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

[THE POLITICAL SITUATION OF EUROPE.]
[ORGANIC NATURE’S RIDDLE.]
[A VERY OLD MASTER.]
[THE ORGANIZATION OF DEMOCRACY.]
[SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS.]
[A FRENCH DRAMA UPON ABELARD.]
[THE UNITY OF THE EMPIRE.]
[ODD QUARTERS.]
[SIR TRISTRAM DE LYONESSE.]
[OLD MYTHOLOGY IN NEW APPAREL.]
[OUTWITTED.]
[THE BANK OF ENGLAND.]
[EXPLORATION IN A NEW DIRECTION.]
[A RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHER ON ENGLISH POLITICS.]
[BLACKSTONE.]
[LITERARY NOTICES.]
[FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.]
[MISCELLANY.]

Eclectic Magazine
OF
FOREIGN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.

New Series. Vol. XLI., No. 5.	MAY, 1885.	Old Series complete in 63 vols.

[THE POLITICAL SITUATION OF EUROPE.]
BY F. NOBILI-VITELLESCHI, SENATOR OF ITALY.

I.

It is a matter worthy of consideration why the progress which is in our time so unexpectedly rapid in all which concerns the physical world, should be so slow, or rather so limited, in the sphere of morals. We might almost say that, like a line ascending in a spiral form, progress can in each historical period only be made within the given orbit in which the period itself revolves.

With respect to the two principal questions which interest mankind in its complex—that is, in its political and social—existence, the orbit in which the historical period preceding our own revolved, as far as politics are concerned, circled round what we may term the State, although this does not precisely correspond to our present conception of the word; and socially it revolved round an absolute system of proprietorship, together with the rights and duties which were to a varying extent attached to it, and which included a relative and practically obsolete exercise of charitable customs.

That which was called a State was not always a combination which had, in accordance with the modern conception, the public welfare as its sole and supreme object, but it generally depended on certain rights which had their origin in facts of extreme antiquity. These combinations were of two kinds. The most usual, which was indeed almost universal in Europe, was the monarchy, in which a given family governed and represented the interests of a more or less extensive number of peoples, which in virtue of ancient rights, of conquests, of treaties, or in any other way belonged to her. In a few rare instances these monarchies were elective, and the rulers, who were elected by a college, a caste, or in some other manner, found themselves in the same conditions as hereditary sovereigns. The least common, but not the least important and successful, form of government was that of the communities which governed themselves. But even this form relied for its existence on the same elements as the monarchies—that is, on rights, conquests, and treaties, or similar reasons—on which alone the political state of Europe was based up to the year 1815.

By this we mean that up to 1815 no right was recognised in political life except that which derived its origin from some fact or facts which were supposed to constitute rights, such as successions, conquests, concessions, or gifts. Spain, in virtue of one or other of these titles, ruled the Low Countries and the kingdom of Naples, nor did it occur to any one to discuss the fitness of this strange aggregation of different peoples, united in a single State. It would be tedious to cite all the instances of curious combinations to which the ancient European rights gave rise. Although they had a tendency to dissolve under the influence of recent times, yet the system was maintained up to 1815, the date of the last great treaty which was made on this basis, and of which the effect remained up to 1845.

Throughout this protracted period, of which the beginning is confounded with that of European civilisation, a certain progress did, however, take place in the conditions of European society, which advanced from the capitulations of Charles the Great to the English Great Charter, from arbitrary decrees to the statutes of the republic of Florence, and finally, to the legislative acts of Joseph the Second in Austria, of Leopold in Tuscany, Charles the Third in the kingdom of Naples, and of all the contemporary governments which uttered their last word on such progress as was possible to politicians of that period, and which consisted in adapting as far as possible the inflexible exigencies of ancient rights to the necessities of modern facts, and in inducing those who governed by divine right to consider the interests of the people. But this was only up to a certain point, and the relative conditions of the governors and the governed did not cease to be the basis of European policy.

Speaking of these things at this day is like speaking of another world. A State which is not governed in the interests of those of whom it consists would be a tyranny. It is held to be an iniquity to hold a people subject to a rule which is independent of ethnographical, geographical, or economical considerations, and such a people would be considered justified in throwing off the yoke, if possible. A war undertaken to maintain a purely dynastic title would be regarded as an intolerable burden, to which no nation is bound to submit.

The arguments which are used to stigmatise and condemn the old system as unjust and out of date are naturally derived from its evils, dangers, and inconveniences. The people were subject to laws, taxation, and wars, for causes which did not concern them, and which for that very reason multiplied without control. The Thirty Years’ War and the War of Succession cut down whole peoples, not for their own benefit, but in order to decide to whom they should belong. A permanent state of war appeared to be the inevitable result of the conflagration of all these rights, which were contested at the expense of the happiness of peoples. Meanwhile science had changed the basis of rights, and the famous principles of 1789, which had their birth in the intoxication of the nascent revolution and were nourished by the blood of its maturer age, found their way into codes and constitutions. The old system, condemned both in theory and practice, was anathematised by the rising generation, which claimed to have discovered the secret of true policy, and the grand panacea for all the evils of humanity.

Nor was it otherwise with social questions. The conception that every man might do what he pleased with his own, and might transmit it to others both before and after his death, was more or less present in the constitution of all civil societies. But this system deprived of the enjoyments of life all those who were unable to acquire property for themselves, and to whom no one could or would transmit it. In one word, in this system there were no official dispositions for the poor, who nevertheless constitute the eternal problem of human society. In fact, money enough for the permanent and complete relief of the poor could not be found, nor the mode of useful legislation on this subject. But an appeal beneath the beneficent influence of Christianity was made to the most refined sentiments of humanity, and created duties which, however imperfectly fulfilled, were imperious, and relied on a divine sanction. In this way charity provided for the variable and indefinite needs which exist in all human societies, from the richest and most fortunate to the poorest and most unhappy, and did so with the buoyant and indefinite force inspired by sentiment, which contrasts strongly with similar laws and provisions enacted by the State.

The modern phase of thought does not venture openly to attack socially property, as politically it has attacked divine right, because it has not known what to substitute in its place. It was less difficult to sustain universal suffrage, which met with fewer obstacles in its translation into fact than communism or socialism. There has therefore been no direct attack on property, but for a long while circuitous means have been taken to undermine its rights. By the destruction of the feudal system, the bonds which connected property with the exercise of political power were burst asunder, and another blow was struck at its stability by the abolition of the rights of eldest sons, and of all the other privileges belonging to it, according to ancient usage. Later, legitimate successions and those of intestate persons have been regulated, and thus the disintegration has been gradually prepared. Finally, the laws of taxation for purposes of the State or of public welfare have further confiscated a large portion of private property. Hence it may be said that on great part of the Continent property of every kind—rural, urban, movable, or immovable—has become a merchandise, great part of which is administered by trustees for the benefit of the State, while the rest is subject to a number of laws, contracts, and combinations which cause it to pass from one person to another with the utmost rapidity, so that its enjoyment may be extended to as large a number as possible, since the mode of distributing it to all has not yet been discovered.

Charity has been overthrown by the same blow. It has shared the unpopularity of her preachers, and it also, without being directly attacked, has been subjected, under different pretexts, to the destruction and conversion of a very large number of institutions founded under its banner, and discredit has been thrown on its practices and provisions, while the struggle for existence has been brutally substituted for charity. So much the worse for the man who cannot help himself out of a difficulty. The motto of our time is a species of sauve qui peut, which begins in the transactions of the money market and leads some to the temple of fortune and others to the river or to the lunatic asylum.

We do not, however, assert that the inexhaustible source of human kindness with which God has mercifully endowed our nature does not still find means of doing good, and great good. Institutions, which are for the most part beneficent, abound on every side, and supply the place of the ancient foundations which have disappeared. But the conception and its mode of execution are different and do not correspond with the old usage. Everything is done according to rule in modern philanthropy. There are free municipal schools in which instruction is given to those who do or do not desire it. There are hospitals in which a definite number of patients afflicted by certain diseases are collected, and if the number is exceeded or the symptoms are not the same, they are left to die until a hospital is founded which is intended for such cases. If a man is in want of bread he receives a garment, because the institution which might help him only provides clothes; and if a whole family is dying of hunger they will receive a mattress if directed to an institution which only supplies beds. The liberal charity which is personal and intelligent, and which corresponds to the infinite variety and combinations of human necessities, lingers, thank God! in the hearts of the beneficent, but its form is discredited and its means are abridged. The great mass of the funds which were devoted to charity is now diverted into the official and semi-official channels of modern philanthropy. In my opinion, the relief which is now given does good without remedying the evil, since a dinner for to-day is always welcome, but it will not prevent a man from dying of hunger next week, or of cold if he has not wherewithal to cover himself; while a loaf or a cloak given at a propitious moment may save the life of a man or of a whole family. So it may be said that the place of charity has been taken by the struggle for existence, only modified by administrative philanthropy.

This second revolution was produced by the growing discredit which resulted from the evils and inconveniences which had their source in the ancient conception of property, and from those which were attributed to the free and sentimental charity. Property, when in the hands of a few privileged classes, made few happy while the many were unhappy. Charity created miseries by encouraging idleness. Such were the principal arguments which overthrew the old system.

Thus political power of an exclusive and egotistic character, which was founded on divine right, was destroyed in order to constitute governments on a popular basis; labor was substituted for charity. It appeared to the philosophers who carried out this great revolution that nothing more was needed to inaugurate a new golden age in which the rivers would flow with milk, and ripe fruits would fall on every man’s table. It is needless to add that peace and general satisfaction were to be the results of this profound and laborious revolution.

II.

The old order of things was, however, hardly demolished before two distinct and menacing questions were raised upon its ruins—Nationality and Socialism. Let us begin with the first.

Since the country (patria), in the limited sense of the word, had disappeared—that is, the political unity which was represented by the dynasty or flag or even simply a steeple, the early symbol of the old societies—the sentiment of association took its concrete form in a fresh combination, more in harmony with the democratic tendencies of our times. It assumed the widest possible basis—to constitute a society which should unite all common interests, and should be governed in conformity with these. It is, indeed, not surprising that men who speak the same language, inhabit the same zone, who are alike in their customs and dispositions, who are, in short, what is now called a nation, should present all these characteristics, and should therefore become the new political unit both of the present and the future, thus replacing the earlier units formed by heredity or conquests without respect to the interests of all the component elements.

Nothing in nature is produced at one stroke; and some races had already advanced towards nationality, and especially France, which had laboriously constituted herself into a nation, before the word was used in its political meaning. But the country to which it was allotted to assert loudly and explicitly this new form of political life was Italy in 1859. The formula of nationality as the basis of right was first proposed by her and obtained acceptance by international jurisprudence, and this basis had scarcely been established before it led to the overthrow of six thrones which boasted of different origins, among which was the most ancient and most venerable of all—the temporal power of the Popes. The experiment was favorably received, and Germany lost no time in adopting it, since the old system had produced in that country the same conditions of divisions and of relative weakness which had occurred in Italy. The campaigns of 1866 and of 1870 served to contribute to the new theory the force which was necessary to convince European diplomacy.

Even those who most reluctantly accept modern ideas do not now speak of anything but nationality. It might be supposed that there had never been any other basis for politics, since this has in a very short time been so completely and universally accepted.

The production of these nationalities has, however, been accompanied by all the defects of the system which preceded them. They have brought with them all the rancours of ancient Europe. The rancours of Francis I. and of Charles V. have been transmuted into the deadly enmity which exists between French and Germans. The testament of Frederic II. has led to the programme of the German people, and the ambitious projects of Catherine II. have issued in the aspirations of the Slave race. So though the new era which began with nationality indicates a real progress in the internal constitution of the different States, and in the fundamental reasons for their several governments; still with respect to their international relations to universal justice and to general peace, in a word, with respect to the progress of the human race in morals, we find ourselves—to make use of the metaphor we employed at first—in a fresh spiral, equally limited in space, in which there is a relative progress, but it has only a slight influence on the general progress of humanity. And, to turn from abstract principles to the concrete limits of politics, the present state of things is not promising nor hopeful for the peace of Europe.

