Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, June 1885

by Various

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Transcriber’s note: table of contents added by the transcriber.

[THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE IN CENTRAL ASIA.]
[THE STATE VERSUS THE MAN.]
[THE TRUE STORY OF WAT TYLER.]
[M. JULES FERRY AND HIS FRIENDS.]
[ORGANIC NATURE’S RIDDLE.]
[CONCERNING EYES.]
[BIG ANIMALS.]
[A DAY OF STORM.]
[SOME TURKISH PROVERBS.]
[MACPHERSON’S LOVE STORY.]
[WHEN SHALL WE LOSE OUR POLE-STAR?]
[LAUREL.]
[THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF GHOST STORIES.]
[THE GERMAN ABROAD.]
[GEORGE SAND.]
[SOME INTERESTING WORDS.]
[SOCIAL SCIENCE ON THE STAGE.]
[A COMMENT ON CHRISTMAS.]
[THE ECONOMIC EFFECT OF WAR.]
[A MASTER IN ISLAM ON THE PRESENT CRISIS.]
[LITERARY NOTICES.]
[MISCELLANY.]

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Eclectic Magazine
OF
FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

New Series. Vol. XLI., No. 6.

JUNE, 1885.

Old Series complete in 63 vols.

THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE IN CENTRAL ASIA.
BY MAJOR-GENERAL SIR HENRY RAWLINSON, K.C.B.

It is easier to write about the Russian advance at the present day than it was a few years back. The ground has been cleared of much of the rubbish which formerly encumbered it. Not long ago the apologists of Russia were wont to compare the progress of her arms in Central Asia with the progress of our own in India. We were warned of a certain law of nature which impelled civilisation to advance on barbarism, and were asked to hail with sympathy, rather than view with suspicion, the extension of a Power which, as it swept on in its resistless course, diffused the blessings of order, of knowledge, and of commerce over a vast region hitherto sunk in a savagery of the worst description. But public opinion is now somewhat changed. No one questions that Russia is entitled to great credit for the civilising influence that has attended her progress, for the large benefits she has conferred upon humanity in her career of conquest through Central Asia. By crushing the Turcoman raiders, indeed, and by abolishing the slave markets of Khiva and Bokhara, she has restored peace and prosperity to districts which were groaning in misery, and has earned the gratitude of thousands of terror-stricken families. Whatever may happen in the future, she has gained imperishable glory in the past by her victories of peace along the desolated frontier of Khorassan; but here the register of her good deeds must end. To suppose that she launched her forces across the Caspian in 1869 and engaged in Central Asian warfare with a view to these beneficent results, is to ignore the whole spirit and character of her policy. Fortunately there is now no room for misconception. Her soldiers and statesmen have recently laid bare her springs of action with a plainness that is almost cynical, but at the same time with a fulness of detail that must carry conviction to all unprejudiced minds. It was during the Crimean war, we are told, that Russia first realised her false position in regard to England. In her schemes of aggrandisement in Europe she was liable to be met and thwarted at every turn by British alliances and British influence; and when engaged in war she was open to our attack in every quarter, in the Black Sea, the Sea of Azof, the Baltic, or the coast of Georgia, without any possibility of retaliation. If she was to develop in due course, as had so often been predicted, into the leading Power of the world, it was thus absolutely necessary that the inequality complained of should be redressed. Some weak point in our armor must be discovered. Some means must be found to shatter the palladium of our insular security. Hence there arose the idea of creating a great Oriental satrapy, under Russian administration, which should envelop the north-west frontier of our Indian Empire, and from which, as occasion might arise, pressure could be exerted, or, if necessary, armed demonstrations might issue, which would neutralise British opposition in Europe, and would place our policy on the Bosphorus or elsewhere in subordination to her own. In former times, as is well known, elaborate schemes have been discussed at St. Petersburg for the actual invasion of India, and, if we may judge from the utterances of the Moscow press and the fervid letters of certain Russian generals, the same exalted ideas still prevail in many military circles; but assuredly no such extravagance has been apparent in the careful plan of trans-Caspian operations hitherto adopted by the Russian Government, which has, on the contrary, been of the soberest and most practical character.

The end in view has been simply to arrive by gradual accretion of territory at the frontier of India. In pursuance of this object Russia has incurred expense without any immediate prospect of return, to an extent which has filled economists with dismay; fifty millions sterling, at least, having been expended by her in Central Asia during the last twenty-five years. Native rights at the same time have been mercilessly trampled on, and, above all, diplomacy has pushed its privilege of deception far beyond the bounds hitherto recognised as legitimate; but success, which condones all such irregularities, has rewarded her efforts, and the crisis has now arrived, almost sooner than was expected.

A brief summary of the salient points which have marked the persistent advance of Russia in Central Asia seems to be all that is required at present. For the first ten years following on the Crimean war her generals, having crossed the Kirghiz steppes from Orenburg, were gradually feeling their way along the valley of the Jaxartes. Creeping up the river, and taking fort after fort and city after city, they everywhere defeated the rabble soldiery of the Uzbegs, and finally, in 1867, planted the Russian flag on the famous citadel of Samarcand, adjoining the mausoleum of Timúr. Here, according to prearranged design, the progress of the Russian arms was arrested, pending the approach of co-operating columns from the Caspian; but, in the meantime, the neighboring Khanate of Bokhara, hitherto the most important of the Central Asian States, was brought completely under control, and the influence of Russia was fully and firmly established on the Oxus. To the westward a still more important series of operations was now commenced. In 1869 the first Russian detachments crossed the Caspian, and boldly invaded the country of the Turcomans. Had such an expedition been carried out in Europe, it would have been stigmatised as piracy, for there was absolutely no provocation on the part of the tribesmen, nor even was the formality observed of declaring war. Coercive measures, without further warning and with varying success, were directed against the tribes of the neighborhood. Gradually the sphere of action was extended. Khiva was reduced in 1873, and then the Tekkehs, the principal tribe of the Turcoman confederacy, who inhabited the steppe from Kizil-Arvat to Merv, were seriously attacked. The western division of this tribe, called the Akhals, made a stout resistance, on one occasion in 1879 beating off the regular troops led by Lomakin, and seriously imperilling the whole Russian position. Ultimately, however, in 1880, the renowned Scoboleff, greatly assisted by the Persian chiefs of Kuchán and Bujnoord, who furnished carriage and supplies from the adjacent frontier of Khorassan, penetrated to the heart of the Akhal country and took their stronghold, Geok Tepeh, by storm. All active opposition then collapsed, and in due course conciliation, combined with intimidation, being skilfully employed against the Eastern Tekkehs, who were demoralised by the subjugation of their brethren in Akhal, and who applied for support in vain both to Persia and to Cabul, Merv—“the Queen of the East,” as she has been called—surrendered to Russia in February, 1884, and the first act of the great Central Asia drama, after twenty-five years of sustained and energetic action, was brought to a successful close. It is needless to say that during this long and desperate struggle to reach and occupy Merv there were many phases which tended to distract public attention from the main object in view. To many persons who followed the Russian proceedings with an observant and even friendly eye—for the atrocities committed by the Turcomans had excited general indignation against them—the explanation which most commended itself was, that as Russia had already established an important government in Turkestan very imperfectly supplied with the means of communication with the Wolga, she found it indispensable to supplement the northern line with a more direct and assured route to the west, which route should traverse the Turcoman steppe viâ Merv and Askabad, and should thus connect Tashkend and Samarcand with the Caspian. And it is quite possible that consideration of this nature—which from a strategical point of view were perfectly sound and proper—may have had some weight in determining the course of events, combined, as they naturally were, with a full appreciation of the advantages in respect to prestige and military power which must accrue from the creation of a new empire in Central Asia; but I must adhere to my view that neither strategy, nor lust of conquest, nor military glory, nor any of the thousand and one motives which in matters of peace and war ordinarily actuate nations, was the governing principle in directing the Russian advance into Central Asia. That principle was, I believe, an intense desire to reach the threshold of India, not for the purpose of direct or immediate attack, but with a view to political pressure on Great Britain, with which Power she would thus, for the first time, be brought in territorial contact.

With this conviction strong on my mind, and with a lively sense of the inconvenience to India of Russian contiguity, is it surprising that I should feel constrained to put the following questions? Ought we to have remained passive while the meshes were thus being woven round us? Ought we not rather to have impeded by all the means at our command the passage of the Russian columns from the Caspian to Merv? There were many such means available. We might have persuaded Persia, whose jealousy was already excited by the movement of the Russian columns along her frontier, to interdict that supply of grain and transport animals from Khorassan which was indispensable to a successful advance. We might have furnished the Tekkehs of Akhal with arms and money to resist the invaders. We might have warned the Russian Government in plain but forcible language that her occupation of Merv would infallibly lead to war. It is impossible, indeed, to acquit ourselves of shortcoming in this respect. It is impossible to avoid the conviction that, by a want of firmness in action as in language, the crisis which now threatens us has been unduly accelerated. I have no wish to reopen old sores, or to revive the acrimonious strife of 1881, when the questions of the evacuation of Candahar and the abandonment of the Quetta railway were debated with the keenness of political disagreement, embittered by the virulence of party feeling; nor, indeed, although strongly advocating at the time the retention of the Western Afghan capital, and believing as I still do that Russia was mainly encouraged to advance on Merv by our retirement from Candahar, am I at all insensible to the solid advantages which resulted from the adoption by the Government of the day of an opposite course of action. I freely admit three distinct sources of gain. Firstly, the considerable expense of maintaining an independent government in Candahar for the last four years has been saved to the public treasury; secondly, we have avoided local friction with the Dúrání population, which might have seriously hampered us under present circumstances; and, thirdly, we have succeeded during the interval in maintaining friendly relations with the Amir of Cabul, a result which, according to the best authorities—I refer especially to Sir Lepel Griffin’s statement on this head—would have been impossible had he been subjected to the constant sense of humiliation, as well as to the pecuniary loss, occasioned by the dismemberment of his kingdom and the continued presence of a British garrison at Candahar. Yet, admitting the value of such results, I cannot but think them a poor compensation for the cramped position, both military and political, in which we now find ourselves. At any rate, if we were at present established in strength at Candahar as we were in 1881, with the railway completed to that town from Sibi, and with a small detachment occupying Girishk on the Helmend, the improvement in our military position would be at least equivalent to an additional force of 20,000 men in line should hostilities really supervene with Russia, whilst the relations we should have been able to establish during the interval with the Hazáreh and Parsiwán section of the population—relations which must in the future constitute our chief element of strength in the country—would have rendered us almost indifferent to the jealousy and opposition of the Afghans.

Having thus disposed of all preliminary matter, I now take up the frontier question, from which arises our present acute misunderstanding with Russia. Oriental states have notoriously elastic and fluctuating frontiers, and Afghanistan is no exception to the general rule. At different periods, indeed, since the institution of the kingdom of Cabul by Ahmed Shah in 1747, the Afghan power has extended on one side to Cashmire, on another to Deregez in Khorassan, while to the south it has stretched into Beluchistan and even to the frontiers of Sinde. More frequently of late years it has been circumscribed within much narrower dimensions, and has moreover been disintegrated and broken up into three distinct chiefships. The normal condition of the kingdom may be considered to be such as it presented on Shir Ali Khan’s accession to power in 1868, Herat and Candahar being united to Cabul, and the seat of government being established at the eastern capital. It was shortly after this, in 1872, that, on the invitation of Russia, who had already brought Bokhara under her influence, and was exercising a tutelary direction of her affairs, we undertook, in the interests of Shir Ali Khan, to specify the northern districts over which we considered that he was entitled to claim jurisdiction, the object being thus to define a frontier between the Afghans and Uzbegs, which should obviate in the future all risk of collision or misunderstanding. As Russia at that time had no relations whatever with the Turcomans of Merv, it is not very obvious why it should have been thought necessary to protract the Afghan frontier beyond the Bokhara limit to the west of the Oxus. Perhaps the object especially was to protect the Afghan-Uzbeg states of Andekhúd and Mymeneh, which in the time of Dost Mohammed Khan had been subject to Bokhara. Perhaps Russia already contemplated the absorption of Merv, and foresaw that all territory outside of the Afghan boundary would naturally fall into her own hands. At any rate, the memorandum of 1872, better known as the Granville-Gortchakoff arrangement, after defining the Bokhara frontier as far as Khjoa Saleh on the Oxus, went on to name, as districts to be included in Shir Ali’s dominions, “Akcheh, Sir-i-Púl, Mymeneh, Shilbergán, and Andekhúd, the latter of which would be the extreme Afghan possession to the north-west, the desert beyond belonging to independent tribes of Turcomans;” and further: “The Western Afghan frontier between the dependencies of Herat and those of the Persian province of Khorassan is well known and need not be defined.” Now, however much it may be regretted that this memorandum, which was evidently drawn up as a mere basis for negotiation, and not as a formal declaration of territorial rights, was not more explicit in defining the trace of the line, and especially in marking the points at which it would cross the Murgháb and abut on the Heri-rúd, it did at any rate establish two main points of geographical interest. In the first place, it clearly distinguished between the independent Turcoman desert to the north and the Afghan hilly country to the south; and in the second place it naturally, and as a matter of course, assigned to Afghanistan the “dependencies of Herat” to the west of the Murgháb, which dependencies again were divided, it was said, from Persian territory by the “well-known” boundary of the Heri-rúd.

The terms of this agreement were in February 1873 formally accepted by Russia; and, faulty and irregular as the document is from a diplomatic point of view, it has quieted all frontier agitation between the Oxus and Heri-rúd for the last ten years, and would have served the same purpose for another ten years in advance but for the unfortunate intrusion of Russia into the controversy as a sequel to her conquest of Merv.

Russia first reintroduced a discussion on the frontier early in 1882, suggesting, in the interests of peace and order, that the arrangement of 1872-3 should, in respect to the western portion of the line, be complemented by some formal demarcation, determined by actual survey of the country; but as the Tekkehs were then independent, and there seemed to be no advantage in encouraging Russia to absorb their territory up to the line of demarcation, the proposal for a joint commission of delimitation was received by us at the time with some coldness. Two years later, in February 1884, affairs having much advanced in the interim, negotiations were resumed, and in due course (July 1884) commission ad hoc was appointed, General Lumsden being nominated by the British Government, and General Zelenoi by the Russian, with instructions to meet at Serakhs in the following October.

Now, it is quite evident that in the earlier stages of these frontier discussions the Russian Foreign Office understood the provisions of the 1872-3 arrangement, which were held to govern the later negotiation, in their natural and common-sense acceptation. The principle of a distinction between plain and hill was fully recognised, and the phrase “dependencies of Herat” was held necessarily to include the province of Badgheis, a tract which extended from the Paropamisus range to Serakhs, and which had been a dependency of Herat from the time of the Arab conquest. The line on which the commissioners were to be engaged is thus everywhere spoken of by M. de Giers and M. Zinovieff in the preliminary negotiations as a direct line from Khoja Saleh to Serakhs, or to the neighborhood of Serakhs, and there is no hint of any deflection of the line to the south. After the annexation of Merv, however, and especially after M. Lessar had perambulated Badgheis and made a careful study of the valleys of the Kushk and Murgháb rivers, larger views appear to have dawned upon the Russian authorities. Geographical and ethnological conditions were then invented that had never been thought of before. It was discovered that the Paropamisus range was the true natural boundary of Herat to the north, that the district of Badgheis, which lay beyond the range, had been absolved from its allegiance to Herat by efflux of time, Afghan jurisdiction having been suspended during the Turcoman raids which had desolated the district for above fifty years; above all, it was asserted that the Saryk Turcomans who dwelt at Penj-deh and in the valley of the Kushk, well within the Afghan border, must be registered as Russian subjects, because another detachment of the same tribe, who dwelt at Yolatan, beyond the desert and near Merv, had proffered their allegiance to the Czar. Questions of principle of such grave moment, it was further stated, required to be settled by the two European Governments before the commissioners could enter on their duties, and General Zelenoi was accordingly, without further explanation or apology, sent to rusticate at Teflis, regardless of the public convenience or of the respect due to his colleague, who had been waiting for him for four months on the Murgháb with an escort of 500 men and a large gathering of attendants and camp-followers.

The abrupt and discourteous manner in which Russia gave effect to her altered views, by withdrawing her commissioner, was not calculated to improve the prospect of an amicable settlement. Other graver matters, too, soon supervened. Before General Lumsden had arrived at the Heri-rúd, Russia had pushed forward a patrol to Púl-i-Khatún, about fifty miles south of Serakhs, thus occupying one of the points on which the Commission would have had to adjudicate; and subsequently she extended her advance still further into the “debateable” land, placing a strong post at Ak Robát, in the very centre of Badgheis, so as to cut off from the Afghans a famous salt lake which supplies the whole country with salt as far as Meshed and Askabad, and was thus a valuable source of revenue; and also taking possession of the pass and ruined fort of Zulficár, fifty miles south of Púl-i-Khatún, where one of the favorite tracks of the old Turcoman raiders crossed the Heri-rúd, and where an Afghan picket was already stationed. This last aggression, which was later sought to be justified by Russia on the ground of retaliation for an unauthorised Afghan advance on the Murgháb, brought the outposts of the two nations into immediate contact, and would certainly at the time have caused a collision but for General Lumsden’s urgent remonstrances. On the Murgháb, too, affairs were equally critical. As long ago as 1883, before the appointment of a frontier commission was ever thought of, the Amir of Cabul, alarmed by the Russian proceedings at Merv, had established a strong military post at Bala Murgháb, in the Jamshídí country,[1] and about fifty miles short of the Saryk settlement at Penj-deh. This was a purely military precaution, with no political significance, and could give offence to no one. In March of the following year, however, the situation was a good deal altered. Owing to a visit from M. Lessar, who came from Merv for the express purpose of testing the fidelity of the Saryk Turcomans to the Amir of Cabul, and who was generally regarded as the forerunner of a Russian advance, so much alarm was created in the neighborhood that application was made to the commandant at Bala Murgháb to send a detachment of his troops to Penj-deh for the protection of the Saryk tribesmen; and it was fortunate that this requisition was complied with, for otherwise the chances are that the Afghans would have lost the place, as the Russians were actually preparing to attack it.

The importance of this incident of the Afghan occupation of Penj-deh has been a good deal exaggerated by Russian partisans, who claim that the “debateable” land reserved for the adjudication of the commissioners was thus first invaded by the Afghans; but in reality, as will be presently explained in detail, no question had ever been raised in the country as to Penj-deh being outside the jurisdiction of Herat, previous to M. Lessar’s visit in March 1884, and the Cabul commander at Bala Murgháb, in ignorance of the appointment of a commission in Europe to consider any such question, naturally and properly supposed that he was merely carrying out an arrangement of internal police in strengthening his northern outpost. As it afterwards turned out, however, Russia attached the greatest importance to this obscure position of Penj-deh. Colonel Alikhanoff, indeed, always preferring action to negotiation, made an attempt to seize it with a detachment from Merv a few months after its occupation by the Afghans, and only desisted when he found that he must fight for its possession. There have been since repeated demonstrations of attack from the northward, and at the present moment it is the point where a collision between Russians and Afghans is most to be apprehended, the Saryks of Yolatan under Russian orders holding Púl-i-Khishti on the Kushk river, while the Saryks of Penj-deh under Afghan orders hold the neighboring position of Ak Tepeh, within half a mile’s distance, at the junction of the Kushk and Murgháb, and peace being only kept between the rival parties by the presence of our assistant commissioner, Colonel Ridgeway, who has been directed by Sir P. Lumsden to watch the frontier with an escort of fifty lancers, as long as he can with safety remain.

It must now be noted, that while local proceedings of this grave character have been taking place on the Murgháb, diplomacy in Europe has not been idle. When Russia decided not to send her commissioner to the frontier pending our acceptance of the new principles which were to govern the negotiation, she proposed for our consideration a zone of arbitration within the limits of which the boundary line was to be drawn. Negotiations on this subject are still proceeding, but no definite arrangement has been yet arrived at.

It must be patent to all the world that if Russia were pursuing a really honest policy, and were not striving to make a bargain especially favorable to her own interests, she would leave the delimitation commission to decide, according to evidence obtained on the spot, what was meant in the arrangement of 1872-3 by drawing a distinction between the Afghan hilly district and the Turcoman desert, as well as what extent of territory ought to be fairly included within “the dependencies of Herat.” On these points, which constitute the real difficulties of the situation, I now propose to make a few general remarks, repeating the arguments in favor of the Afghan claims which I have already submitted to the public in another place.[2]

Firstly, then, in regard to what is meant by the dependencies of Herat, the district between the Murgháb and Heri-rúd is known by the name of Badgheis, not, as has been fancifully suggested, from any traditional connection with the mythical Bacchus, but rather, as is stated in the Bundehesh, that curious repository of ancient Aryan legends from the tribe of Vad-keshan, who were probably a subdivision of the Hiyátheleh or Ephthalities, and who, according to Beladheri, were first established in the district, in direct dependency on Herat, by the Sassanian king Firoz in the fifth century A.D. Badgheis, from its rich and abundant pasturage and its sylvan character, soon became the favorite appanage of Herat, and the two names have been bracketed in all history and geography ever since, the Lord of the Eastern Marches being called, under the Sassanians, the Marzabán of Herat and Badgheis, and the district in question having followed the fate of the capital in all subsequent revolutions. The geographers, Istakhrí, Ibn Haucal, Mokadassi, Edrisi, and their followers to the time of the Mongol conquest, all describe Badgheis as the most valuable portion of the Herat territory. Although indifferently supplied with running streams, and being thus deficient in irrigated lands, particularly in the northern part of the district, it was on the whole well peopled, wells and kahrízes (or underground aqueducts) supplying the wants of the inhabitants. Again, in the southern and eastern portions of Badgheis, including the northern slopes of the Paropamisus range and the valley of the Kushk river, the natural beauties of the district became proverbial. The author of the Heft Aklím describes this part of Badgheis as a flower-garden of delights, and adds that it contains a thousand valleys full of trees and streams, each of which would abundantly supply an army not only with encamping ground but with grass and water, and fuel and fodder, and all the necessaries of life. He also alludes to the strong hill forts in the Kaitú range, Naraitú and others, of which our officers have lately seen the remains, and thus illustrates the famous passage in the Bundehesh which records that “Afrasiáb of Tur (the eponym of the Hiyátheleh) used Bakesir of Badgheis (Baghshúrde of the Arabs; now called Kileh Maúr) as a stronghold and made his residence within it, and a myriad towns and villages were erected on its pleasant and prosperous territory,” The geographers enumerate some ten or twelve considerable towns, which continued to flourish till the time of the Suffaveans, the capital being Dehistán (probably modern Gulran or Gurlan), which must have been founded by the Dahæ when they accompanied the kindred tribe of Tokhari or Hiyátheleh in their original immigration.

The boundaries of Badgheis seem to have fluctuated according to the power of the neighboring states, and it is not always easy to verify the notices of the geographers, owing to the disappearance of the old names. Still, it is important to note that Hafiz Abrú, who was a minister of Herat under Shah Rúkh, states categorically that Badgheis was bounded on the west by the Persian districts of Jam and Serakhs, thus proving that, at any rate at that period, the district extended northward up to the confines of the desert. To the east Badgheis was frequently made to include Merv-er-Rúd (Ak Tepeh), Penj-deh, Baghshúr (Kileh Maúr), Baún or Bavan (Kara Tepeh), and the entire valley of the Kushk river, while to the south it was separated from the plain of Herat, as at present, by a range of hills (now called Barkhút), the prolongation of the great Paropamisus. Such being the concurrent testimony of all writers as to the configuration of the country in antiquity, and Badgheis being so intimately connected with Herat as is the Campagna with Rome, it is difficult to understand on what grounds it can now be excluded from Afghan territory as indicated in the memorandum of 1872. The argument that neither Dost Mohammed Khan, nor Shir Ali Khan, nor even Abdur Rahman Khan until quite lately, exercised any effective jurisdiction in the district, or held it in military subjection, is certainly of no value; for this condition of recent possession, which at one time did really govern the distribution, was specially excluded from consideration in determining claims to Afghan nationality by Prince Gortchakoff’s letter of the 19th of December, 1872; and it would be a monstrous aggravation of the original outrage if the Turcomans, who had rendered Badgheis uninhabitable for fifty years, were, in virtue of their forcible interruption of Afghan government, to become themselves the legal owners of the country.

With regard again to the claims of Russia to inherit through the Saryk Turcomans, a portion of whom have lately become her subjects, the pretension is still more preposterous, since her outposts were not within 500 miles of the disputed territory when in 1872 the dependencies of Herat were adjudged to Afghanistan. It must be acknowledged that Badgheis has for the last fifty years been swept and harried by the Turcoman raiders till not a vestige of habitation has been left in the district. The land, especially along the Heri-rúd, is utterly desolate; but who will pretend that violence and outrage of this exceptional character has obliterated the rights of Herat to resume possession of the country on the re-establishment of order and security? In real truth Herat has never abandoned her hold de jure upon Badgheis. The towers along the southern hills, which Macgregor remarked in 1875, were intended to protect the immediate plain of Herat from the further incursions of the Tekkeh savages, who suddenly swept down like a hurricane from the north whenever an opportunity offered, not to serve as landmarks for the Afghan territorial border; they were strictly works of internal defence, and as such have no analogy with the line of border towers along the course of the Heri-rúd, which at an earlier period had been erected by Kilich Khan, an officer of Shah Zamán’s, with a view to resist invasion from Persia, and the ruins of which are still to be seen in a scattered line, extending from Kohsán to Garmáb in the vicinity of Púl-i-Khatún. Practically, and in so far as the safety of Herat is concerned, it can make no great difference if the Russian outposts are stationed at Púl-i-Khatún, or Zulficár, or at Kohsán. Herat would be equally open to attack from any of these points, and must rely for protection on its own means of defence; but it must be remembered that this is not a mere strategical question: on the contrary we are dealing with the rights and property of an independent sovereign as the guardian of his interests, and have no sort of authority to override the one or alienate the other on grounds of geographical or political convenience. Badgheis is unquestionably Afghan territory. Rescripts are still extant, addressed to the inhabitants by the Suddozye kings of Cabul. In 1873 Shir Ali Khan specifically named Badgheis, in his negotiations with Lord Northbrook, as an Afghan district which was likely to be overrun by the Turcomans if these tribes were expelled from Merv by the Russian arms. Again, in the famous memorandum of 1872, I have a certain knowledge that the phrase, “dependency of Herat,” was specially intended to cover Badgheis, and finally the assessment of the district is actually borne on the Herat register at the present day.

And now with regard to the other point at issue between Russia and ourselves—the dependency of Penj-deh, which, being situated on the Murgháb, just before the river issues from the hills, should belong geographically to Afghanistan, and which, moreover, is at least forty miles south of a direct line drawn from Serakhs to Khoja Seleh on the Oxus—a brief summary of its history would seem to be required. In antiquity Penj-deh was a mere suburb of the great city of Merver-Rúd, now marked by the ruins of Ak-tepeh. Formed, according to the geographer Yacút, of five separate villages (whence the name) on the river Murgháb, which had been gradually consolidated into a single township under Malik Shah, it was at the time of Yacút’s visit, in A.H. 617, one of the most flourishing places in Khorassan. Shortly afterwards it was ruined by the Mongols, and a second time it was devastated by Timour, but under his successors, and especially during the reigns of Shah Rúkh and Sultan Hussein Mirza, it again rose to a state of great prosperity, and ever since, except during some brief intervals of foreign dominion, it has remained in close dependency on Herat. When Ahmed Shah Abdalli, on the death of Nadir in 1747, established the kingdom of Cabul, the Kushk and Murgháb valleys were held by Eymák tribes, Hazárehs, Fírozkohís, and Jamshídís, who cultivated the lower lands along the rivers and pastured their flocks over the downs of Badgheis, unmixed with either Afghans or Turcomans, but paying revenue to Herat in common with all the other tribes who inhabited the ranges of the Paropamisus.

The earliest Turcoman intruders into the valley were Ersári, from the Oxus. These nomads first appeared in about 1825, and were shortly followed by Salors from Yolatan, and somewhat later by detached parties of Saryks from Merv, all the new visitors, however, acknowledging the jurisdiction of the local Jamshídí or Hazáreh chief, and paying their dues to the Afghan ruler of Herat. In 1858 a further dislocation occurred; the Ersáris, who never liked the Murgháb, returned to the Oxus, while the Salors and Saryks, retreating before the Tekkehs of Merv, took their places at Penj-deh. Later still the Salors crossed over to the Heri-rúd, leaving the Saryks alone in possession of the lands on the Murgháb and Kushk, where they remain in the same condition of squatters on Afghan lands to the present day. During all this long period, that is from the first appearance of the Ersáris at Penj-deh, an annual tax has been levied on the Turcoman cultivators and shepherds, either by the local Eymák chiefs—lords of the soil, and themselves accountable to Herat—or by an officer specially deputed for the purpose by the Afghan Governor of Herat. The names of the naibs, or deputy governors, who have thus acted in command of the district are all well known, and in many cases the individuals are still living to attest their employment at Penj-deh under the Afghans. In fact, no question was ever raised as to the Afghan right to Penj-deh, or as to the political condition of the Saryks, until after the Russian occupation of Merv. The Saryks were Turcoman tribesmen renting Afghan lands, and during their tenancy accounted as Afghan subjects, precisely as other divisions of the great Turcoman community who were settled temporarily in Persia, in Khiva, and in Bokhara, during their sojourn paid tribute to, and acknowledged the jurisdiction of, those States. If the Saryks of their own free will desired to quit their Afghan lands at Penj-deh and in Badgheis and migrate to their former pastures, which have passed under the rule of Russia, the Afghans could not properly interfere to prevent them; nor, indeed, with a view to avoiding friction on the frontier, is it at all clear that an arrangement of this nature might not be to the advantage of the Herat Government. But it was wholly indefensible that Russia, on the broad principle of ethnographical unity, should, as she recently did, demand as a right the registration of the Saryks as Russian subjects, and should require the transfer of the lands which they occupied to Russian jurisdiction. A frontier, too, is now boldly claimed, assigning to Russia Penj-deh, with all the adjacent lands on the Murgháb and Kuskh, and troops are moved up the river from Merv to support the claim, at the imminent risk of provoking collision and thus initiating war.

It remains now to consider the prospect before us in regard to this momentous alternative of peace or war. To those who, like myself, have watched the cautious and consistent proceedings of Russia in Central Asia since the close of the Crimean war, with a growing presentiment of evil, but still not without a certain admiration of such determined policy and a warm approval in many cases of the results, the immediate future presents no special features of mystery or alarm. The occupation of Merv and the incorporation in the Russian Empire of the vast hordes who roam the steppes from the Caspian to the Oxus was but the crowning act of a long series of costly but tentative enterprises, all leading up to the same much-desired consummation. The threshold of India was reached. Russian Turcomania was now conterminous with British Afghanistan, and it only remained to give effect to the situation in the manner most conducive to Russian interests. It must be understood, then, that in all the recent discussions between London and St. Petersburg regarding lines of frontier, work of the Commission, relations with the tribes, &c., Russia, in prosecution of those interests, has been guided by three distinct considerations, all aiming at the strengthening of her position in view to future pressure upon England. Firstly, she requires the best strategical base available for immediate demonstration against Herat. As far as actual attack is concerned, her power would be as formidable if launched from Serakhs or Merv as if she had already advanced half-way to Herat and were encamped at Zulficár and Chemen-i-bíd; but in respect to a passive but continued pressure, no doubt her best position would be on the northern skirts of the hills which divide Badgheis from Herat, and in full command of the upper valley of the Kushk. Hence her desire to possess a boundary line from Zulficár on the Heri-rúd by Chemen-i-bíd to Meruchek on the Murgháb, and hence the persistency with which she clings to this line, even at the risk of actual conflict. Secondly, she requires the full command of the Murgháb and Kushk valleys, not only because the most direct, and by far the most commodious, road to Herat from her northern base, the Caspian and Askabad, leads by Merv and Penj-deh, but also because Penj-deh dominates the communication between Herat and Afghan Turkestan, and would be thus of the greatest strategical importance in the event of war between Russia and Cabul. Hence the insistence with which she clings to Penj-deh and the boldness she has shown in enveloping the place with her troops, hoping, as it would seem, to redeem Alikhanoff’s former failure to obtain peaceful possession by now provoking a disturbance between the Saryks and Afghans which shall justify her own forcible interposition. And, thirdly, in regard to the Saryks of Penj-deh, it should be clearly understood that it is not the tribesmen that Russia principally cares about, but the lands which they occupy. She is tempting them, no doubt, to declare in her favor by every means in her power, and she ostentatiously displays before them the bait that she has now occupied Badgheis as far as Ak Robát, and thus commands the Salt Lake and the pastures which they have hitherto enjoyed as Afghan tenants; but if the Afghans were to resume occupation of Badgheis, and the Saryks were to offer, nevertheless, to migrate to Merv or the Tejend, it is doubtful whether she would receive them. The whole controversy, indeed, may be regarded as a sham, or at best a means to an end, the possession of Penj-deh being the real object aimed at, on account of its affording such a convenient basis for threatening, or even for attacking, Herat.

