employed in the form of local douches (Royat, La Bourboule).

They are applicable to the treatment of a great number of chronic
maladies. In moderate doses they exercise an important solvent and
purifying influence, correct acidity, promote tissue change, and
possess active diuretic properties. If taken in too large quantity
they depress the heart's action, and cause emaciation through excessive
solvent action. They are given in cases of acid dyspepsia, especially
in the gouty and rheumatic ; in constitutions showing a tendency to
the formation of uric acid (gouty) ; in cases of renal calculous dis-
orders and gravel, in which they often prove of very great service ;
in diabetes ; in cases of torpid liver, with tendency to gall-stones,
in constitutions which would not bear the stronger alkaline aperient
waters like those of Carlsbad.

These waters are also found of very great service in the treatment
of chronic catarrh of the bronchial and other mucous membranes.

Those containing common salt are more tonic and stimulating
than the simple alkaline ones. As we have no waters of this class
in this country we are obliged to have recourse to foreign spas for
the treatment of the very large number of chronic ailments in which
they prove beneficial.

4. Scarcely less important are the waters of the fourth class, the
sulphated waters. This group includes all the best known aperient
waters, which owe their aperient qualities to the presence of the
sulphate of soda and magnesia, singly or combined. Some of these
springs contain also considerable quantities of carbonate of soda and
chloride of sodium, which add greatly to their remedial value, and
this fact has led to the subdivision of the class into two groups : —

a. Simple sulphated waters — the so-called ' bitter waters,' such
as Friedrichshall, Pullna, and Hunyadi. These are rarely drunk at
their source, but are largely imported for home consumption.

And b. alkaline sulphated waters — a group comprising such
world-renowned spas as Carlsbad, Marienbad,Franzensbad, and Tarasp.
I have dwelt fully elsewhere on the important services rendered

1886 ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS. 207

to suffering humanity by this last group of waters. The cases to
which they are appropriate are often of so serious a character that it
would serve no good purpose to attempt to indicate them in a summary
like this.

Strictly speaking we have no spa in this country representative
of this latter group. The Cheltenham waters contain sulphates of
magnesia and soda as well as common salt, and resemble, therefore, the
waters of the simple sulphated group ; but they are cold, and have
no claim to be classed with the important second group of this class.
The same remark applies to the Leamington springs, which contain
sulphate of soda and chlorides of sodium, calcium, and magnesium, a
valuable combination it may be, but not applicable to the same cases
as the Carlsbad group.

5. We next come to the large and interesting group of iron or
chalybeate waters. These are tonic waters par excellence. They
are valuable in proportion to their purity — that is, in proportion to
the absence of other solid ingredients — and in proportion, usually,
to the amount of carbonic acid, in a free state, they contain. The
presence of free carbonic acid promotes the digestion and assimilation
of the iron, and renders the water more palatable. The carbonic acid
is also a very important agent in the baths that are given in con-
nection with most chalybeate courses. These iron and carbonic acid
baths are found in great perfection at Schwalbach. I have entered
very fully into the action of iron water and carbonic acid baths in
the chapter on St. Moritz in the work already referred to.

The purest iron waters are those of Spa, Schwalbach, Alexisbad,
and Tun,bridge Wells, but the absence of any appreciable quantity
of free carbonic acid in the Tunbridge spring really puts it out
of competition with such celebrated iron waters as those of Spa,
Schwalbach, and St. Moritz.

In many iron springs salts of lime are found in rather large pro
portions, as in the St. Moritz spring, and the spring at Santa Caterina.
The same is the case with the Orezza (Corsica) spring, perhaps the
strongest iron spring in Europe.

The iron water at Pyrmont is stronger than that at St. Moritz
or Spa, but it is not so agreeable to drink, as it contains a small
quantity of the bitter sulphate of magnesia. There is a valuable iron
spring at Booklet, near Kissingen, but that also is not a pure iron
spring, as it contains aperient sulphates and chlorides of soda and
magnesia ; and the chalybeate waters of Eippoldsau contain sulphate
of soda. Harrogate possesses useful composite chalybeate springs,
but no pure gaseous iron springs like those of Spa or Schwalbach, so
that, in this class again, when we require a comparatively pure,
natural, gaseous, iron spring, we are compelled to seek for it on the
Continent.

6. The sixth class comprises the numerous and well-known

208 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

sulphur springs. Some of these are hot springs, some of them are
cold.

Of the hot sulphur waters, perhaps the best known to our country-
men are those of Aix-les-Bains and Aix-la-Chapelle. The celebrated
Pjrenean spas also are nearly all of them hot sulphur springs — as
Luchon, Les Eaux Bonnes, Cauterets, &c. Besides these Baden in
Switzerland, Baden near Vienna, Allevard, Uriage, Schinznach, and
Heluan, near Cairo, are all hot sulphur waters. Examples of cold
sulphur springs are found at Enghein, Challes, Gurnigel, Eilsen,
Neundorf, Weilbach, and in our own country at Harrogate, Dinsdale,
and Strathpeffer.

Some of these sulphur springs contain a considerable amount
of common salt ; this is the case at Uriage, Aix-la-Chapelle, and
Harrogate.

Here again it will be seen that while hot sulphur springs abound
on the Continent, we have not a single natural hot sulphur water in
this country.

Luchon is perhaps the most remarkable of European sulphur
spas. Apart from the natural beauty of its situation, which is very
great, it is pre-eminent for the abundance and variety of its springs,
the vast quantity of water 'they afford, their composition, and range
of temperature. The hottest have a temperature of 154° F., and
most of them have to be cooled or mixed with springs of lower tem-
perature before they can be used as baths. In consequence of the
possession of this immense quantity of hot sulphur water, the most
extensive and elaborate arrangements have been established at
Luchon for their administration in all possible forms, including large
and small swimming baths, vapour baths, douches of all kinds, in-
halations, pulverisations, &c.

Aix-les-Bains has also the command of a very abundant supply
of water, the temperature of which ranges from 113° to 115° F., and
very elaborate and complete arrangements prevail there for the
utilisation in all possible ways of their natural resources.

Harrogate is the chief sulphur spa in this country. Dinsdale-on-
TeeSy with much more limited resources, has acquired a considerable
local reputation. At Harrogate the waters have of course to be
heated before they can be employed as baths ; the arrangements for
their application are fairly good, and where the tonic effect of a
bracing upland country, 430 feet above the sea, is required, no doubt
a course of sulphur waters can be obtained at Harrogate which is
likely to be as efficacious in many cases requiring this form of treat-
ment as that at more distant spas. The great variety of ailments
— rheumatic, gouty, cutaneous, catarrhal, and constitutional — remedi-
able by treatment at the various sulphur spas I have fully considered
elsewhere.1

1 Climate and Health Resorts.

1886 ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS. 209

7. Finally, there is the class of earthy and calcareous waters, so
named on account of the preponderance in their composition of the
earthy salts of lime and magnesia. As examples of this class, Leuk,
"Wildungen, Lippspringe, and Contrexeville may be mentioned.

When employed as baths their mode of action is much the same
as that of the first class of springs, the simple thermal waters ; in
some places, as at Leuk in Switzerland, they are applied as very pro-
longed baths in certain inveterate forms of skin disease, where long-
continued soaking the skin is thought advantageous.

At Contrexeville, where the waters are largely employed internally,
a great deal is claimed for them, and great benefit is undoubtedly
derived from them in many cases ; especially in cases of irritative,
acid, or gouty dyspepsia, and in particular in calculous and vesical
complaints. It must, however, be admitted that the precise mode
of action of these earthy waters is not well understood ; probably
much of their efficacy is due to the large quantity of an active
solvent, such as hot water, which the patient is induced to consume.
In this country the Bath waters offer the nearest approach to an
example of this group of spas, and they would possibly prove as
efficacious, when judiciously administered, as those of Contrexeville,
in some of the cases that are sent thither.

This brief summary and review of the several classes of natural
mineral springs will, as I have already said, show clearly how limited
are our own resources, and that, in availing ourselves of the help of a
great number of foreign spas, we are only doing what we are com-
pelled to do from the absence of any examples of the waters we
require in England. Sometimes, indeed, there are other reasons
besides the mere composition of the mineral spring for selecting a
foreign rather than an English spa. It is often advantageous and
desirable to associate change of climate, of entourage, and of mode
of life with a course of mineral waters. It may be altogether prefer-
able to follow a course of baths in a drier and more bracing climate
than our own. The influence of forest or mountain air is certainly a
not unimportant adjunct to some cures.

Some of the most successful applications of the simple thermal
springs are found to occur at such a sub-Alpine spa as Grastein, or
in the forest air of Wildbad. And this leads me to remark how
impossible it is to determine all the appropriate uses of a mineral
spring from too exclusive a consideration of its mineral ingredients.
Chemical analysis certainly fails to reveal, in all cases, even the
physical peculiarities of a mineral spring ; and to maintain the
opinion that all mineral waters of analogous composition must have
the same curative action can only be the outcome of haste and inex-
perience. One of the springs at Vichy (VHopitai) is found practically
to be more suitable to the treatment of irritative dyspepsia than the

210 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

others, although of apparently similar composition ; it is found to
be more soothing to the stomach. The only noticeable difference in
this spring is that it deposits around its basin a considerable amount
of a greenish organic substance termed baregine, so named from its
presence having been noted long ago in the waters of Barege.

There is nothing in the chemical analysis of the water of Schlan-
genbad (of the same class as our own spa, Buxton) to account for
the peculiarly luxurious effect of this bath, which the author of
Bubbles from the Brunnen of Nassau describes justly as ' the most
harmless and delicious luxury of the sort ' he had ever enjoyed, and
he quotes the opinion of a Frenchman that ' dans ces bains on dement
absolument amoureux de soi-meme I ' Describing elsewhere my
own impressions of this bath, I have said, ' Reclining in one of those
luxurious baths, the water with its delicious softness and pleasant
temperature seems to envelop the whole body with a sort of diffused
caress ; while, from some peculiar property in the water, it gives a
singular lustrous beauty to the skin, which seems to be suddenly
endowed with a remarkable softness and brilliancy.'

Then, again, some special modes and processes of employing a
mineral water doubtless have more influence in determining the range
of its usefulness than its mere chemical composition. The peculiar
vapour chambers and other modes of applying the waters practised at
Mont Dore have much to do with their efficacy in the relief of cases
of asthma and other forms of chest affections. The production of
very profuse perspiration is often the consequence of the application
of these processes, and seems to be not very remotely connected
with the beneficial results obtained.2

At Aix-les-Bains the combination of the douche with shampooing
and massage has been carried to great perfection, and may be credited
with much of the benefit derived from treatment there. The
physicians at Kreuznach believe that much of the success attending
their treatment of scrofulous and other tumours depends greatly
on the system and processes they adopt in the application of their
fortified salt springs.

So also the very strict regime enforced at some of the Continental
spas, where the tables d'hote are under the direct control of the
physicians — as, for instance, at Carlsbad — contributes greatly to the
attainment of the results aimed at.

It has been said, and with much truth, that there is a fashion in
waters, and that various spas come into and go out of fashion like
many other things.

Au temps de Francois Ier (says M. Taine 3), les Eaux Bonnes gu6rissaient les
Wessures : elles s'appelaient eaux d'arquebusades ; on y envoya les soldats blesses a
Pavie. Aujourd'hui elles guerissent les maladies de gorge et de poitrine. Dans

2 Etude sur leg Sneurs qui se prodmsent sous ^influence du Traitement Thermal au
Mont Dore. By Dr. Cazalis. 3 Voyage aux Pyrenees.

1886 ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS. 211

cent ans, elles gue"riront peut-etre autre chose : chaque siecle, la medecine fait un
progres. Un me"decin celebre disait un jour a ses Sieves : ' Employez vite ceremede
pendant qu'il gue"rit encore.' Lts medicaments ont des modes comme les chapeaux.

A few years ago a fierce controversy arose between some of the
physicians of the Pyrenean spas and some of those practising at
Mont Dore, as to the relative value, in certain cases, of sulphur and
arsenic. Arsenic was coming into fashion, and it was seen that
sulphur, for a time, was in danger of going out of fashion. The
managers of numerous spas, then, began to magnify the amount of
arsenic contained in their sources, while the curious in these matters
might have noted that in many others, as at Vichy for example, where
they had other potent ingredients to trust to, they took little account
of the arsenic in their springs, although it existed in them in greater
quantity than in some that boasted largely of its presence. Arsenic
still holds its ground, and is long likely to do so, especially in such
a spa, for instance, as that of La Bourboule in Auvergne, five or six
miles from its more ancient neighbour Mont Dore. This water,
containing as it does a very notable quantity of arsenic, is, for that
and other reasons, perhaps one of the most valuable additions that
have been made of late years to our available mineral springs.

But far and away the most fashionable constituent in mineral
waters at the present time is lithium, and the authorities in various
foreign spas appear to be competing with one another in the dis-
covery of this popular ingredient. Who shall produce an analysis
with the greatest quantity of lithium in it ? That seems to be the
burning question at this moment with bath managers all over Europe.

A striking testimony to this fashion is afforded by the recently
circulated analysis of the springs at St. Moritz. Formerly the pre-
sence of a notable quantity of iron in these springs was regarded as
the point of paramount importance, now the list of constituents is
headed by ' Lithium Chloride ' !

Why this exalted estimation of lithium ? Because lithium is a
remedy for gout, and the desire to acquire the esteem of the many
sufferers from this ubiquitous malady is foremost in the wishes of
spa physicians. A cure for the various kinds of goutiness is, in the
language of commerce, an < article greatly in demand,' hence the
eagerness to possess one, or rather to possess the reputation of pos-
sessing one.

It was Koyat who led the way and started this vogue for lithium.
The Koyat springs are hot, weak alkaline springs, all containing
lithium in certain proportions, and it used, on account of the simi-
larity in the composition of its springs, to be called the French Ems.
The Koyat springs also contain a minute quantity of arsenic.

The success which has attended the efforts to establish Koyat as
a resort for certain forms of goutiness has led to considerable compe-
tition on the part of other spas for a like reputation, and as the

212 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

prosperity of Eoyat is considered to be based on the possession of
lithium in its waters, no effort has been spared to discover lithium
in other springs.

Kemarkable claims have recently been advanced in favour of the
Contrexeville waters in the treatment of atonic forms cf gout, and it
is not difficult to foresee that this spa also is about to enter on a
period of popularity. Its waters are very feebly mineralised, and some
of the benefit they produce might possibly with justice be assigned
to the amount of pure water that is consumed in drinking them.
But not only do they cure gout and diabetes at Contrexeville, but
they claim to have turned diabetes into gout ; 4 they do not, however,
appear to have as yet turned gout back again into diabetes — the
patient would probably object !

In speaking of the spa treatment of these supposed related dis-
orders, gout and diabetes, it would be most unwise to forget or over-
look the claims of Neuenahr and the brilliant success which has
attended the treatment of diabetes there. Dr. E. Schmitz has
published an analysis of 310 cases of diabetes treated at Neuenahr,
from which it appears that 135 got rid of all symptoms of the
disease, 134 were greatly benefited, and only in 41 was the result of
the course unsatisfactory, and for very obvious reasons.5 Exceedingly
good results have also been obtained at Neuenahr in the treatment
of chronic articular gout.

When we find a number of Continental spas, which possess waters
of very various composition, publishing evidences of their efficacy in
the cure of the same chronic maladies, we are naturally induced to
ask, Is there any common agency operative in all of them ? There is
this common to nearly all of them, that they require the daily intro-
duction into the body of a considerable quantity of an important
solvent agent — water ! and this brings me to the consideration of a
subject with which I must conclude this article, viz. the use of 'hot
water as a remedy,' a subject, I venture to think, by no means
remotely connected with the spa treatment of certain maladies,
especially of gout and corpulence.

A very eminent confrere once asked me to define gout. I had
often thought over this difficulty, and I was, therefore, prepared with
an answer ; so I defined gout as disturbed retrograde metamor-
phosis ! This seems a very pedantic phrase, but it is capable of
explanation, and when examined it will, I think, be found to be
nearly, if not altogether, coextensive with the meaning of gout.
For the perfection of healthy life it is requisite that certain changes
(metamorphoses), constructive and destructive (retrograde), should

* On the Common Origin of Diabetes and the Uric Acid Diathesis. By Dr. Debont
d'Estrees, of Contrexeville. Lancet, May 22, 1886.

s Results of Medical Treatment of 310 Diabetic Patientt. By B. Schmitz, M.D.,
Neuenahr.

1886 ENGLISH AND FOREIGN SPAS. 213

take place in the body with perfect regularity and uniformity.
Constructive metamorphosis (after growth is completed) is concerned
in maintaining the fabric of the animal frame in its due integrity ;
destructive (retrograde) metamorphosis is concerned in carrying away,
completely and quietly, the results of the incessant use and wear of
the fabric. This is what is meant by the words ' tissue change ' of
so frequent occurrence in every attempted explanation of the action
of baths and waters. If there is a disturbance in the constructive
changes, the perfection of the fabric suffers, and loss of strength
must follow ; if there is disturbance in the destructive 6 changes, the
. injury to the health of the body may not be so immediately apparent,
but they will be felt, sooner or later, and in proportion to the gravity
of the disturbance. Mere excess of food may be the cause of some
of these disturbances, or an improper method of feeding. Thus it
is easy to understand how corpulence arises. Something is regularly
taken into the system which is not needed for construction or main-
tenance ; if in the ' retrograde metamorphosis ' this excess were got rid
of in a regular and normal manner nothing remarkable would arise.
But in some organisations there is a tendency not to turn this excess
into substances which can readily be discharged from the body, but to
throw it on one side, as it were, within the body in the form of fat,
probably a provision of nature for storing up excess of food in a
readily convertible form in anticipation of a season when food may be
difficult to procure, for fat disappears rapidly enough when persons are
deprived of food, and those who profess that they get fat ' on nothing '
would soon be undeceived if they were seriously to try this painful
experiment.

But a tendency to disturbance of ' retrograde metamorphosis ' may
be independent of excess or error in the matter of feeding, and
depend on an inherited peculiarity, although aggravated undoubtedly
and called into activity frequently by excesses and errors of diet.
The tendency both to gout and corpulency are very commonly in-
herited and often coexist in the same person.

Now it is to get rid of the results of these disturbances and to
prevent their recurrence that most mineral water cures are undertaken.
One reason why certain substances resulting from these abnormal
-changes are so injurious, and linger so long in the system, is because
of their very slight solubility, and it has recently been maintained
that the regular consumption of such an active solvent as pure hot
water would serve the purpose of getting rid of these troubles as
•efficaciously as a course of mineral waters. I do not doubt there is
much truth in this, but I do not doubt also that the presence of
•certain constituents in many mineral springs increases considerably
the solvent action of the water in certain cases and in certain persons.

8 Exception might be taken to the word ' destructive,' and 'retrograde ' is more
strictly accurate.

VOL. XX.— No. 114 Q

214 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

Those who believe they can get all they require by the consumption
daily of a certain quantity of hot water have only themselves to
blame if they do not carry into effect such an easy, cheap, and
harmless mode of treatment.

I do not propose to pursue this discussion further, at present ;
the whole question of the role played by water in the processes of
nutrition and its influence on corpulence has been largely debated
recently in France, Germany, and America, and experimental inves-
tigations are still being pursued for the purpose of throwing light
on this important practical subject.7

To treat this question fully and satisfactorily would require an .
article to itself, and it seems wiser to postpone such an undertaking
until the investigations which are now in progress shall have attained
greater completeness.

I should like, in conclusion, to quote some remarks I published
fifteen years ago on this head, when considering the action of
mineral waters : ' It is not unimportant to consider what the effect
may be of drinking daily a large quantity of water, apart from the
mineral substances which it holds in solution, especially in the cases
of persons unaccustomed to the use of pure water as an ordinary
beverage. This is a part of the inquiry very commonly omitted, yet
it cannot be doubted for a moment that the admission of from one
to two pints of an influential physical agent like water into the ali-
mentary canal, every day, in opposition to ordinary habit, must have
a very decided influence on the health of the body.' 8

J. BURXEY YEO.

* An excellent account of these investigations so far as they have at present gone
is to be found in the Archives d' ' Hydrologie for March, April, and May 1886.
8 Notes of a Season at St. Moritz and a Visit to the Baths of Tarasp.

1886

215

LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS.

1 Virginibus pueris^ue.'

DURING the year ending the 31st of March, 1885, the sum of
7,898,OOOZ. was received for the transmission of letters through Her
Majesty's Post Office. This means that during the year the number
of letters, circulars, newspapers, and postal cards counted by hundreds
of millions. We cannot, try as we may, realise what is meant by
these prodigious numbers ; they baffle the imagination ; they stagger
us as much as the conception of thousands, or even hundreds, staggers
those savages of rudimentary brain who, we are told, cannot yet
bring themselves to count above four consecutive units. But this
we can understand, that the mere sum of intellectual effort involved
in the composition of all the vast assemblage of written and printed
matter transmitted through the Post Office in a single year must be
and is enormous.

We most of us think that there must be something wrong some-
where if the postman does not bring us something to read and
something to answer by the time we present ourselves at the break-
fast table in the morning, and very few of us of the middle class who
have got out of our teens know what it is to pass a week without
having to write a letter. Yet I often hear it said that the penny
post and the halfpenny cards and the sixpenny telegrams are rapidly
lessening the old habit of writing letters that are worth reading,
and, in fact, that letter-writing is an art that is dying out.

I am one of those who do not believe in such a dreary prospect
as the pessimists hold out to us ; and if it be true that the machinery
now employed in distributing our daily budgets is being largely
utilised in sending huge numbers of circulars and advertisements all
over the land, I can see no fear of any very great catastrophe ensuing.
The rubbish basket is also an institution of our times, and its mission
is not quite contemptible, in that it is the great eliminator which rids
us of the draff and chaff and dross of our correspondence.

The gift of speech — articulate speech — is one of the greatest
of the gifts which differentiate us from the lower animals. Language is
the prerogative of man, and the art of writing down his thoughts so
that others may read them is the art which more than any other

Q2

216 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

differentiates the civilised man from the savage. Nevertheless, it is
only when a people has attained a high level of civilisation and
culture that men and women begin to write familiar letters to one
another. Literature begins in verse, for verse is the earliest of all
composition, and only when men have passed out of the stage of
metrical utterances and thence to the severer forms of prosaic narra-
tive or formal legislative enactments, and the social fabric has attained
to a certain condition of stability, and education has become diffused
among the many and has ceased to be the privilege of the few — only
then do people begin to address one another on matters of everyday
life, and, being interested in the concerns of the present, find a pleasure
in commenting upon the things in being and the things in doing
that present themselves to their eyes.

The hankering for what we call sympathy is the virtue — or the
vice — of advanced civilisation. I doubt whether primaeval man cared
much for what his neighbour was thinking about in the abstract-
When we advance to the point where luxurious leisure is possible,
then only do we begin to communicate our sentiments one to the
other. It is often an extremely annoying habit. My cultured
brother ! are you condemned by the strictness of your circumstances
to drive about the country in a vehicle called a wagonette ? Then
you must know what it is to have an exasperating fellow-creature of
intense enthusiasm and excessive love of the picturesque appealing
to you a dozen times in a mile to twist round your head like a Polly-
pi-caw, and look at something behind you. ' Oh, you must look ! ' is
the cruel appeal of one who aches for sympathy and who has no sym-
pathy for your aches ! Strange that there should be in the human
mind this absorbing desire to put somebody else in the same position
that he or she occupies. Such attempts always fail, yet they will
always be repeated in defiance of all experience to the contrary, and
in total disregard of the law of nature, that a man cannot possibly
be in two places at once. Is it that we are dimly conscious of the
fact that the spiritual man will be independent of the limiting condi-
tions of time and space, and that any device whereby we can help
one another to approximate, even to the semblance of such independ-
ence, must be at once a move in the right direction, and a proof
that we ourselves are rising in the scale of being.

Certainly the earliest letter that has come down to us — as far as
I know — is an attempt to make all who read that letter feel at home
in a great Egyptian city more than three thousand years ago. Yes !
At least fourteen hundred years before Christ, say the pundits.
Think of that !

Centuries before there was a man or a thing called Homer — per-
haps while Moses was trotting about in a wig and loin-cloth, and
little Aaron was fishing in the Nile with a bit of string and a crooked
pin — this letter was written, which all may read, by Panbesa to his

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 217

correspondent Amenemapt. ' I arrived at the city of Eameses,' says
this old-world gentleman, ' and I have found it excellent, for nothing
can compare with it in the Theban land.' A very paradise for the
vegetarian. Vines and fig trees, and leeks, and onions, and garlic,
and nursery gardens — positively, nursery gardens. But, alack ! they
drank, these Egyptian people did — they drank the shameful, and
Panbesa did not blush for them ; he too smacked his lips — metaphori-
cally— at the wine and the beer and the cider and the sherbet. He
actually names them all, and he gives us clearly to understand that
the place was ' a pleasant place to live in,' none the less because the
drinks were various. And this before Israel had crossed the Jordan,
while wolves were prowling among the seven hills where Eome rose
in the after time, eight centuries before Solon appeared as a legisla-
tor, and a whole millennium before Pericles was born or thought of!
Yes, even then this Egyptian gentleman pronounces in a letter his
opinion upon things in general, and goes out of his way to remark in it
that there was a brisk trade in bitter beer imported all the way from
Galilee.1

It is observable how few letters we find in the Old Testament.
When they occur they are for the most part letters written
among people in a far higher condition of civilisation than the
Israelites had attained to — i.e. people among whom there was a
more settled government, a greater knowledge of the world, and
wider views than the children of Israel had any toleration for. It
is to the West that we must turn, and to a literature that grew up
long after the times of the older Jewish polity in Palestine, if we
are to look for the earliest specimens of what we now understand by
letter-writing.

So, too, it is significant that Greek literature is entirely wanting
in anything that may be called a collection of letters. It is signifi-
cant because, when we remember the kind of life which people led
in Hellas, it is difficult to understand how they ever could have been
a letter-writing people. They knew little or nothing of that affectionate
intercourse between members of the same family which our word
home stands for ; the innocence of childhood, or even its loveliness,
has hardly a place in Greek art ; the companionship of brother and
sister, or of mother and child, was hardly thought of. Where the
moral sentiment is deficient, or so feeble as to exercise hardly any
influence upon the conduct, people cannot be expected to keep up a
friendly correspondence. It is to Eome and Eoman literature that
we must turn to find the earliest examples of affectionate and con-
fidential letters passing between members of the same family, and
between friends of the same tastes and sympathies.

1 Records of the Past, vol. vi. p. 11.

218 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

It is only when we come to the second century B.C. that we find
the fashion of letter- writing has already become generally prevalent —
i.e. just when Home's Empire had become widely extended, and when
her citizens were always on the move, and sometimes absent from
home for months or years, while in the meantime their hearts were
ever turning towards the old scenes and the old friends whom they
had left behind. As might have been expected, the earliest letters
are those from parents to their children. Letters from Cato the
Censor to his son seem to have been published soon after the old
man's death, and a considerable fragment of a letter from Cornelia
to her son Gaius Gracchus is still extant, though some doubt its
genuineness. Fifty years after Cornelia's death Cicero tells us he had
read Cornelia's letters — that is, they were already common property,
and already a recognised portion of Eoman literature.

Of all the early Eoman letter- writers, Cicero himself was by far
the most prolific and indefatigable. Born in 106 B.C., and murdered
in 43 B.C., his life of sixty-three years was among the busiest lives
that any Eoman ever lived, but, like many another busy man, he
always found time to write hig letters;' There are nearly 800 letters
of Cicero now extant, besides at least 90 letters addressed to him ;
and we know that this large collection is a mere fragment of the
immense correspondence that he left behind him. It extends over a
period of less than twenty-five years — i.e. it gives us on the average
a letter for about every eleven days of the last twenty-five years of
his life ; the letters are written to all sorts of people, and are of all
varieties of style. Only in a very few instances does the writer seem
to have had any thought of their being published. Their charm is
their naturalness, their frankness, their outspokenness. It is diffi-
cult to imagine what our notion of Eoman life and manners, of Eoman
history, would be without this unique correspondence ; and all this
astonishing letter-writing went on in the midst of every kind of en-
gagement, and of such claims upon the writer's time and thoughts
as few men that have ever lived are exposed to. Cicero was deeply
immersed in politics, in .lawsuits, in foreign affairs, in building houses,
in writing books and making collections of art treasures, in travelling,
in actual warfare ; yet in the midst of it all he was writing letters,
long and short, at a rate which only a professional journalist nowadays
could think of turning off.

Sometimes pedantic and sometimes affected in his other writings,
Cicero is never so in his letters. There he is always natural, and
there you have the best side of the man shown us. The letters
were written from his heart — I mean the familiar letters. He
writes because he had a longing to communicate his thoughts to
his friends — in other words, because he had a craving for the
sympathy of those he loved. I believe that will be found to be
the real secret of all good letter-writing. If a woman sits down

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 219

to write as Madame de Sevigne did, or as Pope did, with a view
to an outside public, and only half a thought for the friend
or relative addressed, you will never get really natural letters.
There will always be a false ring about them. More than one book
has been published during the last few years the author of which has
been extremely careful to tell us in his preface that it was never
intended for publication ; that he was very much surprised indeed
when it was urged upon him that he should actually print his letters !
Nothing had been further from his intention. The letters were
written in the first instance to X, or Y, or Z, &c. Yet we can hardly
read a page without feeling quite certain that X, or Y, or Z was only
a peg to hang the letters on, which were most surely addressed to a
larger outside public, whom the author never lost sight of from the
moment he took his pen in hand till the moment he laid it down.

Cicero's letters are thoroughly genuine, and when they are meant
to be read by the world at large, the style is altogether different from
that which he uses in the simple confidence of friendly intercourse.
Yet there is one abominable practice which is extremely objection-
able in these letters. Cicero is always putting in little scraps of
Greek and Greek words — Greek slang, in fact. His letters swarm
with them — exactly as some people now never seem to be able to
get on without some scraps of French or German, which might just
as well, or better, be expressed in homely English. There was some
excuse for a Koman doing this in Cicero's days, for the language was
inadequate for the wants of a large-minded man then, and there
were new ideas and new habits and new experiences for which the
meagre Latin vocabulary of the time did not suffice ; but there is
no excuse for this kind of thing now. The habit of putting in tags
and rags of French at every page is only one of those crafty devices
whereby a person with a small vocabulary endeavours to conceal
poverty of style. It is a confession of weakness and a pretence on
the part of the writer that he is master of a foreign language, which
he can use with greater facility than he can his own mother tongue.
That usually means that he is very imperfectly acquainted with any
language, his mother tongue included.

There are two curious omissions in Cicero's letters, one to be very
much applauded, the other very much to be deplored. The first is
that Cicero never indulges in that most foolish practice of ordinary
letter-writers, to wit, long descriptions of scenery — what people now
call ^uord-painting — a most silly and affected expression. Few
things are more irritating than to receive a letter extending over three
sheets, filled with descriptions of scenery. They are almost always
very feeble, at best they are very tantalising, and they generally
wind up with an abrupt notice that the writer has positively no time
for more. Of course not ! You can't go on indefinitely using up
superlatives and ringing the changes upon all the names of the

220 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

colours in a paint-box. When I write a book of travels, I shall de-
scribe nothing I ever saw in the whole course of my journey— I shall
only tell my readers what I heard. And a very interesting and
exciting book will my travels be !

The other omission in Cicero's letters is really quite unpardonable.
In all those 800 letters it would be difficult to find one in which he
says a word about the dress of the ladies of his time — it is disgraceful,
but so it is. It proves him to be like other male creatures — unob-
servant, tasteless, dark, obtuse, and lacking in that higher sense and
that gentler, truer, elevating refinement which the nobler sex is gifted
with. This omission in Cicero's correspondence is all the more repre-
hensible because his correspondents were by no means exclusively
gentlemen. There was one lady, Caerellia, who, we are told, had
a very voluminous correspondence with him. It is most unfortunate
that Caerellia's letters are all lost. She must have told him how
Fulvia and Terentia and Tullia and a host more were dressed, and
how they looked. The result is that there are few subjects of which
we know less than we do of ladies' dress at Eome in the later years
of the Kepublic. We know that Cicero's own wife got him into
great difficulties by her speculations on the Stock Exchange or some-
thing of the sort, and that Caerellia herself was an extremely fine
lady of great wealth and of very great culture. We know that
Cicero frequently writes about his lady friends, though he was not
exactly what is known as a lady's man ; but about their toilet — their
jewels — their fashion of doing their hair — their shawls and their
feathers and their ribbons, and the last new thing in caps or
mantles — not a word ! It is very sad ! What a deplorable loss the
world has experienced in the disappearance of the Lady Caerellia's
letters ! Is it not to be hoped that they may yet be discovered in some
obscure library ? How much happier we shall all be !

When Julius Caesar was murdered at Eome there was a young
man pursuing his university education at Athens, and his name was
— well, it does not much matter what his name was, but we call him
Horace. I don't know whether he was a great and voluminous
letter-writer, but I do know that he left us two books of what he
calls letters, which have this great recommendation, that they are
written in verse. I know it is a received axiom that a poet
is born, not made ; but a poet is one thing, and a versifier is
quite another. Anybody who has only average ability can write
verse if he tries ; it is the very easiest accomplishment that man or
woman can acquire. But practice and care are needed for the manipu-
lation of verse, and practice and care are not generally allowed to be
essential to the production of letters worth reading. Therefore I do
strongly recommend any young person afflicted with the dangerous gift
of fluency in writing and liable to be run away with by a restless pen and
an exuberant style — any one, i.e., who, being still in the teens, is in a

3886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 221

fair way to become intoxicated by the discovery of how much may be
produced on paper under some circumstances and by some unfortunate
people in twenty-four hours — I say, I do strongly recommend such
persons to write, if it be only one or two long letters a week, in
English verse. My gentle sisters of the nimble pens, my noble
brothers who drive the goose-quill with such ready fingers, as a
wholesome check upon excessive speed in the production of literature,
do try writing your letters in verse. Did not Horace do so ? Why
should not you ? Is it not a melancholy thought that all Horace's prose
letters have perished ? So may yours. Yes ! But a good many of
his verse letters have survived. Why not emulate Horace ?

There is one more Roman letter-writer that I have a word to say
about — I mean that coxcombical and self-conceited prig commonly
known as the younger Pliny. Yes ! he was really the beau ideal
of a prig. Very rich, very polite, very refined, very highly cul-
tured, very choice in the society he mixed with, very punctilious,
and very much impressed with the conviction that the world at large,
and the Roman world in particular, had a great deal to be thankful
for in the fact that he, Pliny, had been born when he was and been
brought up as he had been.

He could not help being a prig. He was brought up a prig from
his childhood. He wrote a Greek tragedy when he was fourteen.
When he was a boy his uncle seriously expostulated with him once
for taking a walk. It was such waste time. Once he writes to a
friend that he had been out hunting — killed three boars too, and
fine ones. Who had ? That didn't matter ! He, Caius Plinius
Csecilius Secundus — better give him his full name ! — had sat by the
nets — that was quite enough — sate with pen and notebook in hand,
a wild boar or two grunting at him all the while and preparing for a
charge on the earliest possible opportunity ! Cool as a cucumber and
improving the occasion, * I thought about a subject, and made my
notes about it,' says he — like a young curate sermonising, in fact.

Once, when he had been invited to a dinner, he stipulates that
he will come, provided the conversation shall abound in Socratic
discourses ; and .once, when half promising a friend that he intends
to write him something worth reading, he checks himself with the
horrible thought that he had no paper good enough, and there was a
great doubt as to whether he could get any good enough to write
on. ' Think of the nasty coarse spongy stuff in these parts,' he says.
* Why, my dear friend, I should actually be sending you smudges —
dreadful ! ' The most sublime instance of Pliny's priggishness is to be
found in his letter to Tacitus, describing his own lofty and superior
demeanour during the great eruption of Vesuvius. The angry volcano
was all aflame — the earth was heaving like a troubled sea — the air
was dark with smoke and ashes — his own uncle had been suffocated
by the sulphurous fumes, and his mother burst into the room where

222 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

this young puppy of seventeen was playing the stoic. Pliny says,
' I called for a volume of Livy, and read it as though quite at my
ease, and even made extracts from it as I had begun to do.' Making
extracts from Livy in an earthquake ! What sort of letters could
you expect from such a man ?

And yet Pliny has left us some very delightful and amusing letters.
Among them is the famous ghost story, which is perhaps the best
specimen of his power of simple narrative. Here it is : —

There was a certain mansion at Athens, large and roomy, but of evil repute,
and a plaguey sort of place. In the stillness of the night, lo ! there used to sound
the clank of iron, and as you listened there -was a rattling of chains ; at first a long
way off, then coming nearer and nearer, till it came quite close. Presently a spectre
appeared. An old, old man, lean and wan, with a long beard and shaggy hair,
with fetters on his legs and manacles on his arms, and wringing his hands. The
inmates of the house were very miserable. They would not live there. The place
became deserted and given up to the dreadful phantom. At last a certain philoso-
pher came to Athens, Athenodorus by name. He saw the advertisement, inquired
the terms, asked why it was so cheap, learnt the full particulars, and gladly
hired the mansion. Towards evening he ordered a sofa to be set for himself in the
front of the house, and provided himself with pen and paper and a light. He sent
away all the servants and set to work writing. For a while there was only dead
silence. By and by — hark ! — there was the sound of iron grating against iron, then
the chains clanking. The philosopher never looked up nor stopped his writing. He
kept his mind clear and his ears open. The noise increased ; it drew nearer — it
was at the threshold — it had come inside the door — it was unmistakable. He
raised his eyes. There was the phantom he had heard of staring at him. The
ghost stood still and beckoned to him with its finger. Athenodorus waved his
hand as much as to say, ' I'm engaged ; you'll have to wait,' and he went on with
his writing. The ghost rattled his chains over his head as he wrote. He looked
up again — the ghost was still staring at him. He took up the light and followed.
The ghost went very slowly, as if it felt the weight of its chains. It led the way
to a back yard of the house, then vanished. Next day Athenodorus went to the
magistrates and told them they must dig in the place where the ghost disap-
peared. There they found some human bones and fetters upon them. They were
collected, buried at the public expense, and the house was rid of ghosts from that
time forward !

' Very odd ! ' says Pliny. ' My dear friend, what is your private opinion upon
this story ? '

I have ventured to give a translation of this letter, not only because
it is the earliest detailed account of the appearance of a spectre with
which I am acquainted, nor because it is a specimen of the kind of
ghost story which is very commonly repeated when such stories are
going the round, but because it is difficult to see how any such story
could have been told except in a letter. There are some things for
which familiar letters are peculiarly adapted. In what other branch
of literature could a man sit down seriously to tell a ghost story ?
He could hardly venture to introduce such a narrative into history ;
science would deride him, philosophy would frown at his levity,
poetry would refuse to lend herself to his tale. But in a letter you
may be as playful as you please, and then you may adapt yourself to

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 223

your correspondent, who may be credulous or the reverse, but in any
case you know he is not likely to take you au grand serieux. In
our letters we are not expected to write by rule and compasses. We
are not afraid of too severe criticism. A letter is hardly expected to
be a full-dress performance.

• • * * •

As far as I know, more than three hundred years had passed
before any such collection of letters as that of Pliny was published,
or at any rate attained to anything like very general popularity. At the
close of the fourth century or beginning of the fifth, Q. Aurelius Sym-
machus thought proper to proclaim to the world that he considered
himself the prince of letter-writers of his time, and the world — i.e. the
Koman world — was in such a dilapidated condition that it took Sym-
machus at his own valuation. For, like Pliny, Symmachus was very
rich, had a grand house at Rome, and several beautiful villas in various
parts of the world. If I ever live to be rich I am not sure that I shall
publish a volume of my letters, but I don't know. Somehow rich
people seem at all times to have delighted in letting mankind
read their letters. Any poor creature can get his children to
read his letters, long or short, but to get a whole generation of men
and women to pore over your correspondence and applaud it — that
seems to be grand ! So Symmachus thought, and so his son thought,
when he edited his father's epistles in ten books, I suppose because
Pliny had published his in ten books. It is a dreary collection —
' vapid as long decanted small beer,' as one says — yet noticeable for
one feature that in our time has become extremely well known to
us. Symmachus is the first who gives a specimen of the real genuine
begging letter, and we have of this two examples. I am not going
to translate them — partly because I am reluctant to facilitate matters
for the begging impostors and give them a model from antiquity,
partly because most of us have no need to go back to the past to find
out the kind of epistles which the begging impostors send. This is
a kind of literature familiarity with which has bred in most of us a
certain measure of contempt. There is one letter which Symmachus
wrote for a young friend of his, who very much wanted to make an
offer of marriage to a young lady and wished to do so in the best
possible manner. Symmachus was equal to the occasion, and gave
his friend a model. As to the letters of introduction in this
collection, they are legion, and the letters of condolence and the
letters of congratulation. But, as I said before, they are a dreary
lot, and perhaps the only really curious and valuable epistles
are those which have to do with the writer's bargains in
horseflesh and the purchases he made of strange animals for
his menagerie ! As for his style, it has one merit and one
only, it is fairly simple and fluent. If the man had written
obscurely his rubbish would never have reached a second edition.

224 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

Note that if there is something in what a man says, the world
will forgive a little awkwardness in the manner of saying it. But
if there is nothing, then only that man's writings are read who can
be understood at a glance. Miss — what was her name ? — was wise in
her generation. The lips that are always in the proper attitude for the
pronunciation of ' potatoes, pruins, and prism ' are sure to be practised
in the enunciation of elegant phrases ; and a letter that offends nobody,
and does not require to be read three times before you can catch its
meaning, is much more likely to be read by thirty times three
readers with pleasure than the other is to be read three times by one.

Just a generation after Symmachus (almost the last of the dandi-
fied pagans) joined the majority, he actually found an imitator in the
person of Sidonius Apollinaris. At any rate, they say that Symmachus
was his model. He certainly did not copy his model very closely as
far as style goes, for a more villanous style than that of Sidonius in
his letters one would not wish to find. Sidonius started in life as
a politician, and at one time it seemed on the cards that he might
actually become Emperor of Rome some day, for he married the
daughter of the Emperor Flavius Avitus. Avitus had a short reign
of barely a year, and then Sidonius found himself effaced. By
and by he rose to the surface again, was employed as an ambassador
from the Arverni to the Emperor Anthemius, got into favour, and
had a statue of himself set up in Rome. I dare say it is there now
somewhere.

One day the Emperor said, ' I'll make this man a bishop.' Sidonius
protested vehemently, by no means liking the prospect. But there
was no help for it. In those days when an emperor took a thing
into his head it had to be done. Sidonius became a bishop accord-
ingly— Bishop of Clermont, and a very good and conscientious and
zealous bishop he was — so good a bishop, in fact, that when he died
he was proclaimed a saint ; and there stands his name sure enough,
in the Roman Calendar on the 23rd of August as Saint Apollinaris.

I can hardly imagine a greater contrast than the letters of
Symmachus and Sidonius. Symmachus's trashy epistles have been
saved from absolute oblivion only by their flimsy transparent style,
and the very triviality of their contents. The letters of Sidonius
will always be read in spite of a style that is most repulsive, and
at times appears studiously unintelligible. He is one of those
objectionable writers whom a man reads because he can only get at
his information by reading him ; for really the matter in Sidonius is
extremely valuable. Some paragraphs you can no more make out
than you can crack a cocoanut with your teeth. These you must
skip, and if you can find a translation happy are you.2 Nevertheless,
some of Sidonius's letters are charming. Thus the careful portrait

2 See Germain, Essai Littcraire et Historiqiie sur Ap. Sid., 1840 ; Chaiz,
S. Sidonie A_poll. et son Siccle, 2 vols. 1867.

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 225

of Theodoric, King of the (roths, in the first book, is one of the most
elaborate miniatures that has ever been drawn in words. So too the
delightful account Sidonius gives of a visit he had paid to a friend's
house near Nimes, and the sketch he gives of the way in which a
rich country gentleman kept up hospitality in the fifth century is
invaluable. We talk about our luxurious way of living. Let a man
read some of Sidonius's letters, and he will see that 1,400 years ago,
<iown in the South of France, people had a rather exalted notion of
grand and capacious amusement.3 Indeed, the impression we get
from these letters of the prodigality and luxury of the times is almost
•dreadful. There is one letter taken up with the description of the
dresses and appearance of a young bridegroom's retinue on his wedding
morning. There is another with very valuable details on the plan
of a large villa, apparently at Clermont; and there are up and down
the letter all sorts of odd hints and notes which only a letter-writer
could have inserted.

But what is especially valuable in this correspondence of Sidonius
is the fact that in it we seem to be taking a farewell of heathendom,
as it was concerned with the life of the upper classes in Roman society,
and find ourselves moving now in a world that has, if not yet become
Christianised, yet has become profoundly modified in its habits of
thought, and even in its moral tone, by the influence of Christianity.
Between the letters of Symmachus, the pagan gentleman, and those
of Sidonius, the Christian bishop, one would expect to find a great
gulf fixed. There is no gulf at all ; Sidonius, the Christian gentle-
man, bridges it over, and by the time that Sidonius has taken his
place as the bishop of his diocese, and begins to write letters to other
bishops and to the Pope and the clergy round him, we feel that we
have stepped with him into the Christian world, and are not surprised
to find that in this valuable correspondence we are brought face to
face with that not always very edifying form of composition, to wit,
religious letter-writing.

• ••••*••

Here I am touching upon a branch of our subject which requires
such very delicate handling that I feel I had better pass it by with a
very few words. This, however, must be said, that religious letters
were things unknown till the Gospel made its way in the world.
Not till the tendency had been at work to a very dangerous extent
whereby people were urged to aim at being Christians first and men
and women afterwards — not till unanimity in opinion on matters of
faith had become the idol which all professing Christians were taught
to bow down to, and till a wave of fierce and intolerant asceticism had
swept over the Christian world, and men and women had been taught
the duty of self-examination and self-contemplation to an extent which
made their own dreams and moods and emotional condition appear

3 Lib. ii. 9.

226 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

to them the only realities, and God's beautiful world that with its
glories was appealing to them on every side was getting to seem the
only dreamland — not till then did people begin to write religious
letters, detailing their own experiences, telling of their own or others'
visions, or temptations, or ecstasies ; and at the best occupied with
discussions on the interpretation of sacred Scripture, or the writer's
vieius on theology, the beatific vision, counsels of perfection, and
those tempestuous emotional paroxysms which are called conflicts of
the soul.

I am not at all sure that such letters as these when they abound
(as they have abounded at times) indicate that religion is in a
flourishing condition in the Church, or in a healthy condition for the
individual. But with such letters I feel that it would be unwise to
meddle now. The fourth century saw the beginning of what may be
called religious letter-writing. The three largest collections of these
letters are those of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Basil. St.
Augustine's letters can really hardly be called letters at all; they are
for the most part treatises on the interpretation of sacred Scripture,
or on theological or philosophical questions. The human element,
and even the moral element, is conspicuously absent. I can think of
only a single instance in all this collection of 263 epistles which I
could describe as a graceful or affecting letter ; I mean that one in
which the writer accepts the present of a tunic which a young lady
had prayed him as a special favour to wear. Sapidia — that was her
name — had made the tunic for her brother with her own hand. Her
brother had died — suddenly, we may infer : would Augustine wear the
tunic as a memento of the dear lost one, as a token of regard and
confidence from the sorrowing sister ? Augustine writes that he was
actually wearing the tunic at the moment that he was replying to
the letter of the poor girl.

In the letters of St. Jerome, which number one with another just
150, we have some valuable notices of the religious life of the time,
and we get a most curious impression of the awfully high pressure at
which devout people were living at the close of the fourth century.
So far St. Jerome's letters are invaluable, but there is an unreality
about them. I do not mean insincerity. The men and women are
not men and women, but creatures who are trying to be something
else, and who believe themselves to be something else. Jerome's
letters are, with, I think, a single exception, eminently and
glaringly unpractical. Jerome himself is up in a balloon, and he
seems to assume that everybody else is, or ought to be, or wishes to
be, or is trying to be up in a balloon too. The single exception
(which, however, you must take for what it is worth) is the letter to
Laeta, in which he gives advice on the education of a young lady
whose mother was very anxious to bring her up religiously. The
rules are almost amusing. The girl is not to mince her words as the

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 227

fashion is; she is not to paint; not to have her ears bored; not to
dye her hair red ; not to dine with her parents lest she should learn
to be greedy ; not to allow any young gentleman with curly hair to
smile at her ; she is to learn to spin, and she is by no means to learn
dancing or fancy work.

I think we have met with this kind of advice in more modern
times than St. Jerome's, but a letter like this is noteworthy because
it shows us how there is really nothing new under the sun ; and this,
perhaps, is one of the most useful lessons which familiar letters read
us — they hold the mirror not up to nature, but they hold it up to
society, and remind us that the manners of one age are not so very
different from those of another.

St. Basil's letters are very much less known than those of his two
great contemporaries, but they are far more real, genuine, human,
and interesting than those of Augustine and Jerome. Basil's letters
have a wide range of subjects, and his correspondents were people of
all ranks and classes and opinions — pagan philosophers and professors,
governors of provinces, ladies in distress, rogues who had tried to
take him in, and of course a host of bishops and clergy. There are
going on for four hundred of St. Basil's letters which have come
down to us, and therefore they must have been very popular once.
Certainly nobody reads them now. Yet as letters — as natural,
graceful, gentlemanly letters — they are incomparably superior to those
of Augustine or Jerome — these are always dreadfully grim. But Basil
can laugh and can be playful — witness his letter to the Governor
of Cappadocia, who had cured himself of an illness by dieting himself
on pickled cabbage. * My dear sir,' says Basil, ' I am delighted at
the news. I never believed in cabbage before, still less in pickled
cabbage ; but now I shall praise it as something superior to the lotus
that Homer talks of — yea, not inferior to the very ambrosia that
served as the food of the gods ! ' The Governor answered that letter
very briefly, and his answer has been preserved. ( My right rev.
brother,' says the Governor, ' you are right, there's nothing like
pickled cabbage ! Twice to cabbage kills — so the saying has it. I
find many times to cabbage cures. Come and try. Dine with me
to-morrow on pickled cabbage — that and nothing more ! ' I think the
Governor had the Bishop there. I suppose he felt compelled to go,
but I can't be quite sure. Think of a saint solemnly dining on
pickled cabbage !

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that after St. Basil's time,
after St. Augustine's time, the art of writing letters in an easy,
familiar, frank, and unconstrained way died out for more than a
thousand years. I do not mean that no letters have come down
to us ; they swarm in mediaeval literature ; the eleventh and twelfth
centuries are especially rich in Epistles, for that is a better name
for the missives which the prominent personages of those centuries

228 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

issued. But these epistles have all the appearance of being made
by machinery. To begin with, they are almost always written by
men in office, either in the State or the Church, by bishops or
archdeacons, or kings or nobles, or abbots or priors. One never
hears the prattle of a child, or the sob of the widow, or the
laughter of a friend. The letter-writers never unbend. Even in
St. Bernard's letters we hear little about common affairs. I re-
member one of them in which St. Bernard, being away from Clair-
vaux, and either at Eome or on his way to Eome, gets tidings tBat a
certain landed proprietor in the neighbourhood had swooped down
npon a herd of swine which belonged to St. Bernard and his monks.
The letter is a short one, and it bluntly tells the offending marauder
that on the receipt of this letter he shall straightway send back
the pigs without an hour's delay. * If not,' says St. Bernard, ' I will
beyond a doubt excommunicate thee for thine evil doings.' It was
no light offence to drive off the pigs of a holy abbot ! But the point
is that the abbot was writing and not the man, and it is so, as far
as I have observed, through all the correspondence of these ages.
The people whose letters were thought worth preserving were all
personages, they are players in the drama of their- time, and they
all have their stage dresses on — nay, they have all broken with any-
thing like the family life and the sympathies and affections which
flourish round the domestic hearth. The official life has swallowed
up the personal.

If you ask how and why this was, I should be disposed to
assign more than one cause for the phenomenon. But certainly the
most powerful and most crushing influence which produced this
effect was that which was furnished by the almost universal intoler-
ance of anything that bordered on freedom of thought and freedom
of speech during the long period to which I have referred. Do not
commit the mistake of assuming that this intolerance was only
in matters of theology. It was in everything. The bitterest
and narrowest intolerance that ever was displayed was not greater in
the domain of theology proper than in the domain of philosophy.
Abelard was no ecclesiastic, and the party strifes between Nominalists
and Kealists had only a remote bearing upon religious belief. When
Vacarius, the greatest lawyer of the twelfth century, began to lecture
at Oxford, and was gathering crowds round him in his lecture-room,
the king, Stephen, drove him away from England because he would
have no new-fangled science of law. Heresy as late as the fourteenth
century did not mean only theological heresy, it meant any novelty
in physical science, politics, law, even art. For a thousand years
people were afraid of expressing their real sentiments, they were
afraid of one another, orthodoxy was the one thing needful, and any
revolt from the tyranny of the dominant authorities was visited upon
the rebel with no sparing hand. How could people write freely as

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 229

friend to friend with a halter round their necks ? It was not till
the time of the Renaissance that men began to unbosom themselves
again. In speaking thus I must be understood to speak with special
reference to England and Englishmen, for the intellectual awakening
of Italy in the fourteenth century had characteristics peculiar to itself,
and the letters of Petrarch are wholly unlike anything which we
have to produce in our literature of the same age.

But when the fifteenth century dawns, then we come upon
what, I think, may fairly be called the incomparable collection
which goes by the name of the Paston letters, and which, I think,
stands quite alone in literature as an assemblage of the private letters
addressed by members of a family of distinction to one another
during a period of eighty-seven years, and which includes more than a
thousand letters, the earliest of the date of 1422, the latest written in
1509. The minuteness of detail, the naturalness, the outspokenness
of this correspondence, the way in which by its help we are plunged
into the family life and social habits and political schemes and con-
flicts of this period of our history, are so wonderful and so thoroughly
unreserved that an attempt was made about twenty years ago by the
late Mr. Herman Merivale to show that they were and must be a
forgery. The attempt was triumphantly scattered to the winds.
Mr. Merivale was smitten hip and thigh, the original letters were
actually produced, and are now deposited in the National Archives.
We are not likely to hear any further doubts of their genuineness.

One of the arguments that Mr. Merivale brought forward to
prove his point was that, on a comparison of these compositions with
the published works of the time, and especially with what might be
called the professional English of the bookmakers, the Paston
letters were incomparably more simple and modern in their language,
incomparably more intelligible and readable than the books were.
The fact is undeniable, and it is a very significant fact too. Familiar
letters, if they are not lucid and unaffected in style, if they are
pretentious and stilted, are worthless. Fine writing is bad enough
anywhere ; it is detestable in a letter. If a man is paid by the page
for his writing, and has to live by it, we may pity him for his hard
fate ; and if he spins off his periods with a view to covering so much
space in a given time, it is partly his fault and partly the fault of
his unhappy circumstances ; but if a man writes pages upon pages of
commonplace in a bombastic and inflated style to a relation or a
friend it is all his fault. He at any rate might have let it alone.

When we come to the sixteenth century we come to a very
curious condition of affairs. As far as the quantity of letters is
concerned, the sixteenth century has perhaps the largest assem-
blage of letters to produce of any period in English history. The
letters and papers (for the most part letters in form) of the reign of
Henry the Eighth, which have already been calendared, count by
VOL. XX.— No. 114. R

230 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug

hundreds of thousands. The Cecil correspondence preserved at
Hatfield, and which extends from the accession of Edward the Sixth
to the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, is a fathomless ocean of
letters. We are told that during all those fifty years over which the
Cecil correspondence extends scarcely a day passes which does not
produce one or more letters connected with passing events. The Cecil
correspondence is said to contain upwards of 30,000 documents, only a
portion of which is bound up in 210 huge volumes. Yet it is re-
markable that in all this prodigious assemblage of letters which the
sixteenth century could produce, the really hearty, friendly letters
are rarities. The men are all dressed in buckram, the women are all
playing a part ; there is no free, unrestrained intercourse.

When James the First came to the throne English society seemed
to recover from the constraint which had oppressed it so long, and then
everybody began to write letters — their name is legion. Everybody
began to write letters then, and everybody regarded letter- writing as
a graceful accomplishment by which he might hope to gain friends
or improve his prospects, or even make money ; it was like playing
the violin. Who could tell whether a career might not be open to
the professional ? For the newsletters of the seventeenth century
did the work of the newspapers now, and the quidnuncs of the time
bought and sold the last piece of intelligence, which straightway
was committed to paper and circulated sometimes widely, sometimes
among the privileged few. And this, too, produced its effect upon
the familiar intercourse which was carried on by correspondence.
The letter-writers were writing for an outside public, and how large
that public might grow to be no one could say. When the Common-
wealth comes, and everybody is suspicious of his nextdoor neighbour,
as he had been in the century before, it is noticeable that there is a
great dearth of such letters as we should most desire to meet with —
so great a dearth, indeed, that we are very imperfectly acquainted with
the general tone of sentiment among even the middle and upper classes,
and their real opinions and secret hopes and fears and wishes under
the Protectorate. It is extremely significant that in those periods of
our history, when Englishmen were most held down by the tyranny
of their rulers, when their lives and liberties were most insecure,
when the nation was cowering in the most abject panic — I mean
under the terror of Henry the Eighth, under the oligarchy which
ruled in the name of Edward the Sixth, and under the iron heel of
Cromwell — we have almost nothing that can be called familiar and
friendly letters. In times of horror and fear and suspicion, and
when no man can trust his neighbour or kinsman, men and women
dare not put pen to paper ; then the least said the soonest mended.

It is only when the reign of Queen Anne had come to an end
that English letter-writing revived. Pope and Bolingbroke wrote
for fame, Grey and Horace Walpole wrote for love. I think only

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 231

one man that ever put pen to paper has surpassed Horace Walpole as
a letter-writer. Grey and he were at Cambridge together, and
through life they were always friends and correspondents. It is
impossible now to do much more than mention the names of these
accomplished men. Grey's own letters are very finished composi-
tions— not because he laboured at them, they never smell of the
lamp ; I should be surprised to hear that he had ever re-written a
letter in 'his life — but Grey had all the fastidiousness and precision of
style which come of severe scholarly training and correct scholarly
taste, and it is conceivable that if his education had been other than
at was, he might have proved only an ordinary correspondent. I
sometimes think that if Cowper had been sent to the University,
instead of to an attorney's office, he might have been, and would have
been, more like Grey than any one else. But Horace Walpole would
have been Horace Walpole whatever his training had been. His
letters came from him by a spontaneity that can never be attained.
He was born a writer of letters, and if he had been shut up in a desert
island like Eobinson Crusoe he would have written letters all the same,
and kept them till some ship arrived which should carry them to
their destination. The good-humour, the gaiety, the delicate satire,
the exquisitely felicitous turns of expression, the sly hits here and the
shrewd comments there, the inimitable way in which he tells a story,
the absence of that scowling detraction and venomous spite which
make some of Pope's letters so distasteful — all this and a great deal
more make those nine volumes of Horace Walpole's correspondence
the delightful treasure-house they are. I never take down a volume
of Horace Walpole's letters without reading more than I intended,
without thinking and sometimes saying to myself, Why will people
•write any more books ? Surely we have enough already !

I have ventured to say that one letter-writer has surpassed even
Horace Walpole, but I feel inclined to withdraw my words. Could
any one surpass him ? Well, if any one could or did, that one was
Charles Lamb. And if he did it was because in Walpole's large
correspondence there is sometimes silver mixed with the gold, and
sometimes the writer's heart is not quite free from guile, nor his
hands always clean. But Charles Lamb's letters are all gold, all
pure gold. When he dipped his pen in the inkhorn all the gall
evaporated. That unique genius seemed to be unassailable by the
baser passions and meaner motives which trouble common men ; that
gentle spirit did not seem to know what the feeling of jealousy or
hatred or spite or envy meant. Only once that I remember was he
known to be angry, but then more grievously hurt and troubled
than wroth. It was when Southey had quite unintentionally laid
bare an old and dreadful wound.

No man can be the worse for reading Walpole's letters, but any
man or woman or boy or girl will be the better — yes, very greatly

R2

232 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the better — for reading Charles Lamb's letters, every word of
them!

Take the following specimen. It is one of that incomparable
collection of letters addressed to his friend Manning, and I give it as
an instance of the same kind of literary composition of which I have
already instanced the ghost story in Pliny's correspondence, when I
said that only in a letter could such a story be told ; for as there are
some subjects which are best dealt with by a poet, and some by a
mathematician, and some by an historian, and some by a philosopher,
so there are some which only admit of being handled by a letter-
writer who has no higher aim than to delight or amuse or interest
his friend, and to carry on a genial and light-hearted talk with him
on paper when he can no longer talk with him by word of mouth.
His aim is to provoke him to laughter or playful retort, to engage
with him in a game of skill and repartee, when neither side desires
to be too sombre, where both are playing for love, and each is the
merrier for all the surprises and tricks and passages with the foils
that occur as the game goes on. Take, I say, the following as a
specimen : —

DEAR MANHING, ... I wish you had made London in your way. There is
an exhibition quite uncommon in Europe, which could not have escaped your f/eniug
— a live rattlesnake, ten feet in length, and the thickness of a big leg. I went to
see it last night by candlelight. We were ushered into a room very little bigger
than ours at Pentonville. A man and woman and four boys live in this room,
joint tenants with nine snakes, most of them such as no remedy has been discovered
for their bite. We walked into the middle, which is formed by a half-moon of
wired boxes, all mansions of snakes — whip-snakes, thunder-snakes, pig-nose snakes,
American vipers, and this monster. He lies curled up in folds ; and immediately
a stranger enters (for he is used to the family, and sees them play at cards) he set
up a rattle like a watchman's in London, or near as loud, and reared up a head1
from the midst of these folds like a toad, and shook his head, and showed every
sign a snake can show of irritation. I had the foolish curiosity to strike the wires
with my finger, and the devil flew at me with his toad-mouth wide open : the
inside of his mouth is quite white. I had got my finger away, nor could he well
have bit me with his big mouth, which would have been certain death in five
minutts. But it frightened me so much that I did not recover my voice for a
minute's space. I forgot, in my fear, that he was secured. You would have
forgot too, for 'tis incredible how such a monster can be confined in small gauzy-
looking wires. I dreamed of snakes in the night. I wish to heaven you could see
it. He absolutely swelled with passion to the bigness of a large thigh. I could
not retreat without infringing on another box, and just behind a little devil, not
an inch from my back, had got his nose out, with some difficulty and pain, quite
through the bars ! He was soon taught better manners. All the snakes were
curious, and objects of terror ; but this monster, like Aaron's serpent, swallowed up
the impression of the rest. He opened his cursed mouth, when he made at me, as
wide as his head was broad. I hallooed out quite loud, and felt pains all over my
body with the fright.

Yours sincerely,

PHILO-SXAKE, C. L.

I have been told that when I was a child Charles Lamb once
patted me on the head. (Surely the hair will never cease to grow

1886 LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS. 233

on that particular spot ! ) But what a reserve of joy he would have
bestowed upon me if he had ever written me a letter ! A man with
a letter of Charles Lamb's in his breast coat-pocket addressed to his
very self would be as rich as one who owns a genuine Hobbema.

We have come to our own time at last, after skimming on the
surface of the centuries. We have got back to the Postmaster-
General from whom we started. Bless the good man and all that
belong to him ! We could not do without him now, and we owe him
more than we know. But is it true that with the increase of
quantity there is coming a deterioration in the quality of our letters ?
Never believe it ! First-rate quality in any commodity — material or
mental, moral or spiritual — is not to be had for the asking. But
pleasant, cheery, happy letters, such letters as — like the quality of
mercy — are twice blest ; courteous, graceful letters, such as win
young people friends, and go far to keep such friends in good
humour ; hearty, affectionate letters, such as strike the chords of love
and awaken mysterious tremors in response ; letters that tend to
keep us at our best and to protect us from sinking down to our
worst — these any one may write who is not too indolent to take
trouble and not possessed by the delusion that accomplishments
come by nature as spots do upon the leopard's hide.

Young men and maidens ! When I began to write this paper I
started with the most audacious purpose in my mind. I actually
intended to offer you some valuable advice on the subject of letter-
writing, beginning with ' Firstly ' and ending with * Forty-ninthly.'
Happily for my reputation, the gifted editor of this Review decidedly
objected to this excessive display of practical wisdom, and even Mr.
Cadaverous outdid himself by remarking, * Sir, I am surprised at
your imprudence ; no Doctor, not even a Doctor of Divinity, should
give advice gratis ; did it never occur to you that a handsome fortune
might be realised by setting up as a Professor of Epistolopathy and
charging the usual fee ? '

The suggestion is receiving my most earnest attention, and I am
not without hopes that a house in Savile Eow may be vacant before
next season.

AUGUSTUS JESSOPP.

234 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

BIRMINGHAM:
A STUDY FROM THE LIFE.

WHEN, last October, the mayors met at the Freemasons' Tavern to
celebrate the jubilee of municipal reform in England, Lord Granville
told them he had ' often thought it would be an interesting task to
trace the similarities and dissimilarities between the corporations of
our great centres of industry and the old historical municipalities
of Italy ; ' and then he proceeded to institute a comparison, the
general correctness of which will be admitted. The English muni-
cipalities, he said, were superior to the famous cities of Italy in
their respect for justice, for order, for the i general well-being ' of
their inhabitants. But his observations on the subject of culture
seemed to imply a misconception. The English cities, he observed,
* can only for the present humbly follow in the encouragement of
art and literature.' Doubtless Lord Granville meant what the
Archbishop of Canterbury meant when his Grace spoke, some weeks
later, on this very subject of municipalities, in the town of Birming-
ham, and before the famous Institute of which, in succession to
James Eussell Lowell, he is honorary president for the current year.
The artistic achievements of the Italian cities were, lie said, ' the-
love and despair of the ages.' If, in speaking of ' the encouragement
of art and literature,' Lord Granville was thinking of its fruits in
individual masterpieces, then, indeed, it is to be feared that we are
not only humble followers of the Italians ' for the present,' but also
for a more indefinite period than one likes to think of. But if, in
speaking of the encouragement, we mean the combined effort of the
community, for the sake of every member of it, then the English cities-
are, or will be, ahead of their superb prototypes of mediaeval Italy.

I am not attempting the task suggested in Lord Granville's
speech, but only intend to select a representative English town,,
to make a study of it from the life, and to show how this life is an
expression of the social tendencies of the day. I have therefore
chosen the great city which claims to be the most open and
hospitable to ideas, to be regarded as the most fully developed
example of the English city of the future — in a word, as the city
wherein the spirit of the new time is most widely, variously,
energetically assuming visible form and shape. What is the social

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 235

temperament of this Black Country community — its intellectual
character, its ideal of a City ? Is there any fundamental principle
underlying its multiform aspirations and endeavour ? In the conflict
of opinions even about questions seemingly incongruous (questions
about corporation stock, questions about popular culture ; local
questions and questions imperial) can there be discovered any line
of intellectual cleavage? Avoiding abstract discussions, I wish to
isolate, as it were, a fragment of the restless, many-sided life of
this swiftly-changing close of the nineteenth century — a fragment
of half a million souls — and to examine that.

Grote, the historian of Greece, was of opinion that the enfran-
chisement of the English municipalities was about as important and
far-reaching a measure as the great Eeform Bill itself. He thought
that a mayor might become somebody. But there are distinguished
politicians even who would appear to think rather meanly of mayors.
* A mayor ! ' was the exclamation which, in the late debate, a celebrated
Irish orator — Mr. Sexton — hissed out, half articulately, between his
teeth as he darted his arm daggerwise in the direction of the corner
seat, where sat, quietly smiling, the * rebel ' member for Birmingham.
Now the ex-mayor might have retorted (I mean mentally) that, if he
thought the Eighty-five would govern Ireland as well as the mayor
and his parliament of sixty-four members governed Birmingham, he
would at once vote for Mr. Gladstone's Bill. But perhaps it was only
in the heat of the moment that Mr. Sexton hurled forth a taunt
which seemed to imply that a mayor, even of the head-quarters of
British Radicalism, must be, comparatively speaking, a poor creature,
and his municipal politics of little more than parochial scope and
interest.

Judged by their respective utterances, the Primate is the sounder
statesman of the two. He clearly recognises the fact that the dele-
gation of great powers and responsibilities — amounting, indeed, to a
very liberal kind and degree of ' home rule ' — from the State to local
authorities is one of the most distinctive movements of the day.
The government of a town like Birmingham is, in reality, as com-
plex, and demands as high administrative gifts, as if it were a little
kingdom. From main drains to free libraries, from coal gas to the
antique, whatever concerns the physical and mental well-being of
her children, that is the business, the official business, of this re-
nowned city of the Caucus. Lord Granville's Italian cities had foreign
policies of their own ; and their energies were rather often expended
in fighting their foreign rivals next door. In this respect, the English
cities are at a disadvantage ; but, making allowance for this differ-
ence, the scope of self-government of the ideal English City (such as
the democratic age is bringing forth) will as far exceed that of the
Italian communities, as the nineteenth-century conceptions of public
duty are wider than those of the Middle Age. The distinguished

236 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

statesman — or, if Mr. Sexton prefers, the distinguished mayor — had
this in his mind when he said that Birmingham wanted to keep her
best men to herself — her best students, her best writers, her best
surgeons and physicians, her best artists. Why should they be so
very ambitious to go to London ? Why should they not turn Bir-
mingham into a London of the Midlands — a small London certainly,
but unlike the mechanical conglomerate of great London — an organ-
ism with a life of its own, and a life to be proud of ?

But it was not without a long and stout fight that the modern
idea of the English city obtained final, definite recognition in
Birmingham. Stated generally, the whole course of municipal
conflict in Birmingham, from 1835 until the present day, has turned
on this idea : — the Tories battling obstinately against it ; the Liberals,
or Kadicals, as they were ordinarily called, the Democrats, as Mr.
Chamberlain now calls them, fighting as obstinately for it. The
contending theories of the scope of corporate government might be
described as parochialism and civism (to borrow a word from Dr.
Benson's Institute speech). The parochialists were of a mind with
the local historian, Hutton ; who, about forty years before the
Municipal Acts, taunted his townsmen on their rising ambition for the
pomps of a mayor, * a white wand and a few fiddles.' ' The Birming-
ham folk,' wrote he, * have generally something on the anvil besides
iron.' ' A town without a charter is a town without a shackle,' he
rapped out. Short sentences of this wrought-iron sort, as if chipped
off by the deft blows of a Black Country hammerman, are scattered
throughout his book. The reason of Hutton's hostility to the civic
idea must be explained. Birmingham had always been ' a free town '
— without any ' shackles ' of trading guilds, or merchant guilds, or
State-made guilds of any sort. In this 'unshackled' condition, Bir-
mingham had won her great prosperity ; and in it he wished her to
remain. Besides, the chartered corporations of the day were any-
thing but models of self-government.

When at last the era of municipal reform arrived, the Tories
were still holding to the venerable doctrine that a local government
fulfils its end when it keeps a jail and a squad of policemen. They
resisted the extension of local liberties, on the ground that popular
assemblages — as at ward elections — must be detrimental to the
peace and security of the town. They were repeatedly urging —
though the connection was not very apparent — that the charter for
which the Liberals fought would injure trade. In fact, the muni-
cipal conflict was the national conflict in miniature, as if viewed
through an inverted telescope ; and the fundamental question com-
mon to them both was an ethical question : the question of trust or
mistrust in the people ; the question which underlies all the speeches
in which Birmingham's most distinguished citizen, Mr. Chamberlain,
has elaborated (but not very exhaustively) his programme of ' State

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 237

Socialism ' — in a word, a question or theory of human nature. The
special issues in dispute — State franchise, municipal franchise, control
of police, the limit of local taxation — might be infinitely various and
with no apparent connection ; but the permanent, the fundamental
issue, as above stated, was one and the same. Thus, as already said,
there was a law of political cleavage, according to which it would be
found that the men who would vote, say, for such prosaic measures
as a city's purchase of gas and water monopoly, were the same men
who would fight most earnestly for the removal of electoral restric-
tions, whether in State or city ; and for the utmost expenditure of
local funds on such a non- political object as popular culture. Such
were the men who, in the years when Birmingham was just making
her first advance towards the great eminence which she has since
reached, took the high ground that no question was too great for
the consideration of the municipality — that is, of the people, not
merely in their individual, mechanical aggregate of Browns, Joneses,
and Robinsons, but in their character of civic organism — that, in a
word, the true English city should be a sort of ' miniature republic ; '
influencing, either by direct impulse or merely by removing unfair
obstacles against individual development, the whole sphere of social
life ; yet necessarily subordinating its activities to those of the
national whole, and beating with the nation's mighty life.

For the details of the struggle between the popular and anti-
popular parties I must refer the reader to Mr. J. Thackray Bunce's
municipal history, where it will be seen, how the Tories endeavoured
to nullify the charter by preventing the newly born corporation from
maintaining and controlling its own police ; how Lord Melbourne
became alarmed lest ' those Birmingham fellows,' as he called them,
should, in their revolutionary career, reverse the Saturnian feat by
swallowing their Whig parent ; how all the Whig ministers of the
day, including the Greys and the Eussells, shared the apprehensions
of the Tory Peels and the Tory Wellingtons ; how consequently
Whig and Tory combined to foist upon Birmingham the ' foreign
police,' the ' foreign gendarmerie ' — in other words, the police con-
trolled from London — how irate Birmingham Radicals, of the type
of Mr. Scholefield, M.P., declared they would sooner emigrate from
Birmingham, bag and baggage, than live in a town pronounced unfit
to take care of itself; how ' those Birmingham fellows ' abused the
* foreign police ' and the London Department almost in the same
language in which the Irish orators of to-day denounce ' the Castle '
and the Royal Irish Constabulary ; how, after four years' fighting, the
Radicals carried their point ; but how even then the Town Council
continued to rank as one among seven or eight co-ordinate Boards
independently levying rates for their respective departments, and
crossing and recrossing each other's purposes to such striking effect
that one * authority ' might be seen diligently cleansing while a

238 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

second as diligently was shooting rubbish into that very slimy and
oozy Kea which did duty as the Arno of the Black Country Florence ;
and lastly how, in 1851, the Town Council, swallowing up all the
Boards, started on its career as a great corporation. I will only say
of this period that the Whigs — the more ' cautious,' as they them-
selves explain, the more ' timid,' as others insinuate, wing of the
great Liberal army — really had some reason for dreading an opening
of the democratic flood-gates by the * Birmingham fellows.' For, in
the first place, Birmingham was the cradle of the political unions
which hastened the great Keform Bill ; upon which Conservative
politicians fathered Chartism and all its works ; and of which, it may
be added, for the sake of historical connection, our Liberal federations
and caucuses are the latest developments. In the second place, local
politics and national politics were interfused in Birmingham to an
extent and in a degree unknown before or since in any other English
city.

This, then, was the first stage in the development of the civic
idea. Its work, as also that of the next or transitional stage, which
lasted until about 1872, lay mainly in the material sphere. But
also in this first period there manifested themselves the early signs
of what the future historians of the nineteenth century will recognise
as the beginning of the period of popular culture in England.
Manchester and Liverpool were already in this respect some years
ahead of Birmingham, whose famous free library and first art gallery
were not opened to the public until 1865, the latter institution, it
may be remarked, being first opened on Sundays in 1872, to the
great delight of the vast majority of the working population. The
free library, to quote an eloquent speech at the opening ceremonial,
is < the first fruit of a clear understanding that a great town exists
to discharge the same duties to the people of that town, which a
nation exists to discharge towards the people of that nation.' The
speech was a ' note ' of a new time. Students of contemporary history
will mark how the period from about 1872 has been distinguished
by an awakening of popular taste, revealing itself in the establish-
ment of free libraries, picture galleries, museums, loan exhibitions,
in almost every corner of the country. This same period, moreover,
is distinguished by a rapid growth of political associations. People
fail to realise the significance of this popular or democratic
renaissance, for the simple reason that they are living in the very
midst of it. In the Midland city, this revival set in with full force
in the third or present period of its civic development, the Chamber-
lain period — the period of bold experiments in self-government, of
new conceptions of social duty, of new ideas on the relation of the
city to the higher life of its people.

The ordinary municipal powers (which Birmingham shares in
common with other great towns) have been used by her with such

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 239

splendid energy that in the few years of this third period thousands
of fever-haunted human piggeries, misnamed houses, have been swept
away, 1,500,000^. worth of land acquired in the heart of the town,
and a series of magnificent streets and noble public buildings raised
upon it, which have changed Birmingham from one of the ugliest to
one of the finest cities in the kingdom. The purchase of the gas
and water works for 4,000,OOOL was an experiment of [unparalleled
magnitude in the history of English municipalities. This transaction
looked like any other commercial transaction, but itunvolved a social
principle worth noting. It dealt the first great blow at the hoary
abuse of ' consolation ' prices, proceeding on the just principle that
market price is the price of private property required for the good
of all : a principle which Mr. Chamberlain has so earnestly enforced
in his political addresses, and of which more will be heard when the
Irish question is swept off the boards. Secondly, as regards the
financial results of the purchase, the price of water has been reduced
30 per cent. ; the reduction in the price of gas has also been very
large — two hints for the future municipality of London. But in this
case the meaning of ' profits ' has undergone a change. ' Profits '
go to the reduction of local taxation, or to the further lowering of
prices, for the whole community of Birmingham is the owner.
That a necessary of life should never be the monopoly of private
speculators, whose first care is (naturally) for dividends, is the doctrine
which Mr. Chamberlain enforced in 1874, the year of his second
term of office. ' We shall get our profits indirectly,' said he, ' in
the comfort of the town and the health of its inhabitants.'

But the distinctive feature — the most honourable and the most
attractive feature — of this present period is the latest step in the
comprehension of popular culture within the scope of municipal
energy and ambition. This is the ' new departure ' in the history of
English cities. English municipalities have expended public money
on free libraries and picture galleries ; but the beautiful building
nearly opposite the Birmingham new Art Gallery is the first municipal
school of art in the British Isles. The new school and its branches
now give instruction to 2,000 pupils. That the city cares as much
for the culture of her people as for the sweeping of her streets is
the boast of every Birmingham man, from the chief magistrate to
the humblest master craftsman bending over his ' factored ' work in
his own garret. And lastly, in order that the community might
have the freest possible scope for its energies, there came into force
in 1884 the Consolidation Act, one of the chief effects of which was
the removal of the limit of the public rate for libraries, museums,
galleries, and the Art School; and, in a word, the extension of bor-
rowing powers indefinitely.

And so we have travelled a long way beyond the jail-and-squad-
of-constables stage in the evolution of an English City. It would

240 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

astonish the old historiographer if, revisiting the earth, he could see
the Birmingham house of parliament, with a ' strangers' gallery '
more liberal in space than that of St. Stephen's ; and learn how its
members regard a seat in it as a highest distinction ; if he were made
to understand that the lands, the parks, the gardens, the public works,
the great buildings, the splendid libraries and galleries, which the
sixty-four members administered, are the property of the half-
million people ; and to realise the strong personal interest, as of
ownership, which every man in the half-million feels in the institu-
tions of his town. The keen, restless intelligence of the Birmingham
people — their curiosity, in the fine sense of the word — their hospitality
to ideas, their pride in their city (with its significant motto of
Forward),' their idea of the city as a power to which they stand in
filial relationship — this it is which so forcibly strikes a stranger as
soon as he begins to know them at first hand.

I must now address myself to the question, How far does all this
official activity — all this organisation — represent the ideas and the
aspirations of the people ? Is it not possible that a dead weight of
popular indifference may underlie it ? Well, let the people answer
for themselves. As already explained, the Consolidation Act con-
tained proposals for the abolition of the law which restricted the
* popular culture ' rate, as it may be called, to one penny in the pound.
But the task of introducing order into the confusion of the already
existing municipal Acts was so pressing that many even among the
warmest advocates of free libraries and galleries, dreading the effect
of the prospect of increased rates, were for omitting the proposals.
These gentlemen were backed by a considerable body of the rate-
payers. But while the city fathers were disputing, out the voters
turned in their thousands at the ward elections, and by overwhelming
majorities approved of the application to Parliament, 'just for the
reason,' as a leading citizen of Birmingham afterwards said to me,
t that our Bill increased the free library rate.'

This success was principally due to the working-men voters. It
was a curious commentary on the first stingy measure introduced by
Mr. Ewart, more than a generation before, for ' the establishment of
free libraries at municipal expense, providing that the rate should
not exceed a halfpenny ' in the pound, with the further precaution,
that, before a community could levy its own halfpenny two-thirds of
the ratepayers must vote for it ; that if they did get their halfpenny
they could only spend it on house room, not a farthing on books ; and
that if they did not get it they must wait two years before making a
second application.

* There is one thing,' said another eminent citizen — one of the
most enlightened and successful servants of the great community for
which he toils — ' there is one thing which neither the Council nor
the people will stand, and that is extravagance : they will sooner

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 241

spend fifty pounds than fifty farthings to get a thing done if that
be the only way to get it well done.' After a tolerably minute
investigation on this point (as well as on many others) I have come
to the conclusion that in this rational, this true notion of ' expense '
the councillors reflect the opinion of the vast majority of the
Birmingham population.

To turn for a further illustration to a department which, though
not under the direct control of the Town Council, is yet representative
— the School Board — I was greatly struck with a remark which I fre-
quently heard from working men no less than from the Board
officials : * We consider the child first.' An expedition among the
thirty-six Board schools — so many of which are models of taste and
comfort — will convince any one that the Birmingham people are as
good as their word. The architecture and the adornment of some of
these schools are in themselves an education to their pupils. The
Birmingham ideal is that the schools, where the young generation
is trained for its life's work when the old generation is dead and
gone, shall be as beautiful as the common purse can afford.

In the free art gallery one's attention is speedily attracted
by many and eloquent signs of what I have been insisting upon
throughout this article — the idea, the sentiment of the City. Pre-
sented to the town 'by five thousand workmen, in appreciation of
the earnest and able manner in which he has promoted measures
tending to the intellectual and material advancement of the popu-
lation, during a long and honourable connection with the municipality
of Birmingham ' — this is the inscription on the portrait of an ex-
chairman of the Free Libraries Committee of the Birmingham
Council — the three-acres-and-a-cow statesman, Mr. Jesse Collings.
Had this been the gift of five rich aldermen, who would not * miss '
their guineas, one might perhaps pass it by without much remark ;
but the ' five thousand workmen ' contributing their pennies, that is
the point of it. And there is another point, perhaps ; we may, or
may not, approve of Mr. Jesse Collings (and his quadruped), but
that is beside the present question — What is the intellectual and
moral temperament of this Birmingham democracy ? what its attitude
towards ' the things of the mind ' ? what kind of public service does
it most appreciate, whether the servant be Mr. Collings or Mr. X. ?

The foregoing is only one example, which I have taken at random,
from a great number of precisely similar memorials in honour of
citizens who have done good service to the town, or of free gifts
from other citizens to enrich the common collection. The portrait of
John Henry Newman — Birmingham's most illustrious inhabitant — is
presented by a body of subscribers ' to the Corporation.' Among
other names is that of George Dawson, whose portrait is in re-
freshing contrast to his statue. But, to pass over this part of my
subject, there is the splendid collection of the paintings of Cox —

242 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

himself a Birmingham man — presented to the town by Mr. J. H.
Nettlefold.

But there could hardly be a more creditable record of the
popular taste of which I am speaking than the tablet in the great
library which sets forth how the building was destroyed by fire in
1879, how it was reopened in 1882 by Mr. Bright and the chief
magistrate, and how a sum of 14,000£., a considerable proportion of
it from the artisans, was ' forthwith subscribed ' for the purchase of
books. The restoration of the Shakespeare section, with its collec-
tion of about 7,000 volumes in every literary language of the
world, some of them extremely rare and valuable, is in itself no
mean triumph for the Birmingham people. The exquisitely designed
Shakespeare room is a veritable shrine, in which, among visitors less
illustrious, the aged recluse of St. Mary's Oratory has sometimes
been seen lingering, as if oblivious of the vast tomes of the Actcu
Sanctorum close by. One cannot but admire the steady persistence
with which the city has been repairing the losses of the great fire.
I see that in some details about the government of Birmingham,
which Mr. Chamberlain has been communicating for publication in
the United States, the reference library alone is said to contain
about 80,000 volumes; but in 1882 the number was only about
50,000. Moreover the volumes in the seven or eight branch
libraries number some 60,000 more. So that at the present time
the Library Committee of the Town Council is responsible for the
keeping of about 140,000 volumes, the property of the community.
The total issue of books ' by the corporation ' (to quote Mr. Cham-
berlain's expression) exceeds a million a year. Not only are the
books there, but some of the most highly educated citizens — not
excluding M.P.'s of the borough — have fallen on the happy device of
giving lectures on the contents of the library : one lecturer choosing
the books on law ; a second the editions, commentaries, history, &c.,
of the poems and dramas of Shakespeare ; a third taking for his
subject the literature of Greece and Rome ; a fourth the botanical
books ; a fifth art works, and so on. These lectures, reprinted in
pamphlet form at a penny each, have a large circulation and form
an invaluable guide to the working men who read in, or borrow
books from, the library.

The perfect freedom of these institutions ! As regards access to
the famous central library — one of the most magnificent of the kind
in existence — perhaps the most formidable restriction is contained
in the laconic rule that ' readers giving a false name and address will
be held responsible for the consequences.' Wherever you hail from,
whoever you are, and whatever you are — provided you be sober, not
too untidy — the whole treasures of the place, from Tupper to Aristo-
phanes, from the Queen's magnificent present (Lepsius, price about
to a file of Punch, are at your disposal. When I saw how

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 243

promptly my volumes were brought to me I could not help reflecting
on the somewhat leisurely processes of the British Museum. l One
of my most distinguished readers,' says the chief librarian, ' is the
little boy whom you may have just seen outside ; he blackens boots,
or looks after the cabmen's horses, or does something of the sort ;
however in he comes, here in his leisure moments gets his books,
takes his arm-chair, and becomes deeply absorbed.' * With all this
enormous circulation of books among people of whom you cannot
know much more than the names and addresses,' I asked, ( do you
have many lost or damaged ? ' ' The instances,' was the reply, ' are so
very few that they are not worth mentioning.' Let us cross the square
and enter the new Museum galleries with their fine collection of
paintings and sculptures, and bronzes, vases, jewelled enamels,
textiles, embroideries, carvings, arms, gems, antiquities of every
age and of every clime from Japan to Britain. Not a single accident
occurred even on the Sunday after the inaugural ceremony by the
Prince of Wales last November, on which day the street was blocked
with a crowd eager to get in, and when even what looked like the
* rough ' element was not inconspicuous among the sightseers. The
curator, Mr. Whitworth Wallis, of South Kensington, tells me how
among his more unpolished visitors he has noticed a gradual
improvement in manners and personal appearance, as if they were
influenced by the example of the others whom they met there, on
equal terms for the moment, or perhaps by their awakening sense of
beauty. Not the least pleasant proof of the success of this great
municipal experiment is the regular resort to the spot of numbers
of artisans, who may be seen patiently examining the specimens of
artistic craftsmanship, making note of them, and perhaps instituting
silent comparisons between their style and that of certain classes of
their own workmanship.

I may here remark that the Birmingham Art Gallery possesses
great advantages over the Liverpool gallery, superb even as this is.
The Liverpool institution is too exclusively a collection of paintings.
The Birmingham institution preaches as plainly as may be the
supreme value of artistic treatment in all handicrafts, for which
reason it is intended to embrace everything from a button to a
Burne-Jones.

On the other hand Liverpool can give a useful hint to Birming-
ham : as, for example, in her collection, of topographical details, in
the form of drawings of the old seaport, which will be of the highest
value to historical students. But these great provincial capitals are
not too proud to learn from one another ; and shortly after the
opening of the Birmingham gallery a deputation of the Nottingham
town council visited the town to take note of its public institutions.
From the opening day until the present date — a period of nearly
eight months — the Birmingham Art Gallery and Museum has been

244 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

visited by upwards of 800,000 persons. This attendance far exceeds
that of any other institution of the kind in the kingdom. In short,
the success of this magnificent popular experiment has exceeded all
expectations. This is due to the determination of the City Council
to turn the galleries to the utmost account for recreation and in-
struction ; to the intelligence and the enthusiasm with which the
Curator has addressed himself to his enviable task ; and in no small
degree to the revolt against the Sabbatarian superstition. At the
present moment the picture galleries are being furnished with the
electric light (how slow we are in London !).

Sixpenny, and penny, catalogues, containing short biographies of
artists, comments on paintings, descriptions and historical sketches of
the processes in enamel work, pottery, decorative iron work, &c. &c.,
are bought on the spot by the ten thousand. The Birmingham
people do not commit the mistake of turning their town and country
visitors loose into this splendid collection without a guide to the
appreciation of what they have come to look at. As already said,
the entrance is free. But to the Nottingham museum, the beauti-
ful building which, from the top of its hill, overlooks the lovely
valley of the Trent, admission is free on Tuesdays only: sixpence
is charged on Fridays, and a penny on each of the remaining days of
the week.

Doubtless it is but natural that the Birmingham museum should be
a popular institution in a community which for variety of handicraft is
a long way ahead of all other towns. There are upwards of five hundred
classified manufactures, which, counting their respective branches,
are supposed to embrace 2,500 or more different sorts of occupation.
The Birmingham masters and artisans will frankly admit to you that
a great deal of the produce is ' rubbish.' They admit the imputation
about ' Brummagem ware ; ' but having done so, they will stoutly
argue that the real culprit is the barbarous consumer, that if they
produce the very worst stuff, they also produce the best, and that
large quantities of the finest and costliest articles sold under other
local designations in London and all over the world are the ' factored *
work of Birmingham craftsmen. I inquired of one of my master-
worker acquaintances whether it was true that, besides making glass
beads, and cheap (and very dangerous) rifles for the more unsophisti-
cated races of mankind, the Birmingham artists exported copper
gods to the heathen of her Majesty's Indian dominions, and then
sent out missionaries, on comfortable salaries, to disestablish and
disendow them. The charge was repudiated.

I have here touched upon a chapter of what might be palled the
natural history of the Birmingham people ; and I can only touch
upon it. Their quick intelligence, their openness to ideas, their
liberalism, are partly ascribed, by some authorities, to this very
variety of occupation ; to the ancient town's freedom from the

] 886 BIRMINGHAM. 245

K shackle ' of a guild, owing to which freedom, as also to its position
in the centre of England, it became a favourite place of resort for
enterprising people (and perhaps for waifs and strays) from other
parts of the country. Whatever may be the bearing of this theory
of immigration upon the intelligence and the liberalism of the
town, it is certain enough that a surprisingly large number of
Birmingham's most distinguished citizens are not Birmingham men
at all. Mr. Chamberlain, for example, is * only a Londoner ; ' Hutton,
who wrote the history of his beloved Birmingham, was an immigrant.
' My compassionate nurse,' he calls the town of his adoption : ' I was
hungry and she fed me, thirsty and she gave me drink, a stranger
and she took me in.' The words express the spirit in which, gene-
rations after, men who, like himself, were poor when they began
their career in Birmingham and rich when they ended it, proved
their affection and gratitude to the city by endowing her with noble
institutions and making her the inheritor of their wealth.

If an inquirer into the distinctive characters of English cities were
to ask me for some hints about operations in the Midland capital, I
should say that he could not do better than begin by making friends
with that part of it which extends square-wise round its noble Town
Hall ; and includes, almost in one continuous series of great build-
ings, the Institute, the Free Library, the Free Gallery and Museum,
the Council House, the Mason College, and the Municipal School of
Art. It is an eloquent sermon, in stone, on the temper of unofficial
Birmingham, her ambition as a corporate unity, and her citizens'
ideas of social obligation to the community wherein they have
prospered. The Mason College — that 'noble gift,' as Professor
Huxley called it in his address on modern culture — cost 170,000 of
the million pounds which, according to Mr. Chamberlain's estimate
of two or three months ago, represent the value of the parks, the
gardens, the public institutions, the scholarships, the works of art,
with which in the short space of twenty years the Masons, the
Ry lands, the Tangyes, the Nettlefolds, the Adderleys, the Calthorpes,
the Middlemores, the Chamberlains, the Rattrays, and others have
enriched and adorned their city.

Other English towns can boast of individual buildings which
equal, or even surpass, the best in the Midland capital. The museum
of Nottingham is unique. The Town Hall of Manchester is a monu-
tnent of which the greatest of cities might be proud. In some respects
• — architectural and others — the library and gallery which Liverpool
owes to two of her most illustrious citizens, surpass the corresponding
institutions of Birmingham. But nowhere in England are gathered
together such varieties of intellectual wealth, so many evidences of
a noble public spirit, as in that small space round the Town Hall of
Birmingham. There is a certain indefinable air of refinement, and
of a homely, familiar, hospitable Northern welcome, about this favoured
VOL. XX.— No. 114. S

246 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

spot. Moreover, the Liverpool galleries, the London Palaces of
Delight (which want more money) are wholly, or nearly so, the results
of private benevolence ; but though private benevolence has done so-
much for Birmingham, it is the spontaneous initiative of the com-
munity as a whole which gives it its great distinction among English
cities.

Speaking about the Mason endowment, Mr. Max Miiller makes
the noteworthy observation that what he admires most in its statutes
is * its spirit of faith in the future.' It was feared lest the teaching
of the College should be confined to what Mr. Goschen, in one of his
addresses on modern culture, calls ' saleable knowledge ' — to metal-
lurgy, practical mechanics, technique, Davy lamps, coal mining,
and, generally speaking, to — if I may venture the expression — the
chemistry of the Black Country. The founder, however, left the
decision of this important question to his townsmen, and the result
is that the literatures and philosophies of Greece and of Eome
divide with modern science and modern languages the sphere of
college studies. * Politics ' and ' theology ' — denominationalism, in
whatever form, educational or any other — are the only subjects
against which the College shuts its doors. Here we have the stern
Puritanism of old Birmingham, passing into modern nonconformity
(a most potent influence in the Midland city), and this milder form of
the old spirit, mellowing at last into nineteenth-century humanism.

Round this new seat of modern culture are slowly grouping
themselves into an interconnected living whole all the educational
institutions of the place, from the elementary Board school upwards.
I will deal with only one of them — the Institute, the honorary
presidency of which is regarded as being almost as great a distinction as
the rectorship of a Scotch University. Indeed the Institute is looked
to by some people as the real nucleus of the future University of
the Midlands : but whatever its destined position may be, it is a
wonderful microcosm of that variety of pursuit distinctive of the
big Birmingham outside which Burke christened * the toy shop
of Europe.' If on some night of the session one could see
through the floors and walls of its endless lecture rooms and labora-
tories a very extraordinary spectacle would meet the gaze — in one
room an audience listening to a lecture on the development of the
English novel ; on the other side of the partition a crowd of students
taking notes of an address on architectural styles ; in a group of
other rooms the Birmingham artisan, in his hosts, all eyes and ears,
taking in his pennyworth of magneto-electricity, or of physiology, or of
hygiene, or of mixed mathematics ; down below, at the bottom of a long
whirligig of stairs, in the metallurgical department, young men bend-
ing over furnaces where the solid iron of the Black Country melts
like rain ; and far away over their heads 200 small Paganinis at their
pennyworth of fiddling, following with simultaneous bow-sweep their

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 247

conductor's movements on a violin diagram on a blackboard. When
I came upon them (to my amazement, I must confess) they were play-
ing ' Grod Save the Queen,' and playing it very well. This experi-
ment in juvenile performance was started two or three years ago, and
has been, I am assured, a success, in spite of the jocular legend that
the innovator's friends and admirers sent him by postal delivery an
occasional box of cotton wool. The class, in short, is but a recent
manifestation of that love for music which no one who visits the
provinces will fail to recognise as one of the most remarkable
characteristics of the awakening of national taste and refinement.

Perhaps to some reposeful temperaments there may seem to be
too much of intensity— of high-pressure energy — in all these multi-
form pursuits. But, however this may be, the energy is Birming-
ham's ' all over.' As for the penny lecture system, it is, without
doubt, one which should be adopted by Sir Edmund Hay Currie and
his friends for their ' Palace of Delight ' — the ' People's University ' of
recreation and culture — in the East End of London. The introduction
of the penny system in the Midland Institute was immediately
followed by a large increase in the number of working-men pupils.

The lesson which Birmingham and her sister cities — Newcastle,
Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool — teach
is this : that the greater the facilities the people have for self-culture
the more eagerly and gratefully will they take advantage of them.
In Birmingham even the republished addresses on popular subjects
are sold every season literally by the hundred thousand. Some in-
teresting facts on these points could be given by the professors and
lecturers, who in their overcrowded rooms repeat the same address
to different audiences of workmen from the same factories and work-
shops.

The great characteristic of this manysided popular movement is
its spontaneity. As the Primate said in his Institute speech, ' nothing
but an interior agency could have done all that has been done
in Birmingham, an agency in which every single man has an interest.'
But these interior agencies are also initiating energies, and it is re-
markable how they are directed to serve the one end of public good —
how, in other words, even the unofficial agencies of local philanthropy
are harmonised with the official, corporate work of the community.
To descend to the very nadir of social existence in the Midland
capital, I would indicate as an illustration of this harmony, the un-
official co-operation of the Halfpenny Dinner Society with the
School Board. I say that the ' father ' of the halfpenny dinner
movement (not only in Birmingham, but in England), Mr. France,
of Moseley, and his associates, whose daily * delivery ' at the public
elementary schools is now as regular an institution in Birmingham as
the cabinet on wheels which accompanies the science head master
on his rounds, accomplish more of the work of practical Christianity

s 2

248 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

in a day than certain other fathers of the cities of the ages of faith
got through in a month.

The light which the operations of agencies of this description
throw on the lives, the needs, the characters of people of the lower
class will prove inestimably valuable in the times of social legisla-
tion which are close at hand. I have a striking example of this in
a mass of MS. which has been compiled for me by the kind direction
of the secretary to the School Board, and which might be called a
Doomsday Book of the miseries — and the heroisms — of the poor. No
one acquainted with the facts accumulated by the officers of the
department will be at a loss to foresee how the Birmingham capital
will cast its solid vote on the coming question of Free Education.
This is one of the advantages of studying a community from the
life.

And now, to end this portion of iny subject, I will ask the reader
to accompany me, in imagination, to a popular ' At Home ' — first of
Old Birmingham, and then of Young Birmingham, qui rempublicam
sustinebit when Old Birmingham has departed. We may as well
go on a Sunday — for some reasons. In the galleries and wide area
of the Town Hall at least 3.000 people, representing every class of
the community — learned folk and folk not very learned, masters
and workmen, and Midas rubbing shoulders with the slender-pursed
half-timer — are cheering some passage in a * lay sermon ' on the
English poets, or on ideal communities, or on the ugliness of workmen's
dwellings, the speaker in this last case reminding them of the artist
who had learned from Dr. Johnson how hell was paved, but who did
not know, until he went in and out among the houses of manufac-
turing towns, how it was ' papered ; ' or, plunging deeper into geology,
the preacher may be describing the ( slabs with rain-drops and ripple-
marks, that tell how the tide rose and fell millions of years ago.'
Said a Birmingham clergyman once about a meeting of this discription,
1 1 envy you your congregation : there wasn't a cough among them.'
He did not say whether he envied the cheering.

I can fancy how in the lay church a three-thousand-power congre-
tion would cheer the expressive reading of some splendid passage
from Job, or from 'Isaiah of Jerusalem,' and feel none the less
reverence by reason of their demonstrativeness. There are in
Birmingham places of worship which are as crowded on Sundays as
the Town Hall during its winter and spring season ; but the contrast
which in this respect some others show is sufficiently startling.
While we in London are still under the Sabbatarian yoke, the
Birmingham people have shaken themselves free of it ; and when you
have had your lay sermon, or your music, in the Town Hall, you
, may cross the square and spend an hour or two in the Museum and
'Gallery.

Now for Young Birmingham. I cannot but think that many

3886 BIRMINGHAM. 249

refining impressions must be left upon his mind by the mere beauty
of the noble building — the Town Hall, again — in which he so fre-
quently appears, with grown-up Birmingham watching how he com-
ports himself. The occasions of his appearance — in public, observe —
are too numerous for notice, and I will choose that which has the
advantage of being one of the very latest institutions of the city —
namely, the periodical gymnastic display by the boys and girls from
the public elementary schools. I have seen many a pretty sight in
England and out of it, but none more charmingly pretty, of its kind,
than this. In the orchestra amphitheatre were placed hundreds of
children, boys and girls, whose pure voices blended in the choral
singing which is a favourite art of provincial England ; and on the
broad arena the brightly clad bands of athletes, still in their sunny
borderland between childhood and early youth, executed, with simul-
taneous, exquisite precision, their rhythmic maze dances and their
gymnastic feats amid the plaudits of as much of lay and official
Birmingham as the galleries could accommodate. One sees that,
in this assembly of the children, the City — the parental City, let
us call it — exercises a civic ' function,' or that only a very slight
formality is required to render it completely so. The president of
the gathering is the chief magistrate of the city. To him, as
prize distributor, are presented the victors at the running, leap-
ing, swimming, cricket, football, and other matches of the season ;
and one thinks it a very natural thing when, the speech-making
coining on, one of the speakers goes back to an olden time when
' the most beautiful and gifted race ' of the world, before or since,
valued games as they valued knowledge, and turned them into
public festivals. At any rate there can be no doubt as to the spirit
in which this great community regards its obligations to the rising
race. On the other hand, their consciousness of this public interest
in them, their direct personal association with the names, the men,
the institutions which have given their town its high distinction, are
likely to brace and refine the moral fibre of the young, and in after
years to develop their sense of social duty.

One night last winter, on the same spot, but before a very
different audience, this question of educating the rising race formed
the subject of one of the most impressive debates ever heard in an
English city. The audience — judge, jury, rival counsel all in one —
was the far-famed Caucus. A long ' time might pass before such
another opportunity of seeing the terrible Caucus at work, and taking
note of its business capacity, its temperament, its spiritual outlook.
For the question, though ' non-political,' was of the first importance.
Fought over fourteen years since, it would now, it was hoped, be
finally disposed of : for a whole week it had filled the columns of the
Post and the Gazette, and been hotly argued at local meetings, excit-
ing a kind and degree of public interest which are entirely beyond

250 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the range of London experience. So I received permission to be
present.

Punctually to the minute, * The Two Thousand ' began to arrive.
The side galleries filled rapidly, and the semicircular tiers of orchestra
seats, and the larger area where a few nights earlier young Birming-
ham celebrated his gymnastic festival. There they were, from the
sixteen wards of the city : the Birmingham * Two Thousand,' the
very pick and choice of the most democratic of English communities.
Among them were lawyers, doctors, clergymen, schoolmasters, mer-
chants, manufacturers, journalists. It was a journalist, the editor of
the Post, who opened the proceedings. But a large proportion of
them appeared to be artisans, including a class which Birmingham
inherited from medieval times, the class of master-workmen. Some
of them were in their working attire — as if they had been kept late.
But the majority of them had managed to go home, wipe off the
workshop dust, shave, brush their hair, swallow two cups of tea and
a chop, button their jackets, and stride off just in time for the
debate. Some talked with gestures more or less emphatic to the
men next them ; others skimmed over Dr. Dale's pamphlet, or pro-
duced their newspaper extracts, made marginal notes, or scribbled
something — the heads of their speeches perhaps. Within a couple
of yards of me, a clerical-looking gentleman and a workman conversed
with animation. ' But we shall be satisfied with the compromise,'
said the former. A slow, good-humoured smile, a leisurely shake of
the head, was the workman's reply, as he drew his forefingers and
thumb contemplatively over his black stubbly whiskers. It was
clear how he meant to vote. Perhaps it might not be difficult to
guess how nine-tenths of them would vote. However, it was beyond
a doubt that every man in the Caucus had carefully studied the
subject, and in his own mind had settled the following serious ques-
tion or questions — Does religious instruction (as commonly under-
stood) afford the best moral training for the rising race ? Does it
purify and elevate the sentiment of reverence ? Or does it deaden it ?
In this age of the democratic renaissance, shall the clergy lead or
be led ? Taking ethic in its widest sense (the interfusion of moral
feeling with intellectual temperament, attitude, ideal), is the ethical
level of the clergy above that of the community ? In plain English
can the clergy be trusted ? In the programme the question did not,
of course, appear in that form. In general terms it was merely this
— Shall Bible-reading, ' with historical, geographical, and grammatical
explanations ' be permitted in the Board Schools ? But the real issue,
the issue from which the debate derived its whole interest and signifi-
cance, was just as I have put it.

A detailed account of the night's work is out of the question.
I shall only indicate one or two instances of the spirit of this remark-
able assembly. For example, the long and loud applause which

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 251

followed when a speaker — an artisan, I think — argued that there
was no religious instruction or ceremony of any kind whatever in the
Midland Institute, where he had received his education, and when he
implied that the study of science and literature constituted in itself a
moral and religious discipline in the highest sense of the terms ; and
when, again, he challenged the clerical party to deny that the chil-
dren of the Birmingham Board Schools, where no religious teaching
was allowed, were as truthful, as polite, as moral, as religious as any
other children in the kingdom. Here the Caucus cheered loudly
for Young Birmingham.

The most heartily applauded sentences of the evening's speeches
were those which described religion as something too high and too
sacred to be made the subject of the disputes which (it was alleged)
would be sure to break out on the acceptance of the compromise,
which meant nothing else but the thin end of the sectarian wedge.
But the Birmingham clergy, pleaded one of the members, have
promised to accept this proposed concession as final. The Caucus
interrupted him with a burst of ironical laughter. But there was no
irreverence, nor spirit of intolerance, in it, any more than in the
applause which greeted a speaker's straightforward confession that,
loyal Churchman though he was, he could not trust the clergy
in this matter of education ; iior was there any in the merriment to
which the ' Two Thousand ' gave way when the Eeverend Dr. Dale
humorously described how the denominationalists would fall out
when, taking the advice of a clerical champion, they would meet
in the schools to settle the meaning of scriptural words with the help
of a dictionary.

Not irreverence, nor shallow scorn, but the sense of solemn
responsibility was, clearly, the dominant feeling and inspiration,
' It is better to send forth the young spirit, unhampered by dogma,
into life's battle ; we shall teach it how to acquaint itself with the
best that has been known and thought in the world ; we shall trust
that its experience, emotion, and reflection will ultimately and
naturally flower into religion ' — that, if one were asked to put the
matter into a word or two, was the signification of a discussion which
lasted three hours, in which not a moment was lost — every speech
being brief, clear, and to the purpose— every ' point ' in which was
caught up promptly by the large audience, and in which the forms
and courtesies of debate were scrupulously observed from first to
last. A shout of applause followed the vote of about nine to one
against scriptural teaching. And then it seemed, somehow, as if the
whole affair had suddenly receded into ancient history. Just as at
the sound of bell, or of steam-whistle, the multitude of workers
drop their tools, pull on their jackets, and make for the gates, so did
the Caucus promptly write its finis to the question which had been
ripening for months and years ; and in a minute or two the great

252 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

hall was empty and silent. That, said my friend, with a nod of what,
seemed proud approval, * that's Birmingham.' It was, no doubt.

Firstly, the debate exemplified the doctrine which Birmingham
proclaimed at the beginning of her municipal career, and which she
has since striven to apply, in ever-widening range of action — the
doctrine that the life of the city, with all its variety of function,
should be, like the life of the human organism, one and indivisible.
Complete corporate unity has not yet been effected. The School
Board, for example, is a separate administration, though, indeed, the
city council, years ago, asserted its authority, even in the educational
sphere, by its successful struggle for the repeal of the 25th clause.
The assumption of popular education, as a branch of municipal govern-
ment, will, perhaps, be the next important step in the civic evolution
of Birmingham.

Secondly, it was a re-assertion of another position which the first
civic reformers maintained — that no subject bearing upon the physi-
cal and spiritual welfare of society should be considered beyond the
scope of local or national politics (between which they admitted of
no essential distinction). Whatever men in combination can do for
the free growth of each individual, for the refinement, the elevation,
the beautifying of human life, by art, by literature, by science, by
* recreation ' — all that is ' Politics : ' and the art of politics, the art of
life in society, is the highest and greatest of all arts.

Thirdly, the men who hold this view of popular culture are
the Radicals, the Democrats in politics. The men of the Birming-
ham Caucus, and their constituents, are the men who voted for the
increase of the library rate ; who would support with all their might
and main every Liberal measure in the House of Commons ; who
would have said with the Hebrews of old that even the building of
the temple should be stopped for the education of the children ; who
would give but short shrift to institutions which could not satisfac-
torily account for themselves, but deal considerately and generously
with all of them which were useful or beautiful. These men believe
that it is from Democracy that culture has most to expect; that
there, or nowhere, is the hope and the ideal of the better life.

The Democratic movement in Birmingham is merely an example
of the general movement. I have selected it because it is the most
complete of English examples. It is but a single current in the stream
of national tendency. To change the figure, it is but an individual
symptom of the upward ' filtration ' of ideas from the soil and the roots
of the nation's life. The forms vary, but the impulse, the informing
spirit, is one and the same. Take two types of the modern English
democracy — the northern, with Newcastle for its centre ; the Midland,
with Birmingham. The types are as distinct from each other as either
is from that of the southern population, influenced by the Metropolis.

1886 BIRMINGHAM. 253

Strength and reserve seem to be the special characteristics of the
first, versatility and expansiveness of the second ; and these charac-
teristics appear to reveal themselves in corresponding preferences
for forms of popular culture, the northern Englishman showing a
stronger bent towards scientific studies and a less pronounced lean-
ing towards art and literature than his countryman of the Midlands.

There is no more extraordinary testimony to the reality and the
rapid propagation of the popular enthusiasm for culture than the
history of the University extension scheme among the miners and
artisans of Northumberland and Durham. This new educational
movement among these men has been spontaneous, the extent of
it being limited only by their pecuniary resources, though it is
possible that this difficulty may be surmounted by recourse to the
agency of the co-operative and other trade societies. In fact, the
members of an industrial co-operative society in Lancashire were
among the first to suggest the idea of University lectures. It must
not be supposed that the movement among the northern population,
is confined to a small minority of exceptionally intelligent men. On
the contrary, it is a general movement, and, be it again asserted,
a movement from below. The vast majority of those who share
in it are working men — miners and artisans — the same men who
have founded the Miners' Union, who are now the mainstay of
northern Liberalism, and who have sent representatives of their own
self-reliant, sturdy class from the mine-pit to the benches of the
House of Commons. It will have its centres in such institutions as
the Science College of Newcastle, Owens College of Manchester,
the Institute and College of Birmingham, and the kindred establish-
ments in Liverpool, Nottingham, and other great towns. And side
by side with this transformation of these great cities into centres of
culture and learning there proceeds the civic development, with its
careers for the talents which otherwise would have sought scope for
themselves in the Metropolis. While the Metropolis will become
less than it has been the centre of attraction for the best energies
and the highest ambitions in the realm, the great towns will assume
more and more the character of, so to speak, provincial Londons — a
town like Newcastle, for instance, representing and influencing the
national and the local politics of the North ; or, like Nottingham,
those of a considerable portion of North-Eastern England ; or, again,
like Birmingham, giving the most complete expression to the in-
telligence and the social ideals of the teeming population of the
Midlands.

It would be easy to show how this quickening of the popular
taste and intelligence — revealing itself in the love of art, of noble
music, and the craving for literature and science — becomes apparent
even in the Middlesboroughs, the Warringtons, the Northwiches,

254 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the Walsalls, and other smaller towns, where ugliness and the dreary
monotony of mechanical toil have reached the extreme limit. The
builder and the scavenger having reduced the death rate, the men-
machines have called in the artist and the man of letters to make
their longer life worth the living. It is the reaction of their spirit
against brutish materialism ; the broadening edge of light on the
cloud of their existence.

JOHN MACDOXALD.

1886 255

ARE ANIMALS HAPPY?

THERE exists in the shop window of a naturalist in the East End of
London a glass frame containing a carefully mounted group thus
composed : in the centre of the frame a small moth is pursued by a
dragon-fly in the air above and by a trout in the water beneath ; the
dragon-fly is itself about to fall into the jaws of a swallow, which in
its turn is pursued by a large bird of prey, while the trout at the
same moment is about to furnish a meal to a hungry pike. That
group is a pictorial embodiment of an answer which nineteen out of
twenty people would give to the question at the head of this article.
It represents the general impression of animal life as an existence of
perpetual struggle ending in violent death. The same idea pervades
Wolff's admirable series of drawings of animal life, published under
the title of Wolff' s Wild Animals, and containing, some of Mr.
Whymper's finest engraving. There, as typical groups of animal life,
are depicted the hare dying in the snow with carrion crows hovering
above ; a grizzly in combat with a bison, and a tiger with a crocodile,
the terrified deer rushing through the forest with the leopard clutch-
ing his flank, the elk pursued by wolves, the antelope overwhelmed
in the avalanche. The same ideas pervade all attempts at artistic
embodiment or verbal description of wild animal life — warfare and
suffering, starvation and destruction.

This view is not simply the casual conclusion of the artist or
of the aforesaid nineteen persons who think of omnibus-horses on
Ludgate Hill or pigeon-matches at Hurlingham ; this gloomy view
of animal life has been endorsed by science whose verdict was pro-
nounced by Professor Huxley after the reading of Charles Darwin's
posthumous paper on Instinct. That verdict is a reasoned conclusion
derived from a consideration of the working of natural selection and
of the vital phenomena incident to the struggle for existence. No
race of animals exists except at the expense of pain and suffering to
some other race. To keep a cobra in health and happiness, who
shall tell what number of vermin must yearly suffer untold agonies ?
and yet a cobra is not of more value than many vermin. To the
unscientific mind this statement is decisive, but possibly the un-
scientific would stop here ; they would say, ' Remove the carnivora
• and the rest of animated nature may then be happy.' Science, how-
ever, goes further and says, ' The struggle for existence would be just

256 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug,

as hard ; the weaker, the unsuitable, the superfluous organisms must
still perish, whether they perish swiftly or by slow starvation. Every
race is constantly tending to increase beyond the existing means of
subsistence, and the immense annual surplus must be drained off at
whatever cost in suffering.'

It needs, perhaps, some courage to enter a protest against conclu-
sions so weightily supported. But to one who feels that there is
something to be said on the other side, the desirability, nay, the duty,
of saying it is apparent. So truly terrible is the view of the universe
thus presented to us, that if one should see any possible way of escape
it behoves him to point it out.

Now, in dealing with animal life, its energies and passions, it is
impossible for us to do otherwise than argue from our own life and
our own energies and passions. "We find a number of beings consti-
tuted on the same general plan with essentially the same arrangement
of organs of sense and nutrition and motion. It is an inference we
are compelled to make, that the sensations and the emotions of such
beings resemble our own in no less a degree. When we find, more-
over, such beings drawing inferences which we should draw under
the like circumstances, or making such movements as we should
make under corresponding incentives, we are compelled further to
conclude that their reasoning faculties also resemble our own.
Assuming this, we have for our inquiry a starting-point in our own
happiness and misery ; and the fairest line of argument will be to
consider how far our own pleasures and pains would suffer modifica-
tion by the change in organisation, in habits and in conditions of life,
from our own to those of the lower animals. In the first place,
however, there are two considerations which, as they form no part of
our subsequent line of argument, we may as well set forth and dispose
of at the outset.

First. Animals do not commit suicide. I do not say that no-
animal ever has committed suicide, but there is no species in which
it is a deliberate custom. It used to be a popular belief that the
scorpion stung itself to death whenever placed in a situation of
danger from which there was no escape. The subject has, however,
recently been investigated (and has been made the subject of some
rather cruel experiments) by some correspondents of Nature, and
the result appears to be that in one case, when the rays of the sun
were repeatedly concentrated by a lens on one point of its thorax,
the animal did eventually sting itself in the same place ; but that in
many other cases, where presumably even more pain was inflicted, no
attempt was made by the animal to wound or kill itself. That is to
say, the scorpion can commit suicide — it knows how — but it refrains
from doing so. There was also a rather exaggerated story related by
De Quincey, attributing deliberate self-destruction to a young horse ;
-but the catastrophe was obviously brought about by an error of judg-

1886 ARE ANIMALS HAPPY1? 257

merit committed in an excess of high spirits, or perhaps in one of those
panics which seem to overmaster the horse more completely than
any other animal, and which frequently lead to the destruction of
runaway steeds. There is, further, the authentic and periodically
recurring instance of immolation in the case of the Norwegian
lemmings, probably, if not yet certainly, referred to the persistence
of a once beneficial habit. These apart, there is not even a sugges-
tion of suicide as a habit amongst brutes. Other anecdotes there
certainly are of dogs who have refused food after the death of their
master, but such tales must be accepted with a certain amount of
reserve : they are recorded out of a very honourable affection for the
dumb hero, but, entirely apart from that, they none of them establish
a case of genuine suicide. There is no record of a dog deprived of
its master deliberately doing any act which would at once and inevit-
ably cause its death.

But if there is no suicide in the animal world, then the immense
probability is that there is no misery sufficiently unbearable and
sufficiently hopeless to cause self-destruction. The animal which
knows how to kill another knows also how to kill itself. It recognises
none of the scruples which prevent man from attempting self-
destruction, or make him pause when he has resolved on it. If
animal life \rere really so unhappy that 'twere better not to be, there is
no reason at all why suicide should not be a common occurrence. What
prevents it but that which we call the instinct of self-preservation ?
And what is the instinct of self-preservation but this : the inherited
conviction of every species of animal that its life is worth living ?

Secondly. Animals increase and multiply. Not only do they not
destroy themselves, but their tendency is to perpetuate their own
species, and by means of varieties to give rise to new species.
Prima facie, this again suggests happiness. Why should those varie-
ties which have, through natural selection, become permanent — why
should they have increased from one or two solitary individuals to
the myriads now representing their descendants ? There are only
two explanations possible : either there has been a divinely implanted
instinct compelling them to reproduce their kind to the same life of
misery they themselves have lived, or, on the other hand, the life of
the species has been a happy and prosperous one. Unless one is
prepared to recognise the hand of a Creator in the compulsory per-
petuation of agony, it seems impossible to suppose that the species of
animals now dominant have had a miserable existence. Surely on
any natural principle of selection those whose existence is on the
whole most in harmony with natural surroundings — those who are
able to extract the largest amount of pleasure from their condition of
life — they are the organisms we should expect to find most numerous
on the face of the earth.

Pains and pleasures are the guide for conduct in the animal

258 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

world, teaching the individual, and through the individual the species,
•what to do and what to avoid. Mr. Romanes (summing up the re-
searches on this subject of Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Grant
Allen) says : —

They clearly point to the conclusion, which I do not think is open to any one
valid exception, that pains are the subjective concomitants of such organic changes as
are harmful to the organism, while pleasures are the subjective concomitants of such
organic changes as are beneficial to the organism — or, we must add, to the species.

In other words, those species which have survived and multiplied
have done so because their actions (as a whole) were associated with
pleasurable feelings, and because those actions which they were pre-
vented by painful associations from doing were those which would
have been hurtful. That, indeed, is the raison d'etre of pleasure and
pain, for that purpose were they called into existence as part of
organic life. They

must have been evolved as the subjective accompaniment of processes which are
respectively beneficial or injurious to the organism, and so evolved for the purpose
or to the end that the organism should seek the one and shun the other.

Pleasures and pains begin in almost the lowest stratum of animal
life, rising in the very dawn of consciousness, and they have helped
to guide individual action, and specific growth or decline, throughout
all the ages from the times of Eozoon to the present day. If any
animal or any species found delight in habitually doing that which
was hurtful, one of two things must ultimately happen : either the
species must acquire a dislike to the hurtful act, or else it must
dwindle and disappear. And with reference to those species which
have survived — those which have triumphed and are now over-
spreading the earth — it is safe to infer that the activities which have
constituted the greater part, of their lives have been associated with
pleasurable sensations.

May we then draw a distinction between the organisms which have
failed in life and the organisms which have succeeded, and must we
admit that those which have failed have, during the time of their
decline, had an existence on the whole of more misery than
happiness ? Apparently we must do so. The latter days of the
British wolf or of the dodo cannot have been very happy. Those
rare tentative forms which appear in the geological record as in the
nature of an experiment may have had a precarious and chequered
existence. Possibly Archseopteryx was not altogether happy, but
the birds which succeeded him have solved the problem of existence
and their happiness has been cheaply purchased by his vicarious
sacrifice. Can we carry the argument any further ? Can we estimate
the total surplus of animal happiness over animal unhappiness at any
given time by comparing the number of the vigorous organisms with
the number of the decaying? If so, there is at present, and there

1886 ARE ANIMALS HAPPY? 259

always has been, a large surplus of pleasure. Now. as at any previous
geological horizon, the orders which are disappearing must be very
few and very widely scattered as compared with those orders which
are advancing and multiplying. The more widely aberrant any
species is from the type of its parent group (the type of success and
happiness) the poorer it is found to be numerically, and the less
widely is it distributed on the earth's surface. Even, therefore, if we
admit that the process of decay and approaching extinction in all
cases involves individual misery (by no means a necessary inference)
— even if we admit that universally, we admit only a very small
set-off against the happiness of the vast majority of flourishing and
healthy forms of animal life.

With these preliminary considerations in our favour, let us con-
sider the principal constituents of human happiness and tmhappiness,
and draw what inferences we can from our own case to that of the
lower intelligences.

The psychology of pleasure and pain has yet to be worked out.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has laid the physiological foundation and Mr.
Grant Allen has developed it, but their analysis leaves untouched
altogether the higher or purely cerebral pleasures. Modern psycholo-
gists since Bain have considered those pleasures alone which arise
directly from sensation, and not those which are concerned with
reason or reflection. For we must draw a wide distinction (a dis-
tinction which no one has drawn since Hobbes) between satisfactions
and conveniences, as Hobbes called them, or, as we might call them
in modern phraseology, pleasures of the cerebral hemispheres and
pleasures of the local ganglia, otherwise central pleasures and peri-
pheral pleasures. Take as the type of one kind the pleasure you
experience in winning a game at chess, and of the other kind the
pleasure of warming your hands at a fire on a cold day. There is, of
course, the corresponding distinction to be drawn between physical
suffering and mental disappointment or trouble. This we may
shorten by limiting the word *pain' to the former and by using the
word ' distress ' or ' trouble ' in speaking of mental suffering.

Now, taking the total pleasures of man's life, we shall find that the
local or ganglionic pleasures, the conveniences, largely predominate,
both in volume and intensity, over the central or brain satisfactions ;
while, on the other hand, of the total pains mental troubles constitute
by far the larger share. Perhaps this general statement requires
some little support. Take, then, the last part of it first, — that which
applies to troubles and pains. The statistics of Friendly Societies
show the average annual sickness in middle life to be six days. Con-
sidering the source from which this estimate is derived it is, no doubt,
above the mark, for it includes every slight derangement out of
which a claim on the funds of a society could be manufactured, and
a blistered finger counts for as much in the returns as an attack of

260 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

cholera. It is also to be observed that the statistics are taken from
those classes most liable to serious accidents — those which an Accident
Insurance Company would insure only as hazardous risks. Conse-
quently in the upper and middle classes the sick-rate must be well
below that figure ; and further, there is no doubt that, with better
sanitary arrangements, the rate has decreased since the estimate was
made. Probably we shall not be understating the case if we estimate
the present average sickness of civilised man in middle life at four
days a year.

Now what is four days' sickness in comparison with the mental
Buffering which the average man undergoes in the course of a year ?
Out of the millions on English soil, how many units are there who
have less than four days' anxiety in a year ? how many who spend so
little as one-ninetieth part of their time in struggles against poverty
and hunger, in dread of creditors they cannot pacify, in sorrow for
their own or others' misdoings, in unavailing regrets for the past, or
in useless forebodings of the future ? Ask any man who has his
living to earn whether he would be contented to have his mental
anxiety limited to four days in the year. He would be more than
contented if he could have it limited to ten times that amount.
Furthermore, every disease or sickness is accompanied by mental
depression which is frequently, if not invariably, responsible for
greater suffering than the physical derangement ; and even in slight
illness involving no danger, there is an amount of mental worry from
the enforced confinement, and the consciousness of work left undone,
which is frequently harder to bear than the physical inconvenience.
It is scarcely necessary to enlarge on this theme, because most
persons, as soon as the statement is made, will concur that the per-
plexities of life, the disappointments and the anxieties, constitute
with the mass of humanity a blot on existence far more serious than
the pains of limbs or bodies.

Now as to the first part of our postulate, viz. that local ganglionic
pleasures predominate over intellectual pleasures. This does require
a little more corroboration, nay, it may even appear a paradox embody-
ing nothing but contempt for man's prerogative, mind. It is, how-
ever, no paradox, but a truth which the most highly cultured and
contemplative person (who is also healthy) will, unless he is holding
a brief for the supremacy of the intellect, very soon acknowledge.
Nay, he will in all probability go further, and assert that from the
satisfaction of one appetite alone (that for food and drink) he has
derived more pleasure than from literature and science, or art, or all
combined. The pleasures of eating — including in that not merely
the pleasures of the palate, but the far more impressive volume of
sensation resulting from digestion — do, as a matter of fact, occupy a
more important place in man's life, not merely than any other single
activity, but than any two or three combined. The sensations arising

1886 ARE ANIMALS HAPPY? 261

in the alimentary canal during the process of digestion and assimila-
tion of food are frequently overlooked, because they are not, like the
movements of the higher organs of sense, within the direct control of
the brain. But throughout the whole process a stream of impressions
is conveyed to the brain corresponding with the manner in which
the digestion is proceeding, and these impressions constitute a very
large portion of the total from which the happiness or misery of a life
is derived. Those unto whom digestion is a healthy and regularly
conducted process can with little difficulty verify this observation if
they take the next opportunity of observing how very differently
some slight trouble presents itself to their mind before and after a
good meal. If we consider simply the element of time, the period
occupied each day in the actual satisfaction of the appetite and the
still longer period occupied in digestion, we must admit there is
represented in those processes an amount of quiet enjoyment to which
no other function or activity of humanity can show a parallel.

It will, no doubt, be admitted at once that for the poor (that is, for
three-fourths of humanity) bodily pleasures are more important than
mental. If this is admitted, it is quite sufficient for my present pur-
pose. But those who admit this will, if they reflect, extend the observa-
tion to the whole of humanity. As we rise in the scale of wealth intel-
lectual pleasures become possible, but also at the same time the range
and variety of the objects ministering to bodily pleasures are indefi-
nitely extended, and the leisure and other adjuncts to their complete
enjoyment are present as they are not in the case of the poor, with
whom even the enjoyment of food is interfered with by the necessity
for labour, and proper digestion is hindered by want of leisure. With
wealth — wealth which brings opportunities for intellectual pleasure —
come also fresh forms of satisfaction for the animal appetites. There
exists no scale by which these two can be measured — no means
of comparing the aesthetic values of a bottle of chambertin and a
sonnet of Petrarch. It is a difficult matter sometimes for a man
of leisure and culture to make up his mind whether he will go to a
banquet or to hear Patti as Zerlina. But it is not necessary for us
at present to discuss the relative charms of music and dining, and
therefore we need not force the delicate problem to its final test —
which of the two a man would rather go without. We have quite
sufficient evidence already. For if to the pleasure of consumption
and digestion of food we add the subtler pleasures of taste, the
pleasure of smoking, the pleasures of exercise, those of repose, and,
more intense than all, those connected with the passion of love, we
have undoubtedly such a volume of conveniences as no intellectual
satisfactions can pretend to approach. It is not possible for us to
strike a balance between human joys and human woes, to say by how
much the one outweighs the other, nor is it necessary for our present
purpose to do so. All that we can be sure of, and all that we require
VOL. XX.— No. 114. T

262 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

to know, is that, taking mankind as a whole, his conveniences
outweigh his satisfactions, and his dissatisfactions outweigh his
inconveniences.

Starting, then, from this assumption, let us suppose the mental
powers gradually diminished, while the bodily powers remain unim-
paired. Suppose that process continued until the mind no longer
troubles itself about unseen things, but is content with drawing
inferences from actual present sensations, so that the looking forward
— the taking thought for the morrow, which is the principal source
of human mental suffering — ceases to exist. You then approach the
constitution of one of the higher mammalia. It is a constitution in
which the chief sources of human pleasure remain untouched, while
the chief sources of human pains are either removed or diminished.
In such a constitution, as compared with man, the reduction in total
pleasures should be relatively small, while the reduction in total
pains should be relatively large. Grant to an animal so constituted
unstinted food, and it ought in theory to be happier than a human
being, the limitation in its pleasures being more than counter-
balanced by far greater limitation in its pains.

Imagine a graminivorous quadruped with limitless pasture, and
you have a state of things in which you ought to find the maximum
of happiness of which the organisation is capable. Granted that the
totality of its pleasures would not equal the totality of human
pleasures, by far more would the totality of its woes fall short of the
totality of human woes. If such an animal cannot taste the pleasures
of the knowledge of good and evil, neither has it to taste the miseries
of poverty and loneliness, of loss of wife or child, of failure in busi-
ness, of knowing not where to procure food or where to lay its head.
The problem how to make both ends meet never vexes the mind of
the ruminant ; monotony has no terrors for the ox ; no fear oppresses
it of another's rivalry ; no jealousy of another's success. Even when
disease and decay overtake it, it knows nothing of that which makes
disease terrible to man — the knowledge that it must end in a separa-
tion from those whom he loves.

It would not be fair, however, to take an ideal ruminant with
unlimited pasture as a representative of animal life. Other elements
than those which affect man's pleasures may have to be taken into
account, or those which do affect man's pleasures may acquire a
greater modifying influence in the economy of animal life.

Pasture is not, in fact, limitless, and there may be a difficulty in
obtaining food, climatic influences may inflict more discomfort on
beings who cannot at will alter their covering, or in other ways the
conditions of life may be such as to increase the totality of physical
suffering. We must, therefore, consider separately the sources of
pleasure in the animal world.

The pleasures connected with the maintenance of individual life

1886 ARE ANIMALS HAPPY? 263

hold, of course, the chief place. From the most lowly of the protozoa
up to the highest of mammals and insects, pleasure (presumably of
increasing intensity) is associated with the consumption and assimi-
lation of food. The earliest type of a nervous system is a collar of
cells surrounding the oesophagus, and that type persists with modifi-
cations up to the most highly organised mollusca and arthropoda. The
earliest function of the nervous system — its chief function throughout
all animal life — is to subserve nutrition, and thus the most solid plea-
sures come to be associated with the assimilation of food, while the
greatest inconveniences attend its deprivation. In the lower forms of
life, no doubt, this is the only form of enjoyment. Whatever pleasures
a medusa may be supposed to possess, they must necessarily all be
derived from the actual consumption of food. With further develop-
ment come special organs adapted to discover by sight, or smell, or
hearing, or some other sense the prey intended for food. Here there is
another opening for pleasure. All animals which catch their prey have
the additional pleasure of the pursuit and the capture, which is one of
the keenest, if not the very keenest, of all pleasures ; while, on the
other hand, ruminants have their own special pleasure in the process of
re mastication, which is nature's solatium to them for the deprivation of
the pleasures of the chase. There are two forms of enjoyment connected
with food, the latter possessed by a widely spread family, and the former
by all carnivorous animals, neither of which pleasures are shared by man.
And taking this into account, together with the fact that the majority
of animals can consume with relish more food in proportion to their
bulk than man, there seems every reason to believe that in this most
important of all elements the pleasure of the average vertebrate is
greater than that of man.

In connection with the preservation of the individual life there
remain to be considered the pleasures of exercise and sleep. Precisely
what amount of pleasure is represented by the latter it is impossible
to guess, but the former in the youth of all animals counts for a
great deal, and in the majority continues throughout life to afford
enjoyment of the keenest description. The fox-terrier is always
readier for a walk than his master, and generally enjoys himself more
thoroughly on the way. His natural gait is swifter than man's, and all
animals of whom that can be said have a great advantage in the
amount of pleasure which they derive, or ought to derive, from the
use of their limbs. The glory of rapid motion which we can only
begin to realise on the box-seat of a coach, or in the movement of
skating, must be something much more intense to the chamois or
the white-headed eagle. Constantly, throughout the animal world,
we notice that delight in the use of muscle and limb which in man
scarcely survives his majority, but which in them lasts far into matu-
rity. We are accustomed unconsciously to recognise their prerogative
in this respect when we apply the phrase * animal spirits ' to a boy

T 2

264 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

who is full of life and energy, and who enjoys a run over the hills on
a breezy day.

Besides the pleasures connected with individual existence, there
are the pleasures connected with the perpetuation of the species.
Here the lower animals are certainly at a great disadvantage as
compared with man. They can have nothing to correspond with
that blending of chivalry and common sense, of devotion and friend-
ship, of sensual passion and calm and trustful respect, which con-
stitutes, or ought to constitute, the modern Englishman's love for his
wife. Nor can the joys of animal maternity be compared with those
of the human mother, who has the development of an intellect t»
watch as well as growth of limb. But the advantage which man
has in these respects is entirely on the mental side. Considered
simply as physical processes, the pleasures connected with the per-
petuation of the race are probably as great in the case of most
vertebrates as in man, while certainly the pains of maternity are
immeasurably less.

The majority of the miscellaneous instincts exhibited by animals
are directly connected with the preservation of the race, and it is
important to consider whether instinctive acts are accompanied by-
pleasure. If, as we have seen, even reflex acts are accompanied
sometimes by pleasure, the probability seems to be that instinctive
acts are so accompanied. They are more likely to be than are reflex
acts, because the former rise into consciousness, whereas the latter
do not; that is to say, instinctive acts are not performed purely
mechanically, they require the co-operation of different nerve-centres
and the guidance of the head of the nervous system. And originally,
no doubt, the great majority of actions now instinctive were done
intelligently and deliberately, and have through long usage and
through the effects of heredity now come to be done instinctively.
Mr. Gr. H. Lewes, indeed, supposed this ' lapsed intelligence ' to be
the origin of all instincts, but Mr. Romanes has shown sufficient
ground for believing that some instincts have been developed directly
by natural selection out of habits casually and unintelligently
adopted, which habits chanced to be beneficial to the species ; these
he calls primary instincts, and all the others arising from lapsing of
intelligence, secondary instincts. Now it seems nearly certain that
secondary instincts are accompanied with pleasure, and it is probable
that many primary instincts are so accompanied. As a rule, where
a habit has been persisted in generation after generation, until it
has become almost as mechanical as a reflex act, it seems fair to
presume that originally the habit must have been pleasurable, and
that, therefore, some reminiscence of the original pleasure still
attends its repetition. The act of incubation certainly still seems
to give pleasure to the hen, and the ancestral birds who first adopted
the troublesome habit can only have done so (one would think)

1886 ARE ANIMALS HAPPY? 265

because they found some satisfaction in the act. It may have been
done originally as a protective act of ownership, with the same sort
of delight as that which a little child feels in gathering all her play-
things close round her, whether she wants to use them or not. But
whatever may have been the original motive it must have involved
pleasure, otherwise the act would never have been persisted in
sufficiently to solidify into a permanent instinct. In animals, as in
man, we cannot suppose that any act which involves work, or care,
or attention would continue to be performed unless pleasure were
associated with it. True, there are some primary instincts necessary
to the preservation of the species which are actually destructive of
sthe individual, but these constitute no objection to our theory,
because the ultimate results are not at the time present to the
mind of the individual, and the immediate act is purely one of
pleasure. We may conclude with some degree of probability that
all primary instinctive acts were originally highly pleasurable, and
that in all flourishing orders of animals sufficient pleasure still
attaches to them to ensure their continuance.

As to secondary instincts — those which are due to lapsing of
intelligence — it is obvious that such must, when first performed,
deliberately have been so performed under the influence of some
pleasant stimulus, either as incentive or as reward. It is thus that
man has succeeded in implanting in domestic animals those habits
which he required for his own use, and which have hardened into
permanent instincts. They have been implanted, in the first
instance, by a system of rewards and punishments, and they are so
maintained. Let the artificial stimulus be removed, let the animal
be allowed to run wild, and such instincts — all instincts, in fact,
which are enforced by no sanction — soon disappear. Nature must
have furnished a corresponding motive either of pleasure in perform ;
ance or pain in non- performance of all those acts which, originally
intelligent and voluntary, have now become secondary instincts. At
each subsequent performance of any such act there must be some
revival of the pleasurable feelings originally associated with it, and,
however faint these may be, yet, considering the frequency of repe-
tition of such acts in the life of the individual, they must, on the
whole, be something worth counting towards the total of happiness.

Now what is there to set off against this solid substratum of
pleasure which we have found accompanying alike the activities
preservative of individual life and those preservative of the
species ?

Principally these four things — famine, exposure to weather, bodily
injury, and violent death ; things not altogether unknown to man,
but to which beings living from hand to mouth, and in many cases
upon each other, are more especially liable. It is undoubtedly true
that every year a certain number of animals are condemned ta

266 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

starvation, crowded out of existence by the pressure of surplus
population, and this process must be attended by a certain amount
of suffering. But it is exceedingly doubtful whether the suffering
is of that intense and dramatic kind which is popularly associated
with the struggle for existence and the working of natural selection.
It is not the case of a strong healthy animal going out alone into
the wilderness to struggle with the agonies of starvation. It is a
process which takes effect principally on the very young or the very old.
The very young perish because their mother is too ill nourished herself
to supply them, or because they are not sufficiently vigorous to fend
for themselves ; the old go perhaps somewhat before their full time.
In the one case life is stopped before much pain can have been felt, in
the other case it is stopped after the greater part of its pleasure is past ;
in either case with very much less than the maximum of suffering.
In the majority of the higher mammalia the operation of the Mal-
thusian law very probably does no more than equal the rate of infant
mortality in England 200 years ago, a rate which was then looked
upon as a matter of course. Moreover, in animals the pressure of
population upon subsistence is very much modified by frequent
migration to fresh pastures or new hunting-grounds, a step taken
much more easily than a similar step can be taken by man, and with
much more certainty of result. It is only in carnivorous animals
that hunger can come to assume alarming dimensions ; in their case
it, no doubt, frequently is responsible for considerable suffering ; but
in making that admission we must qualify it by the further observa-
tion that the carnivora are accustomed to go for a long period with-
out food and then to make up for lost time by eating a meal of
proportionate magnitude. We should probably greatly exaggerate
their sufferings from want of food if we compared them to any of the
more serious ailments which man suffers without permanent injury.
We admit — we have already admitted — that the Malthusian process
must be attended with misery to the members of an expiring group
or species, but on the overplus of the members of a vigorous group
its effect is insignificant when contrasted with the grand mass of
healthy animal activity surrounding them.

The vicissitudes of the weather may be responsible for more
suffering among the lower animals than in the case of man, but we
who live in England are perhaps inclined to overrate the amount of
inconvenience occasioned to the world at large by this cause. When
our English winters are really rigorous, then we do see a certain
amount of suffering both amongst flocks and birds, but that is due
rather to the capriciousness than to the actual rigour of the season.
The corresponding changes which over the greater portion of the large
continents occur with more regularity are foreseen and provided for
by animals as well as man. Either by change of coat, by migration,
or by hibernation, most animals and birds contrive to endure or

1886 ARE ANIMALS HAPPY? 267

to avoid the cold of northern regions, and in those cases in which no
corresponding instinct has been developed it may be safely inferred
that the necessity has never been sufficiently felt. We are too apt
to over-estimate the sensitiveness to cold of other organisations.
We should remember that, with the exception of the hermit-crab,
man is the only unclothed animal, and as a protection against cold
man's garments are a very poor substitute for a woolly or hairy hide
covering the whole body without joint or opening. If any one will
carefully notice a dog in his kennel after a night of intense frost,
he will be surprised how little inconvenience the animal has suffered
from the low temperature. As for rain and damp weather, the con-
sequences to human beings are far more serious than any that
trouble the animal world from that source.

We come, then, to what in the mind of the artist and of the casual
observer occupies the chief place in the catalogue of animal miseries —
the physical injuries and violent deaths due either to conflict between
individuals or to the capture and slaughter by carnivorous creatures
of their prey, to which, perhaps, if animals themselves were consulted,
they would add the ravages in their number committed by man.
This is the aspect of animal life which was condensed for the instruc-
tion of children by the popular versifier who concluded that * God
had made them so,' which dismal doctrine we have tacitly assented
to without inquiry whether it is really the ordinary occupation of
bears and lions to fight, or whether, on the other hand, they are not
very well content to get on without fighting so long as hunger or
jealousy does not call for such exertion. Now we ought at least to
try to be fair with those who cannot defend themselves ; we need
not endeavour to clothe the carnivora with the wool of the sheep, but
let us try to see them as they are, let us endeavour to do them justice.
And we do not do them justice when we accuse them of indiscriminate
cruelty. Cruelty is rare in the animal world ; the present writer is
very much inclined to doubt whether it exists at all, though the
instances of the cat, the hawk, and the Javan loris are perhaps
obstacles to the acceptance of such a statement.

Cruel in effect the carnivora no doubt are, but it is a cruelty such
as that of the skilful butcher who takes the best and shortest way
he knows to attain his purpose. It is cruelty in the way of business,
either for food, or from anger or revenge, to maintain supremacy or
protect the household. The lion kills its prey or its opponent in a
straightforward, businesslike way, as an act which ought to be done,
and must be got through as speedily as possible. The higher refine-
ment of intentional, deliberate cruelty is reserved for the more in-
tellectual being. If the history of the most bloodthirsty of the
carnivora came to be related it would contain no chapter such as the
one which tells how Einar, Earl of Orkney, with his sword carved
the back of the captive Halfdan the long-legged into the form of an

268 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

eagle, dividing the spine lengthwise and separating the ribs, and
then lifted the lungs aloft in the air as an offering to Odin !

The victims of the carnivora have, then, at all events, this advan-
tage, that they perish speedily ; moreover, they perish under cir-
cumstances either of struggle or flight which probably minimise the
suffering. Sudden death has not the terrors that it has for man,
whom it deprives of his hour of preparation ; to animals it is an
unmixed benefit to die speedily, so that on the whole it is quite
possible the operations of the carnivora result in a real economy of
pain.

A more important consideration is this : how far is the suffering
from wounds or sickness of one of the lower animals comparable
with the suffering undergone by mankind from the like causes ? Is it
not in all probability utterly insignificant in comparison, as insignifi-
cant as are the mental troubles of an animal when contrasted with
ours?

The nervous organisation of a wild animal is so much coarser-
grained (to speak metaphorically), so much less delicately nurtured
than that of civilised man, that the same wound which would cause
intense pain in the latter will pass unheeded in the former. The
wolf will give no cry of pain though a limb be severed, while the
humanised dog cries out if his toe is trodden on. A corresponding
difference can readily be observed in man himself, between the
European and the North American Indian, or between civilised man
in his drawing-room and the same man reducing himself to a semi-
savage state on the field of battle.

It needs not to go very far down the scale of existence before
coming to creatures to whom, quite obviously, the loss of a limb is a
matter of very small concern, and whose injuries are rapidly and
completely repaired by regrowth : from this point there is, no doubt,
a gradual, very gradual increase in susceptibility, until we reach the
apes, or even, we might say, until we reach savage man, and then
there is a wide gulf. With civilisation and regular habits comes a
quite different scale of proportion between injuries and suffering.
One daughter of Eve suffers, to bring her child into the world, more
pain than is suffered by all the ewes on the Welsh hills during a
whole season, and one man dying of cancer endures more than all
the oxen slain for food in a whole month.

We have now instituted a comparison between the bodily pleasures
and pains of men, and of animals, and with what result ?

Starting with the proposition that man's total happiness depends
principally on these local ganglionic pleasures, we have been led to
the conclusion that all those very pleasures are present also in the
organisation of the lower animals, undiminished, so far as we can
see, in force, and even with some additional advantages. And as to
physical suffering, we have inferred that its intensity is so much less

1886 ARE ANIMALS HAPPY? 269

in animals than in man that, even if the individual instances of it
are more frequent, the balance of advantage would probably remain
with the brutes.

Briefly, therefore, our conclusion is that, so far as bodily pains
and pleasures are concerned, if in humanity there be a surplus of
pleasure over pain, there is in brutes a still greater surplus ; if in
humanity there be anything like an equality between pleasure and
pain, there is in brutes a large preponderance of pleasure ; if in
humanity pain predominate, then in brutes the proportion should
be reversed.

BRIGGS CARLILL.

270 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS.
A REPLY.

IT would have been far from my wish to break a lance with so
formidable an antagonist as Mr. J. C. Robinson had not the opening
of the controversy in the Times assumed the character of a challenge
to those who practise water-colour painting, as well as to collectors
and the custodians of our museums. I venture, therefore, to enter
the lists as a humble representative of the challenged party upon
the understanding that, in this capacity, I am entitled to the choice
of weapons.

The weapon I select without hesitation is a plain unvarnished
statement of facts, together with such inferences as may be drawn
from the study of a question that has occupied the attention of
water-colour painters long before the present discussion arose.

Convinced that ad captandum arguments and the recourse to
exaggerated statements only divert the attention from the real issue,
I will endeavour to summarise as briefly as possible the several
phases through which the question has passed, and then enter upon
the consideration of individual cases.

The project of lighting up the National Gallery, so justly con-
demned by the authorities of that institution, led naturally to the
consideration of a kindred question — the condition of the valuable
and representative collection of water-colour drawings at the South
Kensington Museum. Mr. J. C. Robinson, doubtless from a laudable
desire to secure the safety of our public collections, drew attention
to the deleterious influence of daylight upon water-colours, instancing
the present condition of the South Kensington drawings as a proof
that these works could not be exposed without risk to the light of
day ; but Mr. Robinson appears not sufficiently to have considered
that there are other influences besides light which work prejudicially
upon water-colours, such, for 'instance, as damp and impure air. A
careful examination of the collection has convinced me that the two
last agencies have been at work in several of the instances brought
forward in evidence of the injurious effects of light alone. Now, as
the arguments against the exposure of water-colour drawings upon
our walls rest chiefly upon the assumption that daylight is their

1886 LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS. 271

greatest enemy, I wish to point out that as regards their safety from
damp, impure air, and mechanical injury from abrasion and careless
handling, they are better protected when placed in frames covered
with glass and sealed at the back than when they are kept in port-
folios or in drawers.

When the results of the official inquiry into the merits of this
difficult and complex question become known, the public will be in
a position to judge how far the serious accusations brought against
an important department of one of our principal museums are
justified by the patient and searching inquiry that is being
instituted. That the decision arrived at will be an impartial one
and lifted above the heated atmosphere of a newspaper contro-
versy there can be no reason to doubt. I may be permitted, however,
in the interim, without in any way prejudging the case, to record a
few facts that have come under my notice during a very careful
survey of the South Kensington Collection, tending to prove that the
danger of exposure to light has been greatly exaggerated.

The bearing of the very beautiful collection of early English
water-colour drawings now on view at the Eoyal Institute upon the
question at issue will next engage my attention, and here I have been
so fortunate as to procure, in a large number of cases, exact and
perfectly trustworthy data from which to form a judgment both as
regards their present condition and the circumstances under which
they were placed previous to their exhibition on the walls of the
Institute.

Beginning with the permanent collection at South Kensington,
examined the water-colour drawings seriatim, stopping here and there
to note down such observations upon particular works as seemed to
bear upon the question of exposure. I have been greatly aided in
this investigation by the very ably compiled catalogue, which,
together with the information contained in the labels, forms an
admirable guide to the collection and conduces greatly to its edu-
cational value.

The drawings by Turner, fourteen in number, are thoroughly
representative of his different styles, and with the exception of
* Hornby Castle ' (No. 88), the distance and foliage of which seem to
have slightly faded, are in excellent preservation. The ' Warkworth
Castle' (No. 547), exhibited in 1799, is a splendid example of per-
manence. The paper in this beautiful drawing — perhaps slightly
deepened in colour by age — seems to justify the assertion of Sir
James Linton that this work and some others that he mentions are
actually deeper in tone than when they were first painted — a remark
that has been perverted by Mr. Kobinson into the assertion that
they have gained in brilliancy.

Three drawings by H. W. Williams, who died in 1822, come next
on my list— No. 648, < Castle Campbell,' No. 649, « Loch Tummel,'

272 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

and No. 3018, ' Bothwell Castle,' painted in 1802. All three in
perfect condition.

Francia, who died 1839, Nos. 568 and 625, the first faded, the
second unchanged. The works of this clever artist are grey in tone,
which renders it somewhat difficult to give an opinion as to what
their antecedent condition may have been. The same remark applies
to many of the earlier masters. John Glover, born 1767, died 1849,
No. 478, 'Tivoli,' apparently unchanged. J. Laporte, b. 1761, d.
1839, 'Conway Castle,' sky and water much faded, the Indian red
pronouncing itself strongly, the indigo nearly disappearing. I wish
to insist upon this quality in indigo when it is associated with Indian
red, because in a great number of cases this combination of pigments
appears to have been the sole cause of fading.

Mr. J. C. Eobinson, in his letter to the Times of March 26,
makes the remark that ' the more or less fugitive colours are not
only by far the most numerous, but they are also the most brilliant
and useful to the artist.' Now here I must join issue entirely with Mr.
Eobinson, for, if we eliminate indigo and some of the vegetable
yellows, the causes of decay are quite insufficient to justify the cry
that * every fully-coloured water-colour drawing, framed and exposed
to the light, begins to fade and change, to die in fact, from the very
moment it is so exposed.'

Another instance of change arising from the use of the above
combination may be noticed in No. 1303, W. F. Wells, * The
Dawn.'

No. 522, B. Barker, b. 1 776, d. 1838, « Brecon Town and Bridge,' a
low-toned drawing in perfect condition, possibly a little darkened by
age, but absolutely unfaded. Here indigo appears to have been freely
used, but of Indian red there are no traces.

I now approach a series of drawings which offer a remarkable proof
of permanence. I allude to the ' Ellison Gift.' It happens, most for-
tunately for my argument, that the greater part of these drawings
are in their original frames. A glance at the style and condition of
these frames ought to convince the most sceptical that the works
they contain have been exposed on the walls for a period far exceed-
ing the limits assigned by Mr. Eobinson to the duration of a water-
colour drawing.

No. 1057, J. Varley, Ellison Gift, ' Bolton Abbey,' painted 1842,
original frame, quite unfaded. No. 1056, J. Varley, Ellison Gift,
' Eiver Scene,' painted 1840, quite unfaded; the original frame.
No. 512, David Cox, Ellison Gift, « A Cornfield,' and No. 1018, Ellison
Gift ' Windsor Castle,' both in the original frames, in perfect condition.
No. 1022, P. Dewint, Ellison Gift, 'The Snowdrift;' Indian red is
much exposed in the sky, the indigo faded, otherwise unchanged ;
original frame. No. 515, P. Dewint, Ellison Gift, ' Nottingham,' in
perfect condition ; a very early style of frame. No. 1021, P. Dewint,

1886 LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS. 273

Ellison Gift, 'Lincoln Cathedral,' a large drawing in an old-fashioned
frame, in good condition ; indigo in the sky possibly a little
faded. Nos. 1040 and 1041, Ellison Grift, 'Ratisbon Cathedral ' and
' Wiirtzburg,' in perfect condition ; undated, but the style of frames
points to about the year 1840. No. 51 5, Ellison Gift, ' The Cricketers ;
this beautiful drawing has suffered much in the sky, almost all the
indigo having vanished, leaving the Indian red dominant. As a
proof that the two pigments, Indian red and indigo, ought never to-
be associated, this drawing is of the utmost value ; but it remains
to be proved that this action is caused or aggravated by exposure to
light. No. 1034, Ellison Gift, F. Mackenzie, 6. 1787, d. 1854, ' Lincoln
Cathedral,' framed in the old style, as are several others by the
same artist ; in perfect condition. No. 1025, Ellison Gift, Copley
Fielding, ' A Ship in Distress,' painted 1829, the original frame ;
the sky is 'foxy,' from the use of Indian red. No. 519, Ellison
Gift, Copley Fielding, ' South Downs,' in perfect condition ; original
frame.

Leaving this valuable series of drawings in the Ellison Gift, I will
proceed to notice some others which have been selected to illustrate
both permanence and change. And here I occupy more uncertain
ground, as, for obvious reasons, I am prevented from ascertaining
with certainty the extent to which they may have been exposed to
light previous to their acquisition by the Museum.

No. 431, Cristall, 6. 1767, d. 1847, 'The Fishmarket, Hastings.'
This drawing shows no evidence of fading, but its appearance sug-
gests that it must have been exposed to smoke or impure air long
prior to its purchase by the Museum in 1873. No. 2938, Smith
Bequest, Eddridge, ' Near Bromley, Kent,' secured by the Museum
according to the terms of the bequest in 1876 ; generally in good
condition, as are the other eleven drawings by that artist. Eddridge
was born in 1769, and died in 1821. No. 1426, Townshend be-
quest, Robson, 6. 1790, d. 1833, 'Loch Coruisk, Skye,' in perfect
condition. No. 3047, Smith bequest, Bonington, 6. 1801, d. 1828,

* Street in Verona,' in good condition. Nos. 568 and 569, J. Chalon,
6. 1778, d. 1860. Both these drawings are in a bad condition.
The * Welsh Landscape ' has suffered from damp, and in the ' River
Scene ' there is distinct evidence that water has run down it from
above.

No. 3013, Smith bequest (1876), Cotman, b. 1782, d. 1842,

* Dieppe.' The colour is unaltered, but there are mildew spots in the
sky, pointing to damp. The other drawings by this artist are in-
good condition. No. 564, D. Cox, ' Cottage near Norwood,' in perfect
condition. No. 158, D. Cox, 'Moorland Scene,' signed and dated
1854, quite unchanged. I have omitted to notice two other draw-
ings in the Ellison Gift, which I here add to that important series —
namely, No. 1011, J. Barret, ' Landscape Composition,' original frame,

274 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

and No. 1012, J. Barret, ' Weary Trampers,' signed and dated 1840,
both in a perfect state.

In order to justify the censure directed against the authorities of
the Museum by Mr. J. C. Robinson for neglecting the necessary pre-
cautions for securing the safety of this collection, it will be necessary
for that gentleman to prove that the unsatisfactory condition of
some of the drawings, which I have not hesitated to notice above,
has been brought about since they have been placed upon the walls of
the South Kensington Museum.

It now remains for me to notice the interesting series of drawings
by Cozens included in the Dyce collection. As regards their present
condition they speak for themselves. I see no evidences of change,
but they offer a valuable illustration of the method of work adopted
by the early school of English water-colour painters, being executed
first in monochrome and then heightened in effect by thin washes of
local colour. This conventional treatment was followed by Turner
in his early works, which in many instances have been actually copied
from drawings by Cozens. Turner, however, very soon emancipated
himself from the trammels of his instructor, his instinct for colour
leading him to see that one monotonous tint was quite inadequate
to express the varied hues of shadows as seen in nature. Girtin shared
with Turner in this just discrimination, and, even in the few years of
life allotted to him, was able to effect a revolution in the practice of
water-colour art. The seven drawings at South Kensington appear
to be well preserved, but as the turning point in the history of
English water-colour art it is to be hoped that the authorities of the
Museum will be able to enrich their collection by other and more
striking examples.

Passing to the works of an artist belonging to a totally different
school, I will next notice the large drawing by G. Cattermole, the
6 Diet of Spiers.' This work having been particularly alluded to as an
instance of fading, I wish to ask why it is that other drawings by
Cattermole belonging to the same series (the Ellison Gift) and
exposed to light under the same conditions offer so marked a con-
trast. The answer to this question is very simple. The ' Diet of
Spiers ' is a very early work of the master. It is executed on white
paper in transparent colour. At an early period of his career
Cattermole discovered that the use of white paper was not congenial
to him, and he soon abandoned it for the peculiar grey coarse paper
used, I believe, for wrappers by the papermakers. Upon this
material he painted frankly in body colour (gouache'). This method,
so well suited to the impetuosity which characterises his work, he
pursued to the last.

The drawing in question, regarded as a work of art, could never
have competed with his later productions, but I have it upon the
authority of one of Cattermole's most intimate friends — a gentleman

1886 LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS. 275

still living, and who is the contributor of some of the finest produc-
tions of the master in the present exhibition at the Institute — that
this particular drawing was allowed to remain uncovered for weeks
together at the engraver's, exposed certainly to dust and possibly to
damp.

The drawings by Holland may also be compared with advantage
with those at the Institute, these latter being authenticated as
having been for many years exposed to full daylight. I am unable
to discover any appreciable difference between the works of this
artist as represented at the South Kensington Museum and those
now on view at the Institute.

I will close the notice of the South Kensington drawings, neces-
sarily imperfect, by a reference to a work by W. Hunt, because it
has been cited by Mr. Church in evidence of fading under the treat-
ment to which it has been subjected at the Museum. The drawing
in question is obviously an unfinished one. This the pencil marks
still left in the background would suffice to show ; but I would call
attention particularly to the melon, the principal feature in the
work. This portion of the drawing has not faded, for the colour has
never been there. It is simply a laying in with body colour previous
to its completion in transparent or glazing colours — a process familiar
to oil painters, but seldom resorted to by water-colour artists except
in the case of William Hunt. •

We come now to the region of facts, not only as regards the
actual condition of some of the finest specimens of water-colour art
that have ever been gathered together, but also to that chief element
in the question, the history and antecedents of a considerable number
of them.

I allude to the collection at the Eoyal Institute which the energy
and perseverance of Sir James Linton have enabled him to present
to the public as a proof that the hasty and sweeping charges
brought against one of the most beautiful arts of our time have
not been substantiated and are incapable of verification.

Presuming that most of the readers of this article have personally
inspected the collection in question and that the perusal of Sir James
Linton's preface to the catalogue will have explained the objects
of the exhibition, it will be sufficient to state briefly that it was
intended to confute a mischievous fallacy which by its wide circula-
tion through the medium of a powerful journal is calculated to mis-
lead the public into the belief that one of the richest and purest
enjoyments of our lives — the contemplation, namely, of the works of
the greatest English water-colour painters of a past generation — is a
fleeting delight which can only be indulged in under conditions that
are troublesome and difficult of attainment. Who can compare for a
moment the satisfaction we derive from the inspection of works in a
museum with the enjoyment of water-colour drawings exposed upon

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

our walls ? The critic or dilettante visits the British Museum to
compare styles or to verify a date, and it is well that this opportunity
should be afforded him, but the pictures upon our walls appeal to a
different and I think a higher faculty. Who is there that, being
the fortunate possessor of beautiful works of art, will fail to admit
their humanising influence ? and how the aspect of a ' Turner ' or a
* David Cox ' diverts his attention from the petty cares of life,
the res angustce domi, and even helps to soothe him under the
pressure of greater troubles ?

I would wish to point out that the objects of the permanent
• collection at South Kensington and the much smaller exhibition
which I am now about to notice are widely different. The South
Kensington Museum is above all an educational institution, and its
art collections are brought together with the distinct intention of
guiding the student in the investigation of the history of its different
branches. Hence the condition and the qualities of individual speci-
mens have been less regarded than the position they occupy in the
category they are intended to illustrate. The exhibition of early
English water-colour painters at the Institute consists of the contri-
butions of various collectors and connoisseurs, who have kindly lent
their works for the purpose indicated. In the former case I purposely
selected for notice many of the drawings which at some period of
their existence had suffered injury from the treatment to which they
had been subjected, with the view of showing that in numerous
cases other causes besides exposure to light had been at work. With
regard to the Institute collection no such discrimination is required,
for they are nearly all in admirable condition.

I will proceed to notice a few of these drawings. The three
magnificent Turners, now the property of Professor Kuskin, occupy
— as their transcendent beauty entitles them — a central place on the
walls of the Council Eoom. Of the drawing No. 90, ' Scene in Savoy ,r
I am enabled to state with absolute certainty the following parti-
culars. Professor Ruskin speaks of it in these terms : * It is a very
early drawing, certainly not later than 1812 or 1814, and I cannot
conceive of it as ever more beautiful than now.' To my personal
knowledge the ' Scene in Savoy ' was hung on the walls and exposed
to ordinary daylight for upwards of twenty years. Mr. Kuskin pro-
ceeds to say : ' The Devonport and Salisbury were hung in the
excellent light of Mr. Windus's drawing-room at Tottenham, and
came from Tottenham to Denmark Hill.' No. 8, Turner, ' Tintern
Abbey,' exposed to light ever since it was painted in the year 1800.
The practice pursued by Professor Ruskin of covering up his Turner
drawings during a portion of the day, although, as evidenced by the
condition of many works by Turner, by no means a necessary pre-
caution, is to be advocated as an exceptional measure, owing to the
extreme tenuity of many of his tints and the subtle gradations of

1886 LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS. 277

colour upon which so much of the value of his work depends. It is
well known that paper when excluded from the light acquires a
yellow colour by age, an effect similar to that produced upon oil
pictures. It is, therefore, in every way desirable that delicately
tinted water colours should be alternately covered up and exposed
to light. The opinions of Professor Ruskin upon all matters relating
to art stand in no need of advocacy by me. Every line that he
has written will be remembered and quoted long after the present
controversy has been forgotten ; but as he has been charged with
inconsistency, it is well to remember that he only advocates this
precautionary measure in the case of drawings by Turner.

No. 41, W. Hunt, ' Pine, Melon, and Grapes,' exposed in frame
for forty years. No. 73, J. Varley, * A Landscape,' exposed since
painted, about 1828. No. 108, S. Prout, 'Dresden,' toned paper,
always exposed to light. No. 122, E. Dayes, * Greenwich Hospital,'
exposed ever since it was painted, about 1800. No. 168, J. Varley,
' Windsor,' always exposed since painted in 1828. No. 91, ' Salisbury
Cathedral,' a very early work by Turner, showing no evidence of
change. No. 93, ' Buckfast Leigh Abbey,' the property of Mr. Arthur
Severn, E. I., an exquisite drawing in perfect condition. There are
several other very early works by Turner, but being executed almost
entirely in monochrone, their value as an evidence of durability
under exposure to light is less striking ; but I may mention one —
No. 158, * The Bay of Nice ' — a drawing executed in the old manner,
first in neutral tint and then slightly washed with local colour.
This drawing has been in my own possession and always exposed to
light for more than thirty years. I can discover no change in it.

I turn now to the beginning of the catalogue. No. 5, W. Hunt,
'The Restless Sitter,' an exceptionally brilliant drawing by the
master. This work has been executed fifty-five years ; it has changed
hands four times, but has to this day always been framed and exposed
to light. No. 10, De Wint, ' Felling Timber,' exposed to light by
the present owner; sky quite unchanged, owing probably to the
absence of Indian red. No. 11, ' Ulverston Sands,' De Wint, hung
on the walls for twenty years. No. 13, De Wint, 'Haymaking,' in
perfect condition; the original frame. No. 18, 'Plums and Black-
berries,' W. Hunt, exposed to light since painted ; exhibited at the
Fine Art Exhibition 1878-9 (see notes by Professor Ruskin in
catalogue of that exhibition).

No. 21, J. Holland, 'Interior of Church,' dated 1844, always
exposed to light. I may mention that the works of this artist are so
eminently decorative in character that they are generally placed on
the walls by their owners. Having been intimately acquainted both
with the painter and his works for many years, I have frequently
been struck with the brilliancy of his water-colour drawings. His
VOL. XX.— No. 114. U

278 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug

oil pictures, on the other hand, have sometimes deteriorated in quality,
owing, I believe, to the injudicious use of certain media.

No. 23, J. Varley, ' Lake and Mountain,' exposed to light from
the time it was painted ; the original frame.

No. 29, W. Miiller, ' Near Bristol,' dated 1844, always exposed to
light. No. 35, Gr. Barret, * Landscape with Cattle and Sheep,' hung
on the walls. No. 41, Wm. Hunt, ' Pine, Melon and Grapes,' in
splendid condition; exhibited at the Fine Art Gallery 1878-9
(see notes by Professor Euskin in catalogue of that exhibition).
No. 45, W. Hunt, * Black Grapes and Strawberries,' at least twenty years
exposed to light. No. 49, ' Quinces,' W. Hunt, twenty years exposed
to light ; exhibited at Fine Art Exhibition 1878-9. No. 53, W. Hunt,
( Green Grapes,' always exposed to light, remarkably strong and pure
in colour. No. 55, W. Hunt, ' Dead Pigeon,' always exposed to light,
especially brilliant and pure in colour (see notes by Professor
Euskin in catalogue of Fine Art Exhibition). No. 60, G-. Barret,
' Morning,' for fifty years exposed to light ; original frame. No. 62,
J. Holland, ' Old Port of Dover,' dated 1846, framed and exposed
to light from the time it was painted.

No. 25, J. Varley, ' Eoss Castle, Killarney,' long exposed to light ;
the original frame. No, 43, W. Hunt, ' The Shy Sitter,' twenty years
exposed to light. I have been informed by Mr. Orrock that all his
Hunt drawings have been exposed in frames for twenty years, so that
further mention of them is needless. No. 70, Sir A. Callcott, E.A.,
' Lake of Thun,' an early drawing evidently executed tinder the
influence of Turner ; exposed to daylight for thirty years. Note
particularly the purity of the grey tones. No. 77, Gr. Cattermole,
'Eeading the Bible in the Baron's Chapel,' dated 1846, in the
original frame ; in perfect condition.

No. 78, G-. Cattermole, ' Visit to the Monastery,' exposed since
it was painted to light. No. 82, 'Flower Drawing,' J. Holland,
always exposed to light. Note the purity and brilliancy of the
colour. Holland's early practice of flower painting doubtless contri-
buted much to the beauty of his colour in after days. No. 86,
Bonington, ' G-enoa,' framed and exposed to light for thirty years.
No. 95, G-. Cattermole, ' The Minstrel,' always exposed to light.
No. 100, W. Hunt, * Interior of a Cottage,' exposed to light ever
since it was painted, fifty-six years ago.

No. 105, J. Holland, ' Venice,' extremely bright and pure in colour ;
in the original frame. No. 113, D. Cox, ' The Skylark,' a magnificent
drawing in perfect condition ; in the original frame, as is also the
pendant, * Changing the Pastures ' — two of the finest Coxes in exist-
ence. No. 119, F. J. Lewis, ' The Dancers.' This drawing was pur-
chased by Mr. Euskin, sen., in 1840, and has been always exposed to
daylight until quite recently. In the original frame.

No. 120, E. de Witte, 'A Dutch Church.' This drawing has been

1886 LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS. 279

the subject of much discussion. Mr. J. C. Kobinson declares that the
name and date 1669 inscribed upon it are a forgery, and that the
paper is of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, and moreover that
it is a very bad copy of an old oil picture by the master. This
statement remains to be verified, but it is an undoubted fact that
the drawing in question has been framed and exposed to the light
for forty-five years, which is amply sufficient for our present purpose.
No. 137, D. Cox, 'Crossing the Moor.' This drawing was purchased
from the artist by the late Mr. Topham, E.W.S., and hung on his walls
until his death. No. 139, Gr. Barret, 'Evening,' framed fifty years
ago, and always exposed to light. No. 151, D. Cox, 'A Windy Day.'
This remarkably brilliant drawing has been exposed to daylight for
thirty-three years. No. 155, De Wint, ' Aysgarth,' exposed for more
than twenty years to the light. No. 163, S. Prout, * An Old English
Cottage,' the property of Professor Euskin, who informs us that it
has been exposed to light since his childhood (see appendix to
Catalogue).

I have now, I trust, succeeded in verifying my original statement
that a very large number of the drawings in this remarkable col-
lection have been exposed to full daylight without appreciable
change. The publicity given to the statements of Mr. J. C. Kobin-
son has induced me — I fear at the risk of wearying the reader — to go
into much detail. This has been inevitable, for it is only by the
reiteration of particular facts that it has been possible to meet gene-
ral accusations. As regards the present condition of the drawings,
they speak for themselves.

In a letter from Mr. J. C. Eobinson recently addressed to Truth
the following passage occurs : * What is there to show that many,
perhaps even the majority, of these drawings may not, for the
greater part of their time even, have been kept in the dark in port-
folios, or otherwise carefully protected from the light ? This has
certainly been the case in some instances ; and if this can be proved,
is not the exhibition at least sailing under false colours ? ' I trust
that the information I have been enabled to procure is a sufficient
answer to these questions. Had the collection at the Institute con-
sisted solely of works that had been exposed to daylight, Sir James
Linton would have laid himself open to the charge of having
purposely excluded every drawing which told against his argument.
It might have been supposed that the mere fact of such a collection
as this having been secured in little more than a week would have
been sufficient to refute the absurd accusation that members of an
honourable profession have banded themselves together in order to
propagate a falsehood — for this in effect is the charge hurled against
them.

Before concluding this branch of the subject, which is intention-
ally devoted to the enumeration of facts, I wish to call attention to

u2

280 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the condition of a small but well-selected collection of drawings in
the possession of my friend Mr. Henry Drake, of Kensington. This
gentleman has not only afforded me an opportunity of carefully
inspecting the works in question, but has given me the assurance
that they have been hung on his walls for twenty years, and for
about the same time on the walls of their former possessor. Being
most of them in their original frames, it may be taken for granted
that they have been exposed to the light for more than forty years.
I think that their present appearance would be a revelation to those
who hold that the period of thirty years arbitrarily fixed upon
for the duration of their existence so far as colour is concerned,
has been far exceeded. The collection comprises drawings by the
following artists : W. Miiller, Copley Fielding, David Cox, Gr.
Cattermole, E. Duncan, Gr. Fripp, P. Naftel, and others, all in
admirable preservation. No special precaution has been adopted
with regard to these drawings, except their protection from direct
sunshine.

The difference between the effects of direct sunshine and diffused
light are so enormous that I was long under the impression that they
differed in kind as well as in degree. The inquiries I have instituted
concerning this matter have led me to modify this opinion, but prac-
tically my conviction remains the same, and I think the above
facts attest that there is a gulf between the effects of sunshine and
ordinary diffused daylight — an assertion that no one who has practi-
cally studied the subject will be able to deny. The exclusion of the
direct rays of the sun from water-colour drawings is a condition of
their preservation in the state in which they were produced ; and had
the discussion opened with a recommendation to that effect, I am
convinced that the controversy would have been pursued in a very
different tone from that it has unfortunately assumed.

It is to be observed that in his first letter to the Times Mr. J. C.
Robinson takes no notice of the varied pigments employed by dif-
ferent artists, but pointedly asserts that all water-colour drawings
are doomed to destruction unless guarded from daylight, thus leading
the uninitiated reader to conclude that all the pigments employed
by water-colour painters were open to the same objection. It was
not until Professor Church took up the question and pointed out the
particular pigments that should be used with caution, that Mr.
Robinson descended from vague generalities to the consideration of
really important factors in the question. It is, however, worthy
of remark that Mr. Church is more exercised in his praiseworthy
endeavours to promote the study of the chemistry of pigments
amongst living artists than in vain regrets over the ignorance or
indifference of some of the greatest artists of the century concerning
the pigments they employed.

The greatest master of landscape painting — the man who occupies

1886 LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS. 281

a solitary pedestal in the Walhalla of landscape art — was admittedly
careless in this respect. In whichever medium he worked, the one
consideration by which he seemed to be guided was the production
of the effect to which he was urged by the inspiration of the moment,
and this especially with regard to the scheme of colour he adopted,
which induced him to select the colours which were the best expo-
nents of his ideas. Turner was probably little troubled by the
question of durability. As Mr. Euskin happily remarked, * He feels
in colour, but he thinks in light and shade.' The rich enjoyment
which the mere practice of his art must have afforded him was un-
tempered by anxiety as to the future of his work, and was akin to
the satisfaction of a great musician who draws sweet tones from his
instrument.

It is from these considerations that I should feel disposed to ex-
elude the water-colour works of Turner from the walls of our public
galleries, except under the conditions which in the National Grallery
render them secure from injury.

Passing on to the lesser lights, the men who, admirable in their
way, are only second to Turner, it would be a misfortune were we to
be deprived of free access to their works so long as they are placed
under vigilant care.

The pessimists, happily few in number, would have us believe
that the durability of pigments, as regards the effect of daylight upon
them, is in the inverse ratio of their usefulness. This is fortunately
far from being the case. The fading effect of light upon certain pig-
ments is almost confined to those of organic origin, many of which
have been but sparingly employed by our best water-colour painters.

Sir James Linton expresses the opinion that certain drawings
have even become richer and deeper in tone than when they were
first painted, but he is represented by Mr. J. C. Eobinson to have
said that they have gained in brilliancy, which is quite another thing.
The desiccation of the size in the paper, as well as the gum and other
media employed in the manufacture of water-colours, may have con-
duced to this quality, a change which is analogous to the darkening
of the oils and varnishes in oil paintings.

It has been hinted that artists are not entitled to a hearing on
this question of durability, on the ground that they are influenced
by interested motives. The truth or fallacy of this accusation must
depend upon the meaning attached to the word. In one sense
artists are certainly interested witnesses, but if sordid motives are
attributed to them such an imputation must be emphatically dis-
claimed. Mr. Eobinson may rest assured that the sincerest admirers
of the early school of English water-colour painters are to be found
in the ranks of living artists, who would view with dismay the disso-
lution or decay of the priceless treasures which have been bequeathed
to us.

282 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

Many artists have themselves instituted experiments upon the
pigments employed by painters in both materials, but they have
hitherto been of a desultory nature, and not pursued with sufficient
system. The investigations of Professor Church have been of great
value in this respect, and whilst deprecating the animus exhibited
by Mr. J. C. Eobinson, both as to the matter and the manner of his
attacks, I am quite ready to allow that good results may follow from
the inquiry that he has instigated, and whilst separating the good
seed from the chaff let us remember the old adage : Fas est et ab
hoste doceri.

Before this comtroversy began, people were becoming weaned
from the fallacious doctrine that works executed in water-colour were
necessarily less permanent than those ' protected ' by the oils and
varnishes with which they were painted, and it is to be hoped that
this scare will not deter them from reconsidering the verdict that all
water-colour drawings which have been long exposed to daylight have
been irreparably injured.

Mr. Kobinson contends that one of the causes of the greater
stability of oil paintings is the circumstance that the pigments
are employed in far greater volume than in water-colour paint-
ing, strangely overlooking the fact that the early painters applied
their colours with remarkable thinness, as may be seen in the works
of Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Diirer, Holbein, and in most of the early
Italian masters. It is moreover to be noticed that these works were
painted on a white gesso ground, and probably in water-colour. The
use of oil or varnish was an after-process employed in finishing the
picture. I am aware that I am now treading upon debatable ground,
but there is high authority for the assumption. Now these so-called
oil paintings are precisely the works which excite the admiration
of the world not only from their inherent beauty, but from their
extraordinary durability.

The practice of loading the colour belongs to a later date, and I
have yet to learn that it conduces to their permanence. That light
is not without its influence upon certain pigments, even when they
are ' locked up ' by oil or varnish, is evidenced by the fact that
numerous examples of the Dutch school have suffered in this
respect.

Landscapes by Hobbema, Both, and Euysdael, frequently show
fading in the greens of their foliage. In these cases yellow glazing
colours of vegetable origin have been employed, which, being fleeting,
have passed away, leaving a cold blue green underneath. Such
examples might be multiplied, and they extend even to the Floren-
tine and Sienese schools of the fifteenth century, and especially in
the flesh tints of Botticelli, whose works, graceful and refined as they
must always have been, may even have acquired a certain pathos

1886 LIGHT AND WATER-COLOURS. 283

from the pallor that has ensued owing to the use of pigments
prepared from cochineal.

I mention this fact in order to show that the fading effects of
light upon certain pigments is by no means confined to water-colours.
On the other hand, the durability of flax, which material is the
foundation of all good drawing paper, is abundantly proved by the
wonderful preservation of linen in the Egyptian tombs.

' Pure old water-colour painting upon pure old rags' — such is the
panacea offered by the greatest art critic of the day, to pour balm
into the wounds of those who hold that all water-colour drawings are
doomed to extinction when exposed to daylight.

In the opening pages of Mr. J. C. Robinson's article in this
Review, to which I have presumed to offer a reply, he says that in
his first communication to the Times he did not intend to provoke
a controversy, by which, I suppose, he means that, the fiat having
gone forth that all water-colour drawings were for the future to be
considered as inherently perishable, it would be presumptuous for
any one to dispute either the premisses with which he starts, or the
conclusions at which he arrives.

Not being in a position to speak ex cathedra, and having to face
the proverbial difficulty of proving a negative, I have ventured to
embark in a controversy with an assailant in whom fluency and wealth
of illustration are happily blended. But, fortunately for ourselves,
combatants have been enlisted on our side who combine a practical
experience of the art in which they excel with the critical faculty
which renders their testimony of the highest value. As any defini-
tive judgment upon the merits of the case can hardly yet be expected,
we must look to the gradual enlightenment of the public for the
decision of a question that concerns every lover of art.

FRANK DILLON.

284 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

NAVAL DEFENCE OF THE COLONIES.

WE have heard much of late of the necessity for Imperial Federa-
tion, but no attempt appears to have been made either to formulate
a scheme for the practical development of such a policy, or to offer a
definition of the word federation as applicable to the British Empire.
The term is probably used by many to express their desire that the
mother country — irreverently called by our American cousins the
' grandmother country ' — should use her utmost endeavours to unite
the subjects of the Queen in all parts of the world as one family,
with one bond of union founded on a determination to promote the
welfare and to protect the interests of every portion of the British
Empire.

If federation signifies the permanent union of her Majesty's
numerous possessions on such principles it is clearly intended to be
framed on a sound basis ; but it is doubtful whether any legal or
political enactments, beyond those which now exist, can be expected
to accomplish that object more completely than the system which
has prevailed of recent years, and which, in accordance with the
general feeling of the nation, is undoubtedly drawing the colonies
and the mother country into closer union year by year, with ties of
friendship and confidence in each other.

In the January number of this Keview the difficulties of attempt-
ing to establish a federation of the Empire, in the ordinary meaning
of the term, have been so ably and conclusively discussed by Sir
Henry Thring that a repetition of his arguments would be super-
fluous ; but after careful consideration I am led to believe that the
same arguments which he has advanced against the probability of a
political federation of the colonies with Great Britain being esta-
blished, at least during this century, apply with equal force to the
proposal for a federation of the naval and military forces of the
colonies with those of the United Kingdom, except as regards the
local defences of each colony. I refer only to the immediate future.
What may occur in the far future I will not venture to predict.
But whatever system is adopted to unite those forces it should be
such as may readily be expanded to meet the increasing strength
and importance of our colonial empire, which has in it all the
elements of greatness and which will require all the care and con-

1886 NAVAL DEFENCE OF THE COLONIES. 285

sideration of both imperial and colonial statesmen to consolidate as
it grows in power and extent year by year.

Whatever change is made in the mode by which the colonies are
bound to the mother country must be (as was ably urged by Sir
George Bowen at the Colonial Institute on the 15th of June last) only
in consequence of the expressed wish of the colonies themselves. Any
attempt to force or to persuade them into federation will assuredly
result in failure. The secret of our success in colonisation hitherto
must not be ignored ; it is that the self-government of each colony
has been made a reality and does not exist in name only. We learnt
our lesson in 1776, and have most certainly profited by it. Do not
let us depart from those principles, but rather let us continue to
encourage our colonial brethren to apply all their energies to
insure the stability of their own institutions, and to the mainte-
nance of their own prosperity and happiness.

The consolidation of our great empire will best be assured by
treating our colonies as friends, not as children ; as friends bound to
us by the closest of ties, those of love and mutual confidence : by
recognising unreservedly their growing strength and importance ; by
giving full consideration to all requests which are founded on careful
discussion among themselves, and which may therefore be relied on
as the expression of public opinion. A desire for closer political
union may arise spontaneously from the colonies, but such desire
will probably first show itself by a voluntary federation of the
Australasian group, where there is a nearer approach to a community
of interests, and in respect to which a notable example has been
shown to them by the Dominion of Canada.

If our colonies in various parts of the world were to form them-
selves into groups for their own defence and commercial interests —
especially in regard to custom-tariffs — any subsequent desire for
imperial federation would be more easy of accomplishment. Such a
movement would in itself indicate the wish of the colonists to ad-
vance in the direction of closer political union.

It is not within the object of this paper to discuss the question
of the representation of the colonies in the House of Commons of
the United Kingdom. It appears desirable, however, for many
reasons connected with the management of the internal affairs of
each colony and its independence of imperial legislation, that the
most capable men should remain in the colonial legislature, where
they could best render good service to their own portion of the
Empire.

If the admission of colonial members were limited to a small
number to represent each colony, their influence in Parliament would
be insufficient to guide its policy, although their presence would offer
temptations for undue interference with colonial affairs: if the number
admitted were in proportion to population or revenue, they would in

286 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the course of years overwhelm the members returned by the con-
stituencies of the United Kingdom.

I think it probable that the colonists would, after a careful con-
sideration of the matter, be more likely to desire the formation of a
council in London, to which the Secretary of State might look for
advice on colonial affairs in general, and which might be formed
somewhat on the lines of the Indian Council, now acting under the
Secretary of State for India.

Whatever steps may be taken, or may be disregarded, in this
direction, it is certain that the stability and integrity of this great
empire will in the future to a large extent depend on the wisdom
and sagacity with which the Imperial Government deals with ques-
tions connected with the welfare and interests of our colonies and
dependencies. They are often spoken of by foreigners and even by
our own countrymen as sources of weakness, as direct temptations to
attack by any hostile force of a maritime State with whom we may be
involved, or about to be involved, in war ; they are considered to be
unable to protect themselves and too far removed from Great Britain
to be able to rely on efficient protection by the mother country. If
this be so, we must not let such a state of things continue. We must
make the colonies in the event of war what they are during peace —
a source of strength. Their revenues, their manhood, and their
minerals would, we may feel assured, thanks to the patriotism and
loyalty of the colonists, be at the disposal of the Imperial Govern-
ment for the defence of their own territory as well as of our trade
and shipping in their vicinity. But while there is time we should,
in conjunction with the Governments of our principal colonies,
organise a system capable of general application, and insure that
whatever plans are adopted for defence should be matured and
executed without delay, that they may be ready and efficient when
required.

It is generally acknowledged to be the duty of the Imperial
Government to afford protection to British subjects, British interests,
and British territory in the event of war — first to insure the
safety of the head and heart of the Empire, then to guard all its
members.

The question of Home Defence is one of such magnitude that it
will not be touched upon here. It depends mainly on the strength
and efficiency of the navy ; if that, our first line of defence, is not
adequately provided for, our existence as a nation is imperilled.

When discussing the mode in which the defence of our colonies
should be undertaken it must be borne in mind that they are to be
classified in three distinct categories.

1. Those which are held as naval stations for the repair and
equipment of our ships of war, and also as places d'armes for strategic
purposes, as depots for troops, stores, and provisions, and which will

1886 NAVAL DEFENCE OF THE COLONIES. 287

provide a secure refuge for ships of the Royal Navy and mercantile
marine if pressed by the enemy in time of war. Positions of such
importance should be made capable of protecting themselves against
any force that might reasonably be expected to be brought against
them, and be prepared to stand a siege until the arrival of our fleet
to their support. In this class are included Malta, Aden, Simon's
Town, Gibraltar, Bermuda, Hong Kong, and others.

2. There is another class of colony which is of value for the re-
plenishment of our ships of war and merchant vessels with coal, stores,
and provisions, and which will also serve as a refuge when ships are
pressed either by the enemy or bad weather. These, usually called
coaling stations, are of much importance for the maintenance of our
squadrons in all parts of the world where our ships must necessarily
cruise for the protection of our commerce and carrying trade.

These ports should be so defended as to be independent of the pre-
sence of our fleet, which must always be left free for offensive operations
and for the protection of our trade on the high seas. The permanent
self-defence of these ports should be sufficient to deny the anchorage
to an enemy and to prevent the occupation or destruction of the
depot by a hostile squadron.

This protection can be best afforded by the provision of submarine
mines, to be laid down when required, on a system carefully organ-
ised in time of peace ; the mines being guarded and the anchorage
commanded by a few guns of about 6-inch and smaller calibre,
separated from each other, placed at heights of about 100 feet above
the sea-level, and at distances from the shore varying from a
quarter 'to half a mile. Each gun should be mounted on a disappear-
ing (Moncrieff) carriage, and be surrounded by a ditch or other
sunken obstruction to prevent it from being run into.

In this class of coaling stations may be included St. George's
Sound (Western Australia), Port Eoyal (Jamaica), St. Lucia (West
Indies), Perim (Red Sea), a coaling depot in the Fiji group, and
for the present the island of Port Hamilton, near the Corea (though
I look forward to this latter possession becoming a far more import-
ant station than a mere coaling depot), with others of varying im-
portance.

3. The most important class of our colonies has yet to be con-
sidered ; it consists of those large territories peopled by the Anglo-
Saxon race, who with love and pride own the Queen of Great Britain
as their sovereign, and which are rapidly increasing in population,
wealth, and strength. In this class are included the Dominion of
Canada, all the colonies in the Australasian group, and our colonies
in South Africa. This last-named group has passed through a period
of trouble and difficulty of late years, and it is hoped that they are
rising out of them and may insure a prosperous future by a confedera-
tion among themselves.

288 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

In each of these groups it is considered that the Imperial Govern-
ment should secure at least one port by efficient protection as
a naval station ; for this purpose Halifax, Sydney, and Simon's Bay
have been selected. Of these Sydney may be considered to be fairly
secure, and has the advantage of a good dock for the repair of large
ships. Halifax may with submarine mines and some additional forts
be moderately well protected against the approach of a hostile force
by sea, though it is open to an attack by land and has as yet no dock
which will accommodate a ship of war; one is in course of construc-
tion, which I trust will be completed without delay. Simon's Town and
the locality of the dock at Cape Town are not yet in a state to defend
themselves against an enemy without the assistance of our fleet. No
time should be lost in making this important station secure by
completing both the fortifications and the railway, so as to render
us independent of the Suez Canal for a route to India, China, and
Australia.

We are bound also to provide for the protection of our trade and
merchant shipping in the neighbourhood of these important colonies,
whose welfare depends so intimately on their exports and imports ;
and with this object our cruisers, which must be fast and powerfully
armed, should be multiplied, so as to be ubiquitous. The duty of
these cruisers should be not only to drive away or capture those of
the enemy, but to guard against filibustering or other expeditions
on unprotected parts of the coast, and especially to capture the steam
colliers which would be a necessary accompaniment to any hostile
squadron, by which alone they could be provided with coal, the sinew
of maritime war.

A very general movement among the Australasian colonies which
has lately taken place indicates that many of them consider they
should not rely only on the Royal Navy for defence. They naturally
feel that in the event of Great Britain being involved in war with a
great maritime Power the attention of this country would be mainly
directed to the seat of war nearer home, and to the conduct of offen-
sive operations against the enemy which might have the effect of
bringing the war sooner to an end. Provision would doubtless be
made for the protection of our trade on the high seas in all parts of
the world, but it is not improbable that the importance of the capture
of one of the principal ports of one of our principal colonies would be a
temptation to an enterprising enemy to despatch a powerful squadron
to distant seas, whose destination would be unknown to us, and which
might temporarily outnumber our squadron in those seas. It is to
guard against such a contingency, I presume, that the colonies are
turning their attention so seriously to local defence ; and it is our
duty to support their efforts loyally and effectually. The great
commercial interests which are at stake and the honour of this
country and of our flag, which is involved, render it necessary that

1886 NAVAL DEFENCE OF THE COLONIES. 289

the Imperial Government and the colonies should jointly take steps
to secure the outlying territory of the Empire from hostile invasion
and colonial property from destruction.

It is almost superfluous to refer to the fact that the object of
the colonies in providing vessels of war is solely for the purpose of
defence. Their status as armed vessels of war is provided for under
the Colonial Defence Act of 1865, the title of which indicates that
their special duty is to take part only in the local defence of the
colony which provides them. No fear therefore need be entertained
that the possession of armed ships of war, which are constructed
and intended only for service in harbours and on coasts, will
be utilised for purposes of offence in such a manner as might,
during peace time, involve us in troublesome diplomatic corre-
spondence with foreign Powers. The necessity for such a limit of
the duties of the colonial armed forces was, presumably, carefully
considered by the framers of the Act of 1865, and should not be
disregarded.

Many of the colonies are now voting money for, and are earnestly
engaged in, the provision and maintenance of naval forces for de-
fensive purposes. In some cases officers on the active lists of their
respective ranks in the Eoyal Navy have accepted service in the
colonies. These have been allowed by the Admiralty to proceed abroad
for such temporary service as they can be spared. Warrant officers,
petty officers, seamen-gunners, and others have also temporarily
been allowed to accept such appointments. They would probably,
however, be immediately recalled to England in the event of this
country being involved in a maritime war, which is precisely the
time when the colonies would require their services. This would
disorganise most seriously the young colonial navy. No doubt
officers of the mercantile marine of experience and high character
could be found to fill the vacant places, but it is certain that the
principal duties of officers in such a force will be those of training
seamen in the management of heavy guns and in the use of the
arms which will be placed in their hands. The capacity for instruct-
ing and training the seamen in the performance of all their duties
can only be properly possessed by those who are thoroughly con-
versant with them, and who have kept pace with the progress of
science and art in the construction and use of ships and weapons for
naval warfare.

In the event of war the naval forces of each colony would doubt-
less be placed under the orders of the naval commander-in-chief on
the station. The officers and men would then be under the Naval
Discipline Act and would in all respects be incorporated with the
Eoyal Navy. But it is evident that such a force, composed of officers
on the active list (if not previously recalled), others on the retired list,
officers and seamen of the merchant navy, and other seafaring men

290 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. August

entered in the colonies, trained on different systems, under different
commanding officers, not imited under anyone authority, would lack
that cohesion and strict discipline which is absolutely necessary to
form an effective naval force. It is true that each flotilla would be
generally retained for the defence of the port to which it belongs, but
occasion might arise when it would become necessary to unite them,
and in any circumstances they would be required to act in conjunc-
tion with the ships of the Koyal Navy, where the want of a uniform
system would be seriously felt.

I am very far from wishing to depreciate the personal value of
officers and men trained and nurtured in the colonies. I believe
that men whose early life has been passed in any of our large colonies
will be found to be peculiarly well fitted for service in the army or
the navy ; and I would gladly see both services more fully recruited
from that source, both as regards officers and men. In respect to
the navy, in which service a considerable increase in the number of
young officers is becoming more necessary every year, much benefit
would be derived by the admission of a larger number of colonial
cadets, who would thus be trained to take part in the defence of
their native or adopted homes, as well as to fulfil their duties in
other seas. I do not, however, anticipate, in view of the scarcity
of labour and high wages now prevalent in the colonies, that we
shall get seamen in any large numbers to join ships of war at the
present rates of pay for some years to come.

There are many minor difficulties to be overcome before colonial
naval forces can be with advantage incorporated with the Eoyal
Navy in time of war. Our naval regulations, Naval Discipline Act,
and system of signals are not to be learnt in a day ; the officers and
men will, however, be subject to all of them ; and arrangements
must also be made to define the relative rank of the officers of the
combined forces. These matters are no doubt capable of solution,
but they require careful consideration, and the efficiency of the
armed vessels of any colony must in a great degree depend not only
on their organisation, but on the constant exercise and training of
the officers and men in every branch of their duty.

An inspection of a well-disciplined ship of war by a landsman, or
indeed by anyone not thoroughly conversant with naval matters,
would give him an impression that the order, regularity, rapidity,
and precision with which every operation is carried out are the result
of natural causes, or perhaps the application of ordinary intelligence
and attention to the performance of daily duties a knowledge of which
may be easily acquired, and that when once the machinery of routine
is in motion it must go smoothly and with accuracy. There is nothing
to indicate that a long apprenticeship, with constant, unflagging
training and daily exercise actually at sea, is necessary to enable
reliance to be placed on the performance of every branch of the

1886 NAVAL DEFENCE OF THE COLONIES. 291

varied duties which combine to make an efficient ship of war. The
management of steam machinery, the repair, maintenance, and use
of torpedoes, a knowledge of electricity and magnetism, thorough
acquaintance with the working of ordnance, both heavy and light,
the navigation and handling of a ship in dangerous localities and
in a fleet, the control and discipline of bodies of men, and that self-
confidence in actual warfare founded on experience, are all necessary
branches of knowledge which must be possessed by the officers, and
especially by the captain if he is to take his ship into action with
any prospect of success.

It is certain that an efficient and reliable naval force cannot be
extemporised: it must be the growth of years, of years during
which the personnel must apply their whole energies to obtain a
knowledge of and practice in their profession.

These points are for the serious consideration of those colonies
which at the present time are with much energy and patriotism
endeavouring to organise local navies for their own defence.

I will now endeavour to give an outline of the system which I
believe those of our colonies, really in earnest in providing for
the local defence of their important ports, will sooner or later
desire to adopt. As has been mentioned previously in this paper,
the protection of trade on the high seas must continue to be the
duty of the Imperial Government. We ought not to look to the
colonies to take any share of the cost of providing sea-going ships,
whether ironclads or unarmoured cruisers ; and it would be most
unwise to limit the cruising grounds of such cruisers at the request
of any colonial Gfovernment, so as to hamper the plans of the
admiral in command and prevent the concentration of his force for
offensive or defensive operations as he thinks desirable.

The Government of each colony which is desirous of supple-
menting the Imperial forces by contributing towards the provision of a
flotilla for the local defence of its seaports, whether it be that of the
Dominion of Canada or of any of the Australasian group, might be
invited to consider, in conjunction with any naval and military officers
they think it desirable to consult, what description and amount of
naval force they deem it necessary to provide for the defence of their
ports. This should include the provision of submarine mines, gun-
boats, torpedo-boats, and any description of force afloat. An estimate
can then be formed of the cost of providing and annual cost of maintain-
ing the vessels decided on, which estimate should be approved both
by the Imperial and Colonial Governments, and the amount be paid
annually by the colony to the Imperial Government, which should
then engage to provide the necessary vessels without delay, and to
maintain them in efficiency at the several ports as part of the Royal
Navy under the command of the admiral on the station, on the distinct
understanding that neither during peace nor war should they be

292 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

removed from the ports they were provided to defend without the
consent of the Government of the colony.

This system is similar to that which has been in operation for
many years between the Home and Indian Governments for the pro-
tection of trade in the Persian Gulf, and has worked to the satisfac-
tion of both Governments and of the Koyal Navy. It will insure one
uniform system being adopted in all parts of the world : the colonies
would thus determine what number and description of vessels they
require for each locality ; the officers and men would be under
constant training, and would be acquainted with every improvement
in the art of naval warfare. The navy would be increased, and
facilities would be furnished for the entry and training of seamen,
boys and officers from the colonies, whether they are enrolled in the
active service of the navy, or in the colonial naval reserve to be
called out when required.

A remedy would thus be found for all the difficulties which are
inherent in the organisation of separate colonial squadrons indepen-
dently of the Royal Navy, of which the vessels would be perhaps
provided with different arms and ammunition ; and a true federation
for defensive purposes would be established, which would be more
efficient and more economical than any combination of colonial forces.
No one can doubt the administrative power of colonial statesmen or the
energy and high personal qualities of the colonists : they are capable
of creating an army and navy which would in time be second to none
in the world ; but I have endeavoured to show that the creation of a
navy requires a long period of training, for which the colonists have
not at present the leisure, and they will not be satisfied with a paper
force.

Various plans have been proposed for the defence of the trade of
the colonies during war, one of which has the merit of simplicity, if
it were practicable. It is that we should agree with other maritime
Powers to exempt private property from capture or destruction during
war. It is scarcely necessary to point out that such a convention
would soon be disregarded during a maritime war, and that any
nation which trusted to its observance would suffer. War must
continue to be a burden and disaster to all the inhabitants of the
countries engaged in it, and every individual should be interested in
bringing it to a close as soon as possible.

The foreign policy of the Imperial Government is a matter of
much importance to the colonies, and is one in which they apparently
have no voice ; but is it really so ? The Government of this country
is bound to consider, and doubtless does consider, the interests of the
whole Empire ; and it cannot be questioned that our foreign policy is
chiefly dictated — more or less wisely — by considerations affecting the
interests of our foreign possessions. These interests are best secured
by a powerful navy, one that is represented by an adequate force in

1886 NAVAL DEFENCE OF THE COLONIES. 293

every part of the globe, under one supreme command, a force which
should be homogeneous, uniform in organisation and in discipline,
not composed of various materials which could never form a compact
body.

The time has arrived when the protection of our commerce
requires a large increase in the number of fast, well-armed cruisers ;
it cannot be too forcibly urged that, in view of the great speed of
many ships in our own and other mercantile navies, we must provide
ships of at least equal speed and coal-carrying capacity, armed and
protected so as to be superior in fighting power to any armed merchant
ships they may meet.

I believe that the stability of this rapidly extending empire
depends in a great measure on the consideration which is given by
our statesmen to the interests of our sister States abroad. The
proceedings of this year connected with the Colonial and Indian
Exhibition in London will do much to awaken the people of Grreat
Britain to the fact of how large a share of our commercial greatness
is due to our colonial possessions ; and will induce them to consider
that their prosperity can best be insured by a continuance of the
policy which has been followed of late years, by which those countries
so separated from us by local position, climate, and other circum-
stances are not only encouraged to manage their own internal
affairs, but have free institutions and true liberty secured to them by
constitutions guaranteed by the Imperial Government, and are pro-
tected from disturbances from without by the navy of Grreat Britain.
The electric telegraph and our lines of steamships have lately
brought the colonies into much closer and more rapid intercourse
with each other and with the people of these islands ; and all classes
of society have followed the example of the Queen and the Eoyal
family in showing their appreciation of the high qualities of our
colonial brethren, and the value we attach to their friendship.

It is my earnest desire that the union between our colonies and
this country should be closer and more firmly established year by year ;
not bound by any additional legal ties or enactments, but by far
more reliable and permanent bonds, those of affection, common
interests, and mutual confidence.

A. COOPER KEY.

VOL. XX.— No. 114.

294 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

THE UNIONIST CAMPAIGN.

THE month which has come and gone, since I wrote in the last
number of this Review on the then impending election, has been
fraught with grave results. It is needless to say that those results
have been very welcome to those who hold, with me, that the main-
tenance of the Union is a matter of life and death to Great Britain.
A great danger has been averted ; a great disgrace has been avoided ;
a great principle has been vindicated. When a battle has been won,
there is little to be gained in fighting it over again on paper. Con-
cerning the elections, all I need say here is that they have amply
justified the confidence which I ventured to express when last I
wrote. There is one person — according to the French proverb — who
is always cleverer than all the world, and that is all the world. So
it has proved once more. The astute politicians, the clever wire-
pullers, and the sharp electioneering agents, as usual, failed to
realise the truth that the plain common sense of the great public would
carry the day against party organisations, however adroitly worked,
and party tactics, however skilfully played. The masses to whom
Mr. Gladstone appealed against the verdict of his own Parliament
have confirmed that verdict by an overwhelming majority, and have
now transferred their confidence to his political opponents.

This, as I read it, is the real lesson of the late elections. The
great public, whose judgment is in the end the final arbiter of all
our political controversies, has lost confidence in the Liberals, and
above all in their leader. In an evil hour for themselves and for
their country, the Liberals, as a party, consented, at the instance of
Mr. Gladstone, to identify themselves with the Irish Separatists.
By so doing they have impaired — and most justly impaired —
popular faith in their patriotism and their statesmanship. It is dis-
trust of Liberalism, far more than belief in Conservatism, which
has brought about the Conservative reaction. Be this as it may, the
existence and the extent of the reaction are not open to dispute.
Not only has the Conservative vote increased to an extent almost un-
known in our political annals ; not only have the great centres of the
nation's intelligence and wealth and industry pronounced in favour
of Conservatism ; but in every part of the United Kingdom, in every
nine constituencies out of ten, the Liberal vote has fallen away — the

1886 THE UNIONIST CAMPAIGN. 295

Conservative vote has increased in numbers. What is more than this,
the Conservatives would unquestionably have commanded an absolute
and decisive majority in the new Parliament if they had been willing
to subordinate the interests of the country to party considerations.
It is as certain as any hypothetical event can ever be, that if the
Conservatives had chosen to contest the seats held by Unionist
Liberals, the latter would in a large majority of cases have been
compelled to retire in favour of the Conservative candidates, who, as
a rule, would have proved successful. It is certain also that in a
very large number of the seats carried by Ministerialists, in which
the contest lay between them and Conservative candidates, the result
would have been different if the malcontent Liberals, instead of
simply staying away from the polls, had given their votes to the
Conservatives. The country, to speak the plain truth, has declared
for the Conservatives.

There is no good whatever in shirking facts : and the plain fact
is that from Lord Hartington downwards the Liberal Unionists who
have been returned to Parliament, number more Conservatives than
Liberals in the majorities to which they owe their election. They
are, to speak the truth, Liberals who were returned by Conservative
votes, and who cannot hope to be returned again unless they retain
the confidence of their Conservative supporters. There is nothing
in this of which the Liberal Unionists have any cause to be ashamed ;
the only reproach to which they have laid themselves open is that of
not fully realising the true character of their election.