The first and most curious phenomenon which accompanied the affirmation of different nationalities as a guarantee of peace in Europe, has been compulsory service—a euphemism which implies that the whole male population of Europe is trained and educated for war; thus men are fashioned into as deadly instruments as were ever found in barbarous ages and during the warfare of the old system. Military education, both technical and gymnastic, is brought to such perfection that whole generations are trained like hounds for mortal conflict, and each man may on an average kill ten others in the course of a minute. Even in traversing Europe by the railway we may observe near the fortresses, and indeed in the great centres of population, arenas, gymnasia, drilling grounds, and young men clothed in the prescribed warlike uniform. This strange spectacle is unnoticed because it is concealed and confounded with the attractions of modern civilisation; but it must strike all who seek to penetrate its external phenomena: and certainly those who established the present civilisation did not anticipate such a result.

We must, however, leave the speculative side of the question to philosophers, since what concerns us in the interests of this same civilisation is to examine the practical results of the situation in Europe in its political aspect, with which we are at this moment occupied. Briefly, we wish to ascertain what is now the political situation of Europe, in consequence and in presence of the new basis on which European rights are established.

And primarily, since the application of these new rights, all nationalities, if they do not feel the present necessity, yet they have potentially a tendency to assimilate the elements which properly belong to them. And each forms a judgment of the situation in accordance with his standard and purpose.

Thus, for example, Russia, under the pretext of consisting for the most part of Slav peoples, begins to nourish in her bosom the ambition of uniting all the Slav races under the well-known name of Pan-Slavism. No matter that the Slavs of Poland and Bohemia differ widely from those of Russia proper in their language, religion, and habits, perhaps more widely than from those of another nationality. Panslavists extend to the race the privileges of the nation, and as it would be difficult to define logically where the one begins and the other ends, so among them, and especially among those who believe, perhaps rightly, that they speak in the name of Russia, the Slav nation consists of a third of Europe, reaching from the North Pole to the Adriatic. In order to unite it under Russian rule, it would be necessary to overthrow, or at any rate seriously to mutilate, the dominions of Turkey and of Austrian Hungary.

The demolition of the Turkish empire and the diminution of Austrian Hungary would be carried still further by the nationality of Greece, which requires for its proper development to absorb another portion of Turkey, and to deprive Austria of such access to the sea as the Slavs might leave to her.

The Italian nationality would also propose some modifications of the geography of Europe, less searching than the above, but not without their importance.

France and Spain are the countries which have least to ask in the way of expansion; the former because her territory was acquired before the enunciation of the principle was formulated, the latter because of her limited proportions, unless, following the interpretations of Russia, she should entertain the ambition, which up to this time is scarcely perceptible if it exists at all, of acquiring the whole Iberian peninsula.

If we continue our circuit of the continent we come to the two small nationalities of Flanders and Scandinavia. These two, although their populations are the least numerous, seem less sensible of the necessity of political reunion. It is certain that no one in Belgium and Holland has seriously formulated the idea of a fusion, nor yet among the Scandinavians. These States enjoy a certain ease of circumstances and unusual prosperity, without being tormented by the demon of aggrandisement; they allow the claims of nationality to remain dormant in order that they may enjoy in prosperity and contentment what they have acquired by political shrewdness and indefatigable labor; but it may be said that in these conditions they stand alone in Europe.

The circuit we have made from the extreme north to the centre of Europe includes the most complete, successful, and indisputable instance of a compact and homogeneous nationality in that of Germany. Twenty-five years ago this was hardly regarded as an ethnographical or historical designation, and it was certainly not political, since the tendencies and interests of the different States of Germany were quite dissimilar, even when, as in many of the most important questions, they were not altogether opposed to each other. Now that the nationality has arisen, has grown and reached maturity, and in two memorable campaigns has swept all obstacles from its path, it would be as useless to try to arrest its development and divert it from its path as to try and make the Rhine flow back to its source.

The German nation must absorb a few more States in order to constitute itself into a political unity, but since the most important would shake to its foundations the Austro-Hungarian empire, this last annexation will be deferred as long as possible. The fraction of Germans which remains to be absorbed into the empire would only augment the number of its constituents by some millions, and its territory by some provinces; meanwhile in its present condition it fulfils the mission of a colony detached from the parent nation, impressed with the same characteristics, and adhering to the same interests, and thus constituting a weighty instrument for carrying out the national views throughout the Austro-Hungarian empire, which, amidst the conflict of the different nationalities of which it consists, is clearly and irresistibly impelled towards that which is the nearest, the most energetic, and the most powerful. This state of things is too favorable to Germany to allow her to hasten to exchange her independent colonies in Austria into faithful subjects of the German Emperor. There remain other tendencies to assimilation on the side of Russia and of Switzerland. The first are so problematical that they may be regarded as a pretext rather than a claim. The second have not, up to this time, acquired any appearance of probability, since Switzerland has had the privilege of constituting an artificial and political nationality out of such as are truly geographical and ethnographical, and has gallantly resisted any encroachment, so that on this side also any assimilation must be regarded as immature. We must not, however, forget the homogeneity of race, if Germany should be for any cause impelled to approach or to cross the Alps. In such a case the effects of this homogeneity must make themselves felt.

These tendencies are not, however, all equally active, nor have they all the same intensity. Up to this time some of them are still latent, and give no sign of their existence, nor are they the only factors of the political state of Europe. Besides their tendencies to become complete, nationalities have certain other tendencies, objects, and ends, which may be said to be peculiar to each of them, since they correspond with their special needs, relate to certain conditions, and are in conformity with the mission which each State has, or thinks it has, in the political concert of nations.

Since, therefore, we are considering the subject from the political point of view, as it now exists, we shall only regard those tendencies which actually demand satisfaction, and which, therefore, constitute an element and a factor of contemporary politics. The more important tendencies may be reduced to few, intense in character, and wielding mighty forces. The others may be considered as depending by those which are greater and stronger, only differing in degree of intensity and power. They generally take an intermediate place, and receive their satisfaction second-hand, according to their position on the right or wrong side in the great conflict of interests. They usually follow the fortune of the conquered or conquering leaders.

Russia, the dominant Slav race of the north, in addition to the desire of assimilation with her brethren, tends towards the sun, in order to exert an influence over the temperate zone, in which the most vital interests of Europe are at issue. This is the popular tradition which goes by the name of the testament of Peter the Great. Russia has persistently and indefatigably extended her conquests in the direction of the East. If this movement appears to be at present less decided, it is because her want of success in the last war and last treaty has reacted on the constitution of the empire, which is thus weakened and hindered in its efforts at expansion. But as soon as this impulse of internal dissatisfaction is subdued, her activity abroad will be renewed. The man or the government which is able to lead Russia back into her old course will solve the enigma by which she is now agitated.

She advances towards the east from two sides—the north and west. In the former direction she is impelled by the force of circumstances. The only element of order amid the nomadic and barbarous peoples which overspread the country extending from the sides of the Caucasus to the interior of Asia, the endless controversies about frontiers enable her to advance stealthily and insensibly, owing, as we have said, to the very nature of things. On the western side she makes her way deliberately, and in spite of all the obstacles opposed to her. These are of two kinds—the resistance of the Ottoman empire; and that of the European Powers, which are either interested in maintaining it or desire to succeed to its territory. England stands first in the first category, Austria in the second, if, indeed, she is not alone in the desire to succeed to Turkey.

Russia would have overcome the first obstacle, in spite of the tenacity of the Ottoman policy and the bravery of the army, if it were not complicated by the second. The great and moribund empire of Turkey has still vitality enough to respond to the affectionate care of the more or less interested physicians who take charge of her.

But since 1870 the political attitude of Europe with respect to Turkey has completely changed. Each of the three Powers which with a somewhat elaborate disinterestedness assumed her defence in 1855 has modified its views. Italy, to whom it was hardly more than a pretext for inaugurating her political constitution, has attained her object and will no longer apply herself with the same tenacity of purpose to the maintenance of the Ottoman empire. France and England have abandoned their office of guardians, to assume the more profitable one of heirs—the one in Tunis, the other in Egypt. As for Russia, with which we are now occupied, her position is also different. Now that France has taken her share, she has no great interest in upholding the tottering giant against whom she has directed one of the most recent and most decisive blows; and, on the other hand, she is by no means interested in opposing the plans of Russia or in offending her, since she recognises in this Power the only hope of vengeance remaining to her in the present state of things.

England, on the other hand, who has taken her share of the succession, wishes, if possible, to prolong the existence of the dying man, especially since Russia is with more or less reason considered by a certain section of public opinion in England to menace her influence and even her possessions in the East, as well as in the West. The influences of Russia and England are so heterogeneous, one to the other, that whenever they come in contact, although it may be in the distant future, it must be a reciprocal source of danger. But now that England has secured Egypt, she has perhaps no longer the same intense interest in the preservation of the Turkish empire by which she was actuated in 1855.

From 1870 onwards, a new and very important actor appeared on the Oriental stage. Austria, repulsed by the different nationalities—by Italy in 1859, by Germany in 1866—for the very reason that she was the only European State which did not rely on nationality, that exclusive and jealous factor of modern politics, has been obliged to depend on one of those already in existence, and also to create for herself a scope and office which might justify her own existence. She has found these two objects fulfilled by the Oriental question.

Since the Hapsburg dynasty found itself placed on the confines of German nationality, and close to all the fractions of different nationalities which the storms of past ages had thrown on the shores of the Danube on one side, and on the Balkan peninsula on the other, it quickly took the part of ruling all these different nationalities, which, owing to their insignificance, could not aspire to form a political unit, and therefore relied on the great German nationality which was behind them. But, as we have said, this did not suffice; another object was presented to them, dictated by the nature of things—that is, to substitute the Mohammedans in the supremacy of Eastern Europe, as they were incompatible with European civilisation, and at the same time to prevent this, which is commonly called the key of Europe, from falling into the hands of a really numerous nationality, which would on many accounts have excited the fears of all European interests.

Through this act, dictated, as we have said, by the necessities of things, Austria has found herself inextricably bound to Germany and opposed to Russia, with whom she contests the two objects most dear to the latter—the acquisition of the Catholic Slav races which Austria jealously cherishes in her bosom, and her progress towards the sun, or towards whatever obstructs her advance to the East. The indissoluble bonds which unite the policy of Germany with that of the Austro-Hungarian empire enable the former country to enjoy the inestimable advantage of exerting a powerful influence on Eastern diplomacy without, however, showing the hand which she neither could nor would withdraw.

Consequently, Russia finds in the German nationality upon her western frontier a much more serious and permanent barrier than that which was raised by the political combinations of 1855. Her development in the East is opposed, as well as the expansion of her influence in Europe, which is still more important. We see these two great nationalities fatally opposed to each other by their most vital necessities, and in the objects they most ardently desire. The wise and prudent combinations of the statesmen of these two great countries are applied to smooth difficulties and distract attention from these fatal conditions; and owing to the calm temperament of these nations, and to the discipline still maintained by their Governments, they have been successful up to a certain point. The ancient alliance of the three emperors has, however, already become that of two. On the one side there is a true and serious alliance established between the two houses of Germany and Austria; on the other, a close, warm, and probably sincere friendship between the houses of Germany and Russia. But none such can be firmly established between the three; and as for the two most numerous and powerful nationalities of Europe, they may (and the God of Peace will reward them for it) dissimulate, soften, temporise—do everything in their power to avert too rapid or too violent a collision of the important interests of their subjects, but they cannot change the nature of things. The two great nationalities, Slav and German, are essentially rivals, both in geographical position and in their political aims.

These considerations naturally lead us to speak of the German nationality.