The measures which Russia has taken to carry out the above objects are of a very grave significance. Although it is known that we have already recognised the validity of the Afghan claim to Badgheis and Penj-deh, and are, moreover, pledged to support by our arms the Amir of Cabul, Abdur Rahman Khan, in the event of an unprovoked aggression on his territory by a foreign enemy, she has, on the mere ground apparently that she contests his claim to these districts, advanced her troops as far as Zulficár, Ak Robát, and Púl-i-Khishti. She has, in fact, as matters stand at present, superseded the work of the commission. She has arbitrarily drawn up a line of frontier deciding all the moot points of jurisdiction in her own favor; and by her military dispositions she has given evidence that she intends to uphold this territorial distribution by force of arms. We have in the meantime done all that was possible with honor to avert hostilities. We have refused to abandon the hope of a settlement of the frontier dispute through the agency of the delimitation commission, and we have in various ways stretched conciliation to the utmost, merely requiring that no further advance shall be made into the debateable land by the pickets or patrols on either side, pending negotiation. Although no formal arrangement to this effect has been agreed to, orders have been issued to the Russian commanders on the spot, and a sort of truce of a very temporary character has been thus established; but what is to be the outcome of this strained position of affairs? The truce cannot be prolonged indefinitely, and in the meantime any chance collision between Cossack and Afghan patrols may set the whole country in a blaze, for considerable reinforcements are said to be marching on Penj-deh both from Merv and from Herat, and there is much exasperation of feeling upon either side.

It is, of course, well understood that neither Russia nor England is desirous of entering on a war at the present time, and if the quarrel were really what it is ostensibly, it might be safely assumed that a recourse to arms would be impossible. To suppose, indeed, that two mighty nations like Russia and England would enter on a serious conflict, which would cost millions of money and entail the sacrifice of thousands of lives, upon a paltry squabble regarding a few hundred square miles of barren desert or a few hundreds of savage Turcomans, would be a simple absurdity. But the fact is that there are far graver interests in the background. Russia, in pursuance of her original design of demonstration against India, will certainly strain every nerve and encounter very serious risks in order to obtain a frontier suitable to her purpose. She desires to secure a strong and permanent position at the foot of the Barkhút hills, not perhaps with a view to undertaking the siege of Herat, for if such were her object the route up the Kushk valley would offer a more convenient mode of approach, but especially in order to increase her prestige among the Turcomans and Persians, and, if possible, to overawe the Afghans, while at the same time she would exert a severe and continuous pressure upon India. This pressure undoubtedly would be very inconvenient to us, entailing, as it would, the necessity of a constant preparedness for war, and we should be fully justified in seeking to protect ourselves against it by every means at our command. Already, for defensive purposes, we have created a strong and friendly government in Afghanistan, and we have undertaken to give it our cordial support. If, therefore, Russia continues to maintain the positions which she has usurped far within the Afghan limits, and thus permanently violates the integrity of the country, resisting all negotiation, and even thwarting our efforts through the commission to effect a compromise, there would seem to be no alternative but a resort to arms. The Afghans are quite aware of this, and are prepared to bear the brunt of the attack. The Amir, with very brief preparation, could probably put 100,000 men into the field, and supported with an auxiliary British army, which India, it may be confidently assumed, is ready to supply, would prove at least as formidable an antagonist as Omar Pasha or Shamil. Fortunately there is already a small British force under Sir P. Lumsden in the immediate vicinity of Herat, which in conjunction with the garrison of the city would be sufficient, it is thought, to protect the place from a Russian coup de main, pending the arrival of British reinforcements; and it must be borne in mind that if once the die were cast and Russian supremacy were fairly challenged by us in Central Asia, we might be joined by unexpected allies. The Turcomans and Uzbegs, though cowed at present, are not subdued. Persia is incensed at her spoliation by Russia of the slopes of the Attock and the canals and rice-grounds of old Serakhs, besides being much alarmed at the gradual envelopment by Russian arms of her rich and warlike province of Khorassan; and even Turkey would not be indisposed to strike another blow on behalf of her ravished provinces, if there were the faintest prospect of success. To the possibility of European complications I need not allude, but it is hardly to be doubted that in any general débâcle the balance would be against Russia and in favor of England.

But it is just possible that at the eleventh hour Russia may listen to the voice of reason and moderation, and may by timely concession render the resumption of the work of the commission possible. In that case war, immediate war, might be avoided. It must not, however, for a moment be imagined that, unless forced by severe military disaster, Russia would really abandon the great object of threatening India, in pursuit of which she has already sacrificed so much treasure and spilt so much of the best blood of her army. All that we should gain would be a respite. With her attention riveted on Herat, which would henceforward become the centrepiece of the Asiatic political tableau, Russia might be content to withdraw from her present aggressive attitude, and bide her time at Merv and Serakhs. Our own proceedings must in any case mainly depend on the issue of the interview which is about to take place between the Viceroy of India and the Amir of Cabul. If, as there is every reason to anticipate, a complete understanding should be arrived at between the two authorities, the further demonstration against India would be met and checked. The defences of Herat, under British superintendence, would rapidly assume the dimensions and completeness befitting the importance of the position as the frontier fortress of Afghanistan and the “key of India;” and an auxiliary British garrison might even, if the Amir required its co-operation, be furnished from India, so as to enable him to show a bold front to his enemies, or, in case of need, to beat off attack from the north. Under such circumstances the situation would very closely resemble that which I ventured to foreshadow in 1874—the only difference, indeed, being that whereas I then proposed, much to the dismay of the peace party both in England and in India, to lease Herat and Candahar of the Amir of Cabul, so as to enable Great Britain to negotiate direct with the Russian Government, in the present case the normal arrangement of territory would remain unchanged, and England would merely appear in relation to Herat as the Amir’s ally and representative. The passage will be found in England and Russia in the East, second edition, 1875, p. 378, and is as follows: “What this occupation [of Herat] might lead to, it is impossible to say. Russia might recoil from contact with us, or we might mutually retire to a convenient distance from each other, or in our respective positions at Merv and Herat—Russia being able to draw on her European resources through the Oxus and the Caspian, while a railway through Candahar connected our advanced garrison with the Indus—we might lay the foundation of that limitary relationship along the whole line of frontier, which, although unsuited to the present state of affairs in Central Asia, must inevitably be the ultimate condition of our joint dominion in the East.”

P. S. It should be well understood that this article has been drawn up on the writer’s personal responsibility, and does not in any way commit the Government to the opinions or line of action which it advocates.—H. C. R.—Nineteenth Century.

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THE STATE VERSUS THE MAN.
BY EMILE DE LAVELEYE.

II.

A Criticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer.

“La nature est l’injustice même.”—Renan.

Four articles of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s which appeared in the Contemporary Review, have recently been reprinted together, and form now a work which Mr. Spencer has entitled “The Man versus The State.” This little volume merits the most attentive study, because in it the great sociological question of our day is treated in the most masterly manner. The individualist theory was, I think, never expounded better or with stronger arguments based on first principles, or supported by so great a number of clearly analyzed and admirably grouped facts. These pages are also full of important truths and of lessons, from whence both nations and governments may derive great benefit. Mr. Spencer’s deductions are so concise and forcible that one feels oneself drawn, against one’s will, to accept his conclusions; and yet, the more I have thought on the subject, the more convinced have I become that these conclusions are not in the true interest of humanity. Mr. Herbert Spencer’s object is to prove the error and danger of State socialism, or, in other words, the error and danger of that system which consists in appropriating State, or communal, revenues to the purpose of establishing greater equality among men.

The eminent philosopher’s statement, that in most civilized countries governments are more and more adopting this course, is indisputable. In England Parliament is taking the lead; in Germany Prince Bismarck, in spite of Parliament; and elsewhere either Parliament or town councils are doing the same thing. Mr. Spencer considers that this effort for the improvement of the condition of the working-classes, which is being everywhere made, with greater or less energy, is a violation of natural laws, which will not fail to bring its own punishment on nations, thus misguided by a blind philanthropy. I believe, on the contrary, that this effort, taken as a whole, and setting aside certain mistaken measures, is not only in strict accordance with the spirit of Christianity, but is also in conformity with the true principles of politics and of political economy.

Let us first consider a preliminary question, on which I accept Mr. Spencer’s views, but for different reasons from his: On what are individual rights founded, and what are the limits of State power? Mr. Spencer refutes with pitiless logic the opinions of those who, with Bentham, maintain that individual rights are State concessions, or who, like Matthew Arnold, deny the existence of natural rights. The absurdity of Bentham’s system is palpably evident. Who creates the government? The people, says he. So the government, thus created, creates rights, and then, having created rights, it confers them on the separate members of the sovereign people, by which it was itself created. The real truth is, that government defines and sanctions rights, and employs the public strength to enforce their being respected, but the rights themselves existed before.

Referring to the history of all primitive civilization, Mr. Herbert Spencer proves to Mr. Matthew Arnold that in familial and tribal communities there existed certain customs, which conferred recognized and respected rights, before ever any superior authority which could be designated by the name of State had been formed. Only, I think Mr. Herbert Spencer is wrong in making use of the term “natural rights.” This expression was an invention of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, and it is still employed in Germany by a certain school of philosophers as Naturrecht. Sir Henry Maine’s clever and just criticism of this expression in his book “Ancient Law” should warn us all of the vague and equivocal meaning it conceals. The jurists and philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attached two very different significations to the term “natural rights.” They sometimes applied it to the condition of primitive societies, in which their optimism led them to dream of a reign of justice, liberty, and equality, and at other times they made use of it when speaking of the totality of rights which should be possessed by every individual, by reason of his manhood. These two conceptions are equally erroneous. In primitive societies, in spite of certain customs which are the embryo of rights, might reign supreme, as among animals, and the best armed annihilate their weaker neighbors. Certainly, one would look in vain there for a model of a political constitution or code suitable to a civilized people. Neither can it be maintained that the “Rights of man,” as proclaimed by the American and French Revolutions, belong to each individual, only because he forms part of the human species. The limit of rights which may be claimed by any one individual must depend upon his aptitudes for making good use of them. The same civil code and the same political institutions will not equally suit a savage tribe and a civilized nation. If the granting of the suffrage to all were likely to lead a people to anarchy or to despotism, it could not be called a natural right, for suicide is not a right.

If one analyze completely the expression “natural rights,” one finds that it is really not sense. Xavier de Maistre, annoyed by the constant appeals to nature which are to be found in all the writings of the eighteenth century, said, very wittily: “Nature, who and what is this woman?” Nature is subject to certain laws, which are invariable; as, for instance, the law of gravitation. We may call these “laws of nature,” but in human institutions, which are ever varying, nothing of the sort can exist. This superior and ideal right, which is invoked for the purpose of condemning existing laws, and claiming their reform or suppression, should rather be called rational right—that is to say, right in conformity with reason.

In every country, and at all times, an order of things may be conceived—civil, political, penal and administrative laws—which would best conform to the general interest, and be the most favorable to the well-being and progress of the nation. This order of things is not the existing one. If it were, one might say, with the optimists, that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and a demand for any amelioration would be a rebellion against natural laws, and an absurdity. But this order of things may be caught sight of by reason, and defined with more or less accuracy by science; hence its name of rational order. If I ask for free trade in France, for a better division of property in England, and for greater liberty in Russia, I do so in the name of this rational order, as I believe that these changes would increase men’s happiness.

This theory permits of our tracing a limit between individual liberty and State power.

Mr. Herbert Spencer proves very clearly that there are certain things which no man would ever choose to abandon to State power; his religious convictions, for instance. On the other hand, all would agree that the State should accept the charge of protecting frontiers and punishing theft and murder, that is to say, the maintaining of peace and security at home and abroad; only here, like most Englishmen, Mr. Herbert Spencer invokes human will. Find out, he says, on the one hand, what the great majority of mankind would choose to reserve to an individual sphere of action, and, on the other, what they would consent to abandon to State decisions, and you will then be able to fix the limit of the power of public authority.

I cannot myself admit that human will is the source of rights. Until quite recently, in all lands, slavery was considered a necessary and legitimate institution. But did this unanimous opinion make it any more a right? Certainly not. It is in direct opposition to the order of things which would be best for the general welfare; it cannot, therefore, be a right.

Until the sixteenth century, with the exception of a few Anabaptists who were burnt at the stake, all believed that the State ought to punish heretics and atheists. But this general opinion did not suffice to justify the intolerance then practised. The following line of argument, I think, would be most in keeping with individual interests, and, consequently, with the interests of society in general: A certain portion of men’s acts ought not to be in any way subject to sovereign authority, be it republican or monarchical. But what is to be the boundary of this inviolable domain of individual activity? The will of the majority, or even of the entire population, is not competent to trace it, for history has proved but too often how gross have been the errors committed in such instances. This limit can, therefore, only be fixed by science, which, at each fresh progress in civilization, can discover and proclaim aloud where State power should cease to interfere. Sociological science, for instance, announces that liberty of conscience should always be respected as man’s most sacred possession, and because religious advancement is only to be achieved at this price; that true property, or, in other words, the fruit of personal labor, must not be tampered with, or labor would be discouraged and production would diminish; that criminals must not go unpunished, but that justice be strictly impartial, so that the innocent be not punished with the guilty.

It would not be at all impossible to draw up a formula of these essential rights, which M. Thiers called necessary liberties, and which are already inscribed in the constitutions of America, England, France, Belgium, Holland, and all other free nations. It is sometimes very difficult to know where to set bounds to individual liberty, in the interests of public order and of the well-being of others; and it is true, of course, that either the king, the assembly, or the people enacts the requisite laws, but if science has clearly demonstrated a given fact it imposes itself. When certain truths have been frequently and clearly explained, they come to be respected. The evidence of them forms the general opinion, and this engenders laws.

To be brief, I agree with Mr. Herbert Spencer that, contrary to Rousseau’s doctrine, State power ought to be limited, and that a domain should be reserved to individual liberty which should be always respected; but the limits of this domain should be fixed, not by the people, but by reason and science, keeping in view what is best for the public welfare.

This brings me to the principal question I desire to treat. I am of opinion that the State should make use of its legitimate powers of action for the establishment of greater equality among men, in proportion to their personal merits, and I believe that this would be in conformity, not only with its mission properly speaking, but also with rational rights, with the progress of humanity; in a word, with all the rights and all the interests invoked by Mr. Herbert Spencer.

I will briefly resume the motives given by Mr. Herbert Spencer to show that any wish to improve the condition of the working-classes by law, or by the action of public power, so as to bring about a greater degree of equality among men, would be to run against the stream of history, and a violation of natural laws. There are, he says, two types of social organization, broadly distinguishable as the “militant” and the “industrial” type. The first of these is characterized by the régime of status, the second by the régime of contract. The latter has become general among modern nations, especially in England and America, whereas the militant type was almost universal formerly. These two types may be defined as the system of compulsory co-operation. The typical structure of the one may be seen in an army formed of conscripts, in which each unit must fulfil commands under pain of death, and receives, in exchange for his services, food and clothing; while the typical structure of the other may be seen in a body of workers who agree freely to exchange specified services at a given price, and who are at liberty to separate at will. So long as States are in constant war against each other, governments must perforce be on a military footing, as in antiquity. Personal defence, then, being society’s great object, it must necessarily give absolute obedience to a chief, as in an army. It is absolutely impossible to unite the blessings of freedom and justice at home with the habitual commission of acts of violence and brutality abroad.

Thanks to the almost insensible progress of civilization and to gradual liberal reforms, the ancient militant State was little by little despoiled of its arbitrary powers, the circle of its interventions grew narrower and narrower, and men became free economically, as well as politically. We were advancing rapidly towards an industrial régime of free contract. But, recently, the Liberals in all countries have adopted an entirely opposite course. Instead of restricting the powers of the State, they are extending them, and this leads to socialism, the ideal of which is to give to government the direction of all social activity. Men imagine that, by thus acting, they are consulting the interests of the working-classes. They believe that a remedy may be found for the sufferings which result from the present order of things, and that it is the State’s mission to discover and apply that remedy. By thus acting they simply increase the evils they would fain cure, and prepare the way for a universal bondage, which awaits us all—the Coming Slavery. Be the authority exercised by king, assembly, or people, I am none the less a slave if I am forced to obey in all things, and to give up to others the net produce of my labor. Contemporary progressism not only runs against the stream of history, by carrying us back to despotic organizations of the militant system, but it also violates natural laws, and thus prepares the degeneration of humanity. In family life the gratuitous parental aid must be great in proportion as the young one is of little worth either to itself or to others, and benefits received must be inversely as the power or ability of the receiver.

“Throughout the rest of its life each adult gets benefit in proportion to merit, reward in proportion to desert, merit and desert being understood as ability to fulfil all the requirements of life. Placed in competition with members of its own species, and in antagonism with members of other species, it dwindles and gets killed off, or thrives and propagates, according as it is ill-endowed or well-endowed. If the benefits received by each individual were proportionate to its inferiority, if, as a consequence, multiplication of the inferior was furthered and multiplication of the superior hindered, progressive degradation would result, and eventually the degenerated species would fail to hold its ground in presence of antagonistic species and competing species.” (Page 65.)

“The poverty of the incapable, the distress that comes upon the imprudent, the starvation of the idle, and the shouldering aside of the weak by the strong, which leave so many ‘in shallows and in miseries,’ are the decrees of a large, far-seeing benevolence.” (Page 67.)

When the State, guided by a wrongly inspired philanthropy, prevents the application of this wise law, instead of diminishing suffering it increases it. “It tends to fill the world with those to whom life will bring most pain, and tends to keep out of it those to whom life will bring most pleasure. It inflicts positive misery, and prevents positive happiness.” (“Social Statics,” p. 381, edit. 1851.)

The law that Mr. Herbert Spencer desires society to adopt is simply Darwin’s law—“the survival of the fittest.” Mr. Spencer expresses his astonishment that at the present day, more than at any other period of the world’s history, everything is done to favor the survival of the unfittest, when, at the same time, the truth as revealed by Darwin, is admitted and accepted by an ever-growing number of educated and influential people!

I have endeavored to give a brief sketch of the line of argument followed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. We will now see what reply can be made to it. I think one chief point ought not to have escaped the eminent writer. It is this: If the application of the Darwinian law to the government of societies be really justifiable, is it not strange that public opinion, not only in England, but in all other countries, is so strenuously opposed to it, at an epoch which is becoming more and more enlightened, and when sociological studies are pursued with so much interest? If the intervention of public power for the improvement of the condition of the working-classes be a contradiction of history, and a return to ancient militant society, how is it that the country in which the new industrial organization is the most developed—that is to say, England—is also the country where State intervention is the most rapidly increasing, and where opinion is at the same time pressing for these powers of interference to be still further extended? There is no other land in which the effort to succor outcasts and the needy poor occupies so large a portion of the time and means of the well-to-do and of the public exchequer; there is nowhere else to be found a poor-law which grants assistance to even able-bodied men; nowhere else would it ever have been even suggested to attack free contract, and consequently the very first principles of proprietorship, as the Irish Land Bill has done; and nowhere else would a Minister have dared to draw up a programme of reforms such as those announced by Mr. Chamberlain at the Liberal Reform Club at Ipswich (Jan. 14, 1885). On the Continent all this would be looked upon as rank socialism. If, then, as a country becomes more civilized and enlightened it shows more inclination to return to what Mr. Herbert Spencer calls militant organization, and to violate the Darwinian law applied to human society, may we not be led to conclude that this so-called retrogression is really progress? This conclusion would very easily explain what Mr. Herbert Spencer designates as the “wheeling round” of the Liberal party with which he so eloquently reproaches them.

Why did the Liberals formerly do their utmost to restrict State power? Because this power was then exercised in the interests of the upper classes and to the detriment of the lower. To mention but one example: When, in former times, it was desired to fix a scale of prices and wages, it was with a view to preventing their being raised, while, to-day, there is a clamor for a lessening of hours of labor with increased remuneration. Why do Liberals now wish to add to the power and authority of the State? To be able to ameliorate the intellectual, moral, and material condition of a greater number of citizens. There is no inconsistency in their programme; the object in view, which is the great aim of all civilization, has been always the same—to assure to each individual liberty and well-being in proportion to his merit and activity!

I think that the great fundamental error of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s system, which is so generally accepted at the present day, consists in the belief that if State power were but sufficiently reduced to narrow it to the circle traced by orthodox economists, the Darwinian law and the survival of the fittest would naturally follow without difficulty. Mr. Spencer has simply borrowed from old-fashioned political economy without submitting to the fire of his inexorable criticism, the superficial and false notion that, if the laissez-faire and free contract régime were proclaimed, the so-called natural laws would govern the social order. He forgets that all individual activity is accomplished under the empire of laws, which enact as to ownership, hereditary succession, mutual obligations, trade and industry, political institutions and administrations, besides a multitude of laws referring to material interests, banking organizations, money, credit, colonies, army, navy, railways, &c.

For natural laws, and especially the law of the survival of the fittest, to become established, it would be necessary to annihilate the immense existing edifice of legislation, and to return to the wild state of society when primitive men lived, in all probability, much as do animals, with no possessions, no successions, no protection of the weak by the State.

Those who, with Mr. Spencer and Haeckel and other Conservative evolutionists, are anxious to see the law of the survival of the fittest and of natural selection adopted in human society, do not realize that the animal kingdom and social organization are two such totally different domains that the same law, applied to each, would produce wholly opposite effects. Mr. Herbert Spencer gives an admirable description of the manner in which natural selection is accomplished among animals:—

“Their carnivorous enemies not only remove from herbivorous herds individuals past their prime, but also weed out the sickly, the malformed, and the least fleet and powerful. By the aid of which purifying process, as well as by the fighting so universal in the pairing season, all vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples is prevented, and the maintenance of a constitution completely adapted to surrounding conditions, and therefore most productive of happiness, is ensured.”

This is the ideal order of things which, we are told, ought to prevail in human societies, but everything in our present organization (which economists, and even Mr. Spencer himself, admit, however, to be natural) is wholly opposed to any such conditions. An old and sickly lion captured a gazelle; his younger and stronger brother arrives, snatches away his prize, and lives to perpetuate the species; the old one dies in the struggle, or is starved to death. Such is the beneficent law of the “survival of the fittest,” It was thus among barbarian tribes. But could such a law exist in our present social order? Certainly not! The rich man, feebly constituted and sickly, protected by the law, enjoys his wealth, marries and has offspring, and if an Apollo of herculean strength attempted to take from him his possessions, or his wife, he would be thrown into prison, and were he to attempt to practise the Darwinian law of selection, he would certainly run a fair risk of the gallows, for this law may be briefly expressed as follows: Room for the mighty, for might is right. It will be objected that in industrial societies the quality the most deserving of recompense, and which indeed receives the most frequent reward, is not the talent of killing one’s fellow-man, but an aptitude for labor and producing. But at the present time is this really so? Stuart Mill says that from the top to the bottom of the social ladder remuneration lessens as the work accomplished increases. I admit that this statement may be somewhat exaggerated, but, I think, no one will deny that it contains a large amount of truth. Let us but cast our eyes around us, and we see everywhere those who do nothing living in ease and even opulence, while the workers who have the hardest labor to perform, who toil from night to morning in mines, or unhealthy workshops, or on the sea in tempests, in constant danger of death, are paid, in exchange for all these hardships, a salary hardly sufficient for their means of subsistence, and which, just now, has become smaller and smaller, in consequence of the ever-recurring strikes, and the necessary closing of so many factories, mines, &c., owing to the long-continued depression of trade. What rapid fortunes have been made by stock-broking manœuvres, by trickeries in supplying goods, by sending unseaworthy vessels to sea to become the coffins of their crews! Do not such sights as these urge the partisans of progress to demand the State’s interference in favor of the classes who receive so inadequate a payment for their labors?

The economists of the old school promised that, if the laissez-faire and free contract régime were proclaimed, justice would reign universally; but when people saw that these fine promises were not realized, they had recourse to public power for the obtaining of those results which the much-boasted “liberty” had not secured.

The system of accumulating wealth and hereditary succession alone would suffice to prevent the Darwinian law ever gaining a footing in civilized communities. Among animals, the survival of the fittest takes place quite naturally, because, as generations succeed each other, each one must create his own position according to his strength and abilities; and in this way the purifying process, which Mr. Herbert Spencer so extols, is effected. A similar system was generally prevalent among barbarians; but, at the present day, traces of it may be seen only in instances of “self-made men;” it disappears in their children, who, even if they inherit their parents’ talents and capacities, are brought up, as a rule, in so much ease and luxury that the germs of such talents are destroyed. Their lot in life is assured to them, so why need they exert themselves? Thus they fail to cultivate the qualities and tastes they may have inherited from their parents, and they and their descendants become in all points inferior to their ancestors who secured to them, by labor and industry, the privileged position they hold. Hence the proverb, A père économe fils prodigue (To a thrifty father, a spendthrift son).

It follows, therefore, that those who wish to see the law of natural selection, by the transmission of hereditary aptitudes, established amongst us should begin by demanding the abolition of hereditary succession.

Among animals, the vitiation of the race through the multiplication of its inferior samples is prevented “by the fighting so universal in the pairing season.” In the social order the accumulation and hereditary transmission of wealth effectually impede the process of perfecting the race. In Greece after the athletic sports, or in those fortunate and chimerical days of which the Troubadours sang, “the most beautiful was sometimes given as a prize to the most valiant;” but, in our prosaic age, rank and fortune too often triumph over beauty, strength, and health. In the animal world, the destiny of each one is decided by its personal qualities. In society, a man attains a high position, or marries a beautiful woman, because he is of high birth, or wealthy, although he may be ugly, lazy, and extravagant. The permanent army and the navy would also have to be destroyed, before the Darwinian law could triumph. Conscription on the Continent and enlistment in England (to a less degree) condemn many of the strongest and most warlike men to enforced celibacy; and, as they are subjected to exceptional dangers in the way of hazardous expeditions and wars, the death-rate is far higher amongst them than it would be under ordinary circumstances. In pre-historic times, or in a general way, such men would certainly have begotten offspring, as being the strongest and most apt to survive; in our societies, they are decimated or condemned to celibacy.

Having borrowed from orthodox political economy the notion that it would suffice to put a check on inopportune State intervention for the reign of justice to become established, Mr. Herbert Spencer proceeds to demonstrate that the legislators who enacted the poor-law, and all recent and present law-makers “who have made regulations which have brought into being a permanent body of tramps, who ramble from union to union, and which maintain a constant supply of felons by sending back convicts into society under such conditions that they are almost compelled again to commit crimes,” are alone responsible for the sufferings of the working-classes. But may we not blame law-makers, or, rather, our own social order, for measures more fatal in their results than either of these—for instance, the law which concentrates all property into the hands of a few owners? Some years ago, Mr. Herbert Spencer wrote some lines on this subject which are the most severe indictment against the present social order that has ever fallen from the pen of a really competent writer:—

“Given a race of beings having like claims to pursue the objects of their desires—given a world adapted to the gratification of those desires—a world into which such beings are similarly born, and it unavoidably follows that they have equal rights to the use of this world. For if each of them ‘has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other,’ then each of them is free to use the earth for the satisfaction of his wants, provided he allows all others the same liberty. And, conversely, it is manifest that no one or part of them may use the earth in such a way as to prevent the rest from similarly using it, seeing that to do this is to assume greater freedom than the rest, and, consequently, to break the law. Equity, therefore, does not permit property in land. On examination, all existing titles to such property turn out to be invalid; those founded on reclamation inclusive. It appears that not even an equal apportionment of the earth amongst its inhabitants could generate a legitimate proprietorship. We find that, if pushed to its ultimate consequences, a claim to exclusive possession of the soil involves a land-owning despotism. We further find that such a claim is constantly denied by the enactments of our legislature. And we find, lastly, that the theory of the co-heirship of all men to the soil is consistent with the highest civilization; and that, however difficult it may be to embody that theory in fact, equity sternly commands it to be done.”

“By-and-by, men may learn that to deprive others of their rights to the use of the earth is to commit a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties.” (“Social Statics,” chap. ix.)

Has Mr. Herbert Spencer changed his opinions as to the proprietorship of the soil since these lines were written? Not at all, for, in the chapter entitled “The Coming Slavery,” he writes that “the movement for land-nationalization is aiming at a system of land-tenure equitable in the abstract.” But if society, in depriving numbers of persons of their right of co-heirship of the soil, has “committed a crime inferior only in wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties,” ought it not, in common justice, to endeavor to repair the injury done? The help given by public assistance compensates very feebly for the advantages they are deprived of. In his important book, “La Propriété Sociale,” M. Alfred Fouillée, examining the question from another standpoint, very accurately calls this assistance “la justice reparative.” The numerous and admirable charitable organizations which exist in England, the keen emotion and deep commiseration manifested when the little pamphlet, “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London,” was first published, the growing preoccupation of Government with the condition of the working-classes, must be attributed, in the first instance certainly to Christian feeling, but also, in a great measure, to a clearer perception of certain ill-defined rights possessed by those who have been kept deprived of national or rather communal co-heirship. Mr. Herbert Spencer has expressed this idea so closely and eloquently that I hope I may be allowed to quote the passage:—

“We must not overlook the fact that, erroneous as are these poor-law and communist theories, these assertions of a man’s right to maintenance and of his right to have work provided for him, they are nevertheless nearly related to a truth. They are unsuccessful efforts to express the fact that whoso is born on this planet of ours thereby obtains some interest in it—may not be summarily dismissed again—may not have his existence ignored by those in possession. In other words, they are attempts to embody that thought which finds its legitimate utterance in the law: All men have equal rights to the use of the earth.... After getting from under the grosser injustice of slavery, men could not help beginning in course of time to feel what a monstrous thing it was that nine people out of ten should live in the world on sufferance, not having even standing room save by allowance of those who claim the earth’s surface.” (“Social Statics,” p. 345.)

When one reads through that substantial essay, “The Man versus The State,” it appears as if the principal or, indeed, the sole aim of State socialism were the extension of public assistance and increased succor for the unworthy, whereas the reality is quite the reverse of this! Scientific socialism seeks, first of all, the means of so raising the working-classes that they may be better able to maintain themselves and, consequently, to dispense with the help of others; and, secondly, it seeks to find what laws are the most in conformity with absolute justice, and with that admirable precept, “Benefit in proportion to merit, reward in proportion to desert.” In the speech delivered by Mr. Shaw Lefevre, last year (1884), as President of the Congress of Social Science, at its opening meeting at Birmingham, he traced, in most striking language, all the good that State intervention had effected in England of late years: Greater justice enforced in the relations between man and man, children better educated and better prepared to become useful and self-supporting members of the community, the farmer better guaranteed against the exaggerated or unjust demands of the proprietor, greater facilities for saving offered, health ensured to future generations by the hours of labor being limited, the lives of miners further safeguarded, so that there are less frequent appeals to public assistance, and, as a practical result of this last measure, the mortality in mines fallen in the last three years to 22·1 per thousand, as compared to 27·2 per thousand during the ten previous years—a decrease of 20 per cent.! One fact is sufficient to show the great progress due to this State legislation: in an ever-increasing population, crime is rapidly and greatly diminishing.

Suppose that, through making better laws, men arrive gradually at the condition of the Norwegian peasantry, or at an organization similar to that existing in the agricultural cantons of Switzerland; that is to say, that each family living in the country has a plot of ground to cultivate and a house to live in: in this case every one is allowed to enjoy the full fruit of his labor, and receives reward in proportion to his activity and industry, which is certainly the very ideal of justice—cuique suum.

The true instinct of humanity has ever so understood social organization that property is the indispensable basis of the family, and a necessary condition of freedom. To prevent any one individual from being deprived of a share in the soil, which was in primitive ages considered to be the collective property of the tribe, it was subjected to periodical divisions; these, indeed, still take place in the Swiss Allmend, in some Scottish townships, in the greater part of Java, and in the Russian Mir.

If such a régime as this were established, there would be no more “tramps wandering from union to union,” In such a state of society as this, not in such as ours, the supreme law which ought to govern all economic relations might be realized. Mr. Herbert Spencer admirably defines this law in the following passage:—

“I suppose a dictum on which the current creed and the creed of science are at one may be considered to have as high an authority as can be found. Well, the command, If any would not work, neither should he eat, is simply a Christian enunciation of that universal law of nature under which life has reached its present height, the law that a creature not energetic enough to maintain itself must die; the sole difference being, that the law which in one case is to be artificially enforced is in the other case a natural necessity.”

This passage ought to be transcribed at the commencement of every treatise on social science as the supreme aim of all sociological research; only the delusion, borrowed from the old political economy, which consists in the belief that this dictum of science and Christianity is in practice in our midst, ought to be suppressed.

Is it not a fact that, everywhere, those who can prove by authentic documents that, for centuries past, their ancestors have thriven in idleness are the richest, the most powerful, the most sought after? Only at some future date will this dictum of science and Christianity be brought to bear on our social organization, and our descendants will then establish an order of things which will create economic responsibility, and ensure to each the integral enjoyment of the produce of his labor. The difficult but necessary work of sociology is to endeavor to discover what this organization should be, and to prepare its advent. Mr. Shaw Lefevre’s speech shows very clearly the road that ought to be taken.