It is obvious to any one who is prepared to look facts in the face
that the Liberal Unionists have no chance of forming a party of
their own. The British public, as I wrote in my last article, likes
clear colours and has no taste for neutral tints. A number of Liberal
members of the late Parliament, who had voted against the Home
Eule Bill, retained their seats because they were supported by the
Conservative vote. But the number of cases in which a Liberal
Unionist who had not sat in the last Parliament secured his election
might be counted on the fingers of two hands. The defeat of
Mr. GToschen and Sir Greorge Trevelyan, two of the most conspicuous
of the Liberal seceders, was doubtless due in the main to local and
personal causes. But still, neither of these mishaps could have
occurred if the cause they represented had commended itself strongly
to popular favour. The people of England may be — and I believe
are — Unionists to the backbone ; but they attach very little import-
ance to the question whether the defence of the Union is or is not
conjoined with a particular shade of Liberalism. What they want is
to see the Union upheld ; and the political instinct which is so largely
diffused amidst Englishmen teaches them that the party most likely
to put down all attempts to dismember the Empire are the Conserva-
tives. If the Union is to be maintained it is — as things are — not

296 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

the Unionist Liberals, but the Conservatives who have got to do the
work. This is the bottom fact of the whole political situation.

I dwell upon these considerations not from any wish to disparage
the services of a body of men for whom personally I have the highest
respect, and whose political opinions are very much in accordance
with my own, but because I wish to point out to my Liberal Unionist
friends what in my judgment is the course recommended to them
alike by interest, by good faith, and by duty. Before these lines
appear in print Lord Salisbury will in all likelihood have formed his
Government. It may be taken for granted that previous to forming
it he will endeavour to secure the active collaboration of the Unionist
Liberals. If would be idle to speculate here upon what precise
response will be made to his overtures. Nor is it of much use to
lay down any law as to the conditions under which a coalition might
or might not be formed with advantage. All these are points on
which speculation is, for my present purpose, either too early or too
late. It is, however, possible to express a very definite opinion as to
the spirit in which the overtures to which I allude should be received.
That spirit, if I am right, should be a cordial and sincere desire
to meet the Conservatives half-way.

In order to make my meaning clear, it is necessary to recall the
general character of the crisis with which Liberal Unionists and Con-
servatives are now called to deal. The facts stand thus : The repeal
of the Union has been demanded by an overwhelming majority of
the Irish representatives. This demand has been endorsed by the
acknowledged leader of the Liberal party, and at his solicitation has
been accepted by the bulk of the party. Home Rule for Ireland is
now part and parcel of the programme of the Liberals, and will
continue to be so as long as the policy of the party is dictated by
Mr. Gladstone. It is idle to ignore the fact that the Home Rule
agitation occupies a very different and a far more formidable position
than that which it occupied only six months ago. For the first time
since the Act of Union a proposal for the repeal of that fundamental
law has been seriously discussed in Parliament, and carried through
its preliminary stages with the sanction and support of an English
Ministry. The proposal has been defeated in Parliament and
rejected by the country. But it is not dead for all that. We shall
hear of Home Rule again — we shall hear of it very shortly ; and Mr.
Gladstone may safely be relied upon not to let the agitation die out
for want of sustenance. I need hardly say that I do not share the
opinion of Mr. Gladstone's statesmanship entertained by his partisans ;
but it would be absurd to dispute either his activity as a political
leader, his personal popularity with large masses of his fellow-country-
men, or his singular astuteness as a master of Parliamentary tactics.
We may take it for certain that we shall hear no more for the
present of Mr. Gladstone's desire for rest, or of his intention to

1886 THE UNIONIST CAMPAIGN. 297

devote himself to loftier and more congenial pursuits than those of
politics. Mr. Gladstone, to speak the truth, stands irrevocably
committed to the principle of Home Eule, and he must either
redeem the pledges he has given to his Irish allies, or submit to have
his public career as a statesman brought to a close with a colossal
and ignominious failure. The latter alternative is one which, to do
him justice, he will never accept save under absolute compulsion.
We have got, therefore, to reckon with the fact that the agitation
for Home Rule will be resumed forthwith, and resumed, too, under
Mr. Gladstone's leadership, and with the active support of the great
mass of the Liberal party. This is the danger we have got to meet.
In the face of such a peril we have now to consider what are the
resources which lie at the disposal of the supporters of the Union.

First and foremost, then, we have the staunch and united support
of the great Conservative party, numbering as it does now not far
short of a majority of the whole House of Commons, and commanding,
if the Parnellites are left out of account, an overwhelming majority
in the representation of Great Britain. Secondly, we have the
Unionist Liberals, who, notwithstanding Mr. Gladstone's vaticinations,
have returned to the new Parliament not far short of the number they
mustered in the old. If the Unionist Liberals consent to co-operate
loyally with the Conservatives, then, in as far as Parliament is con-
cerned, all agitation for Home Rule is doomed to certain failure.
Whether this co-operation can best be given in the form of an actual
coalition or of independent support, is a question of detail. The all-
important thing is that the Liberal Unionists should make up their
minds to the fact that their first and paramount duty is to keep Mr.
Gladstone and the Liberals out of office so long as they remain com-
mitted to Home Rule. They can do this easily if they consent to
vote with Lord Salisbury on any question which might imperil the
fate of the Conservative Government. They may remain Unionist
Liberals if they like ; but if the Union is to be preserved from future
attacks they must be Unionists first and Liberals afterwards.

In speaking of the policy which the Unionist Liberals should
pursue, it must be understood that I am alluding to the section of
the party represented by Lord Hartington, not to that represented
by Mr. Chamberlain. The two sections occupy very different posi-
tions. Mr. Chamberlain is beyond all question the future leader
of the Radical party. By his bold and high-minded refusal to tamper
with the integrity of the Union for the sake of a passing party
advantage, he has earned the confidence of the general public, with-
out which no party leader can ever hope to attain high rank in
English politics. But he remains for all that a Radical politician,
with aims, ideas, and aspirations all of which, whether right or
wrong, are in distinct opposition to the views of government held by
the Conservatives and the Whigs. Even with regard to Home Rule

298 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

Mr. Chamberlain, though he scouted Mr. Gladstone's crude and
illogical proposals, is prepared to make concessions which the sup-
porters of the Union would regard with dismay. The time must
come — and probably at no remote date — when Mr. Chamberlain will
return to the Liberal fold, and return, too, with increased authority
and a larger following. For this the Unionists must be prepared.
Mr. Chamberlain's assistance is welcome, as long as it lasts. Of its
essence, however, this assistance is merely transitory, and all idea of
Mr. Chamberlain's ever joining or actively supporting a Conservative
Ministry is utterly beyond the question. Indeed the one forcible
argument in favour of Liberal Unionists remaining outside the
Salisbury Government is, that any distinct coalition would probably
drive Mr. Chamberlain and his Eadical adherents to take up a posi-
tion of covert if not of open hostility.

It is to Lord Hartington and his followers that the Conservatives
must look for the support of which they stand in need. Of the
seventy odd Unionist Liberals, fifty at least acknowledge Lord
Hartington as their leader. If the Conservatives can rely upon these
fifty votes in case of need we may hope to have for the next few
years a strong, stable, and solid Government, powerful enough to
uphold the Union against all attacks from within and from without.
The Conservatives have close upon three hundred and twenty votes of
their own. If they can count on fifty Liberal Unionist votes on any
critical division, they will have a majority of seventy as against any
possible coalition of Gladstonians, Parnellites, and independent
Eadicals. The only question is whether Lord Hartington and his
followers are sufficiently alive to the gravity of the crisis to realise
the fact that the practical maintenance of a Unionist Government
in power is more important than the vindication of their abstract title
to the name of Liberals.

I have heard that on some occasion when a youthful member
of Parliament informed Lord Palmerston that he should always
support his Government when they were in the right, the old
Premier answered, ' My dear sir, that is not at all what we want.
Everybody will support us when we are in the right ; what we need
are friends who will support us when we are in the wrong.' In the
answer, cynical as it may seem, there is a substratum of sober truth.
Under our system of party government no ministry can hold its own
unless its supporters will stretch a point in case of need to help it
over a difficulty. Questions must arise in every administration where
the measures and policy of the Government are not in absolute accord
with the ideas, or even the convictions, of a large section of its
supporters. These supporters have then got to determine for them-
selves whether the divergence is great enough to justify them in
upsetting a ministry of which in the main they approve ; if they
cannot answer this question in the affirmative they are bound to vote

1886 THE UNIONIST CAMPAIGN. 299

in favour of the Government and against their individual opinion.
To do this is not pleasant even for the nominal and avowed sup-
porters of a Government. It is still less pleasant for unavowed and
independent supporters who are nominally attached to another party.
Yet unless the Unionist Liberals are ready to vote for the Conserva-
tives whenever the Ministry are threatened by a Liberal coalition, irre-
spective of the question whether the point at issue is one on which
they are in complete agreement with the Conservatives, their support
is not of the kind which a Government requires. Of course it must
be understood that the Conservative Government will avoid, as far as
possible, the introduction of all measures that are likely to prove
distasteful to the Unionist Liberals. But still points will infallibly
arise on which the Conservatives and the Unionist Liberals are not
in accord ; and no powerful Unionist Government is possible unless
on these points the latter in case of necessity are prepared to
give way to the former. In other words, the Unionist Liberals must
make it their first aim and object to keep Mr. Gladstone out of office,
and in order to do this they must do their utmost to keep the Con-
servatives in office.

It may be said that if the Unionist Liberals are always to vote
with the Conservatives on every question which might give rise to a
ministerial crisis, they had better join the Conservative administration.
As this is exactly my own opinion, I should find it hard to gainsay the
force of the above argument. Still it must fairly be allowed that
there are many considerations with regard to the future which mili-
tate against the immediate formation of a coalition ministry. The
question is one which Lord Hartington and his followers must, and
will, decide for themselves. All I contend for is that whether they
actually join the Conservative Government or not, they must give
this Government, as long as it remains the champion of the Union,
the same support as they would under other circumstances have
accorded to a Liberal Government of which they were not actually
members. If they fail to do this they will stultify themselves and
undo the work which they have made such sacrifices to accomplish.
The sole justification of the Liberal secession lies in the fact that
Lord Hartington and his colleagues honestly believed that the policy
proposed by Mr. Gladstone was fatal to the Union, and that the
maintenance of the Union was more important than the maintenance
of the Liberal party in office. If the Unionist Liberals did not
believe this, their secession was simply factious : if they did believe
this, and do believe it still, they are bound to keep the Conservatives
in office in order to keep Mr. Gladstone out of office. From this
dilemma there is no escape. Of all the characters mentioned in
the Gospels, the one who has been held up to the most persistent
obloquy is that of the man who put his hand to the plough and then
turned back. Nor is this reprobation unreasonable. There is no

300 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

necessity to put your hand to the plough at all. If you choose to
see the land lie fallow sooner than inconvenience yourself, that is
your concern. But if you once recognise the duty of seeing that
the land is ploughed, and take part in the ploughing, and then grow
weary of your labour before the soil is turned up and the furrows
set straight, you are not unjustly held up to reproach. So it
is with the Liberal Unionists. If having put their hands to the
plough they turn back before the work is done, their record will be
one of failure without credit.

The warning thus given is not, I fear, unneeded. A certain section
of the Unionist Liberals seem, at present, to have nothing more at
heart than to show that they are Liberals after all, and that they
have nothing in common with the Conservatives. Yet, if they are
right in their contention, I fail to see how they can possibly justify
their reason of being. If the battle for the Union was over, then
there would be no objection to their proving, if they thought fit, that
though they had fought and conquered together with the Conserva-
tives, their alliance ended with the attainment of their common
victory. But the battle is not over, it is only just begun; and at
the outset of a campaign it is indiscreet, to say the least, to remind
the allies on whom you must rely for victory that you intend to
repudiate their alliance the moment they have served your purpose.
It is obvious that within a very short time the informal coalition
between the Conservatives and the Unionist Liberals will be exposed
to a very severe strain. As soon as Parliament reassembles in
earnest, Lord Salisbury will be compelled to formulate his policy about
Ireland. Now, for my own part, I utterly disbelieve in the possibility
of discovering any compromise which will at once satisfy the Irish
demand for self-government, and yet preserve intact the authority
of the Imperial Parliament. Either the concessions offered will fail
to give the Nationalists increased power in Ireland, and in that case
they will be rejected ; or the concessions will give the Nationalists
increased power, and in that case they will be employed to subvert
the Union. This being so, no Conservative Government, with all
the good- will in the world, can do anything to satisfy the agitation
for Home Rule. Yet, failing such satisfaction, the agitation will be
revived with renewed activity ; and its revival must of necessity be
met by coercive measures. It is quite true that to assert the
supremacy of the law, to uphold the authority of the courts, and to
protect individual liberty against organised terrorism, can only be
called coercion by a shameless perversion of language. But coercion
is the term which will be applied by the Gladstonian party to all
measures for the preservation of law and order in Ireland ; and these
measures cannot be carried into effect unless the Liberal Unionists
are prepared to support the Government by which they are pro-
posed, and thus to expose themselves to the reproach of being

1886 THE UNIONIST CAMPAIGN. 301

advocates of coercion. The difficulty of joint action in supporting a
policy of so-called coercion will be infinitely greater for the Liberal
Unionists if they sit on the Opposition benches, than it would be if
they were sitting on the benches of the Administration and voting
openly and boldly as its supporters.

Upon Irish questions, however, the necessity for joint action is so
manifest and so imperative, that in the end the Liberal Unionists
will, I believe, feel themselves compelled, however reluctantly, to go
into the same lobby with the Conservatives. The real danger to the
continuance of the informal alliance, whose existence is essential to
the defence of the Union, will arise upon questions not directly con-
nected with the Irish difficulty. I shall certainly not be credited
with placing any unduly high estimate on Mr. Gladstone's ability or
statesmanship, but I should be the first to do justice to his astute-
ness as distinguished from ability, and to his statecraft as opposed
to statesmanship. Now it is matter of notoriety that, since his
defeat at the polls, Mr. Gladstone has exerted all his influence and in-
genuity to hinder the Liberal Unionists from forming an open coalition
with the Conservatives, and to keep alive the contention that they
have done nothing to justify their being read out of the ranks of the
Liberal party. The mere fact that these tactics find favour with
Mr. Gladstone and the Home Kulers would lead me to doubt whether
the absence of any open coalition can be regarded as an advantage to
the cause of the Union. Apart from this consideration we may take
it for granted that in the course of the next session the policy of
the Opposition will be to bring forward non-Irish questions on which
the Liberal Unionists are likely to be more in accord with their old
than with their new colleagues. Far less dexterity than that
possessed by the * Parliamentary Old Hand ' is required to raise a
question on which it will be difficult for members sitting on the
Liberal benches and professing allegiance to the Liberal party, to
vote with the Conservative Government against the Liberal Opposi-
tion. Yet unless they do so vote, the cause of the Union will be
endangered.

Whenever such a crisis arises — and it will infallibly be made to
arise, if it does not arise of itself — the Liberal Unionists will probably
split into two sections. A certain number will vote with Mr. Glad-
stone, irrespective of what the ulterior consequences of their vote
may be. A certain, and I believe a larger, number will feel that the
maintenance of the Union is more important than the assertion of
their Liberal orthodoxy, and will vote with the Government. The
remainder will probably abstain from voting. Now the Conservatives
have so close upon a majority of the whole House that the votes of a
score of Unionist Liberals would save them from actual defeat. But
it is clear that these experiments could not often be repeated, and
that a constant struggle between their allegiance to the Union and
VOL. XX.— No. 114. Y

302 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug.

their allegiance to the Liberal cause must soon break up the party
of which Lord Hartington is the leader.

I am convinced, therefore, that if the Unionist Liberals, as is
deemed probable at the time when I write, decline to form any open
coalition with the Conservatives, they will only have succeeded in
postponing the necessity of making an unwelcome decision. Sooner
or later — and sooner rather than later — the conviction will be brought
home to the Unionist Liberals that they must join the Conservatives
if they desire to preserve the Union. So long as Mr. Gladstone and
the Liberal party are in favour of Home Rule, the real safeguard for
the Union lies in the strength of the Conservative Government ; and
this Grovernment cannot be strong until it can rely, not only on the
casual votes, but on the constant and open support of the Unionist
Liberals, as distinguished from the Unionist Radicals.

I was taught as a child that if you have got to jump into the sea
you had better jump in at once instead of standing shivering upon
the steps of the bathing machine. Subsequent experience has con-
firmed my belief in the truth of this teaching as a rule both for
private and public life. For my own part I think the Liberal
Unionists would do more wisely to take the leap at once. This,
however, is a matter for their own decision. But if they have any
claim to political foresight they should make up their minds to
the plain hard fact that sooner or later the leap has got to be
made.

I know that many of their members cherish the idea that their
secession from the Liberal party is as transitory as a lovers' quarrel,
and that whenever Mr. Gladstone, by choice or by necessity, retires
from public life the Liberals will be once more a happy and united
family, of which Lord Hartington, as long as he has not formally
abjured his allegiance to Liberalism, will be the natural leader.
The idea to my mind is a complete delusion. Nobody is less dis-
posed than I am to underrate the evil that Mr. Gladstone has inflicted
on the country by his sudden conversion to Home Rule. But still
Mr. Gladstone could never have carried his part with him unless
they had long before been indoctrinated with ideas and principles of
policy utterly at variance with the old-fashioned Liberalism of which
Lord Hartington and the Whigs are the representatives. The diver-
gence between Radicalism and Liberalism has undoubtedly been
accentuated by Mr. Gladstone's ill-advised policy, but this divergence
is not due to Mr. Gladstone's personality and will survive the removal
of that personality from the scene of public life. Remove Mr. Glad-
stone, blot out the Home Rule agitation, and the forces which have
gradually been bringing about a fusion between the Moderate
Liberals and the Conservatives will continue in operation and will
act as years go by with increased energy.

The subject is far too wide a one to be discussed here. I can

1886 THE UNIONIST CAMPAIGN. 303

only say in passing that I fail to see why the prospect of a fusion
with the Conservatives should be viewed with apprehension or dis-
trust by any sensible Liberal. To me, as to all thinking men, it is
a matter of supreme indifference by what name my party is called,
so long as my party is identified with the advocacy of principles I
deem true, and the maintenance of institutions I desire to uphold.
Now, as a matter of fact, the existing distinction between a common-
place Conservative and a commonplace Liberal is one of name and of
name only. I defy you to name any important measure of home or
foreign policy on which there is any substantial difference of opinion
between the parties represented by Lord Salisbury and by Lord
Hartington. I defy you to name any grave reform likely to be
proposed by the Radicals which the Whigs are not as much opposed
to in principle as the Conservatives. All important reforms con-
sistent with the preservation of our existing Constitution have practi-
cally been accomplished. All future reform must be of a revolutionary
character, and involve an attack upon some one of our fundamental
institutions. Any such attack would be deprecated alike by Whigs
and Conservatives. The time is fast coming, if it has not come
already, when the two parties in the State will consist of the defenders
and the assailants of our Constitution. This is the simple fact ; and
in the long run names have to give way to facts. Mr. Gladstone's
unsuccessful attempt to effect the repeal of the Union has precipi-
tated the fusion between the two great sections of the Constitutional
party ; but, even without Mr. Gladstone's efforts, this fusion must
inevitably have been brought about by the course of events. To fusion
Whigs and Conservatives must come at last. Far from deploring
this result, to me it seems a consummation most devoutly to be
wished.

EDWARD DICEY.

304 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Aug. 1880

Hawarden Castle, Chester :
July 11, 1886.

MR. GLADSTONE presents his compliments to the Editor of the
Nineteenth Century., and requests, with reference to an observation
by Professor Huxley on Mr. Gladstone's neglect duly to consult the
works of Professor Dana, whom he had cited, that the Editor will
have the kindness to print in his next number the accompanying
letter, which has this morning been sent to him from America.

' Kev. Dr. Sutherland,

' My dear Sir, — I do not know that in my letter of yesterday,
in which I referred you to the Bibliotheca Sacra, I answered directly
your question, and hence I add a word to say that I agree in all
essential points with Mr. Gladstone, and believe that the first
chapters of Genesis and Science are in accord.

' Yours very truly,

'.TAMES D. DANA.

'Newhaveu : April 16, 1886.'

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake
to return unaccepted MSS.

THE

NINETEENTH
CENTURY.

No. CXV.— SEPTEMBER 1886.

THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS.

IT is a bad thing, as Lincoln said, to change horses in crossing the
stream, especially when the stream is a boiling torrent. Threatened
with disruption, the nation naturally and rightly rallies round its
existing institutions. It is better that the Union should be saved
by the most stationary or even reactionary of ministries, than lost
by the most progressive. To support the Queen's government against
foreign conspiracy and the confederates of foreign conspiracy within
the realm is the plain duty of the hour, which every good citizen,
Conservative or Liberal, will fulfil, much as the Liberal, at all events,
may wish that the government were other than it is. To dismember-
ment, the people, both of Switzerland and of the United States, rightly
preferred civil war, and the British Liberal may well prefer to it any
temporary sacrifice of what he deems legislative reform. Commerce
universally prays for a few years of firm and quiet government. No-
thing else can redeem Ireland from ruin. That which is most to be
feared is that the Conservative government may not be Conservative,
but may, under the inspiration of unwise ambition and from the desire of
outshining the other party, attempt some brilliant settlement of the
Irish question, and by so doing throw the country back into the confu-
sion from which it has just escaped. Now that separation has been
rejected, no political question relating exclusively to Ireland, of a
fundamental character, remains. Nothing remains in the political
sphere but to reinstate the national in place of the rebel government,
restore order, and place the persons, properties, and occupations of
peaceful citizens again under the protection of the law. Questions
VOL. XX.— No. 115. Z

306 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

respecting the Viceroyalty, the abolition of •which was voted thirty
years ago by the House of Commons, or the institution of an Irish
Grand Committee, are not fundamental, and maybe considered with-
out heat or hurry. There are Irish questions, other than political,
which may be * settled ' if Acts of Parliament can at once alter the
soil and climate of the island, or the character, habits, and religion of
its people. The quiet reception of the national decision against
separation by the Irish people shows the good effects of firmness,
and the futility of the pretence that tranquillity could be restored in
Ireland only by a revolution.

But though a Conservative government is the thing to be desired
for the present, the late events surely call upon statesmen, with a
voice of thunder, to look to the future, and to undertake, before it
is too late, a rational and comprehensive revision of British institu-
tions. A party leader, worsted in the Parliamentary fray, suddenly
determines to open the way back to victory by taking a plebiscite on
a question vitally affecting the integrity of the nation. This he is
able to do of his own mere will and pleasure, though the most
eminent men of his party have repudiated his policy and left his
side. A few weeks are given the nation to make up its mind whether
it will consent to the most fundamental of all possible changes. In
the electorate there are great masses of people, upon whom political
power has just been thrust by the strategical moves of leaders in the
party war, untrained in its exercise and ignorant of the question.
The question itself is not put distinctly to the people, but is
mixed up with all the other questions of the day, and with all those
of a local and personal character which enter into the mind of the
voter at an ordinary election : so that votes are counted for a separate
Irish Parliament when they are really given for Disestablishment,
for Small Holdings, for the Abolition of Vaccination, for the popular
man of the district, for the Gr. 0. M., or simply for Blue and Yellow.
After a confused struggle the nation just escapes irrevocable dis-
memberment, though we cannot tell exactly how, no two persons
agreeing in their analysis of the results, while the defeated party
asserts that if the hay had not been out dismemberment might have
won. This, I say, is a loud call to a revision of institutions. In
democratic America, not the smallest amendment of the Constitution,
much less an issue affecting the integrity of the nation, can be put
to the vote except in the most distinct and formal manner, after the
most ample notice, and by a process such that consent must be the
deliberate act of a decisive majority of the entire nation represented
by the legislatures of the States.

What had preceded this throwing of dice for the destiny of the
country ? Scenes which must surely have led anyone but a wire-
puller to reflect on the working of party, and to ask himself whether
it is the foundation on which government is for ever to rest. The

1886 THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS. 307

economical part of the Irish difficulty has deep roots ; but the poli-
tical agitation was in itself weak, like all those which had preceded it,
and which, from O'Connell's Eepeal agitation downwards, had come
successively to farcical ends. Its strength, which became at length
so formidable, was derived from British faction ; the Parties in their
reckless struggle for power playing alternately into its hands.
Government was thus paralysed in its struggle with rebellion, and
the nation was laid at the feet of a despicable foreign conspiracy,
while the House of Commons itself ignominiously succumbed to
obstruction which a town council would at once have put down. Nor
was the Tory party, though presumably most interested in the main-
tenance of order, more patriotic or scrupulous than its rival. Few
things in our political history are worse than the purchase of Mr.
Parnell's support for a Tory government by the abandonment of the
Crimes Act and the repudiation of Lord Spencer, to which is imme-
diately traceable the origin of the present perilous situation. Every
Tory gentleman who had not cast regard for public honour out of his
heart, listened with disgust to the speeches of his leaders in the
Maamtrasna debate. On the other side we had signs not less porten-
tous. We had the foremost man of the country, full of years and
honour, when disappointed of his majority, flinging himself into the
arms of what he had himself denounced as public plunder and treason,
and assailing what had been designated by the Queen a few months
before as a fundamental and inviolable statute of the realm. We
had him appealing, deliberately and repeatedly, to class passions and
provincial animosities, inflaming disaffection in Ireland by represen-
tations of the conduct of England to the Irish people which no man
competently informed could in his sober senses believe, and holding
up his country before the whole world to unmerited odium and infamy.
For the last six months the national government in Ireland has
effaced itself, and allowed authority to pass into the hands of a law-
less conspiracy, which, without a particle of military force at its com-
mand, has been left master of the country ; till at length the police
and constabulary, whose firmness long continued to attest to the feeble-
ness and hollowness of the revolution, have begun to be shaken in
their fidelity, as they were sure to be when they found that the
government which they served had struck its flag to rebellion. Such
are the works of faction, which does not shrink even from the thought
of employing the national army in compelling loyal men to submit
to the will of rebels and of the foreign enemies of the realm. For
what greater or more ominous symptoms of political disorganisation
does the nation wait ? Does it wish to become the scorn of the whole
world ?

1 Discriminations between wholesome and unwholesome victories
are idle and unpractical. Obtain the victory, know how to follow it
up, leave the wholesomeness or unwholesomeness to critics.' Such

z 2

308 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

is the recorded principle of the present Tory leader of the House of
Commons, and he asserts and abundantly proves that it was the
principle of Lord Beaconsfield before him. Though seldom so frankly
expressed, or so consistently observed, it is the principle of all who
subsist by faction ; the practice of it has led. under the Party system,
to the most brilliant prizes ; and as soon as it shall have thoroughly
pervaded public life a domination of scoundrelism must ensue.

Parties, moreover, are now splitting into sections, not one of
which is strong enough to sustain a government. This tendency is
seen all over Europe, and its growth will conspire with morality to
seal the doom of party government. No British party returned from
the late election with a majority of its own ; this, combined with the
perilous nature of the crisis, which made a strong executive govern-
ment indispensable to the country, seemed likely to lead to a coali-
tion, which by moderate and patriotic men was generally and earnestly
desired. Supposing the temporary relaxation of the strict Cabinet
principle had involved a pause in legislative progress, the nation
could have afforded this far better than it can afford to be left with-
out a strong and respected executive at such a moment as the present.
But Lord Hartington, it seems, found it impossible to induce his
followers to * cross the House.' If the House had been arranged as
an amphitheatre, so as to render this dread formality needless, the
country might have had a government capable of extricating it from
its peril. It would be difficult to place the party system in a more
ridiculous light. Party, however, has once more prevailed, and has
given the country in its hour of peril an administration which its own
partisans receive ' with groans,' and the weakness of which is too
likely to lead to a fresh revolution of the circle of disaster. The
union of the party chiefs for the purpose of settling the Redis-
tribution of Seats without a faction fight was the happiest thing
in recent politics ; but it seems to have been merely a rift in the
cloud.

The country has no longer anything worthy of the name of a
government ; that is the momentous fact which every crisis of peril
will place in a more glaring light. Extreme Radicals do not want
the country to have a government ; they only want it to have an
organ of indefinite revolution in a House of Commons elected by
universal suffrage. But for the rest of the nation the hour of
reflection has arrived. All power, both legislative and executive, is
now vested in an assembly far too large for deliberation or for unity
of action, distracted by faction, and growing daily more unruly and
tumultuous, the new rules having had no more effect than new rules
usually have when the root of the evil is left untouched. And this
assembly is elected by a method purely demagogic, which imparts its
character to every function of government. Diplomacy itself is now
demagogism. The vacillations in Egypt, which have cost the nation

1886 THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS. 309

so dear in blood, in money, and in reputation, seem to have arisen
not so much from the indecision of the government itself as from its
endeavours to keep in unison with the shifting moods of the people.
After all, what else can a demagogic executive do ? It can hope for
no support against any gust of unpopularity from a Parliament as
demagogic as itself.

What democracy can be more untempered or unbridled than this
which is styled a Monarchy ? The Ministry, which is supposed to be
appointed by the Crown, now resigns upon the popular vote, without
even presenting itself at the bar of the House of Commons. Kepre-
sentation itself is being rapidly converted into mere delegation, with
a mandate from the local caucus which the delegate dares not disobey.
The only Conservative institution left with any practical force is the
non-payment of members ; and this demagogism has already marked
with its axe. When it falls the last check will be gone ; for if the
existing restrictions on the suffrage are worth much, we may be sure
that faction will soon chaffer them away for new votes. To this pass
the most practical of nations has been brought by its blind reliance
on forms. It has gone on fancying that the government was the
Crown, and that, consequently, anything might be safely done with
the representation of the people, long after the representation of the
people had, in fact, become the governing power. Party leaders
have alternately ' dished' each other with extensions of the franchise,
and they have never stopped to consider what would be the effect on
the constitution as a whole, nor has the constitution as a whole
appeared ever to be present to their minds. Nothing can be more
devoid of statesmanship than their speeches, which are made up of
vague philanthropy and platitudes about popular rights, while the
interest of a faction is really at the bottom of the whole ; and if fore-
cast is exercised, it is in the interest of the faction alone. Party
leaders cannot help themselves ; they are the creatures and slaves of
a system, and the councils of a faction are not those of the nation.

Mr. Gladstone proclaimed the other day that only by means of
party could Parliamentary government be carried on. Curiously
enough he proposed himself, by the admission of Irish representatives
on reserved subjects, to introduce an element plainly incompatible
with the working of the party system.

Of the vast constituencies which have been now called into
existence, the units are for the most part as unconnected with each
other as grains of sand in a sand heap, and they can be organised for
electoral purposes by the wire-puller alone. The wire-puller thus
becomes master of the electorate and of Parliament. His power is
not yet confirmed, and at the last election, in which strenuous and
most praiseworthy efforts were made by independent men to rescue
the country from imminent disaster, it was to a considerable extent
set aside. But such efforts are made only at a great crisis. The

310 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

wire-puller steadily pursues his object, and the constituencies at last
fall into the hands of men who turn the noblest of all callings into
the vilest of all trades.

There is, as everybody complains, and as the present state of the
government proves, a growing dearth of statesmen. The indepen-
dent statesman is being inevitably superseded by the servant of
the caucus. Moreover, the masses must be excited and amused.
Stump oratory, therefore, is increasingly in request, and the faculty
for it will soon be absolutely essential to political leadership. Can-
ning or Peel would have been horrified if he had been asked to take
the stump or to speak at any election but his own. Now public
men are released from the fatigue of a protracted session in the
House of Commons only to begin their work on the platform. No
time is allowed them for rest, no time is allowed them for study or-
reflection. What is perhaps worst of all, they are continually drawn
into committing themselves on questions of state in the exaggerated
language of platform rhetoric. Even a stentorian voice will soon
become indispensable to statesmanship. It is so already in a great
degree in the United States, and unless some sort of speaking trumpet
can be invented to redress the balance, sound must finally triumph
in public affairs over brain. Upon making that remark to an
American friend with reference to the House of Eepresentatives, I
was told, by way of reassurance, that a shrill voice was heard as well
as a loud one. Drum or fife, it is sound, not brain. These are not
the vague complaints of satirists or homilists ; they are literal facts
and their tendency is certain. We can see as plainly as possible
the statesman departing and the platform orator coming in his place.

Optimists comfort themselves by dwelling on the practical good
sense of the British people. Let the practical good sense of the
British people be as great as it may, it cannot operate without know-
ledge of the question, nor is it likely to operate long when the people
have fallen under the influence of wire-pullers whose business it is,
in effect, to lead them astray. So long as you can speak to them
directly the response may be good ; but the day will come when you
will be able to get at them only through the * machine.'

Another dangerous growth native to a democracy in this con-
dition is the sinister action of special interests or particular move-
ments, such as those of the Liberationists, the Temperance Alliance,
and the Anti-vaccinationists, which, putting aside the general welfare
of the community, try to enslave the representation for their exclusive
ends. Their compactness gives them an influence out of all propor-
tion to their numbers. Protectionism and Prohibit! onism are for-
midable disturbing forces in the politics of the United States. Still
more noxious is the Irish vote.

The danger would be great enough if the British democracy, like
the American democracy, had only its own affairs to manage. But

1886 THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS.

it has to manage an Empire. I never met with an American states-
man who did not admit that to govern an India would be an impos-
sible task for his people, though their average enlightenment is
greater than that of ours. Whether the acquisition of India or of
other dependencies, and the assumption of an Imperial position and
responsibilities generally, were in the first instance moral or conducive
to the happiness of the British people, is not now the question.
History cannot be undone, and Great Britain is an Imperial Power.
Not only has she enormous investments in India and other depend-
encies ; for the fabric of her commerce and her manufacturing
industry these little islands are plainly too narrow a basis. The
sudden dissolution of the Empire would bring upon her an avalanche
of ruin ; and the ruin would be irreparable. Smash the American
Republic, and the fragments will put themselves together again by
political instinct, and under the pressure of the manifest necessity.
Smash the British Empire, and smashed it will remain. The good
nature of the people is in this case not less dangerous than their
ignorance. They are disposed to give anybody, Irish Celt or Hindoo,
whatever he asks, and they are as little able to see that in granting
the Hindoo independence they would be handing him over to a
murderous anarchy, as they are to see that in granting the Irish
Celt self-government they would be handing him over to political
brigandage. If the democracy, in its present state, nearly lets
Ireland go, what hope is there of its holding India ? Already British
demagogism is spreading to India, and Indian Home Rule rears its
mild head as a candidate in British elections, while the people fondle
it unconscious of its fang. They might understand it a little better
if they could hear its hiss in an American magazine. Who can say
that the democracy will not in some sudden impulse of economy or
aversion to militarism prematurely reduce the army and navy, and
lay the Empire open to aggression from every side ?

The British government is now in the weakest condition possible
for dealing with rebellion or disintegrating forces of any kind. The
American Republican identifies himself with the government of the
Republic, and regards rebellion against it as rebellion against him-
self: this sentiment showed itself with signal force, and gave the
administration immense strength, in the struggle against Secession.
But the British ' subject,' although the power is really in his hands,
blinded by forms, does not identify himself with the government of
the Queen: he regards it as something apart from the people, and
even as naturally adverse to them, so that all who struggle against
it are presumably oppressed and entitled to his sympathy. About
the only political sentiment of a large portion of the artisan class
especially is a vague sympathy with revolution. With the popular
mind in this state and power in the hands of the people, it will not
be found easy to hold and rule an Empire.

312 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

As has been pointed out before, this political crisis is complicated
and rendered more dangerous, like the political crisis of France on
the eve of the Eevolution, by the simultaneous setting in of strong
currents of religious, social and economical change, including what is
called the Eevolt of Woman, out of which political parties are evi-
dently preparing to make capital. The British mind seems to be
breaking loose from its moorings, and that which has hitherto been
the most conservative of nations has suddenly become the most open
to innovation of every kind. There is even a sort of fatalist feeling
that any proposal of change which has made a certain noise and
obtained a certain number of votes is the decree of destiny, and that
nothing remains but to submit with a good grace to the inevitable ;
as though anything were inevitable but that which comes when we
have done all in our power to avert it. Statesmen have almost
renounced any attempt to control events. This is particularly
notable with regard to the phantom necessity of conceding a poli-
tical revolution of some kind to Ireland. An economical accident,
the competition of foreign wheat, comes at this critical moment to
add to the political and social disturbance by impoverishing and, in
many cases, driving from their mansions the governing class of the
rural districts, as well as withdrawing the revenues of the Established
Church ; and the depreciation of home-grown wheat seems not likely
to diminish, but on the contrary to increase. Nor are general
industry and commerce in a state of assured prosperity. There is
even a possibility that widespread distress in the manufacturing dis-
tricts may be added to the other elements of political disturbance.

These points have been pressed before with the pen, but they are
now pressed in a manner unspeakably more effective by the spectacle
of a great nation cowering before a mere gang of political banditti,
and brought to the verge of dismemberment and shame through its
want of political organisation and its lack of an executive govern-
ment. American statesmen, a hundred years ago, organised their
democracy according to the lights which they then had. They
gave it an executive independent, during its official term, of popular
impulse and of the fluctuations of opinions or faction in the legislature ;
the Presidential veto, a Senate elected on a conservative principle, a
written Constitution denning and limiting all powers, and as the
guardian of that Constitution, a Supreme Court, besides the Federal
system itself, the influence of which is highly conservative, as it
localises the majority of legislative questions and sets bounds
everywhere to the tide of change. The time has surely come for
British statesmen to organize British democracy in the same manner,
though with the improvements, neither few nor unimportant, which
American experience suggests. Assuredly the British people are
not less in need of everything that wisdom can do to make the
action of popular government here that of reason and not of passion

1886 THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS. 313

than are the people of the United States. The consecrated forms of
Monarchy which have long ceased to be realities ought to blind
practical statesmanship no longer. England has at present no con-
stitution ; she has nothing but a vast electorate exposed to the
unbounded action of demagogism, and regulated only by social influ-
ences the strength of which is apparently declining. That she has
stumbled on so far is no proof that she will not fall.

There is an alternative — to restore the old Constitution, which
would be done by reviving the political power of the Crown, encourag-
ing the personal intervention of the Sovereign, infusing, if possible,
new vigour into the House of Lords, and reinstating the royal and
national Privy Council in the place which has been gradually usurped
by the party Cabinet. Such is the course to which a reader of Sir
Henry Maine's ' Popular Government ' will probably be inclined by
the general tenor of that most admirable and important work. Sir
Henry perhaps regards the subject from the special point of view of
an Indian administrator, and sometimes applies rather too much to
modern politics the method which has yielded such memorable
results when applied to the investigation of ancient law. Eeason, if
it does not yet reign supreme, is now awake, and we can no longer
explain the actions of men like those of a superior kind of ants or
bees. But this does not prevent the book from containing riches of
thought. To all that Sir Henry says against the worship of democracy
and the insane jubilation over its advent all men of sense will heartily
assent. Nothing can be more absurd or dangerous than this frenzy,
which, with a good deal besides that is disastrous, has its chief
sources in the American and French Revolutions. But I should
hesitate to say with Sir Henry Maine and Scherer that democracy is
merely a form of government. It seems to me, living in the midst
of it, to be a phase of society and of sentiment to which the form of
government corresponds. The sentiment pervades not only the
State but the Church, the household, and the whole ^intercourse of
life. The cardinal principle of democracy is equality, not of wealth,
intellect, or influence, but of status in the community and right to
consideration — equality in short as the negation of privilege. To
this, with all its outward symbols, American democracy tenaciously
clings, and the sentiment is in the republic what loyalty was in
monarchies. Fraternity is an aspiration which though most imper-
fectly fulfilled cannot be called unreal or abortive. The relation of
democracy to personal liberty remains undetermined ; we have yet
to see whether democracy will choose to be Authoritative or Liberal.
Among the chief causes of the advent of Democracy appear to be
industry and popular education ; but together with these must cer-
tainly be reckoned the action of Christianity on society and politics,
the omission to notice which appears to me to be a defect in Sir
Henry Maine's historical analysis. ' That is the best form of govern-

314 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

merit which doth actuate and dispose every part and member of the
State to the common good' would hardly have been said by a man who
had not the Christian Church in his mind. Apart from demagogism
there has certainly been a religious desire in the minds of the posses-
sors of power to chare it, as well as other advantages, with their
brethren, which is traceable to the influence of the Gospel.

It is significant, and I would call Sir Henry Maine's attention to
the fact, that with the advent of democracy there has certainly been
a great advance in humanity generally, and especially in the domain
of criminal law. This seems to be connected with the feeling that
all the members of a community are of equal value in its eyes. The
criminal law of aristocratic England was lavish of the unvalued life
of the poor. Even lynching in the United States arises partly from
the dislike of inflicting capital punishment in a legal way. Nobody
was put to death or very severely punished for the Rebellion. Demo-
cratic humanity has even extended its action to theology, and pro-
tested with success against the belief in Eternal Punishment. All the
legislation in favour of popular education, health and amusement,
or for the protection of the working class against neglect or mal-
treatment by employers, will surely be admitted by Sir Henry
Maine to be the characteristic product of the democratic era.

To talk of popular government as divine, and of its gradual
approach through the ages as the coming of a political kingdom of
heaven, is of course absurd and mischievous. But I must venture
to differ from Sir Henry Maine if he thinks that the tendency of
civilisation has not been towards democracy. The republics of
antiquity, the national polity of Judea, the free cities of the Middle
Ages, the Swiss Federation, the United Netherlands, the memorable
though short-lived Commonwealth of England, the popular part of
the British Constitution, were so many forestalments and presages of
that which was in the womb of time, though many centuries and
repeated efforts were required to bring it forth. They have been
intimately connected with the general progress of civilisation, moral,
intellectual, and industrial as well as political. ' Mr. Grote,' says
Sir Henry Maine, ' did his best to explain away the poor opinion of the
Athenian democracy entertained by the philosophers who filled the
schools of Athens ; but the fact remains that the founders of political
philosophy found themselves in presence of democracy in its pristine
rigour, and thought it a bad form of government.' I doubt
whether it can be said with truth that Aristotle thought democracy
comparatively a bad form of government, though it may not, formally
at least, have been his ideal. But, at all events, it was democratic
Athens that produced the philosophers, not aristocratic Boeotia,
monarchical Macedon, or despotic Persia. The same remark may be
made with respect to Dante's condemnation of Florence. A relapse
from a popular form of government into one less popular, such as

1886 THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS. 315

that of the Italian tyrants or the restored Stuarts, has usually been
a general relapse, and has marked, not an effort to rise to a better
political state, but the lassitude which ensues upon overstrained
effort and premature aspiration. Sir Henry Maine has, however,
himself indicated the principal cause of the extinction of mediaeval
liberties, in pointing out that they succumbed to the power and
prestige of the great military monarchies. The centres of a preco-
cious civilisation, in short, were crushed by the overwhelming forces
of the comparative barbarism by which they were surrounded. That
the Eoman empire, the Italian tyrannies, the Tudor aristocracy, the
French centralised Monarchy were all hailed with acclamation, is a
proposition which I venture to think must be taken with some
abatement as to the quantity of the acclamation and still more as to
its quality. But in each case it was some special disorder — the
overgrowth of the Roman Empire, the turbulence of factions in the
Italian cities, the Wars of the Roses, the local tyranny of the French
nobles — which made the change at the moment welcome. If, after
the military anarchy which ensued upon the death of the Protector,
the Restoration came in with ' cheering,' it went out again with
hissing as soon as the nation had recovered its tone. There has at
the same time been a decay, now apparently complete and definitive,
of the belief in hereditary right upon which kingship and aristocracy
are based. The Italian tyrants, who, Sir Henry Maine says, founded
modern government, were not heaven-descended kings, like those of
Homer or those of the Teutonic tribes, but dictators, and their
power was partly popular in its origin, though it tended to become
dynastic. At last, hereditism expired in America, not, as Sir Henry
Maine seems to think, merely because there was no king to be had
(for a king might have been imported from France), but because the
people were determined not to have a king, and were animated by
republican aspirations. Democracy now prevails in all highly civilised
nations, either in its own name or under monarchical forms. The
Bonapartes thought it necessary to found their dynasty on a plebiscite,
and the last phase of Toryism styles itself democratic. We are in
presence of a fact which, though not divine, is universal, and
imposes a universal task.

On the other hand, it seems fallacious to speak of Greek demo-
cracy as l democracy in its pristine vigour,' and to say that monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy ' were alike plainly discernible ' at the
dawn of history. The ancient Republics were municipal, slave-
owning, and military. Their militarism, which was that of the
ancient world, was hardly less baneful to them than were slavery
and their exclusively urban character, at once narrow and unbalanced.
The Italian Republics, though not slave-owning, were municipal and
military: in subjugating Pisa, Florence sealed her own -doom. But
the American Republic is national and industrial. Its people,

316 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

though they fought well at need for their Union, have no military
tendency whatever. We cannot read its destiny in the annals of the
republican past.

Before, even with reference to the past, we set down republics as
specially ephemeral, we must take into account not only monarchies
tempered by public opinion, but monarchies untempered, like those
of the East, the history of which, as Pym said, is ' full of combustions
and of the tragical ends of princes.' The Koman Kepublic, though
it fell at last under the weight of military empire, was not epheme-
ral ; and we cannot tell that those of Greece would have perished by
their own vices had they not been crushed by the arms of Macedon.
The French centralised Monarchy was founded by Richelieu. It
lasted through three reigns, and in the fourth fell by its own corrup-
tion. Since the Revolution, if the Republics have been ephemeral
the Monarchies have been not less so.

I regard the French Revolution as the greatest calamity in
history, and hate Jacobinism and the worship of Jacobins as heartily
as M. Taine, though I cannot forget that the Jacobin Republic was,
as Sir Henry Maine says, the French king turned upside down, and
from the Monarchy inherited its arbitrariness, its cruelty, and its
belief that all property belonged to the State, while from the
Church it inherited its intolerance. But let us bear in mind what
happened. By the collapse of the Monarchy through its own vices,
the tremendous task of founding a Constitution was thrown, at a
moment of general excitement and distress, into inexperienced
though patriotic hands. Yet a Constitutional Monarchy would
probably have been founded, and the fatal crash at all events would
have been avoided, had not the Queen and her coterie in their mad-
ness brought up the army to crush the Assembly. The army broke :
but in the meantime the Assembly had been fain to put itself under
the protection of armed Paris, of which from that hour it became the
slave. Thus the worst mob in the world got possession of the
administrative centre and the whole machinery of a despotism which
had extinguished in the provinces all power, moral or material, of
resistance to its decrees. There naturally ensued a reign of Bed-
lamites and devils. Thus was generated one of the two forces which
have ever since disturbed the course of popular government in
France ; while the other, military Imperialism, was generated by the
inevitable reaction. Each has apparently at last received its quietus,
Imperialism at Sedan, Jacobinism in the defeat of the Commune ;
and the Republic has now lasted nearly as long as any Monarchy
since the Revolution. Its Executive, it is true, is fatally unstable ;
but this in France as in other countries is the result of the fatal
system of Cabinet and party government, which, as the example of
the United States proves, is no necessary concomitant of democracy.
Militarism, the deadly foe, as Sir Henry Maine himself sees, of popu-
lar government, has apparently declined under the Republic.

1886 THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS. 317

Popular government in America, where alone I must repeat it
has been fairly tried, though it has many faults, the worst of which
arise from Party, shows at present no sign of instability. On the
contrary, it has come forth from the furnace of the most tremendous
of civil wars without even the smell of fire upon its garments. The
predictions current here of a military usurpation were ludicrously
belied, and the suggestion of an Empire to be founded by the suc-
cessful general was received as a sorry joke.

I am surprised that Sir Henry Maine should found any inference
on Mexico and the South American Republics. Republicanism was in
this case thrust upon a population consisting partly of the dregs of
Spain, partly of uncivilised Indians, and having in it not a spark of
political life. The disturbing force here has been mere brigandage,
with a political ribbon in its bandit's hat. Yet Chili and the
Argentine Republic are much better than anything was under
Spanish dominion, and even Mexico is improving at last.

In 'Spain itself the disturbing force once more is the army, while
political life has not recovered from the trance into which it was
thrown by centuries of despotism and the Inquisition. But Spain is,
to say the least, in a more hopeful state now than it was under
Ferdinand, though it lacks like France an executive government
independent of legislative parties and cabals.

What has been said of France and Spain may be said of Europe
generally. War, or the constant imminence of war, standing armies
and conscriptions are the enemies of popular government. One need
not be a peacemonger, or blind to the political services rendered by
soldiers as preservers of order and by military discipline, to say that
difficulties thus generated are different from difficulties inherent in
the particular form of government.

Again, I cannot help demurring to Sir Henry Maine's position
that the masses of mankind are inherently unprogressive, and that
consequently where the masses have power progress will probably
cease. His eyes are fixed on Hindostan, in the languid East, and
outside the pale of Christianity , the historical connection of which with
development, political and general, I would again suggest deserves,
altogether apart from theology, a place in Sir Henry Maine's field of
speculation. Yet even in Hindostan the case seems one not so
much of inherent immobility as of progress arrested, like that of
ancient Egypt, by a dominant priesthood. Buddhism was, in its
way, progress, to which the victory of Brahminism put an end. Till
yesterday it might have been said that Japan was inherently unpro-
gressive. The leading shoot is always slender, though the tree
grows. Immobility is certainly not in any sphere the characteristic
of the American democracy, upon which science and every other
agency of progress operate with full force. Even the power of
amending the constitution, restricted as it is by legal checks, has
been exercised perhaps about as often as it was required ; at least I

318 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

have not heard American statesmen complain of excessive conserva-
tism in this respect on the part of the people. Want of respect for
intelligence certainly is not the defect of the Americans. Intel-
lectual eminence, on the contrary, is the one thing which they almost
•worship, though they may not be infallible in their discernment of it.
If the people and popular government are by nature conservative, a
large part of our fears may be laid aside, but the danger appears
to me to be in another quarter.

The rich and privileged have hitherto had things their own way ;
they will henceforth be obliged to exert themselves in order to have
things the right way, and perhaps they will be none the worse or the
less happy for the change. Envy is about the most dangerous of all
the disturbing forces in a democracy ; it has as much to do with
socialism as cupidity ; and it may be allayed by avoiding ostentation
of wealth. There are various engines of influence and leaderships of
different kinds. * The ruling multitude,' says Sir Henry Maine,
* will only form an opinion by following the opinion of somebody — it
may be of a great party leader ; it may be of a small local politician ;
it may be of an organised association ; it may be of an impersonal
newspaper.' It may be also, and in America often is, that of a great
writer, like Sir Henry Maine, whose work will, I doubt not, have great
influence in the United States, or a great citizen. The newspaper
press, in which, rather than in political assemblies, the real debate now
goes on, is perhaps in an equivocal state ; what is behind it is one of
the most serious questions of the hour. In some countries Hebrew
exploitation. But Capital, if it pleases, may see that some newspapers
at all events shall have honesty and independence behind them, and
its resources cannot be better employed. In a commercial society, the
leadership of industry is not less influential than that of politics, and
it is usually in strong hands, as the general result of labour wars in
the United States has proved. The texture of industrial society itself
is strong. A man cannot go without his daily bread or break the
machine which yields it. There is danger, especially in the cities,
of an abuse, at the instigation of demagogues, of the taxing power.
But socialism has made little progress in America ; among the native
Americans, none ; nor has Mr. George's torch yet set anything on
fire. I assume, of course, that the political institutions are rational ;
unless they are, mere tendencies or influences, however good, cannot
preserve the body politic from confusion.

Let us call the government not ' popular,' but elective, which is
its proper designation, as it marks the real contrast between it and
the hereditary system ; we shall then get rid of the notion that it
must be a mere organ of the will of the multitude. We shall become
conscious of the fact that there are different modes of election, some
of them highly conservative, and various agencies by which the
ascendency of public reason in politics may be maintained.

1886 THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS. 319

Sir Henry Maine holds that under all systems of government,
under monarchy, aristocracy and democracy alike, it is a mere chance
whether the individuals called to the direction of public affairs will be
qualified for the undertaking, but the chance of this competence, so
far from being less under aristocracy than under the other two systems,
is distinctly greater. ' If,' he says, ' the qualities proper for the
conduct of government can be secured in a limited class or body of
men, there is a strong probability that they will be transmitted to the
corresponding class in the next generation, although no assertion be
possible as to individuals.' Is this borne out by the history of pure
aristocracies, to which, if hereditisrn is the principle to be vindicated,
the appeal must be? Waiving the physical question, Sir Henry
seems to forget that while the founder of a line must have won his
place by some sort of merit, or at any rate of force, his descendants,
under the conditions of modern society at least, are exposed to all the
influences of idleness, of unearned distinction, and of membership
of a privileged class. In the Middle Ages kings and nobles were held
to the performance of their rude duties from generation to gene-
ration by the pressure of circumstances, which have now entirely dis-
appeared. The difficulty of inducing hereditary rank and wealth to
do their duty without pressure seems to me, I confess, to be fatal to
the restoration of the hereditary system. Look at the neglect of
Ireland by the Eoyal Family. No innovation is so arduous as the
revival of the past.

When the question is raised, however, as to the retention of the
House of Lords, the appeal must be not to probabilities, physical or
mental, but to the facts of history. Since the Tudors, when this
aristocracy of birth and wealth without the territorial and military
duties commenced its career, what practical service has it rendered to
the nation? • At first, it may have been something of a curb on
despotism, though the House of Lords bowed to the will of the
Tudors even more slavishly than the House of Commons, and behaved
no better under the tyranny of Charles II. In the succeeding period
it was led by its vast interest in the Abbey lands, for a quiet title to
which it had, under Mary, sold the national religion, and its antago-
nism to ambitious ecclesiastics, once or twice to rank itself on the side
of civil and religious liberty. But since that time what has the
House of Lords done ? Of what useful legislation on any important
subject has it been the source? Has its concurrence or refusal to
concur in measures sent up to it from the Commons been determined
by its judgment, so as to afford any security for their wisdom, or
has it been determined by the interest and prejudices of a class ?
Is any rational discrimination visible in its repugnance to change ?
Has it in fact done anything but oppose the blind and unreasoning
resistance of a privileged order to innovation of every kind, even to
the reforms obviously required by common sense and humanity in

320 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

the criminal law ? Did it not, after blocking the most necessary
improvements, pass without hesitation, in the interest of a faction,
that most equivocal of all measures of change, the Tory Suffrage Bill
of 1867 ? Have the mass of its members risen perceptibly above the
ordinary character and habits of the rich and unemployed ? Have
they even shown interest in public affairs or attended in decent
numbers at the debates? For my part, living far away from dukes
or earls, I have no more feeling against them than I have against
hospodars or mikados, and should be perfectly willing to admit their
political usefulness if I could see it. I have a good deal more
feeling against demagogues, and I am keenly sensible of the fact that
while the tomb of a dead ancestor is a bad entrance to public life,
a worse is the gate of lies. But having read the history of the House
of Lords, I am unable to imagine how such a body can be likely
to retain the respect and confidence of a modern nation. Of social
servility, rank however factitious will always, to the great injury of
its possessors, be the object; but social servility is not political
allegiance : social servility is in fact rather apt to indemnify itself
by political revolt. Now, too, the territorial wealth which is the
necessary basis of aristocratic influence is evidently being withdrawn.
Sir Henry Maine hints at reform, of what kind he does not say. It
will not be easy to put a patch in the old garment of hereditary
privilege. Life peerages may be introduced, and the insensate resis-
tance of the Lords to their introduction was a signal instance of the
obstinacy with which privileged orders prefer suicide to reform. But
the operation of such a remedy would be far too slow for these times.
Sir Henry Maine evidently, thinks that the plan of a Single
Chamber must be conceived in the interest of revolution, and with a
view of giving uncontrolled sway to the sheer will of the sovereign
people. He compares its advocates to the Caliph who destroyed all
books except the Koran, saying that if they agreed with the Koran
they were needless, and if they did not agree with it they must be
heretical. He is not aware that the Single Chamber has been
advocated not from the revolutionary but from the Conservative
point of view, on the ground that Second Chambers had failed, and
had either, like the Upper House in Victoria, produced deadlocks
and convulsions, or, like the French and Canadian Senates, sunk into
impotence ; that power, after all, would inevitably centre, perhaps
after a struggle, in the popular House, and that the sense of responsi-
bility in that House was only diminished by the shadow of control.
He does not answer the vital question of what special materials the
Upper House is to be composed, or tell us, if it is a Chamber of
Wealth, how it can escape odium ; if of age, how it can escape feeble-
ness ; if of eminence, how it can fail to take from the popular House
those who ought to be its leaders. In deprecating the abolition of
the House of Lords he has curious allies in the extreme Radicals,

1886

THE MORAL OF THE LATE CRISIS.

321

who perceive that it is an ostracism of Conservative forces. It takes
Lord Salisbury, and it may any day take Lord Hartington away from
the real council of the nation. The American Senate is not a
Second Chamber or a counterpart of the House of Lords; it is a
representation of the separate States as opposed to the United
Nation, and was a compromise with State independence. The fancy
for Second Chambers generally, however, has arisen from a miscon-
ception as to the nature of the House of Lords, which is not really
a Senate, but an estate of the old feudal realm, and an organ of
territorial wealth, in the interest of which it has always acted.
Even the American Senate sometimes shows, in its relation to the
House of Eepresentatives, the liabilities of the Double Chamber
system : there is at this time a paralysis of legislation, caused
by the collision between a republican majority in the Senate, and a
democratic majority in the House. I would submit once more that
the truly conservative, and in every way the better plan, may
be to recognise the fact that power, under a democracy, will centre
in the popular assembly, and instead of trying to impose a check
upon it from without, to regulate and temper its action by instituting
forms of procedure such as will secure deliberation, by subjecting it
to a suspensive veto, by requiring rational qualifications for the
electorate, and, as I should say, by introducing, if possible, in place
of direct election by the people at large, elections by local councils,
which would both act as a filter and keep demagogism within
bounds. The American Senate, which really, if party could only be
eliminated, would be pretty much all that could be desired in a
governing assembly, is an earnest of the good results of such a
method of election. A stable executive, independent of the fluctua-
tions of party in the legislative assembly, would crown the edifice of
a popular yet conservative constitution.

To me, looking to the general tendencies of the age, to the
necessity of keeping government in unison with the spirit of society,
and to the pronounced and universal decadence of the hereditary
principle, it seems that the more hopeful course is to organise
democracy, in other words so to regulate the elective system that it
shall yield a government of public reason. But either on this line,
or on that of restoring political monarchy with the Privy Council,
British statesmen will apparently before long find it necessary to
move, if they mean the country to have a constitution or a govern-
ment. There are, as has been already said, those who do not wish
it to have either, but desire simply Universal Suffrage and a popular
assembly with uncontrolled power, and elected by a purely dema-
gogic method, as an organ of indefinite revolution. It is in this
direction that the nation, in its present condition, moves.

VOL. XX.— No. 115.

GOLDWIN SMITH.
A A

322 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

COLLAPSE OF
THE FREE TRADE ARGUMENT.

THE oracle has spoken. * At the special request of the Committee
of the Cobden Club ' Mr. Medley has undertaken to expose my errors
and fallacies, and expound the true doctrine of what is called Free
Trade. This is as it should be. The questions involved in the con-
troversy are of vital importance to the nation, and have been raised
by me with the sole desire to arrive at the truth . I therefore hail with
satisfaction the work of an able and accomplished writer, thoroughly
acquainted (as his previous publications show that he is) with all the
arguments by which our present system can be upheld, well able to
disclose to view those merits of that system which do not meet the
eye of the ordinary observer, and give full force to every considera-
tion which tells in its favour. In controversies it often happens
that the disputants waste much time and energy in asserting, re-
futing, proving, and disproving propositions that are either not really
in issue between them, or, if they are in issue, have little to do with
the subject of contention. After reading with much care and interest
Mr. Medley's paper, ( The Lion's Share of the World's Trade,' I am
well content to find that this is not the case here, and that what I
put forward as the two main arguments by which our present system
of Free Trade is maintained are accepted by him as such.

In so stating the case, of course I do not intend to pass over the
obvious merit, and, as it seems to me, the sole merit, of a system of free
imports which consists of rendering many things cheaper than they
would otherwise be — to what extent cheaper is a matter of much con-
troversy. The extent of the benefits conferred on the community by
this cheapness is also a matter of controversy. In the case of food
and raw materials these benefits are not to be doubted, though they
may be and have been exaggerated ; but passing by, for the moment,
this merit of cheapness which the system of free imports is calculated
to secure, I first addressed myself, in the remarks which Mr. Medley
has undertaken to answer, to the proposition that every import of
foreign goods * necessitates ' a corresponding export of British goods
to pay for it, a proposition which I asserted lies at the very founda-
tion of the Free Trade contention. I next addressed myself to the
argument that the system of ' Free Imports ' must be a sound one
because the country has prospered so greatly since the time when

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 323

our Legislature adopted it, and I added that in refuting these two
propositions the * main, if not the sole, support of a system of free
imports would be withdrawn.' Mr. Medley, I am glad to see, finds
no fault with this statement. He accepts my view of the cardinal
importance of these two arguments, and, in answer to my challenge
to point out any merits or advantages connected with the system of
' Free Imports ' beyond those to which I had addressed myself, he
has nothing to say.

This is very satisfactory. It clears the ground of mystery ; we
know what it is we are discussing — we can proceed to the discussion
with the consciousness that we have the whole merits of ' Free Im-
ports ' before us — that nothing remains unsaid which can be said in
support of them, and that in dealing with these two arguments or
propositions, we are really dealing with the reasoning, except, as I
said before, the obvious benefits of cheapness by which, if at all, our
English system, which is at variance with that of the rest of the
world, must be upheld.

It will conduce to clearness and brevity if I take these two
arguments separately, and in the order in which I presented them
to the reader.

First, then, has Mr. Medley, in answer to my objections, succeeded
in establishing his grand proposition, that every foreign import brings
about — < necessitates,' I think, is his word — an export of British
goods ? An export of British goods means a market for the produce of
British labour, and so say the Free Importers, How dull you are not
to perceive that by taking off all duties on foreign manufactured
goods you are stimulating and fostering the import of them, and by
thus increasing these imports you are making it necessary for the
foreigner to buy more of your own manufactures in return. For this
is the only way in which he can practically be paid for the 'goods he
sends you. And so you get a double benefit : first, the opportunity of
buying what you want to consume at a cheaper rate than your own
people can supply it to you ; and next, you secure a purchaser for
your own manufacturing produce, and thus find employment for
your own people. How very dull — ' ignorant ' is, I think, Mr.
Medley's favourite word — you must be not to see this. Indeed he
called it, I think, the ' Pons Asinorum.'

Well, if it is indeed true that the foreigner must of necessity
take payment for the goods he sends us by taking ours in return, I
confess I think it would be rather dull not to see the merits of the
system. Even I, of whom Mr. Medley evidently entertains but a poor
opinion, can see that ; but is it true ? This is what I ventured to ask in
the first paper I offered to the readers of this Eeview, and this is what
I venture to ask again, after being enlightened by reading the * Lion's
Share.' I venture to question the fact that an import of foreign
goods necessarily causes an export of British goods to pay for them,

A A 2

324 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

or that, in point of fact, such imports were accompanied by such
exports, and I gave my reasons.

It seemed to me that if the proposition was true, we should find
over a number of years, if not in each year, that the amount of
imports was balanced, or about balanced, by an equal amount of
exports (of course I speak of value, not quantity), whereas the
returns of the Board of Trade showed exactly the reverse. In some
years, when the imports went up largely, the exports advanced very
little ; in others, when the imports advanced largely, the exports
actually decreased ; and vice versa, when the imports fell off, the
exports, instead of sympathising, increased in value. In the returns
of fifteen years there were only two years, I think, in which the im-
ports and exports stood in anything like an approach to equality.

I further pointed out that the causes by which foreigners were
led to purchase the produce of our labour were entirely independent
of the extent to which we have bought theirs, that the two things
could have no connection, and could not possibly stand to one
another in the relation of cause and effect, and I thought I proved
this by asserting that nobody buys a thing unless he wants to con-
sume it or sell it again, and that in commercial operations the pur-
chases of the importing merchant are dictated and regulated in
amount by the wants and demands of the consumer, whose needs
it is his business to supply, and in no degree by the amount of goods
which his countrymen may have previously sold to us.

I further attacked the chain of reasoning by which this pro-
position of every import necessitating an export was supported, by
denying the assertion that we did not pay the foreigner in money,
although we did not export bullion to do so ; for I asserted that the
practical course of a transaction of importation was this : That the
British purchaser gave his acceptance on a bill of exchange in pay-
ment, and that this acceptance, when it fell due, was paid in actual
cash at the bankers' or elsewhere where it was made payable, and
that if the foreigner or his agent did not receive this cash, it was
only because he had already received the value of it in money when
he negotiated or sold the bill, and thereby entitled the holder or
purchaser to receive the money in his place.

Now, what says Mr. Medley to all this ? Does he point out where
the error lies in these propositions, or the conclusions which, to the
ordinary mind, would seem to flow from them ? He can speak freely
of ' ignorance ' and want of * knowledge of political economy,' but
when he finds these to -exist, why does not he take compassion and
enlighten us ? I have read his handiwork, the < Lion's Share,' <£c.,
with much interest. I find some things put into my mouth which
I have never said, and other things which I have said so disfigured
that I recognise my offspring with difficulty ; also I find many sug-
gestions of ignorance on my part, and lofty superiority on the part

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 325

of Mr. Medley, but I declare that I have been quite unable to find a
single word in answer to the above observations. He does not deny
the great, the paramount importance which I ascribed to this propo-
sition, that every import necessarily brought about an export, and
does not qualify or find fault with my statements on that head, such
for instance as the following : —

1 But this belief, that by importing largely we are by some
mysterious law inevitably securing to ourselves an outlet for our
manufactures by an increase of our exports, lies so universally at
the root of the faith in Free Imports, and as it seems to me con-
stitutes so entirely the basis of all reasoning in favour of that belief,
that I may be pardoned if I pursue the subject a little further.'

But what does he say to it ? He shall speak for himself. What
he does say is this : —

Lord Penzance, however, is of a totally different opinion. He thinks that the
competition of the foreigner in the importation of manufactures is an injury to home
production and to the employment of our dense population, because the Free Trade
argument, which maintains that every import necessitates an export, is unsound in
theory and false in fact, the truth being, according to him, that these importations
are paid for in actual money, as may be seen by the inspection of our Board of
Trade returns, in which the actual results of a system of Free Imports are recorded
for us.

The above is the substance of Lord Penzance's argument, which is spread over
several pages. It is brimful of fallacies. In the first place, he asserts that we pay for
these importations in actual money, but what does he mean by the term ? He cannot
mean bullion, for in the very next line to that, in which he says that we pay in
money, he writes ' it is plain that we do not pay by sending bullion abroad.' He thus
draws a distinction between money and bullion, but in international dealings there
is none. A nation cannot pay another nation in money except by the trans-
mission of bullion ; if bullion be not sent, no money is sent.

In the first place, then, Mr. Medley says, he wants to know what
I mean by money, when I say we pay for these importations in actual
money. I am at a loss to know how to make my meaning plainer.
This is the passage which Mr. Medley says he does not understand : —

1 How then do we pay ? I know how the actual importer in any
case pays. He does pay in money, that is, he gives his acceptance
at two or three months, or whatever prompt is customary in the trade,
and when the bill falls due, he pays it. When and how is it then
that this money payment, before it arrives in the foreigner's hands,
is converted into goods as the Free Importers say that it is ? What
becomes of the acceptance ? We know that it is or may be trans-
ferred from hand to hand by endorsement in this country, or sold
and sent abroad.

' It is impossible to conjecture into whose hands it may have
found its way whilst running, or to whom it may ultimately be paid,
but whoever may be the holder, unless the purchaser of the goods be-
comes insolvent (in which case the foreigner's goods are never paid

326 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

for at all, either in goods, or money, or anything else), the price
of the foreign goods is paid in actual money when the bill falls due.'

I see no ambiguity in this — I meant exactly what I said — that
the purchaser gives his acceptance for the goods, and that when the
acceptance falls due it was paid in actual money over the counter at
a banker's, as any other bill of exchange is paid, and I am not aware
that payment is ever made except in gold or bank notes, and that is
what I call money. Does not Mr. Medley also call that payment in
actual money ? I suppose that he would, but then it appears he has
a difficulty. I could not mean bullion, he says, because in the
very next line to that in which I said that we pay in money, I wrote,
' It is plain that we do not pay by sending bullion abroad,' and,
says Mr. Medley, * he thus draws a distinction between money and
bullion.' This would have been, I think, a very silly distinction to
draw, and why I am to be charged with drawing it I am at a loss to
know. If I had said we did not send bullion abroad in payment,
but did send money abroad for that purpose, Mr. Medley's charge of
drawing a distinction between them would have been intelligible, but
I said nothing about sending anything abroad in payment ; on the
contrary, what I said was, that the money was paid here at the
banker's or elsewhere where the bill of exchange was made payable,
either to the foreign seller of the goods himself, or to some one to
whom he had transferred the bill.

And this delusion of a distinction between money and bullion,
which no man in his senses would draw, is the sole answer which
Mr. Medley makes to my statement that the individual importer of
foreign goods pays his vendor in actual money. ' A nation,' he says,
* cannot pay another nation any money except by the transmission of
bullion.' I will not stop to question this, though I do not agree with
it ; for I was not discussing what nations did — I was talking of the
way in which an individual purchase is carried out. It is not nations
who purchase goods, but individuals ; and after showing how an indi-
vidual purchase was carried out by a money payment, I added : —

' Surely this closes the transaction, and if all imports are paid for
in this way, saving as I have said in the case of bad debts, what room
is there for the assertion- that they are paid for in goods, and goods
of British manufacture ? '

How then, I ask again, does Mr. Medley deal with this? He
makes no attempt to explain how, consistently with this money pay-
ment, it can still be asserted with truth that the foreign import is
paid for with British goods, but first manufactures a delusive distinc-
tion between money and bullion, and then puts it into my mouth.

Utterly insufficient as this suggestion is by way of answer to
me, it would have been well for Mr. Medley if he had rested con-
tent with it ; but he was tempted to go further, and in doing so
he has met with a catastrophe and fallen into the terrible misfortune
of entirely admitting and proving his adversary's contention.

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 327

If the reader will forgive me, I should like to quote the entire
passage without the omission of a word. Having said (as quoted
above) that if bullion is not sent, no money is sent, he goes on thus :

Something else may be sent. It may be money's worth, but it is not money.
The moment this is admitted, however, the bottom of the argument, to use Lord
Penzance's own words, tumbles out. Money's worth can consist only of two
things, merchandise or securities; and if either of these be transferred to the
foreigner, it constitutes the ' export ' which balances the import.

' Money's worth,' he says, ' may be sent in payment of foreign
goods, but that is not money,' and now comes the fatal admission :
* Money's worth can consist of only two sorts of things, merchandise
or securities, and if either of these is transferred to the foreigner it
constitutes the export which balances the import.'

The export, then, which is ' necessitated ' by the import may con-
sist of securities, and is not necessarily an export of goods. Alas, Mr.
Medley, where have you got to now ? Is this what you have been
meaning all along when you preached the doctrinal faith that every
import necessitates an export to pay for it ? If you had only made
that plain when you inculcated in the Cobden Club pamphlets the
import and export doctrine, who would have cared to dispute it ?
But, no ; the export hitherto spoken of as balancing the import, and
brought about by it, was an export not of securities but of British
goods. In no other sense had the proposition any value or sense as
an argument in support of the modern doctrine of Free Imports, and
in no other sense has the word ' export ' been used in any passage of
any one of the voluminous writings on this subject for the Cobden
Club, either by Mr. Mongredien or Mr. Medley himself. I do not
trouble the reader with many instances, it will be enough indeed
if I refer to the single passage which I quoted in the article to which
Mr. Medley is replying.

The trade of a country consists of the aggregate operations of individual traders,
which are always equal, co-ordinate, and self-balancing, and which necessitate to
a mathematical certainty, excepting bad debts, an import to every export, and
vice versa.

And again : —

Now, if the country imports articles X, Y, Z, it necessarily exports in exchange
for them (for every increase of imports necessitates an increase of exports) other
articles of native production, which we may call A, B, C, and thus further channels
of employment are created.

' Other articles of native production.' Could the writer by these
words have meant securities, and foreign securities ? If the import
is paid for by the transmission of a security (say an Egyptian bond),
of what benefit is that to the British producer ? Is that an article
of * native production,' and does it create ' further channels of em-
ployment ? ' It was vaunted as the magical merit of ' Free Imports,'
that by freely importing we were infallibly securing an export of our
own produce in return, and were thus doubly gainers ; first by having

328 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

bought what we wanted in the cheapest market, and then, in addition,
by securing a market for an equal amount of our own produce. This
was the faith of the true Free Trader, as explained, with some con-
tempt for the stupidity of those who did not embrace it, by Mr.
Medley, and with much fulness and lucidity by the other exponent
of the views of the Cobden Club, Mr. Mongredien. In Mr. Mon-
gredien's pamphlet, entitled Free Trade and English Commerce, he
says : —

All are agreed as to the great advantage it is to a country to export largely,
only it has been, and should not be, overlooked that those exports must be paid for
in goods, since, as we have seen, specie is not used for that purpose, except some-
times provisionally, and to a fractional extent. If, therefore, you import little
you can only export little; if you want to export largely you must import largely.
You cannot curtail your bete noire imports without curtailing to just the same ex-
tent your pet exports. For every pound's worth of foreign articles which, by pro-
tection or prohibitory duties, you prevent coming into your country, you prevent a
hundred pounds' worth of your own articles of production from going abroad. It
cannot be repeated too often, because it is at the very root of the question, that to
restrict imports is, by the inexorable law of logical sequence, to restrict exports to
the same extent, and therefore to that extent to restrict foreign trade.

The question narrows itself into a few simple issues, on which plain common-
sense is quite competent to deliver a verdict. We propose to show, first, that for
every export of goods that is not sent to pay a previous debt, there must be an
import of goods to the same amount, and vice versa for every import of goods that
is not received in liquidation of a previous debt, there must be an export of goods
to the same amount.

But what becomes of this comforting belief when Mr. Medley
informs us that the export which was so inevitably secured for us by
every import of foreign goods need not be an export of British goods
at all, but may be an export of ' securities ' ?

All honour to Mr. Medley's sagacity in perceiving this truth,
though somewhat late in the day, and to his candour in admitting
it ; but it is none the less the fact that when Mr. Medley once
admitted that the foreigner was paid by securities, instead of
British goods, he surrendered the entire position which he and Mr.
Mongredien had previously laboured so hard to establish. Hard
driven by arguments which he found himself unable to answer, and
loth to resign his favourite shibboleth that every import necessitates
an export, he has clung to the words at the expense of their mean-
ing— that is, of the only meaning which supports the doctrine of
Free Imports or makes it worth the while of any disbeliever in the
doctrine of modern Free Trade to dispute it. But here, again, I say
it would have been well for Mr. Medley if he had stopped even there,
but he hastens on his downward course. Lightened and invigorated
in having thrown off the weight of the arguments he had in vain
been struggling to meet — a result which he achieved by this device of
a new meaning to the word ' exports ' — he has been fairly run away
with by his new proposition, over which he has no more control than
Mr. John Gilpin had over his holiday nag, and stop he cannot till he is

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. \ 329

landed fully and fairly in the camp of the ' Fair Traders.' For this
is how he goes on. Having stated that if the foreign import is paid
for by merchandise, there is no injury to our home production, he
proceeds to the case in which these imports are paid for by securi-
ties, and he takes the case of a foreign security.

There remains (he says) the case where a foreign security is taken off the market,
but that foreign security could only have been obtained by us by means of some
previous export on our part, and so we come round, as we must always do, to the
fact that, sooner or later, directly or indirectly, an import is either the cause or
the effect of an export.

' Either the cause or the effect.' Here is another new proposition,
but I pass it by, only begging to be allowed to ask why must a
foreign security (say an Egyptian bond), with which the import has
been paid for, have been obtained by a previous export ? Is the ex-
port of goods the sole means of acquiring wealth ? Is the harvest of
this country, for instance, worth nothing to us ? Is the labour of
our people, except that portion of it which produces an export, worth
nothing ? Are the dividends or interest payable to us yearly, on the
accumulated wealth which we have invested at home and abroad, no
source of wealth to us ? But I pass by this astounding assertion
also, because I wish to fasten upon the great truth to which Mr.
Medley has unwittingly given the weight of his authority. If paid
for by an export at all, it is, he says, by a previous eajpori,that is to say,
the Englishman acquires his Egyptian bond by his skill or labour as
embodied in goods exported at some previous time ; weeks, perhaps
months, perhaps years before — in short, by his savings, by his pre-
viously acquired wealth. But this is precisely what the Fair Traders
have complained of. They have complained, as I understand it, that
instead of purchasing what you consume in the shape of imports by
the sale of your current labour as embodied in manufactured goods,
the great difference between the amount of your imports and your
exports tends to show that you are largely paying for your pur-
chases out of your savings, out of your previously acquired wealth,
and that to arrange your legislation so as to encourage the purchase
of imports paid for in this fashion is to encourage the gradual dissi-
pation of wealth previously acquired, instead of stimulating the pro-
duction of fresh wealth by the sale of your own manufactures.

In the result, then, Mr. Medley must be held to have obtained a
great victory in establishing on a firm footing his doctrine that every
import necessitates an export, but it is a victory gained at the ex-
pense of refuting the system which he has been enlisted to support ;
for his proposition is only true by understanding it in a sense which
tends to condemn the practice of ' Free Imports,' and, so understood,
he may hold it, and proclaim it in peace, for no one will be found to
contest it with him. Imports are paid for, he says, either by the
export of merchandise, or by securities. Be it so. In the word
1 security ' he includes, I presume, bills of exchange, which I have

330 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

shown to be the ordinary method of payment in point of fact, and
then what does it all come to ? Why, nothing but this : that imports
are paid for somehow, either by goods, or securities, or something of
value.

All this is plain and simple enough as a matter of reasoning and
experience, but let me imagine a state of things which will illustrate
it in a practical light. Suppose the great American millionaire,
Mr. Vanderbilt, had been able and willing to buy the entire Isle of
Man, and had built himself a palace there, and lived a life of opulence
and luxury, importing everything that such a life demanded from
England, or from abroad. If he had lived there to the age of Methu-
selah, what was there to prevent his spending his vast income in
the purchase of foreign imports without exporting a single bale of
goods, paying his way by bills drawn on America, representing the
earnings of the New York Central Railroad ?

Once admit that imports are paid for by securities, and there
should have been no controversy at all ; but so fixed is the belief in
Mr. Medley's mind, that those who do not believe in * Free Imports '
are either ignorant or deficient in intellect, that, after having wholly
altered his own proposition, and thereby enabled himself to run
away from a position he could no longer defend, he proceeds to lay
the blame of the controversy upon the dulness of his opponents.

It is in the use of the word ' export ' (he says) that Lord Penzance and other
protectionist writers involve themselves in fallacies. They seem to think that an
export must consist of some material thing, and that it must also appear in the
trade returns.

' They seem to think ' ! Is not this somewhat bold and just a
little cruel? Why, who told them to think so, but Mr. Medley and
his companion in arms, Mr. Mongredien ? And who is it that
* seem to think ' that the word * export ' means something material ?
Why — everybody, not only Mr. Medley and Mr. Mongredien and all
the writers of the Cobden Club, but everybody, Free Trader and Pro-
tectionist alike, who has ever used the word * export ' in this con-
troversy. What is the meaning of this battle which has raged about
exports and imports until the reader is I fear nearly sick of the
words, unless exports means exported goods ? In no other sense
have we any account of them ; we know nothing of the securities
that cross the Channel in parcels and post-bags, and the talk
about imports exceeding exports is all nonsense except upon
the understanding that exports means exported goods. Let
us see what Mr. Medley, himself * seems to think ' upon this
subject. In his pamphlet entitled England under Free Trade, he
says : * Of this trade our imports amounted to 411,000,000^., and our
exports to 286,000,000^., leaving an excess of imports over exports
of 125,000,000^. Now, let me remind you that it is in regard to this
excess of imports over exports that the Fair Trade battle most hotly
rages, the Fair Trader maintaining that this excess of 125,000,000^.

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 331

is the measure of our national loss for 1880, while the Free
Trader ridicules this view and maintains on the contrary that it may
more justly be considered the measure of our national gain. In
a little pamphlet called the Reciprocity Craze which I had the
honour of writing for the Cobden Club, I made the assertion that
this question of imports and exports was the pons asinorum or asses'
bridge of the Fair Trade controversy. I reiterate that assertion, and
with your permission we will endeavour to pass over this bridge hand
in hand as it were.'

I venture to express the hope then that we may hear no more
of imports necessitating exports, but before quitting the subject
let me shortly point out the result which with Mr. Medley's assis-
tance has been made clear by its discussion.

The import of foreign goods testifies to wealth, because it re-
presents expenditure. So far as it consists of raw material bought for
the purpose of employing upon it the labour of the population, it is
an expenditure which is returned to us in the sale of the manu-
factures it has enabled us to produce, and thus plays a part in the
produce of wealth. So far as it consists of articles of mere con-
sumption it is the dissipation of wealth previously acquired. These
imports may be paid for, and are paid for, in any way in which wealth
or value is capable of being transferred. They may extinguish a
previous debt either of the seller or of some one else to whom he has
transferred his claim. They may be paid by a transfer of the current
or permanent obligations either of individuals or governments, or by
the transfer of the labour of man as embodied in manufactures or
the produce of the mine, the field, or the ocean. They involve and
testify to the acquisition of wealth in whatever form or from what-
ever source it may be produced, but they do nothing whatever to
create it. On the contrary, so far as they are consumed without the
expenditure of fresh labour upon them, they signify its dissipation
and nothing more.

So much then for the substance of the controversy. But in Mr.
Medley's confused and rambling production there is a great deal
besides that offers a tempting mark for refutation and exposure, full
of interest to his adversary, but not likely to interest the reader. I can-
not wholly forbear comment, however. It was Single-speech Hamilton,
I think, who pointed out that the most brilliant passages of a speech
or essay were generally the weakest in argument, and I set myself to
inquire whether this was so or not in Mr. Medley's case. I am not
quite sure that I know which is the most brilliant part of the 'Lion's
Share of the World's Trade,' but after some vacillation I have settled
upon the following passage : —

To suppose that, by taxing foreign imports, foreign competition will be killed, and
home production and home labour stimulated, is an idea compared with which that
of taking a pill to ward off the danger of a threatened earthquake is sanity itself.

It requires a pretty stout effort of the imagination to picture the

332 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

importation of say French woollen goods as an earthquake, and still
greater to look at a tariff in the light of a pill, but this difficulty
surmounted, and in possession of what it is that Mr. Medley means
to assert, namely, that the imposition of a tax on foreign manufac-
tures will not stimulate home manufacture, I think I shall best
answer him by recounting the experiences of a country that took the
pill, and did thereby avoid the earthquake.

It is well known that in Canada the protective system has been
largely tried of late years and with great success. Here is the
account given of it by Sir John MacDonald : —

I am largely responsible for the national policy of Canada, a policy -which
has been, and perhaps is now, severely criticised on this side of the sea, a policy of
revenue secured by tariff. There is nothing to show that this policy has in any
respect failed in its intention. The balance of advantage has been largely in its
favour ; indeed, high as party feelicgruns in Canada, even the Opposition have ceased
to attack the protective policy, or, as both parties have agreed to style it, the
national policy of our Government. Our policy is to protect such staple industries
as are capable of a practically unlimited expansion, and to admit raw material free
which cannot be produced at home. When we commenced to tax cotton and
woollen goods we were assured that the consumer would be ruined and driven out
of the country by high prices. What has been the result ? Our manufacturers
of cotton and cloth are in a position of increasing prosperity, and to-day the con-
sumer is able to buy his goods more cheaply than when Canada was upon a Free
Trade basis. Formerly our industries were at the mercy of the manufacturers of
the United States, who recognised that our mills, once closed, were never likely to
re-open, and that it was therefore prudent and profitable to sell goods in Canada
for a short time even at a loss for the sake of controlling Canadian markets later
at their own prices. This was actually being done. We found that the cotton
operators of the United States were sending us goods at less than the cost of pro-
duction, and were collecting the amount of that loss by levying an assessment on
their Manufacturers' Association.

One more sample of the way in which Mr. Medley reasons, and I
have done. Having given a definition of his own of what consti-
tutes the difference between a tariff for revenue only and one which
is protective, and having defined me as the most ' simple-minded of
men,' which I regard as a high compliment after some fifty years '
contact with Westminster Hall, he goes on thus : —

If Lord Penzance had borne this definition in mind, he would not have
penned the contradictory and mutually destructive propositions contained in num-
bers 2 and 3. It is impossible to carry out number 2 without setting aside the
directions under number 3, whilst it is impossible to act on number 3 without
violating the principle contained in number 2.

What were these propositions which were so mutually destruc-
tive and contradictory ? They were as follows : Number 2. — That
no duty should be imposed save for purposes of revenue. Num-
ber 3. — That in selecting the articles upon which duty should be
imposed, it is advantageous to the community, ceteris paribus,
that the duty should fall upon any article in which the foreigner
competes in our markets with the labour and skill of our own
people. It is impossible, says Mr. Medley, to carry out number 2
without setting aside the directions under number 3 ; whilst it

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 333

is impossible to act on number 3 without violating the principle
contained in number 2. To Mr. Medley's mind it is impossible
then that a Finance Minister should determine that it is expedient to
lay a duty upon some article of general consumption with a view
of taxing the class which consumes it, and, at the same time, in
determining what article of general consumption it should be, to
endeavour to find a fit subject for such taxation among the articles
the like of which we produce at home.

The sole object of the Minister in imposing the tax at all may
be to equalise the incidence of taxation by reaching classes whom he
cannot reach by any direct impost through the medium of a tax on
the class of articles they consume. In what way would he act incon-
sistently with this object if he should select for taxation, out of that
class of articles, the particular article the taxation of which will
encourage home production ? I am quite unable to suggest what
confusion of ideas has led Mr. Medley to imagine this inconsistency,
and I doubt, therefore, whether any further exposition of the subject
will elucidate it to him ; but it sometimes happens that an apposite
illustration will succeed when reasoning fails, and I will suggest a
very homely one. Let me imagine that Mr. Medley lived in a village
in which there were two bakers, one highly enlightened and a Free
Trader, and the other dull, ignorant, and stupid, and, like Priuce
Bismarck and the American Government, a Protectionist ; and let me
suppose that the Free-trading baker should press not only for Mr.
Medley's custom, but that the latter should buy twice as many loaves
as he needed in order to advance the baker's prosperity. Might
not Mr. Medley, without inconsistency, lay down the following rules
for the governance of his household ? —

First. — No bread shall be bought for the benefit of any baker,
but only so much as is needed for the purposes of consumption.

Secondly. — In selecting the baker from whom it shall be bought,
the preference shall be given to him whose interests I desire to
further — to the enlightened man who understands political economy
as I do ; in other words, I will not allow bread to be bought to benefit
the baker, however enlightened he may be — that would be like
coddling his trade with a protective duty — but what bread is bought
(and that shall be only so much as shall be required for consumption)
shall be bought from him. To that extent I am justified in giving
him an advantage. If Mr. Medley finds any inconsistency here, I
have nothing more to say. I would not have troubled the reader
with this, but I wished to show the way in which Mr. Medley reasons.
I have spoken of him as an able and accomplished writer, and I should
be very sorry to say less ; but, as a reasoner, I confess he seems to me
to leave something to be desired.

I now pass to the second branch of the controversy — I mean the
evidence of the soundness of the Free Trade system which is to be

334

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Sept,

found in the prosperity of this country since that system has been
acted upon. What I have to say about Mr. Medley's observations in
respect of this will be very short, for it will be confined to the ex-
posure of a single fallacy which runs throughout that entire portion
of Mr. Medley's essay which deals with this branch of the subject,
and indeed has given the article its name, ' The Lion's Share of the
World's Trade.' Mr. Medley seems to forget what it is we are dis-
cussing when reference is made to the commerce of other countries.
I had asserted that, great as our progress has been since Free Trade
was adopted, other countries which adopt the opposite system of Pro-
tection had progressed as fast or faster, and from this I drew the
conclusion that our prosperity was not due to the Free Trade system,
and I quoted a table from Mr. Mulhall's Progress of the World,
which Mr. Medley has reproduced, and in which the commerce of
thirteen different communities is set down and contrasted at two
different epochs. The rate of advance in commerce in each com-
munity after an interval of forty-eight years is thus exhibited : —

1830

1878

Increase

£

£

In millions

In millions

United Kingdom
British Colonies
France .

88
21
42

601
322
368

7 fold

14*

9

Germany .
Low Countries

39
30

319
275

8
9

United States
Austria

35
12

225
160

6£
13

Eussia

24

128

5£

South America

14

101

7

Italy .
Scandinavia

11

8

98
66

9

8

Spain and Portugal
Turkey and the East

11
15

39

85

e" ;

350

2,787

8 fold

This table shows that the rate of advance made by this country
is only sevenfold, whilst the average advance made by the other
twelve communities is as much as eightfold. It would be a mistake,
however, to take this comparison as proving more than it really does.
Let me point out what such a comparison is really worth.

We find two systems in operation among the thirteen nations
which Mr. Mulhall enumerates. Twelve of them act in different
degrees upon the system of Protection, whilst one only acts upon that
of Free Imports, and denounces Protection as injurious. It is natural
that we should turn to the practical results — I will not say caused by,
but which have accompanied, the operation of these two opposite
systems during the last thirty or forty years.

We must not accept these results as a positive proof in favour of
either system, for it is obvious that the commerce or prosperity of
any individual country may be, and no doubt is, more largely

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 335

affected by other causes than it is by the scale of duties which they
impose on imported goods. To so great an extent is this the case
that a comparison instituted between the commerce of any two in-
dividual countries alone could be little trusted as an exponent
of soundness in any fiscal system. But with a number as large as
twelve such a comparison is worth something. If a marked advance
appears in the commerce of twelve different communities, absolutely
dissimilar in their forms of government, with populations of dissimilar
aptitudes, with dissimilar climates and natural products, and if the
rate of this advance during the same period of time exceeds the rate
at which we ourselves, one of the richest and most energetic of
nations, have been advancing, this, though far from conclusive, says
something in favour of the system of Protection. But as an answer
to the conclusion in favour of * Free Imports,' which is sought to be
drawn from the prosperity of this country since it adopted that
practice, this comparison with other countries is worth a great
deal more. Indeed, it is almost, if not quite, a complete answer.
For if, disregarding the operation of all other causes, you attribute
the prosperity of this country to free imports alone, if, fixing your eye
upon this one possible cause of prosperity alone, you treat it as a
proof of the soundness of your system, I am justified in doing the
same thing with respect to other countries, and in whatever degree
your argument is cogent or conclusive in favour of free imports, my
argument, standing on precisely the same basis, is equally cogent or con-
clusive in favour of Protection. It is thus that I made use of Mr. Mul-
hall's table in the article which Mr. Medley has undertaken to answer;
and how has he answered it ? I arn afraid I here must note a confusion
of thought similar to that upon which I have already commented.
Institute a comparison with foreign nations by all means, he says, but
institute it properly. Take the actual figures which show the actual
value of the commerce of each country and see which country has
the best of it — which has the ' Lion's Share.' Do not compare each
country with itself at two different epochs. Do not take the com-
merce of any given country at a given time, and compare it with the
commerce of the same country after a lapse of forty years, and, ob-
serving the rate at which that commerce has advanced, draw a con-
clusion favourable or otherwise to the system upon which it has
regulated its fiscal laws, but compare the commerce of one country
with that of another, and whichever country has the largest com-
merce must be proceeding on the best system. In other words, his
argument is this : Whatever nation has the greatest wealth, the
largest territories and population, the greatest energy and ability,
and the greatest natural advantages, will in all probability command
the greatest commerce, and if it enjoys the * Lion's Share ' of the
world's commerce, it follows as a matter of course that its affairs are,
in the matter of taxes and tariff, conducted on the soundest system.
The wealthiest community, then, is necessarily the wisest ; and the

336 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

most successful nation, no matter what is the extent and character
of its territories or the qualities of its population, must needs act
upon the wisest system in the matter of tariff, or it could not enjoy
the « Lion's Share.'

To characterise this argument I must borrow a phrase of Mr.
Medley's, ' It is brimful of fallacies.' Its absurdity, however, may
be demonstrated in a single sentence, and refuted by a single fact.
If the preponderance of Great Britain over other nations in commerce
is a proof of the soundness of the Free Trade system, how is it that
that preponderance existed before Free Trade was invented, and existed
even in a greater degree ? And yet such is the fact. This very
table of Mr. Mulhall's shows it. In 1830 our commerce stood at
88,000,0002., and that of France at 42,000,0002., being less than half
ours. In 1870 our commerce stood at 601,000,0002., and that of
France at 368,000,0002., being much more than half of ours. If you
take Germany in 1830, her commerce stood at 39,000,0002., again
less than half that of Great Britain. In 1878, the figures stand
at 390,000,0002. for Germany, and 601,000,0002. for Great Britain,
showing German commerce to have advanced to more than
half that of Great Britain. The commerce of Great Britain, there-
fore, bears a less favourable comparison with that of other
countries in 1878, after thirty-two years of Free Trade, than it
did in 1830. It is less comparatively in advance of them. So
far, therefore, as increase of commerce is to be imputed to Free
Trade or Protection, the verdict must be in favour of Protection.
But this is not the way in which Mr. Medley reasons. ' You are at
the head of nations,' he says ; ( you have the lion's share — what
more do you want as a proof of the blessings of " free imports " ? '
It is in vain to point out to him that you had this lion's share before
you began your disastrous experiment of 'free imports.' He is
unable to see the bearing of it, but, what is rather hard, Mr. Mulhall's
name is invoked by him in favour of this confusion of ideas. ' Mr.
Mulhall,' he says, ' would be one of the most surprised to learn
that any such deduction could be drawn from his table.' Mr.
Mulhall, then, must be a very inconsistent man, for he drew the
deduction himself. Mr. Mulhall's table was drawn up not to exhibit
the comparative commerce of one nation with another, but the
relation which the commerce of each nation at one time bore to its
commerce at another time, bringing out as a result the rate at which
the commerce of each nation has advanced ; and the proof that it was
so is to be found in the last column of it, which is headed ' Increase.'
Under the heads of the different countries he compares each country
with itself at the two periods indicated, and states the increase to be
sevenfold, or eightfold, or ninefold, as the case may be, bringing out
at the foot an average advance of eightfold. What does he mean by
sevenfold or eightfold except that the commerce of the country speci-
fied has increased to eight times the amount at which it stood before ?

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 337

I will now, in my turn, invoke Mr. Mulhall. This same writer,
when speaking of manufactures, has a still more discouraging tale to
tell. ' Forty years ago,' he says, ' Great Britain produced two-thirds
of the total dry goods in the world ; at present her manufactures are
barely one-third, although her factories turn out twice as much as in
1840.' (Progress of the World, p. 60.)

This condition of things, this sad falling-off of our manufactur-
ing supremacy, is unimportant in Mr. Medley's mind, I presume, so
long as we continue to manufacture more than any other individual
nation and possess the comforting lion's share. But the question
Mr. Medley has to consider is this : Will the lion always continue
to possess his share ? Does not that depend on how he conducts
himself? The advance of other nations into those regions of manu-
facture in which we used to stand either alone or supreme, should
make us alive to the possible future. Where we used to find
customers we now find rivals, and with a magnanimous disdain for
all rivalry we sell to all comers our coal, the source of mechanical
power, and our machinery, the means by which that mechanical
power may be profitably exerted. Prudence is not alarm, and
prudence demands a dispassionate inquiry into the course we are
pursuing, in place of a blind adhesion to a discredited theory. That
such an inquiry can be long delayed I do not believe.

At any rate, let us hope that we have heard the last of the
shibboleth that every import necessitates a corresponding export of
British goods. The advocate of the Cobden Club has abandoned it
as untenable, substituting for it the undeniable truth that all
foreign goods are paid for by something of equal value.

In like manner must be abandoned the belief that our pro-
sperity since 1 846 is due to Free Trade ; for this belief can only be
supported upon the assumption that, because we are still at the head
of nations in commercial prosperity, as we always have been, there-
fore the system of free imports which we have acted upon for the last
forty years must be sound, although we enjoyed the same pre-emi-
nence at a time when we acted upon the opposite system of Protection.

On these two questions, then, the Free Trade contention as ex-
pounded by the chosen champion of the Cobden Club is a complete
collapse. Does the Committee of the Cobden Club offer us any-
thing else in support of the Free Trade faith ? Absolutely nothing.
There is no mysterious merit in the background, or surely their able
champion, Mr. Medley, would have disclosed it. Let the artisan,
then, who suffers from the injury or extinction of his industry —
let the employer of labour who suffers from a system under which
large portions of our wealth, as fast as it is acquired, are poured into
the lap of foreign countries in the shape of wages for the support of
their populations, while our own people are craving for work, look
this system in the face.
VOL. XX.— No. 115. B B

338 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

Let them bear in mind that neither Europe nor America —
monarchies nor republics — contains a community which does not
repudiate it. The injuries it inflicts are patent and notorious
and are forced under our eyes alike in the statistics of trade and
the records of the daily press.

What are the benefits that counterbalance them ?

The supporters of ' Free Imports ' have been challenged to point
them out, and, so far as Mr. Medley's essay is concerned, have
miserably failed to do so.

Is it anything short of infatuation, then, to defer inquiry until
the mischief is done ? It takes a long time to displace the com-
merce and established manufactures which have been built up by the
patient energy of past generations, and are still upheld by the wealth
and industry of such a country as Great Britain ; and the inroad
made upon us under the shelter of our own laws may not as yet
have reached formidable dimensions. But is that a sensible reason
for refusing to inquire whether our system is sound or not ? The
road you are travelling may be the wrong one, though your foot is
not yet in the morass to which it leads. Your mode of life may be
unhealthy, though your health is not yet seriously impaired. Many
causes, and notably the civil war in America and the Franco-
German struggle in Europe, have combined to sustain our commerce
since Free Trade was adopted by checking the progress of those who
are now our rivals, and reducing the effects of competition. But
these countervailing incidents are little likely to be repeated. All
prudence then points one way, but unfortunately two great national
characteristics point the other. First, that noble tenacity of purpose
which makes us hold fast to whatever position we have taken up ; that
refuses to acknowledge defeat, and elevates persistence into a virtue ;
and next, the curse of Ethelred the Unready, which ever tempts us
to defer the moment of defence to the moment of actual disaster.

I will conclude by the suggestion of a danger and the expression
of a hope. An article appeared not long ago, by Mr. Moreton
Frewen, on the ' Displacement of Nations.' I have not left myself
room to quote it at any length, but what he said in substance was
this : — The Government of the United States, as is well known,
have for some time enjoyed a revenue far greater than the demands
of the country require. What the artificial system of government
bounties acted upon by France and Germany has done for our sugar
trade is notorious. Mr. Frewen suggests that a similar policy is not un-
likely to be adopted by the United States, and carried out by means
of their great surplus revenue, in an attack upon other industries
in which we now hold a high place. ' This I believe,' he says, ' to
be the future fiscal policy of the United States. Already we are hear-
ing the first mutterings of the storm that is to break. Mr. Samuel
J. Tilden, the veteran wirepuller of the Democratic party, wrote re-

1886 COLLAPSE OF FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 339

cently to his nominal chiefs that the surplus revenue could be most
profitably expended in bonusing the construction of a mercantile
marine. Ten millions sterling thus invested would transfer all the
skilled labour of the Clyde and the Tyne to the Hudson, and would
destroy all the fixed capital invested in British ship-yards ; and when
this branch of native industry has succumbed, the next departure will
be a heavy export duty levied on American raw cotton, and a hand-
some export bonus on all manufactured cotton goods.'

If such a thing as this should come about, might it not go hard
with us if it found this country still worshipping the tyrannical dogma
that no duty is to be imposed on foreign manufactures, and thereby
incapacitated from even considering, much less adopting, any fiscal
changes which might operate in our defence ?

But after all, this is but a fear. Let us hope that it may turn
out, as many fears do, to be groundless.

The hope I spoke of is already, I believe, on the road to fulfil-
ment. We cannot shut our eyes to the fast-growing desire which
has lately sprung up for the welding of our magnificent colonies into
a real Empire with these islands. The time is opportune, the
colonies are favourable, and we have a statesman at the head of
affairs who has given effective proofs that he regards the national
welfare above the miserable interests of party warfare — a statesman
whose commanding genius is capable of grasping this vast question
and guiding these national aspirations to a fruitful end. How long,
then, after these islands and our colonies become knit together for
offence and defence, for mutual dependence and support, shall we be
content to draw our supplies of food from Kussia, from Spain, or the
United States ? How long, indeed, shall we be able to refuse to our
brethren and fellow-subjects whatever advantage over the foreigner
our fiscal laws can secure to them without laying an undue burden
on the consumer in this country ?

And a further question — Is it not to be expected that treatment
of this kind may be demanded by our colonies as the reasonable
basis upon which alone they will be content to unite their fortunes
and their future with ours ?

There is strong ground for belief that it would be so. One great
colonial leader, whose name, if I were at liberty to give it, would
command full respect and confidence, on being questioned as to the
probable success of this desire for federation, thus expressed himself :

It would seem to me that a policy of give and take is needed for this purpose,
and this will involve the entire question of what is known in England as Free
Trade. I may say at once that if you are determined in England to accept impli-
citly the postulates of latter-day economists, then you cannot count upon the
support of the colonies.

PENZANCE.
BB 2

340 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

BEFORE BIRTH.

IF we except the adherents of Positivism and some allied schools of
thought, there is a pretty general belief in some conscious existence for
each one of us after death. But speculation which ventures into the
future rarely wanders into the dark realms of the past. There has
been plenty of theorising as to the nature of the life to come, but the
possibility of an antenatal existence gets far less attention and far less
credit. It is natural, perhaps, that interest should centre chiefly in
the hereafter, since we are more practically concerned with our future
than our past. But there is no conclusive reason why the idea of
previous existence should receive less credit. On the contrary, there
is at least one weighty reason for accepting it. If we assume that
that something in us which is to survive our bodily death came into
existence for the first time with our bodily birth, we are confronted
by the difficulty of a something which is eternal at one end only — the
difficulty, in fact, of supposing that something which is to have no-
end in the future, has nevertheless had a beginning in the past. This
difficulty may not be insuperable, but it is serious. If, on the other
hand, we incline to a belief in the pre-existence of the soul, we
seem driven back upon some form of metempsychosis, with all its.
attendant difficulties. However, as a preliminary to all discussion, let
us try to make out more clearly what we actually mean by our ' souls.'

At the first step we shall possibly be startled by the vagueness of
our ideas on the subject. ' Soul ' is a counter of language which long
custom allows us to handle freely, but only so long as we refrain from
prying into its composition. The slightest examination reveals this
vagueness at once. We shall find soul to be variously identified with
consciousness, spirit, and reason. Principal Tulloch l says, ' Soul is.
only known to us in a brain, but the special note of soul is that it
is capable of existing without a brain, or after death.' This may be
true enough, but it does not throw much more light on the soul's
nature. The ordinary theology, avoiding the question of the soul's
composition, is content to regard it as that something within us, or
forming part of us, which is destined hereafter to eternal happiness-
or eternal perdition.

If none of these views are completely satisfactory, they each
1 Modern Theories in Pldlosopliy and Religion, p. 328.

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 341

contribute something, and we may gather from them that, whatever
else our conception of the soul may include, we certainly conceive
it as something conscious, rational, and, above all, personal. It is
not like the spiritual monad of Buddhism, an impersonal individu-
ality ; nor is it merely an impersonal consciousness. Nor, again, is it
merely an emanation from some Divine soul, which, though bound up
during man's life with his personality, casts it off at death, and re-
turns to the bosom of the Absolute. But, as most of us conceive it,
it is something which is not only inseparable from, but which com-
prises the essence of, our personality ; it is, in fact, the religious in-
terpretation of the philosophical conception of the ' ego.' Accordingly,
I do not think that I shall do violence to prevailing ideas on the sub-
ject if I define the soul to be ' that permanent something by which
each individual's personality is constituted, and which we believe to
persist after our present life and its transient attributes have dis-
appeared.'

Having thus got our permanent soul or ' ego,' let us try to trace
its history. Three questions confront us at the outset : —

1. Does the soul spring into being for the first time with the
birth of our physical body ?

2. Has it existed before such birth, either from eternity, or as
an antenatal creation ?

3. Assuming its pre-existence, under what conditions has it pre-
•existed ?

It is obvious that in dealing with such problems as these certainty
is out of the question, and probability is "(the utmost that we can hope
to reach. We cannot know, we can only guess ; and if we are to
guess at the character of the unknown, it must be by inference from
the character of the known.

Now, whatever the character and whatever the origin of the soul
may be, it is at any rate a constituent part of the universe. Accord-
ingly there is a prima-facie presumption that its growth and develop-
ment will follow the same processes of growth and development which
prevail, so far as we can see, throughout the cosmic system. Therefore,
until the contrary is proven, it seems to me that we are entitled, if
not bound, to regard the soul as a natural product — a natural product
no more and no less than any other of God's works. In this case
it may help us to guess what soul is if we look for guidance to the
•character and origin of the universe.

Speaking broadly, there are two views on this point : —

1. The theological view, which insists on the miraculous cha-
racter of the creation, and many, if not most, of Grod's dealings with
the universe.2

2 Principal Tulloch repudiates this as the theological view, declaring that ' theology
.knows nothing of a conflict between order and will. If there is a Divine Will at all,
it must be a Will acting by general laws, by methods of which order is an invariable

342 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

2. The scientific view, which, whether accepting, or shelving, or
denying the existence of a creating Deity, insists that the universe
now is an orderly whole, whose processes exhibit inflexible law, and
wherein no place for miracle can be found.

Each of these views is saddled with a special fallacious tendency.
Theology is prone to explain what it cannot understand by a miracle.
Science is apt to discredit what it cannot explain as miraculous, and
therefore impossible. Miracle, in the sense of a violation of natural
law, no doubt must be excluded from any rational account of the
universe. But it need not follow that the unexplainable is in this
sense miraculous. For, though * natural law ' is commonly described
as an observed uniformity of process, it is at least possible that natural
uniformities may exist which are not known to us, and these, though
unknown, would be as actual as any others. Accordingly, in dealing
with what may seem to be mysteries of nature, we are not entitled
either to discredit them offhand as violations of natural law, or to
account for their presence by the expedient of a miracle.

If miracle, however, be eliminated from the universe, it follows
that all development must be an orderly evolution of its subject-
matter. Direct investigation of such evolution is necessarily con-
fined to this earth of ours ; but since the earth is but a part of the
universe, though the springs of its development be chiefly contained in
itself, cosmic as well as mundane forces may help in the work.

What, then, is the subject-matter of the universe ? It is popu-
larly said to consist of matter and force ; and though this division
will not really stand scrutiny, it furnishes a convenient working hypo-
thesis, which it may be useful to accept for the present under protest.

Now force and matter show a development which proceeds on
the strictest economical principles. Nothing is either lost or added,
nothing is either created or destroyed. In this lies a serious objection
to the theory of specially created souls, for if an entirely new soul is
created for each child that is born, every birth witnesses a violation
of natural law. Something has appeared on one side of the equation
which is not accounted for on the other. Even if the presence of
this something be due to extra-terrestrial energy, the difficulty still

remains.

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

This in a sense is possible enough. I do not say that soul is
merely an earth-product ; I only insist that it is a product of some

characteristic.' But with all the respect due to so high an authority, I am quite-
unable to adopt this pxplanation. Prayer for recovery from Sickness, for change of
the weather, and similar requests for Divine interposition usually encouraged by
theologians, imply a belief in a breach of causation somewhere, which no ingenuity
can get rid of, unless prayer be robbed of its voluntary character, and the Divine-
Will of its freedom.

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 343

sort, not a new creation, seeing that the whole testimony of nature is
against such a conclusion.

Not so, may be the reply. Life presents just such another appa-
rent anomaly. No doubt, according to the doctrine of Biogenesis, all
life comes from some antecedent life, and so far the chain of causation
is unbroken. But when research pushes back to the lowly organisms
which fringe the brink of animate nature, it finds beyond them a
great gulf fixed. On the hither side of this gulf appears the new
presence, life ; on the far side there is a realm of order, but it is a
realm of the dead. All efforts to bridge the gap have failed. Up to
a certain point matter may develop or differentiate under the im-
pulse of molecular energy. But with animate existence, a new factor
is added which cannot be evolved from the forms of force which we
know in the organic world.

This may be true enough so far as it goes, but accuracy requires
the addition of a single word which may prove fatal to the whole
objection — ' now.'

It may be perfectly true now that life springs only from antece-
dent life,3 and that the theory of spontaneous generation must yield
to the triumph of Biogenesis. But in this case we cannot infer the
past from our experience of the present, because the conditions have
altered enormously. What is true of the earth of the nineteenth
century need not by any means be true of the earth of, say, the
Silurian age. The thermal conditions under which life first appeared
upon the globe certainly differed widely from those of the present
day, and this difference alone suffices to restore possibility to the
evolution of life.4

It will be necessary for my present purpose to go somewhat deeper
into this question of the beginnings of life, for if soul be a natural
product, soul life, like all other life, must conform to natural law.

The gap between dead and living nature is no doubt sharply
defined, but the excessive stress sometimes laid upon this distinction
gives rise to an impression that the two kingdoms differ toto ccelo in
their character and laws, and proceed upon different lines of develop
ment. It would probably be more accurate to compare their develop-
ment to a chain, one of the links of which is hidden or lost. By
examining the frontier cliffs of the two countries, geologists are able
to declare that England and France were once united, notwithstanding
the sea that now flows between them. And in like manner, if we look
honestly across the ancient gulf which severs dead from living matter,
we may yet find evidence that this gulf represents not an original

1 This, however, can hardly be considered as completely proved.

4 Dr. Temple ( The Relations between Religion and Science, p. 198) seems inclined
to admit as possible, what he quotes as a scientific belief, ' that such properties are
inherent in the elements of which protoplasm is made, that in certain special circum-
stances these elements will not only combine, but that the product of their combina-
tion will live.'

344 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

division, but a breach of original continuity. In both orders alike
there appears an evolution from a low simplicity to a high, or compa-
ratively high, complexity. But this by itself is insufficient to prove
that the two orders form part of one continuous chain ; since such
a similarity might belong to two distinct, though parallel, orders of
development. We must look rather to the edges of the gap for
evidence that once the two orders were connected. To pursue this
investigation properly would require a knowledge of chemistry and
physiology to which I cannot pretend, but I may mention a few cases
which seem to point to some connection.

The most highly fashioned product of dead matter is the crystal ;
the lowest product of living matter is an apparently formless colloid
(jellylike) lump. There seems little enough in common between
these two stages, and throughout the earlier forms of life the dissimi-
larity remains. This might well be expected. Short of a certain
degree of stability, the rigid processes which mould the crystal could
not be utilised by life. But after this point has been reached, it
seems more than doubtful whether such processes are rejected or ex-
cluded by vitality. Moreover the distinction between crystal and
colloid is not so rigorous as at first appears. Even now some minerals
appear both in colloid and crystalloid forms, and flint is a familiar
instance of a crystal which has passed through a colloid stage. One
of the chief characteristics of colloid as opposed to crystalloid matter
is its mobility. But the stability of the crystal is by no means im-
mutable. In some substances the forms of crystallisation vary under
difference of conditions, especially conditions of temperature, and
even the character of a crystal already formed may be so altered.5 But
the analogies of crystal and colloid may be brought closer still. Dr.
Hughes Bennett (quoted by Dr. Bastian) found cellular forms of
crystalloid matter in the pellicle formed on the surface of lime water.
Dr. Bastian himself found similar forms in a solution of ammonic
sulphate with potassic bichromate;6 and globular formations of car-
bonate of lime were found by Mr. Eainey where this substance had
been introduced into a viscid solution.7 If we turn to the crystals of
a simple substance like water, the patterns of frost on a window-pane
often reveal, even to the naked eye, the closest resemblance to feathers,
leaves, &c. ; and under the microscope similar crystals display
faithful, if too symmetrical, copies of the flowers and foliage of plants.8
Again compare with some of these crystals the star-shaped forms
which the spores issuing from the Protomyxa aurantiaca sometimes
assume ; 9 the quasi-crystalline grouping of some of the organisms
which appeared in a solution of iron and ammonic citrate,10 and the
more perfect stellar forms of some monads from a Nitella.11

* Bastian, Beginnings of Life, vol. ii. p. 82.

6 Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 59, 60. 7 Ibid. vol. ii. p. 63.

8 See plate, Tyndall, Forms of Water, p. 33. 9 Beginnings of Life, vol. i. p. 194.

10 Hid. vol. i. p. 453. » Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 379, 403.

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 345

It is possible that such similarities may be mere coincidences, but
surely it is more reasonable to suppose that life in its operations may
utilise, though it modify, the molecular affinities which produce the
crystal. Life did not spring from crystallisation, but both alike
sprang in due order from natural antecedents; and if the spontaneous
evolution of life, unlike crystallisation, no longer occurs, it is only be-
cause the requisite conditions of the former have passed away, while
those of the latter have survived.

If we seek to know what the conditions of archebiosis, or life-
beginning, were, we must realise broadly what was the course of the
•earth's development chemically. In the earth's infancy chemical
combination was rendered impossible by the intense heat which kept
terrestrial matter in a state of dissolution. It has been calculated
that the earth's temperature when it first started on its course as an
independent planet was something like 3,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
or about 14,000 times hotter than boiling water. As the mass grew
cooler the affinities of certain molecules became just strong enough
to overbalance the disruptive influence of heat and its allied forces,
and the first and simplest chemical combinations then took place.
It is obvious that such combinations would at first be very unstable,
and would so continue till a cooler stage rendered them practically
permanent, and called new combinations into being. At each repeti-
tion of the process a similar instability would attach to the newest
combinations, while these combinations would gradually become more
complex. Clearly, therefore, the stage of terrestrial formation from
the earliest chemical combinations down to the hardening of the
earth's crust must have been a period of enormous chemical activity.
Nor is this all ; for under the thermal conditions which heralded the
appearance of life on the earth, many substances may, indeed must, have
possessed properties which they no longer display. Experiment, even
under present limitations, verifies the marvellous effects of heat, cold,
and pressure. Heat will drive iron into vapour ; cold will solidify or
liquefy oxygen and other gases; and even hydrogen, the lightest of
known substances, when subjected to a pressure of 650 atmospheres
(about 9,533 pounds to the square inch), issued as a steel blue sub-
stance, and fell to the ground in solid drops which rang like a metal.12

But here we must bear in mind that absolute stability is unknown.
The molecules of the most compact body are incessantly swinging to
and fro, though the rate of their vibrations may vary. Now heat
increases the impetuosity of this molecular rhythm till the point is
reached at which cohesion is overpowered and disruption ensues.
Any compound therefore under a temperature close upon the disrup-
tion point is in a very unstable or mobile condition. Now we are
not in any way bound to conclude that the lowest forms of life dis-
coverable at the present day are necessarily identical with the forms

12 Experiments by M. Eaoul Pictet, of Geneva, in 1878.

346 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

•which first appeared. But even protoplasm as known to us possesses
a chemical constitution of considerable mobility.

And now, gathering up the threads of the argument, is it not
possible to conjecture that life may have arisen in some such way as
this ? Colloid, no less than crystalloid, matter depends ultimately for
its coherence on the polar groupings of its molecules. Given, there-
fore, colloid matter of a certain complexity, and a high mobility
caused by the thermal conditions of its environment, we may well
suppose that under such circumstances the polarities of its molecules
might fluctuate to a degree which would produce corresponding
modifications of its character; and this, with the motion sup-
plied by molecular vibration, would constitute a moving equilibrium
almost sufficient to bridge the gap between animate and inanimate
existence.

Regarding life as a process of adjustment of inner to outer rela-
tions, matter in such a state would possess the mobility of constitution
without which life-adjustment would be impossible, and it would also
possess the motion without which such an adjustment could not be
carried into effect. But it is clear that these are not quite sufficient.
Mere capability of chemical modification by its environment will not
turn dead into living matter. However elastic such a capability
might be, it could not provide for the complex adjustments involved
in nutrition and growth. Something more is needed to change this
passive capability of modification by, into a capability of active
response to, external stimuli, and thereby to give the process of ad-
justment that purposive and selective character which seems to be of
the essence of life. It is obvious what this something must be. It
must be some form, however faint, of sentience.

Since, therefore, life can find its necessary mobility in matter,
can it not also acquire its necessary sentience from the same source ?
I think the answer to this question may be found in the late Professor
Clifford's doctrine of ' Mindstuff.' A full account of this is given in
an article by him on 'The Nature of Things-in-Themselves,' in
Mind, vol. iii. (1878), p. 57. But his conclusions, so far as they
relate to the present subject, may be summarised as follows : —

1. A feeling can exist by itself without forming part of a con-
sciousness.

2. That element of which even the simplest feeling is a complex
he calls 'Mindstuff; ' and these elemental feelings which correspond
to motions of matter are connected together in their sequence and
coexistence by counterparts of the physical laws of matter.

3. ' A moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind
or consciousness, but it possesses a small piece of mindstuff. When
molecules are so combined together as to form the film on the under-
side of a jellyfish, the elements of mindstuff which go along with
them are so combined as to form the faint beginnings of sentience.

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 347

When the molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous
system of a vertebrate, the corresponding elements of mindstuff
are so combined as to form some kind of consciousness. . . . When
matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, the cor-
responding mindstuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having
intelligence and volition.' 13

Such in brief is the theory of mindstufF, and though I do not
think it can be accepted unreservedly, it lends great help to the
present inquiry. Clifford's premature death prevented any further
elucidation of the subject by him, and some of its points are left in
unwelcome uncertainty. Prima facie we should suppose that mind-
stuff was something material, but Clifford seems to evade this con-
clusion, and to treat mindstuff, first, as something distinct from but
inseparably connected with matter, and, later, as the one absolute
reality of which matter is only a manifestation. However, I think
there can bs little doubt that, according to his original idea, mind-
stuff was something in its nature material. A moving molecule of
inorganic matter possesses, he says, 'a small piece of mindstuff.'
These words can mean nothing unless mindstuff is to be credited
with quantity and extension. But that which has quantity and
extension we can only regard as matter ; and this view I am prepared
to adopt. With respect, however, to the association of matter and
mindstuff, I do not think that we can regard this combination as
consisting of a double atom of matter and mindstuff. I think rather
that we must distinguish matter proper and mindstuff as two forms
of matter, diffused in their original condition separately through the
universe ; though this apparent duality of substance will disappear,
as will be seen later, under a somewhat different analysis.

But this primitive sentience which comes in as the crowning
factor of life is something more also : it is the first germ of soul.
There is a tendency in force, pointed out by Dr. Maudsley, to
develop upwards, and consequently a tendency in organic substance,
even when life has fled, to resist, as he puts it, 'the extreme retro-
grade metamorphosis of material and force before being used up
again in vital compounds.' 14

Let us see how this will apply to the growth of soul. For the
convenience of discussion I retain 'matter ' and ' mindstuff' as dis-
tinctive terms, but it must be clearly understood that mindstuff is in
its nature material.

It is possible, perhaps, that mindstuff can cohere mechanically
with simple matter; but I do not think that it could combine
physiologically, except with matter of a certain complexity. The

13 In a note to this article Professor Clifford remarks that he had found traces of
his theory in other writers, mentioning particularly Kant and Wundt. To these may
be added Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Herbert Spencer.

14 Body and Jfind, p. 282.

348 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

earliest forms of life present such a combination, and from such forms
soul growth, as well as physical growth, originates. Where living
matter has only assimilated mindstuff enough to give it mere sentience,
when physical life ceases, the mindstuff may perhaps be released from
combination in its original simple condition. But as physical life
mounts higher, soul-life follows in its train. Every advance in
physical complexity brings with it higher mental needs and higher
mental possibilities. The simple mindstuff which suffices to supply
unmodified protoplasm with its feeble sentience is replaced in the
higher organisms by mindstuff grouped into a mental structure.
When such a higher physical organism dies, the mental organism
belonging to it does not forthwith decompose back into simple
mind-stuff, but normally retains its organic unity, and in this state
can be appropriated again by a physical organism, but only by an
organism at least as highly developed as its last. In the order
of purely physical development we find that the lower organisms
commonly draw the materials for their growth and nutrition from
inorganic nature.15 Thus the plant depends for its nourishment on
a proper supply of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, &c., and these in-
organic materials it works up within itself into protoplasm. But
higher organisms, such as the vertebrates, depend for their nutrition
on a proper supply of formed protoplasm. The ox, for instance,
is nourished by the formed protoplasm of the grass which it
assimilates, as the man, in turn, may be nourished by the formed
protoplasm of beef. Similarly in the order of mental develop-
ment. As in due course of evolution higher and higher organisms
appear, these cease to draw solely upon simple mindstuff for their
mental needs (though probably enough they may use it for some
lower sentient purposes), but in virtue of their greater complexity
require, and are able to appropriate, the formed mindstuff structures
fashioned by lower organisms, and gradually to group them into
mental structures of a higher complexity. Thus the whole mental
fabric of a lower form of life may be merely one of the molecules, as
it were, which compose the consciousness of a higher form. This
process continues till some mental structure is reached upon which
^(/"-consciousness dawns ; with self-consciousness arises for the first
time the ' ego ' or soul ; and at this point we may safely assert that
no known organism can group it any further.

It would be as rash to declare that a mental organism never
undergoes the extreme of decomposition as it would be to make a
similar assertion of a physical organism. But what is true of the
latter is probably true of the former, and we are entitled to think
that a mental organism tends to cohere as such, instead of sinking back
into simple mindstuff.

But how does se?/-consciousness spring from mere consciousness ?
Is Certain f angi, I believe, can assimilate organic matter.

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 349

How can a mere capability of apprehending sensations furnish the
idea of an ' ego ' that apprehends ? In some way or another con-
sciousness becomes able to turn from the perception of sensations
as such, to a cognition of the sensations as states of itself. And
how is this brought about ? The question is not an easy one,
but I believe the explanation is to be found in the structure of
the mental organism. At first sight it may seem unwarrantable to
treat our highest human quality as a mere product of structure, but
a little consideration will show how closely quality and structure are
connected. We are bound to regard matter in its simplest form as
homogeneous ; how, then, did it come by its present diversity of
qualities ? These are clearly the results of various molecular groupings
— in short, of structure. A striking proof of what diversities of quality
structure can produce is shown by the ' isomerism ' of chemistry. Sub-
stances composed of the same elements, and in the same proportions,
are chemically described as isomeric. But the properties of isomeric
bodies often differ widely, as may be seen in the case of starch, gum,
and a certain form of sugar. These are all isomeric, and their
differences depend simply on the different arrangement of their com-
ponent molecules. And be it observed, the more complex the struc-
ture, the higher as well as the more numerous will its properties be.

In the case of a mental organism, the very fact that, with all
endeavour, we cannot get at the back, so to speak, of our self- con-
sciousness strongly suggests that this self-consciousness is not an
independent entity, but a property of structure. If we still press for
some mechanical account of how self-consciousness operates, we may
arrive at some such conclusion as this. Consciousness is a mental
structure which responds more or* less perfectly to nerve-stimuli. If
this response be translated into terms of matter, we must regard it as
being in itself a sort of thrill. Indeed psychologists describe the
ultimate unit of consciousness as a ' psychical shock ' or 'tremor' — a
view which seems to me to imply necessarily the materiality of the
consciousness in which the shock or tremor takes place. But these
units are not themselves objects of consciousness, they are only the
elements of which conscious states are composed ; and thus, paradox-
ical as it sounds, every state of consciousness is built up of unconscious
or subconscious elements. Accordingly, in the mind-structure of an
animal incapable of seZ/-consciousness, a conscious state is just a
responsive thrill. Now to every such thrill there must naturally be
a recoil, and in such a mental structure as we are now considering,
this recoil would either pass off in some of the commoner forms of
force,16 or its units, if affecting the mind-structure at all, would never
rise above the subconscious level. But in the more sensitive and
complex mind-structure of the man, the recoil might, partly at any

16 Professor Lombard has succeeded in measuring the heat given off by the cere-
brum during mental operations.

350 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

rate, pass back into the mind-structure, and this absorbed recoil
constitute consciousness of self. .So far, then, it would seem that a
state of simple consciousness is the mind-structure's thrill to nervous
stimuli ; a state of se£/-consciousness, a thrill to its own thrills. But
we may venture yet a step further. Even our present imperfect
knowledge of the correlation of forces enables us to perceive the
Protean facility of transformation with which force is endowed.
Consequently it is not impossible that the recoil in being absorbed
may be transmuted from a thrill into some special, but hitherto
unanalysed, form of force.

Again — approaching the subject from another side — wherein does
the unity of the ' ego ' consist ? Clearly not in identity of individual
self. The self of the child, of the man in his prime, and the man in
his old age are not identical. Mr. Galton states, as the results of
some introspective experiments,17 that our self is ' by no means one
and indivisible,' and that irresolution is due to our disinclination ' to
sacrifice the self of the moment for a different one.'

We feel, indeed, that there is a continuity of self through all these
changes, but this is because we can recognise connecting links between
each of the several ' selfs ; ' and these links are successive modifications
of the mental whole — faculties, emotions, appetites, and aversions —
of which self is composed. Pari passu with these we find structural
modifications of body and brain. This does not, perhaps, amount to
demonstration, but it does amount to a strong inference of some
structural connection between the two sets of modifications ; and
consequently that the unity of self is preserved through all its varia-
tions by the mind-structure of which self is a property.

But there is a closer parallelism yet. Whatever be the nature
of the conscious ' ego,' its physical organ is the brain. And it is of
course notorious as a matter of fact that the capacities of conscious-
ness are, speaking generally, connected with complexity of brain-
structure. Nobody would believe that the ' ego ' of a Spencer could
be found in combination with the brain of a bushman. Nobody, on
the other hand, will deny to the bushman an ' ego ' of some kind,
however low. ' Egos,' then, vary in quality. But, if so, how can
they be absolute spirit? And since their quality varies with the
complexity of their brain-organs, must not their differences of quality
depend on differences of structure, corresponding to the structural
differences of their rer pective brain-organs ?

Again, it seems to me that only on the structure hypothesis can
the facts of heredity be explained. It is obvious that mental, no less
than physical, peculiarities are transmitted hereditarily. In fact, the
transmission of both is habitually relied on, and manipulated by,
breeders of animals. Among the lower forms of life the parent cha-
racteristics are almost exactly reproduced in the new growth. What
17 Mind, vol. ix. p. 409.

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 351

is it, then, that the parent plant transmits to its seed, or parent
animals to the fertilised ovum ? Certain structural tendencies of
development. In the case of transmitted mental qualities, even in
mankind, though we are apt to evade a definite explanation, the
hereditary character of these qualities is readily admitted. l He has
his father's taste for music,' &c. is a form of expression common
enough even among those who deny the evolution of the 'ego.'
But how are we to account for heredity in mental qualities if
these do not come from parents and ancestors, but are created
specially for us? One answer of course is just possible. It may be
said that these similarities, though confessedly hereditary in the case
of physical qualities, in the case of mental qualities are due to a
special creation. In short, that a man may derive the shape of his
nose in a due course of nature from parental sources, but that his
taste for painting does not come from an artist father, but is conferred
on him by a miracle. After admitting the possibility of this explana-
tion for those who do not believe in an invariable natural law, it is
hardly necessary to argue upon its probability. But if mental quali-
ties are transmitted hereditarily, either man's soul must be partly
derived from an hereditary source, or we must be prepared to sever the
soul from the mind.

Even the apparent failures of heredity do not overthrow the struc-
ture hypothesis. In an interesting article on * Idiosyncrasy,' 18 Mr.
Grrant Allen points out that though an ancestral quality may not be
displayed visibly in the descendant, its apparent absence is due to a
rearrangement of the elements transmitted by the ancestor. The
quality is present, but it. has undergone a change of grouping. In
like manner, the glistening sugar-crystal put into the teacup at
breakfast shows no apparent trace of carbon. Add a little sulphuric
acid, and the ugly black presence is instantly revealed. In the group-
ing called sugar, the carbon was concealed. Disturb that grouping
by redistributing the molecules, and it comes out of bondage at once.
Mr. Grrant Allen illustrates his argument by comparing the ancestral
qualities which go towards the endowment of an individual to a num-
ber of red and white beans shaken up together and poured upon a
table. The collection of beans, of course, does not exactly resemble a
collection of ancestral qualities. The former is a mechanical mixture ;
the latter, an organic combination. The organic combination tends to
reproduce its type ; but there is, of course, no question of reproduction
in the case of the mechanical mixture. In this, however, they are
strictly alike, that neither bean nor ancestral quality is lost. Every
antecedent will be accounted for in the consequents, even though its
presence be obscured by the alterations of grouping.

With respect to the evolutional origin here claimed for the human
soul, I may point out that, unless the soul be regarded as a product of
18 Mind, vol. viii. p. 487.

352 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

development, the difficulties presented to us by the lower animals
are enormous. Consider for a moment how the problem stands,
especially with respect to the higher vertebrates. \Ve find conscious-
ness, volition, and, within limits, reasoning ; we find also emotions,
passions, and quasi-moral qualities, such as the affection and courage
of the dog, and that trustworthiness which appears to arise from a
sort of sense of responsibility. The highest apes come within a mea-
surable distance of humanity ; indeed, as a mere matter of brain-
capacity, there is less difference between the gorilla and the non-
Aryan Hindu than between the non- Aryan Hindu and the European,
the difference of cranial capacity being 1 1 inches in the one case, and
68 inches in the other.19

Yet we are forbidden to give immortal souls to the beasts that
perish, and rightly enough. Quite apart from any theological doc-
trines, we cannot bring ourselves to believe in glorified animals, as such,
finding a place in any final hereafter. But the doctrine of specially
created human souls bars the only other path of progress possible to-
animals. Therefore we .are driven by this doctrine to maintain that
animal consciousness, however complex, however laboriously built up, is
annihilated at death, and, though it may be resolved back into simpler
forms of force, it is lost as consciousness to the universe for ever. .It
might seem possible to escape this conclusion by supposing that the
consciousness of a dead animal served again in the living body of a
similar animal, e.g., that a canine consciousness would pass on from
dog to dog. But, omitting a host of minor objections, this view
firstly requires an original fixity of species which we know did not
exist ; and, secondly, it does not provide for any species becoming
extinct. What has become, for instance, of the consciousnesses of
the extinct ichthyosauri, pterodactyls, &c. of the early world, or the
great auks of our own day ? If they have been utilised, my theory
is affirmed. If they have been annihilated, my objection remains.
Obviously no such difficulty attends any system of soul evolution.
The mind-structure of the animal passes upwards in an orderly course,
and towards the same goal as the souls of men.

In connection with this question of animal souls, some forms of
idiocy deserve remark. A relapse towards animalism generally is
not all uncommon amongst idiots ; but some cases of theroid idiocy
show a relapse to specific animals. Dr. Maudsley gives some
instances in his lectures on Body and Mind, pp. 47-53. Ape-
faced and ape-natured idiots are moderately frequent, but relapses in
this direction are less remarkable, because they might be a recurrence
along the direct line of ancestry. But with idiots who resemble
sheep and geese this explanation fails. An ovine idiot girl, referred

19 Huxler, Man's Place in Nature, pp. 77, 78. The actual figures are : Highest
European, 114 cubic inches; lowest Hindu, 46 cubic inches; highest gorilla, 34£
cubic inches.

1866 BEFORE BIRTH. 353

to by Dr. Maudsley, refused meat, but took vegetables and water
greedily. She expressed joy or grief by the words ' be,' 4 ma,' ' bah ; '
she would try to butt with her head, and displayed other ovine pro-
pensities, while her back and loins were covered with hair two inches
long. Still more curious is the case of the anserine idiot girl which
he mentions. This poor creature had a small head scantily covered
with hair, large and prominent eyes, a lower jaw projecting more
than an inch beyond the upper jaw, the whole of the lower part of
the face presenting the appearance of a bill. Her neck was very
long, and so flexible that it could be bent backwards till it touched
her back between the shoulder-blades. She uttered no articulate
sounds, but displayed pleasure by cackling like a goose, and dis-
pleasure by screeching or hissing, and flapping her arms against her
sides. Such facts as these can scarcely be accounted for by atavism ;
for though man, sheep, and goose have a common ancestral origin,
the branches which they represent must have diverged from the
common line long before the appearance of any such specialised
creature as a sheep or goose. In short, the relationship between
man and the other two being collateral only, the above facts cannot
be explained as a back strain to a direct ancestor. On the other
hand, they do seem to point to the undue prominence in a human
organism of a specific animal element, and this is exactly what we
might expect to occur occasionally if my theory of soul evolution
should be correct. According to this view the materials of the
human soul are drawn largely from lower mind-structures, which
under ordinary circumstances are individually combined into a due
subordination to the organic unity of the whole. But where from
any reason such organic combination should be imperfectly carried
out, it seems highly probable that some one of the animal mind-
structures appropriated by the organism might be left in a position of
undue predominance, and this would exactly meet the case of the
theroid idiot. Finally, the fact that the animal mind of the theroid
idiot is accompanied by appropriate animal peculiarities of body
points to a much closer natural connection between mind and body
than any that the special creation theory admits of.

After this general sketch of soul-growth, it will be necessary to re-
trace our steps and examine the stages of the process more minutely.
When the lowest forms of life die they may possibly give up their
mindstuff unaltered. But upon the death of higher organisms part,
at any rate, of the mindstuff which leaves them has been worked up
into more or less complex groups, which may be called mind-molecules.
As we get higher in the scale of existence, the constant regroupings
of these mind-molecules into higher and larger aggregates result in
the formation of mind-structures of very considerable complexity.
And with regard to these some interesting questions arise. The self-
conscious structure of the human soul cannot conceivably, as I have
VOL. XX.— No. 115. C C

354 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

said, be subsumed into a higher unity by any organism at present
known to us. Excluding humanity, however, for the moment, I
suppose that the totality of animal life on the earth does not diminish,
if indeed it does not increase. Also bearing in mind the continual
process of absorption going on, it seems probable that the higher
mind- structures are not often for long together out of active employ-
ment. But it is clear that certain intervals must occur after the
death of each physical organism when they are left without an organic
tenement ; and it is possible that in some cases such intervals may
be comparatively long. And here the question arises, how are these
disembodied mental structures occupied during such intervals, and
what are the conditions of their existence ?

In the first place it seems to me that the process of their develop-
ment as well as the sphere of their utilisation need not be confined
within terrestrial limits. It is impossible to suppose that this earth
of ours is the only seat of life and mind in the universe ; and if there
be more worlds than one, there is no conclusive reason why mind-
stuff and mind-structures should not pass freely between them, though
we cannot detect the laws which these migrations follow. But a
still more interesting consideration lies before us. Since the human
soul is the product of a long line of development, the process, like
every natural process, must be extremely gradual. Consequently the
mind-structures immediately below the human soul in point of
development must have reached a complexity which only just falls
short of self-consciousness. What follows is obvious. Besides the
incarnate mind-structures of visible life, we must reckon on the
existence of a fluctuating body of similar structures diffused through
the universe. Whether the form which immediately precedes the
human soul be developed upon this world or elsewhere matters little.
It may be that the mind-structures of the higher animals, or some of
them, when grouped into a higher complexity suffice for the forma-
tion of a human soul. Or it may be that the ' missing link ' would
be found in some other sphere of existence. We are only concerned
to recognise that it is to be found somewhere.

Personality is so inexpugnable a factor of our own consciousness
that we can with difficulty conceive the idea of a consciousness which
lacks it. We may test this in a simple case by trying to frame a
clear conception of the character and contents of the consciousness
of some lower animal to whom we do not ascribe an c ego.' But the
difficulty becomes very much greater when we try in imagination to
separate such a consciousness from the bodily organism through
which its impressions are received. We must conclude, however,
that in the absence of a nervous system, sensations of external things
in the ordinary sense would be impossible. In this case the only
impressions possible to an unembodied mind-structure would be those
derived from other mind-structures ; and upon the quality or method

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 355

of such impressions we cannot, of course, pronounce with certainty.
But, assuming that communication between mind-structures is possible,
there is no reason why communication should not take place between
embodied and unembodied mind-structures ; and some such suppo-
sition seems to me a possible explanation of a very puzzling class of
so-called spiritual phenomena. I must observe that in speaking of
spiritual phenomena I exclude all the supernatural associations of the
term, and refer only to certain phenomena of consciousness and
volition, which are not the less orderly because they are imperfectly
understood.

In spite of the ridicule which has been thrown upon the Society
for Psychical Eesearch, I think that, after criticism has done its
worst, and cleared away the more doubtful parts of the mass of in-
formation collected, there still remains a considerable residue of un-
explained matter, the facts of which seem to be conclusively estab-
lished. Some forms of telepathy are good instances of what I mean,
and on the current theories of the character of mind these present
a perfectly hopeless problem. If mind be non- material, then every
act of perception — say my perception of the inkstand before me — is
a non-material interpretation of certain material changes in my
brain. And how such a non-material interpretation can be trans-
ferred across the Atlantic (or, for the matter of that, across the
room), and presented as an object to the consciousness of some one
else, is extremely difficult to understand. But half the difficulty
disappears if we regard mind as a material structure situated in an
environment of mindstuff and mind-structures. This combination
of organic structures and the raw material of which they are com-
posed may be regarded as analogous to the combination of nerves
and neuroglia, and may possibly resemble it in some of its proper-
ties. Through a mindstuff medium of such a kind as I have
suggested mental states might well be transmitted from one con-
sciousness to another. Are we, then, to suppose that space is per-
petually traversed by conscious ideas hurrying to and fro ? By no
means. The changes or impressions produced on the transmitting
medium by the transmitted idea certainly need not be faithful re-
productions of that idea as present to the consciousness at either
end of the chain of transmission. Telephony supplies us with an
excellent analogy. The spoken words produce waves in the air
which produce vibrations in the plate, which by a magnetic con-
trivance sets up a corresponding electric action in the wire which
in its turn produces vibrations in the hearing plate at the other end
of the telephone, which again produce air-waves, which finally render
up to the hearer the words originally spoken. Here there are words
at each end of the chain, but assuredly none in the middle ; and a
like explanation may apply to the transmission of ideas; How this
mental chain becomes established is less easy to determine but the

c c 2

356 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

simpler realms of science offer some helpful suggestions. Chemical
affinity is fully as mysterious as any of the seeming mental affinities,
which are either dismissed with ridicule, or regarded with super-
stitious awe. Chemical affinity if, in effect, a state of rapport which
binds distinct molecules into a unity, but the nature of the com-
bining power is quite beyond our ken. Yet the belief in chemical
affinity is not usually regarded as impious or absurd, and there is no
valid reason why a belief in mental affinity — a belief to which some
of the phenomena of hypnotism seem to point directly — should be
treated worse.

We now have to consider what is the composition of the human
soul. The difficulty of this is very great, because, so far as can be
judged, we are in the first stage of ' egohood.' We have no past
experience nor the possibility of past experience to go back upon.
We have seen that the ' ego ' is a mental whole of some sort, but the
question is, wherein precisely does its unity consist ? On the one
hand, the whole of our mental equipment seems to form part of our
present personality. On the other hand, it seems incompatible with
any considerable progress in future stages of our existence that the
greater part of this equipment should be an essential part of the
' ego.' This question belongs in a special degree to theology, but
theology does not help us much to a solution of the difficulty. By
theologians as by most people the soul is identified somehow with
our personality. How much then of the individual personality is
supposed to go to heaven or to hell ? Does the whole of the mental
equipment, good and bad, noble qualities and unholy passions, follow
the soul to its hereafter ? Surely not. But if not, and something
has to be stripped off, how and where are we to draw the line ? If,
on the other hand, the soul is something distinct from all our mental
equipment except the sense of self, are we not confronted by the
incomprehensible notion of a personality without any attributes ?

Perhaps, however, the difficulties of the question really spring
from a misconception of the true nature of these attributes. The
components of our mental equipment — appetites, aversions, feelings,
tastes, and qualities generally — are not absolute but relative exist-
ences. Without going too deeply into the psychology of the matter,
I think they may be correctly described as mental states, or capacities
for mental states. Hunger and thirst, for instance, are states of con-
sciousness which arise in response to the stimuli of physical necessities.
Unless consciousness were capable of responding to such stimuli,
hunger and thirst would be unknown, and our bodies might perish
from inanition. A similar, though, of course, not identical, account
must be given of love, anger, selfishness, benevolence, sight, smell,
taste, and so forth. All alike either conduce to some present utility
to ourselves, or are survivals from some obsolete utility in the past.
But all alike are mental states produced in consciousness by the

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 357

stimuli of our environment, and as such are not absolute, but relative ;
they are not inherent and necessary elements of the soul, but are the
joint products of consciousness and environment, and will disappear
or become modified by the alteration of either of these.

If this be so, then our present qualities will not cling to us un-
altered in any future existence, unless the conditions of such an exist-
ence be identical with those which surround us here ; and this we
ought not to expect. Therefore, the only part of our personality that
can survive into the future is the self-conscious mind-structure, de-
nuded of its present positive qualities, but retaining its capacities for
response and its structural predispositions to certain kinds of response ;
and this only is the true soul. From the remote past the develop-
ment of the mind-structure on its upward path has been a process of
modification by its environment, and if soul-evolution continues at
all, similar fashioning influences must take up the task. In a new
and higher environment, some of the responsive capacities and pre-
dispositions which the human mind-structure now possesses will dis-
appear from disuse, while new ones will be evolved by necessity. And
thus the soul will pass onward and upward through purer and nobler
stages of existence, till personal perfection be attained, or perhaps
personality itself be merged in something which is higher.

These speculations have now carried us from before the cradle to
beyond the grave, and I must return within the bounds of my present
inquiry to some objections not yet fully dealt with.

I have implicitly touched on some of the chief difficulties which
encounter the supposition of a non-material soul in remarking on the
facts of heredity, and the concomitant variations of mental power
with cerebral growth and complexity. I will here add another. If
mind is non-material, it must be independent of space. It cannot
matter to an immaterial something whether its locality (if, indeed,
local position can be predicated of such an entity) be large or small.
Yet, speaking generally, we find not only that the mind shows varia-
tions in power with the size and complexity of the brain, but also
that any given mind becomes incapable of operating at all, or operat-
ing properly, under sufficient pressure upon the cortex. How, then,
can the mind be something independent of spatial conditions; in
short, how can it be immaterial ?

It may be said — indeed it is said, expressly or implicitly, by what
I may call orthodox evolutionism — that the soul may be regarded as
a structural product of evolution, educed in the orderly course of
natural law, without being regarded as a material product. Mind, it
is said, is in matter, but not of matter. So far as man is concerned,
it is indeed limited by material conditions ; its operations correspond
strictly with material modifications in its physical organ, the brain,
and depend on laws which are the counterparts or correlates of the
laws of matter. But, nevertheless, it is in itself something distinct

358 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

from matter ; its unity is a mental, not a physical, cohesion, and as a
structure it is neither material nor in any way partaking of matter.

I do not say that this account is impossible, but I do say that it
is beyond the possibility of conception, and I say further that appear-
ances are against it. It may be, indeed, that mind is a complex
whose nature is beyond the grasp of our intelligence, but I dissent
from this view, not because it is inconceivable, but because the weight
of evidence is opposed to it. The dependence of mind (of course, I
am speaking only of mind as known to us) on material conditions is
admitted ; the correspondence of its laws to physical laws is also ad-
mitted. Accordingly, when we find ourselves in the presence of a
something which requires for its operations space, cohesion of nerve-
tissue, nutriment for and certain chemical conditions of this tissue ;
and when we further find that the laws of its operations are linked
generally with the laws of matter, then I say that the balance of pro-
bability favours the conclusion that this something is itself matter,
and not any mysterious analogue of matter. Nor is this conclusion
the least affected by the mere fact that we cannot lay our finger upon
mind, for the same objection would then extend to such forms of
matter as ether, which is quite inaccessible to us, though its mate-
riality is never questioned.

Any theory which makes the soul material has to encounter the
repugnance which is felt to any attempted fusion between spirit and
matter. Matter is commonly regarded as something mean and
degraded. Plotinus described it as a deep darkness, and identified it
with evil. The epithet * material ' is often used as a term of reproach ;
and a materialist thinker is still considered by many to be a sort of
moral pariah.20 This view of matter has no special claims to admira-
tion, and it certainly is not, as some seem to think, a sacred and uni-
versal instinct of humanity. The earliest philosophers were hylozoists,
i.e., they placed the ultimate source of the universe in some form of
life-endowed or spirit-endowed matter. Even the world-ordering intel-
ligence of Anaxagoras was only ' the finest and purest ' form of matter.
But this original unity split up later into a dualism, which constantly
tended to the exaltation of mind and the degradation of matter, and
culminated in the Alexandrine schools, whence it was absorbed by
theology.

But, quite apart from the esteem in which matter may be held,
the notion of spirit is open to serious objection. Spirit, as ordinarily
used, has no intelligible content whatever, and apart from some con-
nection with matter it is absolutely inconceivable. As a name for

20 Professor Fiske mentions a case of a theological lecturer on Positivism, who
informed his audience that materialists were men who led licentious lives. ' It would
be hard,' he observes, ' to find words strong enough to characterise the villauy of such
misrepresentations . . . were they not obviously the product of extreme slovenliness
of thinking, joined with culpable carelessness of assertion.' — Cosmic Philosophy,
vol. ii. p. 433.

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 359

some of the mental activities manifested in matter, spirit or spiri-
tuality may do well enough, but as an independent immaterial exist-
ence it is quite unintelligible. I do not say that because we cannot
conceive spirit as an independent entity, therefore it cannot possibly
so exist ; but I do say that it is idle and misleading to treat it in
discussion as if it were a known and intelligible existence.

It seems, then, that in dealing with the soul we have only two
courses before us. We may pronounce the soul to be pure spirit, but
then we must remove it forthwith to the realm of the unknowable ;
or we may retain it within the realm" of things knowable, but then
we must treat it as something in the nature of matter.

But we are not yet at the end of our difficulties. For it may be
said that if such a dualism as that of Matter and Spirit, wherein one
factor is known and the other unknowable, be illegitimate, the objec-
tion is not really disposed of by introducing spirit under another
name, i.e. mindstuff, and calling this material; and that such a
monism is purely fictitious and unable to withstand the first touch of
analysis. It may farther be urged that if unknowableness be a fatal
objection to spirit (so far as discussion is concerned), the same objec-
tion really extends to matter also. No doubt we know matter
phenomenally as a state of our consciousness, but as a state of our
consciousness only, and commonplace as it may seem to HS, we are
yet unable to give any intelligible account of it in itself. Are we to
regard it as absolutely solid ? Then motion must be impossible. Is
it on the other hand porous ? Then how does it cohere ? If to
explain cohesion we introduce attraction between the atoms of
matter, we have next to explain what this attraction is. If it is
material, all the difficulties of matter attach to it. If it is non-
material, it is not to be distinguished from spirit. Again, the very
notion of atoms is inconceivable : for we cannot imagine anything
hard enough to resist compression by infinite force, nor anything so
small that it cannot conceivably be divided. Thus it seems that,
strive as we may, we cannot get rid of the dualism that is inherent in
Nature ; and that whether we describe this dualism as Matter and
Spirit, Matter and Mind, Matter and Force, makes no difference
at all.

This indictment looks formidable, but I think that its strength
really depends on a mistaken view of matter. I have already said
that the current distinction between matter and force must be taken as
provisional only, and I shall attempt to show shortly why it is invalid.

We have seen that we cannot abolish dualism by absorbing force
into matter, but it may be found possible to reach the desired unity
by referring matter to force. As I have just pointed out, though
matter is apparently a self-evident existence, our notions of it, when,
analysed, lead only to hopeless contradictions. It may be well,
therefore, to unravel our notions to their head, and detect, if we can,

360 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

the original experience on which they rest. If we do this we shall
rind that our primary notion of matter is simply of something which
offers resistance to muscular energy. Now, a force energising in an
otherwise forceless vacuum would meet with no resistance, and under
such conditions no conception of matter could arise. The moment
resistance appears the case is altered; but what does resistance
imply ? That which opposes force must be itself force. And there-
fore we can only conclude that matter is but the name which we
give to a state, or a series of states, of our consciousness produced by
the collision of opposing forces. Here let me interpose that of the
nature of force in itself we are absolutely ignorant. We can only
regard its effects subjectively as manifestations of the unknowable ;
and matter, as we know it, may be compared to a spark struck out in
the darkness from the collision of two invisible flints.

Hence we perceive that the popular dualism of matter and force
is apparent only, and the real substance of our universe is variously
manifested force. And this conclusion bears directly on the difficulty
before us. Whether we regard mind as having a miraculous
origin or as arising in the orderly course of evolution, we must
in either case regard it as a form of force. It may be set apart
as a special form, and distinct from all other forms known to us,
but force in some form or another it must be. So long as we looked
upon matter as something in its nature and essence irreconcilably
opposed to mind, it seemed an impossibility to conceive of the soul
as material. But when once we perceive that no such fundamental
antithesis between mind and matter really exists — each of them being
alike manifestations of one force — then there ceases to be any
insuperable difficulty in supposing that the mindstuff of which the
soul is fashioned is a force-manifestation akin in character to those
manifestations which we describe as material, though it differ from
the matter of our senses in tenuity and mobility of substance, and
complexity of structure.

It may be said that, even if this theory be adopted, we are no
better off than before. We have only substituted force for spirit,
one unknowable for another. But we have really done more than
this, for we have reduced two unknowables to one. Dualism presents
us with two separate inconceivable entities, mind and matter. Monism
offers us unity, either by merging mind in matter or matter in
mind, or, as I have here attempted, by referring both to a single
unknowable principle, of which each is, as known to us, a manifesta-
tion.

There seems, then, as I have suggested, to be some truth in each
of the three theories of the soul to which I have alluded above. The
soul, as such, does truly arise for the first time in man. But its
elements have pre-existed, originally as simple mindstuff, and at a
later stage as lower mind-structures ; and finally, so long as we bear

1886 BEFORE BIRTH. 361

in mind the material character of mindstuff, we may in this sense
correctly speak, of the soul as a product of universal spirit.

So far I have endeavoured to present this account'of the soul with
as little reference as possible to religious doctrines. But I must here
point out that the evolution of soul, like all evolution, may well
proceed under the guidance of the Deity, though, of course, not
the Deity of ecclesiastical dogma. Evolutionism, indeed, does not
require such a "belief, but, so far from banishing, it directly suggests it.
Evolutionism expressly declares its inability to define the Infinite,
or to describe the Unknowable ; but, though we cannot know, and
therefore cannot properly predicate, anything of the Divine Power
in Itself, we can pronounce upon Its manifestations in relation to our-
selves, and, so far as we are able to interpret these manifestations,
they reveal to us a system of inviolate order.

To ascribe, therefore, to the Deity the commission of a miracle
seems from this religious standpoint positively impious, and thus the
evolutionist is constrained by the double claims of religion and science
to reject any theory of the soul which involves a miracle at every
birth.

But if we are compelled to regard the soul as conforming like the
rest of the universe to natural law, are we not entitled to presume, in
the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, that its origin and
growth must be referred to that great natural order of evolution
which, so far as we can discern, is universal in its range ? 21

To many excellent people the idea of a universe left by the Deity
to work out its own development without the aid of miracles will still
seem intolerable, because, from education and surroundings, they
cannot help regarding every form of energy which is not miraculous
as somehow unworthy of Divine Power. We are bound to deal re-
spectfully with this, as with all honest belief. But we need not
hesitate to declare that the conception of a universe harmoniously
evolving, under Divine control, by fixed laws, is incomparably higher
than that of a universe whose life and development can only advance
with any semblance of harmony by perpetual miraculous inter-
ventions.22

We have to a great extent got rid of the anthropocentric theory
of creation, which, in variously pronounced forms, regarded the

21 I understand Dr. Temple (Religion and Science, p. 225, &c.) to consider that
the freedom of the will is evidence against the complete uniformity of Nature. But
he seems to ignore the fact that at least half of the current philosophies stoutly
deny that the will is free.

22 Since this passage was written I have been glad to find that Dr. Temple sup-
ports the same view. He says (Religion and Science, p. 115), ' It seems in itself
something more majestic, more befitting to Him to whom a thousand years are as
one day, and one day as a thousand years, thus to impress His Will once for all on
His creation, and provide for all its countless variety by this one original impress,
than by special acts of creation to be perpetually modifying what he had previously
made.

362 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

universe, or at any rate this world, as created exclusively for man's
benefit ; but some relics of this narrow belief still support the
reluctance to concede the derivative character of man's soul.

_ A similar and hardly less vehement opposition was offered to the
idea that our physical characteristics came to us through the anthro-
poid apes. But now that we are ceasing to resent our physical
ancestry, can we logically refuse to acknowledge that our mental
powers are also a heritage from the past ? Science has widened the
domain of consciousness, and neither man nor the higher animals
can claim it any longer as their exclusive gift. The old barriers of
thought which shut off the animal from the vegetal kingdom are
rapidly being broken down. If we go back to the beginnings of life we
find the same protoplasm in the simplest animal and. vegetal organ-
isms ; and even in their higher forms striking similarities still appear.
Taylor 23 reproduces a plate showing the resemblance in growth and
development between a plant, a zoophyte, and a colony of aphid s.
Amoeboid movements are found in plant-tissues ; and the locomotive
powers of moss antherozoa show a still closer approach to animal
functions.

Seeing, then, that life in all its diverse forms can thus be traced
back to a single source, it is surely not unreasonable to suppose that
the mind which accompanies it has had a similar history, and that
the pedigree of the soul itself may reach back to a simple mindstuff
unit.

But, be this as it may, scientific authority supports the belief that
mind, in some form, always accompanies life, and has accompanied it
from the first. Romanes tells us that the discrimination between
stimuli, which is the germ of mind, is found in a rudimentary form
even in protoplasmic and unicellular organisms.24 Darwin declares
that the sensitive radicle of a plant acts like the brain of an animal ; 25
and in insectivorous plants, like the sundew, we find something closely
resembling a selective consciousness.

As knowledge widens, thought widens also ; and the cosmogonies
which may have suited the knowledge and ideas of the past barely
suffice for the present, and assuredly will not suffice for the future.
Science and philosophy may not have reduced phenomena to a visible
unity, but they have at least gone far to reveal their solidarity.
Development must be the law of the whole universe ; we can no
longer regard it as the exclusive privilege of any part. Still less can
we believe that the history of the universe is the history of a struggle
between the goodness of a Divine mind and an evil and antagonistic
matter. Philo, the Alexandrine, taught that God, even in the act of
creation, abstained from contact with His work, for ' it was not meet
that the Wise and Blessed One should touch chaotic and defiled

23 Sagacity and Morality of Plants. 24 Mental Evolution in Animals, p. 62.

25 Movements of Plants, p. 573.

1886

BEFORE BIRTH.

363

matter.' Dr. Temple, in the widening spirit of to-day, declares that
' we cannot tell, we never can tell, and the Bible never professes to
tell, what powers or gifts are wrapped up in matter itself, or in that
living matter of which we are made.' 2G

Early religion took delight in exalting the Creator at the creature's
expense ; the religion of science prefers to regard all nature as sanc-
tified by the Deity made manifest therein. With this happier recog-
nition that the whole universe works together, as it were, for its own
salvation, and that no single atom is common or unclean, it is time
that we should free matter from its old burden of reproach. To de-
grade matter is not really to glorify God, for the baseness imposed
upon it seems to cast a shadow even upon Divine grandeur itself.
Surely it is at once truer and more reverent to regard matter, not as
inherently evil, but as a manifestation of good, believing, in the words
of Carlyle, that ' This fair universe, were it in the meanest province
thereof, is in very deed the star-domed city of God ; that through every
star, through every grass blade, and most through every living soul,
the glory of a present God still beams.' 27

NOEMAN PEAKSON.

26 Religion and Science, p. 187.

27 Sartor JRcsartus, Book III. ch. viii.

304 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

THE HINDU WIDOW.

THERE is hardly a class of living beings whose wretched condition
appeals more strongly to the humane feelings of charitably disposed
persons, and in whose woeful state there is more scope for the display
of philanthropic efforts, than the widows among the Hindus in India.
Very few people in Europe have even the remotest idea of the
miseries and horrors which Hindu women undergo after the death
of their husbands. The Hindus themselves do not fully know the
sufferings of their widowed sisters and daughters, much less do they
care to alleviate the hardships of their bereaved country-women, or
to improve the general status of the female population of India. It
is a hopeful sign of the times that many benevolent Englishmen in
England and in India and the few enlightened Hindus are now
devoting their attention to the improvement of the condition of
women in the latter country. Schools have been opened to teach
young girls the rudiments of knowledge, zenana teachers have been
appointed to give lessons in the common branches of learning to
women at their own homes, and medical ladies have been taken from
England to treat ailing Hindu women, who would not be treated by
medical men. All this, and much more, has been done to make the
life of an Indian woman more comfortable and happy than before, but
up to this time the miseries and hardships of Hindu widows have
been almost overlooked. The cries of the hapless creatures who are
doomed to lifelong widowhood hardly find an echo beyond the four
walls of the Indian zenana.

It is certain that the prohibition of the marriage of Hindu
widows Las from a very ancient time been prevalent in India. The
great Hindu lawgiver Manu, who nourished about five centuries B.C.,
enjoins the following duty on widows : — ( Let her emaciate her body by
living voluntarily on pure flowers, roots, and fruits, but let her not,
when her lord is deceased, even pronounce the name of another man.
Let her continue till death forgiving all injuries, performing harsh
duties, avoiding every sensual pleasure, and cheerfully practising
the incomparable rules of virtue which have been followed by such
women as were devoted to only one husband. A virtuous wife
ascends to heaven, if, after the decease of her lord, she devotes her-
self to pious austerity ; but a widow who slights her deceased

1886

THE HINDU WIDOW.

365

husband by marrying again, brings disgrace on herself here below,
and shall be excluded from the seat of her lord.' Whether the
Vedas (the Hindu scriptures) and the Vedic commentaries expressly
lay down, that a widow after the death of her husband must not
marry again, has been disputed by many a modern Pandit ; but
it is clear from the above quotation that the cruel custom has
reigned supreme in India since the time of Manu, whose injunctions
have been literally obeyed by all Hindus. And as time passed on
the merciless law of Manu has not only been rigorously carried out,
but its evil effects have been immensely aggravated by many
additional and not less cruel customs imposed upon the widows by
the priestly class in India, which is, par excellence, the land of
customs and ceremonies. Even Manu would have shrunk from
making so inhuman a law, had he known that it would be so barbarously
abused and would be the source of the unutterable sufferings and
heart-breaking woes to which Hindu widows are in modern times
subjected.

The evils of widowhood in India are manifold, and the system of
early marriage makes them tenfold intense. Among the Hindus, a
boy who is hardly out of his teens is married to a girl who has
barely passed twelve summers ; and it often happens that a wife loses
her husband soon after her marriage, and then she is initiated in the
horrors of a widow's life ere she has passed her very girlhood. Even
if the would-be husband, after the formal engagement has been
made, dies before the ceremony of marriage, the girl is condemned
to widowhood for all her life. The mischievous tendency of Manu's
law is then at once perceived. Notwithstanding the watchfulness of
their elders, the restrictions of the zenana system, and the inculca-
tions of doctrines of moral purity in life and manners, many young
widows yield to the irresistible impulse of passion. Do what you
will you cannot conquer nature ; and the utter futility of man's
efforts to beat nature has been proved over and over again, by the
numerous instances of deviation from the path of virtue and its
attendant vices and crimes, among the widows in India. It is diffi-
cult to say whether the existing system is more cruel than pernicious,
but that its extreme hardships give rise to much of the degradation
and corruption of female society in India will be apparent to every
reader of the following pages.

A Hindu woman's period of temporal happiness ceases, irre-
spective of her rank or wealth, directly she becomes a widow. When
a young man dies, his parents and friends are in deep mourning for
him, expressing the greatest grief for his untimely loss ; but few
people understand or care to comprehend the utter wretchedness in
which he leaves his young wife, who is yet. too tender and inexpe-
rienced to bear even the commonest hardship of this world. No
sooner has the husband breathed his last than the young wife is

366 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

made to give up all tokens of the married state, and to forego all
pleasures and luxuries as utterly unsuitable for her present condition.
The iron bangle round her wrist, and the red powder on the parting
of her hair, which she so proudly wore but a few days ago, she must
now give up for ever. The ornaments which were never off her
person during her husband's lifetime, she herself removes one
by one from her limbs and puts them away, unless somebody else,
without taking any heed of her grief- stricken heart, snatches them
off her body. Fine or attractive clothes she must not wear, she has
to be contented with a plain, simple, white sari. The very appear-
ance which her bereaved and helpless condition presents would make
you stand aghast. It is hardly possible even to recognise her now,
who, only a few days ago, was radiant with her youthful bloom, and
glittering with her picturesque costume and brilliant ornaments.
The most outrageous customs are imposed on her, and she must ob-
serve them or lose her caste, which, among the Hindus, virtually
amounts to losing her life. Alas ! the custom of man is more cruel
than the decree of Providence.

I shall give, as far as possible, an exact description of the actual
state to which a Hindu woman is reduced after the death of her
husband ; and as some people assert that the widows in Bengal are
not ill-treated at all, I shall first put forward the milder case, and
then endeavour to sketch the horrors of Hindu widowhood in the
heart of Hinduism, the North-West Provinces of India.

The formal period of mourning for a widow in Bengal lasts for one
month with the Kayasiks, the most numerous and influential class
in that part of India, — the Brahmans keeping only ten days. During
this time she has to prepare her own food, confining herself to a single
meal a day, which consists of boiled coarse rice, simplest vegetables,
ghi or clarified butter, and milk ; she can on no account touch meat,
fish, eggs, or any delicacy at all. She is forbidden to do her hair and
to put any scent or oil on her body. She must put on the same
cotton sari day and night even when it is wet, and must eschew the
pleasure of a bed and lie down on bare ground, or perhaps on a coarse
blanket spread on it ; in some cases she cannot even have her hair
dried in the sun after her daily morning ablution, which she must go
through before she can put a particle of food in her mouth. The old
women say that the soul of a man after his death ascends to heaven
quickly and pleasantly in proportion to the bodily inflictions which
his wife can undergo in the month after the death of her husband.
Consequently the new-made widow, if not for any other reason, at least
for the benefit of the soul of her departed husband, must submit to
continuous abstinence and excruciating self-inflictions.

A whole month passes in this state of semi-starvation; the
funeral ceremonies, which drag on till the end of that period, are all
performed, and the rigid observances of the widow are a little relaxed,

1886 THE HINDU WIDOW. 367

if it may be so termed, since the only relaxation allowed to her is
that she need not prepare the food with her own hands, and that she
can change her clothes, but always using only plain cotton saris.
The real misery of the widow, however, begins after the first month.
It is not enough that she is quite heart-broken for her deceased
husband, and that she undergoes all the above-mentioned bodily
privations, she must also continually bear the most galling indignities
and the most humiliating self-sacrifices. She cannot take an active
part in any religious or social ceremony. If there be a wedding in
the house, the widow must not touch or in any way interfere with
the articles that are used to keep the curious marriage customs.
During thepoojahs, or religious festivals, she is but grudgingly allowed
to approach near the object of veneration, and in some bigoted
families the contact of a widow is supposed to pollute the materials
requisite for the performance of marriage ceremonies. The widow
is, in fact, looked upon as the ' evil one ' of the house. If she has no
son or daughter to comfort her, or if she has to pass her whole life,
as is often the case, with her husband's family, her condition truly
becomes a helpless one. During any ceremony or grand occasion
she has silently to look on, others around her enjoying and disporting
themselves ; and if some kind relation does not come to relieve her
tedium, she has hardly anything else to do but to ruminate on her
present sad, wretched condition. Every female member of a family,
whether married or unmarried, can go to parties, but a widow can-
not ; and if she expresses any wish to join the family on such occa-
sions it is instantly repressed by the curt rebuke of her mother-in-
law, or some other relation, that ' she is a widow, and she must not
have such wishes.'

The most severely felt injunction of custom upon the widows is
that of fasting for two days every month during the whole period of
her widowhood, that is, till the last month of her life. This ob-
servance is called ekddasi, which is a Sanskrit word meaning ' the
eleventh,' so called from the fact that the widow abstains from all
food on the eleventh day of each of the two fortnights into which
the Hindu lunar month is divided. This ekddasi is a strict fast,
nothing in the shape of liquid or solid can be touched by the widow ;
even a drop of water is forbidden to her for the whole of twenty-four
hours on those two days of the month. There is no trace of this
stringent rule anywhere in the Vedas or in the ancient literature of
the Hindus. As I have shown above, Manu enjoins a system of
frequent abstinence, but nowhere in the Hindu books of old on laws
and observances is it ordained that a Hindu widow must pass two
days in every month without touching, even at the risk of her life,
any food or water. It is an innovation of later date, as are a great
many of the present customs and ceremonies observed by the natives
of India.

368 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

Under the joint family system of the natives of India there are
very few Hindu houses where either a widowed daughter or daughter-
in-law cannot be found, and the sufferings of these young widows on
their ekddasi days are simply beyond description. In the middle of
the fasting day you will find the young widowed daughter writhing
in agony of thirst and hunger, her aged mother sitting silently by
her and shedding tears at the pangs of her bereaved child, who
cannot, for fear of shame and ridicule, even give vent to her feelings
by the only way left to her — by weeping; her face is deathly pale
through want of food, her eyes are bleared with racking pain,
and her lips parched with terrible thirst. Perhaps she hears the
noise of dropping water ; she at once turns her eyes towards it, she
looks hard at it, but she dares not utter a word. She longingly
watches the course of the water as it reaches the courtyard ; a dog
passes by and drinks of it, but she cannot touch it. She draws
away her eyes from it and mutters to herself, * Oh ! what sin have
we committed that God has made us widows even worse than dogs ! '
She casts a look of despair at her mother. But the mother is helpless.
The ordinances of custom must be rigidly followed. Her heart
breaks at the sight of her daughter's agonies, but the rules of
Shdstras cannot be broken. They say that it is written in the
Shdstras that the widow who drinks water (not to speak of taking
any food) and the person who gives her water on the day of ekddasi,
are both damned to eternal perdition. The timidly superstitious
Hindu mother cannot dare the risk of the perpetual condemnation
of her soul to hell for the sake of alleviating the sufferings of her
widowed daughter.

In many houses you will see an aged, invalid widow, lying down
prostrate on her fasting day, haggard and emaciated, her daughters
sitting around her. It is the middle of Indian summer, everything
is blazing with torpid heat. The poor widow can hardly get up
through age and illness, and there on so scorching a day she goes
through her fast without touching a particle of food or a drop of
water. The daughters are trying their best to soothe and comfort
her, but she lies almost in an insensible state. All at once her eyes
open, she looks hard at one of her daughters and most beseechingly
asks for a little water. They look at her helplessly and tell her —
' Dear mother, to-day is ekddasi, water is forbidden.' The wretched
widow is in a state of delirium, she has lost her memory. Again
and again she implores her daughters for a drop of water, saying,
' I am dying, pray give me water.' They cannot bear this sight any
more, they burst into tears — but they dare not grant their mother's
prayer; they only try to comfort her by saying that directly the
night passes away she shall have water. But, alas ! the night may
not pass away for the widow ; perhaps she succumbs to her mortal
thirst in a few hours, and thus dies a victim to the custom of man.

1886 THE HINDU WIDOW. 369

The widows of Bengal, notwithstanding the barbarous custom
which imposes on them such miseries and inflictions, are not pur-
posely ill-treated by their relations and friends ; on the contrary, in
respectable families they are greatly pitied and comforted in their
state of abject wretchedness and despair. Widows of a mature age
are very much respected, and though they cannot take an equal
share with others in certain festivals and ceremonies, their counsel
and criticism are earnestly sought for in all important domestic
events, and very often they personally superintend the household
affairs of everyday life as well as on grand occasions. In Bengal it
is not the treatment of relations and friends that the widow suffers
from ; it is the cruel custom of the land, which is more obligatory on.
her than the most stringent written law, and which binds her down to
a continuous course of privations and self-inflictions. A distinguished
Bengali gentleman, the Eev. Lai Behari Dey, says on this point : —
* There are no doubt exceptional cases, but, as a general rule, Hindu
widows are not only not ill-treated, but they meet with a vast deal
of sympathy. Old widows in a Bengali Hindu family are often the
guides and counsellors of those who style themselves the lords of
creation. We had the happiness of being acquainted with a vener-
able old Hindu widow who was not only the mistress of her own
house, consisting of a considerable number of middle-aged men and
women, but she was often the referee of important disputes in the
village of which she was an inhabitant, and her decisions were re-
ceived with the highest respect.' This description is quite true,
and we ourselves know of many cases of great respect shown to old
widows ; but a person may be respected and venerated and at the
same time she may, especially in a land of superstitions and preju-
dices like India, be continually harrowed by the most merciless
mental and bodily torments.

In the North-West Provinces of India widows suffer treatment
far worse than that to which their sisters in Bengal are subjected.
The heartless customs are strictly enforced among all the castes, but
as you ascend to the more well-to-do and richer classes they assume
a more relentless and virulent form.

A widow among the respectable classes in this land of rigid
Hinduism is considered and treated as something worse than the
meanest criminal in the world. Directly after the death of her
husband she is shunned by her relations and friends, and, as if her
breath or touch would spread among them the contagion of her
crime — the natural death of her husband — they do not even approach
near her, but send the barbers' wives, who play an important part in
all Hindu ceremonies, to divest her of all her ornaments and fineries.
These mercenary persons often proceed to their task in a most heart-
rending manner ; but that is the command of their mistresses, and
they must obey it. No sooner has the husband breathed his last,

VOL. XX.— No. 115. DD

370 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

than these hirelings rush at their victim and snatch off her ear-rings
and nose-rings :

Ornaments plaited into the hair are torn away, and if the arms are covered
with gold and silver bracelets, they do not take the time to draw them off one by
one, but holding her arm on the ground, they hammer with a stone until the metal,
often solid and heavy, breaks in two ; it matters not to them how many wounds
are inflicted, neither if the widow is but a child of six or seven, who does not know
what a husband means, they have no pity.

At the funeral the relatives of the deceased, male and female,
accompany the corpse, and all, rich or poor, must go on foot. The
men lead the procession, the women, with thick veils drawn over
their faces, following, and last comes the widow, preceded by the
barbers' wives, who take great care to keep her at a respectable
distance from the main body of the mourners, shouting out as they
go along to warn the other people of the approach of the detested
widow. Thus she is dragged along, wild with grief, aghast at the
indignities heaped upon her, her eyes full of bitter tears, mortally
afraid to utter a single syllable, lest she should receive a more heart-
less treatment from the very people who, but a few days ago, held
her so dearly. Soon after the party reaches the river or tank, near
which the cremation takes place, the widow is pushed into the water,
and there she has to remain, in her wet clothes, away from all the
other people, until the dead body has been burnt to ashes — a process
occupying, in India, several hours — and the whole company have
performed their necessary ablutions. And when all of them have
started for home, the widow is led along by the barbers' wives, her
clothes soaking wet, and she mutely bearing the rudenesses of her
barbarous guides. This custom is rigidly observed in all seasons and
all circumstances. It matters not whether she has been laid up with
fever or suffering from consumption, whether she is scorched by the
burning rays of the midday sun of Indian summer or frozen by the
piercing winds blowing from the Himalayas in winter, the widow
must be dragged with the funeral party in the preceding manner.
There is no pity for her. It sometimes happens that if she is of
delicate health she breaks down in the middle of her journey, and
falls dead. And death is her best friend then.

When she returns home, she must sit or lie in a corner on the bare
ground in the same clothes, wet or dry, which she wore at the time
of her husband's death. There she has to pass her days of mourning
unattended by anybody, except perhaps by one of the barbers' wives,
who, if not well paid, does not care to give her kind offices to the
widow. She must be content with only one very scanty and plain
meal a day, and must often completely abstain from all food and
drink. Her nearest and dearest relations and friends shun her
presence, as if she were an accursed viper, and if ever they approach
near her it is only to add fresh indignities to her miserable lot. They

1886 THE HINDU WIDOW.

make her the butt of the vilest abuses and the most stinging asper-
sions. She is a widow, and she must put up with her lot ; and thus
she drags on her miserable existence, with no ray of comfort to cheer
her sad soul and no spark of pity to lighten her heavy heart. Hope
that comes to all comes not to her.

On the thirteenth day after the funeral the widow is allowed,
after necessary ablutions, to change the clothes that she has worn since
her husband's death. Her relatives then make her presents of a few
rupees, which are intended as a provision for life for her, but which
are often taken possession of and spent in quite a different way by
some male relative. The Brahmans, who have been continually
demanding money from her ever since she became a widow, come
again at this stage, and make fresh requests for money for services
which they have not rendered. Her head, which was covered with
black glossy hair only the other day, is completely shaved, and the
Brahmans and the barbers' wives have to be paid their gratuities for
this cruel ceremony. But even then the wretched woman has no
respite. Six weeks after her husband's death the widow has again
to wear those clothes — the very sight of which sends a shudder
through her inmost soul — which she had put on for the first thirteen
days. She can change them only on one condition, that she must
go on a pilgrimage to the holy river Ganges (which is often impos-
sible on account of distance), and perform ablutions in its purifying
waters. After that she has to wear the plainest cotton dress, and
live on the simplest single meal a day, only varied with frequent
fasts.

The year of mourning, or rather the first year of her lifelong
mourning, thus slowly passes away. If she happens to live with her
own parents, and if they be tenderly disposed towards her, her
miseries are a little lightened by their solicitude for her health and
comfort. She is sometimes allowed to wear her ornaments again.
The kind mother cannot perhaps bear the sight of her daughter's
bare limbs, while she herself wears ornaments and jewels. Kind
mother indeed! She cannot bear to see her daughter without
ornaments about her body, but she can bear to see her soul crushed
with the curse of lifelong widowhood. The very kindness of the
mother often turns into the bitterest gall for the daughter. For
many fond parents by thus encouraging their young widowed
daughters to wear ornaments and fineries, and to indulge in little
luxuries, have paved the way for their future degradation and ruin.
For a young widow it is but an easy step from little luxuries to
fanciful desires, and how many young, neglected, uneducated, and
inexperienced women can restrain their natural instincts ?

The widow who has no parents has to pass her whole life under
the roof of her father-in-law, and then she knows no comfort whatever.
She has to meet from her late husband's relations only unkind looks

D D 2

£72 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

and unjust reproaches. She has to work like a slave, and for the
reward of all her drudgery she only receives hatred and abhorrence
from her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. If there is any disorder
in the domestic arrangements of the family, the widow is blamed and
cursed for it. Amongst Hindus, women cannot inherit any paternal
property, and if a widow is left any property by her husband she
cannot call it her own. All her wealth belongs to her son, if she
has any, and if she has nobody to inherit it, she is made to adopt an
heir and give him all her property directly he comes of age, and her-
self live on a bare allowance granted by him. Even death cannot
gave a widow from indignities. For when a wife dies she is burnt
in the clothes she had on, but a widow's corpse is covered with a
coarse white cloth, and there is little ceremony at her funeral.

I cannot conclude this description of the treatment of Hindu
widows in the North- West Provinces of India without quoting some
of the burning words of one of them, which were translated by an
English lady and published in the Journal of the National Indian
Association for November 1881 : —

Why do the widows of India suffer so ? Not for religion or piety. It is not
written in our ancient books, in any of the Shdstras or Mahdbhdrata. None of
them has a sign of this suffering. What Pandit has brought it upon us ? Alas !
that all hope is taken from us ! We have not sinned, then why are thorns instead
of flowers given us ?

Thousands of us die, but more live. I saw a woman die, one of my own
cousins. She had been ill before her husband's death ; when he died she was too
weak and ill to be dragged to the river. She was in a burning fever ; her mother-
in-law called a water-carrier and had four large skins of water poured over her as
she lay on the ground where she had been thrown from her bed when her husband
clied. The chill of death came upon her, and in eight hours she breathed her last.
Every one praised her and said she died for love of her husband.

I knew another wore an who did not love her husband, for all their friends
knew they quarrelled so much that they could not live together. The husband
died, and when the news was brought the widow threw herself from the roof and
died. She could not bear the thought of the degradation that must follow. She
was praised by all. A book full of such instances might be written.

The only difference for us since sati was abolished is, that we then died quickly
if cruelly, but now we die all our lives in lingering pain. We are aghast at the
great number of widows. How is it that there are so many ? The answer is this,
that if an article is constantly supplied and never used up it must accumulate.
So it is with widows ; nearly every man who dies leaves one, often more ; though
thousands die, more live on.

The English have abolished sati ; but, alas ! neither the English nor the angels
know what goes on in our houses, and Hindus not only don't care but think it
good !

And well might she exclaim that ' neither the English nor the
-angels know what goes on in our houses, and Hindus not only don't
.care but think it good ; ' for, Hindu as I am, I can vouch for her
statement that very few Hindus have a fair knowledge of the actual
sufferings of the widows among them, and fewer still care to know

1886 THE HINDU WIDOW. 3T3

the evils and horrors of the barbarous custom which victimises their
own sisters and daughters in so ruthless a manner; nay, on the
contrary, the majority of the orthodox Hindus consider the practice
to be good and salutary. Only the Hindu widows know their own
sufferings ; it is perfectly impossible for any other mortal or even-
'the angels,' as the widow says, to realise them. One can easily
imagine how hard the widow's lot must be in the upper provinces oi
India, when to the continuous course of fastings, self-inflictions, and
humiliations is added the galling ill-treatment which she receives-
from her own relations and friends. To a Hindu widow death is a
thousand times more welcome than her miserable existence. It ij
no doubt this feeling that drove, in former times, many widows to
immolate themselves on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands,
Thanks to the generosity of the British Government this inhuman
practice of sati, or the self-immolation of widows, has now been
completely abolished in India. There is only one thing to be said
on this point, and that is that the British Government lopped off the
outward and more flagrant part of the pernicious system, but did not
strike at the hidden root of it.

The English have done many good things, they can do more.
They need not, by passing laws or issuing public proclamations*
directly interfere with the domestic customs of the Hindus ; bufc
they can make their influence bear indirectly upon the enlightened
heads among the natives of India, and, by the steady infusion of the
spirit of European culture and refinement, bring about the elevation
of Hindu women and further the progress of the country at large.
The English, by the peculiar position they enjoy in India, possess a
distinct vantage-ground from which they can exert great influence
on everything appertaining to the Hindus. Besides, the natives,
themselves are, under the benign influence of English education^
awakening to the horrors of their vicious system. They have already
begun the forward movement ; all that they want is a sympathetic
and effective impulse from outside to push them on in their cours®
of improvement.

DEVENDKA N. DAS;,

374 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

A VISIT TO
SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES.

BESIDES the solid, historic investigation as to ' what has been,' and
the philosophic inquiry as to 'what will be,' there is the, if less
practical yet ever interesting, speculation as to ' what might have
been ' — a speculation to which exceptional circumstances may give
an exceptional value.

As the ' advanced ' Radical programme now avowedly includes the
disestablishment and disendowment of the National Church, and as
(to our very great regret) such a step seems to approach nearer and
nearer to the area of practical politics, the phenomena presented by
the very few remaining churches which yet continue in the enjoyment
of their landed property can hardly be devoid of interest to those
who really care about matters either of Church or State.

A Teutonic land, such as Austria, admits of a more profitable
comparison with England than do countries which are peopled by
the Latin races. Moreover, the Austrian Church, like the Church of
England, still survives in wealth and dignity, and thus strongly con-
trasts with the Churches of Spain, Italy, and France, as well as with
those of Northern Germany.

But not only is it thus exceptional, but it is yet more so in the
possession of monastic institutions of extreme antiquity, which still
retain possession of large domains, even if their possessions may have
been somewhat diminished. The vast and wealthy Austrian monas-
teries which are to be found in the vicinity of the Danube may enable
us to form some conception of what our St. Albans and St. Edmunds,
Glastonbury and Canterbury might now be had no change of religion
ever taken place in England, and had our abbey lands continued in
the possession of their monastic owners.

Besides such considerations of general interest which induced the
present writer to visit these rare examples of ecclesiastical survival,
there were others of a personal nature. When a mere boy he had
found in his father's library and read with great interest a presen-
tation copy of Dibdin's charming account of his antiquarian tour
in France and Germany.1 Therein were graphically described his

1 A BibliograpJiical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany.
By the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, D.D. Second edition. London, published
by Robert Jennings and John Major, 1829. In three volumes.

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 375

visits in August 1818 (in search of manuscripts and early printed
books) to the great monasteries of Kremsmiinster, St. Florian, Molk
and Gottwic, as also to Salzburg and Grmunden, with vivid pictures of
their artistic and natural beauties. The strong desire kindled in a
youthful imagination to follow Dibdin's footsteps and see sights so in-
teresting and so rare having, after persisting undiminished for thirty
years, at length been gratified, it may not be uninteresting to compare
what the traveller saw in 1885 with Dr. Dibdin's observations made
exactly sixty-seven years before.2

The centre from which these monastic visits can best be made is
the bright, clean, busy city of Linz, and to Linz accordingly we went
after pausing at Wurzburg, Nuremberg, Eegensburg, and Passau by
the way. The Danube journey, from Passau to Linz, was performed
on the 19th of August, a day which felt more like November, so great
was the cold. To one who comes fresh from the Khine, the wildness of
the Danube is very striking. The latter river, with its long stretches
of forest intervening between the rare and scanty signs of man's
handiwork, still presents much of the aspect it must have worn in
the days of Tacitus, especially its lofty frowning left bank, the old
Frons GermanioB.

At Linz the Erzherzog Karl Hotel is pleasantly and conveniently
situated close to the steamers' landing-place, and its windows com-
mand a pleasant view of the Danube and the heights on its opposite
shore, (rood carriages and horses can also be hired at the hotel ;
and one was at once engaged to take us next day to pay our first
monastic visit — namely, that to the great monastery of St. Florian,3
the home of some ninety canons regular of St. Augustine.

The day was delightful, the open carriage comfortable with its
springs and cushions in good order, and a very civil coachman, with
a smart coat and black cockade, drove our pair of spanking bays briskly
along a pleasant road which, after for a time skirting the Vienna
railroad, turned south and began between fields and woodlands to
ascend the higher ground whereon the distant monastery is perched.
The greensward of a picturesque wood we traversed was thickly
spangled with brilliant blossoms of Melampyrum nemorosum. This
lovely little plant requires more than most others to be seen alive to
be appreciated, as its coloured leaves become invariably and rapidly
black when preserved for herbaria. Nor can it be a very common
plant, as, though we repeatedly looked for it, we never saw it in any
of our country rambles save in this one wood. The true flower is a
brilliant yellow drooping tube, while the blossom is made up of several

2 See vol. iii. pp. 217-276.

3 St. Florian is said to have been a soldier and martyr of the time of Diocletian^
who was thrown from a bridge with a stone tied about his neck. He is a popular saint
in Bavaria and Austria, though not nearly so much so as St. John Nepomuk. He is
usually represented in armour pouring water from a bucket to extinguish a house or
city in flames, and is popularly esteemed an auxiliary against fires.

376 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

of these surmounted by a crown of brightest blue or purplish bracts —
that is modified foliage leaves.

In a short time the spires and cupolas of St. Florian's began to
appear above a distant wood; they were again lost to sight as we
descended a declivity, but soon the whole mass of the vast monastery
came gradually into view during the last ascent. Though its com-
munity celebrated five years ago the thousandth anniversary of their
foundation, none of the buildings, save some fragments of the crypt,
are even of medieval date, the whole having been rebuilt during
the reign of the Emperor Charles VI., who reigned from 1710
to 1740. To English ideas it has rather the character of a palace
than a monastery, and indeed within it are apartments destined for
imperial use, to lodge the sovereign and his suite when visiting this
part of his dominions.

Passing the small village immediately without the monastery walls,
we drove within the first enclosure, and, having sent in our letters of
introduction, were conducted into the church, wherein vespers had
just begun.

It is a stately edifice, rich in marble and gilding, and pro-
vided with handsome pews (carved seats with doors) throughout
its nave. The choir is furnished with stalls and fittings of rich
inlaid woodwork, while at the west end of the nave is the celebrated
organ, which has more stops than any other in Austria, and three
hundred pipes, which have now, just as at the time of Dibdin's visit,
completely the appearance of polished silver. The woodwork is
painted white, richly relieved with gold. ' For size and splendour,'
he remarks,4 ' I have never seen anything like it.'

The office was but recited in monotone by less than twenty of the
canons, each having a short white surplice over his cassock.5 It was no
sooner finished than a servant advanced to invite us to see the Herr
Prelat, or abbot, whose name and title is Ferdinand Moser, Propst
der reg. Chorherrenstifter St. Florian. We found him in the sacristy,
a man of about sixty, of pleasant aspect, with a manner full of dignified
but benevolent courtesy, such as might befit an Anglican bishop
or other spiritual lord of acres. Ascending a magnificent staircase
to the richly furnished abbatial range of apartments, we were soon
introduced to the librarian, Father Albin Cxerny, a venerable white-
haired monk who had been for three-and-forty years an inmate of
the monastery. Our first visit was to the library, consisting of one

4 Loc. cit. vol. iii. p. 242.

* It should be recollected that these religious are not Benedictines but Augus-
tinians. Part of their ordinary dress consists of a singular garment which, by a zoo-
logical analogy, may be termed an ecclesiastical ' rudimentary organ.' Over the black
cassock is worn a long and very narrow slip of white linen hanging down in front and
behind, and united by a tape round the neck. This odd appendage is, we were told, a
much diminished survival of an ordinary monastic scapular of a white colour which was
worn by them in former ages.

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 377

handsome principal room with smaller chambers opening out from
it and rich with 50,000 volumes, many having been added since
they were gazed at by the English bibliographer, our predecessor.
We were greatly interested to find that there was yet a lively
tradition of Dr. Dibdin's visit, and were shown first the portrait,
and afterwards the tomb, of the abbot who had received him ; and,
to our great satisfaction, the librarian at once took down from their
library shelf the three volumes of Dibdin's tour. (which had been
presented to the monastery by their author), and, turning to his
description of the scene around us, spoke with just admiration of
its engravings, and with touching kindness of his predecessor in
office — the Father Klein (now long since deceased) who had received
with so much docility the bibliographical doctrines G of his English
visitor. Amongst the books of the library is an elaborate German
flora in many quarto volumes with a coloured plate of each species,
as in our Sowerby's English Botany.

There is a very fine refectory and large garden and highly orna-
mental conservatory — or winter garden — for the abbot's use, but
thrown open to the public except on great feast days. The imperial
apartments are richly and appropriately decorated, and the banquet-
ing hall is magnificent. The bedrooms were strangely mistaken by
Dibdin, as the librarian pointed out, for monastic ' dormitories.' 7

By the kindness of the superior the very same treat was given
to us as had been given to our predecessor in 1818. We were taken
to the church, where seated in the stalls we listened for the best part
of half an hour to a performance upon their world-renowned organ.
Our experience was much like that of Mr. Dibdin, who wrote : 8

To our admiration the organ burst forth with a power of intonation (every stop
being opened) such as I had never heard exceeded. As there were only a few
present, the sounds were necessarily increased by being reverberated from every
part of the building ; and for a moment it seemed as if the very dome would have
been unroofed and the sides burst asunder. We could not hear a word that was
spoken ; when, in a few succeeding seconds, the diapason stop only was opened . . .
and how sweet and touching was the melody which it imparted ! A solemn stave
or two of a hymn (during which a few other pipes were opened) was then per-
formed by the organist . . . and the effect was as if these notes had been chauuted
by an invisible choir of angels.

Our last visit was to the spacious crypt, around the interior of
which lie (above ground) in bronze sarcophagi the bodies of the abbots
and of a few of the monastery's benefactors, while in its centre are
the remains of the other members of the fraternity, each in a cavity
closed by a stone engraved with a name and date, and reminding
us of the catacombs of Kensal Green. Here lie all those whom
Dibdin saw. In another sixty-seven years will this monastery be still
enduring, and another visitor in 1952 be shown the resting-places of
those on whose friendly faces we ourselves have gazed ?

6 Loc. c\t. p. 257. 7 Los. cit. p. 243. 8 Loc. cit. p. 242.

378 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

Austria certainly shows a marvellously tenacious power of endur-
ance, and in spite of many political changes has been so far singularly
exempt from revolutionary destruction. No lover of antiquity, no
one who rejoices to see yet surviving social phenomena elsewhere
extinct, can fail to exclaim Esto perpetua, ! The convent 9 of St.
Florian still possesses, as we have already said, its old landed pro-
perty. This property it does not let out either on lease or by the
year, but it is its own farmer, all the work, whether of arable land,
pasture, or forest, being performed by hired labour exclusively.

Though the community is so large, yet the number within the
monastery is almost always much less. This is because the convent
possesses not only its lands, but also (as did our own monasteries)
the right of presentation to various livings. These are still no less
than thirty-three in number, and members of the community are
sent out to serve them, but they are liable to recall at any moment.
A considerable number of the canons are also sent out to act as pro-
fessors in different places of education. Upon the death of an abbot
his successor is freely elected by the members, who assemble from all
parts for the occasion. Neither the Pope nor the government has
any right of nomination, or even of recommendation, but the govern-
ment can veto the election of an obnoxious individual. This right of
veto, however, has been, we were told, very rarely exercised.

The abbey farm has a large supply of live stock. We saw sixty-
seven cows in their stalls, and they seemed very well looked after. The
abbot has his own private carriage and horses, and we saw twenty-six
horses of different kinds in the stables. The collection of pigs was
very large, and included some which had recently arrived from England.
They were shut up in four dozen pens, the whole of which were en-
closed and roofed over by a very large and solid outhouse.

It was with some surprise that I found the superior of this great
abbey was as unable to converse either in French or English as was his
predecessor when visited by Dibdin. He and the librarian were both,
however, well up in English politics, and we were playfully reproached
with our late Prime Minister's sentiments towards Austria, nor could
we but feel surprised at hearing Mr. Gladstone's questions as to ( where
Austria had done good ' quoted in this secluded monastic retreat.

After cordial farewells, a rapid drive soon carried us back to Linz,
in time to escape a storm which had been threatening us, and to
enjoy in security the long-continued reverberations of thunder which
sounded amongst the mountains, and to see the city lit up by rapidly
repeated flashes of extreme brilliancy.

The next day was set apart for a visit to our first great Benedictine
house — that of Kremsmiinster.

Although material progress enabled us for this purpose to dispense

9 The word ' convent ' properly denotes the community, whether male or female,
which inhabits a religious house. The word ' monastery ' denotes the dwelling-place
itself.

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 379

with ..the use of horses, yet we rather envied the conditions under
which Dibdin had visited that monastery. ' By eleven in the morn-
ing,' he tells us,10 ' the postboy's bugle sounded for departure. The
carriage and horses were at the door, the postboy arrayed in a scarlet
jacket with a black velvet collar edged with silver lace; and the
travellers being comfortably seated, the whip sounded, and off we
went uphill at a good round cantering pace.' Our pace, on the con-
trary, was of the slowest which a stopping- at-every-smallest-station
train could be credited with. We had to start from our inn at Linz at
a quarter past six, and we did not accomplish the whole journey from
door to door in much less time than that in which the about equally
long journey to Kremsmiinster from Gmunden was made by road
sixty-seven years before.

As we approached Krems, the mountains of the Salzkammergut
stood out boldly on the horizon, but more striking to us was the pro-
digious monastery, with its Babel-like observatory tower, the whole
mass of its buildings rising from an elevated hill overhanging the
small townlet of Krems at its base.

By good fortune, close to the station, we overtook a monk on his
road home, who kindly escorted us by a short cut through the monas-
tic gardens, of which he had the key, up to the monastery and to the
Prelatura, when, after a short wait in an anteroom, the abbot,
Herr Leonard Achleitner, came and invited us into his study (an
elegant apartment furnished in crimson velvet), where he read our
letters of introduction. Again we were forced to use our little store
of German. The courteous prelate lamented that official business
called him away from home, and, after inviting us to dine and sleep,
consigned us to the care of a pleasant and healthy-looking young monk,
by name Brother Columban Schiesflingstrasse, who was careful that
we should fail to see and learn nothing which it interested us to
inspect or to inquire about.

The huge abbey—an eighteenth-century structure, though its
foundation dates from the eighth — consists of a series of spacious
quadrangles and a large church similar in style to that of St. Florian,
save that the choir is a western gallery and that the decorations gene-
rally are not so fine.

This great house is the home of one hundred monks, three
hundred students, and many servants. As was the case with the
Augustinians, so here many of the monks are non-resident, being
appointed to serve the twenty-five livings to which the abbot has the
right of presentation. The abbot is freely elected for life by the com-
munity. An applicant for admission amongst its members need not
be of noble birth or the possessor of any fortune, but if he is the
owner of property he must make contribution therewith on his
admission. The novitiate lasts for a year, and for four years longer
the newcomer is free to leave if he likes. After that he is held

10 LOG. eit. p. 216.

380 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

morally bound, but not legally so, as now the arm of the law cannot
be employed to force back any monk who may desire to leave.
The youngest members are provided with one cell for each pair,
but when more advanced each has a room to himself. The monks
who act as professors have each two rooms, the prior has three rooms,
and the abbot a whole suite of apartments. They have much land,
none of which is let to farmers, but is entirely cultivated by hired
labour, except of course their forests. These are to be seen from the
abbey windows extending up the sides of distant mountains, and our
host assured us they were richly stocked with deer and roebuck,
pheasants and partridges.

As to their c'hurch services, they do not rise at night nor extra-
ordinarily early. All their office is but recited in monotone, and the
matins of each day are said the evening before, not in church, but in
a room set apart for that purpose. They do not have high mass
even on Sundays, but only on great festivals, when each wears a
cowl in choir. On all other occasions they only wear their ordinary
black cassock and scapular without any hood, nor have they, any
more than the Augustinians, a large monastic tonsure.

The abbot, in spite of his stately lodgings and his importance,
ordinarily dines with the community in their refectory, and no special
dishes are served at the high table, but only those of which all are
free to partake.

At the time of our visit the students and most of the professors
were away for their vacation, and we could but inspect the means and
appliances of learning.

The immense tower, at the summit of which is the observatory,
has each story devoted to a scientific collection of a different kind.
Thus there is a large collection of fossils and minerals ; another of
chemical materials and instruments ; another is a cabinet of physics,
and there is besides a moderately good zoological gallery, and also
some skeletons and anatomical preparations. Lining the whole
staircase, and also in other parts of the tower, are some hundreds of
portraits in oil of former students, each one with his powdered wig,
and all anterior to 1799. Every portrait is numbered, but unfor-
tunately in the troubles of the Napoleonic wars the list was lost.
It was to me a very sad sight to see this multitude of young faces
about whom no one now knew anything, not even a name — lifelike
shadows of the forgotten dead !

At Kremsmiinster, as at St. Florian, there are royal apartments
and also a picture gallery, a gallery of engravings, and other
galleries of old glass, china, and objects of vertu. In the church
treasury are many relics, much plate, and expensive vestments — some
given by the Empress Maria Theresa. There is, however, hardly
anything mediaeval, except a very large chalice of the time when
communion in both kinds was partaken of by the laity.

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 381

The library contained, we were told, no less than eighty thousand
volumes, but to our regret we had no time to properly inspect even a
portion of its contents, though some things in it are very curious and
others beautiful. There is an elaborate manuscript treatise of magic
with illustrations, and another on astrology. A book of the Gospels
of the eighth century is wonderful for its most beautiful writing, and
there are various ancient missals admirably illuminated. The works
treating on the different physical sciences were, we were told, not
in the general library, but in separate departmental libraries for the
use of each professor. I did not succeed in ascertaining that there
was any record or recollection of Dr. Dibdin's visit. The librarian,
however, was away for his vacation.

The gardens are attractive, with many interesting plants and various
greenhouses, but the most interesting object external to the monas-
tery was what at first sight might be mistaken for a sort ofcampo santo.
This consisted of a large space, in shape an elongated parallelogram,
bounded by a sort of cloister with an open arcade of pillars and round
arches. This space was traversed at intervals by passages similarly
arcaded on either side, and these passages connected the two arcades
on each longer side of the parallelogram. In each rectangular space,
thus enclosed by arcaded passages, was a large fishpond abundantly
furnished with large trout or gigantic carp. The walls of the quasi
cloister were hung round on every side with deer's heads and antlers,
and the venerable monk who went round this place with us assured us
they had all been shot by members of the community, he for one having
been a very keen monastic sportsman in his younger days, as were
many of his younger colleagues now, who found good sport in their
• well-stocked forests.

From the fishponds we were conducted to the monastic lavatory,
and thence to the refectory, with many hospitable regrets that our
visit should have taken place on a Friday, with its consequently
restricted table.

In the refectory we were received by the prior, Father Sigismund
Fellocker, a monk devoted to mineralogy.

The party having assembled, all stood round and repeated the
ordinary monastic grace, after which, being placed at the prior's
right hand at the high table, we all fell to amidst a lively hum of
conversation, no one apparently being appointed to read aloud during
an obligatory silence, as is usually the case in monasteries.

The feast consisted of maigre soup, omelettes, sauerkraut, excellent
apple turnovers, and cray fish. Before each monk was a small
decanter of white wine, made at one of their houses in Lower
Austria, for at Krems the vine will not ripen enough for wine-
making. Dinner being over and grace said, the prior and most of
the monks retired, but the sub-prior invited us and another guest
and two monks to sit again and taste some choicer wine, white and

382 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

red, which we did willingly, for the rain was pouring in torrents and
we could not leave. Droll stories and monastic riddles went round
till coffee came and also the hour at which we had intended to depart.
Not liking, however, to begin our long and tedious railway journey
to Linz wet through, we accompanied our kind young guide Brother
Columban to his cell, where, at our request, he played with skill
and taste air after air upon the zitta till the clouds cleared and he
was able to escort us, as he kindly insisted on doing, to the outside
of the ample monastery's walls.

Much interested with our first experience of the Austrian Bene-
dictines, we looked forward with pleasure to our visit next day to their
far-famed monastery of Molk.

Leaving Linz by steamer at half-past seven on the morning of
the 22nd of August, we reached in four hours our point of disembarka-
tion. Long before our arrival there the magnificent palatial monastery
was a conspicuous object, with the soaring towers and cupola of the
abbey church, the whole massed on the summit of a lofty cliff very
near the right bank of the river. This commanding position was in
the later part of the tenth century a fortified outpost of the heathen
Magyars, from whom it was taken in 984 by Leopold, the first
Markgrave of Austria, the founder of the present monastery, who,
with his five successors, is buried in the conventual church. Centuries
afterwards it had again to do with Hungarians, who besieged it for three
months in 1619. When visited by Dr. Dibdin it had also recently
suffered from war. The French generals had lodged in it on their
way to Vienna, and during the march through of their troops it was
forced to supply them with not less than from fifty to sixty thousand
pints of wine per day.

In spite of the antiquity of its foundation, the monastic buildings
are all modern, having been erected between 1707 and 1736.

A walk of about a mile from the landing-place led us (after
passing round beneath the walls of the monastery and ascending
through the town of Molk) to a gate, passing through which, and
traversing a spacious quadrangle, we ascended a stately staircase to
the Prelatura, or abbot's lodgings. The community were at dinner,
but we ventured to send in our letters, and the first to come out and
welcome us was the prior, Herr Friedrich Heilmann, a monk who
had inhabited the monastery for forty years, but who was as amiable
as venerable, and full of pleasantry and humour. He introduced us
to the Herr Prelat, Herr Alexander Karl, who then came up con-
versing with the monks who attended him on either side.

Eather short in stature, he wore his gold chain and cross over his
habit, and on his head a hat, apparently of beaver, shaped like an
ordinary ' chimneypot,' except that the crown was rather low. He
displayed at first a certain stiffness of manner, which made us feel a
little ill at ease, and which seemed to bespeak the territorial magnate,

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 383

no less than the spiritual superior. This uneasy feeling, however,
was soon dissipated, for nothing could be more cordial and friendly
than the whole of his subsequent demeanour to us throughout our
visit. As we were too late for the community dinner, the abbot
consigned us to the hospitable care of the prior, and sent word to
ask the librarian to show us whatever we might wish to see after
dinner. Since many of the ninety monks who have their home at
Molk were now away, the community had not dined in their great
refectory, but in an ordinary, much smaller apartment. To the
latter the genial prior conducted us, and sat beside us, chatting
of the good game which stocked their forests — their venison, par-
tridges, and pheasants — while we, nothing loth (for the river journey
and walk had given us a hearty appetite), partook of soup, boiled
beef, roast lamb, salad, sweets and coffee, which were successively
put before us. The prior had been a keen sportsman, and still loved
to speak of the pleasures of earlier days. Invigorated and refreshed
we set out to see the house, and our first visit was to the adjacent
refectory. It is a magnificent hall, worthy of a palace, with a richly
painted ceiling and with pictures in the interspaces of the great
gilded caryatides which adorn its walls.

Passing out at a window of the apsidal termination of the refec-
tory, we came upon an open terrace, whence a most beautiful view
of the Danube (looking towards Linz) was to be obtained, with a
distant prospect of some of the mountains of the Salzkammergut.
We here met the venerable librarian, Herr Vincenz Staufer, Biblio-
tekar des Stiftes Molk, into whose hands the prior now consigned us.
After contemplating with delight the charming scene before us and
viewing with interest the parts which had been occupied by Napoleon's
troops, we entered the library, which is a hall corresponding in shape
and size with the refectory, and like it abutting on the terrace balcony
by an apsidal termination.