This nationality, like all those of recent origin, desires to feel itself secure. On the one side there is an instinctive fear of the possible conflagrations to which the influence of their powerful neighbor may give rise; on the other, it cannot lose sight of the strong antagonism between Germany and France which dates from 1870. It will for a long period be difficult to overcome this antagonism, since it is founded on the great frontier interests which have been contested on both sides. As long as France is deprived of her traditional frontier she will never feel herself secure, and if it were surrendered by Germany, she would lose all the fruits of her loss and bloodshed in 1870. Even if it were only a contest for influence and supremacy, it is not in the French nature to submit to defeat without feeling from time to time the desire for revenge. This impulse alone in so excitable a nation is enough to keep Germany watchful in this direction. Certainly such an occurrence is not at present either certain or threatening, but it is always possible that their two formidable neighbors may combine, and this would re-act also on the different nationalities which compose the Austro-Hungarian empire. It is this danger which keeps the German nation in an indefinite and indefinable state of uneasiness, to her own economical ruin, as well as to that of all the European States which are compelled to imitate her.

To this feeling of uneasiness must be referred the feverish activity of the Imperial Cabinet, who never ceases to make and unmake plans and combinations, dominated by the single idea which was cherished by the rival nationality of France from the time of Louis the Fourteenth to that of Thiers—namely, to keep all Europe in a divided state. This is not only in order to carry out the famous maxim, Divide et impera, but because among all the possible combinations, some might be, if not fatal, yet dangerous to the existence of Germany.

This possibly was foreseen in 1870, and it is known that lengthy negotiations secured the neutrality of Russia in that war. The concessions made to Russia in the East were part of the price of that neutrality, and chief among these was the revision of the Treaty of Paris.

It was readily believed that the opportunity of securing predominance in Europe, for which Germany had been so elaborately prepared, and which a chance unlikely to occur twice in the lifetime of peoples so liberally offered her, would not be let slip by the German Government. The war with France has been justly called a Punic War, or a deadly strife for supremacy in Europe. And therefore the second Punic War was looked for in a period in which it should not be possible for Russia to intervene. According to the plan by which the Roman Horatius fought with his rivals one by one, it seemed that the dominion, if not of the world, at any rate of Europe, was secured to Germany.

This opinion was confirmed, inasmuch as the first question which arose after 1870 was the Eastern question. The part taken by Germany is well known, and certainly the peace was concluded at Berlin, where the Treaty of San Stefano, which had secured to Russia the price of her action, was cancelled. Russia issued from the struggle seriously shaken, nor has she yet recovered from the shock. The Russian nation, deluded in its most cherished expectations, has been given up to a state of discontent which it is not necessary to study in its forms but in its essence. The people are conscious of having been misdirected in their course, and are displeased with whoever has failed to interpret their wishes.

It seemed as if this might have been the moment for a second war with France, and especially since it was unlikely that Russia would forget, when her strength returned, the auto da fé made at Berlin of the Treaty of San Stefano. To this end all the manœuvres of the Berlin Cabinet seem to have tended, as if the powerful hand of the German Chancellor had only been exerted to effect its conclusion.

The mountain did not, however, bring forth a mouse but a canard, for such it must appear to our calmer judgment, in the unexpected rumor of a Franco-German alliance. We are not now in a position to examine the reasons of this abortive birth. It only concerns us to show that when the hypothesis of this solution was overthrown by the power so ably and opportunely exerted, the question was reproduced to the German nation in its integrity. Placed between and in collision with the interests of two great nationalities, the one consisting of nearly sixty and the other of forty million inhabitants, Germany was still uneasy and insecure. Her people are, however, strictly disciplined, trained for conflict, and of a naturally brave temperament, and all means have been used to develop this quality in them. We know that when men conscious of strength are uncomfortable or of evil humor they soon try to mend their condition, and that they expend their wrath on some thing or person until they have regained security and calmness. This constitutes one of the most serious questions now presented to Europe, and whence issues much of the uncertainty and dangers which menace its peace.

The Chancellor, with the ability and diplomatic genius which no one can dispute that he possesses, involves this phantasm in all sorts of wrappings, with the double aim of appeasing it and of rendering it less alarming to Europe. He expends all the energy which was accumulated in the violent struggle in diplomatic combinations. Hence the friendly relations with Russia have continually become closer; hence the triple alliance again, the courteous treatment of Spain, the favorable recognition of the French occupation of Tunis, so acceptable to France, although received with dissatisfaction by Italy; hence also the English occupation of Egypt was not opposed by Germany from the first, while it was very displeasing to France. All this incessant activity of German diplomacy, which appeared to be ably directed, and very probably really was so directed, to procure the isolation of France, was on that account supposed to lead the way to a second Franco-German war. But at the present it should rather be regarded as a long succession of manœuvres and a complicated diplomatic strategy, which had lost sight of its immediate object and had for the time no other interests than those which the episodes of this grave question present to the curiosity of all Europe—a question of which the issue is so uncertain and indefinite that at the moment when the object in view appeared to be obtained in the complete isolation of France, we hear of a Franco-German alliance. Incredible as it may appear, this is the fact. The alliance is spoken of, and this is enough to show that everything is possible in the state of tension in which things are in Central Europe.

The sudden transition from a state of mortal war to that of an alliance might have been contemplated in the political exigencies of the times of Cardinal Richelieu—that is, when foreign politics were of a kind of sacerdotalism, only transacted by Cabinets, on which public opinion exercised little or no influence. But it is difficult to believe, in the present state and exigencies of public opinion, and especially in France, that it would be easy or possible to stifle in a diplomatic combination, however able and useful, the memories of Metz and Sedan, the loss of the Rhine Provinces and the occupation of Paris.

Such an opinion may be to some extent accepted by the victors, but not by those on whom the burden of the war of 1870 fell. We mean by this that when such combinations are contemplated and the attempt is made to carry them into effect, they will not change the actual state of things. The rivalry, incompatibility, and rancours produced by interests which are different and in many cases opposed to each other in two neighboring and powerful nations, may be subdued for a while, but they must sooner or later revive until the question is substantially resolved by the triumph of one side or the other. It is precisely because she has been unwilling or unable to resolve it, that Germany remains in this condition of profound disquietude—a condition which has taken no certain and definite direction, but which is pregnant with possible dangers for the rest of Europe.

We have said that the movement has not yet taken a definite direction, but not that its tendency does not begin to declare itself. While setting aside for a little and adjourning to a more or less distant future the question of its own safety, the German nation, in common with others, has certain objects in view beyond that of mere existence; it has natural aspirations which give a purpose to life. We have said that the Slav races of Russia are drawn towards the sun, and the Germans are as strongly attracted towards the sea.

The people of Germany are very poor, owing to the natural conditions of the soil and climate, poor also owing to compulsory military service, to which, however, they willingly submit for the sake of their national existence. If a strong people does not long tolerate an uneasy condition, neither can it tolerate poverty. One which is strong and poor is a dangerous neighbor to richer peoples. Now, from whatever side we cross the German frontier, we are struck by the prosperity and riches of the neighboring nations, whether agricultural, manufacturing, or mercantile. The only advertisement posted up in every German village is the name of the company, battalion, and regiment to which it belongs, instead of the numerous advertisements which we find in similar villages of Belgium, France, and Holland, announcing transactions of trade, commerce, and manufactures. When we see the poor and humble villages which are thus classified, we might say that the German nation is merely encamped in the midst of Europe.

In the present conditions of Europe, and precisely on account of the nationalities to which the credit must be given, territorial acquisitions among neighbors and the subjection of one people to another have become hardly possible except in a few limited cases which cannot enter the mind of any statesman as having any large significance in the political future. Since European nations can no longer, as of old, obtain expansion at the expense of one another, they now seek for it in distant lands, amid lower civilisations and in societies which are less firmly constituted. This is done not only by conquest, but by colonisation and commercial establishments of every kind, which assure influence, and still more riches and prosperity to their founders. For this end, it is important that a nation should have easy access to the sea. The German nation is eminently continental and has only an inconsiderable extent of seaboard. Hence Germany has need of the sea, and this tendency attracts her equally towards the north and east of Europe. This has probably influenced her policy in the late Eastern war, and this subsidiary necessity is the complement of the more important need of securing her own safety which has been the object of the policy of the German Chancellor in its varying transitions. It agrees with the colonising tendencies which have come openly to a head within the last few months.

We have thus briefly indicated the tendencies of two among the principal nationalities. France comes next in importance, and since she is in fact the most ancient, so that her customs and interests are firmly welded in spite of all her misfortunes, she need not greatly concern herself about the fact of her existence. It would be difficult to make any breach in the unity of France, since the traces of her ancient divisions no longer exist. Her external borders may be enlarged or restricted wherever the popular characteristics are less marked, or even ambiguous, so that their affections and interests may oscillate towards neighborly nations. But the great nucleus of the people has no fear of being other than it is, and this is not now the source of agitation in France. It is precisely because she has long been secure in the enjoyment and free exercise of all her faculties as a nation that her tendencies are more clearly and explicitly displayed.

Unfortunately these tendencies are towards domination and empire as the scope and means of her prosperity. As soon as France was constituted into a nation, or from the Revolution onwards, her history is only a history of aggressions which nothing but superior force from without and exhaustion within could arrest. The necessity of expansion by warlike means is so intense in the French nation that she is hardly subjected to foreign compulsion before there is an outbreak of internal disturbances. France, conquered in 1815, only remained quiet until she had recovered strength. The blood hardly begins to circulate in her veins when she either overthrows her Government or makes war on foreign Powers. The dilemma imposed like an incubus on all the rulers of France for the last hundred years issues in this—either war or revolution.

The present Government, instinctively conscious of this state of things, and not feeling strong enough to make war on its more powerful neighbors lest it should be ruined in its turn, has invented a diversion by transposing the problem—waging war in Asia and Africa, and carrying fire and flames into all parts of the world which could offer no resistance. The first idea of this policy must be ascribed to Louis Philippe, who owed the tranquillity of the early years of his reign to the conquest of Algeria. Other European nations have undertaken colonisation or conquest of distant lands with reference to their material prosperity, but conquest has been the primary object of France. Economic views take a secondary place, out of proportion with the scale of the enterprise, and are, indeed, rather a pretext. This constitutional restlessness of France, which is only arrested by force, has long constituted one of the gravest perils which threaten the peace of Europe.

Italy, as well as Germany, feels the need of security, and this common need has, since 1870, united the interests of the two countries. There are insuperable obstacles in the tendency natural to all nationalities to absorb unconsciously the congenial elements of other States. The only symptoms of this tendency have been displayed on the side of Austria, which is not herself a nation, but those who so improvidently in any respect promoted it were also perhaps not aware that behind Austria stands Germany, and that Trieste on the Adriatic corresponds to that nation’s tendency towards the sea. But as far as her own existence is concerned, Italy is irrevocably bound to all the combinations which may secure her, and is the irreconcilable enemy of all those who threaten her.

The path of Greece is equally barred by Austria and Russia, nor has she much hope of making way against these two great Powers, unless their antagonism can nourish such hopes.

We have reserved England to the last, because her political condition as it concerns her nationality is altogether distinct from those with which we have been hitherto occupied. If by nationality we mean homogeneous characteristics of race, a similarity in language, religion, and customs, the Anglo-Saxon nationality extends beyond the United Kingdom into both hemispheres. If, on the other hand, we regard the United Kingdom as an actual political unit, we find that it is composed of different races, in which are included the English, Scotch, and Irish, which have nothing in common with each other but their official language. And yet, while the English nation has for good reasons never posed, morally speaking, as the champion of nationalities, she presides over the most cultured, numerous, and energetic nationality in the world. But the Anglo-Saxon nationality does not need nor desire, and indeed is unable, to be a political unit. It may be said that the Anglo-Saxon race has passed through the historical period of a nationality without observing it. It has advanced beyond this period to attain to the ideal of a civilisation forming whole parts of the world, in which only one language is spoken, in which we find the same customs, interests, and religion, or, at any rate, the faculty of accepting, each man for himself, what seems good to him, without allowing this diversity to produce, either in theory or practice, a distinction which has any political efficacy.