Mr. Herbert Spencer thinks, however, that this road would lead us directly to a condition of universal slavery. The State would gradually monopolize all industrial enterprises, beginning with the railways and telegraphs as it has already done in Germany and Belgium, then some other industries as in France, then mines, and finally, after the nationalization of land, it would also take up agricultural enterprise. The freedom enjoyed by a citizen must be measured, he says, not by the nature of the government under which he lives, but by the small number of laws to which he is subject. The essential characteristic of the slave is that he is forced to work for another’s benefit. The degree of his slavery varies according to the greater or smaller extent to which effort is compulsorily expended for the benefit of another, instead of for self-benefit; in the régime which is approaching, man will have to work for the State, and to give up to it the largest portion of his produce. What matters it that the master under whose command he labors is not an individual, but society? Thus argues Mr. Herbert Spencer.

In my opinion, the State will never arrive at a monopoly of all industries, for the very simple reason that such a system would never answer. It is possible that some day a social organization such as Mr. Albert Schäffle, formerly Finance Minister in Austria, has explained, may grow up, in which all branches of production are placed in the hands of co-operative societies. But, be that as it may, men would be no more slaves in workshops belonging to the State than in those of merchants or manufacturers of the present day. Mr. Herbert Spencer can every easily assure himself of this fact. Let him visit the State collieries at Saarbruck, or inspect the Belgian railways, and interrogate all the officials and workmen employed; he will find that, from the highest to the lowest, they are quite as free, quite as contented with their lot, as those engaged in any private industry. There is even far more guarantee against arbitrary measures, so that their real freedom is greater than elsewhere. The proof of this is the fact that posts in any industries belonging to the State are always sought for by the best workmen. If the degree of man’s slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain, then it must be admitted that the majority of workmen and small farmers are certainly slaves now, for they have very little or no property, and, as their condition almost entirely depends on the hard law of competition, they can only retain for themselves the mere necessaries of life! Are the Italian contadini, whose sad lot I depicted in my “Lettres d’Italie,” free? They are reduced to live entirely on bad maize, which subjects them to that terrible scourge, the pellagra. What sad truth is contained in their reply to the Minister who advised them not to emigrate!—

“What do you mean by the nation? Do you refer to the most miserable of the inhabitants of the land? If so, we are indeed the nation. Look at our pale and emaciated faces, our bodies worn our with over-fatigue and insufficient food. We sow and reap corn, but never taste white bread; we cultivate the vine, but a drop of wine never touches our lips. We raise cattle, but never eat meat; we are covered with rags, we live in wretched hovels; in winter we suffer from the cold, and both winter and summer from the pangs of hunger. Can a land which does not provide its inhabitants, who are willing to work, with sufficient to live upon, be considered by them as a fatherland?”

The Flemish agricultural laborer, who earns less than a shilling a-day, and the small farmer, whose rack-rent absorbs the entire net profits; the Highland crofters, who have been deprived of the communal land, the sacred inheritance of primitive times, where they could at least raise a few head of cattle; the Egyptian fellahs, whose very life-blood is drained by European creditors—in a word, all the wretched beings all over the world where the soil is owned by non-workers, and who labor for insufficient remuneration; can they, any of them, be called free? It is just possible that, if the State were to become the universal industry director (which, in my opinion, is an impossible hypothesis), their condition would not be improved; but at all events it could not be worse than it is now.

I do not believe that “liberty must be surrendered in proportion as the material welfare is cared for.” On the contrary, a certain degree of well-being is a necessary condition of liberty. It is a mockery to call a man free who, by labor, cannot secure to himself the necessaries of existence, or to whom labor is impossible because he possesses nothing of his own, and no one will employ him!

Compare the life of the soldier with that of the hired workman either in a mine or a factory. The first is the type of the serf in “The Coming Slavery,” and the second the type of the independent man in an industrial organization under the free contract régime. Which of the two possesses the most real liberty? The soldier, when his daily duties are accomplished, may read, walk, or enjoy himself in accordance with his tastes; the workman, when he returns home worn out with fatigue after eleven or twelve hours’ hard labor, too often finds no other recreation than the gin-palace. The laborer at his task must always, and all day long, obey the foreman or overseer, whether he be employed by a private individual, by the State, or by a co-operative society.

“Hitherto,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer, “you have been free to spend your earnings in any way which pleases you; hereafter you shall not be free to spend it, but it will be spent for the general benefit.” The important point, he adds, is the amount taken from me, not the hand that takes it. But if what is taken from my revenue is employed to make a public park which I am free to enter whenever I feel inclined, to build public baths where I may bathe in summer or winter, to open libraries for my recreation and instruction, clubs where I may spend my evenings, and schools where my children may receive an education which will enable them to make their own way in the world; to build healthy houses, let at a low rent, which save me the cruel necessity of living in slums, where the soul and the body are alike degraded; if all this be done, would the result be the same as if this sum were taken by some private Crœsus to spend on his personal pleasures and caprices? In the course of last summer, while in Switzerland and Baden, I visited several villages where each family is supplied, from forests belonging to the commune, with wood for building purposes and for fuel; also with pasturage for their cattle, and with a small plot of ground on which to grow potatoes, fruit, and vegetables. In addition to this, the wages of all public servants are paid for from the communal revenue, so that there is no local taxation whatever.[3] Suppose that these woods and meadows, and this land, all belonged to a landed proprietor, instead of to the commune; he would go and lavish the revenue in large capitals or in travelling. What an immense difference this would make to the inhabitants! To appreciate this, it suffices merely to compare the condition of the Highland crofters, the free citizens of one of the richest countries in the world, and whose race has ever been laborious, with that of the population of these villages, hidden away in the Alpine cantons of Switzerland or in the gorges of the Black Forest. If, in the Highland villages of Scotland, rentals had been, as in these happy communes of Switzerland and Baden, partly reserved for the inhabitants, and partly employed in objects of general utility, how very different would have been the lot of these poor people! Had they but been allowed to keep for themselves the sea-weed and the kelp which the sea brings them, how far better off would they have been than they now are, as is admirably proved in Mr. Blackie’s interesting book, “The Scottish Highlanders.”

A similar remark may also be applied to politics. What matters it, says Mr. Herbert Spencer, that I myself contribute to make laws if these laws deprive me of my liberty? He mentions ancient Greece as an example to startle us at the notion of our coming state of slavery. He writes: “In ancient Greece the accepted principle was, that the citizen belonged neither to himself nor to his family, but to his city—the city being, with the Greek, equivalent to the community. And this doctrine, proper to a state of constant warfare, is one which socialism unawares re-introduces into a state intended to be purely industrial.” It is perfectly certain that the régime of ancient Greek cities, which was founded on slavery, cannot be suitable to modern society, which is based on a system of labor. But we must not allow ourselves to forget what Greece was, nor all we owe to that Greek civilization, which, Mr. Herbert Spencer says, the “coming slavery” threatens to re-introduce amongst us. Not only philosophy, literature, and arts flourished as they have never done in any other age, but the political system so stamped characters with individuality that the illustrious men of Greece are types of human greatness, whose deeds and sayings will be engraven on the memory of men so long as the world lasts. If the “coming slavery” gives us such men as Pisistratus, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Lycurgus, Sophocles, Thucydides, Epaminondas, Aristides, or Pericles, we shall, I think, have no cause to complain! But how is it that Greece produced such a bevy of great men? By her democratic institutions, combined with a marvellous system of education, which developed simultaneously the faculties of the mind and the body.

The German army, in spite of its iron discipline, arrives at results somewhat similar, though in a less degree. A rough peasant joins a regiment; he is taught to walk properly, to swim, and to shift for himself; his education is made more complete, and he becomes a man of independent character, better fitted to survive in the struggle for life. If the authorities in towns levy heavy taxes, and employ the money in improving the condition of the inhabitants and in forming those who need forming, even more than in the German army, and after the fashion of the ancient Greeks, will not the generations yet to come be better able to earn their own livelihood, and to maintain an honorable position, than if they had been allowed to pass their childhood in the gutters? Hr. Herbert Spencer reasons falsely when he says, “What matters it that I make the laws if these laws deprive me of my liberty?” Laws which tax me to degrade and rob me are odious, but laws which deprive me of what I have for my own good and for the further development of my faculties are well-meaning, as is the constraint imposed on his children by a wise father for their instruction or correction. Besides, to contribute to make laws elevates a man’s character. As Stuart Mill has proved, this is indeed one of the great advantages of an extension of the suffrage. A man called upon to vote is naturally raised from the sphere of personal to that of general interests. He will read, discuss, and endeavor to obtain information. Others will argue with him, try to change his opinions, and he will himself realize that he has a certain importance of his own, that he has a word to say in the direction of public affairs. The elevating influence of this sentiment over French, and still more over Swiss, citizens is remarkable.

It is perfectly true that, for political and social reforms to be productive of fruits, the society into which they are introduced must be in a sufficiently advanced condition to be able to understand and apply them, but it must not be forgotten that improved institutions make better men.

Go to Norway; crimes are hardly known there. In the country people never close their doors at night, locks and bolts are scarcely known, and there are no robberies; probably, first, because the people are moral and religious, but certainly, also, because property is very equally divided. None live in opulence and none in absolute beggary, and certainly misery and degradation, which often results from misery, are the causes of the great majority of crimes.

The rich financier, Helvetius, wrote, very truly, that, if every citizen were an owner of property, the general tone of the nation would be conservative, but if the majority have nothing, robbery then becomes the general aim. (“De l’Homme,” sect. vi. chap. vii.)

In conclusion, let us try to go to the root of the matter. Two systems are suggested as cures for the evils under which society is suffering. On the one hand, it may be said, in accordance with the doctrines of Christianity and socialism, that these evils are the consequences of men’s perversity and selfishness, and that it behoves charity and fraternity to remedy them. We must do our best to assist our unfortunate brethren. But how? By trying, Christ tells us, to imitate God’s Kingdom, where “the last shall be first and the first last;”—or by “having all things in common,” say the Apostles in all the ardor of primitive Christianity, and later on certain religious communities;—or by the giving of alms and other charitable acts, says the Christianity of the middle ages;—while socialism maintains that this may be affected by reforms in the laws regulating the division of property. On the other hand, political economy and evolutionary sociology teach us that these miseries are the inevitable and beneficent consequences of natural laws; that these laws, being necessary conditions of progress, any endeavor to do away with them would be to disturb the order of nature and delay the dawn of better things. By “the weeding out of the sickly and infirm,” and the survival of the fittest, the process of amelioration of species in the animal kingdom is accomplished. The law of natural selection should be allowed free and ample scope in human society. “Society is not a manufacture, but a growth.” Might is really right, for it is to the general interest that the mighty should triumph and perpetuate the race. Thus argues what is now called Science.

In a book entitled “The True History of Joshua Davidson,” the author places ideal Christianity and contemporary society face to face, and shows very clearly the opposition which exists between the doctrines of would-be science and those of the Gospel:—

“If the dogmas of political economy are really exact, if the laws of the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest must really be applied to human society, as well as to plants and animals, then let us at once admit that Christianity, which gives assistance to the poor and needy, and which stretches out a hand to the sinner, is a mere folly; and let us at once abandon a belief which influences neither our political institutions nor our social arrangements, and which ought not to influence them. If Christ was right, then our present Christianity is wrong, and if sociology really contains scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth spoke and acted in vain, or rather He rebelled against the immutable laws of nature.” (Tauchnitz edition, p. 252.)

Mr. William Graham, in his “Creed of Science” (p. 278), writes as follows:—

“This great and far-reaching controversy, the most important in the history of our species, which is probably as old as human society itself, and certainly as old as the ‘Republic’ of Plato, in which it is discussed, or as Christianity, which began with a communistic form of society, had yet only within the past half-century come to be felt as a controversy involving real and living issues of a momentous character, and not utopias only remotely bordering upon the possible.”

I think it may be proved that this so-called “doctrine of science” is contrary to facts, and is, consequently, not scientific; whereas the creed of Christianity is in keeping with both present facts and ideal humanity.

Darwin borrowed his ideal of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest from Malthus, from whom he also drew his theories of evolution and of transformism; but no naturalist ever dreamt of applying either of these laws to human society. It has been reserved to sociology to attempt this, because it has accepted, blindfolded, from the hands of economists, this most erroneous principle: that society is governed by natural laws, and that it suffices to give them free scope for the greatest possible happiness and prosperity to reign. It is manifestly true that, as human society is comprehended in what we call Nature, it must obey her laws; but the laws and institutions, in all their different forms, which decree as to the acquisition and transmission of property or possessions, and hereditary succession, in a word, all civil and penal laws, emanate from men’s will, and from the decisions of legislators; and if experience, or a higher conception of justice, shows us that these laws are bad, or in any way lacking, we are free to change them. As far as the Darwinian laws are concerned, it would be perfectly impossible to apply them to existing society without more radically destroying all established institutions than the most avowed Nihilist would wish to do.

If it be really advisable that the law of the “survival of the fittest” should be established amongst us, the first step to be taken would be the abolition of all laws which punish theft and murder. Animals provide themselves with food by physical activity and the use of their muscles. Among men, in consequence of successive institutions, such as slavery, servitude, and revenue, numbers of people now live in plenty on their income, and do nothing at all. If Mr. Herbert Spencer is really desirous to see the supreme principle, “reward in proportion to desert,” in force amongst us, he must obtain, first of all, the suppression of the existing regulations as to property. In the animal world, the destiny of each is decided by its aptitudes. Among ourselves, the destiny of each is determined by the advantages obtained or inherited from parents, and the heir to, or owner of, a large estate is sure to be well received everywhere. We see then, that before Darwinian laws can become established, family succession must be abolished. Animals, like plants, obey the instincts of nature, and reproduce themselves rapidly; but incessant carnage prevents their too excessive multiplication! As men become more civilized, peace becomes more general; they talk of their fellow-men as their brothers, and some philosophers even dream—the madmen!—of arbitration supplanting war! The equilibrium between the births and the deaths is thus upset! To balance it again, let us glorify battles, and exclaim, with General Moltke, that the idea of suppressing them is a mischievous utopia; let us impose silence on those dangerous fanatics who repeat incessantly, “Peace on earth, good-will towards men.”

In the very heart of nature reigns seeming injustice; or, as M. Renan puts it more strongly, nature is the embodiment of injustice. A falling stone crushes both the honest man and the scamp! A bird goes out to find food for its young, and after long search is returning to its nest with its well-earned gains, when an eagle, the despot of the air, swoops down and steals the food; we think this iniquitous and odious, and would not tolerate such an instance amongst us. Vigorous Cain kills gentle Abel. Right and justice protest. They should not do so, for it is the mere putting in practice “of the purifying process by which nature weeds out the least powerful and prevents the vitiation of the race by the multiplication of its inferior samples.” Helvetius admirably defines, for its condemnation, this Darwinian law which Herbert Spencer would have society accept:—

“The savage says to those who are weaker than himself: Look up to the skies and you see the eagle swooping down on the dove; cast your eyes on the earth and you see the lion tearing to pieces the stag or the antelope; while in the depths of the ocean small fishes are destroyed by sharks. The whole of nature announces that the weak must be the prey of the strong. Strength is a gift of the gods. Through it I become possessor of all it is in my power to capture.” (“De l’Homme,” iv. 8.)

The constant effort of moralists and legislators has been to replace the reign of might by a reign of justice. As Bacon says, In societate aut vis aut lex viget. The object is to subject men’s actions more and more to the empire of the law, and that the law should be more and more in conformity with equity. Society has ever been, and still is, to a great extent, too much a reflection of nature. Violations of justice are numerous, and, if these are to be put a stop to, we must oppose ourselves still more to the laws of nature, instead of contemplating their re-establishment.

This is why Christianity, which is an ardent aspiration after justice, is in real accordance with true science. In the book of Job the problem is tragically proposed. The unjust are equally happy with the just, and, as in nature, the strong live at the cost of the weak. Right protests against this, and the voice of the poor is raised against their oppressors. Listen. What deep thought is contained in the following passage!—“Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them” (Job xxi. 7-9). “Some remove land-marks; they violently take away flocks and feed thereof. They cause him to go naked without clothing, and they take away the sheaf from the hungry; which make oil within their walls, and tread their wine-presses, and suffer thirst” (Job xxiv. 2, 10, 11).

The prophets of Israel raised an eloquent protest against the evils then reigning in society, and announced that a time should come when justice would be established upon the earth. These hopes of a Messiah were expressed in such precise terms that they may serve as a programme of the reforms which yet remain to be accomplished. “He shall judge the poor of the people, He shall save the children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of the needy. There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of the mountains” (Psalm lxxii. 4, 13, 16). “And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever” (Isaiah xxxii. 17). “Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies, and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast labored; but they that have gathered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have brought it together shall drink it in the courts of My holiness” (Isaiah lxii. 8, 9). In the New Jerusalem “there shall be no more sorrow nor crying,” “They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat; for as the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands” (Isaiah lxv. 21, 22).

The prophet thus raises his voice in favor of the poor, in the name of justice, not of charity and mercy. “The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of His people and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard; the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat My people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of hosts” (Isaiah iii. 14, 15). “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth” (Isaiah v. 8). In the future society property will be ensured to all, and every one will “sit under his vine and under his fig-tree” (Micah iv. 4).

The ideal of the prophets comprehends, then, in the first place, the triumph of justice, which will bring liberty to the oppressed, consolation to the outcast, and the produce of their labors to the workers; and secondly, and chiefly, it will bring the glorification and domination of the elect people—Israel.

The ideal of the Gospel makes less of this second consideration of national grandeur and pre-eminence, and places in the foreground the radical transformation of the social order. The Gospel is the “good tidings of great joy,” the Εὐαγγέλιον, carried to the poor, the approach of the Kingdom of God—that is to say, of the reign of justice. “The last shall be first;” therefore the pretended “natural order” will be reversed!

Who will possess the earth? Not the mightiest, as in the animal creation, and as Darwinian laws decree; not the rich, “for it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” Lazarus is received into Abraham’s bosom, while Dives is cast into the place of torment, “where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.” The first of biological precepts, the one respecting the survival of the fittest, as it immolates others for personal benefit, is essentially selfish, which is a vice incessantly reprobated in the New Testament. “Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others” (Philippians ii. 4). The chief of all Christian virtues is charity; it is the very essence of the Gospel. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (St. Matthew vi. 33).

How very true is the economic doctrine that, with equitable laws, each should enjoy the integral produce of his labor, and that, were this the case, personal activity would attain its highest degree. Nothing is more adverse to the prosperity of a nation than unjust laws; and this is precisely what the prophets and Christ teach us.

If Darwinian laws were applied to human society, the utility of history, considered as a moral lesson for both kings and people, would be destroyed. The history of man might then be looked upon as a mere zoological strife between nations, and a simple lengthening out of natural history. What moral instruction can possibly be drawn from the study of the animal world, where the strong devour or destroy the weak. No spectacle could be more odious or more demoralizing!

The incomparable sublimity of the Gospel, which is, alas! only too often misinterpreted, consists in an ardent longing for perfection, in that aspiration for an ideal of justice which urged Jesus and His earliest disciples to condemn the world as it then was. Thence sprang the hatred of evil in its many various forms, the desire for better things, for reforms and progress! Why do Mahometans stand still in the march of civilization, while Christian countries advance ever more and more rapidly? Because the first are resigned to evil, whereas the second combat and endeavor to extirpate it. The stoicism—the elevated character of which can hardly be sufficiently admired—the austerity, and purity of such ancients as Marcus Aurelius, nevertheless, bowed before absolute facts, looking upon them as the inevitable results of the actual and natural order of things. Like modern evolutionists, they glorified the laws of nature, considering them perfect. Their optimism led them so far as to adore the cosmos as a divinity. “All that thou wilt, O Cosmos,” says Marcus Aurelius, “is my will; nothing is too early or too late for me, if it be at the hour thou decidest upon. My fruit is such as thy seasons bring, O Nature! From thee comes all. Thou art all. All go towards thee. If the gods be essentially good and just, they must have permitted nothing, in the arrangement of the world, contrary to right and justice.” What a contrast between this serene satisfaction and the complaints of Job, of the prophets, and of Christ Himself! The true Christian, in direct opposition to stoics and to Mr. Herbert Spencer, holds that the world is completely infected with evil; he avoids it carefully, and lives in the hope of a general cataclysm, which will reduce our globe to ashes, and make place for a new and purified heaven and earth! The belief of stoics and of evolutionary sociologists logically advocates inaction, for it respects the present order of things as attributable to natural laws. The Christian’s belief leads him to ardently desire reform and progress, but also, when he is deceived and reduced to despair, it occasionally culminates in revolutionary violence and in Nihilism.

Not only Jesus, but all great religious reformers, such as Buddha, Mahomet, Luther, and the great philosophers, especially Socrates and Plato, and the great law-givers, from Solon and Lycurgus to the legislators of the French Revolution—all the elect of humanity, in fact—are struck with the evils under which our race is forced to suffer, and have imagined and revealed an ideal social order more in conformity with the ideal of justice; and in their writings they place this Utopia in contrast with the existing order. The more Christianity becomes despoiled of dogmas, and the more the ideas of moral and social reform, contained in Christ’s teachings, are brought forward as the chief aim, the more Mr. Herbert Spencer’s principles will be shunned and avoided. In the splendid development of Roman law, which lasted fifteen hundred years, a similar evolution took place. In the beginning, in the laws of the twelve tables, many traces of the hard law in favor of the mighty may be found. This is symbolized by the lance (quir), which gave its name to the quiritarian right. The father was allowed to sell or destroy his children, as they were his possession. He had absolute power over his slaves, who were his “things”. The creditor might throw his debtor in prison, or even cause him to be cut in pieces—in partes secanto. The wife was entirely in her husband’s power—in manu. Little by little, as centuries rolled on, eminent lawgivers succeeded each other, and gradual changes were made, so that, finally, just and humanitarian principles penetrated the entire Roman code, and the Darwinian law, which glorifies might, gave place to the Christian law, which extols justice.

This movement will most assuredly continue, in spite of all the abuse it may receive from Mr. Herbert Spencer, and from others who think as he does. It is a result of the advance of civilization from the commencement of Christianity, and even from the time of the prophets of Israel. It will manifest itself, not as it did in the middle ages, by works of mercy, but, under the control of economic science, by the intervention of the State in favor of the disinherited, and by measures such as Mr. Shaw Lefevre approves of, so that each and all should be placed in a position to be able to command reward in proportion to the amount of useful labor accomplished.

Darwinian laws, generally admitted in the domain of natural history and in the animal kingdom, will never be applied to human societies, until the sentiments of charity and justice, which Christianity engraves on our hearts, are completely eradicated.—Contemporary Review.

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THE TRUE STORY OF WAT TYLER.
BY S. G. G.

One of the most noteworthy objects in the great pageant that passed through the crowds of London on the 10th of last November was an effigy of Wat Tyler, upon a lofty platform, lying prostrate, as if slain, at the feet of Walworth, the Mayor, who stood with drawn sword beside the seeming corpse. The suggestion was that of hero and miscreant—rebellion defeated—the City saved! Many there were in the line of procession who showed, by unexpected hisses and groans, that they did not so read history; and it seems worth while to ask, especially while the greatest contemporary of the Mayor and the Tyler is freshly brought to our remembrance by the Wycliffe quincentenary commemoration, what that scene in Smithfield really meant and what was its issue.

In reading the old chronicles we have to remember the fable of the Lion and the Man. Monks like Knighton of Leicester, and Walsingham of St. Albans, or courtiers like Jean Froissart, with great simplicity betray their bias, and we must often “read between the lines.” It is useful also to recollect that the distinction between a rebellion and a revolution turns very much upon the fact of success. Had Wat Tyler won the day, and secured the charter which seemed so nearly within the people’s reach, his name would have come down to us in better company than that of Jack Cade and other vulgar insurgents and rioters. A second Magna Charta would have become memorable in English history, and its chief promoter might have been known to posterity as Sir Walter Tyler, or perhaps the Earl of Kent.

We all know the story of the poll-tax—that intolerable impost[4] which followed the “glorious wars” and the sumptuous extravagance of Edward III., and which awakened such bitter resistance in the early days of Richard II. The monkish historians themselves tell us how harshly and brutally the tax was levied, especially by one John Legg, the farmer of the tax for Essex and Kent; and if this part of the history stood alone we might pause before we wholly condemned the hasty blow by which the Dartford bricklayer or “tiler” avenged the insulted modesty of his child.[5] Why should we give all our admiration to William Tell—with his second arrow for the heart of Gessler had his first sped too fatally[6]—and not recognise in this man of Kent also the honorable indignation of an outraged father? But this may pass, as it is plainly impossible that the great insurrection could have been wholly due to such a cause. Sixty thousand men from Kent, Essex, Sussex, Bedford, would never have been roused to revolt even by the news of this Dartford tragedy. The deed, no doubt, gave impulse to the movement; but the causes of disaffection had been at work long before the levy of the poll-tax; and the “peasant revolt” becomes most deeply interesting, as well as important, when regarded as the first passionate claim of the “lower classes” in England for freedom and their rights as men.

The courtly Froissart informs us that there was in the county of Kent[7] “a crazy priest,” one John Ball, who had long been testifying against the serfdom in which the peasantry were held, “Why,” he asked, “should we be slaves? Are we not all descended from Adam and Eve? By what title do our masters hold us in bondage?” Froissart declares that Ball preached absolute communism, but there is no evidence that he went beyond the vigorous assertion of the equal right of all to freedom. “Every Sunday after mass,” writes the chronicler, “as the people came out of church, he would preach to them in the market-place (he had been excommunicated), and assemble a crowd round him ... and he was much beloved by the people.” As a consequence “the evil-disposed in these districts began to rise, saying they were too severely oppressed, that at the beginning of the world there were no slaves, and that no one ought to be treated as such, unless he had committed treason against his lord, as Lucifer had done against God; but they had done no such thing, for they were neither angels nor spirits, but men, formed after the same likeness with their lords, who treated them as beasts. This they would no longer bear, but had determined to be free, and if they labored or did any other work for their lords they would be paid for it.”

Such words of the “crazy priest” and his “evil-disposed” hearers seem to us reasonable enough. Their chief fault, perhaps, is that they belong to the nineteenth century, rather than to the fourteenth. Never was a man more emphatically before his time than this same John Ball. The usual result followed. For these and the like “foolish words” he was arrested and imprisoned by Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury. But those words could not die, although the first attempt to realise them in deed was—like many a first effort for justice, truth and freedom—premature and a little blind.

At the beginning of 1831, then, John Ball was lying in the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone. Yet it was not in Kent that the rising actually began. Five thousand men of Essex, according to Walsingham, took the first step to revolt. The monkish chronicler makes merry with their equipment. “Sticks, rusty swords, hatchets, smoke-dried bows the color of old ivory, some with but an arrow apiece, and many arrows with but one feather!” “Think of this ragged regiment,” he contemptuously writes, “aspiring to become masters of the realm!”

Placards and flysheets of a quaint and grotesque rather than of an inflammatory character, called upon the people to assert their rights. Knighton of Leicester gives some remarkable specimens, transcribed from the old black-letter manuscripts, purporting to be issued by “Jack the Miller,” “Jack the Carter,” “Jack Trueman,” and “Jack Straw.”[8] For the most part they are written in a kind of doggerel rhyme, as in the Miller’s appeal: “With right and with might; with skill and with will; let might help right, and skill before will; and might before right, then goeth our mill aright.” “In the rude jingle of these lines,” writes the late Mr. Green, “began for England the literature of political controversy. They are the first predecessors of the pamphlets of Milton and Burke. Rough as they are, they express clearly enough the mingled passions which met in the revolt of the peasants; their longing for a right rule, for plain and simple justice; the scorn of the immorality of the nobles, and the infamy of the Court; their resentment at the perversion of the law to the cause of oppression.”

A leader of this motley band was one Baker, of Fobbing, in Essex, of whom a story is told similar to that of the Dartford Tyler. The Essex men sent messengers to Kent, and a great company, doubtless of John Ball’s hearers, speedily assembled. They roamed the country. Broke open the archbishop’s prison at Maidstone, and liberated the popular champion. They stopped several companies of Canterbury pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Becket, not to maltreat or to pillage them, but to impose an oath “to be loyal to King Richard, to accept no king of the name of John”—a clause aimed at the deservedly hated John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster—“and, for the rest, to stir up their fellow-citizens to resist all taxes except the ‘fifteenths,’ which their fathers and predecessors had acknowledged and paid.” Wat Tyler of Maidstone—a different person evidently from the man who had slain the tax-collector at Dartford—was chosen as their leader. Hollinshed, after Walsingham, describes him as “a verie craftie fellow and indued with much wit[9] (if he had well applied it).”

A march upon London was now planned, for the purpose of meeting King Richard face to face, and demanding a redress of the people’s grievances. Sir John Newton, one of the king’s knights, was led, by persuasion or force, to act as envoy for the insurgents. The king shut himself up in the Tower of his Court, but was invited to meet the peasant army, now mustered at Blackheath. Perhaps had he done so, much that followed might have been avoided; but the messengers sent to reconnoitre dissuaded him. His majesty had taken boat and had descended the Thames to Rotherhithe, a detachment from Blackheath having come to the riverside to meet him. At this point Richard was advised by Sudbury the archbishop, and Robert Hales the treasurer, to hold no parley. “Have nothing to do,” they said, “with a set of shoeless ribalds.” For a little time, the royal lad—he was but sixteen—was rowed up and down the river in his barge, pitiably irresolute; but at last he returned to the Tower, and an advance upon the City was resolved upon by the peasant army, after a sermon by Ball, on Blackheath, from the text—

“When Adam dalf and Eve span,

Wo was thanne a gentilman?”

The mayor and aldermen were for shutting the City gates, but the mass of the citizens effectually protested against excluding those whom they owned as “friends and neighbors.” The gates were accordingly left open all night, and an immense multitude went in and out, as yet comparatively orderly, and certainly honest. They stole nothing, not even food; everything they took they paid for at a fair price; any robber amongst them they put to death on the spot. As far as in them lay, these rude undisciplined masses wished to make fair war on those whom they regarded as their oppressors.[10] The Duke of Lancaster was the first object of their animosity. His sumptuous palace in the Savoy was ruthlessly destroyed, but the chronicler is careful to relate that the rioters did not appropriate the spoils. His jewels and other valuables he flung into the river, and one man detected in secreting a silver cup was thrown in after it. The records of the kingdom and other State papers were burned, the peasantry in some dim confused way connecting these documents with the oppressions to which they had been subject. Other acts of violence followed, notably the destruction of great part of the Temple, of which Robert Hales was Master. The insurgents, to whom drink had been freely served by many of the citizens, soon became infuriated and uncontrollable. A wild, half-drunken mob raged through the City, and deplorable excesses were committed.

In this way the Thursday was passed—Corpus Christi Day, June 13, 1381. The City was panic stricken. Walworth, the mayor, proposed, according to Froissart, that an onslaught should be made upon the insurgents during the night, when many of them, lying in drunken sleep, could easily be killed “like flies.” But the atrocious counsel was rejected, and on the Friday morning the king came to parley, chiefly, as it appears, with the Essex contingent, gathered at Mile End, “in a fair meadow,” writes Froissart, “where in the summer time people go to amuse themselves.” The interview was a peaceful one. Nothing could be more simple and reasonable than the demand of the people: “We wish that thou wouldst make us free forever, us, our heirs, and our lands, and that we should no longer be called slaves, nor held in bondage.” Richard II. at once acceded to the petition, promised four things: first, that they and their children after them should be free; secondly that they should not be attached to the soil for service, but should be at liberty to rent lands of their own at a moderate fixed price; thirdly, that they should have access, free of toll, to all markets and fairs, cities, burghs, and mercantile towns, to buy and sell; and, fourthly, that they should be forgiven for the present insurrection. The king further prepared to send letters to every town confirming these articles of agreement. Two persons from each locality were to remain to carry back these precious documents; “thirty secretaries” were instantly set to work; and the multitude cheerfully dispersed.

But the men of Kent had meanwhile enacted a terrible scene at the Tower. Taking forcible possession of the place and frightening the six hundred yeomen on guard almost out of their wits in a way which the chroniclers graphically describe, they sought out the archbishop and treasurer who had called them “shoeless ribalds,” with Richard Lyons the merchant, chief commissioner for levying the poll-tax, and John Legg, the man who had taken the most prominent part in the collection of the impot, also two of Legg’s satellites and an obnoxious friar. These men they beheaded, carrying their heads on long pikes through the streets of London. It was a terrible revenge, and must have steeled the hearts of well-meaning citizens at once against the movement. The King’s mother (the Princess Joan, widow of the Black Prince) was in the Tower, half dead with terror. Some of the insurgents had penetrated into her room and thrust their swords into the mattress of her bed in search for the “traitors,” but beyond the murder of the archbishop and his companions they seemed to have committed no outrage. The princess herself, on being recognised, was treated with honor, and was conveyed to the Wardrobe, Carter Lane, in the vicinity of Blackfriars, where the king found her when his business at Mile End was done—a royal day’s work that might have been one of the best and brightest in the annals of England!