It is a stately apartment furnished with costly inlaid woods, and
with a profusion of gilding on all sides, including the gilt Corinthian
capitals of its mural pilasters. The library is much richer now than
it was when visited by Dibdin, and it contains sixty thousand
volumes. Amongst its treasures are an original chronicle of the
abbey begun in the twelfth century, a copy of the first German
printed Bible, and a very interesting book about America, executed
only two years after its discovery by Columbus. There are also
mediaeval copies of Horace and Virgil. Various other apartments,
besides this stately hall, are devoted to the library, amongst them
one containing four thousand volumes of manuscript. The librarian
turned out to be an enthusiastic botanist; so with his help we
made out the names of several Austrian wild plants which had
interested us. Having done the honours of his part of the establish-
ment, he reconducted us along several spacious corridors to the

384 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

prior, whom we found in his nice suite of five rooms, well furnished,
ornamented with flowers, and with his pet Australian parrot. He
took us to see the royal apartments, which are less handsome than
those of St. Florian, and to the abbey church, which is exceedingly
handsome of its rococo kind. It is cruciform with a high and
spacious central dome. The choir is in the chancel, but there is
a large organ and organ gallery at the west end. All round the
church — where a clerestory would be in a Gothic building — are
glazed windows that look into the church from a series of rooms
which can be entered from the corridors of the monastery. The
church is rich in marbles and profusely gilt.

We were finally conducted to the lodging assigned us, which opened
(with a multitude of others) from the very long corridor at the top
of the staircase we first ascended. On the opposite side of the
corridor is the door which gives entrance to the abbot's quarters.
This very long corridor is ornamented with a series of oil paintings
representing the whole house of Hapsburg as figures of life size. It
begins with fancy portraits of Hapsburgs anterior to the first Imperial
Rudolph, and continues with portraits, more or less historical, of all
the Emperors of the Holy Eoman Empire and with the subsequent
Emperors of Austria, including the present Francis Joseph. Ample
vacant space remains to similarly depict a large number of his suc-
cessors.

Our room was comfortably furnished with all modern appliances,
including a large looking-glass and a spring bed, and the window
commanded a fine view of the mountains towards Vienna. After
a little more than an hour's rest the abbot himself came to invite
us to go with him to see his garden and join in a slight refec-
tion habitually partaken of between dinner and supper — a sort
of Teutonic ' afternoon tea.' The garden was very pleasantly situ-
ated, with a well-shaded walk overlooking the Danube, and with
a fine view of the mountains of the Soemmering Pass, between
Vienna and Grratz. He told us that his lands were only in part
cultivated by hired labour, the more distant being let out to tenants
at fixed rents. As abbot he had the right of presentation to twenty-
seven livings. We then entered a very large summer-house, a long
hall lined with frescoes illustrating the four quarters of the world,
and representing their beasts, birds, flowers, as well as their human
inhabitants. The painting was wonderfully fresh, though it was done
130 years ago. Here was taken the 'afternoon tea,' which consisted
of most excellent beer, a dish of cold veal, ham, and tongue, cut in
thin slices, a salad, cheese and butter. The abbot sat at a principal
table with his guests, including a monk from Kremsmiinster, the
aunt and sister of a freshly ordained young monk who was to sing
his first mass the following day, the young monk himself, and a
secular priest who had come to preach on the occasion, and also

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 385

the prior and the librarian. At other smaller tables sat other monks
and apparently one or two friends from without ; most of them
smoked (the genial prior enjoying his pipe), and parties of four
amused themselves with cards, playing apparently for very small
stakes. The demeanour of all was easy and quite sans gene, but in
no way obnoxious to hostile criticism. The rest of the afternoon
was devoted to a further examination of the vast building until
eight o'clock, when we were summoned to supper. Of this the com-
munity generally partook in the smaller room in which we had
dined ; but, in honour of the event of to-morrow and of his guests,
the amiable abbot had ordered supper to be served in the magnificent
refectory, which was illuminated with what poor Faraday taught us
was the best of all modes of illumination — wax candles.

We were but a small party in the great hall. On the abbot's right
sat the aunt and sister of the young priest — the latter with her
brother next her. On the abbot's left were the secular priests, our-
selves, and the librarian, and one or two more. Our supper consisted
of soup, veal, souffle, and roast chicken. For wine we had at first a
good but not select wine — being from the produce of several vintages
mixed — but afterwards came a choice white wine of one vintage.
Supper ended, the whole party retired together and separated in the
large corridor outside the abbot's lodgings, the ladies being politely
conducted to their rooms, which were adjacent to our own.

The next day (Sunday) was the festival of the first mass, which
was to be sung with full solemnities, though ordinarily there is no
high mass on Sundays at all.

It was to take place at eight o'clock, but long before that time
the church was fairly filled, and the clerestory boxes filled with visitors,
who from that vantage ground could see well. First came the sermon,
to hear which the monks left their choir to occupy benches opposite
the pulpit ; they wore no cowls, but white cottas (a Koman shrunken
surplice) over their cassocks. The worthy priest who preached had
evidently determined not to make a journey for nothing. For a full
hour his eloquence suspended the subsequent proceedings. At last
came the mass, in which the abbot was but a spectator in his stall.
The new priest occupied his throne, as if abbot for the day. There
was an assistant priest, as well as the deacon and subdeacon, and all
the choir boys had garlands of flowers round the left arm, with flowers
round the candles they carried as marks of rejoicing at this ' first
mass.' The aunt and sister were accommodated with seats for the
occasion in the monks' stalls.

The high mass was not liturgical; no introit, offertory, sequence,
or communion was sung by the choir, which was in the western
organ gallery. The music was florid, and there were female as well as
male singers, accompanied by a full band.

We had to take a hurried leave of our friendly host, and, promis-
VOL. XX.— No. 115. E E

386 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

ing to pay another visit at the first opportunity in compliance with
his very friendly request, we took the train to St. Polten in order
to go thence to visit the Benedictine monastery of Grottwic or
Gottweih. We had specially looked forward to visiting this house,
for, though smaller than any of the three previously visited, it had
been most attractively described in Dibdin's tour.11 The abbot in
his time was Herr Altmann, who had, he tells us,12 * the complete air
of a gentleman who might have turned his fiftieth year, and his
countenance bespoke equal intelligence and benevolence.' He re-
ceived Dr. Dibdin with great courtesy ; and as his bibliographical tour
is by no means a common book, the following extracts may not be
without interest to our readers.

Pointing out the prospect about the monastery, the abbot said : ' On yon
opposite heights across the Danube we saw, from these very windows, the fire and
smoke of the advanced guard of the French army in contest with the Austrians,
upon Bonaparte's first advance towards Vienna. The French Emperor himself took
possession of this monastery. He slept here, and we entertained him the next day
with the best dejeuner a la fourchette which we could afford. He seemed well
satisfied with his reception, but I own that I was glad when he left us. Observe
yonder,' continued the abbot ; ' do you notice an old castle in the distance ? That,
tradition reports, once held your Richard the First, when he was detained a
prisoner by Leopold of Austria.' The more the abbot spoke, and the more I
continued to gaze around, the more I fancied myself treading on faery ground, and
that the scene in which I was engaged partook of the illusion of romance. On our
way to the library I observed a series of paintings which represented the history of
the founder, and I observed the devil or some imp introduced in more than one
picture, and remarked upon it to my guide. He said, ' "Where will you find truth
unmixed with fiction ? '

We now entered the saloon for dinner. It was a large, light, and lofty room ;
the ceiling was covered with paintings of allegorical subjects in fresco, descriptive
of the advantages of piety and learning. We sat down at a high table — precisely
as in the halls at Oxford— to a plentiful and elegant repast. We were cheerful
even to loud mirth ; and the smallness of the party, compared with the size
of the hall, caused the sounds of our voices to be reverberated from every
quarter.

Behind me stood a grave, sedate, and inflexible-looking attendant. He spoke
not ; he moved not, save when he saw my glass emptied, which, without previous
notice or permission, he made a scrupulous point of filling, even to the brim, with
the most highly flavoured wine I had yet tasted in Germany, and it behoved me to
cast an attentive eye upon this replenishing process. In due time the cloth was
cleared, and a dessert, consisting chiefly of delicious peaches, succeeded. A new
order of bottles was introduced, tall, square, and capacious, which were said to
contain wine of the same quality, but of a more delicate flavour. It proved to be
most exquisite. The past labours of the day, together with the growing heat,
had given a relish to everything which I tasted, and in the full flow of my spirits
I proposed ' Long life and happy times to the present members, and increasing
prosperity to the monastery of Gottwic.' It was received and drunk with
enthusiasm. The abbot then proceeded to give me an account of a visit paid him
by Lord Minto, when the latter was ambassador at Vienna.' 'Come, sir,' he
said, ' I propose drinking prosperity and long life to every representative of the
British nation at Vienna.' I then requested that we might withdraw, as we pur-
posed sleeping within one stage of Vienna that evening. ' Your wishes shall be

11 See vol. iii. pp. 260-273. 12 P. 263.

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 387

mine/ answered the abbot, ' but at any rate you must not go without a testimony
of our respect for the object of your visit— a copy of our Chronicon Oottwicense.' I
received it with every demonstration of respect.13

Our amiable host and his Benedictine brethren determined to walk a little way
down the hill to see us fairly seated and ready to start. I entreated and remon-
strated that this might not be, but in vain. On reaching the carriage, we all shook
hands, and then saluted by uncovering. Stepping into the carriage, I held aloft the
Gottwic Chronicle, exclaiming ' Valete domini eruditissimi! dies hie omnino com-
memorations dignus,' to which the abbot replied, with peculiarly emphatic sonorous-
ness of voice, ' Vale! Deus te omnesque tibi charissimos conservet.' They then
stopped for a moment, as the horses began to be put in motion, and, retracing their
steps up the hill, disappeared. I thought that I discerned the abbot yet lingering
above with his right arm raised as the last and most affectionate token of farewell.

We had no sooner arrived at our inn — the Kaiserin Elizabet — than
we, not without much difficulty, engaged a carriage and pair to take
us the two hours' drive thence to Gottweih, along the same road
driven over by Dibdin. I passed several sets of pilgrims such as
he describes, as also the statue of St. John Nepomuk, which he
took for St. Francis. At first our path was bordered by poplars^
but afterwards, for miles, by damson trees which were loaded
with fruit. At the commencement of the last quarter of our
journey we entered a defile in the wooded mountains, a most wel-
come shelter from a driving wind and blinding dust. The monas-
tery then soon became visible at the top of a lofty elevation,
reached by a long winding road, which we, unlike our predecessor,
ventured to drive up. No doubt half a century has done something
to improve it. As we mounted, we obtained charming glimpses of
the Danube, and a good view of an adjacent town. We pulled up
within the courtyard of the monastery a little after two o'clock, and
found the community engaged in afternoon service, which was
largely recited in the vernacular. The church is much smaller than
that of the other monasteries we visited, but is more interesting,
as, in spite of its stucco ornaments, its substance is ancient, and the
romanesque character of its nave and the pointed architecture of its
chancel are distinctly traceable. The latter part, which contains the
monks' choir, is raised up many steps, on either side of which is a
way down into a light and rather lofty crypt, in which is buried the
founder of the monastery, Altmann, Bishop of Passau, who died in the
year 1091.

When the service was concluded, we made our way to the cloister
entrance, and having sent in our letters were received by the abbot,
Herr Eudolph Grusonhauer, in the well-furnished suite of apartments
which constituted the abbatial lodgings. We found him at first much
disquieted from a fear that we should make some large demand upon
his time, which he assured us was insufficient for the multitude of
calls upon it. When reassured, however, by learning the modest

13 This copy was placed by Dr. Dibdin in the library at Althorp.

EE2

388 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept..

nature of our demands, he was all courtesy, and insisted on showing
us himself the library and some of its most precious contents. He,
indeed, invited us to sleep, or at least to dine, but we had lunched
before starting, knowing that we could not reach the abbey in time
for the community dinner, and we much preferred spending the short
time at our disposal in inspecting whatever might be seen to taking
a solitary dinner. Dibdin's pleasant experience of Grottweih's hospi-
tality was therefore impossible for us. We were, however, shown the
pleasing portrait of his kind host, Abbot Altmann, who, we were told,
survived till the year 1854, though the last ten years of his life were
passed in blindness. The library is said to contain 60,000 volumes,
besides 1,400 volumes of manuscripts, and no less than 1,200 books
printed before the year 1500. Amongst the latter was one dating
from before the time when type was first used, each page of printing
being one large woodcut. Amongst the manuscripts was a small
bible 700 years old, entirely written in the monastery itself on the
finest parchment in such small characters as to make ordinary eyes
ache to read it, but most beautifully written. One manuscript was
of the sixth century, and of course we were careful to see the cele-
brated Chronicon Gottwicense. We also carefully visited the re-
fectory, and noted in the corridor the paintings of legendary events
in the founder's life, noted by Dibdin.

The apartments prepared for imperial use, and which were used
by Napoleon the First, are finer than those of Molk, and are ap-
proached by a wonderfully imposing staircase. From their windows
delightful views may be obtained, but, indeed, the monastery is so
charmingly situated on a summit amidst such umbrageous mountains
that not only northwards on the Danube side, but also southwards,
there are delightful prospects and agreeable walks. The monastery is
evidently much visited, and in its basement are rooms which are used
as a public restaurant and had the appearance of doing a good business.

The community consists but of fifty monks and two novices. It
is not nearly so wealthy as the abbeys we had previously visited, but
the abbot declared himself fully satisfied both with its present con-
dition and apparent prospects.

After showing us the library we were committed to the care
of an attendant, and other visitors arrived, a carriage and pair with
two Augustinian canons from a neighbouring house, and other
carriages full of laity. On taking our farewell of the abbot, who was
now, indeed, busy with his guests, some of whom were old school-
fellows he had not seen for years, he cordially wished us farewell,
exclaiming, * Truly this is a wonderful day. Heaven has opened and
showered down upon us the most unexpected marvels.'

We rapidly drove along the, mainly downhill, road to St. Polten,
which we quitted next day to return by rail to Linz, and went
thence, through Gmunden and Ischl, to Salzburg,Jthere to pay the
last of our monastic visits, that to its venerable abbey of St. Peter.

1886 A VISIT TO SOME AUSTRIAN MONASTERIES. 389

St. Peter's, Salzburg, is the origin of the whole of its surroundings.
From it have arisen city, archbishopric, principality, and it is one of the
most venerable establishments in Austria. Unlike those yet visited,
it stands in the very heart of a city, in close proximity to the
cathedral of which all the earlier abbots were the bishops.

Though far from a picturesque building, it yet contains more
fragments of early art than Molk or Kremsmiinster. The outer gate
gives admittance to a romanesque cloister, almost entirely paved with
ancient tombstones. Adjacent to the cloister are remains of the old
chapter house in the pointed style of architecture. The abbey
church, though horribly disfigured, with the best intentions, in 1774,
still shows some traces of its early romanesque character. Till the
above-mentioned date, it had exceptionally preserved its old de-
corations, being entirely lined with old frescoes, and having its
choir closed in by a wooden rood-screen with its rood. We
were conducted over the establishment by the reverend prior,
assisted by Father Anselm, who greatly lamented the architectural
ravages of the eighteenth century. In that same century St.
Peter's Abbey was a not unimportant scientific centre, and its
zoological and mineralogical collections are still worth a visit, espe-
cially the latter, which is very rich. There are also interesting and
instructive models illustrating the topography and geology of the
neighbourhood and of the Salzkammergut generally. The treasury
of its church is also rich, and its library of fifty thousand volumes
contains many precious manuscripts, the chief of which, ' The Book
of Life,' goes back to the sixth century, and contains a long list of
benefactors with their anniversaries, for masses. There are also
manuscripts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries not less wonder-
ful for their state of complete preservation than for the brilliancy
and beauty of their illuminations.

It being very near the hour of dinner, we waited in an ante-
room to the refectory for its arrival. Therein are hung the portraits
of a long line of abbots, including the one who welcomed to the abbey
my predecessor Dr. Dibdin.14 In the refectory itself we met the
abbot, a bright, rather small and youngish man, who cordially shook
hands and invited us to take our place beside him at the high table.
The company consisted, this being vacation time, only of the abbot,
twelve monks, five novices, three guests, and some lay brothers.
The guest beside us was Dr. von Schafliaentl, professor of geology at
Munich, who was the only German present who could speak any
English. The repast was of the usual plain character, but the wine
fully merited the reputation it has acquired and made at Stein (near
Vienna), where the community possess a vineyard.

Before taking our leave we visited the abbot in his lodgings,
which are remarkably elegant, and consist of seven richly furnished
apartments and an oratory. He seemed to take an amiable pleasure

14 See vol. iii. p. 197.

390 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

in showing us everything of interest, and cordially invited us to
renew our visit.

St. Peter's Abbey is rich, but only contains about fifty monks
when all are at home. Not many are required for external work, as
not more than half a dozen parishes belong to the abbey. With St.
Peter's terminated our long-desired visit to these curious instances
of ecclesiastical survival, the still established and endowed monasteries
of Austria, which we found to be just what we had anticipated to find
them. That these were no abodes of stern austerity we knew, but
we hardly expected to find such diminished observance as regards
public worship. The men with whom we conversed had much book
learning, and some were devoted to one or other of the natural
sciences. We found also that they were well up in the politics of
the day. Nevertheless we were surprised to find that none of the
five abbots we visited were any more able to converse in either
French or English than were those visited by Dibdin sixty-seven
years before. It should be recollected, however, that the principals
are selected largely with a view to wise administration of the abbey
lands, and not for learning. All the five, in spite of the more or less
sumptuousness of their lodgings, partook of the plain monastic fare,
and we remarked the earnest gravity with which each superior
took his part in whatever of devotion we witnessed. The existing
communities are not responsible for relaxations of monastic discipline
which already existed before the present monks joined them. Nor
would it be fair to expect that men who had attached themselves to a
body, enjoying a certain degree of comfort and freedom, should readily
acquiesce in the institution or reintroduction of severities for which
they never bargained. Though we met with a certain breadth of view
and tolerant spirit in those we ventured to converse with on subjects
affording opportunity for the display of such qualities, yet it would not
be just to conceal that we met with no tendency to what would be
called unorthodoxy by the strictest theologians. At Kremsmiinster,
at Molk, and at St. Peter's we took occasion to turn the conversation
upon Dr. Dollinger, and in each case we found that with expression of
the warmestpersonal esteem there was manifested the most unqualified
condemnation of the line he had taken. Whatever may be thought,
however, of these institutions, whether they may be admired or their
continuance in their present state deprecated, they are full of interest
for us in England, as it is more than probable that such as they are
our own abbeys would have become, had events in the sixteenth and
succeeding centuries turned out otherwise in England than they did
turn out, so that abbots of St. Albans and St. Edmunds might still be
sitting in our House of Lords beside our Archbishops of Canterbury
and York.

ST. GEORGE MIVART.

1886

391

HOW A PROVINCIAL PAPER IS
MANAGED.

THE very great merits of the London daily press, and the advantages
derived from publication in a city which is the seat of Government
and the largest aggregation of people in the world, have combined
in the past to invest it with an overshadowing importance as com-
pared with the provincial press.

That exaggerated relative importance has in some sense ceased,
and many persons and most statesmen have come to recognise that
the provincial press has a power and an influence of the greatest
moment in shaping the destinies of this country. The belief is
frequently entertained that the provincial morning newspapers of
England, Scotland, and Ireland have, as a whole, a greater weight in
the conduct of the affairs of the Empire than the morning papers of
London. The opinion is still more pronounced in reference to the
comparative influence of the provincial evening press and that of the
eagerly competing evening journals of London. For this there are
two prominent reasons. In the first place, the provincial press has
a far more numerous clientele,. It may be assumed that the district
served by the London press, to the practical exclusion of local dailies,
does not contain more than six or seven million persons, and to the
remaining thirty millions the London press, with the exception of a
few of the more widely circulating dailies, is little more than a
name. There is one modifying circumstance which will shortly be
considered, but, however ungrateful it may be to London editors, the
fact remains that, wherever a local daily paper can be remuneratively
maintained, the London press ceases to circulate. It does not
purvey local news, and without attributing to local readers any
narrow preference of ' the rustic murmur of their bourg to the great
wave that echoes round the world,' they have a natural desire to
know what is going on in their own neighbourhood, parish, town, or
county. In its character of purveyor of news of this kind, the local
newspaper wins that support which ultimately invests it with an
appreciable influence in moulding opinion upon imperial concerns.
The attractions of the scenes in the local vestry, the letters on the
disgraceful condition of the parish pump — in a word, the gossip of the

392 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

village — primarily surpass in that kind of interest which gains public
patronage the most brilliant writing of the most brilliant journalist
or the most profound thinking of the soundest political economist.
The squires and rectors, the banker and the doctor, and many others
of the better class, will, of course, order both the London and the
local paper ; but when we go further from the seat of Government,
where the delivery of the London mail is after breakfast, and where
the local paper grows larger and better in the ratio of distance, then
the sale of London papers becomes quite exceptional. So much for
the numerical argument.

But there are other reasons which contribute to the influence of
the provincial press. The London daily press scarcely touches the
genuine London workpeople, who wait for their weekly paper at the
week end, whereas the provincial daily press does reach the wage-
earners ; and this is more especially the case with the evening papers,
which are always sold at one halfpenny, and are in many cases large,
well-appointed, and well-printed sheets, with a considerable adver-
tisement revenue and a great circulation. Let us take the case of
Glasgow. There are in that city three morning and three evening
papers, with a probable combined, circulation of 200,000 copies daily,
of which the evening papers have very much the larger share ; and
as the subscribing population both in the city and in the counties is
almost entirely commercial and industrial, the only conclusion to be
arrived at is that artizans in the West of Scotland are evening paper
buyers. The most superficial inquiry, or even a casual look at the
streets of an evening, goes far to bear out that fact, and much the
same condition of matters prevails elsewhere in the provinces.

The artisan, for obvious reasons, is more influenced by the views
of his paper than is a richer man. He has, on the whole, less oppor-
tunity of reading contradictory papers, less means of hearing opinion
otherwise than in his paper, and a much profounder admiration and
respect for the editorial judgment. A judge or a bishop, a lawyer
or a banker, probably considers himself quite as competent to form
a political opinion as the editors or writers of the press, and he must
sometimes see in his paper statements and opinions which from his
own professional skill in law, or commerce, or theology, he knows to
be rank nonsense. The workman, on the other hand, sees a know-
ledge which must seem very profound, and is certainly uttered with
most dogmatic and convincing authority, and insensibly he is moved
as the journalist wills. The argument then amounts to this : that
for each copy sold, the provincial press exercises a higher average of
political power than the London press, and that the number of copies
sold is incomparably greater.

There remains one qualifying fact which is the salvation of the
wider influence of the London press. It is quoted freely in the
provincial papers. The country morning newspapers of the best

1886 HOW A PROVINCIAL PAPER IS MANAGED. 393

standing make arrangements which enable them to print short and
pithy extracts from the leaders of one or two of the London papers
of the same morning. Thus, of three morning newspapers in any
provincial city, one will quote the Times and Standard and Post.
another the Standard and Telegraph, a third the Daily News and
the Telegraph. An evening local contemporary will probably, after
an important political debate or other event, follow the custom of
extracting the London press opinions from each of the three local
morning papers, and of thus presenting in one column the opinions
of perhaps five of the London morning dailies. It will probably
further cause its London office to procure the first copies of the
chief London evening papers and to telegraph extracts from their
leaders. By this means it can present in the afternoon a series
of opinions on one subject from nine or ten London papers of that
day, and may supplement these by the opinions of half a dozen pro-
vincial morning dailies. Such a practice may be only occasionally
observed to the extent here indicated, but it remains that the London
papers are freely quoted. That their influence may not be overrated
it must, however, be remembered that they are usually quoted in such
a way that each paper contradicts the other, and the reader is apt to
look upon the collection of opinions as a curious and strange puzzle
rather than a serious contribution to his political enlightenment. There
can be no doubt, however, of the value to the London papers of this
system of quotation, which keeps them before the great bulk of the
people who have no other means of knowing anything about them ;
and London managers and editors should encourage the practice. So
far as managers are concerned, they can do much to advertise their
papers by giving facilities to the Fleet Street provincial offices to
obtain the earliest printed copies of their issue, and editors can also
do much by seeing that a political leader contains somewhere in one
or two sentences a pithy opinion of the whole matter under discussion.
Such a sentence will almost certainly be quoted.

It nevertheless remains that the average reader will be influenced
by the fully argued leader of his own paper, rather than by the frag-
mentary extracts from London ; and it still further remains that for
the advertisement which keeps them before the people in mass the
London papers are indebted to the costly arrangements of the pro-
vincial press.

The difficulties and expenses of the provincial press have never
yet been fully stated to the public, and are but little comprehended
even by London managers and editors. First, then, as to cost. A
first-class provincial paper always rents from the Post Office two
telegraph wires, which are its exclusive property from six o'clock
evening till six o'clock morning, and which are switched off the P^ st
Office connection and switched on to instruments in the London and
provincial offices of the paper. Four telegraph clerks are at work on

394 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

these wires all night taking news from London. They are paid by
the Post Office, which supplies them and the wires at a charge of a
thousand a year ; and as newspaper managers have found means to
induce these clerks to work much harder than when on Post Office
service, the number of columns of matter which can be taken over
these wires at a push is surprising. But, great as that quantity may
be, all liberally conducted offices prefer to take the chief part of
their Parliamentary reports, as well as much other London matter, by
ordinary Postal Telegraph service, and the charge for telegraphing
Parliament alone may be taken at another thousand a year.
Further, provincial papers, which have to give all the imperial news
given by the London papers, have also to give local news, a thing of
whose expense and worry London managers have no conception ; for
London is so big that London papers make no attempt to give local
news, but leave it to the Clapham Sentinel and others. The cost
of a good local reporting corps, its travelling expenses, the staff em-
ployed to sub-edit and cut down its reports, and the cost it incurs in
telegraphing, varies of course with the district over which the journal
circulates. But if the journal has a desire to be more than local to
a great town it need not expect to spend in this manner less than
four thousand a year. It will also incur a cost of about a thousand
a year in obtaining nightly a smartly written London letter, and a
light and humorous account of Parliamentary proceedings, commonly
spoken of as * the sketch.' We have here in a very few items an
expenditure of seven thousand a year, entailed by the fact that the
paper is provincial and has special calls to meet other than those im-
posed on a London paper of the same standing. But this expenditure
immediately entails more. If Parliament is to be reported as fully,
or more fully, than in any penny paper published in London, and if
London theatres, pictures, and operas are to be dealt with at as great
length as in a London paper, and if London banquets, speeches, cele-
brations, and all events of interest to the nation are to be given as
fully as in the London press, and if the same rule applies to sporting,
and to commercial and shipping news, it follows that the only way
to find room for local news and reports is to increase the size of the
paper; and in Scotland, where the papers are probably more ambitious
than elsewhere, this has been done to a remarkable extent.

For the purpose of showing more clearly how great is the task
thrown upon the provincial press, the following table has been pre-
pared, which shows all the matter, inclusive of advertisements, printed
in three London and two provincial newspapers in one week. The
table is divided into eleven heads, and a supplementary calculation
shows the space allotted to news and comment exclusive of adver-
tisements. During the week selected there were extra supplements
to the Times and Scotsman, but as that is often the case it only
makes the figures the more representative. The Scottish News,

1886 HOW A PROVINCIAL PAPER IS MANAGED. 395

however, was in no way increased from its customary size, and it may
make the table more clear to say that that paper has precisely the
same size of page and the same width of column and the same style
of type as the Times.

Number of Columns of Printed Matter in Five Newspapers, from Monday, 5th,
to Saturday, 10th April, both Inclusive.

Times

Standard

Telegraph

Scotsman

Scottish
News

Advertisements

294

188

232f

188^

1142

Leaders and leader summaries
Other original writing

30
18

27
8

29f
13

30

291

30£

151

Parliamentary reports

70

32

262

451

47|

Foreign news

272

211

12|

8*

9i

Letters to the Editor

8*

2i

164

7!

Commercial and shipping ....
Sporting and athletics ....

52f

12i

30|
14

23£
12

41

202

59i
45

General news (not local) ....
News local to London and England .
News local to Scotland, including
Scotch Private Bills

79
12f

37*

7

30i
2i

39£
442

30£
72i

600

368

384

464

432

For the purposes of comparison there is now deleted the space devoted to adver-
tisements, and it is found that the following is the number of columns given to news
and comment : —

Times Standard Telegraph Scotsman Scottish News
306 180 151 276 317

The table shows that the absolutely largest of the five selected
papers was the Times, followed by the Scotsman, with the Scottish
Ne^vs as a close third, and the Telegraph and Standard lagging
materially behind as a bad fourth and fifth. When we deduct the
space occupied by advertisements, however, and take the space devoted
to news and comment, the places materially change. We find that,
of the five papers, the Scottish News is first with 317 columns, the
Times second with 306 columns, the Scotsman third with 276
columns, and far away and behind these, out of the race altogether,
come the Standard with 180, and the Telegraph with 151 columns.
To form a just view of this it is necessary for one moment to put
on one side the threepenny Times, with its enormous revenue from
all sources, and to take the penny papers only. Surely, then, it is a
very extraordinary thing that two Scottish penny newspapers should
be absolutely larger than the two chief penny newspapers of London,
and that in space devoted to news and comment they should so far
exceed the London press that the Scottish News at the one extreme
is more than twice as large as the Daily Telegraph at the other.
Examining the details of the table, it is found that almost identically
the same space is given in all five to leaders, but that a completely
contrary course is followed with Parliamentary news. In that the
Times comes first with its wonderful record of 70 columns, then the
Scottish News and the Scotsman run a close heat with 47 and 45

396 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

columns respectively, and the Standard and Telegraph follow a long
way behind with 32 and 26 columns. In foreign news, again, the
Times leads with 27 columns, the Standard follows with 21, the Tele-
graph with 12, and the Scottish News and Scotsman again run close
with 9 and 8 columns respectively. In commercial and shipping
intelligence the Scottish Neivs heads the list with 59 columns, the
Times follows with 52, the Scotsman with 41, and the Standard and
Telegraph are again behind with only 30 and 23 columns. To sport-
ing and athletics the Scottish News gives the alarming space of 45
columns, and the Scotsman follows with 20, while the three London
papers give only 12 to 14 columns each.

The preponderance of sport and athletics in Scottish newspapers
may best be left to the student of history as dissipating some popular
delusions about Scotland ; but to prevent unnecessary floundering after
truth it may be said that a large part of the news relates to football, an
exercise which has taken the place in the Scottish mind formerly held
by theological discussion. News local to London occupies 12 columns
in the Times, 1 in the Standard, and only 2 in the Telegraph, while
news local to Scotland has 72 columns in the Scottish News and 44
in the Scotsman. The sum of these figures, then, is that the provin-
cial papers give Parliamentary reports much more fully than the
chief London penny papers, which have the House at hand, that they
give commercial and shipping news very much more completely, and
that they supply sporting and athletic news in a preponderance abso-
lutely startling. While endeavouring thus to cater so liberally for
those interested in politics, in commerce, and in sport, they also
devote great space to purely Scottish news telegraphed to them from
many places. It is needless to enforce the fact that all this means
money, and money, and yet more money.

But this comparison has hitherto been made with the three
greatest papers of London — papers having a circulation and an ad-
vertisement revenue to which no provincial paper can aspire. It
would be more fair to the provincial papers to compare their size
and their consequent outlay with that of the lesser London dailies,
and as compared with these it may be said that the provincial paper
incurs a cost in extra setting of not less than four thousand a year,
and in extra paper (taking a very moderate circulation) of another
five thousand a year. That is to say, the extra cost of telegraphing
London and provincial news, and of maintaining a local reporting
corps, and of procuring London political and social gossip, has been
set down at seven thousand a year, and it is now added that the
space to give both fully costs nine thousand a year in excess of what
a London penny paper need spend. When we add to this the charge
of maintaining a London office and of arranging for resident corre-
spondents in every hamlet where the paper circulates, and innumerable
other matters where a provincial paper incurs exceptional outlay, we

1886 HOW A PROVINCIAL PAPER IS MANAGED. 397

find that a first-class provincial morning paper pays twenty thousand
a year for the privilege of being produced a few hundred miles from
London. That twenty thousand a year is solely an extra outlay
above what a London paper need spend, and it requires some courage
to contemplate it and some confidence to rest assured that it will be
repaid. Yet if there is any belief that good provincial papers grudge
outlay it is entirely wrong. Granted that a thing be desirable, they
will have it, no matter what the cost, and the rejection of a proposal
because of the outlay involved is unknown. It rather seems as if
both provincial and London papers have a delight in incurring out-
lays for little else than the moral consciousness that they are sparing
nothing that may contribute to their excellence.

It would demand a close familiarity with the inner working of
London newspapers to state the exact costs that they incur as
compared with the leading provincial journals. In reply to an
inquiry, they would probably suggest foreign correspondence and its
telegraphic cost. To that it may be replied that the outlay of the
Times on these things must be enormous, and that of the Standard
and Telegraph very great, but that the provincial papers spend
money on these things also, and that, having regard to their circula-
tion and revenue, their expenditure should rather be contrasted with
that of the lesser London dailies. The most enterprising provincial
papers maintain correspondents in Paris and New York, and for
other foreign news in ordinary times they depend on Eeuter's service ;
and it is doubtful whether the London papers other than the chief
three do much else. In times of war some of the provincial dailies
form syndicates for supplying themselves with war correspondence,
while others contribute a proportion of the expenses of a London
paper in exchange for the use of that paper's telegrams simulta-
neously with itself. During a recent war there was one provincial
syndicate whose correspondents' despatches were as successful as
those of any pressmen with the army, and from whom a great
London paper, in default of its own telegrams, was glad to be per-
mitted to buy news at a considerable price. These telegrams were
published simultaneously by the provincial papers in the syndicate,
care being taken that the districts served did not overlap. Each
paper of course published the despatches as from ' Our own Corre-
spondent,' and obtained much reputation thereby. Thus these
country newspapers had war correspondence quite equal to that of any
London paper, and if the cost was less than the public may have
supposed, that was the result of prudent enterprise. It seems to be
the desire of most London papers, save only the Times, to retail
their war correspondence to the provincial papers, and it is possible
that this desire will increase. Meanwhile let it suffice that good
provincial newspapers do incur the expense of placing a good man
with our armies, and that, however much they may strive to reduce

398 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

that expense by sharing it, they incur it freely and hamper their
agent by no restrictions.

As the resolute way in which the provincial papers overcome by
great expenditure the disadvantages of their surroundings has so
far been shown, the spirit and courage with which they face diffi-
culties that cannot be overcome merely by money may also be
adverted to. In the case of a Parliamentary debate, the London
paper has this advantage, that in ordinary course the report of the
debate is with it a full hour before it can reach the provincial paper ;
and further, by reason of the railway arrangements, a provincial
paper supplying a great area has to go to press half an hour before
its London rival. Yet, as has been shown, the provincial paper gives
a fuller report of the debate than its metropolitan contemporary ;
and if the discussion be continued till a late hour, the provincial
journal can only maintain its position by enormous energy. The
concluding portion of a debate can be most speedily taken over the
paper's own wires, and at the last the energy of messengers,
telegraphists, subeditors, compositors, and machinists is wonderful.
In one instance words spoken in the House of Commons at 2.25
A.M. were recorded in a newspaper sheet lying on a publishing counter
in a provincial town at 3.22 A.M., and within twenty minutes later
vans were driving away with many thousand copies tied up in
scores of parcels carefully addressed to country newsagents. The
calculation was that the House of Commons gallery staff spent eight
minutes in transcribing, that eight minutes were spent between the
House and Fleet Street — either by messenger or telegraphic tape —
that six minutes took the matter over the wires, that the compositors
had eight minutes for setting in small ' takes,' that the maker-up had
four minutes to put the takes together, that five minutes were spent
in corrections, three minutes in completing the page on the stone,
thirteen minutes in casting a plate, and that then the machine
started. The allocation of time to each department, however, is
more or less one of calculation, and the only thing absolutely asserted
is the interval of fifty-seven minutes between the spoken words in
London and a verbatim report in the accurately printed sheet in the
provinces.

The difficulty of distance also tells heavily against the editor and
his assistant and their leader-writers. It is a necessary condition of
producing a satisfactory paper — satisfactory at least to the editor him-
self— that he shall publish a well-written article, explanatory and
critical, of any important news in his sheet, and the custom every-
where is to have three leaders, each of a column or so in length, all
of which should be relevant to matters of the moment. A leader is
not an essay, but a statement, an explanation and a criticism of
current facts. Now, whether the provincial paper places a leader
writer in the Commons gallery, or prefers to have its Parliamentary

1886 HOW A PROVINCIAL PAPER IS MANAGED. 399

leaders written in its editorial rooms, it is one hour behind its London
rivals, and this one hour lost out of the small time available puts a
physical and mental stress on the provincial writer which London
journalists can scarcely comprehend. The stress, it must be observed,
is not exceptional, but daily ; and if it falls daily on one man,
he ought either to break down and fall below the high standard of
physical vigour necessary for the best journalistic work, or alterna-
tively he must take things easily and do them badly.

The custom of many of the best provincial dailies is believed to be
to have their regular Parliamentary articles written by one man Avho
is accredited to the Commons gallery, and who hears the debates,
writes his leader, and sends his copy to the Fleet Street office. It is
inconvenient unless the close of his article is in the provincial case-
room by 2 o'clock A.M. And as the paper can probably give only one
of its wires to leader copy at that hour, it follows that one half of the
article must leave the Commons by 1 A.M. and the other by about
half an hour later ; which means that in a late debate the represen-
tative of the provincial journal must write early and often fragmen-
tarily, while a writer for a London paper may send his copy much
later, finish his article in a room in the office, and be there to see it
in proof and to tone down any misapprehensions and crudities caused by
haste. The provincial writer's article, written more hastily, is, on the
other hand, only subject to revision by an editor who is himself ill
acquainted with the course of the debate. Finally, there is too long-
continued a strain on the writer, and, as a result, the Parliamentary
leader writing is the weakest part of the ordinary provincial paper.

It would be better if these leaders were written in the editorial
rooms, and if, in place of giving all and sundry Parliamentary topics
to one person, the subjects were allotted in the usual way — that is to
say, if the debate is to be about a Highland Crofters' Bill, let it be
given to the man who has written on the subject when it was on the
carpet before it became a Bill ; if it is on Irish affairs, allot it on the
same principle ; and apply the same rule to finance and all other
matters. Let the writer see all the telegraphic copy before it goes
from the subeditors to the case-room ; supply him also with ' summary '
messages from the gallery, and let him have, when it gets late, the
extra time saved by sending his copy to the case-room in single
sheets wet from his pen. If this be done with system, and if the
writer has applied his mind to the subject and talked over the
matter with his editor before writing, then, granting precisely equal
capacity, the writer in the office will produce a better article than the
writer in the gallery. And as he need only write a ' late leader ' occa-
sionally, he will have more reserve energy to work on. But with all
he cannot write so good a Parliamentary leader as a man with equal
capacity writing for a London paper.

There is, of course, an assumption here that the paper has always

400 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

at its command a considerable staff of leader-writers. The non-
fulfilment of this assumption is probably one of the chief defects of
the provincial press. If three leaders a day are used it may be
assumed that the paper is willing to pay at least an average of two
guineas an article; and if the person responsible for the leaders
distributes his two thousand a year wisely, he should command many
willing and capable pens. The rule should be that the office should
be able to produce under its own roof three fresh articles on subjects
that have occurred, or have been made known for the first time, that
evening. Of course, that is an exceptional though not an unprece-
dented call on its resources, and represents the maximum of strength
at which its staff should be maintained. For this purpose it is
convenient that it should have at hand two competent writers
paid fixed sums, and one other from whom it takes sufficient work to
make it worth his while to come to the office after dinner and ex-
change a few words with the editor, after which he may stay and
write or walk home with an easy mind. Of course the work
taken from the three persons who may be called the permanent
establishment need not necessarily be leaders ; but, on the contrary,
it is to be assumed that they will each have some special knowledge
in art, or literature, or philosophy, or science, or finance, which will
enable the editor to give them other opportunities of writing at the
cost of some other department of the paper, and so allow room for the
services of what may be called the fluctuating leader staff. What
the value of that may be in towns which are supposed to be devoted
solely to commerce, as Birmingham and Leeds, it is difficult to
judge; but in Edinburgh and Glasgow, where there are some scores
of university professors, some dozens of judges and sheriffs, countless
advocates, and a number of men who are specialists in various arts and
sciences, the aid afforded to journalism by these may be very great.
The more a provincial editor avails himself of these men, the better
his paper is. He can easily do so. As a stranger simply offering so
many guineas for so much copy he certainly could not command
their services. But he probably knows them personally and meets
them frequently. Some are indebted to him for publishing, or for
refraining from publishing, some matter in which they are interested.
Others have had his influence, or hope to have his influence, in
obtaining an appointment. Others are zealously anxious to promote
the interests of their party paper. Others still are flattered by the
invitation to contribute, while some are delighted with being allowed
to write anonymously what they dare not say openly. For one
reason or another they are willing to write, and, if used with discretion,
their work is most valuable. It is probable that none of them could
do as efficiently the quick yet accurate work on miscellaneous matters
that is demanded from the daily pressman, or form anything like so
swift and sound a judgment as the trained journalist. But writing

1886 HOW A PROVINCIAL PAPER IS MANAGED. 401

at home amidst their books, and on subjects to which they have-
given years of study and to which they bring ripe knowledge, and'
stating their opinions in absolute leisure and free from any physical
weariness, they produce articles that will better stand the test of
time and the scrutiny of experts.

Where a provincial paper has a staff organised on such %
basis, or on some basis equivalent thereto, it overcomes the last
remaining difficulty in the way of maintaining its equality with-
its London rivals. There are some provincial papers that are so-
provided, and, where that is the case, they have the credit of being^
well- written and well-conducted journals. There are others that
have had such an organisation but have lost it, and are living^
on and daily diminishing their reserve of credit. There are others^
that have never aspired so high, and have not the influence that
their circulation and opportunities might command. But this;
is certain, that a number of provincial journals would do well to>
insist on a higher standard of writing than they seem to attain ; ancfc
that, however little the bulk of their readers might appreciate the
difference, these newspapers would yet find themselves repaid by the-
reputation that would gradually accrue. In newspaper enterprise.,,
reputation always solidifies into money.

If in these things an endeavour has been made to set forth the
enterprise, the energy, and the public spirit of the provincial press,
and thereby to illustrate its real importance, it has not been done-
either in a spirit of envy as against the London press or of profes-
sional pride. For the ability of the London press all must have
great respect, and the best men and consequently the best work are
admittedly at its service. It need not, however, be believed, and it is-
nowise claimed, that men engaged in conducting newspapers or 211
writing for them are one whit cleverer or in any way better than those
otherwise employed. All that can be said for them is, that inasmuch,
as no men are set apart for press work in the way that men qualify
as barristers, or clergymen, or merchants, without regard to their bent,,
it follows that pressmen are more generally than other men engaged
in a calling for which they have a bent ; and inasmuch as there are-
few callings in which brains and industry tell so quickly, it follow*
that more certainly than in other callings the best men come to the-
front. The reverse side of the medal is that the habit of anonymous-
writing, so conducive to the influence of the press, is to a great extent-
destructive of the sense of individual responsibility. That of course-
is true of the metropolitan and provincial press alike, but it seems^
more powerful for evil in the provinces. The sense of editorial re-
sponsibility in London is quickened by the fact that the several great
papers are closely competing with each other, and that their mistakes-
or improprieties are subject to keener criticism than elsewhere..
Where there is one great paper and the rest nowhere, there is apt If-
VOL. XX.— No. 115. FF

402 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

'be recklessness of utterance. The theory is borne out by the fact
that in those provincial towns where two or more papers stand on
something like an equal footing, not only is there more enterprise
but there is more caution. The enterprise is shown in the collection
of news, and the caution in dignified and becoming comment.

What it is here intended to enforce has thus two sides. So far
as these words are read by persons unacquainted with newspaper
affairs, the purpose is served in telling something new of the
difficulties, the trials, and the methods of the journals that are the
informants and in some sense the teachers of the thirty million
people who live outside of London. So far as the readers are the
writer's comrades, the argument may serve to remind them and him
that, although journalists are neither better, wiser, nor cleverer
than their neighbours, and are often less so, they bear a responsibility
immeasurably great.

In the ceaseless pressure of a very active life they may too
seldom take the leisure to reflect that the words written either by
themselves or on their approval fly far and wide to places where the
reverse side of the argument or the qualifying facts may never be

, made known. Some time ago one called upon the writer to complain
of a published comment, and as the comment was obviously harsh
the offer was at once made to contradict or qualify it. ' It's no

, use,' he said sorrowfully ; '. one half of the people would miss the
explanation, and the other would not accept it.' Such an experience
cannot or ought not to be forgotten. If there be some greater aim
in life than to push on, some nobler end than to do the day's work
and have it past, then the boundless influence of a newspaper, the
limitless journey of a printed word, should be ever present to those
on whom rests so great a responsibility.

ARNOT KEID.

1886 403

MARRIAGE WITH A DECEASED WIPES

SISTER.

:

I PROPOSE to consider this matter as calmly and impartially as I can,
having a very strong opinion on it. I will try to fairly state the
reasons for and good alleged of allowing such marriages, and the
reasons against and evil alleged of permitting them.

It may be as well first to show what the law was before Lord
Lyndhurst's Act in 1835, and what it now is as that Act has made it.
Before that Act such marriages and all marriages within the pro-
hibited degrees of kin or affinity were valid till, and not void without, a
decree to that effect. Such a decree could only be pronounced in the
lifetime of both parties, the reason being that the proceedings were pro
salute animce with reference to future cohabitation, which of course
could only be when both spouses were living. The result was that till
such decree the marriage was binding, and if either spouse died before
such decree the marriage was altogether valid and unimpeachable.
For example, if one of the spouses before such decree, the other living,
married, the offence of bigamy was committed. The husband in
such marriage was bound to maintain the wife. On the death of
either, the rights of the survivor to dower, tenancy by courtesy, and
otherwise were as good as if the marriage had been between persons
having no relationship. The children were legitimate and could in-
herit. But if, living both spouses, the.. decree of invalidity was pro-
nounced, the marriage became void oh initio. The parties could
remarry, the children were or became illegitimate, and in short the
marriage became null as much as though one of the parties had had
a spouse living when it was contracted. Which is the worse or better
of the two laws it is not necessary to determine. On the one hand,
the marriage might remain for ever unimpeached ; on the other
there must have been the temptation to contract such a marriage
and run a risk, with the constant dread of its possible annulment. It
should be mentioned that the suit might be promoted by others than
one of the spouses.

But, as I have said, the question is as to the present law. Mar-
riage now within the prohibited degrees is absolutely void ab iriitio,
without any decree -to declare it. Either spouse may leave the

FF 2

404 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

other. Their relation is that of concubinage. Neither has any legal
claim on or responsibility for the other. Either can marry another
person. The children are bastards. Further, it may be as well to
mention that the notion that this law can be obviated by a marriage
ceremony abroad, or in the colonies where such marriages are valid,
is erroneous. The domiciled Englishman is bound by the law of his
domicile.

Now, then, to consider whether this law should remain, or whether
it should be altered — not to what it was before Lord Lyndhurst's Act ;
not whether all marriages within the prohibited degrees should be
valid, but whether the particular marriage of a man with his deceased
wife's sister should be valid, and be unimpeachable at all times.

In favour of allowing such marriages are the following considera-
tions : A man and woman, in the same condition of life, same age,
every way fit for marriage, having that affection for each other which
should exist between persons about to marry, are desirous of doing
so. As a special and particular reason the man has motherless
children who need a woman's care, and the woman loves them as the
children of her deceased sister. Neither instinct nor reason forbid it.
The Duke of Argyll has said, * My opinion is, on the subject of
marriage and the relation of the sexes generally, man's reason and
instinct cannot be trusted' (letter dated August 23, 1883, in the
Scotsman, in answer to a letter on the subject of marriage with a
deceased wife's sister). And we know that though most honestly
objected to by very good and worthy people, there is no feeling of
horror at such a marriage, as there would be at incest between
brother and sister. Yet the law forbids a valid marriage between
these two persons so fitted for marriage together. It overrules their
feeling, denies the motherless children the best guardian they could
have, and forbids that which is not forbidden by reason or instinct
and is earnestly desired by both parties. This is the case with
thousands. It is really sad to read the mournful list of cases ; the
grief, the pain, the waiting anxiety and hope for a, change in the
law ; the unlawful, or rather invalid, unions that are made, either
with a knowledge they are so, or in the mistaken belief that the
marriage abroad is valid. There are also cases of desertion, very
few ; cases of children deprived of the provision made for them
because the parent, in intending to make it, used the word * children,'
which in law means * legitimate ' children.

But certainly there is this to be said : People who make these
marriages, knowing the consequences, have brought the troubles on
their own heads and have themselves to blame. When the man has
tempted the woman into such a marriage he is most blamable ; for
he has made her a false position, subject to a charge of living in con-
cubinage ; which, rightly or wrongly, is not an equal reproach to him.

But there is another class of cases to which this reproach does

1886 MARRIAGE WITH DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. 405

not apply. I refer to those cases where the family has but one
room and the mother dies. There are hundreds of thousands of
these in the United Kingdom. There are 27,000 such in Glasgow
alone. The mother dies : the children must have a woman to care
for them, who must live in the room with them : the mother's sister
is first thought of. We cannot shut our eyes to what must and does
follow. It cannot be denied it would be well if the man and woman
could marry. These people may be blamable, but the law drives
them to that for which they are blamed.

It must be admitted that I have shown objections to the present
state of the law ; that the burden of proof is on those who maintain
it. Let me say at the outset that it is maintained with most perfect
sincerity by many for whom I have the sincerest esteem and respect
— for their learning, ability, and truth.

The arguments are theological or religious and social. I will
consider first the theological. I do so reluctantly, because, strive
as one may, it is impossible to avoid giving offence. An argu-
ment against a man's religious opinions is almost sure to be resented,
however respectfully it may be stated. First it is said by those
who object to these marriages that they are opposed to the texts
which say that a man and his wife are one flesh. The way in
which it is generally put is, that if a man's wife is his flesh then
her sister is his sister, and so her marriage with him would be the
marriage of brother and sister. Now the first remark to be made
on this is that the expression is a metaphor. That it is not a
statement of an absolute or physical fact is certain. I desire
to avoid anything like a ludicrous illustration, but what of a
marriage between people of different colour? What happens if
a marriage is dissolved ? Is there then more than one flesh ? It
is impossible, it seems to me, to suppose that a command not to
do that which is not forbidden by reason or instinct can have been
given by the use of this metaphor. Further, those who say it is
are not consistent. For if A by marrying B becomes one flesh
with her, and thereby becomes brother of her sister C, so also does
his brother D become B's and C's brother, and ought not to be
able to marry C ; yet that he may is allowed on all hands. So a
man may marry his deceased wife's deceased brother's wife. But,
I repeat, to my mind it is impossible to suppose that, instead of
a direct and intelligible command, a divine and benevolent Being
would express only by an uncertain metaphor a prohibition to do
that which is contrary neither to reason nor instinct.

I now come to the argument derived from the Old Testament, and I
venture to say that, so far from prohibiting these marriages, by implica-
tion it plainly authorises them. But first it may be useful to see how
far, if at all, and on what grounds the Jewish law is binding on
Christians. In terms it is addressed to the people of Israel alone. * And

406 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron, Speak unto the children of
Israel and say unto them ' (Leviticus v. 14-17), and especially at the
commencement of chap, xviii., on which the questions arise (vv. 2, 3),
* Speak unto the children of Israel and say unto them, I am the
Lord your (rod. After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye
dwelt, shall ye not do, and after the doings of the land of Canaan,
whither I bring you, shall ye not do.' This looks very like a command
to the particular people only. And it is to be remembered that
the Jews were an exclusive race. I do not say that a man not a
descendant of Jacob could not be admitted among them ; the
contrary is the case ; but they were not a proselytising people.
The contemplation of the lawgiver was that they would be and
remain a separate race from the Gentiles. It seems strange that to
such a people a command was given which was to bind the whole
of mankind ; which was unknown to other nations than the small
community addressed, till the time of Christianity, and which is
still unknown to half the world. I know it is said that the com-
mand is not in itself binding — that it only shows what is the law
of nature. I will address myself to that presently, contenting my-
self with observing meanwhile that if these marriages were for-
bidden, and forbidden to others than Jews, it would be hard on
the mass of mankind that they should have been left with no
.guide but reason and instinct, which prompted rather than forbade
them. This makes me approach the question with a strong feeling
that no such prohibition will be found in the Jewish law.

But let us suppose that either as a direct command or as a model
or warning the Jewish law, or some part of it, should be followed by
Christians. Then what part ? Certainly not the ceremonial ; nor
all which, as distinguished from the ceremonial, may be called the
moral or social (Leviticus xviii. 19, where a command is given,
the punishment for the breach of which is death, xx. 18). It
is impossible to suppose, and indeed it is not said, that the command
there mentioned, with the penalty for its disobedience, is binding on
Christians. So of many others. I ask again, then, what part is
binding ? Now it is said, as I understand, that that part is binding
on Christians for the non-observance of which the land of the
Canaanites was taken from them and given to the Jews, and they
were destroyed. It is said that to have punished them for disobedi-
ence of laws not revealed to them would be unjust, unless they
knew without revelation that they should act as though the law had
been given to them expressly — in other words, that reason and
instinct would guide them rightly to do what they (the Canaanites)
were punished for not doing, so that their punishment was for dis-
regarding reason and instinct. Be it so. But we have the highest
authority for saying that reason and instinct do not teach us that a
man is not to marry his deceased wife's sister. Further, Jacob

1886 MARRIAGE WITH DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. 407

married two sisters, the first living at the time of the second mar-
riage. That this was afterwards forbidden by the Mosaic law is certain
during the life of the first wife. But it is difficult to suppose that
nature and instinct would have forbidden what the patriarch did
apparently without reproof, and indeed with approbation, seeing the
high position and importance of the progeny, Joseph. It may well
be that the pain this second marriage gave to Leah, the first wife,
caused the'prohibition of the marriage of a sister, living her sister as
the first wife.

One may, therefore, as I say, approach the consideration of the
question with a strong presumption that, as the Canaanites were
punished for doing what reason and instinct forbade — and reason and
instinct do not forbid these marriages, especially as shown by the
marriage of Jacob with Leah and Eachel — so it was not for such
marriages that the Canaanites were punished. Therefore either
such marriages are not forbidden at all, even to the Jews, or if at all,
they are forbidden to the Jews in particular. Their prohibition is
not binding on Christians. Let it not be said that this reasoning
would set aside the decalogue. Certainly not ; reason and instinct
both go along with the last six of the commandments. Society
could not exist without the observance of what is ordered and forbidden
by them.

But we are not driven to speculate what would be the law ; we
have it. Let us examine the texts and very passages which decide the
question. Leviticus xviii. 16 is relied on. It says, ' Thou shalt not
remove the nakedness of thy brother's wife ; it is thy brother's naked-
ness.' Now it is said, as I understand, that a wife's sister is as near
in affinity as a brother's wife, and so by implication such a marriage
as that is forbidden. I say, and I say it with all sincerity, that I
am by no means sure that this does not extend solely to the case of
the brother's wife, living the brother. It is the natural meaning of
the words ' it is thy brother's nakedness.' In the case of a mother
the expression is indeed ( thy father's nakedness,' but it proceeds
' even the nakedness of thy mother shalt thou not uncover ; she
is thy mother.' Another instance is * the nakedness of thy son's
daughter is thine own nakedness.' It is true that adultery
generally is specially prohibited. But the prohibition is addressed
to the male. It must be remembered that concubinage was not
prohibited by the Jewish law except as within the prohibited
degrees; and what confirms this opinion is, that if a man died
childless it was the duty of a brother to marry the widow and raise
up issue to the deceased. It has been said that these were not
marriages between the widow and surviving brother, but it is
manifest they were. If proof were wanting it would be found in the
question, * What if a woman marries seven brothers in succession?'
and in the answer, not that the marriages were not marriages or

408 . THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

were wrong, but that ' in heaven there is neither marrying nor giving
in marriage.' And it is a fact that at this day among Jews who
•observe the law a childless widow will not marry other than her late
husband's brother till that brother has formally refused to marry
ler. It may be as well to add that it does not follow that because
marriages were prohibited between a man and his brother's widow
that they would be with a deceased wife's sister.

But let us assume that verse 16 applies to a brother's widow.
!Let us also assume that if a man might not marry his brother's
"widow it would be a fair conclusion that, if there was no other con-
sideration, he could not marry his deceased wife's sister, and so
the case against their marrying would be made out. But there is
another and decisive consideration ; for whatever consequence might
foe deduced from verse 16, if it were not followed by verse 18, there
is that latter verse, ' Thou shalt not take a woman to her sister to be
a rival to her, to uncover her nakedness beside the other in her life-
time.' This is the Revised Version. The Authorised Version is ' to
vex her,' instead of ' to be a rival to her.' This is the text, and it
•seems to me that no man, not merely as a lawyer, on legal con-
sideration, can do otherwise as a matter of ordinary reasoning from
the text than say it is a limited prohibition, and therefore by im-
plication a permission out of the limits. Expressio unius, exclusio
<dterius. To say that it shall not take place in the joint lives, is by
implication to say that it may when both lives do not exist together.

So thoroughly has this difficulty been felt that the greatest
•efforts have been made to get out of it. A venerable archdeacon of
the Church of England has said that the text ought to have been
translated in the Authorised Version, ' Neither shalt thou take one
wife to another to vex her, to uncover her nakedness beside the
other in her lifetime ; ' but that, out of deference to the Septuagint,
the translator in the Authorised Version gave this rendering in the
text, making, however, amends by placing the alternative render-
ing in the margin, ' which no doubt,' says the archdeacon, ' is the
true one.' This really seems very strange. It is a charge on those
who are responsible for the Authorised Version that out of deference
to the Septuagint they knowingly put a wrong meaning on this all-
important text in the body of the book, contenting themselves with
putting the right meaning in the margin. What makes this the
more remarkable is that ninety-nine Bibles out of a hundred are
without marginal notes. This, inasmuch as those books are printed
by institutions governed and controlled by clergymen, is a strong
amputation on them. But having adopted the translation in the
margin, the archdeacon had to give it an object. He says it was
directed against polygamy, which is a breach of the moral law. Is
it possible that he can have forgotten the cases of David and Solomon
in particular? It is incorrect to say that polygamy was pro-

1886 MARRIAGE WITH DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. 409

hibited to the Jews. They recognise its lawfulness, though they do
not now practise it. However we need not trouble ourselves about
what would have been the meaning of the text if translated as the
archdeacon would have it. The matter is set at rest. The marginal
translation was wrong, that in the text right. Those who prepared
the Authorised Version had not put a falsity in their text. The
Revised Version, the authority of which the archdeacon will not
dispute, gives the translation I have quoted, and does not even
notice the other in the margin or otherwise. It ought to be con-
clusive. The archdeacon says it is strange that "a permission
should occur in a chapter which is otherwise wholly concerned with
prohibitions.' Now this is very remarkable. I am sure that the
archdeacon is incapable of saying anything that he has not con-
sidered and does not believe. Otherwise I should say this was
inconsiderate or uncandid. There are two answers to it : one that
there is nowhere a list of permissions in which it could find place.
Another and better answer is that it is not an express permission,
but one by implication. The matter stands thus : all marriages are
lawful which are not prohibited expressly or by implication ; this
marriage is not expressly prohibited, and cannot be by implication,
as by implication it is permitted. The meaning I find in the text
of verse 18 ; the implications from it are those of the Jews themselves.
They interpret in the same way. With them these marriages are
lawful. They refrain from them in England, because they know
they are null by English law, not by their own. Foreign scholars
are universally of the same opinion. Indeed, I do not know that
since the Revised Version anyone here in England contests the
interpretation it gives to verse 18. But in some way, which in all
honesty I declare I do not understand, it is said that, though the
particular text in verse 16 is given up, yet these marriages are
prohibited by the Old Testament.

But, it is asked,1 by one of the archdeacon's correspondents, * Were
counsel to argue upon any other subject before Lord Bramwell, by
using an inference of this kind against a distinct enactment, what
would he not say against it ? ' I should say a good many things.
But where is the distinct enactment ? The archdeacon's statement of
it is this : ' So it is said a man may not marry ' (that is not the word)
* his brother's wife.' ' Conversely ' (qu. conversely) ' a woman may not
marry her husband's brother, and analogously, a man may not marry
his wife's sister.' This is the ' distinct enactment,' conversely and
analogously, every step being questionable, or, as I think, wrong.

This brings me to another argument. I have said, and repeat,

if by common consent there is a divine command against these

marriages, that command should be obeyed. But if some find the

command, and others do not, and on the contrary find a permission,

1 Hessey's Six Grand Objections, p. 2.

410 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

I say that the former have no more right to enforce their opinions on
the latter on this than on any other subject. Formerly men were
persecuted for their belief or opinion on transubstantiation, the
Trinity, episcopacy, and a variety of other subjects. They are now
allowed their opinions on these ; why not on marriage with a deceased
wife's sister, unless social reasons are against it ? See how hard the
law is on the Jews : as they read their books these marriages are
permitted. The followers, or some of the followers, of a different
religion read those books differently and forbid the marriage. To
say nothing of the probability as to who is right, how is it possible
to justify this, except on considerations which would justify punish-
ing the Jews for holding to their old faith ? If it should be said that
to forbid such a marriage is not persecution, I say it is in principle.
It is an interference with another man because your opinion is right,
as you think, and his wrong. And the penalty he pays he would
willingly exchange for a large fine or substantial imprisonment. But
the law is no harder on the Jew than on the Christian, though its
unreasonableness may be more glaring. As I have said, one Christian
believes in transubstantiation, another does not ; one is for episco-
pacy, another not. They have given up persecuting each other ; each
is allowed his opinion and to act on it as far as it can be acted on.
Why is not the same rule followed as to this question, as far as
religious considerations are concerned ?

The social I will now deal with. First, it is said that as the law
at present stands a wife's sister may be on the most friendly and
familiar terms with the husband, because, as they could not validly
marry after the wife's death, there is no danger of improper feelings
or conduct, living the wife. I cannot but repeat that this is to me
shocking. For what does it involve ? This, that if they could marry
after the wife's death there would be danger of improper feelings
and conduct during her life. Is this true ? Is it true of English
men and women ? Is it true of the wife's or husband's cousin or
other female friends or acquaintances ? And if in any case it might
happen, is it to be supposed that the man and woman, being lost to
every sense of religion, morality, and duty, and having conceived a
detestable passion for each other, would be deterred from its gratifi-
cation by the consideration that they could not marry if the wife
died ? That future difficulty would not deter such persons from the
present gratification of their desires.

Another argument is this : It is said that a sister of a deceased
wife can safely and without scandal live in the house of the widower,
because, as they cannot marry, neither he nor she can be supposed
to entertain, and will not entertain, any desire for the other such
as would lead to matrimony. To this there seem two answers.
First, no prudent parent would expose an attractive girl to the
danger of living in the same house with an attractive man with

1886 MARRIAGE WITH DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. 411

whom a marriage would on every ground be desirable, and to which
neither reason nor instinct is opposed. Secondly, as Archbishop
Whately said, the reasoning is the other way ; for if they could
marry and did not, the legitimate conclusion would be that they
did not desire it, and consequently had not those feelings for each
other which would endanger their chastity. Then it is said that if
such marriages are permitted there is an end to all prohibitions on
the ground of affinity. I deny it. I say there is a permission of this
marriage — to me as plain as though in so many words. I say that
when there is a prohibition the case is different. It may be that
Christians ought not to be bound by it. Certainly I think those ought
not to be bound who cannot find the prohibition. Still let it be treated
as binding where it exists. Let those who think one way have their
way. Let it even be maintained when it can be got at ' conversely and
analogously.' But I say there is no prohibition express or by im-
plication of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, none conversely or
analogously. I will deal with a particular case urged, that the same
principle that admits this marriage would admit marriage with a
deceased wife's daughter. I repeat, that is not permitted expressly
or by implication — nay, it may be said to be ' conversely ' prohibited.
For a man may not marry his step-mother ; so I interpret verse 8.
That shows that step-parent and step-child are not to marry, and ' con-
versely ' therefore, a man may not marry his step-daughter. Further,
on social grounds I would prohibit such a marriage ; for men usually
marry women not older than themselves, so that the man is usually
old enough to be the step-child's father. That being so, their ages
are unfit ; and the law should protect the child from being forced into
a wrong marriage by one so much older than herself, and who is in
loco parentis and with the authority of one.

Then it is said that the Bill is not logical, that if right it ought
to go further. Let us try this logically. No law should be made
that is not logical. The proposed law is not logical ; therefore it
should not be made. Is that so ? Is the major premiss true ? Are
there no good laws that are not logical? In this world of expediency
and compromise are we to wait for improvement till we are entirely
logical ? Eeally this is a practical proposal to get rid of a practical
wrong and mischief — sin, I should say if a man can be said to sin
whom bad laws drive to the act called sinful. Men desire to marry,
and do marry, their deceased wives' sisters. They do not desire to
and do not marry their deceased wives' grandmothers.

There is yet another argument. The archdeacon calls it the
ecclesiastical objection. What, it is asked, is to be done by or with
the clergyman who respects the canon law which forbids these
marriages if he is called on to celebrate one or to admit to the Holy
Communion the parties who have contracted one ? It might, perhaps,
be answered, Let those who take the State's pay do the State's work,

412 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

for the doing of which, they are paid. But I would not insist on this,
as some deny that the clergy are State-paid ; and whether or no
they are, I think such a rule would be hard on conscientious men.
It is better to let them decline to celebrate such marriages. The
Duke of St. Albans expressed his willingness to have a clause to that
effect in the Bill the House of Lords has just rejected. As to the
Sacrament, I would leave that to be settled by the law. If living
together after such a marriage disentitles the parties to partake in
the Sacrament, so be it. They must put up with it ; if not, they
would be entitled to enforce partaking in it. I looked up the matter
some time back. I have not the books with me, but my recollec-
tion is that it is very doubtful if there is a right to refuse participa-
tion in the Sacrament to such parties. How can two thoroughly
well-conducted persons, having contracted such a marriage lawfully,
as they would if the law was altered as desired, be said to be
* notorious evil livers,' so as to cause scandal ? I cannot but think
that reasonable charity, a feeling of the duty of allowing participa-
tion in the Sacrament, unless for strong reasons, and a feeling also
that otherwise the sheep might stray from the flock, would cause few
refusals to take place on this ground.

It has been urged that in the Code Napoleon these marriages
are forbidden, and that it was so settled by the casting vote of
Napoleon himself. So we are to be influenced by the opinion of
that most hateful of men. Why ? He was not influenced by religious
considerations and, we may make pretty sure, not by any love of his
fellow-creatures. In fact, I believe the matter was determined as it
was mainly on the ground of its being the existing law. Against it
may be set the modern French practice. Thousands of such mar-
riages take place under some dispensing power.

There is another consideration in favour of these marriages.
They are lawful in every sense in the vast majority of our colonies.
An Australian of English race may validly marry his deceased wife's
sister if he was born in Australia, or if, though born in England, he
has become domiciled in Australia. And that marriage is not only
valid there ; it is, as I believe, valid here. The husband and wife
would have all the claims of husband and wife on each other ; they
would owe all the duties ; the children would be legitimate, and
would succeed certainly to personalty as next of kin, if not to realty
as heirs. Does it not seem a strange thing that an English court of
justice should have to inquire, not whether A and B were married
in point of form, but that being proved, and it also appearing that
the woman was the sister of the man's deceased wife, the court should
have to inquire whether at the time of the marriage the man was
domiciled in the colony when it took place, and that the rights
and duties of the man and woman and those of their offspring depend
on that question ? There is a question whether the offspring could

1886 MARRIAGE WITH DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. 413

succeed to real estate or title ; but to personalty they could, if the
father was domiciled in Australia when he married the mother ; or
perhaps when the grandfather married the grandmother.

Of course this cannot influence those who think these marriages
ought to be forbidden on religious grounds ; but it may well influence
those who object only on social grounds, more especially when it i-s
remembered that the laws which allow these marriages have had the
sanction of the Crown and its ministers. And as to the former, one
would have thought that these marriages, lawful in America and our
colonies, without visible signs of divine displeasure, would have pre-
vented such a wonderful thing as appears in a paper I have received,
viz. that we ought to ' fear the wrath of Grod on this country ' if we
permit them.

I have addressed myself to every specific and distinct argument
pro and con that I know of. There are some it is impossible to deal
with as a matter of reasoning — for example, the following : ' A man and
his wife are by (rod's ordinance one flesh, and a circle is formed around
them of those in near intercourse with whom they are necessarily
thrown.' Within the limits of this circle, as was beautifully said,
* there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage. The area
contained therein is to be as it were a sacred precinct, the purity of
whose air is to resemble that of heaven.' I dare say this is eloquent.
If so, I distrust it. It may be that what was said is beautiful, and my
fault that I do not see it ; but as far as it reasons, or is meant to do
so, it is unintelligible. A circle is formed round a man and his wife,
and within the circle there is to be no marrying. How could there
be when the only two persons within it are married already ? Oh,
but it means that those who form the circle can't marry those who are
within it. Well, then, say so, and we will deal with it.

Then a silly story is told of a man who wanted to marry his half-
sister, their mothers being sisters. On his father objecting that she
was his sister, he answered, ' She is my cousin.' Why, if a man marries
his cousin the child is cousin of both parents in the same sense —
first cousin once removed. So the young man gave a silly reason.

The Church of Eome takes upon itself to grant dispensations for
these marriages. It is strange. Could it dispense with the impedi-
ment between brother and sister, son and mother ?

Then St. Basil is cited as disapproving such marriages and object-
ing to the argument from verse 18 that it by implication permits
them. What claim this particular saint has to be an authority I
know not. I should value his opinion more if he knew that hundreds
of thousands of families are living each in one room, in thousands of
which the sisters of deceased mothers are taking care of their nephews
and nieces, with the inevitable consequences of cohabitation with or
without marriage ; and I should value his opinion more if he had
not said that any second marriage should be visited with a year's

414 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

excommunication, and a third with five years of that penalty. I
value more the opinion of the archdeacon whose good faith and
learning I know, though he has not been, and probably never will be,
canonised.

On the question as to the interpretation of Leviticus xviii. 18,
and particularly as to the interpretation till recent times — that is, till
about 1500 or 1600—1 refer to Dr. McCaul's letter to Sir W. P. Wood,
1860, and his letter to the Eev. W. H. Lyall, 1859. A wonderful
amount of research and learning is shown, and most urgent reasons are
given for holding these marriages not only not forbidden but permitted.
The letters also contain a learned and laborious examination as to
what was the law in England anciently, and how the table of pro-
hibited degrees and the canon relating to it came into existence.

It is said that many great lawyers have pronounced opinions
against these marriages. If it were a matter of faith and not of
reasoning I might be inclined to follow them. Some are named
in whose learning, ability, and sincerity I have implicit confidence ;
but they are all men, shall I say, ecclesiastically given, and who
would be likely to have more regard for canons and ecclesiastical
opinions than the majority of mankind — more, I think, than was felt
by our sturdy old common-law lawyers, who stopped as far as they
could the meddling of ecclesiastical courts.

I have, as I have said, stated the case pro and con as fairly as I
could. That the existing law causes much misery cannot be
doubted, nor that it causes a mischievous breach or disregard of the
law by almost driving people to live in a state of concubinage, immoral
and sinful in the minds of those who yet uphold the law. It makes
a great and most important difference between ourselves and our
colonies, while it is on every ground desirable that our institutions
should be as alike as possible, that, so far as it depends on religious
considerations, it is a breach of what is now recognised as right — viz.
that a man must not be persecuted or hindered from following his
own honest, conscientious opinion on religious matters because others
think differently.

These evils require a justification. "What is it? A metaphorical
expression, mainly in the New Testament but also in the Old, is relied
on as a prohibition of these marriages. An argument is drawn from
the eighteenth chapter of Leviticus to the same effect, though no
particular verse is relied on. I will only refer to the way I have dealt
with it, and add that if Christians are affected by that eighteenth
chapter it furnishes in verse 18 a most cogent argument against
the present law.

As to the social objection, it is based on the untrue and dis-
graceful argument that but for this prohibition decent men and
women would form and indulge unholy and loathsome passions for
each other.

1886 MARRIAGE WITH DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER. 415

I believe the present law had its origin partly in asceticism, which
delights to deny the pleasures, though innocent, which nature would
give us, partly in the love of governing, ordering, directing, and of
the influence and power that follow — a characteristic of priests, but
"which is only more marked in them than in other human beings
because they have more opportunity of indulging it. I trust that a
right view will be taken of this important matter and the law
altered.

BRAMWELL.

416 THE NINETEENTH CLNTURY. Sept,

MERELY PLAYERS.

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players,

which accounts for the fact that we all of us — or almost all,
especially those of simple, child-like, and imaginative natures — delight
in a play, and are apt to get up an ardent enthusiasm for those ' poor

players,'

Who strut and fret their hour upon the stage,
And then are seen no more.

Nor is this wonderful. To be able to throw oneself completely out
of oneself into another's individuality is one of the highest
triumphs of intellectual art. The painter does it, in degree, when
he invents a face and depicts it, real as life, though it exists only in
his own fancy; the novelist does it, by thinking out a character,
and making his puppet act and speak according to its nature and its
surrounding circumstances. But the actor is both these combined,
He must look the picture, he must be the character. Therefore a
truly great actor in any line — whether he stirs in us the heroic
pain of tragedy, or refreshes us with harmless comedy, or even by
the fun of broad farce ' shoots Folly as it flies,' — is, in his generation,
among the best benefactors of society.

All the more so, perhaps, because his life-work is of so ephemeral
a kind. The artist leaves his pictures, the author his books, behind
him, for the world to judge him by, and to profit from, long after he
is gone ; the actor leaves behind him only a memory. No descrip-
tion can keep alive, even for a single generation, the fame of that
fascination which once drove audiences wild with delight. It is
gone — vanished! — as completely as an ended song, a forgotten
dream. Who now believes in Mrs. Siddons' grace, John Kemble's
dignity, Edmund Kean's pathos and passion ? Nay, the young
generation begins to smile when we, who have seen him, praise
Macready. They think he was, after all, nothing to compare to
Henry Irving. And how can we prove anything ? We can only say
* It was so.'

It is this which makes the underlying pathos of acting, and the
actor's life — the feeling of ' Live while you live, for to-morrow all will

1886 MERELY PLAYERS. 417

have passed away.' Still, while it lasts, the charm is all-powerful,
the triumph supreme. No admired author or artist, no victorious
general or popular sovereign, ever evokes such universal enthusiasm,
or receives such passionate ovations, as a successful actor and actress
during their brief day — brief, but still glorious, and great in its power
for good or for evil. Those of us who can recall the enthusiasms
of our youth, how we used to come home from the play, literally
saturated — soaked through and through — with insane admiration;
hearing for days the tones of the one voice, imitating and quoting
the words and gestures of our idol — must confess that it is a high
and a responsible career even to be < merely, players.'

I am led to these remarks by reading through — and it takes a
good deal, perhaps a little too much, of reading — a volume entitled
* Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters,' by Helen Faucit, Lady
Martin. Truly, if any one has a right to say her say on these said
characters, and to be listened to, it is Lady Martin.

For forty years, possibly more, since she rose early and set late,
Helen Faucit was the star of our English, and especially of our Shake-
spearian drama. Among the last generation of actresses there was
no one to compare with her. More refined and cultivated than Miss
Glyn, though in genius and passion few could surpass the occasional
outbursts of that very remarkable woman ; more original and free
from mannerisms than Mrs. Charles Kean and Miss Vandenhoff; while
those passing meteors, Fanny Kemble and Mrs. Scott Siddons, can
scarcely be counted as rivals — Helen Faucit remains, to all of us
who have lived long enough to contrast the present with the past,
the best impersonator of Shakespeare's women whom the last genera-
tion has ever seen.

Though not beautiful, there was about her an atmosphere of
beauty, which made itself felt as soon as ever she came on the stage.
Her lightest gesture, the first tone of her voice, suddenly heard through
other stage voices like a thrush through a chorus of sparrows, seemed
part of a harmonious whole. She had no sharp angles, no accidental
outbursts, which may be either pathos or bathos, just as it happens ;
everything with her was artistically perfect. If, as some alleged,
too perfect — that in her care never to * outstep the modesty of nature '
she ignored nature altogether, and substituted art — it was at any
rate a very high form of art. And after reading her book, which
gives us a glimpse into the soul of the woman, for it is essentially a
woman's book, we come to the conclusion that the secret of her
success was not art but nature. She felt all]she acted. Her cultivated
mind, which, if not absolutely a poet's, had a sympathetic appreciation
of poetry, enabled her to take in ail the delicate nuances of Shake-
speare's characters, while her heart taught her to understand those
things which have made 'Shakespeare's women ' a proverb for feminine
charm. During a whole generation — nay, more, for like Ninon de
VOL. XX.— No. 115. GG-

418 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

1'Enclos she seemed to have perpetual youth — she so enchained the
public that the children of her first worshippers were her worshippers
too. And she retired with scarcely even physical graces lost. Her
Portia and Kosalind, acted when youth was no more, were as * young '
and as delightful as ever. Such an actress cannot but have had as
the key to her popularity, the only key which unlocks ' the wide
heart of humanity,' a heart of her own.

This book shows it, and makes interesting what as a literary
production might have been superfluous, for Shakespeare has had
only too many commentators and analysers. But here we have an
individual study, not of the whole play but of the one character in
it which the actress impersonated. In a very simple and feminine
way, autobiographical without being egotistic, she lets us into the
secrets of that impersonation. We see how she must have penetrated —
for herself and not another, since she tells us she had never seen
them acted by any other — into the very nature of Juliet, Rosalind,
Desdemona, Imogen, and caught the bright spirit of Beatrice —
though she owns she never cared for this last as she did for the more
womanly women. If, in truth, she takes too feminine a view of her
poet, if in the minuteness of her criticism she attributes to Shake-
speare's women certain nineteenth century qualities which Shakespeare
never thought of, and embellishes them with preceding and subse-
quent episodes wholly imaginary, such as Ophelia's motherless child-
hood, and Portia's consolatory visit to the dying Shylock, we forgive
her, since she has made a contribution to Shakespearian literature
quite original of its kind, and which could have been done thus by
no other person.

The book has one more characteristic. It is for an actress whose
personality must ever be before her, indeed forced upon her,
strangely impersonal. \Ve wish it had been a little more of an
autobiography. So many players are ' merely players,' with no
literary capacity at all, no means of expressing their feeling about
their art or their method of study, that such revelations from a
woman of Lady Martin's intellectual calibre would have been not
only pleasant but profitable. Now that we see her no more, it is
interesting to an almost pathetic degree to hear that in her first
girlish performance of Juliet, her nervousness was such that she
crushed the phial in her hand, and never discovered this till she saw
the blood-drops staining her white dress ; how Macready complained
that she was ' so hard to kill ' as Desdemona ; and how, when writing
about Imogen, the remembered agony seemed still to fill her mind,
as it used to do on the stage.

As a whole this book, and the light it throws both upon the
individuality and the professional history of the writer, are to us
who remember what Helen Faucit was, and the sort of plays she
acted in, a curious contrast to the stage and the actors of to-day.

1886 MERELY PLAYERS. 419

Then Browning, Westland Marston, Milman, GK W. Lovell, Bulwer
Lytton, were, if not all poets, at least very capable dramatists, who
had no need to steal from the French, but could invent actable plays,
which intelligent audiences eagerly listened to, and went home the
better for it. The writing might have been a little stilted, lengthy
and didactic, and the acting more conventional than realistic, but the
tone was always pure and high. No confusion of right and wrong
made you doubt whether it was criminal, or only ' funny/ to make
love to your neighbour's wife ; or whether, instead of the old-fashioned
stage morality, when virtue was rewarded and vice punished, there
was not now a system of things much more interesting, in which
a lady of no virtue to speak of, and a gentleman who prided himself
on breaking all the ten commandments, were the hero and heroine
with whom you were expected to sympathise. Is it so now ? To how
many — or rather how few — London theatres can one take one's young
daughters and sons without blushing for them — and ourselves ?

All the worse because over the foulness is thrown a certain veneer
of refinement. Shakespeare, though often coarse in language, as was
the fashion of his time, is always pure at heart — pure as the Bible
itself, which is perhaps the plainest-spoken book of that date now
admitted into general reading. His women too, spite of our ultra-
realistic modern actresses — one of whom as Juliet appears on the stage
en robe de nuit, and another sings an interpolated song which Shake-
speare never would have put in the mouth of his maidenly and pure-
minded Kosalind — his women are and always will be the ideal of all
feminine purity. Except the historical Cleopatra, there is not among
all his diverse heroines one unchaste woman. Imagine the creator
of Imogen, Desdemona, Portia, inventing a Dame aux Camelias, a
Fedora, or a Theodora !

Such a book as this of Lady Martin's awakes in us, with a regret-
ful memory of what the stage was, a longing for what it ought to be
and might be. Not exactly by returning to old traditions; the
world is for ever advancing, and we must accommodate ourselves to
this fact. Even lately a charming little comedy of Westland
Marston's, Under Fire, which for wit and grace of diction, and deli-
cate sketches of character, was worth a dozen ephemeral and immoral
French vaudevilles, fell flat after two or three nights. And not even
its admirable mise en scene and the perfect acting of Wilson Barrett
could save the public from discovering that Bulwer's Junius was an
essentially false diamond, which the most splendid setting could
never rescue from deserved oblivion. No ! ' The old order changeth,
yielding place to new,' and it is right it should be so. Only, let us
try that the new ' order ' be as good as the old.

Dramatic art at present may be roughly divided into three
sections : the Shakespearian and poetic drama, melodrama, and
adaptations from the French. A few stray variations, English and

G G 2

420 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

original, may crop up between, such as the evergreen Our Boys ;
but still, putting aside the drama proper and melodrama in its modern
phase of domestic realism, the stock repertoire of managers and actors
both in London and the provinces is almost exclusively 'stolen'
from our neighbours across the Channel. Whether the theft is to
our benefit or their credit remains an open question.

Of high art dramas, not Shakespearian, there are, alas ! not many,
yet audiences ' fit though few ' have had the sense to appreciate The
Cup and The Falcon. Poets are not often nor necessarily skilled
playwrights, for a play is poetry in action rather than diction. But if
they would condescend to this limitation and train themselves into
writing for the stage, which is quite different from writing for the
closet, there seems no reason why our nineteenth century should not
give us a second Shakespeare — if audiences could be educated into
intelligent appreciation of him. I lately overheard an actor con-
versing with an author on the lack of English talent, and the flood
of French triviality in the modern drama. The actor — he was one
of those cultivated, high-minded gentlemen, men with an ideal, who
are gradually ennobling the profession — said to the author, ' People
lay all this to the charge of the managers and actors, but it is not so.
We want audiences. Not the " gilded youth," or the man about
town who merely goes to the theatre to amuse himself, but an
audience, intelligent, appreciative, critical without being ill-natured,
composed of fathers and mothers of families, who come with their sons
and daughters, and spend their money as regularly and safely upon
the theatre as upon Mudie's Library. To them the stage should
be not a mere amusement but a part of education, supported and
deserving of support by cultivated, intelligent, and right-minded
people, instead of by the froth, or worse than the froth — the vicious
residuum of society.'

Most true, and yet I think this actor, who was still young and
enthusiastic in his profession, laid the saddle on the wrong horse.
May not the fault lie primarily with managers and actors? The
public is like a child, as simple and as impressionable. You must
either be led by it or lead it, and it rather prefers the latter. Is
any one strong enough to do this — to take the bull Society by the
horns, and beginning as a revolutionist to end as an autocrat ?

Could there not be established in London — I believe there is in
New York — a theatre of which the primary object is that nothing
shall be allowed therein which sins against morality or decorum ?
thereby abolishing at once the unwholesome atmosphere which makes
the modern stage often a place which no decent woman or honest
man can breathe in. Failing this, could not our best actors and
actresses, many of them excellent fathers and devoted wives and
mothers, take the law into their own hands, and absolutely refuse to act
in such plays as we outsiders shrink from taking our young daughters

1886 MERELY PLAYERS. 421

to see ? And if, besides pure morality, high art was also studied —
and by high art I mean the best of everything, be it a lever de rideau
or a broad farce, all being done as well as it could be done, not merely
to please, but to elevate the public — would such a theatre fail?
Pessimists say it would ; but I, for one, think better of human
nature. I believe it would in a very short time be crammed nightly
to the ceiling.

There is a vast and virtuous understratum in society which really
loves the right and hates the wrong. In proof of this we need
only point to modern Shakespeare revivals, always successful in any
theatre, and to that form of melodrama which, on the principle that
everything excellent of its kind is high art, ranks only second to
what is called the legitimate drama.

No one could go and see such pieces as Chatterton, The Silver
King, and even the Lights o1 London, without coming away the
better — morally as well as mentally. So far as it goes, each is
thoroughly well acted throughout — a veritable transcript of nature —
though realism is sometimes carried to excess. A van with live horses
crossing the stage, the outside of a gin palace, the inside of a London
4 slum,' though vivid and lifelike as some Dutch painting of a
drunken boor — may be questionable subjects for art at all. But
on the whole these melodramas are admirable studies of nature, and
nature always wins. For among the generality of middle-class
playgoers there is an honest sense of right and wrong, a delight in
virtue rewarded and vice punished, very refreshing to see.

But the artist in any branch cannot rely on nature only. He must
exercise that power of selection which is the secret of genius, and
use nature without abusing it. Surely between the intensely
realistic and the poetical drama there must lie a golden mean, which
if managers and actors would believe in — their fortunes would be
made. Witness the enormous success of that very original play
Glaudian. Its pure idealism, lofty moral, nay, actual religiousness
of tone, caught the popular fancy, and it ' ran ' for a year and a half.
Let sceptics howl as they will, there is still in our England a whole-
some heart of righteousness — the recoil of pure-minded women and
chivalric men against that foul sewage stream which sometimes
threatens to swamp us all. Every one who helps to stem it does a
good deed. Therefore, those who, though 'play-actors,' are also
gentlemen and gentlewomen, striving both by their acting and their
private lives to make the stage what it ought to be, may take con-
solation for the brevity of their day of fame by remembering that
while it lasts their power to guide not only public taste but public
morality is enormous. And it is a personal power. Individual
character as well as genius is the root of it. No woman who was
not good, pure, and high-minded could have impersonated Shake-
speare's women as Helen Faucit used to do. And though I have

422 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

carefully avoided referring to those others of her profession who are
still before the public, it would be easy to name a noble band of
rising and risen actors and actresses, whom the British public —
that is, the worthiest section of it — would certainly not admire as it
does if it could not say between its bursts of enthusiasm, ' That man
is a true gentleman,' ' That woman is a thoroughly good woman.'

If this is not always so, God help them, and God pity them ! —
for the small mimic stage has double temptations compared with the
larger stage of the world. Shakespeare knew both — he was an actor
as well as an author, and yet he could paint aDesdemona, an Imogen,
a Hamlet, a Coriolanus. When our modern dramatists aim at
creating such characters, and our modern actors and actresses delight
in impersonating them, believing that to show Vice her own image
is infinitely more dangerous than to shame her by showing the fair
ideal image of Virtue, then will the impressionable public believe
that there really is a charm worth trying for in ' whatsoever things
are pure, whatsoever things are holy,' or even ( of good report.'
Thus, and thus only, we may hope for the gradual purifying of the
stage, and the raising into the goodly company of true artists those
whom some of us are prone to condemn or ignore as * merely players.'

D. M. CRAIK,

The Author of ' John Halifax, Gentleman!

1886 423

EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS.

ANCIENT EGYPT is one of the battle grounds in the long quarrel as
to the origin and the nature of early religion. Did religion arise
from an instinctive tendency of human nature, from an innate
yearning after the Infinite, and were its primal forms comparatively
pure, though later corrupted into animal worship, fetichism, and the
cult of ghosts ? Or did religion arise from certain inevitable mis-
takes of the undeveloped intellect — did it spring from ghost worship,
magic, and totemism, that is, the adoration of certain objects
and animals believed to be related to each separate stock or blood-
kindred of human beings ? These, roughly, are the main questions
in the controversy; and perhaps they cannot be answered, or at
least they cannot be answered by a simple ' yes ' or ' no.' Complete
historical evidence is out of the question. We are acquainted with
no race of men who were not more or less religious long before we
first encounter them in actual experience or in history. Probably
a close examination would prove that in even the most backward
peoples religion contains a pure and spiritual element, as well as an
element of unreason, of magic, of wild superstition. Which element
is the earlier, or may they not have co-existed from the first ? In
the absence of historical evidence, we can only try to keep the two
factors in myth and religion distinct, and examine them as they
occur in different stages of civilisation. When we look at the reli-
gion and myths of Egypt, we find both elements, as will be shown,
• co-existing, and both full of force and vitality. The problem is to
determine whether, on the whole, the monstrous beast- worships are
old or comparatively late ; whether they date from the delusions of
savagery, or are the result of a system of symbols invented by the
priesthoods. Again, as to the rational element of Egyptian religion,
is that, on the whole, the result of late philosophical speculation, or
is it an original and primitive feature of Egyptian theology ?

In the following sketch the attempt is made to show that, whatever
myth and religion may have been in their undiscovered origins, the
purer factor in Egyptian creeds is, to some extent, late and philo-
sophical, while the wild irrational factor is, on the whole, the bequest
of an indefinitely remote age of barbaric usages and institutions.
The Fathers of the Christian Church were decidedly of this opinion.

424 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

They had no doubt that the heathen were polytheists, and that their
polytheism was either due to the wiles of the devil, or to survival of
ancestor worship, or simply to the darkness and folly of fallen man
in his early barbarism. Mr. Le Page Renouf (in his Hibbert
Lectures}, Dr. Brugsch, M. Pierret, and the late Vicomte de Bouge
(an illustrious authority) maintain, against the Fathers and against
M. Maspero and Professor Lieblein, of Christiania, the hypothesis
that the bestial gods and absurd myths of Egypt are degradations*
In this essay we naturally side with Professor Lieblein and M.
Maspero.1 We think that the worship of beasts was, in the majority
of cases, a direct animal worship, and a continuation of familiar and
world-wide savage practices. Mr. Le Page Kenouf and M. Pierret,
on the other hand, hold that this cult was a symbolical adoration of
certain attributes of divinity, a theory maintained by the later
Egyptians, and by foreign observers, such as Plutarch and
Porphyry.2 It is not denied on one side that many and
multifarious gods were adored, nor, on the other side, that mono-
theistic and pantheistic beliefs prevailed to some extent at a very
remote period. But the question is, Are the many and multi-
farious gods degradations of a pure monotheistic conception ? or does
the pure monotheistic conception represent the thought of a later
period than that which saw the rise of gods in the form of beasts ?

Here it is perhaps impossible to give at once a decided and
definite answer.

There is nothing to tell us what the gods were at their debut, nor whether the
Egyptians brought them from their original seats, or saw their birth by Nile-side.
When we first meet them their shapes have been profoundly modified in the course
of ages, and do not present all the features of their original condition.3

Among the most backward peoples now on earth there are traces of a
religious belief in a moral ruler of the world. That belief, however, is
buried under a mythology in which, according to the laws of savage
fancy, animals take the leading roles. In the same way the religious
speculation of early Egypt was acquainted with ' a Power without a
name or any mythological characteristic.' 4 ' For some obscure
reason, monotheistic ideas made way very early into Egypt.' 5 At

1 M. Lefebure (Leg yeux d'Horus, p. 5) remarks that Egyptian religion is already
fixed in the earliest texts, and that, thanks to a conservatism like that of China, it
never altered. But even China is not so conservative as people suppose, and that
there were many reformations and changes of every kind in the long history of
Egyptian religion is plain even on M. Lef6bure's own showing.

2 See Brugsch's idea that the crocodile was worshipped as an emblem of the sun
arising from the waters (Rel. und Mijtli. pp. 104, 105). Meanwhile SI. Lefebure
thinks that the crocodile is not the rising sun but a personification of the west, which
swallows the setting stars (Osiris, 105). The Egyptians, like most savages, had a.
Nature-Myth explaining that the stars, when they became invisible, were swallowed
by a beast.

* Maspero, Hist, de P Orient, 4th edition, p. 25.
4 Le Page Renouf, p. 100.

* Maspero, Rev. de VHist. i. 125 (1st edition).

]886 EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. 425

the same time, the worship of Egypt and the myths of Egypt were
early directed to, and were peopled by, a wilderness of monkeys,
jackals, bulls, geese, rams, and beasts in general. Now it may be,
and probably is, impossible for us to say whether the concep-
tion of an invisible being who punishes wickedness and answers
prayers (a conception held even by the forlorn Fuegians and Bush-
men) is earlier or later than totemism and the myths of animals.
In the same way, it is impossible to say whether the Egyptian belief
in an all-creating and surveying power — Osiris, or Ea, or Horus — is,
in some form or other, prior to, or posterior to, the cult of bulls and
rams and crocodiles. But it is not impossible for us to discern and
divide those portions of myth and cult which the Egyptians had in
common with Australian and American and Polynesian and African
tribes, from those litanies of a purer and nobler style which are only
found among civilised and reflective peoples.6 Having once made
this division, it will be natural and plausible to hold that the animal
gods and wild myths are survivals of the fancies of savagery, to
which they exactly correspond, rather than priestly symbolisms and
modes of worshipping pure attributes of the divine nature, though
it was in this light that they were regarded by the schools of esoteric
theology in Egypt.

The peculiarity of Egypt, in religion and myth as in every other
institution, is the retention of the very rudest and most barbarous
things, side by side with the last refinements of civilisation. The
existence of this conservatism (by which we profess to explain the
Egyptian myths and worship) is illustrated, in another field, by the
arts of everyday life, and by the testimony of the sepulchres of Thebes.
M. Passalacqua, in some excavations at Quoarnah, struck on the
common cemetery of the ancient city of Thebes. Here he found
' the mummy of a hunter, with a wooden bow and twelve arrows, the
shaft made of reed, the points of hardened wood tipped with edged
flints. Hard by lay jewels belonging to the mummy of a young
woman, pins with ornamental heads, necklaces of gold and lapis
lazuli, gold earrings, scarabs of gold, bracelets of gold,' and so forth.7
The refined art of the gold-worker was contemporary, and this at a
late period, with the use of flint-headed arrows, the weapons commonly
found all over the world in places where the metals have never pene-
trated. Again, a razor-shaped knife of flint has been unearthed ; it
is inscribed in hieroglyphics with the words, ' The great Sam, son of
Ptah, chief of artists.' The ' Sams ' were members of the priestly
class, who fulfilled certain mystic duties at funerals. It is reported,
by Herodotus, that the embalmers opened the bodies of the dead with
a knife of stone ; and the discovery of such a knife, though it had not

6 See a collection of lofty and beautiful Egyptian monotheistic texts in Brugseb
{Bel. und Myth. pp. 96, 99).

7 Chabas, Etudes sur VAntiquitv Historique, p. 390.

426 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept,

belonged to an embalmer, proves that in Egypt the stone age did
not disappear, but coexisted throughout with the arts of metal-
working. It is certain that flint chisels and stone hammers were
used by the workers of the mines in Sinai, even under Dynasties
XII., XIX. The soil of Egypt, when excavated, constantly shows
that the Egyptians, who in the remote age of the pyramid builders
were already acquainted with bronze, and even with iron, did not
therefore relinquish the use of flint knives and arrow-heads, when
such implements became cheaper than tools of metal, or when they
were associated with religion. Precisely in the same way did the
Egyptians, who, in the remotest known times, had imposing religious
ideas, decline to relinquish the totems, and beast-gods, and absurd
or blasphemous myths which (like flint axes and arrow-heads) are
everywhere characteristic of savages.

Our business, then, is to discern and exhibit apart, so to speak,
the metal age and the stone age, the savage and the cultivated
practices and ideas, which make up the pell-mell of Egyptian
mythology. As a preliminary to this task, we must rapidly survey
the history of Egypt, as far as it affected the religious develop-
ment.

The ancient Egyptians appear to be connected, by race, with the
peoples of Western Asia, and are styled, correctly or not, ' Proto-
Semitic.' 8 When they first invaded Egypt, at some period quite
dim and inconceivably distant, they are said to have driven an earlier
stock into the interior. The new comers, the ancestors of the
Egyptians, were in the tribal state of society, and the various tribes
established themselves in local and independent settlements, which
(as the original villages of Greece were collected into city states) were
finally gathered together (under Menes, a real or mythical hero) as
portions, styled ' nomes,' of an empire. Each tribal state retained
its peculiar religion, a point of great importance in this discussion.
In the empire thus formed, different townsj at different times,
reached the rank of secular, and, to some extent, of spiritual capitals.
Thebes, for example,9 was so ancient that it was regarded as the
native land of Osiris, the great mythical figure of Egypt. More
ancient as a capital was This, or Abydos, the Holy City par excellence.
Memphis, again, was, in religion, the metropolis of the god Ptah, as
Thebes was of the god Ammon. Each sacred metropolis, as it came to
power, united in a kind of pantheon the gods of the various nomes
(that is, the old tribal deities), while the god of the metropolis itself
was a sort of Bretwalda among them, and even absorbed into himself
their powers and peculiarities. Similar examples of aggregates of

8 Maspero, Hist, de T Orient, p. 17. Other authorities regard the Egyptians as a
successful race, sprung from the same African stock as the extremely unsuccessful
Bushmen.

9 XL-XX. Dynasties.

1886 EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. 427

village or tribal religions in a State religion are familiar in Peru, and
meet us in Greece.10

Of what nature, then, were the gods of the nomes, the old tribal
gods ? On this question we have evidence of two sorts : first, we
have the evidence of monuments and inscriptions from many of the
periods ; next we have the evidence, in much more minute detail, of
foreign observers, from Herodotus to Plutarch and Porphyry. Let
us first see what the monuments have to say about the tribal gods,
and the divine groups of the various towns and of each metropolis.
Summaries may be borrowed from M. Maspero, head of the Egyptian
Museums, and from Mr. Flinders Petrie, the discoverer of Naucratis.
According to these authorities, the early shapes of gods among the
Egyptians, as among Bushmen and Australians and Algonkins, are
bestial. M. Maspero writes,11 'The essential fact in the religion of
Egypt is the existence of a considerable number of divine personages
of different shapes and different names. M. Pierret may call this
" an apparent polytheism." 12 I call it a polytheism extremely well
marked. . . . The bestial shapes in which the gods were clad had no
allegorical character, they denote that straightforward worship of the
lower animals which is found in many religions, ancient and modern.
... It is possible, nay it is certain, that during the second Theban
Empire (1700-1300 B.C.) the learned priests may have thought it
well to attribute a symbolical sense to certain bestial deities. But,
whatever they may have worshipped in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, and
not a hieroglyph, that the first worshippers of the ibis adored.13 The
bull Hapi was a god-bull long before he became a bull which was
the symbol of a god, and it would not surprise me if the onion-god
that the Roman satirists mocked at really existed.' 14 M. Maspero

10 Maspero, Rev. de VHist. des Rel. i. 126. ' The unity of political power which,
despite the original feudal organisation of the country, had existed since Menes,
brought with it the unity of religion. The schools of theology in Sais, Heliopolis,
Memphis, Abydos, Thebes, produced, perhaps unconsciously, a kind of syncretism
into which they fused or forced all the scattered beliefs.'

11 Rev. de I' Hist, des Rel. i. 120.

12 Pierret, Essai sur la Mythologie Egyptienne, p. 6. ' Polytheiste en apparence,
la religion Egyptienne etait essentiellement monotheiste.' M. Pierret explains the
divine animals thus : these creatures, employed as symbols, became sacred for no
other reason than because they had the honour to be used as vestments of religious
thought (Le Pantheon, Egyptian, p. vi).

13 Mr. Le Page Eenouf, on the other hand (Hib. Lect. p. 116), clings to the belief
that the ibis-god sprang from a misunderstanding of words, a kind of calembour or
pun.

14 When we hear of the one god he is only the god of the town, or nome, and
does not exclude the one god of the neighbours. ' The conception of his unity is,
therefore, at least as much geographical and political as religious. Ea, the one god
at Heliopolis, is not the same as Ammon, tlie one god at Thebes. . . . The unity of
each of these one gods, absolute as it might be in his own country, did not exclude
the reality of the other gods. . . . Each one god, therefore, imagined in this way,
is only the one god of his town, or nome, noutir noutti, and not a national god,
recognised by the whole country.' (Hist, de T Orient, p. 27.)

428 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

goes on to remark that so far as it is possible to speak of one god in
ancient Egypt, that god was, in each case, f nothing but the god of
each nome or town.' M. Meyer is resolute in the same opinion.
* These sentiments (of reverence for beasts) are naturally no expres-
sion of a dim feeling of the unity of godhead, of a " primitive
henotheism," as has so often been asserted, but of the exact oppo-
site.' 15 The same view is taken by MM. Chipiez and Perrot. * Later
theology has succeeded in giving more or less plausible explanations
of the animal gods. Each of them has been assigned as a symbol or
attribute to one of the greater deities. As for ourselves, we have no
doubt that these objects of popular devotion were no more than
ancient fetishes.' 1G Meanwhile it is universally acknowledged, it is
asserted by Mr. Le Page Eenouf, as well as by M. Maspero, that ' the
Egyptian religion comprehends a quantity of local worships.' 17

M. Maspero next describes the earliest religious texts and testi-
monies. * During the Ancient Empire I only find monuments at
four points — at Memphis, at Abydos, and in some parts of Middle
Egypt, at Sinai, and in the valley of Hammamat. The divine names
appear but occasionally, in certain unvaried formulae. Under
Dynasties XI. and XII. Lower Egypt comes on the scene ; the formulae
are more explicit, but the religious monuments rare. From the
eighteenth century onwards, we have representations of all the
deities ' (previously only named, not pictured), ' accompanied by
legends, more or less developed, and we begin to discover books of
ritual, hymns, amulets, and other materials ' 18

What, then, are the earliest gods of the monuments, the gods
which were local, and had once probably been tribal gods ? Mr. Flinders
Petrie 19 observes that Egyptian art is first native, then Semitic, then
renascence or revival. In the earliest period, till Dynasty XII.
native art prevails, and in this earliest art the gods are invariably
portrayed as beasts. ' The gods, when mentioned, are always
represented by their animals' (M. Maspero says that the animals
were the gods) * or with the name spelt out in hieroglyphs, often
beside the beast or bird. The jackal stands for Anup ' (M. Maspero
would apparently say that Anup is the jackal), * the frog for Hekt,
the baboon for Tahuti ; ... it is not till after Semitic influence
had begun to work in the country that any figures of gods are found.'
Under Dynasty XII. the gods that had previously been repre-
sented in art as beasts appear in their later shapes, often half
anthropomorphic, half zoomorphic, dog-headed, cat-headed, hawk-
headed, bull-headed men and women. These figures are probably
derived from those of the priests, half draped in the hides of the
animals to which they ministered. Compare the Aztec pictures.

14 Geschichte des Alterthums, p. 72.

16 Egyptian Art, English translation, i. 54. The word ' fetish ' is here very loosely
employed. » Hib. Lect. p. 90.

18 Rev. de THiat. des Rel. i. 124. w The Arts of Ancient Egypt, p. 8.

1886

EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS.

429

It is now set forth, first, that the earliest gods capable of being
represented in art were local (that is originally tribal), and, second,
that these gods were beasts.20 How, then, is this phenomenon to
be explained ? MM. Pierret and Le Page Kenouf, as we have seen,
take the old view of the Egyptian priests that the beast-gods are
mere symbols of the attributes of divinity. MM. Chipiez and
Perrot regard the beast-gods as * fetishes,' and suppose that the
domestic animals were originally worshipped out of gratitude. 21 But
who could be grateful to a frog or a jackal ? As to the fact, their
opinion is explicit : ' the worship of the hawk, the vulture, and the
ibis had preceded by many centuries that of the gods who correspond
to the personages of the Hellenic pantheon,' such as Dionysus and
Apollo. 'The doctrines of emanation and incarnation permitted
theology to explain and accept these things.' Our own explanation
will have been anticipated. The totems, or ancestral sacred plants
and animals of groups of the original savage kindreds, have survived
in religion as the sacred plants (garlic, for example) and animals of
Egyptian towns and nomes.22

Here we are fortunate enough to have the support of Professor
Sayce.23 He remarks : —

These animal forms, in which a later myth saw the shapes assumed by the
affrighted gods during the great war between Horus and Typhon, take us back to a
remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt was still totemism. They
are survivals from a long-forgotten past, and prove that Egyptian civilisation was
of slow and independent growth, the latest stage only of which is revealed to us
by the monuments. Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and Pacis of Her-
monthis, are all links that bind together the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Egypt
of the stone age. They were the sacred animals of the clans which first settled
in these localities, and their identification with the deities of the official religion
must have been a slow process, never fully carried out, in fact, in the minds of
the lower classes.24

Thus it appears that, after all, even on philological showing, the
religions and myths of a civilised people may be illustrated by the
religions and myths of savages. It is purely through study of
savage totemism that an explanation has been found of the singular
Egyptian practices which puzzled the Greeks and Romans, and the
Egyptians themselves.25 The inhabitants of each district worshipped
a particular sacred animal, and abstained from its flesh (except on
rare occasions of ritual solemnity), while each set of people ate with-

20 Beasts also appear in the chronological roll of the earliest kings. Turin papyrus
(Brugsch, Hist, of Egypt, Engl. transl. p. 32).

21 Chipiez and Perrot, i. 64.

22 Eusebius quotes from Alexander Polyhistor an absurd story that Moses founded
a town, and selected the ibis for its protecting animal {Prap. Ev. ix. 432).

23 Herodotus, p. 344.

24 Ibid. p. 344.

25 Mr. Le Page Renouf ridicules, in the H'Mert Lectures, this discovery of Mr.
M'Lennan's, whose original sketch of his ideas was certainly hasty, and not well
documente.

430 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

out scruple the animal or vegetable gods of their neighbours.26
Thus the people of Mendes sacrificed sheep and abstained from goats,
while the Thebans sacrificed goats and abstained from sheep.27 To
explain this, Herodotus repeats a ' sacred chapter ' of peculiar folly.
Ammon once clad himself in a ram's skin, and so revealed himself to
Heracles, therefore rams are sacred. But on one day of the year the
Thebans sacrifice a ram, and clothe the statue of Ammon in its hide,
thereby making the god simulate the beast, as in the totem dances
of the Red Indians. They then lament for the ram, and bury his
body in a sacred sepulchre.28 In the same way the crocodile was
worshipped at Ombos (just as it is by the ' men of the crocodile,' or
men of the cayman, among Bonis in South America and Bechuanas
in South Africa), but was destroyed elsewhere. The yearly sacrifice
and lamentation for the ram is well illustrated by the practice of
the Californian Indians, who adore the buzzard, but sacrifice a buzzard
with sorrow and groanings once a year. In the same way the
Egyptians sacrificed a sow to Osiris once a year, and tasted pork on
that occasion only.29 Thus it seems scarcely possible to deny the
early and prolonged existence of totemistic practices in Egyptian
religion. We have not yet seen, however, that the people who
would not eat this or that animal actually claimed to be of the stock
or lineage of the animal. But Dr. Birch points out 30 that ' the
Theban kings were called sons of Amen, of the blood or substance of
the god, and were supposed to be the direct descendants of that deity,'
who was, more or less, a ram. Thus it seems that the Theban royal house
were originally of the blood of the sheep and claimed descent from the
animal. Other evidence as to the totem ism of Egypt may be found
in Plutarch, Athenseus, Juvenal, and generally in ancient literature.31
Thus it remains certain, however and whenever the practice was in-

M Herodotus, ii. 42.

27 Compare Robertson Smith on ' Sacrifice,' Encyc. Brit.

28 Herodotus, ii. 42. * All the folk of the Theban nome abstain from sheep and
sacrifice goats.' ' The sacred animals or totems of one district were not sacred in
another.' (Sayce's note.)

29 Herodotus, ii. 47; Leffibure, Les Yeux, p. 44; Plutarch, De Is. et Os. 8;
Bancroft, iii. 108 ; Robinson's Life in California, 241, 303.

» Wilkinson, edit, of 1878, ii. 475, note 2.

81 De Is. et Os. 71, 72 ; Atken. Dnp. vii. 299 ; Juvenal, xv. Plutarch says : ' Even
at the present day the people of Wolf-town (Lycopolis) are the only Egyptians that
eat the sheep, because the wolf, whom they worship, does the same, and the fish-folk
of Oxyrhyncus, when the people of Dog-town were eating that fish, collected dogs
and sacrificed them, and ate them as victims,' whence a civil war began. The reader
must remember that it would be most hazardous to interpret every bestial form in
Egyptian religion as originally a totem. When animal forms were used as hiero-
glyphs they might readily become attached to divine figures and legends, with no
totemistic reference or intention. A number of facts must combine before totemistic
character can be demonstrated. Among these facts is the exclusive attachment to, and
refusal (except on sacramental occasions) to taste the flesh of the one beast who is
worshipped, combined with a belief in descent from or close mystic connection with
him.

1886 EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. 431

troduced, that the cat, the goat, the wolf, the sheep, the crocodile, were
worshipped by local communities in Egypt, and that, in each district,
the flesh of the local sacred animal might not be eaten by his fellow-
townsmen. If, then, we find animals so powerful in Egyptian religion
and myth, we need not look further, but may explain the whole set of
beliefs and rites — the local beast-gods, not eaten by their worshippers,
but eaten by the people of other nomes — as a survival of totemism.
Or will it be maintained that totemism among the lowest races of
Australia, America, Asia, and Africa, sprang from a priestly habit of
worshipping the attributes of Grod under bestial disguises ? Among
other defects, this theory does not account for the local or tribal
character of the creed. If the sheep typifies divine longsuffering,
and the wolf divine justice, why were people of one nome so fiercely
attached to justice, and so violently opposed to mercy ?

The beast-gods of Egypt were the laughing-stock of Greeks,
Eomans, and Christians like Clemens of Alexandria and Arnobius.
Their prevalence proves that a savage element entered into Egyptian
religion. But the savage element in its rudest form is only part,
though perhaps the most striking part, of the creeds of Egypt.
Anthropomorphic and monotheistic conceptions are also present,
forces and phenomena of nature are adored and looked on as persons,
while the dead are gods, in a sense, and receive offerings and sacrifice.
It is true that all these factors are so blended in the witch's cauldron
of fable that the anthropomorphic gods are constantly said to assume
animal shape : that the deity, at any moment addressed as one and
supreme, is at the next shown to be but an individual in a divine
multitude ; while the very powers and phenomena of nature are often
held to be bestial or human in their shapes. Various historical
influences are at work in the growth of all this body of myth and
observance.

It is certain that many even of the lowest races retain, side by
side with the most insane fables, a sense of a moral Being, who
watches men, and ' makes for righteousness.'

This sense is not lacking in Egyptian religion, and expresses
itself in the hymns and prayers for moral help and for the pardon of
sin, and in the Myth of the Destruction of Mankind by the wrath of
Ra. Once more, as a feeling of national unity grew up, the common
features of the various tribal deities were blended in one divine con-
ception, and various one-gods were recognised, just as in Samoa 32 one
god is incarnate in many beasts. We have the sun-crocodile, Sebek-
Ra, the sun-ram, Ammon-Ra, just as in Samoa we have the war-god
owl, the war-god rail-bird, the war-god mullet, and so forth. The
worship of the Pharaoh of the day was also a cult in which all could
unite. The learned fancy of priests and theologians was busy at the
task of reconciling creeds apparently diverse or opposed.

82 Turner's Samoa.

432 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

In the complex mass of official and departmental gods three main
classes may be more'or less clearly discerned, though even these classes
constantly overlap and merge in each other. Adopting the system of
M. Maspero,33 we distinguish —

(1) The Gods of Death and the Dead.

(2) The Elemental Gods.

(3) The Solar Gods.

But though for practical purposes we may take this division, it must
be remembered that, from the religion of the Eighteenth and later
Dynasties down to the Greek period, any god may, at any moment,
appear in any one of the three categories, as theological dogma, or
local usage, or poetic predilection may determine.

The fact is that the Egyptian mind, when turned to divine matters,
was constantly working on, and working over, the primeval stuff of all
mythologies, the belief in ' a strange and powerful race, supposed to
have been busy on earth before the making, or the evolution, or the
emergence of man.' The Egyptians inherited a number of legends
of extra-natural heroes like the savage Qat, Cagn, Yehl, Pundjel,
loskeha, and Quahteaht, like the Maori Tutenganahau and the South
Sea Tangaroa. Some of these were elemental forces, personified in
human or bestial guise ; some were merely idealised medicine-men, or
even actual men credited with magical gifts and powers. Their
' wanderings, rapes, and manslaughters, and mutilations,' as Plutarch
says, remained permanently in legend. When these beings, in the
advance of thought, had obtained divine attributes, and when the
conception of abstract divinity had become pure and lofty, the old
legends became so many stumbling-blocks to the faithful. They
were explained away as allegories (every student having his own
allegorical system), or the extra-natural beings were taken (as by
Plutarch) to be * demons, not gods.'

A brief and summary account of the chief figures in the Egyptian
pantheon will make it sufficiently plain that this is the true account
of the gods of Egypt, and the true interpretation of their adventures.

Returning to the classification proposed by M. Maspero, and
remembering the limitations under which it holds good, we find
that—

(1) The Gods of Death and the Dead were Sokari, Isis and
Osiris, the young Horus, and Nepthys.34

(2) The Elemental Gods were Seb and Nut, of whom Seb is the
earth, and Nut the heavens. These two, like heaven and earth in
almost all mythologies, are represented as the parents of many of the
gods. The other elemental deities are but obscurely known.

** Loc. cit. p. 125.

14 Their special relations to the souls of the departed is matter for a separate
discussion.

1886 EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. 433

(3) Among solar deities are recognised Ra, Ammon, and others,
feut there was a strong tendency to identify each of the gods with the
sun, especially to identify Osiris with the sun in his nightly absence.35
Each god, again, was apt to be blended with one or more of the
sacred animals. * Ra, in his transformations, assumed the form of
the lion cat, and hawk.' 38 In different nomes and towns, it either
happened that the same gods had different names, or that analogies
were recognised between different local gods, in which case the
names w^re often combined, as in Ammon-Ra, Souk-Ra, Ptah, Sokar,
Osiris, and so forth.

Athwart all these categories and compounds of gods, and athwart
the theological attempt at constructing a monotheism out of contra-
dictory materials, came that ancient idea of dualism which exists in
the myths of the most backward peoples. As Pundjel in Australia had
his enemy, the crow, as in America Yehl had his Khanukh, as loskeha
had his Tawiscara, so the gods of Egypt, and specially Osiris, have
their Set or Typhon, the spirit who constantly resists and destroys.

The great Egyptian myth, the myth of Osiris, turns on the
antagonism of Osiris and Set, and the persistence of the blood-feud
between Set and the kindred of Osiris.37 To narrate, and as far as
possible elucidate, this myth is the chief task of the student of
Egyptian mythology.

Though the Osiris myth, according to Mr. Le Page Renouf, is
( as old as Egyptian civilisation/ and though M. Maspero finds the
Osiris myth in all its details under the first dynasties, our accounts
of it are by no means so early.38 They are mainly allusive, without

34 ' The Gods of the Dead and the Elemental Gods were almost all identified with
the Sun, for the purpose of blending them in a theistic unity ' (Maspero, Rev. de
I1 Hist, des Rel. i. 126).

*• Wilkinson, iii. 59. 87 Herodotus, ii. 144.

88 The principal native documents are : the Harris Papyrus of the Nineteenth
or Twentieth Dynasty, translated by M. Chabas (Records of tlie Past, vol. x. p. 137) ;
the Papyrus of Nebseni (Seventeenth Dynasty), translated by M. Naville, and in
Records of Past, x. 159 ; the Hymn to Osiris, on a stele (Eighteenth Dynasty),
translated by M. Chabas {Rev. ArcMol. 1857 ; Records of Past, iv. 99) ; ' The Book
of Respirations,' mythically said to have been made by Isis to restore Osiris, a ' Book
of the Breath of Life ' (the papyrus is probably of the time of the Ptolemies —
Records of Past, iv. 119) ; 'The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys,' translated by
M. de Horrack {Records of Past, ii. 117). There is also ' The Book of the Dead,' of
which many editions exist in French and German : that of M. Pierret (Paris, 1882)
is convenient in shape. M. de Naville's new edition is elaborate and costly. Sarco-
phagi and royal tombs (Champollion) also contain many representations of the
incidents in the m 'th. 'The myth of Osiris in its details, the laying out of his body
by his wife Isis an his sister Nepthys, the reconstruction of his limbs, his mythical
chest, and other incidents connected with his myth, are {sic) represented in detail in
the temple of Philje ' (Birch, ap. Wilkinson, iii. 84). The reverent awe of Herodotus
prevents him from describing the mystery play on the sufferings of Osiris, which he
says was acted at Sais, ii. 171, and ii. 61, 67, 86. Probably the clearest and most
consecutive modern account of the Osiris myth is given by M. Lefebure, in Les Ycux
tTHorus and Osiris. M. Lefebure's translations are followed in the text ; he is not,

VOL. XX.— No. 115. HH

434 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

any connected narrative. Fortunately the narrative, as related by
the priests of his own time, is given by Plutarch, and is confirmed
both by the Egyptian texts and by the mysterious hints of the pious
Herodotus. Here we follow the myth as reported by Plutarch and
illustrated by the monuments.

The reader must, for the moment, clear his mind of all the many
theories of the meaning of the myth, and must forget the lofcy,
divine, and mystical functions attributed by Egyptian theologians
and Egyptian sacred usage to Osiris. He must read the story simply
as a story, and he will be struck with its amazing resemblances to
the legends about their culture heroes which are current among the
lowest races of America and Africa.

Seb and Nut — earth and heaven — were husband and wife, or, as
Plutarch put it, the Sun detected them in adultery. In Plutarch's
version, the Sun cursed Nut that she should have no child in month
or year ; but, thanks to the cleverness of a new divine co-respondent,
five days were added to the calendar. This is clearly a later addition
to the fable. On the first of those days Osiris was born, then
Typhon, or Set, ( neither in due time, nor in the right place, but
breaking through with a blow, he leaped out from his mother's
side.' 39 Isis and Nepthys were later-born sisters.

The Plutarchian myth next describes the conduct of Osiris as a
'culture hero.' He instituted laws, taught agriculture, instructed
the Egyptians in the ritual of worship, and won them from ' their
destitute and bestial mode of living.' After civilising Egypt, he
travelled over the world, like the Greek Dionysus, whom he so
closely resembles in some portions of his legend that Herodotus
supposed the Dionysian myth to have been imported from Egypt.40
In the absence of Osiris, his evil brother, Typhon, kept quiet. But,
on the hero's return, Typhon laid an ambush against him, like

however, responsible for our treatment of the myth. The Ptolemaic version of the
temple of Edfou is published by M. Naville, Mytlie tV Horns (Geneva, 1870).

39 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, xii. It is a most curious coincidence that the
same story is told of Indra in the Rig Veda, iv. 18. 1. ' This is the old and well-known
path by which all the gods were born: thou inayst not, by other means, bring thy
mother unto death.' Indra replies, ' I will not go out thence : that is a dangerous
way; right through the side will I burst.' Compare (Leland, Algonquin Legends, p.
15) the birth of the Algonquin Typhon, the evil Malsumis, the wolf. ' Glooskap said,
"I will be born as others are."' But the evil Malsumis thought himself too great to be
brought forth in such a manner, and declared that he would burst through his
mother's side. Mr. Leland's note, containing a Buddhist and an Armenian parallel,
but referring neither to Indra nor Typhon, shows_the bona fides of the Algonquin
report.

40 ' Osiris is Dionysus in the tongue of Hellas ' (Herodotus, ii. 144, ii. 48). ' Most
of the details of the mystery of Osiris, as practised by the Egyptians, resemble the
Dionysus mysteries of Greece. . . . Methinks that Melampus, Amythaon's son, was
well seen in this knowledge, for it was Melampus that brought among the Greeks the
name and rites and phallic procession of j Dionysus.' (Compare De Is. et Os. xxxv.)
The coincidences are probably not to be explained by borrowing ; many of them are
found in America.

1886 EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. 435

^Egistheus against Menelaus. He had a decorated coffer (mummy
case ?) made of the exact length of Osiris, and offered this as a
present to any one whom it would fit. At a banquet all the guests
tried it ; but when Osiris lay down in it the lid was closed, and fas-
tened with nails and melted lead. The coffer, Osiris and all, was
then thrown into the Nile. Isis, arrayed in mourning robes like the
wandering Demeter, sought Osiris everywhere lamenting, and found
the chest at last in an erica tree that entirely covered it. After an
adventure like that of Demeter with Triptolemus, Isis obtained the
chest. During her absence Typhon lighted on it as he was hunting
by moonlight ; he tore the corpse of Osiris into fourteen pieces, and
scattered them abroad. Isis sought for the mangled remnants, and,
whenever she found one, buried it. each tomb being thenceforth
recognised as ' a grave of Osiris.' It is a plausible suggestion that,
if graves of Osiris were once as common in Egypt as cairns of Heitsi
Eibib are in Namaqualand to-day, the existence of many tombs, of
one being may be explained as tombs of his scattered members,
and the myth of the dismembering may have no other foundation.
On the other hand, it must be noticed that a swine was sacrificed to
Osiris at the full moon, and it was in the form of a black swine that
Typhon assailed Horus, the son of Osiris, whose myth is a doublure
or replica, in some respects, of the Osirian myth itself.41 We
may conjecture, then, that the fourteen portions into which the
body of Osiris was rent may stand for the fourteen days of
the waning moon.42 It is well known that the phases of the moon
and lunar eclipses are almost invariably accounted for in savage
science by the attacks of a beast — dog, pig, dragon, or what not — on
the heavenly body. Either of these hypotheses (the Egyptians
adopted the latter 43) is consistent with the character of early myth,
but both are merely tentative suggestions.44 The phallus of Osiris
was not recovered, and the totemistic habit which made the people
of three different districts abstain from three different fish — lepi-
dotus, phagrus, and oxyrhyncus — was accounted for by the legend
that these fish had devoured the missing portion of the hero's body.

So far the power of evil, the black swine Typhon, had been
triumphant. But the blood-feud was handed on to Horus, son of
Isis and Osiris. To spur Horus on to battle, Osiris returned from
the dead, like Hamlet's father. But, as is usual with the ghosts of
savage myth, Osiris returned, not in human but in bestial form, as
a wolf.45 Horus was victorious in the war which followed, and

41 In the Edfou monuments Set is slain and dismembered in the shape of a red
hippopotamus (Naville, Mytlie d'Horus, p. 7).

42 The fragments of Osiris were sixteen, according to the texts of Denderah, one
for each nome. 43 De Is. et Os. xxxv.

44 Compare Lefebure, Les Yeux cPIlorus, pp. 47, 48.

45 Wicked squires in Shropshire (Miss Burne, Shropshire Folk-Lore) ' come ' as
bulls. Osiris, in the Mendes nome, ' came ' as a ram (Mariette, Denderah, iv. 75).

H H 2

436 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

handed Typhon over bound in chains to Isis. Unluckily Isis let him
go free, whereon Horus pushed off her crown and placed a bull's
skull on her head.

There Plutarch ends, but46 he expressly declines to tell the
more blasphemous parts of the story, such as * the dismemberment
of Horus and the beheading of Isis.' Why these myths should be
considered ' more blasphemous ' than the rest does not appear.

It will probably be admitted that nothing in this sacred story
would seem out of place if we found it in the legends of Pundjel, or
Cagn, or Yehl, among Australians, Bushmen, or Utes, whose own
' culture hero,' like the ghost of Osiris, was a wolf. The dismem-
bering of Osiris in particular resembles the dismembering of many
other heroes in American myth ; for example, of Chokanipok, out of
whom were made vines and flint-stones. Objects in the mineral
and vegetable world were explained in Egypt as transformed parts,
or humours, of Osiris, Typhon, and other heroes.47

Once more, though the Egyptian gods are buried here, and are
immortal in heaven, they have also, like the heroes of Eskimo and
Australians, and Indians of the Amazon, been transformed into stars,
and the priests could tell which star was Osiris, which was Isis, and
which was Typhon.48 Such are the wild inconsistencies which
Egyptian religion shares with the fables of the lowest races. In
view of these facts it is difficult to agree with Brugsch 49 that ' from
the root and trunk of a pure conception of deity spring the boughs
and twigs of a tree of myth, whose leaves spread into a rank im-
penetrable luxuriance.' Stories like the Osiris myth, stories found all
over the whole world, spring from no pure religious source, but embody
the delusions and fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed
human fancy and human speculation.

The references to the myth in papyri and on the monuments, though
obscure and fragmentary, confirm the narrative of Plutarch. The coffer
in which Osiris foolishly ventured himself seems to be alluded to in the
Harris Magical Papyrus.50 * Get made for me a shrine of eight cubits.
Then it was told to thee, 0 man of seven cubits, how canst thou enter
it? And it had been made for thee, and thou hast reposed in it.' Here,
too, Isis magically stops the mouths of the Nile, perhaps to prevent
the coffer from floating out to sea. More to the point is one of the
original ' Osirian hymns ' mentioned by Plutarch.51 The hymn is on
a stele, and is attributed by M. Chabas, the translator, to the seven-

" DC Is. et Os. xx.

47 Magical Text, Nineteenth Dynasty, translated by Dr. Birch ; Records of Past,
vi. 115; Lefebure, Osiris, pp.100, 113, 124, 205; Litre des Marts, chapter xvii. ;
Records of Past, x. 84.

48 Custom and Myth, 'Star Myths; ' De Rouge, Nour. Not. p. 197; Lefebure,
Osiris, p. 213.

49 Religion und Mytkologic, p. 99.

w Records of Past, x. L54. •' De Is. et Os. 211.

1886 EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. 437

teenth century.52 Osiris is addressed as the joy and glory of his
parents, Seb and Nou, who overcomes his enemy. His sister, Isis,
accords to him due funeral rites after his death, and routs his foes.
Without ceasing, without resting, she sought his dead body, and
wailing did she wander round the world, nor stopped till she found
him. Light flashed from her feathers.53 Horus, her son, is king of
the world.

Such is a precis of the mythical part of the hymn. The rest
regards Osiris in his religious capacity as a sovereign of nature, and
as the guide and protector of the dead. The hymn corroborates, as
far as it goes, the narrative of Plutarch, two thousand years later.
Similar confirmation is given by ' The Lamentations of Isis and
Nepthys,' a papyrus found within a statue of Osiris, in Thebes. The
sisters wail for the dead hero, and implore him to * come to his own
abode.' The theory of the birth of Horus, here, is that he was
formed out of the scattered members of Osiris, an hypothesis, of course,
inconsistent with the other myths (especially with the myth that he
dived for the members of Osiris, in the shape of a crocodile54), and,
therefore, all the more mythical. On the sarcophagus of Seti the
First (now in the Soane Museum), among pictures and legends de-
scriptive of the soul's voyage after death, there is a design of a
mummy. Behind it comes a boat manned by a monkey, who drives
away a pig called ' the devourer of the body,' referring to Typhon as a
swine, and to the dismemberment of Osiris and Horus. The Book
of Respirations, finally, contains the magical songs by which Isis was
feigned to have restored breath and life to Osiris.55 In the repre-
sentations of the vengeance and triumph of Horus, on the temple
walls of Edfou, in the Ptolemaic period, Horus, accompanied by Isis,
not only chains up and pierces the red hippopotamus (or pig in some
designs), who is Set, but, exercising reprisals, cuts him into pieces as
Set cut Osiris. Isis instructs Osiris as to the portion which properly
falls to each of nine gods. Isis reserves his head and ' saddle,' Osiris
gets the thigh, the bones are given to the cats. As each god had
his local habitation in a given town, there is doubtless reference to
local myths. At Edfou also the animal of Set is sacrificed sym-
bolically, in his image made of paste, a common practice in ancient
Mexico.56 Many of these myths, as M. Naville remarks, are doubtless
setiological — the priests, as in the Brakmanas, told them to account
for peculiar parts of the ritual, and to explain strange local names.
Thus the names of many places are explained by myths setting forth
that they commemorate some event in the campaign of Horus against
Set. In precisely the same way the local superstitions, originally

M Rev. Archeol. May 1857.

53 Plutarch says that Isis took the form of a swallow.

54 Marietta, DenderaTi, iv. 77, 88, 89. " Records of Past, iv. 121.

56 Herodotus, I. ii. 47; Plutarch, Is. et Os. 90. See also Porphyry's Life of
Pythagoras, who sacrificed a bull made of paste.

438 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

totemic, about various animals, were explained by myths attaching
these animals to the legends of the gods. If the myth has any his-
torical significance it may refer to the triumph of the religion of
Horus over Semitic belief in Set.

Explanations of the Osiris myth, thus handed down to us, were
common among the ancient students of religion. Plutarch reports
many of them in his tract De Iside et Osiride. They are all the inter-
pretations of civilised men, whose method is to ask themselves, * Now,
if / had told such a tale as this, or invented such a mystery play of
divine misadventures, what meaning could / have intended to convey
in what is apparently blasphemous nonsense ? ' There were moral,
solar, lunar, cosmical, tellurian, and other methods of accounting for
a myth which, in its origin, appears to be one of the world-wide early
legends of the strife between a fabulous good being and his brother,
a fabulous evil being. Most probably some incidents from a moon-
myth have also crept into, or from the first made part of, the tale of
Osiris. The enmity of Typhon to the eyes of Horus, which he
extinguishes, and which are restored,57 has much the air of an early
mythical attempt to explain the phenomena of eclipses, or even of
sunset. We can plainly see how local and tribal superstitions, ac-
cording to which this or that beast, fish, or tree was held sacred,
came to be tagged to the general body of the myth. This or that
fish was not to be eaten, this or that tree was holy ; and men who
had lost the true explanation of these superstitions explained them
by saying that the fish had tasted, or the tree had sheltered, the
mutilated Osiris.

This view of the myth, while it does not pretend to account for
every detail, refers it to a large class of similar narratives, to the
barbarous dualistic legends about the original good and bad extra-
natural beings, which are still found current among contemporary
savages. These tales are the natural expression of the savage fancy,
and we presume that the myth survived in Egypt, just as the use
of flint-headed arrows and flint knives survived during millenniums
in which bronze and iron were perfectly familiar. The cause assigned
is adequate, and the process of survival is verified.

Whether this be the correct theory of the fundamental facts of
the myth or not, it is certain that the myth received vast practical
and religious developments. Osiris did not remain the mere culture
hero of whom we have read the story, wounded in the house of his
friends, dismembered, restored, and buried, reappearing as a wolf or
bull, or translated to a star. His worship pervaded the whole of
Egypt, and his name grew into a kind of hieroglyph for all that is
divine.

The Osirian type, in its long evolution, ended in being the symbol of the whole
deified universe — under-world and world of earth, the waters above and the

" Lirre des Norti, 112, 113.

1886 EGYPTIAN DIVINE MYTHS. 439

•waters below ; it is Osiris that floods Egypt in the Nile, and that clothes her with
the growing grain. His are the sacred eyes, the sun that is born daily and meets
a daily death, the moon that every month is young and waxes old. Osiris is the
•soul that animates these, the soul that vivifies all things, and all things are but his
body. He is, like Ra of the royal tombs, the Earth and the Sun, the Creator and
-the Created.58

Such is the splendid sacred vestment which Egyptian theology wove
for the mangled and massacred hero of the myth. All forces, all
powers, were finally recognised in him ; he was sun and moon, and the
maker of all things ; he was the truth and the life, in him all men
were justified. His functions as a king over death and the dead
find their scientific place among other myths of the homes of the
departed. M. Lefebure recognises in the name Osiris the meaning
•of ' the infernal abode,' or ' the nocturnal residence of the sacred
eye,' for, in the duel of Set and Horus, he sees a mythical account
of the daily setting of the sun.59 ' Osiris himself, the sun at his
setting, became a centre round which the other incidents of the war
of the gods gradually crystallised.' Osiris is also the earth. It would
be difficult either to prove or disprove this contention, and the usual
divergency of opinion as to the meaning and etymology of the word
4 Osiris ' has always prevailed.60 Plutarch 61 identifies Osiris with
Hades ; * both,' says M. Lefebure, ' originally meant the dwellings —
and came to mean the god — of the dead.' In the same spirit Anubis,
the jackal (a beast still dreaded as a ghost by the Egyptians), is
explained as ' the circle of the horizon,' or ' the portals of the land
of darkness,' the gate kept, as Homer would say, by Hades, the
mighty warden. "Whether it is more natural that men should repre-
sent the circle of the horizon as a jackal, or that a jackal totem
should survive as a god, mythologists will decide for themselves. The
jackal, by a myth that cannot be called pious, was said to have eaten
his father, Osiris. Thus, throughout the whole realm of Egyptian
myths, when we find beast-gods, blasphemous fables, apparent nature-
myths, such as are familiar in Australia, South Africa, or among the
Eskimo, we may suppose that these are survivals, or we may imagine
that they are the symbols of nobler ideas deemed appropriate by
priestly fancy. Thus the hieroglyphic name of Ptah, for example,
shows a little figure carrying something heavy on his head, and this
denotes ' him who raised the heaven above the earth.' But is this
image derived from un point de vue philosophique,62 or is it-
borrowed from a tale like that of the Maori Tutenganahau, who firsc
severed heaven and earth ? The most enthusiastic anthropologist
must admit that, among a race which constantly used a kind of
picture-writing, symbols of noble ideas might be represented in the

59 Leffibure, Osiris, p. 248. 59 Osiris, p. 129.

60 See the guesses of etymologists (Osiris, pp. 132, 133). Horus has ever been
connected with the Greek Hera, as the atmosphere !

61 De Is. et Os. 75. e" Lefebure, Osiris, 159.

440 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

coarsest concrete forms, as of animals and monster?. The most
devoted believer in symbolism, on the other hand, ought to be aware
that most of the phenomena which he explains as symbolic are plain
matters of fact, or supposed fact, among hundreds of the lower
peoples. However, Egyptologists are seldom students of the lower
races and their religions.

The hypothesis maintained here is that most of the Egyptian
gods (theriomorphic in their earliest shapes), and that certain of the
myths about these gods, are a heritage derived from the savage-
condition. It is beyond doubt that the Egyptian gods, whom
Plutarch would not call gods, but demons, do strangely resemble
the extra-natural beings of Hottentots, Iroquois, Australians, and
Bushmen. Isis, Crisis, Anubis do assume animal shapes at will, or
are actually animals sans phrase. They do deal in magical powers.
They do herd with ghosts. They are wounded, and mangled, and
die, and commit adulteries, rapes, incests, fratricides, murders ; and
are changed into stars. These coincidences between Cahroc and
Thlinkeet and Piute faiths on one side, and Egyptian on the other,
cannot be blinked. They must spring from one identical mental
condition. Now, either the points in Egyptian myth which we have
just mentioned are derived from a mental condition like that of
Piutes, Thlinkeets, and Cahrocs, or the myths of Thlinkeets, Cahrocsy
or Piutes are derived from a mental condition like that of the
Egyptians. But where is the proof that the lower races ever
possessed ' the wisdom of the Egyptians,' and their splendid and
durable civilisation ? ^

ANDREW LANG.

63 A curious example of a choice to make between the symbolical and historical
methods occurs when we read (in Diodorus, i. 85) that Osiris, like the daughter of
Mycerinus (Herodotus, ii. 129), was buried in a wooden cow. The symbolical method
explains the cow as ' the goddess of the space under the earth.' The historical method
remembers that, in Abyssinia, the dead of a certain tribe are still sewn up in cows'
hides, placed in a boat, ,Tkand launched on the waters (Lefebure, quoting Speke)~
Professor Sayce thinks the cow 'must have been a symbol of Isis-Hathor.' What do
the Abyssinians think 1

1886

441

OUR SUPERSTITION ABOUT
CONST AN TINOPLE.

A MODERN humorist tells us of an unhappy man who, having been
cast into a loathsome dungeon, there lingered in darkness and
suffering for twenty years, at the end of which period * he opened
the door and went out.' For a very much longer period than twenty
years the energies of England have been imprisoned in the grim
circle of European quarrels, with the apparently impenetrable gate
of the Eastern question shutting her off for ever from a free use of
her natural powers. Beyond doubt it would be an extraordinary
deliverance if we were able to follow the example of the hero of the
romance alluded to, to i open the door and walk out ; ' and, animated
by the example and encouraged by the result, I am tempted to ask,
« Why not ? '

But before attempting to answer the inquiry it will be worth
while to recall some of the conditions of the case as it stands, to re-
view the loss and danger which are involved in the continuance of
the existing state of facts, and to appreciate the tenacity of the
tradition which keeps us spellbound in a servitude to which it is
no longer either our duty or our interest to submit.

For many years past the very phrase the ' Eastern question *
has had a sinister sound for Englishmen. That its ramifications
were endless was admitted, that its ultimate solution by fire and
sword was inevitable was, and still is, an axiom ; that, whatever
wisdom might be displayed in postponing the end, England must,
beyond all power of escape, be involved in the final catastrophe,
has always been an equally uncontro verted article of every Eng-
lishman's political faith.

That the Eastern question exists is a sorrowful fact, that its
solution can only be accomplished by force of arms is probably no
less certain ; that we are intimately and necessarily concerned in its
solution is another, and by no means equally evident proposition.
Yet that we are and must be so concerned has been assumed by
almost every English statesman during the present century : the
assumption is equally general and equally sincere among the leaders
of both parties at the present day. For England the Eastern ques-
tion has always meant and still means the possession of Constanti-

442 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

nople ; and, indeed, all its developments are practically subordinate to
this one central idea. Half a dozen times we have armed, and nearly
as often we have fought on the occasion of some new Eastern panic ;
but Constantinople has always, and under every disguise, been the
real cause of our alarm.

It is neither wise nor profitable to indulge in general criticisms
of the policy of our forefathers. It is not necessary to deny, and it
is perhaps respectful to admit, that they knew their own business
best. But there can be no doubt as to what they thought their
business was, namely, to preserve the balance of power in Europe,
and to maintain the position of England as one of the Great Powers
of their time. If we admit the correctness of their aim, there can
be no doubt that successive Governments fought with admirable
tenacity and a great measure of success to attain it. But the re-
sult of their exertions has in one respect been far from satisfactory.
The policy, which in their hands was possibly a wise and certainly a
practical one, has outlived the conditions of its creation, and has
survived as a baneful legacy to a time when all the facts which gave
it any reality have passed away.

There can be no doubt of the survival. With very few exceptions
there is not a public man in England who would hesitate to pledge
this country to a war on behalf of Constantinople, and who would
not on any platform or in any debate assume as an incontrovertible
proposition that the final settlement of the south-eastern corner of
Europe could not possibly be accomplished without this country
being involved in the conflagration by which it must be preceded.

It is hardly necessary to seek for much further illustration of
this truth. Every act of our foreign policy demonstrates it; the
disposition of our scanty forces is a testimony to it ; the fact that
the too numerous class of politicians and journalists who live by
parading the irreconcilable unorthodoxy of their views on every ques-
tion on which there is general agreement have not yet made a
reversal of our Eastern policy a part of their repertoire is an over-
whelming confirmation of it.

And yet, at the risk of being classed forthwith among the de-
testable class to which I have just referred, I venture to believe that
the almost universal consensus of opinion which undoubtedly exists
on this subject is wrong, and will eventually give way to a new and
far more hopeful view with regard to our dangers and our duties in
the East. I should certainly not venture to hold this somewhat
presumptuous opinion in the face of a reasoned and living faith ; but
the dull weight of acquiescence, which is pushing us once more down
the perilous incline which ends in war, is not a living faith, but is a
survival of form over a spirit and an idea which have long passed
away. The conditions under which our Eastern policy was formed
are gone, but the policy still guides us, and will end in guiding us

1886 OUR SUPERSTITION ABOUT CONSTANTINOPLE. 443

to a catastrophe, unless we open our eyes to the facts of the situation.
The awakening may come after the disaster. It will be a thousand
times better if by some means or other it may be produced in time
to enable us to avoid it.

For England the Eastern question means Constantinople. ' The
Russians shall not have Constantinople ' is the popular summary of
a foreign policy sanctioned for many years by the most correct and
diplomatic forms. As to who shall have it that is another question,
which the British public and the British Foreign Office have not as
yet quite made up their minds about.

For a long time there was no difficulty upon this point either.
The Turks had it, and there was no reason to wish that anybody but
the Turks should have it. But by the light of recent events it has
gradually begun to dawn upon the British mind that the forces
which were put in motion under the walls of Vienna in 1683 are not
quite extinct yet, and that the fee-simple of Constantinople is not
vested in the Ottomans by a tenure which can be- depended upon.
It has gradually come to be admitted that a final grand catastrophe
is in store, which will end in the Crescent being removed from St.
Sophia. As to the particular nature of the catastrophe nobody
is agreed ; who will come out of it alive is also a point of much un-
certainty ; but that among the nations who by the force of an irre-
sistible law will be compelled to go into it England must be the
foremost there seems to be no sort of doubt in the mind of anybody.

Undoubtedly this is a very mournful prospect. It is dishearten-
ing to have to sit still without an effort swirling down the rapid
stream till we find ourselves carried in one fearful leap over the great
cataract into the unfathomable whirlpool of war, and suffering, and
misery beyond it. But ' it is inevitable ' say the statesmen and
diplomatists, l it is inevitable ' echoes the public with a marvellous
resignation, * it is inevitable ' is the answer written in every military
and naval depot, in every warlike preparation, in every diplomatic
despatch. It is idle to fight against Fate and the immortal gods.
But ministers, diplomatists, and a phase of uninstructed public opinion
do not represent either Fate or the immortal gods. And when I am
told that these things are inevitable, and that the interests of Eng-
land are inextricably bound up in the solution of the Eastern question,
I simply ask, Why ? And I hope and believe that before many months
are over the British public will have awakened from its lethargy, and
will have propounded in much more importunate tones, and with a
very much greater certainty of getting prompt attention, iny inquiry,
and before they move a man or spend a shilling will ask, Why ?

I believe that the true answer to the question is not far to seek,
nor difficult to uphold. The implication of England in the final
catastrophe of the Eastern question is not inevitable, and can only
result from an entire misapprehension of our true interests and our

444 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

true strength. On every ground of policy and common sense we
ought to put ourselves definitely outside the area of disturbance, and
to refuse positively and doggedly to be drawn into it on any pretext
whatsoever.

In stating the reasons which lead me to this conviction it may
be well to begin with one which, is exceedingly cogent, but some-
what distasteful to our national pride. We ought not to try and
settle the Eastern problem because, to put the matter in its simplest
form, we should fail if we tried. The English people do not devote
much attention to foreign affairs, and it is usually a long time before
changes which are patent to foreign observers are brought home to
the mass of the public in this country. Since 1855 we have for-
tunately been engaged in no European war, and during the thirty
years that have elapsed since the fall of Sebastopol the military
organisation of every country in Europe has undergone a radical
alteration. The conditions which existed in 1855 exist no longer,
and it is indeed doubtful whether in forming our opinions as to the
military power of England we quite take into account the limitations
under which we accomplished a fairly successful campaign a quarter
of a century ago.

In 1854 the Eastern question had reached an acute stage,
and England interfered in arms to secure a satisfactory solution
for the time being. To a certain extent our intervention suc-
ceeded. This much is remembered by the public, but the most
important facts of the situation are forgotten. We fought the
Crimean war in alliance with the greatest military power then
existing, and in addition to French aid we had the assistance of
Turkey and Sardinia, and the more than benevolent neutrality of
Austria. At no time had we 30,000 men in line during the war.
At the end of the campaign we were ourselves buying soldiers
in Switzerland and Germany. In two years, with the help of
our allies, and by the expenditure of an incredible amount of life
and money, we succeeded in reducing a fortress at the extremity
of the Eussian Empire, with which there was no existing internal
communication, and which could only be reinforced or relieved by
regiments which had lost 90 per cent, of their strength on the
road to the front. Every condition under which we obtained this
qualified and costly triumph is changed at the present day. We
were able to get rather under 30,000 men under arms at the
Alma ; we could probably get rather more than 30,000 under the
same conditions at the present day. But at Gravelotte the number
of killed and wounded alone was three times the total of the army
of the Alma.

For many and most conclusive reasons England has stood still in
the matter of military preparation. Europe, for reasons which may
be good or may be bad, has not stood still, but on the contrary haft

1886 OUR SUPERSTITION ABOUT CONSTANTINOPLE. 445

advanced at an appalling rate, till the armed forces available at the
call of any one of the great European powers are to be numbered
by millions. We are extraordinarily fortunate in being able to
dispense with the conscription and all its attendant expenses and
dangers, but it is simply folly to shut our eyes to the consequences
of our choice. The wealth, strength, and intellect of European
nations have for twenty years past been organised for the one pur-
pose of making successful wars. The wealth, strength, and in-
tellect of England have been directed into other channels. An
immense advantage no doubt, but it is useless to ignore the con-
sequences of our choice. We are no longer in a position to engage
with any prospect of success in a contest with any of the military
powers of Europe. We may possibly render some effectual aid by
means of a small contingent to the chief combatants in any future
struggle ; but in such a case we must at once consent to abandon
the position of principals for that of not very important subordinates.
I do not mean to say for a moment that our power as a military
nation has gone, or that under certain conditions and in certain
directions it may not be as great as ever ; but the idea of our com-
peting on land with the great armies of the Continent is ridiculous,
and when people discuss the part to be taken by us in solving the
Eastern question, they will do well to lay this fact to heart.

But the military difficulty is by no means the only or the most
important reason why we should abandon all thoughts of mixing
ourselres up in European quarrels. Fortunately there are other and
much stronger motives for abstention, which make it as desirable for
us to avoid a quarrel, as it must be disastrous for us to enter upon
one.

In a certain very limited number of years from the present time —
it may be two or it may be twenty — Constantinople will have changed
hands, and the hands into which it will have fallen will not be those
of England. As to the change, there can, humanly speaking, be no
doubt whatever. Two centuries ago the backward movement of the
Turks began. Things moved slowly then, they move quickly now,
but not for a single day has there been a check in the movement.
Hungary, Servia, Eoumania, and last, but by no means least, Bul-
garia, have each in their turn been relieved from the presence of the
Turk. Even now little more than Eoumelia remains of the European
provinces of Turkey. The last chapter has not yet come, but it has
very nearly come. The teaching of history is uniform and con-
clusive, but it is not required to prove that the great city on the
Bosphorus cannot much longer remain in the hands of the Otto-
mans. To see Constantinople and to see the Turks there is enough.
The continuance of such a regime in the central point of modern
Europe is inconceivable, incredible. As to who will be the successors
of the Sultan, that must always be a question of deep interest for

446 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

England. Whether it is a question which is worth fighting about
is an entirely different matter. At present Russia and Austria are
racing for the goal. The forthcoming completion of the Bulgarian
section of the railway to Constantinople, the annexation of Bosnia
and Herzegovina, and the commencement of a new line of railway
under Hungarian control, giving a second communication further to
the west, are all points which seem to favour Austria at the present
moment. On the other hand, the divided nationality of the Austrian
army, the unprotected nature of the northern and north-eastern fron-
tier of Hungary, combine with many other circumstances to fortify
the position of Russia. This is not the place to go into a discussion
of the probabilities of a Russo-Austrian campaign, or the enumera-
tion of the strategic advantages of either power might be prolonged
and would form a most interesting study. But one great fact
remains clear above all details, namely, that if ever the unaccom-
plished can be foreseen, and the unknown deduced from the known,
an early conflict between Russia and Austria is among the most
absolute certainties of the European situation. As to the result, it
is of course idle to prophesy, though there can be hardly any doubt
that English sympathies would lie and ought to lie on the side of
the Kaiser as against the Czar.

But to whichever side the victory for the time being may incline,
the mainspring of action on the part of one, at any rate, of the
combatants must remain absolutely intact. It is well that Eng-
lish people should realise fully what is the strength of the idea
which is behind the descent of Russia to the sea. Looked at
from the outside and without prejudice, the situation is a very
striking one ; the forces at work are enormous. A nation of one
Imndred millions is shut up against the north pole with no outlets
save the Arctic Sea and the shallow and often frozen waters of the
Baltic.1 To all intents and purposes this vast nation is one people—
a Russian can be understood from Archangel to Odessa. The im-
perial ukase is obeyed from Wilna to Yladivostock, and, what is still
more important, a single idea can penetrate, and has before now
penetrated, the whole of this enormous population. Southward there
is the sea, tlie sun, and free intercourse with the world, but from
the sea and all that it implies Russia is practically shut off. There
are ports on the Black Sea, it is true, but let us conceive ourselves
for a moment in the position of a Russian at Odessa or Sebastopol.
Imagine the position of English merchants if every vessel leaving
Liverpool were compelled to navigate the Seine for sixty miles under
the guns of French forts before reaching the sea, and to accomplish a
journey of more than a hundred miles in an inland lake locked up at
either end by powerful fortifications. Such is precisely the position

1 The fact that there are one or two posts on the edge of the North Pacific does
not appreciably affect the situation.

1886 OUR SUPERSTITION ABOUT CONSTANTINOPLE. 447

of owners of Kussian shipping passing through the Bosphorus, the
Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles. The situation is an aggra-
vating one beyond doubt, an unavoidable one, it will be said, in view
of the facts of geography. But we can hardly expect Eussia to
take this view ; as a matter of fact, she does not take it, and never
will.

That the irresistible pressure of a hundred million people speak-
ing one language and moved by one idea will break a way to the
sea I firmly believe. There are two points at which the sea may be
reached : the one is Salonica, the other is Bassorah. Granting that
one of these two points for the moment will ultimately be reached,
there can hardly be any doubt as to which can be occupied with the
least disadvantage and danger to England.

It must not be supposed for a moment that I desire to see a
further extension of Russian influence, or an aggrandisement of
Russian power. I have seen something of Russia, and I have learnt
what I could as to her history and her present condition. A deeper ac-
quaintance and a wider study might alter my views ; but at present I
must confess that the extension of Russian authority over any portion
of the earth's surface seems to me an unmitigated curse and calamity
to the spot so afflicted. With such a political system I do not see how
any other result could be anticipated. If England had the commission
of a knight-errant to fight perpetually against evil-doers wherever
found, no doubt a crusade against the Russian Government would be a
fitting and useful exercise of her functions. But, as I am very strongly
of opinion that we have no such commission, and have quite enough
to do in protecting our own inheritance, and in providing for the
happiness of our own people, I see no reason for buckling on our
armour against Russia merely because of her general iniquities, or
because of any action on her part in Eastern Europe, unless arid until
our own interests are really threatened. At that point I would have
us fight instantly, choosing our own ground and our own method, for
I have a sufficiently strong belief in the value of England and our
Empire to resent at once anything which might seem likely to interfere
with our progress. But does Russia on the Mediterranean, or still
less Russia fighting in Eastern Europe in order to get to the Medi-
terranean, interfere with us at all, or at any rate to such an extent as
to make it worth our while to spend a man or a shilling in prevent-
ing her ?

I do not think so. Assume the worst, and picture Russia seated
on the Bosphorus with the control of the Dardanelles. According
to all the accepted traditions of English statesmanship, such a con-
summation would be equivalent to the end of the British Empire, the
one great and awful calamity to avoid which all our resources should
be expended and the four quarters of the world involved in war. But
is this so ? It would be unfortunate certainly. Constantinople is a

448 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

wonderful city, the Bosphorus is a magnificent port. But Marseilles
is also a great city, Venice is a great city ; Toulon, Spezzia, and
Fiume are great ports ; and yet in the face of all of them the work
of the British Empire goes on and prospers. Why is it so self-evi-
dent that the existence of one more great military power upon the
Mediterranean could conjure up a danger which the presence of the
great French, Italian, and Austrian strongholds has not yet created?
To Austria, doubtless, the establishment of Kussia at Constantinople
may be death ; that is owing to the internal constitution of the
Austrian Empire, which no power can alter. But for England there
is no such danger, and consequently no such need for a conflict.

But it will be said there is the Suez Canal — the Suez Canal is the
key to India. Russia on the Mediterranean will threaten the Canal,
and will have it in her power to seize the key of India. Now, in the
first place, I say that the Suez Canal, save in time of peace, is not the
key to India, but that, on the contrary, it is a dangerous temptation
laid before our eyes to lead us to neglect the real and only true key
to our Indian Empire. The road to India in time of war is round
the Cape, and not through the Canal ; and if a hundredth part of the
money which has been spent in securing us from imaginary dangers
in North Africa had been expended upon fortifications and docks at
Simon's Bay and Cape Town, the terrible dangers of the present situ-
ation would have been reduced to a minimum. I am content to
take the judgment of almost any military expert as to the fact that
in case of a war with Russia in India we could not rely for a day upon
the Suez Canal for the security of our military communications. The
detention of a single ship in the waterway might mean a month's
delay and the loss of invaluable stores. The uncertainty would
paralyse every preparation, the danger would be too formidable to
face.

I believe that this proposition is generally admitted among mili-
tary men, and yet hitherto there seems to have been no adequate
recognition of the fact in the disposal of our forces. We still lock
up one-third of our troops and half our naval strength in an inland
sea in which in time of war every ship must run the gauntlet of
half a dozen possible enemies, all favourably posted for attack, with
the reasonable probability of ending in an impasse if all other
dangers be safely avoided. It may, I admit, be wise to fortify
Cyprus, or better still to obtain possession of Rhodes ; it is always
well to have two strings to one's bow. And more important even
than this is the strengthening of Aden and Perim. As long as we
can shut up the eastern end of the Canal at will to other powers,
we are by that very fact placed in a position of extraordinary
strength.

The mere strategical advantage of abandoning our dependence
upon the Canal route and concentrating all our energies upon the

1886 OUR SUPERSTITION ABOUT CONSTANTINOPLE. 449

protection and improvement of that by the Cape would be enormous.
But it is absolutely unimportant as compared to the indirect but not
less certain gain that such a change of policy would assuredly bring
to us. In some respects our power as the arbiter of European
destinies has greatly diminished if it has not wholly gone ; but in
other respects it is, I believe, greater than ever, or rather, I should
say, it will become so the moment we take the step to which every
fact of our history points.

As a European power in competition with the armed states of the
Continent, England is at a hopeless and permanent disadvantage.
As a member of a confederated empire of sea-bordered English-
speaking states, she will be in an absolutely impregnable position, in
which the quarrels and bickerings of the European Governments will
be absolutely without importance, and only interesting as a study of
contemporary history in its smaller developments. So long as we
give hostages to Europe by claiming an interest in its quarrels, and
a right to participate in them, so long shall we be at their mercy.
The day on which we declare once for all that we have no concern
with the domestic politics of Europe, and inform our enemies, if we
have any, that if they wish to quarrel with us they must take to the
water to obtain satisfaction, we shall enter upon a new and brighter
period of our history. At present the indiscretion of a Eoumanian
patrol, the ambition of a Eussian colonel, or the intrigues of a Greek
patriot, may drag us at a day's notice into a conflict in which we
have nothing to win and everything to lose, and in which we must
inevitably spend our blood and money in serving the cause of other
nations.

The material and immediate advantages of releasing ourselves
from the false position in which we now stand are obvious ; but the
value of the new policy does not end with its immediate and concrete
effect.

At present between England and her colonies there is a theo- '
retical, but not a real equality of conditions. The traditions of our
home history and the accident of our home position have bound us
up with the continent to a degree of which we are scarcely conscious.
The colonies are free altogether from any such trammels. They do
not care for European politics, and do not wish to be mixed up with
them. It might be that in case of our being engaged in a conflict
arising out of some purely European and local question, the colonies, \
or some of them, would assist us. Probably they would do so. But
the assistance would come as a matter of grace, and every occasion on
which it was rendered would make a subsequent offer less likely.

It is the enormous privilege of the colonies to be free from all

contact with old-world quarrels. If the chief result of our connection

with them is to drag them back into the old circle, they not only

will not thank us, but they will certainly be inclined to dissolve a

VOL. XX.— No. 115. II

450 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept.

partnership which brings with it such dangerous liabilities. On the
other hand, when we have once shaken ourselves free from all conti-
nental complications, when we have once fairly convinced European
nations that they must settle their quarrels without us, we shall
stand on a footing of perfect equality with every other portion of
the empire.

The pathways of the sea are in the hands of the British people.
The maintenance of them is a common interest to every one of the
great mercantile communities which compose the empire. Let it be
once clearly understood that at all hazards we are going to preserve
the freedom of our communications, and that in case of need every
part of the empire will help to defend them, not in deference to
sentiment and affection only, but in pursuance of direct and obvious
interests, and our position in the world will be one of unprecedented
power and security.

I have not spoken of India, but I do not forget that in India
we have a land frontier, and, consequently, a weak point. Morally
the possession of India is a strengthening force in the national life
of our people ; the responsibility which its government involves,
the opportunities it confers, are useful and elevating influences.
But materially our occupation weakens instead of strengthening
our position. There ought to be no illusions in this matter. The
strength of the empire is its English-speaking population. Our
occupation of India is a danger and not a defence. But if we
duly set our house in order, it is a danger which we can well afford
to face. As soon as we make it clear that not only in theory, but in
fact, India is the common possession of the empire, and that while
all our countrymen are entitled to share in the honour of adminis-
tering it, all are equally bound to take part in defending it, we shall
have made a great step forward.

Already events are helping to impress upon the colonies the
nature and extent of the privilege and of the responsibility. Our
real through route to the East has within the last few months been
completed through the West. Already the military authorities in
India are looking to Australia as a base of supply which can be
reached more easily than England. The proper fortification of
Esquimalt, Sydney, Singapore, Simon's Bay, and Mauritius will make
us absolutely independent of the Suez Canal. Close the Cape route,
and Sydney and Melbourne are still open. If the great Australian
ports are momentarily unavailable, the Canadian Pacific railway will
once more enable us to turn the flank of any enemy. The one and only
route, throughout the greater part of which we move on sufferance
under the guns of every man-drilling power in Europe, is the one on
which we expend all our forethought and all our resources. It is
time that we recognised the new facts of the political situation.

I am most anxious that my contention in writing as I have done

1886 OUR SUPERSTITION ABOUT CONSTANTINOPLE. 451

should not be misunderstood. My main proposition is this, that the
time has come when it is greatly to our interest to cut ourselves off
entirely from European complications if we can do so with safety.
That we can do so not only with safety but with immense advantage
I am convinced. At present we are tied and bound by our fears
about the Eastern question. I believe that we can not only afford
to see that matter settled without our interference, but that as a
matter of fact no interference on our part is likely to bring about a
solution particularly favourable to us. I do not wish to see Eussia
at Constantinople ; as friends of civilisation we should all deplore it.
But I do not believe that it is either our duty or our interest to use
force to prevent her going there. It does not matter to us ; it does
matter to Austria, to Germany, and to Greece : by all means let
them settle the issue among them.

One other small point ought not to be forgotten. We shall
not be free of our European fetters as long as we hold Heligoland. .
Geographically it is a mere point in the ocean, historically it
may any day become the cause of a great war. It is time we
exchanged it during a period of peace for some other possession.
The island is of absolutely no value to us now. It is not fortified,
and the day we began to fortify it we should be in danger of war
with Germany. Naturally enough the Germans would refuse to see
a new fortress raised within sight of their own shores, and just off the
mouth of one of their greatest rivers.

Ministers are on the look-out for a policy, parties are on the look-
out for a cry. I venture to prophesy that the minister and the
party that first comes to the British people with the assurance that
they are for ever freed from the miserable competition of European
armaments will have earned and will receive the deepest gratitude
of a great people. At present there is not a power in Europe which
cannot force our hand and is not perfectly aware of the fact. Eussia,
Austria, Germany, and France all believe, and are probably right in '
believing, that they can drag us into a hopeless and bloody struggle,
on an element where we must always be weak, in a cause which our
people do not understand, and for which nine-tenths of them do not
care.

All this comes of our forgetting that a new England has sprung
up, destined to be infinitely greater and infinitely more powerful than
the old on the one condition that she breaks for ever with the old
tradition which made her one of the old land powers of Europe, and
accepts the new and brighter role of the greatest sea power of the
world.

I venture to commend this new policy to every speaker who
addresses large bodies of his countrymen. No boon will, I believe,
be more readily appreciated by the great body of the workers of
Great Britain than that of immunity from the wars and rumours of

452 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Sept. 1886

wars which have injured them so much. Outside these islands such
a policy would be received with consternation by our enemies, with
delight by our kinsmen. ' Ex Oriente lux ' runs the motto. But for
England the message of the East for many weary years past has been
one of darkness, not of light. ' Westward Ho ! ' has been the watch-
word of our success, and it may well be that only when England, true
to her secular tradition, has circled the world with the setting sun, and
found along the pathway of the West the true road to the gateway
of the East, that we shall be able to rest in the assurance of undis-
turbed peace, and to adopt for our own motto also, * Ex Oriente lux.'

H. 0. ARNOLD-FORSTER. -

POSTSCRIPT.

Since the proofs of the above paper were corrected the catastrophe
in Bulgaria has taken place. No event could possibly have done
more to enforce the conclusions I have asked my readers to arrive at.
Even within the last few days signs have not been wanting that the
change in English opinion with regard to our duties in the East
which I have ventured to prophesy is already commencing. Of course,
however much we may regret the Russian coup d'etat we shall, as a
matter of fact, do nothing, though if we follow former precedents we
shall talk much. It would be an enormous advance if on this
occasion we could give up the talking, or rather transform our usual
threatening platitudes into a plain declaration that we have no concern
in the matter. There will then only remain the duty of devoting
to useful purposes the energy we have hitherto exhibited in our
preparations for the crash in the East. — H. 0. A.-F.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake
to return unaccepted MSS.

THE

NINETEENTH

No. CXVL— OCTOBER 1886.

PRISONERS AS WITNESSES.

ONE of the measures which came to nothing in the last Parliament,
and which it may be hoped will be passed by the present one, was
Lord BramwelPs Bill for making accused persons competent wit-
nesses in criminal cases.

Something may now be added from actual experience to what is
already familiar in theory to all persons who care about such discus-
sions. I refer to the practical working of the statutes which have,
in some particular cases, made prisoners competent witnesses. The
most important of these statutes is the Criminal Law Amendment
Act of 1885, which renders persons accused of various offences against
women competent, though not compellable witnesses.

These statutes have effected two things. In the first place they
have made the law as it stands so inconsistent that it can hardly
remain in its present condition. It is a monstrous absurdity that a
man should be allowed to give evidence if he is charged with a rape
or with an indecent assault upon a female, but not if he is charged
with analogous offences, even more disgusting and more likely to be
made the subject of a false accusation ; ! that if a man is charged with

1 The most singular of these contrasts arises no doubt from a slip in the drafting
of the Bill. A prisoner is a competent witness if he is charged with indecent assault,
but not if he is charged with an assault with intent to commit a rape. Section 20 of
the Act of 1885 makes prisoners competent witnesses in the case of all offences under
that Act or under ' s. 48 and ss. 52-55 both inclusive ' of the Offences against the
Person Act (24 & 25 Viet. c. 100). An assault with intent to commit rape is
punishable not under these sections, but under s. 38 of 24 & 25 Viet. c. 100, which
punishes all assaults with intent to commit felony. If no other alteration is made,
ss. 61 and 62 of c. 100 and so much of s. 20 as relates to charges of assault with intent
to ravish should be included in the references in s. 20 of the Act of 1885.

VOL. XX.— No. 116. KK

454 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

personating a voter he should be allowed to be examined as a witness,
but not if he is accused of personation with intent to defraud ; that
he should be competent if he is charged with sending an unseaworthy
ship to sea or with being unlawfully in possession of explosives, but
not if he is charged with manslaughter by negligently causing loss
of life on a ship or by negligently dealing with explosives. These
and some other contrasts which might be mentioned stultify the law.
It is impossible to justify both the rule and the exceptions which
have been made to it.

There is, however, another thing which the provisions in question
have done. They have exemplified the manner in which the evidence
of prisoners works, and have illustrated the principles upon which its
importance depends.

I have gained much experience on this matter since the Criminal
Law Amendment Act came into force in the autumn of last year.
Since that time I have tried a great many cases in which prisoners
were competent witnesses. In most of these cases, though not in all,
they were called, and I have thus had the opportunity of seeing how
the system works in actual practice. My experience has confirmed
and strengthened the opinion upon the subject which I have held for
many years, and maintained on various occasions,2 that the examina-
tion of prisoners as witnesses, or at least their competency, is favour-
able in the highest degree to the administration of justice ; that the
value of a prisoner's evidence varies according to the circumstances
of each particular case as much as the evidence of any other class of
witnesses does ; and that therefore it is as unwise to exclude the
evidence of prisoners as it would be to exclude the evidence of any
other class of persons arbitrarily chosen.

No theory on which the evidence of prisoners ought to be ex-
cluded can be suggested which does not really come to this — that the
probability that a prisoner will speak the truth is so much diminished
by his interest in the result of the trial that it is not worth while to
hear what he has to say. I do not think that anyone ever held this
theory completely in the crude form in which I have stated it, for so
stated it involves the monstrous result that no prisoner ought to
be allowed, even if he is undefended, to tell his own story to the jury,
but that all prisoners ought to be confined to remarking upon the
evidence given for or against them. This appears to me to reduce
the theory to an absurdity. It may, however, be worth while to
dwell a little upon the reasons why the theory is absurd. It is, in
the first place, obvious that it assumes the prisoner's guilt, for if the
truth is in his favour the prisoner's interest is to speak the truth as
fully and exactly as he can, and it is therefore probable that he will
do his best so to speak it. This remark, if followed out, explains the
whole matter. It is waste of time to try to lay down general rules
2 See, e.g., my History of the Criminal Law, vol. i. pp. 440-46.

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 455

as to the weight of evidence and the credit of witnesses. What
really has to be determined is the probability that this or that
statement is true ; and this task cannot be undertaken unless and
until the statement is made. No doubt the interest which a witness
has in the result of the inquiry must always be entitled to considera-
tion as bearing upon the probability of different parts of his state-
ment. No doubt also it may in particular cases be not only a leading
but a decisive consideration. In such cases due allowance can be
made, and the evidence given may be thrown out of account ; but
the importance of this depends on time, place, and circumstance, and
varies from case to case and statement to statement. Interest, in
other words, ought in reason to be treated as an objection to the
credit of a witness and not to his competence.

No one can deny this who is not prepared to maintain that it
was a mistake to alter the old law as to incompetency by interest,
and indeed to maintain in addition that it did not go far enough.
By that law the smallest pecuniary interest in the event of a trial
made a witness incompetent, but no interest in relation to affection
or character had that effect. A man was always a competent witness
for or against his son or his brother, and he might be a competent
witness in a case in which his own character and all his prospects in
life were at stake. As regarded all witnesses, prisoners upon trial
only excepted, the restriction as to money interest has long since
been abolished. Why should a much wider exclusive rule be retained
in that single case ?

The principal object of this paper is to show by illustrations taken
from actual experience that the value of the evidence given by
prisoners is exactly like the value of the evidence given by other
witnesses, and that though their interest in the result must always
be taken into account, and is in many cases so important as to destroy
altogether the value of their evidence, there are also many cases in
which it is of great and even of decisive importance. These matters
are most easily understood by illustrations, and I will accordingly
proceed to attempt to prove what I have said by references to actual
cases which have been tried before me, and which are so chosen as to
illustrate the different degrees of importance which may attach to
the evidence of accused persons.

I am sorry to be obliged to take most of my illustrations from cases
of sexual crime ; but this cannot be helped, because most of the cases
in which prisoners are by law competent to testify have arisen under
the Criminal Law Amendment Act. It is not, however, necessary
for my purpose to enter into any details of an offensive character.
I will begin with cases which appear to me to illustrate the doctrine
that the evidence of prisoners may often be unimportant.

A man was indicted under the Criminal Law Amendment Act for
the seduction of a girl under sixteen. About the facts there was no

KK2

456 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

dispute, but the prisoner was defended on the ground that he believed
the girl to be of the age of seventeen. She admitted that she had
told him she was seventeen. His counsel said that he should not
call the prisoner. He would of course say, if he were called, that he
believed the girl, but as this would be merely his own statement
as to his own state of mind it would add nothing to the case. His
evidence would thus be superfluous. The jury acquitted the prisoner,
seeing no reason to doubt that the girl had made the statement, and
probably regarding her appearance as such that the prisoner might
naturally believe the statement made by her to be true. In this case
the prisoner's evidence was sure to be given if asked for, whether it
was true or false, and was therefore worthless.

This case is a typical one, and suggests a general principle which
may be illustrated in many ways as to the value of the evidence of
prisoners and of interested witnesses. It is, that the evidence of a
deeply interested witness, given on the side which his interest would
incline him to give it, is of no value when the circumstances are
such that he cannot be contradicted on the subject-matter of his
evidence. This principle is of very general application, and reaches
its height when the matter to which the prisoner testifies is a fact
passing in his own mind, such as knowledge, belief, intention, or
good faith. Did you in good faith believe the girl's statement that
she was seventeen and not sixteen ? Did you, when at twelve o'clock
at night you bought for a small price from a man whom you did not
know, and who concealed his face, a quantity of government stores
of which he gave no account, know that they were stolen ? Did you,
when you fired a pistol straight at an enemy and wounded him,
intend to do him grievous bodily harm ? — are questions which it is
idle to ask, because they are sure to be answered in one way, and
because no reasonable person would be affected in his judgment on
the subject by the answer. Bare reluctance to commit perjury is
shown by daily experience to be far too feeble a motive to counteract
any strong interest in doing so. No doubt honourable men in
common life feel as if it would be morally impossible for them to
tell a wilful lie on a solemn occasion like a trial in a court of justice,
whether upon oath or not, and many men would no doubt undergo
great loss and inconvenience rather than do so ; but this reluctance, I
feel convinced, proceeds much more than they suppose from the fear
of being contradicted and found out. There are temptations under
which almost everyone would lie, and in the face of which no man's
word ought to be taken. The fact that the most respectable, most
pious, and most virtuous of men denied upon oath that he had com-
mitted some disgraceful act, especially if the admission that he had
done so would involve not only perjury, but a shameful breach of
confidence, would weigh little with me in considering the question of
his guilt. His character would, or might, weigh heavily in his favour,

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 457

but his oath would to my mind hardly add to it perceptibly.
Voltaire asked long ago whose life would be safe if even a virtuous
man was able to kill him by a mere wish ; and the case is the same
with regard to perjury. Unite a strong temptation to lie with a
strong interest in lying and security from discovery, and it is all but
morally certain that the lie will follow.3

I will give a few more instances of the way in which this principle
works, and I may observe that it affords a rule by which it is often
possible to test the justice of the complaint, often used as a topic of
grievance by counsel, that the prisoner's mouth is closed. A woman
was tried for murder under the following circumstances. She lived
as servant to an old farmer on one of the most barren, out-of-the-way
moors in England, near the place at which the five northern counties
closely approach each other. The only other inmate of the house
was a young man, the farmer's son. The old man and the servant
were sitting together one evening when the young man came in, and
said he had been at the nearest village and seen some one there,
about whom he laughed at the girl. The farmer did not know what
his son referred to, nor was there any evidence on the subject. The son
left the room. The girl also left soon afterwards, and returned after
a short absence. The son did not return, and after waiting for him
a considerable time the father went to bed, leaving the girl sitting
up. A point to which some importance was afterwards attached was
that the dogs remained quiet all night, which, it was suggested, went
to show that no stranger approached the house. In the morning the
girl called the old man down and told him that on going out to see
after the cows she had noticed blood on the walls of the cowhouse,
which had trickled down from chinks in the floor of a room above it,
used as a sort of workshop. In this room was found the dead body
of the young man. He had been killed by several terrible blows
from a stone- breaker's hammer kept in the room, which was found
lying near him ; and the position of the body and the hammer made
it clear that he must have been stooping down lacing his boots when
some one armed with the hammer, striking him from behind, knocked
him down with a terrible blow in the face, and afterwards despatched
him by breaking his skull. There were various other circumstances
in the case, but these were the most important of them. Some
which appeared to throw suspicion on the girl were rendered doubtful
by the fact that the old man, on whose testimony they depended,
completely contradicted at the trial the evidence he had given about
them before the magistrates, excusing himself by saying that he was
so agitated and broken down by the murder of his son that he could

3 The following is a quaint illustration of the way in which this matter is some-
times regarded. An old American attorney once observed : ' A man who would not
perjure himself to save a woman's character must be such an infernal scoundrel that
I would not believe him on his oath, although I knew what he said was true.'

458 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

not depend on his memory. The girl was acquitted, and, as I thought,
properly, as the whole matter was left in mystery. That she had an
opportunity of committing the crime was clearly proved ; there was
some evidence, though not enough to exclude a reasonable doubt on
the subject, to show that no one else could have committed it.
Nothing in any way resembling a motive for the crime was proved, or
even suggested, and the matter was thus left incomplete.

If this matter had been investigated according to the French
system, the girl would have been put in solitary confinement and
examined in private for weeks or months as to every incident of her
life, in order to discover, if possible, circumstances which would show a
motive for the crime which would have been imputed to her, and to
sift to the utmost a number of minute circumstances in the case
which I have passed over because they were imperfectly ascertained.
It is impossible to say what the result might have been, and it is not
worth while to consider it, as no one would propose the introduction
of this mode of inquiry into this country. The point here to be
noticed is that, if she had been a competent witness according to
English law, her evidence, assuming her innocence, could have done
her no good, nor if she were guilty would it have exposed her to
much risk, unless she had gone out of the way to tell lies in her own
favour, as a guilty person very probably might. Suppose her inno-
cent— all she could have had to say would have been that she knew
nothing about the man's death ; that she left the room to look after
the cows or for some other purpose ; that whilst absent she neither
saw nor heard anything suspicious ; that, after sitting up in vain for
the man's return, she went out again to the cows and found the
blood, and so the body. If her guilt is assumed, she would be able
to tell the same story, as there was no one to contradict her and
nothing of importance to explain. Her evidence, therefore, would
have been in the particular circumstances of the case wholly unim-
portant.

This no doubt is speculation upon what would have happened
had the law been some years since what it is now proposed to make
it. I will give an instance of the same kind under the Criminal Law
Amendment Act. A man was tried for an attempt to ravish, which
was undoubtedly committed by some one. His guilt was positively
sworn to by the girl herself, and by two if not three other witnesses
who were near. His defence was an alibi. He said he was at dinner
at his mother's house at the time when the offence was committed. He
called a number of witnesses in support of his story, who had seen
him at different times on his way there, at the house, and on his way
back. The persons in the house gave evidence as to the time during
which he stayed there. His own evidence accordingly added only this
fact, that between the time when he was last seen going towards his
mother's house and the time when he arrived there, he was not en-

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 459

gaged in committing the crime, but in walking along the road. On
a close inquiry into times and places, it turned out that all that was
necessary for him to say, on the supposition of his guilt, was to alter
the time of his arrival at his mother's by a very few minutes. Any
accused person who was not prepared to admit his guilt would go as
far as that in the direction of perjury.

Further illustrations may be found in the case of almost all
offences committed at night. 'When you say I was committing
burglary or night-poaching I was in fact at home and asleep in bed,
and both my wife and I are prepared to swear to it now that the law
has opened our mouths.' If the law were altered, I should expect
such defences to be set up in almost every case of the kind ; but I
should hope juries would be slow to acquit in consequence of it if
the evidence for the prosecution were, independently of it, enough to
warrant a conviction.

Though the evidence of an accused person on a point in which he
is interested and cannot be contradicted ought to be regarded as
worthless in the way of proving his innocence, the absence of such
evidence may, under particular circumstances, go far to prove his
guilt ; for it is a fact, and a very strange one, that criminals will now
and then shrink from denying the commission of crimes from the
actual commission of which they have not shrunk. The working of
the Criminal Law Amendment Act has furnished very curious illus-
trations of this. A girl swore that her master committed an offence
upon her in his shop, and that immediately afterwards he suggested
to a friend who came into the shop that he should do the same.
The friend persuaded the girl (so she said) to go with him to his
house to get some grapes, and, when he got there, committed the
same offence. That the girl had gone to her master's shop, that his
friend had come in and had persuaded her to go to his house to get
grapes, was clearly proved ; but the commission of the two offences
rested upon her testimony, which was in itself open to many objec-
tions, showing, to say the least, great inaccuracy and confusion as to
time and place, and being in several particulars intrinsically impro-
bable. If the master's friend had sworn to his innocence and had
said that all that passed between him and the girl was that he took
her to his house and gave her some grapes, and that the rest of her
story was false, I think he would have been acquitted, but he refused
to be called as a witness. The jury convicted him, I suppose, con-
sidering it incredible that a man falsely accused of such an odious
crime should not deny it upon his oath when he had the opportunity.
The girl's master did give evidence. He swore that the girl's story
was totally false as regarded his having committed the crime. The
girl, he said, had been sent to his shop (which was some distance
from his house) on an errand, and had, after a short interval and some
joking with his friend who came in, left it in the friend's company.

460 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

The jury acquitted him, being greatly dissatisfied with the girl's
evidence. This was a very singular case. It clearly shows that in
the class of cases under consideration accused persons will, if the law
is altered, have to swear to their innocence, unless the facts of the
case are undisputed, or else be taken, and not unjustly, to have con-
fessed their guilt.

No doubt there are cases in which silence does not admit guilt.
A number of men were indicted for a rape ; their defence was consent,
of which there was strong evidence in the prosecutrix's own story.
Two of them gave evidence, but the second of the two made such a
pitiable exhibition of himself, especially in answering questions asked
of him by the jury, that the rest preferred to keep silence. They
were all acquitted, but this was because their evidence could not
have materially varied the facts, whilst their silence was under the
circumstances not surprising and not inconsistent with the defence
set up. All that their silence admitted was that they had been con-
cerned in a disgraceful transaction.

Cases sometimes occur in which the evidence of a prisoner is
useless because it is out of his power to give the only evidence
which would be of use to him. A man was tried for murder. He
had spent the greater part of the day before the murder with the
murdered man, and was seen in his company late at night near the
place where his dead body was discovered next morning. In the
course of the morning after the discovery of the murder the prisoner
exhibited to several people the murdered man's watch, and finally
sold it to a companion, who kept it for some time, and minutely
described it at the trial. Hearing of the murder, and fearing he
might get into trouble about the watch, the purchaser gave it back
to the prisoner. The prisoner did not produce it at the trial, and
neither gave nor suggested any account of it. This the jury regarded
as being inconsistent with any other supposition than that he did
not produce it because it had belonged to the murdered man, and so
would, if produced, have procured his conviction. It is obvious that
in this case the prisoner's evidence would have been useless, unless
he had been able to produce or account for the watch. As the
charge against him was murder, he was not a competent witness ; but
a very similar case under the Criminal Law Amendment Act occurred
very lately. A man was indicted for a rape. The question was as to-
the id entity of the prisoner, as to which the account of the prosecutrix
was highly unsatisfactory, or at least very doubtful. The prisoner
was a soldier. The prosecutrix saw him with other men at the
barracks soon after the crime. She hesitated as to his identity, and
even denied it at one time, though at the trial she spoke to it with
the utmost confidence, giving reasons for her previous mistakes. On
this evidence, had it stood alone, the man must have been acquitted-
The woman had, however, been robbed of a purse containing three or

1886

PRISONERS AS WITNESSES.

461

four coins, which she specified — one being a half-sovereign, kept in a
small compartment of the purse with a separate clasp. It was proved
that immediately after the commission of the offence the prisoner
was at a public-house, in which he saw an amber mouthpiece for
cigars. He bought it from the landlord after some talk, in the
course of which he displayed a purse exactly corresponding to the
description of her purse given by the prosecutrix, not only in its
shape, colour, and material, but in the coins it contained, and the
way they were distributed in it. The prisoner said nothing of the
purse, and did not produce it. This caused his conviction. He was
not called as a witness,4 and there would have been no use in calling
him if he had not been able to produce a purse like the one seen by
the publican but different from the one stolen from the prosecutrix.

This was an instructive case in another way. If it had not been
for the purse, the prisoner would probably have been acquitted on
account of the weakness of the evidence of the prosecutrix, and his
evidence would have been immaterial even if hers had been stronger.
He was unquestionably near the place at the time of the crime, and
had not more than perhaps a quarter of an hour to account for. If he
had sworn that he was lounging about the streets (as he had been
just before) for this quarter of an hour, and did not commit the
crime, his evidence would, for reasons already given, have made no
difference. It may seem to be paradoxical to say so, but it is never-
theless true that the class of accused persons who will get least
advantage from having their mouths opened are those who are
entirely innocent of and unconnected with the crime of which they
are charged — people who have nothing to conceal and nothing to
explain. The only way in which the most innocent man can prove
his innocence of a crime, of which he knows nothing whatever, is by
proving (as by an alibi) that it was physically impossible that he
should commit the crime ; this in many cases he would be able to do
only by his own uncorroborated assertion. ' I was sitting quietly writ-
ing letters in my library at the time when you say I was committing a
crime ' would in many cases be all a man could say, and of such a state-
ment he might have no corroboration whatever, and he might well
have the means of leaving the room undiscovered.

If, however, there is a possibility of corroboration, the fact that a
man can supply, so to speak, the threads on which the corroborating
facts are strung may be of the greatest importance. A man was tried
for a rape. His defence was an alibi. He gave a complete account
of the way in which he passed the whole period during which the
crime was being committed, and was corroborated as to several of

4 This was, I believe, because it did not occur to his counsel that he was a com-
petent witness ; the crime was committed before the Act came into force, and the
trial took place afterwards. I should have admitted his evidence if it had been
tendered.

462 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

the incidents which he said had happened during the interval.
He had been at work making a bridge over a ditch ; he came from
thence to a corner of a field, where he heard some children returning
from a school feast use language for which he reproved them.
He went to his lodgings and remained there writing a letter for a
considerable time, and finally he went to a club to which he belonged
at a public-house some short way off. He was corroborated on
each of these points. One man had lent him tools for his work
and had seen him employed there. The children to whom he had
spoken described where he was standing, what he said, and what
gave occasion for his reproof. Several little incidents were proved
about his writing his letter and leaving it to be posted, and his
arriving at his club, and so on. No doubt these facts might have
been independently proved, and they might have had the same
effect as they had in fact, but nothing could have given the effect of
the ease, vivacity, and spirit with which he told his story, his entire
absence of embarrassment, and the confidence with which he dealt
with all the different questions put to him.

It must never be forgotten in connection with this subject that
there are differences between people who tell the truth and people
who lie, which it is not easy to specify, but which are none the less
marked and real. I have known cases in which a jury has acquitted
merely upon hearing an accused person tell his tale, and in which I
felt perfectly confident they were right. A girl, between thirteen
and sixteen, prosecuted a hawker for an offence against her under
the Act of 1885. He had no counsel, and he did not much cross-
examine her, but he gave his own account of the matter in a
way which led the jury to stop the case and declare that they did
not believe a word of the girl's story. Theoretically, the two
stories were no more than an affirmation on the one side and a
contradiction on the other. The girl affirmed that the man had
committed the offence, and that he had, when charged by her and
her mother, admitted it ; and the mother corroborated her daughter
as to the last assertion. The man denied the offence, and said (and
in this his wife confirmed him) that when the girl came to his house
he threatened to kick her out and prosecute her. More particularly,
the girl declared that on a particular day and at a particular place
the man called her into the house and committed the offence. The
man gave a minute description of where he was and what he was
doing on the day in question, of his having met the girl and scolded
or, as he called it, ' chastised ' her for some fault, and of her be-
haviour to him on the occasion. It would not be easy even by enter-
ing into minute details to give all the reasons for my opinion, but I
do not think that anyone who heard this man give his evidence
could have doubted its entire truth. He was a grave, elderly man,
with no kind of special talent, and with a slight impediment or im-

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 463

perfection in his speech ; but all that he said had upon it the mark of
honesty and sincerity, and the details which he gave — though, having
no legal advice, he was not prepared to prove them by independent
evidence — were in themselves some guarantee of his truthfulness.
It is little less than a monstrous denial of justice that a man so
situated should be deprived of the opportunity of telling the truth
in his own behalf under every sanction for his truthfulness that can
be devised ; and I think that nothing but the force of almost invete-
rate habit could blind us to the fact.

It ought not, however, to be forgotten that the opening of the
mouths of prisoners opens a way to falsehood as well as to truth, and
sometimes to falsehood which it is difficult at the moment to unmask.
I have known cases in which — as it appeared to me — failures of
justice have occurred because the prisoner, either from artfulness or
from mere blundering, kept back till the last moment some more or less
specious topic of defence, and brought it out at last when it was too
late to test the matter properly. Three soldiers were tried for a
rape, which no doubt was committed. The evidence against perhaps
the most prominent of them was that he had a bugle upon which he
repeatedly blew while the crime was being committed, the whole
party being probably more or less in liquor. He swore positively,
and with many piteous appeals, that he was not only innocent, but
that it was physically impossible for him to blow upon a bugle
because he had lost his front teeth, which loss he exhibited to the
jury. Several persons in court, and one of the jurymen, professed to
be acquainted with playing on the bugle, and one of them swore to
his conviction that it was in fact physically impossible that the
prisoner should play. The jury, upon this, acquitted all the three
prisoners, thinking, no doubt, that a failure in the identification of
one of the three greatly shook the evidence against the other two. I
was afterwards informed that the bugle was actually taken from the
man on his return to the barracks shortly after the offence. Whether
I was rightly informed I cannot, of course, say ; but the prisoner un-
doubtedly by keeping his defence back to the last moment, and then
bringing it unexpectedly before the jury, got an advantage which he
assuredly ought not to have had.

This trick of keeping back a defence is one of the most dangerous
to public justice which could be played by persons accused of crime.
I have known many cases of it, and I think it is well worthy of con-
sideration whether, before their committal, prisoners ought not to be
examined before the magistrates, and whether a power of adjourn-
ment might not be entrusted to judges when such points are raised,
in order that they might be properly dealt with.

It would be of little use or interest to multiply these stories. It
is enough to say that they show clearly, in respect at all events of one
particular class of crimes, that the evidence of an accused person.

464 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

resembles that of any other witness in all essential respects — that is
to say, its value varies from case to case according to circumstances.
In the case of a man, truthful, resolute, with a good memory and
adequate power of expression, it is great, and may, under circum-
stances, be decisive. In other cases it is of less importance ; in many
instances it is practically of no more use than a bare plea of not guilty ;
and this, I think, is more than enough to show that it ought never to
be excluded, but in all cases be taken for whatever it may be worth.

I have already observed upon the circumstance that the numerous
exceptions to the general rule of law which have now been introduced
into it make the law an absurdity. It is impossible to justify both
the rule and the exception. But this is not the only observation which
arises upon the present state of the law. Another is, that the class
of crimes as to which the most important exception to the rule which
incapacitates prisoners as witnesses is made is far from being the one
in which that rule is most likely to be mischievous. In regard of
offences of an indecent character there is, as a rule, a plain well-
marked question of fact. Were certain things done or not, and was
the prisoner the man who did them ? But in respect of crimes
against property this is not the case. Such offences are often com-
plicated transactions, full of details, of which different views may
be taken and different accounts given, on the special nature of
which depends the question of guilt or innocence. A case of
theft, false pretences, embezzlement, or fraudulent bankruptcy will
often turn upon matters in which it is of the utmost importance
that the prisoner should be examined and cross-examined. I remem-
ber a case in which a prisoner was tried for embezzlement. He
was defended by counsel, and was convicted. When called upon
to say why he should not be sentenced, he gave an account of the
transaction which his counsel had never suggested, but which, on
questioning the witnesses who had testified against him, appeared
to be, to say the very least, so highly probable, that the jury desired to
withdraw their verdict, and instead to return a verdict of not guilty,
which was done. This was an illustrative case, and one of consider-
able interest. It shows both the strong and the weak sides of the
proposed change in the law. It shows its strong side, because it
gives an instance in which a man was enabled by telling his own
story to escape from what would presumably have been an unjust
conviction. It shows, or rather suggests, its weakness, because it
shows how great an opportunity the examination of prisoners might
afford for artfully contrived frauds and evasions of justice. Each of
these observations requires some development.

To take the strong side first. It must always be borne in mind
that the business of prosecuting and defending prisoners, though in
some respects the most important branch of legal business, is the
least important of all if it is measured in money, and that it is in

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 465

many cases in the hands of the lowest class of solicitors and the
least experienced class of barristers. A great criminal trial, in
which the prisoner has plenty of money, and in which the prosecu-
tion is conducted by the Treasury, is susceptible of little improve-
ment, but the case with the common run of criminal business
is totally different. If the prisoner is not defended at all, he may,
and often does, fall into every kind of mistake. He may have
a good defence, and not know how to avail himself of it. He may
be shy and ill-instructed, and not put it forward at the proper time.
He is probably not aware of his rights in respect to the calling of
witnesses, and may therefore not be prepared with them at his trial.
If, on the other hand, he is defended, he is in all probability in the
hands of a solicitor of the lowest class, to whom he and his friends
probably give some very small sum, say 21. or 31. The solicitor gets
from the clerk to the magistrates a copy of the depositions, puts on
the back of them a sheet of paper endorsed * Brief for the prisoner,

Mr. , one guinea,' pays some junior counsel \l. 3s. 6d., and tells

him that the nature of the case appears from the depositions. The
counsel does as well as he can upon his materials, repeating with
more or less energy and ingenuity the commonplaces appropriate to
the occasion, and making the most of whatever he may have been
able to obtain by cross-examination. The result is, that if the case
of a pauper client presents any intricacy or requires any special
attention, it is very apt to be mismanaged and misunderstood. I
have no doubt that in the case of embezzlement to which I have
referred, something like this had happened. The prisoner's counsel
was a busy and able man, he had obviously no instructions which
deserved the name, and I suppose knew nothing about the case
beyond what the depositions told him and what the prisoner could
tell him in a few hurried unintelligible whispers from the dock, and
so he exposed his client to an imminent risk of conviction.

From dangers of this sort prisoners would be effectually protected
by being made competent witnesses. They would be sure, at all
events, of telling their own stories and, if the judge was competent
and patient, of having them understood.

In order to appreciate the importance of this it is necessary to
bear in mind the fact that it is often exceedingly difficult to under-
stand prisoners, and to appreciate the real nature of what they
have to say, and also that it is quite essential to justice that they
should be understood, and lastly that far the easiest and safest
way of doing this is by questioning them. A prisoner, generally
speaking, is an ignorant, uneducated man, dreadfully frightened,
very much confused, and almost always under the impression that
the judge and the jury know as much about his case as he does
himself, and are able at once to appreciate whatever he says about
it, although what he has to say consists mainly of imperfect allu-

466 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

sions which he does not explain. I remember a case in which five or
six men were tried for wounding A. with various intents, also for
wounding B. with various intents, also for being armed by night
in search of game. The defence of some of them was that two
parties of poachers set out at night together in company ; that at a
certain point they separated, one having a white dog with them and
the other what they called a red dog ; that after they separated the
party with the white dog met the keepers and police, and committed
the different offences with which all were charged, whereas the party
with the red dog had nothing to do with them. The men were tried
three separate times on the three charges I have mentioned. It was
only by degrees that they succeeded in making their defence intelli-
gible. At the first trial the only hint given of it was by one of the
red dog party who asked one of the witnesses the colour of the dog he
said he had seen with the men whom he identified. The witness said

it was white. * That's a lie,' said the prisoner, ' it were red.' Not

a word was said to explain in any way the meaning of the question or
the importance of the answer. It requires a good deal both of
patience and experience to understand and disentangle the stories
which prisoners often set up. At an assize held a few months ago,
a good many of the prisoners took it into their heads to write their
defences, and to ask that they might be read to the jury. They
were strange compositions, but it was usually possible, though difficult,
not only to extract from them an intelligible defence, but to examine
the witnesses by the help of it in such a way as to test its truth.
One prisoner, I remember, who was charged with theft, made bitter
complaints, by way of an irregular cross-examination, about his wife,
his sister, and several other persons. In his mouth these complaints
and reproaches were wholly unintelligible, thanks to the combined
effects of ignorance, confusion, fear, and anger ; -but I found it possible,
by giving him hints, which I must own were questions in all but
form, to find out what he really meant, which was that the charge
against him was a false one, got up from base motives, and founded
upon the misrepresentation of innocent actions. The jury thought
the defence important enough to justify his acquittal. If he could
have been called as a witness, the matter would have been arranged
much more clearly and satisfactorily.

In cases of this kind I have no doubt that it would be in the
highest degree conducive to justice to make prisoners competent
witnesses ; but it must not be forgotten that prisoners are not always
needy or ignorant. They are in many cases thoroughly well aware of
their position, and are well provided with money and with the pro-
fessional assistance which money will procure. It certainly is to be
feared that in such a case a prisoner would be so well advised as to
his position, and as to the strong and weak points of his case, that he
would be able in the witness-box to lie with skill and effect. I think

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 467

that this, especially in capital cases, would be dangerous to the
interests of justice. It may be supposed that legal advisers would be
too honourable to devise lies for their clients to tell, and I feel no
doubt that honourable men would not say openly and crudely, ' You
must, in order to save your life, swear this or that.' I do not believe
they would do so, but I have no doubt that in the course of the
preparation of the case the client would be made fully aware of its
weak as well as its strong points. He would be told where his danger
lay. He would be asked to give explanations on this point and that,
he would be asked whether such and such persons might not be able
to testify on such and such points, and he would in practice require
no more. It must also be remembered that people do not in real
life repose absolute confidence in their legal advisers, nor are they
pressed to do so.5 As a rule they put before their advisers as good
an account of what has happened as circumstances permit, and leave
it to the lawyers to put the matter into shape. The best proof of
this is to be found in the evidence given by the parties in civil
actions. In nearly every civil action the parties contradicb each other
more or less, generally on the vital parts of the case. But I think
it would be unjust to throw the blame on the solicitors or on the
counsel, though no doubt the evidence given is a good deal influenced
by the light which the parties get from their legal advisers as to their
legal position, and the bearing upon it of particular facts if esta-
blished. In cases where life, liberty, and character were at stake,
I have no doubt contradictions would become more pointed, and the
provision of false or misleading evidence more artful and complete..
I have, in short, little doubt that, if prisoners were made competent
witnesses, there would be a considerable increase in perjury. The
same thing was predicted as a natural consequence of the admission
of the evidence of parties in civil actions, and I have no doubt that
the prophecy has been fulfilled.

Few actions are, in my experience, tried in the Superior Courts of
England and Wales in which there is not a good deal of rash and
false swearing, and in a large proportion there is wilful perjury — that
is to say, false evidence which cannot be accounted for either by
rashness or prejudice or bad memory. I do not suppose, however,
that anyone would wish to reimpose the old restrictions upon evidence
which made the parties to a suit incompetent as witnesses. After
all, courts of justice only show the national veracity as it is ; they do
not make it .what it is. False evidence of every kind might at once

eminent colleague of mine told me that in his early days at the bar he was
asked by the judge to defend a case of murder. He went to the gaol to confer with
his client, and asked him, for one thing, how he accounted for the blood with which
his waistcoat was covered after the crime. The man seemed puzzled for a moment,
and then said, ' Well, sir, don't you think you might say that perhaps my nose might
have been bleeding ? ' My friend wished him good morning, and said he had no
more to ask.

468 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

be put an end to absolutely by shutting up the courts ; but if they
are to be open, people must take what they get in the way of evidence.
I do not think, however, it can be denied that the change suggested
would in fact greatly multiply perjury, and it is to be feared that,
unless juries could be got to harden their hearts against accused
persons and their oaths, wrong acquittals would become even
commoner than they are. Jurors are usually ignorant, good-natured
men, quite unaccustomed to the administration of justice, and willing
to receive any plausible statement consistent with a prisoner's
innocence as being enough at least to raise a reasonable doubt on the
subject.

If the change in question should be made, it would, I think, be
necessary to modify the old doctrine about proving beyond all reason-
able doubt the guilt of an accused person, for it would be a matter of
moral certainty that whenever a plausible story consistent with inno-
cence could be devised, the prisoner would swear to it and find others
to help him.

My experience upon this part of the subject is taken rather from
the civil courts than from actual experience in criminal cases, for it
is noticeable that in the many scores of cases which I have tried and
to which the rule of evidence laid down by the Act of 1885 applies, the
accused person has in every case been too poor to be able to make
full use of the resources which the Act lays open to people who have
money and are well advised. If it is true, which I do not believe,
that the crimes against which the Criminal Justice Act is directed are
principally committed by rich men, it is also true that only those
exceptional cases in which they are committed by the lowest and
most brutal ruffians come into court. I think, however, that the ex-
perience of the Divorce Court would confirm what I have said, both
as to the necessity of allowing the parties to a suit to be competent
witnesses, and as to the practically irresistible nature of the tempta-
tion to perjury which their competency provides.

There is one point on which the public naturally feel much
anxiety as to the examination of prisoners, and on which I think the
experience of trials under the Criminal Law Amendment Act throws
great light. Nothing has operated so strongly as the example of
France in causing the public to view with distrust and reluctance
the proposal to make prisoners competent witnesses. It has been
said that nothing which could be gained in the way of additional
evidence by the examination of prisoners could compensate for
what would be lost by a diminution of dignity in the whole proceed-
ing, and by placing the judge in an attitude of hostility to the
prisoner. With this I entirely agree. The enactment in English
courts of the kind of scenes which frequently occur in French
courts, apparently without exciting any particular complaint, would
certainly completely alter the whole character of our administration

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 469

of justice ; but I think that it may be clearly proved by experience
that the consequence apprehended would not follow in fact, and it is
not difficult to explain the reason why it would not follow.

As to the fact we have already abundant experience. Since the
parties to a civil suit were made competent witnesses in 18.51, no
complaint has been made that they are worse treated than other
witnesses. Notoriously, indeed, they are treated in exactly the same
way, and those who are familiar with the actual practice of the courts
will, I think, agree with me in the opinion that in the course of the
present generation the treatment of witnesses has become gentler
than it used to be, or, at all events, simpler and more direct. A
stronger instance of the way in which the parties to an action are
treated, and one which has a closer resemblance to what may be ex-
pected in criminal cases than the common run of civil actions, is
afforded by the Divorce Court. In no class of cases are equally strong
feelings excited, in none is perjury of the most artful kind more
common or sturdy and determined ; but I do not know that it is
alleged (my own experience on the subject is too small to be worth
mentioning) that the parties to divorce suits are treated in the
witness-box with unfairness or cruelty. Certainly no imputation of
any want of dignity or impartiality has been thrown on the distin-
guished judges who have presided in that court. If this is so, what
reason is there to fear that prisoners should be worse treated in the
witness-box than the parties are treated in civil cases or in divorce
suits ?

In the trials in which accused persons are competent witnesses I
have not observed the smallest tendency to such treatment. I should
say that prisoners were cross-examined rather too little than too
much. In particular I have hardly ever heard a prisoner cross-
examined to his credit as to previous convictions.

As to the reasons of this, they are, I think, plain enough to any
one who is acquainted with the spirit of the system and the nature
of cross-examination. An English criminal trial is from first to last a
question between party and party, and the position of the judge is one
of real substantial indifference, in which he has neither any interest
nor any vanity to gratify by the prisoner's conviction. This interest,
such as it is, is always in favour of an acquittal, which frees him
from the exercise of a painful and embarrassing discretion, and the
only questions which he has occasion to ask, either of the witnesses
or of the prisoner, are such as tend to throw light on points in the
casejwhich for any reason are left in obscurity. In cases where the
prisoner is poor and undefended this is a most important function,
which at present is often discharged imperfectly, under great diffi-
culties, or not at all, as I have already sufficiently shown. In cases
in which a prisoner is competently defended the judge would as a
rule be not only able but willing to sit still and listen, leaving the
VOL. XX.— No. 116. LL

470 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

responsibility of sifting the facts to those whose natural and proper
duty it is to sift them. As for cross-examination by counsel, many
false impressions prevail. People who take their view on the subject
from actual experience are well aware that counsel of any experience
never try to prove their case by cross-examination. In respect to
prisoners, counsel, in my experience, usually regard their duty as done
when they have committed the prisoner to contradicting witnesses not
likely either to commit perjury or to be mistaken. I have indeed been
greatly struck with the moderation and brevity with which prisoners
have usually been cross-examined before me. I think indeed, as I
have already said, they have been cross-examined rather too little
than too much.

A French criminal trial — and it is from the reports of French
trials that English people get the notions unfavourable to the
examination of prisoners which commonly prevail — is quite a differ-
ent process from an English one, and proceeds from entirely different
principles. It is in its essence an inquiry into the truth of a charge
brought forward and supported by public authority, and the duty of
the judge is rather to inquire than to direct and moderate. His
examination of the prisoner is directed to this object, and the result,
no doubt, is to produce scenes much at variance with what our
notions, founded as they are upon principles and on practice of an
entirely different kind, approve. It is no part of my present purpose
to compare the two systems, or to criticise either of them. It is
enough to say that there is no danger that a change in the procedure
of the English system, made in exact conformity not only with its
principles, but with the practice already established and in use in a
large and important class of cases, should introduce amongst us what
strike us as the defects of a system founded upon and administered
according to totally different principles.