In those parts of the world there are not five or six groups of men which look askance at each other with a hostile air, and which, because they speak a different language, have a different history and religion, believe themselves to be justified as a matter of duty and honor in exterminating each other two or three times in a century. Because a scrap of ground belongs to one set of people, does not that appear to be a sufficient reason to the others to maintain millions of armed men trained for their reciprocal destruction? Geographical degrees do not suffice to create different and conflicting interests which may justify them in mutual injuries, and in inflicting on one another the long series of small and great miseries which begin with protracted wars and fiscal duties and end in the imposition of quarantine.

This fact gives to the English people, which represents that nationality in Europe, an exceptional power and authority. The English people may become decadent as an European Power, but as a nationality it will be unmenaced, since it does not represent a limited political unit, but the half of the world. If the German nationality should ever be baffled in the political combination made since 1870, she would lose her political importance in the world. But if Britain were attacked and conquered, the Anglo-Saxon nationality would still remain the greatest political power in the universe. Hence this nationality or race is exalted above all the narrow sentiments which underlie the policy of the different European States; but England herself as a State and political unit is jealous of the power which has in less than two centuries produced the miraculous development of the Anglo-Saxon race to its present extent; but if this jealousy is shown by the legitimate defence of a greatness achieved by what was, comparatively speaking, a handful of men from a remote island in the Atlantic, it does not express itself in the palpitations of a whole people struggling for their existence, which is the case with continental nations.

It follows from her exceptional circumstances that the aims of England in Europe are few, and different from those of other States, and that her policy has gradually become more disinterested in the contests which divide continental Europe. She has witnessed the supremacy of France, as she now witnesses the supremacy of Germany; she has watched the rise of Italy and the decline of the Mussulman empire, to which she formerly appeared so warmly attached, and it has not affected her political position. The political vicissitudes of this half of the century have disturbed the balance of all the States of Europe, while England has during the same half century pursued her unalterable course through all these changes, not only without adopting compulsory service, but also without adopting conscription, and with an army which a continental Power would scarcely consider sufficient for a grand review. One point, however, England holds it necessary for her honor and interests to maintain—namely, her maritime supremacy and the free action of her eminently commercial people, in order to carry on her mission of civilisation, which is at once noble and lucrative. She will strive for this object with her last penny and with the last drop of her blood, and it is on this side only that the English nation takes its place as a great factor in European politics. She will strive for this object with her accumulated materials of character, power, and wealth, and at all events she will for a long time strive with the success and efficacy which no one can deny that she possesses. But with this exception her points of contact with Europe are few, and there is little probability of friction since her object is remote. Instead of striving for her nationality in Europe, she carries on without a conflict the advance of civilisation throughout the world.

But she cannot, we have said, be indifferent to any attacks on her maritime supremacy, nor to the serious rivalry with her colonial policy displayed by the European States. For this reason, and with a recollection of all which the continental blockade cost her, she regards with displeasure the excessive preponderance of any one of the great European Powers. England consists of a belly and brain nourished by scattered members which include in their manifold organism all parts of the world. If any one member is severed or paralysed, the blow is felt in the centre. The inclination to found colonies aroused in different European nationalities, which is, indeed, the necessary consequence of their development, naturally interests England in the highest degree, nor can the cases be rare when these new aspirations must be checked by the appearance of the British flag.

We have now indicated all the perils and difficulties which threaten the peace of Europe under the present political conditions that come from the principles established with so much difficulty by philosophers who were actuated by humanitarian motives, and who inscribed on the banner which floated above the ancient citadel of their cherished theories, the magic word “Fraternity.”

On their banner there was also inscribed “Equality,” which would lead me to speak of socialism, if space allowed it: as in Europe the progress in social questions has not been more fortunate. And just as monarchy had hardly been called in question before it was face to face with the republic, so the rights of property have hardly been discussed before riches and poverty are confronted, and the whole problem of the distribution of wealth rises again like a phantom before society. But this article has already reached such a length that I must postpone to a future occasion the treatment of that important and extensive subject. What I have said, however, is quite enough to show that if in Europe the present state of opinion on these subjects should not be modified, national wars as well as civil wars could eventually carry us at least through a temporary period of barbarism.

Yet we do not believe that we should lose confidence in progress, and repudiate it in order to revert to the old state of things, nor yet that the principles and ideas of which we have spoken are not really progressive. Progress is a law of humanity which, if it were not, as it undoubtedly is, beneficial, must be fatal to it; and it is certainly a mark of progress that community of language, customs, and tendencies is regarded as a reason for political union rather than certain arbitrary or fortuitous combinations of successions, treaties, conquests, and the like. Above all, it is well to have substituted the right of good government for that which is merely arbitrary. We must again regard as progressive some of the modifications introduced in the laws relating to property. I say some of them, since it was perhaps dangerous to shake prematurely the foundations of the systems by which it has been ordered up to this time, when those which are to replace them are still imperfect and untried.

But a long process of moral discipline is required, which may by instruction modify the ideas about the two great modern conceptions of politics and society.

Besides, and in the meantime as a compensation, our gentler customs, a real progress in the education of sentiments and general culture, greatly neutralise the effect of this violent state of things. After the Russian has made a long tirade on the future of the Slav race, he sets out for the Rhine or Paris, and forgets the mystical and obscure visions of Holy Russia in the genuine pleasures of civilisation. When the German lays aside his deadly arms in order to re-enter civic life, his prejudices against the Latin race often fade before the amenity of a Frenchman and the glorious sun of Italy. Undoubtedly the multiplicity, the facility and gentleness of intercourse produced by modern civilisation, are of great efficacy in paralysing the effects of national antagonism and of social hatreds, but our watchfulness must not therefore relax. But, notwithstanding all these considerations, we persist in believing that until European opinion is modified on these important subjects, European policy must always take account of them, constantly on the watch lest she should be surprised by wars and unforeseen catastrophes, which would compromise the long and laborious work of her refined civilisation.

As long as nationalities are compelled to be rivals, it is necessary to find some compensation for this rivalry. The ancient system of the balance and equilibrium of power, which has seemed to be old and disused armour, was perhaps never more opportune than now. If a general confederation after the American manner seems visionary, as opposed to the actual state of things in Europe, it might be practical and efficacious to substitute this system of equilibrium for partial alliance, and to establish the political balance of Europe in a normal position. But it is necessary that this work should be effected in time, before the preponderance of different Powers should become more marked, and especially before the ambitions and greed which are now upon the surface should strike deeply into the basis of international policy. A well-planned system of approximating those elements which are in any sense homogeneous or guided by common interests would tend to secure peace and strengthen governments, and would at the same time keep in check the social discontent which is nourished by political dissensions, gathers strength from the uncertainty and weakness of our present institutions, and triumphs in our misfortunes.

Here we must break off on the brink of conclusions and remedies. A few words will not suffice to sum up the moral of this long dissertation, nor was it our intention to do so either in few words or many. The question is too large for solution in the pages of a Review.

It simply appeared to be an opportune moment for pointing out the singular situation created by the progress of modern ideas, and to indicate the dangers involved in it.

We do not wish to exaggerate these dangers, and have ourselves pointed out that modern civilisation also includes their correctives, and that they do not imply the end of all things, nor that another flood of Deucalion is needed to renovate the human race from its very beginnings.

But precisely because European civilisation is so elaborate and complex, it would be an error to suppose that catastrophic causes are needed in order seriously to affect the conditions of our comparative civility. Feudal and tyrannical wars took place in barren lands, amid rude castles and squalid villages; those which are national and social must be fought out amidst gardens and the monuments of art and manufacture. The last wars recorded by history had Lombardy and Champagne as their theatre, or were fought in the streets of Paris. Any of the tendencies indicated by us in the foregoing considerations which should terminate in a conflict would take place under analogous conditions and in the same degree of civilisation which, while it might mitigate the modes of warfare, must make its effects more grievous. And the same ambition to possess distant countries which are more or less civilised may also be equally full of danger to commerce, international relations, the peace of Europe, and the interests of civilisation.

The privileged rules of the policy of the old world imposed upon themselves a limit to excessive power, and used the saying, Noblesse oblige. A new motto might be proposed to the builders and destroyers of Governments in our day, which would be equally noble and might be more fertile of results—Progrès oblige.—Nineteenth Century.

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

Amongst the many sagacious sayings of the patient and profound thinkers of Germany, not the least noteworthy was Schelling’s affirmation that the phenomena of instinct are some of the most important of all phenomena, and capable of serving as a very touch-stone whereby the value of competing theories of the universe may be effectually tested. His prescience has been justified by our experience. The greatest scientific event of the present time is the wide acceptance of the theory of evolution, and its use as a weapon of offence and defence. It is used both against the belief that intelligent purpose is, as it were, incarnate in the living world about us, and also in favor of a merely mechanical theory of nature. Now it would be difficult to find a more searching test of that theory’s truth than is supplied by a careful study of instinct. The essence of that view of nature which is associated with the name of Professor Haeckel,[1] a negation of the doctrine of final causes and an assertion of what he calls “Dysteleology,” that is, the doctrine of the purposelessness of the organs and organisms which people a purposeless planet. That doctrine may be called the gospel of the irrationality of the universe, and it is a doctrine to which a proof of the real existence of such a thing as “instinct” must necessarily be fatal. Instinct has been defined[2] as a “special internal impulse, urging animals to the performance of certain actions which are useful to them or to their kind, but the use of which they do not themselves perceive, and their performance of which is a necessary consequence of their being placed in certain circumstances.” Such an impulse is always understood to be the result of sensations: actions which take place in response to unfelt stimuli being referred, not to instinct, but to what is termed reflex action. In such action it is commonly supposed that the mechanism of a living body occasions a prompt responsive muscular movement upon the occurrence of some unfelt stimulation of the nervous system. The nervous system, or total mass of nerve-stuff—which is technically called “nerve-tissue”—in the body of an animal, such as a beast, bird, reptile, or fish, is composed of two parts or divisions. One of these divisions consists of a voluminous and continuous mass—the brain and spinal cord (or spinal marrow), which form what is called the central part of the nervous system. The second division consists of a multitude of white threads or cords—the nerves, which form what is called the peripheral part of the nervous system. Of these nerves one set proceed forth from the central part of the nervous system to the different muscles, which they can cause to contract by a peculiar action they exert upon them, thus producing motion. Another set of nerves proceed inwards, from the skin to the central part of the nervous system, and by their peculiar action give rise to various sensations, according as different influences or stimulations are brought to bear upon the skin at, or in the vicinity of, their peripheral extremities. Under ordinary circumstances, different stimulations of the surface of the body convey an influence inwards, which produces sensation, and give rise to an outwardly proceeding influence to the muscles, resulting in definite and appropriate motions.