The next morning Richard heard mass in Westminster Abbey, and, on his return with sixty knights, encountered Wat Tyler and his men in Smithfield “before the Abbey of St. Bartholomew.” As it appears, Tyler had some further demands to make, not being altogether satisfied with the charter of Mile End.[11] Sir John Newton rode up to invite him to approach the king. According to some accounts the knight was received insolently. “I shall come,” said Tyler, “when I please. If you are in a hurry you can go back to your master now!” Another narrator tells us that Wat began to abuse Sir John Newton for coming to him on horseback, being met with the courteous reply, “You are mounted, why should not I be so likewise?” In a third chronicle we read that Tyler was approaching Richard covered, and was ordered by Walworth, the mayor, to remove his cap, but roughly refused. There was, at any rate, a brief dialogue between Richard II. and the peasant leader, in which the latter insisted on the immediate issue of letters of manumission to all, and added his new demand, to the effect that “all warrens, waters, parks, and woods should be common, so that the poor as well as the rich might freely fish in all waters, hunt the deer in forests and parks, and the hare in the field.” This cry for the repeal of the game and forest laws went to the heart of one of the chief grievances of the people. What reply the king gave is not recorded, nor is it easy to disentangle from the conflicting accounts any clear details. One chronicler says that Tyler came too near the king’s horse, as if intending some mischief against his majesty; others that he was simply insolent, tossing his dagger from hand to hand as he parleyed; others that blows were actually interchanged between Wat and Sir John Newton. This much at any rate is clear, that the Mayor Walworth—John Walworth, as Knighton calls him; William, as in the other authorities—aimed a sudden blow at the bold demagogue, who fell at once from his horse, and was dispatched by one of the king’s squires, named Sandwich or Cavendish.

With Wat Tyler died also the insurrection, and the hopes of English liberty for many a dreary year. “As he fell from his horse to the earth,” writes Walsingham, “he first gave hope to the English soldiery, who had been half dead, that the Commons could be resisted.” There was, no doubt, a touch of chivalry in the first words of the young king, “Follow me!” he cried to the people infuriated by their leader’s assassination; “I will be your captain!” They were startled, and obeyed, the king preceding them to Islington, where he was met by a large body of soldiers. There was no conflict, and the multitude slowly dispersed, being threatened with death if found in the streets after nightfall.

As soon as the king was safe it was found that his pledges had meant nothing. The promises of enfranchisement, the “letters” about which the “thirty secretaries” had been busy all the night of that memorable fourteenth of June, were treated as void. “Villeins you are,” said the king, when asked by the men of Essex to confirm his promises, “and villeins you shall remain. You shall remain in bondage, not such as you have hitherto been subjected to, but incomparably viler. For so long as we live and rule by God’s grace over this kingdom, we shall use our sense, our strength and our property, so to treat you that your slavery may be an example to posterity, and that those who live now and hereafter, who may be like you, may always have before their eyes, and as it were in a glass, your misery and reasons for cursing you, and the fear of doing things like those which you have done.” In the spirit of this royal message, commissions were sent into the country to bring those who had taken part in the insurrection to condign punishment. John Ball, the preacher, Jack Straw with the Millers, Truemans, and a host of others, were mercilessly put to death; and in that terrible autumn the scaffold and the gallows had no fewer than seven thousand victims![12] Nothing could more clearly show the panic into which this wild rough outcry for freedom had thrown the constituted authorities in Church and State. One good result, however, of the insurrection was in the vanishing of the poll-tax. Of that impost, at least, we do not hear again. And more—the people had learned their power, a lesson which in the darkest times was never forgotten.

We believe in freedom now. Almost all that John Ball and Wat Tyler demanded is the heritage of every Englishman. They might have sought it, perhaps, by “constitutional methods.” Yet we must remember their times. They did but imitate in their rough way during those three days of terror the course which their masters pursued for more than three hundred years! The stroke that laid Wat Tyler low—and made Richard II., that worthless lad, the master of the situation—whatever it was, was not a blow for liberty!

Some partisan writers have associated the teachings of John Ball with the principles maintained by Wycliffe, especially in his treatise “On Dominion.” The dates, however, are against this. Ball is said to have been a preacher for more than twenty years before the insurrection. This carries us back to about 1360, an earlier date than we can assign to Wycliffe’s treatise, or to his institution of “Poor Preachers.” In fact, the chronicler Knighton takes a diametrically opposite view, and regards Ball as a forerunner of Wycliffe—the John the Baptist to this false Messiah! In his fervid imagination the Leicester canon sees the apocalyptic visions fulfilled—the catastrophe of the last days! Such events can mean nothing else than the end of the world! “Much has happened since then,” and the signs of the times may perhaps be read as fallaciously by seers of to-day. There can, however, be no doubt that before the insurrection, Ball had been an adherent of Wycliffe. The demand for spiritual freedom fell in, at least, with the thoughts and impulses that had prompted the serfs of their wild irregular cry for social and political rights.

“In memory of Sir William Walworth’s valor,” writes Thomas Fuller in his “Church History of Great Britain,” “the arms of London, formerly a plain cross, were augmented by the addition of a dagger, to make the coat in all points complete.” This is still a popular mistake. That dagger, or short sword, has nothing whatever to do with Walworth, or Tyler, or Richard II., or any of the personages, good or evil, of that era. In fact, it was a relic or “survival” of the sword in the hand of the Apostle Paul, formerly engraven on the City seal.[13] St. Paul anciently figured as patron saint of London, and when in Reformation times his effigy disappeared from the City arms his sword remained. We know that in Christian art, from about the tenth century, the sword was a familiar symbol of St. Paul, the primary intention no doubt being to denote the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

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M. JULES FERRY AND HIS FRIENDS.

The history of the Republic up to this time has been such a course of surprises, that any forecast as to the future must be made with a large reckoning for accidents; but this much may be said, that the Republic owes its present appearance of stability to the want of commanding talents among her ruling men. The outlook could not have been so peaceful had Gambetta been alive. Gambetta had a vast ambition, and a leonine, roaring energy, which provoked furious opposition. The men who have parted his influence among them may be as ambitious as he was; but they are so for personal objects, and as there is nothing great in their characters or their policy, nothing imperious in their manner, nothing stirring or seducing in their eloquence, they are less feared than the man who wished to be a master, and said so. Nobody could denounce M. Jules Ferry as aspiring to become a dictator; yet during the past year he has held more effective power than was ever wielded by Gambetta. He is a faithful party-servant who has been allowed to exercise authority, because his employers have felt that they could dismiss him at a moment’s notice. We bear more from a humble, useful domestic, than from a self-asserting master. Louis XIV., who broke the tyranny of Mazarin, and could not brook the arrogance of Fouquet, submitted to the management of the quiet, astute Colbert.

In his novel “Numa Roumestan,” written while Gambetta was alive, Alphonse Daudet showed “the North being conquered by the South,” that is, the blustering, bragging, blarneying blagueurs of Provence and Gascony enthralling the democracy with their charlatanism, and seizing upon all the public offices. Sardou had worked out the same idea in “Rabagas;” but it must be noticed that the holders of the four most important posts in France at this moment—the four Presidents, of the Republic, of the Senate, of the Chamber of Deputies, and of the Cabinet—are conspicuously exempt from the usual attributes of demagogues. They are cold-headed men, plain of speech, dry in manner; they are not Southerners, and, in fact, they are by no means representative of the French as a nation.

M. Grévy comes from the Jura, on the borders of Switzerland, a department which has for the last half century been more advanced in public instruction than all the others, and where the bourgeoisie are something like the Scotch in their puritanism.

M. le Royer, President of the Senate, a hard, sententious little man, with solemn eyes peering through gold-rimmed spectacles, and a voice like the drone of a Lenten preacher—M. le Royer is a Genevan Protestant, whose father became French by naturalisation. M. Brisson was born and educated at Bourges, in the old province of Berry. He is a trim, mathematically-minded lawyer and logician, creaseless in his morals as in his dress, one of those Frenchmen to whom all the levities of French life—light literature, music, gossip, and even cuisine—are distasteful. M. Jules Ferry is a Lorrainer, born in the mountainous Vosges; and, like M. le Royer, a Protestant—at least so far as he confesses to any religion at all.

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A nation must be turned upside down before a man like M. Jules Ferry can become Prime Minister. It makes one smile to think that the French have demolished three dynasties, and that countless thousands of enthusiastic revolutionists have let themselves be shot behind barricades, in order that the country may now be ruled by a Cabinet containing three second-rate journalists, and three barristers who have no names at the Bar. “No more revolutions: I have become a Minister,” wrote the late M. Garnier Pagēs to his constituents in 1848.[14] M. Ferry, to do him justice, did not conclude that progress reached its zenith on the day when he took Cabinet office; he has rather shown modest thankfulness at his own elevation, while feeling privately, no doubt, some astonishment. Now that he has been in place some time, the astonishment must have worn off, for he has learnt to know men, and to perceive that circumstances do more for most successful rulers than these accomplish for themselves. An inexperienced man at the helm soon gets accustomed to see the big ship obey the propulsion of his rudder, and if he be steering in calm weather, he may do as well as the skilled pilot. M. Ferry became Prime Minister faute de mieux, and he may remain so (with occasional displacements) crainte de pire. The course of French Republicanism is always downward, and the constant preoccupation of men’s minds under that happy régime, is the fear of worse.

Jules Ferry owed the beginning of his political fortune to his luck in writing for a newspaper which had a witty editor. Just twenty years ago (1865), being then thirty-three years old, he joined the staff of the Temps, and after contributing leaders for three years, undertook in 1868 a series of papers attacking the administration of Baron Haussmann as Prefect of the Seine. Baron Haussmann had rebuilt Paris and made it a city unique in the world for beauty and sanitation. M. Ferry could not have performed such a task, but he was able to criticise the Prefect’s work, to array long columns of figures showing how much it had cost, and to ask whether it would not have been far better if all these millions had been given to the poor. Baron Haussmann sent communiques to the Temps impugning the accuracy of M. Ferry’s figures; but the journalist of course stuck to his multiplication, and, as spirited opposition always made a man popular under the Empire, the Vosgian’s articles obtained more success than is usual with statistical essays. It was proposed that they should be rebound in pamphlet form and circulated among Parisian householders in view of the general election of 1869. M. Neffzer, editor of the Temps, then suggested that the pamphlet should be called, “Les Comptes Fantastiques d’Haussmann.”[15]

The title took, and Jules Ferry got the reputation of being a comical fellow. Resolving to make the most of this character while it lasted, he came forward as a candidate for Paris at the elections of 1869—calling himself a Radical for this purpose. He was no more Radical than comical, but if he had not taken up extreme views he could have offered no reason for opposing the moderate Liberal (M. Guéroult, editor of the Opinion Nationale), who was the sitting member of the sixth Parisian ward. M. Ferry defeated his brother-journalist; and in the following year, when the Empire collapsed at Sedan, he became ex-officio a member of the Government of National Defence. It will be remembered that this Government was composed of the nine members for Paris, because M. Grévy and some other leading Republicans refused to accept power unless it were lawfully conferred upon them by a national assembly.

M. Ferry was of course installed in Baron Haussmann’s post; but during the siege of Paris he was very nearly lynched by some of those excellent working-men who had formerly hailed him as a friend and brother. On the 31st October, 1870, an insurrection broke out in the beleaguered city, and a vigorous attempt was made to overthrow the Government. M. Ferry fell into the hands of the insurgents, and for six mortal hours these rude men subjected him to every species of indignity. They pulled his luxuriant black whiskers, they taunted him with eating white bread and beefsteak, while his proletarian brethren had to content themselves with rations of brown bread and horseflesh, and when dinner-time came they offered him his choice between a grilled rat and some cold boiled dog. Happily the Breton Mobiles were at hand and delivered him; but from that day M. Ferry’s Radicalism perceptibly cooled, and when the Communal rebellion occurred, he took good care not to let himself be kidnapped again by the once-idolised working-man. Decamping to Versailles he remained there throughout the second siege, and did not return to take possession of his post as Prefect of the Seine until the rebellion had been crushed. It was on this occasion that alighting from his brougham near the still-smouldering Hôtel de Ville, and seeing a convoy of Communist prisoners pass, he shook his nicely-gloved fist and exclaimed: “Ah! tas de canaille!”

The exclamation was pardonable, for these Communists had shot M. Ferry’s friend and former Secretary, Gustave Chaudey, and the new-fledged Prefect must have imagined bullets whistling by his own sleek ears as he looked at them. However, M. Ferry’s vindictiveness went no further than words, for he exerted himself charitably to save some old journalistic comrades who had taken the wrong side during the civil war. He is believed to have secreted several of these in his private lodgings and to have covered them with his official protection while the police were hunting for them. What is more, he honorably connived at the escape of one of his vilest detractors, Félix Pyat. This charming person, always the first to preach sedition and regicide, and the first to fly in the hour of danger, had been unable to get clear away from Paris when the Commune fell. He took refuge in a convent, where the nuns harbored him for six weeks, though these poor women were quite aware that he was the Pyat who had been clamoring for the demolition of churches and the shooting of hostages. Jules Ferry happened to hear of Pyat’s whereabouts, but instead of delivering up the wretched men to a court-martial, he caused a passport to be privately given him.

Good nature abounds in M. Ferry’s character, and this quality, in combination with perseverance and a quiet talent for picking up other people’s ideas, has been the secret of his success. During the last years of the Empire while he wrote for the Temps, he was a daily frequenter of the Café de Madrid, and there he was appreciated as an attentive listener to no matter whose stories. He had then, as he has now, a face such as is only to be seen on the shoulders of old-fashioned French barristers and Belgravian footmen. The judges of the Second Empire did not allow avocats to wear beards, so M. Ferry shaved his upper lip and chin, but his whiskers were of stupendous size. Add to these a Roman nose, a fine forehead, shrewd playful eyes, a well shaped smiling mouth, and a certain plumpness of girth which removed him altogether out of the category of those lean men whom Shakespeare thought dangerous. He always shook men’s hands with a hearty grip; he could laugh loud and long even when not amused; if conversation flagged he could light it up suddenly with a few crackling jokes, but he generally preferred to sit silent, smoking penny cigars (for he was not rich), sipping absinthe, and taking mental notes of what was being said around him. Now and then, especially if a talker appealed to him, he would nod approval with a grave closing of the eyes, which is the supreme politeness in the art of listening.

He never squandered his knowledge in small talk, so that his public speeches always took his most intimate friends aback. Gambetta once said to him: “You are the most secretive of chatter-boxes,”[16] the truth being that Ferry used commonplace ideas in private intercourse, just as some men keep half-pence for beggars. To stake gold in conversational games over a café table was more than his intellectual means could afford. A blagueur himself in a small way, he knew the destructive power of that light chaff which can be thrown upon a good idea while it has the bloom of novelty on it. Then he was not combative. Gambetta, a millionaire in talents, could scatter his best thoughts broadcast without ever impoverishing himself. At the Café Procope, at Brébant’s, and in the dining-room of his friend, Clément Laurier, he would pound his fists on the table and thunder out long passages of the speeches which he intended to deliver, and this without caring whether political opponents heard him. “You are showing your hand,” Laurier[17] and the still more prudent Arthur Ranc used to say. But Gambetta could win without hiding his trumps, or he could win without trumps.

Ferry always went into political action with his powder dry, chose his ground carefully and picked out an antagonist whom he was sure to worst. Gambetta would rush at the strongest enemy, Ferry fired at the weakest; but this system had the advantage of leaving him after every combat victorious and unwounded. It was a great triumph to him, when, coming back among his friends, he heard their self-astonished bravos as they slapped him on the back. There is much slapping on the back in French political assemblies. Many a time has Gambetta’s broad hand descended upon Ferry’s stalwart shoulders with the shout, ”C’est bien fait, mon petit!”

The two were capital friends from the first, and remained so till nearly the end. It was not till within two years of Gambetta’s death, that the chief began to find his protégé a little too independent. Mutinous Ferry never was, but a time arrived when, from one cause and another, he found himself second in influence to Gambetta among the Republican party. He was but Addington to Gambetta’s Pitt: nevertheless he got tired of hearing people say that he was only allowed to hold office as a stopgap; and with a proper dignity he resented Gambetta’s pretensions to act as occult Prime Minister without assuming the responsibilities of the premiership. Gambetta, as we know, wanted to become President of the Republic, or else Prime Minister with a secure majority to be obtained by scrutin de liste. Until he could compass one or other of these ends, he preferred to play the Agamemnon sitting in the Presidential chair of the Chamber of Deputies. M. de Freycinet and M. Ferry each humored this whim so long as it was possible, and indeed nothing could have been more amicably subservient than M. Ferry’s conduct while Prime Minister in 1881. He not only dispensed his patronage by Gambetta’s directions, but framed all Government measures according to the Dictator’s tastes, and even agreed to the performance of little Parliamentary comedies, in which Gambetta pretended to attack the Cabinet in order to dispel the notion that M. Ferry was not a free agent. This state of things, however, could not continue after the general election of 1881, when a strong Republican majority was returned—not to support the Ferry Cabinet, but to set up something better. Gambetta forgot that in putting on the gloves with his friend Ferry, simply pour amuser la galerie, he was apt to give knock-down blows which made Ferry look small. The cautious Lorrainer felt that he had had enough of these sparring-matches, and he had the sharpness to see that if he accepted a portfolio in the “Grand Ministère,” which Gambetta formed in November 1881, he would confirm the general opinion that throughout his premiership he had only been the great man’s puppet. For all this, it was a very brave thing he did in refusing to sit in Gambetta’s Cabinet. Gambetta was deeply offended and doubtless as much surprised as Richelieu would have been if Brother Joseph had declined to “act any longer with him for the present.” Happily the Dictator could not punish Brother Jules as the Cardinal would have chastised Brother Joseph.

He sent twice to Ferry to offer him a portfolio, wrote to him once, and ended by proposing to get him elected life-senator and President of the Upper House. But when all these favors were declined with thanks, he shrugged his shoulders and exclaimed: “Mais c’est absurde!” meaning that his friend Ferry had come to think a little too much of himself.

Two months after this the “Grand Ministère” had fallen. Jules Ferry had given the Scrutin de Liste Bill his vote, but he had refrained from exerting any influence on behalf of the Cabinet. “C’est un coup de Ferry!” ejaculated Gambetta, when the numbers of the division were announced,[18] and upon somebody’s remarking that Ferry had voted aright, “Bah, you should have seen him in the smoking-room,” growled the angry chief. “But he was speaking up loudly for you in the smoking-room.” “The song is in the tune,” answered Gambetta, “and Jules was singing flat.”[19]

The fact is that the fate of the Scrutin Bill had turned wholly on the question as to whether Gambetta could be trusted. The measure establishing election by caucus would have placed absolute power in his hands for years, and the Left Centre were naturally afraid of this prospect, which was tantamount to the destruction of regular Parliamentary government. But before committing themselves to a coalition with Radicals and Monarchists, many of these moderate Liberals came and sounded Ferry. He would only answer that he was sure Gambetta meant well, and so forth; but of course this was not enough, and the Moderates marched over to M. Clémenceau. The day after this vote M. Ferry was back in office with the portfolio of Public Instruction, and thirteen months later he was Prime Minister once more, but this time under conditions very different from those which had chequered his first Administration. Gambetta was dead, three Cabinets had been overthrown within eight months, and M. Ferry was actually able to make a favor of accepting a post in which M. de Freycinet, M. Duclerc and M. Fallières had wretchedly failed. Things had come to such a pass that if M. Ferry had objected to form a Government, M. Grévy would have resigned.

Thus M. Ferry was truly on a certain day the Deus ex machinâ. His advance to a position so powerful can only be explained by comparing him to the winner of an obstacle race. Nine years ago, any politician contemplating the possibility of Gambetta’s death, would have named at least six Republicans now living as more likely than M. Ferry to succeed him as leader of the party. He would have named Jules Simon, Léon Say, William Waddington, Charles de Freycinet, Challemel-Lacour, or Eugène Clémenceau; and supposing all these runners had started with M. Ferry over a flat course, it may be questioned, to keep up the racing metaphor, whether Ferry would have been so much as placed. But in an obstacle race, one man comes to grief at the “hanging-tub,” one at the crawling, another at the water-jump, and the winner is often the man who, having scrambled through every thing in a haphazard fashion, comes in alone—all the others having dropped off.

No man ever spoilt a fine chance so sadly as Jules Simon—the first to “drop off”—and this all for want of a little spirit at the right moment. The author of many learned and entertaining works on political economy, a bright scholar, charming causeur, persuasive debater, a man of handsome face and lordly bearing, infinitely respectable in his private life, full of diplomatic tact and with a genuine aptitude for administration—M. Simon had all the qualifications of a party-leader. Under the Empire he was an Orleanist, but he let himself be converted to Republicanism by M. Thiers after the war, and he was the only Minister whom Thiers trusted to the extent of never meddling with the business of his department. He was Minister of Public Instruction and Worship for more than two years, and acquitted himself of his functions in a manner to please both Catholics and Freethinkers, cardinals and vivisecting professors. He was perhaps a little too unctuous in his phrases; he had a suspicious facility for weeping, and he scattered compliments and promises about him, as a beadle sprinkles holy water in a May-day procession. But these are the little arts of diplomacy: M. Simon could be quite firm in dismissing a Bonapartist professor, even while shedding tears over the poor man’s appeal to be suffered to earn his bread in peace; and when he was sent as High Commissioner of the Government to visit the pontoons and prisons in which Coummunists were confined, all his tender pity for political offenders in general (he recognised many of his quondam electors in bonds) did not prevent him from investigating each individual case with unemotional acumen. He had power to liberate whom he pleased, but he used it sparingly. At Brest he was much pained by the rudeness of a prisoner to whom he had said kindly: “Why are you here, my friend?” “For having too much studied your books,“ was the sniggering answer.[20] He had another disagreeable shock at the prison of Versailles, where Louise Michel called him ”Vieux farceur.”

But Jules Simon rendered some very great service to the Republican cause. The office-holders of to-day often talk as if they had founded the Republic—which shows that they have defective memories. The Comte de Chambord was the real “Father of the Republic,” as even Senator Wallon must acknowledge in his meditative moments.[21] If the Bourbon prince had been anything better than a Quaker, Monarchy would have been restored after the Commune—in fact, during the five years that followed the civil war, the Republic merely lived under respite of a death-sentence, so to say, until its enemies agreed as to how it should be exterminated. But they could not agree, and Jules Simon was in a large measure the cause of this. He went about among the Orleanists, coaxing over this one and that one to the idea that Republicanism was the only practical thing for the moment. His favorite argument was this, that Socialists and other such people could be put down much more summarily by a Republican Government than by a King. Under a Bourbon Sovereign, Liberals and Socialists would make common cause, and there would inevitably be another revolution before long; but if the Orleanists would only take the Republic under their patronage they might rule the country according to their doctrines, just as the English Whigs had long ruled England, keeping their Radical tail in subjection. With these words, Jules Simon wiled away many; and the trophies of success thickened upon him. He was elected to the French Academy; in 1875 he was nominated a life-senator, and in 1876, some months after the first general election under the new Constitution, he became Prime Minister.

He kept his post for about eight months, and then one memorable morning he allowed Marshal Mac Mahon to dismiss him from it like a lacquey. The Spaniards, by way of expressing their disbelief in the consistency of courage at all times and in all circumstances, are accustomed to say that a man was brave “on a certain day.” One may assert then, without any imputation on M. Simon’s general valor, that on the 16th May, 1877, he showed an utter want of pluck. The reason for this appears to have been that he was out of health at the time—worn out by two or three sleepless nights, and disgusted with the worries of office. He had gone to bed on the 15th May without any suspicion that the Marshal President intended to dismiss him and his Liberal Cabinet, and he was therefore astounded when, as he was dressing, a messenger brought him a letter in which the Marshal cavalierly told him that, as he had been unable to manage the Republican majority, he must make way for stronger men.

Now it was quite true that the Republicans under Gambetta had behaved very factiously towards Jules Simon. Parties were so divided in the Lower House that no Minister could govern, and it was manifest that the only way out of the death-lock would be through a dissolution. But M. Simon was cashiered at the instigation of a Royalist Palace Cabal, who wanted the next elections to be held under the auspices of a Reactionary Cabinet, and he should have had the boldness to denounce this intrigue. Instead of doing that he sat down in his dressing-gown, it is said, and wrote a tame, self-exculpatory letter to the Marshal. He did not see that Mac Mahon had played into his hands by enabling him to take his stand as champion of the entire Republican party. A few brave words of defiance to the Cabal, a dignified reproof to the Marshal himself, and an appeal to the whole nation to rouse itself for a grand battle at the polls, this is what Jules Simon’s letter should have contained, and an epistle couched in these terms would have made him immensely popular.

But the ejected Premier’s abject, doleful apology appearing in the papers on the same day as the Marshal’s letter, spread consternation and disgust through the Republican party. It was a whine at the moment when a trumpet blast was expected. Simon had missed the opportunity of being great. The Republicans were ashamed of him, and spurned him with a positive yell of execration. In the course of the morning he hurried to M. Thiers’s house, and began in a lachrymose style to descant upon his wrongs, saying that he had never been the Marshal’s effective adviser, that the Duc de Broglie had all along been guiding Mac Mahon, &c. “Why on earth didn’t you say that in your letter?” screamed Thiers; and the lugubrious M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, lifting up his long arms in woe, repeated like his chief, “Why was not that said in the letter?”

Why indeed? If Jules Simon had shown spirit he would have been accounted the foremost man of the Republican party after Thiers’s death, and he might eventually have been President of the Republic in place of M. Grévy. As it was, the Republicans, after their victory at the general election of 1877,[22] refused to rank him as one of their number, and he has ever since been in the humiliating position of a pariah. His speeches in the Senate are always applauded, but not by the Republicans. It has become the fashion among his former allies to speak of him as a renegade, and facetious party-newspapers have not scrupled to play practical jokes upon him. One of these pleasantries was rather funny. A paper announced that M. Simon had inherited a large sum of money, and that, in the excess of his philanthropy, he had taken to distributing twenty ‘napoleons’ every morning among the first five score beggars (being true Republicans) who knocked at his door. For days the Place de la Madeleine, where the unhappy statesman lived was infested by hordes of vagabonds, howling “Vive la République,” and the police found it difficult to disperse these believers in M. Simon’s munificence.

M. Léon Say has been mentioned among the politicians who once seemed destined to do great things. He may do some of these things yet, for he has not lost the confidence of his party, but he is such a rider of hobbies, that he can never be expected to fall into the swing trot of any party cavalcade, even though he be suffered to caper at its head. He has been Prefect of the Seine, Minister of Finance, Ambassador to London, and President of the Senate. He is a jovial man, with a plump waist, face and moustache, not quite sixty, the proprietor of the Journal des Débats, a millionaire, and the highest French authority on finance. He writes as well as he speaks, and he speaks like a clever book. The Bourse has so much confidence in him that this return to the Ministry of Finance would at any time make the funds rise, and for this reason every Premier has been anxious to have him in the Cabinet. If M. Say would only confine himself to finance as M. Cochéry does to postal matters,[23] he might abide comfortably in office for years; but he is a political Sybarite who chafes at rose leaves. He has no sooner accepted a post than he begins to see reasons for throwing it up. Hours are wasted at every change of Cabinet in trying to persuade M. Say to join this or that combination; but either his Free Trade principles stand in the way, or he cannot sit with so and so, or he insists upon having such and such a man to be his colleague. The curious thing is that, while in opposition, M. Say takes immense trouble to get the offer of one of those places, which he rejects when they have been given him. He is not the dog biting at shadows, but the dog who snatches substantial bones, and then turns up his nose at them.

Very different is M. de Freycinet, who has neither snatched at the bones of office, nor surrendered them willingly when they fell in his way. How came this able and active politician to fail so egregiously as Prime Minister? About his talents there is no dispute, and he entered public life under Gambetta’s special and most admiring patronage. A distinguished civil engineer, he was almost unknown to the political world, when, at the senatorial elections of 1876, Gambetta brought him forward as candidate for Paris. De Freycinet was elected, and all of a sudden he got talked of as the coming man—that is, the man who was to be Gambetta’s factotum. He had dedicated a book on military tactics, with some academical compliments to his patrons; and it was remembered that he had been Gambetta’s military secretary and adviser during the war. He was supposed to be full of new ideas about army reorganisation, railway management, tax-assessment, and colonial extension. The first time he spoke in the Senate there was a hush of curiosity, and though he delivered himself in a small, piping voice, the lucidity of his reasoning, and his business-like exposition of statistics, produced a favorable impression. He was not much cheered, for applause would have drowned his voice. “Nous n’applaudissions pas pour mieux écouter,” said Léon Say politely to him.

Unfortunately, De Freycinet too soon forgot that Gambetta had singled him out as an assistant and not as a rival. He did fairly well as Minister of Public Works in M. Waddington’s Cabinet, but the rapid using up of men in parliamentary warfare forced him out of his turn into the front rank. His total and often amusing ignorance of foreign countries made him unfit for the post of Foreign Secretary, whilst his want of suppleness rendered him incapable of managing a party by means of easy social intercourse with its most prominent members. He is a politician of self-asserting conscientiousness, with a smileless face, a distant manner, and a captious tone of saying, or rather speaking, “no” to every proposal which he does not approve on a first hearing. At the Quai d’Orsay he always seemed to Ambassadors to be in a hurry; but, though he would draw out his watch two or three times in ten minutes and repeat, “Venons au fait,” he generally wasted half the time in every interview by telling his hearers that which he did not mean to do, “because my conscience forbids it.” At the time when the rewards for the Exhibition of 1878 were distributed, he told an English attaché that as the French Government had allotted 150 crosses of the Legion of Honor to exhibitors, he thought that the Queen of England would do a popular thing by awarding “twenty Garters.” When the constitution of the Order of the Garter was explained to him, he said: “Ah well, then twenty Victoria crosses.” He once remarked to Lord Lyons that he was afraid it was only an antiquated insular prejudice which prevented the English from adopting the French decimal system of coinage; and he maintained in the hearing of Prince Orloff, the Russian Ambassador, that “every Russian peasant speaks French.”

Respecting M. de Freycinet’s trick of pulling out his watch, a droll story is told. M. Tirard, now Minister of Finance, who made his fortune in the jewelry trade, once gave his colleague a gold watch as a New Year’s present, the reason of this gift being that De Freycinet had lately lost a watch. Next time the Foreign Secretary pulled out his timepiece in the Senate, a facetious member observed in a stage whisper: “He wants to make sure that Tirard’s present isn’t pinchbeck.” “I am sure it is not,” answered the unjocular Freycinet, turning round quite gravely in his place; “you are quite mistaken in ascribing any such suspicions to me, sir.”

De Freycinet and Gambetta soon quarrelled, because the former as Prime Minister wanted to follow out a policy of his own or else compel Gambetta to take the reins. “I’ll be coachman or passenger,” he said with his love of logical arrangements: “but I won’t sit on the box and let you drive from the inside.” He had to resign, and the next time he came to office, after the fall of the “Grand Ministère,” it was as Gambetta’s declared opponent. But Gambetta at once set himself to show that, although he had been unable himself to command a majority, no Cabinet could live without his support, and M. de Freycinet was made the first victim of this demonstration. He was overthrown on the Egyptian question, and as M. Ferry did not care to be bowled over in the same style, the veteran M. Duclerc was asked to form an emergency Cabinet. But this gentleman and his successor M. Fallières, nick-named “le Gambetta blond,” were mere nonentities.

M. Duclerc’s Cabinet was called the Long Vacation Ministry, because it was too obviously predestined to collapse at the first contact with Parliament. M. Fallières’s Administration lasted but ten days, owing to the excessive modesty of its chief in recognising that he had been placed on a pinnacle too high for his nerves. On the strength of his sobriquet —though his only resemblance to Gambetta consisted in his being fat and hearty—he had been giving himself some airs as a pretender to office, but his sudden accession to the Premiership in the trying period that followed Gambetta’s death, made him so giddy that he was smitten with gastric derangement and had to pen a resignation in his bedroom. It was then that Jules Ferry, laughing quietly in his sleeve at the discomfiture of his various competitors, came back to the helm as already described.

We have said nothing about M. Waddington and M. Challemel-Lacour, who were once thought superior to him in their prospects because M. Jules Ferry has really always had advantages over these two rivals. M. Challemel-Lacour, who is now shelved, has been a much over-rated man, and M. Waddington is an Englishman. If it had not been for M. Waddington’s nationality, which has estranged him a little from French thought and made the French people somewhat suspicious of him, his talents would possibly have enabled him to keep the leadership of the Moderate Republicans; but then it has to be borne in mind that if he were not English—a Rugbeian, a Cantab, a scholar and athlete—his talents would not be what they are. M. Waddington may remain a valued servant of the Republic and hold all sorts of high posts except the highest; but the greatest destinies perhaps await Eugène Clémenceau—the sixth on our list of men who were once preferred to M. Ferry, as “favorites” for the first place.