One point which appears to me of great practical importance in
the matter of the evidence of prisoners is that provision should be
made for their being examined as witnesses before they are committed,
as well as at their trial. There cannot be a greater pledge of truth-
fulness and good faith. It is a common form for solicitors to advise
their clients, when asked before their committal whether they wish
to say anything, to answer, ' I reserve my defence.' How far this may
be a convenient course in the case of a guilty person I do not say,
but in the case of an innocent person who has a true and substantial
defence to rely upon it is a great advantage to be able to say, ( This
defence of mine is not an after-thought, it is what I have said all along.
It is what I gave my accusers notice of as soon as I had an opportunity.'
An alibi in particular is greatly strengthened if it is set up at once,
and that for many reasons. In the first place, such a course gives
the prosecution an opportunity of making inquiries and testing the
evidence of witnesses. In the second place, the evidence of the

1886 PRISONERS AS WITNESSES. 471

witnesses is less open to attack, either on the ground of a failure of
memory or on the ground of subsequent contrivance.

It is more difficult to say how this desirable result is to be obtained.
One way of doing it would be to make the accused person not merely
a competent but a compellable witness at every stage of the inquiry ;
to authorise the magistrates or the prosecutor before the magistrates
to call him as a witness ; and to provide that unless he gave evidence
at the trial his deposition might be given in evidence. This course
would no doubt be effectual, and I do not myself see why it should
not be taken. I can understand, however, that there might be a
feeling against it. It might be regarded as oppressive, and it might
not improbably invest a certain number of police officers with a
discretion which they are not fit to exercise. It is not uncommon
for officers of the police to act as prosecuting solicitors in some parts
of England and Ireland, and it may well be that such an addition
to their powers would be objectionable. In matters of this sort
the popularity of the law is more important than an increase of its
efficiency, unless the increase of its efficiency is very great indeed.
It is, however, important to obtain as general as possible a recogni-
tion of the fact that to keep back a defence is a suspicious thing,
and that to bring it forward on the first opportunity is the strongest
pledge of sincerity and truthfulness that can be given.

One point closely connected with this subject is the propriety of
adding to the permanent and general law a provision to the same
effect as that one which lately proved so useful in Ireland for the
detection and suppression of systematic crime — power, namely, to the
police authorities to hold an inquiry upon oath with a view to discover
the authors of a crime, although no one may have been charged
with it. It was one of the proposals of the Criminal Code Commission
of 1878 that such a power should be given, and a clause to that effect
was introduced into the Criminal Code which that Commission
prepared. Upon general grounds I cannot understand the objection
to such a measure. The practice exists in most parts of the world,
and in England the principle is recognised by one of the oldest
of our judicial institutions — the coroner's inquest. Of its utility
for the discovery of crime it is necessary only to refer to the case
of the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke. It is,
of course, possible to lament that discovery, but there can be no
question at all as to the means by which it was brought about.
With regard to all questions of the reform of the criminal law,
whether in regard to the rules of evidence or otherwise, it must
never be forgotten that those who fear that the criminal law may be
applied to themselves or their friends for political offences of which
they do not morally disapprove do not wish to see the efficiency of
its administration increased.

For these various reasons I think that the old rule as to the

LL 2

472 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

exclusion of persons accused of crime from competency as witnesses
ought to be entirely abolished, and that criminal and civil proceedings
should so far be put upon the same footing. It would, however, be
wrong, in advocating such a measure, not to point out one inevitable
consequence. It is a consequence which has already been incurred
in respect of all civil proceedings, and which I believe to be nearly in-
separable from all improvements in the law. There are in all legal
proceedings two interests which are diametrically opposed to each
other, though their opposition is for the most part concealed, be-
cause its existence is one of those disagreeable truths which no one
likes to admit. They are goodness and cheapness ; either object
may be attained, but not both. Up to a certain point it is no doubt
possible to combine and promote the two objects at once. If you have
a system at once inefficient and costly, a system in which fees are
imposed at every step for the purpose of providing for useless officials,
it is no doubt possible to increase efficiency and economy at the
same time by a reduction of establishments and alterations in the
law. This state of things did at one time exist to a considerable
extent in regard to litigation in England, and it was possible to get the
work better done at a less cost by proper alterations, but even at that
time reforms usually were found to mean increased expenditure in the
long run ; and I think that, in regard to the administration of justice,
the question in most cases is whether new elaborations are worth the
price paid for them. I have a very decided opinion that in civil cases
the procedure in the present day is too elaborate, though some recent
efforts have been made for its simplification, I hope with success. I
do not think this is so with regard to criminal justice. A certain
number of criminal trials are still dealt with, not unfairly, not hastily,
but without that degree of care to find out the truth which ought
to be employed in every case in which liberty and character, and,
indeed, a man's whole prospect of leading a respectable, prosperous
life, may be at stake, but which an ignorant unadvised man cannot
be expected to employ for himself. Many circumstances, some of
which I cannot now remember, have produced a conviction in my
mind that, if the whole truth were known, it would be found that many
crimes are not so simple as they look, and that prisoners might often,
if fully examined, bring to light facts which would set their conduct
in an unsuspected light. This, I think, would certainly lengthen
trials and might tend to complicate them considerably. Unless some
means were taken to secure the taking of the prisoner's evidence fully
before the magistrates, it would in all probability lead to the raising
of false issues before juries, and make occasional adjournments for
the purpose of summoning new witnesses necessary, and thus in
various ways give a good deal of trouble to all the parties concerned ;
but I think it would contribute largely to the fairness of the ultimate
result, and this is the main thing to consider.

J. F. STEPHEN.

1886 473

COMTE'S FAMOUS FALLACY.

CIRCUMSTANCES, which I need not specify, have led me to consider of
late, more carefully than I had ever considered before, the grounds
upon which Comte's famous theory or dictum concerning the three
progressive states of human knowledge rests, and the amount of
truth which it contains. I have long doubted the accuracy of the
law of progress as Comte has stated it; the very neatness and
plausibility of the statement seem to suggest that it is not likely to
be strictly exact ; at the same time these qualities also suggest the
probability of the existence in it of some strong element of truth.
There may be in this case, as in so many others in which mathe-
matical accuracy is impossible, a basis of reality of which it is
important to ascertain the nature and limits, while the claim of
absolute universality may be incapable of being substantiated, and
may tend to throw doubt upon the claim to acceptance which the
theory may really possess.

I propose in the following pages to offer to such persons as care
for discussions of the kind some observations upon Comte's three
states, and to suggest the limitations necessary for the acceptance of
the same as an exposition of truth. Or perhaps it may be more
correct to say, that I shall lay before the reader such modifications —
and they are important modifications — of Comte's statement as seem
to me to be necessary, in order to free it from exaggeration and
from virtual error. First, however, let us have Comte's own enuncia-
tion of his theory, which shall be quoted from Miss Martineau's
translation of the Philosophie Positive : —

From the study of the development of human intelligence, in all directions,
and through all times, the discovery arises of a great fundamental law, to which it
is necessarily subject, and which has a solid foundation of proof, both in the facts
of our organisation and in our historical experience. The law is this — that each of
our leading conceptions — each branch of our knowledge — passes successively through
three different theoretical conditions : the theological, or fictitious ; the meta-
physical, or abstract ; and the scientific, or positive. In other words, the human
mind, by its nature, employs in its progress three methods of philosophising, the
character of which is essentially different, or even radically opposed : viz., the
theological method, the metaphysical, and the positive. Hence arise three philoso-
phies, or general systems of conceptions on the aggregate of phenomena, each of
-which excludes the others. The first is the necessary point of departure of the

474 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

human understanding, and the third is its fixed and definitive state. The second
is merely a state of transition.

Now in this enunciation of the supposed necessary law of progress,
the following are the material points : —

1. Each branch of knowledge passes through three states: the
Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Scientific.

2. The progress is in the order above indicated.

3. The three states are mutually opposed to each other, and can-
not harmoniously co-exist.

I trust to be able to show that no one of these propositions is
universally true, but by way of introduction let me give an illustra-
tion or two of the philosopher's meaning, in order that we may
be in a better position to consider the limitations which should be
imposed upon it. I will borrow the first from the writer of the
article on Comte in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, who in his turn
borrows from ' an able English disciple of Comte' : —

Take the phenomenon of the sleep produced by opium. The Arabs are content
to attribute it to the ' will of God.' Moliere's medical student accounts for it by
a soporific principle contained in the opium. The modern physiologist knows that
he cannot account for it at all. He can simply observe, analyse, and experiment
upon the phenomena attending the action of the drug, and classify it with other
agents analogous in character.

A still better, because wider, illustration is afforded by the general
view of nature taken by thinking men in different epochs of the
earth's history. Here we have undoubtedly something which cor-
responds very much to Comte's theory. In early days natural
phenomena were attributed by those who at all thought about such
things to direct divine action ; the rising and setting of the sun, the
phenomena of thunder and lightning, rain, famine, and pestilence,
and all the multiform facts of the material universe connected them-
selves instinctively with the action of a Being, or of Beings, more
powerful than man. The only escape from the thought was to be
found in not thinking at all — an escape of which probably many
availed themselves. This is Comte's theological stage in palpable
manifestation. Then comes the metaphysical stage as exhibited by
such speculations as those of the Greek philosophers, concerning
which we may truly say that they were only transitional, scarcely
caricatured by Moliere's medical student with his soporific principle.
Yet these speculations had a marvellous hold upon the human mind,
and in no small degree probably affect it still ; it was only after hard
battles and long-continued struggles that nature's abhorrence of a
vacuum and the notion of inherent tendencies, and such hypotheses
as that of the fortuitous concurrence of atoms, and the like, yielded
to the overwhelming claims of inductive science. To this last step,
which has conducted the human mind to some real knowledge of

1886 COMTE'S FAMOUS FALLACY. 475

nature, the metaphysical stage, according to Comte's nomenclature,
was truly introductory, and, when it had served its turn, it vanished
away and became impossible to all philosophic minds. And thus
we may find in the history of physical speculation concerning the
material universe a very complete and illustrative example of Comte's
law of human progress — a better and more helpful example, I think,
than that which the philosopher himself gives us, when he writes as
follows : —

The progress of the individual mind is not only an illustration, but an indirect
evidence, of that of the general mind. The point of departure of the individual
and of the race being the same, the phases of the mind of a man correspond to the
epochs of the mind of the race. Now, each of us is aware, if he looks back upon
his own history, that he was a theologian in his childhood, a metaphysician in his
youth, and a natural philosopher in his manhood. All men who are up to their
age can verify this for themselves.

One is afraid in the case of a great philosopher to suggest a
homely explanation of his having fallen into a mistake ; but it really
looks as if Comte had in this sentence generalised from his own
experience, and concluded that the movement of his own mind must
be representative of that of the mind of every man who is ' up to his
age.' I cannot tell how far the experience of the reader may
correspond to that described by Comte, but it is not difficult to
prove the fallacy of his description by looking round to those whom
one knows well, amongst them thinking men, or by examining
recorded histories of thoughtful minds. It will be observed that
Comte says, not that the theology of childhood will be affected
by the speculations of youth, and again by the mature knowledge
of manhood, — which is probably very generally, though not quite
universally, true, — but that the theology of youth will give way to
youthful metaphysics, and this again to manly natural philosophy :
in other words, since the three conditions are mutually incompatible,
a man who is ' up to his age ' must give up the belief of his child-
hood, and replace a knowledge of Grod by a knowledge of natural
philosophy. Now this view of the case brings us to a point at which
we may appeal to experimental fact ; and it is open to us to ask
whether the dictum of Comte was verified in such persons as the
following : Cauchy, Moigno, Sir John Herschel, Clerk Maxwell,
Faraday ? The mental history of a man like Clifford — and I do not
deny that there are others like him — would no doubt tell for Comte's
theory ; it would show at all events what he means, and would prove
that the law enunciated by him has brilliant illustrations. But if
anyone will turn from Clifford to his remarkable pupil Ellen Watson,
whose interesting biography was published some time ago, he will
perceive that it is possible to find in the history of a mind much
akin to his own the very reverse of Clifford's experience ; that is to
say, the case of one who commenced absolutely without theology,

476 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

to whom natural philosophy was meat and drink, who found in youth
every appetite satisfied by the pursuit of mathematics and kindred
knowledge, and who nevertheless in the maturity of her powers,
when according to the theory she ought to have been a natural
philosopher and nothing else, found her soul * athirst for God ; yea,
even for the living God,' and sought the satisfaction of her thirst in
the waters of life which Christ gives by the ministry of His Church.
Observe, this treatment of Comte's dictum is in accordance with the
principles of the Positive Philosophy. A certain fact is asserted as
universally true ; ' all men who are up to their age can verify this for
themselves.' Well, then, try it by a few examples; the dictum breaks
down ; it is not true in certain cases, and therefore to assert its
universal truth is impossible.

When the preceding paragraph was written I had not noticed a
passage in Dr. Martineau's * Types of Ethical Theory,' which I thank-
fully quote in confirmation of what has been advanced : —

With Comte's assertion in your mind, that every cultivated man has been a
theologian in childhood, a metaphysician in youth, and a positivist in maturity,
glance down the roll of honoured savans and discoverers since the rebirth of the
scientific spirit, and the effrontery of the generalisation is apparent at once. His
favourite heroes and precursors, Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, give it no support ;
as applied to Galileo, Huyghens, and the Cassini, to Newton, Pascal, and De Moivre,
the maxim is simply ridiculous. And if we are forbidden to expect its evidence so
far from Comte's advent, contradiction still meets us in later generations : the
whole spirit of John Dalton and Thomas Young, of the two Herschels and the
two Amperes, are a protest against it. Are there any names more purely repre-
sentative of the inductive method, carried into the newest department of physical
research, than those of Oersted and Faraday ? Of these two, the Englishman, in
telling his last thoughts to his countrymen, insisted, like Bacon, on the distinct
spheres, but the harmonious coexistence of inductive knowledge and religious faith ;
and the Dane left for posthumous publication an essay to prove that ' One Mind
pervades all Nature.' And notwithstanding the well-known voices that loudly
appropriate the agnostic rule, there is no country eminent in modern science that
does not record votes of high avail against it ; from Fechner in Germany, from
Pasteur in France, from the late Clerk Maxwell, from Tait and Balfour Stewart,
from Carpenter and Allman in our own country.1

Now, however, let us treat the subject more generally ; and for
this purpose let ine ask the reader to go back to the three proposi-
tions which were specified on page 473, as the material points in the
enunciation of the law of progress.

In the first place, can it be asserted that every branch of know-
ledge passes through the three states alleged ? Test the assertion
by applying it to a most important branch, namely, the mathematical.
Comte places mathematics first in his list of sciences, telling us that
the study of mathematics is an indispensable preliminary to that of all
other sciences, and that mathematics must ' hold the first place in the

1 Vol. i. p. 454. I would gladly quote, did space allow, a portion of the subse-
quent paragraph on the failure of history to support Comte's view.

1886

COMTE'S FAMOUS FALLACY.

477

Hierarchy of Sciences, and be the point of departure of all education.'
With which description I do not feel called upon to find fault ; it is
at • least intelligible that a science, which has to do with the funda-
mental conceptions of number and space, should take precedence
of others ; we recognise the precedence by the introduction of
arithmetic into our elementary schools ; but when we come to
inquire how this branch of knowledge illustrates the general position
as to the universality of the enunciated law of progress, it is not easy
to find an answer. Neither history nor reasoning, so far as I know,
can suggest to us that mathematical knowledge ever passed through
a theological stage. Yet when we are told that * each branch of our
knowledge passes successively through three theoretic conditions,'
how can we make an exception in favour of such an important branch
as the mathematical? and if the law of progress does not hold in
this case, may it not be suspected that there are other failures, and
that the law is not so truly universal as Comte supposed it to be ?

But, secondly, we are told not only that each branch of knowledge
passes through the three states, but that the order is invariably that
laid down, namely, Theological, Metaphysical, Scientific. Will this
assertion bear to be tested by an example ?

Let the example be that of commercial knowledge. The use and
power of money, the laws of commerce and exchange, the production
and application of wealth, undoubtedly constitute an important branch
of science. It is a branch of science, too, which may be contemplated
from the three points of view suggested by Comte's dictum ; but
I venture to say that in such contemplation Comte's order cannot
possibly be observed. In fact, the exact reverse of the alleged order
is perhaps the only possible one. The science of commerce begins
with no theological base, but is built upon the simplest social
necessities of man : the natural barter of goods is facilitated by the
substitution for the goods themselves of a more convenient medium,
such as silver or gold ; and the most elementary branch of the
science of money consists in weighing out so much silver, as we read
that Abraham did when he bought a piece of ground in which to
bury his dead. Ages might pass before anyone considered philoso-
phically what were the principles of exchange ; even now we know
very well that there is much difference of opinion upon many
commercial and monetary questions, such as that of bimetallism, the
use of paper money, and the like ; and it requires much thought
and a clear head to master the problems which continually arise in
connection with the wide subject of finance. High above this philo-
sophical side of the question towers the theological — it is so high
that to some it is almost out of sight — but it exists and is very real ;
according to this theological view money is a sacred trust, and as
such it needs to be dealt with by religious teachers. And so we find
St. Paul writing that ' the love of money is the root of all evil ;' and

478 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

our Lord warning us that it is hard for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of Heaven, while He did not shrink from the paradoxical
assertion that two mites, ' which make a farthing,' are under certain
moral conditions of more value than a large quantity of gold and
silver. It may be possible therefore to say that commercial knowledge
is (1) Scientific, (2) Metaphysical, (3) Theological, but impossible to
reverse this order.

And, thirdly, it is asserted by Comte that the three states, the
successive existence of which he enunciates, are mutually opposed
to each other, and cannot co-exist.

Here once more I venture to doubt the soundness of the assertion,
and to support my scepticism by the test of an example.

Let the example be astronomy ; a choice which is favourable to
Comte's theory, because it is one in which the succession for which
he contends is conspicuous, and may be readily admitted. That is
to say, we have in the case of astronomy, first, that simple view
which suggested itself to the mind of him who wrote, ' The heavens
declare the glory of Grod, and the firmament sheweth His handy-work ; '
secondly, the speculations as to the heavens which preceded the
exact knowledge of the days of Kepler and those of Newton ; and
thirdly, the scientific precision characteristic of our own days. It is
easy to perceive in this case, and to acknowledge freely, the existence
of such a progression as that of which Comte speaks ; but still it may
be asked, where is the proof of that mutual opposition and incompati-
bility which is alleged ? It is fully granted that science of the most
accurate and effective kind is in possession of the field ; there is no
department of knowledge in which the powers of the human mind
and the application of mathematical calculation have been so success-
ful as they have been in this : but is the philosopher, and still more
is the theologian, ousted by the success of the mathematician? Are
there no problems started, or at least emphasised, by that success,
with regard to the origin of things, the nature of the laws which
govern the universe, the essence of motion, of force, and other
physical mysteries, with which the mathematician does not pretend
to deal ? and is there any reason why the theologian should not
speak as confidently as ever of a divine artificer, whose glory is more
and more clearly declared by the heavens, as those heavens are more
accurately known ? I demur therefore to the assertion that the three
states of human knowledge, even when they follow the progression
assigned to them by Comte, are destructive each of the others.2

2 I will here interpose by way of note the expression of my astonishment, that
Comte should have laid so much stress upon the invariable sequence of events, accord-
ing to ascertained laws, as the highest result of science. Cause and effect, not mere
invariable sequence, seem to be the spolia opima of scientific investigation. A mere
invariable sequence, without any reference to causation, may be strange and curious,
but can scarcely satisfy all the demands of human intelligence. There is a story told
of some Eastern half-civilised potentate, who in visiting London was so much struck

1886 COMTEK FAMOUS FALLACY. 479

Therefore, venturing (as I have done) to join issue with Cornte
as to the truth of each of the three propositions which have been
now briefly discussed, or rather tested by examples, I proceed to
examine in a more direct manner what may be accepted as true with
regard to the three states.

I trust that I shall not be regarded as resuscitating any defunct
notions as to the occult powers or qualities of numbers, if I say that
there are not a few cases in which the number three appears to exhaust
all that is thinkable, and to have in itself a kind of completeness or
perfection. Thus in geometry three lines and no less will enclose a
space ; and in mechanics the fundamental proposition is that of the
triangle of forces. Length, breadth, and height exhaust the conception
of space. Past, present, and future comprise all time. I might almost
cite the proverbial three courses, which are so frequently open to
hesitating politicians. And it might even be permissible, if it were
necessary, to seek, as some philosophers have done, in the regions of
abstract reason an explanation, as at least an explanatory illustration,
of the triple character of the great mystery of the Christian Creed.

But I pass from such considerations as these to point out some
departments of thought, in which a threefold division appears neces-
sarily to present itself and to embrace the whole subject.

Consider the material universe which we inhabit. The most
obvious point of view to a modern thinker will undoubtedly be the
scientific. It is needless to say that the scientific study of the
material universe must be a very widespreading and difficult business.
It will include all the physical sciences, mechanics, chemistry, elec-
tricity, botany, zoology, geology, physiology, and many other branches.
It will be beyond the power of any one mind to grasp ; but the study
is conceivable, the methods are understood, and by the combined
energies of a multitude of workers much has been and is being
done. We can conceive of everything being known in this depart-
ment of knowledge, though we are confessedly far enough distant
from the goal at present. But supposing all to be known concern-
ing the material universe that can be known through the medium
of such studies as those which have been specified, it is obvious that
we shall still leave a large class of questions altogether untouched.
Is there no moral tie between the universe and myself? Is there any
reason why the said universe exists, and why I also exist ? Is there
any great purpose to be performed by these existences ? Or again,
what is the material universe ? what is matter ? what am I ? Ques-
tions such as these, which may be suggested in abundance, which
force themselves upon every reflecting mind, and which may be

by the fact of a pull at a certain rope in his chamber producing the phenomenon of
a servant opening his door, that he made the experiment repeatedly, and satisfied him-
self that he had discovered an invariable sequence ; but there was no great amount of
intelligence either in the experiment or in the discovery.

480 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

followed into all kinds of queer ramifications and puzzling conse-
quences, constitute the basis of a study which is altogether distinct
from the scientific method of considering the universe. Let us call
it philosophical or metaphysical. Whatever name we give to it, it is
something different in kind from the method previously described.
But we cannot stop here ; for the material universe will suggest to
a thinking mind something outside itself which is not material : the
idea of cause and effect, the postulate that there is no effect with-
out a cause, and the difficulty of conceiving such a complicated yet
delicately adjusted system as the material universe without the
assumption of a pre-existent presiding mind, lead the thoughtful
student to consider the material universe with reference, not merely
to itself, which is the basis of science, nor merely with reference to
the contemplating mind, which is the basis of philosophy, but also
with reference to a first cause of all, lying (so to speak) outside and
beyond both ; and this is the basis of theology. Observe, I am not
saying that the material universe leads by necessary logical conse-
quence to belief in a God — this may or may not be, so far as my
present argument is concerned : the point upon which I am insisting
is, that the consideration of the material universe must necessarily
introduce the discussion whether there be a Grod or not ; if
there be, it will lead to other weighty conclusions : but anyhow the
study of the universe cannot be complete until it has led the mind
of the student up to this supreme question. Moreover, when the.
mind has been so led, the study would seem to be necessarily com-
plete; for when we have discussed the subject, (1) with reference to
itself, (2) with reference to the contemplating mind, and (3) with
reference to that which is beyond both the thing contemplated and
the contemplating mind, and which is the cause and origin of all the
possibilities of the case are exhausted as truly as space is exhausted
when we have examined it in all three dimensions.

The view which has now been suggested may receive elucidation
and support from observing what has been propounded by notable
philosophers before the days of Comte.

For example, Bacon writes as follows : —

The knowledge of man is as the waters, some descending from above, and some
springing from beneath ; the one informed by the light of nature, the other inspired
by divine revelation. The light of nature consisteth in the notions of the mind
and the reports of the senses ; for as for knowledge which man receiveth by teach-
ing, it is cumulative and not original ; as in a water that besides its own spring-
head is fed with other springs and streams. So, then, according to these two
differing illuminations or originals, knowledge is first of all divided into divinity
and philosophy.3

It will be observed that in this paragraph we have a tripartite
division of knowledge. For although Bacon divides it into two, the

* Advancement of Learning, book ii. vol. iii. pp. 3-6.

1886 COMTVS FAMOUS FALLACY. 481

second of his heads is subdivided. The light of nature as he tells
us consists in the notions of the mind, and the reports of the senses,
which division corresponds pretty well — in fact, if fairly interpreted,
corresponds completely — with what we should call metaphysical and
physical science : for the metaphysical has to do with ideas of the
mind, and the physical depends upon observation of the external world,
that is, ultimately upon the senses. Consequently we may represent
Bacon's classification of knowledge thus : —

Human knowledge

Divinity Philosophy

Metaphysics Physics.

In the paragraph following that which has been quoted above, we
again fall upon a tripartite division : —

In philosophy, the contemplations of men do either penetrate unto God, or are
circumferred to nature, or are reflected or reverted upon Himself. Out of which
several inquiries there do arise three knowledges — divine philosophy, natural philo-
sophy, and human philosophy, or humanity. For all things are marked and
stamped with this triple character, of the power of God, the difference of nature,
and the use of man.

In this paragraph I understand Bacon to assert that, when the
mind of man sets itself to philosophise, or (using a simpler term) to
think, on any subject, there will be three lines in which his thoughts
may run. First, the man may consider the subject or thing with
reference to God ; secondly, with reference to other things like itself,
that is, with reference to the natural world ; or thirdly, with reference
to man or to the contemplating mind. So that putting aside all
consideration of divinity as such, and confining ourselves to philo-
sophy only, we still are driven by the necessity of the case to admit
a divine element, and to discuss any subject which has to be dis-
cussed with reference to God and nature and man.

There is thus a bond of similarity between Bacon and Comte ;
the difference consists in this, that with Bacon the members of the
triple division are co-ordinate and harmonious, whereas with Comte
they are successive and incompatible. I suspect that Bacon is
right, and that consequently Comte is wrong.

I venture to refer by way of further illustration to that curious
work of Henry More, which he describes as 'A Conjectural Essay of
interpreting the mind of Moses, in the first three chapters of Genesis,
according to a threefold Cabbala.'

The heads of the Cabbala are Literal, Philosophical, and Mys-
tical, or Divinely Moral. Now it will be apparent from the very
terminology here used that there is a probable connection between
the heads of Henry More's Cabbala and the divisions of Comte;

482 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

only the order of arrangement is reversed ; More's first head cor-
responding to Comte's third, and vice versa. This will become
clearer if we note the substance of the discussions under the three
different heads of the Cabbala.

Under the head Literal, we find the account of the creation
treated as a quasi-scientific history of what took place in the be-
ginning : —

The Earth at first a deep miry Abysse, covered over with waters, over which
was a fierce Wind, and through all Darkness. Day made at first without a Sun.
. . . The Creation of Fish and Fowl. The Creation of Beasts and Creeping
Things. . . . How it came to pass that Man feeds on the better sort of the fruits
of the Earth, and the Beasts on the worse.

These are some of the subjects dealt with in the first chapter,
and they indicate that the author considered that the history in the
Book of Genesis might be regarded positively — in other words scientifi-
cally, or in its relation to ordinary human knowledge.

It is very different with the Philosophick Cabbala to which we
come next. Here are some indications, taken from the heading of
the first chapter, of what the reader is likely to find : —

The World of Life and Forms, and the potentiality of the visible Universe
created by the Triune God, and referred to a Monad or Unite. The universal
immense Matter of the Visible World created out of nothing, and referred to the
number Two. . . . The Creation of Beasts and Cattel, but more chiefly of Man
himself, referred to the number Six.

Here we are in a region of Metaphysical, not to say fantastical,
speculation.

Lastly, the Moral Cabbala may be judged from the following
indications : —

Man, a Microcosm or Little World, in whom there are two principles, Spirit
and Flesh. . . . The hearty and sincere love of God and a man's neighbour is as
the Sun in the soul of man. . . . Christ the image of God is created, being a
perfect Ruler over all the motions of the Irascible and Concupiscible. . . . The
Divine Wisdom approves of whatsoever is simply natural, as good.

I do not wish to lay too much stress upon Henry More's un-
doubtedly fanciful conceptions ; but certainly it is curious to observe
the analogy between Comte's three progressive states of human
knowledge, and More's threefold Cabbala.

Let me proceed to observe that an illustration may be found
without going back either to Bacon or to Henry More ; it is sufficient
to quote the controversy which may be read in the pages of this
Keview, . arising out of Mr. Gladstone's paper on the ' Dawn of
Creation and Worship.'4 Here we have Mr. Gladstone representing
the theological side of the argument, Professor Huxley the scientific,

4 Nineteenth Century, November 1885.

18S6

COMTPS FAMOUS FALLACY.

483

and Professor Max Miiller, though not taking up the cudgels so dis-
tinctly as Professor Huxley, representing the philosophical side.
Mr. Gladstone writes : —

There is nothing in the criticisms of Dr. Rdville but what rather tends to
confirm than to impair the old-fashioned belief that there is a revelation in the
Book of Genesis. . . . Whether this revelation was conveyed to the ancestors of
the whole human race who have at the time or since existed, I do not know, and
the Scriptures do not appear to me to make the affirmation, even if they do not
convey certain indications which favour a contrary opinion. ... I will now add
some positive considerations which appear to me to sustain the ancient, and, as I
am persuaded, impregnable, belief of Christians and Jews concerning the inspiration
of the Book.

All this marks the point of view theological, and it is emphasised
by such language as the following, taken from the article in which
Mr. Gladstone replies to the criticism of Professor Huxley, and
which he describes as ' A Plea for a Fair Trial.'

I do not think Mr. Huxley has even endeavoured to understand what is the
idea, what is the intention, which his opponent ascribes to the Mosaic writer ; or
what is the conception which his opponent forms of the weighty word Revelation.
He holds the writer responsible for scientific precision : I look for nothing of the
kind ; but assign to him a statement general, which admits exceptions ; popular,
which aims mainly at producing moral impressions ; summary, which cannot but
be open to more or less of criticism in detail. He thinks it is a lecture ; I think
it is a sermon.

Nothing can exhibit more clearly the difference of view between
the two writers than these last two short sentences. According to
Mr. Gladstone's estimate, the same thing may be a scientific lecture
to one mind, a religious discourse to another. One of these does
not necessarily pass into the other ; the two views may exist simul-
taneously, they may each contain an element of truth.

Now let us turn to Professor Max Miiller. In the postscript to
his article, entitled ' Solar Myths,' he attacks Mr. Gladstone on
certain points, connected with the subject which he has been dis-
cussing. With this attack I shall not concern myself, but shall
quote a short passage from the article itself. What I want to
illustrate is the manner in which a person of the cast of mind which
distinguishes Professor Max Miiller, in dealing with the ' Dawn of
Creation and Worship,' or with the origin of the religious sentiment,
instinctively approaches the subject from the philosophical side.

Take the following passage : —

Is it not something to have gained the conviction, in spite of all that has been
said and written to the contrary, that there is no race on earth without what seems
to many so peculiar — an intellectual excrescence, namely religion ? It is quite true
that this does not prove in the least either the theory of a primitive revelation,
or the existence of religious necessities in primitive man, whatever 'primitive man'
may mean. But it encourages, nay, it even compels us to ask, whether there may
not have been the same causes at work in order to produce, under the most different
circumstances, the same result — the result from one point of view so irrational,
so marvellous, so unexpected, as religion. Whatever form religions may have

484 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

assumed, there is one strange feature in all of them, in the lowest and in the
highest, in the most modern and the most ancient, a belief in the Infinite — meaning
by infinite whatever is not purely finite, and, therefore, not within the cognisance
of the senses. It does not matter whether that belief in the Infinite appears as a
belief in gods or ancestors, in means and ends, in causes, or powers, or tendencies,
in a Beyond, or in the Unknown and Unknowable. The highest generalisation of
which all these beliefs admit is a belief in the Infinite or Non-Finite. This fact
must form the foundation of the whole science of religion, and may possibly give
new life even to the science of thought.

I now pass to Professor Huxley. It will be sufficient for my
purpose to quote a portion of the paragraph in which he explains his
reason for interposing in the quarrel between Mr. Gladstone and
M. Eeville. He writes : —

As the Queen's proctor intervenes, in certain cases, between two litigants, in
the interests of justice, so it may be permitted me to interpose as a sort of uncom-
missioned science proctor. My second excuse for my meddlesomeness is that
important questions of natural science — respecting which neither of the combatants
professes to speak as an expert — are involved in the controversy ; and I think it is
desirable that the public should know what it is that natural science really has to
say on these topics, to the best belief of one who has been a diligent student of
natural science for the last forty years.

Professor Huxley, therefore, criticises Mr. Gladstone from the
scientific point of view ; we have already seen something of the
manner in which Mr. Gladstone meets the criticism. The article
closes with a very important page, from which I extract the
following :

In the eighth century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the
Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as
wonderful an inspiration of genius, as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle :

' And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God ? '

If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it
wantonly mutilates ; while, if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect ideal
of religion.

The antagonism of science is not to religion, but to the heathen survivals and
the bad philosophy under which religion herself is often well-nigh crushed. And,
for my part, I trust that this antagonism will never cease ; but that, to the end of
time, true science will continue to fulfil one of her most beneficent functions — that
of relieving men from the burden of false science which is imposed upon them in the
name of religion.

With the greater part of this quotation I very much sympathise ;
and I am disposed to believe that upon some such basis, a concordat
might be established between Theology, Philosophy, and Science.
Only let it be observed that a certain school of scientists will not
permit men to walk humbly with their God, because they deny that
there is any God with whom men can walk. To walk humbly with
our God, if expanded into its full meaning, implies much. It not
only assumes the dry fact of the existence of one who can be described

1886 COMTE'S FAMOUS FALLACY. 485

as God, but it also postulates for that Being such qualities as to
make humility in His presence the proper mental attitude for beings
like ourselves. Still more it postulates such a relation between God
and ourselves, that a man can say, ' 0 God, Thou art my God.'
Let philosophers and men of science grant as much as this, and the
theologian will grant on his side that, although there are other
doctrines besides, still there is abundance of common ground upon
which all three classes of thinkers may securely stand without rudely
jostling each other.

It would take me beyond my purpose if I should attempt further
to adjudicate amongst these three notable champions ; but the fact
that such men with the same subject-matter before them are so
differently impressed, and are led to conclusions so different in their
complexions, may suggest that in these days, as in others, knights
honest and clear-sighted may look upon opposite sides of the shield.
I can quite understand that an intensely earnest mind looking from
the theological side should be astonished at the fact and at the
manner * in which in this day writers, whose name is Legion, un-
impeached in character, and abounding in talent, entirely put
away from them the conception of a deity, an acting and ruling
deity ; ' and yet I can understand that, looking from the physical side,
scientific men should maintain that as scientific men they have
nothing to do with anything which transcends the region of sense
and observation ; whilst also it is intelligible that the philosophical
inquirer into the origin and relation of the religions of the world
may find himself engaged with problems in the solution of which
neither the theologian pure and simple nor the scientific investiga-
tor can render him much help. But is there not room in the wide
world of thought for all three thinkers ? may not each learn some-
thing from the other two ? and is not spiritual equilibrium to be
most surely sought in the mutual influence of all three ?

In order to illustrate and enforce the view of the subject suggested
by these questions, I will venture to propose as amendments to the
three assertions concerning knowledge enunciated on page 474 as
expressing Comte's theory, these assertions following : —

1. Many branches of knowledge may be contemplated from three
points of view — the Theological, the Metaphysical (or Philosophical),
and the Scientific.

2. The suitable order of contemplation is not the same in all
cases and circumstances, and is sometimes the very reverse of that
assigned by Comte.

3. The three modes of contemplation are not mutually opposed,
nor incapable of harmonious coexistence.5

5 It may be interesting to notice, in connection with what is here suggested, that
the late Dr. Whewell commenced the principal work of his life by publishing the
JKstory of the Inductive Sciences; that he followed up the history by the Philosophy

VOL. XX.— No. 116. MM

486 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

Let me apply these counter-assertions to some examples, and see
•what ground we can find for believing them to be true.

Take as a first example man himself. This is an example
favourable to Comte, and I have given it precedence for that very
reason. It may be said that the first contemplation of man is to be
found in such a history, or theory, or speculation, or myth (call it what
you will), as is contained in the early chapters of Genesis ; the basis
of such contemplation is the creation of man in the image of God,
the delivery to man by God of a moral law, together with the breach
of that law and all its consequences ; this basis is obviously theo-
logical, and nothing else. No philosophy of man can (I apprehend)
be produced more ancient than this. But we meet later on with
a philosophy more properly so called ; we have solemn specula-
tions by Greek thinkers and by Latin followers 6 concerning man's
duties and destiny, and the foundations of his morals ; these specu-
lations correspond well enough to Comte's metaphysical stage.
Then, lastly, we have in these scientific days the distinct science of
anthropology, by which it is sought to make out all that can be
known about anthropos, or man ; and this is Comte's positive stage.
So that it would be difficult to find a case more favourable for the
views of the great positive philosopher. But if it be asserted that
the theological theory of man is gone by, and that the metaphysical
was merely transitional and introductory to the positive or anthropo-
logical stage, it may be asked, Where is the proof of this ? Is the
belief in man's divine origin and his possession of a divine image and
a divine life altogether or even approximately exploded ? Are there
no philosophers who regard ethics as a worthy subject of contempla-
tion and reasoning ? and can any one sanely adopt the position that
anthropological science is a sufficient substitute for religion and
morals ? It seems to me more reasonable to contend that, while it
is historically true that the study of man has been first theological,
secondly metaphysical, and thirdly scientific, the successive platforms
of study are by no means opposed to each other, or mutually destruc-
tive ; on the other hand, each of the three seems to crave the other
two. And if — putting history on one side — we consider how the
three different views of man can best be classified, I should be dis-
posed to say that the anthropological study should stand first in the
natural order ; that the insufficiency of the conclusions of natural
science concerning a spiritual being like man would lead to the study
of him morally, ethically, metaphysically; and that the impossibility of

of the Inductive Sciences, which he regarded as a kind of moral to his first work ; and
that subsequently he published a volume entitled Indications of a Creator, which
consists chiefly of extracts from the former works. Here we have the order : Posi-
tive, Metaphysical, Theological ; and each following harmoniously upon that which
precedes.

6 I do not mean that there were no other thinkers except Graek and Latin, but
merely refer to these as being chiefly before the minds of mcst readers.

1886 COMTE'S FAMOUS FALLACY. 487

rising, even by this form of discussion, to the full height of the argu-
ment would properly lead to the contemplation of man as in a
peculiar sense the image and ' the son of God.' 7 Anyhow, it seems
to be simply impossible to take the measure of man with no other
aid than that supplied by the instruments and observations of
physical science. Let physical science do its best in this as in all
other fields, but let it not be asserted that moral and theological
science is obsolete or useless; rather let it be candidly considered
whether the days, in which the human nature of man is most care-
fully investigated, may not be also those in which it is specially and
supremely important that his divine origin and nature should not be
forgotten.

As a second example, also highly favourable to Comte, take our
knowledge of nature, concerning which it may be granted that the
progression of states historically holds. What need not and cannot
be granted is, that the states are mutually destructive. The notion of
* rising from Nature up to Nature's (rod ' may not always be realised ;
but to say that this progression is impossible may be characterised as
at least arbitrary, and as lacking proof both from reason and from ex-
perience. It seems to me that if we choose to imagine a thinking
being suddenly placed in the plenitude of his powers upon earth,
what he would do would be this : he would first examine carefully
the universe in which he was placed ; then he would be led, by reflec-
tion upon himself and his own feelings and aspirations, to guess that
there were more things in heaven and earth than positive philosophy
could reveal to him ; and, lastly, he would be led to the conception
of a Great First Cause, or a Lord of Heaven and Earth. When
arrived at this terminus, why should not he still hold fast and value
the knowledge which his first investigations had procured for him ?

One more example shall suffice. Let it be that of time and
space. I choose this example, not as in the former cases because it
is favourable to Comte, but because on the other hand it is quite
incompatible with his theory. Time and space are primarily known
to us as connected with the measures of them : time is a matter for
clocks and watches, space for a foot-rule ; the earliest clock or watch
being the sun or the moon, and the earliest foot-rule man's own foot,
or a span, or a cubit : and this positive conception of time and space
proves sufficient to ninety-nine men out of a hundred even in the
present day : it is only the hundredth man who asks, ' Well, but after
all, what is space ? and what is time ? ' And then it is one man in
millions, an Immanuel Kant, or the like, who tries to tell his fellows
what space and time are. In this case it seems perfectly certain
that the metaphysical stage did not precede the positive, and it is
not easy to see how it could. But what of the theological ? So far

7 S. Luke iii. 38.

M M 2

488 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

from being the first state of knowledge, it might be argued that it is
not a necessary state at all. I do not say that this argument would
hold good, for indeed I think that the consideration of space and
time as conditions of human conceptions leads us almost necessarily
to the thought of one whose conceptions are not so conditioned,
whose being is infinite, and whose presence is ubiquitous ; but still I
think it might be argued with some plausibility that space and time
have no theological side : anyhow it would be utterly preposterous to
maintain that our knowledge of time and space begins with a theo-
logical phase, passes through a metaphysical one, and terminates in
a positive.

I trust that I am not unfairly dealing with Comte's theory by thus
testing it : certainly my intention is to be fair, and certainly Comte
asserts that each of our leading conceptions passes through the stages
which he describes in the order which he gives, and with the con-
dition of each stage being destructive of that which precedes it. The
application in many cases of this theory may be harmless enough,
and the assertion of the universality of its application might perhaps
by some be regarded at worst as an eccentricity ; but when we find
that moral and social questions are to be included in the application,
or rather that the reduction of moral and social questions to the limits
of positive philosophy is the end and aim of Comte's efforts, then we
feel that the question of the three states is one of the most serious
and solemn that can possibly be raised.

It would take me far beyond my purpose or the convenient
limits of this paper to discuss the probable results of Comte's views
concerning the right basis of moral and social philosophy being prac-
tically realised ; but I cannot refrain from saying that I should
tremble exceedingly and almost despair concerning mankind, if I
could bring myself to believe that these views had any considerable
chance of gaining general acceptance amongst us.

For it is not only the history of the world, but the history of
each individual man, that is to be subject to this iron law of the three
states. ' So strictly,' writes Dr. Martineau,8 * does Comte accept and
apply this rule, that he names the age at which the youth will
complete his evolution : at fourteen he will stand at the upper limit
of his theological term, having already run through two prior
segments of its length ; and at twenty-one he will have left his
metaphysics behind, and stand forth the essential Positivist. Such
at least will be his history, so far as his education conforms itself to
the spontaneous growth of his powers and tendencies of his nature/
Though it is admitted, to quote the same writer, ' that even in the
keen defining light of Paris, some shreds of metaphysic network still
hang about biology, and for the students of morals a certain Divine
nimbus lingers around the head of humanity, and hides its naked
8 Types of Etldcal Theory, vol. i. p. 413.

1886 COMTE'S FAMOUS FALLACY. 489

zoological affinities.' In other words, it is in vain to ignore the
instinct and conscience of mankind, or to drive them out with the
pitchfork of Positive Philosophy : they will not be ignored or driven
out : even in the most privileged atmosphere usque recurrent ; they
will assert their supremacy, let Positive Philosophers say what they
will.

The aspect of the three states which is thus revealed to our minds
is unspeakably tragical and sad. It is true enough, only too true,
that at the age of fourteen or thereabouts boys not unfrequently,
though far from universally, slough off the teaching of childhood,
and that after some years of doubt and unsettled conviction they
become as men what it has been the fashion to call unbelievers, but
what I suppose we ought to dignify with the name of Positive Philo-
sophers : the Christian birthright is sold for the mess of agnostic
pottage. I know what may be said about the Eeligion of Humanity :
and I rejoice that at least some compensation, which can scarcely be
brought logically within the limits of Positive Philosophy, is offered
for the destruction of the possibility of religious faith in the ordinary
sense of the word : but in truth it is no sufficient compensation ; it
is a stone, when we want bread : it is a fiction in which the soul of a
philosopher, who has reasoned himself out of a belief in God the
Father, may endeavour to find delight, but it is not food for the
simple and ignorant, it is mockery to women and children, it is no
* Gospel for the poor.'

Hence it is not difficult to prophesy, with some confidence of the
truth of the prediction, that Theology has not that transient character
which Comte predicates for it ; that it cannot be and will not be
rendered obsolete either by Metaphysics or by Positive Philosophy ;
that it is in fact built * upon a Rock, against which the Gates of Hell
shall not prevail.'

While, however, theology in all its generality and depth and ful-
ness is thus, as asserted, indestructible, the personal share in the
treasures of theology, the personal knowledge of God, and personal
faith in Him, may be destroyed for any one particular human soul with
•comparative ease. And it is this consideration, above all others, which
has led me to attempt in this essay a simple, and, as I trust, intelligible
refutation of Comte's three-headed dogma, or literary Cerberus. The
question of the truth or untruth of the dogma is one of terrible practical
importance. If it be true, theology vanishes, and therefore ©sos. We
are reduced to the ancient negation, ' There is no God.' And the
very neatness and plausibility of Comte's formula, which was taken
in the commencement of this essay as suggesting that it is not likely
to be strictly exact, nevertheless tends to give it currency amongst
.a multitude of readers, who are probably not exact thinkers, if they
•can be described as thinkers at all. ' Let me write the songs of a
nation,' said one of keen perception of the workings of a national

490 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

mind, < and I care not who makes its laws.' And as with songs so
is it very much with epigrams : a man puts some view concerning
religion or politics or morality into an epigrammatic form, which
supplies it (as it were) with wings, and enables it like thistle seed
to spread and propagate after its kind. Thus we are told that Grod
is none other than * a stream of tendency,' or that ' matter has in it
the potentiality of all terrestrial life,' or that ' property is theft,' or
that ' the voice of the people is the voice of God,' together with many
other epigrams more or less intelligible ; and the epigrams if plausible,
and falling in with the tastes of those to whom they are addressed, are
quoted and quoted until they become almost a part of the popular
creed and are accepted as containing deep undeniable truth. In this
way, as I believe, much mischief is done ; and I can scarcely imagine
any event more injurious in its consequences to the moral and reli-
gious condition of a nation, than the popular acceptance and general
currency of Comte's epigrammatic dogma of the three states. Jn
which belief I have written this essay ; and.' I now submit it to the
world, as a humble contribution towards the destruction of a dogma
which I hold to be philosophically and practically untrue, and
morally and in its consequences pernicious and dangerous.

H. CARLISLE.

491

THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A PROFESSION.

THERE have been many indications of late of a growing feeling in
favour of such an inquiry as the Government has just promised into
the condition of the public departments. These indications may
or may not be in themselves a cause for uneasiness. There is
a large question behind which is worthy of much attention, for
it not only vitally affects the future of the Civil Service as a
profession, but it has a most direct bearing on those questions
of organisation and administration to which public attention has-
been directed on more than one occasion recently. It is now
fifteen years since the system of open competitive examination was
adopted in this country as a means of recruiting the staff of our public
departments. It has worked a revolution in the Civil Service, and
for many reasons the present is a suitable time to review the results,
and at the same time to note the nature and tendency of the work of
those permanent officials in high position who, reared in the tradi-
tions of the old system, have here had to grapple with a question
involving many problems of a nature public and social as well as
administrative.

The question of the state of the Civil Service is a large one, and
I will begin with that aspect of it which meets me significantly at
the threshold. Our Home Civil Service has almost ceased to attract
into its ranks that class of men which its reformers have always
expressed themselves anxious to secure — the men of liberal education,
such as go into the open professions ; the men who go into the law,
the Church, and kindred occupations, and who officer the army and
navy. I may divide my remarks under two heads : (1) The break-
down— for it must be considered as such — of the scheme or schemes
now in operation for recruiting the public departments by open com-
petitive examination ; and (2) the effect upon those departments of
a result so unprovided for.

It will be well to know, in the first place, what we are to under-
stand by the term Civil Service. It is often loosely used, and I do not
wish to quote it in the wide sense in which it is sometimes understood.
The Civil Service Commissioners deal with all candidates for appoint-
ments, and in their last report they state that, during the year 1885,
24,036 cases were so treated. Of this number a large proportion are

492 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

those of candidates for appointments which do not come within the
scope of my remarks, and which may be described as of a nature sub-
ordinate, technical, or special. I shall have to deal only with the ordi-
nary clerical and administrative establishments of the great public de-
partments from the Treasury downwards, which establishments are at
present almost exclusively recruited by open competitive examination.
The system in force is very simple ; with a few unimportant exceptions
all the staff enter under two schemes of examination, both open and
competitive. The superior clerical establishments are supposed to be
constituted from men entering under the higher scheme of examina-
tion, which is arranged to suit the attainments of men trained at a
public school or university, while the ordinary clerical staff is intended
to be recruited under the lower scheme of examination, which only
includes the subjects taught at an ordinary elementary school. For
the information of those who do not already possess any special know-
ledge of the subject, and as a help towards a clearer view of the
situation, it may be well to give both schemes.

The higher examination is in the following subjects : —

Marks

English Composition (including Precis-writing) ..... 500

History of England (including that of the Laws and Constitution) . 500

English Language and Literature 500

Language, Literature, and History of Greece ..... 750

„ „ „ Home 750

„ „ „ France 375

„ „ „ Germany 375

,. „ „ Italy 375

Mathematics (pure and mixed) 1,250

Natural Science : that is (1) Chemistry, including Heat ; (2) Electri-
city and Magnetism ; (3) Geology and Mineralogy ; (4) Zoology ;

(5) Botany 1,000

The total (1,000) marks may be obtained by adequate proficiency in
any two or more of the five branches of science included under this
head.

Moral Sciences: that is, Logic, Mental and Moral Philosophy . . 500

Jurisprudence 375

Political Economy 375

No subjects are obligatory. The limits of age are eighteen and
twenty-four.

The range of subjects, it will be seen, is very wide ; and their
nature and the character of the papers usually set would, under normal
circumstances, render the examination what it is intended to be — a
most comprehensive and difficult test to the average of the men turned
out by our Universities. The Class II., or, as it is now known, the
Lower Division Scheme, is very different in character.

It comprises the following subjects : —

Marks

1. Handwriting 400

2. Orthography 400

1886 THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A PROFESSION. 493

Marks

3. Arithmetic '.. . .400

4. Copying MS. (to test accuracy) .... 200

5. English Composition . . . . . . 200

6. Geography 200

7. Indexing or Docketing 200

8. Digesting Returns into Summaries . . . 200

9. English History 200

10. Bookkeeping 200

No subjects are obligatory. The limits of age are seventeen and
twenty.

Here, it will be seen, the subjects do not include any beyond the
reach of a boy from an elementary school, and they might be described
as such as would be included in what is known as a commercial
education.

Now let us see what is the intention of the authorities respecting
those who have passed successfully through the ordeal of open com-
petition under these examinations. Both schemes have been in
force since the introduction of open competition in 1870; but in
1876, as the result of an inquiry made in 1875, a modification of
the original plan was brought about. Up to 1875 only some of the
superior offices had a part of their staff recruited under the higher
examination, but in that year a proposal was made which has since,
unfortunately for the cause of reform, become associated with the
name of Sir Lyon Playfair, by which every department was to divide
its staff into two grades, each to be separate and distinct and to be
recruited under its own scheme of examination. The proposal was
adopted by the Treasury, and the scheme formulated by the com-
mittee has since been gradually applied to the public departments.
Under it the work in each office is intended to be divided into a
superior and inferior class, and to be distributed between the cor-
responding grades of clerks. In the offices where much of the work
is of a superior character it was the intention that there should be a
large Upper Division establishment, while where the duties were more
of a routine and mechanical nature it was proposed that there should
be a numerous Lower Division staff. The clerks of the higher and
lower grades having entered by different examinations, promotion
within the Service from the Lower to the Higher Division was to be a
matter of rare occurrence. The scheme provides that the scale of
salary in each division shall be uniform throughout the departments,
the difficulty presented by the great inequalities in the work in the
various offices being met by awarding, in variable amounts, special
remuneration over and above salary, to be called ' duty pay,' to those
officers in both divisions employed on more important duties than the
rest of their colleagues.

This is the scheme for the organisation of the public departments
which the authorities of the Civil Service have unfolded and matured

494 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

as a necessary sequence^to the introduction of open competition. It
was avowedly drawn onjnilitary lines. At the bottom were to be the
Lower Division clerks, the privates of the army. Certain of these
were to receive special allowances for performing better work than
their colleagues, which the Commissioners said would confer on them
a rank resembling that of non-commissioned officers. Then, as in
the army, came a chasm, and the barrier between the nou-com-
missioned officers and the Upper Division clerks who were to officer
the others was to be crossed only as a rare occurrence. Above all, to
complete the military pattern, there were to be a few superior ap-
pointments, and these were described and have since been known as
* staff appointments.' The scheme was applied to the public depart-
ments in the face of many authoritative warnings as to the probable
consequences, and the expression of many grave doubts as to the
suitability to a public office of a system of organisation which it was
stated could hardly be expected to succeed in a private establish-
ment.

Now let us examine the results. The first and most significant
of these, and that which is perhaps calculated to cause most anxiety,
is just becoming apparent.

The Civil Service is, by force of circumstances and contrary to
intention, being almost exclusively recruited under the lower exa-
mination. The full meaning of this has not yet been realised. It
is also becoming evident that, whether the young men who have
entered and are entering under this lower scheme do or do not form
the best material from which to constitute the superior establish-
ments, these establishments must now, also by force of circum-
stances, be very largely, perhaps exclusively, recruited from these
men. Since 1870 to the end of 1885 only 199 candidates have
entered under the higher examination, and many even of these, as
will be seen, have been successful under circumstances which rendered
their appointment very undesirable and inexpedient. During this
period some 2,500 appointments have been made under the Lower
Division scheme. Many of the departments, including some of the
largest and most important, have up to the present made no appoint-
ments under the higher examination, recruiting their staff entirely
under the lower scheme. In some instances where the higher exa-
mination has been tried it has been abandoned, and in others where
it is continued no one would think of pointing to the experiment
with satisfaction. The idea of recruiting the upper ranks of the
staff of the public departments by men entering from the outside
simply as clerks, to be placed over the heads of other clerks whose
service and experience had given them a grasp of the work of the
office, was, of course, to say the least, an unfortunate one from an
administrative point of view. No head of a department with any
care for the reputation and efficiency of his office would find it

1886 THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A PROFESSION. 495

practicable in the long run ; and it might have been foreseen that
the responsible chiefs would soon find it necessary to evade such a
regulation by all sorts of official expedients. But other causes have
also been at work to increase the difficulty. Very soon after 1876 it
became apparent that the expectation of attracting men of liberal
education to the Civil Service under the higher scheme of examina-
tion, and with the prospects proposed by the Commissioners, was
doomed to disappointment. The records of examinations for such
vacancies as have been filled under the higher scheme offer in them-
selves striking evidence of the unhealthy state of things prevailing.
The following table gives a bird's-eye view of the conditions under
which these examinations have been held, and the appointments
made since 1876: —

Date of examination

Number of
competitors

Number of
vacancies
filled

Number on
list of last
candidate
appointed

Number of
marks ob-
tained by first
candidate

Number of
marks ob-
tained by last
candidate
appointed

June 1876 .

38

4

5

1,840

1,342

March 1877 .

48

10

12

1,752

1,110

January 1878

19

3

4

1,514

1,128

April 1878 .

33

9

19

2,283

867

November 1878 .

13

5

6

1,810

1,220

April 1879 .

28

11

18

2,256

846

October 1879

21

10

12

2,118

735

May 1880 .

48

8

13

1,948

1,095

July 1880 .

38

8

29

2,278

840

February 1881 .

56

20

25

1,810

865

September 1881 .

39

11

13

1,641

1,061

February 1882 .

32

3

6

2,034

1,524

June 1882 . - .

35

10

18

2,458

1,169

February 1883 .

31

16

21

2,097

697

October 1883

79

19

23

2,295

1,057

June 1884 .

50

18

23

2,548

1,012

March 1885 .

63

12

18

2,105

1,122

Total . . Ij .,

671

177

265

The first point which calls for attention here is the relation of
the number of candidates who were offered appointments to the
total number of competitors. Although these places were intended
by the authorities to be ' such as would attract men of liberal educa-
tion who would otherwise go into the open professions,' the compe-
tition for them has been so very slight that in April and October
1879, July 1880, June 1882, and February 1883, the number of
competitors who were offered appointments was more than half of
those who presented themselves, the Civil Service Commissioners
having often to go a considerable distance down the list of unsuccess-
ful candidates to find men willing to accept some of those vacant.
In estimating the competition for the vacancies filled 265 appoint-
ments must, of course, be taken to have been offered, although the
vacancies were only 177, which gives for the whole period an

496 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

average of 2-5 candidates to each, a proportion quite exceptional
when compared with the other open competitive examinations held
by the Commissioners. In the examinations held for the Indian
Civil Service, with which these examinations may fairly be compared,
the average proportion of candidates to vacancies during the same
period was considerably in excess of 5 to 1 ; and allowing for the fact,
which is really not of much importance in a comparison, that there
is no preliminary examination for the Indian Civil Service, the
difference is sufficiently striking, especially when the close limits
of age in the latter case, 17 and 19, are compared with those in
the former, which are 18 and 24. In the Lower Division examina-
tions held during the same period the proportion of competitors
to appointments, which has been steadily increasing, averaged
nearly 7 to 1, and during the last three years it has averaged over
10 to 1.

The figures in the last two columns are very interesting. These
show respectively the number of marks obtained in each examination
by the first candidate on the list and the number obtained by the
last who received an appointment. The first point to be noticed is
the extremely small number of marks which on some occasions
secured an appointment, the most notable instances being in the
examinations held in April 1878, April and October 1879, July 1880,
February 1881, and February 1883. On the last-mentioned occasion
the last candidate appointed received only 697 marks, the first scor-
ing 2,097. The difference between the marks in the two columns is
striking and very exceptional. The standard of proficiency shown
by the first candidates on the list is in fact very high, while the last
appointments have, on the other hand, very often fallen to men of
very inferior merit. The reason for this is to be found in the fact
that the proposals for a higher establishment uniform throughout
the Service, and with the prospects sketched by the Commissioners,
have either been abandoned or have practically failed, offices like
the Treasury, Home Office, Board of Trade, and others, increasing
the confusion by offering appointments to be filled by this examina-
tion with scales of salary and prospects arranged according to their
own requirements, and much superior to those proposed by the Com-
missioners. It is for these posts that any real competition exists,
the ordinary Higher Division vacancies often going a-begging, and
being for the most part filled by men far down the list of unsuccess-
ful candidates whose appointment under those circumstances, and
as the result of obtaining a few hundred marks for a mere smattering
of information, cannot be regarded as tending to promote either the
efficiency or credit of the Service. I would like to give the marks
obtained by these candidates in the subjects in which they were exa-
mined, but it would occupy too much space, and any one who wishes
to pursue the subject further will find the details in the records

1886 THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A PROFESSION. 497

published by the Civil Service Commissioners. It is, however,
obvious that the small knowledge displayed by such men in subjects,
moreover, which, generally speaking, have nothing whatever to do
with the details of official work, is a very unsatisfactory qualifica-
tion for appointment to positions over the heads of trained men
who have learned the work of the departments in the Lower
Division.

It is scarcely to be wondered at that this examination has not
proved a success. It must be understood that the superior establish-
ments of the public offices are at present largely constituted of men
who have entered under the old nomination system in force before
1870. Now whatever was to be said against the system of making the
Civil Service a close corporation — and there was much from a public
point of view — it is at all events certain that towards the close, under
the plan of limited competition after nomination, a class of men found
their way into the public service which it has always been the desire
of reformers to secure, and which has scarcely been represented since
the days of open competition. The supply has been cut short, and
under present arrangements it is not likely to be resumed.

The Higher Division scheme of examination has broken down :
there remains the lower scheme. Under this, between two and three
thousand youths have entered since 1870. A considerable sprinkling
of men of superior education have up till recently found their way
into the Civil Service under the lower scheme, but the supply cannot
continue ; in my experience it has almost ceased ; the competition is
too severe, and the examination scheme too low. A man of liberal
education would not in the first instance, and probably could not in
the next place, find his way into the Civil Service under this exami-
nation. He would not, for the prospects (on paper) would not attract
him ; and he probably could not, because he would stand little
chance of attaining the extraordinary proficiency in elementary
subjects required to secure success in competition with the crowds of
youths which, under the working of the Education Acts, the School
Boards and elementary schools throughout the country are now
sending into the world to make the most of the knowledge they have
acquired. A youth trained at a good elementary school stands a
much better chance of success in this examination than one whose
parents have given him the benefit of a liberal education, of which,
for instance, the acquirement of unusual proficiency in such a subject
as handwriting would probably have formed no part. It is, in fact,
becoming clear that the efforts of the authorities to regulate the
organisation of the Civil Service to what they conceived to be the
requirements of open competition are likely to result in nothing
more worthy than a scheme under which the public departments are
being almost exclusively recruited by open competition in the
« three E's.'

498

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Oct.

The records of the Lower Division examinations held since 1876
show a very different result from those of the Higher Division. The
average proficiency of candidates presenting themselves for examina-
tion under the higher scheme has not increased, although the fair
competition for the few valuable places offered with the others has, of
course, tended to raise the average proficiency of the men in the
first section of the list. The following table gives a comparative
view of the two examinations : —

Class I. Examinations

Lower Division Examinations

Tear

Number
oi com-
petitors

Number of
candidates
offered ap-
pointments

Proportion
of candi-
dates to
appoint-
ments

Average
marks ob-
tained by
candidates
offered ap-

Xnmber
of com-
petitors

Xumber of
vacancies

Proportion
of candi-
dates to
vacancies

Average of
marks ob-
tained by
successful

offered

pointments

candidates

1876

38

5

7-6

1,605

372

131

2-8

1,613

1877

48

12

4

1,336

578

214

2-7

1,70 L

1878

65

20

2-2

1,333

325

68

47

1,851

1879

49

80

1-6

1,303

950

205

4-6

1,867

1880

86

42

2

1,388

1,313

210

6-2

1,893

1881

95

38

2-5

1,309

1,879

303

6-2

1,883

1882

67

24

2-6

1,718

1,948

193

10

1,950

1883

110

44

2-5

1,298

1,130

156

7-2

1,893

1884

50

23

2-1

1,536

1,646

133

]2-3

1,953

1885

63

18

3-5

1,495

1,915

170

11-2

1,971

Average \

Average )

for the \

2-5

—

—

for the \

6-7

.

10 years )

10 years )

It will be seen from the above that the average proficiency of the
candidates who obtained appointments under the higher examination
has been very fluctuating. The proficiency of the successful candi-
dates in the lower examination shows, on the other hand, a steady
rise by the pretty regular increase in the average marks obtained
from 1,613 in 1876, out of a maximum of 2,600, to the very high
average of 1,971 in 1885. The proportion of candidates to vacancies
has also rapidly increased from 2-8 in 1876 to 11-2 in 1885, the
highest point being touched in the previous year, when it stood at 12'3.

So far the results attending the endeavour to regulate the appli-
cation of open competition to the public departments by dividing the
clerical staff in each office into two distinct grades, each recruited
from the outside under its own scheme of examination, may be
briefly recapitulated as follows : —

1. That under the scheme of examination for the Higher Division
now in force only 199 men have entered the Civil Service since 1870
up to the end of 1885.

2. That the attempt to organise the superior establishments of
the public offices on the lines proposed by the Commission of 1875
has been a distinct failure, and that such appointments as have been
made to them under the higher examination have been to a con-
siderable degree those of candidates of inferior attainments.

1886 THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A PROFESSION. 499

3. That the public departments are being, contrary to intention
but by force of circumstances, almost exclusively recruited under the
lower examination.

4. That under the severe competition prevailing, this examina-
tion is far too low to permit of the entry into the Civil Service of a
necessary proportion of men of superior education.

Let us now glance at the question from an administrative point
of view, for it is here that we meet it under the gravest aspects.
Efficiency and economy are the watchwords in the name of which
Civil Service reformers have always worked for good or evil. Let us
see what is the result in this case.

There is, indeed, no lack of the necessary public spirit amongst
the heads of departments ; the efforts to evade principle in the
interests of efficiency, which have led to the undue development of
the lower scheme, is in itself evidence of this. It is principle which
is radically at fault. The system upon which our public departments
are administered and the public expenditure controlled is calculated
to excite the surprise of any one conversant with the principles upon
which any of the great business or commercial establishments through-
out the country are worked. At the head of the public departments
comes the Treasury, entrusted with some degree of the administrative
control of most of the departments, and largely with the financial
control of all of them. It might be expected that the staff of
the Treasury would in such circumstances consist largely of expe-
rienced and capable officials who had served their apprenticeship and
earned distinction in other departments, and who would consequently
possess some actual knowledge of the work and internal affairs of
those offices over which the Treasury exercises so large a control.
But nothing of the kind is required. With the exception of the
Accounts Branch, the permanent staff of the Treasury consists almost
exclusively of men who have entered that office as youths from the
outside, and who can have no more actual knowledge of the internal
affairs of any department throughout the Service than the clerical
staff at the Colonial Office can have of the internal affairs of New
South Wales. This is the key-note of the whole system of our Civil
Service administration. Everywhere we find the same fatal ten-
dency to place a chasm between the superior establishments and those
others which they control and direct. In the cloud of theories which
have been discussed since 1870, and the many fancy schemes which
have been/proposed, the end towards which they should all tend
has been missed. Sir Charles Trevelyan, to whom, with Lord
Iddesleigh, we owe open competition, stated of the Treasury in 1875
what is even more pointedly true at the present moment : —

In other branches of the public service it is held to be indispensable that those
who exercise control should have practical experience of the duties which they are
called upon to superintend. . . . But at the Treasury neither the political nor

500 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

permanent officers possess, according to the existing system, personal knowledge of
any portion of that vast extent of civil and military business which they have to
control. The experience of the political officers is parliamentary ; the experience
of the permanent officers is confined to the Treasury itself. The result is that the
internal arrangements and regulations of the different departments are very imper-
fectly understood at the Treasury, and the general supervision with which that
office is charged on behalf of the public is either entirely omitted or performed in
what must be pronounced to be, on the whole, a loose, superficial, and perfunctory
manner. The actual state and interior working of the establishments by which the
revenue of this country is collected, and its communications are maintained, are
ordinarily known at the Treasury only by the statements and counter-statements
of complainants and heads of departments, which is a mode of obtaining informa-
tion equally applicable to every other subject, however foreign to the functions of
the Treasury.

The same principle holds sway throughout the departments.
Let not the public blame their officials when there is apparent cause
for censure ; it is not always their fault. The difficulties against the
best men finding their way to the front are not more baneful in their
effect than the conditions under which many of the most responsible
positions are occupied. I have spoken of two distinct grades of
clerks working side by side, throughout the public offices, but in reality
there are three, for below these there are the writers or copyists, who
are, in practice, more rigidly excluded from promotion to the Lower
Division than the members of this Division are, by the regulations,
excluded from promotion to the Higher Division. But this gives no
idea of the number of artificial barriers which have been erected at
every point, and which prevent the right men from getting into the
right places throughout the departments. Let me descend for a
moment into detail. Perhaps the only advantage which might be
secured to the public service from the present curious attempt to
maintain two grades of clerks uniform throughout the departments
is that it would be easy to arrange that men should be allowed to secure
exchanges and transfers, so as to offer facilities to men of different
tastes and qualifications finding suitable work. But this is imprac-
ticable. A youth appointed under the Lower Division examination
entering one of the departments may after a time feel himself better
suited to the duties of another office, but by the time he has learned
in what direction his abilities lie it is too late to secure an exchange
or transfer, for he cannot do so without losing seniority. He may have
a natural bent for statistics and be well suited for the Board of Trade,
and find himself in a second-rate office in Edinburgh, or he may have
a turn for accounts and finance and find himself concerned with the
details of official furniture in the office of works. Even in the
same department the clerks entering different branches are practically
not interchangeable. A man with considerable administrative ability
may find himself in the accounts branch, and another with a genius
for accounts may be sent to the secretarial branch, and yet by the
time they have come to find that a reversal of their positions would

1886 THE CIVIL SERVICE AS A PROFESSION. 501

be advantageous to themselves and the department, they are prac-
tically prohibited from obtaining it, for to obtain an exchange or
transfer each must forfeit seniority, and this although they serve
under the same heads, have entered under the same regulations, and
may have passed in the same examination.

For many years no real progress has been made in the work of
organising the Civil Service upon the lines either of economy or
efficiency. If I may be allowed to make so bold a statement, the
whole scheme of 1870 and 1875 must be pronounced to have been a
grave mistake : it is doctrinaire, academical, and quite unsuited to
the practical requirements of the public offices. It cannot lead to
increased efficiency, and, despite expectations to the contrary, it has
already proved a costly experiment. A most instructive lesson from
a public point of view would be a sight of the bill which the nation
has had to pay for it. Two years previous to the scheme of 1875 a
parliamentary committee presided over by the late Home Secretary
reported, after a most exhaustive inquiry, that the cost of the public
departments was excessive, and that in point of numbers the Civil
Service was decidedly in excess of its requirements. The following
statement from a parliamentary return dated August 1884 will give
some idea of how matters stood in 1875, and again seven years later,
after the scheme now in force had come largely into operation. The
figures given include, I believe, the totals for the departments with
the exception of the Post Office and Education Office.

CLERICAL ESTABLISHMENTS

1875-76

1882-83

Pensions

s

Paid as Commutation of
Pensions between 1st
April 1876 and 31st March
1883 (principally to
apply scheme of 1875)

Numbers

Cost

Numbers

Cost

1875-76

1882-83

3,771

1,290,032

4,241

1,374,029

395,770

£

422,845

350,315

These figures are significant ; although in particular cases the in-
crease can be satisfactorily explained. In the Inland Eevenue Depart-
ment, for instance, where the cost of the clerical establishment has
risen from 181,254£. to 217,783^., the increase is due to improvements
in the methods of transacting the business of the department, and is
counterbalanced by a saving in other directions. But on the whole
the figures cannot be regarded with satisfaction, and however they
may be explained I do not think that the future is likely, under the
present system, to bring any reduction of the cost shown in 1882-3.
The most instructive item is the very large amount of 350,3 151. for
commutation of pensions. This charge arises very largely from the
more or less forced retirement of large numbers of officers during the
process of applying the proposals of the committee of 1875, and in
addition to part of the increase in pensions it represents the bill
VOL. X X.— No. 116. N N

502 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

which the country has had to pay for the present unsatisfactory scheme,
which, with all its other failings, has apparently tended to increase
both the numbers and the cost of the departments.

The Civil Service at present is in sore need of enlightened reform.
Its reformers hitherto have not been very successful. One of the
important professions in the country, it has under their hands come
to be practically closed to men of education. The administrative and
financial control entrusted to the superior establishments is exercised
under the gravest disadvantages, and a most unsuitable and unfor-
tunate system of organisation threatens to seriously impair the
efficiency of the ordinary staff. In addition to all, the taxpayer has
to face the unpleasant incident of increased expenditure.

BENJAMIN KIDD.

1886 503

THE CHASE
OF THE WILD FALLOW DEER.

FOR upwards of two thousand years the wild deer have afforded sport
and food to the dwellers in the beautiful sylvan glades of 'New
Forest.' When first the Romans landed on this island, the district
known as ' Ytene,' cr * the furzy waste,' was found by them to be in
much the same condition as it is in the present times, that is to say,
a combination of wild open wastes covered with heath or furze, with
grand woods, whose recesses are concealed by the thickest of covert.
And their leader, Julius Caesar, has handed down to posterity this
record of the dwellers in forests, that 'all of their time which is not
spent in military exercise is spent in hunting.'

To come one step nearer to modern times, we find Canute, the
Danish King, sitting with his Parliament at Winchester in order to-
draw up a code of forest laws for the preservation of game (and espe-
cially of deer) by the side of which all modern game legislation would
appear like simple jesting. The amputation of a right hand, the loss
of an eye, or even of a man's skin, were the substitutes in those days
for the ' two pounds and costs ' with which modern justice visits
offenders of this class. The old manor of Lyndhurst, with its royal
residence or hunting lodge (now called the Queen's House), existed even
at that time, and was granted to the Abbot of Amesbury by the Saxon
Queen, Elfrida, many years before the Conquest. Greatly altered, of
course, it stands now as a memorial of that passion for the chase which
successive monarchs, by whom it has been inhabited, added to, or
rebuilt, allowed to predominate over every other occupation.

The next phase which came over ' Ytene ' commenced less than a
dozen years after the Conqueror had fairly established himself in the-
country. A wild-wooded country, well stocked with all the game
which he loved best to pursue, and within easy distance from his;
capital of Winchester — what could appear more logical to the mind3
of a conqueror than that this favoured region should be attached,
and for ever reserved to his own personal use and enjoyment? And
so arose the royal domain of * New Forest,' and as the game laws
were in no case likely to be relaxed by the monarch of whom it is
related that he ' loved the tall deer as if he had been their father,' so

N N 2

504 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

it became more than ever felonious even to disturb the quarry which
the king delighted to honour. No dog might set its foot within the
sacred precincts save those only of certain privileged dignitaries
either of Church or State, and the very cur which the miserable
husbandman kept as a guard for his premises might only exist if he
had been ' lawed,' or so mutilated, that the idea of poaching was for
ever banished from his mind. The old stirrup which was the * gauge '
of the dogs that must undergo this penalty hangs to this day in the
ancient hall of justice at Lyndhurst, those dogs which could pass
through it being exempt, but those whose size prevented their doing
so lost, poor brutes, their two centre toes, and were cripples for ever.

So time rolled on, and after three of the blood relations of the
afforester had lost their lives in the forest, including the second
William himself, a more quiet time set in. The ' Charta de Foresta,'
granted by Henry the Second, did much to ameliorate the savage old
forest law, and the perambulations of the forest boundaries in the
time of Edward the First, which have since been rigidly adhered to,
set at rest all question as to whose lands did, or did not, come within
the pale of the forest law. But still one crowned head after another
took his pleasure in this royal chase. Edward the First was a
resident at Lyndhurst, Queen Elizabeth occupied her hunting lodge,
and it remained a favourite hunting ground until the Civil Wars
occupied the minds of Englishmen with thoughts graver than sport,
and the introduction of gunpowder for sporting purposes much altered
the system of chasing the deer, and taking them for purposes of food.
However, Charles the Second was not unmindful of the forest, for he
caused its boundaries to be perambulated, and he nearly rebuilt the
old king's house ; but it was rather as a park or chase well stocked
with deer than as a hunting ground that the forest existed. Much
venison no doubt was provided, and a noble head of deer kept up,
but we have to take a stride from 1680 to the earlier part of the
present century before we again find the royal pack of hounds show-
ing sport in New Forest. Between the years 1820 and 1830 the
Koyal Buckhounds were again brought down regularly in the months
of March and April to hunt the wild deer.

There existed at that time a vast herd of some thousands of fallow
deer, and a smaller herd of red deer, about seventy to one hundred in
number. These were amply sufficient to show sport, and the spring
forest hunting became very popular. It is stated that one season Til-
bury, the famous jobmaster, had as many as one hundred hunters
standing in Lyndhurst and the neighbourhood to be let out on hire to
the various sportsmen visiting the forest ; and so the hunting of wild
deer (though not at this period the fallow deer) went merrily on year
by year up to 1 850, and the institution of the * April month,' so dear to
the New Forester, became an established fact ; because for those two
months in the year, when hunting in other countries has become a

1886 CHASE OF THE WILD FALLOW DEER. 505

farce by reason of drying winds and hard fallows, the sportsmen from
all parts flock in to the moist sheltered forest, and thus enjoy yet a
brief season more of the ' sport of kings ' — whereby they not only en-
liven the inhabitants of the New Forest with their society and ex-
ample, but, moreover, bring much gold into the place, and while
they improve and recreate the sport, they also enrich the pocket, of
the dweller in the woods, no little to his advantage in both respects.

But this is a digression. Up then to the year 1850 the monarchs
of England may be said to have hunted, or to have sent their hounds
to hunt, their own deer in New Forest ; but now a great change took
place. At this period the forest was like a vast park, extending over
some ninety thousand acres, abundantly stocked with deer. The
traveller saw them lying amid the fern, or standing in the hollows
of the old woods literally by hundreds, and one of the greatest charms
of this beautiful district was lent by their presence. The small herd
of red deer kept entirely to the wilder or more open parts of the
forest, but the deer of the country — the resident in the woods and
the animal in all respects suited to the country was, as now, the
fallow deer — the old woodland deer of England, just as the red deer
was the inhabitant of the hill country and open heath.

The presence of this large herd of deer in an inhabited district
was not altogether an unmixed blessing. The expense too of the
large staff of keepers and men to protect them was very great, when
added to the ccst of maintaining the deer in winter. And so when
an agitation was promoted by various landowners and owners of
common rights to get the deer abolished in order that their crops
might not be damaged nor their cattle feed impaired, it was no
wonder that an economical government lent a willing ear to their
prayer, and finally bargained to abolish the deer in exchange for a
right to plant 10,000 acres in perpetuity, free from all common rights.
So the edict went forth, and a ' Jihad ' against the deer was pro-
claimed. The Commissioners of Woods undertook to remove the
deer, root and branch, within two years, and very thoroughly their
work was done. Nets, guns, snares, and finally, as the deer got
scarcer and scarcer, hound and horn were employed to destroy them,
and hence arose in modern times the * chase of the wild fallow deer.'

As the deer became very few in number, so it became quite out
of the power of the keepers to get hold of them. The opportunity of
good wild sport to be enjoyed was soon observed by Mr. Lovell, a
gentleman who had then not long resided in the country, but who
had well earned the reputation of a good sportsman and an exceed-
ingly fine horseman, as a follower of the famous Badminton pack.
This gentleman having proffered his welcome assistance to the
authorities, got together such a pack as he could, chiefly consisting
of bloodhounds, some of which every keeper kept, and which he
assembled into kennel and induced to run together. Ere long, draft

506 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

foxhounds appeared in the pack, and famous runs were obtained,
under Mr. Lovell's management, resulting in the death of many
deer, until it became a matter of difficulty to find one at all, and
practically the deer within New Forest were extinct. Within the
forest I say, advisedly, for on several sides certain well-wooded
manors ' marched ' with it. and the hotter the persecution raged
against the deer within the forest, the greater was the protection ex-
tended to them within these manors, which were only distinguishable
from the Crown lands either by an easily surmountable bank or by
a line of boundary posts. Therefore, however complete was the
destruction of deer within the forest itself, the breed of wild deer
never became really extinct in the district, and after the two years
were past, and the conditions of the Deer Eemoval Act had been
complied with so far as was humanly possible, a scattered remnant
wandered, like the Jews of old, back to their ancient haunts — not in-
deed, as heretofore, to live a life of security under State protection,
but to share with other wild animals the privilege of wandering and
fending for themselves in that wild district. So long, however, as a
deer was known to exist, an excuse was apparent for a pack of hounds
to pursue him with. Thus spring after spring did Mr. Lovell collect
from his friends such draft hounds as they could spare, and show the
best of sport both to the actual foresters and to strangers from all
parts of England, who flocked into the New Forest in April to see a
chase so unlike what they were accustomed to, and so genuinely
.sporting in its character.

The stock of deer seemed like a very widow's cruse, for the same
Act of Parliament that prescribed their destruction had authorised the
planting of 10,000 acres of young plantation. With this huge mass
•of almost impenetrable covert to hide in, the deer feared neither
hound, man, nor firearm, and in a country so thoroughly congenial to
their habits, bred and increased freely in spite of all the efforts of
keepers with their guns and of Mr. Lovell's pack. So before many
years had elapsed Mr. Lovell could advertise his meets each spring,
with but little fear of a blank day, and the New Forest deerhounds
became a popular institution in the country. It was still the practice
to collect some ten couple of draft foxhounds towards the close of
the season and to keep them merely as a temporary pack. The
disadvantages of hunting a quarry strange to the hounds in a country
full of foxes to which they had been entered and accustomed for
many years, will be obvious to all my readers, and it was a marvel
to all who witnessed it, how it was that year after year, although
ably seconded by his daughters (whose activity either in turning
a riotous hound, or in bringing up tail hounds, almost as soon as
they were missed, would have been a lesson to many a mutton-fisted
boy, who aspires to the rank of whipper-in on the strength of a
resonant whip lash and a rasping voice), Mr. Lovell managed to con-

1886 CHASE OF THE WILD FALLOW DEER. 507

trol his half-entered hounds and give almost daily such good runs
that few strangers would believe that they were not hunting with a
regularly established pack. Few men could have succeeded in the
same way, and certainly none whose heart was not thoroughly in it
and who had not served a thorough apprenticeship in the art of
venery as practised in modern times could have even attempted it.

So great, however, was the sport shown by Mr. Lovell that it
became felt on all sides that the field was open for something better
than a scratch pack. The deer were sufficiently numerous to provide
a winter as well as a spring season, and the assistance of a pack of
hounds was really indispensable to keep them within limits. Therefore
a subscription list was organised and liberally responded to. Hunt
servants were engaged and a permanent pack under the management
of an influential committee was fairly established. The services of
Mr. Lovell as master and huntsman were most judiciously retained,
for who but he, who had perpetuated and almost revived the sport,
•could hunt a wild deer with the same success as had been lately met
with?

Almost all the old hounds that had hunted fox were drafted, and
a fresh beginning made with young unentered hounds, collected
from some of the best and most famous kennels in the kingdom.
Rome was not built in a day, and it took some time, by judicious
drafting, by careful renewals, and by the aid of much kind assistance,
before a good pack such as now brings many a fine buck to bay could
be collected. Perseverance is generally crowned with success, and
the stranger may go down to New Forest now, confident that he will
see as good a hardworking pack of high-bred English foxhounds
as he need wish to follow, all entered to the quarry which they
pursue, and to that alone, and in respect of nose, tongue, and
perseverance, hard to beat. And so we have traced the ( chase of the
wild fallow deer ' from the days when in the times of the Normans it
was the one only sport of the forest, until the present day, when,
in spite of adverse circumstances of all kinds, it has been placed in
the position of first among all the manifold sports of the wild district
in which it thrives, to the inhabitants of whom it affords their most
popular amusement, while at the same time it enriches their ex-
chequer by attracting from all parts of the world strangers in quest
of wild sport in a beautiful country, and to whom the prospect of
•deer-hunting is a lure more attractive than any other which the dis-
trict can offer/

So much, then, for a history of the sport, and now a word or two
upon the nature thereof, and the manner in which it is carried on.
Most people know that the time of the year when bucks are ' in season,'
that is, when their venison is in the best condition, is during August
and September ; then follows the rutting season, during which
neither bucks nor does are killed. The season of doe venison com-

508 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

mences about November 1, and continues up to the latter part of
January, after which time no venison is, strictly speaking, in season.
The New Forest Deerhounds hunt, then, at each of the seasons
above mentioned, viz. bucks during parts of August and September,
does during November, December, and January ; and in addition to
this, in accordance with time-honoured practice in this particular
country, they hunt the bucks only during March and April. At this
time of the year the male deer, although not in season as regards
venison, are lean and strong, and in capital condition for running ;
the fern is all dead, and the forest is bare, somewhat dried up, and
in famous order for riding over. At this time, then, the cream of
sport is shown to the numerous visitors to the forest. The hunting
in August is much spoilt by the dense masses of bracken that cover
thousands of acres of ground, which in winter is as bare as a fallow
field, and it is more of the nature of cub-hunting for the purpose of
breaking in young hounds and getting the pack, generally, into con-
dition. In November sport begins in real earnest.

Nothing runs better than an old doe — one that knows a lot of
country, and can stand up for a couple of hours before hounds ; but it is
not easy, when first the doe is viewed, to distinguish the age of the
animal, which any reliable judge can easily do in the case of a buck ;
thus the pack is sometimes laid on to a two or three year old deer,
which will ring and run short until it is killed. In the spring none
but full-grown bucks, of six or seven years old, are hunted, and there
is no excuse for hunting a deer that is not warrantable, unless
hounds unluckily change on to one, too late in the day to recover the
line of the hunted deer. It is then a chase of the buck in March or
April that I will endeavour to describe.

Let it be one of those glorious spring mornings that now and then
gladden the hearts of the sons of men wearied with winter and longing
for genial warmth and bright skies. It matters not where the meet
may be ; in this beautiful country it cannot but be a lovely spot, and
the ride to it almost a dream of beauty. In a mile or so we leave
the high road and branch off on to springy turf under an archway of
grand old beech and oak such as would be the pride of any park in
Europe. How green and velvety is the thick moss on the north side
of every forest giant, and how bright and glossy are the numerous,
thickets of holly that clothe the base of almost every other spreading
beech. The turf is soft and springy after last night's rain, and every
little rill shows how the land is yet full of the rainfall of the sullen
winter that is grudgingly retiring. Here we emerge on to a grand
open glade ; a clump or two of beech shows its vastness as they stand
like islands in a sea of grass and heather. What an exquisite tint of
pale green is over all that rolling volume of beech trees, and how weli
it is relieved by the golden tinge which is creeping over the adjacent
masses of oak. Through a gate we pass into a vast plantation of fir,

1886 CHASE OF THE WILD FALLOW DEER. 509

oak, and larch. What a beautiful colour has come on to the larch
with the bursting of the innumerable buds on every spray, and
how exquisitely patches of it contrast with the more sombre green of
the Scotch fir as we stand on the hill top and gaze over a huge sea
of verdure rolling for hundreds of acres beneath us. And so down
into the valley we plunge, where all is dark green, lighted up with
the red stems of the fir — for it is too early yet for the young oaks to
burst into leaf and clothe all with the dense mass of foliage that
summer brings — and along the wide green rides we canter till we
emerge at the crest of .the opposite hill, and, passing out on to the
heather, pause for a moment to take in the view before us. All
around, and as far as the eye can reach, is a rolling expanse of heath
and gorse — the latter golden with blossom and redolent with perfume.
Across the mind of the northerner flit visions of grouse, of ranging
setters, or of well-planned ' drives,' as he scans the heather-clad hill-
side, but the grand old wood that stands out upon the hill to his left
tells him at once that he is in no land of grouse and horned sheep,,
and that it is a widely different sport that has enticed him into this
strange conglomeration of moor and woodland, park and plantation,
heath and morass, which go to make up that grand monument of the
sporting instincts of our forefathers known as New Forest.

A quarter of a mile further, and under a glorious old grove of
beech and oak we find the pack, consisting of some fifteen couples of
good-looking hounds attended by two whippers-in, clad in dark green
plush, and with the master and huntsman in their midst. Anxiously
is he conferring with sundry individuals having all the appearance of
keepers ; for on these men who act as harbourers much of the sport
depends. Very unlike fox-hunting in its preliminary stages is the
chase of the deer. These animals, let it be remembered, naturally
consort in herds. In this plantation or in that are, it may be, fifteen
or twenty deer of which but one or two are huntable. It is, then,
the duty of the harbourer to observe these deer when on the feed, to-
watch or track them to the thicker covert, and to be able to point out
to the huntsman the actual track of a warrantable deer — if possible
alone, or in company with two or three deer only. Without informa-
tion of this kind much time must be wasted. Deer after deer of the
wrong sort may be found, only to stop hounds on their line ; and it
will be either by great good luck or by great perseverance on the
huntsman's part that a warrantable deer will be found at all while
there is light to hunt him by. But to-day all is couleur de rose. The
report of the harbourer is as favourable as possible. The herd of
does, which comprises all the deer of that sex which frequent thi&
particular district, have moved over the hill into an immense plan-
tation, which for to-day we hope to avoid, and in the wood hard
by are two noble bucks, both of warrantable size, but one is an espe-
cially fine one. It is past twelve o'clock, and a move is made to the

510 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

spot. But first of all the ' tufters ' — some two couple of thoroughly
staunch, fine-nosed hounds — are selected from the pack. The re-
mainder are taken up in leashes, fastened to a light collar, which
each hound wears, and after receiving orders move off to the spot
where they are most likely to be at hand when needed. Far better
is this than the plan of shutting up the body of the pack in a farm-
steading or a stable, two or three miles from the scene of action,
since they can, in the case of a long tuft, be moved from place to
place and never be out of reach of the huntsman.

As soon as all hounds, except the tufters, are secured, the hunts-
man moves off, led by the harbourer, and we are soon at the spot
which he marked, when at five o'clock that day the morning mists
lifted as the dawn broke and showed him the deer we hope to handle
before the sun sets. Here, then, eight hours afterwards, Mr. Lovell lays
his hounds on the line, and it would fairly astound those who have only
seen foxhounds drive after a fox, twenty minutes at the outside ahead
of them, to see these hounds — of the same breed, and from the same
kennels, perhaps, as those which they are accustomed to hunt with —
take up the line of the deer, and, with lashing sterns and resonant
tongues, work out the line foot by foot, yard by yard, till they fairly
settle to it where the deer made his point from his feeding ground to
his bed, and drive through the wood at a pace and with a cry that leads
every stranger out to believe that the deer has just jumped up in front
of them. Not a bit of it ! the line is eight hours old, as I have said
before, and although the hounds run it hard for a mile on the damp
ground under the shade, yet a bit of dry ground brings them to their
noses soon enough. Steadily they work it over the heath and dead fern,
and ' Moonstone ' hits it forward under the beeches. Each hound scores
to cry, and they flash a little forward past yonder dense thicket of
hollies, and all is mute again. A note on the horn and the hunts-
man holds them back, and as they pass to the leeward of the thicket
you see each head flung upwards ; a pause of a moment, and the
hounds drive into the thorns as if they ' knew something.' Tally ho !
There he goes ! and out over the tops of the bushes bounds a grand
buck, with horns as wide as the outspread palm of a man's hand,
followed in a second by his friend, a deer even bigger than himself.
Away go the tufters almost in view, away go master and whip : for,
before anything can be done, these two deer must be separated. Xor
does this take long ; for both of them together plunge into the thickest
part of the adjoining plantation. The cry of hounds can be just heard ;
till in the thickest part of it is heard a crash of music that betokens
a view. Our active whip has clapped on to a spot whence he can see
more ways at once than ordinary human eyes were contrived for, and
in another moment you hear the crack of his whip thong, and a
gentle rate as almost with a word he has stopped the well-trained
tufters, who thoroughly understand what is meant. 'A single deer,

1886 CHASE OF THE WILD FALLOW DEER. 511

sir, so I stopped them,' is the explanation, ' but he is not the big one.'
Hardly are the words spoken when a holloa is heard in the direction
from which we all came, and the harbourer arrives breathless — on the
raggedest of ponies, with more bits of string in his bridle than ever
were seen out of the harness to a donkey cart — to tell us that the big
deer has just stolen quietly away on the very line on which he just
came. To the uninitiated it seems all right and an extraordinary
piece of luck ; but to the master and his practised assistants it all
* reads like a book.' Both deer ran together to the thicket, and both
no doubt dropped therein ; but as the cry of the hounds came
nearer and nearer, a vigorous drive from the older and stronger deer
sent the * weaker brother ' flying from the covert, while he himself
lay squatted securely, although the eager hounds ran almost over his
back. Too cowardly, however, to remain in his fancied security, he stole
quietly away as soon as he supposed the pack to be fairly settled on
the line of his friend, and, overreaching himself, fell plump into the
arms of the harbourer.

Here then is one of the chief of the many difficulties encountered
by the man who endeavours to hunt the wild deer. The object of
every old deer is to substitute another for himself at the earliest
possible opportunity, and no pains are spared by him to achieve this
object. In fact it may be taken for granted that if once the hounds
are laid on to an old and cunning buck there will be on foot, in front
of the pack, a younger or smaller deer within twenty minutes. It is
here that all the huntsman's skill is required in order to detect the
moment that the change takes place even though he may not view
the deer, so that as soon as he can be assured that he is not hunting
the warrantable deer he started with, he may go back and by a clever
cast recover the line of him. However in this case all has gone well ;
one great difficulty is over and nothing remains but to call up the
pack as quickly as possible and to lay them on to the line of the best
of the two bucks. Not much time is lost over this, and it is a
beautiful sight to see the huntsman bring up the eager well-trained
pack clustering close round his horse's heels until he is within a few
yards of the line of the deer. Then with one wave of his hand every
hound is on the line and a glorious chorus bursts from them as they
drive to the front like a field of horses starting for the Derby.
Eiders must sit down in the saddle and catch hold of their horses'
heads if they me^m to live with them as they swing over the open
heather and grass at a pace that will soon choke off the butcher's
boy out for a holiday, and the gentleman in livery who is trying to
get the family carriage horse near enough to the front to see what
mischief his young masters and mistresses are getting into. But it
is too good to last — the deer is hardly yet aware that he is hunted,
and has gone straight into the thickest part of one of the plantations,
where he has again lain down. A check of a moment as the hounds

512 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

flash over the line, and then a deafening burst of music as swinging
round they wind him and rouse him in their midst. Away he goes,
but only runs a short ring, dodging backwards and forwards till a
stranger exclaims that he is ' beat already ! ' Not so ; he is but exer-
cising his craft, and, while he turns short enough to baffle the hounds,
he searches every thicket in order to push out a younger comrade to
take his place and relieve him from the very awkward position he
finds himself in. No such luck is in store for him to-day, and ere
long, fairly frightened, he sets his head straight and abandoning for
the present his wiles he takes refuge in flight. Eunning the whole
length of the covert, he is viewed over the fence and away over the
open moorland. Not far behind him are the hounds, and they stream
over the heather in what has been well described as 'the mute ecstasy
of a burning scent.' Mile after mile is covered ; one large plantation
is entered, but the pressed deer threads his way through the rides
almost without touching the covert, and hardly a check has occurred
till after forty minutes of hard galloping the hounds fling up on the
further bank of a small river. There our deer has ( soiled,' nor has
he very quickly left the cooling shelter ; but it is a beautiful sight
to see the older hounds carry the scent down the very middle of the
water : here questing the bubbles which float on the surface, there
trying a rush or alder bough which, hanging over the water, has
perchance scraped the deer's back and absorbed some of the scent
particles — steadily, if not rapidly, they carry the line down the water
with ever and anon a deep note or light whimper as some subtle in-
dication brings to the mind of some veteran of the pack assurance
doubly sure that he is on the line of his quarry. A recollection of
otter hunting comes involuntarily to the mind of the looker-on as
he sees the whole pack driving down the bed of the stream, and he
could almost expect to see them throw up and ' mark ' at yonder
cavernous root. It is a curious faculty, that of hunting the water in,
this way, and it seems to be born with some hounds, while others
never acquire it. Doubtless it is hereditary, like the power of owning
a line upon hard roads and similar places which some hounds have
possessed in so marked a degree and transmitted to their progeny.
But to our chase. A chorus from the pack marks the spot where
our deer has left the water, after travelling for over half a mile down
it. Yet the hounds cannot at first hunt the line of the wet animal
as they could before he entered the river. Ere long, however, the
scent improves, and the pack is soon driving along the green mossy
glades of a beautiful oak wood, mixed with thickets of holly and
blackthorn. Ah ! what is that that bounds out of one of these
thickets right in front of the leading hound ? A doe, as I live !
followed, by all that is unlucky ! by one, two, three others ! Of
course the hounds have got a view and naturally are straining every
nerve to catch the deer which fresh and not alarmed bound gaily in

1886 CHASE OF THE WILD FALLOW DEER. 513

front of them. Here then is another of the manifold difficulties
which the deer-hunter has to contend with — that of a change on to
fresh quarry at the end of a fine run. All seems lost ; the hounds
are running almost in view, and some of the more desponding of the
field turn away for home.

Those who remain to see the end remark hopefully that the
huntsman * is not beat yet ' — nor luckily is his horse, or that of his
whip, and aided by a turn of speed and a knowledge of the line of
the deer, they have got to the heads of the pack before they penetrated
into the fastnesses of the neighbouring plantation. A blast on the
horn, a rate and a crack of a whip, has stopped the pack, well-trained
to do so. And so it is essential they should be, at whatever cost, in
a country where this manoeuvre must be so often repeated. But
now the huntsman has his pack in hand, and it is for him to recover
the line of his hunted buck, or else go home. He knows well how far
they brought him, but all the ground forward of this point is foiled
by fresh deer, and it will be no easy matter to keep clear of the lines
which he knows to be wrong. Yet he has a strong opinion withal
as to where his deer was making for, and very carefully and with
judgment he holds his hounds forward on a wide swinging cast clear
of foiled ground. See at the very end of his cast they hit a line,
apparently a cold one, but those who know how the scent of a beaten
deer fades away to nothing, become hopeful. The hounds too are
very keen on the line, though they can hardly carry it on. At a soft
place the master catches a glimpse of his slot, and is reassured to
find that he is on the line of a single male deer at any rate. See, too,
how the deer has followed every little watercourse and rill, however
tortuous ; none but a hunted deer would do this, and excitement
becomes doubly keen after the late reverse, as the hounds' pace
quickens and quickens, till the field is galloping again. Now they
come down to the banks of a small stream, and carry the line down
the water, to where the banks are covered with a dense growth of
blackthorn. Suddenly all scent fails on the line, but every hound
has flashed out, and on to the bank with his head and bristles up,
' feeling for the wind.' Look out ! he is here ! and ere the words are
spoken the hunted buck bounds from the thicket, and strides over
the heath almost like a fresh deer. And indeed many who see him
think that he is a fresh-found deer, but those who had a good view of
him in the morning know well that their huntsman's skill and patience
and his good pack of hounds have brought this excellent chase
to a satisfactory finish, in spite of every difficulty. The buck runs
gaily as long as he is in the open view of all, but as he gains the
bushes his head droops, his tail drops flat, his stride contracts, and
he shows that ' tucked up ' appearance which in all quadrupeds is
the indication of extreme fatigue. The hounds are close on him, and
he regains the stream only to plunge into the deepest pool, and with

514 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

head erect, and noble mien, he * sets up ' at bay. The first hound
that dares to approach is instantly driven under water, and crawls
yelping from the stream to dry land, but the pack is at hand. The
fallow deer can offer no resistance like that of his noble red congener,
and in another moment the scene is a confused mass of muddy
water, a dun carcase, a pair of antlers, and struggling hounds.
Into this chaos descends the active whipper-in, an open knife in one
hand and a hunting whip in the other. One rate, and the coast is
clear — a flash in the sun — a wave of crimson rolling down the stream,
and then two or three men are hauling the dead body of a magnificent
deer up the bank surrounded by the pack whose deep baying is
answered by the long blast of the horn and the thrilling who-
whoop of the huntsman.

Well, it is all over, and we turn homewards not a little delighted
with our day ; it has been a fair sample of a good woodland chase.
A dodging twenty minutes to start with — a flying forty minutes to
follow — one long check, and then half an hour of the most interesting
hunting possible, terminating in a triumphant kill. One hour and
forty minutes in all, and the deer lies dead eight good miles from
the spot where the tufters first roused him, although the circuities of
the chase have made us travel over far more ground than the point
to point measurement shows. We shall have something to say to
those faint-hearted sportsmen who ' went home to their tea ' when
the first reverse seemed to show that the termination of the run
might not be all rose-coloured, but perhaps the idea of this detracts
very little from our own feeling of self-satisfaction. The long shadows
of the trees show us that it is time to seek a guide who knows well
these solitudes to steer us to our home, and the setting sun is throw-
ing a golden light on each gnarled trunk as we thread our way over
the soft moss glowing in the slanting beams towards home. A chill
feeling in the air and a dun look stealing over the distant heath-clad
hill tell us that, warm and bright as the day has been, summer is not
yet here in earnest, and a cheerful thought of glowing logs at home
inclines us to quicken our pace. In all the homeward ride not a soul
is encountered save those who have been our companions through the
day, and we might from all appearance have been riding through
the backwoods of America instead of having for the whole day pur-
sued in a thoroughly wild country the wildest perhaps of all the sports
left to us in England — the genuine old-fashioned ' chase * of our
ancestors, in which every faculty of hound and of huntsman is most
fully brought into play — and all this (strangest thought of all)
within three short hours of London, in which busy metropolis it
may be that more than one enthusiastic sportsman will lie down to
rest to-night who has spent this day with us in the ' Chase of the
Wild Fallow Deer.'

GERALD LASCELLES.

1886 515

WHAT GIRLS READ.

GIRLS, like boys, in recent years have been remarkably favoured in
the matter of their reading. They cannot complain, with any
justice, that they are ignored in the piles of juvenile literature laid
annually upon the booksellers' shelves. Boys boast a literature of
their ' very own,' as they would call it. So do girls. If the son has
enlisted in his service such able pens as those of Eeid, Henty, Verne,
Kingston, Aimard, Hughes, Hopes, Hodgetts, Ballantyne, Frith,
Fenn, Reed, Stables, Blake, Hutcheson, Edgar and others, the
daughter may claim allegiance from a band scarcely less numerous
and not less brilliant and worthy. Among them may be mentioned
Mesdames Alcott, Dodge, Marshall, Banks, Browne, Beale, Symington,
Owen, Sewell, Wetherell, Holmes, Meade, and Yonge. These ladies
have endeavoured to do for girls what has now for some years been
done for boys. To a considerable extent they have succeeded.
But to write for girls is very different to writing for boys. (Kris'
literature would be much more successful than it is if it were less
goody-goody. Girls will tolerate preaching just as little as boys, and
to hit the happy medium between the story of philistine purity and
the novel of Pandaemoniacal vice is not apparently always easy.
Girls' literature, properly so called, contains much really good
writing, much that is beautiful and ennobling. It appeals in the
main to the highest instincts of honour and truth of which humanity
is capable. But with all its merits, it frequently lacks the peculiar
qualities which can alone make girls' books as palatable to girls as
boys' books are to boys.

This deficiency is not quite the fault of those who aspire to write
for girls, but is of the essence of the subjects which offer themselves
for treatment. /' Go' — a monosyllable signifying startling situations
and unflagging movement — characterises boys' books, and girls' books
will never be as successful as are boys' books until the characteristic
is imported into them. ' Slow and sure ' is not the motto of either
reader or writer in these days. Public and publicist are acceptable to
each other in proportion as they are ready to conform to the electric
influences of the times. When books were few and far between, an
author might indulge in long-winded dissertations almost to his

516 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

heart's content. Now, if he has a moral to point, he must point it
in the facts of his narrative : not in a sermon, which plays the part
of rearguard to every incident. Girl-life does not lend itself to
vigorous and stirring treatment in the manner that boy-life does.
It is far more difficult to enlist the reader's interest in domestic
contretemps and daily affairs than in fierce combats between nations,
or in the accidents of all kinds into which boys and men, by the very
nature of their callings, are for ever being led. In the ranks of girls
and women it may be conceded are centred the greatest heroism,
the noblest devotion, the highest purpose, the longest suffering, the
harshest and cruellest of human trials. The courage which meets
privation or ignores self for the sake of those near and dear is
woman's. It is courage of the first order. The courage which makes
a man face boldly an enemy on the field of battle or fling himself
into the boiling surf to rescue a fellow-creature is, too, deserving of
all honour, but it is, nevertheless, courage of a secondary order and is
primarily man's. Heroines like Grace Darling are few. Heroes like
Robert Clive are many. It requires to face fever in a loathsome
alley, or to minister to the needs of the wounded soldier, a courage
dissimilar in all respects to that called forth by the necessity of
spiking a gun or swimming out to a wreck. The one is devotion,
human, spiritual, Christian ; the other is pluck, animal-like in its
character, desperate in its instincts. The former is noted by God
and lauded by man, but requires an uncommon power to treat
adequately from the point of view of the story reader ; the latter
is easily susceptible of a treatment, feverish and romantic, which
may be expected to appeal to the dullest of imaginations. The
gore of the battle-field and the flames of the burning building
are facts more readily grasped by, and hence more interesting to,
the majority of youthful readers than the sick room and injured
heart.

These considerations indicate the forces which militate against
the popularity of the works deemed suitable for girls. At the same
time there are many ladies who have become really famous in this
particular branch of literature. At the head of them probably
stands Miss Louisa M. Alcott. That Miss Alcott should be able to
write the kind of story most likely to interest the young mind, is not
surprising to those who have any knowledge of the incidents of her
life. The scenes of suffering and resignation, of patriotism, devotion,
and love, which she, in conjunction with most of her countrywomen,
witnessed during the American Civil War, gave her genius that
fillip which enabled her in Little Women and many other works
to produce stories whose success is said to have yielded her the good
round sum of 20,000^. in the course of a couple of decades. Miss Alcott
has a power almost unrivalled in its exquisite simplicity of making
one interested in the most prosaic of matters. The fate of a plum

1886 WHAT GIRLS READ. 517

pudding boiled by the untrained hands of a girl of fourteen becomes
under Miss Alcott's pen an affair of nearly as great moment as some
of the wildest of situations under other pens. After reading Miss
Alcott, it is impossible not to feel that one has learnt a great deal of
the susceptibilities and trials of young life, and gained an idea of the
surest means of moulding a child's future.

Neither Miss C. M. Yonge nor Miss E. M. Sewell is as much read
now as formerly by young ladies on the road from the Nursery to
Society. The maiden of fifteen a quarter of a century since was a very
different person from the maiden of fifteen to-day in many important
particulars. Mothers who, as girls, read Miss Sewell or Miss Yonge, now
consent to their daughters studying ' Ouida' and Miss Braddon. Miss
Yonge and Miss Sewell have much in common. They were born in
the same decade, they aim at inculcating love of the same Church,
some passages of their works are not unlike, and in one case they
collaborated in the production of a series of readings from the best
authorities entitled Historical Sketches. Miss Yonge has, however,
been more versatile than Miss Sewell. She has written or compiled
all sorts of histories, as well as stories and novels. She aims chiefly
at imparting instruction, and frequently it is to be feared becomes
wearisome in so doing. Her best and most popular work is The Heir
of Redclyffe, a simple story told with equal simplicity and excellence.
Another of her works is Daisy Chain, which is considerably spoiled
as a book for girls by the minuteness of the discussions on the
advantages of- certain methods of learning. Ethel May's flights
( from hie, hsec, hoc, up to Alcaics and beta Thukidides ' are not likely
to secure much sympathetic enthusiasm.

If any complaint is to be made against Miss Sewell, it is that
she is too exhaustive. Almost every one of her books would bear
cutting down by a third at least, and would in the process gain
alike in worth and attractiveness. Miss Sewell's works, however,
ought to be much more widely disseminated among girls than
they have been recently, and the enterprise of Messrs. Longmans,
Green & Co. in producing an entirely new and cheaper edition of
her Tales and Stories is deserving of a word of grateful recog-
nition. A thousand and one moral precepts, admirably put and
beautifully illustrated, might be culled from Miss Sewell's pages.
She is for ever battling with the misery and the wickedness of
* the scenes wherein we play in.' She aims at holding evil up
to the contempt and horror of her audience by placing it in the
light of surpassing goodness. Virtue is the white sheet on which
she turns her magic-lantern-like art, and shows vice in terrible, if
sometimes exaggerated, proportions. Contrast is her means of exem-
plification ; she strives to bring home the advantages of method,
moral rectitude, resolution, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, purity, justice,
charity, and a hundred other ethical adjuncts by dwelling on their
antitheses. To keep young people unspotted from the world is
VOL. XX.— No. 116. 00

518 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

the absorbing purpose of her work. She implores them to live
uprightly in the sight of their Maker, not only with their lips but
with their hearts. Only one who feels what she writes could have
given us Amy Herbert, The Earl's Daughter, Laneton Parsonage,
The Experience of Life, or, indeed, any of her stories. Religion is
Miss SewelPs rock of refuge, and her teaching could not be better
denned than in the words of George Crabbe, in his melodious and
suggestive poem on 'The Library' : —

To thee DIVINITY ! to thee, the light
And guide of mortals, through their mental night ;
By whom we learn our hopes and fears to guide,
To bear with pain and to contend with pride ;
When grieved, to pray ; when injured, to forgive ;
And with the world in charity to live.

In a minor degree these lines would also describe Miss Sarah
Doudney. Miss Doudney seems to me to occupy, as a writer for girls,
a position analogous in some respects to that of Miss Austen among
novelists. Her stories have little plot. Character and nature con-
stitute her chief stock-in-trade. Michaelmas Daisy, for instance,
as a narrative contains many passages and incidents suggestive of
Pride and Prejudice. The loving characteristics of Daisy Garnett,
and the mean and unkindly prejudices which moved her cousins to
persecute her, are brought home to the reader quite as vividly as
are the position and disposition of Miss Bennett and the jealousies
of 'Miss Bingley in Miss Austen's work. Miss Doudney, how-
ever, is pre-eminently a devotee of nature, and the moral which
she strives to inculcate is that which she discerns in nature. She
brings home in many ways the truths which the observant may
find in the trees and the flowers of the earth. Thus she con-
cludes Michaelmas Daisy with an exposition of the story which she
conceives may be read in the Michaelmas Daisy after which her
heroine, is named and likened : ' It is,' she writes, ' no new tale
which the flowers have to tell each other as they stand grouped
together in the autumn sunshine ; it is only the old story that
will never have an end while the earth endures. And yet what
a beautiful tale it is, the tale of patience and long-suffering and
steadfastness. In all the world perhaps there is hardly any nobler
thing than the fortitude which is lovely amid unloveliness and fresh in
the midst of decay.' Miss Doudney sees more in the autumn than
the mere waning of summer into winter ; to her it is an emblem of
life's advance, of its decay and repose, when earthly existence is about
to be exchanged for that other existence beyond the grave of which
we can know little, ( when,' as she writes in Marion's Three Crowns,
' the wheat is gathered into garner, the work is accomplished, and
the eternal resting time is nigh.' In Fallen Leaves, again, Miss
Doudney takes the vagaries of nature as symbolic of human fortunes.

1886 WHAT GIRLS READ. 519

The story is one protracted inquiry whether individual life is to be
characterised merely by leafy profusion, or is to bear golden fruit.

At first sight there may seem to be some likeness between the
work of Miss Sarah Doudney and that of Miss Anne Beale. In
reality there is none. Miss Beale is also a lover of nature. But
whilst Miss Doudney sees far into the inner purpose of the Great
Goddess, and reads there as in an open book a divine story, Miss
Beale recognises only its external beauty and attractiveness. It is
the elements of the surface which particularly inspire her enthusiasm.
In Miss Beale's works you perceive the brilliancy of the sunset, and
the sparkling dew on the grass in the early morning. You have not,
as with Miss Doudney, the very heart of nature exposed before you.
Miss Beale, on the other hand, is an equally apt delineator of
character, and there is not one of her heroes or heroines whom with
a little care one may not know intimately. She understands, too,
how to weave a plot. Pathos seems to be her strong point. Her
works are full of gentleness and generosity, and it requires a very
stout heart to repress the tears which are wont to rise, albeit
one hardly can say why, in many passages in Miss Beale's books.
She has the knack of securing one's sympathy without allowing one
to be conscious of the fact, until the crisis she has in view is
realised. Miss Beale's stories deal largely with Wales. Gladys
the Reaper is an effective combination of Welsh farm and country
life and London misery, told with an admirable admixture of pathos
and dry humour.

Few better things have been written for young people than
this. The loves of Owen and Gladys and of Eowland and Freda,
Gladys's self-abnegation until she knew what her parentage was,
Freda's regret for the harsh words used to Eowland, when he, a
farmer's son, ventured first to tell of his love, Owen's constancy
to the girl who was originally a beggar at his parents' door, and
Rowland's dignity and sincerity of heart, are one side of a very
instructive picture ; the relations of Colonel Vaughan and his wife,
showing the humdrumness, to give it no harsher title, of married life
to two worldly people who have married for lucre rather than love,
and of Howell and Netta, which depict the miseries of disobedience
and extravagance, as well as the part loving woman may play in re-
claiming a scoundrel whose affection for his wife is the one white
spot of his black Career, form the other side. A book which contains
all this is far from superficial. Miss Beale's works are all more or
less full to overflowing of powerful character-sketching and moral
influence, not so much by direct sermons as by hard facts. Miss
Beale's most energetic, if it is not her best, work is The Pennant
Family. This stirring story of the Welsh coast the author assures
her ,readers is founded on fact, and may be read in the history of
Glamorganshire under the heading ' Dunraven Castle.'

oo2

520 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

As I have indicated above, there are, of course, many other more
or less well-known writers for girls whose names, however, it is only
possible now to mention : Miss Maggie Symington, Miss E. Prentiss,
Miss E. Holmes, Miss Holt, Miss Julia Groddard, Miss Meade, and
Mrs. Emma Marshall. A word should be said of the works of
the latter. Mrs. Marshall has written several good stories for girls.
Court and Cottage, Dorothy's Daughters, Violet Douglas, Helen's-
Diary, and Cassandra's Casket, are among their number. Mrs.
Marshall is for ever describing girls who blunder : Cassandra's
Casket and Court and Cottage both deal with girls who go to live
with relations, and who are always getting into scrapes. She writes
with the purpose of showing parents and guardians the misery which
may be caused to children by failure to understand them. All the
anxieties and trouble created by Elfrida in Court and Cottage arise
simply from her aunts giving her an impression that they do not care
for her. In No. XIII. The Story of the Lost Vestal, Mrs. Marshall
has gone quite out of the beaten track, and has given her readers an
instructive and entertaining fiction founded on recent discoveries in
theEoman forum. Mrs. Marshall does not do justice to herself as a
writer. ' It was Lord Maintree's voice, who was walking swiftly from
the gates leading to the stable,' is a specimen of the manner in which
she frequently bungles her English.

To turn from girls' books to girls' magazines, there are two only —
The Girls' Own Paper and Every Girl's Magazine — that could be
placed advantageously in the hands of anybody, to say nothing of young^
ladies in their teens. Several girls' magazines have been started in
the last few years, but they have speedily died or lapsed into the
penny dreadful, composed of impossible love stories, of jealousies,
murders, and suicides. Every Girl's Magazine is following a line
which very few girls of from eight, to sixteen will appreciate. It is,
in fact, hardly so much a girl's magazine as a magazine of general
reading for the household, and it goes out of its way to announce its
secularist aims. Perfectly healthy in tone and subject matter though
it is, it cannot be compared with the Girls' Oivn Paper for popularity.
The latter was started in 1880, and in 1884 was said to have attained
' a circulation equalled by no other English illustrated magazine pub-
lished in this country.' Whether this is so or not, however, it ha&
undoubtedly met with a success of which editor and proprietors alike
have equal reason to be proud. Its good work is unbounded.
Probably the best feature of the paper is its prize competitions-
These are made the medium of much charity. For instance, in 1885,
700 mufflers and 1,224 pairs of cuffs sent in in competition were
presented to occupants of London workhouses, after the prizes had
been awarded. Again, at the suggestion of the Countess of Aberdeen,
the subscribers to the Girls' Own raised among themselves 1,OOOL
towards establishing a ' Girls' Own Home ' for the benefit of underpaid

1886 WHAT GIRLS READ. ,\ t 521

London girls of the working classes. The popularity of these compe-
titions is illustrated by the fact that 4,956 girls took part in endea-
vouring to secure a prize for the best Biographical Table of famous
women. One sack crammed full of these required five men to carry
it upstairs.1 The tables came from all parts of the world ; from Great
Britain, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Greece,
Portugal, Gibraltar, India, Australia, New Zealand, China, Canada,
Jamaica, Turkey in Asia, Antigua, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chili, Cape
Verde Islands, Madeira, and other far corners of the earth. One
lady, we are told, was so enthusiastic as to send the table across the
seas enclosed as a letter at the cost of thirty shillings. The Girls' Own
numbers among its contributors many famous ladies and gentlemen,
and its great merit is that it does not depend wholly on fiction for
its success, but gives interesting articles on all kinds of household
matters.

Having indicated the general characteristics of the literature
which is published exclusively for girls, let us now glance at its
tendency. This is undoubtedly sad, and is the only feature of the
great majority of girls' books to which real objection can be taken. It
is probably the result of an attempt to avoid the absurdities of
extremes. For a long time the custom was, in writing for the young,
to make virtue triumphant in the end. Such a view of the relations
of life is recognised by the most careless observer to be false. Virtue,
far more frequently than otherwise, is found prostrate and helpless at
the feet of vice. Virtue may bring its own reward ; it may even
have proved itself impervious to the onslaughts of the enemy, but it
is the exception rather than the rule that honesty and uprightness of
purpose should overthrow meanness and wickedness. The struggle
between the two sides of human character — the good and the bad
— has been coextensive with the existence of the world in the
past, and will in some phase or other be coextensive with the
future. Civilisation, with all the blessings which it brings in its
train, is environed by new and undreamed-of blemishes. But
it is the duty of man to recognise the evils which are part of
the most virtuous systems, to battle against them, and to be
able in the end to show a roll of courage and steadfastness
in the cause of right, no matter whether his struggle has brought
him victory or not. If he cannot wipe evil off the face of the
earth, he can at/ least prevent evil from being reinforced. If those
ladies who, with every good intention, take up pens to write for our
girls, would lay before them some such code as this, they would vary
considerably their method of treating ethics. As it is, the teaching
which comes of girls' books practically amounts to this. If you are
wicked you must reform, and when you have reformed you will die !
Good young people are not allowed to see many years of life. It is an

1 Report, R.T.S., 1884.

522 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

uncompromisingly severe rendering of the classic axiom * whom the
gods love die young.' I cannot indicate what I mean better than by
reference to a story which every one knows, The Old Curiosity Shop.
Why did Little Nell die ? If she was too good for the world, why was
she ever brought into it ; if she was not, why, in the midst of the sin,
the misery, the suffering of mankind, were her sunny presence and
beneficent influence removed so soon ? This question might be asked
with tenfold force of half the works written for girls. Mrs. Marshall
in Court and Cottage introduces us to a young lady who is wilfully
disobedient and disrespectful to her elders. Her headstrong nature
gets her into trouble, and she then becomes a good girl ; merely to
die. So in the case of Miss Doudney's Marion's Three Croivns.
Marion's conceit is her great sin. When she is brought to a proper
sense of her position, she nobly nurses a step-sister ill with small-pox,
catches the disease herself, recovers life only to find her face robbed
of its beauty, and is through this deprivation deserted by the man
she loves. Finally, she rushes into the heart of the cholera-affected
districts of London, doing noble work, and reaping love and blessings
on all sides. Her reward is to fall a victim to the dread epidemic.
Why, again, was Lady Blanche not allowed to live in Miss Sewell's
work, The EarVs Daughter ?

Seeing for whom Mrs. Marshall, Miss Doudney, and Miss Sewell
are writing, it is not enough for me to know that the deaths of these
heroines constitute the finest passages in their books, just as the
death of Little Nell is one of the finest pieces of writing in all
Dickens's works. Such stories are, it seems to me, likely to make
our keen-witted daughters say, 'Where is the use of my living
virtuously, if virtue's reward is speedy removal from the presence of
the friends I love ? ' Virtue triumphant, wide of living facts though
it may be, is better than this. Let it be distinctly understood that
I give books written especially for girls credit for many excellent
qualities. I simply wish now to indicate a direction in which I fear
they slightly overdo their good intentions. Neither must what I
say in this connection be accepted by those who object altogether
to any kind of special ' literature for the young ' between the ages of
ten and sixteen, as an additional argument in their favour. Girls*
literature as a whole shows few signs of a disposition to write down
to the reader. If this were so, no condemnation of it could be too
strong. Girls' literature performs one very useful function. It
enables girls to read something above mere baby tales, and yet keeps
them from the influence of novels of a sort which should be read
only by persons capable of forming a discreet judgment. It is a
long jump from ^Esop to ' Ouida,' and to place Miss Sarah Doudney
or Miss Anne Beale between Msop and * Ouida ' may at least prevent
a disastrous moral fall. It is just as appropriate and necessary that
girls should read books suitable to their age as that they should

1886 WHAT GIRLS READ. 523

wear suitable dresses. The chief end served by * girls' literature ' is
that, whilst it advances beyond the nursery, it stops short of the full
blaze of the drawing-room.

As with boys' literature, so with girls'. That which the working-
class lads read is generally of the lowest and most vicious character :
that which their sisters read is in no way superior. The boy takes
in the penny dreadful ; the girl secures the penny novelette, which
is equally deserving of the adjective. Because the influence of
these love and murder concoctions among girls is not so apparent to
the public eye as the influence of the burglar and bushranging
fiction among^boys, it must not be supposed that that influence is
less real. It is, in fact, in many ways not only more real, but more
painful. Boys may be driven to sea or to break into houses by the
stories they read ; their actions are at once recorded in the columns
of the daily papers. With girls the injury is more invidious and
subtle. It is almost exclusively domestic. We do not often see an
account of a girl committing any very serious fault through her
reading. But let us go into the houses of the poor, and try to
discover what is the effect on the maiden mind of the trash which
maidens buy. If we were to trace the matter to its source, we should
probably find that the high-flown conceits and pretensions of the
poorer girls of the period, their dislike of manual work and love of
freedom, spring largely from notions imbibed in the course of a
perusal of their penny fictions. Their conduct towards their friends,
their parents, their husbands, their employers, is coloured by what
they then gather. They obtain distorted views of life, and the bad
influence of these works on themselves is handed down to their
children and scattered broadcast throughout the family. Where all
is so decidedly unwholesome it is unnecessary to mention names.
With the exception of the Girls' Own Paper and Every Girl's
Magazine, which are not largely purchased by working-class girls,
there is hardly a magazine read by them which it would not be a
moral benefit to have swept off the face of the earth. It would be
well for philanthropists to bear this fact in mind. There is a wide
and splendid field for the display of a humanising and elevating
literature among girls. Such a literature ought not to be beyond
our reach. Girls can hardly be much blamed for reading the hideous
nonsense they do, when so little that is interesting and stirring in
plot, and bright and suggestive in character, is to be had.

Girls do not, however, by any means confine their reading to the
books and magazines published specially for them. They read of
course thousands of standard works every year. But that so-called
* girls' books ' continue to be published in shoals annually is sufficient
proof that there is a market for them. They are, however, probably
read chiefly by the younger girls. Girls well advanced in their teens
do not largely affect the class of writers to which Miss Beale and Miss

524 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

Doudney belong. American works are greatly in favour, and one of
the best girl-stories I have read is Mr. T. B. Aldrich's Prudence
Palfrey, full of incident and good situations as it is. The Wide, Wide
World and Queechy give place to no books in the English language
for popularity among girls old and young. Mrs. "Wetherell knew
how to write stories true in every particular to nature, and to pourtray
character at once real and ideal. Fleda in Queechy is second only,
if she is not equal, as a literary study, to Little Nell in The Old
Curiosity Shop. Whilst both Fleda and Nell are so ideal in their
perfect beauty of character that one is conscious such veritable sprites
could hardly be found in the e very-day world which we know, one is
also assured that their existence is not impossible. Fleda indicates
what is practicable in women, and, though the linking of her fortune
with Carleton's was a happy stroke which has probably done much
to make the work a household possession in England, the connection
affords an excellent example of the power for good which noble women
have over the minds of those whose sympathy they touch. Miss
Jessie Fothergill's First Violin, Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters,
and Mrs. Henry Wood's East Lynne, are three works to which the
girls of England are much attached. East Lynne, in my humble
judgment, ought to be placed in every girl's hands as soon as she
has arrived at an age when she may find that life has for her
unsuspected dangers. The work teaches many lessons valuable to
young ladies, especially those of a jealous or impulsive disposition.
Girls are, of course, among the chief supporters of the lending library,
and eagerly rush after what Mr. Buskin would call ' every fresh
addition to the fountain of folly,' in the shape of three- volume novels.
Another phase of their reading is in the direction of boys' books.
There are few girls who boast brothers who do not insist on reading
every work of Ballantyne's or Kingston's or Henty's which may be
brought into the house. The Boys' Own Paper is studied by
thousands of girls. The explanation is that they can get in boys'
books what they cannot get in the majority of their own — a stirring
plot and lively movement. Probably nearly as many girls as boys
have read Robinson Crusoe, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Sandford
and Merton, and other long-lived ' boys' ' stories. Nor is this liking
for heroes rather than heroines to be deprecated. It ought to
impart vigour and breadth to a girl's nature, and to give sisters
a sympathetic knowledge of the scenes wherein their brothers live
and work. One lady writes to me : ' When I was younger, I always
preferred Jules Verne and Ballantyne, and Little Women and Good
Wives, to any other books, except those of Charles Lever.'

It seems to be a habit of the times that any one who undertakes
to say anything about any particular branch of literature should
append a list of the best books in that class. To indicate a course of
reading for men and women is difficult ; to indicate such a course for

1886 WHAT GIRLS READ. 525

the young is doubly difficult, and into the perplexing question of what
girls should read I do not attempt to enter. Even were I competent
to indicate the works most suited for girls' reading, the list would
be of no great value. Individual reading must depend upon indivi-
dual taste, save, of course, when reading solely for study and
instruction. I know of only one writer who aspires to point out a
course of reading for girls. Girls and their Ways by * One who
Knows Them ' is a specimen of a kind of work which is constantly
being written ostensibly to meet the wants of both parents and girls.
The author gives a list of between 200 and 300 books. Over fifty poets
from Langland and Chaucer to Jean Ingelow and Sir Henry Taylor
must be read ; nearly 70 histories, 90 biographies, 25 works of travel,
20 on theology, 12 on science, and 40 of a miscellaneous character.
Is there any mental colossus living capable of grappling with this
superabundance of literary wares during the allotted years of indivi-
dual mankind ? Just think for a single moment what it would mean
to place the whole of these works before a girl. The prospect of
having to go through every volume would simply overwhelm her,
and she would not read them but skim them. Her friends would
soon discover that ' they are as sick that surfeit with too much as
they that starve with nothing.' But the gigantic proportions of this
course of reading are not its most distinguished feature. Probably
no one would guess which are the two chief works any mention of
which in the list of books to be read is omitted. They are Shake-
speare and the Bible, in themselves a course of reading and without
which a course of reading is baseless and insubstantial. In the
department of fiction East Lynne is ignored. Mrs. Henry Wood
ought to feel much gratified at being rejected in such company.

Another book of a somewhat similar character to Girls and their
Ways is Miss Phillis Browne's What Girls can do. Miss Browne
gives an account of her own experience as a girl in the matter of
reading, which is highly interesting and suggestive. She describes
how she managed to get hold of some three-volume novels of a
questionable character, and how she used to go to the garret where
they were kept, ' sit on the ground and read all day long books of all
kinds until she was almost dazed.' When her father discovered how
she was employed he was exceedingly angry, and made her promise
to open no book for twelve months which he had not placed in her
hands. He offered her, doubtless as he thought as an antidote to
the novels, Dr. Dick's Christian Philosopher. ' I found this work a
very decided change,' writes Miss Browne. ' I tried hard to read it,
but it was beyond me. The unreal world in which I had been living
had spoiled me for the every-day world in which I found myself, and
the book to which I turned for solace was not written for such as I.'
Miss Browne became very miserable, and her mother intervened on

526 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

her behalf. She was then given Bracebridge Hall, and other works
more suitable to a girl's mind. ' If I might advise as to the kind of
story books that should be given to young girls,' she continues, c I
should say, let them be such as give pure, natural views of life and
character. Let the moral be suggested rather than direct. ... Do
not be uneasy if the heroine gets into mischief occasionally. A girl
that is always good is an anomaly; perfection of character is unusual,
and light without shadow is dazzling to the human vision. Above
all let the books be cheerful, not sad.'

Miss Phillis Browne's experience constitutes a practical argument
in favour of the application of Mr. Euskin's abstract rules. ' The
best romance,' he says, ' becomes dangerous if by its excitement it
renders the ordinary course of life uninteresting, and increases the
morbid thirst for scenes in which we shall never be called on to act.'
Further on he writes, ' Whether novels or poetry or history be read,
they should be chosen not for their freedom from evil, but for their
possession of good.' That is the very key-note to the whole problem
of reading for rich and poor, young and old. It is the standard by
which parents and guardians should judge any book they may wish
to give their children. The duty and responsibility of making the
choice is an onerous one, but must be faced. The young mind is a
virgin soil, and whether weeds or rare flowers and beautiful trees
are to spring up in it will, of course, depend upon the character
of the seeds sown. You cannot scatter literary tares and reap
mental corn. A good book is the consecrated essence of a holy
genius, bringing new light to the brain and cultivating the heart for
the inception of noble motives. Boys' literature of a sound kind
ought to help to build up men. Girls' literature ought to help to
build up women. If in choosing the books that boys shall read it is
necessary to remember that we are choosing mental food for the
future chiefs of a great race, it is equally important not to forget in
choosing books for girls that we are choosing mental food for the
future wives and mothers of that race. When Mr. Euskin says that
man's work is public and woman's private, he seems for the moment
insensible to the public work of women as exercised through their
influence on their husbands, brothers, and fathers. Woman's work in
the ordering, beautifying, and elevating of the commonweal is hardly
second to man's ; and it is this which ought to be borne in mind in
rearing girls. In personal reminiscences we are frequently reminded
of the good or evil which resulted to the autobiographer from the
books placed within his or her reach. Would that every girl were
so fortunate as Miss Louisa Alcott seems to have been. ' When the
book mania fell upon me at fifteen,' she writes, ' I used to venture into
Mr. Emerson's library and ask what I should read, never conscious of
the audacity of my demand, so genial was my welcome. His kind

1886 WHAT GIRLS READ. 527

hand offered to me the riches of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, and
Carlyle, and I gratefully recall the sweet patience with which he led
me round the book-lined room, till " the new and very interesting
book" was found, or' the indulgent smile he wore when I proposed
something far above my comprehension ; " Wait a little for that," he
said ; " meantime try this, and if you like it come again." For
many of these wise books I am waiting still, very patiently, because
in his own I have found the truest delight and best inspiration of my
life.'

Perhaps the best reading which girls can possibly have is bio-
graphy, especially female biography, of which many excellent works
have been published. One cannot help as one reads the biographies
of great women — whether of Miss Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Fry, or
Lady Kussell — being struck by the purity of purpose and Grod-fearing
zeal which moved most of their subjects. There are few women
who have made themselves famous who have not been in the habit,
in all their trials and tribulations, of turning to their Bibles for com-
fort with a touching simplicity of faith. Young people cannot read
too much biography, and, however addicted to fiction they may be,
parents will find record of fact an admirable method of balancing
their children's mind. Fiction should lend relief to girl-life, bio-
graphy should impart right principle, and poetry grace. To feast too
much on any one of these is unwise, and though probably fiction
will always be most popular, girls should be encouraged to read
more poetry and much more biography than they are, I think, ac-
customed to.

Since the foregoing was written I have had placed in my hands
some papers which are an important and interesting contribution
to the discussion of what girls read. Eecently Mr. Charles Welsh, at
considerable trouble and expense, collected from various schools replies
to a series of questions put with a view to eliciting information from
the young themselves as to the literature which they most ex-
tensively affect. He received from boys' and girls' schools, thanks
to the courtesy of their chiefs, some two or three thousand responses.
A thousand of these are from girls of ages ranging from eleven to
nineteen. The questions asked were thirteen in number. To give in
detail the result of the inquiries would take up a whole number of this
Eeview. I may, However, with Mr. Welsh's kind permission, append a
summary of the replies to two of the thirteen questions, viz. * Who is
your favourite author ? ' and * Who is your favourite writer of fiction ? '
The distinction between these questions is somewhat subtle, and
young ladies have only rarely given the name of one writer in reply
to both. I have therefore thought it best to take the replies to the
two together as affording an indication of the favourite author with

528

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Oct.

330

Bunyan . . .

. 11

226

Miss Braddon . .

. 11

91

Mrs. H. B. Stowe

. 11

91

Miss Worboise . .

. 10

73

H. Ainsworth .

. 10

54

Lord Tennyson .

. 9

51

Miss Montgomery

. 9

41

R. D. Blackmore

. 9

41

W. Black .

. 8

31

Defoe ....

. 8

30

Mark Twain

. 8

29

F. Smedley

. 7

26

Carlyle

6

22

Miss Edgeworth

. 6

21

Miss Havergal .

. 6

19

John Ruskin

. 6

18

Lewis Carroll

. 5

17

R. M. Ballantyne

. 5

17

C. Bronte .

. 5

16

Mrs. Gaskell

. 5

16

Mrs. Hemans

. 5

14

Mrs. E. Marshall

, 6

13

Captain Marryat

. 5

12

F. Anstey .

. 5

the thousand young ladies applied to. Eejecting all names which
are not mentioned five times, the result is as follows : —

Charles Dickens . .
Sir Walter Scott
C. Kingsley
C. M. Yonge . '•:
Shakespeare
E. Wetherell
Mrs. Henry Wood
George Eliot
Lord Lytton
Longfellow
A.L.O.E. .
Andersen .
Hesba Stretton .
Canon Farrar
Grace Aguilar .
Grimm . .
Thackeray .
Mrs. Walton
Whyte Melville .
W. H. G. Kingston .
Jules Verne
Mrs. Craik .
Macaulay . . .
Miss Alcott

This analysis of the voting, as it may be called, suggests some
curious reflections to those who have at all studied ' girls' literature.'
Hardly one of the recognised writers for girls is mentioned, and
without attributing any want of frankness to the young ladies who
have voted so emphatically in favour of Dickens and Scott, I cannot
help thinking that the list far from adequately represents what girls
read. Three things at least I should say contributed to make them
vote as they have done. In the first place, doubtless they considered
it proper to vote for such names as Scott and Dickens, although
perhaps they had not read two of the works of either ; in the second,
Dickens' or Scott's works are probably in the school or home library,
and hence easily get-at-able ; in the third, from personal inquiries I
am induced to believe that young ladies do not take particular note
of authors' names, and such household words as Scott and Dickens
occur to their minds more readily than the patronymics of the
authors who devote their energies solely to writing for girls. Miss
Sewell, for instance, is not mentioned once, neither is Miss Maggie
Symington; Miss Sarah Doudney is mentioned only four times,
Mrs. Ewing and Marian Farningham only once each. To imagine
that Carlyle is more popular with girls than any one of these is absurd.
In reply to the question ' What other books have you read ? ' many
books published for girls are mentioned, and, with every respect for
the judgment of the young ladies appealed to, I venture to think

1886 WHAT GIRLS READ. 529

that their voting has been somewhat coloured by circumstances
more or less accidental. At the same time, unless the above list is
to be entirely discredited, it must open the eyes of parents to the
real needs of our girls. Mr. Welsh is doubtless correct when he
surmises that much of the popularity from the publishers' point of
view of books for girls is due to the fact that they are bought by
parents and friends for presents. If girls were to choose their own
books, in other words, they would make a choice for themselves very
different from that which their elders make for them. Allowing,
therefore, that the table now given at all represents the degrees of
regard in which various authors are held by girls, it should induce
those who especially aspire to write for girls to think twice before
giving to the world another story on the usual lines.

EDWARD Gr. SALMON.

530

OUR CRAFTSMEN.

THE existence of ' England's Greatness ' of course requires no
demonstration, however opinions may differ as to its causes. In a
poetic or patriotic spirit this greatness has been attributed to a
variety of things — to the Bible, to our wooden walls and meteor flag,
to the insular position secured to us by the streak of silver sea, to
the special excellence of the roast beef of old England, and the still
more special excellence of our malt liquors.

There have been those who have respectively argued that the secret
of our greatness lay in the possession of our magnificent national debt,
a State Church, a House of Lords, the alleged stability-giving see-saw
of party government, the addition of Empress to the title of Queen.
That in giving us an empire upon which the sun never sets — by many
accounted our greatest greatness — our sailors and soldiers also have
been prime causes, there can be no doubt. In this connection it is no
less true that the Bible has been an instrument of greatness in a sense
— in the sense, that is, that where civilisation has taken the form of
subjugation or annexation, the missionary has often been the precursor
of those instruments of such civilisation, rum and rifles ; the sense
in which, as fishers of men, we have, as Bulwer Lytton somewhere puts
it, baited with a missionary and impaled with a bayonet. The other
supposed leading factors of England's greatness mentioned above may
be passed over in having been named.

As a prosaic matter of fact, the present-day greatness of the mother
country is chiefly the result of our supremacy as a manufacturing nation.
We are a manufacturing, even more than we are a shopkeeping or
carrying, nation. Indeed, our shopkeeping and carrying are to a great
extent the mere outcome and complement of our position in relation
to the manufacturing industries. Eightly considered, it will be found
that our national greatness and manufacturing greatness are something
very like convertible terms. With us coal is the uncrowned king,
iron the emblematical sceptre of power. Our machinery is our best
war material, our craftsmen our most powerful troops. It may be
said that such talk as this might be all very well for weak piping
times of peace, or if the millennium had arrived, but that it is out
of harmony with an age of wars and rumours of wars, an age in •which
it has become axiomatic that the best security for peace is always to

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 531

be prepared for war. To such objection I would answer that on this
point a question of race comes in. It is not a boast but a truism to
say that the English are a hardy and high-mettled race, constitu-
tionally brave, and with an historical record and a national prestige
which make a feeling of noblesse oblige a common possession even
to those who may never have heard the phrase. In actual warfare,
whether by land or sea, the English have always shown dauntless
courage and unconquerable resolution, and there is no reason to
suppose that we have fallen from the standard of our fathers either
in physique or pluck. With such a breed of men to fall back upon,
should the banners of war be unfurled, the modern nation which has
the greatest resources for bringing the arts of peace to bear upon the
operations of war will in the long run be the most successful in battle ;
and in this respect, if not in tariff arrangements, England is ' the
most favoured nation.'

Taking it, then, that we are a manufacturing nation, and that
much of our national greatness arises from such being the case, it
naturally follows that our artisan classes constitute one of the most
important as well as one of the most numerous sections of the com-
munity. They are the elite of the working classes, the portion of
those classes most capable of making themselves felt in political and
social movements. In practice it will generally be found, indeed,
that when the working classes are spoken of in association with
4 movements ' it is really the artisan classes that are meant. In
such an association their name — if skilfully worked — is one to conjure
with, and many are the strange and contradictory things that have
been done or attempted in their name.

The typical artisan is the ' working man ' par excellence, and the
working man, as every one knows, is a man of many friends. He has
candid and sugar-candied friends of every variety, from the self-con-
stituted censor calling himself a friend, and posing as a blessing in
disguise, to the one who takes the line of friend to the working man
and foe to all above him. A friend or leader of the working classes
has come to be a profession, and a paying one, while the methods of
the friendship have attained almost to the dignity of a fine art.
Between their own occasional acts and the regular operations of their
professional friends, the working classes are on some points kept well
before the public. Their importance in respect to their numbers,
their potential political power, their demands — actual or alleged — •
their social rights and wrongs, and so forth, are fully recognised.

But their importance as craftsmen, as the backbone of our manu-
facturing industries, is for the most part left wholly out of account.
Yet this is the ground upon which they are the most important in
relation to the momentous question of national prosperity, in which of
course is involved the question of their own material welfare. While
they are not less important as craftsmen than as — say — voters, neither

532 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

are they less interesting. There need, therefore, be the less hesitation
in entering upon a consideration of their position and characteristics
in the former capacity, as it is the purpose of the present paper to do.
Never, perhaps, was there a time when the subject could be discussed
more profitably.

England is still the first among manufacturing nations — a
long way the first. Her workmen are still the best in the world,
tried by the most practical standards ; for, working fewer hours and
receiving higher pay than Continental workmen, they enable their
employers to undersell Continental producers, and so hold the
premier position in the markets of the world. Nevertheless, it is no
longer a case of England first, the rest nowhere, as was practically
the case a generation or so ago. The total of our manufacturing
production to-day is infinitely greater than it was twenty or thirty
years back, even allowing for increase of population, but it does not
represent the same overwhelming proportion of the manufacturing
production of the world that it did at the earlier period. Manu-
facturing enterprise in foreign countries has been advancing. Nations
formerly entirely dependent upon us for certain classes of goods now
manufacture them for themselves. Others go beyond this and compete
with us in foreign and some even in home markets — a thing they
are enabled to do with a greater chance of success by reason of the
extent to which the spirit of shoddy has been imported into the
practice of our manufacturing arts. Shoddy — using the word in its
representative sense — is a curse that has come home to roost. It has
degraded the once proud trade blazon of ' English manufacture,' has
deservedly depreciated its selling power.

Foreign artisans, too, are picking us up, partly owing to the extent
to which mere machine-minding has been substituted for handicraft skill,
partly to the schooling they have received at the hands of the English
managers, foremen, and leading men whom the more enterprising
among Continental employers have with a wise liberality imported, and
of course in some measure to continued practice. Meanwhile it is, to
say the least of it, an open question whether modern developments in
manufacturing systems have not tended to lessen the special skill and
special value of English artisans. Here again the spirit of shoddy
exerts its baneful influence. Under its operation thousands of work-
men are compelled in their own despite to adopt a sloppy style of
workmanship, are never allowed to acquire, much less practise, any
higher style. Their pay is so arranged that to live, to obtain or
retain employment, they must think of quantity only ; and experience
teaches them that under this state of affairs he is held to be the
cleverest workman who is best not at avoiding but at concealing
scamped work from the trustful, but unskilled, ultimate purchasers
of the work. Frequently, too, shoddy is a means of subjecting bodies
of workmen to injustice from public opinion. Outsiders are led to

l&SG OUR CRAFTSMEN. 533

believe that some depression or disturbance of trade is due to the
.action of the men, when as a matter of fact it really results from
.users or consumers having at length detected the bad workmanship,
or the adulteration of material, or both, which are the characteristic
.features of the shoddy principle as applied to manufactures. In
such circumstances it is scarcely to be supposed that the workmen
concerned can take any special pride or interest in their craft, and
the lack of such feeling upon their part is an element of weakness to
.a trade.

Again, as already hinted, machinery is a great leveller. On the
whole, it is of course a boon and a blessing to men. It multiplies
•the powers of production and ultimately increases the demand for
labour. Still, from the point of view here in question it is not an
unmixed blessing. The greater the degree to which a machine is
self-adjusting and self-acting, the greater the extent to which it
requires as an attendant a minder rather than a mechanic, the more
perfect it is as a machine. If the machine-minder chances to be also
a mechanic, so much the better. He will be able to make his
mechanical experience or intelligence tell in his minding. At the
same time, there is neither expectation nor necessity that he should
be a mechanic. Even among minders who are nothing more than
minders, there are varying degrees of skill; bat, speaking broadly, the
.machine-attendant is rather the slave than the master of his machine
— has to feed rather than work it. Machine hands, like machine work,
can be turned out in quantities. The manufacture of such hands is
a very different thing from the making of mechanics. It is to our
success in the latter process that we are in a great measure indebted
for our superiority over competing nations. Unfortunately, however,
the vital importance of keeping up the ' breed ' of our artisans is in
these later times being overlooked. Employers as a rule think only
of what will pay for the passing season, while State provision for
mechanical training appears to be a thing undreamed of in our
•philosophy of national duty or interest.

Subdivision of labour, like machinery, greatly increases pro-
ductive power, but also, like machinery, it has its drawbacks
where the formation of the craftsmen is in question. In England
•the system of subdivision is carried out very thoroughly and
minutely and with great results as to output, but under it the
-all-round workman is disappearing. And the all-round workman
in his own trade — who, be it marked, is a very different person
from the Jack-of-all- trades — is the best of all workmen. The
•one-job man may be a very good man at his work and yet be
little better than a human automaton — be almost as much a mere
machine as the machine he works. But to become a good all-
round workman a man must have good mechanical aptitudes of
•eye, and hand, and intellect ; and with these aptitudes and a varied
VOL. XX.— No. 116. PP

534 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oc

experience he gains the self-confidence and readiness of resource which
are among the most valuable qualities of an artisan. The workman
of this stamp is not a machine, he is a mechanic. He puts brains
into his work, thinks and plans, and in a rough-and-ready way invents.
He understands the capabilities of tools, whether they be simple
hand-tools or complicated machines. He can make the fullest use
of the automatic adjustments and self-acting gearing which reduce
the one-job man to the level of a machine-feeder and nothing more.
Where, however, any such accessories are wanting, he is not, like the
one-job man, ' floored ' by their absence. He can ' rig up ' substitutes
for them or so vary the methods of executing his work as to be able
to dispense with their aid. He is a Mark Tapley among artisans,
coming out strongest under circumstances that would simply ' flabber-
gast ' workmen who have allowed themselves to become blindly
obedient to, and helplessly dependent upon, automatic appliances.

I remember meeting with a very good illustration of this point in
a stray copy of an American trade journal. A chief engineer of a
steamer, an ' educated ' engineer, one who had passed his Board of
Trade certificate examination and would therefore be learned in
reading and obeying the various self-registering indicators and
gauges with which marine engines are fitted — an engineer of this
stamp found himself fifty miles from port with a broken vacuum
gauge ; a very important gauge to those whose sole trust is in gauges
without any reserve of trust in self. Under the loss of his gauge
this particular engineer ' showed utter helplessness and proposed
immediate return.' The assistant-engineer, however, was another
manner of man. He ' saw nothing amiss in a broken gauge or in
the absence of one. He traded places with his chief and made the
run by feeling. When his condenser felt too hot he gave it more
injection.' If the necessities of the situation had required it, this
assistant would probably have been able to have done an effective
stroke of ship- carpentry, while his chief, if applied to, would no doubt
have replied that he was an engineer, and that wood-work was out of
his line.

Here we have exemplified the essential difference between the
true mechanic and what may be called the machine-made man.
The one can turn his hand to anything broadly within the range of
his own particular craft, or if need be to more or less cognate work in
other crafts, and he has a practical if not scientific knowledge of first
principles in relation to the mechanical appliances used in his trade.
The other is cribbed, cabined, and confined, alike as to manual skill
and intelligent self-resource. The all-round workman requires as a
rule very little foremaning, and this enhances his value to employers.
On the other hand, his value to himself is greatly increased by the
fact that his versatility makes it easier for him than for others to
secure employment. If he is a blacksmith, he is equally ready to

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 535

take work in a marine or locomotive engine factory or to go into a
tool shop or an agricultural implement-making establishment ; and,
the question of wages and personal comfort apart, it is a matter of
indifference to him whether his shop be a new, a repair, or a general
one. In the same way, if a carpenter, he can take anything from
coffin-making up to cabinet-making or pattern-making. If an engi-
neer, he is prepared to take vice or lathe or to go into the erecting
shop.

In practice there are unfortunately difficulties in the way of
such a man turning himself to the best account in this respect.
Occasionally an employer, or a 'putting-on' manager or foreman,
wedded to extreme views upon the system of subdivision of labour,
may be prejudiced against a workman of the all-round type. They
may have an idea that the man who has heretofore wrought in a
marine shop will not be able to hold his own on locomotive work, but,
as they have the remedy in their own hand, in case their doubt should
be, or appear to them to be, justified, they do not allow their
antipathies to become operative if they really want men.

The greatest difficulty of the all-round workman on this point lies
not in the objection of employers, but in the bigotry of fellow- workmen,
many of whom have a blind, unreasoning belief in the doctrine of
'each man to his trade' — trade in the mouths and minds of such
men generally meaning some single sub-section of a trade. This is
emphatically a narrow-minded view, and those entertaining it, acting
after the fashion of their narrow-minded kind, strive to frustrate
those who seek to give practical effect to wider views of trade limita-
tions.

The policy of obstruction and occasionally of terrorism resorted
to for this end makes itself felt chiefly in those trades which are
more or less strictly localised. In such trades as the building and
engineering, which are carried on all over the country, and which
involve a considerable amount of ' knocking about ' upon the part of
many of those engaged in them, more liberal ideas have a greater
though not a complete ascendency. Altogether, the feeling here
referred to is materially detrimental to the interests of the best class
of workmen, and in individual cases often inflicts great hardship.
Foolish action is generally supported by foolish argument. When
the artisan class or /any considerable body of them are blamed for
indulging in this form of restriction of trade, they frequently reply
as though two blacks did make a white. They retort that the
learned professions — and more particularly the law — set them the
example, and argue that a course of action that is right for the legal
profession can scarcely be wrong for working men.

Whether or not it is demonstrably true that the legal profession
does strictly enforce the principle of each man to his (branch of)
trade, whether under the euphemism of legal etiquette they are

pp 2

536 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

guilty of practices that are charged as sins against trades-unionism, I
cannot say. If it is true, so much the worse for the profession, and
especially so much the worse for those members of the public whom
an evil fate casts upon the tender mercies of the profession. But
also so much the greater the mistake of working men in following
their example to do evil. To the cry of ' Every man to his trade,' in
the sense of once that trade always that trade, may fitly be applied the
saying, ' It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.'

On the Continent, I am told, and still more in America, it is no
uncommon thing to meet with artisans who have worked not only
at two or three branches of one trade, but at two or three distinct
trades. Having regard to existing conditions in the mechanical
crafts, there is no good reason why such workmen should not be
common, though in England such a man in a workshop would be
quite a phenomenal personage. In this country there is, as a rule,
only one means by which an artisan can benefit by the ability and
skill to practise more than one handicraft. If he chooses to become
a trade ' Hal o' th' Wynd,' and work for his own hand by uniting in
his single self the positions of jobbing master-man and journeyman,
he can work at as many trades as he likes, which will mean in
practice as many as he can show himself sufficiently competent in to
obtain employment. I have known men who in this way respectively
combined carpentry and watch-making, house-painting and shoe-
making, plumbing and bird-stuffing, cabinet-making and sign-writing,
and blacksmithing and coopering. In each case these men turned their
hands to the second trade at times when they were out of work at their
original calling, and in each case they came to do well between the two
trades. When they had not a job at the one, they had at the other,
and while thus having constant employment, their earnings, time for
time, were greater than they would have been as journeymen at
either one of the trades. In the same way, I knew a bricklayer who
turned monumental mason, and a moulder who became a sewing-
machine and bicycle repairer. In these cases, the men were so suc-
cessful, that from their single-handed and make-shift beginnings,
the one in a backyard, the other in a back kitchen, they became
master-men in the fuller sense of the word — were able to organise
workshops and employ journeymen.

After this fashion it may be said that it is open to English
artisans to change or multiply their trades as often as their tastes,
ability, or necessities may make them wish to do so ; but prac-
tically this fashion is available to but a very limited extent. The
leading trades of the country cannot be carried on in a general
jobbing-hand style. It is an unavoidable condition of their con-
tinued existence that they must be carried on by bodies of journey-
men, gathered together in workshops and factories : and to the
ordinary factory journeyman desirous of changing his craft and

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 537

still remaining a journeyman, the unwritten but powerfully operative
law of each man to his trade offers an almost insuperable obstacle.
The point is perhaps not one of first-rate importance, but, so far as it
goes, it may safely be said that it is bad for the trades and for work-
men in them that it should be so. A young fellow on coming out
of his time, or even before, may discover that he has mistaken
his vocation, or that those who apprenticed him had mistaken it for
him. He may know, moreover, or at least believe that he knows, for
what trade he has true vocation. He may be willing and anxious to
undergo all the struggle and sacrifice legitimately incidental to a
change of trade ; to work as a learner or improver at low wages, and
abide the risk of peremptory dismissal t if he does not show un-
mistakable aptitude for his new calling. In the case of his not
showing such aptitude, the journeyman of a trade need not fear his
competition.

On the other hand, if a man who comes into a trade edgeways
proves himself to be the right man in the right place, he is one who
is likely to do credit to the trade and strengthen it. The perse-
verance, energy, self-reliance, and instinctive sense of the fitness of
things which enable him to conquer the trade, make him a valuable
member of it, a living argument for a good rate of pay. On the
same principle, the man who is compelled to remain at a trade in
which he is, and is conscious of being, a mistake will always be more
or less of a hard bargain in it, and will afford a pretence, if not a
justification, for low wages.

That this is so, that the changing about of round and square
pegs till they find their right holes would strengthen the pegs en
masse, should be, one would think, self-evident. As a matter of
fact it is not. A majority of the artisan classes < do not see it.'
'Every man to his trade' blocks the way to change. The cobbler
must stick to his last, though he may be a bad [ shoemaker, and
might make a good craftsman of another kind. The chief argument
brought forward in support of the ' each man to his trade ' policy
is that it is not right that men who have served a regular appren-
ticeship to a' trade should be subjected to competition from men
who have picked up the trade by some irregular and shorter method.
There is something in this, though hardly in the direct sense in
which the contention is generally applied. Men who pick up a trade-
must in effect serve an apprenticeship. However clever they may
be, they cannot become full-fledged journeymen at a single swoop.
Their apprenticeship may be irregular and comparatively short r
but in one way or another it is made correspondingly sharp, the path
of the picker-up being always a more or less thorny one. That men
of mechanical proclivities and with a fair share of nous could, if they
were allowed, pick up a trade in a relatively short period of time, is
no reason for preventing them from acquiring a craft for which they
feel themselves fitted.

538 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

The conclusion to which such opposition points is, as it seems
to me, that the ordinary period of regular apprenticeship is in the
circumstances of the present day too long. It exacts a payment
from the artisan classes too high and too hard for the value
received, a price so high and hard that to men not used to draw fine
distinctions it appears to justify a spirit and policy of monopoly
and exclusion. When the 'seven long years' which is the usual
period of a ' bound ' apprenticeship was fixed, the contracting
master craftsman expressly undertook to teach the apprentice or
cause him to be taught the whole art and mystery of his craft. For
this the time was not too long, in some cases might be all too short.
We are still within very measurable distance of a time when a boy
who was bound to such a trade as the engineering was ' put through
the shops.' He went from department to department, gaining a
general knowledge of and a certain degree of handiness in each, and
only settling down to the branch to which he was found best suited
during the last year or two of his ' time.' Consequently, during the
greater part of his seven years he was really a learner, and as such
probably earned no more than the small rate of wages paid him, any
gain that there might be on his work during his last year or two
being regarded as in the nature of counterbalance to loss upon him
in his first year or two.

Upon those conditions, apprenticeship was an equitable and
effective arrangement. The trained journeyman entered upon
his career specially qualified for one branch of his trade, and so far
qualified in the other branches that he could readily turn his hand
to them, could honourably and confidently either seek or accept
employment in them. In whatever branch of his trade he did
work, his general knowledge of its other branches added to his
value, and, being able to change from branch to branch himself, he
had less reason than has the one-job man of the present day for
holding monopolist views.

But we have in a great measure altered all this. Under the
operation of the subdivision of labour, what were formerly branches
have in many instances now come to be classed as trades. Where
this is not the case, it is a common practice to stipulate that the
apprentice to be, or his parents or guardians for him, may select
the branch to which he shall be bound, but that, having selected
it, he must keep to it, and to it alone. This is a definite arrange-
ment, and, where it is honourably carried out, all that can be urged
against it is that it is much more profitable to the masters than
to the apprentice. In a great number of cases, however, the
understanding is not honourably carried out upon the part of the
employer. The letter of the contract is fulfilled, but not the spirit.
The apprentice is not only kept to one branch of the trade, but to
some single machine or piece of workmanship in it. At the one

1886

•OUR CRAFTSMEN.

539

thing to which he is thus tied he of course becomes specially expert
— and to the masters specially profitable. So much is the latter the
case, that employers who in this way evade a fair fulfilment of their
contract generally become apprentice farmers as well as — and often more
than — manufacturers. Individually they may be successful men, but
there can be no doubt that their proceedings tend to injure the manu-
facturing interests of the country. It is not simply that injustice is done
to the particular apprentices whose misfortune it is to be bound to such
masters. Apprentice farming for profit, as distinct from journeymen
making to meet the legitimate demands of skilled industry, has the
effect of overcrowding the trades concerned, and that with incom-
petent workmen, of lowering their tone and quality, and of weakening
them in the battle of international competition. Conscious of this
state of affairs, many artisans prefer, if they have the choice, not to
have their sons apprenticed. They get them into the workshops
simply as boys, letting them take their chance as to the branch of
trade to which they may be put. Where this is permitted by
employers, the boys are by the good- will of foremen and workmen
virtually in the position of apprentices as to opportunities for learning.
At the same time they have the substantial advantage over bound
apprentices, that if before they are twenty-one years of age they
* fancy themselves,' they can go elsewhere either as journeymen or
improvers. In the latter capacity they are likely to obtain varied
experience, while their wages, though below journeymen rate, are above
apprentice rate. The possibilities of acquiring a trade in this manner
are if anything on the increase, and it may be that the question of
apprenticeship will settle itself in this manner. If it does not, I would
strongly commend the subject to the serious consideration of the
artisan powers that be. It is one of vital importance to their class.

As a broad suggestion, I should think that the seven long years of
the good old times might be equitably cut down to four in those
cases where it was expressly stipulated that the apprentice was to be
taught not the whole, but a part only of the art and mystery of his
craft. This would tend to induce employers to revert to the practice
of teaching the whole mystery. Where it had not that effect it would
qualify an artisan as a branch man at a fairer cost than he is now
compelled to pay. It would give him fewer years of apprenticeship
and more of journeymanhood, or, if he were of that inclining, afford
him a wider latitude for picking up a second branch while still
young. It may be taken for granted that th6 narrow-minded among
those who had paid a seven years' price for their own trade would be
opposed to any reform of this kind ; but those who wish to establish
reforms must be prepared, not only to meet with, but to ignore
narrow-minded and vested interest opposition.

In speaking as I have done of the subdivision of labour, I have
of course had no thought of suggesting that it should be done away

540 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

with. Any such idea would savour of insanity. The system is a
general and national benefit, a prime source of wealth and comfort.
Without the immense multiplication of productive power which it
gives us, our supremacy as a manufacturing country would be at an
end. All that I have wished to point out is, as I have said, tbat
though a great, it is not an unqualified good. As there is some spirit
of good in things evil, so most great goods have their attendant
drawbacks. To this rule the good thing that we have in the division
of labour is no exception, and I have only laid stress upon the fact
because it so happens that here the drawbacks tell chiefly against
the artisan classes. The workman who under the subdivision system'
is trained and kept to one piece of work (perhaps the hundredth part,
and not an important part), of some elaborate engine or process, wilt
become wonderfully expert at that work. The celerity and accuracy
with which he makes use of the special appliances which in such a
case are certain to be provided will probably be as remarkable as the
mechanical ingenuity of the appliances themselves. But away from
this particular piece of work, or deprived of his special appliances, lie-
is comparatively useless. He has no general knowledge or experience,
no facility in turning his hand to different though related operations,
no adaptability, no talent for mechanical makeshift or improvisation.
There are individual exceptions to this position. Some may have
been general hands before settling down as single-job men. Others,
appreciating the significance (to them) of the situation, may have
privately been at pains to qualify themselves for varying their useful-
ness, or they may be blessed with a faculty for adapting themselves to
modifications of trade environment. Generally speaking, however,
the single-job man finds himself very disadvantageously situated in
these present times of trade fluctuations and revolutions. The range
within which he can hope to find employment at which he can be
confident of approving himself of market value is strictly limited, and
if by some new invention or change of fashion his special work is
superseded, he finds himself in a very unfortunate predicament.

By those who have no practical knowledge of the workshop life
of the artisan classes a good deal of trade romance is indulged in.
When some merchant makes it known that in answer to an advertise-
ment for a clerk at a hundred a year he has had a thousand or more
applications, newspapers are given to improve the occasion in social
leaders. They adorn the tale in a great variety of ways, but they
almost invariably point the same moral. This moral is addressed to-
parents and guardians and runs — Do not put your sons to clerking,
apprentice them to handicrafts. The conclusion here may be a
sound one, but some of the premisses from which it is usually de-
duced are certainly mistaken and misleading ones. It is assumed
that mechanics, unlike clerks, need never be out of employment
save by their own will or through their own fault. But this

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN.

is only intermittently true of any, and is very rarely true of all
trades at the same time.

In periods of trade depression — and such periods have increased
in frequency and length of late years — thousands of artisans are
out of employment, and, as with clerks, some individuals are more
unfortunate than others in this respect. Even when trade is mode-
rately brisk it will be found that a considerable percentage of crafts-
men are still out of employment. In all the large trades there
is a margin of men over and above the average demand. Other-
wise it would be impossible to meet the exigencies of occasional
spurts and rushes in trade. The latter condition is what constitutes
the actual ' pull ' of the mechanic over the clerk. In most trader
there do come times when the demand for skilled workmen in
them is fully up to and even in excess of the supply ; times in which'
there is not only work for all hands, but in which wages rule high
and there is overtime to be made — times, therefore, which afford an
opportunity of in some measure making up for out-of-work periods.
Whether such good times would continue to come if the numbers
of the surplus clerk population were added to the ranks of the
mechanics, is a question that need not be debated here.

The newspaper moralisers speak off-handedly of the skilled
workman earning his two or three pounds a week. That there are
artisans who do earn such a rate of pay is most true, but as a general
estimate this is decidedly too high. I am not aware that there are
any exact statistics bearing on the point, but I feel quite certain that,
taking London and the provinces, large towns and small, one trade
with another, it would be fully stating, not to say overstating, the case
to put the average earnings of artisans at thirty-five shillings a week.

Again, it is said that the clerk is bound to ' keep up an appearance,'
however inadequate may be his means to that end ; the inference leffc
to be drawn being that the artisan has not an appearance to keep up.
This impression is a thoroughly erroneous one. True, there are no
formulated sumptuary laws regulating artisan apparel either in or
out of the workshop, but there are laws of wont and custom that are
none the less powerful because they are unwritten. Dress with the
mechanic is not a matter of respectability of appearance only, it is
an indication of his character as a workman, and is so regarded. The
slouchy, out-at-elbx>w, down-at-heel craftsman will be slouchy, and
coarse, and careless over his work. The slouch is the bete noire of
managers and foremen, the butt of fellow-workmen. He is the
last to be taken on, the first to be dismissed. To him are most
frequently applied the < tongue dressings ' in which some foremen are
given to indulge, and he is the man of all others most conscious of
deserving and least well situated for resenting such dressings. Other
things being at all equal, the man who shows up each Monday
morning in clean overalls will be taken on or kept on in preference

542 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

to the one whose only anxiety — supposing he has any anxiety upon
the point at all — is that his unwashed, unwashable, unworkmanlike
garments may originally have been of a colour calculated l not to
show the dirt.' Out of the workshop, in what stands to the working
class as society, the well-paid artisan who did not dress better than,
and differently from, the poorly-paid unskilled labourer would lose
caste. Not only his fellow-craftsmen, but the labourers also, would
despise him.

With artisans it is de rigueur to have a ' customary suit of
solemn black ' for Sundays and best, and a second-best suit for
evening wear. When to the cost of these is added the cost of wear
and tear, both by work and washing, of working clothes, it will be
evident, I think, that the charges upon the artisan under the head of
keeping up appearances must be to the full as heavy as those upon
an ordinary clerk. I am not writing in correction of the mistaken
notions here adverted to with any view to dissuading parents from
putting their sons to trades rather than to clerking. I am no
advocate for keeping trades close by anything in the nature of
artificial restrictions. There is no need for any policy of that kind.
The evolutionary method is distinctively operative on this head, and
is all-sufficient. In the breeding of artisans only the fit and fittest
develop and survive, and their competition, though it is with each
other, is also with employers, and tends on the whole to extend trade
and keep up wages. The mere ' sticket ' or incompetent clerk is not of
the fibre of which mechanics are made. As to the stronger grained
kinds of youth, if they have any pronounced natural bent for a me-
chanical calling, they will probably be put to it. If they are in-
different as between clerking and handicraft work, they are quite as
likely to succeed — or fail — in the one as the other. At any rate, in
the trades there is room enough for all who are fit. In the nature
of things the skilled workmen of the country cannot be few, but also
in the nature of things they must be fit, otherwise they will as
craftsmen perish in the struggle for existence.

The above points of relation between clerks and artisans are well
worthy of consideration ; still, here they are to a certain extent
merely by the way. The point of the general comparison, more
immediately in the present connection, is that in which the superior
interest of a mechanical calling is dwelt upon. The advisers of the
crowded-out clerks picture the workman rather as an inspired artist
than a commonplace artisan. They speak of him as regarding as
almost living things the machine which he works and the wonderful
engine or apparatus he is helping to construct. They dwell upon
the feeling of delight and consciousness of power which he must
experience as the crude material takes form and function under his
skilful hands, and suggest that his work must excite in his mind an
interest second only to that which agitates an inventor working out

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 543

his models. His labour is represented as affording him an infinite
variety, under which it is impossible for his trade to stale upon him,
and contrasted with which the routine work of an office must indeed
be wearisome.

This is a very pretty picture, and one of which personally I
can only say, Would that it were true ! Unfortunately it is not
true. Applied to the bulk of the artisan classes, it is the reverse of
true. By the system of subdivision of labour, a man is trained
to some single piece of work without any reference to a know-
ledge of the complicated whole of which it may be a simple part.
He is kept to that piece of work day after day, week after week,
month after month, year after year, until — if he is the kind of man
who would take an interest in his work under more favourable
circumstances — it becomes a weariness of the flesh to him. His
limbs and mind become almost automatical in relation to it. He is
rung in and out to work at fixed times, is constantly doing the same
thing in the same fashion, and working alongside of other men subject
to like conditions. He is not allowed to show—in any practical form,
at any rate — interest in any work other than his own, as it is accounted
a fault for him to be found away from his own post, and much more
from his own department.

In this way workshop life becomes thoroughly monotonous,
becomes, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, ' One demd horrid grind.' A
man may work for a lifetime in a tool shop without having any
general knowledge of machine construction, or any opportunity
of acquiring such knowledge so far as his life in the shop is con-
cerned. Or he may be engaged in a marine or locomotive engine
factory, with a similar lack of knowledge of the mechanical principles
underlying steam propulsion. So far as his individual powers of
output are in question, he may be no worse a workman for this
want of general knowledge. Indeed, there are extreme partisans
of the subdivision system who contend that he is all the better
a workman for it, just as there are people who will tell you that a
household servant is all the better for being unable to read or write,
as in that case she will not waste time in reading or be able to
possess herself of the contents of your postcards. To an easy-going
man the circumscribed conditions and monotony of much of our
workshop life may not be particularly irksome, any more than a
monotonous office routine would be irksome to an easy-goiDg clerk.
Still this does not alter the facts that many of our artisans have to
work in a changeless millhorse-like round which is depressing to their
intelligence ; that the fancy portrait of the British artisan set before
the out-of-work clerk as a picture of what he might be is not true to
life ; and that men, like materials, are deteriorated more by rust
than wear.

If as a general thing work could be made interesting to the men

544 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

and the men be brought to take an interest in the work, it would be
better alike for work and workmen ; would add to our power and
resource as a manufacturing nation. But if it is admitted that only
by availing ourselves of the advantages unquestionably inherent in
the system of the subdivision of labour can we expect to maintain
our lead in international competition — if this is admitted, how, it may
be asked, is an intelligent and pleasurable interest in their work to-
be created in the minds of our craftsmen ? The question is an obvious
one, not so the answer. Probably there is no complete answer to it.
It would be too much to hope that the drawbacks to the subdivision
system could be altogether removed. To a certain extent they are,
like the advantages of the system, inherent. Moreover, the im-
perfectibility of ' poor human nature ' forbids so full a hope. In the-
multitude of artisans there are and always will be some weaker
brethren, men of muscle and manipulative skill, but so constituted
mentally that they have no desire and but little capacity for bringing
intelligence to bear upon their work. These are the kind of menr
who, if they are by any accident moved out of the one groove in which
they have been set running, spoil work for want of putting a few
grains of thought into it, and then tell you that they are not paid t&
think. They have no trade ambition, no desire for trade knowledge
beyond being able to turn out the regulation quantity of work, in
the execution of which they have attained an automatical efficiency.
The degree to which such men become mere machines, mere human
tools directed in use by the intelligence of others, is less the fault of
the system under which they work than of their character. In a
lesser — a much lesser — degree even the better and best types of
artisans are mechanicalised by being constantly kept at one piece of
work. That is a matter of course, is what is aimed at by and expected
from the modern methods of manufacturing organisation.

It is more or less true of all men that ' their nature is subdued to
what it works in.' Were it not so, the advantages of subdivision of
labour would be non-existent. But with the utmost allowance made
on this head it still remains true that our skilled workmen would
be more efficient specialists if opportunities were afforded them of
acquiring a wider general knowledge of the respective crafts in which
they are engaged. The great bulk of them are quite capable of assimi-
lating such knowledge, and would be perfectly willing to acquire it
under conditions adapted to their environment. That the acquisi-
tion of such knowledge would be beneficial to themselves is certain,
and it is equally certain that it would be highly beneficial to the-
manufacturing interests of the country at large.

That the diffusion of such .knowledge among our craftsmen is a
consummation devoutly to be wished, none except a few bigots will
for a moment doubt. The question is, How is the desirable consum-
mation to be effected ? Alterations in the conditions of apprentice-

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 545

ship and more liberal views on the part of artisans themselves with
regard to the ' every man to his trade ' idea would, as already inci-
dentally hinted, tend to increase the sum of technical knowledge
•among our working mechanics.

The one thing most needful, however, is some well-considered
imperial measure of technical education. I say this being quite
aware that we already have what it pleases the official mind to call
a Science and Art Department. Three hundred and fifty thousand
a year of public money is voted to this department. Its cost of
administration is abnormally high even for a Government depart-
ment, while the effective results of its executive operations are
abnoimally low — even for a Government department. Its sup-
posed raison d'etre, or at any rate its supposed chief function,
is to afford technical education, in the shape of science and ait
teaching, to the working classes at large. The intention with which
the department was originally instituted was therefore a commendable
one, but in relation to the fulfilment of that original intention the
department is a delusion and a snare, more particularly in the metro-
polis. It does plenty of work of a kind, makes a fairly good show
on paper, and official persons or some of them would no doubt claim
that it has been, and is, a successful institution. But unofficial persons
who take an interest in the matter, and are in positions for forming
a judgment upon it, are unanimously of opinion that the Science and
Art Department, as at present constituted, is a failure. It not merely
does not do the work it was intended to do, but the known fact of its
existence, coupled with the complacent assumption in official circles
that a Government department against which there happens to be no
.general outcry must of necessity be fulfilling its functions, the lack
of evidential results notwithstanding, blocks the way to reform.

The most and best that can be said for the Science and Art Depart-
ment as it stands, is that it might serve as a basis for some such organic
measure of reconstruction as would make its potential means effec-
tively operative to the attainment of the desired end of promoting
technical education of a practically applicable character among the
working classes.

Within the compass of this article there is not space, nor is
there any great need, to discuss the shortcomings of the depart-
ment in detail. , It is sufficient here to point out that as now
organised it has resolved itself into a machine for apportioning
and distributing grants earned on passes by cramming teachers, and
awarding certificates to cram passed students. These certificates
have a certain commercial use and value. They are a necessity to
thote qualifying for, in their turn, becoming cram teachers under the
department ; they have a distinct monetary value to elementary
teachers taking service under school boards, which pay a few pounds
a jear more to teachers holding some certain number of science

546 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

certificates ; they are valuable for advertising purposes to the private
coach for competitive examinations, and may occasionally be useful
to persons associated with mechanical industries in some other than
a handicraft capacity. But in the workshop they are in themselves
of neither use nor value.

If a working man joins a science class, it is with a wish to
obtaining knowledge, not a cardboard certificate. Were the cer-
tificate of the department a proof that its possessor had acquired
a practical knowledge of a science related to his trade, it would
be prized not only for the honour of the thing but on material
grounds also. As a matter of fact it is not a proof of this. What in
nine cases out of ten it does prove is that the holder was a fairly
good * study ' for examination business, and that his teacher was a
clever crammer and successful at forecasting the run of the examination
questions for the year. At cram examination work, in which no room
is left for their practical knowledge to be brought to bear, artisans
are not good. Compared with other classes of students in Government
science and art classes they come out badly in the matter of passes,
and though numbers of them join the classes because nothing better
of the kind is open to them, they know as a body that these classes
as a means of technical education in connection with the handicraft
industries are a dismal failure.

And yet such classes, properly organised, might be of incal-
culable service to the country. The engineering is, I take it, a
trade that would be as largely benefited as any by a sound and
generally available system of technical education, and that trade
has gained more in the way of such education from the insti-
tution of the Whitworth scholarships than from all the efforts of
the Government Science and Art Department. The scholarships
have been founded with a princely munificence, but their successful
results are less due to this fact than to the judgment and common
sense displayed by their founder, Sir Joseph Whitworth, the well-
known engineer, as an organiser. The competitive examination for
these scholarships is not in the ' bookish theoric ' alone, is not mere
paper-work answers to a string of examination questions. Here
theory and practice are compulsorily combined.

Each candidate has to give proof of his skill in handling the
tools and using the materials of his craft, and that in no amateurish
fashion. That is the prime condition, and the manipulative skill
and the bookish knowledge are so arranged as to act and react upon
each other in such a fashion that the competitor whose technical
knowledge on the whole is the most practical and the most readily
susceptible of being practically applied stands the best chance of
success.

Unlike the Science and Art Department certificate, a Whit-
worth scholarship carries weight with the initiated. A man holding

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 547

one of these scholarships may with a considerable amount of con-
fidence aspire to the higher positions in the trade, and on this
ground men of social standing above the artisan classes, and who aim
only at the higher positions, compete for the scholarships. But
to qualify for competition they must go into the workshops and
acquire a fair degree of manual skill, and if in course of time they
do become masters or managers, they will act all the more effici-
ently in those capacities by reason of their workshop experience.
On the other hand, the weight given to practical skill and know-
ledge in these competitions induces large numbers of apprentices
and young journeymen to become competitors; and though of course
all cannot obtain scholarships, the large majority of them benefit
greatly by the study and practice they undergo in the attempt to
win. As workmen they are more capable and intelligent than
they would otherwise have been, and their increased worth in these
respects is so much gain to the trade generally as well as to themselves
individually.

Here we have technical education properly so called wisely and
fitly conditioned to the actualities by which alone it can be made
nationally of practical effect. From an extension of this method
we might reasonably hope to see our artisans improve in value
as artisans. It would give an impetus to mechanical invention, and
would beyond question increase the extent and prolong the period
of our manufacturing supremacy. Here is a pattern for the Govern-
ment Science and Art Department to remodel itself upon. Seeing
that as a Government department it is supported by Imperial funds,
it is but just that the educational facilities afforded by it should be
so varied as to give others beside the working classes opportunities
for benefiting by them. At the same time, the last-named classes
should be the chief and special consideration with the department.

The technical instruction of those classes as a work of national
importance in relation to our position as a manufacturing country was
avowedly the justification for calling the department into existence.
That it has not in any adequate fashion fulfilled its beings, end, and
aim, that as at present directed it cannot hope to fulfil it, is matter
of ' common notoriety among those who have the best means for
forming an opinion upon the point. If it would justify its continued
existence, it must show a much greater regard than it has hitherto
done to the first principles of its constitution. It must establish
science and art classes to which only artisans and apprentices shall
be eligible for admission. Not in any spirit or exclusiveness, but with
the object of making the instruction practical and specific, of making
it bear as directly as may be upon the trades in which the students
are engaged, and so arranging it that it may illustrate or receive
illustration from the actual or possible operations of the workshop —
this is the direction in which the Government department should

548 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

be made to move if it is to accomplish really satisfactory work,
and the sooner it begins to move the better it will be for all
concerned.

Already a great deal of valuable time has been lost. Ever since
<he International Exhibition of 1851 the cry for technical educa-
tion for our artisans has been heard in the land, but as yet it has
been a case of much cry and little — very little — wool. If peace
hath her victories, no less renowned than war, she has also her
struggles for victory, little less severe than those of war and often
more persistent. Never before have these struggles been so keen,
determined, and in their kind so bitter as they are now. In the
modern industrial war of nations it may be said there is * no discharge.'
No country can afford to rest on its laurels. There is no standing
still; not to go forward is to go backward.

In so far as we are without a national system of technical
«ducation, in so far as we leave our armies of industry uninstructed
and untrained in the higher arts of their war, we are not going
forward in the fight. So far, England is wanting in her duty to
herself. Her slackness here no doubt arises from failure to realise
the immense importance of the subject; but the consequences
resulting from continued neglect will be none the less dire on that
account. Our present attitude in respect to technical education
is preparing the way for disaster, if not defeat or disgrace, to our
artisan legions. It is foreshadowing a day of lamentation, a time
wherein there will be but too good cause to cry that England's
industrial glory — and with it much of her national greatness — has
departed; With Government the promotion of technical education
is clearly a duty. With employers of skilled labour it may not be
strictly a duty, but it would certainly be to their interest to aid in
the work, and they could, an they would, render very valuable aid.

It is not every employer who has the means, even if he had the will,
to follow the example set by Sir Joseph Whitworth. Most masters,
however, employing any considerable number of operatives might at
very little cost establish evening classes for technical instruction in
•connection with their workshops. It might be made obligatory upon
apprentices to attend such classes, and no doubt numbers of journey-
men would join them when they were thus ' handy.' Teachers and
demonstrators could in most instances be found among the leading
employes, and the workshops could be made the best of all demonstra-
tion theatres.

That the artisan classes as a body have shown themselves un-
wisely, not to say culpably, apathetic in the matter of technical
education is unhappily but too true. They require a good deal
of rousing on this head, but they are reusable. If a technical
education movement specially adapted to their needs and upon any-
thing like a national scale were organised, they would move with the

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 549

movement, especially when they began to find — as they soon would
do — that those who did not avail themselves of the educational
facilities offered would have to take 'back seats' in their trades.
I have repeatedly heard it argued that all that is required in respect
to the scientific training of our artisans is to bring them to see their
need of such training and to understand the advantage it would be
to them. This done, it is said there would be comparatively little
necessity for national effort, the means for individual self-education
being abundantly accessible to all who had a desire to attain, and
capacity to acquire, technical knowledge. This is true in a measure,
but only in a measure. To the average student — and it is the average
student who must be considered — systematic instruction under com-
petent teachers is much more fruitful in results than unaided self-
study.

Moreover — and this is the important point here — means for
scientific self-instruction suitable to artisans are not so plentiful as
seems to be generally supposed. Technical text-books and treatises
abound, it is true, but they are compiled without any reference to the
special wants in this wise of operative artisans. They are for the
most part mere cram books. The more advanced ones are too purely
and absolutely theoretical to suit working-class students, while the
elementary ones are too elementary for them, generally being full of
descriptions or definitions of the tools with which craftsmen are
already perfectly familiar. The classes of students, considered in the
existing scientific self-help manuals are not artisans but those who
are either cramming for certificate examinations, or those desirous
of amusing themselves with 'the guinea box of tools.' So far as
book assistance is concerned, the working man's pursuit of (technical)
knowledge is a case of the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties.
What should working men read — with a view to technical culture —
is a very difficult question to answer at present. The theorist and
the amateur are provided for, but the artisan is not. It would pro-
bably not be the least of the benefits resulting from a national move-
ment in favour of technical education, that it would lead to the
production of artisan text-books that would justify their title.

In speaking of the absence of technical knowledge among the rank
and file, I am not forgetting that our captains of skilled industry stand
in the very forefront not only as organisers of labour, but also as
practical scientists and mechanicians. But this in itself is no longer
sufficient to afford assurances of our being able to maintain our pride
of place. The tactics of destructive warfare have not altered more
greatly than have the conditions of industrial competition. Prominent
among the new conditions is the necessity for rapid changes and
modifications in the application of manipulative skill ; and to be
prepared for this, while still retaining the system of subdivision of
labour, it is absolutely essential that our men should have a wider
VOL. XX.— No. 116. QQ

550 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

range of technical knowledge. They require to have their trade
drill extended, to be — as well as their tools — easily ' convertible ' to
new uses. It is desirable that as troops they should be made capable
of more varied movement and combination, that they should by being
more technically intelligent be more plastic in the hands of their
commanders. And the needed plasticity, the more ready adaptability
to the circumstances arising out of revolutionary movements or
abnormal developments in industrial operations, can only be gained
under a national system of technical instruction.

If our artisans were educated to a higher, more intelligent com-
prehension of the arts and mysteries of their crafts, if they understood
in a broad and practical way the scientific rationale and mechanical
organisation underlying and governing the ultimate results in which
their individual pieces of work are subdivisional processes — if our
artisans were technically educated up to this point, they would as a
body really feel the vivifying interest in their work which at present
they are only supposed to experience. They would also have a greater
belief and pride in their callings than is entertained by many of them
under the existing condition of affairs. This may seem to outsiders
a merely sentimental consideration, but as a matter of fact it is of
vital importance as affecting the quality of workmen and workmanship.

In every workshop there are numbers of croakers. They are the men
who tell you that the ' trade ' is over-stocked, that it is done for, has
had its day, is no longer a trade to put a boy to. This is the sort of
stuff they do talk to boys who have been put to the trade, often with
disastrous effects. According to this stamp of man the times are per-
manently out of joint, and this world no longer a place for mechanics
if they will suicidally persist in adding to their numbers. * Look at
me,' such a man will say; 'I speak from experience, I am in the trade,
and I know. I have never a penny to bless myself with till pay-day
comes ; I am as much out of work as in, and never certain of employ-
ment from one week to another.' This is quite right of himself, and
he can point to plenty more like himself. His home is miserable,
his family slatternly, himself of poverty-stricken appearance. Fore-
men are ' down upon him,' and more successful — or as he puts it more
lucky — fellow-workmen regard him with a contemptuous pity.

If he were an average specimen of the ' trade,' he would indeed be
a warning against coming into it, an argument for getting out of it.
But he is not an average specimen. Though he tries to figure as a
martyr, he is only that stock character, the horrid example. He is
one of the hard bargains of his craft, is either a duffer, a slouch, or a
boozer, incapable, lazy or drunken, or perhaps all three. The men
of this stamp are the residuum of the artisan classes, and among the
other beneficial effects of the higher training would be its tendency
to squeeze out the residuum. The residual type of workman would
not exert himself to move up, and, as a consequence, his relative

1886 OUR CRAFTSMEN. 551

worthlessness would be so increased that he would no longer be found
worth his salt, even in busy times. He would gradually find himself
pressed to a lower than the artisan level, and his loss would be the
gain of the trade to which he had been attached.

While the croaker is ever ready to call upon you to look upon
this picture as embodied in himself, he is careful not to direct atten-
tion to that, as illustrated by the better, more truly representative
artisan. The latter, in times of anything like average briskness in
trade, can command good work and good pay all the year round, has
a comfortable home, saves money, provides through his benefit and
trade clubs for the proverbial rainy day, is in his degree respected
because self-respecting, and on the whole is a person rather to be
envied than pitied.

It may safely be asserted that there never was a time when there
were such opportunities for the mechanic as there are at the present
day. Every new discovery or development in the resources of civilisa-
tion increases the demand for his services. If by such misfortunes as
do sometimes befall he finds himself crowded out or superseded in an
old country, he is better qualified than most other men to make his
way in new countries. In the work of colonisation the practical artificer
is required almost contemporaneously with the agriculturist, and the
need for him increases with every advancing stage of the work.
There are plenty of openings for him. The instances in which work-
men rise to be masters or managers are innumerable, while even
should he remain a journeyman all his life he may still be happy and
in all essential respects a gentleman. If he has manliness enough to
keep himself free from the taint of the depraving social competition
to keep up appearances, he may live comfortably, have leisure to cul-
tivate the graces, and means to enjoy a fair share of the rational
pleasures of life.

The working classes of the country could be confidently relied upon
to contribute to the success of any movement for once more making the
brand * Of English Manufacture 'a proud and profitable trade device — a
guarantee for trustworthy workmanship and honest material, for the
articles so branded being what they professed to be, or doing what they
were supposed to do. There can be no reasonable doubt either that our
artisans might with equal confidence be relied upon — again on grounds
of self-interest, if from no higher motive — to play the important part
that would fall to them in the successful working out of any national
scheme for technical education. It is sometimes contended that
while English mechanics are undoubtedly more skilful and self-assured
than any others in point of manual skill, they are inferior in point
of artistic feeling and capacity for assimilating and applying technical
knowledge. This opinion must, however, be regarded as merely
theoretic, seeing that it is of necessity founded largely if not wholly
upon surmise. Save in individual instances, English artisans have

QQ2

552 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

had no opportunity of showing to what extent they may bs endowed
with artistic feeling or perception or a faculty for technical knowledge.
It appears to me quite fair to suppose that such perception and
faculty, so far as they relate to mechanical work, are very likely to
be found in latent association with the admittedly superior natural
aptitudes for handicraft skill.

In any case, the time has fully arrived when the subject of a
higher training for our artisans should be taken up as a matter
involving national welfare. Though it does not blaze forth in
agitation, it is nevertheless a burning question. Prolonged in-
activity with respect to it will certainly not prove to be masterly.
If the national value of our artisan classes is to remain unrealised
or unacted upon ; if their position and power is to be determined
solely by a cutting-down competition, in which the chief weapons
employed are adulteration and scamping; if, in short, things are
to be allowed to go on as they have been going, they must in the
nature of events go from bad to worse, and the decline and fall of
our manufacturing empire is inevitable. If as a nation we shirk
our duty, neglect our interest in this matter, we may cynically or
selfishly console ourselves with the reflection that ' sufficient unto the
day is the evil thereof.' We may with a good show of reason hope
and believe that the decline will be slow, that the momentum we
have acquired will carry us on for at least our time, and that the
after-time is for those who live in it to deal with. None the less
we shall be tottering to our fall, and in this age of rapid changes
and the frequent occurrence of the unexpected, the fall or something
approaching it might come suddenly.

THOMAS WJIIGHT.

(Journeyman Engineer.}

1886 553

NOT AT HOME.

DESPITE the Malthusian ' checks ' upon population, such as misery,
disease, war, vice, and * moral restraint,' most of the races and nations
of the world continue to increase and multiply. The fruits of the
earth, which are directly or indirectly their food, do not, according
to the well-known axiom, increase locally in proportion, and so — to
employ the simplest expressions — many mouths have to be separated
from the parent community in the quest for the needful bits to put
into them. The enormous facilities for locomotion, by which modern
science has proceeded so far in reducing the obstacles of earthly
space and time, serve to promote this search for subsistence in its
practical forms of emigration and travel, and the present century has
opened up to us a perfectly new phase of the history of the human race
and its breeds. The vast scale of the emigration of the Teutonic, Scan-
dinavian, and Latin races of Europe, and of the Chinese, must inevit-
ably, as the years roll on, become still more gigantic. Even now it is
almost hopeless to endeavour by any system of statistics to keep pace
with the eternal come and go of all the millions of human beings of
all countries and all languages who are constantly crossing and re-
crossing the oceans and continents of this globe.

Some effort is made in this essay roughly to gauge the extent to
which emigration is scattering and mingling the current generations
of the leading European nations, and at least to lay the foundations
for those more elaborate and complete statistics which may be won
at some future time. The following table displays in one direction —
the horizontal — the numbers of born natives of each country who are
now living out of that country ; and at the same time in the vertical
columns the numbers of foreigners who reside in each such country.
It is important to bear in mind that in the table only the born natives
of the parent countries have been considered, descendants of such
emigrants becoming absorbed among the natural population of their
adopted countries.

It is much to be desired that among the many international
arrangements which slowly advancing civilisation gradually brings
about — such as the postal union, the telegraph, longitude, universal
time, astronomic, currency, and a host of other congresses — states-
men, or at least men of science, would devote some attention to the

554 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

establishment of well-devised, universal, and consistent regulations
for a periodical and contemporaneous census, accompanied by trust-
worthy and uniform statistics of emigration, immigration, and re-
emigration. The value of such a system, in regard to its influence
on economics, would prove incalculable, and it is desired here to
direct especial attention to the excellence of the Italian statistics of
this nature.1

Imperfect as the table now here given admittedly must be, it
still analyses and apportions among a score of nations or groups of
nations no less a total than 18,741,000 of human beings who are
* not at home ' to those who may search for them in their native
lands ; and this large total lends some importance to the conclusions
that may be drawn from its analysis.

The first postulate to be laid down in considering the table is
that a country which sends abroad a greater number of human beings
than it receives from other nations must be considered as contri-
buting the difference to the general total of the population of the rest
of the globe. But such a country must not alone be credited with
her emigrants, who furnish a real and active proof of the vitality of
her population ; she must likewise be debited with the foreigners who
live within her borders ; for they are proof, pro tanto, that at least
an equal number of her own native population might have continued
to exist at home without seeking their fortunes in other lands. Let us
now go through the table, commenting first upon the Austrian empire.

Austria-Hungary. — In the census tables of other countries are
found 337,000 Austrians and Hungarians living out of their own
lands. Of these Germany claims 118,000, and the United States
135,500. These figures are but insignificant when compared with
the total population of 37,883,000, and this dual State must be
set down as contributing the least proportion — only 0*89 per cent.
upon that total — of all the great States to the population of the rest
of the world. At the same time, the number of foreigners resident
in the united monarchy falls short of 183,000, being only about 1
to every 208 of the native population. The Germans in Austria
reckon up to some 99,000, as against 118,000 Austrians in Germany;
and in spite of the long-standing strife of the Carbonari and the
white-coated soldiery, 45,000 Italians now reside on Austrian soil,
while only 16,000 Austrians are to be found in Italy.

Belgium. — Next comes Belgium, with which little Luxembourg
is grouped for convenience, showing a net total population of over
5,800,000, or 485 to the square mile — a ratio of destiny which is
only surpassed by Saxony with 514; England and Wales showed
446 in 1881. Of these, 145,500, or 1 in every 39, are foreigners;

italiana all' estero ; Movimento dello stato cii'ile, and Censimento
dcgli Italiani aW estero, Roma, 1885. Our 0"wn General Report ofttte Census of 1881,
vol. iv., 1883, is full and interesting.

1886

NOT AT HOME.

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but this industrious and populous country, notwithstanding its long-
continued deadlock of political parties, its strikes and its riots —
indeed, perhaps partly because of all these — has sent abroad no less
than 497,000 of her children, or 8' 6 per cent, of her remaining native
population. It is true that the greater part of these have not gone
far from home — for 463,000 of them are distributed in neighbouring
France, Germany, and Holland ; but still, according to the postulate,
Belgium has a balance to her credit at foot of these tables amount-
ing to 351,000. To lessen the tedium of figures, the nearest round
numbers are mentioned in each, case where the result is not thus
sensibly affected. A salient proof of the worthless character of
emigration statistics generally is to be found in the Belgian returns,
which show that in the five years ending with 1884 immigration
exceeded emigration by 10,014 — a manifest absurdity when pitted
against the statistics here given. Perhaps the returns are merely
for the port of Antwerp.

Scandinavia. — Next come Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, which
are grouped to avoid indefinite extension of the table. The net
population of the three countries may be taken at 8,450,000 ; and in
addition thereto 795,000, or 9'4 per cent, of the existing generations,
are living abroad. Of these 440,000 are in the United States, and
306,500 are Swedes living in Eussian Finland. The average emi-
gration from Scandinavia is now over 7 7,000 annually. If we glance
back to the beginning of this century, we shall see the population
of Norway scarcely increasing, and its marriages fewer than in any
country but Switzerland. Since then many of the old customs and
laws that hampered agriculture have disappeared, manufacturing
centres have arisen and flourished, and the growth of the population
has proved quicker in such centres than in the country districts.
Between 1865 and 1875 the population increased 14 per cent, side
by side with constant emigration, and in 1869 there was but one
pauper in a hundred, while at home in England there were 5 per cent.
To Sweden belongs the credit of the earliest and best-regulated
European census, which was taken in 1748, and repeated at first
every three, and then every five years. Here is the place to recall
the uncomfortable fact that five years later our own House of Lords
threw out a bill for an English census on the ground that it was
anti-Scriptural and un-English, and we had consequently to wait
nearly half a century for the first counting of our numbers. At the
same time that these three northern countries send out a host of
795,000 they harbour only 51,000 foreigners, and these are chiefly
Germans residing in Denmark (33,152), and Finns and Russians in
Sweden and Norway ; so that the balance to the credit of the Scan-
dinavian communities in the Not-at-Home account of the world is no
less than 744,000.

But we shall now have to deal with much larger figures, and before

1886 NOT AT HOME. 557

taking the case of our own England let us first examine the German
empire.

Germany. — The vast emigration from Germany in modern years,
and its causes, are now commonplaces of contemporary history. No
pause is needed here for dwelling upon the innate force and healthy
stamina of the breed, its domestic family habits, its calm self-
reliance, and its adventurous spirit.

Keep not standing fixed and rooted,

Briskly venture, briskly roam ;
Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,

And stout heart are still at home.

The results are a high rate of increase in the population, and a
readiness to seek afar relief from the heavy pressure of military ser-
vice under which Germany and her leading antagonist are now both
groaning. The statistics of German emigration are not quite satis-
factory, but between 1880 and 1884 a yearly average of 172,750
left the mother countries of the empire by Antwerp, Bremen, Ham-
burg, Havre, and Stettin. The vast majority of these went to the
United States, and the greater portion of the remainder to South
America. It is significant that between 1881 and 1883, 125,156
emigrants renounced their German nationality. It is thus not sur-
prising to find the table exhibiting 2,601,000 Germans outside
their fatherland, of whom 2,000,000 are in the States, and 110,000
in South America. In Belgium live some 43,000 ; among the
Scandinavians 38,000 ; in Switzerland 90,000 ; in Holland 42,000 ;
and in France, where sullen hostility to * the Prussians ' is but ill-
disguised, no fewer than 82,000. While the German empire can
reckon over two and a half millions of her children in foreign climes,
or 5-7 per cent, on the aggregate population of 45,200,000, she
affords a subsistence to 293,000 natives of other countries, including
118,000 Austro-Hungarians, 35,000 Scandinavians, 28,000 Swiss,
and only 17,000 French, who thus take sbut a pocr revenge of the
82,000 Germans who have peacefully continued the invasion of
French territory. The balance in Germany's favour is thus very
large — 2,324,000 — and is only exceeded by our own.

United Kingdom. — It is difficult to avoid terms that may seem
inflated when referring to the statistics for the British Isles. A
whole section — somewhat heavy, it must be confessed — of modern
literature is developing and enveloping the idea of ' Greater Britain.'
We have occupied the lands. Perhaps, after all, the most forcible
way of putting the facts is to say boldly that English must indubit-
ably be — is even now — the leading language of the globe. It was a
saying of Coleridge's that Shakespeare can never die, and the lan-
guage in which he wrote must with him live for ever. This is some-
what too finely poetical for the present purpose. Shakespeare and
all English literature apart, it is because the language echoes from

558 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

millions on millions of English mouths all over the habitable earth
and its oceans, that it lives and must live everywhere, whether as
the pure well undefiled, or as ' American,' Pidgin, Brother-tongue,
or even as the Negro-English of Surinam.

It may confidently be said that the number of born natives of
the three kingdoms now living out of them is largely understated in
these tables as 4,200,000 ; and still every possible source of informa-
tion has been consulted ; but the exact figures will never be elicited
until we have an international census union. The figures are, how-
ever, vast as they stand, and put England easily at the top of the
scale of nation-making, people-giving races. A native of the famous
old Comte de Foix was once asked by Napoleon what his country
produced. ' Men and iron,' said the Gascon. What flimsy fustian
this retort becomes if the little department of the little Ariege, as
the country now is called, be compared in the light of these statistics
with Britain and its Black Country. In the 4,200,000 given above
no account has been taken of 215,374 soldiers and sailors on foreign
service ; but adding these, we arrive at the almost incredible fact
that every eight persons of the home population are now represented
abroad by a native-born ' Britisher,' who has not been chosen as their
representative by the ballot or by any other known mode of elec-
tion, and who goes about his business in quiet neglect of * our
glorious constitution ' and the ' supremacy of the House of Commons.'
This great world-movement, which will be the making — or the mar-
ring— of the mother-country's future, proceeds calmly, silently, as
the operations of nature, behind the backs of noisy do-nothing
political parties, as certainly, as inevitably, as the planets roll around
the sun.

The number of foreigners resident in England is unexpectedly
small, falling short of 294,000, or, deducting 10,564 sailors, merely
283,000, being about 1 in 124 of the population. These are
chiefly merchants' clerks, teachers, servants, German bakers,
Russian and German tailors, French milliners, and Italian musicians.
The balance in England's favour (3,885,000) in the account here
produced is therefore very large indeed, being more than half again
as great as that of Germany, which is nearly a third more populous
than England. It may be noted here that the Census Tables of
1881 (vol. iv. p. 105.) show that in fifty years at least 8,880,000
emigrants, foreigners included, left our shores.

France. — While the balance in favour of all the other chief
European countries is more or less considerable, the balance is
against France, and it is besides a very large balance on the wrong
side. The facts relating to the population of the country and its
almost stationary condition are common problems of economics, but
it is not usual to see them treated from the present point of view.
As a matter of fact, considerable want of knowledge on the subject

1886 NOT AT HOME. 559

may be detected, and the following passage is found in a recent
publication by no means devoid of usefulness. Mr. James Bonar, in
his ' Malthus and his Work,' observes that —

There are few foreigners in France ; the numbers of the French people are
neither swelled by immigration nor reduced by emigration. . . . Taking the ab-
sence of immigration as balanced by the absence of emigration, we are brought to
the conclusion that the population of France is stationary by its own deliberate
act (pp. 167, 168).

This writer seems to rely for this portion of his information upon
the Times, but one need only turn to that excellent repertory of
statistics the ' Almanach de Gotha' (p. 715), to find that there were
in December 1881 no less than 1,001,090 2 foreigners resident in
France. To these, in considering the French population proper, we
must add 77,046 other foreigners who have naturalised themselves
in the country, and we thus find every thirty-fourth human being in
France to be a ' stranger ' — a sufficiently surprising and significant
fact. In 1872 the foreigners were only 1 in 49, in 1861 they
were 1 in 75, and in 1851 the proportion was but 1 in 94. It will
thus be seen that the peaceable invasion of France is proceeding
at a sure and increasing rate. It is as though nature, abhorrent
of a vacuum, as the maxim of * the ancients ' maintained before
Galileo's time, were stepping in to fill the gaps which the French
make or suffer in their own population. Kural France, as dis-
tinguished from urban, actually lost 820,000 of its population
between 1876 and 1881, as M. Toussaint ,Lona has shown. Turn
now to the handy figures furnished year by year in the ' Annuaire
des Longitudes' (p. 484), and it will be seen that the 1881 popula-
tion of 37,672,048 must be reduced by 1,078,136 in order to
arrive at the actual numbers of French people in France, which is
thus found to be only 36,593,912. The population in 1876 was
36,905,788, from which 836,264 foreigners must be deducted ; and
comparing this with the corresponding numbers for 1881 above
given, it will be seen that the slender yearly increase of the French
population proper is now only 29 per 10,000, instead of 41 as given
by the Government statisticians.

So much for immigration. As to emigration, it is true it does
not go on upon a la'rge scale, but from 1878 to 1884 there was an
efflux of 30,000 ; and the annual amount is on the increase. But
these statistics of French emigration are not in any way to be relied
on. In the first place they only deal with French ports, and with
North and South American destinations ; but numbers doubtless
depart from Belgian, German, and English ports for those and other
continents, and probably go to swell the emigration statistics of the
three countries mentioned at the expense of the credit of France, for
the meagre tale of emigrants just quoted seems wholly insufficient
2 The Annuaire Statistlqne for 1883 gives eighty less.

560 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

to account for the 288,600 Frenchmen born in France who are now
borne on the census returns of North and South America (see Table
A). Furthermore, these French emigration figures take no account
at all of land-migration, and thus ignore completely 52,200 French
who live in Belgium, 17,300 who have chosen Germany for their
workshop, 10,800 who are in Italy, 17,600 in Spain, and nearly
59,000 who live within the Swiss frontiers. In all, nearly 483,000
French born in France are in the position of emigrants all over the
world, and although the total is less than that furnished by Belgium,
and but little in excess of the numbers placed to the credit of Spain
and Portugal, it must be taken into account, and, when set against
the 1,001,090 foreigners who are inside French boundaries, reduces
the balance to the debit of France to 518,000.

The Eev. Mr. Malthus chiefly devoted his speculations to the
consideration of flourishing races with rapidly increasing populations,
his goal, adopted from the American colonies, being duplication in
twenty-five years. But he wholly omitted to consider among his
' checks ' positive or preventive, whether war, disease, or vice — he
completely left out of sight such an undoubted fact as the decay of
races, the dying-out of a people, as so many families die out, because
of a failure of fertility, no matter to what complexity of causes that
failure may be due. Vicious irregularities may have a partial or an
extensive effect in the direction of a check ; but an economist must
be slow to believe that a whole nation of thirty-seven millions, or,
omitting children, twenty-seven millions of greatly differing cha-
racters and origins, can, by individual but universal assent, keep
down the population ; and even if they did so it would be, after all,
only the strongest, the ultimate evidence of the weakening of the
procreative instinct, and therefore of the certain dying-out of the
race.

At the same time Malthus avowed his desire for a longer
life for the living, and fewer births for the sake of fewer deaths.
Had he prophesied this for France, it would have been a wonderful
hit, for there the average duration of life has risen from 28 to 37
years since the beginning of the century, while the annual deaths
have fallen from 276 in 10,000 to 223. At the same time the
annual births have also fallen from 318 in 10,000 to 249, while
the number of marriages remains the same. Thus it may safely be
said that the present apparent small increase in the population — 29
per 10,000 annually, as shown above — is, in reality, not an accession
of new lives, but chiefly a postponement of the termination of old
ones. Had the death-rate remained as it was in 1801-10, the popu-
lation would now be actually diminishing at the rate of 27 per
10,000 (276-249). The causes of the decrease of the death-rate
are various, but not complex. The advance of applied medical and
sanitary science counts for something ; and the doubling of the pro-

188G NOT AT HOME. 561

cluction of meat, corn, and almost everything else, has brought
greater plenty and comfort. It is calculated that the total supply of
food from home and foreign sources is fourfold what it was fifty years
ago, while foreign trade has been multiplied by six. As regards in-
dividual wealth, M. Levasseur made a very cautious estimate, eleven
years ago, when he said it had more than doubled since 1800. And
with all this the annual number of marriages has remained stationary,
and their total, including the widowed, falls far short of the English
rate, being but 2,803 per 10,000 against England's 4,488.