There are cases in which responsive actions take place under very abnormal conditions—as after a rupture of part of a man’s spinal cord, or the removal of the whole brain in lower animals, such as the frog. A man so injured may have utterly lost the power of feeling any stimulation—pricking, cutting, or burning—of his legs and feet, the injury preventing the conveyance upwards to the brain of the influence necessary to ordinary sensation, and stopping short at the spinal cord below the point of injury. Nevertheless, such a man may execute movements in response to stimuli just as if he did feel, and often in an exaggerated manner. He will withdraw his foot if tickled with a feather just as if he felt the tickling, which he is utterly incapable of feeling. Similarly a decapitated frog will make with his hind legs the most appropriate movements to remove any irritating object applied to the hinder part of its body. Such action is termed “reflex action,” on the supposition that the influence conveyed inwards by nerves going from the skin to the spinal cord is reflected back from that cord to the muscles by the other set of nerves without any intervention of sensation. This action of the frog may be carried to a very singular extreme. At the breeding season the male frog tightly grasps the female behind her arms, and to enable him the more securely to maintain his hold, a warty prominence is then developed on the inner side of each of his hands. Now if such a male frog be taken, and not only decapitated, but the whole hinder part of the body removed also, so that nothing remains but the fragment of the trunk from which the two arms with their nerves proceed, and if under these circumstances the warty prominences be touched, the two arms will immediately close together like a spring, thus affording a most perfect example of reflex action. It has been objected by the late Mr. G. H. Lewes and others that we cannot be sure but that the spinal cord itself “feels.” But there is often an ambiguity in the use of the term “to feel.” By it we ordinarily mean a “modification of consciousness;” but experiences such as those just adverted to, and others in ourselves to which I shall next advert, show clearly that surrounding agents may act upon our sense organs without the intervention of anything like consciousness, and yet produce effects otherwise similar to those which occur when they do arouse consciousness. Without, then, entering into any discussion as to whether “sentiency” may or may not be attributed to the spinal cord, it seems evident that some definite term is required to denote such affections or modifications of living beings as those just referred to. Inasmuch as they are affections of creatures possessing a nervous system, which is the essential organ of sensation, and as they resemble sensation in their causes and effects though feeling itself may be absent, they may be provisionally distinguished as “unfelt sensations.” Such are some of the actions with which instinct is contrasted, because, unlike instinct, they are not carried on by the aid of felt sensations, the highest of such insentient action being reflex action.

There are also a number of actions which constantly recur in ourselves, which more or less nearly approximate to reflex action. Thus the respiratory movements, the various muscular motions by the aid of which we breathe, are ordinarily performed by us without advertence, though we can, if we will, perform them with self-conscious deliberation. It is well also to note that when our mind is entirely directed upon some external object, or when we are almost in a state of somnolent unconsciousness, we have but a vague feeling of our existence—a feeling resulting from the unobserved synthesis of our sensations of all orders and degrees. This unintellectual sense of “self” may be conveniently distinguished from intellectual consciousness as “consentience.” We may also, as everybody knows, suddenly recollect sights or sounds which were quite unnoticed at the time we experienced them; yet our very recollection of them proves that they must, nevertheless, have affected our sensorium. Such unnoticed modifications of our sense organs may also be provisionally included in the category of those actions of the lower animals, before provisionally denominated “unfelt sensations.” It is not, however, with such inferior activities as reflex and other insentient actions that instinct is commonly contrasted, but with “reason.” Now “reasonable,” “consciously intelligent”conduct is understood by all men to mean conduct in which there is a more or less wise adaptation of means to ends—a conscious, deliberate adaptation, not one due to accident only. No one would call an act done blindly a reasonable or intelligent action on the part of him who did it, however fortunate might be its result. Instinctive actions, then, hold a middle place between (1) those which are rational, or truly intelligent, and (2) those in which sensation has no place. But a great variety of actions of different kinds occupy this intermediate position, and we must next proceed to separate off from the others, such actions as may be deemed truly instinctive.

M. Albert Lemoine, who has written the best treatise[3] known to us on instinct and habit, distinguishes instinctive actions as those which are neither due to mechanical or chemical causes, nor to intelligence, experience, or will. They are actions which take place with a general fixity and precision, are generally present in all the individuals of each species, and can be perfectly performed the very first time their action is called for, so that they cannot be due to habit. Instinct, he very truly says, is more than a want and less than a desire. Instinct is a certain felt internal stimulus to definite actions which has its foundation in a certain sense of want, but is not definite feeling of want of the particular end to be attained. Were that recognised, it would not be instinct, but desire. It is but a vague craving to exercise certain activities the exercise of which conduces to useful or needful, but unforeseen, end. Instinct often sets in motion organs quite different from those which feel the prick of want, and which do not (experience apart) seem to have relation with it. Hunger does not stimulate to action the organs of digestion which suffer from it, but excites the limbs and jaws to perform acts by which food may be obtained and eaten. In examining into instinct, we must be careful not to omit the consideration of it as it exists in man, since we can know no creature so well as we can, by the help of language and reflection, know ourselves and our own species. Nevertheless, it may be well to begin by calling attention to certain apparently undeniable cases of instinct in other animals, since in them instinct is much more apparent and complex than in man, in whom it is indeed reduced to a minimum. It might naturally be expected to be so reduced in him—if it is a power serving to bridge over the gulf which exists between such almost mechanical action as reflex action, and true intelligence—since in man acts of intelligence, or habits originated through intelligence, come so constantly into play. But before enumerating cases of animal instinct, a word should be said as to one character which M. Lemoine attributes to instinctive action, namely, “consciousness,” This term is an exceedingly ambiguous one, as it is often referred, not only to our distinct intellectual perception of our own being and acts, but also to every state of feeling however rudimentary it may be. I would therefore avoid the use of so equivocal a term, while fully admitting that no sensation in any animal is possible without some subjective psychical state analogous to what I have before denominated “consentience.” Now, as to the lower animals: birds unquestionably possess instinctive powers. Chickens, two minutes after they have left the egg,[4] will follow with their eyes the movements of crawling insects, and peck at them, judging distance and direction with almost infallible accuracy. They will instinctively appreciate sounds, readily running towards an invisible hen hidden in a box, when they hear her “call.” Some young birds, also, have an innate, instinctive horror of the sight of a hawk and of the sound of its voice. Swallows, titmice, tomtits, and wrens, after having been confined from birth, are capable of flying successfully at once, when liberated, on their wings having attained the necessary growth to render flight possible. The Duke of Argyll[5] relates some very interesting particulars about the instincts of birds, especially of the water ousel, the merganser, and the wild duck. Even as to the class of beasts I find recorded:[6] “Five young polecats were found comfortably embedded in dry withered grass; and in a side hole, of proper dimensions for such a larder, were forty frogs and two toads, all alive, but merely capable of sprawling a little. On examination the whole number, toads and all, proved to have been purposely and dexterously bitten through the brain.” Evidently the parent polecat had thus provided the young with food which could be kept perfectly fresh, because alive, and yet was rendered quite unable to escape. This singular instinct is like others which are yet more fully developed amongst insects—a class of animals the instincts of which are so numerous, wonderful, and notorious that it will be, probably, enough to refer to one or two examples. The female carpenter bee, in order to protect her eggs, excavates, in some piece of wood, a series of chambers, in special order with a view to a peculiar mode of exit for her young: but the young mother can have no conscious knowledge of the series of actions subsequently to ensue. The female of the wasp, sphex, affords another well-known but very remarkable example of a complex instinct closely related to that already mentioned in the case of the polecat. The female wasp has to provide fresh, living animal food for her progeny, which, when it quits its egg, quits it in the form of an almost helpless grub, utterly unable to catch, retain, or kill an active, struggling prey. Accordingly the mother insect has only to provide and place beside her eggs suitable living prey, but so to treat it that it may be a helpless, unresisting victim. That victim may be a mere caterpillar, or it may be a great, powerful grasshopper, or even that most fierce, active, and rapacious of insect tyrants, a fell and venomous spider. Whichever it may be, the wasp adroitly stings it at the spot which induces, or in the several spots which induce, complete paralysis as to motion, let us hope as to sensation also. This done, the wasp entombs the helpless being with its own egg, and leaves it for the support of the future grub. Another species feeds her young one from time to time with fresh food, visiting at suitable intervals the nest she has made and carefully covered and concealed with earth, which she removes and replaces, as far as necessary, at each visit. If the opening be made ready for her, this, instead of helping her to get at her young, altogether puzzles her, and she no longer seems to recognise her young, thus showing how thoroughly “instinctive” her proceedings are. Other instances of instinct, such as those of the stag-beetle and emperor moth, I will refer to presently. But most wonderful, perhaps, of all are the instincts of social insects, such as bees, where there are not only males and females, but a large population of practically neuter insects, the special instincts and peculiarities of which have of course to be transmitted, not directly by an antecedent set of neuter animals, but by females, the instincts and peculiarities of which are very different from those of the neutral portion of their progeny.

The instincts we have hitherto noticed, and, I may say briefly, the instincts of animals generally, are destined to subserve two functions, (1) the preservation and, mainly, the nutrition, of the individual, and (2) the reproduction of the species. Armed with the facts we have now noticed, let us turn to consider instinct as it displays itself in ourselves. As one example, there is the instinct action by which an infant first sucks the nipple, and then swallows the thence-extracted nourishment with which its mouth is filled. This action must be reckoned as instinctive, because it is done directly after birth, when there has been no time for learning to perform the action; it is one absolutely necessary for the life of the infant; it is an action which is definite and precise, similarly performed by all the individuals of the species, though effected by a very complex mechanism, and is effected prior to experience. Yet it is not as mechanical as reflex action, for not only sensation, but consentience, accompanies the act. Thus sucking in man is an instinctive action, while spitting, on the other hand, is an art. The latter is not necessary to life, and the power of performing it is slowly acquired by experience, as are also our powers of walking and feeding ourselves. But the action of sucking in an adult human being is of course not instinctive; and because the child learns to walk, it by no means follows that the insect learns to fly. It is thus plain that actions may be instinctive in one animal and not in another; or at one period of life in the same animal and not at another. In a child, however, sucking, deglutition, inspiration, and expiration are instinctive actions, as are also those by which the products of excretion are removed from the body. The second class of instincts, those which ensure the continuance of the race, show themselves of course, only much later. Yet, long before the little girl can represent to herself future tributes to her charms, she seeks to decorate her tiny body with the arts of infant coquetry. Still less does she look forward to the pains and pleasures of maternity when she begins to caress and chastise, to soothe and cherish, her first doll, and fondly presses it to that region whence her future offspring will draw its nourishment. Again, when the lapse of a few years having made her a young woman and the boy a youth, they first feel the influence of love, however ignorant they may be of the physiology of their race, they will none the less, circumstances permitting, be surely impelled towards the performance of very definite actions. In the more refined individuals of the highest races of mankind, the material, merely animal, consummation of sexual love is most certainly far from being the one great end distinctly looked forward to by each pair of lovers. Yet every incident of affectionate intercourse, every tender glance, every contact of hand or lip, infallibly leads on towards the one useful end, indispensable to the race, which nature has in view. Such actions fully merit to be called “instinctive.” Indeed the act of generation is ministered to in nature by the most manifold, imperious, general, and inexplicable of all the instincts, and its instinctive character is the most strongly marked of all. It has emphatically for its origin a rigorously determined and precise want, partly painful, partly pleasurable—a mixture of a feeling of privation with a sense of power. Its end is unknown to the agent, or if known is disregarded, and in almost all animals it demands the concurrent and reciprocal action of two diverse organisms. If anyone would deny that it is instinctive in man, I would advise him to study the sad phenomena connected therewith which may be observed in our asylums for the insane.

There are other human actions which are sometimes reckoned as instinctive, such as guarding the eye against injury by suddenly closing the eyelids. This action, however, appears to be an acquired art, though the habitual act of winking to keep clean the surface of the eye may be instinctive. Some other actions, however, not generally regarded as instinctive, I should be disposed so to regard. Such are the first active exercises of the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling (the first “looking,” the first “listening,” etc.) which the child performs at the very beginning of its learning to perform them. It would seem, then, as if no one could deny the existence of such a thing as instinct, and yet it has been denied, not only in recent times, but centuries ago. Thus Montaigne sought to explain instinct as but a form of intelligence, while Descartes taught that it was but mechanism. Condillac regarded it as the result of individual experience, and Lemarck considered it to be merely “habit” which had become hereditary. In our own day Darwin has sought to explain it as partly the result of accidental variations of activity, which variations have become naturally selected, and partly the result of intelligent, purposive action which has become habitual and inherited. Let us consider these attempts at explanation seriatim. First as to mechanism: This is an hypothesis no one at present entertains, as everyone now credits animals with sensitivity. Moreover, instincts are not absolutely invariable, but are modifiable according to the degree of “intelligence” which animals possess. They cannot, therefore, be due merely to a mechanism. The attempt to explain “Instinct” by mere “reflex action” is equivalent to an attempt to explain a phenomenon by omitting its most striking characteristic. In “reflex action” we have a sudden response to a stimulus, which response is more or less purposive as regards the time of its occurrence, but has no reference to future events to occur long after the faintest waves of the stimulating action have died out. The very essence of “instinct,” however, is to provide for a more or less distant future, often, as we have seen, the future of another generation. It is essentially telic, and directed to a future unforeseen, but generally useful, end. This explanation, then, is fundamentally and necessarily inadequate. It is like an explanation of the building of a house, by “bricks, mortar, bricklayers, and hodmen,” with the omission of all reference to any influence governing their motions and directing them towards a common and predetermined end which is not theirs. But though we cannot explain “instinct” by “reflex action,” there is none the less a certain obvious affinity between these two forms of animal activity, and it is in part my object to point out the nature of this very affinity.