M. Clémenceau is another of those Northerners whose ascendency disproves M. Daudet’s theory. He is a Breton, a doctor by profession, a keen, cold man with a cutting tongue, and something of military peremptoriness in his manner. He began his political career by opening a free dispensary in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, and giving advice gratis to the poor on politics as well as medicine. He was elected mayor for one of the wards of Paris during the siege, and performed his administrative business splendidly, at a time when almost all the other mayors were blundering. He and Gambetta hated each other so thoroughly that it is a wonder they never came to duelling. The Breton Doctor, who loathes “gush,” despised the Southerner’s rhodomontade; and Gambetta used to bound and roar like a stung lion at the contemptuous thrusts which Clémenceau made at him both from the tribune and from the columns of his newspaper, the Justice. This paper is not pleasant reading, for its editor appears always to write as if he meant to provoke his enemies into personal quarrels. He is a brilliant swordsman, most dangerous because left-handed, and a capital shot with pistols. Even the doughty Paul de Cassagnac once declined a meeting with him.

M. Clémenceau has been patiently biding his time—which does not mean that he has been spending his time to good purpose, for he has attacked every Government during the last eight years with an utter disregard of the dangers which might accrue to the Republic through the continual overthrow of Ministries. This must lead one to doubt whether there is not more of personal ambition than of public spirit in his tactics, for the only alternative would be to suppose him stupid, and that he certainly is not. He has now transferred to Jules Ferry the scorn which he formerly poured upon Gambetta, and the two men must be regarded as exponents of two completely antagonistic schools of Republicanism. Jules Ferry used not to be an Opportunist, but in succeeding to the leadership of Gambetta’s party, he has had to take up its programme—colonial extension, little wars for glory, Protection, temporisation in Home affairs, and in particular as regards the relations between Church and State. M. Clémenceau, on the contrary, is a Free-trader, non-interventionist, decentraliser and disestablisher. He is more in harmony with the Manchester school than any other French politician. That huge system of administrative centralisation, which Napoleon created, is to him abhorrent, and he is a partisan of local self-government on the largest scale. He is fond of relating how a certain village mayor, receiving in 1852 a copy of the new Imperial Constitution with orders to post it up, wrote to M. de Morny, saying that he had done as requested, and would be happy to post up as many more Constitutions as might be sent him thereafter.

M. Clémenceau’s Church policy may be summed up in the word Destruction; he goes much further than a mere abrogation of the Concordat. He looks to the day when Notre-Dame shall be a museum, and the Madeleine a scientific institute. He holds that the Republic should repudiate the Catholic Church and treat all ecclesiastical buildings as State property. He would not object to a Gallican Church being afterwards constituted, nor forbid members of that communion from buying back some of the churches if they could afford to do so; but he would apply to Roman Catholics the law against secret societies, and absolutely prohibit French priests, under pain of banishment, to acknowledge the authority of Rome. When people arguing with him about this scheme, remark that “persecution never succeeds,” he answers: “Nonsense, it is half-hearted persecution that does not succeed. Protestantism was thoroughly well stamped out of Spain, and Romanism out of England. I should not expect to get rid of our French Romanists within a few years—two or three generations would be required to complete the extirpation. But if the work is to be done fully, it must be commenced with vigor.”

M. Clémenceau will never do much when he comes to office, because he wants the power of moving masses. He has already been yelled at in Montmartre as a backslider because he has refused to espouse the economic fallacies of the Socialists. The multitude is not to be swayed by pure reason, and no man can be a successful revolutionist unless he have a dash of the fanatic about him. Events are nevertheless preparing to bring M. Clémenceau to the Premiership, and this consummation will be important because it will involve the incursion of an entirely new set of men into all the public offices. M. Clémenceau’s influence comes, not from his doctrines, but simply from his combativeness which has made him the captain of a fine hungry host of young men who see no chance of turning the Opportunists out of their snug places under Government except by banding together as a new party.

If M. Ferry could bring the China and Tonquin wars to a brilliant ending, could manage to create a Budget surplus, reduce taxation, relieve the military burdens of the country, and put an end to the agricultural and commercial stagnation—he might become a People’s man for some years. Indeed he might consolidate his popularity by carrying out half of the programme just sketched. The least success on his part in war or diplomacy would be inflated by his Opportunist supporters into a great triumph, because it is indispensable for the existence of a party that its leader should be a man of reputation. Political ideas must be incarnated in a man before democratic electorates can understand them. Gambetta’s death took the Opportunists by surprise, and they were not prepared with a man to put in his place. “Jouons au Ferry,” said M. Arthur Ranc, and M. Ferry had the great luck of coming to power just at the moment when the Opportunists had begun to perceive that there must be no more overthrowing of Cabinets for some time.—Temple Bar.

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ORGANIC NATURE’S RIDDLE.
BY ST. GEORGE MIVART.

II.

A thoroughly mechanical conception of nature is the scientific ideal of a very large and a very influential school of thinkers.[24] and the goal towards which they strive. In so striving they follow the lead of the earliest of modern philosophers, Descartes, who would probably have felt no small satisfaction could he have foreseen that the doctrine of animal automatism would be so eloquently advocated in the nineteenth century, as well as that of a mechanical evolution of new species of animals and plants.

Evidently the last-mentioned conception was necessary to render the mechanical theory complete. As long as men believed in the action of any mysterious intelligence hidden in nature, and working through it in specific evolution towards foreseen and intended ends, a mechanical conception of nature was obviously impossible. But no less impossible was the acceptance of such a mechanical hypothesis as long as any belief remained in the existence, in individual animals, of an innate and mysterious instinctive power directing their actions in ways beneficial to them or to their race, yet unintended and unforeseen by the creatures which performed those actions. A denial of the existence of any true “instinct,” as well as of any unmechanical action in specific evolution, was then necessary for the maintenance of the mechanical theory, and accordingly such denials have been confidently made, as we have already seen.

While, however, this current of thought has been gaining in volume and velocity, another contrary current has no less made itself manifest, and amongst its exponents Edward Von Hartmann[25] is an eloquent advocate of the manifest action of intelligence in nature, and of what may thus be called an “intellectual” as opposed to a “mechanical” conception of the universe. He lays much stress upon instinct, and is as earnest in asserting its distinct existence and nature, as are the mechanicians in denying its existence.

As was said at the beginning of the former article, the great interest just now of the study of instinct, lies in its bearings on the Darwinian hypothesis, or rather on the philosophy therewith connected. Let us then proceed to examine whether or not the analogies before pointed out between instinct and other forms of vital activity can be carried further. Let us especially examine whether the consideration of instinct in the widest sense of that term, throws any glimmerings of light upon that most recondite and still most mysterious process, the genesis of new species.

We may be encouraged to hope that such a result is possible from the words of one of those twin biologists who on the same night put forth their independently-arrived-at views as to what we are all agreed to regard as at least an important factor in the origin of species. No less a person than Mr. Wallace has written the following significant words:—

“No thoughtful person can contemplate without amazement the phenomena presented by the development of animals. We see the most diverse forms—a mollusk, a frog, and a mammal—arising from apparently identical primitive cells, and progressing for a time by very similar initial changes, but thereafter each pursuing its highly complex and often circuitous course of development with unerring certainty, by means of laws and forces of which we are totally ignorant. It is surely a not improbable supposition that the unknown power which determines and regulates this marvellous process may also determine the initiation of these more important changes of structure, and those developments of new parts and organs which characterise the successive stages of the evolutions of animal forms.”

These words advocate and confirm what I have elsewhere antecedently urged. Many influences doubtless may come into play in the origin of new species; but let us look a little narrowly at certain influences which must come into play therein, and the action of which no man can deny.

One of these influences (which no one has more richly illustrated than has the late Mr. Darwin) is that of heredity; but what is heredity?

In the first place it is obviously a property, not of new individuals, not of offspring, but of parental forms. As every one knows, it is the innate tendency which each organism possesses to reproduce its like. If any living creature, x, was self-impregnating and the outcome of a long line of self-impregnating predecessors, all existing in the midst of one uniform and continuously unvarying environment, then x would produce offspring completely like itself. This fundamental biological law of reproduction may be compared with the physical first law of motion, according to which any body in motion will continue to move on uniformly at the same rate and in the same direction until some other force or motion is impressed upon it.

The fact that new individual organisms arise from both a paternal and a maternal influence, and from a line of ancestors every one of which had a similar bifold origin, modifies this first law of heredity only so far as to produce a more or less complex compound of hereditary reproductive tendencies in every individual, the effect of which must be analogous to that mechanical law of the composition of forces resulting in the production of a new creature resembling its immediate and more remote progenitors in varying degrees, according to (1) the amount of force springing from each ancestral strain, and (2) the compatibility or incompatibility[26] of the prevailing tendencies, resulting in an intensification, perpetuation, modification, or neutralisation of ancestral characters, as the case may be.

All such action is but “heredity” acting in one or other mode; but there is another and fundamentally different action which has to be considered, and that is the action of the environment upon nascent organisms—an action exercised either directly upon them, or indirectly upon them through its direct action upon their parents. That such actions produce unmistakable effects is notorious. It will be, I think, sufficient here to advert to such cases as the well-known brood-mare covered by a quagga, and the peculiar effects of a well-bred bitch being lined by a mongrel. These show how an action exercised upon the female parent (but with no direct action on the immediate offspring) may act indirectly upon her subsequent progeny.

As a rule, modifications accidentally or artificially induced in parents are not transmitted to their offspring, as is well shown by the need of the repetition of circumcision, and of pressure of Indian children’s heads and Chinese girls’ feet, in each generation. Yet there is good evidence that such changes are occasionally inherited. The epileptic offspring of injured guinea-pigs is a case often referred to. Haëckel speaks of a bull which had lost its tail by accident, and which begot entirely tailless calves. With respect to cats,[27] I am indebted to Mr. John Birkett for the knowledge of an instance in which a female with an injured tail produced some stump-tailed kittens in two litters.

There is evidence that certain variations are more apt to be inherited than others. Amongst those very apt to be inherited are skin affections, affections of the nervous system and of the generative organs, e.g. hypospadias and absence of the uterus. The last case is one especially interesting, because it can only be propagated indirectly.

Changes in the environment notoriously produce changes in certain cases, even in adults. The modifications which may result from the action of unusual agencies on the embryo have been well shown by M. C. Dareste.[28] As has been already remarked, processes of repair take place the more readily the younger the age of the subject. Similarly, it is probable that the action of the environment generally acts more promptly and intensely on the embryo than in the older young. That the same organism will sometimes assume very different forms has been observed by Professor Lankester in the case of Bacterium rufescens.[29]

The effects of changed conditions is often very striking. Ficus stipulata grown on a wall has small, thin leaves, and clings to the surface like a large moss or a miniature ivy. Planted out, it forms a shrub, with large, coarse, leathery leaves.

Mr. Wallace has pointed out some of the curious direct effects of external conditions on organisms. He tells us[30] that in the small island of Amboina the butterflies (twelve species, of nine different genera) are larger than those of any of the more considerable islands about it, and that this is an effect probably due to some local influence. In Celebes a whole series of butterflies are not only of a larger size, but have the same peculiar form of wing. The Duke of York’s Island seems, he tells us, to have a tendency to make birds and insects white, or at least pale, and the Philippines to develop metallic colors; while the Moluccas and New Guinea seem to favor blackness and redness in parrots and pigeons. Species of butterflies which in India are provided with a tail to the wing, begin to lose that appendage in the islands, and retain no trace of it on the borders of the Pacific. The Æneas group of papilios never have tails in the equatorial region of the Amazon Valley, but gradually acquire tails, in many cases, as they range towards the northern and southern tropics. Mr. Gould says that birds are more highly colored under a clear atmosphere than in islands or on coasts—a condition which also seems to affect insects, while it is notorious that many shore plants have fleshy leaves. We need but refer to the English oysters mentioned by Costa, which, when transported to the Mediterranean, grew rapidly like the true Mediterranean oyster, and to the twenty different kinds of American trees said by Mr. Meehan to differ in the same manner from their nearest American allies, as well as to the dogs, cats, and rabbits which have been proved to undergo modifications directly induced by climatic change. But still more strange and striking changes have been recorded as due to external conditions. Thus it is said[31] that certain branchiopodous creatures of the crab and lobster class (certain crustacea) have been changed from the form characteristic of one genus (Artemia salina) into that of quite another (Branchipus), by having been introduced in large numbers by accident into very salt water. The latter form is not only larger than the former, but has an additional abdominal segment and a differently formed tail. Such changes tell strongly in favor of the existence in creatures of positive, innate tendencies to change in definite directions under special conditions.

It is also obvious that the very same influences (e.g. amounts of light, heat, moisture, &c.) will produce different effects in different species, as also that the nature of some species is more stubborn and less prone to variation than that of others. Such, for example, is the case with the ass, the guinea-fowl, and the goose, as compared with the dog, the horse, the domestic fowl, and the pigeon. Thus both the amount and the kind of variability differ in different races, and such constitutional capacities or incapacities tend to be inherited by their derivative forms, and so every kind of animal must have its own inherent powers of modifiability or resistance, so that no organism or race of organisms can vary in an absolutely indefinite manner; and if so, then unlimited variability must be a thing absolutely impossible.

The foregoing considerations tend to show that every variation is a function[32] of “heredity” and “external influence”—i.e. is the result of the reaction of the special nature of each organism upon the stimuli of its environment.

In addition to the action of heredity and the action of the environment, there is also a peculiar kind of action due to an internal force which has brought about so many interesting cases of what is called “serial and lateral homology” which cannot be due to descent, but which demonstrate the existence of an intra-organic activity, the laws of which have yet to be investigated. Comparative anatomy, pathology, and teratology combine to point out the action of this internal force.

“Lateral homology” refers to the production of similar structures on either side of the body, as in the similarity of our right and left hands and feet. “Serial homology” refers to the production of similar structures one behind the other, as in the series of similar segments in the body of a worm or a centipede, and the similar series of limbs in the latter animal.

These tendencies to lateral and serial repetition show themselves in ways which cannot be accounted for by inheritance from ancestral forms, but loudly proclaim the presence and action of some internal force tending to produce such homologous repetitions in organisms in different animals.

Thus even in ourselves, when we compare our leg and foot with our arm and hand, we find that they have homologous features which cannot be accounted for as being inheritances from supposed ancestral animals. Our extremities resemble each other in the texture of the skin, the shape of the nails, and other points, and these resemblances are not due to external conditions, but exist in spite of them; and comparative anatomy reveals to us countless similar examples in the animal kingdom. Limbs can hardly be more unlike in form and position than are the arms and legs of birds, and yet we meet with breeds of fowls and pigeons the feet of which are furnished with what are called “boots,” that is, with long feathers which grow on the side of the foot, serially corresponding with that of the hand, which grow the feathers of the wing.

Again, in disease, and in cases of monstrosity or congenital malformation, nothing is more common than to find precisely similarly diseased conditions, or similar abnormalities of structure, affecting serially or laterally homologous parts, such as corresponding parts of the two arms or two legs, or of the right (or left) arm and hand and leg and foot respectively.

Altogether it seems then to be undeniable that the characters and the variations of species[33] are due to the combined action of internal and external agencies acting in a direct, positive, and constructive manner.

It is obvious, however, that no character very prejudicial to a species could ever be established, owing to the perpetual action of all the destructive forces of nature which destructive forces, considered as one whole, have been personified under the name “natural selection.”

Its action, of course, is, and must be, destructive and negative. The evolution of a new species is as necessarily a process which is constructive and positive, and, as all must admit, is one due to those variations upon which natural selection acts. Variation, which thus lies at the origin of every new species, is (as we have seen) the reaction of the nature of the varying animal upon all the multitudinous agencies which environ it. Thus “the nature of the animal” must be taken as the cause, “the environment” being the stimulus which sets that cause in action, and “natural selection” the agency which restrains it within the bounds of physiological propriety.

We may compare the production of a new species to the production of a statue. We have (1) the marble material responding to the matter of the organism; (2) the intelligent active force of the sculptor, directing his arm, responding to the psychic nature of the organism, which reacts according to law as surely as in the case of reflex action in healing, or in any other vital action; (3) the various conceptions of the artist, which stimulate him to model, responding to the environing agencies which evoke variation; and (4) the blows of the smiting chisel, corresponding to the action of natural selection. No one would call the mere blows of the chisel—apart from both the active force of the artist and the ideal conceptions which direct that force—the cause of the production of the statue. They are a cause—they help to produce it and are absolutely necessary for its production. They are a material cause, but not the primary cause. This distinction runs through all spheres of activity. Thus the inadequacy of “natural selection” to explain the origin of species runs parallel with its inadequacy to explain the origin of instinct, as before pointed out.

The formal discoverer of a new fossil is the naturalist who first sees it with an instructed eye, appreciates and describes it, not the laborer who accidentally uncovers but ignores it, and who cannot be accounted to be, any more than the spade he handles, other than a mere material cause of its discovery. So we must regard the sum of the destructive agencies of nature, as a material cause of the origin of new species, their formal cause being the reaction of the nature of their parent organisms upon the sum of the multitudinous influences of their environment. This kind of action of “the organism”—this formal cause—has been compared by Mr. Alfred Wallace, and by me, with the action of the organism in its embryonic development; and this, I have further urged, is to be likened to the processes of repair and reproduction of parts of the individual after injury, and this, again, to reflex action, and, finally, this last to instinct as manifested in ourselves and in other animals also.

The phenomena, then, exhibited in the various processes which have been passed in review—nutrition, growth, repair, reflex action, instinct, the evolution of the individual and of the species—will, I think, abundantly serve to convince him who carefully considers them, that a mechanical conception of nature is inadequate and untenable. For it cannot be denied that in all these various natural processes, performed by creatures devoid of self-conscious intellect, there is somehow and somewhere a latent rationality, by the imminent existence of which their various admirably calculated activities are alone explicable. We are compelled to admit that the merely animal and vegetable worlds which we regard as irrational, possess a certain rationality. This innate mysterious rationality blindly executes the most elaborately contrived actions in order to effect necessary or useful ends not consciously in view. We have here to consider the question, “How is this blind rationality, this practical but unconscious intelligence, explicable?”

Edward Von Hartmann, the eloquent prophet of the unconscious intelligence of nature, teaches us that such intelligence is the attribute of the very animals and plants themselves.

But can we limit the manifestations of intelligence and quasi-instinctive purpose to the organic world? By no means. The phenomena of crystallisation, the repair in due form of the broken angle of a crystal, the inherent tendencies of chemical substances to combine in definite proportions, and other laws of the inorganic world, speak to us of unconscious intelligence and volition latent in it also.

A perception of this truth has led to the conception of the universal presence of true intelligence, as it were in a rudimentary form, throughout the whole material universe—the universal diffusion of what the late Professor Clifford called “mind-stuff” in every particle of matter.

Such a belief can, however, be entertained only by those who neglect to note the differences of objects presented to the senses, attending solely to their resemblances, and describing them by inadequate and misleading terms. The habit of perverting language in this manner, has been lately well spoken of as using intellectual false coin. By such an abuse of language and disregard of points of unlikeness, all diversities may easily be reduced to identity. Against such abuse the scientific biologist must energetically protest. The expression “life” refers to definite phenomena which are not found but in animals and plants. The crystal is not really alive, because it does not undergo the cycle of changes characteristic of life. It does not sustain itself by alimentation, reproduce its kind, and die. Anyone choosing to stretch terms may say that molecules of inorganic matter live, because molecules exist. But in that case we shall have to create a new term to denote what we now call life. We might as well say a lamp-post “feels” because we can make an impression on it, or that crystals “calculate” because of their geometrical proportions, or that oxygen “lusts” after that which it rusts. As the late Mr. G. H. Lewes has said: “We deny that a crystal has sensibility; we deny it on the ground that crystals exhibit no more signs of sensibility than plants exhibit signs of civilisation, and we deny it on the ground that among the conditions of sensibility there are some positively known to us, and these are demonstrably absent from the crystal. We have full evidence that it is only special kinds of molecular change that exhibit the special signs called sentient; we have as good evidence that only special aggregations of molecules are vital, and that sensibility never appears except in a living organism, disappearing with the vital activities, as we know that banks and trades-unions are specifically human institutions.”

The considerations which are here applied to vital activity, may be paralleled by others applied to intelligence. They will show us that however profoundly rational may be that world which is commonly spoken of as irrational, yet that its rationality is not truly the attribute of the various animals which perform such admirably calculated actions, but truly belongs to what is the ultimate and common cause of them all, and to that only.

There is, indeed, a logic in mere “feeling,” there is a logic even in insentient nature; but that logic is not the logic of the crystal nor of the brute; its true position must be sought elsewhere. It is in them, but it is not of them.

However, let us patiently consider a little this hypothesis of an innate, unconscious intelligence as the cause of the various strictly, or analogically, instinctive actions of animals.

It is in the first place plain that no intelligence could exist so as to adjust “means” to “ends,” except by the aid of memory; and “memory” has therefore been freely attributed even to the lower animals. Let us see, then, what the term “memory” really denotes. Now we cannot be said to remember anything unless we are conscious that what is again made present to our mind has been present to our mind before. An image might recur to our imagination a hundred times, but if at each recurrence it was for us something altogether new and unconnected with the past, we could not be said to remember it. It would rather be an example of extreme “forgetfulness” than of “memory.” In “memory,” then, there are and must be two distinct elements. The first is the reproduction before the mind of what has been before the mind previously, and the second element is the recognition of what is so reproduced as being connected with the past.

There is yet a further distinction which may be drawn between acts of true recollection.

We are all aware that every now and then we direct our attention to try and recall something which we know we have for the moment forgotten, and which we instantly recognise when we have recalled it. But besides this voluntary memory we are sometimes startled by the flashing into consciousness of something we had forgotten, and which we were so far from trying to recollect that we were thinking of something entirely different.

There are, then, two kinds of true memory—one in which the will intervenes, and which may be spoken of as recollection, and the other in which it does not, and which may be termed reminiscence. Neither of these can exist in a creature destitute of true self-consciousness. There are, however, two other kinds of repeated action which take place even in ourselves, and which should be carefully distinguished.

The first of these are practically automatic actions, which are repeated unconsciously after having been learned, as in walking, reading, speaking, and often in playing some musical instrument. In a certain vague and improper sense we may be said—having learned how to do these things—to recollect how to do them; but unless the mind recognises the past in the present while performing them they are not instances of memory, but merely a form of habit in which consciousness may or may not intervene.

The second class of repeated actions just referred to are, on the other hand, those in which consciousness cannot be made to intervene, and are mere acts of organic habit. Thus a man wrecked on an island inhabited by savages, and long dwelling there, may at first have the due action of his digestive organs impeded by the unwonted food on which he may have to live. After a little while, however, the evil diminishes, and in time his organism may have “learnt” how to correspond perfectly with the new conditions. Then with each fresh meal the alimentary canal and glands must practically “recognise” a return of the recently obtained experience, and repeat its freshly acquired power of healthy response thereto. Can “memory” be properly predicated of such actions of the alimentary glands? It can be so predicated only by a perversion of language. It is not memory, because not only is it divorced from consciousness as it occurs, but it cannot anyhow be made present to consciousness. Again, a boy at school has had a kick at football, which has left a deep scar on his leg. That boy, now become an old man, still bears the same scar, though all his tissues have been again and again transformed in the course of seventy years. Can the constant reproduction of the mark, in any reasonable sense, be said to be an act of, or due to, memory? Evidently it cannot, and neither can it be reasonably predicated of any of the actions of plants or of the lowest animals.

As, then, “memory” cannot be predicated, except by an abuse of language, of the lower forms of life, it would appear that neither intelligence nor rationality can truly exist in them, so as to preside over all those actions of nutrition, repair, reproduction, and instinct which we have examined and distinguished.

Nevertheless, Hartmann and his followers do not on this account hesitate to ascribe true intelligence to unconscious nature, and though such ascription may seem too absurd to deserve serious consideration, it would nevertheless be a great mistake to despise such opinions. For, as Mr. Lewes truly says,[34] “As there are many truths which cease to be appreciated because they are never disputed,” so there are many errors which are best exposed by allowing them to run to a head. Mr. Butler, who carries this hypothesis of unconscious intelligence to its last consequences, asks,[35] “What is to know how to do a thing?” His answer is, “Surely, to do it.” And he represents how, when many things have been perfectly learnt, they may be performed unconsciously. In a very amusing chapter on “Conscious and unconscious knowers,” he says, “Whenever we find people knowing they know this or that ... they do not yet know it perfectly.” In another place he says,[36] “We say of the chicken that it knows how to run about as soon as it is hatched ... but had it no knowledge before it was hatched? It grew eyes, feathers, and bones; yet we say it knew nothing about all this.... What, then, does it know? Whatever it knows so well as to be unconscious of knowing it. Knowledge dwells on the confines of uncertainty. When we are very certain we do not know that we know. When we will very strongly, we do not know that we will.”

Now the fact is that there is great ambiguity in the use of the word know. Just as before with the term memory, so also here, certain distinctions must be drawn if we would think coherently.

A. To “know,” in the highest sense which we give to the word, is to be aware (by a reflex act) that we really have a certain given perception. It is a voluntary, intelligent, self-conscious act, parallel to that kind of memory which we before distinguished as “recollection.”

B. We also say we “know” when we do not use a reflex act, but yet have a true perception—a perception accompanied by consciousness—as when we teach, and in most of our ordinary intellectual acts.

C. When we so “know” a thing that it can be done with perfect unconsciousness, we cannot be said to “know” it intellectually, although in doing that thing our nervous and motor mechanism acts (in response to sensational stimuli) as perfectly as, or more perfectly than, in our conscious activity. The “knowledge” which accompanies such “unconscious action” is improperly so called, except in so far as we may be able to direct our minds to its perception, and so render it worthy of the name—as we have seen we may direct attention to our unconscious reminiscences, and so make them conscious ones. In the same way then in which we have already distinguished such acts of memory (while unconscious) as sensuous memory, so we may distinguish such acts of apprehension (while unconscious) as sensuous cognition. By it we can understand, to a certain extent, what may be the “knowledge” or “sensuous cognition” of mere animals.

D. Besides the above three kinds of apprehensions, we may distinguish others which can be only very remotely, if at all, compared with knowledge, since they can never, by any effort, be brought within the sphere of consciousness. Such are the actions of our organism by which it responds to impressions in an orderly and appropriate but unfelt manner—the intimate actions of our visceral organs, which can be modified, within limits, according to the influence brought to bear on them, as we may see in the oarsman’s hand, the blacksmith’s arm, and the ballet-dancer’s leg.

If such actions could be spoken of as in any sense apprehensive, they would have to be spoken of as “organic cognitions,” but they may be best distinguished as “organic response” or “organic correspondence.”

That the inorganic world, no less than the organic, is instinct with reason, and that we find in it objective conditions which correspond with our subjective conceptions, is perfectly true; but when once the profound difference between mere organic habit and intellectual memory is apprehended, there will be little difficulty in recognising the yet greater difference between “organic correspondence” and the faithfulness of inorganic matter to the laws of its being.

That the absence of consciousness in actions which are perfectly performed, does not make such actions into acts of “perfect knowledge,” is demonstrated by every calculating machine. No sane person can say that such a machine “possesses” knowledge, though it is true that it “exhibits” it. Similarly we must refuse to apply the terms “memory” and “intelligence” to the merely organic activity of animals and plants.

The assertion that in the vegetal and lowest animal forms of life there is an innate but unconscious intelligence, is an assertion which contains an inherent contradiction, and is therefore fundamentally irrational. Anyone who says that blind actions (in which no end is perceived or intended) are truly intelligent ones, abuses language. The meaning of words is due to convention, and anyone who calls such actions truly intelligent, divides himself from the rest of mankind by refusing to speak their language.

What experience have we which can justify such a conception as that of “unconscious intelligence?” We are indeed aware of a multitude of actions which are evidently the outcome of intelligence, but which (like the analogous action of a calculating machine) are performed by creatures really unconscious, though they may possess consentience. But consciousness is the accompaniment of all those actions which we know to be intellectual and rational. Our experience then contradicts the hypothesis of the existence of any such thing as “unconscious intelligence.” Such a thing is indeed no true concept, for it is incapable not only of being imagined but also of being really conceived of. It resembles such unmeaning expressions as “a square pentagon” or a “pitch-dark luminosity.”

Nevertheless, our experience is in favor of the existence of an intelligence which can implant in and elicit from unconscious bodies activities which are intelligent in appearance and result. Thus we can construct calculating machines and train animals to perform many actions which have a delusive semblance of rationality.

“Truly intelligent action” we know as being intelligent and rational in its foresight, and therefore as necessarily conscious in the very principle of its being.

“Unconsciously intelligent action,” improperly called “intelligent” or “wise,” is that which is intelligent and wise only as to its results, and not in the innermost principle of the creatures (whether living or mere machines) which perform such action. To speak technically, we have “formal” and “material” intelligence, as we have “formal” and “material” vice and virtue.[37] We have already distinguished between the “formal” and the merely “material” discoverer of a new fossil, and this distinction is one which it is most important to bear in mind. It is the failure to apprehend this distinction which is the root of a vast number of modern philosophical errors, and the error which consists in asserting the reality of “unconscious intelligence” is one of them.

In fact “intelligence” exists very truly, in a certain sense, in the admirably directed actions blindly performed by living beings. It is not, however, “formally” in them, but exists formally in their ultimate cause. Nevertheless that intelligence is so implanted within them that it truly exists in them “materially” though it is not “formally” in them.

We have here, then, the answer to the question, “What is the rationality of the irrational?” It is a rationality which is very really, though not materially, present in the irrational world, while it is formally present in that world’s cause and origin.

To every Theist this answer will be a satisfactory one. To him who is not a Theist there is no really satisfactory answer possible. This is a question not of theology but of pure reason antecedent to all theology. To reason, and to reason only, I appeal when I affirm that the existence of a constant, pervading, sustaining, directing, and all-controlling but unfathomable Intelligence which is not the intelligence of irrational creatures themselves, is the supreme truth which nature eloquently proclaims to him who with unprejudiced reason and loving sympathy will carefully consider her ways. He can hardly fail to discover, immanent in the material universe, “an action the results of which harmonize with man’s reason; an action which is orderly, and disaccords with blind chance, or ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ but which ever eludes his grasp, and which acts in modes different from those by which we should attempt to accomplish similar ends.”[38] For myself, I am bound humbly to confess that the more I study nature the more I am convinced that in the action of this all-pervading but inscrutable and unimaginable intelligence, of which self-conscious human rationality is the utterly inadequate image, though the image attainable by us, is to be sought the sole possible explanation of the mysterious but undeniable presence in nature of a rationality in that which is in itself irrational.—Fortnightly Review.

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CONCERNING EYES.
BY WILLIAM H. HUDSON.

White, crimson, emerald green, shining golden yellow, are amongst the colors seen in the eyes of birds. In owls, herons, cormorants, and many other tribes, the brightly-tinted eye is incomparably the finest feature and chief glory. It fixes the attention at once, appearing like a splendid gem, for which the airy bird-body with its graceful curves and soft tints forms an appropriate setting. When the eye closes in death, the bird, except to the naturalist, becomes a mere bundle of dead feathers: crystal globes may be put into the empty sockets, and a bold life-imitating attitude given to the stuffed specimen; but the vitreous orbs shoot forth no life-like flames, the “passion and the fire whose fountains are within” have vanished, and the best work of the taxidermist, who has given a life to his bastard art, produces in the mind only sensations of irritation and disgust. In museums, where limited space stands in the way of any abortive attempts at copying nature too closely, the stuffer’s work is endurable because useful; but in a drawing-room, who does not close his eyes or turn aside to avoid seeing a case of stuffed birds—those unlovely mementoes of death in their gay plumes? who does not shudder, albeit not with fear, to see the wild cat, filled with straw, yawning horribly, and trying to frighten the spectator with its crockery glare? I shall never forget the first sight I had of the late Mr. Gould’s collection of humming-birds (now in the National Museum), shown to me by the naturalist himself, who evidently took considerable pride in the work of his hands. I had just left tropical nature behind me across the Atlantic, and the unexpected meeting with a transcript of it in a dusty room in Bedford Square gave me quite a shock. Those pellets of dead feathers, which had long ceased to sparkle and shine, stuck with wires—not invisible—over blossoming cloth and tinsel bushes, how melancholy they made me feel!