It is impossible to quit this subject without a word upon the size
of French families. The average number of births to ten marriages
was forty-two, from 1801 to 1810; it is now but thirty, that is three
to each marriage ; and of course one death among the three would
leave the population stationary. Last year free schooling was voted
for the seventh child in every family that had so many, and this
measure resulted in the discovery of 213 such families, 107 of which
had more than seven, and 4 as many as thirteen children each.
The fourth fargard of the Vendidad supports the assertion of Herodo-
tus (i. 136) that the ancient Persian monarchs gave prizes to those
who had most children. In 1798 Pitt brought in a bill for extend-
ing relief to large families, and Malthus argued against it that if by
artificial encouragement a Grovernment increases the mouths without
increasing the food, it only brings the people nearer to starvation ;
and though stalwart numbers are a strength, starving swarms are
a patent weakness. But this style of argument cannot apply to
contemporary France, where the general and individual wealth and
comfort are, as has been shown, considerable and notorious.

Italy. — Although Italy has of recent years been making serious
progress in the direction of consolidation, and has shown singular
national common sense in devoting herself to the process of settling
down after her long revolutionary struggles, the generality will be
somewhat unprepared to receive the large scale of her emigration.
Her excellent statistical tables of 1881 show no less than 1,077,000
Italians residing in other countries. South American States absorb
the largest proportion of these, namely 403,000; and next comes
France, where public works attract vast numbers of Italian labourers,
with 241,000 ; the tlnited States with 176,000, and Africa with
62.000. Emigration is going on at an increasingly rapid pace ;
147,000 having left the mother country in 1884, including 33,000 for
Austria-Hungary, 38,000 for France, and 44,000 for South America.
Taking the population of Italy at 29,361,000, we find that those
living abroad are equal to 3-67 per cent, on that total ; and as there
are only 60,000 foreigners resident in Italy, she can claim a credit
balance on the general world account of over a million, thus coming
third among the great emigrating European countries, and being
outstripped only by England and Germany.

562 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

Russia. — If home-ruled Finland be excepted, statistics of the
foreigners resident in unwieldy Eussia have not been obtained.
From the census returns of other countries, it is found that 148,000
Eussians and Poles are living out of their country. The United
States contained in 1880 the largest proportion of these, namely
36,000 Eussians and 48,000 Poles ; and 20,000 Eussians entered the
States in 1884. Germany follows with 15,000. In England and
Wales there are some 11,000 Poles.

Spain and Portugal. — The Peninsula can claim 453,000 of its
inhabitants in foreign countries, thus very closely approaching
France, although the gross population is two-fifths less (population
21,743,093). South America absorbs the vast majority of Penin-
sular emigrants (337,000), France holds 75,000, and the United
States figure for 28,000. Portugal sent abroad 133,000 in the ten
years 1872-81, of whom 130,000 were for America.

Switzerland. — The indefatigable, money-loving, and thrifty
Swiss are to be found in many countries. Table A reckons up
207,000 of them, equal to a percentage of 7'9 on a net population
of 2,635,000. It is, however, somewhat surprising to find at the
same time no less than 211,000 foreigners in the cantons, and this
not in the tourist season, when Tartarin is on the Alps, but in
December 1 880. The conclusion is that these large numbers have
actually settled in Switzerland, and on analysing the total it is found
that the great majority come from adjoining countries : 90,000 from
Germany, 59,000 from France, 42,000 from Italy, and 13,000 from
Austria. This results in a small balance of 15,000 against the Swiss.
The emigration figures, which can scarcely be complete, were 13,500
in 1883, and only 8,900 in 1884.

Asia. — The vertical column headed * Asia,' and the horizontal lines
for ' Chinese ' and ' Other Asiatics ' in Table A, necessarily contain
information of a most rudimentary and unsatisfactory nature. For
instance, the largest item — 1,351,828 Chinamen — consists mainly of
a mere guess that there are a million Chinese in Siam, the balance
being taken from the Dutch statistics of Java and Madura. The
total of 1,512,000 gives but a faint idea of the swarms of industrious
and yellow men who continually issue forth from the populous middle
kingdom. The number of Chinese who entered the United States
up to 1884 was 289,024, but in that year only 8,420 immigrated.
The 50,032 Asiatics shown in Peru are probably for the most part
Chinese. Coolie emigration from India, for the Mauritius, Eeunion,
Natal, English and French Guiana, the English and French West
Indies, the Fiji Islands, and Surinam is now 18,000 a year ; it has
been as high as 25,000 (1875).

Africa. — The African statistics must also be considered incom-
plete, consisting, as they do, chiefly of Egyptian, Algerian, and
Tunisian figures only, if we except the case of those English popula-

1886 NOT AT HOME. 563

tions for which vol. iv. (p. 106) of the Census Papers of 1881 has
been combined with other information.

America. — We shall do no more than direct attention in a general
way to the large number of born foreigners who are now in the Ameri-
can continents, North and South. They amount to more than thirteen
millions, out of our gross totals of nearly nineteen millions. United
States immigration, which first sprang into great activity in the de-
cade 1841-50, reached its highest point, 730,000 — < 2,000 a day '—
in 1882. In 1884 it had sunk temporarily, no doubt, to 461,000.
At the same time, it will be seen that these immigrant hosts have
by no means permanently settled down, for 3,529,000 Americans now
live outside their proper countries. It is to be regretted that the in-
consistent modes of framing its statistics adopted by different coun-
tries preclude a complete analysis of the figures, which there was no
choice but to amalgamate for the United States, Mexico, the rest of
North America, and South America. The emigration from Canada to
the States is noteworthy ; a million having crossed the frontier before
1884, and 48,000 more in that year. Forty-four per cent, of the
Canadian immigrants of 1881, '82, '83, passed on to the States. There
are, per contra, 78,000 natives of the States in the Dominion. It is
a significant fact that Mexico now holds nearly two millions of born
Europeans, or 38 per cent, of her population. As regards South
America, Brazil showed an immigration, at Eio de Janeiro, in four
recent years, of 93,000 Europeans, chiefly Portuguese, Italians, and
Germans. But this is far surpassed by the Argentine Eepublic,
which received in the same years 278,000 immigrants, mainly from
Italy, Spain, and France. The numbers for 1884 were 103,000,
whereas Brazil had only 18,000 in that year. In Uruguay the immi-
gration is about two thousand a year.

Australasia. — As to Australasia and Polynesia the information —
except for our own larger colonies — is meagre in the extreme,
and the figures in this column clearly fall far short of the truth.
The Australian colonies show an immigration of 394,000 in 1882
and 1883 ; but 263,000 also emigrated in those years, leaving a
balance of only 131,000 immigrants, or 65,500 yearly.

Jeivs. — This paper would belie its title if it ignored the race
which of all others is 'pre-eminently ' not at home.' The growing
reluctance — of sectarian origin — to inquire into the religions, or the
irreligions, of the people in England, France, and other countries,
renders it impossible to complete statistics which the Jews them-
selves could not compile without an organisation which would provoke
antagonism in man}7 quarters. The following figures do not account
for quite three millions of this teeming breed, and it will be seen
that three countries — Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Eoumania —
contain the vast majority of the numbers here set down. Every

564

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Oct.

Austria (1880) .

1,005,394

Hungary (1880)

'638,314

Germany (1880)

561,612

Greece (1879) .

5,792

Roumelia (1830)

4,177

Denmark (18SO)

3,946

Roumania

400,000 ?

Holland (1879) .

81,693

Great Britain (1871) .

40,000 ?

Tunis ....

45,000 ?

Italy (188 1) . . .

38,000 ?

Persia ....

19,000 ?

Bulgaria (1881)

14,256

India (1881) .

12,008

Australia and New Zealand

(1883)

10,351

tenth individual in Vienna is now a Jew, and the Hebrews number
1 in every 22 in Austria, and 1 in 24 in Hungary: —

Switzerland (1880) . . 7,373
Bosnia and Herzegovina

(1885) . . . 5,805

Servia (1878) . . . 3,492

Belgium (1880) . . . 3,000 ?

Sweden (1880) . . . 2,993

Luxembourg (1880) . . 777

Canada (1881) ... GG7

Peru (1876) ... 498

Spain (1877) ... 402

Orange Free State (18SO) . 67

Norway (1875) ... a4

Sainos(1884) ... 1

Total . . . 2,910,652

There are now but 400 Jews in Spain. At the end of the fifteenth
century, before the Inquisition, the expulsion, and the marranos,
they numbered upwards of a million in Andalusia, Castile, Leon, and
Murcia alone. The Jew in Samos must be a wandering one, and
recalls the Turkish legend that an Israelite once went prospecting
to Mitylene, but levanted again the next day when he saw the
natives weighing the eggs they bought in the bazar.

A last brief paragraph for the Jats or Rom, whom we know as
Gipsies. Enumerations between 1878 and 1881 give 79,393 in
Hungary, 37,393 in Bulgaria, 27,289 in Servia, 19,549 in Eastern
Roumelia, and 200,000 in Roumania. This last number requires
corroboration ; but wherever the Jew goes the Romany goes :—

In each land the sun does visit

He is gay whate'er betide ;
To give space for wandering is it

That the world was rnado so wide ?

JOHN O'NEILL.

1886 565

THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT.

* PARLIAMENT AND THE CHUECH ' is the title of an article in this Review
for October of last year by Mr. W. C, Borlase, M.P., characterised by a
•calmness and moderation which encourage a belief that the burning
question of disestablishment may be argued with such fairness that
even if the controversialists do not ultimately agree they may at
least understand each other. Such, at all events, is the feeling with
which I scrutinise Mr. Borlase's article ; and I am confident that
an ultimate resort to Parliament will be infinitely more hopeful if
reasonable men will, by previous discussion, prepare for the questions
at issue a solution for which legislative confirmation may be required.

Mr. Borlase opines that ' Parliament should declare itself unable
to deal with ecclesiastical legislation in any shape or form ; ' but I
venture to postpone from the outset of our inquiry a proposition which,
if admitted as an axiom, should be admitted only at the inevitable
conclusion of inquiry, and not as a preliminary rule which of itself
would preclude inquiry.

Local self-government, to which Mr. Borlase would assign full
power to manage the affairs of the several districts within its control,
cannot, I submit, be trusted to originate or amend the laws touching
Imperial interests such as religion or taxation. That duty is one vested
in the legislature. The office of local government should be restricted
to the administration of the law when it is statutably determined.

The relation of the Church to the State, or, in other words, to
Parliament, is essentially one of the subjects with which no authority
less than the Imperial Parliament can deal ; and the consideration of
so weighty a subject requires a clear view of the matter in contention,
of the contending parties, and of the principles which should govern
the discussion. 'The case for disestablishment' prepared by the
Liberation Society is inspired by an undeviating enmity to the
Church, and the sentence which it suggests implies the absolute dis-
integration and dissolution of the Church as an organised religious
society. But there are Churchmen and Dissenters, Conservatives and
Liberals who, wishing no ill to the Church, see in her connection
with the State evils so serious that disestablishment may be accepted
as the means of restoring to her the freedom which should pertain to
VOL. XX.— No. 116. ER

566 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

every religious society. Mr. Borlase apparently takes this view, and
he cites among her grievances the inability to vary her formularies
or improve her discipline ; the unreality of the Conge d'elire when ac-
companied with the Prcemunire and the consequent appointment of
her bishops, nominally by the Crown but effectively by the Prime
Minister ; the resort to Parliament as indispensable to the extension
of the episcopate in England, and generally the hindrance to any
change in ecclesiastical law by the necessity for Parliamentary con-
currence reluctantly given or refused. These grievances are real,
but they are remediable without a revolution. Those who desire the
moral and industrial advancement of the people must also desire the
improvement of all religious and educational agencies, including
those of the Church of England, pre-eminent in their antiquity and
widespread influence. Religious nonconformists may therefore be
expected not to thwart, but to support, legislative propositions tending
to facilitate her spiritual labours and amend her discipline. Noncon-
formists exult, not unnaturally, in their deliverance from the disabilities
which weighed upon them in past generations and in their actual
freedom from any practical grievance. I gladly join with Mr. Borlase
in pleading * that in common with all other religious communities
the Church of England should have a ' fair stage and no favour ; ' but
when he further pleads * that the Church should herself desire to
bring about * a position of equality ' (religious equality, which the
Rev. Guinness Rogers defines to be equality of churches), one is
obliged to ask for a precise definition of this term.

Mr. Borlase does not offer one, but I submit that, whatever may
be the other conditions of 'religious equality,' one would be impera-
tive— viz. the repeal of the Act (of 1700 A.D.) for the Limitation
of the Crown, which enacts ' that whosoever shall come to the posses-
sion of this crown shall join in communion with the Church of
England as by law established.'

So long as this statute remains unrepealed, there can be no
religious equality between the Church of England and the sects
which, notwithstanding this disparity, enjoy the largest and most
unqualiBed religious liberty. In virtue of its connection with the
Crown, the Church has certain privileges, but they are hardly of a
character to constitute a practical grievance to the 150 sects who
have them not. For instance, Anglican bishops sit in the House
of Lords, but Anglican clergy are excluded from the House of
Commons. Anglican clergy are protected in their ministrations, but
it is in their own parish and against the intrusion of their own
brethren. The clergy have no legal power to exclude dissenting
ministers from their parish if within it there should be a congregation
prepared to welcome them. On the other hand, the House of
Commons is open to the eloquent preachers and practised ministers
of all dissenting denominations, while the Church submits to the

1886 THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT. 567

exclusion of Anglican deans and canons. The reverend Nonconformist
orators in the House of Commons are a far greater power in the State
than they would be in the House of Lords. There are the sentimental
grievances of precedence arising out of the existence of a National
Church, but it will be for the country to determine whether it is
expedient to relieve these sentimental sufferers by the sacrifice of
the monarchy. Mr. Borlase, I submit, exaggerates the unfitness of
Parliament to entertain and assent legislatively to measures approved
by the Church and Convocation, and to which, in the interest of the
nation, no objection can be raised. Members who felt themselves
disqualified from intervening actively in the discussion might be
satisfied to give their assent under a persuasion that the measure in
question would prove beneficial to the National Church, and therefore
to the nation. Time spent in passing an unopposed Church Bill could
not be time wasted. Nonconformists who will at one time assert
their nonconformity will at another claim the full privilege which
could pertain to them as members of the National Church to share
in the consideration of whatever may redound to the efficiency of
the Church. In so doing they are quite within their rights,
for no sentence of excommunication has been passed upon them,
and their only needful qualification is a charitable and patriotic
spirit.

Church dignitaries are advised by Mr. Borlase to make their
Church the ' Church of the people,' and to substitute for the title
'Established Church 'its ancient name 'Ecclesia Anglicana.' The
advice is hardly needed. As understood by learned dignitaries,
{ the establishment of the Church of England means the recognition of
the Church of England as the national organisation for the profession
and the teaching of the Christian religion.' The State, when it
allied itself with the Church at the Reformation, assumed to itself
certain prerogatives which have proved injurious 'to spiritual inde-
pendence, and may now, if enforced, be found so intolerable as to
necessitate a resolute resistance. In a country holding religious
liberty as a sacred principle, the requisite relief ought not to be a
matter of controversy ; and those alone would refuse it who, hating
the Church, would aggravate her difficulties in order to drive her
to the acceptance of freedom with [disestablishment and disendow-
ment.

Mr. Borlase seems, almost as a matter of course, to assume that
the Church is to be presently disendowed upon the scheme of the
Liberation Society — a scheme which, after he wrote his article,
was disowned by the eminent Nonconformists at the Temple
Conference on November 19, 1885, and by the Liberation Society
itself, with an implied rebuke to their confiding followers who had
been beguiled into thinking that ' Practical Suggestions ' were
suggestions meant to be carried into practice.

RR2

568 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

Foreseeing disendowment, Mr. Borlase comforts himself with the
anticipation that even that calamity will not paralyse the Church's
work, but that the wealth devoted to its service in recent times would
have been even more liberally provided had there been no establish-
ment to fetter the gift. That what the Spectator calls ' the crude,
cruel, and ridiculous scheme ' of the Liberationists would not wholly
ruin Churchmen, and that they would strive to the utmost to com-
pensate the Church for the wrongs inflicted on her, I readily believe ;
but surely it is a strange political morality which would connive at an
act of spoliation because forsooth the sufferer had friends able and
willing to keep him alive. Mr. Borlase insists on the excellent
purposes to which the confiscated Church property might be applied,
in the relief of destitution and the education of the people. Has
Mr. Borlase forgotten that this country is distinguished for its legal
provision for the destitute through a highly organised Poor Law,
and that the Church is the earliest educator of the people, not only in
her churches, but in her grammar schools and parochial elementary
schools, and that up to 1870 the work of education was, and has re-
mained, chiefly in the hands of Churchmen, aided and advised by the
National Society as the organ of the Church ?

I will not follow Mr. Borlase through the details of the pallia-
tives with which he would considerately mitigate the severity of
the ' crude and cruel disendowment.' I pass rather to the evidence
before me that there is a strong reaction following upon the exposure
of the perversions of history and fallacious arguments which pervade
the Liberationist literature, and culminate in the now discredited
' Practical Suggestions.'

On the 19th of November of last year a conference on disestablish-
ment was held at the City Temple, Holborn. The Rev. J. Gruinness
Rogers presided, and the importance of the meeting was marked less
even by the large attendance of well-known men than by the selection as
president of a ' pronounced Liberationist.' The speech of the chair-
man is distinguished by a profession of friendliness towards the
Church which is most gratifying, and from it I select portions which
will constitute a fitting prelude to the subject of this article.

Mr. Rogers based his argument on this proposition : —

If it be a right that what we on the Nonconformist side call ' religious equality,'
then certainly there will be somewhere or other a method found of treating this
question of disendowment in such a manner that no party will have any just ground
to complain of being injured.1

The acceptance of this proposition involves its converse: the 're-
ligious equality ' requiring a method of disendowment which gives
any party just ground to complain of being injured, cannot be right.

1 Nonconformist, November 1885.

1886 THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT. 569

If I thought any proposition for religious equality involved the disintegration
of the Episcopal Church of England, I should pause a long time before I could take
part in it. We care only to make our friends understand that we really mean them no
harm. I say distinctly, as in the presence of Him to whom I have to account, that
I mean no harm to the Episcopal Church.

Mr. Rogers concluded his speech by enjoining that ' the discussion
should be maintained in the spirit of sweet reasonableness,' that
argument and not invective should be employed, and that ' all should
endeavour to speak the truth in love.'

Nothing more encouraging than these friendly protestations
could have been desired, and a peaceful solution of the difference may
have seemed probable even when the speaker said : ' We do not believe
we shall work any harm to the Episcopal Church by disestablishment,
even though accompanied by disendowment.'

But churchmen have a strong impression that disestablishment
and disendowment would work serious harm to the Church and people
of England, and in support of that impression they display the
scheme of the Liberation Society, and in particular they point to the
provisions which would (1) sever religion from all legal connection
with the State, (2) secularise the endowments of the clergy, and
(3) allow the conversion of all sacred buildings to common and
profane uses.

Don't be misled, interposes Mr. J. Or. Rogers ; no scheme has yet
been framed to which any one authority is bound.

I am committed to no scheme, nor is the Liberation Society. The Liberation
Society has published what are called ' Practical Suggestions,' and these ' Practical
Suggestions ' have baen improperly regarded as a definite scheme of disendowment.
They never professed to be anything of the kind. . . . They were the outline of a
brief put into the hands of a prosecuting counsel, or rather counsel for the plaintiff
— that and nothing more.

' Nothing more ! ' Is not that enough ? I will quote from the
Case for Disestablishment, p. 167 : —

At the close of 1874 the Executive Committee of the ' Society for the Libera-
tion of Religion from State Patronage and Control ' appointed a special committee
to obtain legal and other information required for the preparation of a scheme of
disestablishment, and to offer suggestions which might aid in the framing of such a
scheme. The suggestions so prepared were presented to the Triennial Conference
of the Society on the 1st of May, 1877, and were published by direction of the
Conference.

The scheme, carefully prepared, has been widely disseminated, and
has been the source of the instruction assiduously conveyed to the
classes who from want of better and truer teaching were disposed to
be tempted by the secular advantages connected with the plunder of
the Church. The tardy exposure of the conspiracy has roused an

570 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

indignant feeling and resolute resistance which has made even its
promoters pause.

The Kev. J. Gr. Rogers, a l pronounced Liberationist,' repudiates
all responsibility for the Liberationist scheme of which he minimises
the importance as embodying only ' practical suggestions ' — only
' practical suggestions ' ? Short of a Parliamentary Bill, what could
more explicitly propound the intended action than * Practical Sugges-
tions ; ' and why, if they were not meant to commit Mr. Rogers, has
he allowed so many years to pass without publishing his disclaimer and
stopping the circulation of these alarming suggestions ? Churchmen
generally will concur with Canon Curtis in welcoming these tardy
disclaimers as very good news which they will be glad to spread
(Holborn Temple Conference).

In justification, however, of the vigorous defensive preparation
Churchmen have made, it is only reasonable that they should show
the evidence upon which their action has been grounded.

Most opportunely a letter from the Rev. J. Gr. Rogers in the Non-
conformist of the 4th of November, 1 880, meets my eye. In this letter,
prefaced by a disclaimer of hostility to the Episcopal Church and an
avowal of ' admiration for the good men it contains, and of sympathy
in its true spiritual work,' Mr. Rogers professes his aversion for en-
dowments of all kinds, and proposing that the National Church
should be placed on the same level as Congregational churches, he is
unconscious of any desire to do it wrong. Mr. Rogers deprecates the
endowment of Nonconformist chapels ; he even regrets the zeal which
in some cases has discharged the mortgage loan through which the
chapel was built, thus lessening the burden on the congregation, for
he believes ' that a church is strengthened and helped by being
trained in habits of self-reliance.' Self-reliance is a virtue of which
I would not dispute the merit, nor would I de-tract from the en-
nobling effect upon a congregation of a constant training in liberality
for the sake of religion. I know not a parish in which Christian
liberality is not preached on behalf of the Church's work, even
although the preacher may be himself adequately endowed through
the liberality of former ages, and in virtue of that endowment
acquires an independence of temporal provision which enables him
without fear to declare the whole counsel of God and to rebuke sin
without dreading the disfavour of the rich and powerful.

Mr. Rogers does not perceive how essentially the independence of
the clergy is involved in the theory of the Church as stated in No. 62
Leaflet of the Church Defence Institution : —

1. That true religion is not a human invention but a Divine revelation.

2. That the Church is a society of which Christ is the Founder and the Head.

3. That the Church has been ever taught and governed — -first by Christ's
apostles — and subsequently by bishops and clergy acting with the authority
transmitted to them by perpetual succession from their Divine Master.

1886 THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT. 571

4. That the Church of England, teaching the doctrines of Holy Scripture, hold-
ing the true faith, administering the true sacraments, and possessing true orders,
is a living branch of Christ's Holy Catholic Church.

5. That the fabrics and endowments of each parish church and ancient
cathedral were freely devoted to God's service centuries ago by the then owners of
the soil.

6. That the State, as the guardian of the Church's property for the people's sake,
preserves it for religious purposes, and protects the clergy in their pastoral minis-
trations.

7. That the endowments of the Church require constant accessions to meet the
-spiritual necessities of a rapidly increasing population, but that these accessions
liave been and are freely made by individual liberality in each generation, and not
from the taxation of the people.

The ancient endowments of the Church secure, so far as they
•extend, the independence of the clergy ; and although the necessity of
fresh churches in the present century has been too large to permit
the clergy to be wholly provided for out of the annual products of
invested gifts, yet the principle is always asserted, and the rule is
that no church can have a district assigned to it or a minister
appointed until a revenue of 1501. a year is secured, and the cost of
the fabric is fully discharged. By what caprice is it argued that
annual subscriptions are laudable, but their capitalised amount is
denounced as ' benumbing and paralysing ' ? Mr. Rogers may honestly
hold these opinions, and consistently he counsels the National Church
to strip itself of its properties and revenues, and in its unfettered
freedom exert its spiritual powers to the quickening of faith and zeal
in all its members. But Churchmen take a different view of the
question. They appreciate Mr. Rogers's solicitude for the freer action
of the Church, and would welcome his assistance in the removal of
the hindrances to her more perfect organisation and action, but they
•do not perceive how her spiritual influence can be promoted by her
being sent forth freed from her burdens, but naked and penniless.
No, not quite naked nor penniless. Mr. Rogers would leave the
Church in possession of its ' private property,' if it has any. He
proposes only that the State resume the possession of any national
property which it now enjoys (wrongfully), and he defines as private
property all property which has been given to the Church within sixty
•or, as some say, seventy years, and as national property all earlier en-
dowments. Now it may save trouble to agree at once with extreme
Liberationists that there is no distinction in principle between Church
property of the earlier and the later date. History records some two
millions as State grants in later times to the construction of churches.
With that exception, all Church property, of whatever kind or period,
stands precisely on the same footing (Church Defence Leaflet No. 61,
sects. 5 and 7).

Whether as ancient or modern endowments, the gifts in buildings,

572 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

in tithes and glebe-lands, were made not to the nation, but to the
Church, in various localities and at various times. The Church, it
must be remembered, is not a corporation holding lands or property —
it has no funds of its own ; it is a society knit together by its organi-
sation, its laws of worship, orders, and discipline, but the actual
property of the Church is vested in the life-interests of the various
occupants of the several diocese?, chapters, and parochial benefices.
Of these gifts the State or nation became the trustee ; of these
endowments it became the guardian.

The endowment once made was irrevocable ; neither the patron who
made it, nor his successors, nor the State as trustee, could without
sacrilege divert to secular uses the property once dedicated to God's
service. And this remark applies alike to endowments dating back one
thousand years and to one made within a twelvemonth. The proposal
to abstain from confiscating recent constructions or endowments is
a cunning attempt to purchase, by a promise of their own immunity,
the acquiescence of existing patrons and incumbents in the seques-
tration of the rights of future generations. But the device would
assuredly fail ; the patrons and clergy of our day would scorn the
despicable bribe, nor would any trustworthy historian be found to
countenance the fiction that at any period of its existence the
structures and endowments given to the National Church ceased to
be given to God and assumed the character of private property to be
resumed for secular purposes at the will of the donors or their heirs
with the gracious permission of the Liberation Society.

Has Mr. Rogers ever thought how impossible it would be to
classify churches and parsonages according to their age, so as to satisfy,
even if it did exist, the opposition of selfish and personal interest ?
Within thirty years I built a church in London which I conveyed with
its funded endowment to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and
transferred the patronage, the clergy-house, and its appendages to the
Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's. Mr. Rogers promises that the \\hole
of that property shall be respected ; will he respect also the church and
the parsonage of the parish in which I live ? The church dated back
some three centuries, and the parsonage, of very ancient construction,
I found in ruins. I rebuilt them both ; are they to be confiscated in
virtue of their ancient foundation, or are they to be respected in virtue
of their modern reconstruction ? If the latter, then I must warn
Mr. Rogers that the abatements from the structural value of the
cathedrals, churches, and parsonages, which constitute so attractive a
figure in the Liberationist budget, will be so serious as to leave a
surplus value worth impounding peaceably, but not worth fighting
for. In the diocese of Oxford some four-fifths of the parish churches
have been rebuilt, and the ungrudging restoration of our cathedrals
may be seen exemplified in the adjacent county by the treatment of

1886 THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT. 573

the glorious Abbey of St. Albans, which is under restoration at a
cost yet undefined, but already exceeding 100,000£., of which Lord
Grimthorpe alone has, it is said, contributed more than 60,000£.
Mr. Rogers (Nonconformist, November 19, 1885) holds

that when everything had been done chat equity requires in the way of dis-
endowment the Church of England would remain the most richly endowed
church in Christendom. Modern endowments would be dealt with on an entirely
different footing from those which were given when there was really a National
Church, when the Church and the nation were one, when, therefore, what was
given to the Church was given to the nation. There was a wide distinction in
equity and principle between these classes of endowment. . . . The change in the
position of the Church and State was gradual. In the eye of the law the Church
of England included Dissenters. The Church of England, in a legal sense, was the
nation.

Mr. Eogers here contends that 'there was a time when the
Church was the nation, and when, therefore, what was given to the
Church was given to the nation,' and may therefore be dealt with by
the nation at its discretion. Not so ; the endowments of old were
given to God's service, and were locally assigned in perpetuity to the
successive life-tenants of the several religious houses and parochial
benefices constituting the office-bearers in the visible society known
as the English Church. Of these properties the State, as the source
of law and order, became the trustee and guardian for the people's
sake ; and I ask, when and by what statute did the religious society
known as the Church of England lose its legal designation as the
National Church ? * The change was gradual,' says Mr. Rogers.
Change in what ? In its legal designation there has been none. A
change in the relative proportion of the number of declared dissidents
from its communion there has been, because, with the progress of the
spirit of religious liberty and the removal of religious disabilities,
the differences of religious thought which had always subsisted, but
which had been forcibly suppressed, were openly avowed and generated
the formation of organised sects. In all fairness the old National
Church must be entitled to retain for the religious use of its present
adherents the endowments settled ujon it to perpetuate the worship
and service of God upon definite creeds, formularies, organisation,
and discipline.

These have remained essentially unchanged. Dissenters from the
doctrine and discipline of the Church have, in the exercise of their
liberty, founded new sects, but their secession from her public
worship cannot justify them in claiming the property of the institution
they have deserted.

In what Archbishop Tait called their ' fanatical hatred ' of the
Church, Liberationists impeach her nationality upon pleas which
contradict each other. * The Church,' they say, ' is not national,

574 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

because she has ceased to be coextensive with the nation ' — i.e. she
was national so long as the State suppressed the utterance of religious
difference and the consequent formation of separatist communities.
She ceased, ergo, to be national when the advance of learning taught
a lesson of toleration and permitted religious liberty to develop into
sectarian organisms. Religious differences have existed from the
very birth of Christianity ; but how can the existence of Dissent be
a reproach to the Church when its visibility is the assertion of the
sacred principle of religious liberty ? Of the blessing of religious
unity no Churchman doubts ; he laments that God should not be
worshipped by all men with one mind and one mouth ; but while
holding that the path presented to him is the most perfect way,
he cherishes no enmity towards Dissenters, and fully believes that,
pursuing holiness according to their knowledge, they may be saved
through the merits of the one Divine Redeemer of mankind.

Again, the Liberationists insisted that the Church would forfeit
her nationality when she ceased to embrace a majority of the
population, and to realise this plea of condemnation they made
gigantic efforts, by the compilation of unauthoritative and irrele-
vant statistics, to exhibit results placing Churchmen in a numerical
minority, while they frustrated the religious census, which they feared
would show a very different result.

In the Nineteenth Century of January 1881 I had exposed these
spurious statistics and their irrelevance to the conclusion built upon
them by the Liberation Society. In a volume published in 1881,
entitled Church Systems in England, the Rev. J. Gruinness Rogers
thus notices my argument : —

When a lay defender of the Established Church attempts to make the right of
disestablishment depend upon one of the other Churches obtaining a numerical pre-
ponderance over the other, he mistakes or misrepresents the nature of the contro-
versy. ' If any one of the sects,' says the Right Hon. J. G. Hubbard, member for
the City of London, in the Nineteenth Centuj-y for January, ' attained a larger
following than the Church, it must, by a general consensus, supersede it as the
expression of the religious profession of the country and take its place in the Con-
stitution ; but short of such transposition the perpetuation of the monarchy
involves the perpetuation of the National Church with which it has been welded
by statute with the special object of " securing our religious laws and liberties."
If this be the kind of reasoning which contents the mind of an eminent member
of the Established Church, himself a Privy Councillor, it is not surprising that
there should be sucli widespread confusion of thought in relation to this controversy.
... It is singular that any intelligent man could ever entertain the belief that
the religious profession of a nation was to be determined by the mere counting of
heads. . . . Numbers are not an unfailing test of truth, of righteousness, or of
intelligence. ... Is a Church which sets forth doctrines repellent to the intellect
of the age and country, and which insists on a servile submission to the priesthood,
inconsistent altogether with the spirit and rights of a free people, to be set up as
the exponent of the national faith, solely because it has a larger following than
any single church besides, though that following may be composed chiefly of that
section of the people who have not yet learned to think or understand as men, and

1886 THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT. 575

are pleased with the childish things of symbol or picture ? The theory is nothing
better than an apotheosis of imbecility, childishness, and ignorance ; but it serves
to exhibit the straits to which Church defenders are driven when they attempt to
deal with the present relative position of the Established and Free Churches.

The style of these remarks deliberately proclaimed seems strange
as coming from the considerate, conciliatory, and courteous chairman
of the Holborn Temple Conference ; but I confine my comments to the
substance of their meaning.

In the article reviewed by Mr. Guinness Eogers I had noticed that
the Liberation Society, premising- that when the National Church
ceased to embrace the majority of the English people she must cease
to be the National Church, had endeavoured to construct out of the
statistics of religious worship prepared by Mr. Mann in 1851 an
inferential evidence that the Church of England was in a slight
minority as compared with Nonconformists ; (seeing that on their
success in obtaining a general belief in that assumption depends, as
they think, their crowning victory in the disestablishment and
disendowment of the Church.) And I then continued : ' This is not
the place for discussing the conditions which would eventuate in
disestablishment, but it may be easily shown that disestablishment
can be no necessary result of a nice numerical comparison between
Churchmen and the aggregation of dissentients. If any one of the
sects attained a larger following than the Church, it might by a
general consensus supersede it as the expression of the religious
profession of the country,' &c.

It will be seen that, so far from my entertaining the belief that
the religious profession of a nation was to be determined by a mere
counting of heads, I had combated the attempt of the Liberation
Society to make numerical strength the sole test of nationality, and
that Mr. Guinness Eogers has misrepresented and inverted my argu-
ment by omitting the first four lines of a paragraph and substituting
must for might. /

As the Liberation Society have not yet hoisted the Eepublican
flag, I assumed the continuance of the monarchy, and, supposing (for
the sake of argument) that some one sect might secure a larger
following than the Church, I pointed out that it might be elected
as the representative of the religious profession of the country. But,
in the absence of this improbable event, I observed that the perpetua-
tion of the monarchy involved the perpetuation of the National
Church ; for I cannot conceive our returning to an unlimited monarchy
freed from the restraints which were imposed upon the Crown with
the special object of ' securing our religion, laws, and liberties.'

Mr. G. Eogers should be more careful in his quotations.

Parliament is omnipotent, and it is within its power to abrogate
the entire fabric of the Constitution, to disregard its obligations as a
trustee for the people's sake of the Church's rights and property, to

576 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

sever religion from any connection with the Crown — to deal, in fact,
with the Church and Crown as the republican faction did in the
reign of Charles the First. But the calm and fair discussion to which
the country has been invited by the Kev. Guinness Eogers must be
confined to determining whether the Church can be disestablished and
disendowed without doing her any harm, but much to the increase
of her spiritual power by relieving her from injurious restraints.
Mr. Kogers will have learnt that, in the opinion of the rulers and
loyal members of the National Church, the desired relief requires
neither the disestablishment nor the disendowment proposed by the
Liberationists.

That scheme is now repudiated not only by Mr. J. G. Rogers but
by the Liberation Society who framed it, and who, so recently as
December 1884, recited the programme of 1877 in a volume of 200
pages ' written in the confident expectation that the question of dis-
establishment will come up for settlement in the new Parliament soon
to be elected.' 2

Following, however, closely on Mr. Gladstone's postponement of
the assault upon the Church, the Liberation Society issued a leaflet 3
impugning the legitimate criticism which had been applied to this the
thirteenth clause of the ' Practical Suggestions.' ' Both ancient and
modern buildings and all endowments must be regarded as national
property at the disposal of the State.'

It seems no untruthful conclusion to infer from this proposal
that the Liberationists desire a power which would enable them ' to
strip the Church bare of every shilling.' It is satisfactory, however,
to find them recoiling from their own suggestions when viewed in
what might be their practical application.

Controversy may exhaust itself upon the subject of this article,
but the strongest argument after all in favour of the Church — for it is
unquestionable — is the proof of its utility to the nation.

If industry, honesty, purity, truth, and charity are virtues tend-
ing to make mankind happy and prosperous, then a Church which
inculcates these virtues as rules of conduct must be a national
blessing. Say that the Church has been remiss and neglectful and
that millions have escaped her teaching — have escaped all religious
teaching — who is to blame ? The Church ? Yes, but the whole nation
also. The Church, it is rejoined, with her vast endowments was
especially bound to care for the souls of the people. True, but has she
not done so ? The value of her endowments of tithe and glebe is
limited, and the tithe of fifty years since is less, and the rent of the
glebe of fifty years since is less, now than then. Those ancient endow-
ments are wholly inadequate to the wants of the Church at the
present day, and but for the constant accretion to the Church's
revenues by fresh gifts the destitution would be even more deplorable.
2 Nonconformist, Dec. 4, 1885. * Ibid. Nov. 26.

1886 THE CHURCH AND PARLIAMENT. 577

More than a million a year may have been supplied by Church-
men to the provision of churches and of clergy to minister in them,
but the population has outgrown even that measure of liberality, sup-
plemented by Nonconformist munificence ; and although the Church
educates, hundreds of districts with their teeming thousands need —
all the more truly if they do not feel the need — places of worship,
schools, and teachers.

Under these circumstances, a desire for the disruption of the
Church could only be explained by a jealousy so inveterate that
men would sweep away every religious system in the country if only
the Established Church could be involved in the common ruin.

That this unchristian spirit prevails largely I do not believe, and,
reverting for a moment to the Temple Conference of last year, I rejoice
to believe that there are many who, with Dr. Parker, the convener of
the Conference, can rejoice to see the neglected masses taught by the
Church to the measure of her means, even though religious equality,
or the equality of Churches as defined by Mr. Gr. Kogers, be irrecon-
cilable with the restraint of the Sovereign to the communion of the
established religion.

The Liberation Society proclaim these propositions : —

1. That the Church of England is the creation, and her clergy the
servants, of the State.

2. That the property and revenues of the Church were supplied
by the State, and may be resumed by the State to be dealt with at its
discretion as national property.

3. That the Church of England, having failed in its mission, for-
feits its title to be considered the National Church, and should be
disestablished and disendowed, as a prelude to ' religious equality.'

I reply to these propositions that they are distinctly confuted by
every historian of repute, and that the religious equality to which
they are meant to lead would involve the repeal of a primary condition
on which the Sovereign of /England occupies the throne.

The advocates of the ' equality of religions,' which is now the
declared object of disestablishment, are challenged to explain whether
they wish to abrogate the statute for the limitation of the Crown,
and leave the Sovereign free to profess any or no religion, or whether
their ultimate aim is to declare a republic.

Thus far no reply has been vouchsafed. Mr. J. Gr. Eogers personally,
and the Liberation Society in its authorised publications, endeavour
to escape the dilemma by recording their intention, for the present at
least, to leave untouched the Act which binds the Sovereign to the
Anglican Church, and so postpone indefinitely the attainment of
their coveted ideal.

Have Nonconformists any grievance which can be removed
without violating the Constitution ? If they have, let it be shown,
and it will be redressed. If they have none, they should the more

578 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

readily co-operate in affording the relief and effecting the reforms
which Churchmen themselves demand, but which the scope and
purpose of this article exclude from immediate discussion. Such,
at least, presents itself as the patriotic course of loyal and religious
Nonconformists who prefer a monarchy and religious liberty to the
illusive religious equality which inspired the disowned and discredited
* Practical Suggestions,' to be realised only in a republic.

J. Gr. HUBBARD.

1886 579

DISEASE IN FICTION.

Two successful workers in the art of fiction have written articles
endeavouring to explain to the public what they understand to be the
mysteries of their art. Both admit that individuality must play a
large part, but from this common starting-point they diverge, Mr.
Walter Besant dwells on the importance of keeping note-book
records of passing events, and seems to say that these must furnish
the material to be worked in here or there as required. Mr. Henry
James appears to takes a broader view, to allow a wider field for the
play of imagination, regarding every item of fact as a germ which is
to go through a process of evolution in the author's mind, not neces-
sarily following any law of progressive or retrograde metamorphosis,
but simply becoming stamped with the impress of the working brain
through which it has passed. Both principles are useful, both have
been employed, consciously or unconsciously, by both authors, but
the first method only is truly applicable to many instances made use
of by novelists, and this is seen most strikingly if we consider the
medical machinery so frequently introduced to clear the stage of
superfluous characters or to take the place of a plot.

Both our writers dwell on the importance of drawing from the
life, of making every fact play its part in the development of story
or character. We are reminded how often a novelist has to teach
some lesson to an indolent, apathetic public. Scientific text-books
are rarely pleasant reading, and so do not enter the sphere of the
great majority. The works of Arabella Buckley, Grant Allen, Huxley,
and others spread knowledge ; but, however attractively arranged, the
scope of the popular scientific article seldom travels beyond some
simple questions of biology — it does not embrace, or but rarely
embraces, any facts of disease. Here, then, where the popular
scientific writer stops, the novelist steps in as the public instructor.
If his novel extends over any great length of time, characters must
pass out of it ; and that this weeding out should be effected in the
most interesting way, the author should draw from experience, or
from actual knowledge of no uncertain character. He may perhaps
be fortunate enough not to have personal reminiscences to supply his

530 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

wants, or have been too ill to remember enough of his symptoms
and surroundings to turn them into copy, or he may feel that
there is something inartistic, trivial, ridiculous, in giving to a
•slight ailment, such as a bilious headache, its true position as a cause
affecting the future of the puppets of his play. Should he of
necessity have drawn his knowledge of pathology from medical works,
•certain broad ideas will be found to have guided him in his selection,
these ideas evidently arising partly from the way in which special
diseases seem to attract attention, partly from the limits imposed by
good taste.

The illnesses introduced must have some striking character,
something remarkable in the mode of onset or termination, and the
symptoms must not be repulsive. The practical value of a real
disease to a novelist depends very largely on the presence or absence
of symptoms calculated to produce a shiver of disgust. We can
tolerate paralysis from accidents in the hunting-field or from over-
strain of business worry, but we do not' relish in fiction any accident
involving amputation. Dickens deprived Joe Willett of an arm in
battle ; but, in spite of the eloquence of its fellow, every one sympa-
thises with poor wilful Dolly Varden for having to be content with
the remnant.

In the same way public feeling requires a peculiar sense of fitness
to be observed in the deaths chosen by novelists. A hero may be
allowed to die in great agonies from accidental injuries, but he must
not be made to suffer prolonged medical pain ; his body may be
racked with fever or ague, but these will be transient in a novel, so
we care not ; but he must not, he cannot be permitted to have any
gross lesion like cirrhosis, Bright's disease, or carcinoma — these
involve structural changes suggestive of museum specimens, and
cannot be tolerated. He may act as a host for microbes, but the
hero must go no further.

With such limitations the medical path of a conscientious
novelist is by no means an easy one. Sometimes he finds it conve-
nient to clear the ground rapidly, and then is hard pressed to call up
a suitable disease which shall have been lurking about without any
sign until the right moment : the various forms of heart-disease,
aneurysm, and apoplexy have thus all been drawn in. When it is
desirable to give time for death-bed repentances or revelations, or
when it is wished to tinge and alter the whole life and character by
some slower form of disease, the difficulty becomes extreme, and the
novelist requires careful study or guidance. He feels that precision
and accuracy are of as much importance in this as in the legal terms
of a will or contract. It is not necessary to name the disease re-
ferred to, still less to give all its details; but it must be a real
disease in the author's mind, it must not be an imaginary conglome-
ration of vague symptoms.

1886 DISEASE IN FICTION. 581

The school represented by Harrison Ainsworth and Gr. P. R.
James evaded study and criticism by adopting a rough-and-ready
method. Their characters are frequently afflicted with a peculiar
instability of life and limb, a tendency to * rolling corpses on the
plain,' and thus dispensing with surgical aid. In more recent
times we can almost trace the growth of knowledge in the pages of
fiction. Every disease when first discovered has its picturesque aspect,
but the progress of science gradually robs it of this, and destroys its
artistic value. Typhus and typhoid were once favourites, but now
the widespread knowledge of their causes, and the great increase of
attention bestowed on sanitary matters, make it almost impossible for
them to be utilised. We all know too much about them ; they are
deprived of all romance ; an indulgent public cannot be expected to be
sympathetic when feeling that, because the drainage was imperfect or
the water impure, the hero or heroine is consigned to the grave pre-
pared by the author for the favoured few allowed to rest. When we
remember too that, medically, typhus is almost synonymous with
filth and famine, it is easy to see that it is now practically useless, in
spite of the glorious convenience of rapid onset and rapid decline,,
separated by a period of high fever and delirium — a period valuable >
to the novelist for involuntary revelations.

The same is true of consumption ; once a favourite, it is now being
neglected. The glittering eye, the hectic flush, the uncertainty o£
its lingering course, have been depicted again and again ; but a wider
knowledge has led to the universal recognition of such prosaic facts,
as its hereditary character, and its destruction of lung-tissue, and
all the symptoms are so well known at present that the subject is.
painful, if not actually of no value.

Injuries to the head, allowing the surgeon's instruments to make,
a very inferior person a valuable member of society, have frequently
been turned to account. Spinal injuries, too, have long found favour
with authors. The disease technically known as paraplegia gives
abundant facilities for confining the most truculent hero or villain to
his bed, and has the advantage of leaving him with an unclouded
intellect to go through a salutary process of forgiveness or repentance.
It can be brought on the scene in a moment, and it often affords an
opportunity of describing a hunting-field, a race, or any other piece
of brisk movement by which to lead up effectively to the contrast of
the strong man humbled — a most valuable piece of light and shade,
of which, for instance, the author of Guy Livingstone has availed
himself.

These simpler diseases and injuries have now almost come to the
limit of their employment, and new topics must be found. The
search for material is endless, and when seriously undertaken with a
full sense of responsibility, it keeps pace with the progress of science.
No new disease passes unnoticed ; wonderful symptoms and wonder-
VOL XX.— No. 116. S S

582 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

ful cures are equally laid under contribution. Aphasia, a disease of
comparatively recent separation from its associates, has already been
worked into the Golden Butterfly, the sudden onset and bizarre
alteration of the mental atmosphere rendering it, for the present, a
peculiarly suitable subject. Even the modern treatment of baths
and waters for rheumatism and gout has led to the scenes in some
novels being laid at fashionable resorts : witness the excellent picture
of Aix and of the type of many of its invalids, drawn so faithfully by
Mrs. Oliphant in her new novel Madam. Forensic medicine forms a
valuable storehouse of material ; already we have gone through the
detection of crime by such technical details as the recognition of
an assassin's instrument by the examination of a wound, the estima-
tion of the precise position of the person firing a pistol, as in the
Leavenworth Case, and the whole question of homicide or suicide.
It has supplied an almost dangerous knowledge of poisons and their
actions, sometimes following the suggestions afforded by actual
crime, or, as in Bret Harte's Mliss, introducing a reference to a
particular poison (aconite), before the enormity which subsequently
rendered it notorious. All this store of wealth is readily at hand in
the reports of causes celebres in the daily press, or is to be had from
ten minutes' reading of any medico-legal book.

The attitude of different novelists with regard to medical matters
varies in the most remarkable way; the study may be conscien-
tiously prosecuted, and we then get perhaps a painful but true
picture of some particular illness, not including every detail, but
enough to make a fair addition to the facts and interests of the
book. It may be briefly sketched, or a master-hand may deal with
it tolerably fully, and even call to his aid a chronic disease and
make it run through two or three volumes. Sometimes, on the
other hand, such an account is given as might have been gathered
from the chatter of the sick-room, the gossip of the nurses and
neighbours, and this is replete with errors of etiology, diagnosis,
and even symptoms.

It may be of interest to show by a few examples the application
of these statements. Charles Kingsley, whose object in his novels
was to preach sanitation, should be placed at the head of the list of
those who have vividly depicted well-known diseases. In his ' Two
Years' Ago ' he gives at least three accurate studies of morbid pheno-
mena. His account of a cholera epidemic is well worthy of being
placed as an appendix to a chapter on this disease in any medical
text-book. Delirium tremens is also drawn with the hand of a
master, although not with the full repugnance and significance which
we find in Zola's Assommoir, or in the Scenes of Clerical Life,
while his careful study of the gradual development of suicidal mania
reads like a clinical record of an anecdotal character.

Next to Kingsley, and indeed treading closely in his steps in this
particular groove, comes George Eliot, with the truly marvellous

1886 DISEASE IN FICTION. 583

picture of catalepsy iu Silas Marner. As in the preceding case with
cholera, so here we would venture to say that any study of nervous
diseases would be incomplete if this were not included.

Thackeray is sure to be always popular with medical men ; he
understands them, he sympathises with them, he speaks genially of
their work and liberality ; he was evidently on the best of terms with
some practitioner whom he impressed into his service as that most
excellent, gruffly good-humoured Dr. Goodenough, and he very justly
puts into his hands most of the well-merited invective and sarcasm
which he launches against the petty pretences of a fashionable quack.
On medical matters, although he uses his knowledge sparingly,
Thackeray knows precisely what he is talking about, and he
knows, too, what to tell and what to omit. His death-bed scenes
are always truthful without repulsiveness ; the deaths of Colonel
Newcome and of General Baynes of course owe their interest less to
the actual diseases concerned than to the attendant circumstances,
but in both there is nothing unnatural to vex a medical mind. We
can follow the symptoms easily, and yet the pathos of the deaths is
too great to allow the most fastidious of the laity to be offended by
any details. One of the most interesting ' cases ' medically is the
illness of Arthur Pendennis in his rooms in the Temple. There can
be no doubt that this is intended for typhoid fever. The facts
given us are briefly the following : — An illness of a week or so before
total incapacity for work ; ' one night he went to bed ill, and the next
day awoke worse ; ' ' his exertions to complete his work rendered his
fever greater ; ' then a gradual increase of fever for two days, and we
come to Captain Costigan's visit, the patient being ' in a very fevered
state,' yet greatly pleased to see him, his pulse beating very fiercely,
his face haggard and hot, his eyes bloodshot and gloomy. Matters
are protracted for a week, and then he is delirious and is bled, and
two days later the selfish old Major and the mother and Laura are
summoned to town. Antiphlogistic remedies are employed, and the
lapse of time is left doubtful, but spoken of later as a few weeks,
until we are informed that the fever had left the young man, or ' only
returned at intervals of feeble intermittence ; ' reference is made to the
recovery of his wandering senses, to his lean shrunken hands, his
hollow eyes and voice, and then our hero ' sank into a fine sleep, which
lasted for about sixteen hours, at the end of which period he awoke,
calling out that he was very hungry.' After about ten days of con-
valescence in chambers, the patient is moved out of town, and later
taken abroad. In all this there can be no reason for hesitation in
arriving at a diagnosis ; the onset is too gradual, the duration too long
for typhus ; and, moreover, Thackeray is too fine an artist to allow his
reader to form a mental picture of the hero spotted like the pard.
We may question Dr. Goodenough's treatment of blisters, bleeding,
and antiphlogistics, which would have been more suitable for a case

ss 2

584 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

of pneumonia, but the hunger is too true a touch to be mistaken, as all
who have had typhoid fever would at once realise. Compared with this
careful study the death of Mrs. Pendennis appears medically feeble ;
it is strictly analogous to a similar death from heart disease in the
Sea Queen of Clark Eussell. In both we have a short period of
intense mental anxiety followed by a time of rest and peace from
which the fatal termination rouses us with an unpleasant shock, but
the details are meagre, and the effect produced is purely that attend-
ing any sudden catastrophe. Thackeray's chronic invalids, Miss.
Crawley, Jos Sedley, Major Pendennis, and others, are all stamped
with that assiduous care for their own health, that selfish disregard
for others, which so "often results from the concentration of the mind
on the physical condition of the individual ; he tells us plainly when
they have been over-eating or indulging in too much punch ; he doe&
not spare them, he holds them up to ridicule and scorn. Thus in all
his dealings with medical topics we feel he is treading on sure ground,
and that he never forgets that as an artist it is impossible for him to
write in a loose way, as though it did not matter what diseases his
characters die of, provided only that they die. He makes us believe
fully in his work ; all removed from his pages pass out naturally ; for
though he may not trouble to tell us of the disease, in one way or
another he has led up to the death, so that little surprise is excited.

At the risk of treading in well-worn paths, it is natural to turn
from Thackeray to Dickens, and the change is not gratifying. He
can scarcely be civil about doctors, he appears to have had some
grudge against the medical profession which he worked off by instal-
ments whenever his pages required mention of a doctor ; exceptions,,
perhaps, being made in favour of the shadowy Allan Woodcourt, and
of that meek and mild Mr. Chillip, who superintended David Copper-
field's entrance into the world, and who endured Miss Betsy Trot-
wood's wrath. Otherwise from Ben Allen and Bob Sawyer onwards
he has waged pitiless warfare. With this unfortunate bias, this
moral twist, he cannot be expected to trouble himself with medical
lore ; he did not believe in it sufficiently to appreciate the importance
of being correct, and as a consequence we find that the lines become
more hazy and indefinite, the deaths and cures more incomprehen-
sible. When disease of a chronic form is introduced, however,
Dickens may mostly be trusted, especially when the character is
influenced by it. The demoralising effect of one class of sick-room
work is drawn from the life by him in the immortal Mrs. (ramp, — the
mind of a woman originally grasping and of a low type getting
thoroughly subordinated to professional aims. On her particular
topic she is as never-ending and troublesome as any fanatic when
once started on his hobby, and yet the picture is faithfully drawn, its
truth arrests attention, and even if a little shocked, we cannot but
be amused with her rebuke to poor Pecksniff for terrifying the

1886 DISEASE IN FICTION. 585

neighbourhood. The various forms of mental aberration appear to
have been a favourite study with this novelist. Mr. Dick stands out
clearly with his simplicity, his childishness, his times of being lifted
out of himself, his hopeless confusion and entanglement with his
memorial and the head of Charles I. Mr. F.'s aunt is another
instance, with her malevolent gaze, her strange antipathies, her
extraordinary, startling, disjointed ejaculations ; Barnaby Eudge,
with his love for his raven, for flowers, for wandering from place to
place, and with the innocence with which he gets drawn into the
Gordon riots ; Harold Skimpole, with his inability and craftiness ;
Miss Elite, with her birds and flowers ; Mrs. Nickleby's lover, with his
shower of cucumbers — these and many more show the strange fascina-
tion of the grotesque aspect of mental derangement, and in this
particular line our author is inimitable, though Stockton's amiable
lunatics in Rudder Grange are, perhaps, the nearest approach to
these familiar creations.

Dickens is not so easy to follow at all times, even when the symp-
toms appear to be given in full detail. In the Old Curiosity Shop
we have a fair example of difficulty. These are the facts connected
with the illness of Dick Swiveller. First the predisposing cause, ' the
spiritual excitement of the last fortnight working upon a system
affected in no slight degree by the spirituous excitement of some
years, proved a little too much for him.' This might serve as a pre-
lude for an attack of delirium tremens, but the symptoms of this
disease will not harmonise with what follows : ' That very night
Mr. Eichard was seized with an alarming illness, and in twenty-four
hours was stricken with a raging fever.' Then come ' tossing to and
fro,' ' fierce thirst,' ' rambling,' * dull eternal weariness,' ' weary
wanderings of his mind,' ' wasting and consuming inch by inch,' 'a
deep sleep, and he awoke with a sensation of most blissful rest.' Then
we learn from the Marchioness that he has been ill ' three weeks
to-morrow,' that his hands and forehead are now quite cool, and he is
fed with a great basin of weak tea and some toast. The next day
Dick was ' perfectly ravenous,' but is still kept on toast and tea, and
later in the morning he takes ' two oranges and a little jelly.' Some
pages further on we are told of Mr. Swiveller recovering very slowly
from his illness. Now for summing up. Clearly not delirium tremens,
not pneumonia — the illness is too long — not any of the commoner
eruptive fevers, for the same reason ; but either typhus or typhoid, or
both hopelessly jumbled together. The onset belongs to typhus, the
•duration to typhoid ; the wanderings would do for either, so would
wasting, delirium, and protracted convalescence. The two oranges
were injudicious, to say the least, for typhoid, but they were
given, as is commonly the case, by a well-meaning friend. Yet we
hear of no relapse, no return of the fever, and the conclusion to be
arrived at is that Dickens, perhaps unconsciously, had mixed up the

586 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

two diseases, merely intent on producing a quaint, humorous picture,
in which he has undoubtedly succeeded.

Of all the victims of this novelist, perhaps the most puzzling cases
occur amongst the legion of children destroyed by him. The school-
master's little pupil, in the Old Curiosity Shop, would, in a modern
novel, have died from tubercular meningitis, caused by educational
pressure. He is allowed to be delirious at one time ; but, instead of
expiring in a state of coma and collapse, he enjoys the privilege ac-
corded to most of Dickens's pets, the power of reviving to a strange
brightness, to make touching and improving death-bed utterances,
separated by the briefest possible interval from the final termination.
Little Nell, we presume, dies of consumption, hastened by exposure,
and the same ending is probably a safe guess for Little Dombey,
as well as for the poor chivied outcast Jo, who had recently had
smallpox ; but in all these cases we cannot help thinking that the
author was not in the least disposed to be hampered by any scientific
accuracy ; the time had come for the slaughter of the innocents, and
accordingly he snuffed them out without troubling himself about
certificates of death. They died for sentimental purposes, and it
seems almost like sacrilege to inquire into their symptoms too closely.

Anthony Trollope, as Mr. Henry James has said, did not believe
sufficiently in the vitality of his characters even for art ; hence it is
not surprising to find disease conspicuous by its absence in most of
his novels. His men and women were too genteel to suffer from
illness ; they had not reached the stage when it is right to have some
fashionable complaint. Charles Reade does not make medicine play
an important part, generally contenting himself with mere passing
references, not entering into the symptoms in any detail ; thus, when
he kills with spinal injury, he just mentions the paralysis of motion and
sensation, and gives a fatal prognosis ; when a character dies with
plague she is filled with forebodings of the possibility of ghastly
changes in her appearance after death. With his omnivorous reading
he amassed in his commonplace book curiosities of any striking
nature ; we are not startled, then, at finding him giving a careful de-
scription of the mode of applying the wet-pack ; but it is startling to
find it used for a case of jaundice.

Some of the modern novelists bestow care on medical detail.
Clark Eusseii's Sea Queen treats a broken leg with skill sufficient to
avoid shortening or other deformity, but we are not told quite enough
about the accident to make us certain that the case was not what is
termed technically an impacted fracture, which would considerably
diminish the marvel. Yellow fever is drawn into the same book to
account for a vessel in sound condition wandering on the ocean
without a crew. In Christie Murray's Val Strange occurs a good
picture of paralysis following severe anxiety and overwork ; the pre-
monitory symptoms and the slow restoration, with enfeeblement of

1886 DISEASE IN FICTION. 587

intellect, being well pourtrayed. Henry James makes use of Eoman
fever to kill his wayward heroine Daisy Miller ; andjln the Madonna
of the Future brain fever is just indicated with, similar skilful
touches.

Other writers slip along carelessly in a vague way, appearing to
mean something or nothing, medically, according to the knowledge of
the reader. The illness and death of Mr. Dimmesdale, in the Scarlet
Letter, would be very difficult to explain on a scientific basis.
Eobbed of all its glamour of sorrow, and looked at seriously, we feel
the need of a new nomenclature, a new classification of disease to in-
clude a group which might be headed ' Killed by an acute attack of
conscience.' Hawthorne has failed scientifically, but we cannot help
admitting that he has ' exquisitely failed.' The ending is evidently
intended to be dramatic rather than truthful ; it is almost impossible
not to feel that the man could get up and die again, every gestuie,
every word, every gasp being so studied, and the full stop coming
with such admirable precision at the right time. Howells gives us
an instance of loose writing in the fever of Don Ippolito in the
Foregone Conclusion. It is impossible to be certain of its nature —
typhus, typhoid, meningitis, pneumonia, or acute rheumatism — we
feel it is all one to the author ; he does not wish to give us a clinical
record of the case any more than he does of the illness of the
Pythoness of the Undiscovered Country. This last might well be
acute rheumatism, especially when taken in conjunction with the
illness of her father, attributed to an obscure affection of the heart ;
but he leaves it an open question, not filling in the picture with the
same firm touch which he uses with the weakness and fainting fits,
the general sleepiness and apathy of Mrs. Vervain of the Foregone
Conclusion. This is an accurate study of disease ; the others are but
vague sketches with blurred outlines.

When all scientific men chafe and beat against that dead wall
which separates the known from the unknown, and are ever striving
to break down the boundary, or, by changing its position, to annex
part of the realm beyond, it is hardly to be wondered at that the
novelist, who regards science as material for copy, should refuse to be
bound by the same limits of knowledge, that he should occasion-
ally make his characters a new order of beings, governed by laws un-
taught by medicine, and capable of recovering from diseases commonly
regarded as incurable ; or even that he should evolve from his inner
consciousness new diseases or new mysterious combinations of nervous
symptoms. Frequently we find that, starting from the boundary
line, the novelist goes on to explain phenomena incapable of expla-
nation, allowing his fancy free play, taking up the thread where
science has left it for the present, and endeavouring to assume the
part of a prophet, foretelling the cures, the marvels which may per-
haps be looming in a nebulous form in the distance. To enjoy books

588 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

of this nature we must be content to accept them as true, to set aside
our knowledge and understanding for a while, and allow ourselves to
be carried away from the landmarks of prosaic fact by the current of
plausible reasoning and assertion in which we are involved. Such
books are beyond the reach of serious medical criticism, which would
lead us to apply to them a rude, unpleasant monosyllabic term
which has already caused mischief enough in the world. Provided
however that we do not inquire too closely into probabilities, they
may be read with the same keen interest which is excited by books of
travel over virgin soils, or descriptions of the habits of newly-discovered
races or animals — an interest akin to that with which we have de-
voured the Arabian Nights or Gulliver's Travels. It must be
granted that we are not seeking facts by which to guide our lives, that
we do not wish to trammel our author with historical precision, that
we read his book only for the amusement or amazement it affords.

Called Back probably largely owed its phenomenal popularity to
the skill with which the impossible was demonstrated as fact. The
author seized upon and made his own a large number of subjects of
current controversy. He gave us what professed to be a truthful
version of experiences akin to thought-reading, mental states of con-
sciousness being declared to be interchangeable by the mere contact
of the hands, and brain-waves passing from one individual to another ;
we get curious deductions concerning localisation and inhibition of
nerve force, or, to speak less technically, we are asked to believe that,
after a sudden shock, memory can be lost entirely until a recurrence
of the shock brings it back again, calling to mind the man and the
quickset hedge of our youth, a repetition of the same course of treat-
ment producing diametrically opposite results, as in the last act of
Martha and some other operas. Through the whole book the secret
of success may be traced to a combination of causes, foremost among
them being a judicious pandering to popular weaknesses, to credulity,
to the love for the marvellous, and even to Russophobia. ' An author
must believe his own story,' says Mr. Besant, but the author of Called
Back was surely too clever for that. This mode of utilising current
ideas, of touching upon strings which are already vibrating, determines
to a large extent the success or failure of novels of this description.
Paul Vargas, a sketch by the same hand, merely excited ridicule ;
the secret of perpetual life is too much out of date to interest ; the
illness of the hero of too mysterious a nature to delude into belief.
» It is curious to find that many novelists who, as a rule, are to be
commended for the fidelity of their medical data, seem sometimes
weary of this world which they know, and cross the boundary line
into the unknown land of the imaginative or ignorant. They seek
relaxation by change of style of workmanship, just as an artist occa-
sionally draws caricatures ; or perhaps they intend to point a moral
from these airy flights, preaching contentment by awful examples.

1886 DISEASE IN FICTION. 589

That weirdly unpleasant Lifted Veil of George Eliot's is a typical
instance of this class, professing to be the autobiography of a man
conscious of the precise date and hour of his doom, and of all the
attendant circumstances, capable of reading the unspoken thoughts
of those about him, showing in their full horror the result of the
possession of powers for which many have longed in a vague way. It
matters little that symptoms of a true disease, angina pectoris, should
herald the death, when all those preceding are exaggerations and
fictions. So too with the Ten Years' Tenant of Besant and Eice,
the possible discomforts and shifts arising from the possession of im-
munity from death by disease form the mainspring of a story in
which the leading character is supposed to live through over two
and a half centuries.

While medical men puzzle and theorise over the limits to be
assigned to the influence of heredity, the novelist is not troubled by
more doubts than those of the monthly nurse, whose confidence is so
great in the matter of maternal impressions. The modes of thought,
the vicious habits, the same likes and dislikes, have often been drawn,
but the oddest of all developments of this subject is the curious
background it affords Wendell Holmes in the fate of Elsie Venner,
whose snakelike propensities are in this way accounted for by a doctor
in this book.

In like way it would be amusing, were it not for the grain of
truth which lies hidden like a sting, to note how often novelists shift
responsibility for strange statements to the shoulders of medical men.
Ouida, in one of the Bimbi stories, makes a doctor speak of a case
as meningitis, and after gloomy prognostications she cures it with
the bark of a long-lost dog. Dickens also, having stumbled across
the notion of destruction by spontaneous combustion, proceeded to
quote authorities without estimating their scientific value. A refer-
ence to Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence will at once set this matter
in its true light.

Further we find novelists gravely predicting the future of medi-
cine. An American writer in Dr. Heidenhojfs Process recently
started with three separate ideas — the doctrine of inhibition, the
localisation of motor and sensory areas in the brain, the assump-
tion of similar localisation of memory. With these materials he
proceeded to development of an imaginative nature : in the form
of a dream following closely after a talk on mental physiology, a dose
of morphia, and a dry book on electricity — a dream occupying a
large portion of the book — we are led to believe with the author that
it will be possible in the future to ' Throw physic to the dogs,' and to
answer in the affirmative Macbeth's questions : —

Canst tliou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain ?

590 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

In fact, in this dream a lady goes through this process of mental
obliteration, and is totally relieved of all inconvenient recollections
of some unpleasant episodes in her life ; indeed, the working of our
future is represented as being as easy as that of an automatic print-
ing machine — name the memory you wish to dispose of, place the
electrodes over one particular spot of the brain, press the knobs, a
local area of nerve-cells neatly circumscribed becomes sterilised, and
the patient goes on his way rejoicing.

But, setting aside such trifling, the bonds linking together
science and fiction are already strong. Science owes to our novelists
much of its interest, much of its publicity. The scientist slowly
and laboriously hammers out some new discovery, some recognition
of the individuality of a certain group of symptoms which had been
previously lost in the crowd; wearied with his work he too often
launches this discovery with all the ugliness of technicality hanging
around it like a convict's dress, betokening the hard labour through
which it has passed ; and then some good Samaritan of a novelist
turns out of his way to take pity on it, to lavish care upon it, to
clothe it anew, to attract to it the attention of the public, and thus to
save it from death from neglect. It is introduced into good society,
and it thrives, and perhaps becomes a leading topic of conversation
for a short time.

But if the scientist has reason to be grateful, so also has the
novelist. New facts have been given to him, new marvels to dilate
upon and make his own ; he has been supplied with new modes of
escape from the web of intricacies with which he has entangled his
characters, and thus the advantage is mutual.

For the continuance of this good-fellowship there is reason to be
hopeful. Medical science has never perhaps been more active than
at the present time. The new diseases and the new methods of treat-
ment which have not been utilised in novels are already forming a
portentous crowd clamouring for recognition in story. Neurasthenia
and its cure by the Weir Mitchell process of massage has not, to my
knowledge, yet been drawn in, although the marvellous cures of bed-
ridden individuals would seem to furnish scope for an enterprising
worker. The antiseptic process also has its picturesque side; the
saving of life and limb on the battlefield, as furnished by the medical
records of the last Egyptian campaign, gives ample opportunity for
surprises of the most telling character.

The recognition of hitherto unrealised disease by means of the
ophthalmoscope, and the prognostic value of the signs, might also be
described. Locomotor ataxy has already played a part in an Agnostic
dialogue in a contemporary, but there is yet room for its further de-
velopment in the pages of fiction. Metallo-therapy is too much dis-
credited now to find favour, but the prophylactic action of copper
against cholera was until recently sufficiently unproven to allow of its

1886 DISEASE IN FICTION. 591

being swept into the vortex of fiction, for the instruction of those
who do not follow the medical journals assiduously.

It is impossible to lay down rules or to point out all the lines
which might be followed. The aim of this article is to show from
the past what has been worthily accomplished, what has been reck-
lessly undertaken, as well as the mistakes of those attempting to fore-
tell the future of medicine, in the hope that, while affording interest
to the public, it may also help novelists, who, with the Materialist of

a recent poet —

Would learn with, the "boldest to think,
Would grapple with things that perplex,
Would stand on the verge and the brink
Where the seen and the unseen are met.

NESTOR TIEARD.

592 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

THE LIBERAL SPLIT.

THE autumn session of the new Parliament has already thrown much
light upon the position and tactics of those members of the House
of Commons who have assumed the title of Liberal Unionists, but
whom the mass of the Liberal party, unwilling to concede an exclusive
claim to either of these adjectives, prefers to designate as Dissentient
Liberals. Though it is little worth while to quarrel about a name,
it is eminently so to discuss what will be the future of this section ;
whether it will succeed in the hopes of its leaders in inducing a
reunion of the whole party upon their own terms, or whether it will
be forced by the irresistible logic of events into the adoption of Mr.
Gladstone's Irish policy, with some slight modifications to satisfy
the amour propre of its leaders, or whether it is destined to be a
permanent secession from Liberal ranks, and to ensure the continu-
ance of the present Government, for a more or less prolonged period,
and ultimately to be incorporated with the Tory party.

The position, though novel in many of its aspects, is not without
precedent in party politics. There have been two serious secessions
within the present century, one from each of the two great parties,
leading to the defeat of Ministries, though neither of them successful
in defeating a policy : that of the Protectionists' secession from Sir
Robert Peel's Government in 1846, and that known as the Liberal
Cave in the case of Lord Russell's Government of 1866. The latter
speedily ended in disaster and discredit to those responsible for it ;
for the only result of the defeat of Lord Russell's Reform Bill
was to afford the opportunity to the Government of Lord Derby and
Mr. Disraeli to carry a still more democratic measure of Reform ; and
in the ensuing general election the members of the Cave either
disappeared from public life or were re-absorbed as contrite members
of the Liberal party.

The Protectionist revolt of 1846 had more serious and lasting
effects. It consisted of nearly two-thirds of the Tory party ; 240
of them voted against Sir Robert Peel on the second reading of the
Bill for the repeal of the Corn Laws ; and in revenge for their
betrayal, 80 of these, under the leadership of Lord George Bentinck
and Mr. Disraeli, joined with the Liberals in defeating the Irish

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 593

Coercion Bill and in turning out the Government, while as many more
abstained from voting. It may be worth while to recall the fact
that, on the formation of Lord Russell's Government, the Protec-
tionists, to mark their separation from Sir Robert Peel, took their
seats on the Liberal side of the House. It was soon found, however,
that they were a majority of the Tory party, and constituted the real
Opposition to the Liberal Government.

In his Life of Bentinck,1 Lord Beaconsfield states that the incon-
venience of this arrangement soon became apparent, and in the
session of 1847 it was arranged, in concert with the Government, that
the Protectionists should cross over to the other side of the House
and fill the benches usually allotted to an adverse party ; he
himself took his seat on the front Opposition bench, from which he
led the main body of the Tories ; while Peel, who sat by him, led what
were practically the Dissentient Tories, and supported the Govern-
ment. In the general election of 1847 the followers of Peel kept up
the distinctive characters of their section, but they lost in numbers
somewhat more in proportion than the Protectionists ; and the split in
the party did much to secure the return of Liberals. Even with this
advantage, the Whigs were not a majority of the new Parliament.
They were kept in power during the greater part of that Parliament
by the Peelites. In 1852 a Coalition Government was formed of
Liberals and Peelites, and at the general election of that year the
distinction between these two parties disappeared ; the Peelites ceased
to exist as a separate section, and their leaders — Mr. Gladstone, Mr.
Cardwell, and Sidney Herbert — identified themselves with the Liberals,
and thenceforward became Liberal leaders.

These cases show that the separate existence of a third party
(other than the Irish), consisting of dissentients from one or other of
the two great historic parties, is not, under our system of party
government, likely to be a very long one. The attraction of the two
main parties is too strong for it, and it must ultimately give way to
one or the other. If analogy from the past is of value in deter-
mining the future of the Dissentient Liberals, the next general
election will see the extinction of their rank and file, and the com-
plete union of their leaders either with their old or their new allies.
Will the attraction be the stronger in this case to the Liberals or to
the Tories ? Will the fate of the Peelites or that of the Liberal Cave
of 1866 be the precedent? An answer cannot be given to these
questions without a brief review of the circumstances attending
the split, and the subsequent action of the dissidents, and without
estimating their weight in the country as shown in the last election.
In making this, although I may question the policy of many of
their actions, I shall not attribute to them any but the most patriotic

1 Life, of Sentinel, pp. 371-2.

594 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

motives. No one can doubt that the Dissentient Liberals separated
themselves on the Irish question from their former allies with the
greatest pain, under the strongest impulse of public duty, and at
great personal sacrifice to many of them. It must have been with
equal pain, and under an equal sense of public policy, that Mr. Glad-
stone, after consultation with Lord Spencer and others specially con-
versant with Ireland, determined to adopt a policy of autonomy for
that country, a policy which he must have known would result in the
defection of a large section of his former Whig colleagues. It was
absolutely certain that many of them could not adopt this policy
consistently with their known convictions. Much as the split of the
party was to be regretted, it was inevitable. The Liberal party
could not have returned to power at the beginning of 1886 without
the support of the Irish party. If no agreement had been come to
with Mr. Parnell, a Liberal Government would not have been formed ;
the Tories would have remained in office, and would have proceeded
with their policy of coercion ; they would have been supported in
this by many of the Whig section, and the main body of the Liberals
parting from them would have supported the Irish party in violent
opposition to coercion. The split, therefore, must have arisen under
any circumstances, and a combination must have been formed be-
tween the main body of the Liberals and the Irish members on the
basis of an Irish policy, while the Tories and a section of the Whigs
would have been united in supporting coercion.

One of the principal complaints of the Dissentient Liberals is that
Mr. Gladstone did not give sufficient indications of a leaning to a
Home Rule policy, either during the general election of 1885 or
previously. As a result, however, of that election a new position had
arisen. Ireland, for the first time in its history, and in consequence
of its electoral reforms, returned a vast majority of its members
pledged to support Mr. Parnell in a demand for Home Eule. This
was a constitutional demand which could not be lightly disregarded
or rejected. It compelled a more complete consideration of the
whole question of Irish government, and a review of the results
of the Act of Union of 1 800, and its effect on Irish interests of all
kinds.

Assuming that a statesman at this moment, after long hesitation
and doubt, came to the conclusion that the demand of Ireland could
not be refused, it will scarcely be denied that it was wise and states-
manlike on his part to come to terms at once with the Irish leaders.
Was it not the best course for him to settle the question by agree-
ment with them, rather than to wait till the Irish representatives
should formulate their most extreme demands in the House of Com-
mons, and to delay pronouncing in favour of the policy till it should
appear to be conceded only to menace and to agitation, preceded or
accompanied by coercive measures which would take from it all its

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 595

grace ? The Irish leaders were more likely to be brought to reasonable
terms if they were met at once half way by a policy of conciliation
than later when the blood of the Irish people was stirred by refusal
of their constitutional demands. The true historical defence of Mr.
Gladstone and his colleagues will be that their new policy, whether
consistent altogether or not with their past, was wise and just, espe-
cially at the time when it was proposed, and when, by the extension of
its franchise, Ireland was for the first time able to declare its views in
a constitutional manner, and did so in terms so unmistakable.

A difference in policy on the Irish question between two sections
of the Dissentient Liberals was early emphasised by their attitude to
Mr. Gladstone on the formation of his Government. Lord Hartington,
Mr. Goschen, and Lord Derby refused even to entertain the policy
of Home Eule. They had none of them given the smallest indication
of a leaning in that direction. Lord Hartington, it is understood,
had strongly opposed Mr. Chamberlain's scheme for a National
Council in Ireland. On his visit to Belfast during the general elec-
tion of November 1885, he had shown no desire to conciliate Irish
opinion in the direction of Local Government.

With Mr. Chamberlain and Sir George Trevelyan it was different.
They were both favourable to the scheme for a National Council in
Ireland. There was every reason to hope that they might be in-
duced to go further in support of a policy of autonomy. They joined
the Government upon the understanding that the subject was to be
dealt with. It is unnecessary to discuss the reasons which led to their
retirement. They were unable to support the particular scheme for
autonomy as propounded by Mr. Gladstone ; they objected specially
to the Land Purchase scheme. They resigned their posts in the
Cabinet, and joined the other and very different section of Dis-
sentient Liberals in their endeavours to defeat the measure and to
overthrow Mr. Gladstone's Government. The defection thus formed
was perhaps the most serious which any Government has ever en-
countered— formidable not so much from its numbers as from the
authority and activity of its leaders. They not unreasonably hoped
to carry with them a majority of Liberal Members, and a majority
of Liberal voters, when a general election should take place. Every
influence, political and social, was brought to bear on Liberal Mem-
bers, with the object of detaching them from the support of the
Government. The seceders contained within their ranks some of
the most accomplished masters of the art of private persuasion in
the lobbies. As a result, at one time, no fewer than 133 Members
of the Liberal party, or rather more than a third of its number,
were detached, or were known to be opposed to the measure as it
stood ; thirty of these, after much wavering, were brought back to
the Government fold, mainly by the promise of the Government to
make provision for the representation of Ireland in the Imperial

596 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

Parliament for Imperial purposes onty, and in some cases by the
pressure of their constituents.

It may be permitted here to recall a method of persuasion in the
opposite direction, which, so far as my experience and reading go,
was quite new to party tactics. I refer to the promises openly held
out by the Tory leaders to Liberal Members, as an inducement to
them to vote against the Irish Bill, that they would use all their party
organisation to secure their re-election in the general election which
might result from the defeat of the Government. Such a course
is hardly to be distinguished from a corrupt bargain. It could not
be adopted by any one who has any respect for or a belief in repre-
sentative government. It is one which either party might adopt,
but which it is the interest of both should not be resorted to. If
generally adopted, it would undermine the confidence of electors
in their members, and would tend to even stricter bonds of party
organisation than now exist. What are likely to be the feelings of
either party in a constituency when they learn that their repre-
sentative has voted against the wishes of a vast majority of them, under
the promise of the opposite party that they will join with a few dis-
sentients from his own former supporters in returning him again as
member ? That some Liberals in the last Parliament were induced
by such tactics to vote against their own party and against the Irish
measure cannot be doubted, for several urgent personal appeals
were made in the course of the general election to the Tory leaders to
fulfil their promises. It is much to be regretted that the leaders
of the Dissentient Liberals did not dissociate themselves from
such tactics, and openly repudiate them as contrary to the good
faith and fair play on which in the long run party politics must be
based.

The Parliamentary campaign on the Irish Bill resulted in 93
Liberals voting against Mr. Gladstone's Government, and in 10
abstaining from voting. With this combination against them the
Government was defeated, and appeal was made to the constituencies.
In the general election which followed, no one could doubt the
right of the Dissentient Liberals, who had voted against the Irish
Bill, apart from any such bargain as I have referred to, to appeal to
the whole of the electors of their constituencies. We may, however,
question whether many of them, who had originally been selected as
candidates by the local associations, were wise in standing again in
direct opposition to the vast majority of the same bodies, and, while
still calling themselves Liberals, receiving the full support of the
Tory party. It is difficult to suppose that members who thus
acted can ever again make peace with their former friends, and
unless they attach themselves to the Tory party they are not likely
again to receive Tory support.

Of the 103 Dissentients (including those who abstained from

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 597

voting), thirty-five withdrew from the contest or were defeated ; a few
made peace with their party and promised to support the Irish
policy. The waverers were even more unfortunate ; for, of thirty,
twenty lost their seats to Tory opposition. Whatever hopes the
Dissentient Liberal leaders may have had of carrying a majority of
the Liberal party were bitterly disappointed. Their campaign was a
total failure in this respect. In the contests, forty in number, which
took place between Dissentient Liberals, who had been members in
the late Parliament, and Liberal supporters of Home Rule, there were
not more than four in which majorities of Liberal voters supported
their former members. In all the other cases the Dissentient
Liberals owed their return to the support of the whole of the Tory
party, aided by a small contingent of Liberal voters or by Liberal
abstentions, varying from five to thirty per cent, of the Liberal party.
The cases of contests between new candidates representing the views
of Liberal dissentients and Liberals selected by the local organisations
were different. Without impugning the good faith of the leaders of
the Dissentient Liberals, it may be permitted to question their policy
and the methods they resorted to in the electoral campaign in these
cases. The Central Liberal Unionist Committee was formed, with
Lord Hartington as its President, and with large funds at its disposal
for election purposes. This association entered into direct communi-
cation with the leaders of the Tory party, with a view to the defeat
, of Government candidates at the election. The plan of their campaign
provided that, wherever at the previous general election, in November
1885, the majority in favour of a Liberal candidate had been small,
he should now be attacked by a Tory candidate with the full sup-
port of the Unionist Liberals ; where, however, the majority at the
last election had been large, the Liberal Unionists undertook the
task of fighting the sitting Liberal member, with the promise of full
support from the Tory party.

Under this arrangement no fewer than seventy new candidates
were put forward by the Liberal Unionist Committee to contest
Liberal seats already represented by Liberal members, most of
them with promises of pecuniary support from the Association. In
no one of these cases did the candidate, thus sent down, obtain any
substantial support from the local Liberal party ; in all they were
repudiated by the local Liberal Associations. Their only hope of
being returned consisted in obtaining the support of the whole
of the Tory party, and detaching from the Liberals a small number of
voters sufficient with the Tory voters to turn the scale. The success
of these candidates would have done more to split the Liberal party,
and to destroy its integrity, and to ruin its prospects for the future
in the constituencies thus dealt with, than if Tory candidates had
been returned. It would be difficult to exaggerate the animosities
which have resulted in constituencies where this policy has been
VOL, XX.— No. 116. TT

598 . THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

successful ; much ill-feeling survives in those where it was tried
without success. There could have been no reason, indeed, to complain
of any section of the Liberal party endeavouring to secure the
nomination of its members by majorities of the local Associations or
of the Liberal party ; but that those who wish to remain members of the
Liberal party ^ and hope to be its future leaders, should have been
induced to act as I have described, and to have done their best to
undermine and destroy the Liberal party in these seventy consti-
tuencies, is difficult to understand.

Fortunately the policy was not more successful than it was ill
conceived. Of the seventy new candidates thus put forward by the
Liberal Unionist Committee, all of them of the same type, Whigs or
something less advanced than Whigs — for the old Whig traditions of
Charles Fox and his school were undoubtedly favourable to Home
Kule — not more than five were successful at the poll. The remainder
were defeated in spite of their compact with the Tories. They were
repudiated by the mass of the Liberal voters. On the average they
did not receive the support of more than two per cent, of Liberal voters.
In fact, they received a smaller measure of support from Liberals in
the constituencies they contested than did Tory candidates else-
where ; and it is now clear that the Tory leaders would have done
better if they had made no bargain with the Liberal Unionists, and
had put forward their own candidates in every constituency.

A careful examination of the results of the contests or a com-
parison with the contests in the same constituencies in the previous
election in November 1885, shows that, after making an allowance
of five per cent, for a reduced vote, due to deaths and removals, the
Dissentient Liberal members who had voted against the Government,
and who were opposed by Liberal candidates, on the average obtained
the support of twenty per cent, only of the Liberal voters, and that
seventeen per cent, of the Liberals abstained from voting; it also
shows that in constituencies where Liberal members were opposed
by candidates sent down by the Liberal Unionist Committee, the
latter succeeded on the average in obtaining no more than two per
cent, of Liberal votes, and that twelve per cent, only of the Liberal
voters abstained.

A computation of the results of contested elections throughout
the three countries shows that the Tories and Liberal Unionists
together had a majority of not more than 70,000 over the Liberals
and Irish Nationalists, out of an aggregate poll of nearly 2,700,000.
The uncontested constituencies nearly balanced one another, for 101
Tories and Liberal Unionists were returned unopposed, and 103
Liberals and Parnellites. It should, however, be recollected that in
the case of Irish constituencies, if polled out, the majorities for a
Home Kule policy would be vastly greater in proportion than the
majorities against it in English uncontested constituencies. If, there-

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 599

fore, the aggregate voting power could be fairly weighed throughout
all the constituencies, it is doubtful whether the majority could fairly
be considered as adverse to Home Eule.

In the contested constituencies it appears that the number of
Liberals who transferred their votes on this occasion to Tory candi-
dates or to Liberal Unionists did not much exceed 50,000, and that
about 200,000 Liberals abstained from voting. A large number of
voters abstained from in differ entism rather than from real hostility to
Home Eule. The actual defections, therefore, of voters from the Liberal
party cannot be estimated at more than ten per cent.

In the new Parliament the Tories and the Dissentient Liberals
combined have a majority of 118. It is obvious, therefore, that the
election has resulted in a majority of members against the Irish
policy far greater than the majority of actual voters. The Dissentient
Liberals especially are greatly over-represented. They are from 70 to
75 in number. Their true proportion should not be above 30.
The excess in both cases is due in part to the split among the Liberals,
and to the particular tactics referred to, and in part also to the fact
that, under the system of one-membered constituencies, the verdict of
the majority is accentuated, and the majority of members will probably
always be larger in proportion than the majority of voters. It is often
said that further discussion of the Irish question would have resulted
in a still greater majority against Home Eule. Where, however, the
subject was most fully discussed on the platform, where the Dis-
sentient Liberals, and their allies the Tories, had the amplest
opportunity of laying their case before the electors, they met with
the heaviest reverses. No one can doubt that at Edinburgh the case
on both sides was most fufty argued. The Unionists had the daily
advantage of many most able speeches of Mr. Goschen, of the constant
support of the foremost of Scotch papers, which had the field to itself ;
yet even there the verdict of the voters was overwhelmingly in favour
of Home Eule ; and the same division of the city, which in November
1885 had returned Mr. Goschen by a majority of over 2,000, after a
prolonged platform controversy with Mr. Chamberlain, rejected him
by as large a majority in favour of Home Eule. It is impossible to
suppose that the voters were influenced only by Mr. Gladstone's
great personality. What influenced them is stated to have been
a real conviction in favour of the Home Eule policy, after hearing
the full case on both sides, and the inability of Mr. Goschen to
suggest an alternative policy other than Coercion. The same remarks
apply to Glasgow ; to Paisley, where Lord Hartington and Mr.
Goschen used their utmost exertions ; to Cardiff, where Lord Hartington
and Mr. Chamberlain in vain endeavoured to turn out Sir E. Eeed ;
to Darlington, and to North Derbyshire. In all these cases the
objections to the Irish policy were most fully expounded by its ablest
opponents, and under the best advantages, but without success.

T T 2

600 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

That, in spite of the Liberal split, and of the fact that the leaders
of the dissentient section advised their friends everywhere to vote
for Tory candidates, where there were no Liberal Unionist candidates
before the constituencies, the aggregate vote for Home Kule should
have been so great, is most remarkable. In Scotland, in Wales, in
Yorkshire, and in the mining districts, the Home Eule policy achieved
a marked success. In the agricultural counties, in London, in
Lancashire, in Birmingham and the surrounding district, the defeat
of this policy was no less conspicuous.

The general election was followed by an even closer rapproche-
ment between the two opposite sections of the Liberal dissentients.
Their policy when the Irish question was first raised had been widely
divergent. There was far greater difference between Mr. Chamberlain
and Lord Hartington than between the former and Mr. Gladstone.
Mr. Chamberlain was not a member of the Liberal Unionist Committee
before the elections. But as the contest proceeded an alliance
offensive and defensive was effected between the chiefs of the two
sections. The country was informed that they had agreed on a
common policy for Ireland, the terms of which were not made known ;
whether Lord Hartington was prepared to give way to Mr. Chamber-
lain or the reverse, or whether some half-way policy had been arrived
at, we were not informed. Later these two leaders met on the same
platform ; and after the elections the alliance was further consolidated.
Mr. Chamberlain joined the Liberal Unionist Committee ; he publicly
acknowledged the leadership of Lord Hartington ; and both have
announced in Parliament their intention to support the Tory Govern-
ment so long as Mr. Gladstone and the main body of the Liberals
should adhere to their Irish policy. When we recollect the great
differences between these two leaders in the election of 1885, and
that Mr. Chamberlain has boasted that he looked upon the reversion
of the leadership of the Liberal party, after Mr. Gladstone, as within
his grasp, his subordination to Lord Hartington is the more signifi-
cant. We are still ignorant of the terms of the alliance, how far
the two together are prepared to go in an Irish policy, and what
other questions have been the subject of compromise between
them.

The union of the two chiefs was confirmed at the meeting at
Devonshire House immediately after the general election, at which
it was decided that they would take their seats in the House of
Commons on the front Opposition bench, side by side with colleagues
whose policy they so much disapprove. The good taste of this
arrangement may be open to question. It is alleged to be in
accordance with the precedent of Mr. Disraeli and the Protection-
ists in 1847; but, as I have shown, that position was only taken by
the Protectionists when it was found that they constituted the real
Opposition.

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 601

The reasons for the decision, however, and the general line of
policy to be followed by the Dissentient Liberals, have been fully
explained in a contemporary Eeview for last month, which has the
impress of the highest authority of their more radical section.2

It is there stated that

Mr. Gladstone having declared his resolve to continue the struggle for Irish
autonomy till his efforts are crowned with victory, the Liberal Unionists felt, them-
selves compelled to take up a new position, and at a meeting at Devonshire House
immediately before the session, they resolved no longer to content themselves with
a policy of passive resistance to Mr. Gladstone's policy, but determined to go a
step further and assert their adherence to Liberal traditions and principles by
taking up their seats on the front opposition bench, while lending to the Con-
servative party the assistance of their counsel and support. The Liberal Unionists
thus broke finally with Mr. Gladstone and with his policy of separation, and set
themselves to dispute his claims to the allegiance of the Liberal members of the
House of Commons. The real Parliamentary contest, therefore, is not now, as
heretofore, between Liberals and Conservatives, but between Lord Hartington and
Mr. Chamberlain on the one hand and Mr. Gladstone on the other.

The contest, we are further informed, is not so unequal as might
appear ; the authors of this policy have convinced themselves that,
of the 1,300,000 electors who voted for Home Rule, not more than
300,000 were really favourable to his Irish policy, the remainder
voted for Mr. Gladstone's personality ; his colleagues and followers in
the House of Commons are represented

as mere worshippers at the shrine of self-interest, who, when they find that
there can be no union until Mr. Gladstone resigns the leadership, will quickly go
over to Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain, in order to regain their seats on the
Treasury Bench.

We are also reminded that ~*

Mr. Gladstone is an old man who must shortly pay the debt he owes to mortality,
and when this event happens, nothing will remain for his lieutenants but to make
tardy peace with the two leaders.

Meanwhile it is said that three out of four of the, Liberal Unionist
members are dependent for their seats upon Tory support.

We may be sure that they will do nothing save on compulsion to bring about a
change of Ministry and a dissolution of the present Parliament. They are young,
and the great protagonist is old. Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain and
their followers are calmly prepared to go to any length in order to preserve the
Union. They are masters of the position, just as Mr. Parnell and the Irish
members were in the last Parliament. . . . The Conservative leaders are not fools, and
they know full well that they are dependent upon the Liberal Unionists for the
maintenance of their present position. Lord Salisbury takes his cue from Lord
Hartington, just as Lord Randolph Churchill takes his from Mr. Chamberlain.

The Government policy for Ireland already announced is put to
the credit of the Liberal Unionist leaders, who we are told now hold
the balance of power, and are utilising their position to liberalise the

2 Fortnightly Review, September 1 886. ' Home Affairs.'

602 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

Conservative councils, while keeping the cage-door shut ' where the
man of blood is watching with the still more dangerous man of
words.'

This exposition of policy is frank and full, but cynical, and con-
temptuous in the highest degree to the main body of Liberals. It is
in accord with much that we see and hear of the daily doings and say-
ings of the leaders of the dissentient section, their close and frequent
relations with the Tory leaders, and their recent speeches on Irish
policy. It practically comes to this — that they must be taken back
by the Liberal party on their own terms or not at all, and these
terms involve the dismissal of Mr. Gladstone from the leadership of
the party, and the complete surrender of his policy for Ireland.

It is difficult to believe, however, that these leaders can have
persuaded themselves that a reunion of the Liberal party can be
effected on any such terms, either now or in the future, or that Mr.
Gladstone's colleagues and supporters could be base enough to
accept them. Were the Liberal party to adopt them, they would be
no nearer to regaining office ; for the Irish members would again be-
come masters of the position, and would doubtless prefer the present
Government to one formed on such a basis.

The dissentient leaders could scarcely demand more if they had
secured a majority of the votes of Liberals in the country ; in view
of their complete defeat within the limits of the party, it would seem
that concession is due from them and not to them, if reunion is to be
effected, and if they are again to act as leaders.

In the opinion of an immense majority of Liberals, the Irish
question is incomparably greater in importance than any other now
before the country. It involves the application of Liberal prin-
ciples in their most essential and primary form. A settlement of
it in such a spirit as to appease the national sentiment of the Irish
and to give them full command over their own legislation and
their own administration, while reserving Imperial questions for an
Imperial Parliament, is essential to the interests of the Empire.
Can any one seriously suppose, after the support this policy has
already received in the country, that it can now be dropped ? Is no
concession to be made to the immense weight of public opinion
already pronounced in favour of it ? Can the constitutional demands
of Ireland be permanently refused by a bare majority of voters of the
United Kingdom ? Will it be possible to carry on the government
of Ireland in a constitutional manner if this demand be rejected, in
the face of eighty-five members pledged to demand it with the
persistency which has become a part of their policy?

Have, again, the Dissentients considered what will be their own
position while carrying out the programme as announced in the
certain event of the Liberal party refusing to abandon their chief
or their policy? The present Government is in a minority of

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 603

thirty-eight in the House of Commons, if the Liberal Unionists
are counted against them. To retain the Government in power, it
will be necessary for them to give it a continuous and unvarying
support, one not limited to Irish questions, but extending over the
whole field of politics. The Government cannot last if it is liable
to defeat on the many other questions which must constantly arise,
on questions of foreign policy, of administration, of legislation. On
all these subjects the Liberal Unionists will, bon gre mat gr&> be
found voting as a rule with the Tories. How will they be able to
face Liberal constituencies again after two ,or three years of this
kind of work, during which period all administrative and legisla-
tive questions will mainly be dealt with from a Tory point of view ?
Neither will their leaders find it a pleasant task to be constantly
rising from the front Opposition bench to give their protection
to the Government in the differences which are certain to occur
with the Liberal party, to speak in opposition to four-fifths of
those who sit behind them, to throw confusion into Liberal ranks
at the moment perhaps of victory, to identify themselves in every
petty party scrimmage with the Tory party.

It is assumed that the Dissentient Liberal chiefs will exercise a
paramount influence over Tory councils ; if this should be so, it
would be a position opposed to the best constitutional principles.
Those who determine the policy of a Government should be in a
position where they may know the whole of the conditions on which
the policy from time to time is based, and where they may defend it
with a full sense of responsibility. Those who are outside the
Government, who are not daily and hourly at the centre of power,
cannot control its policy, and are liable to have their views thwarted
and set aside at any moment, either purposely or by inadvertence,
often by a chance speech or concession made at a moment's notice
in the House of Commons.

Is it also so certain that the Dissentient leaders will continue to
hold a paramount influence over the decisions of the present Govern-
ment ? The Tory leaders will soon weary of such a position of depen-
dence ; they will ask whether those who owe their seats and the seats
of all their supporters to Tory votes, are in a position to command
them. They will appreciate the fact that a dissolution will extinguish
the rank and file of the Liberal Unionists, and they may use the
threat of dissolution, not without effect, as against those who show
a desire for independence. The decisions of the Government, espe-
cially on administrative questions, will be arrived at before their
allies have the opportunity of using their influence, and it will often
not be possible to undo them without discredit or defeat.

Neither, again, is it probable that the agreement between the
two sections of the Dissentient leaders and their followers will be of
long duration. Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain may have

604 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

patched up a combination for the time, but they differ fundamentally
upon so many questions, not excluding Irish policy, that, when
not bound by the mutual responsibilities of office, they must
speedily fall out, or find themselves pulling in opposite directions.
These differences will find — have perhaps already found — their reflex
in the present Cabinet. It is doubtless true that Lord Salisbury
takes his cue from Lord Hartington and Lord Randolph Churchill
his inspirations from Mr. Chamberlain. The divergence between
the Tory leaders which must necessarily result from this, is a subject
for political speculation of the greatest interest, and may result in
combinations of an unexpected kind.

Is it, however, hopeless that the reunion of the Liberal party
may yet take place upon some other than the terms which have been
demanded by the Dissentients ? It is difficult to form an opinion on
this without knowing the basis of the present agreement between
Lord Hartington and Mr. Chamberlain. It is evident that Lord
Hartington has made considerable advance in Irish policy since his
Belfast speech in 1885, and since his earlier speeches against the
Home Rule Bill. He must by this time recognise the failure of his
campaign in the general election — by this I do not mean his failure
to defeat Mr. Gladstone's Government, but his failure to carry with him
any but a very small section of the Liberal party ; he is too sensible
a politician, too well bred in the Whig tradition of moving with the
times, not to perceive that great concessions must be made to the
very large vote in the country in favour of autonomy for Ireland.
He must have recognised, when he declined to join the Tory Govern-
ment, that the last chance of meeting the Irish claims with a direct
negative was lost for ever. He must know the inutility, if not the
danger to property and social order in Ireland, of any moderate
scheme of local government, which while giving control of local affairs
to the popular party gives no satisfaction to their national sentiment.
What can be his hopes of settling the Irish question on any other
lines than those of autonomy? When the alternative policy for
Ireland of the Tory Government is fully developed, and when it
fails, as it will certainly fail if it falls short of autonomy, will he not
feel the necessity of adopting this principle ?

Still more may we expect in this direction from Mr. Chamberlain.
Of the various schemes which he has propounded for dealing with the
Irish question, many appear to contain principles which might afford
the basis of agreement with the main body of Liberals. The essential
condition of any such agreement is the concession of legislative and
administrative autonomy to Ireland. Beyond these, the special
relation of Ireland to Great Britain, for Imperial purposes, is quite
an open question, on which there may be differences of opinion and
opportunities for compromise. The result of the discussions on the
Irish measure and of the elections was to elicit an opinion favourable

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 605

rather to a settlement of these relations on a Federal plan than on the
Colonial plan. The original proposal of Mr. Gladstone was based on
the latter principle. It undoubtedly alarmed many people ; though
it is by no means certain that, if once the principle of autonomy
were conceded, the Colonial relation would not be more acceptable
to the majority of people of Great Britain. Presented, however, as
the question was, the balance of opinion was undoubtedly in favour
of a Federal solution of the future relations of Ireland to Great
Britain.

Mr. Chamberlain has in many of his speeches advocated change in
this direction. Speaking against the Irish measure on its introduc-
tion, he admitted that his scheme for a National Council in Ireland
was no longer possible ; that only a very large proposal could at any
future time be accepted as a settlement of the question ; and that he
looked for a solution of it in the direction of Federation. This solution,
he said, would maintain the Imperial unity, and would at the same
time conciliate the desire for a national local government which is so
strongly felt in Ireland. Writing again on the 7th of May last, at a
critical period of the fortunes of the Bill, he expressed his hearty
support to the principle of autonomy for Ireland, subject to the full
representation of Ireland in the central Parliament, and her full re-
sponsibility for Imperial affairs. Later, in the debate on the second
reading of the Bill, he referred with approval to the constitutional
relations of the Dominion of Canada to its provinces, such as Nova
Scotia and New Brunswick — a relation strictly of the Federal kind,
and where autonomy as regards administration and legislation is fully
conceded to these provinces,

It seemed to most Liberals that, with these views, Mr. Chamber-
lain might have well withdrawn from further opposition to the
second reading of the Irish measure, when Mr. Gladstone had promised
to introduce clauses for the representation of Ireland in the Parlia-
ment of Great Britain for Imperial purposes. Without desiring,
however, to point out inconsistencies in Mr. Chamberlain's speeches
and conduct, we may say that, looking^ broadly at his many proposals,
there is much which suggests the possibility of agreement on his part
with the Liberal party on the basis of a real and genuine autonomy
for Ireland. It is this which is the essential kernel of the Irish
policy ; all other questions are subservient to it ; subject to this,
the Irish members themselves have expressed their readiness to accept
whichever of the two possible solutions of their future relations to
Great Britain is most acceptable to the English people.

Again, the Land Purchase scheme no longer bars the way to any
agreement with the Dissentient Liberals. The proposal was eminently
unpopular with the constituencies. It did more to wreck the Irish
policy of the late Government than any other part of their scheme.
Tory candidates and Dissentient Liberals vied with one another in
VOL. XX.— No. 116. U U

606 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct.

denouncing it and in making capital out of it. It was persistently
alleged that it involved a loan from the central Grovernment of
200,000,000^. without any real security. What more plausible argu-
ment could be addressed to distressed agriculturists or to depressed
manufacturers than that they were to be taxed for the benefit of Irish
landlords ? None made more frequent use of this argument than Mr.
Chamberlain. Could the electors, however, have known that the
very first proposal of the Tory Grovernment, supported by Lord
Hartington and by Mr. Chamberlain, would be an immense extension
of the principle of Imperial loans, with the avowed purpose of con-
verting all the tenants of Ireland into owners, and of abolishing the
system of dual ownership recognised by the Land Act of 1881, how
very different might have been the result of the elections! The
new proposal, if not accompanied by any measure conceding the de-
mand for local government, would substitute a hated central Govern-
ment for the hated landlords, and would draw upon the State all
the unpopularity now attaching to the rent receivers, while the
Imperial Grovernment would find itself the mortgagee of every farm
in Ireland, and receiving what would practically be rent for a long
term of years in the shape of interest or repayment of capital. Is
it possible to conceive a position more full of danger to the State, so
long as the national demands of Ireland are refused ?

The proposal of the present Grovernment, however, is of the utmost
political importance. It is made far more in the interests of the
landlords than of the tenants. It proves that the landlords of Ireland
are as anxious to clear out of that country as their bitterest enemies
are to get rid of them. Can any one doubt that the demand for
Home Rule would be even more universal in Ireland if the landlords
were bought out under such a scheme than at present ? or that it
would be conceded without objection in England when all fears of
what might happen to landlords were removed ? It is my confident
belief, however, that any universal scheme of Land Purchase, or of
converting tenants into owners, by Imperial loans, either with or
without Home Eule, will, after what occurred at the last general
election, be rejected by the country. It does not, however, follow
that a moderate application of the principle of Imperial loans to aid
a settlement of the Land Question may not still be adopted as a part
of the settlement of the Home Kule question. I have myself advo-
cated such an application to the case of the smaller tenants only.
The use of Imperial credit to convert them into owners would have
the advantage that, at a moderate rate of purchase, the relief to
them in the substitution of interest for rent would be very great,
that it would create at once a very large class of persons permanently
interested as owners, and get rid of the relations of landlord and
tenant between the most numerous and most difficult class of small

1886 THE LIBERAL SPLIT. 607

tenants, and that it would enable the landlords to realise a fair value
for the most hazardous parts of their properties.

In respect of larger tenancies the same arguments scarcely apply.
There is not the same reason for large reductions of their payments ;
if their rents are too high, they ought to be dealt with by the Land
Court ; the purchase of them would involve an enormous advance of
money. It may be that in respect of the larger tenancies some
other method of settling the question may be devised, not involving
any great advance, such as that of fining down their rents by the aid
of State loans, and converting the variable rent into a rent charge of
lower amount.

It is unnecessary, however, to pursue this question further. It
will be conceded that the proposal of the present Government to
extend indefinitely Lord Ashbourne's Act, and to substitute a uni-
versal system of peasant proprietors for the dual ownership of land
now existing in Ireland, has made it far easier to approach the ques-
tion of Home Kule. Proposals to ease off the difficulties of that
question by a partial application of Imperial credit can no longer be
denounced in the spirit of the last electoral campaign. We need no
longer despair of the Liberal party coming to an agreement on the
subject. The following, however, of Mr. Chamberlain among the Dis-
sentients is small in comparison with that of Lord Hartington. Mr.
Chamberlain alone could not influence a sufficient number of them to
secure a majority of the present House of Commons in favour of any
measure which he might agree upon with the Liberal party. He
could have turned the scales in the last Parliament on behalf of the
Irish measure. It is possible that at the general election his active
co-operation with the Liberals on behalf of a policy of autonomy for
Ireland would have made the difference. He no longer holds the
balance in the new Parliament. It rests with Lord Hartington
and his Whig followers to decide whether to effect a compromise
with the Liberals upon the basis of a real autonomy for Ireland, with
security for the maintenance of the Imperial Parliament for Imperial
purposes, or whether to throw in their lot with the Tories, to support
them in some scheme, such as that which has been foreshadowed by
Lord Kandolph Churchill, and which appears to be something in the
nature of a National Council, a scheme which will give no content to
Ireland, and be no settlement of the question.

The responsibility on them is a heavy one. It is even greater
than in the last Parliament, when they opposed and rejected the
Irish measure. They had then a not unreasonable hope that they
would be supported by a majority of the Liberal party in the country.
They must now be aware that the Liberal party as a whole, with the
exception of a small minority, has pronounced in favour of autonomy
for Ireland ; they must know by experience that what the Liberal

608 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Oct. 1886

party adopts is certain of ultimate success. It rests with them
whether the interval shall be long or short, whether the political
agony in Ireland, and its social disorders, and a bitterness between
its classes shall be prolonged, and whether all Liberal measures for
Great Britain shall be suspended during the present Parliament, and
until the next appeal to the electorate. The longer that may be
postponed, the more certain will it be that, whatever else may be the
result of it, the Dissentient section will be ground between the two
parties, and extinguished as a political factor for the future.

G-. SHAW LEFEVRE.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake
to return unaccepted MSS.

THE

NINETEENTH
CENTURY.

No. CXVIL— NOVEMBER 1886.

THE COMING WINTER IN IRELAND.

THE bill introduced by Mr. Parnell to give temporary relief to the
Irish tenants was defeated in — for the time of year — a very full
house on the 22nd of September last. It was defeated by a majority
of 95 in a house of 503 members. The defeat of the Compensation
for Disturbance Bill in the House of Lords, in the month of August
1880, closed one chapter, and opened another, in the history of
Ireland, and it is quite possible that the defeat of Mr. Parnell's bill
may yet be pointed to as an event of equal gravity, and equally far-
reaching in its consequences on the future of Ireland.

What was Mr. Parnell's bill, and why was it introduced ? It was a
bill designed to give temporary relief to tenant farmers in Ireland pend-
ing the inquiry which has been undertaken by the present Government.
I shall presently state what the bill proposed to do ; but I must here
try to answer two questions which have been very frequently put : —
First, why was such a bill considered by Mr. Parnell to be necessary in
September last ? And, secondly, why was not it or some similar bill
introduced during the spring session ? I shall answer the latter ques-
tion first. No bill for the temporary relief of Irish tenants was intro-
duced during the spring session, chiefly because the Irish National party
had strong hopes that the measures proposed by Mr. Gladstone for the
better government of Ireland would be passed into law. And when
pressed, as we frequently were, by our constituents to take some steps
to stop evictions, our answer always was that it would be folly to
embarrass a Government which was engaged in an attempt to settle
the Irish question in a generous and final fashion ; and that if, as we
VOL. XX.— No. 117. X X

610 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

hoped, the Government should succeed in their attempt, this and
other difficulties could very soon be dealt with by our own people at
home. We knew that with the Liberal Government in office no bill
interfering with the landlord's power to evict would be allowed
through the House of Lords, and that to introduce such a bill at that
time would be simply to place in the hands of the enemies of the
Government, and our enemies, a weapon to do them injury. But
this was not our only reason for considering it not wise to bring
forward this question last spring. ' Coming events cast their shadows
before ; ' and whether it was due to the rumours of the coming of
Home Rule, or to the influence of Lord Carnarvon, the fact is un-
deniable that in the winter quarter of 1885 there was a most asto-
nishing falling off in the number of evictions in Ireland. The number
of families evicted in the quarter ending the 31st of December 1885
was only 369, of whom 208 were readmitted as caretakers or tenants ;
as against 642 in the quarter ending the 31st of December 1884, 646
in the quarter ending the 31st of December 1883, and 709 in the
quarter ending the 3 1st of December 1882. And this state of things
continued in some measure into the spring quarter of 1886, though
here there was an alarming increase — the number evicted in the
quarter ending the 31st of March 1886 being 698. But when we
came back to Ireland after the election had been decided in the
month of July last, what was the state of things with which we were
brought face to face ?

The people had during the past year been restrained from active
agitation by a very considerable exercise of influence on our part ; by
the hope that their national demands were about to be granted, and
the long chapter of their oppressions be closed for ever ; and by the
tremendous influence of the speeches delivered by Mr. Gladstone
during the spring — speeches which were read even in the poorest
cabins from one end of Ireland to the other, and which with a people
like the Irish had an immense effect in making them patient and
content to endure a great deal rather than embarrass such a friend.
All these things, which had made it easy for us to restrain agitation
in the country up to July last, had ceased to have effect, and at the
same time we found that, encouraged by the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's
Government, and by the result of the elections, the landlords were
making up for lost time, and were carrying on the old game of
eviction at an appalling rate. In the quarter ending the 31st of
June 1886, there were evicted in Ireland 1,309 families; and from
the 31st of June up to the 20th of September, 1,037 families were
evicted. Such being the state of affairs in Ireland, and there being
now no immediate prospect of a settlement of the National question,
we had no choice but to take the earliest opportunity of forcing on
the attention of the House of Commons the desperate condition of the
Irish tenants, and the great troubles we foresaw if the landlords were

1886 THE COMING WINTER IN IRELAND. 611

supported in their then course, and nothing done to afford protection to
the tenants.

But now it may be asked, Why was the bill introduced in the
middle of September, and not at the beginning of the autumn
session ? When the session opened, we did not know what the policy
of the Government in respect to Ireland was to be. During the
debate on the Address we drew attention to the serious condition of
Ireland, and the absolute necessity for some measure to put a check
on harsh evictions, and it will be remembered that it was only in the
course of that debate that the Government proposals were disclosed.
On the 3rd of September the Chancellor of the Exchequer moved
to take all the time of the house for financial business, and I, at Mr.
Parnell's request, moved the following amendment : —

That, in the opinion of this House, the state of Ireland is such as to require the
proposal of remedial measures by the Government before the time of the House is
appropriated entirely to the business of supply.

And it was in the course of the debate upon this amendment that
Mr. Parnell showed that the proposals of the Government could by
no possibility meet the present difficulties in Ireland, and stated that
he himself was ready to introduce a bill which, in his opinion, would
ensure peace and quiet in Ireland whilst the Government Com-
missions were carrying out their inquiries. In making this offer
Mr. Parnell was doing what he had been frequently invited to do by
all sections of the English press on other occasions. But I must
say that the result of the experiment has not been encouraging.

Now what was it that this bill proposed to do ? It was a very
short and simple bill, consisting as it did of only three clauses, and
except as regards the second clause it was of a purely temporary
character. The first and third clauses were intended to protect
judicial tenants, whose rent had been fixed before the 1st of January
1885, from eviction in cases where their landlords had refused to
give them a reasonable reduction. But no tenant could claim pro-
tection under this Act unless, first, he paid 50 per cent, of all rent
and arrears due by him ; and, secondly, the court was satisfied that
he was unable to pay the balance without deprivation of the means
of subsistence and of working his farm. If these conditions were
fulfilled the tenant got simply a stay of any proceedings for
eviction or recovery of the balance of rent due until the Land
Court had decided what abatement his landlord ought to give him.
And this court which was to decide as to the abatement would
have been the very court which had fixed the judicial rent, and
would therefore be in a position to decide immediately whether
there really was a case for an abatement this year on a rent fixed by
themselves three or four years ago. That was all that the bill pro-
posed to do for judicial tenants, and a most modest proposal it was.

xx 2

612 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Under these clauses about 153,000 judicial tenants would have
come.

The second clause in the bill proposed to admit the Irish lease-
holders to the benefits of the Land Act, from which in 1881 they
were most unfairly excluded in spite of the repeated protests of the
National party. The leaseholders number about 60,000, they include
the very cream of the Irish farmers, are largely men of some capital,
and as a rule are very highly rented ; and having been denied all
relief under the Act of 1881, they have in many instances during
these disastrous years been sinking deeper and deeper into poverty
with the most deplorable results as regards the cultivation of their
farms and the general prosperity of the country. The justice of
their claim to be admitted to the Land Courts has long ago been
admitted on all sides, and as on this point Irish members of Parlia-
ment, Orange, Unionist, and Nationalist, were absolutely unanimous,
Mr. Parnell thought it right to lose no more time in putting an end
to an admitted grievance. One thing is certain : that this refusal,
without any reason given, to do justice to the Irish leaseholders will
tend to aggravate seriously the agitation in Ireland during the
coming winter.

Such was Mr. Parnell's bill, and in preparing it he had to keep
two things in view: — First, that the bill should be one which would
not be repudiated by the people of Ireland represented by the
National party. Secondly, that it should be one which would enable
us to state honestly to the House that if it were accepted we could
look forward with confidence to peace in Ireland during the coming
winter. Keeping these two points in view, we did our best to make
the bill a moderate one, and in the course of the debate our very
moderation was charged against us as a crime. The bill, in fact,
amounted to nothing more than an attempt to compel all Irish
landlords to act as every reasonable and humane landlord in Ireland
will act of his own free will. By rejecting it the House of Commons
has placed the peace of Ireland entirely at the mercy of the Irish
landlords — I should say, indeed, at the mercy of a section of the
Irish landlords. And past experience fully justifies us in believing
that this is a most uncertain and dangerous tenure.

The course of the debate on this bill was most characteristic and
instructive. Mr. Parnell introduced the measure in a speech of
studied moderation — a speech which I believe would carry conviction
to the mind of any unprejudiced man who heard it. And on the
first night of the debate the only other Irish member who spoke in
support of the bill was Mr. Pinkerton, a Protestant farmer from
Antrim, a man who had lived all his life at farming, and whose
speech was entirely occupied with practical details of the subject.
On the second night of the debate no opportunity had been offered
to any member of the Irish party to address the House, although

1886 THE COMING WINTER IN IRELAND. 613

several were prepared and anxious to do so ; and when Mr. Dillon,
who had been asked to speak on behalf of the Irish party, informed
the Government whips that he was anxious to address the House at
half-past nine, he learnt from them that Sir Michael Hicks-Beach
intended to speak at ten o'clock himself. I have dwelt on these
particulars because the character of the Chief Secretary's speech
makes them of great importance. For any one who has studied the
debate, it is impossible to deny that Sir Michael Hicks-Beach's
speech was the first, coming from any one of importance, which con-
tained a note of hatred, contention, and strife. He began by re-
fusing to give credit to the promoters of the bill for the intentions
which had been stated on their behalf by Mr. Parnell. There was
not a word in his speech of regret at being compelled to refuse this
concession. He treated the leader of the Irish party and his bill
with an unconcealed contempt which very ill became a man who is
responsible for peace and good government in Ireland. His argu-
ments— so far as there were any arguments in his speech — were
directed to show that no case had been made out for any abatement
of judicial rents, and the whole tone of his speech was one of insult
and of menace, for which no word uttered by any member of the
Irish party in the course of the debate could be quoted in justifi-
cation. It was a speech calculated to blood on the Irish landlords
to deeds of oppression during the coming winter, and to fix more
firmly than ever in the mind of the Irish tenant the old conviction
that his sufferings and persecutions are matters of contemptuous
indifference to the English Government.

We really desired to have peace and quiet in Ireland this winter.
And we desired it — if for~no other reason — because now for the first
time in living memory the English public seems willing and anxious
to listen to a fair statement of the Irish National cause. And it was
plainly our interest that nothing should occur in Ireland which would
make it impossible for us to get a fair hearing in England.

After careful consultation we decided to do what we had been
over and over again invited to do on similar occasions in the past —
we decided to bring forward a measure which we considered would
meet the difficulties of the case and secure peace in Ireland during
the coming year. We made that measure as moderate as we dared
to do in face of the condition of things in Ireland ; in point of fact
we incurred a good deal of blame in Ireland for presenting so mode-
rate a bill. And how were we met by the press of London, and by the
Conservatives and the Unionists in the House of Commons ? On all
sides we were denounced as dishonest agitators. * We did not really
want the bill to pass ' ; ' it was brought in merely to keep up agita-
- tion ' etc. etc. — the same old story that we listened to in 1880 on the
Compensation for Disturbance Bill. And in the debate when we
considered that we had made an unansiverable case for the justice

614 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

of the demand of the Irish farmers for the abatement of judicial
rents fixed before last autumn, how was our case met ? Not by any
arguments worthy of the name, but by contemptuous incredulity, and
jeers at statements of the losses and sufferings of tenant farmers in
Ireland, and by idiotic assertions that the wealth of the Irish small
farmers was steadily increasing ; that the distress was due to drink-
ing too much whisky, etc. And finally, by a repetition on the part
of the Irish Secretary of those threats to which we were so well
accustomed to listen in 1880 and 1881.

Some of the arguments used in the course of the debate were of
such a character that I cannot avoid placing them side by side in
order to exhibit all the more clearly the gross inconsistency of our
opponents : —

1. It was said that no case had been made out for reduction of
judicial rents.

2. That the landlords could be trusted to act generously and give
reductions.

3. That the bill if passed would give the tenants no material
relief. n.,.r,

4. That it would amount to a No-rent manifesto.

So much for the debate on Mr. ParnelPs bill. I will pass from it
now, and will only say further that it was not of a character to
encourage the Irish people to look to the London Parliament for
justice.

The Government having, as we think, most unfortunately decided
to reject Mr. Parnell's proposal and to promise to Irish landlords the
full support of the Irish executive in enforcing their legal rights,
what is to be the result in Ireland ? The answer to that question
depends entirely on the Irish landlords themselves. Some of the
largest landowners in Ireland have already offered to their tenants
large abatements on the judicial rents. If the rest were to follow
their example there would be no trouble in Ireland during the coming
winter. If there had been any strong reason to hope that all, or
nearly all, the landlords in this country would act reasonably and
humanely, Mr. Parnell's bill would have been quite unnecessary;
but that bill was brought in by men who know the Irish landlords
better than Sir Michael Hicks-Beach knows them, and better than
most Englishmen do, and I am sorry to say that we have the very
strongest reason to expect that a large section of the landlords will
pursue a course this winter consistent with their past history.

It would be plainly impossible for me, within the necessary limits
of this article, to go into details as to the action of individual land-
lords. Those who desire to pursue this subject further I must refer
to the speeches delivered in the debate on Mr. Parnell's bill, and to

1886 THE COMING WINTER IN IRELAND. 615

the publications of the Irish Press Agency. There cannot, however,
be the least doubt that any Englishman who does devote a little of
his time to this study will speedily become convinced of two things :
— First, that under the law as it stands it is still possible in a great
many cases for Irish landlords to do the most cruel injustice to their
tenants ; and, secondty, that the history of the dealings of Irish
landlords with their tenants down to this very hour fully justifies
us in refusing to place any trust in their forbearance, or in their
sympathy for the people whom we represent. As I have said, the
winter in Ireland depends on the action of the landlords. If they
follow the example set by a few within the last three weeks, we
shall have peace. If, on the other hand, they do as they did in
the autumn of 1880 ; and if they follow the example of men whose
names I could mention ; and if the language which is repeated to
us as having been used by a number of agents and landlords is
sought to be acted upon, it would take a very wise man indeed to
predict what this winter will bring forth. Two things are certain —
first, that the National organisation is immensely stronger than it
was in 1880 ; and, secondly, the difficulties of the fanners are
greater even than they were in that year. And such being the case,
any one who wishes to realise what is before the Irish Government if
they are called upon by the landlords to support them in a policy of
extortion and eviction, had better read the history of the autumn of
1880 and the spring of 1881, and he will then be able to form an
opinion for himself.

If then a struggle for existence is forced on the Irish tenants this
winter, it seems to me that a very great responsibility will lie on the
Liberal party in Englandr For it will be in their hands to decide
whether the great work of reconciliation between the two people, so
happily begun by Mr. Gladstone last spring, is to be rudely inter-
rupted.

As it is, we of the Irish National party do feel under a considerable
obligation of gratitude to the Liberal party for the way in which
they stood by us during the spring, at the elections in July, and
on Mr. Parnell's bill. And I personally have a deeper feeling of
gratitude to many individual members of that party for words of
encouragement and sympathy spoken in private. But if we are to
have another land war in Ireland, the new faith of the Liberal party
may be put to a severe strain. Many bitter things will be said, and in
spite of all that we can do deeds may be done in Ireland which will
shock them deeply. But if when they are in trouble about what is
going on in Ireland, they will only remember that all through the
spring and down to September last we did everything in our power
to effect a compromise — if they will turn to the debate on Mr.
Parnell's bill, and then read the past history of this Irish land
question, they will not wonder at the intense bitterness of feeling

616 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

which exists on this question in the minds of the Irish people. And
they will be able to understand much which in the past was utterly
inexplicable to them. If they will be strong in their faith, and
sufficiently wide in their sympathies to enter into the bitterness of
an oppressed people, all will come right very soon. And Mr. Glad-
stone will live to see then two peoples who have hated each other for
seven hundred years agreeing to live side by side as friends — equally
free, though under the one Crown.

JOHN DILLON.

1886 617

FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN.

I.

THE latest intelligence from China and Eome seems to leave no doubt
that France has found means of preventing any action on the part of
the Vatican, and so far to have gained a free hand to deal in her own
interest with China, unembarrassed by the independent action of a
third Power. The Pope, compelled to choose between sending a
Nuncio to Peking, as desired by the Chinese, and a rupture with
France under a menace of war on the Church, the withdrawal of the
subvention of 50,000,000 francs, and the termination of the Con-
cordat, could have little option. But the end is not yet. China may
be less open to intimidation than heretofore, and assert her undoubted
right to refuse the recognition of an assumed protectorate over Eoman
missions, irrespective of the nationality of their members, and its
extension to the native converts throughout the Empire. French
interference between the Chinese authorities and the subjects of the
Emperor of China has never had any treaty warrant or justification
by the law of nations. China has the remedy therefore in her own
hands, to a certain extent, by simply refusing to admit the pre-
tension. Of course, in doing so, the Chinese Government must be
prepared to resist any action, either diplomatic or belligerent, to
coerce them — even by a renewal of M. Jules Ferry's system of
* intelligent destruction' on their coast; and in the Treaty Ports
where the French have free access under a treaty of peace —
proceedings from which the Chinese have only recently been relieved.
But, as the latter have shown that even a great destruction of
property and sacrifice of life could not induce submission to demands
which they deemed too humiliating and unjustifiable, it may not
be wise to trust too much to such means of coercion. France may
well consider whether the cost of such measures in the late operations
was adequately compensated by any advantage gained. The French
inflicted a great amount of injury no doubt upon the Chinese Govern-
ment and the people in property and commerce, and a great sacrifice
of lives also ; but they had to pay their own expenses after all, which
were too heavy to hold out much inducement to recommence a
similar inglorious and unsuccessful struggle.

In any case it is to be remembered that other nations besides
the French have interests in China, and are liable to serious damage

618

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Nov.

by the renewal of hostile action. Interests in trade, compared with
which the total amount of French trade in China is wholly in-
significant— and, so far as such b interests are concerned, this fact
gives the French the advantage, if not the satisfaction of knowing
that it is their rivals, and the British more especially, who are
the chief sufferers; and, under the law of nations, without any
claim to compensation. Every sovereign and independent state,
being the guardian of its own honour and interests, is entitled, by the
jus gentium, accepted among Western nations, to take such
measures as it may deem expedient to obtain redress for injuries
received, subject only to the limitations imposed by international
treaties in the common interest.

In view of these circumstances, and the unsettled contention
between China and France, which is fraught with so much evil,
not only to one or other of the contending parties, but to all the
Treaty Powers in various degrees, according to the magnitude of the
stake of neutral Powers in the China seas, it may be well to ascertain
accurately what is the relative proportion of the commercial interests
engaged in the intercourse of Western nations with China. The
Reports andEeturns of the trade of the Treaty Ports, issued annually
by the Inspector-General of the Imperial Maritime Customs, furnish
in the most authentic and complete form all the necessary data.

In estimating the proportionate share of France, however, in such
a comparative view, it would not be fair to take the Custom House
returns for 1885 as a test, since French carrying trade was by the
hostile operations of the French fleet reduced in that year to a mere
simulacrum. But, if we take the return of all trade of foreign
countries with China at the Treaty Ports for the year 1882, the
following statistics will give a fair comparative statement during
a period immediately preceding the commencement of French
operations : —

HK. Taels.

. 145,052,074

The total net value of foreign trade was

The exports amounted to

And the total gross value therefore was

Of which the British dominions contributed

Leaving for other foreign countries ....

Thus accounted for in detail —

HK. Taels.

Next to Great Britain,

The United States of America con-
tributed 11,696,858

The Continent of Europe . . 11,236,276

Japan 6,209,099

Russia 4,962,597

Cochin China 652,474

Siam 464,950

The Philippine Islands .... 268,340

Turkey in Asia, Egypt, and Aden . . 54,911

As above .... 35,750,320

1,789,015

146,841,089

111,090,769

35,750,320

1886 FRANCE, CHINA, AN'D THE VATICAN. 619

Deducting the percentages . /che Chinese flag, and then taking
the average of the percentages -?r foreign flags (as given at p. 27)
under the four headings of (1) Tonnage Employed; (2) Total
Foreign and Coast Trade ; (3) Duties on Cargo ; and (4) Tonnage Dues,
the comparison between foreign flags in the carrying trade from and
to foreign countries and between the ports of China is as follows : —

British . . ,.;? •-< ;,; »• .

i"*fr«-i. 80-46 per cent.

German ....

. 8-34 ,

French . .

. 3-33

Japanese . ''"."'.

. 2-08

,

1-80

Russian ....

. 1-32

'

Danish ....

. . -92 „

Swedish and Norwegian .

. . -61 „

Spanish ....

. . -46 „

Dutch ....

•38

Non-Treaty Powers .

. . -25 „

Italian ....

. . -05 „

100-00

It is thus evident that the stakes held by the other Treaty Powers
and France are so hugely disproportionate, that the former, who
were as neutrals merely spectators, had much to lose and nothing to
gain ; while these conditions were exactly reversed, and France, so
far as trade and material interests connected therewith were concerned,
had a bare 3£ per cent, en jeu.

If such preponderating interests of a material kind do not entitle
neutral States to any consideration for the heavy or incurable injury
they may suffer from the-acts of a quasi-belligerent, it may at least
justify a searching inquiry on the part of the sufferers into the causes
of quarrel, and the pleas either party may advance for liberty to
inflict any amount of loss or damage not only on each other as
principals, but on one or more neutral Powers.

The ostensible cause of a state of continued enmity and irrecon-
cilable antagonism is, no doubt, Religion, and its propagation under
the Roman Catholic Church, coupled with the claim of France to
exercise a protectorate over all missions of that persuasion in China —
persisted in notwithstanding ever-recurrent disturbances and mas-
sacres of missionaries and their converts, by outbreaks of popular
hostility throughout the Empire.

It is evidently all-important, if this common danger is to be
averted, to ascertain the actual fons et origo of such widespread
and continuous hostile feeling, and not only one persistent in its
manifestation, but as a rule, with few exceptions, directed against
the Romish missions in the first instance, under the French pro-
tectorate. Is it religious fanaticism and intolerance in the Chinese
population ? or is there a political and social motive underlying
the whole movement? It is essential that the true answer to

620 THE NINETEENTH! CENTURY. Nov.

these questions should be givenlntecause the same causes, if not
removed, will in all likelihood produce similar effects in the future.
And what these effects have been during the last forty years, since the
gates of China were forced open by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 at
the conclusion of a war with Great Britain, when foreigners of all
nations were for the first time free to trade and reside at five
ports, we have now seen. Riots, popular violence, massacres, and
pillage, in which the Roman Catholic missions and their converts
have in most cases been the objects of attack and the first victims.
Disturbances so serious that they have constituted a real danger to
the maintenance of peace, and in 1856-60 did actually lead to a war
most disastrous and humiliating to the Chinese Government. And
the French cause of quarrel (not the British) was the execution in
the interior of M. Chapdelaine, a French missionary bishop. With
such dire consequences we cannot be surprised if the rulers of China
and the people look upon all missionaries, and those more especially
of the Roman Church under French protection, with profound distrust
and hatred, as the teterrima causa of all their troubles with foreign
Powers and a permanent source of danger and further disasters,
threatening their national independence and security. With this
ever-present menace and source of anxiety preoccupying the minds
of the responsible members of the Government, the Prince of Kung's
parting words to me when I was leaving Peking no doubt expressed
the thought which was uppermost and most constantly present in
his mind : * If only you could relieve us of missionaries and opium,
all might be well ! ' l

For though the Prince coupled the missionary and the opium
questions together, as the two we had most frequently discussed,
there could be no doubt to which of these he attached the greatest
importance. The missionary trouble was constant and urgent. At
any moment some terrible massacre (as that of Tientsin which
occurred a very few months later) might bring a question of peace or
war upon them, as it had already done once. The opium was more
a question of finance and social morality, on which, as an academic
question, there was always much to be said by censors and literati,
who were often themselves consumers of the drug. Not so
the missionary question, which still remains, now as then, with-
out any visible hope of a satisfactory solution — unless, indeed, a
change in the policy of the French Government should take place,
with a corresponding modification in the proceedings of the French
missionaries themselves, as we shall presently see.

1 The opium question, I may say here, received a solution some years later, which
even then I had foreshadowed, by the action of the Chinese themselves, in the more
extensive cultivation of the poppy in their own territories ; and the effect is now
shown by the reduced importation of foreign opium ; China becoming the largest
poppy-growing country in the world, probably.

1886 FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN. 621

II.

The outbreak of popular violence which took place at Tientsin in
June 1870 was characterised by so much barbarity and atrocity that
it called the attention of all the Treaty Powers forcibly to the pre-
carious tenure of their relations with China, and the supreme import-
ance of the missionary question. The attack was on the French
settlement, separated from the British by the whole breadth, of the
city of Tientsin, and on opposite sides of the river. This, in fact,
accounts for the fact that the destruction of buildings and the mas-
sacre of the inmates was in a great degree limited to the one Settle-
ment. The mob, organised beforehand, with leaders exciting them
to destroy and kill, had been presaged some days before by many
threatening notices ; and the French orphanage, cathedral, and con-
sulate were the first destroyed.

After forcing an entrance to the orphanage, they proceeded to
murder all the Sisters in charge (nine), with every kind of brutality,and
to fire the premises, throwing their victims, dying or dead, into the
flames ; and the cathedral and consulate shared the same fate. The
French consul, his chancelier and interpreter, were all killed, and
several members of the French community. Three Eussians — a
merchant, his wife, and clerk — were mistaken for French and
butchered in the streets, and their bodies stripped and thrown into
the river. And, no force being sent to check them in their work of
pillage and murder, they proceeded subsequently to destroy three
Protestant establishments situated in the city. All this to take
place in open day at a Treaty Port the nearest to Peking (not ninety
miles distant, and with a-4arge arsenal not a mile off, where many
Europeans were employed), gave to the event a most sinister aspect.

Much correspondence followed ; money indemnities were paid ;
of the superior officials, the prefect, intendant, and magistrate were
sentenced to penal servitude ; and thirteen of the rioters executed at
the demand of the French Government. Still the question remained
more urgent than ever — What could be done to prevent similar
fearful outbreaks? Eedress for the past was of little value if it
brought no security for the future ; and it was very evident this
was unaccomplished.

And now, while this article is in the press, recent intelligence
has been received of a wholesale massacre of missionaries and their
converts in Cochin China, in which it is reported seven hundred of
the latter were killed and thirty villages burned. And by the same
telegram the news came of a similar outbreak at Ch'ungking, in
Szchuen, a province in China, beginning with an attack on the French
cathedral and residence of the Vicar Apostolic, and extending, as
usual, to all other foreign establishments, and threatening death to
all foreigners. The British and French consular officers, among

622 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

others, barely escaped with their lives, as fortunately did the mission-
aries this time.2

These last proofs of unabated hostility and unchecked violence
in the populations where missionaries have a base of operations and
erect buildings, whether hospitals, churches, or mission-houses, were
scarcely needed to demonstrate how many elements of danger con-
tinue to exist, and the obligation of the Treaty Powers and the
Chinese Government alike to devise some better means of dealing
with the missionary question, and of establishing a less unsatisfactory
and precarious footing for them and for all foreigners in the country.

And the first step towards this object requires more knowledge
of the people and the classes who influence them, — their habits of
thought, their national prejudices and superstitions, and though
last not least, the estimates they have formed of the motives of
foreigners for coming among them, and their claims to respect or
consideration, which are rated very low by all classes, literate and
illiterate, as there is abundant proof.

It will, then, be found that not one, but many causes combine
to move the people to hostile action towards missionaries as a class,
and the * French missions ' (so called by them) more especially.
A general distrust and dislike of foreigners, as such, the common
result of differences of race and creed in all countries, is always pre-
sent; but in this religion has little part. The Chinese educated
class only look upon the superiority claimed for Christianity over
Confucism with supreme contempt. Spiritual questions have no
interest for them ; and the odium theologicum has no part in their
dislike or their scepticism. Buddhism, the only religion very widely
accepted, though of foreign origin as much as Christianity, sits very
lightly on the majority of the Chinese population.

The late Abbe Hue, one of the most talented of the missionaries
* de la Congregation de Saint-Lazare,' after long years devoted to
missionary work in Mongolia and China, bore strong testimony to
this effect. He tells us in his work entitled The Chinese Empire : —

The religious sentiment has vanished from the national mind, the rival doctrines
have lost all authority ; and their partisans, grown sceptical and impious, have
fallen into the abyss of indifferentism, in which they have given each other the
kiss of peace. Religious discussions have entirely ceased, and the whole Chinese
nation has proclaimed this famous formula, with which everybody is satisfied —
San-Kiao-y-Kiao — that is, ' The three Religions are one.' Thus, all the Chinese
are at the same time partisans of Confucius, Laotze, and Buddha — or rather they
are nothing at all.

- The ' eccentric originality of the Protestant missionaries ' in their building was
telegraphed to Rome as the cause of the riot, but the real provocation and immediate
object of attack was the Roman Catholic cathedral, roofed with the yellow tiles
strictly reserved for Imperial use — an offence to the military students, collected in
large numbers for their examination, and the populace. In Annam and Tonquin,
exclusively in French hands, of course there are no Protestant missionaries to be found.

1886 FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN. 623

It was a saying of Dr. Arnold's, that « universal tolerance was
often very much akin to universal indifference ' ; and certainly their
formula of politeness, in which they are apt to close all discussion,
after a panegyric on their neighbour's religion, as the Abbe tells us,
is an edifying commentary on the text, < Religions are many, reason
is one ; we are all brothers ' — which goes far to confirm the correctness
of his conclusion.

But they do believe in tutelar deities, in the duty of ancestral
worship — in these and many other things that we deem superstitions,
such as the Fung Shui, in occult powers and geomantic influences,
and witchcraft. And perhaps we should remember, as Sir Thomas
Wade remarks, that ' after we ourselves had had the Bible a century
and a half, we still continued to condemn witches on charges at once
as horrible and ridiculous' as those laid to the charge of the Sisters
of Charity and to Christians generally.3 And the Jews even at this
day in Christian countries are murdered and pillaged by evil disposed
and fanatic mobs, just as the missionaries and their converts are in
China on similar charges, and with quite as little help or sympathy
from the constituted authorities, civil or military. The Chinese
of all classes believe in the existence of such influences, and the
calamities they may bring upon individuals or communities if offence
is offered them. And partly from fear of this, and partly from anger
and dislike of the foreigner, the populace burn their churches, pillage
their houses, and murder their occupants.

Practical statesmen will not treat these national feelings and
superstitions as M. Jules Ferry was disposed to treat the opposition
he encountered, as ' une quantite negligeablej which later on he
found was both a constantjind a very formidable power, backed by a
spirit of national resistance. It is not wise, and it cannot be safe, to
regard this feeling of hostility to missionary proceedings on the part
of the Chinese with contempt as something that may be met by
force, or left to expend its violence in vain efforts to resist religious
propagandism and foreign influence.

It is in no sectarian spirit, or disposition to invoke any anti-
Gallic feeling, that attention is so pointedly called to all these tragic
and fearful missionary riots, so generally directed against the mis-
sions under special French protection ; but because I regard certain
of the proceedings both of the missionaries and their protectors as
the chief causes of disturbance. Nor is this charge of modern date, or
of Protestant origin. Kang-hi was the liberal patron of Roman mis-
sionaries of all nationalities — French, German, Dutch,, and Italian.
They were well received, and many were employed by him in important
scientific work for the State. And in his reign large and flourishing

3 The kidnapping of children and natives, to take out their eyes and other organs
to use as medicines or for ceremonial rites and sacrifices ; and also cf giving drugs
to bewitch the native victims.

624 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Christian communities grew up in various parts of the Empire. But
before the end of his long reign, we are told, he ceased to regard
them with the same favour. Disturbed by the disputes between the
Dominicans and the Jesuits about ancestral worship, and the resist-
ance of converts under the missionary influence, he issued an edict
in 1718 limiting the freedom previously enjoyed, and restricting the
number of missionaries to those only who had his special permission.
And later, on the representation of his officers that the tendency of
the new religion was to undermine his authority, further steps were
taken. And at this time, Father Kipa tells us, the personal conduct
of the missionaries had much to do with this unfavourable change.
He observes, that

If our missionaries would conduct themselves with less ostentation, and accom-
modate their manners to persons of all ranks and conditions, the number of con-
verts would be enormously increased. Their garments (he goes on to say) are
of the richest materials, they go nowhere on foot, but always in sedans, on horse-
back, or in boats, and with numerous attendants following them.

We might have expected that such warnings would have averted
a precisely similar mistake in like circumstances. At the present
day the missionaries have hardly followed the counsel of their
Master ; for they have neither been wise as serpents nor harm-
less as doves, however devout and well-intentioned they may be.
Over-zeal and bad judgment are often quite as injurious to a good
cause as a lack of virtue or any other defect. And how grievous
an offence it has been to the authorities and the people to see
foreign teachers of a new religion assuming the insignia and distinc-
tive marks of office and Imperial authority, the foreign Powers have
had ample evidence in numerous complaints and grave remon-
strances, as will presently be seen. But the extent to which this
assumption has gone can hardly be realised without reading the
following description from the pen of a French bishop, writing from
a missionary station in the interior, far from any Treaty Port or
consular authority either to control such vagaries or to protect him
and his coadjutors from the consequences. The letter was pub-
lished in the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, dated from the
Mission of Kouy-Tchaou-Ching, and addressed to the Directors of
the Society by Mgr. Faurie, the vicar apostolic at that place. After
describing himself as exercising * the powers of life and death, of
imprisoning and setting free,' and how he moves from place to place
in making a tour through his diocese, with the ceremonies in use
by the mandarins, attended by a retinue that might follow a high
authority, he describes his approach to a town in the following
terms : —

Besides the red parasols consisting of three tiers of shades, the cavalcades and
the cannonades, there was added before my palanquin an escort of three little
children dressed in red and green, and carrying crowns composed of precious

1886 FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN. 625

stones. Here, again, I signalised my arrival by setting free several prisoners who
were confined for offences against our religion.

After this lie informs us that * having arrived at Gran Chouey-
foo, all the chief insignia of authority were placed at the door of the
house, besides cannon announcing the nightly guard,' and * each
time that I left my house or returned three rounds of cannon
announced the fact.' In the interior of the residence ceremony
was not banished, for he adds, ' I always eat alone. The principal
chiefs in full dress stand round the table to serve me, while musi-
cians attend at the door and commence their harmony.' And so
it goes on, with an account which reads more like the text of a
burlesque play than anything else. It is easy to understand how
exasperatingly offensive this must have been to the high authorities,
whose state and official attributes were thus usurped and travestied,
but it is needless to speculate on what the Chinese Government and
its provincial authorities think of such procedures, and what they feel
on the subject. No Treaty Power is ignorant, for a remarkable
document was received by all the foreign representatives at Peking,
some time after the massacre at Tientsin, addressed by the Prince of
Kung and his colleagues at the Tsung-li-Yamen (in charge of foreign
affairs), and on this subject there is the following paragraph : —

In trade there is no cause of serious quarrel between native and foreigner.
But connected with the missionary question there is a vast amount of mischief on
the increase, the fact being that, while propagandism starts with the announce-
ment that its object is the exhortation of people to virtue, Romanism as propagated
in China has the effect of setting the people against it ; and, inasmuch as this is
the result of the unsuitableness of the modus operandi now in vogue, it is essential
that there be devised, without loss_of time, such remedial measures as will bring
things to a satisfactory condition. The missionary question affects the whole
question of peaceful relations wifth foreign Powers — the whole question of their
trade.4

After this preliminary exordium, so earnestly stated, the 'writers
proceed to describe in detail what are the abuses which they con-
ceive are the chief cause of trouble in regard to missionaries :—

As the Minister addressed cannot but be well aware, ill-feeling begins between
them (the missionaries) and the people. In earlier times they say it was not so ;
but since the exchanged ratifications in 1860 the converts have in general not been
of a moral class, and the religion has in consequence become unpopular ; and
the unpopularity is increased by the conduct of the converts, who, relying on
the influence of the missionaries, oppress and take advantage of the common
people (the non-Christians), and yet more by the conduct of the missionaries
themselves, who, when collisions between Christians and the people occur, and the
authorities are engaged in dealing with them, take part with the Christians, and
uphold them in their opposition to the authorities. This undiscriminating en-

* Memorandum of the Tsung-li-Yamen upon the missionary question, circulated
October 9, 1871, among the Foreign Eepresentatives at Peking. Parliamentary
Papers, China, No. 1, 1372, pp. 4-14.

VOL. XX.— No. 117. YY

626 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

listment of proselytes has gone so far that rebels and criminals of China, and such-
like, take refuge in the profession of Christianity, and covered by this position
create disorder. This has deeply dissatisfied the people, and their dissatisfaction
being felt grows into animosity, and their animosity into deadly hostility. The
populations of different localities are not aware that Protestantism and .Romanism
are distinct. They include both under the latter denomination, or under the one
denomination of foreigners, and thus any serious collision that occurs equally com-
promises all foreigners in China. In the provinces doubt and misgiving are certain
to be largely generated. Under such circumstances, how is it possible but there
should be irritation, and that this should show itself in serious outbreaks ? Be it
that the troubles connected with propagandism come of the resentment of the
people, roused at last to wrath, it is not the less a fact that the Christians have
given them cause of exasperation.

The Ministers then go on to state that the hostility of the
people is

particularly roused by the conduct of the Romanist missionaries themselves, who
go beyond all bounds in assuming an attitude of arrogant importance and of
overbearing resistance to the authorities, and in every province interfering at the
offices of the local authorities in lawsuits in which native Christians are con-
cerned [citing in proof many individual instances].

This interference with the jurisdiction of the Chinese authorities
is plainly shown to be one of the most serious'grounds of protest, and
in connexion with it the assumption of official titles — seals or other
insignia of rank and authority in use in China. One case among
others is cited of a missionary in Shantung assuming the title of
* Sinn-fu ' (Governor of a Province.) ' This,' it is observed, ' is not
only encroachment upon the authority of the local officials, but
usurpation of the authority of the Chinese Government,' and it is
asked, ' How is it possible that all these improprieties should not
arouse general indignation ? '

III.

We cannot now feel any doubt that the missionary question is
the main cause of disturbance in our relations with China, and
of danger to the Chinese Government itself no less than to all
foreigners resident in the country, missionaries and laymen alike,
and whatever their nationality — a danger all the more serious that,
as the Prince himself has truly stated, ' the missionary question
affects the whole question of pacific relations with foreign Powers
and the whole question of their trade.' Whether it be desired or
not, a community of danger, if not of interests, does exist, and must
be taken into account in considering by what means the persistent
and ever-increasing hostility of the Chinese of all classes can best be
met, and an ever-present danger averted ; and M. de Lavalette, the
French ambassador in London, when the intelligence arrived of the
attack on the French settlement at Tientsin, based his first com-

1886 FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN. 627

munication to her Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
on the recognition of a solidarite of interests, as well as of dangers,
in the following terms : —

Bien que lea victimes de ces attentats soient presque exclusivement des
Francajs, on ne saurait contester que des faits pareils r^velent 1'existence de
dangers qui menacent indistinctement tous les etrangers r<§sidant en Chine.

Whence he draws the conclusion, so true in fact, but so little regarded
in practice —

C'est en conside'rant leurs interets comine solidaires dans ces contre'es de
1'extreme Orient que les Puissances europeennes peuvent arriver a assurer a leurs
nationaux les garanties et les se'curite's stipules dans les traite's.

From this principle, so promptly and frankly invoked by the French
ambassador in the disaster that had befallen the French settlement,
the question naturally suggests itself, how far, in this missionary
question more particularly, and dominating all others, the relations
of the French Government with China and their independent action
under special conventions can be reconciled with a common interest
and a common policy for their advancement.

This evidently occurred to Lord Granville, for, writing to Lord
Lyons in Paris in reference to the expressed desire of the French
Government for united action, he pointed out, while agreeing in
the community of interests, a certain difficulty in * the different
nature of the treaty provisions as affecting the position of Protest-
ant and Roman Catholic missionaries in China, and that in con-
sequence * there were difficulties in the way of a collective note to the
Chinese Government on the subject.' And this is the first obstacle
to unity of action in all that concerns the Treaty Powers and a
common policy, as a means of defence against the danger that
threatens all. Where the acts of one may, or must of necessity,
bring equal danger on all, divergencies in policy or action are
incompatible with united effort, and therefore fatal to the very
principle of such solidarite as the French Minister invokes. While
sharing unavoidably in a solidarite as regards the danger it
entails, it cannot be invoked to secure safety in practice. To show
this more clearly, we have to inquire what are the divergences in
the treaty provisions of France and England bearing upon the mis-
sionary question. The treaty of Great Britain made in 1842 had
no stipulations about missionaries as such. They had a right of
residence in common with other British subjects at the open ports.
France made her first treaty in 1846, negotiated by M. Lagrene,
without any special provision beyond a stipulation for the toleration
of Christianity and liberty to teach. But M. Lagrene induced
Keying, the Chinese plenipotentiary, to memorialise the Emperor,
and obtained a decree in reply to the effect that ' the religion of the
Lord of Heaven, differing widely from that of the heterodox sects, and

Y Y 2

628 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

the toleration thereof, has been already allowed.' In another paragraph
it goes on : —

Let all the ancient houses throughout the provinces which were built in the
reign of Kang-hi (1661-1772), and have been preserved to the present time, and
which on personal examination by the proper authorities are clearly found to be
their bondjide possessions, be restored to the professors of their religion in their
respective places, excepting only those churches which have been converted into
temples and dwelling-houses for the people.

Without the right of circulation in the interior, however, which
was only acquired by foreign officials, missionaries, or merchants
under the treaties of 1858, the restitution clause of 1846 proved of
little value. But in 1858, after a second war, ending in Chinese
defeat, the four Powers all obtained certain privileges for the mission-
aries of their respective nationalities, and the French in Article VI.
of their Convention a clause confirming the above right to exact
restitution.

To realise the feeling of the people on learning that they were
to be called upon by foreign missionaries to give up property which
for a couple of centuries had passed into Chinese hands, and been
inherited from generation to generation under the laws of the land,
we must try to imagine what would follow in our own country in
similar circumstances.

We must suppose a French army could succeed in entering London
and there dictating the conditions of peace, and among others one
that all the Church property confiscated after the Eeformation by
Henry VIII. should forthwith be restored to the Roman Catholic
Church by the present holders, however acquired, and without com-
pensation, and that the French Government could be appealed to in
order to enforce the rigorous execution of the stipulation. What
would be the result ? Would it be peace and harmony or revolt and
a general insurrection ?

As regards the obnoxious and invidious position of the French
Government, and its action in support of these missionary claims,
some judgment may be formed by the refusal recently to allow the
French cathedral built in the precincts of the palace and overlooking
the Imperial domain to be removed by mutual agreement between
the vicar apostolic of Peking and the Chinese Government, at the
cost of the latter, to a more eligible site. And yet past experience
might show, apart from the equity and fitness of such a measure,
that, in its present offensive position, a gathering of students
leading the populace might at any moment reduce it to ashes
without any power in the French Legation to prevent it, if
happily the missionaries and legations together might escape from
an infuriated mob, not prone to discrimination and no respecter of
persons.

Precisely in the same spirit of contempt for the susceptibilities

1886 FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN. 629

of a great people among whom they have to live, and of the Imperial
authorities, has been the act of roofing with yellow tiles, reserved to
the Emperor's sole use, a church built at Chung King, the scene
and the occasion of the last outrage on the Eoman Catholic
mission, and the rest of the community as a sequence. And how
should it be otherwise with such arrogant and wanton provo-
cations ?

How different has been the policy adopted by the Protestant
Powers in missionary matters could easily be demonstrated if space
would permit. And as regards the British Government more
especially, the instructions sent to their representatives have in-
variably, from the beginning, enjoined on all their missionary sub-
jects ' to abstain with a steady purpose from exciting suspicions, to
conduct their operations with the utmost prudence, and to insist
upon their proselytes not looking upon their conversion to Chris-
tianity as releasing them from their general duties as subjects of
China.' 5

As regards our treaties it is known that Lord Elgin, the nego-
tiator of the Treaty of 1850 and the subsequent Convention of 1860,
had serious doubts as to the expediency of inserting an article upon
the subject of the Christian religion at all. And Sir Thomas
Wade, who was acting as official interpreter at the time, has stated
his belief that it was Lord Elgin's opinion that, while the en-
forcement of treaty stipulations affecting the propagation of
Christianity was offensive to our own feelings and outraging to the
feelings of any other nation which might be compelled to accept
such conditions, the cause of Christianity itself could be advanced
by nothing so little as political support. And from the same autho-
rity we learn that two years later, after the Convention of Peking, a
Eomish father, long resident in the country, in conversation ad-
mitted of his own accord that the personal position of Eomish priests
in China was anything but ameliorated by the support they now
received from the French Government. The comparatively amicable
relations previously existing between the missionaries had been
disturbed. The mandarins and men of the lettered class who had
been formerly friendly stood aloof.6

In reference to the clause of the French Convention of 1860
stipulating for the restitution of Church property, we are left in no
doubt as to the feeling with which it is regarded by the Chinese
Government and people. In the memorandum of Prince Kung,
already cited, the following paragraph conveys this very plainly.
Thus :—

5 See Parliamentary Papers, China, No. 3, 1871, relating to the massacre of
Europeans at Nankin, June 21, 1870.

6 China, No. 5. Correspondence respecting the revision of the Treaties of
Tientsin.

630 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

In the interest of peace it will not do for the missionaries to be demanding
restitution of any chapel they may choose to indicate. During the last few years
the restitution of chapels in every province has been insisted upon without any
regard for the feeling of the masses, the missionaries obstinately persisting in
their claims. They have also pointed out fine handsome houses (belonging to, or
occupied by, the gentry or others) as buildings once used as churches, and these
they have compelled the people to give up. Places even the surrender of which
was a question of dignity improper (probably Yamens are meant), with meeting-
houses, clubs, temples — all such places being held in high respect by the gentry and
people of the whole neighbourhood — they have forced from them for the benefit of
the Church in lieu of other lands or buildings. Buildings which were once used
as chapels have been in some cases sold years ago by Christians ; and, having been
sold and resold by one of the people to another, have passed through the hands of
several proprietors. There is also a large number of buildings which have been
newly repaired at very considerable expense, of which the missionaries have in-
sisted on the restitution, refusing at the same time to pay anything for them. On
the other hand, there are some houses which have become dilapidated, and the
missionaries put in a claim for the necessary repair. Their conduct excites the
indignation of the people whenever they come in contact with each other, and it
becomes impossible for them to live quietly together.

The only wonder would be if they could live quietly together ; for
such proceedings in any other country would lead to insurrections,
if not to a revolution, by a general uprising of the people against
the Grovernment that attempted to enforce such a concession to a
foreign Power, and at its bidding.

IV.

In this evil state of affairs the imperative necessity for measures
that may afford some reasonable hope of improvement, if not a
permanent and effective remedy for the common interest, must be
manifest. In what direction we are to look for a remedy, the
knowledge of the true causes of the hostility of a whole population,
exceeding in numbers and in the area it occupies the whole of
Europe, should suffice to indicate.

The chief cause of the existing hostility and all the mischief it
works in its manifestations in increasing frequency and intensity,
it can hardly be doubted, lies in missionary propagandism ; and
not so much in the attempt to introduce a new religion as in the
procedure adopted by the Eoman Catholic missions, and the in-
gerence of the French Grovernment in the exercise of an assumed
protectorate which has no warrant in treaties.

In this policy, and its effects on the temper and national feeling
of the people, so constantly outraged by the missionaries on the one
hand, and by the intervention of the French authorities in the support
of their pretensions on the other, lies the common danger, because in
this isolated action, in which none of the other Treaty Powers are dis-
posed to join or approve, the solidarite of interests ceases, and is only
exchanged for a community of danger. That is all that remains, if
not in principle, in actual practice. And if this be so, it is no less

1886 FRANCE, CHINA, AND THE VATICAN. 631

plain that without a modification of such policy on the part of one
there is no practical remedy. We hear a good deal of French sus-
ceptibilities, and the respect that should be shown to them. But is
it to be assumed that other nations have no susceptibilities for
which they are entitled to an equal regard from France? The
Chinese are certainly not without theirs, though it has been too
much the habit to treat them with contempt. To what other nation
in the world would such an affront be offered as to build a cathedral
for an alien religion in the precincts of the palace of the reigning
sovereign, and against his protest ?

Nor is there any provision by treaty to justify a claim on the
part of missionaries or foreign Powers for the exemption of proselytes
from the obligations of their natural allegiance and from the juris-
diction of their constituted authorities. Yet such things are done,
not avowedly, but very certainly not the less to the humiliation of
all in authority, and with scandal to the whole population.

We are told it is in the interest of religion ; but if this were the
single object of the protecting Power, or if it was the real object of
French policy in China, it would still be a question whether it could
be advanced by such means. Can other Powers forget — it is
certain the Chinese cannot and will not — that the actual presence
of the French in Annam and Tonquin, and in such close proximity,
can be traced to missionary initiative as far back as the reigns
of Louis XIV. and Louis XVI., who each, at the incitement of
missionary bishops, sent military and naval expeditions and took
possession of ports and territory in Saigon, Siam, and elsewhere ;
while in these later aggressions and annexations to enforce in-
demnities, &c., missionary— ingerence has never been wanting. For
the Chinese to believe that religion, and not a political object,
directs French policy, must be very difficult.

The course followed by the Eepublican Government in France,
in the persecutions and injuries inflicted upon the Catholic Church
within their own country, bears strong evidence of the absence of
any profound regard for its interests or that of the religion it pro-
fesses. So at least many of the French themselves think, and the
four Algerian bishops, in a remonstrance they lately addressed to the
Senate and Chamber, bear similar evidence, when they urge that
' the persecution of Catholicism at home becomes an argument
against the French protectorate of Catholic missions abroad.' M.
Paul Bert, fresh from his expulsion of the clergy from their schools
and churches, with other injurious dealings, would hardly have been
chosen, if they had been consulted, by the Komish missions in
Cochin-China as the protector of their interests and the Catholic
religion.

The protectorate under these circumstances is illusory in a double
sense. It does not protect the missions from' outrages; on the

632 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

contrary, it is the chief cause of hostility ; and it does not advance
religion and the work of the missionaries, but constitutes the greatest
obstacle.

The Pope has no armies or fleets wherewith to threaten war or
attack, but for that reason would be all the more likely to make
his intervention acceptable where Christian communities were con-
cerned ; and a French war dance at the Tsung-li-Yamen is not
calculated to predispose the Chinese Grovernment to encourage
missionary settlements in their midst.

We may remember that M. de Freycinet, in a public speech
lately delivered at Toulouse, told his constituents that the foreign
policy of his Government was to maintain its relations with all
the foreign Powers on a ' footing of mutual consideration ; ' and
an appeal to this principle, and for its application in China, should
not be disregarded to the detriment of all the chief Powers of the
Western world, old and new. They have the strongest claim on
any French Grovernment not to conduct its relations with China
so as inevitably to create a state of popular feeling incompatible
with the maintenance of peaceable intercourse, fatal to the security
of life and property in the country, and threatening ruin to the
commerce and material interests of all other nationalities.

KUTHERFORD ALCOCK.

1886 633

EXHIBITIONS.

THAT the Great 1851 Exhibition should not have realised all the
expectations of its projectors is no great matter for wonder. Few
schemes do realise the expectations of their projectors. Of the sixteen
thousand inventions for which during the last calendar year their
authors sought the protection of a patent, how many will justify the
hopes of their inventors ? Certainly not ten per cent. — probably not
five. Fortunately, however, inventors, projectors, saviours of man-
kind, and all their enthusiastic genus, are blind to the lessons of ex-
perience. They never learn the hard truth that their invention — their
project — is at most one of the wheels of the machine which is to
renovate society — not the machine itself — and that they have done a
good day's work if they have shaped their cogs so deftly that the
wheel will run smoothly when it is fitted to^its place, or that they
are luckier than their fellows if they have found a place for it at all.
Those who invented exhibitions were unduly^sanguine as to the out-
come of their project; but, if they had not been, probably they
would never have invented exhibitions at all, and the world would
have suffered a very decided loss. Enthusiasm is a terrible nuisance,
and enthusiasts are terrible bores, but we should lose a great deal if
the cult were extinguished.

The first World's Fair did not inaugurate a reign of peace. The
modern successors of Trygaeus found that the goddess was not to be
bribed by commercial advantage more easily now than in the days
of Aristophanes. Still, it did its work well for all that. If, like Acts
of Parliament and many other human devices, its energy was
principally effective in directions not wholly foreseen by its pro-
moters, yet it was effective. If it did not cause the swords and
spears to be wrought into plough-shares and reaping-hooks, it led to
the former being drawn by steam instead of by horses, and sub-
stituted reaping-machines for the latter. Its political influence, its
direct effect on the comity of nations, was inconsiderable ; but its
influence on industrial progress, especially on the industrial progress
of England, cannot easily be over-estimated. It gave rise to many
industries of a wholly new character — notably to the entire group
of artistic industries. Of the great industrial firms now at the
head of British trade no small proportion trace, if not their origin,

634 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

certainly their first rise to a leading position to the Exhibition of
1851. But for it we should have had to wait another decade for
the beneficent reform of the Patent Law, which was actually effected
within a twelvemonth of its close, a reform which reduced the cost
of a patent from 2501. to 25£., and swept away the cumbersome
and ridiculous formalities which were almost as great hindrances
as the cost in the way of an inventor anxious to obtain due legal
protection for his ideas. This Act of 1852 worked admirably for
thirty years, and might, with a few of the modifications naturally
suggested by experience, have worked well for another thirty, had not
our legislators found it easier two years ago to pass a merely popular
measure than to consider carefully the points really wanting reform.
But for the Exhibition and its educational effect, Parliament would
certainly never have passed the 1852 Act in its actual shape, and,
if this had been its one solitary result, the labour and money spent
on the Exhibition would have been repaid over and over again.

Coming as it did at a time when the world was full of the new
discoveries of science ; when the railway had just got its web of
lines fairly spread over the country ; when the telegraph was com-
mencing to stretch across the sea as well as over the land ; when
chemistry was meditating the conversion of enormous masses of foul
waste into products of use and beauty, and photography was ceasing
to be a mere scientific curiosity — the Exhibition taught men how
enormous were the powers for their use and benefit which nature
and the knowledge of nature placed at their disposal. Segnius
irritant animos ; the philosophers had preached to men for years
in vain ; but when they opened a big shop and spread out specimens
of their wares for all to see, the people came, saw, wondered, and
went away wiser ; readier, at all events in some degree, to accept
the benefits of science instead of scoffing at them ; inclined, at least
to some extent, to treat the searcher after knowledge with admira-
tion instead of wholly with contempt.

Thus the public were educated to purchase, and the manufacturer
was taught to produce. Those manufacturers who were quick
enough to see this found their advantage in new and extended
markets, so that they soon left behind those of their rivals who
were content with the more ancient methods. To English manu-
facturers the collection of foreign examples was at the time an
almost unmixed benefit. The English stores of coal and iron, then
practically unrivalled, rendered our people careless of competition in
the manufacture on which all other manufactures are based — that of
iron. In the principal textile industry — the spinning and weaving
of cotton — England was first, and there was no second. But in all
trades depending on any branch of the fine arts she had everything
to learn, and, vacua, could chant as loudly as she pleased in the pre-
sence of the foreign copyist, baffled by the absence of material for

1886 EXHIBITIONS. 635

imitation. Our makers learnt much from the foreigners. If the
foreigners got any lessons in return, they were of a sort that could
not be put in practice at once. Later on we found that not one side
only could profit by knowing how the other worked ; at the time
the benefit was all our own.

The inauguration of an age of commercialism may or may not have
been an unmixed blessing ; anyhow, the exhibition inaugurated such
an age. We learnt from it the value of ' applied ' art and ' applied '
science ; and since its time we have always estimated any new
advance in art, any fresh discovery in science, not as an addition to
the sum of human knowledge, but as a means of making human
life in some fashion better or happier than it was. The new method
is not wholly bad any more than it is wholly good. We should now
regard Galileo not as a visionary fanatic, but as a potential bene-
factor of his kind ; instead of locking him up we should lionise him
and get up a company to sell his telescopes. Now this state of
affairs is distinctly more comfortable for Galileo, and it is better,
too, for ourselves.

The first notable results of the Exhibition were its commercial
results. It brought in a lot of business to the shop. This was
plain to other nations. There was, of course, no reason why these
advantages should be left to England alone. France — who, if there
is any credit in the matter, may justly claim the credit of having
invented industrial exhibitions l — soon followed with the Exposition
Universelle of 1855 ; but the considerable financial deficit did little to
encourage other countries. We ourselves may be said to have had a
share in the loss, for the expenditure of the British Commission
was so lavish that it is believed to have caused a determination at
the Treasury never again to allow large sums, and very seldom to
allow any sums at all, to be spent in upholding British credit in
foreign exhibitions. At the close of the ten-year period from
1851 we had our second exhibition. Surrounding circumstances,
however, were unfavourable, and the promoters were only saved from
a deficit by the liberality of the contractors, Messrs. Kelk & Lucas,
who made over to the Commissioners a very large sum of money in
order to prevent a call upon the guarantors. Great international
exhibitions were also held at Vienna in 1873, at Philadelphia in
1876, and in Paris in 1878. Sydney (1879), Melbourne (1880), and
Calcutta (1883) have also held international exhibitions, but not on
quite so large a scale.

1 The first National Exhibition appears to have been held in Paris in 1798. It
was succeeded by many others, in France and elsewhere. In England the Society of
Arts commenced to hold small exhibitions of British arts and manufactures in 1846,
and from these started the idea of the 1851 Exhibition. The French had discussed
and discarded the idea of making their national exhibitions international, but when
the question was submitted for decision to the Prince Consort he at once decided that
the ' industries of all nations ' should be included.

636 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

When the second period of ten years from 1851 was approaching
its close, the question of holding a third great exhibition in London
came up for consideration. The proposal, however, was soon decided
to be impracticable. The narrow escape from financial failure in
1862 rendered the successful raising of a guarantee fund proble-
matical. It was doubtful how far manufacturers, tired of spending
money on foreign exhibitions, and with their thirst for medals
assuaged, if not entirely satiated, would support a large scheme.
Under these circumstances Mr. Cole, ever fruitful of resource and
ready with suggestion, came forward with a proposal for a series of
annual exhibitions to extend over a period of ten years. Each exhi-
bition was to deal with certain industries or arts, and a scheme
was drafted, allotting to each one its share of the work. The Com-
missioners of 1851 guaranteed 100,000£. ; the remaining buildings
from the 1862 exhibition2 were assigned for the purposes of the
scheme; and in 1871 the first of the series was opened with
much pomp and ceremony. It was not wholly unsuccessful. At all
events it paid its way. Its successors were less fortunate ; each was
a heavier loss than the one before it; and in 1874 the series was
brought to an end, after the fourth had been held.

It has often been asked, now that a series of special exhibitions
has been so successfully carried out, how it was that a similar experi-
ment in 1871 was so dismal a failure. The reasons are simple enough.
The building was unsuitable. It was practically one enormous
passage, running round a central square garden. Visitors were sick
of its interminable length before they had got half round it ; it was
by no means well adapted for the exhibition of goods ; there was no
main building or central hall ; and as for any general coup cToeil, it was
out of the question. Then the Exhibition authorities and the Horti-
cultural Society got to loggerheads, and in the later exhibitions the
gardens were absolutely closed to the visitors to the Exhibition.
Finally, the administration was not all that could have been desired.
Nothing so soon strangles an exhibition as red tape, and the place was
managed as if it were a Government department. There was a good
deal of military routine and an utter absence of that suave geniality
which we have got of late years to associate with the management of
exhibitions. Mr. Cole, one of the ablest and most powerful men of his
generation, a wonderful organiser, and (with some deficiencies) a most
capable administrator, was not popular, and seemed never to know what
the public would like ; perhaps he never greatly cared. He generally
had his way, bending to his will all with whom he had to deal ; but
he got his way by bearing down opposition in a fashion which by no

2 Certain of these buildings were of a permanent character. They include the
arcades of the Horticultural Gardens, and generally the buildings surrounding the
Gardens on the east, west, and south sides, now used for the most part for housing
certain of the South Kensington Museum collections.

1886 EXHIBITIONS. 637

means endeared him to those whose opinions he overrode. Every-
body who has an honest liking for a strong man must admire and
respect Henry Cole. He always knew what he wanted, and he
generally got it. Nothing stopped him. He carried out his views
with the most absolute disregard for the abuse and contumely
which was poured upon him by his enemies. No criticism, no
ridicule, made him swerve for an instant from the line he chose to
take. He would collect and show to his friends the most bitter
caricatures of himself and his associates, and was pleased, when a
savage onslaught was made on him by a newspaper, at the attention
thereby drawn to his proposals. He was absolutely fearless, a terror
to his superiors, but respected, and for the most part liked, by his
subordinates. But he was not a good man to reconcile- conflicting
interests, or to pacify discontented exhibitors. Here, probably, was
the principal reason why the excellent series of exhibitions which
he proposed did not prosper under his management.

The failure of this scheme was thought to have put a stop to
exhibitions in this country, at all events for a long time. In other
countries they were held with success, and English manufacturers
found it worth their while to contribute. Here they were by many
people said to be dead. Their multiplication is not popular with
manufacturers. The man who has made his reputation is quite con-
tent to let matters rest, and until there has grown up a sufficient
number of rivals who would like to make their reputations too, his
natural objection to exhibitions meets with no opponents. The
enormous and unwieldy size of a universal exhibition was an ob-
jection, the force of which was felt more and more with each suc-
ceeding show. It was evident that if exhibitions were to be held at
all they must be limited in scope, and, despite the failure of the
1871 series, Mr. Cole's ideas were far from being dead. How suc-
cessful a special exhibition might be was indeed shown by the
Manchester Fine Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857, an experiment
which has since remained unrivalled, though an attempt has been
made to imitate it in the not very successful collection at Folkestone
this year.

Putting this aside, we may reckon the Loan Collection of
scientific apparatus shown in 1876 at South Kensington as the first
special exhibition of importance. As nothing of the sort is perfect,
opportunities for criticism were not wanting. The expenditure was
somewhat lavish ; the arrangement and cataloguing left something to
be desired. Unfortunately it happened that some of the more active
promoters were the objects of bitter personal hostility to the members
of another class of scientific men, and, as some of these latter had
great influence in the press, the exhibition came in for a good deal
of abuse really intended for its organisers. The class to which it
appealed, the class of scientific students, was a small one, and no

638 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

attempt was made to attract the general public. A few years later,
in the early days of the telephone and the electric light, it would
have been as popular among sightseers as it was valued among
scientific men. As it was the public did not care for it, and the
students of science were not numerous enough to support it.

That the Loan Collection was a little before its time was proved
by the success of the special Electrical Exhibitions in Paris (1881),
Vienna (1883), and Philadelphia (1884). These were of a strictly
scientific character, but they dealt with a subject which was popular
for the moment, and so they attracted that attention from the
general public without which no enterprise of the sort can possibly
prosper.

Another example of an exhibition dealing with a special subject
was the Smoke Abatement Exhibition of 1882. This was practically
a private speculation, and is understood to have cost its public-
spirited promoters a good deal of money. It certainly did much in
educating the public as to the best and most economical methods of
using fuel, and a very distinct improvement in our grates and ranges
may be traced to it.

The origin of the magnificent series of exhibitions now just
brought to a close at South Kensington is interesting, and affords a
good illustration of the difficulty of forecasting the issue of such
enterprises. The holding of several successful fishery exhibitions in
Germany and France induced some gentlemen to start a similar ex-
hibition at Norwich. The success of this attempt suggested a
repetition of the exhibition on a larger scale in London. At first the
thing hung fire for a bit, as such schemes will, but it was taken up
by the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, influential
support was found for it, and the proposal became popular. A start
was made ; the enterprise grew bigger and bigger until it got to be
a little too big for amateur hands. The assistance of Sir Philip
Cunliffe-Owen was called in, and his long experience of such affairs
soon enabled the Fisheries Exhibition to be organised on a scale far
beyond the original intentions of its promoters. He was ably sup-
ported by those who had started the idea, and some of them not
only gave their time and their labour, but took upon themselves the
heavy pecuniary risks involved in an enterprise of such magnitude.
The Prince of Wales, besides lending his influence, gave the benefit
of his advice and his special knowledge of exhibitions. Popular
tastes were consulted to an extent never before attempted at any
exhibition, and provision made for the amusement, as well as the
instruction, of visitors. The best part of the Horticultural Gardens
was given up for promenaders, bands were provided, and of an
evening the garden was illuminated. Success was complete. London
had got what it had long wanted — an outdoor lounge at once
pleasant and respectable ; Vauxhall or Cremorne without the doubtful

1886 EXHIBITIONS. 639

characteristics of either. Everything went well, and the result was
a considerable financial surplus.

So successful an experiment could not fail to be repeated. The
Prince of Wales was now thoroughly interested, and, after due con-
sideration, he announced a series of three exhibitions to be held
under his direction. Carried out on the lines of the Fisheries, the
Health, Inventions, and Colonial and Indian Exhibitions have been
each in its own way an advance upon its predecessor. The Health
made a surplus, after paying its expenses. The Inventions — more
costly in arrangement and maintenance — after using up the balance
from the Health, left certain liabilities to be discharged by the
Colonies. Together, the three will doubtless turn out to have paid
their way.3 That those who are responsible for the management should
feel anxious for the financial solvency of their organisation is but
natural ; but, considering what these three exhibitions have done for
Londoners — to say nothing of others than Londoners — the opinion
may fairly be expressed that it does not matter a pin whether they
result in a moderate deficit or a large surplus. In any other country
the balance would be paid by the Government as a matter of course.
Here we administer by purely private enterprise a concern the
revenue of which is 100,000£. per annum. That is about what an
exhibition costs. Carefully managed, there may be a surplus of
5,OOOZ. — five per cent. Treat the public a little more liberally, give
them a little more for their money, and the surplus is gone. The.
proper object of the managers of an exhibition should be — and the
object of the managers of these exhibitions has been — not to make
a profit, but to dispense all their income without getting into debt ;
to sail as near the wind as possible. This ought to be understood ;
and if the guarantors should be called upon to pay up — say five to
ten per cent, of the guarantee — they ought not, and they probably
would not, grumble at the notion. For this series of exhibitions has
been a real gain to London. It has provided a cheap, harmless, and
pleasant source of recreation to many thousands.4 It has formed a

3 The surplus of the Fisheries (amounting to 15,OOOZ.) was devoted to the esta-
blishment of a Home for Fishermen's Orphans. The finances of the other three exhi-
bitions were so far treated in common that the profits of any of them were arranged
to be available against the losses of any other. The ill-natured statements occasion-
ally made as to misappropriations of funds are pure invention, though it may per-
haps be a matter for regret that the publication of the accounts of each exhibition
has been delayed till the conclusion of the series. There is no reason to suppose that
such separate publication would have caused any confusion or inconvenience, and
it would have prevented a good deal of rather spiteful criticism.

4 The total number of visitors to the whole of the series may be taken as fifteen
and a half millions. It is not possible to judge how many individuals this means.
The same person paying ten visits counts of course as ten. It was calculated at one
of the exhibitions that each season-ticket holder went on an average twenty-five
times. A very large proportion can only have paid a single visit. Supposing that on
an average everybody who went to any of the exhibitions at all went twice to each, we
should get a total of nearly two million individuals who had been amused and in-
structed.

640 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

source of valuable instruction at all events to a portion of the vast
crowds who have visited South Kensington since 1883. It has
promoted trade to a considerable extent, and by the last of the four
exhibitions it has done not a little towards strengthening the feelings
of good-fellowship and kindness existing between the mother-country
and her colonies.

Naturally there is something to be said on the other side. The
tradesmen of London appear to have a genuine cause of complaint
in the introduction into their midst of an enormous bazaar, full of
shops whose tenants have their rents and taxes paid for them, and
who consequently can afford to sell at a cheaper rate. The providers
of public amusements grumble because their houses are emptied by
the cheaper and more novel attractions of South Kensington. As
regards the last class, it is surely a sufficient answer to say that they
must put up with legitimate competition, and that, if they want to
get hold of the public's shillings, they must find out some means of
enticing the public back from the Circe's garden at Brompton to the
joys of the legitimate drama and the elevating pleasures of the
music-hall.

The tradesmen have more reason in their wail. The class affected
would not appear to be a very large one, since, after all, the main
necessaries of life were not provided in Old London, even when the
mediaeval character of that interesting thoroughfare was completed
by the introduction of sweet-stuff shops and stalls for the sale of
photographs. Nor can even the competition of the ' Colonial
Market ' seriously injure the revenues of the West-End butchers and
greengrocers. Still, the grievance is a legitimate one, and it is also
for the most part unnecessary. It is not of the essence of an exhi-
bition that it should be a bazaar. The executive has always sufficient
power to prevent sales if they like to exercise it. When, indeed, the
exhibition is ' international,' there is a divided authority, and diffi-
culties arise. The earlier exhibitions of the present series were, at
all events, in name international, and it is not too much to say that
the sale difficulty was mainly due to this fact. The foreign Com-
missioners, naturally anxious to fill up their courts, did not in all
cases very scrupulously investigate the claims of applicants for space,
and so many English firms got in under the shelter of a foreign
name. These people, having been put to trouble and expense in
acquiring their rights, naturally tried to recoup themselves, and
were the most persistent sellers in the show. They were protected
by the aegis of their adopted country, and the dread of international
complications prevented their being so readily disposed of as other-
wise they might have been. There were also the authorised stalls
in Old London, and the ' markets ' of the Fisheries and the Colonies.
For the existence of the stalls there was not much reason. They
brought no profit to the executive and no credit to the Exhibition.

1886 EXHIBITIONS. 641

The Fisheries market was an attempt to improve the conditions
under which an important article of food is supplied to London, and
the Colonial market is intended to bring directly to the knowledge
of consumers the food supplies of our Colonies. There is, indeed,
one class of goods which almost of necessity must be sold within
an Exhibition. When a firm undertakes to illustrate a process of
manufacture, it is a common stipulation that the articles made, if
suitable, are to be allowed to be sold. This is a reasonable plea ;
and so long as the privilege is exercised in a reasonable fashion, it
should always be allowed. Perhaps it might be well in future to
safeguard it by requiring that a special permit, liable to revocation,
should be obtained in such cases as the executive thought necessary,
and that without it no sales, even of articles made in the Exhibition,
would be allowed.

On the whole, it will, perhaps, be admitted that the grievance of
the tradesmen is not a very heavy one ; but that it is a pity that it
was not, as it might have been, reduced within such narrow limits
as to have made it quite inconsiderable.

An exhibition is, of course, an enormous advertising agency, and
to say this is not in the faintest degree to disparage the exhibition
system. Traders and customers are brought together in a perfectly
legitimate and useful manner. The customer can see for himself
the best wares the manufacturer can produce, and the manufacturer
has the opportunity of discovering which of his products attract
the most notice and the highest praise. But in order to rencler
the advertisement permanent, it is desirable to give the successful
exhibitor some testimony of his success. In other words, a system,
of prizes is necessary. To_decide what should be the character of
these prizes, and to award them fairly, has been the greatest
difficulty in all large exhibitions. In 1851 it was first proposed to
offer prizes of great value. A first prize of 5,0001. was even talked
about. Eventually, however, prizes of three grades were decided
upon — the council medal, the prize medal, and the honourable
mention. To make these awards, a jury system was elaborated
which certainly has not been since improved. The most competent
men in the country, aided by foreign nominees selected with equal
care, gave a vast amount of time to the careful inspection of all the
miscellaneous collection, and produced a prize-list as little liable to
cavil as such a list could be. Of course there were jealousies,
international and other. Of course there were disappointments and
mistakes. The former were in the nature of the case inevitable ;
the latter were not numerous.

With the growth of exhibitions the inherent difficulties in-
creased. First, the value of the medals, their actual trade value,
proved to be very high, probably much higher than was anticipated.
It might have been thought that at the present time their value
VOL. XX.— No. 117. Z Z

642 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

would have been discounted, considering the great number that have
been distributed and the doubtful manner in which some of them
have been obtained. But it is not so. At the Inventions Exhibition
last year, the competition was as keen, the anxiety amongst makers
of the highest standing was as great, as ever. New firms are
anxious to get on a level with, or ahead of, their rivals of established
reputation, and old firms, who would have been content enough to
have let well alone without any exhibition at all, 'are afraid of their
rivals being able to say they are surpassed and beaten at last.
* This means a difference of hundreds a week to my firm ' is a remark
that has been made more than once in the case of a disputed
award.

With such large pecuniary interests depending on the decisions of
the juries, it would be idle to assume that the difficulties of selection
are not very gravely enhanced. The jurors must not only be pains-
taking and honest, but they must be in position and in reputation
quite above suspicion. When it is remembered that a juror is
expected to devote a good many hours, or rather days, to laborious
and unpaid work ; that he is certain to incur the enmity of a con-
siderable portion of the disappointed; that he will be accused of
unfairness, carelessness, ignorance, and malice, at all events by a
smaller portion of the same class ; and that he has for his reward only
the consciousness of merit fortunately attendant on any completed
task — it is no small testimony to the amount of public spirit existing
in the world that so many men are ready to undertake the work.
For it is to be borne in mind that almost nobody concerned can be
satisfied. If there are, say, three classes of medals — gold, silver, and
"bronze — it is certain that nobody will be quite content who has not
a gold medal. Then, even the man with a gold medal is dissatisfied
if his rival has one, too; while even the single holder of a gold
medal in his own class has been known to urge that the several
classes of articles shown by him were of such separate and distinct
natures that they required the recognition of a separate medal
for each.

Thus at the commencement of the work the difficulty arises of
finding suitable jurors — men not only competent for the work, but
likely to be tolerably acceptable to the exhibitors — and of inducing
them to undertake the duties. In two of the present series of exhi-
bitions— the Health and the Inventions Exhibitions — the device was
adopted of asking each exhibitor to nominate three persons, in the
hope that at all events a list would be provided from which a proper
selection might be made, and with the idea also that the exhibitors
would be less ready to find fault if the awards were made by their
own nominees. In practice the plan met with but moderate success.
In the Health Exhibition, a few well-known sanitarians received a large
number of votes, and these would certainly all have been asked to serve

1886 EXHIBITIONS. G43

in any event. Most of the other names suggested had but one or two
votes apiece ; a few had three. All who had more than three votes,
unless they were considered unsuitable, were invited to serve. Many
of them declined, and in the end a large proportion of the juries had
to be made up without much reference to the suggestions. In the
Inventions the nominations were even less valuable. The nominations
of the exhibitors were too varied to be of much service. In both
exhibitions it was evident that many exhibitors merely suggested
some one likely to take a favourable view of their own wares, and
were more anxious to secure a friend at court than to aid in the
selection of an unbiassed jury. In a few cases it was ascertained that
some exhibitors had agreed to nominate the same person, and had
selected gentlemen whose qualifications did not appear very striking
to others than their proposers. On the whole, the system of
universal suffrage disappointed its projectors. It was very little
help ; and, if it prevented objections being taken to the jurors
selected, that is as much as can be said for it. It must be borne in
mind that the experiment was tried with absolute honesty, and that
the Commissioners who in both exhibitions selected the jurors would
have been extremely pleased if their task had been rendered easier
by a sufficient consensus of opinion as to the best appointments.
When foreign jurors are to be appointed, the appointment naturally
rests with the country exhibiting. The central executive is there-
fore relieved of a part of the responsibility, though difficulties of a
different sort are plentiful enough. The alien juror naturally
feels that his first duty is to his own fellow-countrymen, and,
with every wish to be honest, he is naturally more appreciative of
their merits, and possesses a keener sense of their deserts. If
representatives of firms exhibiting are not considered to be eligible,
the choice is still further limited. Generally they have been con-
sidered free to serve, their exhibits being placed hors concours,
Probably from the use of a foreign tongue, this has always been
considered a distinction quite equivalent to a gold medal, and was
therefore much sought after. At the Inventions a rule was laid
down that no exhibitor should act on a jury ; but there was probably
little advantage in the alteration, and it was found to work incon-
veniently by excluding the services of several competent and willing
jurors.

The juries once appointed, it becomes necessary to make
arrangements to ensure that the whole miscellaneous mass of contri-
butions is properly inspected, and by the proper men. This is a
very troublesome and very difficult task, but it is only a matter of
minute and careful organisation. If the original classification of the
goods has been carefully prepared, the work is much simplified, and
with the experience of so many previous exhibitions as a guide there
is not now any real difficulty in preparing a proper classification.

z z 2

644 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Of course anomalies will be discovered, generally too late for remedy.
The inventor of a meat-tin opener, which has been condemned by
a jury of culinary experts, points out that a special application of
his instrument is for drawing teeth, and complains that he has been
unvisited by the judges of surgical apparatus. A new patent horse-
shoe is discovered as part of a collection of ornamental iron-work —
und so welter ; but, after all, care and attention suffice to prevent
such mishaps.

But after all comes the real hardship to those who are honestly
endeavouring to carry out the work in a satisfactory fashion, whether
as jurymen or as organisers and directors. They know that, try as
hard as they may, they cannot make absolutely just awards, they
cannot fairly discriminate between the merits of the different com-
peting articles. How can a mere inspection enable the cleverest
engineer to decide which of two steam engines, each possessing
special and untried features of novelty, is the best ? Or two looms,
or two reaping-machines, or two dynamos ? He can only go by his
own experience, or by what he has heard of the outside performances
of the machines. A proper series of experimental tests, spread over
the whole of the articles shown, would take years of time and cost
thousands of pounds. And so the awards have to be made in a more
or less hap-hazard way. Generally a rough and ready justice, like
that of the Eastern cadi of fiction, is done, but many cases of hard-
ship occur, and it is the knowledge of this that renders the work of
the juries so unsatisfactory to those who enter upon it with a real
anxiety to carry it out fairly and well. If the jury awards were esti-
mated at their true value, as guaranteeing a certain standard of
excellence, as expressing a favourable opinion given under qualifying
conditions, it would not matter so much ; but as it is, they are, natu-
rally enough, put forward by their winners as testimony of supreme
excellence, and it would appear that the public accept them as
such.

Several times attempts have been made to base the awards upon
actual tests. In 1874 the Society of Arts undertook an elaborate series
of tests of the stoves shown in the exhibition of that year. The tests
attempted were too elaborate and minute ; before they were com-
pleted the money allotted for the purpose was all spent, and the
attempt was abandoned. The authorities of the Smoke Abatement
Exhibition in 1882 profited by their predecessors' experience, and
carried to a conclusion the tests on which they based their awards.
But the value of the tests has often been disputed, and it is doubtful
how far their results had any correspondence with the results which
would have been obtained by longer trials in ordinary practice.
These, however, were trials of a single class of inventions only, and
no conclusions could well be drawn from them as to the application
of practical tests to the contents of a miscellaneous exhibition. The

1886 EXHIBITIONS. 645

Eoyal Agricultural Society have shown before now the value of
careful and accurate testing of motors and machines capable of
actual trial, and they could also testify how costly and how carefully
conducted such trials must be if they are to be of actual use.

It will be allowed, therefore, that the honest discharge of jury
work is beset with difficulties. And all the work is not honest.
Illegitimate influence of every sort is but too often brought to bear
on all who have it in their power to advance the claims of some of
the competitors. I believe that in the great exhibitions such
influences have rarely had much success, but in those of the second
class favouritism, to use no stronger term, has been far too common.
This part of the subject is not pleasant. Let it suffice to say that,
if the public will regard with suspicion — or rather treat as of no
value — any awards but those made at exhibitions under the highest
authority, no great injustice will be done to anybody.

It is very possible that the multiplication of prize medals, and the
doubtful value of any but those of the highest class, may before very
long put an end to the system, though from what has been said
above it may be judged that there are not at present many signs of
such a tendency. Some there are. Many firms decline to exhibit,
and are not to be tempted by such baits. The chances are that they
are losers. Medals apart, the profits gained by exhibitors from
increased trade are generally considerable. Any exhibitor who can
make and sell articles — especially articles of food — will drive a
roaring trade. Even manufacturers of heavy goods are tolerably
certain to cover their expenses, unless these expenses are on a very
lavish scale indeed.

The future of exhibitions, at all events in this country, cannot
fail to be very greatly affected by the foundation of the Imperial
Institute suggested by the Prince of Wales, since, whatever may
be the eventual nature of the Institute, it is certain to fulfil, at all
events in great part, the functions of an exhibition. The precise
character of the Institute is not yet known. If it is to take the
high place among English institutions which is evidently intended
by its royal founder, this much may safely be said — that it
must be permitted to develop itself gradually, to attain completion
by a certain process of evolution. Experience does not teach us to
expect success for institutions, however promisingly conceived, which
are launched complete into existence. Gradual growth would appear
to be an almost necessary condition of permanence in the political
as in the physical world.

The ablest councils and the fullest experience are at the command
of its founder, and it cannot be doubted that the constitution for the
new Institute will be drafted in the wisest, the most judicious manner
possible. May it be permitted to express a hope that it will not be
too complete, that it will be to the utmost possible extent elastic,

646 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

that it will permit of growth in every imaginable direction, and even
in directions not now imaginable ? Not the wisest of us can fore-
cast the future development of any human institution. Is it not
therefore well to leave the influences of the future, untrammelled by
restrictions now apparently desirable, but perhaps unfitted to the
changed conditions of half a generation onward, to mould that
development for itself ? To give examples of institutions that have
profited by freedom or suffered by restrictive conditions would be a
task not less easy than invidious. Perhaps the moral may be
accepted without the need for an instance, and may serve as a
contribution to the discussion from the opposite side to that of those
who ask that a fully completed scheme may be submitted before their
adhesion to a large and liberal project is to be expected.

The object of the Institute is defined with perfect clearness in
the letter addressed to the Lord Mayor, in which his Royal Highness
gave publicity to his proposal : the encouragement of the arts,
manufactures, and commerce of the Empire. The means by which
this end is to be attained is the question. Some suggest themselves
obviously enough. Of these, the first is a Museum or collection of
Colonial and Indian products. The proposal for a Colonial Museum
has several times been put forward, and could not fail to suggest
itself as the outcome of the magnificent collection now at South
Kensington. From the British Museum at one end of the list to the
International Exhibition at the other end, there are many grades.
What precise place should be occupied by the Imperial Institute is
a matter which has been a good deal discussed, and will be discussed
a good deal more. Those who would yield something to the popular
demand for a place of amusement might fairly urge that the gardens
at Kew detract nothing from the value of the botanical collections
there, or those of the Luxembourg from the character of the adjoin-
ing galleries. However, be this as it may, it may fairly be assumed
that part ot the Institute will consist of a Colonial Museum, in
which the natural products, the physical characteristics, the arts
and the manufactures of the Colonies will be fully represented. If
it be found possible to relegate specimens of purely scientific value
to their places in such collections as the Natural History Museum,
Kew Gardens, or the Museum of the Pharmaceutical Society, the
purposes of the scientific student will be better served, without
the value of the general Colonial collection being greatly lessened.

As regards the discussion of Colonial matters, whether political,
commercial, or scientific, doubts must suggest themselves whether
it will be found practicable to carry on in what will really be a State
institution such full and free controversy as alone can be of value.
Possibly on investigation it may be found best to leave this
work in the hands of private, and therefore independent, bodies.
To the provision of popular lectures, of a character to diffuse useful

1886 EXHIBITIONS. 647

information about the Colonies throughout the country, no such
exception can be taken, and if such lectures could be delivered
in the courts of the museum amongst the objects to which they
would relate, it would be so much the better. Means for the exami-
nation and analysis of colonial produce ; an organisation for the
introduction of all such produce to the English market ; a system
for informing the English buyer what the colonist has to sell, and
for teaching the colonist what the English trader desires to buy ; a
central office where information could be procurable by would-be
emigrants — these and such objects suggest themselves among the
first for consideration in elaborating a scheme for the new insti-
tution.

If in the fulness of years its success and wealth justify its exten-
sion, so that it may include the mother-country as well as her
dependencies, and become a great trade museum for the illustration
of the arts, manufactures, and commerce of the whole Empire, the
new Institute will fulfil a worthier function still.

Such a development cannot be expected even in the immediate
future, perhaps never. In the meantime it only remains to hope
that the utmost care and thought will be devoted to the elabora-
tion of a constitution for the Institute. Wisely established and
prudently administered, it ought to be a fresh source of strength to
the Union. Hastily set up, and managed without the greatest
judgment, the very importance of the foundation could not fail to
make it a most potent instrument for mischief.

H. TRUEMAN WOOD.

(Secretary to the Society of Arts

648 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY.

"Otrffov 7' d\\o?o( /AfTftyw, r6ffov &p fftpiffiv alfl
Kal ri typoveiv oAAo?o -ira.piffTa.ro.

EMPEDOCLES.

I PURPOSE in this paper briefly to suggest certain topics for reflection,
topics which will need to be more fully worked out elsewhere. My
theme is the multiplex and mutable character of that which we know
as the Personality of man, and the practical advantage which we
may gain by discerning and working upon this as yet unrecognised
modifiability. I shall begin by citing a few examples of hysterical
transfer, of morbid disintegration ; I shall then show that these spon-
taneous readjustments of man's being are not all of them pathological
or retrogressive ; nay, that the familiar changes of sleep and waking
contain the hint of further alternations which may be beneficially
acquired. And, lastly, I shall point out that we can already by
artificial means induce and regulate some central nervous changes
which effect physical and moral good ; changes which may be more
restorative than sleep, more rapid than education. Here, I shall
urge, is an avenue open at once to scientific and to philanthropic
endeavour, a hope which hangs neither on fable nor on fancy, but is
based on actual experience and consists with rational conceptions of
the genesis and evolution of man.

I begin, then, with one or two examples of the pitch to which
the dissociation of memories, faculties, sensibilities may be carried,
without resulting in mere insane chaos, mere demented oblivion.
These cases as yet are few in number. It is only of late years — and
it is mainly in France — that savants have recorded with due care
those psychical lessons, deeper than any art of our own can teach us,
which natural anomalies and aberrant instances afford.

Pre-eminent among the priceless living documents which nature
thus offers to our study stand the singular personages known as
Louis V. and Felida X. Felida's name at least is probably familiar
to most of my readers; but Louis V.'s case is little known, and
although some account of it has already been given in English,1 it
will be needful to recall certain particulars in order to introduce the
speculations which follow.

1 Journal of Mental Science for January 1886. Proceedings of the Society for
Psychical Research, part x. 1886 (Triibner & Co.).

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 649

Louis V. began life (in 1863) as the neglected child of a
turbulent mother. He was sent to a reformatory at ten years old,
and there showed himself, as he has always done when his organisa-
tion has given him a chance, quiet, well-behaved, and obedient.
Then at fourteen years old he had a great fright from a viper — a
fright which threw him off his balance and started the series of
psychical oscillations on which he has been tossed ever since. At
first the symptoms were only physical, epilepsy and hysterical paralysis
of the legs ; and at the asylum of Bonneval, whither he was next
sent, he worked at tailoring steadily for a couple of months. Then
suddenly he had a hystero- epileptic attack — fifty hours of convulsions
and ecstasy — and when he awoke from it he was no longer paralysed,
no longer acquainted with tailoring, and no longer virtuous. His
memory was set back, so to say, to the moment of the viper's appear-
ance, and he could remember nothing since. His character had
become violent, greedy, and quarrelsome, and his tastes were radically
changed. For instance, though he had before the attack been a
total abstainer, he now not only drank his own wine but stole the
wine of the other patients. He escaped from Bonneval, and after a
few turbulent years, tracked by his occasional relapses into hospital
or madhouse, he turned up once more at the Eochefort asylum in
the character of a private of marines, convicted of theft but con-
sidered to be of unsound mind. And at Eochefort and La Eochelle,
by great good fortune, he fell into the hands of three physicians —
Professors Bourm and Burot, and Dr. Mabille — able and willing to
continue and extend the observations which Dr. Camuset at Bonneval
and Dr. Jules Voisin at Bicetre had already made on this most
precious of mauvais sujets_at earlier points in his chequered career.2

He is now no longer at Eochefort, and Dr. Burot informs me that
his health has much improved, and that his peculiarities have in
great part disappeared. I must, however, for clearness' sake, use the
present tense in briefly describing his condition at the time when
the long series of experiments were made.

The state into which he has gravitated is a very unpleasing one.
There is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and (as is often
the case in right hemiplegia) the speech is indistinct and difficult.
Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to
him, abusing his physicians, or preaching, with a monkey-like impu-
dence rather than with reasoned clearness, radicalism in politics and
atheism in religion. He makes bad jokes, and if any one pleases
him he endeavours to caress him. He remembers recent events

2 For Dr. Camusct's account see Annalcs Hfcdico-PyscJiologiqvcs, 1882, p. 75 ; for
Dr. Voisin's, Archives de Nevrologie, Sept. 1885. The observations at Kochefort have
been carefully recorded by Dr. Berjon, La Grande Hysterie chez VHomnie, Paris, 1886.
The subject was again discussed at the recent meeting (Nancy, Aug. 1886) of the
French Association for the Advancement of Science, when Professor Burot promised
a longer treatise on the subject.

650 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

during his residence at the Rochefort asylum, but only two scraps of
his life before that date — namely, his vicious period at Bonneval and
a part of his stay at Bicetre.

Except this strangely fragmentary memory there is nothing very
unusual in this condition, and in many asylums no experiments on it
would have been attempted. Fortunately the physicians of Roche-
fort were familiar with the efficacy of the contact of metals in
provoking transfer of hysterical hemiplegia from one side to the
other. They tried various metals in turn on Louis V. Lead, silver,
and zinc had no effect. Copper produced a slight return of sensi-
bility in the paralysed arm. But steel, applied to the right arm,
transferred the whole insensibility to the left side of the body.

Inexplicable as such a phenomenon certainly is, it is sufficiently
common (as French physicians hold) in hysterical cases to excite
little surprise. What puzzled the doctors was the change of
character which accompanied the change of sensibility. When
Louis V. issued from the crisis of transfer, with its minute of
anxious expression and panting breath, he was what might fairly be
called a new man. The restless insolence, the savage impulsiveness,
have wholly disappeared. The patient is now gentle, respectful, and
modest. He can speak clearly now, but he only speaks when he is
spoken to. If he is asked his views on religion and politics, he
prefers to leave such matters to wiser heads than his own. It might
seem that morally and intellectually the patient's cure had been
complete.

But now ask him what he thinks of Rochefort ; how he liked his
regiment of marines. He will blankly answer that he knows
nothing of Rochefort, and was never a soldier in his life. 'Where
are you, then, and what is the date of to-day ? ' 'I am at Bicetre ; it
is January 2, 1884; and I hope to see M. Voisin to-day, as I did
yesterday.'

It is found, in fact, that he has now the memory of two short
periods of life (different from those which he remembers when his
right side is paralysed), periods during which, so far as can now be
ascertained, his character was of this same decorous type and his
paralysis was on the left side.

These two conditions are what are now termed his first and his
second, out of a series of six or more through which he can be made
to pass. For brevity's sake I will further describe his fifth state
only.

If he is placed in an electric bath, or if a magnet be placed on
his head, it looks at first sight as though a complete physical cure
had been effected. All paralysis, all defect of sensibility, has dis-
appeared. His movements are light and active, his expression gentle
and timid. But ask him where he is, and you find that he has gone
back to a boy of fourteen, that he is at St. Urbain, his first

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 651

reformatory, and that his memory embraces his years of childhood,
and stops short on the very day when he had the fright with the
viper. If he is pressed to recollect the incident of the viper a
violent epileptiform crisis puts a sudden end to this phase of his
personality.

Is there, then, the reader may ask, any assignable law which
governs these strange revolutions ? any reason why Louis V.
should at one moment seem a mere lunatic or savage, at another
moment should rise into decorous manhood, at another should re-
cover his physical soundness, but sink backward in mind into the
child ? Briefly, and with many reserves and technicalities perforce
omitted, the view of the doctors who have watched him is somewhat
as follows : A sudden shock, falling on an unstable organisation, has
effected in this boy a profounder severance between the functions of
the right and left hemispheres of the brain than has perhaps ever
been observed before. We are accustomed, of course, to see the right
side of the body paralysed and insensible in consequence of injury to
the left hemisphere, which governs it, and vice versa. And we are
accustomed in hysterical cases — cases where there is no actual trace-
able injury to either hemisphere — to see the defects in sensation and
motility shift rapidly — shift, as I may say, at a touch — from one side
of the body to the other. But we cannot usually trace any cor-
responding change in the mode of functioning of what we assume as
the * highest centres,' the centres which determine those manifesta-
tions of intelligence, character, memory, on which our identity
mainly depends. Yet in some cases of aphasia and of other forms
of asemia (the loss of power over signs, spoken or written words
and the like) phenomenaujiave occurred which have somewhat pre-
pared us to find that the loss of power to use the left — which certainly
is in some ways the more developed — hemisphere may bring with it a
retrogression in the higher characteristics of human life. And the
singular phenomenon of automatic writing (as I have tried else-
where to show3) seems often to depend on an obscure action of the
less-used hemisphere. Those who have followed these lines of
observation may be somewhat prepared to think it possible that
in Louis V.'s case the alternate predominance of right or left
hemisphere affects memory and character as well as motor and
sensory innervation. Inhibit his left brain (and right side) and he
becomes, as one may say, not only left-handed but sinister; he
manifests himself through nervous arrangements which have reached
a lower degree of evolution. And he can represent in memory those
periods only when his personality had assumed the same attitude,
when he had crystallised about the same point.

Inhibit his right brain, and the higher qualities of character
remain, like the power of speech, intact. There is self-control; there

3 Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. iii. (Triibner & Co.)-

652 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

is modesty ; there is the sense of duty — the qualities which man has
developed as he has risen from the savage level. But nevertheless
he is only half himself. Besides the hemiplegia, which is a matter
of course, memory is truncated too, and he can summon up only such
fragments of the past as chance to have been linked with this one
abnormal state, leaving unrecalled not only the period of sinister in-
ward ascendency, but the normal period of childhood, before his Wesen
was thus cloven in twain. And now if by some art we can restore
the equipoise of the two hemispheres again, if we can throw him
into a state in which no physical trace is left of the severance which
has become for him a second nature, what may we expect to find as
the psychical concomitant of this restored integrity ? What we do
find is a change in the patient which, in the glimpse of psychical
possibilities which it offers us, is among the most interesting of all.
He is, if I may so say, born again ; he becomes as a little child ; he
is set back in memory, character, knowledge, powers, to the days
before this trouble came upon him or his worse self assumed its
sway.

I have begun with the description of an extreme case, a case
which to many of my readers may seem incredible in its bizarrerie.
But though it is extreme it is not really isolated ; it is approached
from different sides by cases already known. The mere resumption
of life at an earlier moment, for instance, is of course only an ex-
aggeration of a phenomenon which frequently appears after cerebral
injury. The trainer, stunned by the kick of a horse, completes his
order to loosen the girths the moment that trepanning has been
successfully performed. The old lady struck down at a card party,
and restored to consciousness after long insensibility, surprises her
weeping family by the inquiry, ' What are trumps ? ' But in these
common cases there is but a morsel cut out of life ; the personality
reawakens as from sleep and is the same as of old. With Louis
V. it is not thus ; the memories of the successive stages are not
lost but juxtaposed, as it were, in separate compartments; nor can
one say what epochs are in truth intercalary, or in what central
channel the stream of his being flows.