Next we may pass in review the two hypotheses that instinct is but (1) a form of intelligence, or (2) individual experience. As to the first, I have already given instances of unquestionably instinctive actions performed by birds as soon as they quit the eggshell, and it would be but waste of time to argue against the view that the human infant is guided by intelligent purpose and conscious foresight in his very first acts of sucking, swallowing, and defecation. Actual intelligence, therefore, is a radically insufficient explanation, as also, for the very same reasons, is Condillac’s hypothesis as to individual experience. About “lapsed intelligence” I will speak later on. Lemarck’s hypothesis, that instinct is but inherited habit, is one which is much more worthy of careful consideration than any we have yet considered. For it may be admitted at once that habits may be inherited. There are many instances of such inheritance in human beings, and as regards the lower animals, the barking of dogs may be taken as an instance of a habit thus perpetuated. In fact “habit,” when inherited, so simulates instinct, that their confusion is far from surprising. There is, however, this radical difference between them: “habit” enables an agent to repeat with facility and precision an act which has been done before, but “instinct” determines with precision the first performance of such act. Referring instinct to habit, but temporarily relieves the difficulty of those who object to instinct, by putting it a step back. It is impossible to believe that any of the progenitors of an infant of to-day first acquired, during his or her lifetime, the habit of sucking, or that the habits of neuter insects thus arose. But after all, if we could explain “instinct” by “habit,” should we thereby make the phenomena less mysterious? “Habit” is due to an internal spontaneity of living things. A living thing no doubt requires some internal solicitation, in order that it should move, but when it does move that movement is its own. All living organisms tend to act. With them action is not only their nature, ’tis a want; and, within limits, their powers and energies increase with action, and diminish and finally perish through repose. The power of generating any “habits,” lies in the very first act of the kind an organism performs, and it is only the first act which owes nothing to habit. If such were not the case, an act might be performed a thousand times and yet not generate habit. It is this mysterious internal active tendency which distinguishes all living organisms from inorganic bodies. The latter tend simply to persist as they are, and have no relations with the past or the future. They have, therefore, no relations with time at all—for the actual present ever evades us. Organisms, on the other hand, which are permanently more or less changed, through habit, by every new motion and sensation, have their future prepared by their past, and thus, as it were, at every present moment they live both in the past and in the future, a mode of existence which attains its fullest development in the highest living organism—man, the creature looking before and after! Thus those who would do away with mystery in nature would gain little by explaining instinct through habit, though, as we have seen, the phenomena presented to us by the human infant and by neuter insects absolutely bar any such explanation. Moreover, the attempt to explain “instinct” through “inheritance” is a contradiction, since “inheritance” supposes something already obtained, otherwise it could not be transmitted. So far, then, from “hereditary transmission” explaining “instinct,” instinct, in whatever remote ancestor it first arose, must have been a violation of the law of hereditary transmission.

Now as to “lapsed intelligence:” This hypothesis assumes that a conscious deliberate, discriminating faculty must have once been exercised by wasps, bees, ants, and other much more lowly animals, in the performance of all those actions which are now instinctive. But could the adult female insect be supposed to foresee the future needs of her progeny, often so totally different from her own wants? It would surely be too much to ask us to believe that she could distinctly recollect all her past experience as a chrysalis and as a grub from the moment she first quitted the egg. Can we suppose that the generative acts of male insects, such as bees, could have been due to deliberate and rational choice, when every such act is necessarily fatal to him who performs it?

Nevertheless, persuaded as I am that “lapsed intelligence” will not explain “instinct” generally, I should be the last to deny that certain apparently instinctive actions may be so explained, and I fully admit that intelligent action in ourselves does tend to become practically though not really instinctive. It is, moreover, very fortunate for us that such is the case, as thereby we are saved great mental friction. Our intellect has first to be laboriously applied to learn what afterwards becomes almost automatic, as the actions of reading, writing, etc. Sensations and bodily actions having been duly kneaded together, the intellect becomes free to withdraw and apply itself to other work—fresh conquests of mere animality—leaving the organism to carry on automatically the new faculties thus acquired. Were it not for this power which we have of withdrawing our attention, our intellect would be absorbed and wasted in the merest routine work, instead of being set free to appropriate and render practically instinctive, a continually wider and more important range of deliberate purposive actions. We come now to the sixth and last attempt to explain instinct, namely, Mr. Darwin’s attempt. He has recognised the futility of seeking to explain many instinctive actions in any of the modes we have yet considered, and he has proposed, as before said, to explain such residual instinctive phenomena by the play of natural selection, i.e. of the destructive forces of nature upon small, accidental abnormalities of action on the part of individuals of a species; such abnormalities, when favorable to the existence of the individual, being preserved and perpetuated by the destruction of the other individuals of the same species who adhered to their ancestral tendencies. But this proposed explanation is not an explanation of the origin of instincts, but only of the changes and transformations of instincts already acquired. But putting back the date or modifying the form of the original instinct, in no way alters the essential nature of instincts or diminishes its mystery. Let us look at one or two strong cases of instinct, and see if it is credible that they should be due to mere accidental, haphazard, minute changes in habits already acquired. In the first place, there is the wonderful instinct of the duck, which feigns to have an injured wing, in order to entice a dog away from the pursuit of her ducklings. Is it conceivable that such an act was first done by pure accident, and that the descendants of her who so acted, having inherited the tendency, have been alone selected and preserved? Again, there is the case of the wasp, sphex, which stings spiders, caterpillars, and grasshoppers exactly in the spot, or spots, where their nervous ganglia lie, and so paralyses them. Even the strongest advocate of the intelligence of insects would not affirm that the mother sphex has a knowledge of the comparative anatomy of the nervous system of these very diversely formed insects. According to the doctrine of natural selection, either an ancestral wasp must have accidentally stung them each in the right places, and so our sphex of to-day is the naturally selected descendant of a line of insects which inherited this lucky tendency to sting different insects differently, but always in the exact situation of their nervous ganglia; or else the young of the ancestral sphex originally fed on dead food, but the offspring of some individuals who happened to sting their prey so as to paralyse but not kill them, were better nourished and so the habit grew. But the incredible supposition that the ancestor should accidentally have acquired the habit of stinging different insects differently, but always in the right spot, is not eliminated by the latter hypothesis.

There is, again, the case of neuter insects and the highly complex instincts of insects living in communities, such as bees, ants, and termites. The Darwinian theory has the great advantage of only needing for its support the suggestion of some possible utility in each case; and as all structures and functions in nature have their utility, the task is not a difficult one for an ingenious, patient, and accomplished thinker. Yet Mr. Darwin, with all his ingenuity, patience, and accomplishments, has been unable to suggest a rational explanation for the accidental origin of these insect communities with their marvellously complex instincts. I will confine myself to one more instance of a highly noteworthy instinct, which no one has in any way succeeded in explaining. The instance I refer to is that by which an animal, when an enemy approaches, lies quite quiescent and apparently helpless, an action often spoken of as “shamming death.” To evade the force of this remarkable case of instinct, it has been objected that the disposition of the limbs adopted by insects which thus act, is not the same as that which the limbs assume when such insects are really dead, and that all species are not when thus acting equally quiescent. The first observation, however, does not concern the matter really at issue. The remarkable thing is not that a helpless insect should assume the position of its own dead, but that such a creature, instead of trying to escape, should adopt a mode of procedure utterly hopeless unless the enemy’s attention is thereby effectually eluded. It is impossible that this instinct could have been gradually gained by the elimination of all those individuals who did not practice it, for if the quiescence, whether absolutely complete or not, were not sufficient at once to make the creature elude observation, its destruction would be only the more fully insured by such ineffectual quiescence. The same argument applies to birds which seem to feign lameness or other injury. Yet even if we could account for these cases, which as a fact are as yet entirely unaccounted for, it would not do away with the need of recognising the real existence and peculiar nature of instinct. It would not do so on account both of man’s highest and of man’s lowest instinctive powers. To speak first of the former: as instinct, such as we have hitherto discovered, is the appointed bridge between mere organic and intellectual animal life, so there is in man a further development of instinct, peculiar to him, and serving to bridge over the gulf between mere intelligent animal faculty and distinctly human reflective intellectual activity. Such special intellectual instinct is that which impels man to the external manifestation by voice or gesture of the mental abstractions which his intellect spontaneously forms, and which are not formed by the lower animals, which give no evidence of this power of abstraction. Language could never have been deliberately invented nor have arisen by a mere accidental individual variation, for vocal and gesture signs are essentially conventional, and require more or less comprehension on the part of those to whom they are addressed as well as on the part of those who use them. Analogous considerations apply to the first beginnings of what cannot be reckoned as merely instinctive activities, but the origins of which must have been akin to instincts. I refer to the beginnings of literature, art, science and politics, which were never deliberately invented. Even men who supposed they were inventing and constructing a certain new order of things with full purpose and much intelligence, have really been all the time so dominated by influences beyond their consciousness, that they really evolved something very different from what they supposed or intended. This fact has been most instructively shown by De Tocqueville and Taine with respect to the men who promoted and carried through the great French Revolution. So much, then, for man’s highest instinctive powers: but our argument has no need to refer to them, for a consideration of man’s lowest instinctive powers alone suffices to show that they cannot be due to “natural selection,” even when aided by “lapsed intelligence.” Can it be for a moment seriously maintained that such actions of the infant as those of the sucking, deglutition, and defecation, or the sexual instincts of later life, ever arose through the accidental conservation of haphazard variations of habit in ancestral animals? If it cannot be maintained, as I am confident it cannot, then it is absolutely impossible successfully to evade the difficulty of the existence of instinct. However far we may put back the beginnings of instinct, the question as to its origin (with its subsequent modifications) ever returns, and indeed with increased importunity. How did the first sentient creatures obtain and swallow their food? How did they first come to fecundate their ova or suitably to deposit them? How did they first effect such movements as might be necessary for their respiratory processes? Wherever such phenomena first manifested themselves in sentient organisms, we are compelled therein to recognise the manifest presence of instinct—the appointed means (as before said) of bridging over the interval between the purely vegetative functions and the intelligent activities of sentient animal life. “Natural selection” is manifestly impotent to account for the existence of such a faculty as that of “instinct.” We have already seen that the hypothesis of “lapsed intelligence” is also impotent to account for it. Thus the most recently attempted explanation falls altogether to the ground. Nevertheless the theory of evolution renders it necessary to assume that as new species of animals were from time to time evolved, so also were new and appropriate instincts. How then are we to account for the origin of such new instincts? That a certain mystery attends such origin cannot be denied, but a parallel mystery attends all other kinds of vital phenomena. What can be more mysterious than the purely organic functions of animals? Though not truly instinctive, they are full of unconscious purpose, and so are akin to instinct. Our nutrition is a process of self-generation by which the various bodies which constitute our food become transformed into our own substance. This process is effected by what is called assimilation, by which process the ultimate substance, or parenchyma, of our own body and of the bodies transforms part of what is immediately external to it, into the parenchyma itself. Again, the process of secretion is, as it were, parallel to the process of alimentation or nutrition. In secretion, the body extracts from the blood new substances (the secretions) which do not exist as such within it. In nutrition, the body extracts from the blood new substances (the various tissues) which do not exist as such within it. The blood is not the only source of our nutrition, since it has the power of replenishing itself. Thus the living particles which form the ultimate substance of our body exercise a certain power of choice with respect to the contents of the fluids which come in contact with them. Such particles are not passive bodies; they are active living agents, and their action no one has yet really explained. Here, then, are a set of activities which, if duly pondered over, will be found to be fully as mysterious and inexplicable in their unconscious teleology as any phenomena of instinct as ordinarily understood. But there is another class of organic vital actions which also seem to have a decided affinity both to reflex action and to instinct, though they are not to be regarded as actual instances of either of these faculties. The actions I refer to are those which bring about the repair of injuries and the reproduction of lost parts. They are like reflex action inasmuch as they take place in perfect unconsciousness and without the will having any power over them. They are like instinct inasmuch as they are directed towards a useful and unforeseen end. In the process of healing and repair of a wounded part of the body, a fluid, perfectly structureless substance, is secreted, or poured forth, from the parts about the wound. In this substance, cells arise and become abundant; so that the substance, at first structureless, becomes what is called cellular tissue. Then, by degrees, this structure transforms itself into vessels, tendons, nerves, bone, and membrane—into some or all of such parts—according to the circumstances of the case. In a case of broken bone, the two broken ends of the bone soften, the sharp edges thus disappearing. Then a soft substance is secreted, and this becomes at first gelatinous, often afterwards cartilaginous, and, finally, osseous or bony. But not only do these different kinds of substance—these distinct tissues—thus arise and develop themselves in this neutral or, as it is called, “undifferentiated” substance, but very complex structures, appropriately formed and nicely adjusted for the performance of complex functions, may also be developed. We see this in the production of admirably formed joints in parts which were at first devoid of anything of the kind. I may quote, as an example, the case of a railway guard, whose arm had been so injured that he had been compelled to have the elbow with its joint cut out, but who afterwards developed a new joint almost as good as the old one. In the uninjured condition the outer bone of the lower arm—the radius—ends above in a smooth-surfaced cup, which plays against part of the lower end of the bone of the upper arm, or humerus, while its side also plays against the side of the other bone of the lower arm, the ulna, with the interposition of a cartilaginous surface. The radius and ulna are united to the humerus by dense and strong membranes or ligaments, which pass between it and them, anteriorly, posteriorly, and on each side, and are attached to projecting processes, one on each side of the humerus. Such was the condition of the parts which were removed by the surgeon. Nine years after the operation the patient died, and Mr. Syme had the opportunity of dissecting the arm, which in the meantime had served the poor man perfectly well, he having been in the habit of swinging himself by it from one carriage to another, while the train was in motion, quite as easily and securely as with the other arm. On examination, Mr. Syme found that the amputated end of the radius had formed a fresh polished surface, and played both on the humerus and the ulna, a material something like cartilage being interposed. The ends of the bones of the forearm were locked in by two processes projecting downwards from the humerus, and also strong lateral and still stronger anterior and posterior ligaments again bound them fast to the last-named bone.[7] It would be easy to bring forward a number of more or less similar cases. The amount of reproduction of lost parts which may take place in many of the lower animals is astonishing. Thus the tails of lizards, if broken off, will grow again, and the limbs of newts will be reproduced, with their bones, muscles, blood-vessels, and nerves. Even the eye and the lower jaw have been seen to be reproduced in the last-named animals. If certain worms be cut in two, each half will become a perfect animal, the head producing a new tail, and the tail a new head; and a worm called a nais has been cut into as many as twenty-five parts with a like result. But the most remarkable animal for its power of repairing injuries is the fresh-water hydra, almost any fragment of which will, under favorable circumstances, grow into a new and entire fresh animal. It is also a notorious and very noteworthy fact that, in both man and the lower animals, the processes of repair take place the more readily the younger the age of the injured individual may be. But these unconscious but practically teleological processes of repair, are often preceded by actions which everyone would call instinctive.