Considering the bright color and great splendor of some eyes, particularly in birds, it seems probable that in these cases the organ has a twofold use: first and chiefly, to see; secondly, to intimidate an adversary with those luminous mirrors, in which all the dangerous fury of a creature brought to bay is best depicted. Throughout nature the dark eye predominates; and there is certainly a great depth of fierceness in the dark eye of a bird of prey; but its effect is less than that produced by the vividly-colored eye, or even of the white eye of some raptorial species, as, for instance, of the Asturina pucherani. Violent emotions are associated in our minds—possibly, also, in the minds of other species—with certain colors. Bright red seems the appropriate hue of anger: the poet Herbert even calls the rose “angrie and brave” on account of its hue: and the red or orange certainly expresses resentment better than the dark eye. Even a very slight spontaneous variation in the coloring of the irides might give an advantage to an individual for natural selection to act on; for we can see in almost any living creature that not only in its perpetual metaphorical struggle for existence is its life safeguarded in many ways; but when protective resemblances, flight, and instincts of concealment all fail, and it is compelled to engage in a real struggle with a living adversary, it is provided for such occasions with another set of defences. Language and attitudes of defiance come into play; feathers or hairs are erected; beaks snap and strike, or teeth are gnashed, and the mouth foams or spits; the body puffs out; wings are waved or feet stamped on the ground, and many other gestures of rage are practised. It is not possible to believe that the coloring of the crystal globes, towards which an opponent’s sight is first directed, and which most vividly exhibit the raging emotions within, can have been entirely neglected as a means of defence by the principle of selection in nature. For all these reasons I believe the bright-colored eye is an improvement on the dark eye.

Man has been very little improved in this direction, the dark eye, except in the north of Europe, having been, until recent times, almost or quite universal. The blue eye does not seem to have any advantage for man in a state of nature, being mild where fierceness of expression is required; it is almost unknown amongst the inferior creatures; and only on the supposition that the appearance of the eye is less important to man’s welfare than it is to that of other species can we account for its survival in a branch of the human race. Little, however, as the human eye has changed, assuming it to have been dark originally, there is a great deal of spontaneous variation in individuals, light hazel and blue-grey being apparently the most variable. I have found curiously marked and spotted eyes not uncommon; in some instances the spots being so black, round, and large as to produce the appearance of eyes with clusters of pupils on them. I have known one person with large brown spots on light blue-grey eyes, whose children all inherited the peculiarity; also another with reddish hazel irides thickly marked with fine characters resembling Greek letters. This person was an Argentine of Spanish blood, and was called by his neighbors ojos escritos, or written eyes. It struck me as a very curious circumstance that these eyes, both in their ground color and the form and disposition of the markings traced on them, were precisely like the eyes of a common species of grebe, Podiceps rollandi. But we look in vain amongst men for the splendid crimson, flaming yellow, or startling white orbs which would have made the dark-skinned brave inspired by violent emotions a being terrible to see. Nature has neglected man in this respect, and it is to remedy the omission that he stains his face with bright pigments and crowns his head with eagles’ barred plumes.

Bright-colored eyes in many species are probably due, like ornaments and gaudy plumage, to sexual selection. The quality of shining in the dark, however, possessed by many nocturnal and semi-nocturnal species, has always, I believe, a hostile purpose. When found in inoffensive species, as, for instance, in the lemurs, it can only be attributed to mimicry, and this would be a parallel case with butterflies mimicking the brilliant “warning colors” of other species on which birds do not prey. Cats amongst mammals, and owls amongst birds, have been most highly favored; but to the owls the palm must be given. The feline eyes, as of a puma or wild cat, blazing with wrath, are wonderful to see; sometimes the sight of them affects one like an electric shock; but for intense brilliance and quick changes, the dark orbs kindling with the startling suddenness of a cloud illuminated by flashes of lightning, the yellow globes of the owl are unparalleled. Some readers might think my language exaggerated. Descriptions of bright sunsets and of storms with thunder and lightning would, no doubt, sound extravagant to one who had never witnessed these phenomena. Those only who spend years “conversing with wild animals in desert places,” to quote Azara’s words, know that, as with the atmosphere, so with animal life, there are special moments; and that a creature presenting a very sorry appearance dead in a museum, or living in captivity, may, when hard pressed and fighting for life in its own fastness, be sublimed by its fury into a weird and terrible object.

Nature has many surprises for those who wait on her: one of the greatest she ever favored me with was the sight of a wounded Magellanic eagle-owl I shot on the Rio Negro in Patagonia. The haunt of this bird was an island in the river, overgrown with giant grasses and tall willows, leafless now, for it was in the middle of winter. Here I sought for and found him waiting on his perch for the sun to set. He eyed me so calmly when I aimed my gun, I scarcely had the heart to pull the trigger. He had reigned there so long, the feudal tyrant of that remote wilderness? Many a water-rat, stealing like a shadow along the margin between the deep stream and the giant rushes, he had snatched away to death; many a spotted wild pigeon had woke on its perch at night with his cruel crooked talons piercing its flesh; and beyond the valley on the bushy uplands many a crested tinamou had been slain on her nest and her beautiful glossy dark green eggs left to grow pale in the sun and wind, the little lives that were in them dead because of their mother’s death. But I wanted that bird badly, and hardened my heart: the “demoniacal laughter” with which he had so often answered the rushing sound of the swift black river at eventide would be heard no more. I fired: he swerved on his perch, remained suspended for a few moments, then slowly fluttered down. Behind the spot where he had fallen was a great mass of tangled dark-green grass, out of which rose the tall, slender boles of the trees; overhead through the fretwork of leafless twigs the sky was flushed with tender roseate tints, for the sun had now gone down and the surface of the earth was in shadow. There, in such a scene, and with the wintry quiet of the desert over it all, I found my victim stung by his wounds to fury and prepared for the last supreme effort. Even in repose he is a big eagle-like bird: now his appearance was quite altered, and in the dim, uncertain light he looked gigantic in size—a monster of strange form and terrible aspect. Each particular feather stood out on end, the tawny barred tail spread out like a fan, the immense tiger-colored wings wide open and rigid, so that as the bird, that had clutched the grass with his great feathered claws, swayed his body slowly from side to side—just as a snake about to strike sways its head, or as an angry watchful cat moves its tail—first the tip of one, then of the other wing touched the ground. The black horns stood erect, while in the centre of the wheel-shaped head the beak snapped incessantly, producing a sound resembling the clicking of a sewing-machine. This was a suitable setting for the pair of magnificent furious eyes, on which I gazed with a kind of fascination, not unmixed with fear when I remembered the agony of pain suffered on former occasions from sharp, crooked talons driven into me to the bone. The irides were of a bright orange color, but every time I attempted to approach the bird they kindled into great globes of quivering yellow flame, the black pupils being surrounded by a scintillating crimson light which threw out minute yellow sparks into the air. When I retired from the bird this preternatural fiery aspect would instantly vanish.

The dragon eyes of that Magellanic owl haunt me till now, and when I remember them, the bird’s death still weighs on my conscience, albeit by killing it I bestowed on it that dusty immortality which is the portion of stuffed specimens in a museum.

The question as to the cause of this fiery scintillating appearance is, doubtless, one very hard to answer, but it will force itself on the mind. When experimenting on the bird, I particularly noticed that every time I retired the nictitating membrane would immediately cover the eyes and obscure them for some time, as they will when an owl is confronted with strong sunlight; and this gave me the impression that the fiery, flashing appearance was accompanied with, or followed by, a burning or smarting sensation. I will here quote a very suggestive passage from a letter on this subject written to me by a gentleman of great attainments in science: “Eyes certainly do shine in the dark—some eyes, e.g. those of cats and owls; and the scintillation you speak of is probably another form of the phenomenon. It probably depends upon some extra-sensibility of the retina analogous to what exists in the molecular constitution of sulphide of calcium and other phosphorescent substances. The difficulty is in the scintillation. We know that light of this character has its source in the heat vibrations of molecules at the temperature of incandescence, and the electric light is no exception to the rule. A possible explanation is that supra-sensitive retinæ in times of excitement become increasedly phosphorescent, and the same excitement causes a change in the curvature of the lens, so that the light is focussed, and pro tanto brightened into sparks. Seeing how little we know of natural forces, it may be that what we call light in such a case is eye speaking to eye—an emanation from the window of one brain into the window of another.”

The theory here suggested that the fiery appearance is only another form of the phosphorescent light found in some eyes, if correct, would go far towards disposing of all those cases one hears and reads about—some historical ones—of human eyes flashing fire and blazing with wrath. Probably all such descriptions are merely poetic exaggerations. One would not look for these fiery eyes amongst the peaceful children of civilization, who, when they make war, do so without anger, and kill their enemies by machinery, without even seeing them; but amongst savage or semi-savage men, carnivorous in their diet, fierce in disposition, and extremely violent in their passions. It is precisely amongst people of this description that I have lived a great deal. I have often seen them frenzied with excitement, their faces white as ashes, hair erect, and eyes dropping great tears of rage, but I have never seen anything in them even approaching to that fiery appearance described in the owl.

Nature has done comparatively little for the human eye, not only in denying it the terrifying splendors found in some other species, but also in the minor merit of beauty; yet here, when we consider how much sexual selection concerns itself with the eye, a great deal might have been expected. When going about the world one cannot help thinking that the various races and tribes of men, differing in the color of their skins and in the climates and conditions they live in, ought to have differently colored eyes. In Brazil, I was greatly struck with the magnificent appearance of many of the negro women I saw there: well-formed, tall, majestic creatures, often appropriately clothed in loose white gowns and white turban-like headdresses; while on their round polished blue-black arms they wore silver armlets. It seemed to me that the pale golden irides, as in the intensely black tyrant-bird Lichenops, would have given a finishing glory to these sable beauties, completing their strange unique loveliness. Again, in that exquisite type of female beauty which we see in the white girl with a slight infusion of negro blood, giving the graceful frizzle to the hair, the purple-red hue to the lips, and the dusky terra-cotta tinge to the skin, an eye more suitable than the dark dull brown would have been the intense orange brown seen in the lemur’s eye. For many very dark-skinned tribes nothing more beautiful than the ruby-red iris could be imagined; while sea-green eyes would have best suited dusky-pale Polynesians and languid peaceful tribes like that one described in Tennyson’s poem:—

And round about the keel with faces pale,

Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.

Since we cannot have the eyes we should like best to have, let us consider those that nature has given us. The incomparable beauty of the “emerald eye” has been greatly praised by the poets, particularly by those of Spain. Emerald eyes, if they only existed, would certainly be beautiful beyond all others, especially if set off with dark or black hair and that dim pensive creamy pallor of the skin frequently seen in warm climates, and which is more beautiful than the rosy complexion prevalent in northern regions, though not so lasting. But either they do not exist or else I have been very unfortunate, for after long seeking I am compelled to confess that never yet have I been gratified by the sight of emerald eyes. I have seen eyes called green, that is, eyes with a greenish tinge or light in them, but they were not the eyes I sought. One can easily forgive the poets their misleading descriptions, since they are not trustworthy guides, and very often, like Humpty Dumpty in “Through the Looking Glass,” make words do “extra work.” For sober fact one is accustomed to look to men of science; yet, strange to say, while these complain that we—the unscientific ones—are without any settled and correct ideas about the color of our own eyes, they have endorsed the poet’s fable, and have even taken considerable pains to persuade the world of its truth. Dr. Paul Broca is their greatest authority. In his “Manual for Anthropologists” he divides human eyes into four distinct types—orange, green, blue, grey; and these four again into five varieties each. The symmetry of such a classification suggests at once that it is an arbitrary one. Why orange, for instance? Light hazel, clay color, red, dull brown, cannot properly be called orange; but the division requires the five supposed varieties of the dark pigmented eye to be grouped under one name, and because there is yellow pigment in some dark eyes they are all called orange. Again, to make the five grey varieties the lightest grey is made so light that only when placed on a sheet of white paper does it show grey at all: but there is always some color in the human skin, so that Broca’s eye would appear absolutely white by contrast—a thing unheard of in nature. Then we have green, beginning with the palest sage green, and up through grass green and emerald green, to the deepest sea green and the green of the holly leaf. Do such eyes exist in nature? In theory they do. The blue eye is blue, and the grey grey, because in such eyes there is no yellow or brown pigment on the outer surface of the iris to prevent the dark purple pigment—the uvea—on the inner surface from being seen through the membrane, which has different degrees of opacity, making the eye appear grey, light or dark blue, or purple, as the case may be. When yellow pigment is deposited in small quantity on the outer membrane, then it should, according to the theory, blend with the inner blue and make green. Unfortunately for the anthropologists, it doesn’t. It only gives in some cases the greenish variable tinge I have mentioned, but nothing approaching to the decided greens of Broca’s tables. Given an eye with the right degree of translucency in the membrane and a very thin deposit of yellow pigment spread equally over the surface; the result would be a perfectly green iris. Nature, however, does not proceed quite in this way. The yellow pigment varies greatly in hue; it is muddy yellow, brown, or earthy color, and it never spreads itself uniformly over the surface, but occurs in patches grouped about the pupil and spreads in dull rays or lines and spots, so that the eye which science says “ought to be called green” is usually a very dull blue-grey or brownish-blue, or clay color, and in some rare instances shows a changeable greenish hue.

In the remarks accompanying the report of the Anthropomentric Committee of the British Association for 1881 and 1883, it is said that green eyes are more common than the tables indicate, and that eyes that should properly be called green, owing to the popular prejudice against that term, have been recorded as grey or some other color.

Does any such prejudice exist? or is it necessary to go about with the open manual in our hands to know a green eye when we see one? No doubt the “popular prejudice” is supposed to have its origin in Shakespeare’s description of jealousy as a green-eyed monster; but if Shakespeare has any great weight with the popular mind the prejudice ought to be the other way, since he is one of those who sing the splendors of the green eye.

Thus, in Romeo and Juliet:—

The eagle, madam,

Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye

As Paris hath.

The lines are, however, nonsense, as green-eyed eagles have no existence; and perhaps the question of the popular prejudice is not worth arguing about.

If we could leave out the mixed or neutral eyes, which are in a transitional state—blue eyes with some dark pigment obscuring their blueness, and making them quite unclassifiable, as no two pairs of eyes are found alike—then all eyes might be divided into two great natural orders, those with and those without pigment on the outer surface of the membrane. They could not be called light and dark eyes, since many hazel eyes are really lighter than purple and dark grey eyes. They might, however, be simply called brown and blue eyes, for in all eyes with the outer pigment there is brown, or something scarcely distinguishable from brown; and all eyes without pigment, even the purest greys, have some blueness.

Brown eyes express animal passions rather than intellect, and the higher moral feelings. They are frequently equalled in their own peculiar kind of eloquence by the brown or dark eyes in civilised dogs. In animals there is, in fact, often an exaggerated eloquence of expression. To judge from their eyes, caged cats and eagles in the Zoological Gardens are all furred and feathered Bonnivards. Even in the most intellectual of men the brown eye speaks more of the heart than of the head. In the inferior creatures the black eye is always keen and cunning or else soft and mild, as in fawns, doves, aquatic birds, etc.; and it is remarkable that in man also the black eye—dark brown iris with large pupil—generally has one or the other of these predominant expressions. Of course, in highly-civilised communities, individual exceptions are extremely numerous. Spanish and negro women have wonderfully soft and loving eyes, while the cunning weasel-like eye is common everywhere, especially amongst Asiatics. In high-caste Orientals the keen, cunning look has been refined and exalted to an expression of marvellous subtlety—the finest expression of which the black eye is capable.

The blue eye—all blues and greys being here included—is, par excellence, the eye of intellectual man; that outer warm-colored pigment hanging like a cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its most spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite blown away are we able to look into the soul, forgetting man’s kinship with the brutes. When one is unaccustomed to it from always living with dark-eyed races, the blue eye seems like an anomaly in nature, if not a positive blunder; for its power of expressing the lower and commonest instincts and passions of our race is comparatively limited; and in cases where the higher faculties are undeveloped it seems vacant and meaningless. Add to this that the ethereal blue color is associated in the mind with atmospheric phenomena rather than with solid matter, inorganic or animal. It is the hue of the void, expressionless sky; of shadows on far-off hill and cloud; of water under certain conditions of the atmosphere, and of the unsubstantial summer haze,

Whose margin fades

Forever and forever as I move.

In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely used in the quickly-perishing flowers of some frail plants; while a few living things of free and buoyant motions, like birds and butterflies, have been touched on the wings with the celestial tint only to make them more aërial in appearance. Only in man, removed from the gross materialism of nature, and in whom has been developed the highest faculties of the mind, do we see the full beauty and significance of the blue eye—the eye, that is, without the interposing cloud of dark pigment covering it. In the recently-published biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author says of him: “His eyes were large, dark blue, brilliant, and full of varied expression. Bayard Taylor used to say that they were the only eyes he ever knew to flash fire.... While he was yet at college, an old gypsy woman, meeting him suddenly in a woodland path, gazed at him and asked, ‘Are you a man or an angel?’” Mrs. Hawthorne says in one of her letters quoted in the book: “The flame of his eyes consumed compliment, cant, sham, and falsehood; while the most wretched sinners—so many of whom came to confess to him—met in his glance such a pity and sympathy that they ceased to be afraid of God and began to return to him.... I never dared gaze at him, even I, unless his lids were down.”

I think we have, most of us, seen eyes like these—eyes which one rather avoids meeting, because when met one is startled by the sight of a naked human soul brought so near. One person, at least, I have known to whom the above description would apply in every particular; a man whose intellectual and moral nature was of the highest order, and who perished at the age of thirty, a martyr, like the late Dr. Rabbeth, in the cause of science and humanity.

How very strange, then, that savage man should have been endowed with this eye unsuited to express the instincts and passions of savages, but able to express that intelligent and high moral feeling which a humane civilisation was, long ages after, to develop in his torpid brain! A fact like this seems to fit in with that flattering, fascinating, ingenious hypothesis invented by Mr. Wallace to account for facts which, according to the theory of natural selection, ought not to exist. But, alas! that beautiful hypothesis fails to convince. Even the most degraded races existing on the earth possess a language and the social state, religion, a moral code, laws, and a species of civilisation; so that there is a great gulf between them and the highest ape that lives in the woods. And as far back as we can go this has been the condition of the human race, the real primitive man having left no writing on the rocks. In the far dim past he still appears, naked, standing erect, and with a brain “larger than it need be,” according to the theory; so that of the oldest pre-historic skull yet discovered Professor Huxley is able to say that it is a skull which might have contained the brains of a philosopher or of a savage. We can only conclude that we are divided by a very thin partition from those we call savages in our pride; and that if man has continued on the earth, changing but little, for so vast a period of time, the reason is, that while the goddess Elaboration has held him by one hand, endeavoring ever to lead him onwards, the other hand has been clasped by Degeneration, which may be personified as a beauteous and guileful nymph whose fascinations have had as much weight with him as the wisdom of the goddess.—Gentleman’s Magazine.

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BIG ANIMALS.

“The Atlantosaurus,” said I, pointing affectionately with a wave of my left hand to all that was immortal of that extinct reptile, “is estimated to have had a total length of one hundred feet, and was probably the very biggest lizard that ever lived, even in Western America, where his earthly remains were first disinhumed by an enthusiastic explorer,”

“Yes, yes,” my friend answered abstractedly. “Of course, of course; things were all so very big in those days, you know, my dear fellow.”

“Excuse me,” I replied with polite incredulity; “I really don’t know to what particular period of time the phrase ‘in those days’ may be supposed precisely to refer.”

My friend shuffled inside his coat a little uneasily. (I will admit that I was taking a mean advantage of him. The professorial lecture in private life, especially when followed by a strict examination, is quite undeniably a most intolerable nuisance.) “Well,” he said, in a crusty voice, after a moment’s hesitation, “I mean, you know, in geological times ... well, there, my dear fellow, things used all to be so very big in those days, usedn’t they?”

I took compassion upon him and let him off easily. “You’ve had enough of the museum,” I said with magnanimous self-denial. “The Atlantosaurus has broken the camel’s back. Let’s go and have a quiet cigarette in the park outside.”

But if you suppose, reader, that I am going to carry my forbearance so far as to let you, too, off the remainder of that geological disquisition, you are certainly very much mistaken. A discourse which would be quite unpardonable in social intercourse may be freely admitted in the privacy of print; because, you see, while you can’t easily tell a man that his conversation bores you (though some people just avoid doing so by an infinitesimal fraction), you can shut up a book whenever you like, without the very faintest or remotest risk of hurting the authors delicate susceptibilities.

The subject of my discourse naturally divides itself, like the conventional sermon, into two heads—the precise date of “geological times,” and the exact bigness of the animals that lived in them. And I may as well begin by announcing my general conclusion at the very outset; first, that “those days” never existed at all; and secondly, that the animals which now inhabit this particular planet are, on the whole, about as big, taken in the lump, as any previous contemporary fauna that ever lived at any one time together upon its changeful surface. I know that to announce this sad conclusion is to break down one more universal and cherished belief: everybody considers that “geological animals” were ever so much bigger than their modern representatives; but the interests of truth should always be paramount, and if the trade of an iconoclast is a somewhat cruel one, it is at least a necessary function in a world so ludicrously overstocked with popular delusions as this erring planet.

What, then, is the ordinary idea of “geological time” in the minds of people like my good friend who refused to discuss with me the exact antiquity of the Atlantosaurian? They think of it all as immediate and contemporaneous, a vast panorama of innumerable ages being all crammed for them on to a single mental sheet, in which the dodo and the moa hob-an’-nob amicably with the pterodactyl and the ammonite; in which the tertiary megatherium goes cheek by jowl with the secondary deinosaurs and the primary trilobites; in which the huge herbivores of the Paris Basin are supposed to have browsed beneath the gigantic club-mosses of the Carboniferous period, and to have been successfully hunted by the great marine lizards and flying dragons of the Jurassic Epoch. Such a picture is really just as absurd, or, to speak more correctly, a thousand times absurder, than if one were to speak of those grand old times when Homer and Virgil smoked their pipes together in the Mermaid Tavern, while Shakespere and Molière, crowned with summer roses, sipped their Falernian at their ease beneath the whispering palmwoods of the Nevsky Prospect, and discussed the details of the play they were to produce to-morrow in the crowded Colosseum, on the occasion of Napoleon’s reception at Memphis by his victorious brother emperors, Ramses and Sardanapalus. This is not, as the inexperienced reader may at first sight imagine, a literal transcript from one of the glowing descriptions that crowd the beautiful pages of Ouida; it is a faint attempt to parallel in the brief moment of historical time the glaring anachronisms perpetually committed as regards the vast laps of geological chronology even by well-informed and intelligent people.

We must remember, then, that in dealing with geological time we are dealing with a positively awe-inspiring and unimaginable series of æons, each of which occupied its own enormous and incalculable epoch, and each of which saw the dawn, the rise, the culmination, and the downfall of innumerable types of plant and animal. On the cosmic clock, by whose pendulum alone we can faintly measure the dim ages behind us, the brief lapse of historical time, from the earliest of Egyptian dynasties to the events narrated in this evening’s Pall Mall, is less than a second, less than a unit, less than the smallest item by which we can possibly guide our blind calculations. To a geologist the temples of Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he has no means by which he could discriminate in date between a scarabæus of Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have shown good grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years ago; and everything that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from the geological point of view, described as “recent.” A shell embedded in a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years ago, while short and swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the irruption of the “Ancient Britons” of our inadequate school-books, is, in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely modern.

But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty thousand years which coincides in part with the fraction of a single swing of the cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and years, and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an inconceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one beyond the other, to our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of the geological record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the Pliocene, immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene, immeasurably longer than all the others put together. These three make up in their sum the Tertiary period, which entire period can hardly have occupied more time in its passage than a single division of the Secondary, such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and the Secondary period, once more, though itself of positively appalling duration, seems but a patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the unthinkable and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary æons. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott’s mystic head, “Time was, Time is, Time will be.” The time we know affords us no measure at all for even the nearest and briefest epochs of the time we know not; and the time we know not seems to demand still vaster and more inexpressible figures as we pry back curiously, with wondering eyes, into its dimmest and earliest recesses.

These efforts to realise the unrealisable make one’s head swim; let us hark back once more from cosmical time to the puny bigness of our earthly animals, living or extinct.

If we look at the whole of our existing fauna, marine and terrestrial, we shall soon see that we could bring together at the present moment a very goodly collection of extant monsters, most parlous monsters, too, each about as fairly big in its own kind as almost anything that has ever preceded it. Every age has its own spécialité in the way of bigness; in one epoch it is the lizards that take suddenly to developing overgrown creatures, the monarchs of creation in their little day; in another, it is the fishes that blossom out unexpectedly into Titanic proportions; in a third, it is the sloths or the proboscideans that wax fat and kick with gigantic members; in a fourth, it may be the birds or the men that are destined to evolve with future ages into veritable rocs or purely realistic Gargantuas or Brobdingnagians. The present period is most undoubtedly the period of the cetaceans; and the future geologist who goes hunting for dry bones among the ooze of the Atlantic, now known to us only by the scanty dredgings of our “Alerts” and “Challengers,” but then upheaved into snow-clad Alps or vine-covered Apennines, will doubtless stand aghast at the huge skeletons of our whales and our razor-backs, and will mutter to himself in awe-struck astonishment, in the exact words of my friend at South Kensington, “Things used all to be so very big in those days, usedn’t they?”

Now, the fact as to the comparative size of our own cetaceans and of “geological” animals is just this. The Atlantosaurus of the Western American Jurassic beds, a great erect lizard, is the very largest creature ever known to have inhabited this sublunary sphere. His entire length is supposed to have reached about a hundred feet (for no complete skeleton has ever been discovered), while in stature he appears to have stood some thirty feet high, or over. In any case, he was undoubtedly a very big animal indeed, for his thigh-bone alone measures eight feet, or two feet taller than that glory of contemporary civilisation, a British Grenadier. This, of course, implies a very decent total of height and size; but our own sperm whale frequently attains a good length of seventy feet, while the rorquals often run up to eighty, ninety, and even a hundred feet. We are thus fairly entitled to say that we have at least one species of animal now living which, occasionally at any rate, equals in size the very biggest and most colossal form known inferentially to geological science. Indeed, when we consider the extraordinary compactness and rotundity of the modern cetaceans, as compared with the tall limbs and straggling skeleton of the huge Jurassic deinosaurs, I am inclined to believe that the tonnage of a decent modern rorqual must positively exceed that of the gigantic Atlantosaurus, the great lizard of the west, in propria persona. I doubt, in short, whether even the solid thigh-bone of the deinosaur could ever have supported the prodigious weight of a full-grown family razor-back whale. The mental picture of these unwieldy monsters hopping casually about, like Alice’s Gryphon in Tenniel’s famous sketch, or like that still more parlous brute, the chortling Jabberwock, must be left to the vivid imagination of the courteous reader, who may fill in the details for himself as well as he is able.

If we turn from the particular comparison of selected specimens (always an unfair method of judging) to the general aspect of our contemporary fauna, I venture confidently to claim for our own existing human period as fine a collection of big animals as any other ever exhibited on this planet by any one single rival epoch. Of course, if you are going to lump all the extinct monsters and horrors into one imaginary unified fauna, regardless of anachronisms, I have nothing more to say to you; I will candidly admit that there were more great men in all previous generations put together, from Homer to Dickens, from Agamemnon to Wellington, than there are now existing in this last quarter of our really very respectable nineteenth century. But if you compare honestly age with age, one at a time, I fearlessly maintain that, so far from there being any falling off in the average bigness of things generally in these latter days, there are more big things now living than there ever were in any one single epoch, even of much longer duration than the “recent” period.

I suppose we may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our earth—the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, “from the evidence before us,” because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe that any one age has much surpassed another in the general size of its fauna, since the Permian Epoch at least; and where we do not get geological evidence of the existence of big animals in any particular deposit, we may take it for granted, I think, that that deposit was laid down under conditions unfavorable to the preservation of the remains of large species. For example, the sediment now being accumulated at the bottom of the Caspian cannot possibly contain the bones of any creature much larger than the Caspian seal, because there are no big species there swimming; and yet that fact does not negative the existence in other places of whales, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, and hippopotami. Nevertheless, we can only go upon the facts before us; and if we compare our existing fauna with the fauna of Jurassic and Pliocene times, we shall at any rate be putting it to the test of the severest competition that lies within our power under the actual circumstances.

In the Jurassic age there were undoubtedly a great many very big reptiles. “A monstrous eft was of old the lord and master of earth. For him did his high sun flame and his river billowing ran, And he felt himself in his pride to be nature’s crowning race.” There was the ichthyosaurus, a fishlike marine lizard, familiar to us all from a thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, his strong flippers, his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring goggle eyes. The ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant creature to meet alone in a narrow strait on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement, the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed twenty-five feet from snout to tail. Now, this is an extremely decent size for a reptile, as reptiles go; for the crocodile and alligator, the two biggest existing lizards, seldom attain an extreme length of sixteen feet. But there are other reptiles now living that easily beat the ichthyosaurus, such, for example, as the larger pythons or rock snakes, which not infrequently reach to thirty feet, and measure round the waist as much as a London alderman of the noblest proportions. Of course, other Jurassic saurians easily beat this simple record. Our British Megalosaurus only extended twenty-five feet in length, and carried weight not exceeding three tons; but his rival Ceteosaurus stood ten feet high, and measured fifty feet from the tip of his snout to the end of his tail; while the dimensions of Titanosaurus may be briefly described as sixty feet by thirty, and those of Atlantosaurus as one hundred by thirty-two. Viewed as reptiles, we have certainly nothing at all to come up to these; but our cetaceans, as a group, show an assemblage of species which could very favorably compete with the whole lot of Jurassic saurians at any cattle show. Indeed, if it came to tonnage, I believe a good blubbery right whale could easily give points to any deinosaur that ever moved upon oolitic continents.

The great mammals of the Pliocene age, again, such as the deinotherium and the mastodon, were also, in their way, very big things in livestock; but they scarcely exceeded the modern elephant, and by no means came near the modern whales. A few colossal ruminants of the same period could have held their own well against our existing giraffes, elks, and buffaloes; but taking the group as a group, I don’t think there is any reason to believe that it beat in general aspect the living fauna of this present age.

For few people ever really remember how very many big animals we still possess. We have the Indian and the African elephant, the hippopotamus, the various rhinoceroses, the walrus, the giraffe, the elk, the bison, the musk ox, the dromedary, and the camel. Big marine animals are generally in all ages bigger than their biggest terrestrial rivals, and most people lump all our big existing cetaceans under the common and ridiculous title of whales, which makes this vast and varied assortment of gigantic species seem all reducible to a common form. As a matter of fact, however, there are several dozen colossal marine animals now sporting and spouting in all oceans, as distinct from one another as the camel is from the ox, or the elephant from the hippopotamus. Our New Zealand Berardius easily beats the ichthyosaurus; our sperm whale is more than a match for any Jurassic European deinosaur; our rorqual, one hundred feet long, just equals the dimensions of the gigantic American Atlantosaurus himself. Besides these exceptional monsters, our bottle-heads reach to forty feet, our California whales to forty-four, our hump-backs to fifty, and our razor-backs to sixty or seventy. True fish generally fall far short of these enormous dimensions, but some of the larger sharks attain almost equal size with the biggest cetaceans. The common blue shark, with his twenty-five feet of solid rapacity, would have proved a tough antagonist, I venture to believe, for the best bred enaliosaurian that ever munched a lias ammonite. I would back our modern Carcharodon, who grows to forty feet, against any plesiosaurus that ever swam the Jurassic sea. As for Rhinodon, a gigantic shark of the Indian Ocean, he has been actually measured to a length of fifty feet, and is stated often to attain seventy. I will stake my reputation upon it that he would have cleared the secondary seas of their great saurians in less than a century. When we come to add to these enormous marine and terrestrial creatures such other examples as the great snakes, the gigantic cuttle-fish, the grampuses, and manatees, and sea-lions, and sunfish, I am quite prepared fearlessly to challenge any other age that ever existed to enter the lists against our own colossal forms of animal life.

Again, it is a point worth noting that a great many of the very big animals which people have in their minds when they talk vaguely about everything having been so very much bigger “in those days” have become extinct within a very late period, and are often, from the geological point of view, quite recent.

For example, there is our friend the mammoth. I suppose no animal is more frequently present to the mind of the non-geological speaker, when he talks indefinitely about the great extinct monsters, than the familiar figure of that huge-tusked, hairy northern elephant. Yet the mammoth, chronologically speaking, is but a thing of yesterday. He was hunted here in England by men whose descendants are probably still living—at least so Professor Boyd Dawkins solemnly assures us; while in Siberia his frozen body, flesh and all, is found so very fresh that the wolves devour it, without raising any unnecessary question as to its fitness for lupine food. The Glacial Epoch is the yesterday of geological time, and it was the Glacial Epoch that finally killed off the last mammoth. Then, again, there is his neighbor, the mastodon. That big tertiary proboscidean did not live quite long enough, it is true, to be hunted by the cavemen of the Pleistocene age, but he survived at any rate as long as the Pliocene—our day before yesterday—and he often fell very likely before the fire-split flint weapons of the Abbé Bourgeois’ Miocene men. The period that separates him from our own day is as nothing compared with the vast and immeasurable interval that separates him from the huge marine saurians of the Jurassic world. To compare the relative lapses of time with human chronology, the mastodon stands to our own fauna as Beau Brummel stands to the modern masher, while the saurians stand to it as the Egyptian and Assyrian warriors stand to Lord Wolseley and the followers of the Mahdi.