Self-severances profound as Louis V.'s are naturally to be sought
mainly in the lunatic asylum.4 There indeed we find duplicated
individuality in its grotesquer forms. We have the man who has
always lost himself and insists on looking for himself under the
bed. We have the man who maintains that there are two of him,
and sends his plate a second time, remarking, * I have had plenty,
but the other fellow has not.' We have the man who maintains that

4 The cases cited here come mainly from Krishaber's Nerropathie Cerebro-car-
diaque. Several of them will be found cited in Eibot's admirable monograph
Maladies de la Personnalite.

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 653

he is himself and his brother too, and when asked how he can possibly
be both at once, replies, ' Oh, by a different mother.'

Or sometimes the personality oscillates from one focus to another,
and the rival impulses, which in us merely sway different moods,
objectify themselves each in a persona of its own. An hysterical
penitent believes herself one week to be * Sceur Marthe des Cinq
Plaies,' and the next week relapses into an imaginary ' Madame Poul-
maire,' with tastes recalling a quite other than conventual model.
Another patient seems usually sane enough, but at intervals he lets
his beard grow, and is transformed into a swaggering lieutenant of
artillery. The excess over, he shaves his beard and becomes once
more a lucid though melancholy student of the early Fathers.
Such changes of character, indeed, may be rapid and varied to any
extent which the patient's experience of life will allow. In one well-
known case a poor lady varied her history, her character, even her
sex, from day to day. One day she would be an emperor's bride, the
next an imprisoned statesman —

Juvenis quondam, nunc femina, Cseneus,
Kursus et in veterem fato revoluta figuram.

Yet more instructive, though often sadder still, are the cases
where the disintegration of personality has not reached the pitch of
insanity, but has ended in a bewildered impotence, in the horror of
a lifelong dream. Speaking generally, such cases fall under two
main heads — those where the loss of control is mainly over motor
centres, and the patient can feel but cannot act ; and those where
the loss of control is mainly over sensory centres, and the patient
acts but cannot feel.

Inability to act just as we would wish to act is a trouble in which
we most of us share. We probably have moods in which we can even
sympathise with that provoking patient of Esquirol's who, after an
attack of monomania, recovered all those social gifts which made
him the delight of his friends, but could no longer be induced to
give five minutes' attention to the most urgent business. ' Your
advice,' he said cordially to Esquirol, 'is thoroughly good. I should
ask nothing better than to follow it, if you could farther oblige me
with the power to will what I please.' Sometimes the whole life is
spent in the endeavour to perform trifling acts — as when a patient
of M. Billod's spent nearly an hour in trying to make the flourish
under his signature to a power of attorney ; or tried in vain for three
hours, with hat and gloves on, to leave his room and go out to a
pageant which he much wished to see. Such cases need heroic
treatment, and this gentleman had the luck to be caught and cured
by the Kevolution of 1848.

Still more mournful are the cases where it is mainly the sensory

654 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

centres which lie, as it were, outside the personality ; where thought
and will remain intact, but the world around no longer stirs the
wonted feelings, nor can reach the solitary soul. ' In all my acts
one thing is lacking — the sense of effort that should accompany them^
the sense of pleasure that they should yield.' 'All things,' said
another sufferer, * are immeasurably distant from me ; they are
covered with a heavy air.' ' Men seem to move round me,' said
another, * like moving shadows.' And gradually this sense of ghostly
vacancy extends to the patient's own person. * Each of my senses,
each part of me, is separate from myself.' * J'existe, mais en dehors
de la vie reelle.' It is as though Teiresias, who alone kept his true
life in unsubstantial Hades, should at last feel himself dream into a
shade.

Sometimes the regretful longing turns into a bitter sense of
exile, of banishment, of fall from high estate. There are words that
remind us of the passionate protestations of Empedocles, refusing to
accept this earth as his veritable home. K\avo-d re /cal Kwicva-a, said
the Sicilian of Sicily, lBa>v curwqQsa %<5/>oi/ (' I wept and lamented,
looking on a land to me unwonted and unknown '). ' Lorsque je me
trouvais seul,' said a patient of Krishaber's, ' dans un endroit nouveau,
j'etais comme un enfant nouveau-ne, ne reconnaissant plus rien.
J'avais un ardent desir de revoir mon ancien monde, de redevenir
1'ancien moi ; c'est ce desir qui m'a empeche de me tuer.'

These instances have shown us the retrogressive change of per-
sonality, the dissolution into incoordinate elements of the polity of
our being. We have seen the state of man like a city blockaded, like
a great empire dying at the core. And of course a spontaneous, un-
guided disturbance in a machinery so complete is likely to alter it
more often for the worse than for the better. Yet here we reach the
very point which I most desire to urge in this paper. I mean that
even these spontaneous, these unguided disturbances do sometimes
effect a change which is a marked improvement. Apart from all
direct experiment they show us that we are in fact capable of being
reconstituted after an improved pattern, that we may be fused and
recrystallised into greater clarity; or, let iis say more modestly, that
the shifting sand-heap of our being will sometimes suddenly settle
itself into a new attitude of more assured equilibrium.

Among cases of this kind which have thus far been recorded,
none is more striking than that of Dr. Azam's often quoted patient,
Felida X.

Many of my readers will remember that in her case the somnam-
bulic life has become the normal life ; the ' second state,' which
appeared at first only in short, dream-like accesses, has gradually re-
placed the ' first state,' which now recurs but for a few hours at
long intervals. But the point on which I wish to dwell is this : that
Felida's second state is altogether superior to the first — physically

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 655

superior, since the nervous pains winch had troubled her from child-
hood have disappeared; and morally superior, inasmuch as her
morose, self-centred disposition is exchanged for a cheerful activity
which enables her to attend to her children and her shop much more
effectively than when she was in the * etat bete,' as she now calls
what was once the only personality that she knew. In this case, then,
which is now of nearly thirty years' standing, the spontaneous read-
justment of nervous activities — the second state, no memory of which
remains in the first state — has resulted in an improvement profounder
than could have been anticipated from any moral or medical treat-
ment that we know. The case shows us how often the word * normal '
means nothing more than < what happens to exist.' For Felida's
normal state was in fact her morbid state ; and the new condition,
which seemed at first a mere hysterical abnormality, has brought
her to a life of bodily and mental sanity which makes her fully the
equal of average women of her class.

Now, before we go further, let us ask ourselves whether this result,
which sounds so odd and paradoxical, ought in reality to surprise
us. Had we any reason for supposing that changes as profound as
Felida's need always be for the worse, that the phase of personality
in which we happen to find ourselves is the phase in which, given
our innate capacities, it is always best for us to be ?

To make this question more intelligible, I must have recourse to
a metaphor. Let us picture the human brain as a vast manufactory,
in which thousands of looms, of complex and differing patterns, are
habitually at work. These looms are used in varying combinations ;
but the main driving-bands, which connect them severally or collec-
tively with the motive power, remain for the most part unaltered.

Now, how do I come to have my looms and driving-gear arranged
in this particular way ? Not, certainly, through any deliberate
choice of my own. My ancestor the ascidian, in fact, inherited the
business when it consisted of little more than a single spindle.
Since his day my nearer ancestors have added loom after loom.
Some of their looms have fallen to pieces unheeded ; others have
been kept in repair because they suited the style of order which the
firm had at that time to meet. But the class of orders received has
changed very rapidly during the last few hundred years. I have
now to try to turn out altruistic emotions and intelligent reasoning
with machinery adapted to self-preserving fierceness or manual toil.
And in my efforts to readjust and reorganise I am hindered not
only by the old-fashioned type of the looms, but by the inconvenient
disposition of the driving gear. I cannot start one useful loom with-
out starting a dozen others that are merely in the way. And I can-
not shift the driving gear to suit myself, for I cannot get at much of
it without stopping the engines, and if I stopped my engines I
should not know how to set them going again. In this perplexity I

656 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

watch what happens in certain factories — Felida's, for instance —
where the hidden part of the machinery is subject to certain
dangerous jerks or dislocations, after which the gearings shift of
themselves and whole groups of looms are connected and disconnected
in a novel manner. From hence I get at least a hint as to the
concealed attachments; and if I see that new arrangement working
well I have an object to aim at ; I can try to produce a similar
change, though a smaller one, among my own looms and by my own
manipulation.

For even if these profoundest spontaneous changes are beyond
the reach of imitation, there are smaller changes, long familiar to us,
which we now see in a new light, as imitable in a manner which
shall reproduce their advantages without their drawbacks. There
is the painless trance which sometimes surpervenes in hysteria ;
there is the action of alcohol ; there is especially the action of
opium, which from the first commended itself by its psychical effect,
by the emotional tranquillity which it induces. Such at least seems
to be the inference from the well-known passage where the wifely
Helen determines to give her husband and his friends the chance
of talking comfortably, without interrupting themselves by perpetual
tears and lamentations.

Then heaven-born Helen in their cups would throw
Nepenthes, woeless banisher of woe :
This whoso drank daylong no tear should shed —
No, though he gazed on sire and mother dead ;
No, though his own son on that dreamy day
Before his own eyes raging foes should slay.5

The successive discoveries of intoxicants, narcotics proper, and
anaesthetics formed three important stages in our growing control
over the nervous system. Mesmer's discovery, or rather his re-
discovery of a process probably at least as old as Solon, marked an
epoch of quite equal significance. And the refinements on Mesmer's
process which this century has seen, the discoveries linked with the
names of Puysegur, Esdaile, Braid, Charcot, &c., though often set
forth with an air of controversy rather than of co-operation, will
gradually be recognised as mutually concordant elements in a new
branch of moral as well as physical therapeutics. Nay, it is a nascent
art of self-modification ; a system of pulleys (to return to our
previous metaphor), by which we can disjoin and reconnect portions
of our machinery which admit of no directer access.

One or two brief instances may indicate the moral and the
physical benefits which hypnotisation is bringing within the range of
practical medicine. And first I will cite one of the cases — rare as yet —
where an insane person has been hypnotised with permanent benefit/

5 Od. iv. 219.

6 Awiales Medico- Psychologizes, 1884, vol. ii. p. 289 sqq. The case was redis-

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 657

In the summer of 1884 there was at the Salpetriere a young

woman of a deplorable type. Jeanne Sch was a criminal lunatic,

filthy in habits, violent in demeanour, and with a lifelong history of
impurity and theft. M. Auguste Voisin, one of the physicians on
the staff, undertook to hypnotise her on May 31, at a time when she
could only be kept quiet by the strait jacket and ' bonnet d'irrigation,'
or perpetual cold douche to the head. She would not — indeed, she
could not — look steadily at the operator, but raved and spat at him.
M. Voisin kept his face close to hers, and followed her eyes wherever
she moved them. In about ten minutes a stertorous sleep ensued ;
and in five minutes more she passed into a sleep-waking state and
began to talk incoherently. The process was repeated on many days,
and gradually she became sane when in the trance, though she still
raved when awake. Gradually too she became able to obey in
waking hours commands impressed on her in the trance — first trivial
orders (to sweep the room and so forth), then orders involving a
marked change of behaviour. Nay, more ; in the hypnotic state she
voluntarily expressed repentance for her past life, made a confession
which involved more evil than the police were cognisant of (though it
agreed with facts otherwise known), and finally of her own impulse
made good resolves for the future. Two years have now elapsed,
and M. Voisin writes to me (July 31, 1886) that she is now a nurse
in a Paris hospital and that her conduct is irreproachable. In this
case, and in some recent cases of M. Voisin's, there may, of course, be
matter for controversy as to the precise nature and the prognosis, apart
from hypnotism, of the insanity which was cured. But my point is
amply made out by the fact that this poor woman, whose history since
the age of 13 had been one~of reckless folly and vice, is now capable
of the steady, self-controlled work of a nurse at a hospital, the
reformed character having first manifested itself in the hypnotic
state, partly in obedience to suggestion and partly as the natural
result of the tranquillisation of morbid passions.

M. Voisin has followed up this case with others equally striking,
into some of which a committee of the Societe Medico-Psychologique
is now enquiring. And M. Dufour, the medical head of another
asylum,7 has adopted hypnotic suggestion as a regular element in
his treatment. ' Des a present,' he says, * notre opinion est faite :
sans crainte de nous tromper, nous affirmons que 1'hypnotisme peut
rendre service dans le traitement des maladies mentales.' As was to
be expected, he finds that only a small proportion of lunatics are
hypnotisable ; but the effect produced on these, whether by en-
trancement or suggestion, is uniformly good. His best subject is a

cussed at the last meeting of the French Association for the Advancement of
Science.

7 Dr. E. Dufour, medecin en chef de 1'asilo ftamt-Robert (Is&rc). See Annalcs
Medico- Psyclwlogiques, Sept. 1886, p. 238.

VOL. XX.— No. 117. 3 A

658 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

depraved young man, who after many convictions for crimes (includ-
ing attempted murder) has become a violent lunatic. ' T.,' says
Dr. Dufour, <a ete un assez mauvais sujet. Nous n'avons plus a parler
au present, tellement ses sentiments moraux ont ete ameliores par
1'hypnotisme.' This change and amelioration of character (over and
above the simple recovery of sanity) has been a marked feature in
some of Dr. Voisin's cases as well.

There is, indeed, in the sleep-waking state even of sane persons,
a characteristic change of character, more easily recognised than de-
scribed. Without generalising too confidently I may say that there
seems usually to be an absence of self-conciousness and anxiety, a
diminution of mere animal instincts, and a sense of expansion and
freedom which shows itself either in gaiety or in a sort of beatific
calm. In Madame B. (a subject whose susceptibility to hypnotisation
by Dr. Gibert and Prof. Janet from a distance has recently attracted
much notice) there was something — as it seemed to me — inde-
scribably absurd in the contrast between the peasant woman's humble,
stolid, resigned cast of countenance and the childish glee with which
she joked and babbled during the * phase somnambulique ' of her
complex trance. On the other hand M. Kichet says of a recent
subject of his own,8 ' She seems when in the somnambulic state to be
normal in all respects except that her character has changed. When
awake she is gay and lively ; when entranced, grave, serious, almost
solemn. . . . Her intelligence seems to have increased.'

And I may remark that this phase of the somnambulic character,
this tendency to absorption and ecstasy, is a fact of encouraging
significance. It is an indication that we may get more work out of
ourselves in certain modified states than we can at present. * Ecstasy,'
which in former ages was deemed the exalted prerogative of saints,
is now described as a matter of course among the phases of a mere
hysterical attack. The truth is, perhaps, more complex than either
of these views would admit. Ecstasy (we may certainly say with
the modern alienist) is for the most part at least a purely subjective
affection, corresponding to no reality outside the patient and appear-
ing along with other instabilities in the course of hysteria. True ;
but on the other hand ecstasy is to hysteria somewhat as genius is
to insanity. The ecstasy, say, of Louise Lateau assuredly proves no
dogma and communicates to us no revelation. Yet, taken strictly
by itself, it is not altogether a retrograde or dissolutive nervous
phenomenon. Eather it represents the extreme tension of the poor
girl's spirit in the highest direction which her intellect allows ; and
the real drawback is that this degree of occasional concentration
usually implies great habitual instability. The hysterical patient has
an hour of ecstasy, during which her face, if we may trust Dr. Paul

9 Revue Pkil-osojrfiiqne, Sept. 1886, p. 327.

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 659

Eicher's drawings,9 often assumes a lofty purity of expression which
the ordinary young person might try in vain to rival. But she pays
for the transitory exaltation by days of incoherent scolding, of reckless
caprice. And similarly, as I maintain, the power of exaltation, of
concentration, which constitutes genius implies a profound modi/la-
bility of the nervous system, a tendency of the stream of mentation to
pour with a rush into some special channels. In a Newton or a Shelley
this modifiability is adequately under control ; were it not so our
Shelleys would lapse into incoherence, our Newtons into monomania.

And I maintain that the hypnotic trance, with its liberation from
petty preoccupations, its concentration in favourite channels, has
some analogy to genius as well as to hysteria. I maintain that for
some uneducated subjects it has been the highest mental condition
which they have ever entered ; and that, when better understood and
applied to subjects of higher type, it may dispose to flows of thought
more undisturbed and steady than can be maintained by the waking
effort of our tossed and fragmentary days.

I have dwelt at some length on the moral accompaniments of
the hypnotic trance, because they are as yet much less generally
known than the physical. It would, indeed, be a mere waste of
space to dwell on the lulling of pain which can be procured by
these methods, or even on the painless performance of surgical opera-
tions during the hypnotic trance; but I will cite a case10 illustrating
a point comparatively new — namely, that the insusceptibility to pain
need not be confined to the entranced condition, but may be pro-
longed by hypnotic suggestion into subsequent waking hours.

An hysterical patient in the hospital of Bordeaux suffered recently
from a malady which was- certainly not imaginary. She had a
' phlegmon,' or inflamed abscess, as big as a hen's egg, on the thigh,
with excessive tenderness and lancinating pain. It was necessary
to open the swelling, but the screaming patient would not allow it
to be touched. Judging this to be a good opportunity for testing
the real validity of deferred hypnotic suggestion, Dr. Pitres hypnotised
the woman by looking fixedly in her eyes, and then suggested to her
that after she had been awakened she would allow the abscess to
be opened, and would not feel the slightest pain. She was then
awakened, and apparently resumed her normal state. M. A. Boursier
proceeded to open and squeeze out the abscess in a deliberate way.
The patient merely looked on and smiled. She had no recollection
of the suggestion which had been made to her during her trance,
and she was not a little astonished to see her formidable enemy thus
disposed of without giving her the slightest pain.

9 La Grande Hysteric, 2nd edit. Paris, 1885.

10 First given in the Journal de Medecine de Bordeaux^ and cited at length in Dr.
Berillon's Revue de VHypnotisme for Sept. 1886. Professor Pitres' name, I may add,
carries great weight in the French medical world,

3 A 2

660 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Cases like these are certainly striking enough to give a consider-
able impetus to further experiment. Hypnotism, however, has in
England many prejudices to contend with. I shall touch on one
such prejudice only — a very natural one and germane to the main
argument of this paper. ' These duplications of state,' it is said,
' are not natural ; and what is unnatural, even if it is not 'morbid,
can never be more than a mere curiosity.' I would ask of such an
objector one single question : ' Which state, then, do you consider,
as unnatural, your own ordinary sleep or your own ordinary waking?
This rejoinder goes, I think, to the root of the matter ; for we
do indubitably undergo every day of our lives a change of state, a
shifting of our internal mechanism, which is closely parallel to the
artificial changes whose induction I am here recommending. Our
familiar sleep, whether considered from the psychical or the physio-
logical side, has a curious history, strange potentialities. In its
psychical aspect — to take the point which here most concerns us — it
involves at least the rudiments of a * second state,' of an independent
memory. I should like, had I space, to show how the mere recur-
rence of a dream-scene — a scene which has no prototype in waking
life — is the first stage on the way to those recurrent accesses of
somnambulism, linked by continuous memory, which have developed
into the actual ordinary life of Felida X. Leaving this point for
future treatment, and passing to sleep's physiological aspect, we
recognise in it the compromise or resultant of many tentative dupli-
cations of state which our lowly ancestors have known. Their earliest
differentiation of condition, it may be, was merely the change between
light and darkness, or between motion and rest. Then comes
encystation, a fruitful quiescence, originally, perhaps, a mere im-
mobility of self-defence, but taken advantage of for reproductive
effort. And passing from protozoa to metazoa, we find numerous
adaptations of this primitive duplicability of condition. We find
sleep utilised as a protection against hunger, as a protection against
cold. We find animals for whom what we call ' true sleep ' is want-
ing, whose circumstances do not demand any such change or inter-
ruption in the tenor of their life-long way.

Yet why describe this undifferentiated life-history as a state of
waking rather than of sleep ? Why assume that sleep is the acquired,
vigilance the * normal ' condition ? It would not be hard to defend an
opposite thesis. The new-born infant might urge with cogency that
his habitual state of slumber was primary as regards the individual,
ancestral as regards the race ; resembling at least, far more closely
than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. ' Mine,' he
might say, * is a centrally stable state. It would need only some
change in external conditions (as my permanent immersion in a
nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your
waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 661

talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological
capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.'

A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument ; but it
may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in
speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true
selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interrup-
tion. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our
personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other
during the stages of our long evolution. And just as these two states
have come to coexist for us in advantageous alternation, so also
other states may come to coexist with these, in response to new needs
of the still evolving organism.

And I will now suggest two methods in which such states as those
described, say, in Dr. Voisin's or in Dr. Pitres' cases, might be turned
to good account. In the world around us are many physical invalids
and many * moral invalids,' and of both these classes a certain per-
centage are sure to prove hypnotisable, with patience and care. Let
us try to improve the moral invalid's character by hypnotic suggestions
of self-restraint, which will continue effective after he wakes. And
let us try to enable the physical invalid to carry on his intellectual
life without the perturbing accompaniment of pain. I am not bring-
ing out a panacea, and I expect that with the English race, and in
our present state of knowledge, but few of these experiments will
succeed. But increased experience will bring the process under
fuller control, will enable us to hypnotise a larger proportion of
persons and to direct the resulting phenomena with more precision.
What is needed is the perseverance in experiment which springs from
an adequate realisation of jthe ultimate gain, from a conviction that
the tortuous inlet which we are navigating is one of the mouths of a
rfver which runs up far into the unexplored interior of our being.

I have dealt elsewhere with some further cases which go to show
the persistent efficacy of moralising suggestions — suggestions mainly
of abstinence from pernicious indulgences — when made to a subject in
the hypnotic trance.11 It must suffice here to point out that such
moralisation, whether applied to a sane or insane subject, must by
no means be considered as a mere trick or a mere abnormality. It is
but the systematisation of a process on which religious and moral
' revivals ' have always largely depended. When some powerful per-
sonage has thrown many weaker minds into a state of unusual perturba-
tion, unusual plasticity, there is an element in that psychical tumult
which may be utilised for lasting good. A strong suggestion may be
made, and its effect on the brain will be such that it will work itself
out, almost automatically, perhaps for years to come. When Father
Mathew spread the temperance pledge through Ireland he showed
this power at its best. What it can be at its worst we see, for in-

II Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, part x. (Triibner, 1886).

662 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

stance, in the recent epidemic of frenzy in the Bahamas, where the
hysterical symptoms were actually the main object sought, and the
dogma only served to give to that hysteria a stimulating flavour of
brimstone. Scenes not dissimilar have been witnessed in England
too ; yet the sober moralist has been forced to recognise that a germ of
better life has often been dropped, and has quickened, amid the tur-
bulence of what to him might seem a mere scandalous orgy.

Just so did the orthodox physician look on in disgusted contempt
at the tumultuous crises of the patients around Mesmer's baquct.
But science has now been able to extract from that confused scene
its germ of progress, and to use a part of Mesmer's processes to calm
the very accesses which Mesmer employed them to generate. Let
her attempt, then, to extract the health-giving element from that
moral turbulence as well, and to use the potency which in ignorant
hands turns men and women into hysterical monomaniacs, to revive
in the spirits which she dominates the docility of the little child.

This last phrase represents a true, an important analogy. The
art of education, as we know, rests on the physiological fact that the
child's brain receives impressions more readily, and retains them
more lastingly, than the adult's. And those of us who have been
well drilled in childhood are not apt to consider that the advantage
thus gained for us was an unfair or tricky one, nor even that virtue
has been made unduly easy to us, so that we deserve no credit for
doing right. It surely need not, then, be considered as over-reaching
Destiny, or outwitting the Moral Law, if we take persons whose early
receptiveness has been abused by bad example and try to reproduce
that receptiveness by a physiological process, and to imprint hypnotic
suggestions of a salutary kind.

I ventured to make a proposal of this kind in a paper published
a year ago ; but, although it attracted some comment as a novelty,
I cannot flatter myself that it was taken an serieux by the pedagogic
world. But as I write these lines I see from a report of the Asso-
ciation Francaise pour 1'Avancement des Sciences (Session de Nancy,
1886) that the ' Section de Pedagogic ' has actually passed a resolu-
tion desiring ' que des experiences de suggestion hypnotique soient
tentees, dans un but de moralisation et d'education, sur quelques-uns
des sujets les plus notoirement mauvais et incorrigibles des ecoles
primaires.' I commend the idea then, with the sense that I am not
alone in my paradox, to the attention of practical philanthropists.

My second suggestion — namely, that we may conceivably learn to
carry on our intellectual life in a state of insusceptibility to physical
pain, may appear a quite equally bold one. * We admit,' the critics
might say, 'that a man in the hypnotic trance is insensible to
pinching ; but, since he can also notoriously, when in that state, be
made to believe that his name is Titus Gates, or that a candle-end
is a piece of plum cake, or any other absurdity, the intellectual work

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 663

which he performs in that mood of mind is not likely to be worth
much.' But my point is, as may have been already gathered, that
this clean-cut, definite conception of the hypnotic state is now shown
to have been crude and rudimentary. Dr. Pitres' case, above cited,
(where the patient was restored to ordinary life in all respects except
that she continued insensible to pain), is a mere sample of cases
daily becoming more numerous, where power is gained to dis-
sociate the elements of our being in novel ways, to form from them,
if I may so say, not only the one strange new compound ' hypnotic
trance,' but a whole series of compounds marking the various stages
between that and the life of every day. Hysterical phenomena, now
for the first time studied with something like the attention which
they deserve, point strongly in this direction. And apart from
hysteria, apart from hypnotism, we find in active and healthy life
scattered hints of the possible absence of pain during vigorous intel-
lectual effort. From the candidate in a competitive examination who
forgets his toothache till he comes out again, to the soldier in action
unconscious of the bullet-wound till he faints from loss of blood, we
have instances enough of an exaltation or concentration which has
often made the resolute spirit altogether unconscious of conditions
which would have been absorbing to the ordinary man. And here too,
as in the case of moral suggestibility, already dealt with, the function
of science is to regularise the accidental and to elicit from the mingled
phenomenon its permanent boon. Already men attempt to do this
by a mere chemical agency. There have been philosophers who
have sought in laudanum intellectual lucidity and bodily repose.
There have been soldiers who have supplemented with 'Dutch
courage ' the ardour of martial fire. Philosopher and soldier alike ex-
pose themselves to an unhappy reaction. But by the induction of
hypnotic anaesthesia we are taking a shorter road to our object ; we
are acting on the central nervous system without damaging stomach
or liver on the way. It was an abridgment of this kind when sub-
cutaneous injection of morphia replaced in so many cases morphia
taken by the mouth. Yet though the evil done in transits, was subtler
and slower evil still was done. On the other hand the direct non-
chemical action on the central nervous system, in which hypnotism
consists, is not proved to be in any way necessarily injurious, and
has thus far, when under careful management, resulted almost uni-
formly in good. Such at least is the view of all physicians, so far as
I know, who have practised it themselves on a large scale, though it is
not the general view at present of those men — physicians or others —
who are content to judge from hearsay and to write at second-hand.
Let us not then, I would say, be satisfied if we can merely give
some poor sufferer a good night by hypnotism, or even if we can
operate on him painlessly in a state of trance. Let us approach the
topic of the banishment of pain in a more thoroughgoing and

664 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

bolder spirit. Looking at that growing class of civilised persons who
surfer from neuralgia, indigestion, and other annoying but not
dangerous forms of malaise, let us consider whether we cannot induce
— in those of them who are fortunate enough to be readily hypnotis-
able — a third condition of life, which shall be as waking but without
its uneasiness and as sleep without the blankness of its repose, a state
in which the mind may go serenely onward and the body have no
power to distract her energy or to dispute her sway.

Is there anything in nature to render this ideal impossible?
Let us consider the history of pain. Pain, it may be plausibly
suggested, is an advantage acquired by our ancestors in the course
of their struggle for existence. It would be useless to the fortunate
animalcule, which, if you chop it in two, is simply two animalcules
instead of one. But as soon as the organism is complex enough to
suffer partial injury, and active enough to check or avoid such injury
before it has gone far, the pain becomes a useful warning, and the
sense of pain is thus one of the first and most generalised of the
perceptive faculties which place living creatures in relation with the
external world. And to the human infant it is necessary still. The
burnt child must have some reason to dread the fire, or he will go
on poking it with his fingers. But, serviceable though pain may still
be to the child and the savage, civilised men and women have now a
good deal more of it than they can find any use for. Some kinds
of pain, indeed (like neuralgia, which prevents the needed rest),
are wholly detrimental to the organism and have arisen by mere
correlation with other susceptibilities which are in themselves
beneficial. Now if this correlation were inevitable — if it were im-
possible to have acute sense-perceptions, vivid emotional develop-
ment, without these concomitant nervous pains — we should have to
accept the annoyance without more ado. But certain spontaneously
occurring facts, and certain experimental facts, have shown us that
the correlation is not inevitable ; that the sense of pain can be
abolished, while other sensibilities are retained, to an extent far
beyond what the common experience of life would have led us to
suppose possible.

Our machinery is hampered by a system of checks, intended to
guard against dangers which we can now meet in other ways, and often
operating as a serious hindrance to the work of our manufactory. A
workman here and there has hit on an artifice for detaching these
checks, with signal advantage, and is beginning to report to the
managers his guess at a wider application of the seemingly trivial
contrivance.

Be it mentioned too that not only pain itself, but anxiety, ennui,
intellectual fatigue, may be held in abeyance by hypnotic treatment
and suggestion. There is not, indeed, much evidence of any increase
of sheer intellectual acumen in the hypnotic state, but in most kinds

1886 MULTIPLEX PERSONALITY. 665

of ordinary brain-work the difficulty is not so much that one's actual
power of thinking is inadequate to the problems proposed as that
one cannot use that power aright, cannot focus one's object steadily
or gaze on it long. Hypnotism may not supply one with mental
lenses of higher power, but in its artificial attention we have at
least the rudiment of a machinery like that which holds firm the
astronomer's telescope and sweeps it round with the moving heavens,
as compared with the rough and shifting adjustments of a spy-glass
held in the hand.

These speculations, especially where they point to moral progress
as attainable by physiological artifice, will seem to many of my readers
venturesome and unreal. And in these days of conflicting dogmas
and impracticable Utopias Science, better aware than either priest
or demagogue of how little man can truly know, is tempted to con-
fine herself to his material benefit, which can be made certain, and
to let his moral progress — which is a speculative hope — alone. Yet,
now that Science is herself becoming the substance of so many creeds,
the lode-star of so many aspirations, it is important that she should
not in any direction even appear to be either timid or cynical. Her
humble missionaries at least need not show themselves too solicitous
about possible failure, but should rather esteem it as dereliction of
duty were some attempt not made to carry her illumination over the
whole realm and mystery of man.

Especially, indeed, is it to be desired that biology should show —
not indeed a moralising bias, but — a moral care. There has been a
natural tendency to insist with a certain disillusionising tenacity on
the low beginnings of our race. When eminent but ill-instructed
personages in Church or State have declared themselves, with many
flourishes, * on the side oT the Angel,' there has been a grim satis-
faction in proving that Science at any rate is ' on the side of the
Ape.' But the victory of Science is won. She has dealt hard measure
to man's tradition and his self-conceit ; let her now show herself
ready to sympathise with such of his aspirations as are still legitimate,
to offer such prospects as the nature of things will allow. Nay, let
her teach the world that the word evolution is the very formula and
symbol of hope.

But here my paper must close. I will conclude it with a single
reflection which may somewhat meet the fears of those who dislike
any tamperings with our personality, who dread that this invading
analysis may steal their very self away. All living things, it is said,
strive towards their maximum of pleasure. In what hours, then, and
under what conditions, do we find that human beings have attained
to their intensest joy ? Do not our thoughts in answer turn instinc-
tively to scenes and moments when all personal preoccupation, all care
for individual interest, is lost in the sense of spiritual union, whether
with one beloved soul, or with a mighty nation, or with * the whole

666 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

world and creatures of God ' ? We think of Dante with Beatrice, of
Nelson at Trafalgar, of S. Francis on the Umbrian hill. And surely
here, as in Galahad's cry of * If I lose myself I find myself,' we have
a hint that much, very much, of what we are wont to regard as an
integral part of us may drop away, and yet leave us with a conscious-
ness of our own being which is more vivid and purer than before. This
web of habits and appetencies, of lusts and fears, is not, perhaps, the
ultimate manifestation of what in truth we are. It is the cloak which
our rude forefathers have woven themselves against the cosmic storm ;
but we are already learning to shift and refashion it as our gentler
weather needs, and if perchance it slip from us in the sunshine
then something more ancient and more glorious is for a moment
guessed within.

FREDERIC W. H. MYERS.

1886 667

W.

FROM time to time during the last five-and-forty years efforts have
been made to alter the marriage law of England in the matter of the
prohibited degrees. It is not surprising that many persons are tired
of the discussion. Kather than listen to any further arguments they
will vote for the change which is so persistently demanded, and hope
to be troubled with it no more. I wish to point out that the Bill
advocated by Lord Bramwell in the House of Lords, and more
recently in this Eeview, will not, if enacted, fulfil their desire. It
will be but the beginning of troubles to those whose chief anxiety is
to lead a quiet life. It will unsettle the whole law of marriage and
decide nothing. Its inherent unreason is a fatal defect.

For my present purpose it is not necessary to enter into the
theological argument. It seems, indeed, but yesterday that a theo-
logical treatment of the question was generally deprecated. Speakers
in Parliament a few years since disclaimed all intention of defending
or attacking the law on that side. Nor would any one have expected
that the Scriptural controversy should be revived under the auspices
of a veteran lawyer who is^careful to remind the world that he knows
no more of theology than of astrology. Divines, perhaps, will remark,
from their point of view, that their own science is not so easily set
aside as lawyers or astrologers suppose. It has an awkward way of
reappearing after it has been declared to be dead and buried by
general consent. Even when polemics slumber, popular literature
has a curious tendency to clothe itself in theological language, and
to adapt Scriptural phraseology to its own use. An attentive reader
of the Parliamentary debates of the late brief session could not fail
to notice that there was hardly one speech of importance in which
illustrations from Bible history, or adaptations of Scriptural lan-
guage, did not occur. Men do not so easily unlearn even that which
they repudiate, or wholly throw off the authority they have resolved to
dethrone. Be this as it may, Lord Bramwell certainly devotes half
his article to the theology of which he speaks so lightly. It would
be foreign to my immediate purpose to follow him on this track.
It is sufficient to reassert the facts that marriage between persons
near of kin is prohibited in the Scripture, and that no distinction
between relationship by affinity or consanguinity is there to be found.

668 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

It is on this last point that the whole subject at present really
turns. In England no one openly denies that it is necessary to put
some restrictions on the general liberty to contract marriage, even
apart from any Scriptural or ecclesiastical rule ; or that nearness of
relationship between the parties to the proposed marriage constitutes
a valid impediment. But what degree of nearness? This is the
point in dispute. I am assuming that the idea of nearness includes
the notion of degrees in nearness ; although, to hear some persons
talk on this subject, one might think that all relationships were the
same. As they attach no particular meaning to the words they use,
argument with them is impossible. Kational men will allow that ail
who are related to one another are more nearly or more distantly
related : parents more nearly related to children than uncles and
aunts to their nephews and nieces. They will hardly deny that
kinsfolk related in the same degree must all be equally allowed, or
forbidden, to intermarry ; and that permission to marry given to the
nearly related, and denied to those more distantly related, would be
an arbitrary indulgence to the one, an intolerable wrong to the
other. These positions have not been, to my knowledge, disputed
in the abstract by any one.

But it is exactly with these positions that the law, in the pro-
posed form, would be in direct conflict. The man would be allowed
to marry two or more sisters ; the woman forbidden to marry two
brothers. Marriage with a wife's sister would be lawful ; marriage
with her niece absolutely contrary to law. Further, the only reason
for prohibiting half the marriages named in the Table of Degrees
would cease to exist. Marriage with a wife's near kinswomen is
forbidden now because they are the wife's kinswomen, and for no
other reason. Remove that reason, and they would be forbidden
for no reason at all. Could it be expected that the persons subject
to these disabilities would contentedly bear them ? Once declare it
lawful and right for a man to marry a near kinswoman of his wife,
and it is inevitable that, if his affections were set on any other of her
kinsfolk, he should feel himself the victim of a senseless tyranny,
were he not allowed to gratify those affections with the sanction of
the law. I am unable to think of any rational answer to the protest
which such flagrant inequality would call forth.

Two answers, indeed, have been attempted, but they are mutually
destructive. On the one hand, it is said that further relaxations
would be so shocking that no one would ask for them ; on the other,
that as soon as they were asked for, they would be granted without
demur. Taking the former line of argument, Lord Bramwell has
urged that it is very foolish not to do a right thing because you
may be asked thereafter to do a wrong one — forgetting, apparently,
that the ' wrong ' thing would cease to be wrong in Parliamentary
and legal eyes in the event of his Bill becoming law. The wrong,

1886 SISTERS-IN-LAW. 669

indeed, would be on the other side. It would be wrong to withhold
the permission, which you had granted in one case, from others
whose plea for it rested on the same grounds. It may be right, or
it may be wrong, to marry your wife's near kinswoman ; it cannot be
right and wrong at the same time. It cannot be right to favour a
particular case by exceptional treatment, or to draw lots for in-
dulgences among those whose status of affinity is the same. It is
not a question of being asked, as Lord Bramwell says, to do a wrong
thing, but of being asked to do that which your own line of action
has compelled you to acknowledge to be right.

From the larger part of the supporters of the Bill, however, we
have a different and contradictory reply. They freely admit that
the principle of it requires the abolition of all prohibitions of
marriage between persons related by affinity, and profess themselves
quite ready to promote that abolition at the proper time. Lord
John Russell said as much in Parliament long ago ; Lord Granville
says it quite frankly and simply now. With the good-natured
pleasantry which makes him so agreeable an opponent he said,
when the Bill was moved in the House of Lords, ' I dote upon my
wife's relations, but they are not my relations.' His argument was,
that he ought to be free to marry any one of them without let or
hindrance from the law.

It is natural to ask, if this be so, why the Bill does not include
all the kindred whom the majority of its supporters admit to be
within the scope of its principle. An alteration of a very few words
would make it consistent with itself and with the arguments used in
support of it. What hinders the alteration from being made ? The
answer to this question Jias more policy than honesty on its face.
Shortly stated it is, ' One thing at a time. This is a world of
expediency and compromise. We cannot ' — say the advocates of
the Bill — ' persuade the great body of our countrymen that it is
right to allow all these marriages, but there is a certain sentiment
in favour of one of them. Kindly grant a privilegium for that one,
then we shall have the lever we require for further action ; we
shall be able to show that the principle has been conceded, and
that the rest must follow.' Truly this reasoning assumes a simplicity
of character among those to whom it is addressed which can hardly
be imputed without some disparagement of their understanding.

' Only just this little Bill, this innocent little Bill,' they entreat
us to pass ; then aside to their friends and allies, ( You shall soon
be set at liberty to marry all your wives' relations, if we can only
just carry this little Bill. Don't mention — for the world — those
nieces, and brothers' widows, and all the rest, while we have this
Bill in hand ; but you shall soon see that we have done your
business for you as effectually as if the whole list had been
enumerated in our Act.' Let it not be thought I am imputing

670 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

motives to opponents ; I am saying only what they have said for
themselves wherever it was politic to say it, and I am thinking of
cases, not a few, in which it is the brother's widow on whom the
widower's heart is set.

I am very anxious that the lovers of a quiet life, for whose
happiness I am much concerned, should open their eyes to the
prospect before them. They must expect a long series of demands
for successive relaxations of a series of prohibitions of which the
foundation will have been already destroyed. Resistance to their
demands must needs grow weaker year by year, as the want of any
valid argument against them is more plainly seen. But what a
prospect ! Year after year to have the whole question of marriage and
of family life dragged into the arena of Parliamentary discussion, with
jibe and sneer and vulgar detraction of all sanctions hitherto revered,
is surely not an anticipation which any good or wise man can with
patience entertain. We stand on the ground of solid principle now ;
we are entitled at least to ask what principle is to be substituted for
it before we sweep it away. To calm lookers-on, indeed, it must be
little less than marvellous to observe the way in which the law of
marriage, with its far-reaching influences on national life, has been
at the mercy of chance majorities any time these last twenty years.
Half a dozen young men, hastily summoned from a racecourse to
give a vote in harmony with the known wish of some distinguished
personage, have been able to influence divisions on which the welfare
of every family in England depended. They may have had as little
desire to take a part as they have had opportunity of acquainting
themselves with the merits of the question at issue ; but the Parlia-
mentary game required their presence, and seemed to place the
stakes of victory at their disposal. If any question ever demanded
the careful study of skilled jurists and experienced masters of social
ethics, it is this question of the Marriage Law. The results of
careful study and sound historical knowledge should have been laid
before Parliament by men capable of placing the whole question in
its true light, with documentary evidence in support of their words.
Some such speakers, indeed, have from time to time treated the
subject in a worthy manner ; but when one recalls the performances
of triflers who have scarcely been at the pains to digest the scraps
of information supplied to them — the hurried, ill-balanced debates,
and the closure dictated by the approach of the dinner-hour, when
the fringe of the question had been scarcely touched — one can but
be profoundly thankful that a great disaster has notwithstanding
been averted for so many years.

I shall be told that what I have written is beside the point, that
no one defends the Bill as logical. It claims to be nothing more
than a practical proposal to get rid — with or without reason — of a
practical evil, arising from the want of a second bedroom in a poor

1886 SISTERS-IN-LAW. 671

man's house. Far be it from me to extenuate the evils caused by
over-crowded dwellings, or to hinder any honest effort to remedy
them : they are grave evils indeed. The remedy, however, would
hardly seem to lie in an arrangement by which a widower should
be encouraged to marry the female who looks after his children as
soon as possible after the poor wife's death. This is not always, nor
indeed often, her sister, as any one acquainted with the habits of the
people can testify. At the sudden death of a young wife the
natural person to care for the orphans is the kinswoman who loved
her best — her own mother; she takes the little ones to her own
house, or stays at their home, until some plan can be devised for
their care. Sometimes it is the man's sister in blood, sometimes
the sister-in-law, who is the friend in time of need. But in a large
proportion of these latter cases, the sister, or sister-in-law, is ' out
at service,' and cannot leave her place without notice, or cannot
afford to give it up to discharge a duty in her brother's house, for
which he can give her no wages. In other cases the neighbours —
and their charity at such times is marvellous— take in one or another
of the young children until the darkest days are past. The notion
that a working-man's family has its store of sisters living un-
employed at home in readiness to help a brother-in-law in his
bereavement is a fancy picture, which is exhibited in order to divert
attention from the fact that it is quite a different class from which
the promoters of this Bill are drawn. Not the labourers, but their
employers, signed the notorious Norfolk petition, and for reasons
altogether different from those which are connected with the ex-
periences of cottages having but a single room. It must be added
that the dwelling-house argument proves too much. It would
require the banns of marriage with the successor to be put up as
soon as the wife's funeral was past. The case, however, is not quite
so lamentable in this respect as the advocates of the Bill would have
us suppose. To those of us who have often visited poor dwellings
it is well known that arrangements which would distress us,
if they existed in our own homes, are often quite free from moral
suspicion — even in Irish cabins — among those who have been fami-
liar with the occupation of one room by a whole family all their
lives. Evils arise, no doubt, from the crowding ; but the ruined
characters and blasted lives, of which our penitentiaries tell a mourn-
ful tale, do not come, for the most part, from one-roomed cottages, but
from the contamination of the work-room or of low places of amuse-
ment, from domestic service to depraved employers, and the manifold
opportunities for corruption which money and leisure supply. Certain
it is that neither the Act of 1835, nor the agitation which has since
grown up, had anything to do with poor men's cottages or poor
men's needs.

I have said that the argument, to which I have just referred,

672 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

proves too much. As much may be said of every argument which
has been urged in favour of the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill. When,
for example, the laws of Prussia and other foreign countries are quoted
in support of the proposed change, I ask, in reply, whether there is any
country in Europe which differs from our own in this respect only, that
it allows marriage with a wife's sister. After the change of our Marriage
Law which this Bill, if carried, would effect, we should remain, as
we now are, alone. Nor is there any such agreement between the
various codes of law in force on the Continent as would give us any
hope of sheltering ourselves by further changes behind the authority
of some general rule. In this only they agree, that they all go
beyond the point at which the Marriage Law Reform Association
proposes, for the moment, to halt. Then we are told that it is our
duty to follow our Colonies in their legislation on this subject. But
why on this subject only ? On important economical questions we
have not yet shown any disposition to adopt Colonial theories or to
introduce Colonial practice. In the days when slavery was part of
the cherished institutions of more than one British colony, so far
from holding ourselves bound to conform the laws of England to
that example, we devoted millions of our money to the emancipation
of the slaves, and compelled the Colonies, much as they disliked the
change, to accept the legislation which set their bondsmen free. It
would, indeed, be an evil day for England when we began to take
the pattern of our laws from the medley of crude legislation which
a score of inexperienced communities had chanced to enact. Nor
should it be forgotten that in the countries inhabited by the majority
of Her Majesty's subjects polygamy is an integral part of the law.

It is not surprising that Lord Bramwell should treat cursorily
what he mentions as the ' ecclesiastical ' objection, or that he some-
what misapprehends its bearing. It is true that most clergymen
would think it a grievous wrong to be compelled to solemnise such
marriages. Lord Bramwell would give them liberty to refuse. But
he fails to see that the Church of England, as a religious society,
would be sorely aggrieved if her clergy were even allowed to cele-
brate in her churches unions which for centuries her courts, her
canons, and her Prayer Book have declared to be unlawful. Still
the charge in the Marriage Service would remain, bidding the parties
to confess any impediment, and solemnly reminding them that ' so
many as are coupled together otherwise than God's Word doth
allow are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony
lawful.' Still the table of kindred and affinity would be the only
answer given by the Church to those who wish to know what persons,
how related, are forbidden in Scripture to marry together. Few
will contend that what Scripture has been held for centuries to
forbid, ceases to be forbidden in Scripture because a narrow Parlia-
mentary majority, created, it may be, by the votes of members who

.1886 SISTERS-IK-LAW. 673

-deny the authority of the Bible, is of that opinion. The Table of
Degrees would still be read on the walls of our churches, placed
there as the canon directs. Preachers might still expound the law
of God as forbidding such unions even in the presence of those who
had contracted them, and parish priests might refuse — as the Bishop
of Fredericton has bidden his clergy to refuse — Communion to the
offenders. In all this the Church of England would not go beyond
the Westminster Confession of Faith (which is the law of Presbyterian
Scotland), declaring that

Marriage ought not to be within the degrees of consanguinity or affinity forbidden
in the Word ; nor can such incestuous marriages ever be made lawful by any law
of man, or consent of parties, so as these persons may live together as man and
wife. The man may not marry any of his wife's kindred nearer in blood than he
may of his own, nor the woman of her husband's kindred nearer in blood than of
her own.

* Very uncharitable language, whoever uses it,' say the advocates
of the Bill. 'Two thoroughly well-conducted persons' — so Lord
Bramwell describes all pairs of attached brothers and sisters-in-law —
ought not to be treated with disrespect. The feeling, which he
has more than once expressed, of sympathy with an agreeable and
affectionate young couple, of like age and condition in life, appa-
rently formed for each other's happiness, appeals to a universal
sentiment. Astrologically they would petition, under his guidance,
against the law which forbids their nuptials :

Utrumque nostrum incredibili modo
Consentit astrum :

and, so pleading, they would enlist — as they have enlisted — in their
favour many a friend to whom. fathers and councils, theology and law,
are equally unknown. But, then, it must be remembered that the same
engaging portrait may be painted with a variety of kinsfolk for the
sitters ; it does not apply to sisters-in-law and brothers alone. While
I write, a case comes to me, in which a man has gone through the
form of marriage with his half-brother's daughter, in spite of serious,
but ineffectual, remonstrance, less than three months after his wife's
decease. Keports of incestuous unions in contradiction to almost
every prohibition in the Table of Degrees reach me from time to
time — sometimes condemned by the better feeling of the commu-
nity, sometimes, alas ! condoned or defended, when personal popu-
larity or a long purse blinds the neighbours to the grossness of the
sin. For all these unions — so far at least as relations by affinity are
concerned — the offenders will have the authority of statute law to
plead if ever this unhappy Bill should pass. They will all have a
claim on the sympathy which is now lavished on a single case.

I have admitted that there is a natural sympathy with young
persons deeply attached to one another, who are prevented from
marrying. But here again, when we try to translate the feeling
VOL. XX.— No. 117. 3B

674 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

into solid reason, we find that the argument proves too much.
* The course of true love never did run smooth ' ; and infinitely
various are the obstacles to marriage which youthful affections
must be content to endure. The very man who has been declaiming
against the table of prohibited degrees, will go home and threaten
to turn his son or daughter out of doors if an imprudent courtship is
not immediately broken off. And this parental sternness may have its
justification too. A thoughtless young couple may be saved from life-
long trouble by the unwelcome intervention of wiser and more expe-
rienced counsellors. Or, on the other hand, that intervention may nip
in the bud affections which might have blossomed into happy married
life. Either way, however, it is part of the condition of things in
which we live that young persons ' madly in love,' as the phrase is,
must often be disappointed ; it is not only widowers in love with
their wives' sisters who have to bear their fate. If it is cruel to
debar from marriage those who are sincerely in love, the Court
of Chancery has more wanton cruelty to repent of than all the
defenders of the Christian law of marriage. Has it never occurred
to Lord Bramwell to turn a glance of pity on the sorrows of its
wards ? The maintenance of the Levitical prohibitions has at least
the general good for its object ; the hard-hearted guardian has
nothing better than the preservation or augmentation of an estate
in view. After all, the happiness of the community and the purity
of social life must outweigh the particular grievances of which dis-
appointed lovers naturally complain. So it is in many another case
familiar to us all. It is a hardship, for instance, to our Jewish
fellow-subjects to lose their trade on the Lord's Day when they have
already kept their own Sabbath on the day before. But we could
not preserve our national Sunday from the invasion of secular
business if we made an exception in their favour ; and, for the general
advantage, they must bear the loss. We may pity the lovers whose
sad case Lord Bramwell deplores ; but they have really no right to
the special aureole with which he would invest them.

The question is often asked, * May I not marry my sister-in-
law ? ' The real question is, whether I may still have a ' sister-
in-law ' at all. If the law which forbids us to marry is abolished,
in what does the relation of sister between us consist ? Thence-
forward she is no more to her sister's husband than any other
female friend. He must be content to see her welcomed by his
wife with tenderest affection, caressed by his children with devoted
love, but she is nothing to him ; sister, either in law or in feel-
ing, she cannot be. His wife's sister, his children's aunt, their
best-loved kinswoman, is to be but an acquaintance to him. A
sharp line of division is drawn through the midst of the family ;
the father, with his group of kinsfolk ; the mother, with her's —
two sets of kindred in one home. It will be hard, no doubt, for

1886 SISTERS-IN-LAW. 675

those who have entered into the happy confidence of the old ire*-
lationship to unlearn the lessons of a united home ; but new gene-
rations as they arise, if the law is changed, must be brought up
in a different experience and form a different estimate of family
life. I am not suggesting any thoughts of improper attachment
in the wife's lifetime. I am only asserting that one who is in
no sense a sister, and may possibly become a wife, ceases absolutely
to be what a sister-in-law has been, and happily still is, in many an
English home.

Some persons make merry with descriptions of the family
circle — perhaps because they have never known the pure and happy
unity to which they refer. The Scripture expression that man and
wife are 'one flesh' is to some of them particularly ludicrous.
Lord Bramwell, with some endeavour to be serious, would dispose of
it by the remark that it is a metaphor, on the apparent assump-
tion that a metaphorical statement is necessarily untrue. I quite
admit that metaphors are not freely used in the Courts, and that
they would be a little out of place in the discussion of a dry point
of law. Nor should I look for illustration of the use of metaphor in
any case to writings from Lord Bramwell's pen. Nevertheless it
would be a strange misconception to make metaphor and fiction
synonymous terms. One might say of a celebrated statesman that
his race is run, or that his sun has set ; and it would be a reasonable
answer to declare that his energies, bodily and mental, are unimpaired,
or that he has still a great career in politics before him. But it would
be absurd to argue that the statement was untrue because it was
clothed in metaphorical language. If marriage be, as some free-
thinkers assert, a time-bargain between two persons that they will
live together as long as it is mutually convenient for them to do
so, it follows that the Scriptural expression, 'they two shall be one
flesh,' is unmeaning. But the truth or falsehood of it does not
depend on its metaphorical character. It may well be that an ex-
pression has been chosen which, by its very paradoxical character,
most strongly expresses the close and indissoluble union which
marriage creates, not to add that the expression, as found in the
language of the Old Testament Scripture, may exegetically have
no metaphorical character ; it may be a simple statement that the
relationship of married persons is to be as close as that which
exists between persons of the same* blood, expressed in the plainest
way of which the language would admit.

We come back, then — putting aside this unprovoked attack on
the moral character of metaphor — to the point which touches the
root of the matter. * Ninety-nine out of every hundred advocates
of legalising marriage with a deceased wife's sister,' says one of
them, ' are in favour of legalising marriage with wives' nieces and
their wives' kinsfolk in general. A man's own nieces are blood

3B2

676 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

relations, but his wife's nieces are not. The reason marriage-law
reformers confine themselves to one point at a time is that they
believe success can best be obtained in this way.' For that very
reason, among others, the upholders of the marriage law of England
tenaciously defend the position which is the object of immediate
attack. They have been fairly warned that all turns on this : its
capture means the loss of the fort. Surely it is time for Parlia-
mentary assailants to give up the disingenuous pretence that they
have only this one point in view, and to discuss the whole question
in a reasonable way. For my own part — disastrous as the change
would be — I had rather see the law altered so as to abolish at once
all legal prohibitions of marriage between persons connected by
affinity than to have an enactment which would abolish them by
implication, and require their legal abolition in detail as opportunity
served. The Church would, in that case, have its own opposite
principle clearly defined as a basis for consistent action ; good
people would be saved from the confusion of thought which would
betray them into condonation of evil, as though it were a compara-
tively harmless exception to the general law. It is not immaterial
to remember that this was the basis of the Act of 1835. That
statute drew, for the first time, a partial distinction between the
prohibited degrees of consanguinity and affinity. Lord Lyndhurst
had not drawn any such distinction in the Bill which he introduced.
His Bill, as he afterwards said, had nothing to do with annulling
marriages ; it had no other end in view than the condition of children,
which the existing law left in an unsettled state during their parents'
lifetime. In its passage through Parliament the distinction (re-
trospectively) between consanguinity and affinity was introduced.
But neither then nor at any other time, until the tactics of the
Marriage Law Keform Association were adopted, was a wife's sister
dealt with on any other footing than that on which the whole of
the wife's near kinsfolk stood. By the law of England, to use the
words of Lord Wensleydale — certainly not one of the ' eccle-
siastically-given ' lawyers whom Lord Bramwell depreciates — the
marriage of a widower with his deceased wife's sister was always as
illegal and invalid as a marriage with a sister, daughter, or mother
was. For the first time, as I have said, by Lord Lyndhurst's Act,
though not by Lord Lyndhurst's will, a partial distinction between
relationship in blood and relationship by marriage was recognised.
To that distinction — if ever we are driven to allow any distinction
at all — sound reason and good sense require us to adhere.

I am well aware that in what I have written I have laid myself
open to Lord Bramwell's sneer at ' priests.' I am content to bear
this reproach. I believe that the Church of Christ has done more
than any power on earth to uphold the sacredness of family life in
its pure affections and unity of interests. The members of other

1886 SISTERS-IN-LAW. 677

religious denominations have not been wanting in zeal for morality,
as they understand it. But in respect of marriage they avowedly
take a ' liberal ' view. They would make prohibitions of it as few as
possible ; they approve of facilities for the dissolution of it which
the Church has always refused to allow. The tendency of these
4 free ' views may be illustrated by the existing state of things in
North America. In the New England States it has come to pass
that 2,000 families are now broken up every year, and 4,000 persons
divorced. We conceive it to be our duty to resist these tendencies
to the utmost of our power. The Church has spoken by her ministers
— surely not unnatural exponents of her mind, and their loyalty has
often brought upon them bitter hatred and personal loss. But on
this question her laity have not been silent. To describe them as
* ecclesiastically-given ' is but a disagreeable way of saying that they
have been on the Church's side. On the other side are ranged a
variety of interests and motives which do not see Parliamentary
light. A traveller in a railway carriage heard some country folk
discussing the Wife's Sister question. One of them mentioned a
man who had ( married ' his stepmother. The father had left her
the house and some property. The grown-up son was living in the
house, and ' married ' the woman * to keep the property together.'
The relator quite approved of what the son had done. We, who
deprecate even a distant approach to such laxity of morals, ought
not to be regarded as hostile to the happiness or the welfare of our
country. We believe that we are its true friends. I adopt the con-
cluding sentence of Lord Bramwell's article — with a variation. I
trust that a right view will be taken of this important matter, and
the law remain unchanged*^

J. F. OXON.

678 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON.

THE poverty of the poor and the failure of the Mansion House Relief
Fund are the facts which stand out from the gloom of a winter
when dark weather, dull times, and discontent united to depress the
hopes of the poor and the energy of their friends The memory
of days full of unavailing complaint and aimless pity is one from
which all minds readily turn, quieting fears with the assumption
that the poverty was exaggerated or that the generosity of the rich
is ample for all occasions.

The facts, however, remain that the poor are very poor, and that
the Fund failed as a means of relief ; and these facts must be faced
if a lesson is to be learnt from the past, and a way discovered through
the perils of the future. The policies which occupy the leaders'
minds, the interests of business, the theologies, the fashions, are but
webs woven in the trees, while the storm is rising in the distance.
Sounds of the storm are already in the air, a murmuring among
those who have not enough, puffs of boasting from those who have
too much, and a muttering from those who are angry because while
some are drunken, others are starving. The social question is rising
for solution, and, though for a moment it is forgotten, it will sweep
to the front and put aside as cobwebs the ' deep ' concerns of leaders
and teachers. The danger is lest it be settled by passion and not
by reason, lest, that is, reforms be hurriedly undertaken in answer
to some cry, and without consideration of facts, their weight, their
causes, and their relation.

The study of the condition of the people receives hardly as much
attention as that which Sir J. Lubbock gives to the ant and the
wasps. Bold good men discuss the poor, and cheques are given by
irresponsible benefactors, but there are few students who reverently
and patiently make observations on social conditions, accumulate facts,
and watch cause and effect. Scientific method has won the great
victories of the day, and scientific method is supreme everywhere
except in those human affairs which most concern humanity.

Ten years ago Arnold Toynbee (it has been said) demanded a

* body of doctrine ' from those who cared for the . poor. He sought

an intellectual basis for moral fervour, and yet to-day what a muck-

1886 DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. 679

heap is our social legislation, what a confusion of opinion there exists
about the poor-law, education, emigration, and land laws. All re-
formers are driving on, but what is each driving at ? ' Sometimes
the same driver has aims obviously incompatible, as when the Lord
Mayor one day signs a report which says that ' the spasmodic assis-
tance given by the public in answer to special appeals is really
useless,' and another day himself inaugurates a fund by public
appeal.

One of the facts of last winter is the poverty of the poor, and it
is a fact about which the public mind is uncertain. The working
men when they appear at meetings seem to be so well dressed in.
black cloth, the statistics of trades-unions, friendly, co-operative,
and building societies show the members to be so numerous, and the
accumulated funds to be so far above thousands and so near to
millions sterling, that the necessary conclusion is ' There is no poverty
among the poor.' But then the clergy or missionaries echo some
* bitter cry,' and tell how there are thousands of working folk in
danger of starvation, thousands without warmth or clothing, and the
necessary conclusion is, 'All the poor are poverty-stricken.' The
public mind halts between these two conclusions and is uncertain.
The uncertainty is due partly to the vague use of the term ' poor,'
by which is generally meant all those who are not tradespeople or
capitalists, and partly to an inability to appreciate the size of London.
The poor, it is obvious, form a minority in the community, and a
minority is regarded as a small and manageable body. Last winter's
experience clears away all uncertainty, and shows that there is a vast
mass of people in London who have neither black coats nor savings,
and whose life is dwarfed and^ shortened by want of food and clothing.
In Whitechapel there is a population of 70,000 ; of these some 20
per cent., exclusive of the Jewish population, applied at the office of
the Mansion House Eelief Fund during the three months it was
opened. In St. George's, East, there is a population of 50,000, and
of these 29 per cent, applied.

Among all who applied the number belonging to any trades-
union or friendly society was very few. In Whitechapel only 6
out of 1,700 applicants were members of a benefit club. In St.
George's only 177 out of 3,578 called themselves artisans. In
Stepney 1,000 men applied before one mechanic came, and only one
member of a trades-union came under notice at all. In the Tower
Hamlets division of East London 17,384 applied, representing 86,920
persons. It may be safely assumed that all in need did not apply,
and that many thousands were assisted by other agencies. The reports
of some of the visitors expressly state that the numbers they give are
exclusive of many referred to the Jewish Board of Guardians, the clergy,
and other agencies, while numbers of those who did apply either did
not wait to have their names entered, or were so manifestly beyond

680 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

the reach of money help that they were not recorded among appli-
cants. Especially noteworthy among the remarks of the visitors is
one, that all who applied would at any season of the year apply in
the same way and give the same evidence of poverty. 'If a fund was
advertised as largely as this Fund has been in summer, and when trade
was at its best, precisely the same people would apply.' The truth of
the remark has been put to the test, and during the summer a large
number of those relieved in the winter have been visited, with the
result that they have been found apparently in like misery and
equally in need of assistance.

Of the poverty of those who made application there has been no-
question. Some may have brought it on themselves by drink or
vice, some may have been thriftless and without self-control; but all
were poor, so poor as to be without the things necessary for mere
existence. The men and women who crowded the relief offices had
haggard and drawn faces, their worn and thin bodies shivered under
their rags of clothing, and they gave no sign of strength or hope.
Their homes were squalid, the children ill-fed, ill-clad, and joyless,
their record showed that for months they had received no regular
wage, and that their substance was more often at the pawnbroker's-
than in the home.

Last winter's experience shows that outside the classes of regular
wage-earning workmen, who are often included among ( the poor,' is
a mass of people numbering some tens of thousands, who are without
the means of living. These are the poor, and their poverty is the
common concern.

Statistics prove what has long been known to those whose
business lies in poor places, to many of whom the reports of the
increased prosperity of the country have been like songs of gladness
in a land of sorrow. They know the streets in which every room is a
home, the homes in which there is no comfort for the sick, no easy
chair for the weary, no bath for the tired, no fresh air, no means of
keeping food, no space for play, no possibility of quiet, and to them
the news of the national wealth and the sight of fashionable luxury
seem but cruel satire. The little dark rooms may bear traces of
the man's struggle or of the woman's patience, but the homes of the
poor are sad, like the fields of lost battles, where heroism has fought
in vain. By no struggle and by no patience can health be won in so
few feet of cubic air, and no parent dares to hope that he can make
the time of youth so joyful as to for ever hold his children to-
pleasures which are pure. The homes of the poor are a mockery of
the name, but yet how many would think themselves happy if even
their homes were secure, and they were able to look to the future
without seeing starvation for their children and the workhouse
for themselves. One example will illustrate many. The Browns
are a family of five ; they occupy one room. The man is a labourer,

1886 DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. 681

London-born, quick-witted and slow-bodied, and, as many labourers
do, he fills up slack time with hawking ; the woman takes in her
neighbours' washing. Their room, twelve feet by ten feet, is crowded
with two bedsteads, the implements for washing, the coal bin, a table,
a chest, and a few chairs ; on the walls are some pictures, the human
protest against the doctrine that the poor can ' live by bread alone.'
The man earns sometimes 3s., often nothing, in the day ; and his
wife brings in sometimes Qd. or 9d. a day, but her work fills the
room with damp and discomfort, and almost necessarily keeps the
husband out of doors. Both man and woman are still young, but
they look aged, and the children are thin and delicate. They sel-
dom have enough to eat and never enough to wear, they are rarely
healthy, and are never so happy as to thank God for their creation.
Hard work will make' these' children orphans, or bad air, cold, and
hunger will make these parents childless.

In the case of another family, where the wage is regular — the
income is ll. a week — the outlook is not much brighter. Here there
is the same crowded room, for which 3s. a week is paid, the same
weary half-starved faces, the same want of air and water. Here, too,
the parents dare not look forwards, for even if the income remains
permanent, it cannot secure necessaries for sickness, it cannot educate
or apprentice the children, and it cannot provide for their own old
age. No income, however, does remain permanent, and the regular
hand is always anxious lest a change in trade or in his employer's
temper may send him adrift.

In the cases where there is drink, carelessness, or idleness,
everything of course looks worse. The room is poorer and dirtier,
the faces more shrunken, jmd the clothes thinner. Indignation
against sin does not settle the matter. The poverty is manifest,
and if the cause be in the weakness of human nature, then the
greater and the harder is the duty of effecting its cure.

Cases of poverty such as these are common ; they who by busi-
ness, duty, or affection, go among the poor know of their existence ;
but if those who hire a servant, employ work-people, or buy cheap
articles would think, they could not longer content themselves with
phrases about thrift as almighty for good, and intemperance as-
almighty for evil. Fourteen pounds a year, if a servant has unfailing
health and unbroken work from the age of twenty to fifty-five, will
only enable her to save enough for her old age by giving up all
pleasure, by neglecting her own family duties, and by impoverishing
her life to make a livelihood. Very sad is it to meet in some
back-room the living remains of an old servant. Mrs. Smith is sixty-
five years old ; she has been all her life in service, and saved over
100£. She has had but little joy in her youth, and now in her old
age she is lonely. Her fear is lest, spending only 7s. a week, her
savings may not last her life. She could hardly have done more, and

682 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

what she did was not enough. A wage of 20s. or 25s. a week is called
good wages, yet it leaves the earners unable to buy sufficient food or
to procure any means of recreation. The following table represents
the necessary weekly expenditure of a family of eight persons, of
whom six are children. It allows for each day no cheering luxuries,
but only the bare amount of nitrogenous and carbonaceous foods
which are absolutely necessary for the maintenance of the body.

Food, i.e. oatmeal, 1| Ibs. of meat a day between eight £ *• d-

persons, cocoa and bread . . . . 0 14 0

Rent for two small rooms . . . . .050

Schooling for four children . . . .004

Washing . . . . . . .010

Firing and light . ,026

Total 1 2 10 *

If to this account 2s. a week be added for clothes (and what
woman dressing on 100L or 801. a year could allow less than 51. a
year to clothe a working-man, his wife, and six children) then the
necessary weekly expenditure of the family is II. 4s. lOd. Few
fathers or mothers are able to resist, and ought not to resist the
temptation of taking or giving some pleasure ; so even where work
is regular and paid at 11. 5s. Od. a week, there must be in the home
want of food as well as of the luxuries which gladden life.

Those dwellers in pleasant places, without experience of the
homes of the poor, who will resolutely set themselves to think about
what they do know, must realise that those who make cheap goods
are too poor to do their duty to themselves, their neighbours, and
their country. The mystery, indeed, remains how many manage to
live at all.

One solution is that there exists among these irregular workers
a kind of communism. They prefer to occupy the same neighbour-
hoods and make long journeys to work rather than go to live among
strangers. They easily borrow and easily lend. The women spend
much time in gossiping, know intimately one another's affairs, and
in times of trouble help willingly. One couple, whose united earn-
ings have never reached 15s. a week, whose home has never been
more than one small room, has brought up in succession three
orphans. The old man, at seventy years of age, just earns a living by
running messages or by selling wirework, but even now he spends
many a night in hushing a baby whose desertion he pities, and whom
he has taken to his care.

The poverty of the poor is understood by the poor, and their
charity is according to the measure of Christ's. The charity of the
rich is according to another measure, because they do not know of

1 This table is taken from a paper -written by my wife in the National Review, July
1886, in which she illustrates by many examples that the average wage is insufficient
to support life.

1886 DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. 683

poverty, and they do not know because they do not think. Only the
self-satisfied .Pharisee and the proud Roman could pass Calvary un-
moved, and only the self-absorbed can be ignorant that every day
the innocent and helpless are crucified. The selfishness of modern
life is shown most clearly in this absence of thought. Absorbed in
their own concerns, kindly people carelessly hear statements, see
prices, and face sights which imply the ruin of their fellow-creatures.
The rich would not be so cruel if they would think. Thought about
the amount of food which ' good wages ' can buy, about the hours
spent in making matches or coats, about the sorrows behind the
faces of those who serve them in shops or pass them in the streets
— thought would make the rich ready to help, and the fact that
there are in the 500,000 inhabitants of the Tower Hamlets 86,920
too poor to live, is enough to make them think.

The failure of the Fund is the other fact of the winter to stir
thought. Mansion House relief represents the mercies to which the
wisdom and the love of the completest age have committed the
needs of the poor. Never were needs so delicate left to mercies so
clumsy ; needs intertwined with the sorrows and sufferings with which
no stranger could intermeddle, have been met with the brutal gene-
rosity of gifts given often with little thought or cost. The result has
been an increase of the causes which make poverty and a decrease
of good-will among men.

The Fund failed even to relieve distress. In St. George's in the
East there were nearly 4,000 applicants, representing 20,000 persons.
All of these were in distress — were, that is, cold, hungry. 2,400
applicants, representing some 12,000 persons, the committee con-
sidered to be working people unemployed and within the scope of
the Fund. For their relief 2,0001. was apportioned, and if it had
been equally divided, each person would have had 3s. 4d. on which
to support life during three months. Such sums might have re-
lieved the givers, pleased by the momentary satisfaction of the
recipient, but they would not have relieved the poor, who would
still have had to endure days and weeks of want.

The Fund was thus in the first place inadequate to relieve the
distress. An attempt was made by discrimination to make it useful
to those who were < deserving.' Forms were given out to be filled
in by applicants ; visitors were appointed to visit the homes and to
make inquiries ; committees sat daily to consider and decide on
applications. The end of all has been, that in one district those
assisted were found to be * improvident, unsober, and non- industrious,'
and in another the almoner can only say, ' they are a careless, hard-
living, hard-drinking set of people, and are so much what their
circumstances have made them, that terms of moral praise or blame
are hardly applicable.' An analysis of the decisions of the com-
mittees shows that the decisions were according to different standards,

684 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

and with different views of what was meant by ' assistance.' A half-
crown a week was voted for the support of one family in which the
man was a notorious drunkard. Twelve pounds were given to start
a costermonger on one day, while at a subsequent committee meeting
10s. was voted for a family in almost identical circumstances. In
one district casual labourers were given 20s. or 30s., but in the
neighbouring district casual labourers were refused relief.

Methods of relief were as many as were the districts into which
London was divided. In Whitechapel a labour test was applied.
The labourers were offered street-sweeping ; and those who were used
only to indoor work were put to whitewashing, window cleaning, or
tailoring. The women were given needlework. When it was known
to the large crowd brought to the office by the advertisement of the
Fund that work was to be offered to the able-bodied, there was
among the ne'er-do-weels great indignation. ' Call this charity ! '
* We will complain to the Lord Mayor, we will break windows,' and,
addressing the almoners, 'It is you fellows who are getting 11. a day
for your work.' Many 'finding they could not get relief without
doing work did not persist in their application,' and they were not
entered as applicants, but work was actually offered to 850 men and
accepted by only 339. Of these the foreman writes, ' the labour test
was a sore trial for a great many of them. I repeatedly had it said
to me by them, ' The Fund is a charity, and we ought not to work
for it.'

In St. George's there was no labour test, and there 1,689 men
and 682 women received assistance in food or in materials for labour.
In Stepney the conditions under which the Fund was collected were
strictly observed, and only those ' out of employment through the
present depression ' were assisted. The consequence was that casual
labourers, the sick, the aged, all known to be frequently out of work,
were refused, and much of the fund was spent in large sums for the
emigration of a few. In this district the committee was largely
composed of members of friendly societies, men who, by experience,
were familiar both with the habits of the poor and with the methods
of relief. Their co-operation was invaluable, both in itself and also
for the confidence which it won for the administration.

In Mile End the committee had another standard of character
and another method of inquiry. They kept no record of the number
of applications, and those relieved have been differently described
as ' good men ' and ' loafers ' by different members of the committee.
2,539£. were spent among 2,133 families, an average of 4s. 10cZ. a
person. The Poplar committee has published no report, but one of
its members writes : * Kelief was often given without investigation
to old, chronic, sick, and poor-law cases, without distinction as to
character ; the rule was, Give, give ! spend, spend ! ' and another states
the opinion ' that the whole neighbourhood was demoralised by the

1886 DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. 685

distribution of the Fund.' As a result of their experiences, some of
those engaged in relief in this district are now making efforts to
unite workmen, and the members of benefit societies, in the adminis-
tration of future funds.

The sort of relief given was as various as the methods of relief.
Sometimes money, sometimes tickets, sometimes food ; the variety
is excused by one visitor, who says, * We were ten days at work before
instructions came from the Mansion House, and then it was too late
to change our system.' Discrimination utterly broke down, and with
all the appliances it was chance which ruled the decision. The gifts
fell on the worthy and on the unworthy, but as they fell only in
partial showers, none received enough and many who were worthy
went empty away.

Discrimination of desert is indeed impossible. The poor law
officials, with ample time and long experience, cannot say who deserves
or would be benefited by out-relief. Amateurs appointed in a hurry,
and confused by numbers, vainly try to settle desert. Systems must
adopt rules ; friendship alone can settle merit.

The Fund failed to relieve distress, and further developed some
of the causes which make poverty.

Prominent among such causes are (1) faith in chance; (2) dis-
honesty in its fullest sense ; (3) the unwisdom of so-called charity.

(1 ) The big advertisement of ' 70,000£. to be given away ' offered a
chance which attracted idlers, and relaxed in many the energies
hitherto so patiently braced to win a living for wife or children. The
effect is frequently noticed in the reports. The St. George's in the
East visitors emphasize the opinion that it was * the great publicity
of the Fund which made jits distribution so difficult.' A visitor in
Poplar thinks ' the publicity was tempting to bad cases and deterrent
of good ones.' The chance of a gift out of so big a sum was too
good to be missed for the sake of hard work and small wages.

Faith in chance was further encouraged by the irregular methods
of administration. Kefusals and relief followed no law discoverable
by the poor. In the same street one washerwoman was set up with
stock, while another in equal circumstances was dismissed. In adjoin-
ing districts such various systems were adopted that of three ' mates '
one would receive work, another a gift, and the third nothing. * The
power of chance ' was the teaching of the Fund, started through the
accidental emotions of a Lord Mayor, and they who believe in chance
give up effort, become wayward, lose power of mind and body.
Chance gives up her followers to poverty, and the increase of the
spirit of gambling is not the least among the causes of distress.

(2) The remark is sometimes made that ' the righteous man is
never found begging his bread,' or, in other words, that there is
always work for the man who can be trusted. Honesty in its fullest
sense, implying absolute truth, thoroughness, and responsibility, has

686 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

great value in the labour market, and agencies which increase a belief
in honesty increase wealth. The tendency of the Fund has been to
create a belief in lies. Its organisation of visitors and committees
offered a show of resistance to lies, but over such resistance lies
easily triumphed, and many notorious evil-livers got by a good story
the relief denied to others. Anecdotes are common as to the way in
which visitors were deceived, committees hoodwinked, and money
wrongly gained, while the better sort of poor, failing to understand
how so much money could have had so little effect, hold the officials
to have been smart fellows, who took care of themselves. The
laughter roused by such talk is the laughter which demoralises, it is
the praise of the power of lies, and the laughers will not be among
those who by honesty do well for themselves and for others.

(3) The mischief of foolish charity is a text on which much has
been written, but no doubt exists as to the power of wise charity.
The teaching which fits the young to do better work or to find
resource in a bye-trade, the influence by which the weak are
strengthened to resist temptation, the application of principles which
will give confidence, and the setting up of ideals which will enlarge
the limits of life — this is the charity which conquers poverty. In
East London there are many engaged, in such charity, and to their
work the action of the Fund was most prejudicial. Some of them,
carried away by the excitement, relaxed their patient silent efforts,
while they tried to meet a thousand needs with no other remedy
than a gift. Others saw their work spoiled, their lessons of self-help
undone by the offer of a dole, their teaching of the duty of helping
others forgotten in the greedy scramble for graceless gifts. They
devoted themselves to do their utmost and bore the heavy burden
of distributing the Fund, but most of them speak sadly of their
experience. They laboured sometimes for sixteen hours a day, but
their labour was not to do good but to prevent evil — a labour of pain
— and one speaking the experience of his fellows, says, ' their labours
had the appearance of a hurried and spasmodic effort.' The fund of
charity, like a torrent, swept away the tender plants which the stream
of charity had nourished.

In the face of all this experience it is not extravagant to say that
the means of relief used last winter developed the causes of poverty.
It may be that if all the poor were self-controlled and honest, and if
all charity were wise, poverty would still exist ; but self-indulgence,
lies, and unwise charity are causes of poverty, and these causes have
been strengthened. One visitor's report sums up the whole matter
when it says : —

They (the applicants) have received their relief, and they are now in much the
same position as they were before, and as they \vill be found, it is feared, in future
winters, until more effectual and less spasmodic means of improving their condition
can be devised, for the causes of distress are chronic and permanent. The founda-

1886 DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. 687

tion of such independence of character as they possessed has been shaken, and some
of them have taken the first step in mendicancy, which is too often never retraced.

Examples, of course, may be found where the relief has been
helpful, and some visitors, in the contemplation of the worthy family
relieved from pressure and set free to work, may think that one such
result justifies many failures. It is not, though, expedient that
many should suffer for one, or that a population should be demora-
lised in order that two or three might have enough.

The Fund as a means of relief has failed : it is condemned by the
recipients, who are bitter on account of disappointed hopes ; by the
almoners, whose only satisfaction is that they managed to do the least
possible mischief ; and by the mechanics, whose name was taken in
vain by the agitators who went to the Lord Mayor, and who feel their
class degraded by a system of relief for working men which assumes
improvidence and imposition.

The failure of the latest method of relief has been made as
manifest as the poverty, and no prophet is needed to tell that bad
times are coming. The outlook is most gloomy. The August
reports of trades societies characterise trade as ' dull ' or 4 very slack.'
The pawnbrokers report in the same month that they are taking in
rather than handing out pledges, and all those who have experience
of the poor consider poverty to be chronic. If not in the coming
winter, still in the near future there must be trouble.

Poverty in London is increasing both relatively and actually.
Relative poverty may be lightly considered, but it breeds trouble as
rapidly as actual poverty. The family which has an income sufficient
to support life on oatmeal will not grow in good-will when they know
that daily meat and holidays are spoken of as ' necessaries ' for other
workers and children. Education and the spread of literature has
raised the standard of living, and they who cannot provide boots
for their children, nor sufficient fresh air, nor clean clothes, nor
means of pleasure, feel themselves to be poor, and have the hopeless-
ness which is the curse of poverty, as selfishness is the curse of
wealth.

Poverty, however, in London is increasing actually. It is increased
(1) by the number of incapables : * broken men, who by their misfor-
tunes or their vices have fallen out of regular work,' and who are drawn
to London because chance work is more plentiful, * company ' more
possible, and life more enlivened by excitement. (2) By the deterio-
ration of the physique of those born in close rooms, brought up in
narrow streets, and early made familiar with vice. It was noticed
that among the crowds who applied for relief there were few who
seemed healthy or were strongly grown. In Whitechapel the fore-
man of those employed in the streets reported that * the majority
had not the stamina to make even a good scavenger.' (3) By the
disrepute into which saving is fallen. Partly because happiness (as

688 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

the majority count happiness) seems to be beyond their reach, partly
because the teaching of the example of the well-to-do is 'enjoy
yourselves,' and partly because ' the saving man ' seems * bad com-
pany, unsocial and selfish ; ' the fact remains that few take the trouble
to save — only units out of the thousands of applicants had shown
any signs of thrift. (4) By the growing animosity of the poor
against the rich. Good-will among men is a source of prosperity
as well as of peace. Those bound together consider one another's
interests, and put the good of the 'whole ' before the good of a class.
Among large classes of the poor animosity is slowly taking the place
of good-will, the rich are held to be of another nation, the theft of a
lady's diamonds is not always condemned as the theft of a poor man's
money, and the gift of 70,000^. is looked on as ransom and perhaps
an inadequate ransom. The bitter remarks sometimes heard by the
almoners are signs of disunion, which will decrease the resources of
all classes. The fault did not begin with the poor ; the rich sin, but
the poor, made poorer and more angry, suffer the most.

On account of these and other causes it may be expected that
poverty will be increased. The poorer quarters will become still poorer,
the sight of squalor, misery, and hunger more painful, the cry of
the poor more bitter. For their relief no adequate means are pro-
posed. The last twenty years have been years of progress, but for
want of care and thought the means of relief for poverty remain un-
changed. The only resource twenty years ago was a Mansion House
Fund, and the only resource available in this enlightened and
wealthy year of our Lord is a similar gift thrown, not brought, from
the West to the East.

The paradise in which a few theorists lived, listening to the talk
at social science congresses, has been rudely broken. Lord Mayors,
merchant princes, prime ministers, and able editors have no better
means for relief of distress than that long ago discredited by failure.
One of the greatest dangers possible to the State has been growing
in the midst, and the leaders have slumbered and slept. The re-
sources of civilisation, which are said to be ample to suppress
disorder, and to evolve new policies, have not provided means by
which the chief commandment may be obeyed, and love shown to
the poor neighbour.

The outlook is gloomy enough, and the cure of the evil is not to
be effected by a simple prescription. The cure must be worked by
slow means which will take account of the whole nature of man,
which will regard the future to be as important as the present, and
which will win by waiting.

Generally it is assumed that the chief change is that to be
effected in the habits of the poor. All sorts of missions and schemes
exist for the working of this change. Perhaps it is more to the
purpose that a change should be effected in the habits of the rich.

1886 DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. 689

Society has settled itself on a system which it never questions. It
is assumed to be absolutely within a man's right to live where he
chooses and to get the most for his money.

It is this practice of living in pleasant places which impoverishes
the poor. It authorises, as it were, a lower standard of life for the
neighbourhoods in which the poor are left ; it encourages a contempt
for a home which is narrow; it leaves large quarters of the town
without the light which comes from knowledge, and large masses of
the people without the friendship of those better taught than them-
selves. The precept that ' every one should live over his shop ' has
a very direct bearing on life, and it is the absence of so many from
their shops, be the shop ' the land ' or ' a factory,' which makes so
many others poorer. Absenteeism is an acknowledged cause of Irish
troubles, and Mr. Goldwin Smith has pointed out that ' the greatest
evils of absenteeism are — first, that it withdraws from the community
the upper class, who are the natural channels of civilising influences
to the classes below them, and, secondly, that it cuts off all personal
relations between the individual landlord and his tenant.' He further
adds that it was ' natural the gentry should avoid the sight of so much
wretchedness . . . and be drawn to the pleasures of London or
Dublin.' The result in Ireland was heartbreaking poverty which
relief funds did not relieve, and there is no reason why in East
London absenteeism should have other results.

In the same way the unquestioned habit of every one to get the
most for his money tends to make poverty. In the competition which
the habit provokes, many are trampled under foot, and in the search
after enjoyment wealth is wasted which would support thousands in
comfort.

The habits of the people are in the charge of the Church, so that
by its ministers (conformist and nonconformist) God's Spirit may
bend the most stubborn will. Those ministers have a great responsi-
bility. God's Spirit has been imprisoned in phrases about the duly
of contentment and the sin of drink ; the stubborn will has been
strengthened by the doctor's opinion as to the necessity of living
apart from the worry of work, and by the teaching of a political
economy which assumes that a man's might is a man's right. The
ministers who would change the habits of the rich will have to
preach the prophet's message about the duty of giving and the sin
of luxury, and to denounce ways of business now pronounced to be
respectable and Christian. Old teaching will have to be put in new
language, giving shown to consist in sharing, and earning to be
sacrifice. For some time it may be the glory of a preacher to empty
rather than to fill his church as he reasons about the Judgment to
come, when twopence a gross to the match-makers will be laid along-
side of the twenty-two per cent, to the shareholders, and penny
dinners for the poor compared with sixteen courses for the rich —
VOL. XX.— No. 117. 3C

690 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

when the ' seamy ' side of wealth and pleasure will be exposed.2 For
some time the ministers who would change habits may fail. It is not
until they are able again to lift up the (rod whose presence is dimly
felt, and whose nature is misunderstood, that they will succeed. In
the knowledge of God is eternal life. When all know God as the
Father who requires rich and poor to be perfect sharers in His gifts
of knowledge, beauty, and joy, as well as in His gifts of virtue, for-
giveness, and peace, then none will be satisfied until they are at one
with Him, and His habit has become their habit.

It may, however, be well here to suggest in a few words what
may be done while habits ' remain the same ' by laws or systems for
the relief of poverty.

It would be wise (1) to promote the organisation of unskilled
labour. The mass of applicants last winter belonged to this class,
and in one report it is distinctly said that the greater number were
' born within the demoralising influence of the intermittent and irre-
gular employment given by the Dock Companies, and who have
never been able to rise above their circumstances.' It is in evidence
that the wages of these men do not exceed 12s. a week on an average
in a year. If, by some encouragement, these men could be induced
to form a union, and if by some pressure the Docks could be induced
to employ a regular gang, much would be gained. The very organi-
sation would be a lesson to these men in self-restraint and in fellow-
ship. The substitution of regular hands at the Docks for those who
now, by waiting and scrambling, get a daily ticket, would give to a
large number of men the help of settled employment and take away
the dependance on chance, which makes many careless. Such a
change might be met by a non possumus of the directors, but it
is forgotten that to the present system a weightier non possumus
would be urged if the labourers could speak as shareholders do speak.
A possible loss of profit is not comparable to an actual loss of life,
and the labourers do lose life, and more than life, as they scramble
for a living that the dividend may be increased.

(2) The helpers of the poor might be more efficiently organised.
The ideal of co-operating charity has long hovered over the mischief
and waste of competing charity. Up to the present denominational
jealousy, or the belief in crotchets, or the self-will which ' dislikes
committees,' has prevented common work. If all who are serving the
poor could meet and divide — meet to learn one another's object and
divide each to do his own work — there would be a force applied which
might remove mountains of difficulty. Abuse would be known, wise
remedies would be suggested, and foolish remedies prevented. Indi-
rect means would be brought to the support of direct, and those

2 Prices paid according to the Mansion House report are : Making of shirts,
3d. to id. each ; making soldiers' leggings, 2s. a dozen ; making lawn-tennis aprons,
elaborately frilled, &\d. a dozen to the sweater, the actual worker getting less.

1886 DISTRESS IN EAST LONDON. 691

concerned to reform the land laws, to teach the ignorant, and
beautify the ugly, would be recognised as fellow- workers with those
whose object is the abolition of poverty. Money would be amply
given, and the high motives of faith and love applied to the reform
of character. The ideal is in its fulness impossible until there be
a really national Church, in which the denominations will preach
their truth, and in which ' the entire religious life of the nation
will be expressed.' Such a Church, extending into every corner of
the land and drawing to itself all who love their neighbours, would
realise the ideal of co-operative charity, and so order things that no
one would be in sorrow whom comfort will relieve, and no one in pain
whom help can succour.

(3) Lastly, the qualification for a seat on a board of guardians
might be removed and the position opened to working men.3 The
action of the poor-law has a very distinct effect on poverty, and in-
telligent experience is on the side of administration by rule rather
than by sentiment. In poor-law unions, where it is known that
'indoors' all that is necessary for life will be provided, but that ' out-
doors ' nothing will be given, the poor feel they are under a rule
which they can understand. They are able to calculate on what will
happen in a way which is impossible when ' giving goes by favour or
desert,' and they do not wait and suffer by trusting to a chance.
Public opinion, however, does not support such administration, and
as public opinion is largely now that of the working men, it is neces-
sary that these men should be admitted on to boards of guardians,
where by experience they would learn how impossible it is to adjust
relief to desert, and how much less cruel is regular sternness than
spasmodic kindness. A carefully and wisely administered poor-law
is the best weapon in hand for the troubles to come, and such is im-
possible without the sympathy of all classes.

By some such means preparation may be made for dealing with
poverty, but even these would not be sufficient and would not be in
order at a moment of emergency.

If next winter there be great distress, what, it may be asked,
can possibly be done ? The chief strain must undoubtedly be borne
by the poor-law, and the poor-law must follow rules — hard-and-fast
lines. The simplest rule is indoor relief for all applicants, and if
for able-bodied men the relief take the form of work which is edu-
cational, its helpfulness will be obvious. The casual labourer, whose
family is given necessary support on condition that he enters the
House, may, during his residence, learn something of whitewashing,
woodwork, and baking, or, better yet, that habit of regularity which
will do much to keep up the home which has been kept together
for him.

3 It might 'be necessary at the same time to abolish 'the compounder,' so that
the tenant of every tenement might himself pay the rates and feel their burden.

3c2

692 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

The poor-law can thus help during a time of pressure without
any break in its established system. If more is necessary, perhaps
the next best form of relief would be an extension of that tried last
year by the Whitechapel Committee of the Mansion House Fund.
By co-operation with other local authorities the guardians might
offer more work at street sweeping, or cleaning — which in poor
London is never adequately done — under such conditions of resi-
dence or providence as would prevent immigration, but would be
free of the degrading associations of the stone-yards. The staff at
the disposal of the guardians would enable them to try the experi-
ment more effectively than was possible when a voluntary committee
without experience, time, or staff, had to do everything.

By some such plans relief could be afforded to all who belong to
what may be called the lowest class ; for the assistance of those who
could be helped by tools, emigration, or money, the great Friendly
societies, the Society for Eelief of Distress, and the Charity Organisa-
tion Society might act in conjunction. These societies are un-
sectarian, are already organised and may be developed in power and
tenderness to any extent by the addition of members and visitors.

These means and all means which are suggested seem sadly
inadequate, and in their very setting forth provoke criticism. There
are no effectual means but those which grow in a Christian society.
The force which, without striving and crying, without even entering
into collision with it, destroyed slavery will also destroy poverty.
When rich men, knowing (rod, realise that life is giving, and when
poor men, also knowing (rod, understand that being is better than
having, then there will be none too rich to enter the kingdom of
heaven, and none too poor to enjoy God's world.

SAMUEL A. BARNETT.

1886 693

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND.

THE genius of each generation chooses instinctively among tradi-
tional forms its particular method of expression and the means by
which it can most easily influence mankind. It is mainly through
the agency of the novel that this end is attained in our portion of
the nineteenth century. Forty-two years ago Sainte-Beuve, while
singing the requiem of the extraordinarily fertile period that reigned
in the intellectual life of France from 1830 to 1840, prophesied that
the old forms of art were passing away, and that new ones must arise :
* I place my hopes for the future on dramatic literature. In it will
be found, I believe, the new development. The theatre, and the
theatre alone, can rouse the wearied mind of this generation from
its apathy, and give shape and colour to the mental speculations now
germinating in men's minds.

The great critic failed to see that the new departure was destined
to take place in the domain of novel-writing rather than in the
domain of the drama, and that not only would the novelist appro-
priate much of the influence hitherto wielded by the playwright,
but would compel the drama to join issue with the novel, as far as
theatrical conventions would allow, in its realism and accuracy of
finish. Many novels are now dramatised, and many novelists have
become writers of plays. Alexandre Dumas, fils, before he was bitten
by the desire to occupy the position of tragic moralist, led the way
to naturalism on the stage. Emile Augier and Octave Feuillet have
both successfully followed in his footsteps. Until, however, the
naturalistic millennium, foretold by the new school, has completely
descended upon the intellectual world the novel must depend for its
effects on motives very different from those which rule dramatic action.
The one evolves its story by describing every shade, every gradation,
in surroundings and background which influence its personages, while
the other is constrained to catch the attention of the public by colour,
movement, sudden contrasts, and anomalous situations, ' Le Theatre
vit d'exceptions,' and our generation, living at high pressure as it
does, likes, in its rare moments of repose, to take its doses of
philosophy diluted, and its quota of morality in solution. A tran-
script of ordinary life, as it passes around it, suits its over-burdened
digestion better than exceptional events or abnormal individualities.

694 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

It is to France we must look for the highest development of
the modern novel. The French intellect is analytic, quick to seize
the phantasies and fashions of the hour and give them expression and
shape, sensitive to the ridiculous and to the weaker side of human
nature, and gifted with an artistic appreciation of form and propor-
tion which permits its imagination to ' vagabond ' here and there,
yet keeps its work symmetrical and within the limits of probability.
The novel on so fruitful a soil has taken every form, socialistic
and pathological, pastoral and erudite, political and domestic.
No reticence hinders, no moral consideration prevents, the French
writer of fiction from touching on any and every subject. Of these
classifications, the most arrogant in its pretensions is the so-called
' Scientific ' or ' Experimental ' novel, by which, its exponents tell
us, ' a work of fiction is to be approached like a study in pathology
and reduced to the observation of the " Universal Mechanism of
Matter " ' !

As the science of medicine, they tell us, has emerged, thanks to
the experimental method, from a state of empiricism into the definite
region of facts, so the study of mental feeling and passion is to be
reduced from theory and supposition to a stern deduction from
actuality. The high priests of this school of fiction are Zola, the De
Groncourts, Gruy de Maupassant, and a host of others in our day ;
Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert, a quarter of a century ago. In
1830 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), with the cynicism and materialism
that has since distinguished the naturalistic following, gave forth
his confession of pessimism and atheism to the world with a crudity
and explicitness that offended a public accustomed to the vaporous
vagueness of De Musset and Baudelaire. ' I shall be understood in
1880,' he said, with a shrug of the shoulders, divining, with a shrewd
comprehension of human nature, that his theory of fiction was the
one destined to rule men's minds in the future. La Chartreuse de
Parme and Rouge et Noir, considered by the * Moderns ' as occu-
pying a foremost position in French literature, were so disregarded
at the time of their publication as to induce their author to shake
the dust of his ungrateful country off his feet and spend the last
years of his life in Italy. * Arrigo Beyle, Milanese,' as he caused
himself to be called on his tombstone, was only a little in advance of
his time. Already young Balzac had entered upon his prodigious
work the Comedie Humaine, and had paid a tribute to the memory
of his predecessor in an exhaustive article on his literary method.
George Sand met the innovator in Italy during her visit to Venice.
Being then in the days of her fiery youth, she could not brook
his plain speaking, and they parted with indignant words. Before
becoming a friend of Flaubert's, she had begun to see the reverse
of the medal ; though remaining a ' troubadour ' to the end of her
days, singing ideal and romantic love without regard to science or

1886 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND. 695

psychology, she listened to those who ranged themselves on the other
side.

In the correspondence lately published between her and Flaubert
we have a full exposition of this disparity in their views. The letters
were never intended for publication, and we quite agree with the
critic, M. Brunetiere, that the editors have done their work carelessly
and hastily ; that they have not taken the trouble de faire leur
toilette ; that they have evidently suppressed pages without acknow-
ledging the fact or without deigning to give explanatory notes ; and
that the dates are in many instances palpably wrong, showing that
they cannot have taken the trouble to collate and compare her letters
with his. For our part, we are glad the correspondence was pub-
lished with its ' toilet unmade,' without the elision of Flaubert's
misanthropy, or his strong language on the subject of the stupidity
of mankind. As it stands at present it might be a dialogue between
the two artists at ' Nohant,' or * Croisset ' — in her study looking out
on the * Vallee Noire,' or by ' the river that brings fresh breezes to
his cavern.' They talk without reference either to the public or to
professional considerations, or to anything that can check the full
flow of confidential and unreserved plain speaking. We hear every
phase and point of view of the two intellectual standpoints which
they occupy discussed and ventilated. We are shown the stratagems
of their craft. We see the ropes and pulleys, the shifting of the
scenes, the necessary appearance or non-appearance of the principal
figure, the extent to which idealism or realism is required to deceive
the audience before which they perform. Sometimes there is a want
of sentiment in Flaubert's matter-of-fact manner of discussing the
methods of his art which isjlisturbing to all illusion. He is like a
child in a garden pulling up the flowers to see how the roots grow.
There is no pretension to fine writing ; indeed, one is surprised at
the want of fluency displayed by the author of Mme. Bovary ; yet
every now and then he demonstrates the < anatomy ' of his art with
a rare precision and skill.

His first letter is dated 1866. He was then forty-five, George
Sand sixty-two. It is written ceremoniously to thank her for a
favourable criticism of some of his work. The next arranges a visit
she is to pay him at Rouen. After this visit a constant interchange
of letters sets in. The two discuss every subject in art, religion, and
literature. They coin words for their own use. She signs herself
the old Troubadour, ' qui toujours chante et chantera le parfait
amour ; ' he addresses her as * mon bon maitre.' She rates him on
his indolence.

And you, my Benedictine, alone in your charming monastery, -working and
never going out, that is -what comes of travelling too much in your youth ; and
yet you can do a ' Bovary,' and describe out-of-the-way corners like a great master.
You are a creature quite out of the way, very mysterious, but gentle as a sheep. . . .

696 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Sainte-Beuve declares that you are very immoral — perhaps he sees with unclean
eyes, like that learned botanist who says the ' germander ' is a ' dirty yellow.'
The observation is so untrue that I could not help writing in the margin of his
book, ' It is your eyes that are unclean.' .... I believe you to be in a state of
grace, since you like work and solitude, in spite of the rain.

They differ on every conceivable point, intellectual and moral.
After ten years of correspondence, she writes, —

We are, I think, as unlike in our manner of seeing things as it is possible to
be ; yet, since we love one another, all is well, since we think of one another at
the same moment. I conclude people require their opposite. Minds find their
completion in identification for a time with elements essentially different to
themselves.

As much dissimilarity existed in the origin, birth, and early
surroundings of George Sand and Flaubert as in every other par-
ticular. Both are striking examples of the laws of heredity so
insisted upon by the pathological school of fiction. She had royal
and heroic blood in her veins, and reproduced in her fiction the
personage of Maurice de Saxe, and women at variance with social
laws — as were three of her ancestresses — to the end of her literary
career. Gustave was the son of a doctor. The only ray of romance
that illumined his bourgeois origin was the friendship subsisting in
childhood between his maternal grandmother and Charlotte Corday.
He was born at Eouen on December 12, 1821. Reared among the
unbeautiful, almost sordid, surroundings of the doctor's home, the boy
grew up quiet, reserved, and backward for his age, except in the
art of weaving stories out of the everyday occurrences round him.
Flaubert's father was a humane man in the best acceptation of the
word. ' The sight of a suffering dog,' his son tells us, ' brought tears to
his eyes. He performed his surgical operations skilfully nevertheless,
and invented some terrible ones.' He took the same view of Gustave's
literary pursuits as the old Hamburg banker did of his nephew
Henri Heine's, ' Hatte der dumme Knabe was gelernt, so brauchte er
keine Biicher zu schreiben.' The boy's freedom was never interfered
with, however, and he was allowed to sit reading all day long, his
head between his hands. In the strange preface, with its mixture of
reserve and effusion, which he wrote to the last poems of his friend
Louis Bouilhet, he relates with subtle force of humour the absurd
enthusiasms of their schoolboy life at the Alma Mater of Rouen : —

I do not know what the dreams of schoolboys are, but ours were splendid in
their extravagance. The last ebullitions of romanticism that reached us, circum-
scribed by our everyday surroundings, brought about a strange excitement. Whilst
enthusiastic hearts sighed after dramatic loves, with their accompaniments of
gondolas, black masks, and great ladies fainting in post-chaises in Calabria, others
dreamt of conspiracies and rebellions. One rhetorician composed an ' Apology for
Robespierre,' which circulated outside the school and led to a duel between the
author and a stranger. I remember that one schoolmate wore a red cap ; another

3886 GU STAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND. 697

declared his intention to live as a Mohican ; while one of our intimate friends
determined to turn renegade and seek service under Abd-el-Kader. We attempted
suicide, we meditated every absurdity, but what a hatred of the commonplace !
What aspirations, what respect for the masters ! How we adored Victor Hugo !

As a young man he was exceptionally handsome, but no woman's
love could tempt him from the one constant passion that animated
his life. ' Je n'ai jamais pu emboiter Venus avec Apollon,' he
declared. From his earliest youth he devoted his entire intellectual
and physical energy to literature, undermining his health, and ulti-
mately sacrificing his existence to his imperious and exacting
mistress. * It is better to get drunk on ink than on eau-de-vie,' he
answers, when his friend tells him prophetically, ' You love litera-
ture inordinately ; it will kill you.'

Infinitely touching is the exhortation with which he ends the
preface to Bouilhet's poems, alluded to above :—

Since the public always ask for a moral, here is mine : Are there two young
students who spend their leisure moments reading the poets together, who, full of
literary ambition, compare words and sentences, indifferent to all else ; hiding
their passion with the modesty of a young girl — then I give them this advice :
Spend the days of your youth in the arms of the Muse ; her love replaces all
other, and consoles for every loss. Then, if events passing around you seem
transposed into shape and form, and you feel imperiously driven to reproduce them,
so that everything, even your own existence, seems useless for other purpose, and
that you are prepared for all disappointments, ready for all sacrifices, proof against
all trials, then I say, ' Take the plunge ! publish ! You will have put your powers
to the test, and be able to bear reverses and trials of every kind with equanimity.'

In 1843 a cloud came over Flaubert's life. One evening, after a
long walk with his brother, he fell in a fit, which proved to be
epileptic. From that time he was subject to frequent similar
attacks. His father did what he could for him, but medical skill
seemed powerless. Flaubert himself studied every medical work
upon the subject, but to no purpose. ' I am a lost man,' he said
one day to a friend. ( Fele, si fele est le mot juste, car je sens
le contenu qui fuit,' is his tragic lament, at a later period, to George
Sand.

The attacks ceased in middle life, but recurred in later year?,
until one day he fell dead on his study table, strewn at the time with
books of reference and the manuscript of a new novel.

The correspondence which is before us shows how this affliction
was present to his mind at all times. In studying his literary work
the recollection of his impaired health must never leave us, for there
is no doubt it accounts for the intense gloom that pervades it. ' The
saddest mourning is not the one we wear upon our hats,' as he says.

Towards the end of the year 1849 Flaubert finished the Tentation
de Saint Antoine, and read it aloud to Du Camp and Bouilhet. The
reading lasted thirty-two hours (eight hours a day for four days)

698 THE NINETEENTH CENIURY. Nov.

His friends were in a predicament. Neither ventured to tell [him.
his work was hopelessly dull. At length Bouilhet plucked up
courage. ' Mon cher,' he said, ' we think you ought to put that
book in the fire, and not think any more about it.' Flaubert took
his friends' advice so far as not to publish Saint Antoine until long
after in a completely different form. Out of this incident, however,
arose one of the most important events in his history, and indeed
in the history of the French literature of the day. Bouilhet,
after his frank advice, suggested the subject which Flaubert gave
form to in Mme. Bovary. Bouilhet had heard the story in Rouen.
Charles Bovary had been an old pupil of Flaubert's father,
and all the main incidents were taken from the life: — the young
girl married to a plain, uninteresting husband ; the crime, the
misery, the debts ; ending with the wife's suicide and the man's
death, after discovering his wife's infidelity; — nothing can be ima-
gined more tragic than the subject, nothing more cruelly realistic
than Flaubert's treatment of it. The very supplementary title,
Mceurs de province, startles us by its cynicism and bitterness.

So base, so mean, so vulgar are the manners and minds of the
people whom he describes, that we feel inclined, a dozen times during
the reading of the book, to lay it aside disheartened and irritated,
and a dozen times we are charmed back again by the marvellous
descriptions and touches of realism in which it abounds. There
are days on the coast of his own Normandy that remind one of
its pages — days dark and stormy, when the sea breaks with a
ceaseless, mournful sound. You look round in vain for a bright
spot in the leaden sky; when, suddenly, a flash of lightning reveals
a whole landscape undreamed of before.

Both the public and private history of Mme. Bovary form
curious episodes in the history of literature. On its publication in
1857, the Second Empire, like all governments who attain to power
with not very clean hands, wished to show the extreme orthodoxy
of its moral and religious views, and endeavoured to suppress the book.
The lawsuit that followed it was vehemently attacked by the counsel
for the prosecution, and eloquently defended by M. Senart for the
defence. The acquittal of the author was obtained with difficulty ;
yet he was more than compensated by the publicity given to the
book, and by its extraordinary and unprecedented success.

Its private history has been revealed by Guy de Maupassant.
After five years of incessant labours Flaubert entrusted his manu-
script to his friend Maxime Du Camp, who passed it on to Laurent-
Pichat, editor of the Revue de Paris. Soon after, Maxime wrote
to Flaubert to the effect that he and Laurent-Pichat, having read it,
recommended him to allow them to cut out and shorten, as they saw fit,
for publication in the Revue. They would concede him the right
to publish it subsequently in any form he might like. If he did not

1886 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AXD GEORGE SAND. 699

consent to this proposal, he was told that by the publication of a
book overweighted with detail and involved in style, he would
hopelessly compromise his literary reputation.

Be courageous [this remarkable letter ends] ; shut your eyes during tlie opera-
tion, and have confidence, if not in our talent, at least in the experience we
have acquired in dealing with affairs of this sort, and also in our affection for you.
You have buried your story under a mass of matter artistic but useless. It must
be unearthed. We will have this done under our own supervision by an ex-
perienced and skilful hand ; not a word shall be added to your copy — only portions
cut out. It will not cost you more than a hundred francs, which can be deducted
from your royalties, and you will have published a really good book instead of an
indifferent one.

This letter was found religiously preserved among Flaubert's
papers, with the one word ' Gigantesque ' written on it. He sub-
mitted to the operation, for a copy of the first edition of the book
was found on which was written : —

This copy represents my book as it left the hands of Sieur Laurent-Pichat, poet,
and proprietor of the Revue de Paris, — GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, 20th April, 1857.

The alterations were noteworthy. Each page was covered with
erasures ; paragraphs, entire pieces were cut out; almost all the
original and striking passages ruthlessly expurgated. Flaubert at once
took it out of their hands and published it in its entirety. Both the
public prosecution and the private negotiation with Maxime Du
Camp did much to embitter his views of ' la betise huinaine.'
* When a man 's got his limbs whole he can bear a smart cut or two ; '
but neither Flaubert's limbs nor his mind were whole.

In his Opinions de Thomas Grandorge Taine describes a dinner
at which a young diplomat, seated beside a stiff Evangelical
Englishwoman, attempts to defend French novels from the charge
of immorality brought against them : —

' Miss Mathews, you judge us severely because you have not read us. Permit
me to send you a French novel to-morrow, just published, the profoundest and
most soul-stirring of all the moral writings of our time. It is written by a kind of
monk, a Benedictine, who went to the Holy Land, and was even shot at by
the infidels. This monk lives secluded in a hermitage near Rouen, shut up night
and day, working incessantly. He is very learned, and has published a work on
ancient Carthage. He ought to be in the Academy ; it is to be hoped he will
succeed Mgr. Dupauloup. Not only is he full of genius, but so conscientious.
He studied medicine for some time under his father, who was a doctor, and judges
character by physique. If he has a fault, it is that he is too profound, too laborious
to please frivolous readers. His end and object is to warn young women against
indolence, vain curiosity, and indiscriminate reading. His name is Gustave
Flaubert, and his book is called " Mme. Bovary ; or the Results of Bad Conduct." '
Miss Mathews looked pleased, asked the name of the editor: 'I will,' she said,
' translate the book immediately on my return to London, and we will distribute it
through the "Wesleyan society for the advancement of morality.'

700 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Flaubert had no intention of ' showing the results of bad conduct'
in Mme. Bovary. * Art for art ' was his axiom ; but like all true artists
he was forced, in spite of himself, into * preaching a moral.' He had
lived long enough in the world to know its sorrows, and to know that
deepest tragedy of all, unlawful, cruel, sensual love ; and therefore
he wrote the story of Emma Bovary, with its pitiful ending. He
abstains from judging the conduct of his characters, but sees life
through a glass darkly, and represents it so to his readers. His theory
was that a novel ought to be a philosophical transcript of life, dis-
passionately and faithfully done, uninfluenced by the sentiment or
bias of the author. ' If the reader does not without help discover
the moral of a book,' he observes, * either the reader is a fool, or the
book is false and inexact.'

I do not -write [he declares to George Sand] 'about the misery of the world ' for
pleasure, believe me ; but I cannot change my eyes ! As to my ' having no con-
victions ' — alas ! convictions smother me. I burst with internal rage and indigna-
tion. But in the ideal I have of art, I think one ought not to show one's
convictions ; the artist ought no more to appear in his work than God in nature.
Man is nothing ; the work everything. This discipline, which may start from an
entirely erroneous basis, is not easy to observe, and, so far as I am concerned,
it is a sort of permanent sacrifice that I make to good taste. I would like to say
what I think, and to comfort the Sieur Gustave Flaubert by phrases ; but what is the
importance of said Sieur ?

They both of them in their letters hark back to this vexed
question, a vital one between the romantic and the realistic schools,
whether the artist's individuality ought to appear in what he writes.
' As to giving expression to my personal opinion of the people
I put on the stage,' Flaubert declares, * No, a thousand times
no. ... I have an unconquerable dislike to put anything of my
heart on paper' Her answer, dated Nohant, February 2, 1863,
says : —

To put nothing of one's heart in one's writing ? I do not understand such a
statement. It seems to me impossible to put anything else. Can I separate my
mind from my heart ? Can sensation be limited ? Not to give myself up entirely
to my work seems to me as impossible as to cry with anything but my eyes and to
think with anything but my brain. What do you really mean ? You will tell
ine when you have time.

Again, speaking of the novels they were going to set to work at
in 1875, she says : —

What shall we do ? You for certain will portray ' desolation,' and I ' consola-
tion.' I do not know what influences our destinies. You see your characters as
they pass, you criticise them ; from a literary point of view you abstain from
appreciating them, you content yourself with painting them, hiding your personal
bias carefully and systematically. Still, it is visible through your work, and you
only make people who read you more sad. I wish to make them less unhappy.
I cannot forget that my personal victory over despair was the work of my will

1886 GU STAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND. 701

and of a new method of comprehension which is the complete opposite of that
which I held formerly.

I know you blame the intervention of the doctrine of personality in literature.

Are you right ? Is it not rather a want of conviction than an {esthetic
principle ? It is impossible to have a philosophy in the soul without its showing-
itself. I have no literary counsels to give you. I believe firmly your school
have more talent and power of work than I have. Only I think theirs and your
great want is a settled and wide view of life. Art is not only portrayal, and
real painting must be always full of the soul that rules the brush. Art is not
only criticism and satire ; criticism and satire only paint one side of truth.

I wish to see man as he is. He is neither good nor evil ; he is good and evil ;
but he is something yet more — a soul ! Being good and bad, he has an internal force
which leads him to be A'ery bad and a little good, or very good and a little bad.

In this discussion, as in almost all they hold, ' George Sand is
right, and Flaubert is not wrong.' She allowed her personality to
appear to an overweening extent. She never wrote a novel that was
not an account of one of her own love affairs or an exposition of some
of her social or socialistic ideas, while he was impersonal and im-
partial to an unsympathetic and depressing degree. His characters
submit to circumstances. They never mould them to their will.
There is little doubt this is what constitutes the immorality of
Mme. Bovary and although never alluded to in the prosecution it is
this fatalism, or, as the school call it, * determinism,' which instinc-
tively filled moralists and ecclesiastics with dread. So you are made,
and so you must act. Providence has developed your sensual appe-
tites, therefore it is useless to resist them. If Emma Bovary does not
yield to Leon, it is not from a moral effort to save herself, but because
she is not ripe for the fall ; and afterwards there is no passionate
regret for sin, no endeavour to lift herself out of the degradation,
no compunction even on account of her child. And when at the
end she commits suicide, it is not from remorse for the ruin she has
brought on all around her ; but because it is the only possible means
of escape from her own difficulties. All the exhilaration of human
struggle and endeavour is ruthlessly eliminated.

Flaubert was above all an artist, nothing but an artist, and one
of those artists in whom two or three predominant faculties absorbed
and ended literally in annihilating the others. The result was that
he understood nothing of the world, or of life, but that ' which could
help to the completion of his own artistic individuality,' * sa con-
sommation personnelle.' He recognised nothing else. He was the
head of the school of art designated ' L'art pour 1'art.' He did not
admit that any aesthetic creation should have any object but itself
and its own completion. He had too great a contempt for his
fellow-men to endeavour to improve them. His pessimism would
have deterred him from any utilitarian tendency.

* Art,' he wrote, ' must be self-sufficing, and must not be looked
on as a means.'

702 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

The end and aim of art for me is beauty. I remember my heart beating, with
acute delight, as I looked at a wall of the Acropolis, a perfectly plain wall (the
one on the left on the ascent to the Propylea). I wonder if a book independently
of what it says can produce the same effect ? In the precision of arrangement,
the rarity of material, the polish of its surface, the harmony of the completed
work, is there not intrinsic merit ? — a sort of divine force, something eternal, like
a great principle ?

The one thing that seemed to him enduring and absolute in his
life made up of delusions and disappointments was form and beauty
of expression. A well-proportioned sentence presented an indestruc-
tible and complete force to his senses that was as concrete and exact
as the resolution of a problem to a mathematician.

When one knows how to attract the whole interest of a page on one line,
bring one idea into prominence among a 'hundred others, solely by the choice
and position of the terms that express it; when one knows how to hit with a
word, one only word, placed in a certain position ; when one knows how to move a
soul, how to fill it suddenly with joy, or fear, or enthusiasm, or grief, or rage, bv
putting an adjective under the reader's eye, then one is really the greatest of
artists, a real writer of prose.

There is something pathetically comic in the way he struggles
with his composition —

I pass weeks without exchanging a word with a living being, and at the
end of the week I cannot recall a single day or a single event. I see my mother
and my niece on Sundays, that is all. My only society consists of a band of
rats who make an infernal row in the garret above my head, when the water
does not gurgle and groan and the wind blow. The nights are as black as ink,
and a silence like that of the desert reigns around me. Such an existence reacts
on the nerves. My heart beats at the least thing.

All this is the result of our intellectual occupations. This is what comes of
torturing body and soul ; but that torture is the only thing worth having in the
world.

You astound me [George Sand replies] with the difficulty you find in your
work. Is it coquetry ? You show it so little ! My great difficulty is to choose
between the thousand and one scenic combinations, which can vary ad infinitum the
simple situation. As to style, I treat it much more cavalierly than you.
The wind plays on my old harp as it pleases : high or low, loud or soft. It is all
the same to me, so long as the emotion is there. Yet I cannot evolve anything
out of myself. It is the ' other1 who sings as he lists, well or ill. And when I
try to think about it, I get frightened, and tell myself that I am nothing,
nothing at all.

A certain amount of philosophy saves us from despondency. Suppose we are
really nothing but instruments, it is a delightful state, and a sensation unlike any-
thing else to let yourself vibrate.

Let the wind rush through your chords. I think you take too much trouble,
and that you ought to let the ' other ' influence you oftener. The instrument
might sound weak at times, but the breath of inspiration continuing would
increase in strength. Then you could do afterwards what I don't do, but what I
ought to do — you would raise the tone of colour of your picture, putting in more
light or shade.

He had the faults as well as the merits of an artist. Towards the
end of his life his exclusiveness and impatience with commonplace

1886 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND. 703

humanity became predominant, often to the deterioration of his good
heart and liberality of mind. It is not without a pained feeling of
surprise, for instance, that we see a Frenchman writing in 1867,
* At the last Magny dinner the conversation was so " boorish " that I
swore internally never to go again. They talked of nothing but " M.
de Bismarck and the Luxembourg." I was sick of it.' This ebullition
was perfectly sincere. He did not understand that among literary
people and artists a conversation could turn on politics. Politics, as
he thought, were outside of, and almost antagonistic to art. Man is
made for art, and not art for man ; ' La sacro-sainte litterature '
is the only thing of any importance in life ; everything else is but
unmeaning and vulgar. Such is his estimate of men and things.

As a natural consequence of this extreme literary fastidiousness
Flaubert declared that the artist ought only to work for a chosen few,
and that the crowd for him did not exist. We can imagine how
antagonistic this was to all George Sand's views of work and life.
t We novelists must write for all the world, for all who need to be
initiated. When we are not understood, we are resigned to the
inevitable and begin again. When one is understood, one rejoices
and goes on.' And then she says, later on, ' You can hardly be
accurate in saying that you write to please a dozen people, for
failure irritates and affects you.' She knew that, like many
others, when Flaubert succeeded, he did not find humanity so
stupid, nor the public so dense ; but also, that when he did not
succeed, instead of trying to find out the reason, he declared it was
a cabal, or prejudice, or jealousy. This incapacity of submitting to
the mildest criticism did not arise so much from wounded vanity as
from his incapacity to see that his work could have been conceived or
executed in any other method than that in which he had conceived
and executed it.

This exclusiveness, as far as the outside public was concerned,
did not extend to his own circle of intimates. Guy de Maupassant
has given us an interesting glimpse of his Sunday receptions in
Paris in his bachelor apartments on the fifth floor. His intimate
friend, Ivan Tourguenieff, ' le Muscove,' was often the first to arrive.
He would sink into a chair and begin speaking slowly and softly, but
with an intonation that gave the greatest charm to all he said. He
was generally laden with foreign books, and would translate the poems
of Goethe, Pouschkine, or Swinburne as he read. He and Flaubert
had many sympathies and ideas in common. Others soon followed :
Taine, his eyes shining behind his spectacles, full of information
and talk ; then Alphonse Daudet, bringing the life, the vigour, the
brightness of Paris, making jokes and telling stories with the sing-
song voice and quick gestures of a southerner, shaking his black hair
from his handsome, finely cut face, and stroking his long silky beard.
George Sand, when in Paris, would sometimes join the circle.

704 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

In her coarse, black serge gown, made perfectly plain without
crinoline or trimming, her hair cut short, looking as like the
' troisieme sexe,' to which Flaubert compared her, as possible, with a
nod for all and a shake of the hand for a favoured few who crowded
round, she also would sit down, and after the cigars were handed
round, of which she partook, the talk began. Not a conversation,
perhaps, which M. Taine would have recommended his imaginary
Evangelical lady to listen to, or a society he would have recom-
mended her to mix in ; but interesting as all societies are interest-
ing in which the yeast of speculative thought is working. Such
was the moment, his biographer says, to see Flaubert. With
grand gestures, moving from one to the other of his guests, his long
dressing-gown blown out behind him like the dark sail of a fishing-
boat, full of excitement, indignation, vehement expression of opinion,
of overflowing eloquence, his voice like a trumpet, his good-natured
laugh ; amusing in his indignation, charming in his good-nature,
astounding in his erudition and surprising memory, he would ter-
minate a discussion with a profound and pertinent remark, rushing
through the centuries with a bound to compare two facts of the same
genus, two men of the same race, two religions of the same order,
from which, like flints struck together, he kindled a light.

Since, as Flaubert says, the public ' will have a moral,' what con-
clusion do we come to between these two great artists ? Is idealism,
or realism to be the issue of true art ? Is the primitive, often dis-
cordant and painful tune evolved by the human instrument to be
transcribed by the hand of the artist without comment or addition ? Or
is it the mission of great art, by the aid of counterpoint and modu-
lation, to give us a symphony which, from gradation to gradation,
through unison and dissonance will lead us up to wider planes of
sensation and knowledge? Either side argues, as we have seen,
from its own standpoint. But after all the best test of art must be
its results. And what are the results of Flaubert's tenet of ' art for
art'?

Zola, who has formulated the axioms of his school more boldly
than any, says, alluding to some coarse stories that had been made
in Gil Bias, a low Parisian paper : —

Not that I blame the inspiration of them, for did I do so I should hut blame
Rabelais, La Fontaine, and many others I think highly of; but, in truth these
stories are too badly written. That is my only reason for condemning them. An
author is guilty if his style is bad. In literature this is the one unpardonable
crime. I do not see any other question of immorality. A well-turned phrase is a
good action.

The pathological or scientific method of romance-writing, has
brought us to the present school of French realistic novel, of which
one would be sorry even to write down the name of one of the pro-
ductions. We are surprised indeed that so artistic and analytic a

1886 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND. 705

race as the French can accept the term ' scientific novel.' We have
heard the theories of science ironically called a fiction, but it is
difficult to see how fiction can l)e erected into a science. The know-
ledge of a scientific student of medicine remains empirical until, by
amassing a number of facts, and carrying out a large number of
experiments, he makes it actual. This, the writer of fiction, by the
nature of his art, which ties him to the treatment of one set of facts,
is precluded from doing. Flaubert himself says : —

In spite of all the genius brought to bear on the development of one fable
taken as an example, another fable can be made use of to prove the contrary, for
' denouements' are not conclusions. You cannot deduce general principles from one
fact, and people who think thoy are making a step forward in that direction are
at issue with modern science, which insists on the multiplication of facts before
establishing a law.

The art of fiction is entirely governed by personality. It is a
spontaneous effort of the creative faculty, and has nothing in common
with the conclusions of natural phenomena, in which nothing can
be created. We stop the new school, then, at the science of sociology,
keystone of their edifice ; for sociology is a study of humanity in the
aggregate, while the novel must essentially be a study of humanity
in the individual.

Flaubert had the misfortune to promulgate many theories, and
unfortunately to be accepted literally by an inferior set of thinkers.
We had a right to ask bread of such a genius as he, and he has
given us a stone ; but the pessimism, that like a canker has eaten
into Flaubert's work, is farther to seek than in his own personality or
that of his followers. Frenchmen are dreamers of dreams. Their
genius ever endeavours to scale the heavens. The Eevolution had
awakened hopes and ambitions it had never been able to fulfil. Full
of feverish restlessness they had fought and apparently conquered
Europe under the leadership of Napoleon. When he disappeared
the whole fabric tumbled to pieces like a pack of cards. They
were cast back on themselves to feed on their disillusionment;
hence a morbid cynicism and bitter atheism permeated all classes,
finding expression in Alfred de Musset's JRolla, in Balzac's
Comedie Humaine, and later in Gustave Flaubert's Mme. Bovary.
The third Napoleon endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of his
uncle ; we know with what result. Deceived a second time, the gloom
of pessimism seems to have descended on the young school of realists
more impenetrably than ever. Their critics laugh at them ; recom-
mend ' douches,' ' iron,' * devotion to domestic duties,' or repeat
Voltaire's celebrated advice to the pessimists of his time, ' cultivez
votre jardin.' The evil exists, and is undermining all vigorous
thought and artistic endeavour in France. ' Le monde Latin s'en
va,' Flaubert writes to George Sand ; but at the same time he
hardly recognises the superior robustness of those gentlemen (the
VOL. XX.— No. 117. 3D

706 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Germans) who smash mirrors in white kid gloves, know Sanscrit,
drink one's champagne, but who, he is obliged to confess naively,
took nothing from La Croisset but a * needle-case and a pipe.'
George Sand had inherited some of the Koenigsmarck blood, and
with it a healthier, robuster texture of mind, which, had she been a
man, subjected to the same scientific and practical bringing up as
Flaubert, would have made a greater artist.

The individual named George Sand is well [she writes towards the end] ; he
is enjoying the wonderfully mild winter that reigns in Berry, is gathering flowers,
making botanical discoveries, sewing dresses and mantles for his daughter-in-law,
costumes for marionnettes, arranging theatrical decorations, dressing dolls, reading
music, and playing with little Aurore, the most wonderful child on the face of the
globe. There is no one calmer or more happy in his domestic surroundings than
this old troubador retired from business, who sings from time to time his little
romance to the moon, without particularly caring whether he sings well or ill
so long as he speaks what passes through his brain, and who the rest of the time
idles delightfully. It has not. been so well with him all his life ; he was stupid
enough to be young once ; but as he did not do any ill, or know bad passions, or
live for personal vanity, he is happy enough to be quiet and find amusement in
everything.

Alexandre Dumas describes her in her old age wandering about
her garden in a broad-brimmed hat. She was gathering impressions,
he says, absorbing the universe, steeping herself in nature ; and at
night she would give this forth as a sort of emanation. George
Eliot recognised her greatness in spite of the prejudice that
existed in England against the author of Lelia. ' I don't care,' she
says, ' whether I agree with her about marriage or not — whether I
think the design of her plot correct, or that she had no precise design
at all, but began to write as the spirit moved her, and trusted to
Providence for the catastrophe — which I think the more probable
case. It is sufficient for me, as a reason for bowing before her in
eternal gratitude to that " great power of God manifested in her,"
that I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given
to her to delineate human passion and its results, and (I must say in
spite of your judgment) some of the moral instincts and their ten-
dencies, with such truthfulness, such nicety of discrimination, such
tragic power, and, withal, such loving, gentle humour, that one
might live a century with nothing but one's own dull faculties and
not know so much as those six pages will suggest.'

We cannot resist giving two more extracts from her letters. She
writes to Gustave Flaubert from Nohant, January 15, 1870 : —

Here I am at home, tolerably convalescent, except an hour or two every even-
ing ; but that will pass away in time. ' The suffering, or he who endures it,' as my
old cure" used to say, ' cannot endure for ever.'

I received your letter this morning, dear friend. Why do I care for you more
than many others, even more than old and tried friends ? I am trying to find out,
for the attitude of my mind at this moment is that of him — •

1886 GUSTAVE FLAUBERT AND GEORGE SAND. 707

' qui va cherchant,

Au soleil couchant,

Fortune ! '

Yes, intellectual fortune, light ! There is no doubt, when we grow old and
reach the sunset of life (the finest hour for tones and harmonies of colour), we
form new ideas of everything, and above all of affection.

When, in the age of vigour and strong personality, we advance towards friend-
ship timorously and tentatively, feeling the ground of reciprocity, one feels
solid oneself, and would wish to feel the solidity of that which bears you. But
when the intensity of personality has gone, we love people and things for those
qualities which they themselves possess, for that which they represent to the
eyes of your mind, and not for the possible influence they may exert on your life.
They become like a picture or a statue that we wish to possess, when we imagine
at the same time a beautiful dwelling in which to place it.

I have traversed the green plains of Bohemia without amassing anything. I
have remained foolish, sentimental, a ' troubadour.' I know it will ever be the
same, and that I shall die without hearth or home. Then I think of the statue,
the picture — and say to myself, AVhat would I do with them if I possessed them ?
I have no place of honour to put them in, and I am content to know that they
are in some temple unprofaned by cold analysis, too far off to be looked at too
closely. One loves them all the better, perhaps, and says to oneself, ' I will pass
again through the country where they are. I will see and love all that has made
ine love and appreciate them, but the contact of my personality will not have
changed them. It will not be myself I will love in them.'

Thus it is that the ideal that one has given up endeavouring to incorporate,
incorporates itself in us, because it remains itself. That is the whole secret of
beauty, truth, and love, of friendship, enthusiasm, and faith. Think it over,
and you will agree with me.

To the last she is to do battle for her opinions. Two months
before her death, she writes :—

Because Zola's Itougon is a valuable work I do not change my opinion. Art
ought to be the search for truth, and truth is not the mere portrayal of evil and
good. A painter who only sees the one is as wrong as he who only sees the other.
Life is not made up of villains and brutes. Honest people cannot even be in a
minority, since a certain order reigns in society, and there are no unpunished
crimes.

Stupidity abounds, it is true, but there is a public conscience that influences
stupid people and obliges them to respect right. Let rascals be shown up and
punished — that is just and moral ; but let us see the other side also. Otherwise the
unthinking reader is shocked, frightened, and, to save himself from a disagreeable
impression, refuses to listen.

His letter in reply to the last of the series ends, ' You have
always done me good, intellectually and morally. I love you
tenderly.'

And so ends this delightful artistic dialogue, from which indeed
we would gladly have given other extracts had space allowed of our
doing so.

In an interesting essay of Hazlitt's he discusses what characters
he would rather have met, and under what circumstances. He
suggests a gossip at their club with Addison and Steele, a dinner

3 D 2

708 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

with Johnson and Burke, a supper with Charles Lamb. I would add
a morning spent with George Sand in her garden at Nohant, when
age had modified her views and matured her judgment. While the
world ' scolded and fought ' she remained an enthusiast, a believer
in good, a troubadour singing ideal art and love. Through all her
correspondence there is no trace of vanity, selfishness, or jealousy of
others' fame ; but, on the contrary, a generous carelessness, a courage
and independence which are rare in the greatest of her sex. She
touches every subject, often superficially and inaccurately; but
her brain is ever active, ever bright, full of hope, aspiration, and
the impetuous desire for good.

N. H. KENNAKD.

1886 709

WORKHOUSE CRUELTIES.

NOTWITHSTANDING the vast improvements that have taken place in
the department of legal relief to the poor during the last twenty-five
years, those who are best acquainted with the subject can hardly rest
satisfied with the amount of reform to which we have attained, and
we therefore desire briefly to call attention to some points which we
consider still demand investigation and redress.

It need hardly be said that the subject is not a popular one, and
that it meets with little sympathy from the public — scarcely even
from philanthropists whose study may be the poor and their require-
ments. Had the vast interests involved in the expenditure and
control of eight millions annually been considered as it deserves to
be in the past, the grievances and abuses which have now been
exposed during the last thirty years could never have taken place.
Had even a due interest been felt in the election of our repre-
sentatives for this great work we might have left the matter safely
in their hands ; but to the apathy and neglect of this primary duty
may be traced the mismanagement to which we have alluded. Even
if the large institutions scattered through the land were closed and
inaccessible to the outside public, who contributed the rates for their
support, still it was open to all, and an obvious duty, to use every
exertion to secure the election of the best men (and we may now add
women) to ensure the right management of these vast concerns.1

We can now thankfully acknowledge that an improvement has
begun in this respect, which may, we believe, be partly traced to the
interest excited in the fact that women have come forward to fill
these posts of usefulness ; fifty are now scattered through the 647
Boards of Guardians in the land, and, small as the number is by
comparison, yet we can truly say they have made their mark and
done good service to the cause of the poor and helpless, of whom
women and children form so large a proportion.

Yet this is one of the points still urgently requiring attention and
interest, as is proved by the fact that in one important West-end

1 One means of creating an interest in Poor Law management would be the pub-
lication in each union of an annual report or statement of the workhouse aud infirmary,
with details of expenditure. It will scarcely be believed that only two Metropolitan
Boards print and circulate any such statement at present.

710 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Xov.

parish so much indifference prevailed that out of 17,000 voting
papers issued but a few over 5,000 were returned, or, in other words,
instead of the maximum number of 463,000 votes which might have
been given, only 143,000 were actually polled. That there is great
neglect in the issuing and collecting of voting papers is not denied,
and there is besides another reason, which has been noticed else-
where, deterring large numbers of the upper classes from recording
their votes, viz. the almost invariable coincidence of the elections
with the season of Easter, when many are absent from home, no
interval of time being allowed for sending papers into the country
for signature.2

When the educated classes come to see that it is not only their
duty to vote, but to fill the office of guardian also, we may look for
the disappearance of those few remaining evils of which we still com-
plain. We will now only dwell upon two departments of Poor Law
management which seem to us to call for reforms, some requiring
legislative interference, others the action of public opinion alone, to
bring them about.

First in interest we may name the sick, now, within the Metro-
politan District, contained within twenty-three separate, and chiefly
new, buildings, in all respects like hospitals, under a management
apart from the workhouse, with resident medical superintendents,
matrons, stewards, and for the most part a staff of nurses who have
had some training to fit them for their duties.3 Outside the Metro-
politan District, we may add, there are but three of our large towns
which have as yet provided separate infirmaries (Manchester, Liver-
pool, and Leeds), but Birmingham is preparing to do so, and we
believe it is a step which is desired by the Local Government Board,
as well as all who have the welfare of our sick poor at heart, and
know the blessing which these our ' State Hospitals ' have been to
them. It may be said, then, what more remains to be done in this
direction ? We reply that public opinion, or legislative control,
must require; 1st, that the matrons of these important hospitals
should be educated women who have received a special training in
the care of the sick to fit them for their work, and not, as too often
at present, former workhouse officers, with little or no knowledge of
sickness ; 2nd, that pauper nurses should be excluded from all power
and authority over the sick. And on this point we cannot refrain
from adding how little is known or cared about the sad revelations
which reach us from time to time through the pages of country news-
papers of the cruelties still committed by such so-called nurses of the
sick, rivalling in horror those stories which are supposed to belong only

2 A petition has been sent to the Local Government Board to ask for a further
extension of time.

3 The ' Workhouse Nursing Association ' has done good service in this cause
during the last seven years, and has now sixty trained nurses employed in the metro-
politan infirmaries and country workhouses. Office, 44 Berners Street, W.

1886 WORKHOUSE CRUELTIES. 711

to past history. Five such instances are now before us, resulting in
death, and investigations before magistrates or the Central Board.

It will be impossible to give all the details of these events, they
are too revolting in all their deliberate cruelty, but some facts must
be stated, in order that we may not be accused of exaggeration. In
March an inquiry was held in Lincoln as to the alleged manslaughter
of an imbecile inmate of the workhouse by an attendant, the man
being seventy-five years old, and suffering from senile dementia, as
well as acute bronchitis. The following evidence was given by the
master at the inquest : — ' There were no paid attendants in the im-
becile wards, but two pauper attendants, and one to make the beds.
There was a nurse who only looked after the imbeciles if they were ill.
The medical officer stated that he had only inmate help for the im-
beciles ; there were only two nurses for over sixty patients, and there
were twenty-eight imbeciles ; he considered that it was impossible for
two nurses to discharge the duties properly.' The man who died had
been beaten with a strap, and a verdict of manslaughter against one
attendant was returned, the coroner adding, in summing up, that * it
was a sad state of affairs, and very lamentable, that there should be
no supervision, that is, no paid nurses to look after the imbeciles.'

From Falmouth we have a report of the terrible death of a man
subject to epileptic fits : he was left seated before a fire, on which he
fell, and when he was found, the flesh was burnt to a cinder. At the
inquest it transpired that although there were several epileptic
patients in the house, there was no one specially appointed to look
after them, and that the grates were all open and without fire-guards.
From Ireland we have two sad tales : at Limerick an old blind
woman was found dead in bed with her hands tied. It was stated
that the paid pauper nurses, to save themselves trouble with the sick
woman, tied her to the bed with a sheet, the patient released herself
and fell out of bed, and then the nurses tied her hands, the woman
being soon afterwards found dead. The doctor was of opinion that
death was hastened by this treatment ; and the guardians gave
instructions for the body to be exhumed for the purpose of holding
an inquest, at which the cruelty was proved, one of the culprits
being committed for trial. The magistrate commented on ' the
wholly insufficient nursing arrangements in the hospital.' Our tale
of horrors is not, however, yet complete. There was recently an
inquiry held at Dungarvan Workhouse into the death of a patient,
when a male and female nurse were committed for trial. The man
had been in the workhouse many years, and in hospital three
months, from paralysis and softening of the brain. Being called in
the night to assist this poor helpless creature, the nurse revenged
himself by assaulting him, inflicting severe injuries, and death was
accelerated, though not caused by them. The doctor stated he had
frequently reported on the want of hospital accommodation, and the

712 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

advisability of appointing a paid night nurse, but no order was made
on his report.

When we consider the startling fact that of all deaths occurring
in London, one in fifteen takes place in a workhouse, and one in
nine in a workhouse or hospital, we are able to form some idea of the
awful amount of misery and suffering that is going on in our midst,
when revelations such as these are occasionally brought before us.
So much is heard now of the improvements carried out during the last
few years, that we had begun to hope such tales were only of the
past. In looking back upon scenes and events of thirty years ago,
we have often wished that photography had then lent its valuable
aid in perpetuating the aspect of some of the pauper helps who were
then the sole attendants upon the sick. One is at least before our
mind's eye, who had more than once been within prison walls, and
had emerged from thence to take charge by day and night — for she
slept, lived, and ate in the ward — of numerous sick and dying patients ;
coarse, bloated, repulsive in look and manner, clothed in the pauper
dress, drinking whenever the opportunity occurred, such was the
sister of mercy in a large London workhouse, in which the sole
paid woman was the matron ! Often have we wished we could place
the portrait of such a one beside that of our modern infirmary
nurses, in order to point the moral of our tale. But the days of such
tyrants are not yet over, and it is well that we should be reminded
of this fact, and aroused from a pleasant dream to the terrible reality.

Closely connected with this subject is the urgent need (which
was named, we may remark, thirty years ago) of a higher class of
"workhouse officials, especially as masters and matrons, the sick being
-.still, in country unions, entirely under their control. Here again,
•definite reports are before us, of drunkenness, peculation, and other
•evil practices, which are far more common than the outside public
believe. Surely the post of caring for hundreds of our fellow-creatures,
consisting of many various classes, is one worthy of the intelligence
and love and zeal of the many educated men and women who are now
seeking remunerative work, and who would find in the administration
of these large institutions (including district schools) an occupation
worthy of their best energies.

And perhaps as important a reform as any is now being called
for from many of high standing in the medical profession, viz. the
admission of students into Poor Law infirmaries. There is more than
one reason for this demand, the chief being that these institutions
afford opportunities for studying a variety of chronic diseases which
hospitals do not give, because such long-standing cases of months or
years are not, and cannot be, retained there ; many cases of rare in-
terest are to be found in these wards, which can at present be studied
only by the one medical superintendent and his assistant ; another
reason is that as 600, or even a larger number of patients, are often
under the care of two such medical officers, it would be obviously a

1886 WORKHOUSE CRUELTIES. 713

help to them and a gain to the poor sufferers if such persons were
admitted into the wards. An application has already been made
from one large parish for permission thus to introduce a limited
number of students under the eye of the medical superintendent, but
the reply of the central board was (as might be expected) that such
a practice was not contemplated by their rules. As infirmaries did
not exist when those rules for the treatment of the sick were framed,
it could hardly be supposed that the admission of students would
then be provided for ; but at the present time and under present cir-
cumstances, can there be any conceivable reason why such an advan-
tageous use should not be made of our state and rate-supported
institutions, or that greater difficulties would be presented than in
the case of hospitals ?

As no general consolidated orders have as yet been issued by the
Local Government Board for the guidance of the new infirmaries,
which have been increasing in number ever since 1870, it may be
hoped that some of these recommendations may be shortly considered
and ordered by the authorities.

We now come to a less interesting, but not less important, part
of the subject of Poor Law management which loudly calls for
revision and alterations, viz. that which relates to the able-bodied, or,
in other words, the class of men and women which makes use of the
workhouse as a convenient hotel, to which they are at liberty to come
and go at their own convenience and for their own pleasure. This
class is known to all conversant with pauper life as 'Ins and Outs,'
and so trying are their habits to all officials that there is an almost
unanimous consent that some alteration of the law with regard to
them has become absolutely necessary. Guardians of different
parishes, as well as masters and relieving officers, have represented
the present state of things to be well-nigh intolerable, both men and
women being able to take their discharge with twenty-four hours'
notice, and to claim re-admission whenever it suits them, whether
sober or drunk. The occasions for which such persons desire a
temporary absence from the workhouse are various ; business or
pleasure may be the object ; of the latter, may be named the day of
the annual boat-race, which always causes a large exodus, with a
return at night, as may be supposed, not in the most satisfactory
condition ; from one able-bodied workhouse in London there is a
departure on Saturdays in order to partake of a ' free breakfast,' with
its accompanying religious devotions, on Sunday morning, in a
distant part of London. From another, an old woman, although past
eighty, goes out to stand at a crossing on Sunday mornings, to pick
up pence from a generous and confiding public, to spend at the
neighbouring public-house, before her return to her ' home.' In the
country, girls go out on Fair days, dressed in their finery, as well as
on other occasions, often, as is known, for immoral purposes. Women
from the lying-in wards take their discharge, often at the end of a

714 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

fortnight, in order to baffle the inquiries that may be made as to any
redress from the partners of their sin, such proceedings requiring
a far longer time to carry them out. These and many other abuses,
far too numerous to be detailed here, have brought about a conviction
that greater powers of detention should be demanded, extending at
the least to a week's notice of discharge. One pauper was dis-
charged and re-admitted twenty-three times in ten weeks, and an
experienced relieving officer urges that there should be power
to detain such persons, even for a month, he having noted in
his district 1,482 paupers who went out and returned the same day
in the course of three months.4 The Master of St. Marylebone Work-
house says, as the conviction of many years : ' The frequency with
which a large number of able-bodied men still continue to leave the
house for their weekly holiday shows, as I have pointed out on former
occasions, the necessity for increased powers of detention for dealing
with this class; 157 returned drunk and disorderly, in most cases on
the evening of the day on which they left the house.'

Not less urgent, in the estimation of all who have to do with
pauper children, is the need of increased power over them when
their life in school is ended, and when, at present, the worst of
parents have the right to claim them and employ them for their own
purposes. The State, which has educated them, should surely, as in
other countries, have control over them, at least till the age of
eighteen.

Can the * workhouse test ' be considered of such great value in
the face of facts like these ? and is not the abuse of legal relief very
great and real, when such facilities of admission and discharge exist
as to render the workhouse a free and convenient abode to all the
idle and depraved of every age who choose to resort to it, and who
claim the right to do so? Persons with pensions amounting to 26s.
a week are inmates because they choose to spend them on drink and
vice out of doors, and then return as paupers to this refuge for the
destitute, the authorities claiming the cost of their maintenance from
the remainder. We cannot refrain from asking, is there any other
country where similar practices are carried on, and are we not thus
creating many of the evils we are seeking to remedy ?

We earnestly hope that the attention of all guardians of the
poor may be directed to these results of the system which we have
endeavoured to point out, and that thus pressure may be put upon
the central authority of the Local Government Board, to introduce
reforms which are so earnestly desired by those who have to carry out
the existing law, and are able to judge of its results.

LOUISA TWINING.

* This officer adds the remark, that the permission to smoke is a great encourage-
ment to this class, and should be refused.

1886 715

THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE ON COJllTE.

ONLY the high office and good name of the Bishop of Carlisle could
justify serious notice of his article in this Eeview, entitled ' Cornte's
famous Fallacy.' His piece is based on a misconception — a typical
example, indeed, of ignorantia elenchi — nay, a misconception which
has often before been made by theologians, and which has been over
and over again exposed. Yet such is the persistence of the ' theological
stage,' even in the nineteenth century, that here the old primitive
' fiction ' about the meaning of Comte's ' law of the three states ' crops
up again after twenty or thirty years, apparently under the impres-
sion that it is a new discovery. To any serious student of philosophy
it might be enough to cite half-a-dozen passages from Comte, Mill,
Lewes, and others, to show that the ' law of the three states ' has no
such meaning as the Bishop puts into it. But when a writer, who
has won in other fields a deserved reputation, gravely puts forth a
challenge to his philosophical opponents, although rather by way of
sermon and for edification than by way of strict logic, perhaps it is
respectful to do more than cite a few passages from the author whom
he attacks.

Two main misconceptions pervade the whole of the Bishop's
criticism on Comte's law.

I. First ; he understands the ( theological ' state to mean, a belief
in a Creator ; the ' metaphysical ' state to mean, general philosophy ;
and the ' positive ' state to mean, the denial of Creation, or atheism.
Now, that never was, and never was understood to be, Comte's
meaning.

II. Secondly, the Bishop assumes Comte to have said, that men,
or a generation of men, are necessarily at any given time, in one or
other of the three states exclusively, passing per saltiim, and as a
whole, from one to the other ; and that one mind cannot combine
any two states. Now, Comte expressly said that men do exhibit
traces of all three states at the same time, in different departments
of thought.

This last remark of his obviously proves that Comte could
not have meant by the ' theological state,' believing in God, and by
the ' positive state,' the denial of God ; because no man can believe
and deny the same thing at the same time. Again, had Comte said

716 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

that every man ' up to his age ' can remember that he believed in
God in his childhood, and that he denied his existence in manhood,
he would have said something so transparently false, that it would
hardly be needful for a bishop forty years afterwards to write an
essay to expose so very ( famous a fallacy/ Had Comte's law of the
three states implied what the Bishop takes it to mean, it never would
have received the importance attached to it by friends and opponents
of Positivism alike ; it never would have been a ' famous fallacy '
at all ; it would have been the ' obvious fallacy,' and would have
called forth no admiration from eminent thinkers. It must be re-
membered that the value of ' the law of the three states ' has been
acknowledged by men who have been as far as possible from being
4 Positivists ' in any special sense of the term, and who have been
foremost in repudiating Comte's social and religious scheme. Mr. Mill,
who wrote a book to that effect, expressed his profound admiration for
this particular law of philosophy. So did Mr. G. H. Lewes in his
History of Philosophy. Miss Martineau, Professor Caird, Mr. John
Morley, who have written upon the system of Comte, have given us no
criticism upon the principle involved in this 4 law of the three states.'
It is, to say the least, unlikely that writers like these would have
missed so obvious a criticism as that now put forth by the Bishop,
had they understood Comte as he does.

Forty years ago, Mr. Mill gave an admirably lucid account of the
4 law of the three states,' and at the same time expressed his agree-
ment with it, in words that are remarkable as coming from so cautious
and measured a mind. He says : —

Speculation, he [Comte] conceives to have, on every subject of human inquiry,
three successive stages ; in the first of which it tends to explain the phenomena by
supernatural agencies, in the second by metaphysical abstractions, and in the third
or final state confines itself to ascertaining their laws of succession and similitude.
This generalisation appears to me to have that high degree of scientific evidence, which
is derived from the concurrence of the indications of history with the probabilities
derived from the constitution of the human mind. Nor could it be easily conceived,
from the mere enunciation of such a proposition, what a flood of light it lets in upon
the whole course of history. (Logic, vol. ii. chap, x.)

I. By the term ' theological state,' Comte does not mean the
ultimate belief in God. He means, as Mr. Mill says in the words
quoted, a state in which the mind ' tends to explain (given) phe-
nomena by supernatural agencies.' Comte first put forth his law in
an essay published so early as 1822, where he states the theological
stage to be one where, ' the facts observed are explained, that is to
say, conceived a priori, by means of invented facts.' (Pos. Pol. iv.
App. iii.) In his General View of Positivism, he calls the theo-
logical stage that ' in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions
admitting of no proof.' In the Positive Polity, he usually calls it
the Fictitious stage. The theological state of mind is one where

1886 THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE ON COMTE. 717

the phenomena we observe are supposed to be directly caused by
vital agencies which we imagine, but of the activity of which we
have no real proof. This state is certainly not identical with a be-
lief in God ; it includes all forms of Fetichism, of Nature-worship,
Ghost-worship, or Devil-worship : and all the habits of mind out of
which these forms of worship spring. The nonsense known as
Spiritualism, Spirit-rapping, Raising the Dead, and the like, is a
typical form of the theological state, in which men give ' free play to
fictions admitting of no proof.' And men, otherwise eminent in
science and letters, have been known so to play, even when they have
ceased to believe in God.

Not only is Comte's ' theological stage ' something widely different
from ultimate belief in a Creator, but few educated men, however
deeply they hold such belief, are now in what Comte calls the ' theo-
logical stage.' To all minds ' up to the level of their age,' even if
theologians by profession, the phenomena of nature and of society
are associated with regular antecedents, capable of being explained
by known laws, physical, social, or moral. That is in fact the
4 positive,' or scientific state of thought. If a man has a fit, or if
smallpox breaks out, or two nations go to war, intelligent Christians
do not cry aloud that it is a special judgment, or the wrath of God,
or the malice of Devil. They trace the disease or the war to its
scientific causes, or rather to its positive conditions. Men in the
true theological stage attribute ordinary phenomena to the direct and
special interposition of a supernatural being of some kind. This was
done by devotees in the Middle Ages ; is still done by Fetichists
everywhere ; and by the negroes the other day during the earth-
quake at Charlestown. B uncultivated Englishmen do not so reason.
In fact, very few thoughtful men in our age can be said to be,
properly speaking, in the theological stage at all. They reason about
life and man on the basis of both being amenable to observed laws,
and not on the basis that both are directly subject to the caprice of
supernatural wills.

The habitual reference of facts to observed conditions of nature,
physical or human, does not prevent strong minds from believing in
Creation and a Personal Creator. That is a very different thing.
They refer all observed facts to observed antecedents ; and behind
this enormous mass of observations, they assume an ultimate source,
as First Cause. Mr. Mill indeed insists that it is quite compatible
with the Positive state in Comte's sense, to believe that the Universe
is guided by an Intelligence. Comte himself warmly repudiates the
atheistical hypothesis of the origin of the Universe from Chance. He
calls Atheism a form of Theology : meaning that Dogmatic Atheism,
as a theory of the Universe, is ' a spontaneous fiction admitting of no
proof.' He thought that a mind perfectly attuned to scientific habits
in all forms of observed fact?, would cease to busy itse^ with any

718 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

theory of Origins, and would be entirely absorbed in theories of
growth. But he would not have regarded as being in the theological
stage, any mind which, taking a scientific view of all observed
phenomena, clung to the ultimate solution of their origin in Creation.

II. By the ' positive ' stage, Comte certainly does not mean
Atheism, the denial of a possible Creator. In the first place, he
repudiates that hypothesis, as itself a form of Theological figment.
And secondly, he says that the Positive stage is that 'which is
based on an exact view of the real facts of the case.' That is what
he means : neither more nor less. And the Bishop is quite mistaken
in constantly assuming that Positive is either Positivist or Atheist.
Comte neither said, nor imagined, that any man who ' takes an exact
view of the real facts ' in each case is a Positivist or a believer in the
Religion of Humanity. Dr. Martineau in the passage cited with
approval by the Bishop, does indeed make Comte say that every
cultivated man is a Positivist in his maturity. That, however, is
only a bit of careless rhetoric. Comte says nothing of the kind.
Comte says that a cultivated man becomes ' a natural philosopher '
in his maturity : — meaning a man whose habit of mind is to accept
scientific evidence in each subject.

III. It is no objection at all to the ' law of the three states,' to
argue, as the Bishop does, that many men of science are not atheists,
but believers in God. Even if the ' theological stage ' and the
' positive stage ' had this meaning (and they have not) Comte has
carefully guarded himself by saying that many persons exhibit all
three stages at the same time, on different subject 'matters. His law
is not that * each human mind passes through three stages ' : but
that ' each class of human speculations does.' If that were Comte's
meaning, the whole of the Bishop's criticism falls to the ground.
And it is easy to show that this was Comte's meaning.

Had the Bishop pursued his study of Comte a little beyond
the opening pages of a translation of one of his works, he would
have found this. In the second volume of the Positive Philosophy
(1st ed. p. 173), we read : —

During the whole of our survey of the sciences, I have endeavoured to keep in
view the great fact that all the three states, theological, metaphysical, and positive,
may and do exist at the same time in the same mind in regard to different sciences. I
must once more recall this consideration, and insist on it ; because, in the forgetful-
ness of it, lies the only real objection that can be brought against the grand law of
the three states. It must be steadily kept in view that the same mind may be in
the positive state with regard to the most simple and general sciences ; in the meta-
physical with regard to the more complex and special ; and in the theological with
regard to social science, which is so complex and special as to have hitherto taken
no scientific form, at all.

Again in the Positive Polity, iii. p. 34.

Although each class of speculations really passes through these three successive
stages, the rate of progress is not the same for all. Hence while some speculations

1886 THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE ON COMTE. 719

have already become Positive, others still remain Metaphysical or even Theological ;
and so it will be till our race has entirely accomplished its initiation. This tem-
porary co-existence of the three intellectual states furnishes backward thinkers with
their only plausible excuse for denying my law of filiation. Nothing will com-
pletely clear away this difficulty but the complementary rule, which lays down
that the unequal rate of progress is caused by the different nature of the phenomena
in each class.

In the Positivist Catechism, he says, (Engl. tr. p. 1 74) : —

Certain theories remain in the metaphysical stage ; whilst others of a simpler
nature have already reached the positive stage ; others again, still more compli-
cated remain in the theological stage.

It is thus abundantly clear that Comte intended his law of the
three states to be applied not to the mind as a whole, nor to ages as
a whole, but to different classes of speculation, and to the prevalent
tendencies in different ages. And so he has been always understood
by his exponents. Mr. Mill in his book, Auguste Comte and
Positivism, to meet an objection such as the Bishop now urges,
writes thus : — ' that the three states were contemporaneous, that
they all began before authentic history, and still co-exist, is M.
Comte's express statement ' (p. 31).

And so, Mr. Gr. H. Lewes, in his more lively manner, replying to
similar objections, tells us in his History of Philosophy (vol. ii.
p. 715):-

To these causes of opposition must also be added the licence men permit them-
selves of pronouncing confidently on questions which they have not taken the
preliminary trouble of understanding. Two-thirds of the objections urged against
this law of the three stages are based on a radical misapprehension of it ; and there
is something quite comic in the gravity with which these misconceptions are
advanced.

The law does not assert that at distinct historical periods men were successively
in each of the three stages, that there was a time when a nation or even a tribe
was exclusively theological, exclusively metaphysical, or exclusively positive ; it
asserts that the chief conceptions man frames respecting the world, himself, and
society, must pass through three stages, with varying velocity under various
social conditions, but in unvarying order. Any one individual mind, inheriting the
results of preceding generations, may indeed commence its thinking on some special
topic, without being forced to pass through the stages which its predecessors have
passed through ; but every class of conceptions must pass through the stages, and
every individual mind must, more or less rapidly, in the course of its evolution from,
infancy to maturity, pass through them.

Another eminent theologian, once Kegius Professor of History in
the University of Oxford, fell into the same error as the Bishop, as
long ago as 1861, and he was corrected at the time. In those days
Professor Goldwin Smith used to rage about Comte as furiously as
he now rages about Mr. Gladstone, and, as a polemist is apt to do, he
walked into this open pit. This is how the blunder was corrected in
the Westminster Review N. S. xl. Mr. Smith replied to the Revieiv
with some warmth ; but he did not establish his view as to the law
of the three states.

720 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

The Review said : —

(,'omte invariably insists that the three stages have actually co-existed in nearly
all minds. lie says that a man takes a theological view of one subject, a meta-
physical of another, and a positive of a third ; nor did he ever pretend that one of
these methods rigidly excludes the other. Most minds retain traces of all three,
even in the same subject-matter. What an objector has really to show is this,
that men use other methods of thought, or that they do not in the main use these
successively in the order stated, and that in proportion to the complication of the
subject-matter.

In considering a law of the human mind, such as this is, we should
bear in mind the golden rule of Aristotle ' to demand that degree of
precision that fits the matter in hand.' A law of our mental evolu-
tion, dealing with a subject so subtle and complex as the reasoning
processes, does not admit of absolutely rigid mathematical exactness.
Mathematical reasoning alone, partly because pure mathematics
spring from laws of the mind itself, and are not inductions from
imperfect observations, admits of absolute precision. In no physical
science, perhaps, is the reasoner at all times strictly employing
1 scientific methods without alloy. Few men of science, however
competent, are incapable of error in their reasoning ; and we know
how liable they are to slide into dogmatism a good deal short of
positive proof. But for all that, a trained physicist, or chemist, is
properly said to be in the positive stage of thought, when reasoning
about physics, or chemistry. A few minds trained in a variety of
sciences, may remain at a uniformly positive level. If their scientific
training embraces history, morals, philosophy, and the entire range
of the social, moral, and intellectual laws, then they may be said
to have completely attained to the positive stage of thought. Now
the Creation of the Universe and the Moral Providence of all Creation,
is an ultimate resultant of a man's reflections in the whole range of
speculation — physical, social, intellectual, and moral. And to that
great assize of human thought, few men in England come with a
full positive training in the entire range. Hence the opinions about
Creation of men like Herschel, or Faraday, are not the opinions of
men in the positive stage of thought, but of men in the positive
stage of astronomy and chemistry, and in the metaphysical or the
theological stage in sociology and in morals. When Faraday was
dealing with gases, he was rigidly working out physical and chemical
problems on the basis of physical and chemical laws. If he discovered
a new electrical phenomenon, he did not, as a savage or an alchemist
might, attribute the flash to some latent god, or an explosion to
some bottled-up devil. When Faraday was dealing with the special
inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he deliberately put aside all reference
to law, or to science ; possibly when he was dealing with some big
political problem, he grounded his opinion entirely on strong pre-
judices formed in youth, but certainly not tested as he tested his
chemical compounds. The 'law of the three states' is, like all

1886 THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE ON COMTE. 721

other logical laws, a law of tendency in a subtle and complex organ ;
and absolute exactness and rigid exclusiveness is out of place with
our imperfect mental resources.

When Comte said that one state of mind excludes the other, he did
not imply that a reasoner never makes a slip, or that a mind in the
positive stage may not at times ' revert ' back into a less scientific
process. He meant that, in the main, a mind accustomed to true
scientific processes in any class of speculation will adhere to that
habit of mind, though it may occasionally lapse in its own subject,
and may fail to apply the same scientific process in another class- of
speculation. The Bishop of Carlisle undoubtedly applies a truly
positive process to the science of physics. Though perhaps he would
hardly claim to be infallible there, even in method. But in dealing
with a philosophy at once ' pernicious and dangerous ' he collates
the original authorities with far less patient scrutiny, than when he
is tracing the growth of the Baconian induction.

Finally, the Bishop seems to me to err, in seeking to test the
* law of the three stages ' by applying it to exact and real science.
He declares that there are no three stages in Mathematics, in the
science of Political Economy, and many such branches of our know-
ledge. Certainly, there are no three stages in any kind of real know-
ledge. Nor, strictly speaking, are there in any science — much less in
exact science. All real knowledge, all science, truly so named, and
certainly an exact science, like pure Mathematics, is already positive.
Comte never said that there were three stages in science. He says--,
there are, ' three stages in each branch of speculation.' In many
subjects, which are perfectly simple, a really positive state of thought
is reached in the very infancy of the individual and the race. No
doubt, there is a brief moment in the evolution of thought, when
fictitious beings, or crude abstractions are supposed to determine
the very simplest and commonest facts. When scarcity of food was
thought to be a Divine warning to a King who defied the Pope, or
when a strike was supposed to result from some physical law of
Supply and Demand beyond human control, Political Economy was
in the theological, or the metaphysical stage. That merchants,
manufacturers, or workmen believe in Creation, or believe in Adam
Smith, or in Mr. Ruskin, has nothing to do with Comte's law.

As to Mathematics something further may be said. Pure Mathe-
matics, according to Comte, are really a branch of Logic, part of the
furniture, an analysis of the processes, of the mind itself. There are
of course not three stages in the * law of the three states ' itself, or
in any other true logical process. Mathematics are wholly positive, i.e.
proveable, and based on * an exact view of the true facts.' Every-
thing that we can call Mathematics, from the first idea of addition, is
entirely positive. All our definite notions about number, form, and
movement are strictly positive. But there was a time before the
VOL. XX.— No. 117. 3E

722 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

birth of Mathematics ; and then men's ideas about number, form, and
movement were in a metaphysical (that is, hypothetical) stage, or
even in a theological stage (that is, they are referred to supposed
wills). Infants and savages, as the history of language suggests,
associate changes in number and form with imaginary vital agents.
A child, learning that two and two make four, thinks of a person
purposely giving two more things. The counting and measuring of
savages is formed out of organic movements. In Mathematics, even
in Arithmetic, there is properly none but a positive stage. The
proper sphere of the ' law of the three stages ' is in the observation
of phenomena ; and to that Comte carefully limits it. Directly any
mind attains to real knoivledge in such observations, there are no
further stages to pass. The mind remains in the one stage, the
positive, or final.

I shall not follow the Bishop into the analogies to Comte's law,
with which his reading furnishes him, or his own substitute for
it. I fail to see what the analogies or the substitute have to do with
the matter. The ' law of the three states ' professes to be a theory
of mental evolution, an account of a set of successive processes of
thought. The Bishop's analogies and his substitute profess to be a
classification of ideas, a grouping of knowledge. What have these
in common ? The first is a serial record of movement ; the second
is a coordination of simultaneous conceptions. One might as
well find analogies between history and logic ; or suggest that
Kepler's laws are a history of astronomy. It is quite true that all
men's knowledge can be looked at from different points of view,
and may possibly be arranged under three groups. But how does
that help us to explain the genesis of thought in the past ? So, I
fail to see how the citations from Bacon, the Philosophick Cabbala, or
Mr. Gladstone, advance the matter in hand. The matter in hand is
the law of progress in the genesis of science. No one of the three
passages cited touches on that subject. And is it likely that Bacon,
Henry More, or anyone else who wrote before any true science existed
and before any social or moral science was imagined, could tell us
much about the law of progress in the genesis of science ? So I
leave Bacon, the Philosophick Cabbala, and Mr. Gladstone, who
seems to have written something profound on the latter topic.

With the Bishop's proposed substitute for Comte's law I have no
wish to quarrel. He says that, instead of a law of the three successive
stages, we may have a law of three simultaneous modes of thought.
Certainly we may. And the Bishop proposes as his law this : — that
'many branches of knowledge may be contemplated from three
points of view — the Theological, the Metaphysical (or Philosophical),
and the Scientific.' With a slight modification of the terms, to which
the Bishop ought not to demur, I should most heartily assent to
this. Our general knowledge is Religious, Philosophical, or Scientific.

188G THE BISHOP OF CARLISLE ON COMTE. 723

Keligion, Philosophy, Science, is a threefold coordination of ideas,
very much used by Comte : the distinctions between which three,
and the harmonies of which he is constantly expounding. Positivism,
as a system of thought, does not mean Science only. It means
Eeligion — Philosophy — Science : each in their sphere completing
and aiding the other. So far Comte is entirely at one with the
Bishop. But this eminently Positivist idea is no sort of substitute
for the * Law of the three stages.'

As to that the Bishop must try again ; and I cordially invite him
to do so. But he must begin by understanding the law which he is
to overthrow. The matter in hand has nothing to do with the belief
in Providence, in the sense of a ' Great First Cause, least understood,'
as modern men of science conceive Providence. The law is this : —
that in the infancy of thought, the mind attributes changes in
phenomena to a will of some kind, which it supposes to be acting,
but of which it has no real proof ; secondly, that the mind gradually
passes to attribute the changes to some abstract principle, which it
formulates without true verification ; finally, that the mind comes to
take an exact view of the true facts of the case. These three modes
of thought pass gradually into each other, are applied to different
matters in different degrees, and in the early stages are sometimes
only traceable in transient pre-historic types. Now what an objector
has to do is to show- — that the sciences have been built up by some
other definitely marked stages, or have passed through these stages
in a reverse order, or do not pass through stages at all.

FKEDERIC HARRISOX.

3E2

724 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY.

SOME years ago I found myself in a Northern capital, and committed
myself to the guidance of a native coachman, whose business and
pride it was to drive me from place to place, and indicate to me the
important buildings of his majestic city. He was a patriotic show-
man, and I am bound to fay he showed us a great deal ; but the
most memorable moment of that instructive day was when he
stopped before, what seemed to us, a respectable mansion in a re-
spectable street, and announced to us that ' yon ' was ' the Free Kirk
Univairsity.' It was the first time in my life that I had heard four
stone walls with a roof over them called a University. It was not
long, however, before I discovered that I myself had been living with
my head in a sack and, in more senses than one, had been of those

•who sweep the crossings, wet or dry,
And alTthe world go by them ;

only so could it have come to pass that this new meaning for an old
word had struck me as strange, not to say ludicrous.

Licuit semperque licebit
Signature prsesente nota producere nomen.

Allowable ? Yes ! and much more than merely allowable ; it is
inevitable that as the ages roll we should attach new meanings to
old words. And if this is inevitable, not the less inevitable is it
that, when we desire to trace the history of the thing signified, we
should be compelled to recur to the original meaning of the name
by which the thing is designated.

A word at starting upon the remarkable book ! which has suggested
the following article. To say of it that it is quite the most sumptuous
work that has ever proceeded from the Cambridge Press, is to say
little. It is hardly too much to say that it is one of the most impor-
tant contributions to the social and intellectual history of England
which has ever been made by a Cambridge man. The title of the
work conveys but a very inadequate notion of its wide scope, of the
encyclopaedic learning and originality of treatment which it displays,

1 The Architectural History oftlie University of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of
Cambridge and Eton. By the late Eobert Willis, M.A., F.R.S. Edited, with large
additions, and brought up to the present time, by John Willis Clark, M.A., late Fellow
of Trin. Coll. Camb. 4 vols. super-royal 8vo. Cambridge : The University Press.

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 725

and, least of all, of the abundance of human interest which charac-
terises it so markedly. It is because of this wealth of human interest
that the book must needs exercise a powerful fascination upon those
who have a craving to get some insight into the life of their fore-
fathers ; and it is because I believe the number of such students
of history is in our times rapidly on the increase, that I am anxious
to draw attention to some few of the many matters treated of so ably
in these magnificent volumes.

• ••••»••

The term University, in its original acceptation, was used to
designate any aggregate of persons associated in a political, religious,
or trading corporation, having common interests, common privi-
leges, and common property. The inhabitants of a town, the
members of a fraternity, the brethren of a guild, the monks or
canons of a religious house, when addressed in formal instruments,
were addressed as a University. Nay ! when the whole body of the
faithful is appealed to as Christian men, the ordinary phrase made
use of by lay or ecclesiastical potentate, when signifying his wishes or
intentions, is * Noverit Universitas vestra.' A University in this sense,
regarded as an aggregate of persons, might be localised or it might
not; its members might be scattered over the whole Christian world,
or they might constitute an inner circle of some larger community,
of which they — though a Universitas — formed but a part. A
University in its original signification meant no more than our
modern term an Association. When men associated together for
purposes of trade, they were a trading Universitas ; when they
associated for religious objects, they were a religious Univer-
sitas ; when they associated for the promotion of learning, they
were a learned Universitas7~ But the men came first, the bricks
and mortar followed long after. The architectural history, in
its merely technical and professional details, could only start
at a point where the University, as an association of scholars
and students, had already acquired power and influence, had
been at work for long, and had got to make [itself felt as a living
force in the body politic and in the national life. It was because
the antiquaries of a former age lost sight of this truth that they
indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting from the assump-
tion that stone walls make an institution, they professed to tell
when the Universities came into existence and who were their
earliest founders. The authors of this modern Magnum Opus have
set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their
object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-
day in its concrete form, down from the early times when
it existed only in the germ ; and to show us how ' the glorious
fellowship of living men,' which constituted the personal Uni-
versity of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed by

726 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

slow degrees into the brick-and-mortar Universities of the nine-
teenth— such Universities as are springing up all over the world ;
their teachers advertised for in the Times, and their students
tempted to come and be taught in them by the bait of money
rewards.

As to the exact time when a band of scholars and teachers first
made their home in Cambridge or Oxford, and began to attract to
themselves from the four winds classes of eager youths hungry for
intellectual food and anxious to listen and learn, that we must be
content to leave undetermined. They who like the flavour of the
old antiquarianism may enjoy it in its spiciest form, if they choose
to hunt up among certain forgotten volumes now grown scarce
They may read what John Caius (pronounced Keys) wrote as the
champion of Cambridge, and Thomas Caius wrote as champion of
Oxford ; they may rejoice their hearts over the Battle of the Keys,
and come to what conclusion they prefer to arrive at. For most of us,
however, this sort of old-world lore has lost its charm. A man lives
through his taste for some questions. The student of history
nowadays is inclined to say with St. Paul, ' So fight I not as one
that beateth the air,' and to reject with some impatience the
frivolous questions which help not a jot towards bringing us into
closer relation with the life and personality of our ancestors.

'JL am half ddk of shadows,' said

The Lady of Shalott ;

and we, too, have grown weary of weaving our webs with our backs
to the light. There is no making any way in Cloudland. We ask
for firm ground on which to plant our footsteps, if we would move

onwards.

• • • . • . •

It would have been very galling to the Oxford antiquaries of
Queen Elizabeth's days to have to acknowledge that there was a
Cambridge before there was any Oxford. Nevertheless the fact is
so. Hide your diminished heads, ye rash ones who would fain have
us believe that a thousand years before our era, King Mempric, the
wicked king whom the wolves ate — as was right and fitting they
should — built a noble city, which as time went on ' was called Oxonia,
or by the Saxons Oxenfordia.' Alack ! it turns out that we must
make an enormous step along the course of time before we can find
trace of any such city or anything like it. It turns out that ' the
year 912 saw Oxford made a fortified town, with a definite duty to
perform and a definite district assigned to it.' What ! Seven years
after the great Alfred had closed his eyes in death, and left to others
the work which he had showed them how to do ? Yes ! Even so.
It may be very hard to have to confess the odious crime of youth ;

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 727

but it seems almost capable of demonstration that Cambridge, as a
fortress and a town, existed a thousand years before Oxford was any-
thing but a desolate swamp, or at most a trumpery village, where a
handful of Britons speared eels, hunted for deer, and laboriously
manufactured earthenware pots. What have we to do with thee,
thou daughter of yesterday ? Stand aside while thine elder sister
— ay, old enough to be thy mother — takes her place of honour.
She has waited long for her historian ; he has come at last, and
he was worth waiting for.

In times before the Eoman legionaries planted their firm feet in
Britain, there was a very formidable fortress at Cambridge. It con-
tained about sixty acres ; it was surmounted by one of those mighty
earthworks which the hand of man in the old days raised by sheer
brute force, or rather by enormous triumph of organised labour.
The Romans drove out the Britons, and settled a garrison in the
place. Two of the great Roman roads intersected at this point, and
the conquerors called it by a new name, as was their wont, retaining
some portion of the old one. In their language it was known as
Camboritum. This primeval fortress stood on the left bank of the
river, which some called the Granta and some called the Cam ; and
for reasons best known to themselves, the Romans did not think fit
to span that river by a bridge, but they made their great Via
Devana pass sheer through the river — as some Dutch or German
Irrationalist has pretended that the children of Israel did when
they found the Jordan barring their progress — that is, those Roman
creatures constructed a solid pavement in the bed of the sluggish
stream, over which less audacious engineers would have thrown an
arch. Through the water they carried a kind of causeway, and
the name of the place for centuries indicated that it was
situated on the ford of the Cam. But what the Roman did
not choose to do, that the people that came after him found it
needful to do. In the Saxon Chronicle we find that the old
fortress which the Romans had held and strengthened, and then
perforce abandoned, had got to be called Grantabrygge ; and this
name, or something very like it, it retained when the great survey
was made as the Norman Conqueror's reign was drawing to its close.
By this time the town had moved across to the right bank of the
river, and had become a town surrounded by a ditch and defended
by walls and gates. Already it contained at least four hundred houses,
and on the site of the old mound the Norman raised a new castle,
and in doing that he laid some twenty-nine houses low.

The early history of Oxford is more or less connected with that of
the obscure and insignificant monastery of St. Frideswide, though
even at Oxford it is observable that the town and the University
grew up in almost entire independence of any influence exercised by
any of the older religious houses. At Cambridge this was much

728 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

more the case. There were no monks at Cambridge at any time ;
there never were any nearer than at the Abbey of Ely, in the old
days a long day's journey off, and accessible in the winter, if ac-
cessible at all, only by water. King Knut, we are told, greatly
favoured the Abbey of Ely, visited it, was entertained there, in fact
restored it. But at Cambridge there were no monks. No real
monks ; a fact which ought to be a significant hint to ' all educated
men,' but which, unhappily, is likely to be significant only to the few
who have taken the trouble to learn what a real monk professed to be.
If there were no monks at Cambridge, there was something else. Out-
side the walls of the town there rose up, in the twelfth century, the
priory of Barnwell — a priory of Augustinian canons ; and, moreover,
a nunnery — the Benedictine nunnery of St. Khadegunda. Within
the walls there was another house of Augustinians, which was known
as St. John's Hospital ; that is, a house where the canons made it
part of their duty to provide a spurious kind of hospitality to
travellers, much in the same way that the Hospice of St. Bernard
offers food and shelter now to the wayfarer, and with such food and
shelter something more — to wit, the opportunity of worshipping the
Most High in peace, up there among the eternal snows. At
St. John's Hospital, as at St. Bernard's, the grateful wanderer who
had found a refuge would leave behind him his thankoffering in
recognition for the kindly treatment he had met with, and it might
happen that these free gifts constituted no small portion of the
income on which the canons — for the most part a humble and un-
pretentious set of men — kept up their houses.

With the dawn of the thirteenth century came the great re-
vivalists— the friars. Wherever the friars established themselves
they began not only to preach, but to teach. They were the
awakeners of a new intellectual life ; not only the stimulators of
an emotional pietism always prone to run into religious intoxication
and extravagance. With the coming of the friars what may be
called the modern history of Cambridge begins. Not that it can
be allowed that there were no schools of repute on the banks of the
Cam till the coming of the friars. It is certain that learning had her
home at Cambridge long before this time.

As early as 1187 Giraldus Cambrensis came to Oxford and read
his Expugnatio Hibernice in public lectures, and entertained the
doctors of the diverse faculties and the most distinguished scholars.2
Oxford was doubtless at that time more renowned, but Cambridge
followed not far behind. If the friars settled at Cambridge early
in their career, it was because there was a suitable home for
them there — an opening as we say — which the flourishing condi-
tion of the University afforded. There were scholars to teach, there
were masters to dispute with, there were doctors to criticise, oppose >
2 Stubbs's Lectures on Mediccval an-1 Modern History, p. 141, 8vo, 1886.

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 729

or befriend. Doubtless, too, there were already strained relations
between the townsmen and the gownsmen at Cambridge as at
Oxford. The first great * town and gown row ' which we hear of
took place at Oxford in 1209, but when we do hear of it we find the
other University mentioned by the historian in close connection with
the event recorded. The townsmen under great provocation had
seized three of the gownsmen in hospitio. suo and threw them into
the gaol. King John came down to make inquiry, and promptly hung
the three, guiltless though they were, as Matthew Paris assures us.
Hereupon there was intense indignation, and the University dis-
persed. Three thousand of the gownsmen migrated elsewhere, some
to Cambridge we learn. Oxford for a while was deserted. This was
fifteen years before the Franciscans settled among us. It was the
year in which King John was excommunicated. There were only
three bishops left in England ; the king had worried all the rest
away. There was misery and anarchy everywhere. Yet, strange to
say, in the midst of all the bitterness men would have their sons
educated, and the Universities did not despair of the republic.
Shadowy and fragmentary as all the evidence is on which we have
to rely for the history of the Universities during the twelfth cen-
tury, it is enough to make us certain that the friars settled at Cam-
bridge because there they found scope for their labours. There was
undoubtedly a University there long before they arrived. Never-
theless it is not till the middle of the reign of Henry the Third
(A.D. 1216-1272) that we come upon any direct mention of a cor-
poration which could be regarded as a chartered society of scholars
at Cambridge, and it is difficult to resist the conviction that, what-
ever may have been its previous history, and however far back its
infancy may date, the friars were to some extent nursing fathers of
the University of Cambridge.

And this brings us again to the point from which we started a
page or two back, and gives me the opportunity of quoting a passage
from Professor Willis's introduction, which will serve at once as a
continuation of and comment upon what has been said, while leading
us on to what still lies before us.

The University of the Middle Ages was a corporation of learned men, associated
for the purposes of teaching, and possessing the privilege that no one should be
allowed to teach within their dominion unless he had received their sanction, -which
could only be granted after trial of his ability. The test applied consisted of exa-
minations and public disputations; the sanction assumed the form of a public
ceremony, and the name of a degree ; and the teachers or doctors so elected or
created carried out their office of instruction by lecturing in the public schools to
the students who, desirous of hearing them, took up their residence in the place
wherein the university was located. The degree was in fact merely a license to
teach ; the teacher so licensed became a member of the ruling body.

We have arrived at this point — we find ourselves at the begin-

730 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

ning of the thirteenth century face to face with a University at
Cambridge, a University which, existing originally in its inchoate
condition of an association vaguely aiming at the improvement of
the methods of education and the encouragement of scholars, had
gradually grown into a recognised and powerful body, with direct
influence and control over its members ; a body, too, which had
become so identified with the interests of culture and research that
a change had already begun in the generally received acceptation of
its name, and already the word ' university ' had begun to be
restricted to such a Universitas as was identified with the life and
pursuits of learning and learned men. This means that, pari passu
with its increase in power, the University had grown, too, in the
number of its members — the teachers and the taught. The time
had arrived when the demands of professors and students for
adequate accommodation would become pressing. Lecturers with
popular gifts would expect a hall capable of holding their audiences.
Public disputations could not be held in a corner. Eeceptions of
eminent scholars from a distance, and all those ceremonials which
were so dear to gentle and simple in the middle ages, required space,
and were more effective the grander the buildings in which they
were displayed. Yet how little the Cantabs of the thirteenth
century could have dreamt of what was coming ! What a day of
small things it was ! Six hundred years ago the giant was in his
cradle.

Meanwhile, another need than that of mere schools and lecture-
halls had begun to be felt. The scholars who came for what they
could get from the teachers — the regents and the doctors — flocked
from various quarters ; they were young, they were not all fired with
the student's love of learning ; they were sometimes noisy, some-
times frolicsome, sometimes vicious. As now is the case at Edin-
burgh and Heidelberg, so it was then at Cambridge, the bonds of
discipline were very slight ; the scholars had to take their chance ;
they lodged where they could, they lived anyhow, each according to
his means ; they were homeless. It was inevitable that all sorts of
grave evils should arise.

The lads — they were mere boys — got into mischief, they got into
debt with the Jews ; for there were Jews at Cambridge, not a few ;
they were preyed upon by sharpers, were fleeced on the right hand
and on the left ; many of them learned more harm than good. The
elder men, and they who had consciences and hearts, shook their
heads, and asked what could be done ? For a long time the principle
of laissez faire prevailed : the young fellows were left to the tender
mercies of the townsfolk. There was no grandmotherly legislation in
those days. Gradually a kind of joint-stock arrangement came into
vogue. Worthy people seemed to have hired a house which they
called a hostel or hall, and sub-let the rooms to the young fellows ;

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 731

the arrangement appears to have been clumsily managed, and led to
dissensions between town and gown ; the townsmen soon discovered
that the gownsmen were gainers by the new plan, and they them-
selves were losers. They grumbled, protested, quarrelled. But it
was a move in the right direction, and a beginning of some moral
discipline was made, and that could not but be well. These hostels
were set up at Cambridge certainly at the beginning of the thirteenth
century, and how long before we cannot tell ; but it was at Oxford
that the first college, as we understand the term, rose into being. It
was Walter de Merton, Lord High Chancellor of England, who was
the father of the collegiate system in England. So far from em-
barking upon a new experiment without careful deliberation, he
spent twelve years of his life in working out his ideas and in elabo-
rating the famous Rule of Merton, of which it is not at all too much
to say that its publication constituted an era in the history of
education and learning in England. Merton died in 1277. Hugh
de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, who survived him nine years, appears
to have been moved with a desire to do for Cambridge what Merton
had done for Oxford. Balsham is spoken of as the founder of St.
Peter's College, and in one sense he was so. The bishops of Ely
were the patrons of Cambridge. Bishop Balsham asked himself what
could be done, and set himself to deal with the problems which
presented themselves for solution in the condition of his own Uni-
versity. He was not a great man, that seems clear enough : his
schemes were crude ; he bungled. The truth seems to me to be that
the feeling at Cambridge was one of suspicion, and there are indica-
tions that the bishops of Ely in an awkward fashion were opposed to
anything like secular education. We hear of money being left to
support priests studying theology, and of an experiment for intro-
ducing scholars as residents in the Hospital of St. John. The
canons were to take in the young scholars as boarders into their
house, and look after their conduct and morals. The plan did not
answer. It was an attempt to put new wine into old bottles.
There came an explosion. Cambridge in the thirteenth century had
not the men that Oxford had, so Oxford kept the lead. Perhaps
there was some soreness. Did ecclesiastics shake their heads as they
saw the walls of Balliol College rise, and learnt that there was just
a little too much importance given to mere scholarship, and no pro-
minence given to theology in those early statutes of 1282 ? Did
they, without knowing why, anticipate with anxiety the awakening
of a spirit of free thought and free inquiry among those scholars of
the Merton Rule ? Did the orthodox party resort to prophecy, which
is seldom very complimentary or cheerful in its utterances ?

This is certain, that while Balliol College was building there
was a stir among the Benedictines, and an effort made to assert
themselves and take their place among the learned. John Giffard

732 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

started his great college for the reception of student monks at
Oxford. It became, and for centuries continued to be, the resort of
the Benedictine order, and was supported by levies from a large
number of the old monasteries. The inference is forced upon us
that the English monasteries no longer stood in the front rank as
seats of learning. Students and scholars would no longer go to the
monks ; the monks must go to the scholars. But the establishment
of a seminary for the reception of young monks at Oxford tended to
the strengthening of the ecclesiastical influence in that University.
Cambridge lost in the same proportion that Oxford gained. Even
the great Priory of Norwich sent its promising young monks to
Oxford, passing by the nearer and more conveniently situated
University. As early as 1288 we find entries in the Norwich Priory
Rolls of payments for the support of the schools and scholars at
Oxford. It was long after this that Cambridge offered any similar
attraction to the ' religious.'

Be it noted that until Merton's day people had never heard of
what we now understand by a college. It was a novelty in English
institutions. Men and women had lived commonly enough in
societies that were essentially religious in their character. Some
of those societies, and only some, had drifted into becoming the quiet
homes of learning as well as of devotion ; but the main business —
the raison d'etre of monks and nuns and canons — was the practice of
asceticism, the keeping up of unceasing worship in the church of the
monastery — the endeavour to be holier than men of the world need
be, or the endeavour to make the men of the world holier than they
cared to be. The religious orders were religious or they were
nothing. Each new rule for the reformation of those orders aimed
at restoring the primitive idea of self-immolation at the altar — a
severer ritual, harder living, longer praying. Nay ! the new rules,
in not a few instances, were actually aimed against learning and
culture. The Merton Rule was a bringer in of new things. Merton
would not call his society of scholars a convent, as the old monkish
corporations had been designated. That sounded too much as
though the mere promotion of pietism was his aim ; he revived the
old classical word collegium. There had been collegia at Rome
before the imperial times ; though some of them had been religious
bodies, some were decidedly not so. They were societies which held
property, pursued certain avocations, and acted in a corporate
capacity for very mundane objects. Why should not there be a
collegium of scholars ? Why should students and men of learning
be expected to be holier than other people ? When Merton started
his college at Oxford, he made it plain by his statutes that he did
not intend to found a society after the old conventual type, but to
start upon a new departure.

The scholars of the new college were to take no vows they were

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 733

not to be worried with everlasting ritual observances. Special
chaplains, who were presumably not expected to be scholars and
students, were appointed for the ministration of the ceremonial
in the church. Luxury was guarded against; poverty was not
enjoined. As long as a scholar was pursuing his studies bona fide,
he might remain a member of the college ; if he was tired of books
and bookish people, he might go.

When a man strikes out a new idea, he is not allowed to keep it
to himself very long. The new idea soon gets taken up ; sometimes
it gets improved upon ; sometimes very much the reverse. For a
wise man acts upon a hint, and it germinates ; a fool only half-
apprehends the meaning of the hint, and he displays his folly in
producing a caricature. Hugh de Balsham seems to have aimed at
improving upon Merton's original idea. He meant well, doubtless ;
but his college of Peterhouse, the first college in Cambridge, was a
very poor copy of the Oxford foundation. Merton was a man of
genius, a man of ideas ; Balsham was a man of the cloister. More-
over, he was by no means so rich as his predecessor, and he did not
live to carry out his scheme. The funds were insufficient. The
first college at Cambridge was long in building. Cambridge, in
fact, was very unfortunate. Somehow there was none of the dash
and enthusiasm, none of the passion for progress, which characterised
Oxford. Cambridge had no moral genius like Grosseteste to impress
his strong personality upon the movement which the friars stirred,
no commanding intellect like that of Eoger Bacon to attract and
dazzle and lead into quite new regions of thought the ardent and
eager spirits who felt that a new era had begun ; no Occam or
Duns Scotus or Bradwardme ; no John Wiclif to kindle a new flame
— say, rather, to take up the torch which had dropped from Brad-
wardine's hand, and continue the race which the others had run so
well. What a grand succession of men it was !

Five colleges had been founded at Oxford before a second arose
at Cambridge. After that they followed in rapid succession, and the
reign of Edward the Third had not come to an end when no less
than seven colleges had been opened at Cambridge. Five of them
have survived to our own days, and two were eventually absorbed
by the larger foundation which Henry the Seventh was ambitious of
raising, and which now stands forth in its grandeur, the most
magnificent educational corporation in the world.

Where did all the money come from, not only to raise the
original buildings in which the University, as a teaching body, pur-
sued its work, but which also provided the houses in which the
colleges of scholars lived and laboured ?

Unhappily, we know very little of the University buildings
during this early period. All the industry of Mr. Clark has not

734 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Xov.

availed to penetrate the thick obscurity ; but this at least is
pretty certain, namely, that the earliest University buildings at
Cambridge were very humble structures clustering round about
the area now covered by the University schools and library, that
it was not till the middle of the fourteenth century that any
attempt was made to erect a building of any pretension, and that
the ' Schools Quadrangle was not completed till ] 30 years after
the first stone was laid.' The University of Cambridge was for ages
a very poor corporation ; it had no funds out of which to build halls
or schools or library. The ceremonies at commencement and on other
great occasions took place in the churches, sometimes of the Au-
gustinian, sometimes of the Franciscan friars. In these early times
the gownsmen dared not contemplate the erection of a senate-house
wherein to hold their meetings. When the fourteenth-century schools
were planned their erection was doubtless regarded as a very bold
and ambitious experiment. The money came in very slowly, the
work stopped more than once, and when it proceeded it was only by
public subscription that the funds were gathered. In 1466, William
Wilflete, Master of Clare Hall and Chancellor of the University,
actually made a journey to London to gather funds from whatever
quarters he could, and he dunned his friends, and those on whom
the University had any claim, so successfully that on June 25 of that
year a contract for proceeding with the work was drawn up and
signed, but it was nearly nine years after this before the schools were
finally completed, together with a new library over them, by the
special munificence of Archbishop Eotherham, who had further
enriched the library with numerous volumes of great value.

The tie which bound the members of the University together
was much weaker than that which united the members of the
same colleges. The colleges were, in almost every case, founded by
private munificence, and in most cases were commenced during the
lifetime of the several founders ; but when we come to look into the
sources of the college revenues we find that the actual gifts of money,
or indeed of lands, was less than at first sight appears. A very large
proportion of the endowments of these early colleges came from the
spoliation of the parochial clergy. Popular writers in our own time
declaim against the horrible sin of buying and selling church pre-
ferment, as if it were a modern abomination. Let a man only spend
half an hour in examining the fines or records of transfers of pro-
perty in England during the fourteenth century and he will be some-
what surprised to discover what a part the buying and selling of
advowsons played in the business transactions of our forefathers five
centuries ago. Advowsons were always in the market, and always
good investments in those days. But not only so. A pious founder
could do a great deal in the way of making perpetual provision for
the mention of his name by posterity at a small cost if he took care
to manipulate ecclesiastical property with prudence. There was a

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 735

crafty device whereby the owner of the advowson could appropriate
the tithes of a benefice to the support of any corporation which
might be considered a religious foundation. The old monasteries
had benefited to some extent from this disendowment of the secular
clergy, the Augustinian canons, during the twelfth century, being the
chief gainers by the pillage. When the rage for founding colleges
came in, and the awful ravages of the Black Death had depopulated
whole districts, the fashion of alienating the revenues of the country
parsons and diverting them into the new channel grew to be quite a
rage. The colleges of secular priests living together in common, or
what it is now the fashion to call a clergy house, might be and were
strictly religious foundations ; and could the colleges of scholars, of
teachers and learners who presumably were all priests, or intended
for the priesthood, be regarded as less religious than the others ?
So it came to pass that the tithes of parish after parish were diverted
into a new channel, and these very colleges at Cambridge which
were professedly meant to raise the standard of education among the
seculars were endowed at the expense of those same secular clergy.
In order that the country parsons might be better educated, it was
arranged that the country parsons should be impoverished !

Seven new colleges opened in less than thirty years at Cambridge
alone ! Think what this must have meant. I suspect that Oxford
had attracted the reading men, and Cambridge possessed charms for
the fast ones. How else are we to explain Archbishop Stratford's
stringent order in 1342 for the repression of the dandyism that pre-
vailed among the young scholars ? These young Cantabs of the
fourteenth century were exquisites of the first water. Their fur-
trimmed cloaks and their tippets; their shoes of all the colours of
the rainbow ; their dainty girdles, bejewelled and gilt, were a sight
to see. And then their hair ! positively curled and powdered, and
growing over their shoulders, too ; and when they passed their
fingers through the curls, look you, there were rings on their
fingers ! Call you these scholars ? Chaucer's ' Clerk of Oxenforde '
was of a very different type : —

Foi1 all that lie might of his frendes hente
On. bookes and in learning he it spente.

Nevertheless it can hardly have been but that the foundation of so
many colleges at Cambridge brought in a stricter discipline ; the new
collegiate life of the scholars began. Perhaps for the majority of
readers no part of Mr. Clark's great work will prove so attractive as
the last four hundred pages, with their delightful essays on ' The
Component Parts of a College.' Here we have traced out for us, in
the most elaborate manner, the gradual development of the collegiate
idea, from the time when it expressed itself in a building that had
no particular plan, down to our own days, when colleges vie with one

736 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

another in architectural splendour and in the lavish completeness
of their arrangements.

At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their
favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of assuming
that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It is
almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was
adopted very gradually.

Again, we are often assured that the colleges at the two older
universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are them-
selves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly be
propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding
of the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an
attempt to supersede them.

More startling still is the fact that a college did not at first neces-
sarily imply that there was a chapel attached. So far from this being
the case, it is certain that Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge,
never had a chapel till the present building was consecrated in 1632.
It was with great difficulty that the Countess of Pembroke in 1366
was allowed to build a chapel within the precincts of her new
college ; and, so far from these convenient adjuncts to a collegiate
establishment having been considered an essential in early times,
no less than eight of the college chapels at Cambridge and four at
Oxford date from a time after the Eeformation. In the fourteenth
century and later the young scholars, as a rule, attended their
parish church. Sometimes the college added on an aisle for the
accommodation of its members ; sometimes it obtained a licence
to use a room in which Divine Service might be conducted for a
time ; once the founder of a college erected a collegiate quire in
the middle of the parish church, a kind of gigantic pew, for the
accommodation of his scholars. Downing College has never had a
chapel to the present hour.

Of all the developments, however, in the college idea, none has
been more remarkable than that of the master's lodge. In the
fourteenth century the master of a college was but primus inter
pares, and the distance between him and his fellows or scholars was
less than that which exists now between the commanding officer of a
regiment in barracks and his brother officers. The master had no
sinecure; the discipline of the place depended upon him almost
entirely, for in those days the monarchical idea was in the ascendant ;
the king was a real king, the bishop a real bishop, the master a real
master. Everything was referred to him, everything originated with
him, everything was controlled by him. But as for the accommoda-
tion asigned to him in the early colleges, it was very inferior indeed
to that which every undergraduate at Trinity or St. John's expects
to find in our time. The Provost of Oriel in 1329 was permitted
by the statutes to dine apart if he pleased, and to reside outside the
precincts of the college if he chose to provide for himself another

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 737

residence ; but this was clearly an exceptional case, for the master
was at this time the actual founder of the college, and Adam de
Brune might be presumed to know what was good for his successors
in the office for which he himself had made provision. But for
generations the master enjoyed no more than a couple of chambers
at the most, and it was not till the sixteenth century that an official
residence was provided, and then such residence consisted only of
lodgings a little more spacious and convenient than those of any
of the fellows, and in no case separated from the main buildings of
the college. Even when masters of colleges began to marry (and
the earliest instance of this seems to have been Dr. Heynes, Master
of Queen's College, in 1529), it was long before the master's wife
was so far recognised as to be received within the precincts ; and as
late as 1576, when the fellows of King's complained of their provost's
wife being seen within the college, Dr. Goad replied that she had
not been twice in the college * Quad ' in her life, as far as he knew.
When the great break-up came in the next century, then the esta-
blishment of the master demanded increased accommodation for his
family, and the master's lodge began to grow slowly, until university
architects of the nineteenth century displayed their exalted sense of
what was due to the dignity of a ' head of a house ' by erecting
two such palaces as the lodges of Pembroke and St. John's Colleges ;
for the glorification of the artist, it may be, but whether for the advan-
tage of the college, the university, or the occupants of the aforesaid
lodges may be reasonably doubted. One master's lodge in Cambridge
is at this moment let, presumably for the benefit of the head of the
house, whose official residence it is ; and, if things go on as they are
tending, the day may come — who knows how soon ? — when Cam-
bridge shall at last be ableTto boast of a really good hotel, * in a
central and very desirable situation, commanding a delightful view
of — what shall we say? — 'fitted up with every convenience, and
formerly known as the Master's Lodge of St. Boniface College.'

I am inclined to think that there is such a thing as architecture
run to seed.

If any one imagines that it would be possible within the limits
of a single essay to follow Mr. Clark through the exhaustive pro-
cesses of investigation which he has gone through, or to summarise
at all satisfactorily the results which he has arrived at and set forth
in so masterly a manner, let such an one spend only a single hour in
turning over the leaves of these splendid volumes. The exquisite
illustrations alone (which count by hundreds), and the elaborate
maps and ground-plans, are full of surprises ; they speak with an
eloquence of their own to such as have eyes to see and in whom
there is a spark of imagination to enlighten the paths along which
their accomplished guide can lead them. Do you think that such
VOL. XX.— No. 317. 3F

738 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

a work as this tells us no more than how the stone walls rose and
the buildings assumed their present form, and court was added
to court, and libraries and museums and lecture-rooms and all the
rest of them were constructed by the professional gentlemen who
drew the plans, and piled up by the masons and the bricklayers ?
Then you will do it a grievous injustice.

Horizons rich with trembling spires
On violet twilights, lose their fires

if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The
authors of this architectural history knew better than anyone else
that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great
national institution. They knew that these walls — some so old and
crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely — bear upon them the
marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the
questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out
of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful
searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in
these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred
years. Do you wish to understand the buildings ? Then you must
study the life ; and the converse is true also. Either explains, and
is the indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the other. Mr.
Clark could not have produced this exhaustive history of university
and collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound insight into
the student life of Cambridge from the earliest times.

How did they live, these young scholars in the early days?
T hrough what whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed ?
As the centuries have rolled on, have the youth of England become
better or wiser than their sires ? Neither better nor wiser seems to
be the answer. The outer man is not as he was ; the real moral and
intellectual stamina of Englishmen has at least suffered no deteriora-
tion. Our habits are different ; our dress, our language, the look of
our homes, are all other than they were. Our wants have multiplied
immensely ; the amount of physical discomfort and downright suffer-
ing which our ancestors were called upon to endure sent up the
death-rate doubtless to a figure which to us would be appalling.
We start from a standing-point in moral, social, and intellectual
convictions so far in advance of that of our forefathers that they
could not conceive of such a terminus ad quern as serves us as a
terminus a quo. In other words, we begin at a point in the line
which they never conceived could be reached. Yet the more
closely we look into the past the more do we see how history in
all essentials is for ever repeating herself — impossible though it may
be to put the clock back for ourselves.

How significant is the fact that through all these centuries of
building and planting, of pulling down and raising up, the makers
of Cambridge — that is, the men who achieved for her her place in

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 739

the realms of thought, inquiry, and discovery — never seemed to
have thought that Death could play much havoc among them.
In the old monasteries there was always a cemetery. The canon
or the monk who passed into the cloister came there once for all —
to live and die within the walls of his monastery. The scholar who
came to get all the learning he could, and who settled in some
humble hostel or some unpretentious college of the old type, came
to spend some few years there, but no more. He came to live his
life, and when there was no more life in him — no more youthful
force, activity, and enthusiasm — there was no place for him at Cam-
bridge. There they wanted men of vigour and energy, not past their
work. Die ? No ! as long as he was verily alive it was well that he
should stay and toil. When he was a dying man, better he should
go. No college at Cambridge had a cemetery. Let the dead bury
their dead !

Indeed, it must have been hard for the weak and sickly — the
lad of feeble frame and delicate organisation — to stand that rugged
old Cambridge life. * College rooms ' in our time suggest some-
thing like the ne plus ultra of esthetic elegance and luxury. We
find it hard to realise the fact that for centuries a Fellow of a
college was expected to have two or three chamber fellows who
shared his bed-room with him ; and that his study was no bigger
than a study at the schoolhouse at Eugby, and very much smaller
than a fourth-form boy enjoys at many a more modern public
school. At the hostels, which were of course much more crowded
than the colleges were, a separate bed was the privilege of the few.
What must have been the condition of those semi-licensed re-
ceptacles for the poorer students in the early times, when we find as
late as 1598 that in St. John's College there were no less than
seventy members of the college * accommodated ' (!) in twenty-eight
chambers. This was before the second court at St. John's was even
begun, and yet these seventy Johnians were living in luxury when
compared with their predecessors of two hundred years before.

' In the early colleges the windows of the chambers were unglazed
and closed with wooden shutters ; their floors were either of clay or
tiled; and their halls and ceilings were unplastered.' We have
express testimony that at Corpus Christi College not even the
master's lodge had been glazed and panelled before the beginning
of the sixteenth century. By an inventory which Mr. Clark has
printed, dated July 3, 1451, it appears that in the master's lodge at
King's College, ' the wealthiest lodge of the university, there was
then only one chair ; that the tables were supported on trestles ;
and that those who used them sat on forms or stools.' As for the
chambers and studies, not only were they destitute of anything in
the shape of stoves or fire-places, but their walls were absolutely
bare, while in the upper chambers there were not even lath and plaster

3 F2

740 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

between the tiles and the beams of the roof. It is to us almost in-
comprehensible how vitality could have been kept up in the winter
under such conditions. The cold must have been dreadful.

At four only of five earlier and smaller colleges was there any
fire-place in the hall, and the barbaric braziers in which first charcoal
and afterwards coke was burned, were actually the only heating
apparatus known in the immense halls of Trinity and St. John's till
within the last twenty years ! The magnificent hall of Trinity
actually retained till 1866 the brazier ivhich had been in use for
upwards of 160 years \ The clumsy attempt to fight the bitter cold
which was usual in our mediaeval churches and manor-houses, by
strewing the stone floor with rushes, was carried out too in the
college halls, and latterly, instead of rushes, sawdust was used, at
least in Trinity. ' It was laid on the floor at the beginning of
winter, and turned over with a rake as often as the upper surface
became dirty. Finally, when warm weather set in, it was removed,
the colour of charcoal ! ' Well might the late Professor Sedgwick,.
in commenting upon this practice, exclaim : — * The dirt was sublime
in former years ! '

Yet in the earliest times a lavatory was provided in the college
halls, and a towel of eight or nine yards long, which at Trinity as
late as 1612 was hung on a hook — the refinement of hanging a
towel on a roller does not appear to have been thought of.
These towels were for use before dinner ; at dinner the fellows of
Christ's in 1575 were provided with table-napkins. If they wiped
their fingers on the table-cloth they were fined a penny. The
temptation must have been strong at times, for no forks were in
use — not even the iron-pronged forks which some of us remember in
hall in our young days. The oldest piece of furniture in the
college halls were the stocks set up for the correction of refractory
undergraduates who should have been guilty of the enormity of
bathing in the Cam or other grave offence and scandal.

Of the amusements indulged in by the undergraduates at Cambridge
in the early times we hear but little. The probability seems to be that
they had to manage for themselves as best they could. Gradually
the bowling-green, the butts for archery, and the tennis-courts were
provided by several colleges. Tennis seems to have been the rage
at Cambridge during the sixteenth century, and the tennis-courts
became sources of revenue in the Elizabethan time. It is clear
that by this time the old severity and rigour had become relaxed,
the colleges had become richer, and in another hundred years the
combination-rooms had become comfortable and almost luxurious
before the seventeenth century closed. In Queen's College in 1693
there were actually /lowers in the combination-room, and at Christ's
College in 1716 a card-table was provided 'in the fellows' parlour.'

1886 THE BUILDING UP OF A UNIVERSITY. 741

It may be said that the immense expansion of the University, as
distinct from a mere aggregate of colleges, dates from the beginning
of the eighteenth century. Up to that time the colleges had for
four hundred years been steadily growing into privileged corpora-
tions, whose wealth and power had been too great for the Common-
wealth, of which they were in idea only members. With the
Georgian era the new movement began. When Bishop Moore's
vast library was presented by George II. to the University, when
the first stone of the Senate House was laid in 1722, when the
University arranged for the reception of Dr. Woodward's fossils in
1735 — these events marked the beginning of a new order of things.
Whatever confusion may have existed in the minds of our grand-
fathers, who had a vague conviction that the University meant no
more than the aggregate of the colleges, and a suspicion that what
the University was the colleges made it — we, in our generation,
have been assured that the colleges owed their existence to the
sufferance of universities ; or, if that be putting the case too strongly,
that the colleges exist for the sake of the University. The new
view has at any rate gained the approval of the Legislature ; the
University is in no danger of being predominated over by the col-
leges in the immediate future ; the danger rather is lest the colleges
should be starved or at least impoverished for the glorification of
the University, the college-fellowships being shorn of their dig-
nity and emoluments in order to ensure that the University officials
shall become the exclusive holders of the richest prizes.