There is yet another class of organic vital actions to which I must advert, which are at once utterly unconscious, while the fact that they are directed to a distinct end is indisputable; in fact they are purposive in the very highest degree that any unconscious actions can be purposive. They are the actions of true reproduction, and they come before us naturally here, since a consideration of the process of remedial reproduction in the individual, naturally leads us on to the consideration of the reproduction of the species itself. In the cases of the frog and the butterfly, everyone knows that the creature which comes forth from the egg is very different from the parent. Animals, in fact, mostly attain their adult condition by passing through a series of development changes; only as a rule that series is not abruptly interrupted by plainly marked pauses, as it is in the frog and butterfly, and, therefore, such changes, instead of being obvious, are only to be detected with difficulty and through patient research. Almost every animal thus goes through a series of very remarkable changes during its individual process of development or, as it is called, during its “ontogeny.” This process, in its perfect unconsciousness, is like reflex action, but it is far more wonderful, since in the earliest stages even nerve-tissue is absent and has itself to be formed. In the accuracy of its direction towards a useful end, it is the very counterpart of the most developed instinct; nor, if the impulses by which adult individuals are led to seek and to perform those processes which give rise to the embryo, are to be called instinctive, is it easy to see how the analogical use of the term “instinctive” can be refused to that impulse by which each developing embryo is led to go through those processes which give rise to the adult. The action of each organism during its individual development may be compared, and has evidently much affinity with, the processes of nutrition and the repair and reproduction of parts lost through some injury. These processes of nutrition and repair have also evidently a close relation to reflex action and reflex action has also a close affinity to instinctive action. Instead, however, of explaining “instinct” by “reflex action,” I would rather explain reflex action, processes of nutrition, processes of repair, processes of individual development, by instinct—using this term in a wide analogical sense. For we know the wonderful action and nature of instinct as it exists in our own human activity, standing, as it were, at the head of the various unconsciously intelligent vital processes. These processes seem to me to be all diverse manifestations of what is fundamentally one kind of activity. Of these manifestations, instinctive action is the best type, because by it we can, to a certain extent, understand the others, whereas none of the others enable us to understand instinct.—Fortnightly Review.

A VERY OLD MASTER.

The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of his own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation of the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib’s hair, just like a modern coachman’s wig, this work of primæval art was already hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying, already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess authentic records of man’s abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten epochs—an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn’t commit one to any definite chronology in particular—then it is probable that all known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth of the epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief would fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I should say it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adam according to Ussher.

The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, and represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following one another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite unfavorable comment at Newmarket. Their “points” are undoubtedly coarse and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the prehistoric Dordognian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hue and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roam over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush grass and tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove this, but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name is so much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar living horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky’s horse (you see, as I have only to write the word, without uttering it, I don’t mind how often or how intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat, or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we can’t do better than begin by describing him in propria persona.

The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other families, into two factions, which may be described for variety’s sake as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including also the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names, in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visitors at the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the chief broad distinction between these two great groups consists in the feathering of the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single bunch or fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle at the extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny patches or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys have them on the fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long hairs are almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving it its peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky’s horse, as one would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands halfway in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from the very top, thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit without actually attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric Phidias the horse of the quaternary epoch had much the same caudal peculiarity; his tail was bushy, but only in the lower half. He was still in the intermediate stage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still struggling up aspiringly toward perfect horsehood. In all other matters the two creatures—the cave man’s horse and Prjevalsky’s—closely agree. Both display large heads, thick necks, coarse manes, and a general disregard of “points” which would strike disgust and dismay into the stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In fact over a T.Y.C. it may be confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of the sporting papers, that Prjevalsky’s and the cave man’s lot wouldn’t be in it. Nevertheless a candid critic would be forced to admit that, in spite of clumsiness, they both mean staying.

So much for the two sitters; now let us turn to the artist who sketched them. Who was he, and when did he live? Well, his name, like that of many other old masters, is quite unknown to us; but what does that matter so long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the Comtists he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is for the most part all we ever have to go upon. “I have my own theory about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,” said Lewis Carroll (of “Alice in Wonderland”) once in Christ Church common room: “it is that they weren’t really written by Homer, but by another person of the same name.” There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable Greek epics; and all we know directly about my old master, viewed personally, is that he once carved with a rude flint flake on a fragment of reindeer horn these two clumsy prehistoric horses. Yet by putting two and two together we can make, not four, as might be naturally expected, but a fairly connected history of the old master himself and what Mr. Herbert Spencer would no doubt playfully term “his environment.”

The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. That cave was once inhabited by the nameless artist himself, his wife, and family. It had been previously tenanted by various other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have lived there in the intervals between the different human occupiers. Probably the bears ejected the men, and the men in turn ejected the bears, by the summary process of eating one another up. In any case the freehold of the cave was at last settled upon our early French artist. But the date of his occupancy is by no means recent; for since he lived there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice Age, or Glacial Epoch, has swept over the whole of Northern Europe, and swept before it the shivering descendants of my poor prehistoric old master. Now, how long ago was the Great Ice Age? As a rule, if you ask a geologist for a definite date, you will find him very chary of giving you a distinct answer. He knows that chalk is older than the London clay, and the oolite than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite; and he knows also that each of them took a very long time indeed to lay down, but exactly how long he has no notion. If you say to him, “Is it a million years since the chalk was deposited?” he will answer, like the old lady of Prague, whose ideas were excessively vague, “Perhaps,” If you suggest five millions, he will answer oracularly once more, “Perhaps;” and if you go on to twenty millions, “Perhaps,” with a broad smile, is still the only confession of faith that torture will wring out of him. But in the matter of the Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost historical event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve on this chronological question and condescended to give us a numerical determination. And here is how Dr. Croll gets at it.

Every now and again, geological evidence goes to show us, a long cold spell occurs in a northern or southern hemisphere. During these long cold spells the ice cap at the poles increases largely, till it spreads over a great part of what are now the temperate regions of the globe, and makes ice a mere drug in the market as far south as Covent Garden or the Halles at Paris. During the greatest extension of this ice sheet in the last glacial epoch, in fact, all England except a small south-western corner (about Torquay and Bournemouth) was completely covered by one enormous mass of glaciers, as is still the case with almost the whole of Greenland. The ice sheet, grinding slowly over the hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and striated their surfaces in many places till they resembled the roches moutonnées similarly ground down in our own day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and Grindelwald. Now, since these great glaciations have occurred at various intervals in the world’s past history, they must depend upon some frequently recurring cause. Such a cause, therefore, Dr. Croll began ingeniously to hunt about for.

He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. This world of ours, though usually steady enough in its movements, is at times decidedly eccentric. Not that I mean to impute to our old and exceedingly respectable planet any occasional aberrations of intellect, or still less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and Venus); the word is here to be accepted strictly in its scientific or Pickwickian sense as implying merely an irregularity of movement, a slight wobbling out of the established path, a deviation from exact circularity. Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion (I am not going to explain them here; the names alone will be quite sufficient for most people; they will take the rest on trust)—owing to the combination of these profoundly interesting causes, I say, there occur certain periods in the world’s life when for a very long time together (10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer than the southern, or vice versa. Now Dr. Croll has calculated that about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it was that produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on till about 80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the climate of Britain and the neighboring continent with its existing inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are good reasons for believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that

He lived in the long long agoes;

’Twas the manner of primitive man.

The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with the hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits with the lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and most remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was in all probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding. Our Zoo can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of Seine. But our old master saw the last of some at least among those gigantic quadrupeds; it was his hand or that of one among his fellows that scratched the famous mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and carved the figure of the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse. Probably, therefore, he lived in the period immediately preceding the Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells with which the long secular winter of the northern hemisphere was then from time to time agreeably diversified.

And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but on several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massénat, where a very early pre-Glacial man is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting a flint-tipped javelin. In this as in all other pictures of the same epoch I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in the costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master’s studies, in fact, are all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently unacquainted as yet with the use of clothing, though primitive woman, while still unclad, had already learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple addition of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though dresses were still wholly unknown, rouge was even then extremely fashionable among French ladies, and lumps of the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of the cave where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To return to our hunter, however, who for aught we know to the contrary may be our old master himself in person, he is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with an arched back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head, long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry and awkward figure.