Once more, take the gigantic moa of New Zealand, that enormous bird who was to the ostrich as the giraffe is to the antelope; a monstrous emu, as far surpassing the ostriches of to-day as the ostriches surpass all the other fowls of the air. Yet the moa, though now extinct, is in the strictest sense quite modern, a contemporary very likely of Queen Elizabeth or Queen Anne, exterminated by the Maoris only a very little time before the first white settlements in the great southern archipelago. It is even doubtful whether the moa did not live down to the days of the earliest colonists, for remains of Maori encampments are still discovered, with the ashes of the fire-place even now unscattered, and the close-gnawed bones of the gigantic bird lying in the very spot where the natives left them after their destructive feasts. So, too, with the big sharks. Our modern carcharodon, who runs (as I have before noted) to forty feet in length, is a very respectable monster indeed, as times go; and his huge snapping teeth, which measure nearly two inches long by one and a half broad, would disdain to make two bites of the able-bodied British seaman. But the naturalists of the “Challenger” expedition dredged up in numbers from the ooze of the Pacific similar teeth, five inches long by four wide, so that the sharks to which they originally belonged must, by parity of reasoning, have measured nearly a hundred feet in length. This, no doubt, beats our biggest existing shark, the rhinodon, by some thirty feet. Still, the ooze of the Pacific is a quite recent or almost modern deposit, which is even now being accumulated on the sea bottom, and there would be really nothing astonishing in the discovery that some representatives of these colossal carcharodons are to this day swimming about at their lordly leisure among the coral reefs of the South Sea Islands. That very cautious naturalist, Dr. Günther, of the British Museum, contents himself indeed by merely saying: “As we have no record of living individuals of that bulk having been observed, the gigantic species to which these teeth belonged must probably have become extinct within a comparatively recent period.”

If these things are so, the question naturally suggests itself: Why should certain types of animals have attained their greatest size at certain different epochs, and been replaced at others by equally big animals of wholly unlike sorts? The answer, I believe, is simply this: Because there is not room and food in the world at any one time for more than a certain relatively small number of gigantic species. Each great group of animals has had successively its rise, its zenith, its decadence, and its dotage; each at the period of its highest development has produced a considerable number of colossal forms; each has been supplanted in due time by higher groups of totally different structure, which have killed off their predecessors, not indeed by actual stress of battle, but by irresistible competition for food and prey. The great saurians were thus succeeded by the great mammals, just as the great mammals are themselves in turn being ousted, from the land at least, by the human species.

Let us look briefly at the succession of big animals in the world, so far as we can follow it from the mutilated and fragmentary record of the geological remains.

The very earliest existing fossils would lead us to believe, what is otherwise quite probable; that life on our planet began with very small forms—that it passed at first through a baby stage. The animals of the Cambrian period are almost all small mollusks, star-fishes, sponges, and other simple, primitive types of life. There were as yet no vertebrates of any sort, not even fishes, far less amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals. The veritable giants of the Cambrian world were the crustaceans, and especially the trilobites, which, nevertheless, hardly exceeded in size a good big modern lobster. The biggest trilobite is some two feet long; and though we cannot by any means say that this was really the largest form of animal life then existing, owing to the extremely broken nature of the geological record, we have at least no evidence that anything bigger as yet moved upon the face of the waters. The trilobites, which were a sort of triple-tailed crabs (to speak very popularly), began in the Cambrian Epoch, attained their culminating point in the Silurian, wandered in the Devonian, and died out utterly in the Carboniferous seas.

It is in the second great epoch, the Silurian, that the cuttle-fish tribe, still fairly represented by the nautilus, the argonaut, the squid, and the octopus, first began to make their appearance upon this or any other stage. The cuttle-fishes are among the most developed of invertebrate animals; they are rapid swimmers; they have large and powerful eyes; and they can easily enfold their prey (teste Victor Hugo) in their long and slimy sucker-clad arms. With these natural advantages to back them up, it is not surprising that the cuttle family rapidly made their mark in the world. They were by far the most advanced thinkers and actors of their own age, and they rose almost at once to be the dominant creatures of the primæval ocean in which they swam. There were as yet no saurians or whales to dispute the dominion with these rapacious cephalopods, and so the cuttle family had things for the time all their own way. Before the end of the Silurian epoch, according to that accurate census-taker, M. Barrande, they had blossomed forth into no less than 1,622 distinct species. For a single family to develop so enormous a variety of separate forms, all presumably derived from a single common ancestor, argues, of course, an immense success in life; and it also argues a vast lapse of time during which the different species were gradually demarcated from one another.

Some of the ammonites, which belonged to this cuttle-fish group, soon attained a very considerable size; but a shell known as the orthoceras (I wish my subject didn’t compel me to use such very long words, but I am not personally answerable, thank heaven, for the vagaries of modern scientific nomenclature) grew to a bigger size than that of any other fossil mollusk, sometimes measuring as much as six feet in total length. At what date the gigantic cuttles of the present day first began to make their appearance it would be hard to say, for their shell-less bodies are so soft that they could leave hardly anything behind in a fossil state; but the largest known cuttle, measured by Mr. Gabriel, of Newfoundland, was eighty feet in length, including the long arms.

These cuttles are the only invertebrates at all in the running so far as colossal size is concerned, and it will be observed that here the largest modern specimen immeasurably beats the largest fossil form of the same type. I do not say that there were not fossil forms quite as big as the gigantic calamaries of our own time—on the contrary, I believe there were; but if we go by the record alone we must confess that, in the matter of invertebrates at least, the balance of size is all in favor of our own period.

The vertebrates first make their appearance, in the shape of fishes, towards the close of the Silurian period, the second of the great geological epochs. The earliest fish appear to have been small, elongated, eel-like creatures, closely resembling the lampreys in structure; but they rapidly developed in size and variety, and soon became the ruling race in the waters of the ocean, where they maintained their supremacy till the rise of the great secondary saurians. Even then, in spite of the severe competition thus introduced, and still later, in spite of the struggle for life against the huge modern cetaceans (the true monarchs of the recent seas), the sharks continued to hold their own as producers of gigantic forms; and at the present day their largest types probably rank second only to the whales in the whole range of animated nature. There seems no reason to doubt that modern fish, as a whole, quite equal in size the piscine fauna of any previous geological age.

It is somewhat different with the next great vertebrate group, the amphibians, represented in our own world only by the frogs, the toads, the newts, and the axolotls. Here we must certainly with shame confess that the amphibians of old greatly surpassed their degenerate descendants in our modern waters. The Japanese salamander, by far the biggest among our existing newts, never exceeds a yard in length from snout to tail; whereas some of the labyrinthodonts (forgive me once more) of the Carboniferous epoch must have reached at least seven or eight feet from stem to stern. But the reason of this falling off is not far to seek. When the adventurous newts and frogs of that remote period first dropped their gills and hopped about inquiringly on the dry land, under the shadow of the ancient tree-ferns and club-mosses, they were the only terrestrial vertebrates then existing, and they had the field (or, rather, the forest) all to themselves. For a while, therefore, like all dominant races for the time being, they blossomed forth at their ease into relatively gigantic forms. Frogs as big as donkeys, and efts as long as crocodiles, luxuriated to their hearts’ content in the marshy lowlands, and lorded it freely over the small creatures which they found in undisturbed possession of the Carboniferous isles. But as ages passed away, and new improvements were slowly invented and patented by survival of the fittest in the offices of nature, their own more advanced and developed descendants, the reptiles and mammals, got the upper hand with them, and soon lived them down in the struggle for life, so that this essentially intermediate form is now almost entirely restricted to its one adapted seat, the pools and ditches that dry up in summer.

The reptiles, again, are a class in which the biggest modern forms are simply nowhere beside the gigantic extinct species. First appearing on the earth at the very close of the vast primary periods—in the Permian age—they attained in secondary times the most colossal proportions, and have certainly never since been exceeded in size by any later forms of life in whatever direction. But one must remember that during the heyday of the great saurians, there were as yet no birds and no mammals. The place now filled in the ocean by the whales and grampuses, as well as the place now filled in the great continents by the elephants, the rhinoceroses, the hippopotami, and the other big quadrupeds, was then filled exclusively by huge reptiles, of the sort rendered familiar to us all by the restored effigies on the little island in the Crystal Palace grounds. Every dog has his day, and the reptiles had their day in the secondary period. The forms into which they developed were certainly every whit as large as any ever seen on the surface of this planet, but not, as I have already shown, appreciably larger than those of the biggest cetaceans known to science in our own time.

During the very period, however, when enaliosaurians and pterodactyls were playing such pranks before high heaven as might have made contemporary angels weep, if they took any notice of saurian morality, a small race of unobserved little prowlers was growing up in the dense shades of the neighboring forests which was destined at last to oust the huge reptiles from their empire over earth, and to become in the fulness of time the exclusively dominant type of the whole planet. In the trias we get the first remains of mammalian life in the shape of tiny rat-like animals, marsupial in type, and closely related to the banded ant-eaters of New South Wales at the present day. Throughout the long lapse of the secondary ages, across the lias, the oolite, the wealden, and the chalk, we find the mammalian race slowly developing into opossums and kangaroos, such as still inhabit the isolated and antiquated continent of Australia. Gathering strength all the time for the coming contest, increasing constantly in size of brain and keenness of intelligence, the true mammals were able at last, towards the close of the secondary ages, to enter the lists boldly against the gigantic saurians. With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the reptiles begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set in at last in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurus we get the huge cetaceans; in place of the dinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place of the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man himself.

The history of the great birds has been somewhat more singular. Unlike the other main vertebrate classes, the birds (as if on purpose to contradict the proverb) seem never yet to have had their day. Unfortunately for them, or at least for their chance of producing colossal species, their evolution went on side by side, apparently, with that of the still more intelligent and more powerful mammals; so that wherever the mammalian type had once firmly established itself, the birds were compelled to limit their aspirations to a very modest and humble standard. Terrestrial mammals, however, cannot cross the sea; so in isolated regions such as New Zealand and Madagascar, the birds had things all their own way. In New Zealand, there are no indigenous quadrupeds at all; and there the huge moa attained to dimensions almost equalling those of the giraffe. In Madagascar, the mammalian life was small and of low grade, so the gigantic æpyornis became the very biggest of all known birds. At the same time, these big species acquired their immense size at the cost of the distinctive birdlike habit of flight. A flying moa is almost an impossible conception; even the ostriches compete practically with the zebras and antelopes rather than with the eagles, the condors, or the albatrosses. In like manner, when a pigeon found its way to Mauritius, it developed into the practically wingless dodo; while in the northern penguins, on their icy perches, the forelimbs have been gradually modified into swimming organs exactly analogous to the flippers of the seal.

Are the great animals now passing away and leaving no representatives of their greatness to future ages? On land at least that is very probable. Man, diminutive man, who, if he walked on all fours, would be no bigger than a silly sheep, and who only partially disguises his native smallness by his acquired habit of walking erect on what ought to be his hind legs—man has upset the whole balanced economy of nature, and is everywhere expelling and exterminating before him the great herbivores, his predecessors. He needs for his corn and his bananas the fruitful plains which were once laid down in prairie or scrub-wood. Hence it seems not unlikely that the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the buffalo must go. But we are still a long way off from that final consummation, even on dry land; while as for the water, it appears highly probable that there are as good fish still in the sea as ever came out of it. Whether man himself, now become the sole dominant animal of our poor old planet, will ever develop into Titanic proportions, seems far more problematical. The race is now no longer to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Brain counts for more than muscle, and mind has gained the final victory over mere matter. Goliath of Gath has shrunk into insignificance before the Gatling gun; as in the fairy tales of old, it is cunning little Jack with his clever devices who wins the day against the heavy, clumsy, muddle-headed giants. Nowadays it is our “Minotaurs” and “Warriors” that are the real leviathans and behemoths of the great deep; our Krupps and Armstrongs are the fire-breathing krakens of the latter-day seas. Instead of developing individually into huge proportions, the human race tends rather to aggregate into vast empires, which compete with one another by means of huge armaments, and invent mitrailleuses and torpedoes of incredible ferocity for their mutual destruction. The dragons of the prime that tore each other in their slime have yielded place to eighty-ton guns and armor-plated turret-ships. Those are the genuine lineal representatives on our modern seas of the secondary saurians. Let us hope that some coming geologist of the dim future, finding the fossil remains of the sunken “Captain,” or the plated scales of the “Comte de Grasse,” firmly embedded in the upheaved ooze of the existing Atlantic, may shake his head in solemn deprecation at the horrid sight, and thank heaven that such hideous carnivorous creatures no longer exist in his own day.—Cornhill Magazine.

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A DAY OF STORM.

‘Twas a day of storm, for the giant Atlantic, rolling in pride,

Drawn by the full moon, driven by the fierce wind, tide upon tide.

Flooded our poor little Channel. A hundred anxious eyes

Were watching a breach new broken—when suddenly some one cries,

“A boat coming in!”—and, rounding the pierhead that hid her before.

There, sure enough, was a stranger smack, head straight for the shore.

How will she land, where each wave is a mountain? Too late for how!

Run up a flag there to show her the right place! She must land now!

She is close—with a rush on the galloping wavetop—a stand,

As the water sinks from beneath her—her nose just touches the land.

And then (as rude hands, sacking a city, greedy of prey,

Toss, in some littered chamber, a child’s toy lightly away),

A great wave rose from behind, and lifting her, towered, and broke,

And flung her headlong, down on the hard beach, close to the folk.

Crash!... But ’tis only her bowsprit gone—she is saved somehow

And a cheer broke out, for a hundred hands have hold of her now.

And they say ’twas her bowsprit saved her, or she must have gone over then;

Her bowsprit it was that saved her; and little they think, those men,

Of one weak woman that prayed, as she watched them tempest-driven!

They say ’twas her bowsprit saved her! I say, ’twas that prayer, and Heaven!

—The Spectator.

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SOME TURKISH PROVERBS.

If the Turk has been qualified as “unspeakable,” he is very far from being inarticulate. Strange as it may seem to those who have formed their opinion of him from hearsay, it is not the less true that he is commonly a good conversationalist, and can say well and pointedly what he has got to say, with a wealth of illustration in anecdote, quotation, and proverb. The latter form commends itself especially to the sententious Turkish mind. The synthetic form of the language, too, secures brevity and conciseness, and opportunities are afforded for those constant assonances or rhyming-vowels which are so dear to the Oriental.

On looking over a note-book containing several hundred Turkish proverbs, taken down in the course of reading and conversation, or borrowed from a collection made at the Oriental Academy at Vienna, the writer has amused himself by grouping them roughly under certain heads, so as to illustrate some aspects of the national character and surroundings.

But first it may be interesting to remark how many well-known English and other European proverbs have their exact counterpart in Turkish. How far are these to be accounted for by contact with, or conquest of, Indo-European races? Or has it been a case of “les beaux esprits se rencontrent”? For instance, we find “You should not look a gift-horse in the mouth,” in exactly the same words, as well as “He that is born to be hanged will never be drowned,” the Turkish version having the advantage of being expressed in two words! The change of words is but slight in “Troubled waters suit the fisher,” “One flower does not make summer,” and “The robe does not make the dervish;” while in Turkey it is not pot that says to kettle, but negro to negro, that his face is black. We are disposed to prefer “The nail saved the shoe, the shoe the horse, the horse the man, the man the kingdom,” to our somewhat lumbering “For want of a nail the shoe was lost,” &c. “Wake not the sleeping dog,” has as a corollary “Step not on the sleeping serpent;” and we are warned that there is “No rose without a thorn, nor love without a rival.”

One instance in which our proverbial wisdom is opposed to the Turkish is to be found in the expression “to kill two birds with one stone.” The attempt to do this is condemned by sundry proverbs such as “One arrow does not bring down two birds,” and “You cannot knock down nine walnuts with one stone.”

Often we are reminded of Scriptural proverbs and aphorisms. “Nothing unheard of in the world” sounds Solomonian enough; while “Out with the eye that profits me not,” “The negro does not whiten with washing,” and “That which thou sowest, that also shalt thou reap,” are strikingly like New Testament teaching. Again and again we find expressed in other words lessons of charity, considerateness, and justice, that would not be unworthy of a Christian teacher, as, “The stranger’s prayer is heard;” “The heart’s testimony is stronger than a thousand witnesses;” “Among the blind, close your eyes;” “In truth is right;” “Justice is half religion;” “Neighbor’s right, God’s right.”

The heading under which, perhaps, the largest number of proverbs can be grouped, is that of opportune speech and silence. If the Turk, as has been said, talks well, he also knows how to hold his tongue. He looks down with the greatest contempt on the idle chatterer, and does not even think that good-manners require him to make small-talk when he has nothing to say. In fact, when on a visit to a well-bred Turk, with whom you have no common subjects of interest to discuss, after exhausting those suggested by politeness—his health, your own, that of your family, the weather, and the water (a most interesting topic in the East)—you may safely fall back upon that golden silence which their proverb, like ours, rates above silver speech. Hear his comments on the chatterer:—“There is no ass but brays;” “The dog barks, the caravan passes;” “Fool is he who alone talks, and is his only listener;” “The fool wears his heart on his tongue, the wise man keeps his tongue in his heart;” and “Many words, an unsound heart.” He warns us of the mischief of evil-speaking,—“The knife’s wound heals, the tongue’s never;” “The tongue slays more than the sword;” and “The tongue is boneless, but it breaks bones.” Again, he feels keenly the danger of free speech under a corrupt and despotic rule; while he extols honesty and good-faith, and generally condemns lying. The latter is condoned in certain cases, for “Some lies are better than truth,” and we may “Lie, but with measure.” The suppressio veri is even strongly recommended, for is not the “truth-teller banished out of nine cities?” while “He who holds his tongue saves his head,” and “There is no better answer than this, ‘I know not, I saw not.’”

But to turn to something pleasanter, we will quote a few sayings still familiar in our Turk’s mouth, which have survived the corruption of the Palace and official Kings, and seem still to breathe the hardy and independent spirit of the old days, when courage and enterprise were the only passports to the highest places in a conquering empire. Then it could be said that “The horse is to him who mounts, the sword to him who girds it on,” “The brave man’s word is a coat of mail,” “Fortune is not far from the brave man’s head,” “The hero is known on the battle-field,” and “Fear not to-morrow’s mischance.” Who but a conquering race could have produced such a proverb as “Power on my head, or the raven on my corpse;” and who can fail to hear a true ring in “Peasant erect is taller than noble on bended knee,” or “I am the slave of him who regards me; the king of him who disregards me?”

Almsgiving is creditable, for “The hand which gives is above that which takes;” and it offers temporal advantages as well as spiritual. In this world “No one cuts the hand that gives,” and “What thou givest that shalt thou take with thee” [to the next]. But beware of accepting alms or favors if you would keep your self-respect, and “Accept the largess of thy friend as if thou wert an enemy.”

Great is the power of wealth; “Even the mountains fear the rich man.” It covers a multitude of failings, and averts many ills. “If a man’s money is white, no matter if his face be black.” “The knife cuts not hand of gold.” But then the disadvantages and dangers of it in a land where empty treasuries are filled by the suppression of a few rich men, and the confiscation of their property! Truly the vacuus viator has the better part where brigands swarm. “Not even a thousand men in armor can strip a naked man.” Our Turk is a man of few wants,—pilaff, coffee, and tobacco are enough for him, and so he will rest contented in the “Health that is better than fortune,” sagely reflecting that “A big head has a big ache,” that “He who has many vineyards has many cares,” and congratulating himself if he can say, “My money is little, my head without strife.” He is not likely to make a fortune in business, being destitute of the enterprise, as well as of the sharpness and hardness, necessary to success. “The bazaar knows neither father nor mother,” and our easy-going friend has a great regard for these domestic ties. Besides, his religion forbids him either to speculate or to put out money at interest, although he sometimes avoids this prohibition by the clumsy expedient of a fictitious sale, or a “present” taken by the lender.

It is a pity that his rulers should not have profited by his experiences of debt. “Poor without debts is better than Prince,” “A thousand cares do not pay one debt,” and “Creditors have better memories than debtors,” are explicit enough, but, perhaps, were not supposed to apply to Government loans.

We find some sound advice on the subject of friendship. Do not expect your friend to be a paragon,—“Who seeks a faultless friend, rests friendless.” But when you have found him, keep him,—“Old friend, old bath,” you will do better to change neither; and if he is “a true friend, he is better than a relation.” On the other hand, avoid the British error of underrating your foe; he is always dangerous. “Water sleeps, the enemy wakes,” and “Be thine enemy an ant, see in him an elephant,” for “A thousand friends are few, one foe many.”

The references to woman are as ungallant as they are unjust. She is to be treated as a child, and as such contemptuously pardoned for her shortcomings. “You should lecture neither child nor woman;” it would be waste of time. Her intelligence, too, is underrated, “her hair is long, her wits short!” It is she who as a mother “makes the house, and mars it,” and she is classed with good wine as “a sweet poison.” But it must be admitted that in this want of gallantry the Turk is far surpassed by the Persian, who says “The dog is faithful, woman never.”

The lover is regarded as a lunatic, unfit for the society of his fellows. “If you are in love, fly to the mountains,” for “Lover and king brook no companion.” He is “blind,” and distance is nothing to him; for him, “Bagdad is not far,” and the only cures for his malady are “travel and patience.”

A word of advice to those about to marry. “Marry below you, but do not marry your daughter above you;” and “Choose cloth by its edge, and a wife by her mother.” It is natural that we should find many references to that submission which is at the root of Islam. Sometimes we find the idea without reference to the Deity, as in the cases, “When fate comes the eye of wisdom is blind,” “No one eats another’s destined portion,” and “What will come, will come, willy nilly;” but more often he is directly invoked. His will is fate, “Whom he slays not, man slays not,” “Who calls on Him is not abandoned,” “He delays, but neglects not,” provides for the helpless and “builds the blind bird’s nest;” and so we should address ourselves to Him, “asking God for what we want, not his servant.” If you apply to the latter, you may be disappointed. Even the minister of religion is chary of his assistance. “Food from the Imam’s house, tears from the dead man’s eye,”—you are as likely to get one as the other. Sometimes, too, we meet with a small touch of scepticism, as when we are told, “First tie-up your donkey, then recommend him to God;” and sometimes a cry of black despair, “Happiest he who dies in the cradle.”

Let us conclude this hasty sketch with a few miscellaneous proverbs, remarkable for point or picturesqueness. “The fish stinks from the head” is often quoted in these days of Ottoman decay, in allusion to the bad example which comes from above. We have heard the incapacity for action which is engendered in Turkish rulers by the enforced seclusion of their youth commented on with “Who stays at home, loses his cap in the crowd.” The difficulties of equality,—“You are master, and I am master; who will groom the horse?” On an impostor,—“The empty sack won’t stand upright.” “Qui trop embrasse, mal étreint,” is rendered by “Two water-melons won’t fit under one arm.” “Old brooms are thrown on the roof,” may be taken to apply to the promotion of superannuated fogies. Your hangers-on profit by your success,—“When you climb a tree your shoes go up too.” The higher you are the worse you fall, for “There is a cure for him who falls from horse or donkey-back, but a pick-axe (to dig his grave) for him who falls from a camel.” Let us hope that this proverb, in its literal sense, may never be justified in the persons of our gallant Camel Corps in the Soudan. Three proverbs on the donkey, exemplifying—the useful guest, “They asked the donkey to the wedding, water or wood was wanting;” the power of hope, “Die not, my donkey; summer is coming and clover will grow;” and the folly of exposing oneself to needless criticism, “Don’t cut your donkey’s tail in public; some will say, ‘It is too long;’ others, ‘It is too short.’” And, lastly, as an instance in which the jingle of the original may be reproduced in English,—“The mannerly man learns manners of the mannerless.”—The Spectator.

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MACPHERSON’S LOVE STORY.
BY C. H. D. STOCKER.

It was on a summer Sunday morning that the story began—or let me rather say, that I take up the story, for who shall mark the real beginning of those events that mightily color and disturb, and even turn the course of our lives?

In the early sunshine, while the dew was still heavy on the grass, Ian Macpherson had been away three miles up the valley with a dying shepherd. Following the course of the broad, brawling, shallow Riach river; now clambering along steep slate-colored banks of shifting flakes and chips of stone, that looked as if they had swept in avalanches down the abrupt hillside; now springing with the sure, agile step of a born Highlander from one boulder to another as he crossed a streamlet or took a short cut across a bend of the river; now walking quickly over narrow, level reaches of meadow-ground, or amongst springy heather under the birches that overhung the broken gravel banks above the water,—his whole heart was overflowing with that exultation which breathes in the very early hours of morning when the days are long. The earth in that hour was very Paradise, not for anything it had given or ever could give him, but because it was so beautiful, and in its glorious undesecrated solitude seemed still fresh from the hand of God.

The home of the dying man was a mere hovel of peat-sods covered with moss-grown thatch, built on one of those fertile reaches of soil brought down and left here and there in these wild Scotch valleys by floods of long ago. It stood just above the river—all too perilously near in time of storm and flood, you would have thought—and round it towered the rugged hills, echoing unceasingly the murmur of the water and the wind—a murmur, at least, in summer. In winter many a wild storm raged up there, darkening the air with heavy snow and sleet, bowing and breaking and uprooting whole tracts of pines and larch; raving down the shrouded peaks and narrow, dim ravines, and making to tremble the little peat hut and the stout hearts within. And then, when the storm was spent, would be a silence as of death; snowy steeps and glittering peaks rising up on all sides motionless against a motionless sky, and down below the dark water creeping slow and quiet under masses of ice.

Macpherson could see it all in memory even as he stepped across the summer flowers, for the poor shepherds in the lone huts scattered here and there in the long valley needed him in winter as well as in summer, in foul weather no less than in fair. But to-day, as he grew accustomed to the half-light in the hut, and the wan face of the dying man became clearer in the shadow of the berth in the wall where he was lying, the minister saw well enough that he would know no more an earthly winter, nor ever see the snow come down upon the hills again. There was only one window in the hut, a single unmovable pane a foot square, let into the sod wall at one end, and rendered even less useful by a strip of rag pinned across it by way of a blind. Most of the light came in dusty beams down the wide chimney, slanting across the background of smoke-blackened wall and rafter, and lying in patches on the uneven mud floor.

As the day was warm the minister set the door wide open, and the dim, dying eyes looked out wistfully at the sunny summer weather and the beautiful wooded slopes where the foot of the opposite hill came down to the river. But he was tired now; all this was passing from him, and his eyes came back to Ian Macpherson’s face, where, as he dimly felt, dwelt something that could not pass away—something that death itself would have no power to disturb or change. Light kindled faintly on his rugged, wasted features when Macpherson came and took the toil-worn hand—so powerless now—in his, for in the young minister’s life this poor shepherd had seen and understood what no words could have brought home to him—the reality and power of love. He knew that Macpherson counted not his life his own, nor any of the things that he possessed. Year by year he had felt the subtle influence deepening, and had seen the spirit burning clearer in the eyes, so that to meet him—to the ignorant, simple shepherd—was like meeting an angel. In Macpherson he saw and knew a man in the very prime of manhood, clever, as those said who knew best, and with the world before him; who yet could let the world go by; who sought no preferment, whose whole life and soul and energy were devoted to his people without a thought for himself, and who had ever a kind word and a happy smile for one and all.

These poor people could perhaps not have explained what their young minister was to them; what he really was beyond what they saw they could never know; and yet they did feel that he had sacrificed himself for their sake in staying there, that this sacrifice was no grudging martyrdom, but a glad free-will offering to the Lord he loved and to them. It shed more light upon their hearts than a thousand sermons; it had power to draw aside for them now and again the gross veil of material aims, and to give them as in a mirror a glimpse of eternal love.

This dying man could believe in the great love of the Lord who died for him when he had seen its living power in his minister’s life; and, though the comparison is but as of a spark to the sun itself, the selfless brotherhood of one whom he knew very far above him in ways which he could not understand brought home to him the brotherhood of Christ. With his hand in Macpherson’s, listening with fast-closing ears to his earnest words, following his childlike, simple prayers, it seemed as if earth and its soul-chains of sin and sorrow faded and fell away; as if the gates of heaven opened wide and wider, and the light shone out more and more perfect, till at last the call came down, “Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord;” and then the spirit went up out of the darkness and ignorance and poverty of the hard shepherd life, and Macpherson was kneeling alone on the mud floor in the dim hovel beside the dead.

An hour later the solitary bell of the kirk on the wooded knoll overlooking Loch Riach was ringing thin and clear across lake and meadow for morning prayer, and Macpherson hurried up the steep footpath that wound upwards to the kirk between Scotch firs from the flat grass land about the water.

A group of strangers stood at the kirkyard gate, a young fellow of two or three-and-twenty, a lady who looked about the same age, tall and very fair, and a lad in an Eton jacket with a top hat and broad white collar. No doubt they belonged to the English family who had been expected at the villa near the railway station and the store—the only villa within half a dozen miles.

Macpherson, with the courtesy that is natural to even the shyest Highlander, lifted his hat to them as a matter of course, and would have passed on, but the young man stepped forward and asked if they might go into the church, and whether it mattered where they sat.

“Oh! There’s only too much room,” he said, when he understood what they wanted, which was not all at once, for the Gaelic was his native tongue and his ears were utterly unfamiliar with English as spoken by English people. He led the way through long rank grass and nettles, across sunken graves and flat tombstones where the inscriptions were worn away, more, surely, by wild winter storms than by church-going feet, for there was no trace of any path from the gate to the door.

“Rummiest hole ’t ever I saw, Lily,” poor Macpherson heard the boy say in an undertone, as he ushered the strangers into as curious a place of worship as perhaps this nineteenth century can show.

The floor was all uneven and rudely paved with round cobble stones, glistening and dark with perpetual damp; a gallery, sagging rather alarmingly towards the middle, ran across either end; on the front panel of the eastern one was branded in irregular characters,

“I. M. Fecit. Aug. 17, 1771,”

and these were certainly the very newest part of the interior. Along under the north wall was a row of little wooden pews, some with broken doors, others with no doors at all; their flooring consisted merely of earth, with a few rough planks thrown down here and there to help to keep the feet of the congregation more or less dry. The once whitewashed walls were stained and blotted with great seas of green and red mould, and the atmosphere was as that of a subterranean dungeon—chill, damp, and smelling of ancient decay. Macpherson opened a pew for them, and they took their places while he walked, just as he was, up the crazy pulpit stair, hung his hat on a nail above him, and knelt down. There were two women in one of the rickety galleries, and not more than half a dozen people in the pews below: a farmer’s daughter in very gay attire, two or three laboring men in ill-fitting suits of Sunday black; a keeper in his master’s former shooting-coat and knickerbockers, and a couple of shepherds in kilt and plaid.

The bell ceased, and the bell-ringer, sexton, precentor, beadle—whatever he was—having made the rope fast where it hung on the gable outside, came in and took his place at the desk under the pulpit, and the Psalm was given out—

“I to the hills will lift mine eyes,

From whence doth come mine aid,

My safety cometh from the Lord,

Who heav’n and earth hath made.”

But the only person who attempted to sing was the factotum at the clerk’s desk, and he rendered the entire Psalm alone from beginning to end, in slow, loud, wavering, twangy tones that took small account of a semi-tone higher or lower, and left the tune, when he had finished, still a matter of conjecture to the uninitiated.

As the service proceeded a few more people came in, dropped into pews here and there, and stared at the unwonted sight of a lovely English face and fresh London millinery. But when Macpherson rose, and gave out his text, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” reading it twice or thrice in his curious foreign accent, every eye was fixed upon his face, and each man placed his arms on the table or shelf in front of him and bent forward to listen.

It was a thin, plain face, with a low, broad brow, high cheekbones and irregular features, that showed against the dull light-blue of the old pulpit; but the dark eyes lit up with intense eagerness as he leaned forward to preach in his fashion the old, oft-repeated lesson, and every line of the slight, wiry figure was instinct with energy and life. His sermon was short, and his language strong and simple—so simple that to at least one listener it had the force almost of a new revelation. The hearers could not know what that simplicity cost him, though some of them might have remembered a time when they could not understand him; there was nothing to tell how each plain, homely phrase came out victorious over eloquent words and symbolic imagery and high intellectual reasonings that were always thronging there within him; nothing to reveal how hard he was trying to live in them and out of himself, that he might realise their need, and feel how the message he so burned to deliver might best wake echoes in those poor dull hearts that were so slow to respond.

Very earnestly he set forth the nothingness of all the things that “grossly close us in” and bar the way that leads to life. Passionately he pleaded for the great single purpose that opens and makes plain that way and guides unerringly the feet that find it.

The fair English lady, looking up at that young earnest face, and then beyond it, where through the window she could see red fir boughs stirring against the summer sky, wondered at the courage that could face this mere handful of listeners and feel as enthusiastic and speak with as much energy as though thousands hung upon his words. To other than Gaelic ears that voice, too, had a special charm with its undertone of pathos, its plaintive echo of “old, unhappy, far-off things,” the melancholy of a dying language and a race that is being fast merged and lost in the self-asserting, irreverent Saxon, akin to that sorrow on the wind across the moors and among the lonesome hills, even when it comes whispering down the wild warm corries, or blows cool off the sunny summits on a summer day, carrying a sound of tears.