For good or evil we have entered upon a new career. The old
Cambridge, which some of us knew in our youth, with its solemn
ecclesiasticism, its quaint archaisms, its fantastic anomalies, its fasci-
nating picturesqueness, its dear old barbaric unintelligible odds and
ends that met us at every turn in street and chapel and hall — that
old Cambridge is as dead as the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The new
Cambridge, with its bustling syndics for ever on the move — its
bewildering complexity of examinations — its ' sweet girl-graduates
with their golden hair,' its delightful * notion of grand and capacious
and massive amusement,' its glorious wealth of collections and
appliances and facilities for every kind of study and research, is
alive with an exuberant vitality.

What form will the new life assume in the time that is coming ?
Will the Cambridge of six centuries hence be able to produce such a
record of her past as that which she can boast of now ? Among her
alumni of the future will there arise again any such loyal and en-
lightened historians as these who have raised to themselves and their
University so noble a monument ?

AUGUSTUS JESSOPP.

742 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC.

DURING the last half-century our' Australasian colonies have been
merely spectators in the diplomatic drama of European politics;
recent events, however, have caused a change in this respect, and
now individually and collectively they are beginning to appear before
the world as actors who will probably play important parts in the
new political sphere of influence that is rapidly attracting the atten-
tion of Europe. — I mean the future policy of the Pacific. Imperial
legislators have hitherto acted too much on their own responsibility
in their diplomatic dealings with foreign Powers relating to Pacific
affairs, and the public opinion of Australasia has not been sufficiently
recognised in matters involving the annexation and giving up of
islands in the southern hemisphere. True the advice of colonial
statesmen and agents-general has frequently been asked, but it is
not too much to say that, though generously given, it has seldom been
seriously considered. Now it must be distinctly understood that
the presence of possibly hostile Powers in the immediate vicinity of
our Australasian colonies is fraught with much future danger to the
colonists themselves, and, as they, and not the people inhabiting
Great Britain and Ireland, are directly affected by the result of
such diplomatic arrangements, their interest in questions of this
kind demand first consideration. The half-heartedness so long
displayed by the home authorities in Pacific policy will have to give
place to more vigorous action, in which deeds must be substituted
for words, and treaties for understandings.

Spain, France, and Holland long ago saw the advantage of pos-
sessing advanced posts in the Pacific — Spain and Holland for com-
mercial reasons, France for naval purposes and the establishment of
convict settlements. Germany and the United States have not been
long in following suit, and slowly but surely the former Power is
gaining a hold upon the trade in these latitudes and endeavouring
to provide herself with coaling stations in the immediate vicinity of
the maritime highways to Australia. Meanwhile, Great Britain is
looking on, content with the passive possession of the Fijis and a
small strip of New Guinea, while Australia and New Zealand, con-

1886 [EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 743

stitutionally powerless to prevent or permit annexation, are daily in
danger of an increase in the number of foreign convicts already
lodged and provided for in islands adjacent to their shores.

I propose to give here some information concerning the more
important groups of islands that lie scattered over the surface of the
Pacific Ocean. The area with which I am about to deal is so vast, and
the islands in question so numerous, that some classification becomes
necessary. Several methods of course suggest themselves, but the
one adopted will well illustrate the object in view, and show at once
not only the relation which these groups of islands bear to each
other, but also their individual importance to European Powers, both
diplomatically and commercially, for which purpose I have arranged
the accompanying chart.

Recent diplomatic arrangements between this country and Ger-
many have settled that for political purposes the Western Pacific
shall mean that part of the Pacific Ocean lying between the 15th
parallel of N. and the 30th parallel of S. latitude and between the
165th degree of longitude W. and the 130th E. of Greenwich. No
corresponding division has hitherto been proposed for the Eastern
Pacific, probably because the reasons that prompted the one did not
appear to require the other. Now I would venture to suggest that it
would be a matter of some convenience if the area of the Eastern
Pacific were defined and made to correspond more nearly with that
of the Western Pacific. To illustrate my meaning I have drawn
on the chart annexed an arbitrary line traversing the 100th degree
of longitude west of Greenwich, and would define the Eastern Pacific
as that part of the Pacific Ocean lying between the 15th parallel of
N. and the 30th parallel of~S. latitude, and between the 165th
degree of longitude W. and the 100th degree of longitude W. of
Greenwich. This division excludes the Galapagos Islands, which
belong to the Republic of Ecuador, but takes in Pitcairn Island and
Easter Island. '.. .

Six months since important declarations were entered into between
the Governments of Great Britain and the German Empire relating
to a demarcation of the British and German spheres of influence in
the Western Pacific and to reciprocal freedom of trade and com-
merce in the British and German possessions and protectorates l in
those regions. For these purposes the area of the Western Pacific was
revised as above, and a conventional line of demarcation 2 agreed upon
starting from the north-east coast of New Guinea at a point near

1 The words 'possessions and protectorates in the Western Pacific' do not
include the colonies which now have fully constituted governments and legisla-
tures.

2 Should further surveys show that any islands now indicated on the British
Admiralty charts lying on one side of the conventional line are in reality on the
other side, the line is to be modified so that such islands shall appear on the same
side of the line shown on the said charts.

744 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

Mitre Rock on the 8th parallel of S. latitude, which is the boundary
between the British and German possessions on that coast, and
following that parallel to point A,3 and thence continuing to points
B, C, D, E, F, and G, as indicated in the accompanying chart. East,
south-east, or south of this line Germany has engaged not to
acquire land, accept protectorates, or interfere with the extension
of British influence, and to give up any acquisitions of territory or
protectorates already established in that part of the Western Pacific.
Great Britain has entered into similar engagements concerning that
part of the Western Pacific lying to the west, north-west, or north
of the conventional line.

These engagements, however, do not apply to the Navigator
Islands (Samoa), which are affected by treaties with Great Britain,
Germany, and the United States ; nor to the Friendly Islands
(Tonga), also affected by treaties with Great Britain and Germany ;
nor to the island of Niue (Savage Island), which groups still con-
tinue to form a neutral region ; nor, of course, are they applicable to
any islands or places in the Western Pacific now under the sovereignty
or protection of any other civilised Power.

Commercially both nations have agreed that the subjects of
either State shall be free to resort to or settle in all the possessions
or protectorates belonging to the other, as well as to acquire any
kind of property and engage in any description of trade, agricultural
or industrial undertakings, subject to the same conditions and laws,
and enjoying the same religious freedom, protection, and privileges,
as the subjects of the sovereign or protecting State. The ships
belonging to both States are in all respects to enjoy reciprocal ad-
vantages as well as most-favoured-nation treatment ; and merchandise,
of whatever origin, imported by the subjects of either State, under
whatever flag, is not to be liable to any other or higher duties than
that imported by the subject of the other State or of any third
Power.

It has been decided too that all disputed claims to land alleged
to have been acquired by British subjects in a German possession
or protectorate, and vice versa, prior to the proclamation of sove-
reignty or protectorate, shall be settled by a mixed commission ; but
any such claim may be decided by the local authority alone, pro-
vided the claimant to the land makes formal application to that
effect. Convicts are not to be transported to, nor penal settlements

1 A, 8° S. lat., 154° long. E. of Greenwich ; B, .7° 15' S. lat., 155° 25' E. long. ; C,
7° 15' S. lat., 155° 35' E. long. ; D, 7° 25' S. lat., 156° 40' E. long. ; E, 8° 50' S. lat.,
159° 50' E. long. ; F, 6° N. lat., 173° 30' E. long. ; G, 15° N. lat., 173° 30' E. long.

The point A is indicated on the British Admiralty chart 780, Pacific Ocean
(south-west sheet) ; the points B, C, D, and E are indicated on the British Admiralty
chart 214 (South Pacific, Solomon Islands), and the points F and G on the
British Admiralty chart 781, Pacific Ocean (north-west sheet).

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1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 745

established by either Great Britain or Germany in, the Western
Pacific.

The table on the following page shows the exact geographical
position and nationality of the principal groups and islands in these
latitudes, and serves at the same time as an index to the chart
annexed.

I will now deal with the groups separately, detailing more
at length their diplomatic connection with European Powers, and
pointing out some of the advantages they possess for commercial
enterprise.

NORTHERN PACIFIC.

The Sandwich Islands, eight in number, and possessing an area
of about 6,000 square miles, form the kingdom of Hawaii. The
Government is constitutional, consisting of a King and Parliament.
In 1843 their independence was formally declared by the French
and English Governments ; and in 1851 a treaty was entered into
between her Majesty and the King relating to commerce and naviga-
tion, containing certain clauses granting concessions to whale ships,
and regulating import duties and harbour dues. The islands, how-
ever, are practically Americanised, and the dollar is the standard
coin. Their importance from a European point of view is chiefly
owing to the position of Honolulu, which is the only coaling station
on the mail route between Auckland and San Francisco and on the
direct line between Vancouver and Fiji. Great Britain, Germany,
France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden,
Norway, and America are diplomatically represented.

The Ladrones, a group oiLabout twenty islands, running almost
due north and south, have a united area of nearly 1250 square miles,
the largest being Guajan, ninety miles in circumference, where the
governor resides. As a commercial possession these islands are very
important to the Spaniards.

SOUTHERN PACIFIC.

The Kermadec Islands, a scattered group of small rocky islets
situated north-east of New Zealand, were annexed by Great Britain
on the 1st of August, 1886.

The Chatham Islands, discovered in 1791, consist of three islands
and several islets. The soil is fertile, and European fruits grow well.

EASTERN PACIFIC.

Cook Islands are seven in number. The natives, a well-disposed
and intelligent people, are Protestant, and adopt European habits.
Rarotonga, the finest and by far the most important of these

746

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Nov.

BETWEEX

Lat.

Long.

Lat.

Long.

Northern Pacific.

o /

0 /

0 /

0 /

Ladrone Islands 4 (S.) . .

12 24 N.

144 24 E.

20 30 N.

146 1 E.

Sandwich Islands (I.) .

1854N.

154 50 W.

28 25 N.

178 27 W.

Southern Pacific.

Kennadec Islands (B.) .

29 15 S.

177 56 W.

3036 S.

179 OW.

Chatham Islands (B.) .

4330 S.

176 17 W.

4420 S.

176 51 W.

Eastern Pacific.

Marquesas Islands (F.) . .

763 S.

138 26 W.

10 30 S.

140 48 W.

Low Archipelago (F.) .

14 9 S.

124 48 W.

25 3 S.

148 44 W.

Society Islands (I. and F.) .

15 48 S.

148 5W.

17 53 S.

154 40 W.

Cook's Islands (I.) . .

18 5 S.

157 8W.

21 55 S.

163 10 W.

Austral Islands (I.) .

21 49 S.

143 28 W.

27 55 S.

154 43 W.

Rapa 5 (F) .

27 35 S.

144 17 W.

Pitcairn Island (B.) .

25 3 S.

130 8W.

Western Pacific.

Pelew Islands (S.) . .

653N.

134 5E.

845N.

134 55 E.

Caroline Islands (S.) . .

1 ON.

137 33 E.

10 6N.

163 5E.

Marshall Islands (I.G.) .

439N.

165 22 E.

1148N.

171 57 E.

Gilbert Islands (I.E.) .

321N.

172 55 E.

241 S.

177 OE.

Admiralty Islands] Bismarck

1 54 S.

145 54 E.

255 S.

14810E.

New Ireland . \ Archipelago

246 S.

160 33 E.

451 S.

153 18 E.

New Britain J (<*•)

4 8 S.

148 17 E.

630 S.

152 15 E.

British .}

German .[ New Guinea

019 S.

131 OE.

10 43 S.

150 54 E.

Dutch . )

Louisiade Archipelago (B.) .

10 58 S.

151 3E.

11 42 S.

154 26 E.

Solomon Islands B (I.E. & I.G.)

327 S.

153 55 E.

12 45 S.

163 1 E.

Ellice Islands (I.E.) .

529 S.

179 50 E.

1041 S

176 6E.

Santa Cruz Islands 7 (I.E.) .

957 S.

165 41 E.

11 50 S

167 11 E.

Samoa Islands 8 (I.)

12 53 S.

168 6W.

1557 S

178 7W.

New Hebrides Islands (I.) .

1336 S

166 40 E.

20 15 S

170 11 E.

Fiji Islands (B.) .

1231 S

176 51 E.

2038 S

178 12 W.

Tonga9 (I.) ....

18 2 S

173 40 W.

2262 S

176 14 W.

New Caledonia (F.)

1759 S

162 55 E.

2246 S

167 29 E.

Loyalty Islands (F.)

2015 S

166 14 E.

2238 S

168 56 E.

Nieue" 10 (I.) .

1910 S

169 50 W.

B. denotes British possessions. I.G. denotes independent, but within German

S. denotes Spanish possessions. ' sphere of influence.'

G. denotes German possessions. I.B. denotes independent, but within British

F. denotes French possessions. ' sphere of influence.'

I. denotes independent.

ROUTES FROM LONDON TO SYDNEY.

Vid Brindisi & Alexandria & Cairo Rly. 10,540 miles, of which 1,490 are land miles

„ Suez Canal 11,533 „

„ San Francisco . . .- 14,895 „ of which 3,300 are land mile s

„ Panama 12,545 .. of which 50 are land miles

811 „ of which 3,271 are land miles

Mariana Islands.
Oparo.

6 For division, see text, p. 756.

7 Charlotte.

10 Savage Island.

8 Navigators.

9 Friendly Islands.

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 747

islands, lies in the highway between Sydney and Panama. Although
mountainous, it is very fertile, and fresh water abounds ; while its
two small but fairly secure harbours might be made of signal service
to us, seeing we have no coaling station in the Eastern Pacific.
About the year 1 864 the king and his chiefs made a formal appli-
cation to her Majesty's Government for protection, in the shape of a
letter addressed to the then Governor of New Zealand. The same
feeling continues, and (July 3, 1886) the New Zealand Government,
in a telegraphic despatch, asked that the island should be brought
under British protection.

It is not probable that, with the present spirit of annexation,
islands possessing so many advantages commercially and diplomati-
cally will remain much longer without an offer of protection from
some European Power.

The Society group may be divided into —

(1) Tahiti, a valuable island with a good harbour (Papeete),
Moorea, Mactia, and Tetuaroa. They were formally annexed by
France in 1880.

(2) Huahine, Eaiatea, and Borabora (to the leeward of Tahiti),
and the adjacent small islands. Their independence was acknow-
ledged by a treaty entered into between Great Britain and France
in 1847, although, strange to say, the French flag has been flying at
Raiatea since 1880.

The Austral group consists of five islands — Rapa, Ravaivai, Tubu,
Rurutu, and Rimatara, ranging from fifteen to twenty-five miles in
circumference and possessing a magnificent climate. The natives,
who are Protestants, have little sympathy with the Roman Catholic
teaching. These islands, cultivated properly by Europeans, would
probably produce fine crops of cotton, coffee, sugar, and indigo, and
constitute commercially a very profitable investment.

Rurutu and Rimatara are independent, but the other three belong
to the French. Rapa, situated at the extreme south-east, possesses
a fine natural harbour, and though it formed part of the 1843 Tahiti
protectorate was not formally ceded to France till 1880.

The French possessions in the Eastern Pacific comprise —

(1) The Marquesas, a group of eleven islands, possessing a de-
lightful climate and valuable agricultural land, ceded to France by a
treaty with Admiral Dupetit-Thouars in May 1842.

(2) The Tahitian Archipelago, which may be subdivided into —
(a) Tahiti, Moorea, Tetuaroa, Meetia, Tubai, Ravaivai, and Rapa.
Admiral Thouars seized Tahiti in August 1842, and during the

following year the island was, at the request of its queen and
principal chiefs, placed under French protection. In May 1880
King Pomare the Fifth handed over the administration of Tahiti
and its dependencies to the President of the Republic, and they
were formally annexed by France. Tahiti, now a great centre of

748 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

commercial activity in the Pacific, was then made, and still is, the
seat of government.

(6) The Low Archipelago, or Paumotu group, a vast collection of
coral islands, numbering seventy-eight or more, covering an area of
6,000 square kilometres, and chiefly valuable for their pearl fisheries.

(c) The Gambiers, a group of four small islands. The French
official resides at Mangareva. The agents of Messrs. Godeffroy some
years ago shipped to Europe, in one parcel, pearls to the value
of $20,000, the product of a few months' collection among the
Paumotus, and the large pearl now in the possession of her Majesty,
and purchased of Messrs. Storr and Mortimer for 6,OOOL, came
from the Gambiers.

The situation in the Eastern Pacific calls for immediate action.
The islanders are becoming aware of the growing power of Germany
in these latitudes, and, as the greater part of their trade is transacted
through "agents of that country, there is some reason to expect that
Prince Bismarck may before long carry out here his principle of
following the German trade with the German flag.

With the diplomatic dealings that led to the establishment of
Kaiser Wilhelm Land in the Ireland of Australia still fresh in our
memory, it might be politic and not altogether unnecessary to take
some preliminary steps in a matter of so great importance to the
future welfare of British commercial interests.

I would suggest that the limits of British and French spheres of
influence in the Eastern Pacific be more accurately defined, and that
declarations be made between the Governments of Great Britain and
France similar in effect to those entered into between this country
and Germany concerning the Western Pacific. The Panama Canal
may or may not be a financial success. That it will be open for
navigation in 1889 is more than doubtful, but that it may be un
fait accompli sooner or later is a possibility which even the Americans
cannot gainsay. Our duty is to be prepared for a favourable result
of M. Lesseps' undertaking, which, if successful, will not only open a
new sea route to Australia and New Zealand, but also bring the
Pacific islands into very much closer communication with European
Powers than is at the present time possible.

It would of course be necessary to agree to a conventional line
of demarcation, and the diplomatic dealings that led to the fixing
of this line might materially assist in solving the New Hebrides
problem.

Provided that the settlement of the Newfoundland fisheries dispute
does not interfere with the carrying out of the declaration entered
into betweeen this country and France, in 1847, respecting the
independence of the islands of Huahine, Kaiatea, and Borabora, and
the small islands adjacent thereto, the withdrawal of Great Britain
from this engagement in exchange for Kapa, Tubai, and Kavaivai

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 749

might be deserving of some consideration at the hands of her
Majesty's Government.

A conventional line, as indicated in the chart overleaf, that
secured Eapa and Earotonga on the British side, would not be with-
out its advantages to this country, and yet keep intact the rights of
France, and not interfere with her diplomatic or commercial policy
in these latitudes.

Tahiti being the great centre of French trade in the Pacific is
absolutely necessary to France ; but Kapa, which can only be ap-
proached from most of the French possessions by a circuitous passage,
owing to the nautical dangers that surround the Low Archipelago,
has hitherto proved of little service to that nation. In support of
my case I would mention the fact that, although this island was
included in the 1843 protectorate, it was only in 1867, after the
Panama Mail Company had chosen it for a coaling station, that
France thought it necessary to send a man-of-war there to reduce it
into possession. In the event of the Panama Canal being opened for
traffic, Tahiti must, from its geographical position, always be the
coaling station for French vessels taking that route to Caledonia or
Australia. Earotonga is independent, and its inhabitants have already
invited, and are still ready and willing to accept, British protection,
while Tubai and Eavaivai are unimportant islands to France in
comparison with the possession of Huahine, Borabora, Eaiatea, and
the remaining islands of the Society group. The guano islands
Fanning, Maiden, and Starbuck would, under the suggested arrange-
ment, also go to France.

WESTERN PACIFIC.

The largest and perhaps the most important island in the Western
Pacific is New Guinea, or Papua. It lies immediately south of the
equator and north of Australia, and is under the control of three
European Powers in the following estimated proportions : —

Square miles

Western New Guinea (Holland) 112,350

Kaiser Wilhelm Land (Germany) 68,390

British Protectorate (Great Britain) 86,800

Total area . . 267,640

The secrecy and jealousy of the Dutch in relation to their East
India possessions, even to a late period, has barred political and
geographical information to the outer world. Lord Carnarvon in
1875 endeavoured to get some definite information as to their title,
or alleged title, to the western portion of New Guinea, and to trace
out the precise boundaries of the territory held by them. No specific
information, however, on these points was forthcoming, beyond the
fact that they claimed to extend to the 141st degree of longitude
east of Greenwich.

750

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Nov.

The Dutch navigators in the early part of the seventeenth
century explored the south-western shores of New Guinea as far east
as the Torres Straits, while Le Maire, Schouten, and Abel Tasman
(1613-43) traced the northern shores from about the 144° meridian
to the westward. The Great Geel Vink Bay was explored in 1705.
In 1820 and 1828 more explorations were made, and a settlement
founded. In 1835 the Dutch sent out another expedition, which
was followed in 1858 by a third to Huraboldt Bay. None of these
endeavours to colonise the place have, however, been very successful.

NEW GUIKEA.

C I F I C

l+S'Long. E tf Gr.

Hence the assumption is their title depends upon the right of dis-
covery and exploration.

Comparatively little too is known concerning German New Guinea,
and although recent White Books give some information about the
interior of Kaiser Wilhelm Land, the greater part of that territory
remains unexplored ; but owing to the untiring energy of the late Sir
Peter Scratchley, who personally visited eighteen districts, twenty-
seven islands, thirty-four inland and sixty coast villages, some definite
and reliable information respecting the British territory has been
acquired. With the exception of the north-east coast, the entire

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 751

littoral of the protectorate is inhabited, and in the west and north-
west, from the Fly Eiver to Hall Sound, the tribes are large. The
soil there, too, is extremely fertile, and large crops of sago are
produced. From Port Moresby to Kerupunu the natives are peaceable
and inclined to the adoption of European ideas respecting labour ;
but at Aroma, Cloudy Bay, Milport Bay, and Toulon Island they
are not to be trusted. Further south villages are smaller but more
numerous, and the character of the natives is docile. Concerning
those on the north-east coast, little is known of their habits or
customs. The natives are far superior in physique to the Australian
black, but there is no such developed tribal system as existed in
Fiji, Java, and New Zealand. Sir Peter Scratchley and his guard
only carried arms on rare occasions, but no hostility was ever shown,
and even at Mr. Forbes's station, the furthest settlement inland
hitherto attempted, a friendly spirit was exhibited.

The discovery of New Guinea is due to the Portuguese. Don
Juge de Menenis landed there in 1526, and called the island Papua,
which some authorities translate * black,' while others construe it
4 curled hair,' either of which meanings suits the native inhabitants.
Thirty years later De Eetz, a Spanish mariner, sailed along the
northern coast, and rechristened the island Nueva Guinea, from a
fancied resemblance it bore to the Guinea coast on the west of Africa.
Dampier, in 1699, circumnavigated the] island, and on landing met
with considerable resistance from the natives. A similar experience
befell Captain Cook when he visited the place in 1770.

Twenty-three years ago a company was started in Sydney to
colonise that part not taken by Holland ; but the idea was abandoned
when the promoters of the scheme found they could not form a
British colony without the express consent of the Imperial authorities.
Since that date the coast-line of New Guinea has been to some extent
explored by the missionaries and various Europeans who have visited
its shores.

The Bismarck Archipelago consists of the Admiralty group, New
Britain, New Ireland, Long, and Rooke islands, and several smaller
dependencies round about.

The Louisiade Archipelago, included in the British protectorate,
embraces the islands of Adele, Roussel, and St. Aignan, and the
groups Eenard, De Boyne, Bonvouloir, D'Entrecasteaux, and Trobri-
ande. Many of the islands are thickly populated, and the natives,
mostly cannibals, are less to be trusted than those on the mainland.

I do not propose to deal with either the British or German occu-
pation of New Guinea at any great length, but it may be interesting
to give here a short account of the way Germany obtained a footing
in the Ireland of Australia and a hold in the Western Pacific.

Like a triangle, the question has three sides — Imperial, German,
Colonial. These I will discuss as briefly as possible, and leave my

752 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

readers to draw their own conclusions. The Imperial authorities,
after much delay and a good deal of outside pressure from the
colonies, decided not to annex New Guinea, but to declare a protec-
torate up to a certain point in the island, and on the 9th of September,
1 884, her Majesty's Government announced to the German authori-
ties that it was intended to establish a protectorate over the coast and
contiguous islands, excepting that part between the 145th degree of
east longitude and the eastern Dutch boundary. Baron von Plessen
then made certain representations in London, the outcome of which
was that another note was sent to Berlin on the 9th of October,
stating that as an act of courtesy we would, pending negotiations with
Prince Bismarck, limit the immediate declaration of the protectorate
to the south coast and islands, it being understood, of course, that
this was done without prejudice to any territorial question beyond that
limit, and adding that, in the opinion of her Majesty's Government,
any question as to districts lying beyond the limit actually taken
should be dealt with diplomatically rather than be referred to a South
Sea Committee, as suggested by Baron von Plessen. Germany, how-
ever, saw no reason for entering into the negotiations suggested by
this country, or waiting for the diplomatic discussion of Baron von
Plessen's representations, and proceeded to annex a portion of the
territory in question.

This action on the part of a friendly Power naturally caused
some amount of irritation at the Foreign Office, and did not tend to
allay the anxiety which was rapidly springing up at the Colonial
Office in consequence of the alarming nature of the telegrams re-
ceived from Australia. Much correspondence ensued on all sides, and
on the 24th of December an interview took place between Prince
Bismarck and Mr. Meade in Berlin, when the matter was personally
introduced to the German Chancellor. Six months later it was offi-
cially announced in London that an arrangement had been agreed
upon between the two Governments. Under this a point was selected
on the north-east coast where the eighth parallel of south latitude
cuts the sea-shore as the coast boundary, and the inland territories
were respectively fixed by a line starting from the coast in the
neighbourhood of Mitre Rock, on the eighth parallel of south
latitude, and following this parallel to the point where it is cut by
the 147th degree of east longitude, then in a straight line in a
north-westerly direction to the point where the sixth parallel of
south latitude cuts "the 144th degree of east longitude, and con-
tinuing in a north-westerly direction to the point of intersection of
the fifth parallel of south latitude and of the 144th degree of east
longitude.

The British possessions lie to the south and the German to the
north of the line thus defined. So the matter was settled, and
68,000 square miles of territory passed under German control which

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 753

might have formed part of the British Empire, without any addi-
tional expense to the British taxpayer, had the mother country but
listened to the voice of the Australian colonies.

Prince Bismarck's explanation of the transaction to Mr. Meade,
who at the interview in question expressed some surprise at Germany
thinking of annexing land which she had just proposed should form
the subject of special negotiation, was that the correspondence
alluded to above was quite new to him, neither had he any recollec-
tion of seeing it. He considered that he was free to take the north
shore when we had limited our protectorate to the south side. So it
is apparent that Germany considered the matter settled by the second
note, and that the only open question was how far the limits of our
protectorate should extend so as not to clash with those of Germany
on the opposite coast.

We now come to the third and perhaps most important side of
the question — I mean the Colonial. On the 4th of April, 1883, Mr.
Chester took possession on behalf of her Majesty and the Govern-
ment of Queensland of all that part of New Guinea and its adja-
cent islands lying between the 141st and 155th degrees of east
longitude. This fact was reported to the Imperial authorities, and
the other colonies urged the necessity of the territory being taken
under British rule. In spite, however, of the unanimous feeling
expressed by Australasia in the matter, the annexation was annulled.
Some soreness naturally resulted from so short-sighted a policy
on the part of her Majesty's advisers, but upon its becoming known
that, on the 2nd of July, 1883, Lord Derby had publicly announced
in the House of Lords it would be regarded as ' an unfriendly act '
if any country attempted to make a settlement on the coast of New
Guinea, confidence was aganrrestored in the colonies; and when
this expression was followed up, on the 9th of May, 1884, with the
assurance ' that her Majesty's Government are confident that no
foreign Power contemplates interference in New Guinea,' Australasia
felt secure. Still the Colonial Governments continued to urge the
necessity of annexation, and ultimately agreed to pay a subsidy of
15,OOOZ. towards the expenses of a New Guinea protectorate. On the
9th of September the announcement stated above was sent to the
German Government, and on the 17th of November the late Sir
Peter (then General) Scratchley received instructions to proceed as
her Majesty's special commissioner to assume jurisdiction over the
southern shore of New Guinea and the adjacent country from the
141st meridian of east longitude, as far as East Cape, including any
islands near the mainland in Goshen Straits, and southward of these
straits as far south and east as to include Kosman Island. These
instructions also stated clearly that he was to act as Deputy Com-
missioner to portions of New Guinea outside the protectorate, a fact
that goes far to prove in the result that either Lord Derby misled
VOL. XX.— No. 117. 3 G

754 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

the colonies or Prince Bismarck misled Lord Derby. Sir Peter
pointed out the absolute absurdity of such a partial protectorate, but,
buoyed up with the hope of his powers being extended, left England
on the 20th of November for Australia. At Albany the news reached
him of the German annexation. Public opinion ran very high in
the colonies against the Home Government when they found their
confidence had been misplaced, and this feeling of irritation was in-
tensified upon discovering that they were to be asked to increase
the subsidy, when half the territory for which they had agreed to
pay was already in the possession of a foreign Power. It is not
that the Australians dislike the Germans as colonists in the Pacific,
but they object to the presence in their midst of a possibly hostile
Power. With the example of South Africa before their eyes, the
danger of border disputes is ever present, and it would be idle to
disguise the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm Land, from its size and posi-
tion, in the unhappy event of a European war, may prove the basis
of awkward complications in that part of the world. The Germans,
too, have a peculiar interest in New Guinea, seeing their other neigh-
bours are so nearly allied to them in speech and habits, for the
Dutch are in fact really German, who have only in consequence of a
separate historical development acquired a special nationality.

There are three well-known routes from New South Wales to
China passing eastward of New Guinea ; the longest, traversing east-
ward of New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands, is about 6,000
miles, and the two shortest, westward of those islands, 5,500 and
5,000 miles respectively ; while from Brisbane to Hong Kong the
distance is only 4,400 miles.

The Caroline Archipelago numbers more than five hundred islands,
of which some are uninhabited, others very populous. The western
side of the group is comparatively unknown, but the eastern extremity
has been to some extent explored. Strong Island, eighty miles
round, possesses two good harbours, where the largest vessels may
anchor with safety. Timber is the chief export, and large quantities
were obtained here for building the ports of China. Ascension, a
larger island than Strong, is similar to it in many ways. Westward
of Ascension is Hogolu, a vast lagoon about three hundred miles
in circumference, while to the south-east are the islands Nugunor
and Sugunor, important chiefly from their trade in pearl oysters and
becke de mer. Yap, situated at the extreme west, is perhaps the
most highly civilised island of the group. Here Messrs. Godeffroy
and Co. have a large establishment. Ponapi, in the extreme east,
is important only on account of the conditions respecting it con-
tained in the conditional arrangement (between Germany and Spain)
respecting the sovereignty of the Caroline group.

The Pelew group was discovered by the Spaniards in 1545, and
forms a chain running about a hundred and twenty miles from S.S.W.

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 755

to N.N.E. Babelthuap is the principal island. Tropical fruits of
all kinds abound, and water is abundant. The natives are of the
Malay race, and exhibit much skill in building canoes and in agri-
cultural pursuits.

Last year a dispute arose between Spain and Germany as to the
sovereignty of the Caroline and Pelew Islands. The Pope, having
undertaken to mediate between the two Governments, proposed that
the sovereignty of Spain over these islands should be recognised by
Germany in return for the grant of concessions to that Power touching
trade, shipping, and the acquisition of land, similar to that recorded in
the protocol concluded on the subject of the Sulu Archipelago. Some
correspondence ensued between this country and Spain upon the
matter, and her Majesty's Government offered to recognise Spanish
sovereignty to the same extent as Germany. Senor Moret, how-
ever, pointed out to Lord Salisbury that he could not suppose
England was in need of a naval establishment in that part of the
Pacific Ocean, and so trusted that point would be waived by us
when claiming to participate in all the advantages which accrued to
Germany under the convention concluded between that Power and
Spain ; whereupon Lord Salisbury did not urge his demand ; and
on January 8 last her Majesty's Government agreed to recognise
the sovereignty of Spain over the Caroline and Pelew Islands to
the same extent as such sovereignty has been or may hereafter be
recognised by the German Government ; and the Spanish Govern-
ment in return agreed that whatsoever privileges, advantages,
favours, or immunities have been or may hereafter be accorded in
these islands to the Government or subjects of the German Empire
shall be immediately and unconditionally accorded to the Government
or subjects of Great Britain. It was for the purpose of this protocol
that the limits of the Caroline and Pelew Archipelagos were fixed
as indicated by the 10 Spanish line in the chart.

The Ellice group, north-west of Samoa, consist of Mitchell
Island, where the Peruvian slavers carried on their nefarious
trade in 1863 ; Ellice, Tracy, De Peyster, Netherland, Speiden,
Hudson, and St. Augustine Islands.

The Gilbert group, better known as the Kingsmills, include
about fifteen islands, the more important of which are Drummond,
Kurd, Eotch, Francis, and Peru. The natives, a degraded race,
have suffered much from their acquaintance with low Europeans.

I have already said my say about Samoa in this Eeview,11 so do
not propose to enter again into the internal affairs of these islands.

At the present time, so far as we know, Samoa is in a state of
quasi-tranquillity. A commission composed of British, German, and

10 The equator + 11° north latitude, and 132° + 164° of longitude east of Green-
wich.

11 Nineteenth Century, February 1886.

3G2

756 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

American representatives is sitting on the spot with a view of bring-
ing about a final settlement of disputes and arranging some form of
government that will be satisfactory to all parties concerned. Their
report is to be submitted to a meeting of British, German, and
American diplomats, to be held at Washington, where everything
will be overhauled and the question of Samoa and her future relations
to the Great Powers finally settled. I have, however, good reason for
believing that Germany wishes to settle the matter by obtaining pos-
session of Upolu, the most important island of the group, possessing
the three fine harbours of Apia, Saluafata, and Safata, and offering
America Tutuila, with the splendid harbour of Pagopago (already
practically under their control), in which event Great Britain would
have to be content with Savaii, the poorest island of the three so far
as soil is concerned, and possessing but one small harbour, that of
Mataatua, and even this is unsafe from November to February,
when the north-westerly gales prevail. The adoption of any such
scheme means good-bye to British and Colonial trade in Samoa
unless transacted through German and American merchants. The
fact that Samoa lies in the direct highway to New Zealand, and
is only 630 miles from Suva, the chief port of Fiji, must not be
lost sight of in the settlement ; and if British commerce is to do any
good in Samoa in the event of Apia going to Germany we must
endeavour to secure the harbours of Saluafata and Safata, in Upolu.
Saluafata is regarded by men of nautical experience as being equal in
security to Apia, and although only a few miles apart the nature of
the country is not such as to allow much communication by land
between the two settlements ; but a considerable trade would probably
spring up along the sea coast.

The best form of native government that would be able to rule
the country and maintain its position with foreign Powers is that
which was in existence when Steinberger arrived in Samoa — a
house of representatives and a house of nobles, with two kings
possessing joint power.

The Solomon Archipelago, now divided by the sphere of influ-
ence line existing between this country and Germany, and extending
N.W. and S.E. for about 600 miles, is composed of eight or ten
principal islands and many others smaller in size and comparatively
unknown.

On the German side lie Bougainville, a very mountainous island ;
Bourka, Choiseul, and Ysabel, valuable chiefly on account of its
valuable ebony and satinwood.

On the British side is Treasury Island, called ' the British naval
depot ' ; Malayta ; Guadalcanar ; New Georgia ; and San Chrisoval
Islands.

The Phoenix Islands, seven or eight in number, are composed for
the most part of coral and sand, and the vegetation is stunted.

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 757

Charlotte or Santa Cruz Islands consist of seven fairly large and
several smaller islands. Santa Cruz, about fifteen to sixteen miles in
length, is well wooded and watered. The natives, a fine-looking
race, are treacherous, but exhibit great ingenuity in building houses,
constructing canoes, and making mats.

The Fiji Islands are too well known to call for remark here, and
as they are a Crown colony information concerning them is easily
obtainable.

New Caledonia was discovered by Captain Cook in 1774, but in
1854 passed into the hands of the French, who use it chiefly as a
convict establishment. The island lies about 270 miles E.N.E. of
Queensland, and is about 200 miles long and 30 broad. It possesses
two secure harbours at Port Balade and Port St. Vincent.

The Loyalty Islands, distant about sixty miles from New Cale-
donia, consisting of Mare Lefu, Uea, and the dependencies, are also
French possessions.

Nieue, called Savage Island by Captain Cook, is about thirty-six
miles in circumference, and the land ascends in places to 200 feet.
In several places anchorage is to be found, and plenty of fresh water
exists near the coast. This island is one of those specially excepted
in the declaration between Germany and Great Britain, owing no
doubt to the trade carried on with the natives by the Godeffroy
firm, who maintain an agent among them.

The New Hebrides Islands and their relations with France and
England have lately 12 been discussed by me in these pages, but several
months have elapsed since the French authorities, in order to avenge
reputed massacres and enforce native obedience to a trading com-
pany, deemed it necessary to utilise the services of two men-of-war,
land soldiers, and hoist the tricolour flag in these islands.

Since the occurrence of this unconstitutional act on the part of
French colonists the negotiations concerning the proposed bargain
with France respecting the New Hebrides have come to an end. In
spite, however, of remonstrance from the mother country and the
Australian colonies, the French troops still continue in possession,
a fact which exasperates colonial opinion and continues to call
forth severe criticisms from Australian statesmen. In the interests
alike of ourselves and Australasia the French soldiers must go, and
it is not too much to ask that France should be called upon to give
some further assurance that she will assist Great Britain in en-
deavouring to support the independence of the natives and carry
out by deeds as well as words the understanding of 1878.

It is, too, of the utmost importance for the well-being of the
natives of these islands, as well as to meet the requirement of British
subjects in Australia and New Zealand, that there should exist in
the New Hebrides some form of government which can insure pro-
12 Nineteenth Century, July 1886.

758 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

tection of life and property and facilitate commercial intercourse in
the Pacific, and I would suggest the formation of a government that,
while leaving the islands practically independent, would represent
native interests as well as those of France, Great Britain, and
Australasia.

The Tonga Archipelago consists of about a hundred islands and
islets, which may be divided into three groups — Tonga, Hapai, and
Vavao. Like Samoa the formation is volcanic, and Tofoa is merely
an active volcano. The group is rich in cocoanuts, and the natives
make large quantities of copra, which is exported to Europe by
the Hamburg firm of Messrs. Godeffroy and Co., whose headquarters
are at Apia, in Samoa. The largest and most important island of the
group is Tongatabu, situated in the extreme south. Here is a good
harbour, guarded by immense coral reefs. If this island should fall
into the hands of a foreign Power the position of the Fijis will indeed
be perilous ; and in the unhappy event of a European war the little
Crown colony will be surrounded by ships of possible hostile Powers,
and Great Britain, with valuable possessions in Vancouver and Sydney,
will have no island in the 6,830 miles of ocean that separate these
two ports wherein to obtain coals or fresh supplies. Surely no time
should be lost in securing possession of Tongatabu.

The government, which consists of a king and a parliament of
chiefs, is officially recognised by the Great Powers ; and our relations
with the King of Tonga and his people, both politically and com-
mercially, are fixed by the treaty of friendship concluded between
the two Governments in 1879.

On the 19th of February, 1844, the Tongans, through their king,
expressed a desire to become British subjects. This memorial
remained unanswered for four years, when the request was re-
newed by the chiefs of the islands, and finally declined by Lord
Palmer ston.

With very few exceptions the bulk of the trade with the Pacific
Islands is carried on by Hamburg merchants and their agents. Messrs.
Godeffroy and Co., who have a network of agencies, do a very large
trade with the natives. Their method is to trust an agent with goods
and expect from him within reasonable time a return at a fixed rate ;
but they pay no salaries, and are very careful to select men who can
not only speak the language of the place but also keep on good
terms with the inhabitants and hold their tongues about their
masters' business when meeting with white men.

Englishmen are far behindhand in the way of commerce and
enterprise. Wherever there is money to be made there you will
find the Hamburg merchant, no matter how remote the spot or how
unhealthy the region. Why at Guacipeti, through which town all the
mining business of that district passes, not a single British house of
business exists, and this large and profitable work is carried on solely

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 759

by German and Venezuelan firms ; and the same is the case at Bolivar.
The sooner our system of trading abroad is altered the better ; and if
we are to do any good in the Pacific we must employ men who know
their work and can do it. A German looks before he leaps, but
having leaped he remains where he lands until he has got every
farthing out of the place and the people. An Englishman leaps with-
out looking, and as soon as he has done his business either goes
elsewhere, or remains thinking everything and everybody about him
a great bore and acting accordingly.

Then again there is another difference. The German is educated
not only commercially but diplomatically ; he knows the language
of the place he is going to and can always speak English, whereas
the Englishman may know a smattering of French and German
but is totally ignorant of the commercial or native language of the
people among whom he is trying to push his trade.

There is every inducement to our countrymen to extend their
commerce in the Pacific. The name of Englishman is associated
in the minds of the native races with a feeling of friendship — the
Queen of England is looked upon by the native mind as the helper
of the defenceless and the avenger of crime, and in Samoa many of
the native girls are named ' Victoria,' after her Majesty — while that
of Frenchman (Tangata Napoleon) is to many a word of fear. The
word Spaniard (Pamoia) expresses a meaning similar to ' fiend,'
while Callao might be construed ' hell.' The native feeling is against
the Spaniards because of the treachery and violence of the Peruvian
shipmasters who were engaged in the labour traffic.

Germans alone are our rivals. Their name at present has not
been dragged in the mud, and the natives are willing to give their
agents the preference, for the German firms are politic and treat
the natives with kindness, while if their pay is small it is at any rate
certain.

The German method of mixing up consular and commercial work
acts very well from the Bismarck point of view, seeing that Germany
does not colonise, but only protects. Prince Bismarck's principle is to
follow his traders when they establish themselves in territory under
no civilised jurisdiction, and to afford them protection, not against
competition by levying differential duties, but against direct aggres-
sion from without. The German Chancellor's intention is to adhere
to the statement he made last year, that the German flag shall only go
where German trade has already established a footing. Hence the
German consuls in the Pacific work hand and glove with Hamburg
merchants, and together push the commerce of their country and
extend the territory of the German Empire.

Our method of procedure is widely different. We leave British com-
merce to look after itself, and if an enterprising trader goes a-trading,
why, he does so at his own risk, and does not carry the British flag

760 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

•

with him. This is all very well if we had no rivals in the field, but,
while the Germans are pursuing tactics that continue to bring grist
to their mill, it is simple folly to allow our consular system to go on
in the same old groove, and make no effort to secure some of the
crumbs that now go to make up the Hamburg loaf.

If British trade interests are to cope with those of Germany in
the Pacific, we must establish agents in the various centres of com-
mercial activity that are rapidly springing up in that hitherto com-
paratively unknown sphere. The mixed nature of the German
consul's duties is no guide to us, inasmuch as our policy is not on all
fours with that of Germany. We must, however, do something.
Why not start a system of Pacific commercial agents, whose duties
would be not only to tell British merchants where to find the best
market for their goods, but also to give information of a reliable kind
about the natives themselves and their disposition to trade and barter ?
Make the British consul a diplomatic agent pure and simple,
and confine him to his instructions. Care of course must be taken
that these commercial agents are men of tact and sound character,
and while able and anxious to do their best for the interests of
British trade, will at the same time do nothing to imperil the entente
cordiale at present existing between European Powers in these
regions.

In order to cope with the increasing spirit of annexation in the
Pacific developed lately by France and Germany, it is a matter of
paramount necessity to Australia that she should possess a navy.
The present system of naval defence would be quite inadequate to
protect her shores, much less secure the coasting trade in the event
of a European war. Besides, what guarantee have the colonies that
at the first outcry of war the Imperial navy, being entirely out of their
control, might not leave them for fields of greater activity. During
the late Russian scare there was not a ship on the coast capable of
catching a Russian cruiser, and only one able to fight with an armoured
vessel. Even the late Sir Peter Scratchley felt it his duty to give up
H.M.S. ' Wolverene ' for defence purposes, and chartered the ' Governor
Blackall ' to take him to New Guinea. Under these circumstances it is
scarcely a matter of surprise that the proposals made to the Australian
Government by Admiral Try on concerning contributions to the cost of
the Imperial navy are not being received with avidity. The colonies
are not likely to pay for a navy to be controlled entirely by the
mother country, without being first satisfied that their shores will be
sufficiently protected at all hazards and at all times ; nor are the
past proceedings with regard to New Guinea and the present
negotiations concerning the New Hebrides likely to inspire con-
fidence.

Besides the Australian shores and coasting trade, there is the
highway to India and China from New Zealand to protect, on the

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 761

one side, and the trade route from Vancouver to Sydney, in
addition to the mail highway to San Francisco and the probable
route to Panama, on the other, every one of which passes uncomfort-
ably near islands in the possession or under the control of a foreign
Power. In the event of a European war it would not be possible for
the Imperial navy, as at present constituted, to protect both the
colonies and the Pacific; and as Australia and New Zealand are
practically powerless to help themselves, the sooner this important
question is settled the better for all parties.

Either the Imperial and colonial navy must be one, the
colonies paying their share of the cost and having a voice in the
control of the ships, or we must build the colonies' ships to their
order, and let them manage their own navy, merely paying a
subsidy for use of the vessels in matters where Imperial interests are
chiefly concerned.

The necessity for unity in matters affecting Imperial interests
cannot be too strongly impressed upon Australasia. If Imperial and
colonial authorities are to carry out in unison the future policy of
the Pacific, Australasia must speak with one voice. Once allow the
rights and wrongs of individual colonies to enter the arena of
Pacific politics and hesitation is sure to follow, the amalgamation
will become a farce, and instead of a result brought about by a com-
bination of ideas focussed on one point, we shall have a babel of
voices but no decisive action, and in the end the allied forces will
have to concentrate their attention in solving the problem of how
best to shut the stable door after the horse is stolen.

Inter-colonial jealousy is far too prevalent in Australasia.
Victoria and New South Wales are the chief offenders in this respect,
with New Zealand not far behind. Examples are not wanting. Take
for instance the New Guinea question. No sooner did Victoria
advocate its annexation by England than New South Wales began
to oppose the proposition, notwithstanding the fact that the Govern-
ment of the latter colony were the first to advise its being annexed
by Britain after the refusal of the Imperial Powers to recognise the
action of Queensland. Again, while Victoria was striving hard to
get the Enabling Bill passed through the House of Commons, New
South Wales was apparently indifferent to the result, and now,
together with New Zealand, objects to join in the Federal move-
ment. Then take the proposal to establish a parcels post between
Great Britain and Australia : while the Postmaster-General of
New South Wales thought the project somewhat premature, the
corresponding official in Victoria saw that the difficulties standing
in the way of its accomplishment, so far as his colony was con-
cerned, could be easily overcome. More lately we have seen New
South Wales assenting to a bargain between Great Britain and
France concerning the New Hebrides, while the other colonies were

762 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Nov.

vigorously opposing this transaction. Only three years ago the
famous memorandum of the Agents-General to Lord Derby respect-
ing colonial ideas in the policy of the Pacific was prevented from
being the unanimous voice of Australasia by the withdrawal at the
last moment of South Australia. On the other hand, in the action
taken by New South Wales and Victoria during the late Egyptian
campaign, we have Victoria as the aggressor. The mother colony
had scarcely offered to send troops to the Soudan before Victoria
began to throw cold water on Sir Bede Daily's proposition. However,
as soon as the offer was accepted by the War Office, that colony
veered round, and begged to have a finger in the pie.

The New Zealand House of Eepresentatives, some few months
since, after a debate on the question of Federation, passed a resolu-
tion ' that in view of the little consideration that has been given to
the subject of Federation in the colony, it is undesirable for Parlia-
ment in the present session to legislate upon the matter, but at the
same time strongly urges the necessity of some form of Imperial
Federation.'

It is a well-known fact among men who have practically studied
on the spot the internal politics of Australia and New Zealand, that
colonial legislators are not in harmony on the subject of Australasian
Federation.

Imperial Federation, on the other hand, finds some favour in the
eyes of the Colonial Parliaments, because it will give each colony an
additional status, greater or less according to the scheme that is yet
to be developed, and at the same time not take away from or under-
mine the value of existing institutions ; while Australasian Federation
tends to place the colonies upon a more equal footing, and intimates a
change in their constitutional powers, a revolutionary proceeding
extremely distasteful to the parties directly interested.

New South Wales boldly asserts its intention to work out its
country in its own way and in its own time, and refuses to be
dictated to by other colonies, whose interests that colony considers to
be of less magnitude than her own.

Victoria believes she is the first colony in Australia, and if
Federation of the colonies is to take place, her position must be
recognised, and Melbourne made the basis of operations. There can
be no doubt that Melbourne is a finer city than Sydney, and nearer
to England, and that Victoria is a more advanced colony than New
South Wales. But then, if we except gold, the resources of New
South Wales are greater than those of Victoria, and the mother colony
has the advantage of possessing abundance of coal, whereas none has
been discovered in Victoria. In my opinion Albany, which is the key
to Australia, should, in the event of a capital becoming necessary, be
the place chosen.

New Zealand is opposed to Feieration, because New Zealand is

1886 EUROPE IN THE PACIFIC. 763

of opinion that she is the colony of the future, and that the time is
not so very far distant when her importance will be more openly
recognised by the civilised world. She is jealous, and justly so, of
her individuality, and sees no immediate necessity to federate with
colonies that are hundreds of miles distant, while, strange to say, the
fact that their interests are to a great extent similar to her own does
not appear to act as an incentive in the matter.

Colonial politicians at home and abroad are well aware of the
value to the Empire of some scheme of Imperial Federation, but
the more thoughtful and practical among them know equally well
that as long as we continue to rule our colonies on the present lines
Imperial Federation is manifestly impossible. In view, then, of the
importance of an Imperial-colonial Pacific policy, it is time to con-
sider the situation, and if, after mature consideration, it should be
found advantageous to the Empire to alter the existing mode of
administering Australasian affairs, it becomes imperative upon
Imperial legislators to consult with the colonies upon the best
system to be adopted, and, having sought their advice, to act in
concert with them. What the colonies really require is a body of
men at home, possessing at once commanding influence and official
status, who can speak to the English people with the voice of autho-
rity on all questions affecting Australasia. If each colony had such a
representative to appeal directly to the English people, the result
would be eminently beneficial both to us and to them.

It may be said that the Agents-General exercise this authority.
I maintain this is not so. On paper they certainly have great power,
while privately they no doubt possess influence, but their power of
control, as seen in the treatment of their suggestions concerning the
annexation of New Guinea question, is practically nil. The area
of Australasia is so vast and its interests so varied, when compared
with the other dependencies of Great Britain, that these interests
cannot be adequately treated by a Board of Advice that includes
representatives from all our colonial possessions. It is equally mani-
fest that the machinery of the Colonial Office, able though it is, can-
not effectually deal with the future work of the Pacific without more
practical assistance, nor can the organisation of the Foreign Office
carry out a vigorous Pacific policy, satisfactory alike to the colonists
and the mother country, without similar aid. I would suggest the
formation in London of a Colonial Governing Body, in which each
colony would be represented in proportion to its area and population,
the latter having more weight than the former; the members to
be chosen by their own Parliaments, and to hold office for a period of
three years. This would enable the more able of colonial politi-
cians to come to England, and yet only deprive the colonies of their
services for a limited period. These representatives, being in con-
stant telegraphic communication with their individual Governments,

764 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Nov.

could discuss in open debate questions involving Imperial and colo-
nial interests, and so enable the British press to ventilate alike
Imperial and colonial opinions upon questions where the interests of
the two are so closely connected.

The conclusions come to would be drafted into a Bill, to be
taken in charge by the Government official representing the colonies
in the Imperial Parliament, and the House of Commons would in
the ordinary course of events debate upon the Bill thus introduced,
and on its second reading either approve or reject it, or, admitting
the principle of the Bill, allow it to proceed to Committee, with
a view of amending the clauses which Imperial legislators considered
objectionable or unworkable.

C. KlNLOCH COOKE.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake
to return unaccepted MSS.

THE

NINETEENTH
-CENTURY.

No. CXVIIL— DECEMBER 1886.

ON THE SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING.

IT may be doubted whether the portentous importance of the system
of boycotting has been appreciated by the public, although some of
its immediate effects have attracted a great deal of notice. As the
weapon in Ireland of the National League, and in the United States
of the organisation called the Knights of Labour, it has attracted a
good deal of attention ; but the public has not, I think, appreciated
the importance of the principle on which it rests, or, if it has done so,
it has recognised it as something which cannot be contended with, but
is — like a well-conducted strike — a weapon which, however terrible,
is still legitimate. The object of this article is to display its true
character, as contradistinguished from strikes, and to show what it
involves ; and to call attention to the way in which it ought to be
attacked and frustrated.

The distinctive special characteristic of all law and government
is force — coercion in some one of its shapes. It is this which draws
the line between law and advice, between government and speculative
discussion. It is because nations have no common superior that
international law commonly so called is not really law at all, but
merely a form of morality. It is for a similar reason that questions
arising within a nation must, if they involve the question of sovereignty,
be settled, not by argument, but by civil war, or by a compromise
guaranteed by the fear of civil war. The question, for instance,
whether each particular State of the Union was sovereign, or whether
the United States was a sovereign State, was one which depended, not
on any argument about the proper construction of the Constitution,
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3 H

766 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

but on the power which the States individually and the United States
collectively actually possessed over the feelings and imaginations of
the individual citizens.

The question whether the King or the Parliament was sovereign
of England was a question of the same sort. If Charles the
First had been able to conquer the Long Parliament, constitutional
writers would have been able to prove that England was constitu-
tionally an absolute monarchy nearly as well as they have, since the
Civil War and the Kevolution, been able to prove the contrary. In a
word, the doctrine that force is essential to and characteristic of law,
and that established admitted force is the origin and measure of all
legal rights and of all the institutions by which life is regulated, lies
at the very root of all fruitful inquiries into political subjects — of all
inquiries, that is, which tend to any definite result.

Of course, it is possible, as to many persons it is pleasant, to
begin political speculations at the other end ; to confound — or rather
deny — the validity of the distinction between ' is ' and ' ought to be,'
to lay down schemes of abstract and so-called natural right, and to
make such schemes the measure by which actually existing institutions
are to be tried, and the ideal at which reformers are to aim. The
objections to this method are in my opinion insuperable. They are
well known, and need not here be referred to. The terrible practical
consequences to which they lead are displayed in the most glaring
light in every stage of history, but in none so strikingly as in the
history of the last century. If, however, this view is taken of the
proper mode of conducting historical speculations and inquiries, it
sets in a still stronger light than it would otherwise stand in, the
truth of what I have already said — that force is the specific peculiarity
and characteristic of law. Speculative systems of natural rights
produce no definite legal effect till they are definitely embodied in
definite laws — definite commands issued by some man or body of men
having power to enforce them. Few men have had an influence over
their contemporaries comparable to that of Kousseau ; but every sort
of arrangement absolutely opposed to his principles continued to
exist and to be carried into practical effect till the States-General
and its legislative successors were able by legislation to give many
of his ideas the force of law. The question whether, according to
the Constitution of the United States, an individual State had the
right to secede from the Union, was discussed with the utmost possible
ardour for years before the Civil War, and might have been discussed
for centuries ; and the discussion no doubt had considerable effect
on a large number of the people. But it was not and could not be
decided till a civil war of four years, which cost hundreds of thousands
of lives and more than five hundred millions of pounds sterling, settled
the question in a way which no living man, and probably the son and
the grandson of no living man, will think it worth while to protest

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 767

against. Look at the whole subject of rights and duties how you
please, view them a priori or a posteriori, look at them from an
abstract or an historical point of view, and it remains true that force is
the origin of laws, institutions, and legal rights, and also the special
characteristic which distinguishes them from advice, opinion, and
moral rights. It is quite true that force may have a moral or specu-
lative origin, and that this may and does give its direction to the
force which is essential to law ; but the moment at which speculation
passes into law is the moment at which it is clothed with an efficient
sanction. In short, the question which in relation to all institutions
takes the lead of all others is the question, What is the sanction of
your proposed laws ? Let any one get into his hands an efficient
sanction for his own ideas, and he becomes to a greater or less extent
a legislator on the subject to which he applies it and over the people
to whom he can apply it. All history is filled with the gradual
growth of different kinds of sanctions and laws, and all constitu-
tional struggles may be described as struggles to define and to
regulate the scope of different sanctions, and the manner of their
application.

There are sanctions which in the nature of things must always
•exist. All human life at all times and in all places is regulated
mainly by what may be called the physical sanction. Eat and drink
or you will die ; Eat and drink wisely or you will not live in health ;
and a thousand other maxims of the same sort resemble in some
ways rules enforced by inexorable sanctions, though for reasons
which are irrelevant to the present subject I do not like to call them
laws. Most of our conduct is affected to a greater or less extent by
what Bentham called the popular sanction — that is to say, by our
regard to the opinions and feelings of others. These sanctions act
automatically, and in that respect do not differ from all the common
mass of motives. The other great sanctions are imposed from with-
out by institutions constructed to a great extent with a view to
improving human life by imposing them. They may be described
collectively as political sanctions, and may be divided into religious
and secular, the one imposed by the Church, the other by the State.
Of the religious sanctions and the body or bodies which impose it I
say nothing here. Of the secular political sanction — that which rules
by the application of punishments, which may affect life, liberty,
property, character, civil rights — two assertions may be made : first,
that its existence is necessary, and, secondly, that its existence implies
its being exclusive. There can be but one government using the
temporal political sanction in one nation. If there are two, the more
powerful will drive out and destroy the less powerful, as certainly as
bad coin will, if allowed to circulate, drive out of circulation all coin
more valuable than itself.

The first of these propositions no one will dispute. It is admitted

3 H2

768 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

that there must be laws to regulate marriage and the devolution of
property, to prevent the infliction of injuries to person, character, or
property, or to give a binding force to contracts. Who is to make
such laws ? who is to administer them ? by what sanctions are they
to be enforced ? with what safeguards against oppression is their
administration to be protected ? are questions which have been made
the subject of infinite discussion, but which in most countries, and
especially in our own, have been practically solved in a fairly
satisfactory manner. What is not sufficiently noticed is the truth
that such a system must for its nature have the exclusive control of
the sanction on which it depends. This is so clear that to my mind
it is difficult to make it clearer, and indeed it can be made clearer
only by trying to imagine it not to be true, and by tracing out the
absurdity of the consequences which would follow.

Let us suppose, then, that there were two governments, each of
which could say to the same persons, * Do this or you shall be put
to death.' If this were so, the result would be that, if the two govern-
ments contradicted each other and carried out their laws, the subjects
must all be put to death, either for doing or not doing that which
necessity compelled them either to do or leave undone. This would
be not government, but destruction. This is merely an extreme'
illustration, but similar though less startling consequences would
follow whenever the two governments disagreed.

Another illustration may be taken from the possible case in which
two sets of sanctions of different classes clash — cases where the
Church says, * If you do you will be damned,' and the State, ' If you do
not you will be hanged.' In such a case the stronger fear, whatever
it may happen to be, will prevail over the weaker, and the govern-
ment which disposes of the weaker sanction will to that extent cease
to govern at all.

A simpler and more popular way of proving the same thing may
perhaps be found in the reflection that liberty is usually regarded as
good, and that oppression is universally regarded as bad ; but it is not
till after the formation of a reasonably good system of government
and law that it is possible to give any intelligible definitions of liberty
and oppression ; and when such definitions are given, the absence of
coercion unauthorised by law will be found to be essential to liberty,
and the application of such coercion to be a constituent element of
oppression. The only meaning which can be given to the word liberty
taken absolutely is the absence of all artificial restraints whatever on
any one of the passions and inclinations of men ; this is a description
of unbridled anarchy involving the destruction of all that makes life
worth having. If, therefore, liberty is to be spoken of as a blessing
and object of rational desire, it must mean absence from all artificial
interferences with speech or action of any kind, except those which
are imposed by a system of such laws as are above shortly described ;

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 769

but this cannot exist if other powers besides the law impose artificial
restraints on conduct. Liberty considered as a blessing thus presup-
poses an established government, a system of coercive laws which
preserves each man from the oppressions which others might otherwise
exercise over him ; for it follows from what has been said that
oppression may be defined as coercion not authorised by such laws as
have been described.

Moreover, it is obvious that every moderately good system of law
and government must constitute some recognised legislative authority,
by which the existing laws can from time to time be modified as
circumstances may require.

Assume the existence of a state of things such as cannot reason-
ably be denied to exist in this country at the present time — namely, a
set of laws which are in the main wise, good, and fairly administered,
though both in substance and in form they have considerable defects ;
and also a legislature having full power to discuss their alteration
and every inclination to do so, and it seems to me to follow that
every man who has the smallest regard for the reasonable liberty of
himself and his neighbours, the least appreciation of the benefits of
a well-organised society, and of the infinite miseries arising from
anarchy — in a word, every reasonable man and good citizen — ought to
feel in the strongest way that there should be no law but Law, that
the established authorities should be its prophets, and that the
usurpation of the functions of government should be recognised in
their true light as acts of social war, as the modern representatives
of the old conception of high treason. The ancient penalties for
treason were to some extent barbarous, and the steps taken to repress
actual rebellious war often needlessly cruel, though perhaps in some
cases they might be palliated or even justified by what to us appears
the harshness and brutality of the times in which they were exer-
cised ; but to me it appears that our ancestors were under no mistake
at all in attaching as much importance to the maintenance of a
regular established government, possessed of an exclusive right of
legislation, as to the confinement of that government in all its parts
to the limits which the law assigned to it. It appears to me that
the nation will give up one of the most valuable parts of its great
inheritance if it does not, at all hazards and by every means at its
disposal, follow the example of its ancestors by maintaining the recog-
nised government of the country in the exclusive possession of
legislative authority, and resisting and putting down by whatever
exertion of public force may be necessary all attempts to usurp any
part of it.

One consideration which at first sight appears to make against
this is in reality the strongest reason which could be alleged in its
favour. I refer to the great changes of opinion and feeling which
have taken place, and which still are taking place, on religious, moral,

770 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec..

and political subjects ; the freedom of discussion on all subjects, which
is now theoretically all but complete and practically quite complete ;
and the great favour which has been shown both by law and by
public opinion to every kind of association, so that we have any
number of religious, political, and social leagues, some of which even
go so far as to call themselves armies, whilst of associations and
unions of all degrees of importance, and for every variety of purpose,
the name is Legion.

The natural and obvious result of this is that the public look
languidly, not to say sympathetically, on very dangerous things,
and are led easily and insensibly to overlook vital distinctions
because of superficial resemblances between what is both in prac-
tice and in theory legal and right, and what is in theory and ought
to be in practice illegal and criminal. One of the strongest instances
of this which can be mentioned is the prevalent notion that boycotting
rests on the same principle as strikes. The law on strikes is now
as clear as possible, and is this : Those who are so minded may com-
bine to fix the price to be given or taken for labour, but they must
not compel those who are not inclined to do so to take part in their
combinations. This result was arrived at after many years of dis-
cussion and struggle, in which some harsh laws were passed and many
disgraceful outrages were committed. In 1875 a distinction was
laid down by law, which has been well recognised and acted upon
since, between combinations intended to enable workmen to sell
their labour at their own price, which are solemnly recognised as
lawful, and intimidation in all its forms, including intimidation by
acts exactly resembling those which are done for the purpose of
boycotting, which is illegal and criminal.

Nothing but the most hasty superficial glance at the subject can
really fail to distinguish between the legitimacy of a strike for wages
and that of a so-called strike against rent. The essence of the first
is that the persons on strike keep what is their own — namely, their
labour — and refuse to part with it except on terms which suit them.
The essence of the second is that the persons who are absurdly de-
scribed as being on strike against rent keep what belongs to somebody
else — namely, land or houses — and refuse to pay for the use which
they have already had of it. The word ' strike,' however, conceals
this glaring contrast, and hardly any phrase has been more frequently
or more effectively used by those who wish to lead English workmen
to sympathise with Irish Land Leagues. The National League, it is
said, is only their trade union.

In the same way nothing is more common than to consider that,
because it is desirable that people should not be punished only for
the expression of political opinion, or only for meeting together for
the purpose of expressing or discussing their opinions, it is therefore
lawful that they should meet in numbers and under circumstances

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 771

likely to annoy and to intimidate those who do not agree with them,
and to cause breaches of the peace, and that when so assembled they
should use language constituting an incitement to the commission
of crime. In this case, no doubt, the confusion is not so gross as in
the other just mentioned, because the line between what is and what
is not objectionable can be drawn only by the use of a good deal
of discretion and the exercise of calm judgment.

These illustrations, and others which might easily be given, and
of which, as I hope tcr show, boycotting is the most glaring, are suffi-
cient to show that the modern changes in the direction of freedom
are so far from being an argument in favour of permitting methods
of coercion unauthorised by law, that they form an unanswerable
reason for suppressing them.

In a state of society where political discussion and the statement
of grievances is not permitted, the establishment of coercive systems
independent of and even antagonistic to law may be unavoidable,
though even in such cases the process always involves great evils.
It is a great misfortune even for a good system to be established
by rebellion and violence, not only on account of the immediate
evils which ensue, but because the precedent set is mischievous.
Where, however, the statement of grievances is not only permitted
but invited, and where an active legislature is provided to consider
and determine upon any measures which can be suggested for their
removal, unauthorised coercion ought, as I have already said, to be
viewed in a moral light analogous to that in which our ancestors
regarded high treason. Some persons appear to think that, whereas
the doctrine that an established government should be treated with
profound respect, and shoukL not, except under the most pressing
necessity, be actively resisted (which is the essential meaning of the
doctrine of the divine right of kings), is natural and not irrational in
an absolute monarchy, it is absurd when applied to a popular govern-
ment. This view is generally held by the strongest advocates of
popular government. It appears to me that there cannot be a greater
inversion of all the rules of logic, and that such views ought to be
held only by the enemies of popular government ; for it is surely
absurd to say that a presumably bad government can reasonably
claim respect and obedience and consistently resist its enemies, but
that a presumably good one cannot ; that Charles the First or
Louis the Fourteenth could rightly, or at least consistently, suppress
a rebellion, but that the United States act against their own principles
in forcibly keeping the Confederate States in the Union.

If government is looked upon from a practical point of view,
and apart from theological theories as to its origin and as to the
nature of moral obligations, it is hardly possible to rate too highly
the duty in all common cases of submission to any government which
has maintained itself long enough to show that it rests on solid bases,

772 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

and which discharges fairly well the primary indispensable objects for
which all governments exist — namely, the security of person and
property — or to condemn too strongly those who, instead of trying to
reform its abuses and supply its shortcomings by the legal means
which the law puts in their hands, presume to try to set up un-
authorised governments of their own. It is necessary in order to do
so to use means which must from the nature of the case be relent-
lessly severe and recklessly unjust. They must be relentlessly severe,
because such secret and unrecognised governments can assert their
powers over those who do not like them, and impose the laws which
they make on those who are unfavourable to them, only by punish-
ments severe enough and administered with sufficient pertinacity
to overcome that resistance to lawless tyranny which is natural to
every man of common courage. They must be recklessly unjust,
because people who try to displace the existing law and to establish
a rival system of their own cannot by the nature of the case do
justice. They cannot hear before they punish. They must deter-
mine, but cannot try. If they do try, their trials must be carried on
by the bitter enemies of the accused ; almost of necessity behind his
back, in secret, without anything which can be called evidence, and
according to laws interpreted and administered in a manner which
gives him the benefit of no doubts and of no discussion as to their
meaning or as to their applicability to his particular case.

In illustration of these remarks I may notice a singularity in the
use of popular language which has lately become common and which
is most significant, though a slight thing in itself. It is the
constant use of the word ' war ' in reference to every sort of popular
movement which would formerly have been called ' agitation,' * move-
ment,' or the like. The Irish disturbances are a ( land war,' a ' rent war.'
The 'tithe war' is a regular heading in the newspapers about the
agitation in Wales. The title of the Salvation and other armies, and
the language which they consider appropriate to their functions, is a
standing hint that those who conduct them mean to make bad people
good by some sort of forcible means ; and this use of language shows
how ready people are in the present day to fall into what Hobbes
called ' the monstrous confusion between power and liberty.' J How
eagerly they snatch at force and seek to become legislators and belli-
gerents, instead of being content to advance their views by peaceable
means and to leave the coercive sanction of law in the hands of the
government of the country.

I have thought it desirable to preface what I have to say of
boycotting in detail by these general observations because, though

1 Burke, who had little love for Hobbes, says the same. Liberty, he says, is not an
unqualified good. ' Liberty when men act in bodies is power. Considerate people,
before they declare themselves ' [i.e. in favour of liberty], ' will observe the use which
is made of power.' — ' French Revolution,' Works, vol. v. 37-8.

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 773

they are sufficiently obvious to any one who is accustomed to such
speculations, they do not seem to me to have received the attention
which they deserve. They lead me to the conclusion that people in
general ought to accustom themselves to the thought that any such
attempt at the usurpation of coercive authority over persons who
have in no way whatever consented to it, is one of the most serious
social and political offences which, in the present state of society,
can be committed.

I have one further remark to make before I pass to the special
questions connected with the subject of boycotting. The establish-
ment of a government which fulfils what is rightly regarded as its
most essential duties has a tendency to defeat itself by discharging
those duties too well. It tends to unfit the comfortable well-to-do
classes for self-defence and the defence of the society to which they
belong. I do not mean to say that in our time and country the
well-to-do classes are effeminate. I think that individually they are
as vigorous in body and as spirited in mind and character as they
ever were. In one way and another, taking in the experience of those
who were young men when I was a boy, and that of my sons and their
friends, I have known intimately the habits both of English Univer-
ity students and of the pupils of at least three of the great public
schools, Eton, Harrow, and Rugby, for more than fifty years, and I
cannot see the smallest signs of degeneracy amongst them in these
respects. The present generation of young English gentlemen ap-
pear to me to be in all essential respects the same sort of people as
their predecessors of 1830-1840, and the vigour of the earlier gene-
rations has been proved in all sorts of ways notorious enough to
every one. But, though all this is true and important, it is no less
true that the comfortable classes of the present day are to the last
degree indisposed, and I think are by no means well fitted, * to descend
into the streets,' to encounter unlawful by lawful violence, to under-
take in any case the duties which they have delegated to the police.
How far this could be altered, and how far it is desirable to try to
alter it, is a great question. Much might be said on a proper occa-
sion about the American system of Militia, our own Volunteers, and
the French National Guard, but I do not at present propose to go
into the matter. I confine myself to the remark that the circum-
stances of the time are such as to give immense facility to revolu-
tionists of all kinds, for the institution of rival governments, which
by the use of weapons that respectable people cannot employ may
easily assume the command of the vast mass who are not indisposed
to submit to any form of coercion exercised for an object to which
they are not altogether averse. A very small amount of shooting in
the legs will efficiently deter an immense mass of people from paying
rents which they do not want to pay. Our age is full of new ideas ;
it is full of all sorts of discontent with the present and of wild hopes

774 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

for the future ; and this makes the establishment of new forms of
government specially easy and tempting, and thus affords a special
motive to all friends of law and established order to keep the ferment,
if possible, within the limits of discussion and exhortation, and to pre-
vent the different revolutionary leaders from getting possession of
effective sanctions by which they can convert into coercive laws their
various crude systems.

I now come to the special points to be attended to in connection
with Boycotting.

The word means several different things, to which entirely dif-
ferent considerations apply, and which ought, I think, to be dealt
with on different principles ; but its meaning is plain enough for some
general considerations applying to every kind of operation which
passes by the name. It may be used as a sanction to any sort of
laws whatever by any man or set of men who can appeal with any
great success to the sympathies of any considerable body of people.
Such a process might perhaps be not unfairly employed in some cases
as a legal punishment. The most effective way of dealing with
habitual drunkards might be to give notice to all public-houses &c.,
within a certain area, not to supply certain named persons with
drink, under penalties. On the other hand, it might be made a
frightful instrument of religious and moral persecution. I can
imagine ways in which different * armies,' ' leagues,' and the like
might, by the use of the zeal about morals, religion, and irreligion
which devours so many people in these days, make themselves an in-
tolerable nuisance to wide circles of people, by methods which as yet
are not forbidden by law, and which, if employed with a moderate
amount of persistence and ingenuity, might be effectual for the
purposes for which they were employed.

Of its powers in the hands of men who do not shrink from secret
crime it is hardly necessary to speak. In part of Ireland it has
enabled a small number of ruffians, by the help of a moderate number
of outrages, to paralyse the law of the land and to erect a govern-
ment which confronts and defies the lawful government. The
shooting in the legs of a few people avowedly because they have
sent goods by a boycotted railway will deter, perhaps, hundreds
from incurring the risk of being shot for the same cause, as one
execution for murder protects a large number of people from other
murderers. It is, however, needless to multiply illustrations upon
this matter. Boycotting is only a modern application of the old
Eoman ' Ignis et aquae interdictio,' and is very like the weapons
of excommunication and interdict by which the Church of Eome
was able practically to govern a great part of the world, till the
terrors of excommunications and interdicts were destroyed by the
decay of faith in their importance.

It must also be remarked that the process of boycotting is par-

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 775

ticularly dangerous because it is so plausible, so quiet, so closely
allied with moral feeling, and so readily capable of being represented
as a mere exponent of it and legitimate vent for it. The mere act
of shunning a man, of refusing to deal with him, of not taking his
land or the like, in no way shocks or scandalises any one. Nothing,
in itself, and if it stands alone, can be more natural and harmless.
Human life could not go on at all if all of us were not at liberty in a
certain sense to boycott each other, to cease to associate with people
whom we do not for any reason like, to cease to do business with
people with whom for any reason, good or bad, we prefer not to do
business — in a word, to regulate all the course of our lives and of our
intercourse with others according to our own will and pleasure. To
resent what you regard as harsh conduct in a landlord in evicting a
tenant, or as meanness in a tenant who plays into his hand by
taking the farm from which the tenant has been evicted, by refusing
to have any dealings with either, may be wise or foolish, right or
wrong, if it is a mere individual act, the bona fide result of the
natural feelings of the person who does it. The transition from this
to concerted action is not one which shocks the common and unin-
structed mind, and the further and final step which leads you to
help to compel others by fear to do that which you rather like to do
yourself is little less natural and easy. By this plain and easy pro-
cess what Bentham described as the popular sanction may be readily
and quickly applied as a sanction of unequalled efficiency to any code
of unwritten laws which vaguely represents the current sentiment
of the most ignorant and passionate part of the community — those
who are guided almost exclusively by sentiment and passion. The
terrible importance of the subject needs no further proof. It is
capable of growing into an instrument as effective in use and as
difficult to control as the spiritual censures of the Koman Catholic
Church used to be.

How, then, ought boycotting to be dealt with ? It should be care-
fully studied, and those forms of it should be effectually suppressed
which are bad in themselves, as contradicting the first principle of
the exclusive supremacy of the law of the land, which is that it is
the only form of coercion (I do not speak here of the religious sanc-
tion) which ought to be brought to bear upon all, whether they like
it or not.

Theoretically I have no doubt the law of conspiracy would reach
the case of boycotting. There are cases well known to lawyers in
which this has been laid down, and it would indeed be a scandal if
it were not so ; for the result would be that a sufficiently powerful
and well-organised conspiracy might deprive people not only of all
the pleasures of life, but even of life itself, without breaking the law.
In the state of society in which we live every man is dependent for
the necessaries of life upon his neighbours. A man cannot get so

776 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

•much as a loaf of bread or a roof to shelter him, be he ever so rich,
without the help of others, which help they could of course be pre-
sented from giving to him by properly calculated forms of intimidation.

These remarks must, however, be taken with one important quali-
fication. Urgent as is the necessity of dealing with the practice of
boycotting effectually, it is at least equally necessary to deal with it
fairly, and on intelligible principles. Any legislation on the subject
likely to be effectual and useful must be based upon a full considera-
tion of its strong as well as its weak side, and should draw a broad
•line between intimidation which should be prevented, and the mere
withholding of voluntary good offices with which the law ought not
to interfere.

The word boycotting is, of course, as vague as it is convenient.
Its essence is that the process brings the force of numbers to bear
upon individuals. It consists of the repetition of a number of what
may be called disobliging acts, so concerted and repeated as to make
•life wretched, though individually they are of no importance, and
are for the most part well within the rights of those by whom they
are done. To refuse to sell a man a loaf of bread is in itself nothing.
In connection with other things it may be a step in the execution of
a sentence of death. To employ one lawyer or doctor rather than
another, to send a parcel by one conveyance or another, are matters in
themselves indifferent ; but they may be steps in the infliction of
professional or commercial ruin. Can such practices be brought under
legal control ? If they cannot, then, as a great deal of recent expe-
rience shows, the result is that individual liberty is restricted within
limits far narrower than has ever been regarded as desirable by the
most despotic of men, the limits, namely, under which any irre-
sponsible association, which can get itself backed by a small local
public opinion, controlled and maintained by a certain amount of
crime, sees fit to leave to it. There is no doubt a difficulty in
legislating against boycotting, on account of the apparent harm-
lessness of the individual acts of which the process consists ; but
it can hardly be carried out without combination, and cannot be
carried out effectually without a good deal of publicity and noise.
Tradesmen will not give up their customers, labourers will not give up
their wages without a good deal of exhortation, discussion, and denun-
ciation. Where an act of boycotting is in progress it is always
notorious in the neighbourhood, and every one knows who is respon-
sible for it. The National League and the association called the
Knights of Labour make no secret of their operations ; on the contrary,
they give them the very widest and broadest publicity in their power.
4Such matters are easily susceptible of proof. They are according
to English law indictable conspiracies ; for an agreement of several
persons to interfere and to procure others to interfere with the com-
fort of their enemies, and to inflict or procure others to inflict loss

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 777

upon them in the pursuit or profession by which they live, is a com-
bination to intimidate, and this is a crime. It is, however, a crime
which it is often difficult to punish, especially when juries sympathise
with the offenders and cannot be got to convict. It must also be
noticed that, if the remedy against the actual authors of the process
of boycotting were made more effective, it might be found practicable
to carry it out in a more secret way.

Be this as it may, the propriety of treating as a crime the con-
trivance of an act of boycotting, or the issuing of orders for that
purpose, can be denied only by those who are also prepared to deny
the principle of the well-known Act of 1875,2 which makes it a
crime to ' intimidate ' any person * with a view to compel ' him ' to
abstain from doing or to do any act which such other person has a
legal right to do or to abstain from doing.' It is impossible to inti-
midate a man — to make him afraid — in a more definite emphatic
way, in order to compel him to abstain from paying his rent or evicting,
a tenant for not paying it — than by threatening him in the one case
or the other with all the penalties of social excommunication.

Fortunately there is no difficulty in defining the offence in an
unequivocal way. It would require more knowledge of the details of,
the practices of boycotters than I possess to give a full specification
of all the practices which should be punished in a moderate but
effectual and summary way; but about many of them there can be
no doubt, and the enactment already quoted supplies a precedent
for such a definition. I do not give the following as a complete
definition, but as an illustration of the sort of enactment which might
be passed: —

' Everyone shall be guiltyi£>f an offence, and shall upon conviction
thereof be liable, &c.,

* Who, with a view to compel any person to do or to abstain from,
doing anything which he has a legal right to do or abstain from
doing,

£ Or with a view to punish him for having done or abstained from,
doing any such thing,

* Or with a view to deter other persons specified or not from doing:
or abstaining from doing any such thing,

' (1) Counsels, procures, or commands, or conspires with any other
person or persons to counsel, procure, or command, any person or body
of persons, or persons in general, not to deal with any such person or
not to employ him in the way of his profession, trade, or calling, or
not to associate with him, or to inflict upon him any other kind o£
inconvenience or loss or damage whatever, whether such counsel.,
procurement, or command is conveyed by writing or by speaking or
by any means whatever likely to produce the effect.

* (2) Publishes, or conspires to publish, the name of any person or

- 38 & 39 Viet. c. 86, § 7.

778 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

of any firm or company in order that he or they may incur any such
consequences as aforesaid ;

' (3) Kefuses to deal with any such person in the ordinary way of
business in compliance with any such counsel, procurement, or com-
mand as aforesaid, provided that any person accused of this offence
may defend himself by proving any reasonable excuse ;

( (4) Attends any public sale of goods taken under any distress,
execution, or other legal process, with intent to obstruct the same or
the removal of goods purchased thereat, and who manifests any such
intention by any act, word, or gesture, or conspires to do so, or counsels,
procures, or commands any person to do so ;

' (5) Commits any assault upon any such person, or injures his
property, or threatens to do so, or publicly insults, or otherwise
intimidates or injures him ;

* (6) Takes any part whatever in any of the proceedings of any
body of persons, by whatever name it may be called, which assumes,
or' purports to exercise, over any person any of the powers of a court
of justice with any such object as aforesaid.'

No doubt such an enactment would require the greatest conside-
ration, and there may be practices which the language suggested
would tnot cover, and which ought to be brought within its scope ; but
if it were courageously and vigorously enforced, it would go a long
way to render boycotting impossible, and would effectually protect so-
ciety at large from what may easily be an intolerable tyranny. The
measure ought to be carried one step further. I have myself known a
case of boycotting in which the person sentenced to that punishment
— for such it was — was unable to procure bread except through his
friends, by more or less indirect means, and could get his horses shod
only by sending them to a forge at cavalry barracks some miles off. I
cannot see why this should be permitted. If a man chooses to drive a
hackney carriage, he is under a legal obligation to < admit and carry
at the lawful fare any passenger for whom there is room and to whose
admission no reasonable objection is made.' 3 Why should not a similar
obligation be extended to every person who keeps a shop for the sale of
articles necessary to life or to the enjoyment of its common comforts ?
We are all dependent on b.utchers, bakers, tailors, shoemakers,
chemists^ medical men, and many others for articles either absolutely
necessary to life, or at all events essential to comfort. Why should
these persons be allowed to make themselves the instruments of the
unlawful commands of a set of irresponsible tyrants, and to refuse to
sell to a boycotted man articles or to render to him services essential
to his life, or at all events to his comfort ? In cases of boycotting,
tradesmen and others who carry a great part of the operation into
execution are themselves for the most part terrorised, and would be
only too glad of a reasonable excuse for not carrying out the orders

8 6 & 7 Viet. c. 86, § 33.

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 779

of those who set the movement on foot. I would therefore not only
provide in the manner already stated for a penalty upon them for
refusing to deal with boycotted persons, if their intention in so
doing could be proved, but I would go further, and enable a boy-
cotted man to demand to be supplied, upon payment in ready
money at the market price of the day, with any necessary of life
exposed j for public sale or dealt in by any person dealing in it ;
and I would authorise any magistrate to send a policeman to take it
and deliver it to the person boycotted, leaving the price at the house
from which it was taken, the shopkeeper being liable to all costs.
Of course with regard to personal services this could not be done.
No one can make a man shoe a horse ; but I do not see why, if a
blacksmith refuses to shoe my horse, when I am ready and will-
ing to pay him for doing so, and thereby compels me to send him
many miles to be shod at a distance, he should not be liable to me
in damages in the county court for loss of time, loss of the horse's
services, and my own costs. Of course in the common state of things
it is needless to give a man a legal right to buy things in shops, to
have his boots cobbled, or to hire a carriage or cart. No difficulty
occurs on such points, and law ought not to occupy itself with trifles ;
but when trifles are turned by combination into instruments of starv-
ation or torture the matter is altered. No one would seek or ought
to be entitled to recover damages for a slight touch ; but if a large
number of people conspired together to touch a man continually
whenever he walked along the road, each touch would go to make up a
grievous and monstrous injury. Collectively, indeed, they would
operate as an imprisonment, by making it impossible for the injured
person to leave his home.

It would be unwise to exaggerate anything. There are and must
be many practices more or less analogous to boycotting which it
might be unwise to attempt to interfere with by any process of law.
It would not be desirable to attempt to give legal protection against
those forms of the manifestation of popular displeasure which a man
of courage may be expected to defy, and which it is possible to en-
counter or endure without undergoing any intolerable evil. Eefusals
of voluntary good offices which depend on the consent of others to what,
without such consent, would be a violation of their legal rights, even,
if they are made systematically and at the exhortation of conspirators
and for the purpose of a conspiracy, fall under this head. It appears
to me that the tenants of land in Ireland ought not to be interfered
with if they combine together to prevent hunting over their fields ;
for, technically, hunting is undoubtedly a trespass which the occupier
has a right to prevent. With regard to shooting or fishing the case
is usually different, as in most cases the landlord has a right to shoot.
At the worst a conspiracy or combination to deprive people of amuse-
ments which depend on the permission of their neighbours is no great

780 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dee.

matter. People ought to be able to do without such amusements in
case of need.

The same maybe said of other social advantages and voluntary
good offices. A systematic refusal to associate with a person, to visit
him, to employ or recommend him, may be a great hardship, espe-
cially to a sociable, sensitive man ; and those who form a conspiracy
to do so, and by public denunciations induce others to take suck
courses, may justly, I think, be punished for it, if their proceedings
are proved ; but I do not see how the actual infliction of such penal-
ties can be prevented, nor would it be within the clause numbered
(3) above, which applies only to refusals to deal in the way of busi-
ness, accompanied by an intention, which it would be in most
cases impossible to prove. The attempt to go further would involve
intolerable and tyrannical inquiries into conduct and motives, for the
most part incapable of being ascertained. It is one thing to punish
a priest who denounces a man by name in his chapel, and declares
that no one ought to eat with him, speak to him, or marry him ; and
quite another to interfere with a girl who thereupon refuses to marry
him, though the injury might be most cruel ; or with a man who
ceases to call upon him, or passes him in the road without speaking,
though such conduct may cause great pain.

On the same principle, in any attempt which may be made to sup-
press boycotting, the utmost care should be taken not to interfere
with the right, now happily conceded and established, to strike. For
many reasons — too obvious to be mentioned — it would be impossible
to interfere even with a concerted and combined refusal of labourers
to work for an employer whom it was intended to reduce to submis-
sion, unless the case fell within the principle of the statute which
punishes as crimes some particular breaches of contract.4 The
employer's remedy in such cases is to get other workmen, and
the duty of the legislator is to protect them in their work and
against interference by boycotting or similar means. It might be
possible theoretically to draw a line between a strike — the essence of
which is an effort to raise the price of labour by withholding it except
on certain terms — and a refusal of labour intended merely to punish
the employer or coerce him ; and there is no doubt a distinction in
principle between the two things. But the distinction is much too-
refined for practical use.

A form of boycotting which presents some special difficulties is
that practised against steamship companies, railroads, and hotels. In
these cases the distinction between, the ringleaders — those who-
counsel, procure, and command — and those who merely carry out
their directions seems to apply. It would be practically impossible,
and it would not be desirable to attempt, to compel people to

4 38 & 39 Viet. c. 86, § 5, relating to contracts of which the breach endangers life or
property, or the deprival of a town, &c., of gas or water.

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 781

travel by or deal with railway or steamboat companies ; but it would
be possible to enable all common carriers, whether railway companies
or not, to protect themselves to a greater or less extent against those
who might boycott them by enabling them to retaliate for a fixed time.
If, for instance, it were provided that a railway with which the people of
a district refused to deal in order to punish them was to be at liberty to
refuse to deal with any of the people of the district for a given time, the
boycotting of a railway would be a dangerous matter. The railway
would have no wish to refuse to deal with those who had not inter-
fered with it, but it might inflict serious inconvenience on those
who had by refusing to carry them or their goods for a considerable
period.

In all cases of boycotting the maxim of Vigilantibus non dormi-
entibus ought to be carefully kept in view. It is undesirable to
afford legal protection in such a form and to such an extent as to
lead people to give up the practice of protecting themselves effectu-
ally. Bolts and bars and firearms in the hands of the inmates,
vigorously used in case of need, are and ought to be the natural pro-
tection for a dwelling-house. If a man is exposed to serious personal
attack by a person for whom he is anything like a match, the person
attacked ought to regard it as a solemn duty to resist to the utmost,
and if necessary with deadly weapons. In the same way the first
and most natural, and often the most effective, protection against
boycotting is to be found in associations for defence by lawful
means. These means might be used with dreadful effect, and this
should be remembered by those who provoke retaliation. No one
can legally force people to employ labour, any more than they can
force labourers to work. The-poor are to a great extent dependent
on the rich for good offices, for the performance of which there is
no legal obligation, as well as the rich upon the poor. If each
party, the boycotters and the boycotted, combine together to hold
each other at arm's length, to exact to the very utmost their
legal rights, to withhold to the very utmost all that the law does
not compel them to give, boycotting would not be confined to one
side. The systematic refusal not only of all charity, but of all
credit ; the systematic and combined prosecution of every legal claim
for rent (for instance) the moment it became due, constitute means
of defence to which it might be possible for the poor to drive the
rich, if the poor push to extremity the many powers which the present
state of the law and of society have placed and are placing in their
hands. The old association between riches and power is no doubt
to a great extent broken down. The poor are now the powerful.
They have by their numbers physical power, unorganised indeed
and undeveloped, but even in its present state formidable. They
have political power by their votes ; they have leaders who can and
do instruct them how to use their political power to procure the
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 31

782 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec..

enactment of laws providing legal means of plunder, and intended to'
realise visionary communistic theories ; their leaders also point out
to them how by strikes and boycotting they can impose their rule on
the rich, interpreting the word in the widest sense. Besides all thisy
they have on their side all the topics of prejudice. All the common-
places of an earlier state of things have outlived the alterations
which are gradually falsifying them. All sympathy, all pathos, is
conventionally on the side of the poor. Dives is presumably bad,
Lazarus presumably good and only unlucky ; and the public at large
is being powerfully moved in all directions by all sorts of people,,
most of whom, strange to say, belong themselves more or less
decidedly to the Dives class, to comfort the one and torment the
other. There is thus a strong current running in the Socialist direc-
tion, and circumstances have given it a character which is extremely
engaging to many minds. It looks disinterested and religious, and
those whom it attracts are so accustomed to assume the solidity
of the foundation of the state of society in which they live, that they
feel no fear of succeeding beyond their wishes.

This, as I think, constitutes a public danger ; for, though it is idle
to use any longer the old commonplaces about the weakness of the
poor and the strength of the rich, it is still true that the rich have
great power in their hands ; and if they are forced to think that the
poor require, under whatever names, a redistribution of property,
they might be forced into using it to the utmost to protect their
property and the state of the law which enables them to accumulate
and enjoy it. It must be remembered in reference to this matter
that the word ' rich ' in this connection includes, not only those who-
have anything to lose, but all who hope to have anything, and all
who hold positions in any station of life in which they feel them-
selves secure and comfortable. It is needless to dwell on so odious
a topic as that of a struggle in which those who fall within this de-
scription would be arrayed in one camp and those who do not in
another. Such a struggle would be by far the greatest calamity
which the world ever has incurred or ever could incur. War, pesti-
lence, and famine all in one would be less fearful. It would involve
the destruction of all that we mean by civilisation, and miseries of
all sorts falling on all classes of society alike in a way hitherto un-
exampled.

For many years this has been a well-worn commonplace. It
was, to take one illustration out of a million, one of the main topics
of Carlyle, and it is the teaching of all his most famous and popular
books. The moral which he and other writers drew from it was
almost invariably put in the form of exhortations to the rich — ' For
your own sakes, and in order to avoid a repetition on a larger scale of
the excesses of Jacobinism, be kind, be charitable ; look on yourselves
as Captains of Industry, and not as accumulators of wealth for personal

1886 SUPPRESSION OF BOYCOTTING. 783

enjoyment. Throw aside political economy. It is the theory of a
mere shopkeeper. Address all the faculties of your minds to the
task of devising in practice some way of life by which human beings
may all be enabled to live as such without grinding poverty or
want.'

There was much in this doctrine which I think no one can com-
plain of. It, no doubt, was so preached as to impress powerfully on
many rich people their moral duties ; but it has also great defects,
at least in my opinion, and it is preached by innumerable writers
without that clear recognition, which was one distinctive feature of
Carlyle's teaching, that such a process implies a well-organised and
really powerful government, which knows and does not shrink from
doing its duty, and that the measures which it recommends cannot
be carried out merely by exhortations to charity.

The great defect of teaching of this sort (and Carlyle was as
deficient in that respect as any one else) is that it is for the most
part entirely silent on two matters of capital importance — namely,
first, the duties of the poor, and, secondly, the truth of the fundamental
principles of political economy in its old-fashioned form — the politi-
cal economy of half a century ago, of the new Poor Law and Free-
trade — principles which, to me, at least, appear to be as true as the
second table of the Ten Commandments, with which they are closely
connected, and which these principles resemble in being deeply
rooted in the most permanent parts of human nature.

This is little more than saying that this teaching is too absolute.
Moral teaching of all kinds, whether addressed to individuals or to
societies, always takes an absolute form, but ought always to be
limited by the circumstances «f the age to which it is given. These
circumstances supply unexpressed exceptions which cannot be neg-
lected without the worst results. The precepts of the Sermon on
the Mount would destroy all human society and convert the world
into a vast monastery if they were accepted absolutely and carried
into full execution on all occasions. In the present day we have for
many years past heard so much of the wrongs and woes of the poor,
of the quasi-sinfulness of being rich, of mankind being all brothers
and sisters, and of the duties of property, that it has become ex-
tremely important to insist upon the neglected truth, that poverty
has its duties as well as its rights ; that human nature is so
constituted that nearly all our conduct, immensely the greater
part of it, is and ought to be regulated much more by a regard
to ourselves and to our own interests than by a regard to other
people and their interests ; that this is the basis on which almost
all law reposes, and in particular that important part of it which
assumes the existence of property — that is to say, the power of
men to be, for purposes not forbidden by law, absolute masters
of such things as they acquire by lawful means — and which pro-

3 12

784 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

tects liberty, which means for one thing the protection of the
owners of property from being coerced in the exercise of their
rights over their property, by any means whatever not authorised by
law. These principles have till quite lately been accepted as of
course. They might be now and then set forth in express words
when it was desired to refute any theory which was inconsistent
with them, but more often they were accepted and acted upon un-
consciously. In the present day virtues which in truth are founded
upon them, and which assume their existence, have been so much
insisted upon as illogically to call into question the principle on
which they depend.

Divide amongst the poor the superfluities of the rich, and all
charity and generosity is at an end, unless it is charitable and gene-
rous to pay one's poor rates. Take away the great characteristic fea-
ture of property — the owner's absolute dominion over it — and it is no
longer true that property has its duties in the sense of moral as dis-
tinguished from legal duties. Strain the quality of mercy, and it
is mercy no longer. I am far from saying there should be no poor
rate. I do not even say there should be no education rate, and it
is fairly arguable whether education should be gratuitous ; but I do
say that these are exceptions to the general rule, justifiable only on
the special grounds that rich and poor alike have a vital interest in
the results which poor rates and education rates are supposed to
procure, and that there is a dangerous tendency in the present day to
enlarge the exceptions and to narrow the rule.

Apart from the special immediate reasons which exist for dealing
with the subject of boycotting, the reflections just made supply a
strong general reason for it. The adoption of such measures would
assert vigorously and strikingly illustrate these fundamental principles.
It is of the last importance to assert and vindicate the truth that legis-
lative power must not be usurped ; and that if property is to be redis-
tributed, as many persons wish it to be — though they do not often
propose it in so many plain words — they must at least obtain their
object by lawful means.

JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN.

1886 785

NOVA SCOTIA'S CRY FOR HOME RULE.

HAVING spent much time in Nova Scotia, I am often asked — Why
does that province wish to sever connection with the Dominion, and
what means her cry of ' Kepeal and Eeciprocity ' ? And some of my
friends are not a little shocked that, at a time when the question of
Imperial Federation is so much discussed, our nearest kinsfolk on
the American continent should be agitating for what at the first
glance looks like separation, though it is far from being so intended.
Imperial Federation is indeed a grand scheme, or will be when it
attains the dignity of a scheme. At present it seems little better
than a vague, but decidedly alluring, dream. And it is likely so to
remain unless, among other safeguards, each unit which makes up
the mass is allowed such a measure of self-government as shall
secure it against possible harsh treatment on the part of any other
unit which happens to be stronger.

Why the inhabitants of the Acadian peninsula want repeal of
the union with Canada, and reciprocity with the United States and
other countries, I propose in the following article to show.

When Nova Scotia, in 1867, entered the Confederation her debt
amounted to some 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 dollars. To-day her share
of the rapidly increasing Dominion Debt, which during the last
eighteen years has advanced from 96,000,000 to 281,000,000 dollars,
is fully 28,000,000 dollars (Ottawa says 40,000,000 dollars), a burden
far too heavy for her altered circumstances. And to-day the
Dominion's annual expenditure, which at the time of Confederation
was 13,000,000 dollars, and in the last year of Liberal Government
(1878) 23,000,000 dollars, has, to the dismay of Canada's wisest
statesmen, already reached 35,000,000 dollars, and ere the close of the
present year is expected to touch 38,000,000 dollars. Of this charge
Nova Scotia pays a tenth, if not a seventh, and of her contribution
a large portion is spent outside her borders and in ways which
benefit her not at all. 'Previous to the Union,' her Premier,
Mr. Fielding, tells us, * Nova Scotia had the lowest tariff, and was in
the best financial condition of any of the provinces.' To-day she has
the highest tariff, since she pays some three dollars more on every
hundred dollars' worth of imported dutiable goods than her fellow

786 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

provinces, and is, the same high authority assures us, in the worst
financial condition. The reason is not far to seek. Not only does
she, with the most liberal hand, subscribe to fill the common Treasury,
but for her own needs she gets back the smallest proportional share,
the allowance meted out to the seven principal provinces being
somewhat as follows : —

Per head.

Ontario #1'49|

New Brunswick 1-50 to 1'95

Prince Edward Island 1'65

Quebec 2-10f

Manitoba 7'50

British Columbia 20-00

Nova Scotia 0-98 to 118| *

While on the subject of monetary payments, it would scarcely
be out of place to instance another grievance. When the Inter-
national Fisheries Commission, which sat at Halifax in 1877, paid the
Ottawan Tory Government, in November 1878, the five-and-a-half
million dollars indemnity for the injury sustained by the fishermen
of the Dominion, Nova Scotia, which had suffered most, received no
share. Newfoundland was more fortunate. She was outside the
Confederation ; thus there was no excuse for withholding her portion.
As the 'grand old island' (to quote Captain Kennedy) keeps an
attentive eye on the doings of her near neighbours, she is likely to
remain outside.

The improvements, such as they are, made in Nova Scotia by the
Ottawan Government, Mr. Fraser, a member of the local Parliament,
assures us, are not paid for out of the taxes levied in the province,
but are charged to the National Debt. It is to be hoped the
improvements are of a lasting and beneficial character, so that the
prospect of getting out of debt again may be less desperate than in
the case of sundry other undertakings. For instance, the Halifax
Chronicle, of June 11, tells us that 500,000 dollars have been spent
in establishing a sugar refinery at Bichmond, a suburb of Halifax,
* every cent of which is lost ; ' also that 350,000 dollars have been
sunk in a cotton-mill hard by which is probably worth ten cents in
the dollar, and has never yet paid a dividend. To keep life in
these 'and other bantling industries, the Ottawan Government im-
poses pretty stiff duties on imported sugar and cotton, whether to
commemorate the throwing away of the 850,000 dollars and other
enormous sums on similar undertakings elsewhere, or to give cause
for a new reading (by substitution of the word Protectionists) of a
sneering old proverb anent the wisdom of our ancestors, I know
not.

Among other efforts, some colonists, foolishly relying on that
spirit of private enterprise which it seems to be the paternal mission
1 See Halifax Chronicle, June 15, and other dates.

1886 NOVA SCOTIA'S CRY FOR HOME RULE. 787

of Protection to thwart, once sought to rival Crosse and Blackwell
by setting up a pickle factory. The vegetables were cheap and
plentiful enough, but the duty on imported glass bottles was suffi-
cient to cause the infant industry to die that premature death to
which most of the infant industries seem doomed whose misfortune
it is to be Protection's foster-children.

Let us examine awhile this matter of Protection, which has so
much to do with Nova Scotia's discontent, and see whether it be true,
.as some of our friends so confidently and at times so flippantly assure
us, that the doctrines taught by Cobden, Bright, and others are all
wrong, and that we had much better return to that halcyon period
when commerce lived in shackles and cheap bread was not. Abler
pens than mine have exhausted the subject as regards Europe and
the United States ; therefore I will chiefly confine myself, because I
-can speak as an eye-witness, to the question as it affects the Acadian
peninsula. And it may not a little astonish ' fair traders ' to learn
that the condition to which Nova Scotia is reduced is that which all
sound political economists would expect, that she is indeed an existing
' awful example,' some 2,500 miles away, of the hideous folly of
reverting to Protectionist principles. Her taxation is swollen some
150 per cent., and the tariff, being purposely framed to bar out
foreign trade as much as possible, does her serious injury ; albeit
Protectionists on her side of the Atlantic labour with a zeal worthy a
better cause (though fruitlessly, I am glad to say, for Acadians are
not ' mostly fools ') to make her people believe that an imported
article which formerly came in free, or with only a 10 per cent, duty
charged, is no dearer now when a 25 to 35 per cent, duty is paid.
And, as the last report of theJFCalifax Chamber of Commerce declares,
Protection presses especially hard upon a ' people who are chiefly
fishermen, agriculturists, miners, and farmers.' ' Eepeal,' says the
Chronicle of May 12, 'would mean closer trade relations with all our
natural markets,' to wit, New England, the West Indies, and other
places, with which, says another writer, ' the province is bound
together socially, commercially, and geographically.' These trade
relations, so far from being cultivated, are, as I will still further
show, distinctly discouraged. And one effect of this unduly heavy
taxation, unequal distribution of its proceeds, and enforced isolation
is to cause more favoured provinces to flourish at Nova Scotia's
expense.

I spoke just now of altered circumstances. Let us glance at
these. To do so is not to wander from the subject of Protection, as
will at once appear. Halifax's two miles or so of fine wharves are
doing far less business than of yore, and have so decreased in value
that, as the Attorney-General, Mr. Longley, says, those ' which once
could not be purchased for 50,000 dollars now will not sell for 20,000
dollars.' One wharf, the Chronicle tells us, which fifteen years ago sold

788 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

for 40,000 dollars, was bought in last year by one of the banks for
22,000 dollars. Another was sold some years since at 25,000 dollars,,
and a few weeks ago was bought in for less than half that sum.
Meanwhile the polo ground, which occupies an excellent situation on
that high tableland which in better times will form part of the city's
centre, was sold some years ago for 16,000 dollars, and recently
bought for 7,000 dollars. Shops, too, may be had at far less price
than their cost of erection could they but meet with purchasers,,
and altogether between 300 and 400 houses in the once prosperous
capital are for sale. Many families are without their grown-up
sons, who are driven to seek a livelihood in other lands; and,
owing to the constant exodus, the population, which between 1861
and 1871 increased over 17 per cent., is acknowledged, even by
those who would fain shut their eyes to tell-tale statistics, to have
grown during the succeeding decade at a much slower rate. If
Nova Scotia be as prosperous as some would have us believe, how is
it that every year thousands of her youth of both sexes and all con-
ditions leave her shores ? The exodus is sometimes, apparently for
political reasons, denied, though the inhabitants of the province are
well aware not only of its existence but of its magnitude. There are,
the Attorney-General tells us, more Nova Scotians in Boston than
in Halifax. New England contains a vast number. And, on the other
hand, in summer the New Englanders gladly crowd into verdant
Nova Scotia, driven by the tremendous heat of their own country to
the more salubrious and enjoyable climate of this ail-but island. An
Ontarian in Nova Scotia, adds Mr. Longley, might be exhibited as a
curiosity. Yet between the natural allies is raised the protective
barrier. A Nova Scotian Q.C., Mr. Thomson, shows that the Assess-
ment Eolls of many districts have steadily decreased, those of four
leading counties, representing the four leading industries of coal-
mining, farming, ship-building, and lumbering, which in 1868
amounted to a little below 11^ million dollars, having fallen in 1884 to
less than 8^ millions. Every way the province suffers.

Were return made to the 10 per cent. ante-Confederation tariff,
and were the taxes raised in Nova Scotia spent in Nova Scotia, there
would, says a veteran member of the Provincial Liberal Gfovernment,
Mr. Morrison, be money enough to 'build every projected rail way, make
our road and bridge service efficient, and still have a large surplus for
other purposes.' As it is, railway enterprise halts, and roads and bridges
are falling out of repair. Meanwhile, Nova Scotia is forced to con-
sume Canadian flour, and to pay 60 cents in conveyance on the
same amount thereof, as, before Confederation, she paid 10 cents to
the nearer United States. In exchange for this dearer flour, distant
Canada is supposed to buy Nova Scotian coal. Needless to say,
distant Canada finds it as a rule more convenient to draw her ' black
diamonds ' from neighbouring Pennsylvania. That Ontario at least

1886 NOVA SCOTIA'S CRY FOR HOME RULE. 789

should do so is inevitable. Her natural markets are not the mari>
time provinces, but the states of New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and
Michigan. Those of Manitoba and the North-West are Dakota^
Minnesota, and Michigan ; while those of British Columbia are Idaho,
Washington Territory, Oregon, and coalless California. When the
trade relations between these states and provinces are hindered, the
injury is mutual. But the provinces suffer most, for, when pro-
tecting themselves against the outside world, the United States were
too wise to allow any individual state to protect itself against any
other individual state. Thus they have an enormous country, com-
pact of shape, and possessed of almost every variety of climate and of
products, enjoying absolute Free Trade within its wide borders. It is
as if international Free Trade prevailed throughout Europe, to the
exclusion only of other continents. This most telling fact, however,
the advocates of Protection over here, when exhorting us to let our
small group of islands follow America's example and bar out the rest of
the world, seem entirely to overlook. The Dominion, although it, too-,
has Free Trade within its borders, differs from the United States in
being a long, straggling string of provinces, designed by nature rather
to be gathered into three or four groups, and possessing too little variety
of climate and products to justify imitation of her great neighbour's
somewhat unsuccessful attempt at independence of other nations.
The United States by Free Trade with other countries would enjoy
greatly increased prosperity. So also would Canada prosper were
she but to throw open her ports and gates. In the case of Nova
Scotia, Protection is nothing Jess than a curse. Visitors to Canada
— the tourists, I mean, who take a month's or six weeks' run across
to the Dominion, are introduced to one set of people, make a mental
note (for later use) of their opinions, give a hurried look round, and
then return home to add yet another to the list of valuable books
upon foreign countries and the colonies — are often invited to admire
the progress the upper provinces have made, and are gravely
assured that 'Protection has done much for Canada.' Much to
make or much to mar ? It is not the marring, however, which is
implied. Of the making, how much has been done by individual
energy, and in spite of Protection, and how much by the forced
contributions of other provinces ?

Protection, being as mischievous as it is foolish, has, wherever
introduced, given rise to smuggling, thereby creating and fostering
a dishonest calling. Was there ever delusion that was not harmful ?
Now, as there is no great Chinese wall built up between the two
sections of friendly English-speaking races which people the United
States and the Canadian Dominion, the boundary-line must exist in
official imagination, except indeed where some custom house or
other barrier has risen, some lake or stream traces the border, or
where (if it still exist) the long lane cut through the primeval forest

790 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

marks the forty-ninth latitudinal parallel. It also follows that as
this boundary-line is some three or four thousand miles in length, it
can scarcely serve its intended purpose as a hindrance to free trading
between two kindred nations. In other words, smuggling flourishes
apace. Needless to add. every smuggler, whether American or
Canadian, is a staunch Protectionist. It is manifestly to the interest
of his pocket so to be. As for his scruples of conscience, they
are too microscopic a quantity, even if they have any existence,
to be worth consideration. But Nova Scotia, like Prince Edward
Island, nowhere touches the United States frontier. Therefore
she has not one quarter of the splendid chance for smuggling,
and consequent cheaper sale of, and larger profit on, dutiable articles
of Cousin Jonathan's manufacture, which the more favourably situated
provinces take, it is rumoured, such frequent opportunities to enjoy.
Which fact doubtless adds to her embarrassment. And the longer
she is bound against her will and against her interests in this unna-
tural bondage the more desperate becomes her condition. ' Wait till
the West is more settled ! ' cry the Protectionists. * Wait till the Ca-
nadian Pacific Kailway gets into full running order ! See how Nova
Scotia's trade will flourish then, and how the West will deal with her ! '
Vain dream ! Have Federationists ever realised the fact that by rail
Montreal (Que.) is 859 miles from Halifax? If Ontario, which is
yet further, is too remote to trade much with Nova Scotia, are the
very much more distant North- West and British Columbia likely to
do so ? If there were no other impediment, there would still be
the one item, in this huge straggling country, of cost of transport.
No ! it is impossible to create artificial trade or artificial markets.
The oft-derided plan of making people virtuous by Act of Parliament '
is not one whit more absurd.

After what I have said of the tariff, I trust that Nova Scotia's cry
for Eeciprocity may not sound amiss in British Free Trade ears. To
us, it is a word retrogressive of meaning, synonymous with Eetalia-
tion. To a country severely suffering from Protection's blighting in-
fluence, Eeciprocity, on the contrary, appears distinctly progressive,
tends towards trade freedom, and has a sense identical with our term
Commercial Treaty. Eeciprocity with the United States to Nova
Scotia would mean trade-resuscitation. The experiment has already
been tried ; and reference to statistics of the past will show with
what success. The Eeciprocity Treaty, which lasted fourteen years,
came into operation in 1854. The previous year — English currency was
then in use — the exports of Nova Scotia were a trifle below 280,000?.
The succeeding year, 1855, they were over 481,OOOZ. The imports
were in 1853 nearly 416,OOOZ. ; in 1855, over 780,000?.2 At the time

- Roughly calculated, five dollars are equal to a pound ; exactly calculated,
generally 4 dols. 86f cents. This would make the last amount something under 4,000,000
dollars, which during the next dozen years had more than trebled.

1886 NOVA SCOTIA'S CRY FOR HOME RULE. 791

of Confederation (1 867) the province was importing 14,000,000 dollars'
worth of goods. She now imports 8,000,000 dollars' worth. During
these fourteen prosperous years the Halifax Assessment Eoll advanced
from about 10^ million dollars to 17^ millions, since which time it
has steadily declined. No wonder the Attorney-General, when speak-
ing of those years, should say, ' The period then was one of the golden
days in the history of Nova Scotia, when fortunes were accumulated,
farms increased in value, and prosperity abounded.' Is it, then,
surprising that the provincials, with that crowning sorrow born of
remembrance of happier things, should be resolutely striving to bring
them back ?

To those among us who are bitten with Fair Trade notions, I would
earnestly recommend a prolonged residence in the Dominion, the
maritime provinces perhaps especially. Those, too, who waste time
and sentiment in deploring the (imaginary) harm done to a country by
free imports, might derive much comfort through studying there the
very real injury inflicted by trying the experiment of heavily taxed
imports. It would be safe to wager that the hostility to Free Trade
would soon be relegated to the society of last year's snows.

Those who think the Eepeal cry in Nova Scotia is indicative of
disloyalty make a great mistake. The question is being agitated in
reasonable and dignified language. Indeed, the Kepeal speeches in
the Provincial Parliament have been at once so moderate in tone
and sound in argument, that they might well command admiration
in our own House. They are ably supplemented by a flood of corre-
spondence in the Halifax Chronicle and elsewhere. Thus it is
clear there is no deterioration in the race which two years before
the mother country passed -a_ measure of Catholic Emancipation.
Nor is humour wanting to give pleasing variety to the discussion, as
is made manifest when Mr. Mack, M.P.P., reminds the House that, as
that man is considered a patriot who makes two blades of grass to
grow where but one grew before, those who were instrumental in
achieving Confederation must have been especially patriotic, since
grass is now abundant — in the city streets. The Halifax Chamber
of Commerce maintains that those are * cruel and unjust laws ' which
restrict trade between ' natural customers,' and truly says that
commercial 'relations between British Colonies should be free.'
' There are,' says Mr. Eoche, M.P.P., ' no more loyal people within
the wide compass of the British Empire than the Eepeal party of
Nova Scotia.' Elsewhere he reminds his fellow-provincials that Nova
Scotia was true when Canada was in rebellion. And ' Loyalist,' in
the Chronicle of the 8th of June, while shifting the reproach of
disloyalty upon shoulders that far better deserve it, says the Dominion
' Tory Government introduced the first wedge of imperial disunion,
in the form of a tariff framed to bar out British manufactures ; and
when warned that this would endanger our connection with Britain,

792 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

retorted flippantly, " So much the worse then for the British connec-
tion." ' The Premier ( asks permission from the Imperial Government
to withdraw from the union with Canada, and return to the status of
a province of Great Britain with full control over all fiscal laws and
tariff regulations such as prevailed previous to 1867.' A provincial
* Home Kuler ' writes, * We want Nova Scotia for the Nova Scotians,
and the dear old flag of England to wave over us. ... We will be
loyal to our Queen, as Nova Scotians always have been.' « We ask
for nothing,' declares the Chronicle of the 5th of June, ' inconsistent
with true loyalty to the British throne — nothing that may not be
granted by the British Grovernment on a full hearing of the case.'

This is not the language of rebels or demagogues.

Let us not, then, grudge our sympathy to our fellow-subjects, the
more so as we too have had not a few struggles for freedom, political
and commercial, and seem likely to have more. Nova Scotians, more-
over, can claim an illustrious parentage which it might be churlish
to leave out of account. It is not so much their Anglo-Scandinavian
or French descent I have in mind, as that nearer ancestry, the
' United Empire Loyalists,' who, a century ago, gave up everything
rather than live in the revolted American colonies under a new and
alien flag, and whose story— seldom, I fear, read here, where the stuff
which is called history treats far oftener of dynasties and wars, than
of heroes and heroines who renounce home, employment, wealth,
kindred, and friends for conscience' sake — is one as affecting as it is
worthy of admiration. These were the people who settled the then
wilderness of Ontario, and sought refuge in the West Indies, New
Brunswick, and elsewhere, very many coming to Nova Scotia, where
their justly proud descendants keep green their honoured memory,
and do it special reverence on St. George's Day.3 Even in the present
struggle these ancestors are not forgotten, as Mr. Weeks, M.P.P.,
showed when he said, * Descended from a race who sacrificed their
estates and shed their blood for that which they then considered the
sacred cause of British connection, I would be the last to lightly
regard or easily discard the sentiment of loyalty to the crown of
England which every true Englishman should feel.'

And to come down to present times: may we not be proud that
Nova Scotia's hardy sailors — true descendants of the ancient stock —
are found all the world over, and that through their enterprise their
native province counts for size and population chief among maritime
powers ? Do we not owe to her the ' hero of Kars ' and Sir E. IL
Inglis, the first Cunard, the eminent geologist Sir William Dawson,

3 In May 1883, when the Centenary of the ' U.E.L.'s ' departure from the now United
States was celebrated in the Dominion with much eclat, the spirited people of St.
John, N.B., had a procession through their streets, in which the quaint costumes of
1783 were worn, and an old stage coach and other curiosities formed interesting-
features.

1886 NOVA SCOTIA'S CRY FOR HOME RULE. 793

and the genial writer and lecturer Principal Grant ? And is not
Judge Haliburton, whose ' Sam Slick ' has enlivened many an other-
wise dull hour, remembered still ? Last, but by no means least,
there is a statesman, Joseph Howe, who, though dead now many
years, is yet spoken of in his native province with a reverence that
does honour alike to the living and the deadr No other part of the
Dominion has given birth to so large a proportion of distinguished
sons, thanks to whose genius Nova Scotia, one of the finest provinces
in all British North America, was once conspicuously prosperous ; as
she will be again when she gets rid of the disastrous partnership into
'which nineteen years ago she was beguiled.

For things cannot last as they are. The instinct of self-preserva-
tion teaches revolt against them. The better to realise the situation,
let us imagine ourselves in Nova Scotia's place. Suppose this strag-
gling Europe to be united like the Dominion with little local govern-
ments everywhere, but with an all-controlling and very despotic
central power situated hundreds of miles away — say at Vienna.
Suppose that by-and-by the Viennese decided, in the imaginary
interests of Austro-Hungary, to adopt a rigorous system of Protection,
-and to impose it upon the rest of Europe. Suppose the inhabitants
of the British Isles, on account of their superior wealth and energy,
to be specially selected for taxation for the benefit of Austro-
Hungary and adjacent countries. Suppose them to become aware of
their consequent impoverishment, to feel its injustice, and to strive,
year after year, constantly and vainly, to convince Vienna of the un-
soundness of her economic views, and, still more, of the sacred right
of each individual member of the European community to control its
own affairs, political and commercial. And, finally, suppose them,
conscious at last that the choice lay between gradual ruin and timely
secession, to prefer the latter alternative, and to try to reach it by
peaceable and legitimate means. They would only be taking the
•course followed by Nova Scotia now. Should we not, looking on,
say, from the neighbouring continents of Asia or Africa, think they
were justified in so doing ? Should we not indeed despise them
were they indifferent to their country's decay, and did they not make
-every reasonable effort to free her and themselves from what had
grown to be an intolerable bondage ?

The grievance of the Nova Scotians, then, being so genuine, and
their spirit so constitutional, the case surely merits a patient hearing.
It is important, too, to recollect that their demand comes not from
clique or from a single nationality. Those of British birth or extraction,
the many descendants of the French Acadians immortalised by
Longfellow, the Germans of Lunenburg, and others who are dwelling
together in this fair land in amity, and gradually fusing to make a
stock as good as any in America, alike protest, and in no uncertain
voice, against the existing state of things. How much in earnest

794 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

these people are — spite of sundry sneering assertions that the agita-
tion is all talk, means nothing serious, and is a mere vote-catching
trick — is abundantly proved by the fact that, at the Provincial
Parliamentary General Election on the 15th of June last, of 38
candidates, 31 were returned (many with large majorities) pledged to
Eepeal and Eeciprocity.

E. C. FELLOWS.

1886 795

THE CLASSES, THE MASSES, AND
THE GLASSES.

THE Classes is an expression which, speaking generally, is used to
describe persons who have a competency, who can manage to get
along, and to whom, on the balance, life is more of a pleasure than of
a * worry.'

The Masses is an expression which is employed to describe the
great bulk of mankind, who have, more or less, to struggle and to
strive in order to procure for themselves the bread which perisheth,
as well as the amount of leisure time which enables them to rise to
anything above mere animal employments and enjoyments.

The classes comprise the men of leisure and of pleasure. The
masses consist of the toilers and moilers of the world, along with
their numerous dependents. The classes are not more selfish than
other folks, and would be pleased rather than the reverse to see the
masses increase in prosperity and happiness. They do not, perhaps,
realise very clearly that each one finds his happiness in others' good,
but they have a vague idea th£t the public welfare is the right thing
at which to aim, though their human nature tells them that of course
their own advantage must be the first and main point.

The masses being also human beings show all the weaknesses and
follies of that curious organism ; and while many of the classes believe
that the best way to maintain their exceptionally pleasant position is
by keeping the masses in their present station, very many of the
latter hold that the way of salvation for them and for their order
consists in pulling the classes down to their own level.

I believe that both the putting-down and the pulling-down theories
are all wrong, and that the interests of the classes and of the masses
are identical. I believe that the -misery and degradation of the
masses may be removed without interfering in any way with the
agreeable position of the classes, but, on the contrary, in a manner
greatly to their advantage.

There's plenty for all, but we thwart one another,

And the weak gather weeds while the strong pluck the flowers ;

But let man aye treat man as a friend and a brother,
And there's plenty for all in this wide world of ours.

796 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

It seems to be an almost universal idea that the maker of wealth
and the spender of wealth should live apart, and form, as Mr. Disraeli
•expressed it, in one of his earlier novels, ' Two Nations.'

Nothing could tend more to the safety of the commonwealth than
any course which should bring these two nations — the rich and the
poor — to see and to feel that their true interests are identical.
'.Statesmen and politicians are continually crying aloud that this is so,
but I suspect that it is only a very limited portion of the public who
believe them. I do not wonder at this.

If I were a poor man I know that I should look with suspicion
and mistrust on the actions of the rich, however plausible those
actions might be represented to me. The ' two nations ' misunder-
stand one another. Most quarrels arise from misunderstandings.
4 Hell is paved with good intentions,' and the poor often suffer from
the mistaken kindness which ends in unmistakable suffering.

We live in a democratic age, and no one seems to have a very
clear idea as to how Demos is likely to comport and disport himself
in the sweet by-and-by. But, though we talk about democracy, it
is 'the upper ten thousand ' who at present are paramount in our
political arrangements. They have been so paramount during the
years that are passed ; and it is well to consider what they have
done for the multitude whom they have swayed, influenced, and
ruled.

It seems to me that, while talking much of their superiority to
the mob, while proud of their superior education, culture, and
manners, they have not taken the wisest course for raising their
poorer fellow-countrymen to the standard of which they are them-
selves so proud.

Looking upon the poor as beings of a totally different order from
themselves, and convinced that only low and grovelling amusements
are to their taste, they have considered it an act of kindness and con-
descension to provide for them these amusements.

I believe that the text which reads, * The love of money is the
root of all evil,' ought to have been translated, ' The love of money
is the root of all manner of evil ; ' and no one will dispute that a
similar text would be equally true if it dealt similarly with drink —
The love of strong drink is the root of all manner of evil.

Here, I fancy, the acute reader says, * Ah ! but you cannot do
without either money or drink.' Possibly the acute reader cannot
do without drink — or thinks that he cannot do without it, which
comes to much the same thing. But I would remind him that when
he knows that the myriads of the Eastern World abstain from
alcohol, and that ever-increasing numbers of dwellers in the West
find themselves in every respect better for abstinence from intoxicat-
ing liquors, it is proved that we can do very well without this drink,
the love of which is the root of all manner of evil.

1886 THE CLASSES, MASSES, AND THE GLASSES. 797

No one that I know of — except Lord Eandolph Churchill — main-
tains that drink is a necessary of life. All responsible speakers and
writers admit virtually that it is a luxury ; and most responsible
speakers and writers admit that it is a dangerous luxury. Indeed,
its danger has been acknowledged for generations by our legislators,
who, in countless enactments, have endeavoured to provide that its
distribution shall only be in the hands of patriotic, prudent, and
godly men, who shall see that the luxury is consumed in the right
form, in the right places, at the right time, and by the right people,
so that no harm may come to the public.

About fifty years ago a movement arose among the working men
having for its object to pledge one another to consume no longer
this dangerous luxury. Those who adhered to this pledge soon found
the great benefit whic^i accrued to themselves and to their families
from cutting off such a source of useless and indeed harmful expen-
diture. Their plan encountered, but survived, ridicule, opposition,
and even persecution, and those who adhered to it might truly have
been called ' the aristocracy of the working classes.' Time went
on — the * moral suasion ' of those who had tasted the benefits of
abstinence went on, clearer and clearer evidence of the evils of drink-
ing went on, but something else went on at the same time, viz. the
moral suasion of thousands and thousands of licensed drink-sellers —
the patriotic and godly men whom I have already mentioned — whose
living depended on maintaining the existing system of dispensing
the dangerous luxury, and who were paid for every glass which the
public could be induced to consume, while the advocates of temper-
ance could only give their advice at their own charges, and without
the widespread official organisation which, by virtue of the licensing
system, spread its ramifications through the length and breadth of
the land.

The contest was .indeed unequal, and the fact that the temperance
advocates could, under the circumstances, make even an approach to
* holding the field,' has ever appeared to me to be one of the strongest
proofs of the soundness of their cause.

Gradually, but steadily and surely, it dawned on the minds of all
those who longed to see a sober nation, that their wish could never
be realised so long as the State should be allowed to employ its host
of ' paid agents ' to counteract in this practical and persistent manner
all the efforts of those who were preaching abstinence to the people ;
thus from ' the masses ' arose the prohibition party, which Mr. John
Morley lately described as the most moral and the most powerful
political party which has existed since the days of the anti-slavery
agitation.

' Not many great, not many mighty, not m-iay noble ' have, up to
a late period, joined that party. For years and years the classes
persisted in asserting that the working man did not really object to
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3 K

798 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

the drink-shops which were plentifully licensed in their midst, and
that to remove these temptations to drunkenness from the working
population would be an act of cruelty and oppression. It was dinned
into our ears that to take such a course would most certainly provoke
outrage, resistance, and tumult. To this the answer of the prohibi-
tionists was, * Then let the step be taken by the people themselves, in
their own localities, if they wish to take that step ; this will do away
with even the suspicion of tyranny, oppression, and coercion.'

In this manner we arrived at what is termed ' permissive prohibi-
tion.' But permissive prohibition met with almost as much oppo-
sition as the policy of Imperial prohibition. The very men who would
not hear of prohibition, through alleged fear of mob violence, now
contemptuously condemned any regulated appeal to the people them-
selves. The Bishop of Peterborough shuddered at what he called
1 the vote of the streets.' Orthodox politicians solemnly denounced
anything in the shape of a plebiscite, and I remember one of the truest
friends of temperance saying that he could not sanction this ' rough
and ready ' mode of procuring sobriety — ' rough and ready ' being,
I suppose, another term for speedy and effectual.

It followed, therefore, that the influential and powerful classes
were resolved that the power of scattering broadcast the temptations
to drinking should still remain unchecked in the hands of irresponsible
authorities. Nevertheless, so undeniably just was the contention
that the public — for whose benefit it is argued that licensing is main-
tained— should be allowed to express their opinion on the matter, and
so strong was the demand from outside for the extension of local self-
government, that something was effected. The principle of the direct
veto was endorsed, and subsequently twice confirmed, by resolutions
passed in the Parliament which was elected in 1880.

But here we stick fast. Six years have elapsed since the House
of Commons recorded its deliberate opinion that communities opposed
to the establishment of drink-shops in their midst should be granted
facilities for giving authoritative and practical expression to that
opinion. During those six years we have had three different Parlia-
ments and.four different Governments, yet not a single step has been
attempted by any of our statesmen to give effect to the resolution
which I have mentioned. Meantime all the crime, lunacy, pauperism,
and national degradation, of which the drink traffic is the exciting
cause, continue in full blast, while the clergyman, the schoolmaster,
the philanthropist, and the social reformer struggle almost hopelessly
and helplessly against the counter-attractions towards drunkenness
and its concomitants which the State lavishly places as obstacles in
their path.

Whether such a state of things is or is not a national disgrace
I leave to the decision of any one who impartially considers the
situation.

1886 THE CLASSES, MASSES, AND THE GLASSES. 799

For my own part, I will only say that it is a'state of things which,
in my opinion, should be altered with the least possible delay.

The experience of the last few years shows that we have nothing
to hope from * statesmen ' acting on their usual statesmanlike
impulses. These distinguished men always appear to be more
interested in contemplating the condition of foreign countries than
in seeking to alleviate the sufferings of their own. Egypt, Mon-
tenegro, Zululand, Burmah, or Bulgaria, they can discuss with
ability and avidity, but to ward off from Englishmen an evil which
the late Prime Minister declared to be bringing upon us the accumu-
lated evils of war, pestilence, and famine, is a task to which they
contemptuously decline to condescend.

Their lofty souls have telescopic eyes

Which see the faintest speck of distant pain,

While at their feet a world of agonies,

Unseen, unheard, unheeded, -writhes in vain.

But though it is not in the nature of statesmen to take the
initiative in this great reform, they will be ready enough to act
when the question ' has come within the range of practical politics,
which simply means when there is a majority in the House of
Commons which will say to them, ' You shall do this thing or out
you go ! '

It would have been very long ere the late unreformed Parliament
would have spoken to them in terms so decisive. But the masses are
now in power, and is it not probable that ere long they will compel
their representatives to say something of the kind ? They know
that this power of local self-protection from the liquor traffic is
already possessed by their Canadian fellow-subjects, as well as by
vast numbers of the citizens of the United States. They know that
it is being sought for and agitated for, more or less, by all the Eng-
lish-speaking communities throughout the world ; and if they are to
be much longer snubbed and thwarted by the classes when making
the same demand, I fancy that they will insist on ' knowing the reason
why.'

And what are these reasons ? Do not let us be unjust to the
classes. They bring forward arguments which, no doubt, appear to
them to be valid in favour of this compulsory licensing, which is
rapidly becoming so unpopular. Let us for a moment examine these
arguments. We are told, ' You can't make men sober by Act of
Parliament.' Certainly not — in one sense. When a man gets drunk,
time, sleep, and cessation from drinking will alone restore him to
sobriety. But if it be meant that laws have no effect in causing or
preventing the consumption of drink — which is the only cause of
drunkenness — that is an argument against the whole licensing system
and in favour of complete free trade in liquor. As I have never met

3 K 2

800 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

with one single person who advocates such a complete measure as
that, I think it unnecessary to pursue the point further.

I have already alluded to the great plebiscite bugbear. It is a
splendid weapon to use against the prohibitionists, more especially as
three parts of the persons to whom it is addressed have no idea of
what is meant by a plebiscite, and think that it is something mys-
terious, awful, and wicked. But in our large municipal towns people
know better. The ' Borough Funds Act ' has taught them the real
meaning of the plebiscite, and they understand that when, in
Manchester, 60,000 ratepayers can be called on to vote ' Ay ' or
' No ' as to whether they will have water brought to their town from
a certain district, it is just as easy to get them to vote * Ay ' or
' No ' as to whether the licensing system is to be in force or not to
be in force in their locality. What can be simpler or more con-
stitutional than to take the < hearthstone ' vote on a question which
affects more or less the order, the happiness, and the morality of
every household ?

Then there is the idea that the interests of the liquor traders may
be unduly damaged. Surely this is another bugbear. Did anybody
ever hear of the House of Commons dealing unfairly with the bene-
ficiaries of any venerable abuse or any powerful vested interest?
Why, the leaning of the House of Commons is exactly the other
way, and if there be one thing more certain than another in the
future course of events, it is that if the liquor traders can make out
even a plausible case for compensation, Parliament will be more
than ready to meet them half way. At the same time it will be
necessary that some arguments should be brought forward to prove
that a man having, as a monopolist has, public money given him for
selling liquor, is also to have public money given him for giving
up selling liquor, or even the House of Commons will reject the
claim.

But let the claim be well or ill founded, it does not affect the
justice of the demand for the power of local protection from the
liquor traffic. The two questions are distinct, and it is only a trick
of the enemy to try and jumble them up together.

The above are the three objections which I have heard urged
more frequently than any others against the policy of the direct
veto. But there are many ardent temperance reformers, who are
also true friends and supporters of permissive prohibition, who think
it wiser and more politic not to confine the legislative attack on
the great drink evil to a demand for the direct veto, but, in addition,
to exert themselves in attempting to reform or purify the licensing
system.

This again is a separate department of work from the prohibition
movement, and it is much better that it should be kept separate.
Those who believe that the common sale of drink is a public evil

1886 THE CLASSES, MASSES, AND THE GLASSES. 801

cannot be expected to exert themselves to place that sale on a more
popular, and therefore on a more permanent, foundation. The man
who believes in licenses is bound, no doubt, to do all that he can to
improve the licensing system. Let him do so without let or hin-
drance. If it is decided that municipal bodies, elected boards, com-
missions, or any other set of officials, are likely to be more satisfactory
licensers, to fix on better houses, or to select superior characters for
the sale of drink than the present benches of magistrates, let the
new plan, whatever it may be, have a trial. Prohibitionists merely
ask that their plan — no licensing — may also have a trial, where public
opinion is so desirous, and that in such localities the new licensing
authority — be it Board, Bench, or Commission — shall be required to
hold its hand and leave that district free from drink-shops.

It should be clearly understood that the United Kingdom Alliance
gives no official opinion whatever as to what should be the nature of
the licensing authority so long as licensing exists. Its avowed and
constant business is to destroy licensing, and not to reconstitute it
in any shape or way. I therefore merely give my own individual
opinion, and do not speak on behalf of the Alliance when I say that,
personally, I agree with the Eev. Canon Grrier, who, in alluding to
the proposal for elected licensing boards, says that he should dread
them more even than the present licensing bodies, for under their
auspices we should probably be landed ' out of the frying-pan of
aristocratic caprice into the fire of local jobbery.' Now, I have tried
to prove that the demand of the masses on the drink question is
reasonable and just. I also think that were the demand granted
the classes would suffer but very slight inconvenience from the
change. I know perfectly well that numbers of them consider that
a certain amount of alcoholic refreshment is an essential to human
happiness, and they conjure up alarming visions of the sufferings
which they would endure while journeying through those thirsty
regions in which no liquor would be purchasable. I can feel for them.
Still it must be remembered that, even in these Saharas of sorrow, it
would be possible for the traveller to carry a sufficient store of alcohol
to sustain his spirits until he should again come within range of the
* resources of civilisation.'

Is it not a little selfish to resist a reform which aims at benefit-
ing the whole public through fear of some slight personal incon-
venience ?

Some, doubtless, see no evil in public-houses. I remember a lady
who declared that a public-house within a stone's throw of her gate
was an advantage, because she always knew where to find the coach-
man. But this was an exceptional case, and does not shake the
admitted truth that the public-house is the hotbed of crime and
pauperism ; and from crime and pauperism we all of us, classes,
masses, and asses, suffer more or less every day of our lives.

802 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

I therefore respectfully ask the wealthy and leisured portions of
the community carefully to consider this request of their poorer
fellow-countrymen and to see whether there is any valid ground for
longer refusing that request.

But the staunch, steady, sturdy opponents of the direct veto are
to be found in the members of * the trade,' and the liquor trade is
very properly called the trade, since both in political and social influ-
ence it is head and shoulders above all other trades. These gentle-
men reiterate ad nauseam how much opposed they are to intemper-
ance, and I suppose nobody doubts them ; were they advocates of
intemperance they would be fiends and not men. We all hate in-
temperance and desire temperance. The whole dispute is as to the
means, not as to the ends.

* The trade ' say : ' Permit us to carry on our operations wherever
we can persuade the magistrates to permit us to do so.' The per-
missive prohibitionists say : ' Prevent these traders from carrying
on their operations in those places where the community object to
their doing so. It is proposed to give the public an opportunity of
proving how much they value and esteem the work of the publican.
Yet the publican shrinks from this test. Is not this rather strange ?
Would the shoemakers, the tailors, or the drapers of any district fear
to have the question put to their neighbours — Tailors or no tailors ?
Shoemakers or no shoemakers ? Drapers or no drapers ? Not
they. They would feel perfectly sure that nobody would take
the trouble to meddle with them. * Conscience makes cowards of
us all,' and it looks as though our friends the publicans had an
uneasy consciousness that their trade is not considered a blessing,
but quite the reverse, by those amongst whom it is carried on.
But the publicans very naturally say, ' Why subject us to this
exceptional treatment ; why put these invidious questions about us
alone ? ' The answer is, because they stand on quite another
footing to any other class of tradesmen. The Statute Law, of which
they are the creatures, already recognises that the permission or pro-
hibition of their trade is optional, at the discretion of the magistracy.
The magistracy are, or ought to be, merely trustees for the public,
and it is only reasonable that these trustees should be informed as to
the real wants of the public, and if the interests of the public clash
with those of the publican, the publican's interests must go to the
wall. But this fear on the part of * the trade ' is still more remark-
able when we look back at the course of legislation with regard to
its members. They are the picked men of the nation, they are
selected by the magistrates, themselves men of ' blood and culture.'
Every year their character and conduct pass again under the review
of these magistrates. Strict laws have been enacted as to how, where,
and when, as well as to whom, they are to sell their liquor, and a
whole army of police are maintained at the public expense whose

1886 THE CLASSES, MASSES, AND THE GLASSES. 803

main business it is to see that these laws are observed. i And yet
they are not happy ! ' It is touching to read — as I often do — their
speeches when they assemble and meet together. They describe the
suspicion with which they are viewed, the uncalled-for abuse which
they encounter, the manner in which they are harassed by all sorts
and conditions of men, the misrepresentations which are poured upon
them, and the generally unsympathetic manner in which their self-
denying and philanthropic efforts are met by an ungrateful public.
One would think that they would be too happy to relinquish a busi-
ness involving so much responsibility, entailing so much vexation of
spirit, and producing so little personal satisfaction. But it is not so.
Patriotism, love of liberty, hatred of fanaticism, and devotion to the
cause of the * poor man's beer,' urged them on, and they are banded
together as one man to resist the movement of the permissive prohi-
bitionists.

It is the old, old story — private interests against public rights,
the individual against the nation, money against men, the gains of
the few against the lives of the many. For, disguise it as we may,
it is the enormous influence of ' the trade ' which has hitherto suc-
ceeded in withholding from the people this simple extension of self-
government, and the political power of the trade must be broken ere
the boon can be obtained.

Surely it is not well that a whole nation should grovel at the feet
of a great ring of monopolists, even though that ring should be com-
posed, as we have seen, of the best of men. Is the curse of drunken-
ness for ever to blight our country ? Are the efforts of those who
spend their time and labour in^ attempts to elevate the working
classes to be permanently thwarted by a gigantic system of State
temptation ? Are we to honour with lip service the memories of
such men as Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. Samuel Morley, and by
our actions to show that we care nothing for the reforms to which
their lives were devoted ? Is England, with her enormous educa-
tional, industrial, and religious advantages, to remain permanently a
drunken nation ? Are our statesmen, unchecked, to fill the nation's
exchequer by promoting the degradation and the misery of their
poorer fellow-countrymen ?

You answer ' No.' But how do you propose to effect the change ?
Are there to be more effective advocates of temperance ? Are our
clergy to be more eloquent or earnest ? Are any new facts to be
brought before the public ? Is human nature to be changed ? Is
the nature of strong drink to be altered ? I hardly think that any
of these things are likely to happen.

Given, then, the same kind of human beings, the same kind of
drink, and the same amount of temptation, I can see nothing for it
but that the same results will follow.

Suppose we try the New Testament plan, and as we pray that we

804 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

may not ourselves be led into temptation, let us cease to lead others
into temptation.

If anybody has a scheme to suggest which has not been tried and
failed in regard to licensing the sale of strong drink, now is the time
to produce it.

If such a scheme cannot be produced, then let the people in their
own localities be permitted to try a plan which, when fairly tried,
has never failed, and by entrusting them with the power of the direct
veto over licenses, let us make at least one more effort towards the
* soberising ' of England.

WILFRID LAWSON.

1886

805

THE ' HAMLET OF THE SEINE.

IN treating of the recent production of Hamlet at the Theatre
Francais, which may be considered as a new epoch in the dramatic
history of France, it is not intended to institute comparisons between
England and France, or between English and French actors, but
merely to comment on the source of the enthusiasm excited at the
present moment by this essentially English tragedy in an audience
habitually indisposed towards anything un-French and chary of
applause under all circumstances.

The first step towards the triumph of to-day was made in
September 1796, when the tragedy of Hamlet, translated by Ducis, was
acted as a startling novelty, with Mole and Dumesnil in the leading
characters, and was listened to with respect if not with any great
sympathy. M. Mole was Hamlet, Madame Dumesnil was Gertrude, the
most remarkable tragic actor and actress of their time, for French
critics have always held the part of the Queen to be second only to
that of Hamlet, and when the tragedy was reproduced at a later date,
in 1805, under the direction of tjie great tragedian Talma, he passed
sleepless nights and agitated days in the pursuit of an actress
sufficiently gifted to undertake the character of Gertrude. Ophelia
was looked upon as a personage of comparatively little importance ;
she was a passing vapour, a slight incident in Hamlet's life, and her
part, never a long one, was subjected to much cutting.

Of all the tragedians who have hitherto played Hamlet in Paris
Talma was the only one who made a great permanent success, and this
he did in spite of the translator's monotonous conventional verse and
monstrous alterations of the text, in which no Ghost ventured to
appear ; Hamlet merely dreamt of him and told his dreams to an
admiring chorus ; and Hamlet, not Claudius, was King of Denmark ;
Claudius was a prince of the blood. It was then a wholly different
play, yet Ducis firmly believed that he adored Shakespeare and that
he had translated Hamlet as faithfully as possible for a French public,
while, as Talma's genius carried success with it, French audiences were
convinced that they were understanding and applauding the great
English Poet.

Thus the first stone was laid, and the movement towards the
romantic drama which was begun by Dumas (pere), but which the

806 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

genius of Victor Hugo carried on to its great consummation, may
fairly be traced back to the inauguration of the Ducis Hamlet by
Talma. This great tragedian was an English scholar, and if he felt
that the passionate creations of Shakespeare's genius could not be
presented faithfully to French society, so long fettered by frivolous
pedantries, he also knew how to transfuse the deep passion of his heart
into the lifeless verse of Ducis with something of a Shakespearian
force : it is the highest vocation, it is, indeed, the great first cause of
the tragedian, that he can interpret the poet's mind to a dense public.

Since the days of Talma Hamlet has been played before Parisian
audiences by Salvini and Rossi, by Rouviere, by Madame Judith, and
by M. Gamier. As to Fechter, he was known in Paris only as an
accomplished actor of melodrama and light comedy when he pro-
duced the tragedy in London and acted the leading character in
English to an English audience.

Among the French Hamlets just cited Rouviere, at the Theatre
Historique, made the greatest mark. He was eccentric and fiery, often
carrying his audience with him by the flash of his passion, but rarely
satisfying their judgment; he played the version which Mounet
Sully is playing now. Neither Salvini nor Rossi made much impres-
sion in this difficult character, which was indeed more successfully
represented in the opera of Havnlet by M. Faure. This admirable
vocalist is also an impressive actor, and there was much of the
charm of the Prince of Denmark in his performance. Fechter never
acted the character in Paris, but in London his success was extra-
ordinary. He was graceful, he was subtle, he was a complete master
of stage business ; he was handsome and singularly dexterous : in
short, he had all the necessary qualities for an ambitious actor, except
the greatest. He had not a wide range of passion and he had not a
single grain of poetical imagination ; but for that very reason he
was all the more welcome to the great bulk of spectators, who prefer
the player to the poet, who seek nothing beyond brilliancy in stage
representation and would rather not have the depths of passion
sounded. Hamlet's complicated character offers many phases of
interest, so many that most of his representatives have been listened
to with attention, whatever their shortcomings ; but to combine all or
a chief part of his qualities is to be great among the greatest ; it is
to possess strong intellectual perceptions, intense passion, a habit of
meditation, and a power of withering irony. It is also to have those
exterior graces which we are in the habit of calling princely — to
move gracefully, to have a commanding presence, a noble countenance,
and a voice capable of expressing infinite varieties of emotion.

With how much trepidation, then, must any thinking actor who
enters into the character approach it for the first time ; how reluctant
he must feel after his long solitary broodings to unveil his ideal.

M. Mounet Sully, the distinguished tragedian, who has now taken

1886 THE 'HAMLET' OF THE SEINE. 807

unwilling Paris captive by his performance of Hamlet, meditated
upon it for fourteen years before he determined to bring it forward.
Three years before the death of M. Perrin he persuaded that clever but
not poetical manager to allow him to try it, and obtained a distinct
promise that he should play it as soon as possible at the Theatre
Francais. Once the promise given, M. Perrin began to interest himself
in the production of the piece. The planning of the costumes, which
he confided to the caxe- of Bianchini, costumier of the Opera House,
remarkable for his knowledge and research, greatly interested the
manager, but his death came as a grave interruption, and for a time
Hamlet was laid aside. The theatre was not prospering ; some great
artists had left it, and Mounet Sully himself was ill, but presently he
began again to ask for his Hamlet. M. Claretie, M. Perrin's succes-
sor, was little disposed towards such an attempt ; the company gene-
rally protested that it would certainly not be a success, that it had been
rejected for good reasons by the Comedie Franpaise in 1846, that they
could ill afford to risk a failure now, and that they would not hear
of it. To this M. Mounet Sully replied that he believed in Hamlet
and that he thought M. Perrin's promise ought to be observed.
This argument finally prevailed and the tragedy was put in rehearsal.
The rehearsals were trying and arduous. The version of Hamlet
chosen for representation was the same translation by M. Paul
Meurice and Alexandre Dumas which had been rejected by the
Comedie Francaise in 1846. It is well that M. Meurice has lived to
see his work brought out under the best auspices after so many
doubts, perplexities, and trepidations as he went through before it
ever saw the light. It is to Dumas that its actual completion is due.
A long time ago — somewhere about the year '42 — he was lamenting
that there was no better French translation of Hamlet to be had than
that of poor Ducis, when Paul Meurice confessed that he had at-
tempted one himself, which he had kept as true as possible to the
original text. Dumas insisted upon seeing the manuscript, was de-
lighted when he saw it, made a few alterations, touched it in a few
scenes, and was furious when the Comedie Franpaise rejected it. But
the French mind, not yet ready, went on gradually outgrowing its
shackles, drinking in fresh nourishment from many newly opened
sources; penny editions of great authors, foreign as well as French,
began to circulate, translated works which made the writers popular
and proved that in spite of pretentious critics there was something
more in the spirit than in the letter. Amongst these cheap publica-
tions was a translation of Shakespeare's most popular plays by a
writer of no special fame which was rather flat in expression but
correct in meaning. M. Franpois Hugo's vigorous and faithful prose
translation is at present better known to students than to the public,
but it is a work of great power and valuable to all foreigners who
want to grasp the thought of the poet. There is nothing omitted

808 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

and above all there is nothing interpolated, but it is crude in some
passages and is less happy in giving the tenderness than the force of
the poet. It was probably by the frequent performance of Victor
Hugo's original plays at the great national theatre that cultivated
audiences acquired such a disdain of conventionalities as gradually
opened the way for the success of an almost literal translation of
Hamlet ; the reluctance of the company to deal with it appears to
have been due rather to their terror of it as a long monologue than
to their apprehension of its extravagances. However that may be, it
is certain that M. Mounet Sully's faith in the work was severely tried
by the opposition, the sneers, the complete incredulity of his col-
leagues ; on one occasion, when the tragedian was urging some scenic
alterations upon M. Meurice, M. Grot remonstrated, saying, ' Vous
oubliez, Mounet, que vous parlez a 1'auteur,' to which M. Mounet
Sully replied, with that majestic simplicity of manner well known to
those who have studied his acting, ' L'auteur est mort ; ' and on this
M. Paul Meurice took up his hat and moved away. General in-
credulity survived even the dress rehearsal, although a few good
judges who were present gave way under the fire of the tragedian
and foretold a success.

When, after long delays, the formidable first night came, a highly
critical audience was assembled ; the opening scene, which is re-
markably well given, was heard in a silence as cold as Elsinore itself,
but afterwards, when the King and his Court appeared in their
splendid costumes and Hamlet sat apart away from the throne in his
deep mourning suit, with his eyes downcast and his hands hanging
listlessly by his side, his noble presence, his complete indifference
to his surroundings and absorption in his own thought made an im-
pression on the audience, and his replies to the King and Queen, dry
in tone as they were cutting in irony, were heard with a grave atten-
tion which became a deep sympathy in the well-known reply to the
Queen — * Seems, madam — nay, it is,' &c. — in the French version : —

Oh ! je ne parais pas, madame, je suis :
MOD coeur, je vous le dis, ignore toute feinte.
Oe n'est pas la couleur dont cette etoffe est teinte,
Ce n'est point la paleur de mon front soucieux,
Ce ne sont pas les pleurs de"bordant de mes yeux
Qui peuvent te'moigner, croyez-le bien, madame,
De 1'incessant chagrin ou s'abime mon ame.
Non, je sais a present que deuil, larmes, paleur
Peuvent n'etre qu'un masque a jouer la douleur.

This speech was so delivered as to bring the hearer into close
contact with the heart of the speaker, and prepare him for all the
sufferings, all the perplexities revealed in the great monologue — ' Oh !
that this too, too solid flesh would melt,' &c. — in the French version : —

Ah! Dieu ! si cette chair voulait, de"composee,
Se fondre, se dissoudre et se perdre en rosee !

1886 THE 'HAMLET' OF THE SEINE. 809

In his first interview with the Grhost, as he stayed half prostrate
on the great stairs leading up to the archway where th e spirit of his
father stood, the tones of his voice were deepened by the sense of
awe ; he seemed enshrouded in a great mystery, and the presence of
the supernatural almost overwhelmed him ; but this phase passed into
one of passionate tenderness with the revelation of suffering from the
unresting soul, and rose into a towering wrath when the history of
wrong, long suspected, was at last unfolded. By this time M. Mounet
Sully had so completely conquered the sympathies of his audience that
he carried them easily through the difficult ensuing scene with Horatio
and his comrades, so long a stumbling-block even on the English stage,
and omitted in representation till Macready's courage restored it, with
a great stage success, but not without many animadversions from
critics who held the wild scoffings and strange shiftings of Hamlet's
delirious excitement to be beneath the dignity of tragedy or of what
they called human nature.

There can hardly be a stronger proof of advance in the knowledge
of humanity than we obtain while we listen to the French tragedian
on the stage of the most fastidious theatre in Europe rushing through
this scene with his grand impetuosity without a single protest from
a single spectator, addressing his father's spirit underground as a
' mineur dans la sape,' and then with his wild irony exclaiming, ' Tu
fais du chemin, taupe.'

In the whole of this scene Mounet Sully seemed inspired by the
soul of the poet ; he was carried by the exaltation of his interview with
the dead to the verge of madness. The alternations of his feeling were
rapid and intense, and it was impossible for any one to listen to him
unmoved : a deep tendernessTenriched his low and pleading tones
when he answered the Grhost's adjuration to secresy — ' Calme-toi
done, pauvre ame en detresse ' — and turned towards his Living friends
to express his belief in them. Here he made it quite evident that
he now intended to simulate actual insanity as a means of silencing
the suspicions of the king, and through all the changing moods of
his truest deepest passion this undercurrent of something outside of
the truth made itself felt. The hold taken on the audience by the
actor increased as the tragedy proceeded, and his various moods, his
flagrant sarcasms, his secret meditation, his wrath, and his tenderness
were attended throughout with complete sympathy. The dialogue
with Polonius preceding the play scene was admirably given ; it was
the outcome of a weary heart made bitter by anguish, and if it was
cruel in the wording it was so decorous in manner that Polonius
might reasonably accept his strange sayings as the promptings of a
disordered mind free from any intention of personal affront.

In the directions to the players M. Mounet Sully was equally
untheatrical, equally true. He spoke without any effort, without
special points ; he gave his advice to the first player, persuasively,

810 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

quietly, with the reticence of the best breeding and apparent
unconsciousness of an audience. But he had an audience which
thoroughly understood him; it was well awakened and ready to
follow him in all his moods. The play scene was admirably staged ;
the mock stage in the centre of the real one was well in view of the
whole audience. The mock King and Queen were played by distin-
guished artists. M. Dupont Vernon was the player King ; and the
whole house listened breathlessly to his every word, watching its effect
upon Hamlet, whose countenance, with his eye always fixed on the
King, reflected the passion and progress of the story till, after drag-
ging himself along, with increased agitation approaching the throne,
according to the usual business of the stage, he leaped to his feet
upon the evidence of the King's disorder, which certified his crime,
and uttered his ' Maintenant c'est clair ' as a great cry of exultation.
His voice put out all its power, and his free and noble action enforced
it ; now the sympathy of the spectators mounted to a height which
demanded utterance, and all rose to their feet to join in one great
cheer. Such a demonstration is rare at the Theatre Francais. It was
a real triumph, and from this moment the progress of the tragedy
may be described as a triumphal march. The great scene with the
Queen known in England as the" closet scene was not less impressive
than the preceding one. When Mounet Sully approached her his
heart seemed full of a deep disdain, and if he relented for a moment
it was rather as a man to a woman than as a son to a mother.
Sarcastic in the opening phrases with those fine inflexions of the
voice which this remarkable tragedian so well knows how to give
to irony, he rose to a towering passion when, clenching the Queen's
hands with irresistible force, he forbad her to move. It was no wonder,
then, that she feared he would murder her and that Polonius in
terror half emerged from his hiding-place. All this was well followed
up with the hope that he had killed the King, and his pity for
Polonius came naturally from him as from a man shaken by a great
preceding emotion. He is indeed so completely steeped in his
character that not one syllable of his utterance stands out as a
distinct effect ; every part is so bound up in the whole that I doubt
whether it would be possible for him to appear in a single act.
Indeed, whatever part he plays, M. Mounet Sully's inward emotions
are always wrapped closely in those of his author ; he is never outside
of them. It is this distinguishing quality which has made his
CEdipe so pathetic and so powerful, which has penetrated into the
very soul of Ruy Bias, which has filled with the grandeur of Greek
poetry Racine's version of Orestes, and which has brought into such
full life the passion of Hernani that when Victor Hugo saw it he
exclaimed to the friend who was with him, * C'est mon ideal ! ' M.
Mounet Sully's fault as an actor proceeds, indeed, from this very power
of abstraction. There are moments when he forgets his audience, as

1886 THE 'HAMLET' OF THE SEINE. 811

if he were actually the personage he plays. At these times he is apt
to become indistinct, to speak too low ; and there have been occasions
when he has made pauses so long, due to an excess of emotion which
chokes his voice, that his comrades have thought he was never going
to speak again.

In his scenes with Ophelia the absorption in one idea — the idea
of his father's murder — is constantly felt; he is in some passages
tender and gentle, but the passion of love seems killed within him,
only to revive for a brief space at the hour of the unhappy girl's
burial : there, indeed, it flashes out with his ' J'egale en amour
quarante mille freres,' and fills with tenderness his question to
Laertes, * Pourquoi m'en voulez-vous ? je vous aimais, mon frere.'
Once more it appears in the emotional accents of his address to
Laertes at the opening of the fencing scene which closes the acting
tragedy ; but that is all. As for the fencing scene itself, which is
always a subject of special interest, I am not well qualified to say
more about it than that it is a brilliant assault of arms contrived by
the well-known master of fencing M. Vigeant, who has studied the
fencing of all ages and countries and has endeavoured to give to
this scene something of chronological accuracy, or at least plausi-
bility ; whether or not he has succeeded in this attempt it is certain
that M. Mounet Sully's well-proportioned figure and commanding
manner appear to great advantage in the combat, and that he and
his opponent, M. Duflos, are both thoroughly skilled in the use of
their weapons ; one or two of their passes were indeed encored by
some enthusiasts in the art on the first night of representation.
The fencing scene with the death of Hamlet, Laertes, and the King
and Queen brings the tragedy to its conclusion on the stage in
Paris as in London, but this is done not without regret. M. Meurice
would prefer that Shakespeare's ending with the entrance of
Fortimbras should be given, and inserts the scene in an appendix
to the acting copy with the expression of a hope that before long it
may be found possible to restore it to the stage by condensations
elsewhere. It is difficult to see where such condensations could be
effected ; not in the text assuredly. There is only one short dialogue,
between Ophelia and Hamlet, most injudiciously interpolated by the
translator, which could well be spared, and perhaps the tragedy
would move on with an easier flow if some changes of scene were
suppressed. The scenery, however, is of the best ; the palace of the
early Renaissance period is solid and grandiose, and its interior
apartments are rich and characteristic.

The awe which attends the apparitions of the Ghost is not, as
usual, felt by Hamlet alone, for there is a sense of the supernatural
excited in the spectators by the manner of his appearances. This
result is obtained by a contrivance which the French call a trans-
parence metallique, and which is probably some kind of wire gauze

812 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

behind which the Ghost moves and lives and has his being, with a
strong electric light thrown upon him. The arrangement is valuable
in diminishing the solidity of the apparition and the sense of
familiarity with the features of the player, while it also gives some-
thing of a far-off tone to the voice. The excellent elocution and
deportment of M. Maubant, who plays the Grhost, assist the illusion
thus produced.

With regard to the general costuming of the tragedy, it is rich
and in accordance with the Renaissance style of the palace, but though
handsome in material and in colour it is stiff in outline and heavy in
action. Hamlet's dress, however, does not strictly keep to the
fashion ; it is plain and tight-fitting and of a dead black, with only
one ornament, the miniature portrait of his father, attached to a
silver chain ; it is becoming to the wearer. Almost all the characters
are well acted. The King and Queen, M. Silvain and Madame Agar,
are personages who might well occupy a throne. M. Grot, one of the
most distinguished comedians of France, gives an amusing eccen-
tricity to the character of Polonius, which is, however, the eccentricity
of a gentleman. Laertes is spirited without noise ; Horatio is
efficient and a gentleman ; the falling off in the cast is the character
of Ophelia. In selecting Mile. Keichemberg to play this part her
pretty golden hair, the girlish tones of her voice, and her skill as a
singer probably influenced the management; but these attributes
are not enough, and Mile. Reichemberg, clever and agreeable in the
pretty ways and light vivacity of an ingenue, has nothing to give to
a character which demands poetry and pathos : she is overweighted
and seems frightened throughout ; her movements are constrained,
and her dress, which is a departure from the fashion of the rest of
the company, is unbecoming both in shape and colour. In the tra-
ditional white robes of the mad scene she is seen to more advantage,
and her songs are well given.

It remains to be said that the regular stage version of a meek
and timid Ophelia seems to me at variance with the poet's idea.
His Ophelia is surely a girl of an enthusiastic spirit : she follows
her fancy without any reference to her father's will, although the
habit of the time was one of strict filial submission; she grants
secret interviews to her1 lover the Prince, so that her brother takes
alarm lest her passion should betray her and carry her too far ; in
taking his farewell he presses this upon her, and hoping to win her
compliance by exciting her suspicion, he speaks of the trifling of
Hamlet's favour, which he calls the perfume and suppliance of a
minute, no more

Her reply, ' No more but so,' is given in such a tone that Laertes
feels it necessary to speak at more length and with more circum-
spection.

' Think it no more,' he says, softening with the fear of driving

1886

THE 'HAMLET' OF THE SEINE.

813

her on to excess by too hot an opposition ; e perhaps he loves you
now,' and goes on to describe Hamlet's position ; he may not carve
for himself, he says, and if he has a fancy for her he may, seeing her
passion, use it. for her undoing ; he adds to this an exhortation to
keep

Within the rear of her affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire,

words which could only be suggested to a brother by the passionate
temperament of his sister.

Her reply is caustic, while it affects compliance. She says —

I will the effect of this good lesson keep,
but she adds with fine irony a sharp retort : —

But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whilst, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own read.

' Oh, fear me not,' answers Laertes, but adds, ' I stay too long,' not
willing to hear any more such pungent remarks. And again with
Polonius she is not the docile daughter who lives only to obey, but
holds an avowed difference of opinion as to Hamlet's disposition, and
without violence but with a good deal of resolution holds her own.

It is the intensity of her passion which, unable to bear the seeming
indifference of Hamlet, leads her into the base business of playing the
spy upon him — anything rather than not see him, anything rather than
the endurance of his neglect — and when by the death of her father she
is driven mad it is not only because she has lost Polonius but because
Hamlet has killed him. The character of her insanity is not an
approach to imbecility, which the stage is apt to make it, but the
delirium of a thwarted passion.

The scene of Ophelia's burial is very well given at the Theatre
Franfais : it is not too long drawn out ; the painful details are not
forced ; the maimed rites are carefully observed ; the gravedigger is
allowed to have his say and his song.

On the whole M. Meurice has shown remarkable ability as a
dramatic translator, for there are few undertakings so laborious in the
attempt and so disheartening in the result as that of converting the
poetry of one nation into the poetry of another. The sense may be
subtly rendered, but how is the sound of it to be captured ? Where
is the music ? It refuses to be torn from its birthplace to charm
another land. But if the translator of a great work expresses the
thoughts of his author with real fidelity, with force and truth, then
he bestows a great boon upon his countrymen. Such a gift M. Paul
Meurice has afforded them in his version of Hamlet. It is generally
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3 L

814 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

faithful (with the exception of the lamentable interpolated scene
already mentioned), it is in some passages vigorous, and it is altogether
dramatic : it has cast off some conventionalities of the French stage
and is courageous without swagger. M. Meurice has had to wait forty
years for the realisation of his desire to have the play of his predi-
lection performed in a wholly worthy manner at the great national
theatre, while the tragedian who has ensured its success has brooded
for fourteen years over his ardent wish to play Shakespeare's Hamlet.
The two separately watched and wondered with something more like
resignation than hope, but while they waited the trammels of French
literature were gradually loosened, the pedantries of the Academy
were cast aside, and so at last it happened that the right author and
the right actor came together and in conjunction obtained for the
Theatre Francais one of its best triumphs.

JULIET POLLOCK.

1886

815

BUYING NIAGARA.

I HAVE been asked to write the story of the movement to preserve
Niagara, and I gladly comply, believing that all students of politics
and the actions of public opinion on measures will find in the movement
which has led to the purchase of Niagara Falls by the State of New
York another instance of the power of mere sentiment among men.
The machinery of government in the United States is rarely used to
procure a result belonging so entirely to the realm of elevated senti-
ment ; and yet it is only by appeal to a legislative body that any
help can be obtained for such purposes from the State. An occa-
sional appropriation for a statue or some other work of art is about
the limit to which a Legislature will go, unless the object is distinctly
of an educational character and has a very practical side to it. But
away down deep in the Anglo-Saxon breast is always to be found the
element of sentiment ; stronger perhaps because so deeply hidden,
and capable too of great results and great sacrifices when once
aroused. The trouble is to arouse it, and this, in the practical, active
life of the great Kepublic, is a matter of difficulty ; certainly it re-
quires time and patience to do it.

Nowhere in the world is private generosity for public purposes
greater than in the United States, and it was not an impossibility
to imagine that the preservation of Niagara might have been secured
by the contributions of private individuals ; yet the evident pro-
priety of the work to be done being carried out by the State, pre-
vented even the consideration of the former method. Besides, it
was thought by those who had the matter in charge that an appeal
to the sentiment, to the patriotism and pride of the people would
not be in vain, and on that principle the battle was fought and the
victory won. Never before had an attempt to use the machinery
of government on so large a scale for such a purpose been tried ;
but the very magnitude and grandeur of the sentiment, so to speak,
would, it was thought, have an attraction for our people, who have
an inborn interest for anything great or large; and, moreover,
there was from the very beginning no sordid element to degrade or
modify the ideal set before the public by the labourers in the move-

3L2

816 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

ment. Time has justified our faith: the work has been accomplished,
and the million and a half which the State of New York has given
for this purpose is not regretted by even the small part of its citizens
who originally opposed the appropriation. On the contrary, the pride
of the people is universal in the fact that they themselves have made
the Falls of Niagara free to all mankind for all time to come. But
to secure all this it was first necessary to obtain an expression of
public opinion, and that not a doubtful one : and this is the way we
went about it, for we never doubted for a moment that, this expression
once obtained, success would follow as a matter of course.

About eight or nine years ago attention was called to the condi-
tion of affairs at Niagara, but not until 1879 did the matter take any
public form. During that year the Governor of New York, as the
result of an interview had with the Governor-General of Canada,
sent a message to the Legislature of the State regarding the abuses
existing at the Falls. The result of this message was a resolution
by the Legislature directing the Commissioners of the State Survey
to inquire, consider, and report regarding the matter. Such a report
was duly made, and in the following year the movement received
additional stimulus by the presentation of a notable memorial to
the Governor of New York and the Governor-General of Canada,
asking that immediate steps be taken to preserve the scenery at the
Falls. The first bill to secure these results was also at 'this time
introduced into the Legislature of New York, but did not pass. A
second bill was brought in the next year, but met with the same
fate.

In 1883, however, another effort was made, and an Act was
finally passed. To secure its passage an association was formed
called the Niagara Falls Association, which had for its object * to
promote legislation and other measures for the restoration and pre-
servation of the natural scenery at Niagara Falls, in accordance with
the plan proposed by the Commissioners of the State Survey in their
special report on the subject.' It was through this society that the
expression of public opinion was obtained. The first move made was
to secure the support of the press ; and right willingly and steadfastly
was -this support given to the very end. Indeed, it was through fear
of this mighty engine of a free people that more than one legislator
gave his vote for the bill, and the writer recollects a fellow-member
of the Legislature telling him he had voted for the measure solely
because he was afraid * the newspapers would hammer the life out
of him if he voted t'other way.'

Strong opposition to the bill came from certain quarters, and
in some of the agricultural counties of the State the fear of
additional taxation to meet the cost of the proposed Eeservation
induced the members from those counties to oppose the bill. No

1886 BUYING NIAGARA. 817

opposition was made to the bill per se, though there were members
who considered the whole thing a bit of sentimental nonsense
got up by a lot of rich people in the large cities. In many cases,
however, these gentlemen were undeceived by their constituents,
whom they found on inquiry to favour the proposition and to be
very much more alive to the advantage and benefit to the State to
be derived from the scheme than the aforesaid legislators dreamed
of. Another difficulty to be overcome was the indifference on the
part of the members, and the trouble always attendant on any effort
to obtain the active support for a measure ' without any politics in
it/ or which lacks the interest which attaches to legislation in the
interests of corporations. Finally, however, the measure came out
of committee in the Lower House, and, after a debate of some length,
passed and went to the Senate. The margin, however, was a narrow
one, the vote in the Assembly being barely enough. Sixty-five
affirmative votes were required, and the measure received but sixty-
seven in a possible hundred and twenty eight.

Altogether this first engagement was the hardest, and promised
to be more difficult to win than any of the subsequent combats of the
campaign. Public sentiment had not yet declared itself so emphati-
cally as it did later on, and there were at this time honest opponents
to the bill who carried many votes with them by the arguments
that the State might become involved by such legislation for an
unknown, and perhaps enormous* amount, and that the measure was
merely the entering wedge for a great and lasting extravagance.
Enemies of the scheme made use of the word 'park,' commonly
applied at the beginning of the movement, to show that all manner
of costly public works were contemplated at Niagara. Groat Island
was to be covered with statues and fountains, roads and paths laid
out, bridges built, and summer-houses and other buildings erected,
a mass of useless officials employed, and the Falls converted into a
sort of State Cremorne. In the Senate the passage of the bill was
delayed for some time by the committee having the bill in charge
failing to report it, and matters began to look serious, when the
assistance of a certain well-known political leader was sought, and
through his influence the bill was at once reported and presently
passed.

This leader was the last person whom many would have thought
willing to give it any help, and yet not only at this time but after-
wards no one gave us more important support or more entirely
sympathised with our efforts, and this, too, purely from a great love
for nature inherent in the man — from, in fact, a mere sentiment, added
perhaps to the sound common sense for which he is recognised by
those who know him. As was generally expected, the Governor of
the State, Cleveland — now President of the United States — at once

818 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

signed the bill, and appointed the commissioners who were to carry
its provisions into effect. These were, that the commissioners
should select the lands at the Falls which in their opinion would
carry out the plan of restoring the scenery at Niagara and renewing
the charm and beauty of the spot so marred and defaced by the
erection of unsightly buildings, &c. A selection was accordingly
made of some 106 acres, including Groat Island and the adjacent
smaller islands, what is known as Prospect Park, and a strip of
land on the mainland ; the result being that a Reservation complete
in itself, and embracing all the American side of the Falls, was
secured.

In compliance with the terms of the Act the commissioners then
proceeded to have said lands condemned by due process of law, and,
when this was completed, made their report to the State, and had
a bill introduced into the Legislature of 1885 appropriating the
sum needed to pay for the Reservation. The success so far had
been in every way gratifying to the friends of the measure ; but, as
we all saw, the greatest difficulty lay in finally securing the money
to complete the work, and with this knowledge every effort was
made to impress upon the Legislature the propriety of voting the
needed amount.

When this matter was first agitated, our opponents, as has been
already stated, took the ground that the cost of the proposed Reser-
vation would be very large, and that the commissioners, who were
given unlimited powers in the way of the amount of property to be
taken, might involve the State in a great expense, and that the
scheme would cost anything from five to twenty millions. .It added
much to the strength of our position then, to learn that the total cost
of the Reservation proposed came to something under a million and
a half of dollars, or just about what we had originally given as
the probable cost. As an offset, however, to this advantage, the
majority of the Legislature of 1885 was Republican, and, in the face
of the coming election for Governor of the State, the politicians of
that party were loth to increase the amount of appropriations for the
year, believing the people might hold them responsible for any result-
ing additional taxation.

The attempt to make Niagara free to every one, rich and poor
alike, was thoroughly democratic, and consequently many of the
leaders in the Democratic party had given the scheme a very cordial
support from the start, a Democratic Governor having first called
the attention of the Legislature to the matter, and another Demo-
cratic Governor having signed the bill appointing the commis-
sioners. Besides, the then Governor was also a Democrat, and should
he in like manner approve of the bill appropriating the money to
secure the Reservation, the people might conclude that it was to the

1886 BUYING NIAGARA. 819

Democratic party in the State that they were indebted for what a
large majority were in favour of and eagerly wished to see con-
summated. Altogether the prospect for securing the money was not
brilliant, and, to add to our doubts of obtaining it, the appropriations
for the year were certain to be unusually large, owing to sudden
imperative events in another direction — namely, for the maintenance
of the State prisons. Indeed, one of our warmest friends and also
one of the most prominent men in the Kepublican party, a man
wielding great influence, wrote to the author of this article early in
the session that, after a careful survey of the ground, he had little
hopes of any success. Some of us, however, still believed that public
sentiment, if its expression in an unmistakable way could be brought
out, would force the Legislature to vote the money, and to that end
the Niagara Falls Association and its friends bent all their endeavours.
As before, we started with the press on our side, and with but few
exceptions every newspaper in the State continued to give us its
help and support. The unanimity of the press had its effect; and
when, besides, members began to receive petition after petition from
their constituents asking that the bill be passed, matters began to
have a different look. Together with the men who, though belong-
ing to one or the other of the great political parties, act inde-
pendently on measures of general interest, the Legislature always
contains many members who are merely the representatives of
certain leaders in different parts of the State, and there are also
other members who are generally willing to act in compliance
with the wishes of some great corporation. The change to be
made at Niagara promised to greatly increase the travel to that
point, and so it was easy to secure the influence of the great railroad
corporations of the State, and through them the votes of certain
members. The political leaders who had helped in the passage of
the first bill again gave us their support, and it was of the most
valuable and positive sort. Finally the appropriation was duly voted
in the Assembly, or Lower House, with but trifling opposition.
When, however, the bill reached the Senate there were found to be
powerful obstacles to its further progress, and an evident desire to
smother the matter and * kill it ' in a quiet way, as by this time
public opinion had become so entirely aroused, and had begun to
express itself so emphatically, that but few politicians, however much
opposed to the bill, dared to openly face it, ' or go on the record '
against it. This attempt to smother and delay the measure was
defeated by the friends of the bill exposing in the open Senate what
was being done by its enemies, and so calling down upon these
latter the thunders of the press and the indignation of their respec-
tive constituencies. Such a pressure was brought to bear that the
bill came out of committee, and then passed the Senate with only

820 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

some four votes recorded against it. Indeed, many senators who had
in previous years discountenanced all attempts to preserve Niagara,
and ridiculed and opposed the scheme, now gave their votes for the
appropriation to redeem and save it.

To reach, however, this result a compromise had to be accepted, so
far as concerned the manner of raising the money to be used for the
payment of the Keservation, an arrangement which later on placed the
bill in a position of great danger. It would have been better to
vote the entire sum outright ; but the Senate were unwilling to do
this for an amount exceeding, say, a third of the total, and directed
the balance to be paid from the proceeds of bonds to be issued by
the State. Even under the State Constitution bonds are only to
be issued for some extraordinary purpose, and such issue is limited
to one million, or just the amount directed by the Niagara bill to be
raised this way. The change made by the Senate was promptly agreed
to by the House, the latter acting throughout with great favour to the
bill.

Mention has already been made of the flood of petitions which
poured into Albany. Besides the petitions there came to every member
of both Houses private letters written by half a dozen of the most
influential citizens of both parties residing in the different Assembly
and Senatorial districts, and these letters were obtained by circulars
sent out by the Niagara Falls Association asking the individuals to
whom the circulars were addressed to write such letters. Thousands
of such circulars were distributed; and the association had also a
gentleman acting as their agent, who for two winters went through
the different counties of the State and personally visited the editors
of newspapers and other influential citizens residing therein, ex-
plaining the proposed legislation, and asking for their influence and
help. Numbers of the clergy of all denominations worked actively
for us, and great was the help and assistance which came from the
women of the State : the vote of more than one member of the
Legislature was secured by the influence of his wife or children.
Another sort of opposition came from a few of the landowners at
Niagara, who were not over-willing to have their property taken by
the State, as, incident to the use of the water-power, they were
enabled to carry on a lucrative manufacturing business, and they
well knew that for such water-power the State would not pay any-
thing. It is true that this did not deter them from making claims
of this sort, when the lands were condemned, of millions of dollars,
which, however, were all thrown out by the arbitrators, as, luckily,
these water rights had never been granted or ceded by the State,
the original owner of the lands, and from whom all the titles to the
property came. The opposition of these property-owners in the
first stages of the enterprise was very active, and led to a clause

1886 BUYING NIAGARA. 821

being inserted in the original Act limiting the time in which the
State was to pay for the property condemned. This limit expired
on the 1st of May, 1885, and had the bill appropriating the money
not been signed by the Governor by that date the whole matter
would have fallen to the ground and the movement to preserve
Niagara received a set-back which might perhaps have for ever
prevented its success. It was with the knowledge of this fact that
our enemies in the Senate tried to delay action on the bill, and
they so far succeeded that the bill went to the Governor at, so to
speak, the last hour.

Great indeed, then, was the anxiety of all concerned when the
Governor, to whom the Legislature sent the bill only ten days before
the expiration of the limit of time referred to, did not immediately
sign it. Allusion has already been made to a compromise in regard
to the manner of raising the money. Governor Hill, who had
succeeded Governor Cleveland, had grave doubts as to the propriety
of the issue of bonds spoken of, and it was only at the last moment
that he concluded that for the purpose intended there was no conflict
with the meaning of the Constitution, and signed the bill just as the
limit of time was about expiring. Pending the Governor's decision,
some of the ablest and most distinguished lawyers of the State
presented opinions in favour of the bill, and personally waited on the
Governor to argue the propriety of his making the measure a law.

An incident which occurred at this time will show how greatly
every one was interested in the measure, and how strong the sentiment
had become in its favour. One of the foremost members of the bar
had been asked by the Governor what his opinion was as to the
constitutionality of an issue of "Bonds except for public defence or
such like emergency, but without making any reference to the
Niagara bill. In reply, the lawyer told the Governor that he had
grave doubts of the constitutionality of any such legislation ; but,
learning a few days later what the bill was the Governor had
reference to, he went immediately to the latter and strongly urged
him to sign the Act, on the ground that the money was for an extra-
ordinary purpose, and intended for the benefit of the entire people ;
in fact, the propriety of such an issue of bonds as was proposed was
recognised in the character of the purpose for which the proceeds of
the issue were to be used.

At the last moment the bill was signed, and perhaps no executive
Act was ever received in the State with more complete and unanimous
approval. Its passage secured for all time, not only for its own
citizens, but for the nation and the world at large, the preservation
of the greatest natural object of its kind, the Falls of Niagara. It
had come to pass that the enjoyment of this wonderful gift of nature
had been greatly impaired by the rapid progress of disfigurements —

822 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

indeed, its speedy destruction was threatened, and the State did not
step in a moment too soon in order to retain this great possession
for the ever-constant pleasure and delight of its people. The petition
of the people addressed to their representatives asked that Niagara
be made for ever free, and that its beauties be made accessible to rich
and poor alike.

In spite of many obstacles this had at last been done, and solely
through the power of sentiment. The love of nature and of the
beautiful, patriotism and pride in retaining unimpaired this great
wonder of the universe, had prevailed over indifference and self-
interest. It is true that the Constitution of the State forbids the
appropriation of public money for any but public uses ; but it was to
be seen whether the meaning of the words ' public uses ' was to be
decided in a broad or a narrow sense, and whether the indulgence of a
great and sublime sentiment was to be denied the people, as it were,
by themselves. Under the administration of an enlightened despot,
the arts may nourish, and all that belongs to the sentiment of beauty
be preserved and fostered, without trouble or difficulty. But amidst
a free people the success of such a movement as has resulted in the
preservation of the Falls of Niagara could only be brought about
by an all-prevailing sentiment, touching all classes of society, a
sentiment sure to carry all before it when once aroused, and which
voices to its servants orders which they never dare to disobey. But
a short period was necessary for the transfer to the State of the
property at the Falls previously selected by the commissioners, and
on the 15th of July, 1885, the Reservation was formally opened to
the public by appropriate ceremonies, and the great cataract declared
free for ever to all mankind.

The commissioners immediately proceeded to the removal of the
many unsightly buildings, &c., which have so long disfigured the
surroundings of the Falls. Already nearly all of such eyesores have
disappeared, and the change made far exceeds expectations. Those
who went to Niagara but a year ago, were they to go again to-day
would hardly recognise the place so far as the American side is con-
cerned. The change has extended to the municipal affairs of
Niagara village, where a most complete reform has taken place, and
which will be sensibly felt by any traveller visiting there now and
having occasion to have to do with one of its far-famed hackmen and
cabdrivers. The freedom of the Falls and the removal of all charges
have greatly increased the number of visitors, the number last season
being many times greater than ever before. With all this great
concourse of people arrests are hardly ever made, and, without any
police deserving of such a name, the commissioners readily guard
the Reservation and preserve the public peace. The success of our
efforts has had its effects on our Canadian neighbours ; and the time

1886 BUYING NIAGARA. 823

is not distant when both sides of the Falls will have been secured
from any possible injury in the future. The province of Ontario,
which shares with New York the possession of the great cataract,
has already through its commissioners proceeded to make a Re-
servation like ours. The lands have been selected and condemned,
and it will not be long before both sides of the Niagara River are, as
they should be, public domain, and thus the work of saving Niagara,
and preserving for ever its great charm and beauty, will be realised
in all its completeness.

J. HAMPDEN ROBB

(ex-State-Senator).

824 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

MASSAGE.

IN the present day, when we hear so much of the wear and tear of
daily work and worry, and when the preservation and restoration of
health is of supreme importance to those who take the foremost
rank in the battle of life, it may not be unprofitable to cast a
glance on the means employed by the nations of the Orient and
of Antiquity to develop and maintain the vigour of the body.

The History of Massage, which of late years has been employed
with wonderful success as a cure for many ailments, has been written
by Dr. Hiinerfauth, of Homburg, and, in the hope that some hints may
be useful, I have translated extracts from his comprehensive work.

The expression ' massage ' is derived, according to Pierry (Dic-
tionary of Medical Science), from a Greek word signifying * to rub ' ;
according to Savary (Letters on Egypt} its derivation is from the
Arabic word ' mass,' to press softly. In England a process of some-
what the same character is known as shampooing. It seems certain
that massage was practised by the Indians and the Chinese many
centuries before the birth of our Saviour. It was combined with
hygienic gymnastics. The Brahmins exercised the art of healing ;
the priests of Buddha are known to have acquired much of their
power over their people by their skill in medicine. Sir William
Jones, the great Oriental linguist, discovered fragments of the third
sacred book of the Brahmin period, entitled The Knowledge of Life,
which contained many secrets of Indian medicine. An extract from
Daily's work states that when Alexander the Great penetrated as far
as India, in the year 337 before Christ, his soldiers suffered much
from the bites of serpents, for which no cure was known by the
Greeks. Alexander had gathered round him the best Indian doctors,
and he proclaimed to the army that any who had been bitten must
come to the royal tent to be cured. These Indian doctors were in
great repute : illnesses were not of frequent occurrence in those
delightful climates, but any who were sick resorted to the wise men,
or Brahmins, who cured them by wonderful or, as they professed,
supernatural means. It has been ascertained that massage and
shampooing were among the remedies employed by them.

1886 MASSAGE. 825

The ' Law of Manou ' prescribed diet, washing, baths, rubbing
and anointing with oil, as religious exercises.

In 1854 an account was published of a German merchant, who
had been treated in Stockholm by medical gymnastics, and who made
a journey to Calcutta, and went through a course of massage and
exercises there, in order to become an authority on the subject.
He afterwards founded an athenaeum for rational gymnastics in Berlin.

The gymnastic exercises of the Indians consist of (1) wrestling,
(2), of what we should call boxing, (3) stick, or sword, exercise.
They also practise movements for rendering the limbs supple, and
manipulations of various sorts. Before the Indians begin their
exercises, they cower on the earth, and by turns rub each other with
the mud from the delta of the Ganges when they can obtain it. All
the muscles of their bodies are pressed and kneaded. When Indians
are unwell, they frequently employ a cure called chamboning ; the
whole of the patient's body is gently kneaded, beginning with the
upper extremities, descending to the feet.

Dr. Stein, of Heidelberg, who spent some years in the Dutch
medical service in Java, writes that massage is practised there, as in
almost all the Dutch colonies of the Indian Ocean. It is known as
Pidjet-ten, and it is also employed in the Society, Sandwich, Fiji, and
Tonga Islands. Dr. Emerson, a native of the Sandwich Islands, says
it is there called Lomi-Lomi, and is performed either over the whole
or part of the body, usually by old women. It consists in rubbing
and kneading, and may vary from the gentlest stroke to the most
powerful grip. It is considered as a high mark of honour for a
host to perform this operation foflris guest, or to receive this atten-
tion from him. No pain is inflicted. Occasionally the natives lie flat
on the earth, and let their children trample on them. In an account
of the Isle of Tonga, it is related that when people are suffering from
great fatigue three or four little children are employed to trample on
the body of the patient as he lies on the grass. Massage is
frequently applied to the forehead, or the top of the head, in those
islands, with excellent results.

In Forster's account of Cook's travels in Tahiti, we read that the
friendly inhabitants rubbed the travellers' limbs in order to refresh
them after their fatigues.

The Chinese are supposed to have learnt the use of gymnastic
exercises from the Indians, and the subject was mentioned in the
most ancient of their books, the Cong-Fou or Science of Limng. The
Chinese added the use of medicinal plants to the treatment of
illness by rubbing and gymnastic exercises. The Egyptians were
and are proficients in the art of manipulation, anointing with oil
and friction being part of the cure employed. The Greeks em-
ployed gymnastics and massage, in order to preserve health as well
as to restore it.

826 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

Pythagoras taught his disciples to practise moderation, to use
vegetable diet and gymnastic exercises.

The gymnasiums and palaestriums of the Greeks were famous.
Plato writes, ' The object of gymnasiums is to instruct youths and
men how to preserve health, and keep their frames in good condition.'

Before the Greeks took part in the national games, they had to
undergo a course of preparation — bathing, friction, anointing, and
also rubbing with sand. Fine sand from the Nile was preferred, and
was imported from Egypt for the purpose ; there were many rules for
carrying out the process properly, and it was performed in various
ways.

Among the many editions of the works of Hippocrates, there is a
French one by Littre, in which the following passage occurs : —

* A physician must possess experience of many subjects, among
others of massage.'

Among the Eomans, as indeed every child knows, the constant
use of baths, followed by friction and anointing with oil, was
customary. In illness, rubbing with warm oil, other kinds of friction,
and ' movement cures,' were used. Asclepiades also recommended
exercise and friction. Celsus, the author of eight books on the
science of healing, took for his motto ' The best medicine is to take
no medicine.' In inflammation of the brain, if he wished to induce
sleep, he ordered rubbing for a considerable time (would this be
animal magnetism ?). He also advises rubbing to cure acute pains in
the head, though not during an attack, and recommends friction
to strengthen weak limbs.

Celsus lays much stress on passive movement for invalids. ' The
gentlest is exercise in voyaging on a ship, either in harbour or on a
river. If being driven in a carriage is too fatiguing, he recommends
the invalid to be carried on a couch or in a chair, and advises that the
patient should be rocked in bed if too feeble to rise. Galen, who lived
in the second century after Christ, approved highly of massage and
gymnastics, but he did not advise athletics. He ordered friction in
the evening, to remove fatigue. The body was to be rubbed with a
woollen cloth, afterwards with oil till the surface became red, and
then. with the bare hands in various directions. Eufus of Ephesus,
who lived in the reign of Trajan, writes, ' Women and maidens should
sing and dance, not only to do honour to the gods, but in order to pre-
serve their health.' He adds, ' It is important that physicians should
not confine their attention to the bodily health, but should do all
they can to develop the mental strength and well-being of children
and young people, of men, and even of old men.'

We must pass over notices of many treatises that appeared during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, only remarking that Hoffman,
in 1708, seems to have advocated the principles that govern the
German schools of gymnastics in the nineteenth century.

1886

MASSAQE.

827

Hoffman wrote, that the conditions under which health is to be
maintained are simple : exercise of various kinds, in alternation
with rest, cold water and strict attention to diet. One of his maxims
was, ' that work and tiring exercise are universal panaceas.'

Between the years 1756 and 1786, Tronchin, a scholar of
Boerhaave's, was in great repute in Paris ; he was physician to the
Duke of Orleans and to Voltaire, and it was owing to his advice that
Voltaire went to live at Ferney. People came to consult him from
distant countries ; his success was extraordinary. His system con-
sisted in ordering friction, movements of various characters, exercise,
long walks, and certain precautions in diet.

Fuller wrote, about the same period, on the value of exercise in
the cure of various illnesses, and especially in hypochondriacal and
hysterical affections. He also laid great stress on riding ; indeed, he
established a riding cure, which had great success among very dis-
tinguished persons. Tissot, of Lausanne, wrote a treatise on the
health of the learned, strongly impressing on the studious and
sedentary the duty of exercise ; he advises games of billiards, ball,
shuttlecock, hunting, shooting, swimming, wrestling, dancing, leaping,
riding, walking, travelling, exercising the voice, speaking, reading
aloud, declaiming and singing. Here Dr. Hiinerfauth remarks, that
many great physicians in old times considered reading aloud, declaim-
ing and singing highly beneficial to the general health. Plutarch
mentions that daily exercise of the voice conduces greatly to health.

A system of gymnastics was established in Sweden by Peter Ling,
between 1805 and 1839. He was the son of a pastor, and devoted
his life to the study of exercises"for the development of the human
frame. Swedish exercises are much used now in England.

Massage and gymnastic exercises have more votaries in France
than in England. The love of sport that seems inherent in English
people is supposed to have obviated the necessity for a widely ex-
tended system of gymnastics. Now, however, gymnastic exercises
and musical drill are being introduced largely, and have been much
appreciated, not only by men and boys, but by women and girls.

The system of massage practised by Dr. Metzger has drawn
crowds to Amsterdam, and has afforded relief to great numbers of
sufferers, several reigning sovereigns — among others the Empress
of Austria — being among his patients. Dr. Hiinerfauth carries out
the same system at Homburg with equal success, and a member of
his family devotes much of her time to relieving from charity the
sufferings of the peasants.

It is necessary to beware of masseurs who have no real know-
ledge of the art, as disastrous results follow from the violent treat-
ment to which ignorant persons subject their patients. Dr. Hiiner-
fauth deprecates massage by machinery, as he considers that much
delicacy is necessary in treating the complicated nervous system of

828 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

the human frame. It is curious to find how much benefit many
sufferers derive from a revival of the same remedies practised in by-
gone ages and in distant climes. Truly, there is nothing new under
the sun.

It has occurred to me that women might, after being properly
instructed, find the practice of massage a useful and profitable
employment. I believe the usual time employed at one sitting is
from twenty minutes to half an hour. To relieve, for instance, the
oppression produced by irregularity of the action of the heart, gentle
continuous rubbing would be practised for ten minutes from the left
to the right side in a downward direction, then from right to left.
The patient should lie on a reclining board, and the masseuse stand
so as to be able to rub firmly, though without inflicting the least pain.
To calm nervous agitation and to induce sleep, it has been found that
rubbing the spine is an almost certain remedy, and sufferers from
neuralgia have often derived great benefit from massage.

Friction with pine oil is a favourite cure for rheumatic affections
in Germany, and also for bronchial and throat complaints. The aro-
matic, astringent fragrance of the oil, which is made from resinous
portions of the fir-trees, has a salutary effect in pulmonary cases.

I happened lately to read an account of an institute in London,
whence * masseurs ' are sent to private houses. I know nothing of
the system carried out there, but I see that four guineas a week is
the charge for daily visits at the patient's own house.

Such an expense would be out of the question for most people, as a
course of massage should be continued for six weeks or two months.
Indeed, there are many invalids, of great position and wealth, who have
a masseuse attached to their households. Doubtless there are numbers
of women who would gladly practise this healing art for moderate
remuneration, and find much happiness in soothing pain and relieving
weariness.

JANETTA MANNERS.

829

A SUSPENDED CONFLICT.

IF the optimist views as to the prospects of the Establishment which
were expressed at the Wakefield Church Congress, and which are
greedily accepted by many Church defenders, are well founded, Mr.
Hubbard's article on the * Church and Parliament ' is another ex-
ample of ' Love's labour lost.' Indeed, this is an imperfect state-
ment of the case, for such work as his, if not helpful, is positively
mischievous. If it be true, as the President told the Church
Congress, that * stillness has followed the storm ' which raged so
fiercely only twelve months ago, it seems scarcely wise to do anything
which would rouse to fresh activity passions which were so disturbing
at the time and which it required so much effort to bring under
restraint. If the dogs are really sleeping it would surely be better
to let them lie.

Mr. Hubbard has probably formed a truer estimate of the situa-
tion. He is not deceived by appearances, and understands that the
conflict is only suspended, and suspended not because of the exhaustion
of the assailants or a successful sortie on the part of the garrison,
but simply because the attention of both parties has been diverted for
the time to another struggle, which has so complicated the relations of
political parties as to interfere with all schemes of reform. Noncon-
formists could not understand the panic of 1885 ; they are even more
puzzled by the buoyant confidence of 1886. When a bishop in his
presidential address tells a Church Congress that. ' the timid sheep of
the flock look wistfully down the muzzle of the monstrous culverin
of disestablishment zeal —

Nor war nor battle's sound
Is heard the world around' —

we can only suppose that he has been carried away by the fascination
of his own rhetoric. The danger of twelve months ago was to a large
extent conjured up by the heated imaginations of excited politicians
playing upon the fears of those who have a nervous consciousness of
the insecurity of their position. The real or assumed confidence by
which it has been succeeded is only the natural reaction from such
exaggerated alarms, and if it tend to engender a spirit of arrogance
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3M

830 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

towards opponents may easily be productive of far more injurious
results. There are, it must be confessed, signs that this may be the
case. Church defenders are not only over- confident, they indulge
in an insolence of triumph which is hardly wise.

The Bishop of Oxford is a controversialist whom even his most
determined opponent must respect, not more for his conspicuous
ability than for his uncompromising assertion of principle. He is
far too sagacious a man to suppose that the election of last winter
has settled the future of the Establishment, or even decided the fate
of that celebrated article in the ' Eadical Programme ' which roused
the indignation of Churchmen to so extreme a point. But even he
complains that * not a single word of that Programme has ever been
withdrawn, and that no apology for a very gross affront has been
offered to the great religious society of which we are members.'
From whom did his Lordship expect this act of humiliation ? . Surely
not from those who have in the most emphatic terms repudiated the
construction put upon the proposals which have come in for such
drastic criticism. On behalf of Nonconformists I can offer no
apology, because we have not been parties to any affront. We are
seeking to assert our own legitimate position in the nation of which
we are a part, and neither intend nor desire any injury to the ' great
religious society ' of which the Bishop is so distinguished a repre-
sentative. We hold that the political ascendency which it at present
enjoys is unjust to us, and therefore we seek to end it, but we believe
that what will be a gain to us will be no injury to the Episcopal
Church as a spiritual community. If our emphatic assurances on
this point are treated as insincere, it is we who have to complain of
' affront ' and are entitled to demand * apology.'

If, however, there be Eadicals who really wish to dissolve the
Church into atoms, and whose views were set forth in the ' Pro-
gramme,' it is scarcely to be supposed that they have renounced
them, still less that they will apologise for the advocacy of opinions
which they hold to be right. I venture to doubt, however, whether
the writer of that much-debated manifesto ever contemplated that
nefarious design which has been so freely imputed to him by Church
defenders. The Tory chief has admitted that there had been a
mistake as to one part of the ' Programme.' Since Mr. Jesse Collings
has, by a process which to outsiders seems little short of the miracu-
lous, been transformed into a friend of the Tory Government, it has
been discovered that he never intended to give every peasant * three
acres and a cow.' So the day may not be far distant when it will be
confessed that a similar mistake has been committed in relation to
the suggestion which has made so painful an impression upon the
mind of the Bishop of Oxford, and that nobody had ever formed
the insane conception of breaking up the Church of England. It
is to^be feared the Church defenders may not find much comfort in

1886 A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. 831

this forecast, since Mr. Jesse Ceilings is promised much of what he
did actually ask.

Is it not high time that, instead of talking about affronts and
apologies, some attempt should be made to get both at the real
meaning of the objectionable phrases in the * Programme ' and at the
exact significance of the document as representative of Noncon-
formist wishes ? I have never exchanged a word with the writer
upon the subject, but a common friend has assured me that no one
was more surprised than himself at the inferences which had been
deduced from his arguments. If the course of recent discussion
in relation to ecclesiastical endowments be closely followed, it is not
difficult to understand how the misunderstanding has arisen. The
contention of Church defenders for some time past — certainly since
the publication of Dr, Freeman's able treatise on Disestablishment
and Disendowment — has been that the Church is not a corporation,
but a number of separate corporations, and that to these the endow-
ments belong. Mr. Hubbard in the October number of this Eeview
insists again on this point.

Whether as ancient or modern endowments the gifts in buildings, in tithes, and
glebe lands were made not to the nation but to the Church in various localities and
at various times. The Church, it must be remembered, is not a corporation holding
lands or property : it has no funds of its own ; it is a society knit together by its
organisation, its laws of worship, order, and discipline ; but the actual property of
the Church is vested in the life interest of the various occupants of the several dio-
ceses, chapters, and parochial beneflces. Of these gifts the State or nation became
the trustee ; of these endowments it became the guardian.

The proposals in the * Programme ' are based upon this view.
If, it is argued, these endowments belong to separate corporations, it
must be with them, and not with the Church — which, as Mr. Hubbard
tells us, is not a * corporation holding lands or property ' — that the
State will have to deal, in case it should determine on the appro-
priation of these funds to purposes in which all the people will be
alike interested.

Following the lead of the Church defenders, the ' Kadical Pro-
gramme ' suggests a plan which would obviate the necessity for a
Church body such as was constituted by the Act which disestablished
the Irish Church. It may be that the proposal was not wise ; that
it pressed a principle to so unfair an extreme as to become an illus-
tration of the old maxim, ' Summum jus, summa injuria ; ' or, at all
events, that its action would press so severely upon the disendowed
Church that it would never be entertained unless the defeat of the
defenders of the Church had been so complete as to leave them
utterly powerless. All these are fair points to be taken in opposi-
tion ; and I must confess that to my own mind they have great
weight. If these objections can be reinforced by the further and
still stronger contention that the scheme would practically * dissolve

3M2

832 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

the Church into its atoms,' it is not only difficult to see how it could
be proposed with any hope of success, but positively incredible that
it could ever be suggested except by aggressive enemies of all
Churches and all forms of religion. There is no other party which
wishes to destroy or to injure the Episcopal Church ; and if it could
be shown that, however undesigned, this would be the practical effect
of a particular mode of disendowment it would probably be conclusive.
Church defenders have weakened their own defences when, instead
of dealing with these suggestions as matters of argument, they have
imputed to their opponents designs which they have not only
emphatically repudiated but which they could not have entertained
without proving themselves fit candidates for Bedlam.

We shall certainly never approach a rational discussion of the
points in debate if we are detained by a profitless controversy about
false issues. Mr. Hubbard tells us that ' the Church is a society
knit together by its organisation, its laws of worship, orders, and
discipline.' With these neither the Liberation Society nor any
Nonconformist Church desires to interfere. The question has relation
solely to political ascendency and State endowments. As regards
the latter, if Churchmen can maintain their own contention that the
property they hold is as much the private property of their Church
as the endowments of any Dissenting community, that point
would be removed out of the arena — Us finita est. We have no
intention of confiscating private property ; all that is sought is to
assert the right of the nation to control and enjoy a national in-
heritance. We are sufficiently answered if it can be shown that the
idea of such an inheritance is a mere dream ; and, for my own part,
I have never hesitated to say that I should not be disquieted if
this could be proved. In face of evidence which seems to prove the
very opposite I should of course object to receive the dictum of
those who are in possession of the disputed property as conclusive
on the question of right. If an impartial tribunal should, after
careful investigation, pronounce that the endowments created in
medieval times were settled ' to perpetuate the worship and service
of God upon definite creeds, formularies, organisation, and discipline,'
and that these t creeds, formularies, organisation, and discipline '
were those of the Church at present by law established, I should be
greatly surprised, but not concerned. I do not share the dread which
many have of the political influence of a free Church richly endowed.
Take what precautions you will, the power of the Episcopal Church
must be great so long as it carries on that ministry of truth and bene-
volence by means of which it has raised itself from the state of weak-
ness into which it had fallen at the commencement of the present
reign. That power may be increased by the enjoyment of a vast
ancestral estate, but that is not always the case with communities
any more than with individuals. In the rivalry of Churches in this

1886 A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. 833

country Congregationalists or Wesleyans have always to calculate on
having to contend against the influence of wealth as well as of fashion.
But in this kind of competition I am not profoundly interested.
Different Churches satisfy the varying needs of different classes and
temperaments, and they should be content to work side by side
without troubling themselves as to the statistical comparisons in
which some appear to delight. So long as in the metropolis there
are millions who have no apparent connection with any Church it is
the height of folly or something worse for one to envy the prosperity
of another, or seek to recruit its own ranks by proselytes from
a different form of Christianity rather than by converts rescued from
the depths of degradation and sin.

I am not anxious, therefore, about any sectarian advantage which
the Episcopal Church might derive from the retention of its endow-
ments, and the political danger seems to me to be to a large extent
visionary. This is really what I meant in my brief speech at
the conference in the City Temple, oa which Mr. Hubbarcl comments.
My desire was as far as possible to separate the question of Disesta-
blishment from that of Disendowment, not because I doubt as to the
justice of a certain measure of disendowment, or suppose that any
statesman would allow a Church which had lost its national status
and was exempt from national control to retain a national property,
but simpl}7 because I was desirous to free the question of religious
equality from the tangled discussions about property with which it
is continually mixed up, greatly to the confusion of public opinion
on the subject. It is surely possible to do this.

Mr. Hubbard says —

It may save trouble to agree at once with extreme Liberationists that there is
no distinction in principle between Church property of the earlier and the later
date. History records some two millions as State grants in later times to the con-
struction of churches. With that exception all Church property, of whatever kind
or period, stands precisely on the same footing (Church Defence Leaflet, No. 61,
sects. 5 & 7).

This is a very bold, sweeping assertion, and it needs to be sustained
by some much higher authority than a leaflet of the Church Defence
Association. That leaflet stands on precisely the same level as a
corresponding paper from the Liberation Society. Neither the one
nor the other is in itself more than a statement of claim which has
to be sifted by impartial judges. Can Mr. Hubbard believe that any
such authority would pronounce in favour of his view, or, indeed,
that it would be accepted by any intelligent man outside the circle
of those who share in his own ecclesiastical proclivities ?

Here, for example, is an endowment which was created in the
mediaeval period, and which bears in almost every clause of the deed
by which it was erected traces of the religious ideas which at that
time were held by the entire nation. Among other requirements it

834 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

specially provides for the saying of masses for the soul either of the
donor or of some one of his kindred or friends in memory of whom
the bequest is made. How is it that this fund has passed into the
possession of a Church which, to say the least, has departed far from
the doctrines and practices of the system for the support of which
this revenue was appropriated, and which in particular pronounces
these masses, for the saying of which provision is made, to be
' blasphemous fables ' ? In all such cases at all events the conditions
of the title are systematically violated. By what authority ? High
ecclesiastics and ecclesiastically disposed laymen may persuade them-
selves that the change was made by the Church itself. But waiving
all question as to the right of the Church to alter the terms of a
trust created, as we are continually told, not for the Church as a
corporation, but for the occupants of the various benefices, will it be
deliberately maintained that a decree of the Church would have had
authority apart from the sanction of Parliament ? How far the
Church proposed or sanctioned the changes is too wide a question
to be opened here. I content myself simply with saying that the
changes at the Reformation could not have been effected without
the action of Parliament. Successive Acts of Uniformity have pre-
scribed the conditions on which these ancient endowments shall be
held — conditions often in direct violation of the expressed intentions
of the founders. But for these Acts — that is, but for the direct
interference of the State — the masses must still have been cele-
brated, and the property have remained in the hands of a Church
to which our National Church is only an incarnation of heresy and
schism. All sorts of ingenious pleas have been urged to break the
force of this reasoning, but we may fairly decline to deal with them
until we are informed how an Act of Uniformity could have authority
except as derived from Parliament, or how such contempt could have
been put on the terms of trust except by the sanction of these Acts
of Uniformity.

It is surely an unwise policy for Church defenders to represent the
modern endowments of the Anglican Church as held on the same
tenure or as * standing on precisely the same footing.' Mr. Hubbard
speaks of the ' definite creeds, formularies, organisation, and disci-
pline ' for the perpetuation of which the endowments were given.
So far as regards those which have been created since the Act of
Uniformity this is perfectly true. Is it possible to assert that it is
equally true in relation to those of the ante-Reformation period ?
The continuity of the Church has always been a favourite point with
High Churchmen, and there are now not a few Evangelicals who,
in their zeal for the Establishment, are prepared to contend for it,
regardless of the bearing of their arguments upon the cause for
which they have always contended. But theories cannot alter
facts, and when Mr. Hubbard commits himself to categorical state-

1886 A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. 835

ments such as those before us, every man can test them. To plain
people, indeed, there seems something absurd in the suggestion that
the great statesmen and divines of the sixteenth century were all
mistaken, that the differences which they supposed to separate them,
and for the sake of which they fought even to the death, were mere
illusions, and that the Church of Elizabeth was the same as that of
Henry the Seventh. But if it be necessary to enter into a refutation
of a contention which seems to be contradicted by so many indis-
putable facts, Mr. Hubbard supplies us with the materials of our
answer. Do the Thirty-Nine Articles make no change in the Creed,
or the abolition of the mass and the introduction of prayers in the
language ' understanded by the common people ' no difference in the
formularies? Has the complete severance from Eome had no effect
on the organisation, or has the abolition of an enforced celibacy on
the clergy left the discipline unchanged ?