At the evening service the young Englishman was there alone, and on his homeward way Macpherson wondered whether he ought to call at the villa. For the next day or two, however, he knew he would have no time, for there was fever at a little farm on the lower boundary of the parish, and in the poor cottages belonging to it, and as often as other work would allow Macpherson was there comforting, nursing, helping, and always bringing with him some welcome trifle that the sufferers could not afford; a few eggs, a lemon or two, a little tea, two or three bottles of seltzer-water—anything his kind heart could suggest and his ready hand procure. Visits like these sometimes occupied his whole afternoon, so that he did not come home till the shadows of the hills darkened all the valley.

The sun had disappeared behind the rugged granite steeps to westward, though the eastern summits could see it still and glowed rose-red against the evening sky when Macpherson reached the Manse after Monday’s work. The door stood wide and showed a vista of boarded, carpetless passage sprinkled with sand, carpetless stairs opposite the entrance, and a door on either hand; merely looking in, it gave one the impression that whoever kept the house had good intentions, but fell lamentably short in carrying them out. Perhaps, however, it had ceased to strike the master’s eye, for he hung up his hat in the passage with quite a sigh of relief, turned to the door on the left with a smile of content on his face, and went into his study.

There, a good deal to his astonishment, stood the young Englishman of yesterday, holding out a cordial hand and introducing himself with an apology as Robert Echalaz.

“I have been making your acquaintance through the names of your books,” said he, with a smile. “The—the maid”—he hesitated a moment before venturing to apply this title to the grimy child who had admitted him—“the maid told me, as far as I could make out what she said, that you would be home soon, so I took the liberty of waiting here.”

Macpherson assured him that he was very welcome, and fetched in another chair out of the adjacent kitchen to add force to his words.

Then young Echalaz came straight to his point. His brother, he said, was bent on getting some fishing, and they thought that probably Mr. Macpherson, if he could not help them himself, might at any rate be able to direct them to some one who could.

“And I was glad of so plausible an excuse for getting to know you,” added the young fellow, with a frank smile. “I—I am preparing for holy orders, and”—he hesitated—“well, I don’t know—but I should very much like to have some talks with you.”

Macpherson’s face lit up with pleasure at this.

“I am afraid I shall disappoint you if you expect to learn anything from me,” he said, and his quaint accent struck the young Englishman afresh. Nevertheless, the two talked there for an hour before it even occurred to them that time was passing, and Echalaz jumped up and declared he ought to have been at home before now.

“And the fishing?” suggested Macpherson.

The fishing had been quite forgotten, but it was very soon settled, and Macpherson after some debate promised to meet the two brothers on the following Thursday. He accompanied his new acquaintance down the path to the gate, thinking it would be pleasant to be able to offer him hospitality of some sort, but afraid that dry oatcake would hardly be attractive, even with the addition—supposing that boiling water could be produced within reasonable time—of tea that this well-to-do young Englishman might possibly not think good. Poor Macpherson dismissed his hospitable inclinations with regret that made his grasp of the other’s hand all the warmer when they parted.

When Macpherson arrived at the villa at the appointed hour he found Tom waiting at the gate.

“Mother wants you to come in and see her,” said the boy, shaking hands, and Macpherson followed him into the house to the drawing-room, where Mrs. Echalaz—a pretty, faded, delicate-looking woman—lay on the sofa beside the open window. She turned her head languidly towards him, and held out a slim white hand.

“Ah, Mr. Macpherson, it is so good of you to devote yourself to my boy,” she said, conventionally. “I am sure he is very grateful; are you not, Tom?”

Tom murmured something about “awfully jolly,” and suggested that they should start at once.

Mrs. Echalaz, however, first asked many questions, as to the distance, the river, and the possibility of danger to her son, who was evidently the spoiled pet of the family.

Macpherson assured her that she need not be alarmed, and promised at all events to do his best to take care of Tom; and then, instead of Robert, when he was expected, Lily came in equipped for a walk, and Mrs. Echalaz said, “Ah, yes, my daughter, Mr. Macpherson. I’m sorry to say Robert is not well. He reads too hard, I am sure; he is not fit to go, and so I am sending Lily instead. I can’t let Tom”—she changed the expression of the thought in her heart—“Tom would be quite too much for you alone,” she said. “I always send one of them with him—not,” she added, betraying herself still more to Macpherson’s quick perceptions, “not that I doubt your care; I am sure you will not let any harm befall him.”

But her last words, far from being expressive of any such assurance, sounded like a reiterated appeal to him to guard her darling.

Macpherson said he would be very careful, and at length the three were allowed to depart.

Tom lost no time in handing over all his encumbrances to his sister, and before they had walked through the wood at the back of the villa he was away after butterflies, leaving Lily and Macpherson to carry the rods and tackle, the fishing-basket, and the lunch. It was a great relief to the young minister to find that the English girl was neither shy nor self-conscious, but ready to talk with the same pleasant frankness and cordiality that had so struck him in the elder brother.

She watched Tom’s retreating figure with an indulgent smile for a minute, and then turned to her companion. “May I ask you a great many questions, Mr. Macpherson?” she said, with natural directness.

“Surely,” answered he, readily; “and I hope I may be able to answer some of them.”

“I want to tell Robert,” she explained, with a smile. “After we had been to your little kirk on Sunday we both wanted very much to know you. He is to take holy orders, and he and I think a great deal about the work to which he will be called. Your life, now, must be something utterly different from anything we have ever seen or imagined before.”

“Is it?” he said. “Only because such primitive conditions exist perhaps no longer in England. I suppose a time is drawing nearer that will sweep away what lingers here.”

“Well, but—” Lily hesitated an instant. “May I be quite frank?” she put in, deprecatingly. “How is it that you are in such a place?”

He did not know the drift of this question, and looked puzzled.

“Why should I not be?” he asked, diffidently.

The girl glanced expressively to north and south, down and up the lonely valley.

“One might say, speaking roughly,” she said, “that there are no people here,”

Macpherson too looked up the valley, and saw, far off, the hut where that poor shepherd had died, and thoughts of that Sunday morning brought the light into his face.

“That would be ’speaking roughly,’” he said, with a gentleness that made her feel ashamed at first, and then anxious to justify herself.

“But is your congregation always so small?” she asked.

“That was about the average on Sunday,” he answered, and added, with a sigh, as if the fact were one he tried to forget, “It is small. My predecessor, I’m afraid, was unpopular, and latterly very old and feeble, and could not keep them together. A few have come back to me, but only a few.”

“Then why do you stay here?” said Lily, impetuously. “Robert told me about your books, and—and the house—the Manse—so poor and bare. He says you must be far above your work. Indeed, we knew it from your sermon on Sunday.”

He looked distressed.

“Do you think they will not have understood me?” he asked, with eager anxiety. “Was it difficult—obscure—beyond the mark?”

“Oh, no, no!” said Lily, astonished at his way of looking at it; “a child must have understood every word. I can’t quite explain how it struck me and Robert too; it was so short and so complete, and the words so simple that one wondered at their intense force; and yet—yet—”

He looked anxiously at her. “Don’t be afraid to find fault, Miss Echalaz,” he said, earnestly; “I shall be so thankful to you—”

“Fault!” she interrupted; “oh, you don’t understand me! I never heard anything that went so straight from heart to heart as those words of yours. When we came out I turned to Robert, and he turned to me, and we both said, ‘Well?’ and then Robert asked me what was the secret of such power, but I couldn’t tell. And he thought a long time as we went home, about what you had said, and what he would have said in your place, which none of them would have listened to or understood.”

Lily smiled rather sadly and broke off, for she remembered how Robert had said to her at last that Macpherson “walked with God,” and that that was the secret of his power. She could not well repeat her brother’s words, but she knew that they were true, and wanted to acknowledge to Macpherson the debt that both felt they owed to him.

“Ah! Mr. Macpherson,” she said, earnestly, “you made us both ashamed. We were eager to begin teaching, and we suddenly found we had everything still to learn. Robert says he sees now that nothing, absolutely nothing, can be done by a man who has not begun with himself.”

Macpherson looked up with keen sympathy, divining at once a fellow-struggler, for this was beaten ground to him, sorely familiar.

“That is true enough,” he said; “and yet we all begin at the outside, and are always returning to it again.”

Lily sighed.

“Yes,” she said, “and looking downward from ourselves instead of up to our ideal—to God. One seems to be always beginning, only beginning, over and over again.”

“Perhaps,” said Macpherson thoughtfully—“perhaps we need a whole life of beginning to show us what we are, and to teach us that the good that is done is all of God.”

“But don’t you feel yourself thrown away on such a miserable little congregation?” Lily went on, recurring to her first idea. “Would you not like a large parish?—a city audience?”

His eyes kindled.

“Once,” he said, “I wished for a larger field, and, as you say, an audience; and I thought myself thrown away. I looked on this as a mere stepping-stone to preferment; it was quite too paltry for my enthusiasm; I could not make myself intelligible to my few people, my sermons flew quite over their heads; I was disappointed and miserable. I wanted to bring a sacrifice, you understand, Miss Echalaz, but it was to be of my own choosing—such as Cain’s. And when I felt that God did not require it of me, I was angry and hurt, just, you know, as Cain was. And then one day a poor shepherd said to me, humbly and simply, ‘You are too clever for the like of us.’ That was lightning across thick darkness, Miss Echalaz. I understood, by God’s mercy, what I had known without understanding all along; it was obedience that He required; no sacrifice but the laying down of my will before His. And now,” he said, sadly—“now I wish I could throw myself away, if it were but for one man.”

“But you won’t stay here always?” Lily suggested.

“Ah! I don’t know,” he answered, with a smile. “We are soldiers; we go where we are sent; but I know now that it is good for us—for me at least—to work in a field where no glory can be reaped. If there were a prize within reach one might be in danger of looking away from the Master who calls us to follow only Him.”

Lily walked on in thoughtful silence.

Meanwhile Tom had strayed far from the track, plunging knee-deep through heather and green cranberry scrub after butterflies, and alarming the oyster-catchers, which flew whistling and circling overhead, “tiring the echoes with unvaried cries,” and grouse, which went whirring and clamoring away up among the big grey boulders on the mountainside. The two sat down to wait for him.

“Every sight and sound here has a personality for me,” Macpherson said, looking across the valley, where along the brow of a scarped hollow lay white wreaths of snow, and a little cloud above it hung about the mountain-top, clinging as if it would fain wander no more across the pathless heaven.

“That little cloud, see how it clings—heaven-born though it is—to the barren earth. If it lingers there it must dissolve in rain and fall into that cold hollow which never sees the sun.”

Even as he spoke the cloudlet stirred, detached itself, and stole slowly away into the blue air.

“Ay!” he said to himself, with expressive intonation as he watched it; and then, bending his head while he held a piece of heather ungathered in his hand, he listened a minute. “Hark!” he said, raising his eyes with a dreamy smile. “Do you hear it?”

Far through the stillness of the sultry summer air came the murmur of water falling down its stony channel.

“It is the burn yonder—that green streak between the hills—tumbling down among the ferns. I used to fancy it mourned to leave its native fountains, and flowery sheltering banks, and the solitude of these mighty hills; but now it seems to me it feels a great destiny drawing it irresistibly onward, down to the forests below, through moor and meadow, to exchange the mountain echoes and the wild birds’ cry for the shriek and rattle of railways and the din of busy towns; to hurry onward, though it lose its early sweetness and receive many a foul stain as it goes to join the ocean, the mighty heart which draws it to itself, reaching which at last all its impurity shall be purged away.”

He was looking into the far horizon, where rank on rank of faint and fainter hills mingled with the clouds and blue sky, and seemed lost in thoughts beyond the words he had been speaking.

Lily’s glance rested on his spiritual face, and presently she sighed.

“My lot, I’m afraid,” she said, “is cast in that same city turmoil—we live in London, you know. It will be hard to go back to that artificial, crowded, stifling atmosphere after this.” Glancing up and round them at the wide moorland and the hills, “Here the soul lies open to all the winds of heaven; there—ah! one can soon forget there is a heaven at all.”

“Hullo!” cried Tom’s voice, some little way behind them; and presently he came up flushed and very much out of breath, and flung himself down in the heather at their feet. “I should like to climb up and touch that snow,” he remarked, after only one minute’s prostrate inaction, resting on his elbows with his chin in his hands and his feet waving slowly about. “I shouldn’t fancy your living in winter, sir,” he went on, looking up at Macpherson, “but perhaps you just shut yourself up with your books, like a dormouse, till the snow clears off?”

“I can’t do that,” said Macpherson, simply. “I have been up this valley sometimes in snow so deep that the three miles took over three hours to walk, and once before I could come back there was such a blinding storm that I had to spend the night in that little black hut—you can just see it, to the right, far up the valley. It is not always safe to go alone, but I generally do because I know almost every stone and tree.”

Tom cross-questioned a little about these winter expeditions, and then voted for refreshments; but Lily laughed at him, and proposed that they should do a little more of the day’s work first, and then the three rose and set forward, Tom engrossing the minister’s attention with a host of such far-fetched and extraordinary questions as only a schoolboy can possibly propound and care to have answered.

When at last they reached the river, after looking about and choosing a place for lunch, Tom condescended to relieve his sister of his own paraphernalia, told her she might “turn out the grub” because he required the basket, and coolly recommended her to mount guard over everything till they came back.

“Are you not going to fish, Miss Echalaz?” asked Macpherson, becoming aware that it was proposed to leave her alone, and not altogether happy at the idea.

“Oh! she’s only chaperon,” cried Tom, impatient to be off, and Lily held up a cloud of white knitting which she said would keep her quiet as long as they liked to be away. Tom uttered an urgent “Oh, sir—please—she really is all right,” Macpherson turned away, and then the two went obliquely down the bank with their rods, and were soon lost to sight.

All was silence but the babbling of the water among the rocks, and the faint summer air playing in the tassels of the birches, and all above the glowing brown and purple moor the heat twinkled and trembled aromatic of thyme and bog myrtle and juniper.

Lily clambered down the bank and found a shady nook fringed about with stunted birch and ferns, and there she resigned herself to knitting and to thronging thoughts suggested by what the young minister had said.

Macpherson, meanwhile, and Tom had established themselves to their entire satisfaction on two large boulders in mid stream, and abandoned themselves to the “sport” of waiting for the fishes.

Tom, conscious at first of Macpherson’s experienced eye, contrived to be very patient for half an hour; but then he could no longer help thinking that the fishes were obstinate, or the spot unfavorable, or the sun too hot and bright, or the air too still, or the fly—probably the fly was not the right kind; at any rate, a change of position must no longer be deferred. By judicious tacking from boulder to boulder, and then across a low shingle island where stunted alder scrub made a shelter for the oyster-catchers, and tufts of saxifrage and stonecrop grew, he arrived at a more likely place, and tried again. Still it was evident that the fishes did not see the matter from his point of view. He very soon wearied of his new position and cast about for a better. He saw a big round boulder out in the very middle of the broadest part of the stream, and was seized with all a boy’s longing to be on it, sport or no sport. To long for a thing, with Tom Echalaz, was as a rule to attain it rather sooner than later, and he at once began making his way out with plenty of pluck and very little caution, and finally landed with his rod, much wetter than he cared to notice, and tried again. He turned presently, when even this new delight was beginning to pall, to see what Macpherson was doing. Then he fancied he heard thunder, and stood motionless to listen. His eyes were fixed on the brown laughing water, flowing so softly over the stones below, that caught the sun and shadow through it and looked like broken gold amongst the soft brown of the bottom; the pebbly clatter of the shallow waterfall beyond was in his ears. This was the moment, the sight, the sound that remained indelibly fixed in his memory afterwards—the sultry stillness, and the slumbrous babble and murmur that only made it seem more still. Surely there was a curious sound far off up the valley.

“It is thunder,” he said softly to himself, and looked up at the cloudless sky. “How—really—it does sound awfully queer.”

He glanced up stream to see what had become of his companion, and called out, “I say, isn’t that thunder?”

Macpherson, who also was in the middle of the stream, to Tom’s astonishment was in the act of throwing off his coat, and shouted almost before Tom had spoken,

“To the bank—the bank, for your life! At once!” and even careless, unobservant Tom saw his face look white as death against the dark background of rock and river.

Young Echalaz, although alarmed, was by no means the man to move without sufficient cause shown, and rather naturally looked about him for his danger before doing what he was told, even when Macpherson shouted again.

Yet the first far-off sound, the shouts and the delay, were all embraced in a few seconds. Then suddenly the boy realised that it was not thunder—this fearful, awesome wail and roar that was drawing nearer. He turned in terror, towards the bank, and heard Macpherson call out, “Can you swim?”

“No,” Tom shouted, but his voice was lost in the wild tumult of rushing water, the river rose to his waist, the spate was upon them. Bewildered, but not losing all his natural courage, the boy made an effort to plant the thick end of his rod down into the bottom to steady himself, but the next instant the water was about his shoulders, he lost his footing and was swept away upon the flood. Exactly what happened then, or how long it was that he felt himself rolling over, whirling helplessly along with the mighty current, choking and struggling, deafened by the thunder of the water, fighting desperately for his life, Tom never could make out, but he remembered feeling at last that he was beaten, that his earthly career was “about played out,” as he himself expressed it; then there was a moment’s vivid anguish of death, and keen memories of things done and left undone in the long ago that he must now “let alone for ever,” and then a pause, a stoppage, energy coming back—he was caught and entangled by the fishing-basket that hung about his shoulders, and then a strong arm held him fast and he heard Macpherson’s voice saying bravely, “Hold on—you’re all safe, thank God!” and in another minute he was dragged on to the bank.

“I’m all right!” he gasped, plucking up his spirits as he got his eyes open and pushed his dripping hair off his face, and then he sat up and laughed at the figure his preserver presented kneeling there in his shirt-sleeves, soaked and streaming with water. “What will the mater say?” he exclaimed, delighted with his adventure. “Let’s go and show ourselves to Lily.”

Macpherson sprang to his feet and looked along the bank down stream.

“Where is your sister?” he faltered, dashing the water from his eyes; and then, without waiting for an answer, he was away like an arrow from the bow, running beside the river as hard as man can run. Tom set off running too, and presently saw Macpherson, now far ahead, plunge into the flood.

A dead tree, bleached by last winter’s storms, went sweeping past him, checked now and again by projecting rocks or overhanging boughs, and then driven on once more by the overwhelming force of the water. For an instant the boy threw himself upon the ground sobbing loud in agonising dread, and then again he struggled to his feet, choked down his sobs, and ran on at his utmost speed.

Not very far down the river turned at a sharp angle towards the nearer bank, and a few old alders leaned out between the rocks. As Tom drew near enough to distinguish one object from another amongst the foam and swirling water, he gave a glad shout, “Hold on! hold on!” and in another two minutes, holding by the alders, he was clambering down towards the edge of the water, where Macpherson had caught a bough with one hand and with the other supported Lily, who was clinging to his shoulder.

“Give her your hand,” said Macpherson, rather faintly. “I can do nothing.”

“Can you give me your hand, Lily?” panted the boy, leaning down. “Can you climb a bit?”

“Oh! save us, Tom! I can’t let go,” Lily gasped, helpless with terror.

“There’s no footing,” said Macpherson, desperately.

Tom laid himself carefully along the trunk, and reaching down, succeeded in taking firmly hold of Lily’s hand. Macpherson at the same moment exerted his flagging strength to lift her a little towards the friendly boughs.

“Be brave,” he said, detaching her clinging hands.

Tom pulled valiantly, and in another minute she was safe; only half out of the water it is true, and trembling with cold and fright, but still able to hold on, and with Tom’s help climb up on to dry land.

“Thank God!” Macpherson uttered, and added, “Is she hurt?” but before either could answer they heard a crashing noise and a cry, and steadying themselves to look downwards, saw the dead tree, which had been caught somewhere higher up and detained a little while, go swinging round the curve with its roots tossing in the air, and Macpherson—? Macpherson was gone, and the lower boughs, where he and Lily had been clinging, were all broken and torn away.

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Two hours later Mrs. Echalaz was brought to the verge of hysterics at the sight of her daughter, wet from head to foot, her face scratched and bruised, her long wet hair hanging tangled about her shoulders, without hat or gloves, and alone, hurrying towards the house.

Before Lily could explain what had happened Tom too appeared, wet and pale, and choking with sobs, followed at a little distance by two red-bearded, red-haired keepers, wet through also, moving slowly, and carrying between them Macpherson, without coat or hat, his head fallen back, his face white and still, his arms hanging limply down, water trickling from his clothes and hair.

“I knew it! I said so!” screamed Mrs. Echalaz, clasping Tom in her arms. “Never, never will I trust you out of my sight again!”

Tom broke away, crying bitterly.

“Oh, mother, don’t! He’s dead!”

“Dead!” shrieked poor Mrs. Echalaz; “and they’re bringing him into this house?”

She was rushing out into the passage, but Robert, who had already helped to bring Macpherson in, met her, and led her quietly back.

“You put these two to bed,” said he, “and I will take care of him, mother. The men say he may come round,” and he hurried away to do all that the keeper’s experience suggested and send at once for a doctor.

The keeper, whose name, in common with most of the population of that district, was also Macpherson, told Robert how this very thing had happened only two years before to the young laird and his own son, who were both very nearly drowned, and explained that an unusual amount of rain must have fallen up in the hills, some sudden and violent downpour, to occasion the spate.

It was long before they dared cease to doubt of Macpherson’s recovery, and when at last he really began to mend, the process was slow and tedious.

As soon as her terrors for Tom were appeased by finding that he was not a whit the worse for his wetting, Mrs. Echalaz took so kindly to the young fellow, who certainly owed his whole misfortune to them, that she waited on him and nursed him as patiently and tenderly as his own mother could have done.

“I could not have believed it was so pleasant to be ill,” he said to her, with a grateful smile, one day when, helped by Robert and Tom, he had come into the sitting-room for the first time; “I shall be spoiled for going back to work.”

They all protested that he need not think of work yet, as he could not so much as walk alone; and many a pleasant day went by in that little sitting-room, where half-drawn blinds made a cool dimness, and an unfamiliar perfume dwelt in the air—attar of roses, perhaps; something quite different, at any rate, from the odor of plain—very plain— cookery and peat smoke to which he was accustomed at the Manse.

The room was like fairyland, with its hundred costly trifles, china ornaments, scraps of Oriental work, curious fans and other nicknacks, photographs and books littered about in prettily-regulated disorder.

Lying there, weak and weary, his eyes dwelt upon it all with vague, unspeculating wonder and faint content. Mrs. Echalaz and Lily too were always so lovely to look at, “a gude sicht for sair een,” their faces so refined, voices so low and gentle, hands so delicately fair; their dress, too, was wonderful and beautiful, like a part of themselves. He felt himself under a deepening spell in their midst; he had never seen things like the things he saw here, nor women like these women.

As for Lily, he was ashamed at all she did for him, but too helpless to protest.

Once, when she saw that he hardly knew how to suffer so much kindness at her hands, she said, rather sadly,

“Except for me, you need not be lying here at all,” and after that he could only hold his tongue, and try to take everything graciously, owning to himself that the least he could do was this; and not owning what he perhaps scarcely knew, that all this kindness would lose its charm if she were no longer the minister. But the more the charm grew upon him the more shy and silent he became with her; and, perversely, the more he longed to see her, or at least to know that she was near, the less dared he raise his eyes or speak a word. And then he felt beyond all hiding that, to part and see her no more would be the bitterest pain he could ever know—such pain as a man must carry to his grave. He knew that he was sorry to be getting strong, and so drawing near the hour he dreaded; and then, because he felt such utter reluctance to return to his old life—the life he would feel to be so desperately lonely henceforth—he resolved to go at once.

That very day he spoke to Mrs. Echalaz alone, when the evening twilight made it easier to say what he knew she would oppose with the pretty tyranny which they all exercised upon him, and which his natural shyness made it very hard for him to resist.

“As if I should listen to such nonsense,” said Mrs. Echalaz, just as he had felt that she would. “You are not going for at least a week.”

His thin, brown hand twitched nervously on the arm of his chair.

“You are very kind,” he said, huskily—“much too kind; but I must go. Please do not urge me to stay—you don’t know how hard you make it to me.”

Mrs. Echalaz laid her pretty jewelled fingers on his restless hand.

“Now tell me why you must go,” she said, kindly; “and if it is a good reason I will allow it.”

He hesitated long enough for her to divine that his answer, when it came, was an evasion.

“I know it is my duty,” he said, looking down. “I shall do wrong to stay here—doing nothing.” The last two words he added rather hastily, after an instant’s embarrassment.

“So you will not tell me?” said Mrs. Echalaz, reproachfully.

He raised his eyes, doubting, to her face, with a strong impulse to tell her all; then he smiled faintly.

“Do you not think duty the highest possible reason?” he asked, resolving to keep silence.

Mrs. Echalaz looked at him.

“I think I could tell you a nearer one,” she said, with a gentle pressure of her hand on his, that told him she read his very heart; and then she added, with grave kindness, “Then I suppose we must let duty carry the day. We shall miss you dreadfully.”

Macpherson raised her hand with reverent affection to his lips, but he could not say a word.

When the rest came home from their walk he was gone.

Privately Mrs. Echalaz told Robert what had passed, and what she construed it to mean.

“Well, why not?” was his comment.

“Why not!” echoed his mother, raising hands and eyes. “Of course I like him. I never met a man to whom I would sooner have trusted Lily’s happiness, but of course it’s impossible.”

“Why?” asked Robert, simply.

“My dear boy!” exclaimed Mrs. Echalaz, “you know he has nothing. And think of the connection! Preposterous!”

“A fig for the connection!” rejoined Robert, coolly; “and as for money, Lily has quite enough, I suppose. Ask her.”

“Oh, you’re perfectly ridiculous!” cried his mother, with a vehemence that convinced him she was already wavering in her own mind, and he said no more.

Meanwhile Macpherson went home, and the first thing that recalled him unmistakably to common earth was the sight of his one servant, a ragged, barefooted, scantily clad, unkempt lassie of eleven or so, who opened the door to him with exceedingly dirty hands, a grin of cheerful welcome on her broad unwashed face. It was like waking from a sunny dream to find oneself lying in the dark; rain beating on the window, the gusty night wind shaking the door; and to feel the thrill of some sharp pain—pain that makes a loneliness for flesh and spirit such as no human heart may share, but is known to God alone.

He nodded to the child, and going past her into his study, shut the door behind him. The sand slipped and grated under his feet, the smell of peat-smoke and cookery was unabated. He sat down at his table, where in that long past other life of his he had spent so many busy happy hours, and hid his face on his folded arms, trying to let the influence and memory of the last weeks go by; trying hard to put it away and brace himself to the old work again.

The girl tapped at the door and said his tea was ready, and he went into the smoky kitchen and sat down before a rather smeary cup and plate, a pile of singed oatcakes, and a small teapot, but the food stuck in his throat. He could not touch it, and by way of getting to work at once he went away to visit a poor family half a mile off. On his way home he found his strength exhausted. He could hardly drag himself along, and even when at last in sight of his own door he leaned against the low kirkyard wall and wondered whether he could reach it, while his tired eyes dwelt listlessly on the lovely evening landscape. The grey birches leaned motionless down over the mossy knolls, and the dark ranks of larch and fir by the loch looked down into their dark glassy shadows in the deep water. The great hills are growing dim through the mist of evening, the clouds have crept away, and all the sky shines with a faint rosy glow through the veil of rising vapor; the long grass in the hollows there beside the lake and all the folded flowers in yonder meadows are drinking in the gracious dew. Far through the stillness comes the voice of many waters—of the river leaping down the rocks. Through Macpherson’s fancy comes a vision of it sparkling in the glory of a summer day, of himself too walking there, fenced about with daylight and companionship, plovers calling and crying overhead, flowers glowing under foot, merry gnats dancing in the yellow gleams under the alder boughs, light and shadow flying over the fields and flickering among the pools and waterfalls. But now the ghostly mist creeps on and folds it all out of sight, and he is alone.

Mournfully, and yet with what deep longing, it brings to his heart thoughts of that dim night that shall be when the day is past to come no more; of the many morrows that shall dawn and set with their sun and shadow, the many evenings with their tender mist and dew, when he will have nor part nor lot in the beautiful earth save a narrow grave he knows not where. Oh, life, swifter than a weaver’s shuttle! vanishing as a dream! Shall he not bear its utmost burden to the end?

Strength and patience came to him beside those quiet graves. Feeling forward into the future he could divine a coming hour when he would be fain to ask a harder trial, longer probation, ere he see the face of the Master he has followed with such faltering feet; that he may suffer a little more for the dear sake of Him whom he has loved so unworthily, ere the day for suffering go by for evermore.

The next day, having made up his mind to avoid the villa entirely, he sent Mrs. Echalaz a basket of water-lilies from the loch, with a message to the effect that he hoped his long arrears of work might be his excuse for not coming in person.

He only longed now to hear that they were gone, and went in daily fear of meeting some of them. He thought and hoped that his fever of unrest might pass into dull pain when she was gone, a pain he might be able to bear more quietly, and in time, perhaps, ignore. Hard work was the only anodyne; but he was not very fit yet for all he tried to do, and the sore trouble of his heart weighed down his spirit and sapped his energy in spite of his best efforts, so that even to himself he grew changed and strange.

He was coming home one evening through the birch wood above the loch, about a week after he had left the villa, with weary, lagging steps, and his eyes upon the ground, when the consciousness of another presence, though he heard no sound, made him look up to find himself face to face with Lily standing alone on the narrow path just in front of him. She had been sitting there under the trees and had just risen to her feet; her hands were full of white scented orchis, her hat lay on the ground, and the evening sunlight fell on her fair hair and showed him that her face was paler than when he saw it last—paler and almost, he thought, a little sad. He forgot how his behavior might appear to her; his one idea was to escape, that she might never guess the fatal shipwreck he had made.

His eyes fell directly, and with a few inarticulate words he lifted his hat and stood aside to let her pass. But Lily did not move. Perhaps if he had not looked so very ill, and something more than ill, she might have lacked courage to disregard his gesture; as it was, pity held her there.

“Mr. Macpherson,” she said, in a low, grieved voice, “am I to pass by without a word?”

He could not speak. It was like the last glimpse of light to the prisoner condemned to life-long darkness to have her standing there. How was he to bid her go?

“What have we done?” Lily asked. “What has happened?”

Macpherson looked up, pale and agitated. “I am not ungrateful,” he said, barely able to control his voice. “Oh, don’t think that, Miss Echalaz.”

“I can’t think that,” said Lily, simply; “but something is wrong if, after all that has happened, you try to treat me as an utter stranger.”

He felt she was hurt, and looked up melted, penitent, ready to give himself any pain, undergo any humiliation, to heal the wound he had made.

“Miss Echalaz,” he said, “I wanted to spare you—and myself too—I—I am blind and bewildered—I have been very selfish—perhaps it is wrong now to tell you—I don’t know—I can’t tell—” he stopped, and there was a moment’s absolute silence covering wild confusion and conflict in his heart, and then he looked up and the words came, he knew not how, steady and clear, “I love you, Miss Echalaz.” They were scarcely spoken before he was condemning himself again. “Oh! Laugh at me—” He laughed too as he spoke, not knowing what he did till he saw her face change and the tears start from her eyes.

“Does it seem to you a thing for laughter?” she asked, passionately. “Have you judged me a woman to laugh at the love of the noblest man I know? To hold it so very cheap that you need not even tell me—”

“How could I tell you?” he broke out. “What could I offer in exchange for all I would ask you to lay down? Could I ask you to come and live in this wilderness in the barest poverty, where half the year is winter, where there is no—no society, nothing but work and hardship and loneliness?”

“If those were all you had to offer, you were right,” Lily answered, tremulously. “You yourself do not live that life for nothing. There is something that so far outweighs all those things that you count them as naught.”

“Oh, I love my people!” said Macpherson at once, and even as he uttered the word it told him what she meant. “My love was such a poor thing to offer,” he faltered humbly, “and I have nothing else.”

The tears brimmed over in Lily’s eyes. “And would you take anything else in exchange?” she said—“would money do instead, or rank, or any other thing?”

“Oh, no, no, no!” he exclaimed, impetuously; “only love, and only yours! Can love—such love as mine—outweigh all the rest?” His voice failed, and as he raised his earnest, searching eyes to her face, the last words came in a hoarse whisper, “Oh, is it enough for me to dare offer you that alone?”

Lily crossed the narrow pathway that divided them, letting all her flowers fall at their feet, and laid her hands in his.

“Would you really have let me go away without telling me?” she asked, bravely, while the rosy color deepened in her cheeks. “Less than love, for you and me, is nothing; and more than love there cannot be;” and then she was fain to hide her face and fast-falling tears upon his breast. “Oh, if only I were less unworthy!”

Macpherson trembled as he drew her to him. “God bless you, darling!” he murmured, brokenly; and again and again, thinking over the past, she heard him whisper, “Thank God! thank God!”—Leisure Hour.

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