But there is another difference between these two classes of
endowments which Mr. Hubbard does not appear to understand.
He says, ' Mr. Rogers here contends that there was a time when the
Church was the nation, and when, therefore, what was given to the
Church was given to the nation, and may, therefore, be dealt with
by the nation at its discretion.' He misses the point of my argu-
ment and makes me responsible for a conclusion which I did not
deduce. I did not assert that the property was given to the nation,
but to the Church when it was conterminous with the nation. I was
not speaking of the right of the nation, but of the difference between
endowments given at a time when the Church and the nation were
one — that is, when there was only one form of religious faith and
worship, and all the people would share in the benefits of any funds
appropriated to its maintenance, and those of later times, when the
donors, with a full knowledge of the diversities of religious opinion
which exist and are represented by the several Churches, gave their
money for the support of the episcopal system. Mr. Hubbard will
take no heed of this difference in the religious circumstances of
these two periods. The Church is the National Church, has always
been so, and is so still. ' I ask,' he writes, apparently with some
indignation, ' when and by what statute did the religious society
known as the Church of England lose its legal designation as the
National Church ? ' His fervid sentiment is wasted. No one ever
made so ridiculous an assertion as that which he flouts with such
scorn, and there is a danger lest his anger should make him in-
cautious just where there is need for special care. He is wielding a
two-edged sword, and it may be turned with fatal effect upon himself.
The 'extreme Liberationist,' as he describes him, will rejoice to see
him urging so dangerous an argument. For this is precisely his own
contention, and it must be said that it is not easy to meet it on legal
or logical grounds. Like Mr. Hubbard he repudiates any attempt

836 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

to discriminate between ancient and modern endowments, maintaining
that all have been given to a national institution, and should the
nation decide that it is inexpedient to perpetuate the institution it
remains for it to determine also how the funds it enjoys shall be
appropriated. Such a conclusion will appear very monstrous to Mr.
Hubbard and all Church defenders, but they will not find it easy to
refute the reasoning when they accept the premisses. The difficulty of
his position is all the greater since the distinction between ancient
and modern endowments is of a moral, not of a legal character. As has
been shown again and again the law recognises no religious society
within the nation as the Church of England. Mr. Hubbard calls for
the statute which deprives the Church of its national character.
The very suggestion indicates a confusion of thought upon the
subject. It implies that the adherents of the Episcopal Church con-
stitute the Church of England. There could not be a greater fallacy,
as has been sufficiently proved by the difficulty of finding any defini-
tion for the term ' Churchman.' It follows that what has been given
r.o the Church of England has been given to the nation — given to it
in its ecclesiastical character and for a special purpose, but not the
less certainly made a part of the national estate and placed under the
national control. This is no doubt a drastic theory, but it is that
which Mr. Hubbard countenances when he insists that the entire
property of the Church stands on the same level. I cannot so regard
it. Where the line should be drawn is a legitimate subject for discus-
sion, but I feel that in equity we are bound to admit a distinction
between the endowments created at a time when there was but one
Church in the country, and that a Church differing on many vital
points from that which now exists, and those which have been
bestowed on the Church as at present constituted and in full view
of the changed conditions due to the existence of Dissenting com-
munities. There are grave objections to this more liberal view, and
the probabilities are that the longer the settlement is delayed the
more consideration will these objections receive. The growing senti-
ment in relation to endowments does not favour such a distinction,
and, however it may be demanded by the equity of the case, it will be
difficult to maintain in face of Mr. Hubbard's contention, should it
be accepted by Church defenders.

Mr. Hubbard insists on the practical difficulty of discriminating
between ancient and modern endowments, especially in the case
of the buildings. The present occupants of the cathedrals and parish
churches have spent large sums of money on the restoration of the
fabrics, some of which had fallen into decay. He asks, ' Will Mr.
Rogers respect the church and the parsonage of the parish in which
I live ? ' adding —

The church dated back some three centuries, and the parsonage, of very ancient
construction, I found in ruins. I rebuilt them both. Are they to be confiscated

188G A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. 837

in virtue of their ancient foundation, or are they to be respected in virtue of their
modern reconstruction ? If the latter, then I must warn Mr. Rogers that the abate-
ments from the structural value of the cathedrals, churches, and parsonages, which
constitute so attractive a figure in the Liberationist budget, will be so serious as to
leave a surplus value worth impounding peaceably but not worth fighting for.

It would not be easy to find a warning which would impress me
less. I have never paraded any ' attractive figures of the Liberation is fc
budget/ I know very little of them, and in candour I must add I
care still less. I am desirous that justice should be done and that
in every doubtful point the advantage should be given to the Church
now in possession. At the same time I believe that these old eccle-
siastical buildings are the property of the nation, and that no expen-
diture of money upon them by those who enjoy the use of them can
affect the question of right. Suppose a tenant of Mr. Hubbard's to
be so interested in his homestead, which had once been a manor
house, but had fallen into decay and neglect, that he undertook a
work of restoration, and executed it with the usual result in such
cases — a heavy cost to himself and a fierce controversy among all
antiquarian experts as to the real merit of his work. Would Mr.
Hubbard say that this expenditure of the tenant affected the rights
of the owner ? There is need for caution before an answer is given,
for Irish tenants and their lynx-eyed champions will not be slow to
take advantage of any principle that may be laid down for the benefit
of English Churchmen, and claim that it be applied to the case of
the farmers of Kerry or Galway.

It is not difficult to invent any number of problems of this kind
which may seem to defy solution^jDut they do not touch the merits
of the controversy, nor will they be found so difficult in practice as
they appear in theory. Nonconformists would be very unwise were
they tempted into any definite proposals for their settlement. That
is the business of practical statesmen. The utmost which can be
required of us is that we clearly state the principles to which we
desire to give effect. Those principles are all summed up in the
phrase ' religious equality,' which is intelligible enough to all who are
anxious to understand it. But no sooner is our claim presented than
we are met at once with a multitude of these curious questions as to
the disposal of the property at present held by the Established Church.
These are, no doubt, extremely interesting and important, but they
are no answer to the demand we make. We who do not conform to
the standard of the Church of England are nevertheless as much
citizens of this great empire as those who do. We are not Church-
men, but we are Englishmen and English Christians. The bishop
is not a more loyal subject of the Queen than the Nonconformist
minister. Mr. Hubbard is not a more earnest champion of the
rights and liberties of the people than the Dissenting member for
Bradford. In the sphere of what is described as religious work

838 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

Nonconformists are working for the same ends as Churchmen, and
without entering into invidious comparison as to numbers we may
say, without fear of contradiction, that we make a large contribution to
the forces which are at work on behalf of religion and morality in the
nation. Yet we are treated as though we had neither part nor lot
in the national Christianity, and are thus relegated to a position of
political inferiority solely because of our religious opinions. We are
tolerated, that is all, and in the idea of toleration there is injustice,
there is insult. It is not only, as some arguments apparently imply,
that a public provision is made for the teaching of one favoured
form of religion, but, what is a more serious grievance to us, that the
State recognises only one Church as a Church at all. Such in-
equality, we contend, is unjust. It breaks up the unity of the
nation, it brands us as schismatics, it creates endless heart-burnings
and controversies, and so it tells most injuriously on the work of
religion in the nation. We ask for reform. Surely it is no reply
to parade before us a number of difficulties, particularly those of a
financial character, which are certain to arise when we have to deal
with an injustice which has existed so long and has so many ramifi-
cations. Wrong is not to enjoy immortality because there may be
some difficulties in doing right. There is not a reform which has
not been met by similar objections, and which would not have been
postponed indefinitely had they been allowed to prevail.

It may be urged, of course, that our grievances are unreal or at
most purely sentimental. That, again, is a familiar plea, with which
reformers have often had to deal before. Even were we to grant that
it were true we should not admit that it affected the justice of our
case. It is only the sentimental grievances of others to which any
of us are indifferent ; we are, for the most part, sufficiently keen
about our own. But are these grievances merely sentimental ? Take
an example from the last number of this Eeview. The Bishop of
Oxford, writing on the question of marriage with a deceased wife's
sister, says —

1 believe that the Church of Christ has done more than any power on earth to up-
hold the sacrediifcss of family life in its pure affections and unity of interests. The
members of other religious denominations have not been wanting in zeal for morality
as they understand it ; but in respect of marriage they avowedly take a liberal
view. They would make prohibitions of it as few as possible ; they approve of
facilities for the dissolution of it which the Church has always refused to allow.

The italics are mine, and are introduced to mark the contrast,
which his Lordship's language is clearly intended to accentuate,
between the Church of Christ of which he is a bishop and the ' other
religious denominations' of whose views in relation to marriage he gives
so extraordinary an account. I say nothing of the counts of his indict-
ment. I am not aware that * other religious denominations ' have any
distinctive theory about divorce, and I content myself with a protest

1886 A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. 839

against the assumption that they take a 'more liberal view of mar-
riage' because they do not accept the sacerdotal theory that relation-
ship by blood and relationship by marriage are on the same level.
What I do note is the arrogant tone in which the Bishop separates
his Church from other religious denominations. Even this affects
me only because the writer is a prelate of the Established Church, and
speaks with the authority of the State, of which the ' other religious
denominations ' are a constituent part as well as his own Church. If
in the opinion of Dr. Mackarness I am not of the Church of Christ
because I do not believe in the Divine right of bishops, that does not
concern rne. Cardinal Manning would, I suppose, pass the same
verdict upon him, and to neither of us need it be a matter of supreme
moment that he should be thus judged of man's judgment. To his
own Master each of us must stand or fall, and we need not fear that
with Him ecclesiastical differences will count for everything, humble
faith and loving loyalty to Him for nothing.

It is the action of the State, not the opinion of a bishop or the
theory of a Church, which concerns us. If bishop and Church so
interpret the mind of Christ they must follow out their own con-
scientious convictions. But we resent the assumption of authority
by the State in such matters. Were Dr. Mackarness a bishop in a
Disestablished Church he would probably assume precisely the same
attitude to all who did not belong to his community. He would not
consent to lower the exclusive pretensions of his Church and might
still speak with a lofty condescension of all other communities, however
abundant their signs of spiritual life and power, as ' other religious
denominations.' He might still-treat the law of his Church as the
infallible standard of morality and brand all who do not conform to
it as guilty of moral laxity. But we, thus treated as schismatics
and * aliens from the commonwealth of Israel,' might sit very easily
under this ban so long as it was that of private ecclesiastics only.
The whole situation is changed when the Bishop speaks as a repre-
sentative of the State. In the one case the offence would be his
own ; in the other a wrong is done by the State to all who are not of
the National Church. The State has placed Dr. Mackarness in the
position of authority he occupies, and it is not to be denied that he is
only speaking in harmony with the entire action of the State when
he treats us as outside the Church of Christ. In effect the State
regards us as excommunicate. It knows one Church in the nation
and one only, and if the prelates, clergy, and members of that Church
treat us as schismatics or heretics they are only translating into words
and acts the principle on which the Establishment is founded. We
have our own opinion as to the conception of Christianity which
allows a bishop so to regard large bodies of his fellow Christians, but
here it is the State, not the bishop, who is the real offender.

So with the recent action of the Bishop of London in preventing

840 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

Mr. Haweis from preaching in the City Temple. The offensive idea
underlying the action is precisely the same as that which the Bishop
of Oxford expresses in his invidious distinction between the Church
and the sects. I can speak on this matter with the more freedom
and impartiality since I have never shared that desire for an inter-
change of pulpits which some liberal-minded men on both sides have
sought to bring about. Indeed, apart from a change of the law its
expediency seems to me extremely doubtful. So long as bishops refuse
to concede to Nonconformist Churches and ministers full recognition I
fail to see the advantage which would accrue from the more Christian
action of individual clergymen rising above the spirit of their own
system, incurring the displeasure of a large body of their brethren,
and possibly defying the law. I am not fairly open, therefore, to
the taunts of the illustrious obscure among the clergy who, whenever
this question arises, are so eager to protest against the innovation.
They may be quite satisfied that there is no consuming desire on
the part of Nonconformist ministers to occupy their pulpits or to
secure their services in Dissenting chapels. Everyone who exercises
his common sense must know that such exchanges must necessarily
be occasional, and that they must depend on the independent action
of individuals. There is nothing to prevent Congregationalists and
Wesleyans from interchange of pulpits, but it only takes place as a
spontaneous act of Christian fraternity. A Congregationalist has not
the right to occupy any "VVesleyan pulpit he might covet, or to insist
on the services of any Weslyan minister he might select. The ex-
change is only one of the amenities of Christian intercourse possible to
those who, though they belong to different sects, feel they are alike
members of the universal Church. This is all that is desired in the case
of the Established clergy. We can assure our friends that we have no
desire to force ourselves upon unwilling congregations or to put any
pressure upon reluctant clergymen to give us the benefit of their minis-
trations. We should be false to our own principle of liberty did we not
recognise the right of every man to determine the limits of his action in
this matter. Even though his ideas of Christian fellowship may appear
to us extremely narrow we are bound to respect his conscience, however
we may regret its decisions. Intolerance is hateful everywhere, but
never more so than when exhibited in the interests of breadth and
liberty. It is not for us, therefore, to condemn even those who feel
bound by their theories to refuse ecclesiastical hospitality to men
who, though shown by their works to be ministers of Christ, have
not received episcopal ordination. But we are entitled to condemn
and oppose a outrance the law which not only sanctions this theory
but enforces it upon all ministers of the State Church.

Let any fair and liberal-minded clergyman, however earnest in
his defence both of the Catholic theory and of the Establishment
(and there are numbers of such men), realise what this means. Mr.

1886 A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. 841

Hubbard pleasantly reminds us that ' the clergy have no legal power
to exclude Dissenting ministers from their parish if within it there
should be a congregation prepared to welcome them,' and apparently
he seems to regard that as all we have a right to ask. It is open to
doubt whether he would take precisely the same view were the
positions reversed. The clergyman, indeed, has no legal power to
keep a Dissenting minister out of his parish, but he has the legal
right to regard him as an intruder, and if, despite the personal and
social influence which is continually employed to exclude him,
he should succeed in effecting an entrance, the rector would be
fully justified by the law in ignoring his existence as a religious
teacher. These two men, the rector and the Dissenting minister,
may be preaching the same Grospel ; they may alike be enforcing by
exhortation and example the characteristic precept of that Gospel,
' Let everyone that nameth the name of Christ depart from all
iniquity ; ' they may have to contend against the same forces of evil,
and, so far as the practical results are concerned, there may be as full
evidence that He for whom they are labouring accepts the service of the
one as of the other. But the State makes a distinction which neither
nature nor grace has made between them. To use Mr. Matthew
Arnold's words, ' the clergyman — poor soul ! — -cannot help being the
parson of the parish; he is there like the magistrate; he is a national
officer with an appointed function.' The Dissenting minister in his
view (and it is the view of the law) is as much an interloper as would
be ' voluntary performers ' who established private courts in which
they professed to give magisterial decisions. The only flaw in the
ingenious parallel is that law is the business of the State ; religion is
a thing for the individual conscience, with which the State has no
right of interference. Happily this is not an idea peculiar to Non-
conformists. The most earnest Churchmen are just as strong in
asserting this indefeasible right of conscience, and were they the
Dissenting minority they would be as sensitive to the wrong they
had to suffer and as resolute in seeking its redress as we have ever
shown ourselves.

The question, then, which, as a Nonconformist, I urge is, are we
to suffer for ' conscience sake ' ? That suffering may seem very light
to those who do not share it, and I do not pretend that it is so heavy
that we could not endure it if it could be shown that it was for the
good of the nation or for the interests of religion that we should
submit in patient silence. To the dwellers in town it is not a matter
of supreme importance that there is a gentleman in each urban
parish to whom the State has committed the care of all the souls
within its borders. For all practical purposes that right is as obso-
lete as the dodo, except when a few obsequious toadies think it
necessary to parade the claims of 'the rector.' In agricultural
districts it is verv different, and there the poor Dissenting minister

842 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

is continually made to feel that he is indeed an interloper. Even in
towns it may be felt as a humiliation that a Dissenting pulpit is the
one rostrum from which the clergyman is forbidden to speak. But
even that might be and ought to be borne if it could be proved that
it was necessary to the great work of Christianity in the country.
Our belief, however, is that the very opposite is true, and that in
seeking the equality of all creeds and Churches in the eye of the law
we are promoting the cause of true religion as well as of liberty and
righteousness.

We have been frequently told that the inequality which exists is
due not to the Establishment, but to other and deeper causes.
Sometimes we are reminded of our social inferiority, at others of the
division we have created by our own separation from the Holy
Catholic Church. Such inferiority as is thus created we are quite
content to endure ; what we ask is that the State shall not make
the inequality still greater and the distinction still more odious.
We have been told in reply that in the United States the separation
is quite as complete, but facts do not bear out this assertion. Even
as I write there has come into my hand a copy of a resolution pro-
posed in the Lower House of the recent Episcopal Convention at
Chicago.

Resolved, the House of Bishops concurring, That the General Convention of the
Protestant Episcopal Church sends cordial greetings to the assembly of the Congre-
gational Brethren, now met in this city, and expresses its devout hope that their
deliberations, though separately conducted, may minister together for the glory of
God and the advancement of our common Christianity.

The mover was Dr. Phillips Brooks. He did not succeed, but he
secured a large number of votes, and the amendment which was
passed, though less pronounced, breathed a spirit of fraternity to
Congregational Churches unknown in our ecclesiastical Parliament.
When such a resolution can be passed by the Lower House of an
English Convocation, a new and brighter day will have dawned for
the religion of our country. The State Church is the great hindrance
to a consummation so devoutly to be desired, and for this, perhaps
beyond any other reason, I work for disestablishment. The Bishop
of Manchester in his first address to the clergy speaks of some who
cry,- ' We want to get rid of endowments that we may secure religious
equality.' I never heard such a cry. I know no party among Noncon-
formists which is at all likely to raise it. ' This cry of the French
Socialist,' as the Bishop describes it, would be abjured by me and by
all Nonconformists as heartily as by himself. His Lordship will
find, when the question of the Church's right to the vast endowments
of past times comes to be discussed, that he will have to deal with
very different arguments from those with which he dealt in such light
and airy fashion at Manchester. In the meantime the Bishop will
do much to promote a better understanding if he will continue to

1886 A SUSPENDED CONFLICT. 843

insist on treating the question of Disestablishment apart from that
of Disendowment. Questions of property are entirely apart from the
claim of Nonconformist Churches to equality. If there are any argu-
ments which can justify the assumption of the State to pronounce on
the merits of different Church systems, and to grant political ascend-
ency to those who recognise the Divine right of bishops to subscribe
the three Creeds and Thirty-nine Articles, let them be adduced, and
they shall have our consideration. But it is sheer mockery to tell
us that we must submit to this injustice because the Church holds a
large property, which, as certain Dissenters tell us, cannot safely be left
under its own control, and which, as Church defenders, cannot justly
be taken away because it is private property. The former plea is the
more hollow and contemptible of the two, and it is matter of surprise
how the Church can be content to accept the service of the allies who
advance it. But neither the one nor the other can avail against the
justice of our demand. The property belongs to the Church or the
State. If to the State, the Church has no right to complain of a
new application of it ; if to the Church, the State has no right to
control it. In either case there is no reason why Nonconformists
should suffer because of their religious opinions.

J. GUIXNESS EOGERS.

844 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS.

\VHETBER, according to the views of one school of historians, English
economic history began with the freedom of the masses of the people,
which gradually degenerated into the serfdom of the Middle Ages,
or whether, according to the views of another school, the change was
in an exactly opposite direction, and it began with the serfdom of
the masses of the rural population under Saxon rule, with only a
change of masters at the time of the Norman Conquest.1 — in either
case there is a tolerable certainty that by the time of James the
First servile tenures were become a matter of historical interest
only, and that rural England was occupied at that date partly by
tenants in fee-simple and partly by a large body of free customary
tenants of various kinds holding under the lords of different manors.2
It is also clear that at that time a very large portion of the country
was still cultivated on what is known as the common- field system ;
and a still larger portion was covered by the wastes of the manor, the
soil of which was technically the property of the lord, the tenants
exercising rights of common over it.

From an early period the wacte of the manor had been regarded
from different points of view by the parties interested in it. The
tenants of the common fields holding otherwise than by servile
tenure, whether in the earliest times a numerous class or not —
and their number and condition would appear to have varied in dif-
ferent parts of the country — probably represented in the historical
order of succession the free or privileged classes of the old village
communities of the earliest German settlers. The constant tendency
was "for the servile tenures to harden into the superior or customary
tenure, and thereby to increase the number and power of the class
belonging to the latter. But the customary tenant, whatever the
laws might say to the contrary, never accepted the doctrine of the
feudal jurisprudence that the waste was, in anything except a
technical sense, the property of the lord of the manor; and the
early statutes relating to enclosure are the monuments of the
long struggle on this question, which runs through whole centuries

1 Seebohm, Tks Enqlixh Village Community, Preface, ix.
- Gncist, Ifistcry of the English Constitution, vol. ii. p. 329.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 845

of English history, varying in its result from place to place and from
period to period. The almost inevitable result of this condition of
affairs was that a constant struggle continued between the two sets
of ideas out of which the land tenure of the country had grown up ;
the customary tenants regarding the wastes as in reality their own.
beneficial property, and the lord of the manor desiring to amplify
his own legal ownership into an absolute possession, qualified by the
easements of the customary tenants, which with time he hoped to
extinguish.

The Statute of Merton gave the lord of the manor the right of
enclosing for common of pasture against the tenants of his own
manor under certain conditions, and the Statute of Westminster the
Second made the same right clear against the tenants of neigh-
bouring manors. The great changes in the economic position of the
country which followed the Black Death increased the temptation
to enclose, in order to feed large herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.
A further movement consequently arose, having for its object not
merely the enclosure of the wastes, but also the absorption of the
common arable fields under which so much of the country was
cultivated upon a system which, it must be acknowledged, was
wasteful and unprogressive in the extreme. As in later times, two
schools arose — one which asserted that enclosure everywhere meant
improvement and an increase in the total amount of the wealth pro-
duced ; the other which claimed that in many cases it meant
nothing of the kind, and pointed to the displacement of the popula-
tion and the misery which often ensued, and frequently led to civil
commotion — nay, even to actual I'ebellion.

The vigorous though hard generation of reformers which had
no pity on nuns and monks, and having satisfied itself that
Malmesbury Abbey would be more productive of wealth if turned
into a cloth factory than if devoted to ecclesiastical uses, pro-
ceeded at once to appropriate the revenues in accordance with
that order of ideas, naturally viewed with disapproval the wasteful
processes and careless ways of the old husbandry, and would have
made short work of it, regardless on the whole of what suffering
might be entailed during the transition period. There was, how-
ever, this difference between the two cases. Against the monasteries
the whole reforming party was unanimous ; against the old system
of land tenure they were not. The yeomanry had no idea of being
driven out like their cowled and hooded neighbours. The voice of
La timer was heard protesting in the famous * Sermon on the Plough '
against the greed of those who, in the words of Scripture, were for
ever adding field to field; and the dramatist, coming to the assistance
of the preacher, held up ' Sir Giles Overreach,' the encloser, to the
hatred and ridicule of his own and succeeding generations.

The contest between the lord of the manor and the customary
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3 N

846 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

tenants is to be seen in full swing in the struggle relating to the
common lands of Wootton Bassett known as ' Vastern,' in Wiltshire,
•which, complicated as it was by the religious and political feelings of
the time — the lord of the manor having been a Roman Catholic and
a cavalier, and the copyholders adherents of the Parliament — presents
several features of exceptional interest. After much litigation, and
some personal encounters, a petition to Parliament was drawn up by
the mayor of the town and the free tenants of the manor to express
their grievances.

It sets forth that the mayor and free tenants of this borough
had enjoyed from time immemorial free common of pasture for the
feeding of all manner of ruther beasts — as cowes, &c. — in Vasterne
Great Park, which contained, by estimation, 2,000 acres of ground or
upwards, and

that soon after the manor came into the possession of Sir Francis Englefield, Knight,
that gentleman did inclose the park, leaving out to the said free tenants of the
borough that part of it which was called Wootton-Lawnd, and contained only 100
acres.

The petition then proceeds to state

that notwithstanding this infringement of their ancient rights, the inhabitants
submitted to it without resistance, and established new regulations of common in
conformity to the contracted extent of their lands, giving to the mayor of the town
for the time being two cowes feeding, and to the constable one cowes feeding, and
to every inhabitant of the said borough one cowes feeding, and no more, as well
the poor as the rich, and every one to make and maintaine a certain parallel of
bound, set forth to every person ; and ever after that enclosure, for the space of
fifty-six years, or neere thereabouts, any messuage, burgage, or tenant, that was
bought or sold within the said borough, did always buy and sell the said cowes
leaze, together with the said messuage or burgage, as part and member of the same,
as doth and may appeare by divers deeds, which are yet to be seen ; and about
which time, as we have been informed, and do verily believe, that Sir Francis
Englefield, heire of the aforesaid Sir Francis Englefield, did, by some means, gain
the charter of our towne into his hands, and as lately we have heard that his
successors now keepeth it ; and do believe that at the same time he did likewise
gaine the deed of the said common ; and he thereby knowing that the towne had
nothing to shew for the right of common, but by perscription, did begin suits in
law with the said free tenants for their common, and did vex them with so many
suits, in law, for the space of seven or eight years at the least, and never suffered
anyone to come to tryal in all that space ; but did divers times attempt to gain the
possession thereof, by putting in of divers sorts of cattell, insomuch that at length
when his servants did put in cowes by force into the said common, many times and
present, upon putting of them in, the Lord, in his mercy, did send thunder and
lightning from heaven, which did make the cattle of the said 8ir Francis Englefield
to run so violent out of the said ground, that at one time one of the beasts were
killed therewith, and it was so often, that people who were not there in presence
to see it, when it did thunder, would say that Sir Francis Englefield 's men were
putting in their cattell into the Lawnd, and so it was; and as soone as those
cattle were gone forth, it would presently be very calme and faire, and the cattell
of the towne ivould never stir, but follow their feeding as at other times, and never
offer to move out of the way, but folloio their feeding ; and this did continue so

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 847

long-, he being too powerfull for them, that the said free tenants were not able to
wage law any longer ; for one John Rosier, one of the free tenants, was thereby
enforced to sell all his land (to the value of 5001.) with following the suits in law,
and many others were thereby impoverished, and were thereby enforced to yield
up their right, and take a lease of the said common of the said Sir Francis Engle-
field for terme of his life ; and the said mayor and free tenants hath now lost their
right of common in the Lawnd neare about twenty years, which this, now Sir
Francis Engletield, his heirs and his trustees, now detaineth from them.

Likewise the said Sir Francis Englefield hath taken away their shops or
shambles standing in the middle of the street, in the market-place, from the towne,
and hath given them to a stranger that lived not in the towne, and he detaineth
them from the town ; and likewise he hath taken certaine garden grounds, which
are taken out by a bye street, and detaineth them from the town ; and he hath
altered, and doth seek wayes and meanes to take the election of the mayor of our
town to himselfe ; for whereas the mayor is chosen at the Law-day, and the Jury
did ever make choice of two men of the town ; and the lord of the Manor was to
appoint one of them to serve, which the lord of the manor have refused, and
caused one to stay two years together divers times, which is a breach of our custome.

And as for our common, we do verily believe that no corporation in England is
so much wronged as we are ; for we are put out of all common that ever we had,
and hath not eo much as one foot of common left unto us, nor never shall have any;
we are thereby grown so in poverty, unless it please God to move the hearts of this
Honourable House to commiserate our cause, and to enact something for us, that
we may enjoy our right again.

And we your Orators shall be ever bound to pray for your healths and prosperity
in the Lord.3

Following this instance of apparently successful encroachment
on the part of the lord of the manor on the rights of the commoners,
an instance of an opposite order of events and the destruction of a
petty manor may be given from the records of the parish of Shrewton,
situated on Salisbury Plain. In 'that place it would appear that in
consequence of the dismembering of the manor in 1596 and the dis-
continuance of the courts baron wherein orders were taken in former
times ' for the better government and quiet estate of the parish,'
great disorder arose, which persisted till 1599, when on the earnest
persuasion of Nicholas Barlowe, the vicar, a written set of ' orders '
were drawn up and subscribed by all the parties interested. These
orders embodied in the shape of a voluntary agreement what had
been the customs of the manor from time immemorial, and the
lord having abolished himself three years previously, the primitive
and self-governing village community was thereby practically re-
stored.4

Aubrey, the Wiltshire historian, speaking of the period of the
Reformation, gives a curious account of what the face of the country
was like in those days :

This county (he says) was then a lovely campania, as that about Sherston and
Coteswold. Very few enclosures, unlesse near bowses. My Grandfather Lyte did

8 Britton, History of Wiltshire, Edin., 1814, pp. 642-44.

4 Wiltahire Archaiological Magazine, vol. xxiii. No. Ixvii., articlle by the Rev.
Canon Bennett.

3 N2

848 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

remember when all between CronihalPs (Eston) and Castle Combe was so, when
Eston, Yatton, and Combe did intercommon together. In my remembrance much hath
been enclosed, and every year more and more is taken in. Anciently the Leghs
(now corruptly called Sleights), i.e. pastures, were noble large grounds as yet the
Demesne lands at Castle Combe are. So likewise in his remembrance was all
between Kington St. Michael and Dracot Cerne common field. Then were a world
of labouring people maintayned by the plough as yet in Northamptonshire, &c.
There wer<i no rates for the poore even in my gr. father's daies ; but for Kington
St. Michael (no small parish) the Church Ale at Whitsuntide did their businesse.
In every parish is, or was, a church house, to which belonged spitts, crocks, &c.,
utensils for dressing provision. Here the howsekeepers met, and were merry and
gave their charitie ; the young people came there too, and had dancing, bowling,
shooting at buttes, &c., the ancient sitting gravely by, looking on. All things were
civill and without scandall. This Church Ale is doubtless derived from the Agapee
or Love Feasts mentioned in the N.T. Mr. A. Wood assures me that scarcely any
almeshowses before the Reformation. That over against Christchurch, Oxon, one of
the ancientest. In every Church was a poore man's boxe ; but I never remembred
the use of it. Nay, there was one at Great Innes. I remember it before the wanes.
Before the Reformation, at their Vigills or Revells they sate up all night fasting
and praying the night before the Dedication of the Church : certain officers were
chosen for gathering the money for charitable uses. Old John Wastfield of Langley
near Chippenham was Peterman at St. Peter's Chappell there ; at which time is
yet one of the greatest Revells in these parts, but the chappell converted into a
dwelling house. Such joy and merriment was every holiday, which dayes were
kept with great solemnity and reverence. These were the dayes when England
was famous for the gray goose quill. The Clarke's Ale was in the Easter Holidays,
for his benefitt, and the solace of the neighbourhood.

Since the Reformation and Inclosures aforesaid these parts have swarmed with
poore people. The Parish of Calne pays to the poore (1663) 500/. per annum, and
the Parish of Chippenham little lesse, as appears by the Poor's bookes there. In-
closures are for the private, not for the public good. For a shepherd and his dogge,
or a milk mayd, can manage that land, that upon arable employed the hands of
severall scores of labourers.5

If the disappearance of old manors and the enclosure of com-
mon fields was even in the seventeenth century going a great deal
too fast for the taste of the historian of the county, ' wherein were so
many observable antiquities,' what would bis feelings have been had
he lived on into the era of general Enclosure Acts and agricultural
improvements ? The changes which Aubrey lamented were after all
only a part, and a very small part, of that process which has gradu-
ally given to the soil of England its present character and appear-
ance ; for, besides the incompatibility of the relative positions of
the lord of the manor and the customary tenants, there were other
and equally important circumstances which after the civil war
did not fail to revive the movement for enclosure at the close
of the seventeenth century. It was still the fact, notwithstanding
the alterations which Aubrey denounced, that a great part of
the cultivated soil of England was still held in common field tenure
under manors. There was the village, with its cottages, shops,

5 The Topographical Collections of John Aulrey, F.R.S., 1C59-70, edited by Canon
Jackson, Preface, pp. 9-11.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 849

""farmhouses, and farm 'buildings, all huddled together; there was
the open arable field with its multitude of driftways leading to
the various allotments, and there was hard by the poor, ill-drained,
scanty waste, the common property of the community. No person who
has lived at a distance and has never had any experience of common
field farming, can have an idea of the inconvenience, wretchedness,
and miseries of the system, which are almost beyond description.
It was not uncommon for areas of upwards of two thousand acres to be
cut up into strips of from two to three roods in extent, and as a con-
sequence a large part of the land was taken up by roads, leading
through the fields, by which these strips of land might be reached.
The latter were scattered about quite irrespective of ownership, so
that the proprietor of a small farm had all his land in small detached
pieces, often very far apart, and the trouble occasioned to the farmer
in overlooking his land and the loss of time sustained by trotting
from one piece to another was very considerable. The parish had to be
cropped in one course, and meadow land which belonged to one indi-
vidual from the 1st of May to the 1st of August had to be thrown
open and become commonable to the whole parish. Then there was
the certainty of distemper and disease amongst cattle and sheep
being disseminated all over the parish if once introduced ; the impos-
sibility of draining the small detached pieces; and the constant
quarrels and bickerings arising from trespass and other evils of the
same character.

It is no wonder that, under these circumstances, endeavours were
made on economic grounds alone, and even apart from other con-
siderations, to get the open fields enclosed. And a further incentive
was added when it was found that the value of land became much
increased by enclosure, and that those who got their land consoli-
dated into one allotment were possessed of a much more valuable
estate than they had had in the scattered and ill-managed parcels
of their former holdings. The various methods by which the now
ancient rights of common might be extinguished and the lands
enclosed began accordingly to be considered and examined. There
were originally the following legal methods of enclosure :

1. By unity of possession, where the wastes and the privileges of
common belonged to the same owner.

2. By severance of the right from the land or tenement to which
it was attached.

3. By release by the commoner.

4. By non-user through a long period.

5. By destruction of the commoner's estate.

6. By alteration of the commoner's tenement.

7. By destruction of the product subject to common.

8. By enclosure under special custom.

9. By enclosure through agreement.

850 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

The majority, however, of these means of extinguishing rights of
common did not much facilitate enclosure. They naturally occurred
in only a few cases, and were attended with many difficulties and
exceptions ; so much so that as the demand for enclosure became
greater, the necessity of applying to Parliament was recognised.
Kecourse was consequently had to private Acts, and it is by their
instrumentality that the majority of enclosures have been effected.
There have been almost four thousand Acts, passed at various periods
from the time of Queen Elizabeth to the present day ; almost one-
half of which have been passed in this century. The earlier Acts
were generally for the reclamation of marshes over which the sur-
rounding inhabitants had rights of common. Some of these had
more especial reference to the regulation of commons or the super-
vision of common rights, so as to allow for the growth of wood, &c.
The first Act, however, of real enclosure ever passed was the 8 Anne,
cap. 20. Like many other Acts relating to the social condition of
the people, it passed through Parliament comparatively unobserved ;
but considering the precedent it set, and the enormous changes it
inaugurated, this little bill would not have been unworthy of the
attention of even the statesmen of a reign which saw the union with
Scotland and the trial of Dr. Sacheverell.

But even private Acts were found too cumbrous to suit the neces-
sities of the time ; and a demand in consequence arose at the
commencement of the present century for a General Enclosure Act,
and the introduction of the machinery of Commissioners and Pro-
visional Orders in order to facilitate the settlement of the different
questions which arose on each enclosure. Several general Acts were
accordingly passed, one of the best known being the General
Enclosure Act of 1836, known as Lord Worsley's Act (6 & 7 Will. IV.
c. 115), under which some enclosures have been carried out even in
quite recent times.6 But a more decisive step was taken nine years
after. In the session of 1845, Sir Kobert Peel's Government passed
the present General Enclosure Act, and established an Enclosure
Commission for England and Wales, now called, under more recent
legislation, ' the Land Commission for England.' This Act sub-
jected every variety of common to be enclosed by the Commissioners.
Exceptions were made of all lands in the New Forest, the Forest of
Dean, and village or town greens; and it was also decided that
no lands within fifteen miles of London, and certain specified
distances of other large towns, could be enclosed.

One of the great features of the Act of 1845 was the permission
given to the Commissioners to set out portions of the lands for recrea-
tion and allotment grounds, or field gardens, for the poor. It was also
enacted that the majority in number and value of the parties
interested should have power to appropriate parts of the land proposed
6 Seagry Common, Wilts, 1883.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 851

to be enclosed for public purposes, such as the formation of roads
and footways and for the supply of stone and gravel ; also for the
formation of public drains, embankments, watercourses, public
ponds, wells, or watering-places, or land for enlarging or making a
burying-ground or any other purpose of public convenience or utility,
or for the general accommodation or convenience of the persons
interested.

In the evidence taken before the Select Committee of 1844, the
amount of land stated to be unenclosed and subject to common
rights in England and Wales was estimated at about eight millions
of acres;7 and by the Commissioners' return of 1874, the total amount
of land subject to common rights was stated to be 2,632,772 acres,
out of a total of 37,157,173 acres; so that, according to these
figures, there would have been something considerably over five
millions of acres enclosed since the passing of these Acts.

The estimate of unenclosed lands given to the Select Committee
was, however, very vague, and subsequent returns go to show that
it was very much over the mark. According to a return made by
the Land Commissioners up to 1876, the total amount of land
dealt with by them was 600,000 acres, which was divided amongst
26,000 separate owners, the estimated value of the wastes being
6,140,000£. The total extent of land set out for public purposes
amounted to 14,107 acres, as follows :

Acres

For exercise and recreation 1,758

field-gardens 2,195

public quarries and gravel-pi is ..... 823

fuel .... ^ 1,168

schools and churches 622

burial-grounds 106

other miscellaneous purposes 85

public roads (2,000 miles iu extent, independent of

occupation roads) covering ...... 7,370

14^107

The value of this at 20/. per acre, being out of the best of &

the land 282,140

Cash expended on the construction of public roads and

other public works connected with enclosures . . 473,500

755,640

The average portion of land allotted to the lords of manors was
acres, to common-right owners 24 acres, and to purchasers of
lands sold to defray expenses 10 acres, there being 35,450 acres
sold to 3,500 purchasers.

The smallness of the lots may be accounted for by the fact that,
even when the expenses were defrayed by rate, it has always been

7 Evidence of the Rev. Richard Jones and William Blamire, Esq.

852 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

optional for each person to have the alternative of selling a small
portion of his allotment.

The 26,000 persons amongst whom these lands have been
divided consist of the following classes : —

Farmers . 4,736

Shopkeepers and tradesmen . . . 3,456

Labourers ...... 3,168

Esquires 2,624

Widows 2,016

Gentlemen 1,984

Clergymen ...... 1,280

Artisans ....... 1,067

Spinsters ....... 800

Charity trustees 704

Peers, baronets, and sons of peers . . 576
Professional men . . . . .512

Miscellaneous ...... 3,000

The operation of the Act of 1845 led to much discussion, which
increased as its ultimate effects began to be understood.

A great deal was said in the first place, and much written, as
to the rights of the public, as such, which had not been recognised
by the Act. It was put forward on one side that the soil of the
waste was absolutely the property of the lord of the manor, and
that, so far from the public having any right over manorial wastes,
the commoners even had, strictly speaking, no right to go upon them
unless for the purpose of taking their common or doing some neces-
sary act in connection with its use ; that subject to these rights the
common belonged to the lord of the manor as much as his private
garden ; and that, if the lord and the commoners agreed to do so, they
could keep everyone else off, even if there were no enclosure at all.
It was replied that, as a mere matter of dry law, this might be
sound ; but that the public had had from time immemorial
the enjoyment of common lands for exercise and recreation, and
that such enjoyment had been entirely free from interruption
by the lords of the manor. It can easily be imagined that
anybody who has been accustomed for years to walk or ride over
a common, and who finds suddenly that by an enclosure he has
been deprived of a privilege which from long use he had learnt to
regard as a right, would feel aggrieved. There would, however,
be no legal remedy, as rights of recreation and exercise must be
claimed by custom or grant, but cannot be claimed by prescription.
It is like the view that is enjoyed from a house, and which one day
is blocked out. The individual affected may feel much aggrieved,
and may even have his property seriously deteriorated in value ; but
in the absence of an express grant or covenant there is no legal
remedy. Apart, however, from the question of injury to the public,
as such, in respect of rights of recreation and enjoyment over

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 853

commons, enclosures, it was declared, affected another and distinct
class of interests of a more tangible description. It was indeed gene-
rally admitted that enclosures, especially enclosures of open fields, by
increasing the produce and the value of the land, by carrying out
works for the benefit of the neighbourhood, by the saving of time
and labour, and by furnishing the country with better and more direct
roads and footpaths, had in the first instance been attended with an
undoubted advantage to the community at large, and had made two
blades of grass grow where one grew before. But it wa s asked whether
they were not in some instances the means of inflicting considerable
hardships on the poorer classes who had been deprived of their rights,
such as turning out a horse, a cow, or a donkey, or cutting brush-
wood on the wastes. It is true that, in cases where they could sub-
stantiate a claim, compensation was given either in money or in a small
allotment. But the money was soon spent, and the allotment almost
invariably sold to the neighbouring landowners. A man who by
the expenditure of 4,OOOL can increase the value of 1,000 acres of
land from 1,0002. to 2,0001. per annum has, of course, enormously
benefited himself and the community also, but the man who has
exchanged his rights of keeping a cow by which he could supply
himself and his family with milk and butter, or of having a horse or
donkey, with which he could carry on a small business, or his
right of taking wood or turves, for a small sum of money or an allot-
ment of land that he is probably soon obliged or is tempted to sell,
cannot be said to have made a very profitable exchange. It was
alleged that in some parts of the country the poorer people had phy-
sically deteriorated since the commons and waste lands of the neigh-
bourhood had been enclosed, owmg to the difficulty and, in many
cases, the impossibility of obtaining a proper supply of milk. In
many districts, even in dairy districts, it was said to be next to im-
possible to buy milk : the farmers made cheese and fed their pigs
with the whey, and would not retail the milk ; and where no small
pieces of land were to be got by the cottagers they were absolutely
obliged to go without what, in the case of children, is one of the
most necessary requirements of life. The poorer individual, too,
who had an interest or rights in a common was without the know-
ledge how to claim his rights, and had recourse to a lawyer, the
result being that his compensation was often swallowed up in costs.
Again, in some cases there were rights which had long been exer-
cised without question, but did not admit of strict legal proof.

The following notes, collected at the beginning of this century, of
the effects of enclosures on the poor, by Sir John Sinclair, in a report
the general object of which, it may be mentioned, was to advocate,
not to oppose, a general enclosure Act,8 were in existence to show
what might be the results of taking in commons.

8 General Report of Enclosures drawn up by the Board of Agriculture, 1808.

854

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Dec,

Effect on the Pool' of the Enclosures ivhich took place during the first Forty Years
of His Majesty King George the Third.

County

Parish

BEDFORD .

Potton
Tutvy

Maulden .

Souldrop .

BEKKS

Letcomb .

BUCKS. .

Waddesdon

Tingewick

CAMBRIDGE

Bradwell .
Caskethorp
March

CHESTER .

Cranage .

DORSET .
DURHAM .

Tolpudle .
Lanchester

GLOUCESTER .

Todenham

HANTS .
HEREFORD
HERTS

Upton Gray
Willington
Offley

Norton

LEICESTER

Rutcliffe .

LINCOLN .

Donington
UfBngton .

NORFOLK ,

NORTHAMPTON

Totterhill .
Shottesham
Ludham
Passenham

STAFFORD
WILTS . ' \ .
YORK

Ashford .
Ramsbury
Ackworth .

I presume the poor are sufferers.
To my knowledge, before the enclosure, the
poor inhabitants found no difficulty in pro-
curing milk for their children ; since, it is
with the utmost difficulty that they can pro-
cure any milk at all. Cows lessened from
110 to 40.
Previous to the enclosure a general system of

trespass existed.

The condition of the labouring poor much
worse now than before the enclosure,
owing to the impossibility of procuring any
milk for their young families.
The poor seem the greatest sufferers ; they
can no longer keep a cow, which before
many of them did, and they are therefore
now maintained by the parish.
Poverty has very sensibly increased ; the
husbandmen come to the parish for want
of employment ; the land laid to grass.
Milk to be had at Id. per quart before ; not

to be had now at any rate.
Fewer hands employed ; rates increased.
Less work for the people.
The poor much benefited; rent of common

right 81., raised to 201.
Poor men's cows and sheep have no place or

any being.
Poverty increased.

Many cottagers have been deprived of the
convenience of keeping a cow, without any
recompense in any other respect. The
proprietors do not consult the welfare of
the labourer so much as they might, with-
out any injury to themselves and with
very little more trouble to their agents.
Nothing increased but the poor ; eight farm-
houses rilled with them.
The poor injured.
Live-stock of the poor gone.
The poor have not t he same means of keep-
ing cows as before.

Cottagers deprived of cows, without com-
pensation.

A great defalcation in cheese and pigs, occa-
sioned principally by taking away the land
from the cotrager.

Cottagers' cows (140) lost by the enclosure.
Town herd of cows reduced one-third, to the

great injury of the poor.
The poor injured.
Cottagers' cows much decreased.
Obliged to sell their cows.
Deprived of their cows, and great sufferers

by loss of their hogs.

All their cows gone, and much wretchedness
Their cows reduced.

The parish belonged to near 100 owners
nearly the whole of whom have come to
the parish since the enclosure, or changec
the quantity of their lands.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 855

County

Parish

Effect

YOEK (co»t.)

Kirkburn .

Ebberston
Tibthorpe

The enclosure has proved of singular advan-
tage to great landowners and their tenants ;
but the labourer who, previous to the en-
closure, had his cow-gate, and from thence
derived considerable nourishment to his
small family, was deprived of this aid by
his inability to enclose, therefore was
under the necessity of selling his tenement
to his richer neighbour, and deprived his
family of a comfortable refuge.
Have lost their cows.
Lost their cows, and sold their tenements.

Milk has diminished, owing to the farmers finding the profits of grazing- larger,
and the unwillingness of too many agents and proprietors to accommodate indus-
trious cottagers with small parcels of land to keep a cow.

J. WALKER,

Minister of Lanchester, Durham.

The abolition of dairies is of late become the prevailing practice ; and I am
credibly informed that above 500 cows have been sold off by different farmers in
the course of a few years, within a small compass round this town.

The Minister of Tottenhill, with West Briggs, Norfolk.

"William Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet, whose verses will probably
obtain a permanent place in English literature, put his forebodings
on the subject on record in his Eclogue ' The common a-took in,'
where John and Thomas, two agricultural labourers, are intro-
duced discussing the whole matter. ' 'Tis the common,' says the

former,

tat da do I good,
The run var my vew^ geese, or var my cow.

Thomas tries to console him with the prospect of getting an

allotment :

I wer tuold back t'other day
That they be got into a way
O' letten bits o' ground to the poor.

To which John replies :

Well, I da hope 'tis true, I'm zure,
An' I da hope tat they wull do it here
Ar I must goo to workhouse, I da fear.

Nevertheless John continues to mourn the loss of his common
rights.9

Such had been the opinions of some of those who, without being
blind to the absolute necessity of getting rid of the common field
system and to the advantages which the enclosure and cultivation of
waste land conferred on the community, were able to see the other

Barnes's Poems of Rural Life, 1844. ' The Allotments,' ' The Common a-took in.'

856 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

side of the shield as well, and the passing of the Act of 1845 only
tended to increase the force of these objections. A conviction
gradually grew up that enclosures were having the effect, whatever
these general advantages might be, of divorcing the poorer classes,
and especially the agricultural labourer, from the soil to an extent
that had not been foreseen.

As a compensation for the rights which the poorer classes had
lost, those who were owners of estates which had benefited, and
in many instances benefited very largely, by the enclosure of large
districts, from an early period allowed in many cases the agricultural
population to hold at a fair rent an allotment of ground which they
could cultivate in the time they had to spare from their daily labour.
From the recent return of the number of allotments in Great
Britain, which has been published during the present year, it will be
seen that in no county is the system so much in vogue as in
Wiltshire, the county from which we have already quoted several
interesting local precedents to illustrate the general history of the
present subject. The return shows that there are 22,071 allotments
not exceeding four acres in extent, and detached from cottages, in the
county. This is the highest number in the list, the next being
Northamptonshire with 20,627, and the third Leicestershire with
19,064.

There are also in Wiltshire 9,444 gardens exceeding one-eighth of
an acre in extent, attached to cottages held by labouring men, which,
considering the size of the county and the quantity of land repre-
sented by Salisbury Plain and Marlborough Down, much of which is
virtually uninhabited, compares very favourably with other counties,
the highest in this class being Norfolk with 15,294. The average
rent of these gardens in Wiltshire, including the cottage, is amongst
the lowest in England, it being 3£. 15s. 8d., which is only slightly
higher than Cornwall, Berkshire and Dorsetshire and Hunting-
don, these being respectively 31. 8s. lc?., 31. 13s. 7d., 31. 13s. 9d.,
and 31. 14s. Id., which are the lowest.10

It is a curious fact that although Wiltshire stands prominent in
the number of allotments it possesses, it is also far ahead of any
other county in Great Britain in respect of agricultural holdings of
above one thousand acres, there being 106 of these, containing
137,705 acres, Norfolk coming second with sixty-four holdings con-
taining 81,916 acres. This to some extent arises from the nature
of the land, the larger farms having extensive sheep walks on the
downs and lighter lands of Salisbury Plain. It also to some extent
arises from the different way in which some of the largest estates in
the county have been dealt with. One of the most extensive of
these was some years ago specially laid out for large farms.

10 This average rental of the allotments, as distinct from the gardens and
cottages, does not appear to be given in the Report.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 857

The estate of the Marquis of Lansdowne in this county, which
comprises, including woodlands, about 11,000 acres, represents one of
the largest and most striking examples of the allotment system in
the United Kingdom. There are at the present time upon this
estate about eight hundred separate allotments, varying in size from
three acres to ten perches, all being arable. The area occupied is
about six hundred acres. The villagers and others who have had the
opportunity of thus securing a portion of the soil have flourished in
a remarkable manner. During the severe agricultural depression
which this country has experienced for the last seven or eight years,
they have paid rents which the farm tenants found themselves unable
to meet. The holders of these allotments will tell you that the pig
which they keep from the refuse produce of the ground, and which is
finally made ready for the butcher with the help of a sack or two of
barley-meal, more than suffices to pay the rent of the land, and in
some cases of the cottage as well, while their spare labour is amply
repaid by the regular crop which they retain for themselves. As
John is made to observe to Bichard in one of the Poems we have
already quoted —

When your pig's a-fatted pirty well,
Wi' tjaties, ar wi' barley an some bran,
Why you've a-got zome vlitches var to zell,
Or hafag in chimley earner if you can.

To which Kichard approvingly replies —

Ees : th'jt's the thing ; an when the pig da die,
We gotm lot of offal var to fry,
An inwjjfds var to'lSuoil, or put the blood in,
An miaki a meal or two o' good black puddin'."

The land is well cultivated, well manured, and kept in admirable
heart and condition, except in some few cases, where the occupier
neglects his land for the greater attractions of the public-house.
These instances are, however, rare ; and in most cases nothing can
exceed the care and diligence with which these holders cultivate
their land, or the excellence and magnitude of the crop which is
raised by their labour. Did space permit, we could give instances
of crops having been raised by a single agricultural labourer on half
an acre of comparatively poor soil, which would astonish the
scientific farmer. Potatoes and vegetables of all kinds are grown in
large quantities, and are of excellent quality. At one time a con-
siderable trade was done in the large neighbouring towns of Bath and
Bristol, but this has been somewhat interfered with by the early
market-gardeners of Cornwall and Devon being able to send up their
goods with low railway rates and thus anticipate the market. The
growth of the neighbouring town of Swindon has, on the other hand,

11 "The Allotments,' in Poems of llural Life, Edin. 1844, p. 73

858 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec

afforded some compensation. Wheat, barley, oats, and the various
root crops are extensively grown ; also vetches and artificial grasses.
In some cases, where the labourers have been able to obtain several
allotments, they are almost independent of wages, and support
themselves entirely by their land. The enterprise shown by many
of them in erecting small buildings, the landlord finding materials,
in draining land on being found pipes, and in executing various
other improvements, would not discredit many large farmers, even
those who count themselves active and energetic men.

It must not, however, be supposed that landlords find letting
allotments such an altogether unqualified advantage to themselves,
as it has been sometimes suggested they do. The large business
naturally entailed by the great number of tenancies, especially where
each tenant has a separate agreement, as is the case on the Marquis
of Lansdowne's estate, the number of audits for collection of rent
and the number of receipts to be given, all greatly tend to increase
the expenses of management. It must also be recollected in making
any comparison of the rent per acre of allotment and ordinary
farm lands that the landlord in the case of the former has in every
case to pay the rates, taxes, and tithes, which in the case of the
latter are usually paid by the farmer, and that an acre of allotment
land means a full acre of land capable of being cultivated, and
excludes the roads and fences which are usually included in the
acreage of a holding of greater magnitude.

It may not be without interest to see how this system came into
existence in this neighbourhood. The Wiltshire estate of the
Marquis of Lansdowne is situate close around, and in fact comprises
a considerable portion of the town of Calne, which at one time
carried on a large business in the manufacture of cloth, great quan-
tities of broad white woollen cloth of a particular description being
made for the East India Company.12 Towards the beginning of the
present century the cloth trade of the West of England began to be
seriously affected by the introduction of machinery, and the conse-
quent springing up of extensive manufactories in the Northern
and Midland counties of England, where coal could be obtained and
machinery more easily constructed and worked. Consequently a
large number of the population of the town of Calne and its neigh-
bourhood were thrown out of employment, and the rates rose to an
enormous extent. The idea occurred to the then Lord Lansdowne
that if small portions of land were let out at a moderate rent, the
distress might to some degree be alleviated. He therefore in the
year 1812 laid out two fields in the neighbourhood of Calne as field-
garden allotments, which proved such a success that two years after, in
1814, two more fields were laid out; in 1816 three more were laid
out ; and in 1817 again three more. The cloth trade, though it had
12 Statistical Description of Wiltshire, by G. A. Cooke.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 859

received a severe blow, lingered on until about the year 1830, when,
owing to some additional stimulus to the Northern trade, it was finally
stamped out. In the meantime the enclosure of the parish of Calne
and the adjoining parishes of Blackland and Cherhill had taken place
under special Acts of Parliament ; and Lord Lansdowne resolved,
with a view to meeting the wants of the population, who were suffer-
ing from the departure of their trade, from the ill effects of the old
Poor Law, from the Law of Settlement, and also perhaps to some
extent from the enclosure of the neighbouring commons, to continue
the allotment system on a much larger scale than he had hitherto
attempted. Consequently in the year 1831 he laid out no fewer than
thirteen different fields, in the following year four fields, in the next
year seven fields, and in the year 1835 two fields. Such were the
causes and means of the Bowood allotment system coming into exist-
ence. But this was not all. Other landowners also, having seen the
good effected by the system, determined to adopt it, and a very con-
siderable quantity of land was laid out in a similar manner on the
estate of Lord Ore we, which is adjacent and intermingled with Lord
Lansdowne's property. Other freeholders round the town began in
like manner to adopt the system, and there are now in the neigh-
bourhood of Calne nearly 100 acres of allotment land in addition
to those of Lord Lansdowne, making altogether a very considerable
tract of land cultivated almost entirely by spade husbandry and by
the labour of individuals employed in other ways through a large
portion of the day. Although there has been a disposition, in
consequence of the decreasing population in some of the purely
agricultural villages, to give upborne of the allotment grounds,
there seems to be as active a demand as ever in the neighbourhood
of towns ; and wherever the population is increasing and the nature
of their employment is such as to give the labourers some degree
of spare time during the hours of daylight, we believe that the
system will always be found to be one attended with many advan-
tages both to landlord and tenant, and well worthy of a more extended
scope than at present is given to it.13

On Lord Lansdowne's estate, as a stimulus to industry and an incen-
tive to neatness, annual prizes are offered for the best crops grown
upon the allotments and for the best cottage gardens. The allot-
ments are judged by a committee of allotment-holders chosen
amongst themselves, and the cottage gardens by the owner or
his agent. There is also a pig club or mutual pig assurance, though
not confined to the holders on the estate alone. The owner of
the pig subscribes a certain sum weekly while the animal is in his

13 The vegetable cultivation on the sand loam near Calne is specially noted, in
connection with the characteristic crops which prevail in different parts of the
country, by Mr. John Algernon Clarke, in vol. xiv. of the Journal oftlie Royal Agricul-
tural Society, p. 593.

860 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

possession, and if it dies of disease or accident he receives the full
value, after deducting anything that the carcass may be worth, or any
sum received from the Government or the county if the animal is
slaughtered under the Contagious Diseases Acts. This little club
has been attended with marked success, and the available reserve
fund is very considerable.

The following account, on an average for six years, was made to
the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834, in regard to the profit of
allotment-holding, by Captain Chapman, one of the Assistant-Com-
missioners for the West of England, and appears in their Eeport: — 14

£ s. d.

Kent for a quarter of an acre 0 12 6

Digging . . . . . . . . . .080

Manure 0 10 0

Seed 030

Planting . . '.; 040

Hoeing, &c. . . . 080

Digging and hauling 0 10 0

Total, supposing the man to hire and pay for

everything . . . . . . . 2 15 6

Produce :

Twenty sacks of potatoes 4 10 0

Other vegetables 100

5 10 0

Less labour, &c., as above 2 15 6

Clear profits, supposing the man to hire and pay

for everything 2 14 0

If all done by the man 446

An opinion expressed by a practical man is also mentioned in the
Eeport to the effect that a man who works for a farmer for twelve hours,
from six to six, with the help of his wife and family, can manage half
an acre, supposing it half potatoes, keep a pig, and support his family ;
and that no mechanic can do more.

The above account is a very fair sample of an allotment account
in the present day, for although the expenses would no doubt be
more, the value of the produce would certainly during the last twenty
years have ranged higher.

The Report goes on to say, speaking of allotments, ' There is a
general improvement in the character of the occupiers, who are
represented as becoming more industrious and diligent, and as never
frequenting those pests the beer houses. Not a single instance has
occurred in which anyone thus holding land has been taken before a
magistrate for any complaint.'

In order to avoid the evils of an enclosure, efforts have also occa-
sionally been made by lords of the manor to ascertain and recognise
the rights of the commoners, thereby putting them outside the region

14 Report, p. 187.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 861

of possible dispute and litigation. This was done at Broughton
Gifford in the county of Wilts, as appears from the record of the
proceedings of a Court Baron held no longer ago than the year 1879,
with a view of finally ascertaining and recording the rights of all the
parties interested, the freeholders and copyholders being present
and appending their signatures to the agreement arrived at.

Thus far the action of private individuals has been traced. In
some few instances the property of ancient corporations has been used
with similar objects. Malmesbury Common is perhaps as near an
approach to the system of three acres and a cow as yet has been
reached in this imperfect world. ' King Athelstan,' says Aubrey,
' was a great benefactor to this borough. For the good service this
town did him against the Danes he gave them a vast and rich
common called King's Heat and other privileges to the burghers,
and also certain meadows near the town.' 15

This large tract, covering about 800 acres, continued from the
remote period at which the original charter was granted to be the
property of the corporation of Malmesbury. For a long time it
was chiefly famous as affording some of the best shooting ground
in the county for snipe, but not as conferring an advantage on the
commoners commensurate with its great extent and agricultural
capabilities.

This state of things led to an Enclosure Act in 1821, but instead
of being set out in severalty amongst the different parties interested,
the common, under the provisions of the settlement then arrived
at, was farmed out on a sort of shifting life tenure amongst the com-
moners in the following proportion s^ the soil remaining the property
of the corporation : —

420 acres amongst 280 commoners
40 „ „ 55 landholders

24 „ „ 24 assistant burgesses

141 „ „ 12 capital burgesses

5 acres to 1 alderman

— making in all 680 acres. Fifty acres were reserved to be let in
order to secure a sufficient sum to cover rates and other charges
on the property, and about seventy acres were set out in roads,
footpaths, and roadside strips. In order to become a ' commoner '
it was necessary to be the son of one of the ' free ' burgesses of
the borough or to have married a burgess's daughter. All the sons
of a family of a commoner could become commoners. Under the
Act of 1821 each commoner has to take up his right, and the com-
moners' portion of the common being divided into hundreds, the
new commoner enters himself on the lists of the different hundreds,

15 Aubrey, p. 252. The account which follows of the tenure of Malmesbury
Common is extracted from the evidence given before the Royal Commission on
Unreformed Corporations, 1880.

VOL. XX.— No. 118. 30

862 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

and as a vacancy occurs in each the senior commoner upon that
hundred takes the land by rotation, receiving in the interval a pay-
ment of 8s. a year till the moment arrives for him to enter into pos-
session of his allotment. The mode of succession from the body of
commoners to the higher orders is regulated by an intricate but well-
defined custom.

This peculiar arrangement subsists to the present day, although
the old corporation has under recent legislation been deprived of
the administrative and judicial functions once exercised by it. These
have now been handed over to a Town Council board and to the
county magistracy. The commoners of Malmesbury have long had
the reputation of having become, under the magic influence of pro-
perty, Conservatives in politics, and the recent inquiry into the judicial
functions of the old corporation was an obvious opportunity for the
confirmation of this tendency through the industrious propagation of
the report that it had been devised by the local leaders of the Liberal
party in order to deprive the commoners of their rights.

Such were some of the temper amenta juris introduced to miti-
gate the evils which were arising from the legislation of the first
half of the century. The conviction nevertheless ripened in the
public mind, and in Parliament, between 1870 and 1875, chiefly
owing to the pertinacious efforts of the late Mr. Fawcett, that the
whole subject of enclosure required reconsideration. It was pointed
out that the Enclosure Commissioners were acting on the view that
all the wastes in the country ought to be enclosed as rapidly as
possible; that this view might have been sound before the repeal
of the Corn Laws, but was now subject to important limitations,
owing to the altered circumstances of the time ; that the Commis-
sioners were taking an extreme view of the rights of the lords
of the manor, and in practice set at naught the requirements of
the Act of 1845 in regard to allotments and recreation grounds ;
and that their procedure was unsatisfactory and in many respects
calculated to cause injustice. Finally, after a succession of severe
struggles in the House of Commons, Mr. Fawcett obtained a Com-
mittee to inquire into the General Enclosure Act of 1845, and
the Committee recommended various amendments in the law.
In 1876 another Enclosure Act in consequence was passed, its
object being to place restrictions on enclosure. The preamble
states that enclosures in severalty, as opposed to regulation of
commons, should not be hereafter made unless it could be proved
that an enclosure would be of benefit to the neighbourhood as
well as to private interests and those legally interested. More
effectual provisions were also inserted for the grant of allot-
ments and field gardens to the labouring poor upon an enclosure
taking place. The present Lord Cross brought in the bill, and
pointed out the reasons which had induced Parliament in the earlier

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 863

part of the century to facilitate enclosures, the principal one being
the scarcity of food and the dislike entertained to obtain supplies
from abroad. Circumstances had, however, greatly changed, and
the amount of food produced by all the commons now unenclosed
would be but as a drop in the ocean as compared with the supplies
that now come from abroad. The increase of population was so large
that Parliament had to consider not merely how to increase the food
supply, but what was really best calculated to promote the health and
material prosperity of the people of this country. Subsequently, in
answer to a deputation of agricultural labourers on the subject of the
bill, he is reported to have said ' that he believed the practical
effect of the bill would be to put an end to enclosures; in fact, it was
drawn with that object.'

The return made by the Commissioners in 1874 showed that in
England there were 32,456,742 acres, out of which the area of
commons apparently capable of cultivation was 732,518 acres; the
area, of commons, mountain or otherwise, unsuitable for cultivation
967,531 acres ; and the area of open field lands 250,868 acres.
In Wales the total area was 4,700,431 acres, of which the area
of commons apparently suitable for cultivation was 151,471 acres ;
the area of commons, mountain or otherwise, unsuitable for cultivation
516,945 acres ; and the area of common fields 13,439 acres. There-
fore, out of 37,157,173 acres there existed 883,989 acres of common
land apparently capable of cultivation, 1,484,476 acres, mountain or
otherwise, unsuitable for cultivation, and 264,307 acres open field
land.

Subsequently to the above return^ which the Commissioners issued
after a careful examination of the Tithe Commutation Awards,
another return was made the following year by the Local Government
Board from the parish rate-books, in which the whole area of common
lands thus ascertained was shown to consist of no more than 1,524,648
acres, of which 326,972 were said to be situate in Wales.

Which is right of these two estimates is a matter of conjecture,
but we incline to the belief that the estimate of the Local Govern-
ment Board, being compiled direct from the parish rate-books, is
more likely to be correct than an estimate compiled from maps made
many years ago, some of which are of at least doubtful accuracy.

The question now is whether the intention of the authors of the
bill as explained by Lord Cross has been fulfilled. It is perfectly
true that under the stricter practice of the Act of 1876 the number of
schemes for the enclosure of commons has greatly diminished, only
twenty-two further schemes having been both approved by the Com-
missioners and also passed by Parliament, and that the proportion of
land set out in recreation grounds and allotments has been greatly
increased, as will appear from an examination of the following table,
which may be compared with the table given at page 851.

3o2

X64

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Dec.

Commons the subject of Provisional Orders for Enclosure under the
Commons Act, 1876."

Year in
which
Act '
passed

Xame of Common

County

Acreage

Allotments for
Recreation

Allotments
for Field
Gardens

A. R. P.

A. R. 1'.

1878

Orford .

Suffolk .

46

600

—

Riceall .

York .

1,297

600

20 0 0

Barrowden .

Rutland

1,925

900

20 0 0

North Luffenham

„

1,636

718

20 0 0

South

„

1,074

600

15 0 0

1879

Matterdale

Cumberland

2,794

14 0 0

10 0 0

(part of)

East Stainmore

Westmoreland

4,075

40 0 0

10 0 0

(part of)

South Hill .

Cornwall

402

10 0 0

10 0 0

Whittington

Stafford

53

800

10 0 0

1880

Lizard Common

Cornwall

280

—

20 0 0

(part of)

Steventon .

Berks .

1,373

14 0 0

20 0 0

1 Privilege of re-

Hendy Bank
Llandegley Rhos .

Radnor .

131
322

creation over
parts unculti-
vated or un-

—

planted

Llanfair Hills

Salop .

1,634

10 0 0

15 0 0

and Offa's Dyke

1881

Wibsey Slack and

York .

400

67 2 9

—

Low Moor

Scot ton and Ferry

Lincoln

1,605

. 10 0 0

48 0 0

Thurstaston .

Chester .

210

45 0 0

500

1882

Arkleside

York .

450

Privilege of

20 0 0

walking on all

unplanted or

uncultivated

parts

Bettws Disserth .

Radnor .

656

Do.

—

Cefn Drawen

>,

893

Do.

—

1883

Hildersham .

Cambridge .

1,175

800

15 0 0

1885

Llanybyther

Carnarvon

1,891

Privilege of

—

walking on all

nnplanted or

uncultivated

parts

24,322

260 0 0

258 0 0

Satisfactory, however, as the above figures are, it is neverthe-
less "certain that just in proportion as greater impediments are
opposed to the enclosure of commons through the channel of the
Enclosure Commissioners and Parliament, the inducement to lords
of the manor, as was repeatedly pointed out by Mr. Fawcett, to
effect enclosure by other means is increased: whether by having
recourse to the older methods of enclosure, which had been falling
into desuetude, or simply by taking the law into their own hands
and trusting to time to give a title through undisputed possession.

u See page 2G of the Report of the Commons Preservation Society, 1885.

1886 RURAL ENCLOSURES AND ALLOTMENTS. 865

The amendments moved in the House of Commons in 1876 in order
to obviate this danger were defeated. It was urged by Mr. Fawcett
that it was an essential condition of the successful working of the
bill if it became law, and especially of that part of it which was
designed to encourage regulation, that dealing with the wastes of
manors by any other process than that contemplated by Parliament
should be prohibited, and that, above all, the arbitrary action of
individuals should be summarily checked ; and it was urged that the
reports of Sir John Sinclair's Committees of 1795, 1797, and 1800
pointed clearly to the fact that no enclosure without an Act of
Parliament was then believed to be practically possible.

These views, however, did not prevail, though certain concessions
were made to them.

The first, which was in the bill as introduced, provides that any
encroachment on a village green shall be deemed a public nuisance..
This is a direct recognition of the interest of the public in such
open spaces. But there is no distinction between village greens or
commons with respect to enclosure, and the members of the Commons
Preservation Society therefore tried to extend the provision in question
to all enclosures of commons otherwise than by parliamentary authority.
A variety of clauses having this end in view were proposed by Mr.
Lefevre, Mr. Fawcett, and others, but the Government persistently
opposed them, and was able to command a majority of the House of
Commons. The ventilation of the question and the successive divisions
produced, however, some impression. The Government introduced the
30th clause, enabling County Courts to grant an injunction against
illegal enclosures, subject to an appeal to the High Court of Justice,
and they accepted from Lord Henry Scott the 31st clause, providing
that persons intending to enclose or approve a common otherwise than
under the provisions of the Act, shall publish a statement of their
intention in two or more local newspapers at least three months
previously.

The new Act had not been in operation more than two years
before the justice of the views of Mr. Fawcett was abundantly
proved. In the case of Maltby Common it was threatened by the
promoters of the scheme that if parliamentary sanction were refused
to the arrangements which had been inserted in the provisional order
and were being considered by a Committee of the House of Commons,
they might be able amongst themselves to effect the desired object
of enclosure without the consent either of the Commissioners or of
Parliament, and that in such case the parties might lose the benefit
of the twenty- nine acres proposed to be allotted for a recreation ground
and allotments. Possibly under the influence of this threat the Com-
mittee passed the scheme, adding however — on the motion of one of
the authors of the present observations — the following recommenda-
tion in a special report to the House :

866 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

It was pointed out to the Committee by Mr. Leach, one of the Assistant-Com-
missioners, that if the provisional order for enclosing Maltby Common were not
accepted by Parliament there was a possibility of the parties interested coming to
terms and enclosing the whole common, and that if that were done the intentions
of Parliament for the protection of the rights of the poorer inhabitants and the
health, comfort, and convenience of the neighbourhood would be thereby frustrated,
and that persons might arbitrarily enclose common land on the chance of nobody
interfering. It is evident that this condition of the law might materially impair
the free action of the Commissioners and interfere with the intentions of Parlia-
ment, if the Commissioners were informed that, should they not accept the exact
terms proposed by the majority of the parties interested, the enclosure would be
carried out in another way, without any reference to the Acts of Parliament
bearing on the subject.

It can hardly be doubted that Parliament will ere long endorse
the views which were unsuccessfully urged on its acceptance in 1876.
The best method for accomplishing the end in view would probably
be to make a general statutory prohibition of enclosure except through
the regular machinery which has been expressly provided to insure
even justice to all parties ; and to provide a cheap procedure and a
tribunal easy of access for the settlement of disputed cases in the
first instance, subject to whatever appeal might be necessary, in
order to deal with such questions as from time to time might arise
where the point would require settlement whether a particular piece
of land did or did not constitute part of a common. The object of
these observations, however, is not so much to discuss the details of
future legislation as to indicate that a grievance exists for which
Parliament will have to find a remedy.

EDMOND FITZMAURICE.
H. HERBERT SMITH.

.1886 807

A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES.

WHILST a mere child my perceptive faculties were remarkably keen ;
and the power to arrive at other people's thoughts was, I presume,
with me at an early age. But it was only about six years ago that I
began to practically test the matter. My first important experiment
was performed about this time with the Very Eev. Dr. Bickersteth,
the Dean of Lichfield. I was on a visit to the Dean, and one morn-
ing after breakfast, the subject of conversation having turned upon
* willing ' and * mesmerism,' he asked me if I thought it possible for one
person to read the thoughts of another. I replied that I believed
such a thing, under certain conditions, would be possible ; in fact
that I was almost certain I could do so myself.

This reply naturally called for a test ; and the Dean undertook to
think of some object in the Deanery of which I could know absolutely
nothing. My attempts to arrive at his thoughts were, as compared
with my after-efforts, somewhat crude, but I was perfectly successful
in what I undertook. I remember that I took my host by the hand
— I was from the first impressed with the necessity of establishing a
physical communication between the subject and the operator — and
led him from the breakfast-room ; not quickly as I do now, but
slowly and lingeringly. We entered the study, and I immediately
felt that I was in the correct locality. A moment more and I placed
my hand upon an object, which, according to the impressions I then
received, I believed to be my subject's selection. I was quite right.

The object was a bust of Lady Augusta Stanley.

This experiment, I need hardly say, emboldened me to make
further attempts ; and I speedily arrived at a much higher pitch
of perfection.

But let it be clearly understood that I cannot to-day find an
object thought of with any greater certainty than I did on my, as it
were, opening occasion. The execution is, of course, speedier, but
my improvement lies in going beyond simple tests of this character.
It is astonishing how, when the faculty is once with one, the power
to thought-read develops by practice, until the most intricate experi-
ments can be encompassed.

At first I don't think I quite understood the nature of my

868 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

exhibitions, and I puzzled myself not a little to account for them.
When young, one is so apt to imagine oneself supernaturally
endowed ; and experiments such as I performed were enough to
develop a tendency of this kind. But, whilst carrying out the
demonstrations, I set myself the task of arriving at a practical
explanation of them. Eventually I convinced myself that, instead
of there being anything of an occult character about my experiments,
they were one and all accountable on a purely natural basis.

Further on in this article I shall explain my theories ; but I
must first give instances of the practice of thought-reading and the
curious features they, in some cases, exhibit.

I shall never forget how the idle many and, not infrequently,
the learned few imbued with abnormal fancies sought to invest what
I did with an aspect of supernaturalism. Some even went so far as
to say that I did not myself understand how the various feats were
accomplished. Others, thorough-going spiritualists, waxed wroth
with me because I would not acknowledge the influence of * spirit
power ' in connection with my work.

By running counter to the former my number of friends in this
world has been considerably lessened ; whilst, if I am to believe the
latter, anything but a cordial reception awaits me when I am trans-
ferred to another sphere.

The following is a striking instance of how people with an under-
current of supernaturalism running through them may act in
antagonism to me.

At a seance held in theMarlborough Kooms, London, close upon five
years ago, under the presidency of Dr. (now Sir) J. Crichton Browne,
at which Professor Ray Lankester, Professor Groom-Robertson, and
other eminent scientists were present, when I was explaining the
modus operandi of thought-reading, Monsignor Capel took part in
one of the practical illustrations I introduced. It was a very simple
test, consisting only of finding a hidden toy ; yet I found it impos-
sible of accomplishment. My * subject,' instead of aiding me with
his concentration of thought in the direction of the hidden object,
was all the time (unconsciously I believe) resisting my progress. I
complained of this, and said that I never professed to read a man's
thoughts against his will ; and that under such circumstances success
was not possible.

' Exactly so,' replied the monsignor with charming frankness ;
* let us, therefore, reverse the process.'

As he said this I felt him breathe on my forehead, above my
blindfold. We then resumed connection with the hands, and in
another moment I found myself flying across the room. In my
experiments I always take the lead ; but in this case my t subject '
took it.

I found the object almost immediately ; and as I withdrew it

1886 A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 869

from its hiding-place the monsignor said, in quiet triumph, 'I
thought my process was better than yours.'

1 How so ?

'Why, I believe in the process, known as willing ; and I have
no belief in your theory that thoughts are conveyed through the
action of the 'physical system. So when you had failed in your
attempt upon your own plan, I bethought myself of willing you to
go to the object; and ' (this with a gentle reproving smile) 'you see
you went there direct.'

' Well, what does that prove ? '

* It proves that my will is greater than yours.'

' Possibly, but in the first place you exercise your will against the
experiment in such a manner that that became the dominant idea
in your mind, and not the object thought of. It is only when the
mind is so concentrated upon a given object, or action, as to leave no
room for the consideration of any other idea that I can have any
chance of success. Under such intensity of concentration the phy-
sical system acts with the mind and so gives me the impressions
sought after. But if you deliberately set yourself to will one to
stand still, I naturally stand still ; or if you wish me to go to a part
of the room opposite to where the hidden object is, there I go,
because those wishes are at the time dominant in your mind and they
form your actual thoughts ; and I am quite as successful a thought-
reader in taking such a course as if I had found the object, provided
you had elected to have allowed that to have been your dominant
thought. No man, you must admit, can have two dominant ideas in
his mind at one time. With regard to the second instance, I felt that
you were so intent upon " willing " me to go to the spot that, in the
very intensity of desire, you unconsciously dragged me the whole of
the way. I did nothing but remain quite passive, until I came to the
table where the toy was, and common sense told me to lift up the
tambourine and take it out.

1 No, Monsignor,' I added in conclusion, ' willing is neither
more nor less than either " dragging " or " pushing," the position of
the " wilier " so called determining which of the two it shall be.'

At one time it was thought to be impossible to find an object
outside of the room in which the experiment might be performed.
It was not long, however, before I demonstrated the falsity of this
contention. The first occasion was at Government House, Ottawa,
where I had been dining with the Marquis of Lome (then Grovernor-
G-eneral of Canada). The test originated with his Excellency, who
took a very keen interest in the subject of thought-reading, and it
consisted of finding an object outside of the drawing-room in which we
were when the experiment was proposed. I was only blindfolded,
and taking my subject by the hand I made a sudden dash out of the
room. Some doors had to be unbolted to allow of my passage : this

870 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

I did, and eventually I found myself in the yard. Unbolting one
more door I entered an out-building — it was a stable I discovered
afterwards — and reaching out my hand in the perfect darkness which
prevailed I encountered something alive.

* This is the thing ! ' I said in some consternation. ' Quite correct,'
was the reply ; and, on pulling off the handkerchief which bound my
eyes, I found that I had been laying hold of a young moose-deer, a
pet of H.K.H. the Princess Louise's.

I afterwards performed a somewhat similar experiment with the
Crown Prince of Austria at the Hofburg in Vienna. Only this time
the animal thought of was an immense black dog. It was a strange
sight to see the Crown Princess and the ladies of the court tucking
up their trains and following His Imperial Highness and myself in
our mad chase along the highways and byeways of the castle ; for,
in the first place, H.I.H. did not know where the dog was ; in the
second place he, in the search for it, lost his bearings, and he cer-
tainly went to parts of the castle where neither he nor any Hapsburg
had ever been before. Wherever his thoughts went there did I at
once proceed, and when he mentally paused in his perplexity I did
nothing but stand still. But immediately the Prince got on the
right track of the dog I did not hesitate a moment in my course,
but proceeded to where he lay panting in his wealth of long
shaggy hair, after evidently having partaken of a late and heavy
dinner.

Since then I have frequently demonstrated my ability to find
objects — even the smallest pins — hid in the open streets. Two
years ago last summer I gave an open-air test of this kind in the
heart of London itself. A pin was hid by that classical scholar, the
Eev. Dr. Holden in Trafalgar Square ; and the Spanish Minister, Sir
Charles Tupper, and Professor Eomanes, F.K.S., were amongst those
who acted on the committee. I speedily found the pin, although I
experienced some difficulty in getting through the crowd which had
assembled outside. The starting-place was an upstairs room in the
Charing Cross Hotel.

Perhaps, however, one of the most interesting of these out-door
experiments I ever performed took place in Berlin twelve months
ago last Easter. Having purchased an Easter-egg and put into it a
quantity of gold, the egg was given to Mr. Casson, the American
Minister, to hide anywhere within a radius of a kilometre of the
Hotel de Rome, which was the starting-point. Accompanied by
Count Moltke. His Excellency Dr. Lucius, and Prince Eatibon, as a
committee of inspection, Mr. Casson took away the egg and hid it,
whilst I remained with the balance of the committee in the hotel.
Instead of taking Mr. Casson by the hand, as I had done in other
cases, I caused him to be connected with me by a piece of thin wire.
One end of the wire was twisted round my right wrist and the other

1886 A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 871

end round his left ; the coil itself remained slack. Thus connected
we started on our errand of search. From time to time the wire
was drawn taut and it cut into our wrists with the force I exercised
in pulling my subject along ; but, as far as possible, I avoided
actually touching his hand with my own. After leaving the Unter
den Linden we turned into a narrow street, and then into the
Emperor Wilhelm's stables. I went up to a corn-box, and found it
locked. For a moment I took Mr. Casson's hand in mine in order
to increase the impression. This done, I moved towards Prince
Katibon, and putting my hand in his pocket I fetched out the key of
-the box, which I at once opened, and inside, among the corn, I dis-
covered the hidden egg. The egg and its contents were afterwards
presented to the Crown Princess of Germany as an Easter gift for
the Kindergarten, in which Her Imperial Highness takes so deep an
interest.

It is not, of course, always such straight sailing as this. Some-
times the subject unconsciouly, and at other times purposely, deceives
you. There are many people in the world who, whilst ethically
honest almost to an extreme, are physiologically dishonest without
scruple. With these people but very little can be done in the matter
of thought-reading, the success of which depends as much upon their
honesty of purpose as it does upon their concentration. Such people
will think it a smart thing to ' do ' a thought-reader ; and, whilst
outwardly promising to obey all the conditions, will not hesitate to
do their best to inwardly exert themselves to thwart the ' operator,'
counting such action as perfectly legitimate and proper.

A notable instance of this "land occurred with the renowned
General Ignatieff, whom I had the honour of meeting one night at
supper at the palace of Count Paul Schouvaloff, in St. Petersburg.
The author of the San Stefano treaty and a well-known officer of the
court had elected, for the purposes of the experiment, to imagine
themselves a pair of bandits. The former was to enact the role of
the robber, whilst the latter was to do the murdering. Whilst I was
out of the room it was agreed that these gentlemen should select
from out of the company some person who should do duty for a
Queen's messenger, whom they in imagination wished to waylay and
rob of his despatches. This having been duly carried out, I returned
to the room, and taking the officer by the hand I at once indicated
the person who had been selected as the victim, and without any
difficulty I re-enacted the mock tragedy in every detail, even to
wiping the imaginary blood-stains from off the knife used upon the
carpet, as had been done in the first instance.

Then came the turn of General Ignatieff, who had taken some
papers from the victim and had hidden them.

WTith him I experienced a difficulty at the outset : he is very
stout and has a natural disinclination to move fast, it was therefore

872 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

quite an effort to get him along at all. At last I mounted a chair,
for the purpose of exploring a vase on the mantel-shelf to which his
thoughts had been going. Finding it empty, I dismounted, and
turning to the gallant general I begged of him to concentrate his
whole thoughts upon the place where the hidden despatches really
were. He actually did so; and, before he had time to alter his
mind, I had opened the door of a closet at the end of the room and
there in a corner lay the papers.

I was much exhausted at the close of my search, and I think I was
vexed ; for I felt that my subject had almost purposely led me astray.

I therefore asked him why he had thought of the vase when the
papers were not in it.

* I think of it ? ' he replied, with that look of bland astonishment
which he knows so well how to assume. * It was never for a moment
in my thoughts.'

' C'est impossible.'

' Impossible ? C'est juste, monsieur ! ' and he bowed his grandest.

' Keally, how can you say so ? ' broke in a young lady on our
right. ' You know very well that you did at first think of putting
the papers in the vase, but that, as you said at the time, you thought
they would be too easily found, and so you put them over there *
(indicating the closet).

General Ignatieff is a marvellous man ; for he was not in the
least abashed at this. He simply smiled his blandest.

( What a memory you have, ma chere comtesse ! Ma vie ! what a
memory ! ' and he let fall a little laugh as he said this, shaking his
forefinger the while in playful reproof.

In my experiment with Mr. Gladstone, in the smoking-room in
the House of Commons, on the 16th of June, 1884, a very remark-
able thing occurred.

It will be remembered that the then Premier undertook to think
of three figures, and that I successfully interpreted his thoughts.
Before, however, this result was arrived at the following hitch took
place. I had without difficulty told the first two figures, viz. 3 and 6,
when I found that Mr. Gladstone's mind was wavering with regard
to the remaining figure ; and I had to beg of him to more firmly
concentrate his whole thoughts upon it. This he promised to do,
and I therefore, without hesitation, declared the third figure to be 6
— making a total of 366 — which Mr. Gladstone declared was the
correct number.

I then asked him why he had hesitated about the third figure,
and why he had at first thought of 5, and had afterwards altered his
mind to 6.

The premier seemed much surprised at the question, and he wound
up by asking me how I knew he had done so.

I reminded him that he overlooked the fact of my being a thought-

1886 A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 873

reader, whose duty it was to interpret such changes of thought, where-
upon he said : —

* It is perfectly true that I did at first think of 365, the number
of days in the year ; but when you had got the first two figures I
thought that you, being such a sharp sort of man — you will pardon
the expression' — (this with that sweet apologetic smile which his
friends so dearly love and his opponents envy) 'might by sequence
guess the remaining figure. So at that moment, remembering it was
leap-year, I took the liberty of altering my number to 366. I am
afraid thereby I gave you much unnecessary trouble.'

At which I hastened to assure him that it had made the experi-
ment doubly interesting.

With the Emperor of Germany another remarkable thing occurred
in connection with figure-divining. The Kaiser, when I was in Berlin,
was graciously pleased to express the desire of having * the pleasure
•of making Mr. Cumberland's acquaintance,' and I had the honour of
being presented to him soon after my arrival in the city. Before
experimenting with his Majesty I performed preliminary experiments
with Prince Henry of Battenberg and Count Hatzfeldt, now German
Ambassador in London ; and it was, I believe, chiefly my success with
the latter subject in telling the number of a bank-note that determined
,the Kaiser in his choice of what to think.

Taking the Emperor by the hand I led him up to a blackboard,
-and almost immediately I wrote thereon 61, whilst underneath this
date, after a moment's pause, I made the figure 4.

* Wonderful, wonderful ! ' exclaimed his Majesty ; ' it is my
coronation year.' He was crowned King of Prussia on the 18th of
October, 1861.

The appearance of the figure 4 was accounted for by the fact
that the number of the bank-note I had previously read with Count
Hatzfeldt was mostly made up of fours, and that the Emperor, quite
unconsciously as it were, let the numeral run through his mind after
I had written down the date upon which his mind had been so firmly
concentrated.

The Emperor of Germany, in his firmness and quickness of thought,
ranks amongst my very best ' subjects.'

When the ' subject' is a good one, the operator is enabled not
only to give a greater precision but often a much higher finish to his
experiments, leaving out in his execution of them not a single detail
which has had place in the « subject's ' thoughts. This was notably
the case in my drawing illustration with his Eoyal Highness the
Prince of Wales, which took place about two and a half years ago
when I was on a visit to Baron Ferdinand Kothschild at Waddesdon.

After dinner one night, his Koyal Highness was pleased to offer
himself as a subject for experiment; and he chose a test altogether
different from anything I had attempted before. It consisted of my

874 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. ' Dec.

having to draw upon a piece of paper the outline of an animal which
his Eoyal Highness had at the time in his mind. A sheet of paper
was placed upon a music-stand on the piano ; and, having blindfolded
myself, I took the Prince by the left hand, holding a lead-pencil in
my right. In a few moments I had drawn the outline of the animal
desired — viz. an elephant. The drawing was very rough, but, as
neither his Eoyal Highness nor myself is an artist, the irregular
contour of the animal depicted was readily accounted for. There was,
however, one striking peculiarity about the sketch which was not
allowed to pass notice. The animal I had drawn was tailless. It
was afterwards explained that the Prince had in mind the first
elephant he had shot in Ceylon, and whose tail he had himself docked
at the time of shooting.

One's powers at arriving at the thoughts of others in the
higher phase of experiment are not limited to divining numbers and
sketching animals, for I found at the first attempt that I could write
down sentences in languages of which I knew absolutely nothing.

My first attempt of this kind was with the Khedive when I was
in Cairo last year.

It appears that His Highness had long taken an interest in my
work, and the very day I arrived in the Egyptian capital he sent a
message through a friend in common asking me to pay him a visit
at the Abdin Palace on the following morning.

When I presented myself he greeted me most cordially, and thus
flatteringly addressed me :

' It has long been my wish to see you, for all your doings have
been known to me. I never thought that I should have the pleasure
of seeing you here, but that I should have to go to England to see
you. But, strange to say, I have dreamt of you two nights running,
and we believe, according to our religion, that he whom we dream of
we shall see '

Having thus expressed himself, coffee and cigarettes (His High-
ness, unlike any other Mohammedan potentate I have met, is himself
a non-smoker) were brought in, and we conversed for half an hour or
so on general topics, His Highness seeming pleased to hear that I
had come to Egypt for the purpose of making myself acquainted with
Egyptian affairs. As I was taking my leave, the friend referred to
above suggested that I should give the Khedive an exhibition of my
skill, which I consented to do. His Highness clapped his hands, and
an attendant obeyed the summons. Paper and pencils were brought
and a sheet of the former was gummed upon one of the gilded doors.

The Khedive thereupon thought of a word, and, without any sort
of hesitation, I wrote on the paper the word Abbas (the name of his
son) in Arabic characters. I did not know at the time a single letter
of the Arabic alphabet ; and, as I have already pointed out, the
experiment was entirely impromptu.

1886 A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 875

The Oriental mind is much impressed by experiments of this
kind ; and, when I left Egypt for India, the Khedive did me the
honour of making me the bearer of a congratulatory message to Lord
Dufferin.

Some four months later I performed a somewhat similar test with
Arabi Pasha. I had been breakfasting with the exile at his house in
Cinnamon Gardens, Colombo ; and, as we adjourned to the verandah
to smoke and sip coffee, he took me playfully by the hand and said,
' Come, read my thoughts.' I proceeded to gratify his wish ; and,
taking out of my pocket a pencil, I asked him to think of a word
which I would try and write upon the wall.

He replied ' Good ! I think of one English word.' I suppose he
did try his hardest to think of that one English word, but I found it
impossible to trace it out ; the letters I did make being perfectly
unintelligible. I then begged of him to think of the word in Arabic
and not in Latin characters. He demurred to this, as he is very
proud of the progress he is making in English ; but he at last con-
sented to do so. In an instant I had scrawled over the yellow
plaster in front of me a word in Arabic. I knew I was right by the
tremendous start of surprise my ' subject' gave, and a moment later
he told me, in an excited tone, that it was correct. The word was
Jesus.

On Arabi being asked to write this word down in Latin characters,
he, as I anticipated, found himself utterly unable to do so.

With the Maharajah of Cashmere I had some extraordinary
results. I even succeeded in writing out a word with him which
could not be read by perhaps hal£-a dozen people in Calcutta, it being
written in Dogra, a Cashmerian hill patois — a language, I need
hardly say, I had never heard of before. The Maharajah was so im-
pressed by my demonstrations that he strongly urged me to come to
Srinuggur, there to act as a sort of supplementary dewcm, with the
object, I understood, of reading the thoughts of his ministers, in
whom he appeared to have but little confidence. I was, of course,
unable to accept his offers of hospitality.

The Indian princes, whilst making much of me whenever I
visited their dominions, were in some instances inclined to look
upon me with something akin to awe. I am sure several of them
were frightened by my experiments, and thought me supernaturally
endowed, whilst many a peccant minister would shut up his thoughts
as it were whenever he met me, or avoid me whenever he saw me
coming.

In time of trouble I really think I could turn my influence in
some of these Native States to good account.

But in western countries one is met on all sides by the question,
4 What is the use of this thought-reading ? What is there in it beyond
a striking and peculiar form of amusement ? '

876 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

Well, if in this very blase age one has produced something
calculated to amuse the world, one, I take it, will have done not a
little towards earning recognition ; and no one will, I think, deny
that thought-reading, so called, has afforded endless amusement (to
say the very least) to hundreds of thousands of both sexes.

But, beyond this, thought-reading has its uses ; and I see no
reason why something practical should not, at some time or other,
come out of it. For instance, I fail to see why it could not, in
certain instances, be applied to the detection of crime.

We will say, par exemple, that a murder has been committed, a
dagger having been used for the purpose, and that this dagger has
been found, suspicion resting upon a man who is assumed to be its
owner.

He is, we will say, arrested, but nothing definite can be proved
against him. Justice halts. Then might be the time for calling
in a thought-reader. Such a person would naturally be better able
to tell whether the * suspect ' had used the knife than an ordinary
observer ; for very few men if confronted with the evidence of their
crime could help in some measure betraying themselves. This would
not refer to habitual criminals, who are better able to control their
emotions. Most murderers, are, however, emotional beings, who
momentarily allow their passions to get the better of them. The
fear of detection, although they may remain undiscovered, is seldom
absent from them ; and what their tongue has not the courage to say
their beating pulses unconsciously confess, whenever the remem-
brance of the crime thay have committed becomes the dominant
idea in their minds. No thought-reader operating, as I do, through
the action of other people's nervous systems, could divine what a man
did not wish to tell ; but under the combined influence of fear and ex-
pectancy very few men would be able to physically retain their secret.

On one or two occasions I have put these views to a practical
proof, for, in addition to having operated with imaginary criminals,
I have successfully tried my hand with genuine ones.

In Warsaw, for instance, two labourers were confined in the prison
on the charge of having dug up on the estate of a M. Bartholdi, and
hid away for their own uses, a quantity of gold, buried by a relative
of the said M. Bartholdi during the last Polish rebellion. The men
were examined by the juge cV instruction ; but they obstinately
remained silent, and no information of a practical character was
arrived at during the examination. I happened to be in Warsaw at
the time ; and one evening, at General Grourko's, the facts were re-
lated to me, and I was asked if I could not assist justice in the matter.

The outcome was, that a seance with the prisoners was arranged in
the prison, in the presence of the governor of the gaol, the British
pro-consul, the juge d? instruction, M. Bartholdi, and another.

The two men were quite different from each other in appearance.

1886 A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 877

One was a stolid, brutal-looking moujik, whilst the other seemed to
have been cast in an altogether different mould. I somehow at once
made up my mind that the former was the actual thief, and that the
latter was at the most but an accessory to the fact ; and the experi-
ment which I presented amply proved this contention.

I took some pieces of money from my pocket, which the men
were told represented some of the coins which they, in their haste
to remove the treasure, had dropped on the ground, and that, no
matter where they should hide them in the prison, I could find them ;
and that, just as easily as I could find money so hidden, so could I
discover the stolen box of gold.

The coins, having been placed in a piece of paper, were given to the
first-mentioned prisoner to hide within the knowledge of his com-
panion, I being out of the room the while. On my return I took
the former as a ' subject,' but, as I had anticipated, I could make
nothing out of him. He was not content with stolidly declining to
think of the place, but he refused to accompany me in my peregrina-
tions around the room. With the other prisoner it was quite dif-
ferent. Directly I came in contact with him, I felt him thrill with
excitement ; and with perfect ease I took him to an ancient Eussian
stove let into the wall, and having unscrewed the door, I scraped
from out of the ashes the hidden coins. The man seemed terrified,
and he straightway made the following confession : That he and
his companion were digging in the woods, when his companion's
spade struck something hard which proved to be an iron chest full
of gold pieces. They took a few (in order to purchase groceries and
other necessaries), the passing of whieh ultimately led to their arrest.
It was their intention, he said, to share the money and get away from
Russia ; but that, when he went to the place with his companion the
next morning for the purpose of removing the chest, he found that it
was gone, and his friend then told him that he had got up in the
night and had removed it to a safe spot on his own account. He ex-
plained that he had been forced to keep the secret because his com-
panion avowed he should never have a single coin if he said anything
of the original discovery of the money. ' But,' he added shudderingly,
* if I only knew where this money now was, this " devil-man,'' pointing
towards me, would be sure to find it out.' And he vigorously crossed
himself. How this case ended I don't know, as I have not been to
or heard from Warsaw since.

Whilst I am now with the reader at Warsaw, it will not, I venture
to think, be out of place to relate an experience I had with General
Gourko (the hero of the Shipka Pass incident), Governor-General of
Poland.

His Excellency was pleased to give a reception in my honour at
the old palace of the Polish kings ; and, during the evening, he
asked me if I thought it would be possible to trace out, by my
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3P

878 THE ^NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

process of thought-reading, the plan of an imaginary military action.
I replied that I had never tried such an experiment, but that I did
not despair of its possibility. He thereupon offered himself as a
' subject.' In the experiment proposed he was to imagine that he
was on a battle-field, and that he wished to lead a corps d'armee in a
certain direction in order to capture a redoubt. To accomplish this
he warned me he should make some very intricate manoeuvres. The
whole thing being firmly fixed in his mind we left the big ' yellow
drawing-room ' in which the guests were assembled, and at a jog-trot
entered the ' red drawing-room ' at its foot. For a moment we
paused whilst we passed through a doorway into a passage. Here we
went slowly and cautiously, the passage representing, in the General's
mind, a rocky defile. At the end of the passage, however, I wheeled
sharp round to the right and found myself in the ' blue room.' After
going across to one of the corners of this chamber, which heads
the centre ' yellow room,' I made a sudden dash with all my speed
into that room, upsetting one or two people in my haste, and
finally paused at a huge settee surmounted by flowers, upon which
I planted a handkerchief which did duty for the Eussian flag.

I was, the Governor-General afterwards said, exact in every
movement.

This experiment caused considerable excitement in Warsaw, and
when an account of it was sent to the local papers, the censor for-
bade its being printed. That functionary afterwards voluntarily assured
a friend of mine that it would have been highly injudicious to have
made such an affair public, as the Eussians, in their superstition, would,
in the first place, have imagined I was a greater man than his
Excellency, and that, in the second place, I might, in time of war,
use my skill towards interpreting the Governor-General's plans to
the enemy.

I think a lawyer might make some practical use of this process
of ' thought-reading.' For my contention is that so closely allied is
the body with the mind that, under the influence of emotion or con-
centrated attention, the body not only acts in unison with the mind,
but the physical system expresses the thought almost as distinctly
as the tongue could. By carefully noting and weighing facial and
bodily indications a skilful lawyer, gifted with a sense of perception
sufficiently acute to enable him to successfully perform so-called
* thought-reading experiments,' would be all the better able to arrive
at the true value of a witness's evidence than by merely acting upon
the replies elicited under cross-examination. It is true, habitual
liars manage to assume an almost perfect control over their facial
organs ; but, for all that, if you watch them closely you will discover
that what does not express itself in the face is bound to physically
betray itself in some other way. It may be a mannerism so slight
as to be almost undetectable, or it may be a movement so strongly

1886 A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 879

marked as to be at once distinguishable ; but in either case you will
find that the expression is habitual with him, and that he will wear
it on one and every occasion when he lies.

What is bred in the mind will come out in the body.

I once knew a man, whom Mark Twain would perhaps have de-
signated as the ' prettiest liar in creation.' He altogether falsified
the adage about a liar not being able to look you straight in the face,
for he would, whilst grossly lying, look at you in the most direct
manner; in fact so straight was his gaze that you invariably would lower
your eyes before his, as if you in reality were the sinner and not he.

He tried his hand with me, and momentarily took me in ; for I
could not conceive it possible that a man could lie so glibly and yet
maintain such an air of perfect, unblushing innocence.

The next time I fell in with him was on an occasion when it was
to his advantage to lie, and that he was equal to the occasion goes
without saying. Yet all the while his expression was ingenuousness
itself. I, however, noticed, that whilst a smile wreathed his lips, and
his light blue eyes danced in playful innocence, there was a suspicious
nervous action of the fingers of the left hand as he grasped his
watch-chain. To give the man credit, he never lied purposelessly,
and only upon matters affecting his own interests ; but when the
purpose was there, there was no limit to where he thought himself
justified in throwing the hatchet. On another occasion I had some
business to discuss with him very much to his advantage ; and I
noticed him involuntarily stretch out his thumb to hook in his watch-
chain preparatory to launching forth. Suddenly he paused, blushed
and stammered, and in his confusion- he actually told the truth..

On looking down where his hand had gone, I saw that he had
come out without his watch-chain.

Naturally truthful men experience much greater difficulty than
do habitual liars in controlling their feelings. That is to say, they
much more readily give themselves away by some physical indication
or other, in many instances the indications being so transparent
that a child could run and read them.

It may or may not be an advantage for a man to be able to judge
of another man's sincerity offhand ; but I believe that I can, imme-
diately I shake a man by the hand, tell what his true feelings are with
regard to me. A man may wreathe his face with smiles when he
receives me, but if they do not correctly express his thoughts there
will be almost sure to be a bodily something about him that will betray
him. A man may retain an idea to himself against all the thought-
readers and clairvoyantes in the world, but he cannot retain a feeling.
Some people do not of course attempt to hide their feelings, and
their expressions of annoyance or dislike are so clearly marked as to be
intelligible to the very dullest : others do try to hide their feelings
under a mask, but their emotions are the more natural and

3 P2

880 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

powerful of the two, and either a corner of the mask is constantly
turning up, showing what is beneath, or it, to a highly sensitive
person, is so transparent as to be readily looked through.

Mr. Gladstone is, of all notable men I have met, about the least
able to mask his emotions, skilful as he is in cloaking his thoughts.
He is a highly emotional man, and there is about him, moreover,
something distinctly mesmeric. His natural charm of manner, the
softness of his voice, and the soothing nervous action of his hands,
give him an immense power over men. It is almost impossible to
be in his presence without feeling this mesmeric influence, and I can
well understand people doing things at his dictation which may be
against their better judgment.

I have often been asked whom I consider to be the best and who
the worst ' subject ' for thought-reading. With all the good ' sub-
jects ' I have at different times fallen in with it is somewhat difficult
for me to particularise any one of them as being in advance of the
rest, yet I think I might be justified in saying that for downright
concentration of thought, mathematical precision, and earnestness of
purpose, Field-Marshal Von Moltke would take the palm.

As to the worst ' subject,' I think of all the distinguished
personages with whom I have operated M. Alexandre Dumas gave
me the greatest trouble. Some people will be surprised, whilst others
will be disappointed, at hearing this ; for I have been so repeatedly
asked if I did not think Mr. Henry Labouchere to be a difficult —
in fact an impossible — ' subject ' that there will no doubt be those
who will be expecting and desiring to see his name in the place of
M. Dumas.

Contrary to general expectation, I found Mr. Labouchere, in the
experiments I tried with him, to be an excellent ' subject.' His way
of thinking was sharp and decisive ; and, what was more, he was
perfectly honest with me. I found in him a sceptic willing to be
convinced, but one keenly on the alert to detect imposition and to
discountenance pretence. With me he was from beginning to end
both earnest and sincere ; and, whilst he may to the British mind be
counted as somewhat too versatile, there is no man in this world
who can on occasion be more ' thorough ' than the senior member for
Northampton.

M. Alexandre Dumas is a man of quite another stamp. He is as
absolutely unemotional as it is possible for anyone to be. Then, in
addition to his cold and passive temperament, he is extremely bigoted
and self-willed. He has, I believe, a warm heart, from which good
resolves and kindly actions repeatedly spring ; but he has schooled
himself to look upon such things as weaknesses, and he would deem
it little short of a crime for him to betray his emotions. He is
•always seeking to have supreme control over himself, and he fully
•expects every one who is brought in contact with him to be equally
subservient to his will. This naturally makes him a bad ' subject '

188G .1 THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 881

for a thought-reading experiment. Difficult, however, as he was, I
eventually — as I took much time and great pains — succeeded with
him. The test consisted of finding an article which he had hid
somewhere in his daughter's house. When the object was found it
turned out to be an early copy of La Dame aux Camellias, in which
M. Dumas had written ' A M. Cumberland, hommage de 1'auteur,
Alexandre Dumas.' It will thus be seen that, whilst his natural
thoughtfulness and kindliness of heart originally prompted this agree-
able phase of experiment, his innate pride of self and domineering
will put obstacles in the way of its fulfilment.

Naturally some persons are more suitable than others for such
experiments; but I have found that with intelligent, thoughtful
people, who act up to the conditions, I seldom fail. In fact the
higher I have been the more certain has been the success. Small-
minded people do not hesitate to trick and lie in their desire to be
considered smarter than the ' operator ; ' but the truly great in thought
and in position never, in such cases, stoop to such pettiness — hence
with them all is from first to last fair sailing.

Much, I should add, depends upon the condition of health of
both the 'subject' and the 'operator.' If either be unwell the
chances of success are in a measure diminished ; as the ' subject ' finds
it difficult, whilst suffering from a severe headache or other acute
bodily ailment, to concentrate his whole thoughts upon a given ob-
ject or action. He is only too apt to allow the knowledge of his
ailment to distract his attention. The same with the ' operator,' who
instead of placing himself in a receptive condition ready to receive the
physical indications conveyed to him by the ' subject,' is forced by
pain or exhaustion to turn his attention to the seat of his disorder,
thus invariably entailing failure.

Taking all in all I have found the best ' subjects ' amongst states-
men, diplomatists, mathematicians, literary men, and all those engaged
in active brain-work. In diplomacy Count Julius Andrassy was
perhaps the most striking exception, as in him I found a somewhat
hard nut to crack.

Military men — especially in Germany, where the officers have
such an excellent mathematical training — provide some very good
* subjects,' especially when the experiments have, as in the case with
General Gourko, a bearing upon their profession.

Lawyers are often not bad ; but they are, as a rule, too much
inclined to stop in the middle of an experiment for the purpose of
arguing the question. Then they are sometimes very dodgy, and
one invariably feels in their hands like a witness undergoing a cross-
examination, whom the ' subject' feels it his professional duty to trip
up at every opportunity.

Musicians — that is when they are eminent and one asks them to
think of everyday commonplace things — are practically hopeless. Get
them at a piano, and the thought-reader who doesn't know a single

882 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.] Dec.

note can invariably vamp out a tune thought of by them. But ask
them to think of a pin, a man, any such object, and their thoughts are
up in the skies immediately, the object selected having no place in
their minds. M. Gounod afforded me an excellent example of how a
first-class composer thinks.

Artists are better. They possess, as a rule, not only greater con-
centration, but they do not object to ordinary things having a place in
their thoughts. Munkacsy, it is true, I found somewhat erratic, but
Angeli, Camphausen, Begas, and Frank Lenbach proved admirable
' subjects.'

Clergymen, for experiments in the drawing-room, are absolutely
perfect ; but in public, especially where the tests are of an intricate
character, they are apt to become nervous and forgetful. This
of course militates against the success of the test, and, knowing this,
they, in their natural conscientiousness, commence to reproach them-
selves for their own shortcomings, thus rendering the experiment all
the more difficult of accomplishment.

Medicine provides some sterling ' subjects.' But the ordinary prac-
titioner, whilst professing to obey the conditions laid down, is much
too apt, during the progress of an experiment, to test his theories ; and
there is scarcely a doctor born who has not theories upon some subject
or other. This would not matter so much in private, but where a public
audience is concerned such interference, which will be sure to delay
and maybe spoil an experiment, is altogether unfair. I am of course
referring to cases where the ' operator ' says, * I cannot clairvoyantly
read your thoughts, neither can I succeed with you unless you desire
it. The success of the experiment as much depends upon your powers
of concentration as it does upon my powers of perception. All I want
you to do is to firmly and honestly fix your whole thoughts upon the
object you have selected, and not in any way to endeavour to lead
me astray. Remain throughout but passive : do not purposely
exercise any contraction of the muscles or endeavour to prevent my
going to any place or in any direction I choose. If you do so I
cannot possibly succeed, for the thought which would dictate such
action to you would become the dominant one and not the object you
have selected. You can, if you choose, easily lead me astray, but for
the time being I want you to place yourself entirely in my hands.'

In locating pains, imaginary or real, either in his own body or
that of another, medical men are much better to operate with than
any other class of persons.

I am somewhat inclined to think that this sleight of touch called
thought-reading is not altogether without the sphere of practical
medicine, and that a doctor who was an expert 'thought-reader'
might find his attainments in this direction of no little use in
diagnosing complaints, being thereby, as it were, able to feel
with his patient instead of having, as in ordinary cases, to be content
with the patient's verbal statement of his or her symptoms.

1886 A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 883

With regard to races, I have found good l subjects ' amongst them
all ; but some of my greatest successes have been achieved with
Englishmen and Germans. The more civilised the nation, the
greater number of ' subjects ' suitable for thought-reading experi-
ments will it provide.

A Chinaman, under the rank of an ambassador with a touch of
Western civilisation about him, is a hopeless case. There is no pos-
sibility of getting him to think squarely. North American Indians
occasionally provide some interesting subjects, but it generally takes
them about twenty-four hours to make up their minds what to
think of, and they insist upon smoking whilst going about the
experiment. It is difficult to make savage tribes understand what
you are about, but when they do * catch on ' they are invariably
frantic with delight. Experimenting with savages — especially if
they happen to have cannibalistic tendencies — is not unfraught with
danger. Once, when I was experimenting with a Maori chief, I felt
convinced that the dominant idea in the old rascal's mind was how a
thought-reader would taste in a pie. Luckily I had white friends
with me at the time, and he did not seek to let this idea have practical
effect.

Contrary to general expectation I do not look upon women as
good subjects. They are, as a general thing, much too nervous and
highly strung to concentrate their thoughts — I principally refer to
public tests — for any length of time. It is all very well if the experi-
ment is an easy one and does not take long to fulfil ; but if it be an
intricate one, taking some time in its execution, you may depend
upon it that she will have got heartily weary of it before she is half
through with it. Moreover, with the natural perversity of her sex,
she will commence to think of everything or everybody in the room,
or perplex herself with the thought what Mrs. A. thinks of her, or
what Miss B. would do in her place, or whether Mr. C. is of
opinion she is making an exhibition of herself. With such thoughts
running like wild-fire through her mind there is no room for that
dominant idea which the operator is in search of.

Ladies, in their pliability, make, in most cases, very excellent
< subjects ' for what is termed ' willing,' in which phase of experiment
they are what is called * willed ' to do certain things desired by the
ladies or gentlemen who have hold of them.

The method is for a lady to stand in the middle of the room, and
for two so-called ' willers ' — generally ladies — to place their hands
upon her body, one hand in front and the other behind. Almost
immediately the lady who is to find the object thought of moves off
in the direction desired by the ' operators,' and, as a matter of fact,
she is nearly always successful. Of course the ladies who hold her
unconsciously assist her in the finding of the object, by the muscular
pressure they exercise upon her. This method is very clumsy, and
it is in no way adapted for the working out of experiments of a

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

complex character, or even for the finding in very small localities.
The manipulation it entails is also much too apparent, and it pro-
vides no safeguard against guesswork. On the whole, however, it
affords a very fair illustration of the general principle of mind acting
on body producing muscular tensions in the direction of the locality
on which the thoughts are concentrated.

In the method I adopt I invariably take the initiative, whether
it be in the matter of searching for a pin or of writing down th&
number of a bank-note.

In my experiments I am always blindfolded, so that my attention
shall not be distracted by light or movement. I generally take the
left hand and place it on my forehead, and in such manner I can
quite readily find the smallest objects. In working out actions such
as imaginary murder tableaux, I prefer taking the patient's hand in
my own, so that all the nerves and muscles may have full play.

Let it be clearly understood that I at no time get any so-called
* mental picture ' of what is in the mind of my subject ; but that I
am in every instance dependent upon the impressions conveyed to
me through the action of his physical system (during contact with
him) whilst under the influence of concentrated attention.

Some mystically inclined people claim to be able to read thoughts
without contact. For my part I have never yet seen experiments
of this kind successfully performed unless there had been opportu-
nities for observing some phase of physical indication expressed by
the subject, or unless the operator was enabled to gather information
from suggestions unconsciously let fall by somebody around. I have
on several occasions managed to accomplish tests without actual
contact, but I have always been sufficiently near to my ' subject ' to
receive from him — and to act upon accordingly — any impressions
that he physically might convey.

In my case, ' thought-reading ' is an exalted perception of touch.
Given contact with an honest, thoughtful man, I can ascertain the
locality he is thinking of, the object he has decided upon, the course
he wishes to pursue, or the number he desires me to decipher almost as
confidently as though I had received verbal communication from him.

I, of course, am not alone in this matter, there being without
doubt thousands of people in the world who possess in a greater or
lesser degree similar qualifications. Nine-tenths of them do not
and, maybe, never will, know it, and a very great proportion of the
remaining tenth would not take the trouble to develop the faculty.
A continuous practice of these feats is not good for one. Whilst
operating one is in a constant state of excitement, and the nerves
are apt to become unhinged. Some amateur operators— especially
the young and mystically emotional — who have not the remotest
idea as to how they perform their experiments, or that they are
capable of a physiological explanation, get so imbued with the mag-

188G A THOUGHT-READER'S EXPERIENCES. 885

netic theory that they are always imagining they see ' auras ' or feel
* strange magnetic currents ' running through them. This is highly
calculated to do their nervous systems some permanent injury, and
the parents and guardians of such people would do well to put their
veto upon the demonstrations.

The process known as 'thought-reading ' is quite a modern thing,
and, so far as I can ascertain, it was altogether unknown to the
ancients. When I was in India I made active inquiries on all sides as
to whether there was any trace in the priestly and historical writings
of similar experiments having been performed in the past. I was
invariably answered in the negative ; but one day an old Brahman
at Bhavnagar told me that there was a tradition amongst the Brahmans
that ages ago — so far back that he could not fix the date — there were
holy people who possessed the power of reading the thoughts of man.
These wise men were in consequence set up as being only next to the
gods, which made the divinities so wroth that they devoured them,
or did away with them in some such effective manner — hence the
dearth of thought-readers in Western India.

Later on this same old priest did me the extreme honour, in a
poem read before the Prince in durbar, of placing me in point of
glory very near some of the most reputable of their gods, all because
I had successfully performed some experiments with his Highness
the Thakore. Whether the Brahman flattered me in the hopes of
obtaining backsheesh, or whether he was anxious for me to incur the
displeasure of the deities referred to, I cannot say. In the first
place, as a Christian I was bound not to hold the gods in question in
very high respect, so I refused-'to be flattered and scattered no
backsheesh ; and in the second, after enjoying the Prince's splendid
hospitality for a week, I left the state without any kind of mishap.

A noted Egyptologist told me, however, that he was of opinion
that the Egyptian priests were adepts in the art of thought-reading,
and that they were quite conversant with the methods adopted by my-
self. In fact, I believe I understood him to say that there was indirect
evidence of such things having been in some of the recently dis-
covered magic papyri. It is possible that if, as has been anticipated,
these Egyptian priests and Persian magi were expert ' thought-
readers,' they developed the process further than I have been able
to do.

For some time past I have not only ceased to further pursue
my investigations in the matter of ' thought-reading,' but have
virtually given up the practice thereof, other matters occupying my
thoughts — and my time. Although I shall no longer be actively
identified with the subject, I cannot but hope that the impressions
I have here let fall will be productive of good fruit.

STUART C. CUMBERLAND.

886 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

LOYALTY OF THE INDIAN
MOHAMMEDANS.

THE facility for travelling in comfort through India owing to the
spread of railways has induced a swarm of tourists to visit that
country, too many of whom consider it necessary to put into print
useless descriptions of places and structures of which it would be
difficult to write anything novel or amusing. The Taj at Agra,
and Futtehpore Sikri, and the Ghauts of Benares, are as well known
as "Westminster Abbey, Windsor Castle, and the landing steps at
Greenwich ; and we talk of the shop of Manik Chund at Delhi as
readily as of that of Liberty in Kegent Street.

For a book to be of value something more than denunciations of
the abominable hotels at Bombay and Calcutta, or stories of ' bowling
over tigers,' or details of railway journeys and misdemeanours of
Hindoo servants, is required. An account of one week's intimate
intercourse with the Eyots of a district would be far more valuable.
But it may be truly said a traveller cannot enter into any intimate
intercourse with the Ryots ; it is hard enough for the oldest resident
to do so. Yet one does meet with men who have had constant,
familiar, and friendly intercourse with the cultivators, having gained
their confidence by kindly words and kindly acts, and by a thorough
knowledge of the dialect of the district. Such men I have met,
more of them outside the Civil Service proper than within its pale ;
men engaged in commerce, in the purchase of agricultural produce,
others in engineering works and in forestry, and in those many oc-
cupations which give them opportunities of sitting under a tree and
of hearing that which the Indian peasant desires or complains of.
The exalted position of the civil servant and the awe he inspires are
obstacles in the way of unrestrained intercourse, and the higher he
rises and the greater his experience, the greater is the awe and the
wider the gulf between him and those he governs.

Although the traveller cannot penetrate below the surface of
Indian life, still from conversation with English officials, and with
natives official and unofficial, specially in the independent states,
and from the articles in the native press, one who has been a pre-
vious visitor to India can see how rapid and how high has been the
advance of the tide of public opinion within a comparatively short

1886 THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. 887

period. It was my good fortune to have been at Calcutta in 1875
during the visit of the Prince of Wales, and to have become acquainted
with almost all the natives of high position who were present on that
occasion. Many of them spoke to me, apparently with great frank-
ness, on the social and political questions of the day. I should rather
say on the political, for as to the social questions they had generally
no strongly defined opinions, nor had they thought much on the
subject. Even as regards political questions there seemed to be much
timidity and no definite aims. During the last ten years, however,
the progress of thought has been enormous ; social questions are
eagerly and profitably discussed, and what were formerly but floating
ideas of political objects have now assumed definite shape, and have
become, if I may use a vulgarism, the planks of an Indian platform.
This is to be ascribed to the general increase of education, and to the
diffusion of intercourse between men of all parts of the Indian con-
tinent, owing to the facilities for travelling by the construction of
railways, and their remarkably low scale of fares.

The opinion of the English governing class on this progress of
thought in India varies. Some denounce it, looking back with
regret to the stagnation of old times ; some regard it as inevitable,
and accept it as such ; and others, I must say the minority, welcome
it as tending to raise our Indian fellow-subjects to higher and nobler
ideas, to the practice of self-government, and thus to the level of
European civilisation. Accepting this as a sound object of policy,
they disregard the scurrilous and malignant outpourings of many of
the Indian newspapers, and laugh at the inflated ridiculous harangues
of young Bengal, knowing that in" the background there are natives
of moderation, good sense, and forethought, and that the conservative
and somewhat timid nature of the Indian mind forbids the applica-
tion of wild speculative theories to the political questions which
affect the course of daily life. It has been my good fortune to meet
such natives, and I am not without belief that every day their
number is being increased, and that by degrees, with caution and
discrimination, many of the demands now advanced may with safety
be conceded. Among the most prominent of these demands are self-
government, reform of the constitution of the Indian Council, and
the raising of the age for admission to the Civil Service. This is
not the occasion to discuss at any length these demands. Suffice it
to say, that the raising of the age of candidates has hardly an oppo-
nent in India. It finds favour, I believe, with the natives and the
ruling powers alike, and would undoubtedly improve the class of
English officials by enabling men who had taken degrees at the
universities of the United Kingdom to compete, and who would come
out matured in judgment and experience by the attrition of English
life. As to reform in the Indian Council, no one can contend that,
with the changes material and intellectual extending throughout India

888 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

at the present rate, it is not necessary to have the advisers of the Ir?dia
Office in touch with the progress of the country, and for that reason
I am quite ready to admit that members of the Indian Council should
hold their seats for a limited period, not exceeding five years, and
that they should be appointed within a defined short time after re-
tirement from service in India. As to the demand for self-govern-
ment, that too can be maintained as a proper and righteous aspira-
tion, but it cannot spring up like a mushroom in a night. It must
be conceded tentatively and by degrees, as individuals fit themselves
for it, and there must be great reservations. But this does not suit
the ardent spirits of young Bengal. Everything must be done at
once ; no delay can be admitted between the admission of a principle
and its being pushed to its extreme limits. Expediency must be
blotted out of the political dictionary, and logical conclusions alone
recognised. The Indian Council must be swept away because it
is supposed that certain of its members are averse to change, and
it is gravely contested that the Secretary of State for India will
be better able to come to right conclusions about intricate ques-
tions with the aid of the permanent officials of his department, and
without being hampered by the interference of men of the highest
character and position who have passed much of their lives in India,
and who have acquired knowledge of every department in every
province of that country. So also as regards self-government — there
must be no halting, no limitation. I asked the question of one of
the delegates who attended the meeting of Indian reformers at
Bombay last December, as to what was meant by self-government.
' Does it mean gradual admission to many offices now practically
closed against natives, or that elected members without any ex-ojficio .
leavening should constitute the municipal councils, or that local
boards should be established composed of natives, who should have
the supervision of districts ' ? 'It would undoubtedly mean all this,
with perhaps the exception of local boards, about which we have come
to no conclusions,' was the reply ; ' but it means a great deal more.
It means that the administration of the country is to be in the hands
of the people of the country, in other words India is to be for the
Indians.' ' That, I presume, implies the retirement of the English,'
I said, * as unquestionably we could not remain and be responsible
for whatever misgovernment might ensue under your administration ;
and how long do you suppose that the timid unwarlike Bengalis
and sleek Brahmins of Poona would hold their own against the
fighting races of the north, or even against the Mohammedans of
Hyderabad ? ' * Not at all,' answered my friend ; * of course we do not
contemplate the retirement of the English. You have conquered
our country, and overthrown and broken up the ancient dynasties.
It is now your duty to stand by and to maintain order, but India must
be governed according to Indian ideas and by natives of India.' ' I .

1886 THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. 889

am afraid,' said I in conclusion, ' that if your views are carried out,
our views as to our duty by you will be very different from yours.'

This gentleman no doubt pushed his theories to their extreme limit ;
but that many agree with him, though not in so many words, we
have the testimony of reported speeches at recent meetings and of
articles in the native press. It is said that these windy wordy speeches
do not penetrate the masses of the people, but only reach a very
small educated minority. This is so far true that newspaper reading
is certainly not rife among the Eyots, but I have heard that these
speeches do reach the villages, and are read out to an astonished
audience of an evening — astonished because the native cannot under-
stand how any one can presume to censure or withstand the Government
unless he be stronger than the Government. The worst of it all is
that this violence and clatter is encouraged by many Europeans who
proclaim themselves to be the native's special friends. No one can
blame our countrymen for asserting the rights, and for endeavouring
to elevate the condition, of their Indian fellow-subjects, and to bring
them into more general social intercourse with us ; but we can and
do blame those who travel over India, proclaiming aloud by words
and by writings that everything which is, is wrong — that we are
governing India solely for our selfish purposes, that the welfare of
the governed is but as dust in the balance compared with the grati-
fication of our own greed and pride, and that nothing less than the
complete overthrow of the present system and the transfer of the
balance of power into Indian hands can or ought to satisfy Indian
aspirations. There are plenty of such persons, far too many, and
their action and their incautious words, which would be harmless
at home, are far from harmless in India, and likely to promote
very mischievous results. There is one matter for congratulation,
and that is the signal defeat of those natives of India whose am-
bition fired them with the desire of entering the English Parlia-
ment. The time may come when India and our colonies may send
representatives to England with mutual advantage, but how that is
to be effected is still in the uncertain future. We do not require
Indians to throw themselves into our political struggles, and to
pronounce their opinion either on home questions or our foreign
policy, neither is it advisable that Indian affairs should be made the
football as it were of party conflict. When recently at Hyderabad I
was spoken to by a Mohammedan gentleman on this subject, who
said he and his friends were much surprised at the public meetings
held in India to discuss various questions, and at the language
employed by the speakers, European and native, and he wished to
know if it were true that there was any disposition at home to hand
over the administration of the country to Baboos and Brahmins. He
supposed we should retire were that the case. I replied I saw no
signs of any such tendency, and that probably such a determination

890 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

would be the preliminary step to our final retirement from India.
' Well,' said he, in a low emphatic tone, ' when that happens we
shall have some old scores to settle with the Brahmins of Poona and
the young gentlemen of Bengal, and one day, mind, one day, when
we get in among them, will do our business.' I was not careful to
inquire what was the business, or what were the old scores to which
he referred, but it is as well that those ardent young native spirits
whose ambition prompts them to attain objects which if attained
would have the effect of leaving them to protect themselves, should
remember that there are still warlike Sikhs in the Punjaub, and still
warlike Mohammedans in the Deccan.

I do not myself attach any importance to these speeches and
meetings, and should certainly not think of suppressing them. We
may hear a good deal that is practicable and useful ; and even if a
little seditious nonsense is now and then delivered, it will not do
much mischief.

Amid all this speechifying and strong writing in a portion of the
native press, there is one remarkable feature which must strike
every one whose attention is directed to what is going on in India,
namely the abstention of the Mohammedans from these meetings,
and the general tone of their press, which is very friendly to the
English Eaj. This is strange enough. Few years have elapsed
since the attention of Indian authorities was mainly directed to
Mohammedan movements, which were watched with ceaseless
vigilance, and deservedly, for no doubt before the mutiny intentions
to revolt were rife among them, and aspirations aroused for a return
of the good old times. Although the principal figures at the time
of the mutiny, Koer Singh, Tantia Topee, the Eanee of Jhansi and
the Grwalior contingent, and the majority of the mutineers were
Hindoos, yet the backbone of the insurrection was Mohammedan.
The native army had come to the conclusion it was irresistible, and
visions of governments and high military commands filled the
imaginations of the more ambitious portion of the soldiery. These
were the Mohammedans. I believe the cartridges had the effect of
precipitating both them and the Hindoos into mutiny, but the
ground had been well prepared, and mutiny there would have been
whether cartridges were greased or not. The Mohammedans
remembered their former great position as courtiers, generals,
governors of provinces ; and though the Nana aspired to be Peishwa,
they would soon have made short work of him and of the Poona
Mahrattas, who had lost all martial ardour and had settled down into
sleek but still seething discontent. Had the mutineers repulsed us
and held Delhi, some puppet emperor would have been set up, and
the Mohammedans of Hyderabad would soon have held out the hand
to their co-religionists. Scindia and Holkar would have been for-
midable opponents had they been united ; still the proud, warlike

1886 THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. 891

Mohammedans thought the game was in their hands, at all events
they were prepared to play it.

The utter destruction of the mutineers and the terrible retribu-
tion which followed completely crushed these aspirations, for I take
no account of the petty conspiracies of a few knots of fanatics at
Patnah and elsewhere. From that period they have been rapidly
falling in the social scale. I am bound to say they have taken the
overthrow of their hopes like men ; they feel and acknowledge that
their future entirely depends on English goodwill, and that goodwill
they are doing their best to secure. This is one of the reasons why
they take no part in the gatherings I have referred to, although probably
a stronger one may be cited, namely, their preference of English to
Hindoo administration ; and that they have good reason for this
opinion will presently be shown. This is the reason why the Moham-
medan newspapers (it is true they are not numerous) take a different
tone from that of the Hindoo press, and undoubtedly as a general
rule a feeling of loyalty to us manifests itself in their columns. The
same feeling is evident in Hyderabad. In that city, formerly so
dangerous for a European to traverse, you are received wherever you
go with more than civility, with kind looks and kind words, and an
Englishman may walk through the streets at all hours in perfect
safety. The same goodwill prevails at Aurungabad ; and the Mussul-
man nobles and officials associate with our officers, hunt, shoot, race,
dine, and gossip with them like comrades. I was so astonished at
this state of things that I asked a Mohammedan official how it all
came about. The answer was, ' Here we are your equals, and you
treat us as such.' But there is also an impression at Hyderabad that
there is a desire manifesting itself among our people to treat the
Mohammedans with confidence and favour. Formerly, there was a
dislike on the part of Indian civilians to them. They are a sturdy,
proud class, and their pride prevented them from adopting the cring-
ing pliancy and submissiveness of the low caste Hindoo. He had no
objection to creep and crawl, and he crept and crawled into all the
good berths. But things have since changed. Our officials have dis-
covered that crawling things can sting and wound. ' Qui peut
lecher peut mordre.' The Hindoo papers are reeking with constant
gross and violent attacks on private persons as well as officials. Many
of these attacks notoriously emanate from domestic correspondents
and informers, and Englishmen begin to think that the Mohammedan,
if he be less pliant, less accommodating, less clever, is at all events
far more staunch and safe than the Hindoo, and so, undoubtedly, the
current of goodwill is flowing in his favour. Now the feeling of the
Mohammedan in regard to the Hindoo, that is to say to the Bengali
Hindoo, is that of contempt, dislike, and fear. He despises him as
timorous, he fears him because he sees him gradually advancing
to high position while he himself is gradually falling into penury and

892 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

•want of consideration, and he foresees the time coming when the
once Hindoo Helot will have his foot on the neck of the Mussulman
Spartan.

It would be the height of unwisdom on our part not to recognise
what is going on, not to take advantage of this favourable disposition
of the leaders of Mohammedan opinion, and not to adapt our policy
to meet it. There are no doubt great difficulties in the matter.
The Hindoo is carrying all before him by his quickness, assiduity,
and superior education. There seems to be among the Hindoos a
kind of instinctive power of acquiring knowledge. The young men
live among well-educated persons ; the necessity of education and
the practical result of it in the shape of lucrative appointments is
constantly before them, and they easily outstrip the Mohammedans,
whose instinct is certainly not to clutch the pen but the sword.
Undoubtedly there is but little tradition of the successful results of
education in his family, and he has very slight tendency towards
that class of bcok-learning which makes men head clerks and Tehsil-
dars. But besides these disadvantages, other obstacles await him.
He starts heavily handicapped in the race of life with his Hindoo
competitor. The latter begins with the study of the vernacular
language and then of English, the former with the study of Arabic
and Persian, the language of religion and the language of the court.
No wonder the Hindoo youth runs away from him. I have spoken
on this subject to many Mohammedans ; they acknowledge that
Arabic is taught too much parrotwise, but the Koran must be learned
in the inspired language, and Persian is the language indispensable
to a gentleman, and must be learned also. Such is the contention.
It is difficult to argue adversely to the study of Arabic, on account of
the profound veneration for the sacred book which affects every
transaction of their life, and the reply when I hinted that Persian
was unnecessary was, ' You would not consider the learning of French
by your children unnecessary.' Of course in the days when every
young Mohammedan might look forward to high and courtly positions
this courtly language was indispensable, and it is now difficult to
shake the belief of any respectable Mohammedan as to the necessity
of the acquisition of Persian by his sons. What, then, can be done
to give the Mohammedans a chance ? It is clear they are not get-
ting their share of State education, but it is their own fault, and
herein lies the difficulty of the Government of India, which recognises
as fully as I do the expediency of maintaining the social position of
the Mohammedans. Lord Mayo, I know, strongly entertained the
policy of advancing Mohammedan education by even special advan-
tages • but the Home Government, though they did not overrule
him, did not give him the encouragement which he ought to have
received.

I was presented with a paper by a Mohammedan gentleman of

1886 THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. 893

high position, from which I transcribe a few extracts. He wrote it
at Eoi Barelly in 1882. He says : —

With a few exceptions I concur in the opinion of the memorial of the National
Mohammedan Association of Calcutta, that the Mohammedans of India are daily
decaying and becoming impoverished. There is a proof of it here in this very
town, where the Mohammedan population amounts to 15,524 persons. Few are in
government employ, and those only drawing a very moderate salary. Poverty and
mendicity are yearly increasing among them. I have found here some descendants
of the great Nawab Jehan Khan, now merged into bearers and khansamas. The
chief cause of this decay is the dislike this people have to innovation, to English,
and to learning the Western sciences. The justice and generosity of the Govern-
ment is beyond all question, and it is undoubtedly the false pride and prejudice of
the Mohammedans which has deprived them of the education so liberally offered
by the Government. Now it is too late for this to be rectified, as all the posts, or
most of them, in which a knowledge of English is necessary, are closed to them.
The following statistics will prove this. In the North- West Provinces and Oudh,
where there is a population of 9,430,285 Mohammedans, there are, besides Chris-
tians, sixty-nine Hindoos gazetted officers in the Medical Department, but no Mo-
hammedan. In the Public Works Department there are seven Hindoo engineers
and no Mohammedan. In the higher circle of the Irrigation Department there
are four Hindoos and no Mohammedan. In the Upper Subordinate there are seven
Hindoos and only two Mohammedans. Among the officers of the Educational
Department there are seven Hindoos and only one Mohammedan. In the Postal
Department of the North- Western Provinces there are thirty-two Hindoos and
only two Mohammedans, and in that of Oudh fifteen Hindoos and one Moham-
medan. The only employments open to them are some low posts where a knowledge
of English is not required. It must be borne in mind (continues the writer) that
50 per cent, of the Mohammedans in India earn their livelihood by service, while
90 per cent, of the Hindoos are agriculturists.

One would naturally suppose under these circumstances that the
bulk of official appointments would be in Mohammedan hands, and
yet they are only an insignificant minority. Government appoint-
ments are vigorously sought in this country, but in the East they are
everything — means of livelihood, position, consideration. We may
therefore estimate how bitter must be the feeling of exclusion to the
descendants of those who revelled in the enjoyment of high emolu-
ment and rank. It should also be mentioned that a large number
of openings were lost to the Mohammedans by the introduction of
the Penal Code throughout India and the establishment of text books
dealing with questions of Mohammedan law. This reform did away
with the necessity of having many officials of that religion connected
with our courts, and caused the abolition of a number of highly
considered appointments requiring an advanced standard of Mussul-
man education.

Of course the reply will be, your Mohammedan friend himself
fully accounts for this state of things, and does not hesitate to
attribute it to the prejudice and pride of his own co-religionists.
No doubt that is so, but statesmen must ever be ready to make
allowances for prejudices, especially when these prejudices are chiefly
nocuous to those who indulge in them. We want the goodwill of
VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3 Q

894 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

Mohammedans. Their ill-will was, in our memory, dangerous to our
supremacy. It rests with ourselves that it shall not be so again.
In ruling so vast a country as India, the old maxim of ' Divide et
impera ' should not be lost sight of. It should not be applied in the
odious sense of exciting sectional animosities, but as inculcating the
expediency of not placing the keys of every branch of the public
service in the pockets of one particular portion of the community,
although it may be the most numerous, the most versatile, quick-
witted, and highly educated. Mr. Bright during the American war
pleaded for something more than neutrality between the contending
parties ; he asked for * benevolent neutrality.' For some time to come
I plead for the same disposition towards the Mohammedans. It will
be strange should our able Indian officials, if urged from head-
quarters, not be able to lessen this disproportion of appointments
between Hindoos and Mohammedans. The same benevolent influence
may be exerted to encourage and arouse the Mohammedans now
sunk in despondency. The Central Government has shown its good-
will in this direction. In July 1885 resolutions were drawn up at
Simla of a very friendly description to the Mussulmans, offering them
the most sympathetic treatment. How far these have become
generally known I am not aware, but I have heard them spoken of
with approbation and gratitude, and that they were likely not to
become a dead letter is evident from the storm of abuse they
encountered in the Hindoo papers. No man, while anxious to
encourage Hindoo talent and good conduct, can be more on the alert
to win the confidence and regard of the Mohammedans than Lord
Dufferin. He cannot of course change the whole system of educa-
tion, but he has done much to encourage them. In Madras university
special recognition has been given to Arabic and Persian, and the
latter language is taught in any High School when there is a demand
for it. In the Medical Department there is actually reserved for
this portion of the community a certain number of stipendiary
appointments. In Bombay university, Persian is placed on the list of
languages which may be taken up for a degree, and in Bengal, where
the Mohammedans are specially depressed, liberal provisions of a
similar kind have been made to help them on.

Important as is the re-introduction, if I may so call it, of
Mohammedans into the Civil Service, and the prevention of their
being virtually expelled from it by Hindoos, no less important would
be the elevation of their position in the army. Such a policy would
go right home to the hearts of their young and ardent spirits. It
would open to them the career of arms, high pay, high position,
and honours. I firmly believe we can implicitly rely on their fidelity ;
as to their bravery and power of command there is no doubt. I
spoke to several military men of high position and of great experience
in India, and they were all disposed to repose trust in Mohammedan

1886 THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. 895

officers and to advance them. One general in command recommends
that they should rise to the rank of Brevet Colonel, stopping short
of the command of the regiment. Sir Frederick Roberts, the Com-
mander-in-chief, is anxious to bring young Mohammedans of family,
•with their adherents, into our native regiments, especially cavalry,
offering them an increase in present rank. I did not meet one officer
who was not favourable to this course, and I have reason to believe
that overtures have been already made from India to the authorities
at home in this direction. Let us hope they may not be put aside
by those who know not the changed circumstances of that country,
and who are still influenced by the fear which prevailed a quarter of
a century ago of Mohammedan ambition.

Another step has recently been taken by the Government of
India which will not only be most gratifying to the Mohammedans
of that continent, but which will convey to the very heart of Islam the
conviction that we, who rule a far greater number of Mohammedans
than any other country in the world, are earnestly desirous of doing
what we can to meet their wishes and provide for their safety and com-
fort in the performance of that pilgrimage to Mecca which is the duty
and pride of every member of that religion. From 8,000 to 10,000
pilgrims pass through Indian ports every year, a large proportion
being from Central Asia and Afghanistan, and of the poorest classes,
for next to undertaking the pilgrimage himself, one of the most
religious works a Mohammedan can perform is to assist his brethren
whose means are small in securing their salvation by the accomplish-
ment of the same pious act. I have heard that the Nizam annually
defrays the expenses of 800 pilgrims. It would be difficult to give
an adequate description of the hardships, misery, disease, extortion,
which used to beset these unfortunate travellers. Things are
certainly much better of late years, but are still so unsatisfactory
that communications have been passing since 1881 between the
Government of India and the well-known firm of Messrs. Thomas
Cook and Son upon this subject. Nothing was finally settled till 1885,
when Lord Randolph Churchill and Lord Dufiferin, in conjunction
with Sir H. Drummond "Wolf, took up the matter in good earnest.
Mr. John Cook, the representative of the firm, a gentleman of remark-
able ability and power of organisation, came over himself to hold
personal communication with the Indian authorities. One cannot
commend too highly the readiness and despatch with which his
proposals were met. I quote one extract from the proceedings of
the Government of India, under date June 4, 1886.

The Governor-General in Council, after careful consideration, and personal
communication with Mr. Cook, is of opinion that the conditions (proposed by Mr.
Cook) are such as may be accepted. The conditions contemplate the appointment
of Messrs. Thomas Cook and Son to be pilgrim agents for the whole of India, local
officers and officers in charge of Treasuries being instructed to assist that firm in

3Q2

896 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

making known the terms of conveyance to Jeddah and back, and in disposing of
through tickets. The Bombay Government will be requested to make over to the
representatives of the firm the issue of passports in Bombay, and to instruct the
Protector of Pilgrims (an officer appointed in 1882) to work in harmony with the
firm and to render it every possible assistance.

The year 1887 will witness the introduction of this great boon.
Mr. Cook's agencies will be distributed through India. Tickets to
Jeddah and back will be issued. Agents at Jeddah will endeavour
to put a stop to the irregularities and extortions practised at that
port, as has already been effected by Mr. Cook at Jaffa and the
other Turkish ports. Mr. Cook thus concludes his account of this
humane and politic transaction.

In due course I was favoured with an assurance that the steps I was taking
met with the hearty approval of the Government of India ; but before leaving
Bombay I had a considerable number of interviews, including one with Lord Reay,
Governor of Bombay, several wealthy Mohammedans, and a considerable number
of shippers, who had at various times conveyed the pilgrims between Bombay and
Jeddah. Lord Reay and the members of the Bombay Government assured me
that they would render every possible assistance. The Commissioner of Police
placed his staff and their books at my disposal, the shippers all expressed their
gratification that at last the arrangements for the pilgrimages were to be controlled
by some responsible firm, and a number of the agents of wealthy and well-known
Companies assured me that they would be prepared to advise their directors to
place certain steamers in the pilgrimage business to supersede the unsatisfactory
vessels that have been constantly employed in it. Mohammedan gentlemen autho-
rised me to express their thanks to the Government of India for the arrangement
made, and assured me that they would undertake to make the arrangement known
to all the Mohammedan societies through the various Mohammedan publications in
the different languages necessary, and, as stated in my report to the Government,
one of the wealthy Mohammedans authorised me to inform the Government that
he would at his own expense build a rest house to accommodate 2,000 pilgrims, and
so do away with the necessity of their having to resort to lodging-houses in objec-
tionable quarters of the city.

I propose sending my eldest son, Mr. F. H. Cook, to India in October next,
armed with all the necessary instructions from myself, and he will be accompanied
by a well-known ex- Anglo-Indian official and a well-known Mohammedan. Their
first work will be to travel to the Afghan frontier and to all the important centres
of Mohammedanism, to explain to the chief Mohammedans and sheiks of the
Mosques that the object of the Government in appointing Thomas Cook and Son to
this business is to ensure the safety, comfort, and economy of the pilgrimage, and
that the Government are paying all the expenses incurred, and that the arrange-
ment is not for the profit of any firm or private individuals. After they have
visited all these gentlemen and the Government officials in every district, they will
then be preparing and putting into operation the details ready for the booking of
the passengers for the pilgrimage of 1887. This will necessitate a journey of at
least 20,000 miles, and negotiations and arrangements not only with railway
administrations, steamship companies, and others actually in the business, but also
explanations to a large number of Government officials, who are authorised by the
resolution of the Government of India to do everything they possibly can to assist
us in ensuring the success of the arrangements.

I have dwelt strongly on the necessity from a political point of
view of straining a point to restore the Mohammedan element in the

1886 THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. 897

native portion of Indian administration. I have shown that the
Mohammedans deeply feel the loss and degradation of falling back in
the race of life, and encouragement will do much to give them a
fresh start. We have a terrible example of the fate of their co-reli-
gionists in Kashmir, where they have been forcibly placed under the
domination of Brahmins, whose execrable tyranny has been maintained
by our strong hand. It should be remembered that in 1846, after the
overthrow of the Sikhs at Ferozeshahar and Sobraon, the Sikh
Government being unable to pay the amount at which they were
amerced, handed over to the English Kashmir as an equivalent, and
we sold it to Gholab Singh for a million sterling ; a transaction de-
scribed by Cunningham as * scarcely worthy of the British name
and greatness,' while Colonel Malleson writes of it deservedly as

a blunder politically and morally : politically, because England thus gave away the
opportunity of strengthening her frontier, and of gaining a position which in the
event of an invasion would be of incalculable value ; morally, because the Governor-
General had no right to sell a hardworking and industrious people to a man alien
in race and religion, and harsh and oppressive in nature. But Gholab Singh could
not have made himself master of the new province without the co-operation of the
English. His army was disastrously beaten by the Kashmiris under Imamuddin,
who declined to yield up the valley until warned that he would in the event of
further resistance be treated as an enemy of the British Government. Thus it
came to pass that a country chiefly inhabited by Mohammedans was handed over
to a foreign and Hindoo prince.

These words are written by the officer sent on special duty to Kashmir,
and who reported to the Government of India on the frightful condi-
tion of that unhappy country during the famine which prevailed in
1877-78-79-80. It is a terrible document, written by a civil servant
of high reputation, of sober judgment, and at present occupying a
responsible position. He says :

The population of Kashmir was reckoned before the famine at about half a
million, of whom all but 75,000 Pandits were of the Mohammedan creed. Some
idea of the depopulation of the country may be formed from the following authori-
tative description.

' No European who carefully examined the city this summer (1879), with a
view to guessing its population, ever put the people at over 60,000 souls, but
nothing can be exactly known. A number of the chief valleys to the north were
completely deserted, whole villages lay in ruins ; some suburbs of the city were
tenantless ; the graveyards were filled to overflowing, the river had been full of
corpses thrown into it. It is not likely that more than two-fifths of the people of
the valley now survive.'

Monsieur Bigex, a French shawl merchant, has informed the writer of this
note that whereas in former times there were from 30,000 to 40,000 weavers in
Srinagar, now only 4,000 remain, and that orders from France for shawls cannot
be executed for want of hands. The Pandits are all of the Brahmin caste. They
are a cunning and avaricious tribe. They fill almost every civil office of state,
from the Governor of Srinagar down to the clerks in attendance on the collectors
of revenue. Their pride and cowardice unfit them for military employ. Pampered
by the Hindoo ruler, they play a tyrannical part in the administration of the valley,
and they reap the fruits of their religious superiority in freedom from the pangs of

898 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

famine, for it is a noteworthy fact that while thousands of Mohammedans have
died and are still dying of hunger, no Pandit is to be met with who shows signs
of starvation or even of pressing want. If attempts be made to control the Pandits,
check their peculations and introduce some equality between them and the Moham-
medans, they repair to the Governor, and with threats of cutting their throats
before him, or abandoning the country with their gods, they bring him to their feet
with submission, for they are holy Brahmins, and he is a devout Hindoo.

The writer speaks of the remains of prosperity which attest the
time when the Kashmir nation had a name and fame.

But (says he) now within the valley the eye meets with tracts of unreclaimed
swamps, fields thrown out of cultivation, and wretched hamlets in which half the
houses are empty, and many more roofless and ruined. The appearance of the
peasants is pitiable in the extreme. In the fields are women and children digging
for edible weeds and roots. In Srinagar, the capital, there are vestiges of popu-
lousness, but the bazaars are sadly thinned, the suburbs are like cities of the dead,
trade is either decaying or gone, and large numbers of the lower classes of people
are so impoverished that they have no money to buy food, even when food is
procurable. During the height of distress, if the inquirer asked for relief works he
was shown a few labourers collected on roads near the English quarter, but these
would loudly complain to him that they got no wages. If he asked for Govern-
ment poorhouses he was conducted to enclosures where handfuls of boiled rice, in-
sufficient to keep a dog alive, were given out to hundreds of people in the most
awful state that can be imagined from hunger and disease. Sometimes the supply
of rice was not sufficient to go round the throng, and then an indescribable scene
of confusion ensued, in which men, women, and children were beheld fighting and
tearing one another for the scrapings of the pans of rice, while soldiers armed with
sticks laid about them on every side ; but in vain, and the sleek Pandits, not one
of whom had felt the pangs of hunger, sat enveloped in their cosy blankets, uncon-
cerned witnesses of the agony of their Mohammedan fellow-subjects. These are
not the inventions of a disordered fancy, but statements of facts as noted by an
eye-witness whose painful duty it has been to observe them without power or
opportunity to interfere.

It may, however, be alleged that the mortality during the last famine
in Madras was greater than that of Kashmir, and that if the Maharajah
is to be blamed, we are more culpable. But the difference is this, that
every effort was made by us, both by public and by private exertion,
to meet the calamity ; that there was no wholesale official malver-
sation in the feeding of the sufferers, no notorious and unpunished
misappropriation of grain, no cruelty in the treatment of those who
were perishing and who tried to migrate, no religious distinction in
which one class was allowed to die without compunction, while another
class was maintained in plenty.

The writer then proceeds to give an account of the frightful mis-
government of this unhappy country; the peculation, rapine, and ex-
tortion which run apace without let or hindrance ; and concludes one
of the most instructive and at the same time harrowing documents I
have ever read with these words :

Here is a question of the fate of a whole people who are being gradually
destroyed, and whom sad experience has taught to hope nothing from their ruler.

1886 THE INDIAN MOHAMMEDANS. 899

The British public can feel sympathy for the sufferings of the Christian Rayahs in
Turkey. Have they no blessing left for the unhappy Mussulmans of Kashmir,
whose lot they could ameliorate by a word or by a hint ?

Can we suppose that the other Indian Mohammedans are igno-
rant of this oppression, and of the actual destruction of their brethren
by Brahmin rule, and that they do not dread and detest it ? It is no
use saying to them, as I have said, such a state of things cannot occur
under the English Eaj. They reply that it is a question solely of
degree. It is true they are not plundered and openly starved by
their Hindoo fellow-subjects, but they are pushed from their seats
by them : from place, emolument, dignity ; and the vista of their
future is penury. My object in writing this article is to direct
public opinion in England towards strengthening the hands of the
authorities in India, who would, I am confident, gladly endeavour
to offer a brighter future to the Empress Queen's Mohammedan
subjects.

If I appear in this paper to have spoken adversely or disrespect-
fully of Hindoos in general, it has been far from my intention. I have
no feeling in regard to them except one of sympathy and regard. I
rejoice to have witnessed their remarkable progress. I welcome them
without one grudging thought in their advance to full and common
citizenship. It is idle to shut our eyes and not to recognise that
advance, or to sit upon the safety-valve, and not foresee the conse-
quence. It is Brahminism, that incarnation of spiritual domination,
ignorance, superstition, rapacity, and lust, which is seeking to regain
its supremacy, that I denounce, together with the follies, conceits, and
windy declamations of young Bengal. These were the classes who
were encouraged to come to the front, and to assume the spokes-
manship for the rest of India, during the late Viceroyalty. Our
government of India is essentially a government of prestige, of a
belief in our enormous resources, of our unswerving justice, and of
our capacity to rule, and if that belief be shaken, the hand of power
becomes at once palsied. All the great material improvements
which are immensely increasing the resources of India have tended
to reduce rather than increase that prestige. The number of
European railway officials, engineers, station masters, guards, many
of whom are rough and uneducated, many also violent and dissolute,
has done much to lower the respect which the white face commanded.
I have myself witnessed scenes in the streets of Ajmere which fully
account for the difference of the reception an ordinary Englishman
meets with there, and that which he experiences in other parts of
Eajpootana, where such excesses are unknown. All this should
make us doubly cautious to avoid unseemly differences in high
places, which naturally encourage the native classes to whom I
have referred to impute weakness to us, and to imagine that
discord reigns in our councils. I have but little fear of any internal

900 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

overthrow of our rule, either from military mutiny or the uprising of
the masses, nor, if proper precautions be observed, which are sure to
be, am I alarmed at the prospect of Kussian invasion. What I do
dread are the writings and speeches of theoretic Englishmen,
absolutely ignorant of the condition of men and things in India,
the stereotyped conservatism of the lower classes, their placid igno-
rance, the confusion and failure which must follow the forcing on
them precipitately institutions for which they are not prepared. It
is no question of retrogression or of even standing still, but of
caution and preparation. If the administrative functions in India
once get out of gear and in incompetent hands, results are sure to
follow which will create a feeling of disgust and despair at home,
and a desire to be rid of a burden, not only intolerable, but
accompanied with shame. And yet this mighty possession, apart
from the actual advantages we derive from it, is worth, for the sake
of humanity, almost any sacrifice to retain. As one travels through
India one naturally reads the records of the famous cities one visits ;
they are all, one after another, written in blood. Begin your
reading in the Deccan, with the annals of the Mohammedan dynasties
of Bijapore, Gulburgah, Golconda; all tell the same tale. The
Sultan of Bijapore quarrels with the Rajah of Vizanagram on account
of some musicians, and vows to erect a pyramid of 100,000 Hindoo
heads ; the Rajah in his turn vows to erect a similar monument of
200,000 heads of the subjects of the Sultan. Each was as good as
his word. As you advance northwards, you proceed through lands
laid desolate, not at long intervals but almost continuously, till
nothing remained to attract the Mahratta and Pindarree spoiler. Go
still further north, and though during the time of the great
Emperors comparative peace was maintained by their sword, yet when
it fell from the grasp of their inert descendants, insurrection followed
insurrection, invasion followed invasion. In fact the history of India,
from the earliest authentic accounts of it until the time of the
supremacy of the English, is one dreadful dreary record of treachery,
outbreak, robbery, spoliation, murder, massacre, and of all the miseries
that can beset the human race. What greater or more noble sight can
a traveller see, than the profound quiet, the absolute security, the
Pax Romana which prevails from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin ?
Surely this is essentially (rod's work. Surely it is our duty to
continue it. We may rely on it that we can do much to lighten our
task, great though it be, by gaining the affections and trust of the
Mohammedan portion of the population, once, but no longer hostile,
and it rests with ourselves to do so.

W. H. GREGORY.

1886 901

A FLYING VISIT TO THE UNITED
STATES.

THE following pages give some impressions formed upon various
matters during a recent flying visit to the United States.

Leaving Liverpool on the 26th of August, I made the outward
passage in the ' Germanic,' one of the vessels of the White Star
Company's fleet. I returned in the ' Servia,' a vessel of the Cunard
line. Both ships are fine examples of the Atlantic Liners of the
modern type. The distance from Queenstown to New York is 2,800
miles. We made the outward passage in nine days. We were
detained during the first three days by strong headwinds and gales,
which for many hours brought our rate of steaming down to eight
knots. In crossing the banks of Newfoundland we passed through a
dense fog. For nearly twenty-four hours the engines were slowed
to half-speed, the ship steaming eleven knots an hour. The dangers
of collision in such circumstances may readily be apprehended.
They are intensified in that season of the year when the presence
of ice is to be expected. Steam whistles may be heard, and
thus approaching ships may be avoided, but the much-dreaded ice-
berg is as silent as the tombstone, and, like that emblem, death
reigns in its vicinity. Captain McKay, of the * Servia,' has given
much consideration to this subject, and has published some valuable
suggestions. He recommends that the Government should be
invited to despatch a suitable vessel to the North Atlantic, which
should follow one of these immense masses of ice from the north to
the sunny south, daily chronicling its course and diminution of size.
He has proposed that a west and east track or line should be definitely
fixed for the great steam traffic between England and the United
States, the western track across the meridian of 50° W., at 42° 40'
N., and the eastern track across the meridian of 50° W., at 40° 40' N.
These routes would carry steamers south of the Banks, and avoid the
dense fogs which hang in the region of the Great Banks. Captain
McKay has wisely urged that a conference of shipowners should be
held at Liverpool to consider the subject.

The « Germanic ' in ordinary weather steams fifteen knots, but at
4 P.M. on Friday, September 3rd, the « Etruria,' of the Cunard Line,

902 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

was seen from the bridge coming up astern. She gained upon us
rapidly, and at 7 P.M. steamed past the ' Germanic,' having an
advantage in speed of nearly five knots an hour. The ' Etruria ' had
left Liverpool two days after the ' Germanic,' and landed her pas-
sengers in New York several hours earlier. As an achievement in
ocean steaming the construction of the ' Etruria ' and the sister ship
4 Umbria ' represents a great advance. From a commercial point of
view, it is less satisfactory. It is generally understood that the
management of the White Star line is able to divide a handsome
dividend. To the holder of the Cunard Company's shares no divi-
dend has been paid for several years. It cannot be sound business to
give the public a service at a speed never yet equalled at a charge
insufficient to yield a reasonable profit. Of two things one: the
speed must be reduced, or the fares raised. To the French Messa-
geries and the North German Lloyds' liberal subsidies are paid by
their respective governments. We have a national antipathy to
subsidies. To such a step we can only have recourse in the last
resort. There is every reason to believe that the public would be
ready to pay fares on a scale sufficient to cover the cost of the
greatly increased speed at which they are now being transported
across the ocean.

Life on board a full-powered passenger ship is monotonous, but
not necessarily tedious. If the varied occupations and absorbing
interests of life on shore are wanting, is it not the complaint of most
of us that we want more of the leisure we command during a long
passage across the ocean ? On board ship mutual sympathies are
soon discovered, and acquaintance grows rapidly into friendship. On
the broad waters of the Atlantic many interesting experiences were
interchanged. Soldiers and civilians, travellers and merchants, each
had the story of his life to tell. All that had been gathered up by
thought, by action, and by culture, was poured forth, to the great
advantage of those who listened.

The passengers in the saloon were but a small proportion of those
conveyed in the ' Germanic.' There were on board nearly one thou-
sand emigrants, recruited from every nationality of Europe. Among
them were Jews in large numbers from the Danubian principalities,
Germans, Finlanders, Swedes, Norwegians, Irish, Welsh, and a few
English and Scotch. Competition has brought down the cost of a
passage across the Atlantic to the moderate charge of 4L, and it has
created a beneficial rivalry in the accommodation afforded. The
quarters are clean and airy. A doctor, steward, and matron keep
watch over the emigrants, and the dietary is liberal. But with all
these improvements the conditions of life on board ship inevitably
bring out the sharp and painful contrast between the luxury which
wealth commands and the hard life of the labouring poor. The
distance is short from the luxuries of the saloon to the bare

1886 A FLYING VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES. 903

sufficiency of the steerage, from the comparative tranquillity in
the centre of the ship, reserved for those who pay high fares, to the
pitching and scending at the bow and stern. At the commencement
of our voyage we encountered bad weather. It was touching to see
the emigrants lying down on deck in melancholy groups, each
sufferer's head pillowed on a shoulder that was dear to it, their
mutual love their only consolation. As the weather improved, all
recovered their health and spirits. The numerous and motley assem-
blage included musicians who could draw melody from the rudest
instruments, studious readers, some much given to public devotions,
and a few who were scoffers at every form of religion. As a body,
the emigrants on board the { Germanic ' gave the impression of a
vigorous and helpful people, who would face all difficulties with
courage, and bring strength to a country where labour was in demand.
A farmer in the Far West, if called upon to make a selection on
board the * Germanic,' would probably prefer the hardy races of
Northern Europe to those reared in softer regions. With a few ex-
ceptions, the emigrants were going out to join some friend already
established, or to supply labour where it was urgently needed in some
young settlement in the North-West which was being formed by
people of their own race. The emigration of Scandinavians to the
North- West has of late been very active. The Germans are rapidly
crowding into the middle States.

From a public point of view the occupants of the forecastle afford
subjects of thought not less interesting than those suggested by a
visit to the steerage. In a full-powered steamer the assistance
derived from sails is scarcely appreciable, and the complement of
seamen is determined not so much with reference to the spread of
canvas as to the extent of deck. Holy-stoning and cleaning brass-
work are not attractive duties, and the wages have been brought
down, by the natural operation of supply and demand, to a scale
which offers no temptation to the flower of our working population.
The rate from the port of Liverpool for an A.B. in an Atlantic Liner
may be taken at 41., and the men are paid off on the day after their
arrival in port. Looking to the nature of the employment and the
rate of wages, it would be unreasonable to expect a high standard of
moral or physical qualities, or seamanship, in crews mustered at
twenty-four hours' notice for a short transatlantic voyage. It may
often be the case that the foreign seaman is a better man than the
Englishman, and the explanation is not far to seek. The foreigner
was probably born in some mountain farm on a Norwegian fjord.
His paternal acres had been brought under cultivation by the
strenuous efforts of generations. Precipices of rock hem in the
farm on all sides. The acreage can never be extended. The number
who can be maintained upon the land is strictly limited. Arrived
near man's estate, the son is warned by his father that he must go

904 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

forth into the world to seek an independent livelihood. The sea,
which washes the adjacent shores, is the only outlet for superfluous
labour. The son seeks employment at first in a little coaster, next
in a sea-going vessel, and finally finds himself in a British port.
From the scanty pay he has been earning it is a great advance to
receive the wages offered to seamen in England. He transfers him-
self accordingly to the British flag. If he is thrifty, he can put
aside the greater portion of his earnings, and after a few years' service
before the mast he returns to Norway in a position to establish his
home in some port on the Scandinavian seaboard. The same reward
which to an English seaman of mature years, and who has a family
to support, is meagre in the extreme, may be very differently regarded
by the Norwegian lad whose career we have described. Such histories
recur again and again. It goes without saying that if it is sought to
secure the services of Englishmen, wages must be at least as liberal
for service at sea as on shore. With the actual scale of wages a sea-
man who aspires to the wages of a blacksmith or a carpenter must
gain the quarter-deck. To do this he has to pass an examination,
but the qualifications in navigation demanded by the Board of Trade
can easily be acquired by a lad of ordinary education.

It would do much to improve the quality of seamen if more en-
couragement were held out to men of superior conduct, and who
thoroughly understand their business. In the merchant service these
inducements are rarely offered. Seamen are usually paid at a uni-
form rate, irrespective of merit, and the most deserving are paid off
on the day after the arrival of the ship with no more consideration
than is shown to the least meritorious of the crew.

Let us turn to the engine-room. There is no question here of
the presence of the foreigner, or of inefficiency or indifference to duty.
The work in an Atlantic Liner is difficult, arduous, and unrelenting.
It demands energy, presence of mind, and technical skill of a high
order. The bare enumeration of these qualifications is a guarantee
that in a British ship no special preference will be given to foreigners.
The engineers are mostly Scotch, the stokers Irish. The qualities
most required in the stokehole are a dogged resolution to face
discomfort, and a sturdy frame. The stoker is begrimed with coal
dust. He has to endure an atmosphere which sometimes rises to a
temperature of 130°. In this intense heat he has to shovel every
day five tons of coal into the furnaces, and to keep the fires clear
and bright by constant raking, and by the periodical removal of
ashes. Upon none have the burdens of the mechanical development
of our age fallen more heavily than upon the men who undertake
the duties of firemen in an Atlantic Liner. Who can refuse to
follow Mr. Euskin in his admiration for the life of the sailor, and the
beauty of the swelling canvas which it is his business to handle, or
withhold his sympathy from those who are engaged in the wretched

1886 A FLYING VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES. 905

labours of the stokehole? It has often been proposed to feed
furnaces mechanically. The method would obviate the necessity of
employing men in one of the most distressful forms of manual
labour.

Our outward voyage was completed on the morning of Sunday,
the 12th of September. It was a lovely day. From the entrance
of the harbour at Sandy Hook to the wharves at which the steamers
lie the distance is some twenty miles. The shores on either hand
are studded with pleasant suburbs and the charming residences of
merchants. New York stands on a narrow peninsula which divides
the Hudson from the East Kiver. The oldest part of the city was
built at the extremity of this peninsula. It has rapidly extended
inland. The few principal thoroughfares terminate at the Garden
Battery, and are carried in almost parallel lines through the whole
length of the city. These streets are crossed at right angles by
smaller streets, which are generally carried in a straight line from
the Hudson to the East Kiver. The streets of New York are
numbered and not named. The monotony of a rectangular plan is
broken by a few squares and by the central park. New York has
nothing which can be compared with the squares and parks of
London. In this regard time gives us an advantage. The leading
thoroughfares are lined with buildings often of noble proportions.

From an architectural point of view, all the effects are completely
destroyed by the telegraph and telephone companies. Huge posts
of fir are planted on both sides of the great thoroughfares carrying
hundreds of wires, which interlace at every crossing. It is a
monstrous abuse to permit those appliances of civilisation to be
carried above ground. Subways should be formed for the purpose.

In a city scarcely inferior in population to London, facility of
locomotion is of primary importance. In New York it is rendered
easy by tramways and railways. The latter are carried overhead.
It is a far cheaper plan than the tunnelling adopted for our metro-
politan lines, and where the overhead system is confined to streets of
ample width and without pretensions to architectural beauty, there
are few objections even from the aesthetic standpoint.

In the social condition of New York the various nationalities
of its inhabitants are a striking feature. As an illustration I may
mention that in the course of a short evening walk round Washington
Square I stopped outside the open windows of a house filled with a
large assembly engaged in lively discussion. The speeches were
being delivered in Italian. In the large assemblage outside the
majority were speaking French, and every cafe in the square and
adjacent streets was kept by a German. New York is the third
largest German city in the world.

On the day after my arrival a procession of 40,000 persons,
organised by the Knights of Labour, defiled before the Brevoort

906 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

Hotel, at which I was staying. Each of the associations was headed
by a band. There were carriages and mounted men at intervals.
The several trades carried their distinctive banners, and many ultra-
socialistic devices were displayed ; denunciations of capital and ex-
hortations to vote for Henry George as the next Mayor of New York
being frequent. In America the relations between labour and capital
will call for discretion and self-denial not less than in the countries of
the Old World.

During my short stay at New York I went out to spend an after-
noon with Mr. John Crosby Brown, at Orange. Crossing by the
steam-ferry to Jersey City, a short journey by train brought us to
our destination. After a drive for a couple of miles along a flat road
we reached the foot of a steep hill. We climbed it on foot, and on
reaching the summit found ourselves on the edge of an elevated
plateau commanding a glorious view. At our feet was a level plain
in which cheerful dwellings and thriving villages, cultivated fields
and dense masses of rich green trees, were delightfully intermingled.
In the middle distance was the noble stream of the Hudson, and
beyond it New York. Who can look down without emotion, from a
peaceful and solitary spot, on a vast city ? How many a struggling
emigrant has trod the streets of New York for the first time, looking
out upon the future with fear and trembling! and how many a
gallant spirit owes to the cordial welcome which America has given
him the means of gaining an honest livelihood, for which he had
found no opportunity in the crowded cities of the Old World !

The first of the series of international contests between the
English cutter ' Galatea ' and the American sloop ' May-flower ' took
place on the second day after my arrival in New York. I had the
pleasure of following the match on board Mr. Morgan's fine steam-
ship, the ' Corsair.' It was a stirring scene. The weather was
lovely — a cloudless sunshine and a pleasant breeze. The waters were
crowded with craft of every description, from the huge two-storied
side-wheelers thronged with hundreds of sightseers, to the tiny
steam launch built by Herreschoff, which darted hither and thither
as if by magic, at a speed of twenty knots an hour. The poetry of
the past was still represented by many graceful sailing yachts, and
more utilitarian interests by the steam liners and the coasting
schooners. It seemed scarcely possible that a match could be sailed
in such crowded waters, but when at last the signal was given the
two champion vessels threaded their way with much less hindrance
than might have been expected through the throng of spectators and
admirers. I shall not enter upon the details of the match. The
American yacht led from the beginning to the close of the race.

On a day of tropical heat, we made our outward journey to
Chicago by the Pennsylvania Central. The line is recognised as one
of the best managed in America. The cars are admirable, and the

1886 A FLYING VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES. 907

commissariat perfect, but the line is one of the oldest in the country,
and was laid out with a view rather to economy of construction than
to the rapid travelling on which the public now insists. The scenery
through which we passed had a charm which amply compensated for
the fatigue of the journey. The State of Pennsylvania is well watered
and richly cultivated. The farms have the cheerful indications of
abundance. The finest scenery is at the crossing of the Alleghany
mountains. The line ascends by a steep incline until it reaches the
famous horse-shoe curve. As the train wheeled swiftly round the
amphitheatre of hills a scene of surpassing beauty was brought into
view. The afternoon sky was aglow with the yellow light of the
descending sun. The upper slopes of the hills were richly wooded.
Descending to the plains the eye ranged over a vast country with its
smiling homesteads and vast tracts of grain ripening to the sickle.

Later in the evening we passed through Pittsburgh, the Wolver-
hampton of the United States, and not less black and grimy than the
iron-manufacturing district in the old country.

We arrived at Chicago at an early hour on the 9th of September.
The hotel to which we adjourned is a colossal establishment. The
large hall is at all hours densely crowded with men of business and
speculation. A telegraph office affords facilities for transmitting
orders, and current prices are posted at frequent intervals.

The marvellous growth of Chicago from an Indian village to a
city of over half a million of inhabitants is due to its great advantages
of position on the shores of Lake Huron, and at the junction
of the most important systems of railways going West. By the
quick trains the distance of neajly one thousand miles from New
York is covered in little more than twenty-four hours, and there are
several alternative routes. By the chain of lakes grain, timber, and
iron ore from the Far West are brought down to Chicago at prices
with which no railways, however cheaply constructed, can compete.
By these various means of communication Chicago has been made
the seat of a great industry, and the centre of an agricultural district
of vast extent. Here are gathered in from distances of hundreds of
miles vast supplies of wheat. . Hither are sent droves of cattle and
pigs innumerable. Chicago transmits the supplies thus collected to
millions of consumers in the Eastern States and in Europe ; while it
furnishes to the farmer in the West, from its enormous warehouses,
manufactured goods, home-made and imported. The transaction of
affairs on such a scale gives occasion for great banking establish-
ments, and the accumulation of wealth in the city leads to extensive
dealings in securities, and attracts in numbers projectors of schemes
of every kind.

In its external features Chicago is remarkable for the colossal
proportions in which everything is carried out. The shops, the
warehouses, the length and the breadth of the streets dwarf by com-

908 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

parison anything that we are accustomed to see in cities of the Old
World.

In the Park, as elsewhere, the extent is the most distinctive
feature. The well-formed roads cover a distance of no less than
thirty-two miles. From the Park we drove into the principal
residential quarter, along the Michigan Avenue, and through miles
of streets lined with houses which bore all the external marks of
affluence. It was a noticeable circumstance that in point of size and
costliness few houses conspicuously overtopped the general standard.
It may perhaps be inferred that wealth is pretty evenly distributed
among the richer classes. If an individual has attained a more than
ordinary success, it is not the custom to indulge in personal luxury.

Chicago is not an attractive city. It has essentially the air of
business. Everybody is in a hurry. The material development of
the city and of the individual is the absorbing object. The vigour is
splendid, but more of that leisure on which Aristotle insists as es-
sential for the discharge of the duties of citizenship would be a price-
less boon. Man's life was spacious in the early world. At Chicago,
in the rush of interests and pursuits, it is too much cramped and
confined. All this will be changed in another generation. In the
present stage the foundation is being laid for the future advance to a
still higher civilisation.

By the kind invitation of Mr. Pullman, we visited the noble
establishment which he has created on the shores of the lake, about
eight miles from Chicago. The Pullman carriage factory is an in-
dustrial palace. Four thousand workmen are employed, and the
utmost pains and liberality have been displayed in making the works a
model of organisation, both for the conduct of business and for the soli-
citude displayed for the well- being of those employed. Long rows of
commodious dwellings have been erected. They are fitted with the
most perfect sanitary appliances. A church, a spacious bazaar, an
hotel, a well-supplied library, and a theatre, scarcely surpassed in
elegance in London or Paris, have been built. While recognising
the generosity and the care with which the wants of the workmen
have been provided for, it is a question whether minuteness of regu-
lation has not been carried too far, and whether sufficient scope has
been given for individual liberty. As a means of binding the
workmen to the establishment, it can scarcely be doubted that
facilities for acquiring land and building for themselves would be far
more effectual than a system under which they are practically under
compulsion to become tenants of their employers, subject to a few
days' notice on either side. The workmen at Pullman's are chiefly
foreigners, the predominating nationality being the Swedish.

Marquette was the bourne of our long journey. We left Chicago at
10 P.M. on the 9th of September. We reached our destination at 2 P.M.
on the following day. The distance is 480 miles. As day dawned
we found ourselves in a region presenting a marked contrast to the

1886 A FLYING VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES. 909

State of Pennsylvania. Instead of a hilly country we were travelling-
over a plain. Agriculture was in an earlier stage. Much of the
country was still covered with wood, and it was only in exceptional
instances that the decayed stumps had been removed from the enclosed
fields. At Mirimichie we came upon one of the most active centres
of the lumber trade. The saw mills are on an extensive scale, and
the harbour was filled with craft taking in cargoes of sawn timber.

On his arrival at Marquette, even the casual traveller would ob-
serve with pleasure unmistakable evidences of general prosperity.
Although of such recent origin, the town contains several places of
worship. The Episcopal Church is a building of considerable archi-
tectural pretensions. The schools are located in a spacious edifice.
The private residences are numerous, and present every indication
of ease and comfort. The homes of the working classes are decidedly
superior to those ordinarily seen in the old established towns in the
Eastern States.

Marquette is one of the busiest of the ports of Lake Superior.
From it are shipped large quantities of iron ore for Cleveland and
Chicago. One company alone sent away last year 250,000 tons.
The harbour is formed by two extensive piers, fitted with all the
necessary appliances for shooting ore rapidly from railway waggons-
into the holds of steamers or sailing vessels. Marquette, in common
with all the chief towns of the Northern States, is built wholly of
wood. In its streets are several considerable stores, well supplied
with dry goods. Our first visit was to the offices of the Michigan
Land and Iron Company. Later we inspected the schools.

The following days were devoted to a journey to L'Anse and
Baraga, a distance of sixty-three miles. The country is traversed
from end to end by the Marquette and Houghton Kailway. Several
other lines are in progress or projected, and, when completed, will
materially improve the communication between Marquette and
Chicago and the North- West. The Sturgeon and Michigamine
rivers, flowing through the most valuable portions of the forest lands,
afford valuable facilities for transporting timber. The whole of this
district is at present a forest.

Starting from L'Anse, we followed, for a distance of seven mile?,
a rough track, used for sending supplies to the lumber camps. On
leaving this track, we soon found ourselves standing by the trunks
of trees whose straight and almost branchless stems attained a height
of not less than 160 feet, Such trees are only to be found on certain
sections. Along the whole line of the railway scarcely any pine-wood
can be seen, and no trees approach these noble dimensions.

We observed with interest that in sections where the pine-wood

has been cut fifteen to twenty years ago, self-sown timber of the same

description is springing up. Many years must elapse before these

young saplings become valuable for the supply of timber. The tallest

VOL. XX.— No. 118. 3 R

910 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec.

trees exceeded three feet in diameter. We counted 112 distinct
circles of annular growth on a stump of similar dimensions, adjacent
to the larger trees. The outer circles of growth were indistinctly
marked, and we estimated the age of the tree at 160 years.

Looking to the future, it is melancholy to see the reckless waste
of timber in former years. This waste has not yet been checked by
timely apprehensions of future scarcity. The sections that have been
the scene of operation of a party of lumber-men are strewn with
timber. Trees have been cut down, which it has not been worth
while to remove ; and acres of charred timber testify to the careless-
ness with which fires are kindled in the midst of dead leaves and by
the trunks of valuable trees. The hardwoods are reckoned as of
little value. Timber of this description is too heavy to be floated
down shallow rivers. It can only be brought to market by railway.
Hence the greater cost of transportation. In the cost of sawing and
manufacture there is also a considerable excess for hardwood as
compared with pine. This disadvantage is compensated by greater
durability. Where supplies of timber are abundant the quality of
endurance is less esteemed.

Mining enterprise in the district is as yet in an early stage. We
visited the Titan and Wetmore mines. Upon descending into the
galleries, we found ourselves among a small assemblage of workmen,
singularly illustrative of the recent course of emigration into the
North- West Provinces of the United States. The two men attending
to the pneumatic drill were Irish, the man who held the lamp came
from Devonshire, the manager in charge was an American, the
bystanders were Finns and Swedes.

The prime motor necessary for the opening out of the mineral
region of Northern Michigan is capital. The first explorers are men
of intelligence, courage, energy, and perseverance. But they would
not engage in the weary, and often ill-rewarded, task of making search
for ore if they were in possession of ample resources. Necessity
prompts their efforts, and makes them anxious to secure as large a
share as possible from the profits arising from success. Being, how-
ever, without capital themselves, and being unwilling to pay liberally
for the use of the capital of others, long delays often arise in the
opening up of mines. In the case of the Michigan Land and Iron
Company, it is one of the principal results of our visits that steps
will be taken to bring together the miner in Michigan and the
capital which can be so readily supplied from the Eastern cities.
The theorists who freely denounce the class of capitalists would find
a practical and conclusive answer to their denunciations if they were
to visit Michigan. They would find the most skilled labour abso-
lutely paralysed and useless until the capital, glibly denounced as
robbery, has been supplied for the assistance of the workmen.

The northern peninsula of Michigan was formerly the country of
the Chippewaw Indians. A considerable tract has been reserved for

1886 A FLYING VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES. 911

their use near L'Anse, and a large number of families are still to be
found in that district. They gain a precarious livelihood by hunting
and selling the skins.

In the first ages of the European settlements, these regions, then
so difficult of access, were the scene of the zealous labours of the
Jesuit fathers. Marquette and Baraga are both named after priests
who were settled here as missionaries. A map of Lake Superior by
the Jesuit fathers shows the sites of numerous missions established
on the shores of Lake Superior. Devotion and self-denial in the
cause of religion have in all ages been conspicuous in the mission-
aries of the Eoman Catholic faith, and especially in the Jesuit order.

On the 17th of September I returned to New York, and on the
18th I sailed for Liverpool.

In the notes of a flying visit it is not necessary to give statistics
as to the population, the wealth, the exports, and the -manufactures
of the United States, but I cannot conclude without a few words on
the social and political condition. It would be unfair to measure the
United States by the standard which would be applied in an old
country. The charm of England is largely derived from those rich
and mellow tones which age can alone impart alike to the land and
its people. Our society and our institutions are derived from a
feudal system, which, though corrected by a continual process of
reform, had its origin in the idea that men were naturally unequal.
In America, the social and political order is rooted in the idea that
all men are naturally equal. For America no other theory could by
possibility have been accepted, and we must admit the success with
which the idea has been worked out in practice. If the government
of the United States has been corrupt in the past, the election of
President Cleveland expresses the resolve of the nation to purge its
political system of a great evil. In our own country public life is
happily free from corruption, but we have to deplore the exaggera-
tion of party feeling to a degree which is detrimental to the State.

Turning from politics to business, an impression prevails that
there is more sharp practice in the United States than in other
countries. In England there are not wanting those who would take
advantage of the unwary. Dishonest men only succeed in America
so long as they are not found out. In the sphere of literature in
every branch, in history and poetry, in fiction, science, and the fine
arts, the Americans have taken a high place. Of the charm of
American society it is quite superfluous to speak: it has been
brilliantly represented in our own country. Life in America differs,
where it differs at all from the best we see at home, only in being
more vivacious and less ceremonious. It would be well if we could
import into the social world in which we live more of the graceful
and pleasing animation which we see in American life.

That the mass of the people of the United States are in a condi-

3R2

912 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Dec. 1886

tion superior to that attained in the most fortunate countries of the
Old World, is beyond dispute. Their advantages are drawn from the
abundant resources of a territory in which there are still wide tracts
not yet brought under cultivation. The political institutions of the
United States have more than the mere negative merit of not having
presented any obstacles to the material progress of the people : they
have facilitated the progress of the country in civilisation and in
wealth. Education has been placed within the reach of all. In the
most newly settled part of the country the reservation of land for
the maintenance of schools has rendered it possible to provide instruc-
tion for the children of the hardy pioneers of agriculture and mining
enterprises. As rude assemblages of huts grow into villages, and vil-
lages into towns, the school buildings, the teachers, and the appliances
for teaching keep pace with the general improvement. We saw an
admirable example of this wise liberality in the schools of Marquette.

Measured by its political results, the Constitution of the United
States has been eminently successful. Since it was first promulgated
it has undergone no change. It has borne the strain of a terrible
war ; it has maintained the Union, and it has won the insurgents to
the national cause by lenity and by justice. It has been sufficiently
elastic and comprehensive to satisfy the aspirations of a self-governed
people composed of many races, and living in different parts of the
country under widely different economic conditions. Looking for-
ward to the near future, only one possible subject of dispute is seen
topping the horizon — I refer to the fiscal system. Protection is now
maintained for the benefit of the manufacturers, who are the few,
and at the expense of the agricultural classes and the great mass of
consumers. Thus far the cultivation of a virgin soil, unburdened by
rent, has been sufficiently profitable to carry the load which has been
laid upon it. Hereafter the agriculturists may be less able and less
willing to submit to protection. Sooner or later, gradually, or
possibly by some sudden change of policy, the free exchange of com-
modities may be accepted. When that day comes, it will not be
England, but the United States, which will reap the greater advantage.

On the happy change which has passed in recent years in the
relations between Great Britain and the United States, I need not
dwell at length. British diplomacy never achieved a greater or
more enduring success than when it won by a generous act of concilia-
tion the forgiveness of America for the depredations of the * Alabama.'
The concessions we made have not weakened us, they have brought
us strength — the strength which comes from the friendship and good-
will of the great American Republic.

BRASSEY.

The Editor of THE NINETEENTH CENTURY cannot undertake
to return unaccepted HSS.

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

The titles of articles are printed in italics.

ACA

A CADEMIE Francaise, 62
-£•«- Adelaide, South Australia, 174
Alcock (Sir Rutherford), France, China,

and the Vatican, 617-632
Alcott (Miss), stories of, 516-517
Allen (Grant) on heredity, 351
Allotments, Rural Enclosures and, 844-

866

America, stability of popular govern-
ment in, 317

— immigration in, 563
Animals, the, of New Guinea, 74-90

— are they Happy ? 255-269
Animals, consciousness in, 352
Apprenticeship, the seven years' system

of, 538-539

Arabi Pasha, a thought-reading seance
with, 875

Arnold-Forster (II. 0.), Our Supersti-
tion about Constantinople, 441-452

Arsenic springs, 211

Artisans, effects of machinery on, 532-
533

— compared -with clerks, 540-543

— need of technical education for, 545-
550

Aubrey, his description of Wiltshire,
quoted, 847-848

Augustine (St.), letters of, 226

Australia, necessity of a navy to, 760-
761

Austria-Hungary, emigration and immi-
gration in, 554

Austrian Monasteries, a Visit to some,
374-390

CAP ,

"DALSHAM (Bishop), 731
J-J Barnett (Rev. Samuel A.), Distress

in East London, 678-692
Basil (St.), letters of, 227
Beale (Miss), stories of, 519
Belgium, emigration and immigration

in, 554

Bernard (St.), letters of, 228
Bible, Revision of tJie, 91-107
Birmingham, 234-254
Birth, before, 340-363
Borthwick (Sir Algernon), The Primrose

League, 33-39
Boycotting, on the. Suppression of, 765-

784
Bramwell (Lord), Marriage with a

Deceased Wifes Sister, 403-415
- Reply to, 667-677
Brassey (Lord), A Flying Visit to the

United States, 901-912
Browne (Miss Phi His), on literature for

girls, 525-526
Bryce (Mr.), his action for libel, 171

/CAMBRIDGE, antiquity of, 726-727
\J — history of the University at,

730-741

Canada, the Political History of, 14-32
Canada, experience of the protective

system in, 332
Canute, forest laws of, 503
Cape route to India in time of war, 448-

449

914

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

CAP
Capel (Monsignor), a thought-reading

stance with, 868-869
Carl (Prince of Sweden and Norway),

In an Indian Jungle, 194-200
Carlill (Briggs), Are Animals Happy?

255-269
Carlisle (Bishop of), Comte' s Famous

Fallacy, 473-490
Carlisle, the Bishop of, on Comte, 715-

723
Carlyle (Thomas), his exhortations to

the wealthy, 782
Casson (Mr.), a thought-reading stance

with, 868-869

Cassowaries of New Guinea, 87
Caucus debate, a, in Birmingham, 249-

252

Cecil correspondence, the, 230
Chalybeate springs, 207
Chamberlain (Joseph), party of, 295-

296

— his attitude on the Irish question,
505

Charity, foolish, 686
Chicago, 907-908
China, Modern, 40-50

— France, and the Vatican, 617-632
Church, the, and Parliament, 565-578
Church endowments, 833-837
Cicero, letters of, 218-220

Civil Service, the, as a Profession, 491-

502
Classes, the, the Masses, and the Glasses,

795-804

Clerks compared with artisans, 540-548
Clifford (Professor), his doctrine of

mindstuff, 346-347
Coaling stations, defence of, 287
Coercion for maintaining the Union, 8
Cole (Sir Henry), exhibition scheme of,

640

Colleges, first establishment of, in Eng-
land, 732

Colonies, Naval Defence of the, 284-293
Colonies, sensitiveness to criticism in
the, 171

— mutual jealousies of, 761-762
Commons, enclosure of, 844-850
its effect on the poor during the

first forty years of George III., 853-

855
recent legislation concerning,

862-866
Comte, the Bishop of Carlisle on, 715-

723

DIS

Comte s Famous Fallacy, 473-490
Conflict, a suspended, 829-843
Conservatives, unwavering opposition

of, to Home Rule, 9-10
— tactics of, to defeat the Irish Bill,

596
Constantinople, our Superstition about,

441-460

Cook (Messrs.) appointment of, as pil-
grim agents for India, 895-896
Cooke (C. Kinloch), France and the

New Hebrides, 118-129
— Europe in the Pacific, 742-764
Craftsmen, our, 531-552
Craik (Mrs. D. M.), Merely Players,

416-422
Crime, detection of, by thought-reading,

876-877

Crisis, Moral of the late, 305-321
Cumberland (C. Stuart), A Thought-

Reader's Experiences, 867-885

TYALBERTIS (Signor), exploration
-L' of New Guinea by, 78-79
Dana (Professor), note of, on Mr. Glad-
stone's statements respecting Genesis
and science, 304

Deceased Wife's Sister, Marriage with a,
403^15

— Reply to, 667-677

Deer, Wild Fallow, the Chase of the,

503-514
Democracy, use of coercion by the, 8

— British, mischievous influence of, on
government, 308-311

Devendra N. Das, The Hindu Widow ,

364-373
Dibdin (Dr. T. F.), his account of Gott-

wic monastery, quoted, 386-387
Dicey (Edward), The Union Tote, 1-13

— The Unionist Campaign, 294-302
Dickens, as a depicter of disease, 584-

586

Dillon (Frank), Light and Water-
colours, 270-283

— (John), The coming Winter in Ire-
land, 609-616

Disease in Fiction, 579-591
Dissenters, relations of the Established

Church with, 839-842
Dissolution, the, and the Country, 139-

148
Distress in East London, 678-692

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

915

DOG

Dog, rabies in tlie, 151-163
Doudney (Miss), stories of, 518-519
Ducis, first performance of bis transla-
tion of ' Hamlet,' 805
Dumas (Alexandre), a thought-reading
stance witb, 880-881

LONDON, Distress in, 678-
" 692

Eastern question, the, what it means
for England, 441

— our attempt to solve it in 1854, 444
Education in China, 45

Egypt, ancient, letter-writing in, 216-

217

Egyptian Divine Myths, 423-440
Election, the general, 294
Emigration, statistics of, for the world,

553-564
Enclosures and Allotments, Rural, 844-

866
English literature, Taine's history of,

61-63

— the leading language of the globe,
557

Europe in the Pacific, 742-764
Evening Schools, Recreative, 130-138
Exhibitions, 633-647

FAUCIT (Helen), see Martin, Lady
Fechter as Hamlet, 806

Felida X., phenomena of multiplex per-
sonality in, 654- 655

Fellows (Mrs.), Nova Scotids Cry for
Home Rule, 785-794

Fiction, Disease in, 579-591

Fitzmaurice (Lord Edmond), Rural
Enclosures and Allotments, 844-866

Flaubert (Gustavo) and George Sand,
693-708

Fleming (Professor), his description of
rabies canina, 151-153; of hydropho-
bia, 154-155

Florian, St., visit to the monastery of,
375-378

France and the Neio Hebrides, 118-129

— China, and the Vatican, 617-632
France, Taine's work on, 64-70

— immigration and emigration in, 559-
561

GUI
Free Trade Argument, Collapse of the,

322-339
French, increase of the, in Canada, 14

— criminals, examination of, 468-470

— novels, 692

— Revolution, the, 316

Frewen (Moreton), on the commercial
rivalry of the United States with
Great Britain, 338

Friendly societies, sick statistics of, 259
Froude, Mr., Neio Zealand and, 171-
182

p AMBIER Islands, 748
*-* Germany, emigration and immigra-
tion in, 557

— annexation of New Guinea by, 752

— (Emperor of), a thought-reading
stance with, 873

Ghost story, Pliny's, 222
Gipsies, statistics relating to, 564
Girls, what they read, 515-530
Gladstone (W. E.), his conversion to
Home Rule, 2-3

— on the dissolution of Parliament, 139

— his paper on Genesis and science,
304

— his policy defended, 594-595

— a thought-reading stance with, 872-
" 873

Goodwin (Bishop), see Carlisle, Bishop

of
Goschen (Mr.), his defeat at Edinburgh,

599
Gottwic, visit to the monastery of, 386-

388
Gourko (General), a thought-reading

stance with, 877-878
Gout, spas for, 211

— definition of, 212

Grantabrygge, the old name of Cam-
bridge, 727

Granville (Lord), his comparison of

English and Italian cities, 234
Gregory (Sir William H.), The Loyalty

of the Indian Mohammedans, 886-900
Grey (Sir George), 179-181
Guardians, boards of, admission of

working men to, 691
— effects of the presence of women in,

709
Guibord interment dispute in Canada,

15-36

916

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

GUI

LAN

Guinea, New, the Animals of, 74-90
Guinea, New, the German occupation
of, 752

; the, of the Seine, 805-814
Harrison (Frederic), The Bishop
of Carlisle on C'omte, 715-723

Harrogate waters, 208

Hartington (Lord), party of, their atti-
tude towards the Conservatives, 298

Hawaii, kingdom of, 745

Heligoland, why England ought to part
with, 451

Heredity, 350-351

Hicks-Beach (Sir Michael), his speech
against Mr. ParnelTs tenant relief bill,
613

Hill (Frank H.), The Dissolution and
the Country, 139-148

Hindu Widow, the, 364-373

Home, not at, 553-564

Home Rule, Nova Scotia's Cry for, 785-
794

Home Rule not an article of the Liberal
creed, 5

— position of the agitation for, 296-297

Horace, letter-writing of, 220-221

Hubbard (J. G.), The Church and Par-
liament, 565-578

Hue (Abbe") on the state of religion
among the Chinese, quoted, 622

Hydrophobia, Pasteur and, 149-170

Hypnotism, treatment of lunacy by,
656-658

IDIOCY, relapses to specific animalism
in, 352-353
Ignatieff (General), a thought-reading

stance with, 871-872
Imperial Institute, proposed, 645-647
India, success of British conquest in, 17

— danger of, from British democracy,
311

Indian Jungle, in an. 194-200

— Mohammedans, the Loyalty of the,
886-900

Inoculation for hydrophobia, 164
Ireland, the Coming Winter in, 609-

616
Ireland, not an oppressed nationality,

6-7

Ireland, the Tory proposal of imperial

loans to, 506

Irish Bill, Tory tactics on the, 593
Italy, emigration and immigration in,

661

' JEHOVAH,' the Old Testament
*J Revisers' rule with regard to, 97

Jerome (St.), letters of, 226-227

Jessopp (Rev. Dr.), Letters and Letter-
writers, 215-233

— The Building up of a University,
724-741

Jews, distribution of, throughout the
globe, 563-564

Jordan (J. N.), Modern China, 40-50

TZANGAROOS of New Guinea, 84
J^- Kashmir, condition of, 897-899
Katscher (Leopold), Taine, a Literary

Portrait, 51-73

Kennard (Mrs. Arthur), Gustave Flau-
bert and George Sand, 693-708
Kensington, South, condition of the

water-colour drawings at, 270-275
Key (Sir Ashley Cooper), Naval Defince

of the Colonies, 284-293
Khedive, a thought-reading stance with

the, 874
Kidd (Benjamin), The Civil Service as a

Profession, 491-502
Kremsmiinster, visit to the monastery

of, 378-382
Kung (Prince), his memorandum on the

missionary question in China, 625-

626, 629-630

T ABOUR, subdivision of, its disadvan-

-l-J tages, 533-540

Ladrone Islands, 745

Lafontaine, Taine's essay on, 54-55

Lamb (Charles), letters of, 231-232

Lang (Andrew), Egyptian Divine Myths,

423-440
Lankester (Professor E. Ray), Pasteur

and Hydrophobia, 149-170
Lansdowne (Marquis of), the allotment

system as practised on his Wiltshire

estate, 857-859

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

917

LAS

Lascelles (Hon. Gerald), The Chase of
the JVild Fallow Deer, 503-514

Lawson (Sir Wilfrid), The Classes, the
Masses, and the Glasses, 795-804

Lawyers, utility of thought-reading to,
878

Leader, wanted a, 183-193

Lefevre (G. Shaw), The Liberal Split,
592-608

Letters and Letter-writers, 215-233

Lewes (G. H.) on Comte's law of the
three stages, quoted, 719

Liberal Split, the, 595-608

Light and Water-colours, 270-283

Lithium springs, 211

Livy, Taine's essay on, 55-57

Lords, House of, abolition of the, 319-
321

Louis V., phenomena of multiplex per-
sonality in, 648-654

Lovell (Mr.), deer-hunting by, 505-507

Luchon spa, 2C8

Lunatics, hypnotisation of, 656-658

Lyndhurst (Lord), marriage law of, 403

MACDONALD (Sir John), on the
protective system in Canada,
quoted, 332

Macdonald (John), Birmingham, a
Study from the Life, 234-254

Machinery, effects of, on artisans, 532-
533

Mackarness (Bishop), see Oxford, Bishop
of

Maine (Sir H. S.) on popular govern-
ment, 313-320

Malmesbury Common, the allotment
system on, 861-862

Maltby Common, 865

Malthus, his speculations on the popu-
lation question, 560

Manners (Lady John), Massage, 824-
828

Mansion House Relief Fund, failure of
the, 683-687

Marriage in China, 44-45

Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister,

403-415
— Reply to, 667-677

Marquette, 908-909

Marshall (Mrs.), stories of, 520

Martin (Lady), her book on Shake-
speare's female characters, 417-419

NEW

Martineau (Dr.), on Comte's three state?,

quoted, 476

Mason College, Birmingham, 245-246
Masoretic text of the Bible, 92-93
Massage, 824-828
Maudsley (Dr.), his observations of

animalism in idiocy, 352-353
Mecca, pilgrimages i'rom India to, 895-

896

Medley (Mr.), reply to, 322-339
Meister (Joseph), inoculation of, for

hydrophobia, 165
Merton (Walter de), 731
Meurice (Paul), his translation of ' Ham-
let,' 807-814
Meyer (Dr.), his exploration of New

Guinea, 79
Mill (J. S.), on Comte's law of the three

states, quoted, 716
Milton, Taiue's criticism of, 71-72
' Mindstuff,' 346-347
Mineral springs, see Spas
Missionary question in China, 619-632
Mivart (St. George), A Visit to some

Austrian Monasteries, 374-390
Mohammedans, Indian, the Loyalty of

the, 886-900
Mb'lk, visit to the monastery of, 382-

385
Monasteries, Austrian, a Visit to some,

374-390
^JMongredien (Mr.) on the relation of

exports to imports, quoted, 328
Montreal, the British in, 14
Moresby (Captain), surveys of New

Guinea by, 79
Mulhall (Mr.), his table of the rate of

advance in the world's commerce,

334'
Myers (Frederic W. H.), Multiplex

Personality, 648-666
Myths, Egyptian Divine, 423-440

"ftTAVAL Defence of the Colonies,
•*•* 284-293
New Forest, deer-hunting in the, 503-

514

New Hebrides, 757-758
New Hebrides, France and the, 118-129
New York, purchase of Niagara Falls

by the State of, 815-823
— appearance of, 905
New Zealand and Mr. Fronde, 171-182

918

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

NEW

Newspapers in China. 42-44

• — reading of, by the working classes,

109-112
• — provincial, cost of producing, 393-

394
— comparative table of the contents of,

395

Niagara, buying, 815-823
Nova Scotia's Cry for Home Rule, 785-

794
Novelists as depicters of disease, 579-

591
Novels, French, 692

OBSTRUCTION in Parliament by
the Home Rulers, 8-9
' Oceana,' see Froude
O'Neill (John), Not at Home, 553-564
Opium-smoking in China, 48
Osiris myth of Egypt, 433-438
Oxford (Bishop of), Sisters -in -Laic,
667-677

— origin of, 726

— founding of the collegiate system at,
731

PACIFIC Ocean, annexation in the,
119

Pacific, Europe in the, 742-764
Pain, 664
Paintings, water-colour, influence of

light upon, 270-283
Panther hunt in India, 199-200
Papua, see New Guinea
Paradise-birds of New Guinea, 86
Paris, performance of ' Hamlet ' in, 805-

814
Parliament, how to deal with Home

Rule obstruction in, 9
— dissolution of, by a defeated Ministry,

139

Parliament, the Church and, 565-578
Parnell (Mr.), his tenant relief bill, 609-

614

Party government, 308
Pasteur and Hydrophobia, 149-170
Paston letters, 229
Paupers, abuse of the workhouse system

by, 713-714
Pearson (Norman), Before Birth, 340-

363

RUS

' Peking Gazette,' the, 42-43
Penzance (Lord), Collapse of the Free

Trade Argument, 322-339
Personality, Multiplex, 648-666
Pigtails, Chinese, 49
Players, merely, 416-422
Pleasure and pain, 259-269
Pliny, letters of, 221-223
Pollock (Lady), The 'Hamlet' of the

Seine, 805

Portugal, emigration from, 562
Postage, a year's payment for, 215
Poverty, increase of, in London, 687-

688

— suggestions for its relief, 690-692
Primrose League, the, 33-39
Prisoners as Witnesses, 453-472
Protection, commercial, experience of,

in Canada, 332
— mischievous working of, in Nova

Scotia, 787
Protectionists, place of, in the House of

Commons during Russell's first Minis-
try, 593
Provincial Paper, a, how it is managed,

391-402
Pullman carriage factory, visit to, 908

QUEBEC, decline of the British ele-
ment in, 14

T) ABIES described, 151-153

J-l' Railroads, opposition of the Chinese

to, 41-42
Rarotonga, 745
Robb (J. Hampden), Buying Niagara,

815-823

Robinson (J. C.), a reply to, 270-283
Rogers (Rev. J. Guinness), his speech

at the City Temple Conference, 568

— A Suspended Conflict, 829-843
Romanes (Mr.) on pleasure and pain in

the brute creation, quoted, 253
Romans, settlement of, at Cambridge,

727
Rome, ancient, letter-writing in; 217-

227
Rural Enclosures and Allotments, 844-

866
Russia, movement of, towards the

Mediterranean, 446-447

— emigration from, 562

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

919

SAL

SALMON (Edward G.), What the
Working Classes read, 108-117

— What Girls read, 515-530
Salzburg, visit to St. Peter's Abbey at,

389-390

Samoa, German designs upon, 756

Sand (George), Gustave Flaubert and,
693-708

Sandwich Islands, the, 745

Scandinavia, emigration and immigra-
tion in, 556

Schools, Recreative Evening, 130-138

Science and Art Department, short-
comings of, 545-546

Sclater (P. L.), The Animals of New
Guinea, 74-90

Scorpions, suicide of, 256

Seamen, merchant, 903-904

Second Chamber system, failure of,
320

SeweU (Miss), writings of, 517-518

Sick, treatment of, in workhouses, 710-
713

Sickness, average duration of, 259-260

Sidonius Apollinaris, letters of, 224-225

Sisters-in-Law, 667-677

Smith (Dr. G. Vance), Revision of the
Bible, 91-107

— (Goldwin), Moral of the late Crisis,
305-321

on Comte's law of the three states,

719
The Political History of Canada,

14-32

— (H. Herbert), Rural Enclosures and
Allotments, 844-866

Sonnerat, voyage of, to New Guinea,

74

Spain, emigration from, 562
Spas, English and Foreign, 201-214
Stephen (Mr. Justice), Prisoners as

Witnesses, 453-472

— On the Suppression of Boycotting,
765-784

Strikes, the law on, 770

Student life at Cambridge in the past,

738-740
Sturgis (Julian), Wanted — a Leader,

183-193

Suez Canal, not the key of India, 448
Suicide, freedom of the brute creation

from, 256

Sulphated waters, 206-207
Sulphur springs, 208
Sully (Mounet) as Hamlet, 807-811

VAT

Suspended Conflict, a, 829-843
Switzerland, emigration and immigra-
tion in, 562
Symmachus, letters of, 223-224

TAHITI, 747, 749
Taine, a Literary Portrait, 51-73
Talma as Hamlet, 805-806
Telepathy, 355-356

Temperance movement and the licens-
ing system, 797
Tetragrammaton, the, 96
Thackeray, as a depicter of disease,

583-584
Thought-Readers Experiences, a, 867-

885
Tientsin, the attack on the French

settlement at, 621
Tiger hunt in India, 195-199
Tirard (Dr. Nestor), Disease in Fiction,

579-591
Tocqueville (A. de), his work on the

French Revolution, 65
Tonga Archipelago, the, 758
Trevelyan (Sir Charles) on Treasury

officials, quoted, 499-500
Twining (Louisa), Workhouse Cruelties,

709-714

TTNION Vote, the, 1-13

Unionist Campaign, the, 294-302
Unionist Liberals, their incapability of

subsisting as an independent party,

10
— position and prospects of the, 592-

608

United Kingdom, emigration and immi-
gration in, 557-558
United States, a Flying Visit to the,

901-912
United States, statistics of immigration

to the, 563
University, the Building up of a, 724-

741

TT ASTERN, the struggle against the
V enclosure of, 846-847
Vatican, France, China, and the, 617-
632

920

INDEX TO VOL. XX.

WAR

WAKEFIELD (Edward), New Zea-
land and Mr. Froude, 171-182

Wales (Prince of), a thought-reading
seance with the, 873-874

Wallace (A. R.), his experience of New
Guinea, 76-77

Walpole (Horace), letters of, 231

Wanted— a Leader, 183-193

' War,' the modern name for popular
agitations, 772

Water-colours, Light and, 270-283

Whitworth Scholarships, 546-547

Widow, the Hindu, 364-373

Wills (Rev. Freeman), Recreative Even-
ing Schools, 130-138

Wiltshire, Aubrey's description of,
quoted, 847-848

— agricultural holdings of, 856

— example of the allotment system in,
on Lord Lansdowne's estate, 857-859

YTE

Winter, the coming, in Ireland, 609-

616

Witnesses, Prisoners as, 453-472
Wood (H. Trueman), Exhibitions, 633-

647

Woodhall Spa, 205
Workhouse Cruelties, 709-714
Working Classes, what they read, 103-

117
Working classes, relations between the

wealthy and the, 794-796
Wright (Thomas), Our Craftsmen, 531-

552

YEO (Dr. J. Burney), English and
Foreign Spas, 201-214
Yonge (Miss), stories of, 517
Ytene, 503

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