Was he black? That we don’t certainly know, but all analogy would lead one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the whole, to be a very recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern. At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old original hairy covering. The few skulls and other fragments of skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our old master and his contemporaries much resembled in shape and build the Australian black fellows, though their foreheads were lower and more receding, while their front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling the immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart from any theoretical considerations as to our probable descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin’s hypothetical “hairy arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,” whose existence may or may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the actual historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as evidently approaching in several important respects the higher monkeys.

It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old monkey-like progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly delineated for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has admirably reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with a little creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes to each hind foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short by far to reach the ground. In our own horse these lateral toes have become reduced to what are known by veterinaries as splint bones, combined with the canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the pre-Glacial horses the splint bones still generally remained quite distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier period when they existed as two separate and independent side toes in the ancestral quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however, the splints are found united with the canons in a single piece, while conversely horses are sometimes, though very rarely, born at the present day with three-toed feet, exactly resembling those of their half-forgotten ancestor the Pliocene hipparion.

The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave period is, I am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of the period ate them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France; it was practised by pre-Glacial man in the caves of Périgord, and revived with immense enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards after the siege of Paris and the hunger of the Commune. The cave men hunted and killed the wild horse of their own times, and one of the best of their remaining works of art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses, while a huge snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his heel. In this rough prehistoric sketch one seems to catch some faint antique foreshadowing of the rude humor of the “Petit Journal pour Rire.” Some archæologists even believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave men as a source of food, and argue that the familiarity with its form shown in the drawings could only have been acquired by people who knew the animal in its domesticated state; they declare that the cave man was obviously horsey. But all the indications seem to me to show that tame animals were quite unknown in the age of the cave men. The mammoth certainly was never domesticated; yet there is a famous sketch of the huge beast upon a piece of his own ivory, discovered in the cave of La Madelaine by Messrs. Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works on archæology, which forms one of the finest existing relics of pre-Glacial art. In another sketch, less well known, but not unworthy of admiration, the early artist has given us with a few rapid but admirable strokes his own reminiscence of the effect produced upon him by the sudden onslaught of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide open, a perfect glimpse of elephantine fury. It forms a capital example of early impressionism, respectfully recommended to the favorable attention of Mr. J. M. Whistler.

The reindeer, however, formed the favorite food and favorite model of the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these early prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palæolithic art is undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, in which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a Chinese artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing of two reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and unearthed in one of the caves of Périgord, though far inferior to the Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit. The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for the head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of another. Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures. Probably all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote Mr. Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, “he lived in a cave by the seas; he lived upon oysters and foes.” The oysters are quite undoubted and the foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.

I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, however, the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves to show how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive. You can’t speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals; nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilized being who is now calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own study. Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the hypothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have intervened innumerable generations of gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master, when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and necklet of bear’s teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human being, with a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had invented the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle. Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements with artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with the figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to distil; and he was probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has rightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.

No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must go much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years, with which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier fire-split flints which the Abbé Bourgeois—undaunted mortal!—ventured to discover among the Miocene strata of the calcaire de Beauce. Those flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial, one distinguished archæologist will not admit they can be in any way human; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the great European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whether you call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it. When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may be sure that man, noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties—cannibal or otherwise—is lurking somewhere very close just round the corner. The more we examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the conviction force itself upon us that he was very far indeed from being primitive—that we must push back the early history of our race not for 250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years into the dim past of Tertiary ages.

But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race by a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he is separated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space, the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows still cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice sheet drove away palæolithic man—the man of the caves and the unwrought flint axes—from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armed only with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant of taming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing of the use of metals—aurum irrepertum spernere fortior—and he had not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to a finished edge. He couldn’t make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery, and if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great anthropological truth, justly remarks, “man, being reasonable, must get drunk”) he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from the capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human being who alone inhabited France and England during the later pre-Glacial period.

A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play bills put it), and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile, loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared away he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man, physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulations of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the age of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity—the age of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake dwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow small ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flax and wear decent clothing; in a word, they had passed from the savage hunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists. That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we must conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn’t to be measured by mere calculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand years. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; what looked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere in the dim distance. Like our palæolithic artists, we fail to get the reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.

On the table where I write there lie two paper weights, preserving from the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this article is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet, produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows, and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now serves me in the office of a paper weight, is far ruder, simpler, and more ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use among the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forests two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angry cave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybody knows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a bastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I have very little doubt in my own mind that with it some æsthetic ancestor has brained and cut up for use his next-door neighbor in the nearest cavern, and then carved upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketch of the entire performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact, habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal remains of the mammoth or the man whom they wished to caricature in deathless bone-cuts. The other paper weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk, belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels of civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trained barbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of a rude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in the midst of this “so-called nineteenth century,” which perpetually proclaims itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to believe themselves inferior to their original ancestors, instead of being superior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base, degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men that ever were our fathers.—Cornhill Magazine.

[THE ORGANIZATION OF DEMOCRACY.]
BY GOLDWIN SMITH.

In the Colonies, at least in Canada, there are a good many of us who believe, not in the expansion of England, but in the multiplication of Englands, and to whom Imperial Federation, or any scheme for the political re-absorption of an adult and distant Colony into its Mother Country, appears totally impracticable. Yet we regard the Mother Country not only as the object of our filial affection and pride, but as the centre of our civilization, feel a practical as well as a sentimental interest in everything that touches her, and tremble at her danger as at our own.

We look on from a distance, it is true; and though the cable transmits to us the news, it does not, nor do even the newspapers and the correspondents, transmit to us the mind of England. In this respect our judgment may be at fault. On the other hand, we are out of the fray; we stand clear of English parties; we care for nothing but the country; we see, while those immediately engaged do not see, the heady current of faction, ambition, chimerical aspiration, political fatalism, and disunionist conspiracy hurrying the nation towards a bourne which all the speakers and writers on the Franchise Bill and the Redistribution Bill, by the vagueness of their speculations on the practical results, proclaim to be unknown.

The electorate, that is to say, the government—at least the body by which the government is appointed and its policy is determined—is undergoing reconstruction on the largest scale. Yet we look in vain, even in the speeches of the great statesman who is the author of these measures, for any forecast of their practical effect, of the influence which they will have on the character of government, or of the sort of policy which they will produce. Able and impressive as the speeches may be, there is little in them but philanthropy and arithmetic, neither of which is politics. The effect of the Redistribution Bill especially is evidently a matter of the merest conjecture. Lord Salisbury thinks that it will act in one way, and Mr. Chamberlain that it will act in another. The first considers it favorable to aristocratic reaction, the second considers it favorable to authoritative democracy. The Bill is a leap in the dark. In any case less important than that of a reconstruction of the national institutions, safe experiments would probably precede sweeping change. A new mode of paving would be tried first in one or two streets; a new mode of cultivation would be tried first in one or two fields. But if you proposed to try the Redistribution Bill in one or two specimen districts, a chorus of scornful reprobation would arise from all parties, sects, and ambitions. Nor would any voices be louder than those of some who are foremost in hailing the advent of political science, and preaching the necessity of a scientific method in all things. This is not a deliberation on the amendment of national institutions; it is a battle of parties. Each party is seeking not so much to improve the government as to make it the instrument of particular theories or passions. But this surely is what a government, an executive government at least, ought not to be. A government ought to be the impartial guardian for the whole nation of law, order, property, personal rights, and the public safety; while opinion is left to shape itself by discussion, reach maturity, and at length impress itself on legislation. This whole movement is pre-eminently the work of party, and inspired by its passions. Reform in 1832 was really national; the nation earnestly desired liberation from a corrupt oligarchy. But the subsequent suffrage agitations have been mainly set on foot by the politicians for the purposes of their party war.

Democracy has come. By all reflecting men its advent seems to be acknowledged, by most it is welcomed as bringing, so far as we can see or so far as experience, though chequered, informs us, an increase of happiness to the masses of mankind, and therefore, in the highest sense, to all. But it requires to be organized and regulated; otherwise the end will be anarchy and, as the inevitable consequence of anarchy, a relapse into a government of force. Republics, as we have more than once seen, are capable of suicide. The people is no more divine than kings, though its divinity was proclaimed by the Maratists; it is capable of governing itself as wrongly as any king can govern it. The ignorance, the passions, the self-interest, not only of particular classes, but of all of us alike, need to be controlled, as far as institutions can control them, and eliminated from the Councils of the State. The Americans, as was said before, have tried to organize and regulate democracy. The framers of the American Constitution—no veil of illusion being spread before their eyes by the surviving forms and names of an old monarchy—saw the problem which destiny had set before them. It was not such a problem as would be presented to them by the America of the present day, with its New York and its Chicago, its flood of foreign immigrants, and its enfranchised negroes; far less is it such a problem as Great Britain, with the populace of its great cities, its host of Radical and Secularist artisans, its uninstructed millions of farm laborers, and its disaffected Irishry presents to the British statesman. They had to deal only with the Puritan freeholders of New England and the planters of the South. Still they saw the necessity of providing a solution, and a solution they produced—one not in all respects correct, even in its day (for the mode adopted of electing the President was a fatal error), yet effective as well as deliberate, and such as has sufficed, notwithstanding the great increase of the strain upon the machinery, to shelter civilization and avert anarchy. They instituted an executive government invested with actual power and existing independently of parties in Congress, a real though suspensive veto, a Senate elected on a Conservative principle, a written constitution in the keeping of a Supreme Court, by which all powers and jurisdictions are strictly defined and limited, and which can be amended only with the deliberate consent of the nation at large. Besides, as was said before, the Federal system itself, by localizing questions and breaking the sweep of agitation, has a highly Conservative effect. These safeguards, with the political qualities of the Anglo-Americans and the Germans, prevent a catastrophe which without them would certainly come. But England has nothing like them. She has nothing but an “ancient throne,” now stripped of the last vestige of political power, and an aristocracy which is evidently doomed, and, by its struggles to retain its obsolete privilege, stimulates revolution. The only Conservative institution which is really effective is the non-payment of Members of Parliament; and this Democracy has already marked for abolition.

One could wish for a blast of the Fontarabian horn to awaken British statesmen, in this decisive hour, to the fact that England, though she has the consecrated form, has no longer the substance of monarchical government. Her only government is the House of Commons, or a committee of leaders of the dominant party, holding their offices during the pleasure of that House. In the electorate is the supreme power; this is now not only the fact but a recognized fact. Twice the Ministry, after submitting its policy to the judgment of the constituencies by a dissolution of Parliament, has resigned in deference to the verdict. Yet these same statesmen go on dealing with the electorate as though they were not dealing with the government or with the sovereign power, but only with a representation of the people convened for the purpose of assenting to taxation. They seem to fancy that flood the electorate as they will with ignorance, passion, and all the elements of violence and anarchy, the government will still be carried on calmly and wisely by the occupant and the Ministers of the “ancient throne.” Is it possible that the mere phrase “servants of the Crown” can cast such a spell over practical minds?

Down to this time the political history of England has been a long revolution, of which the Whig or Liberal party in its successive phases has been the organ, and by which, after many oscillations and vicissitudes, supreme power has been drawn from the Crown and the aristocracy to the Commons. The destructive part of the process is now all but complete, only a small remnant of precarious power being retained by the House of Lords. The constructive part remains to be performed. The task of British statesmen at the present day is, in effect, to found a Democratic Government. The ground has been cleared for the new edifice, but the edifice has yet to be built. Its foundations have hardly yet been laid.

Without giving way to reactionary panic, it may surely be said that the times are critical. They are not evil; they are full, on the contrary, of the unripe promise of good; but they are critical. Statesmen cannot afford to act blindfold. Democracy comes, as it was likely that it would come, not by itself, but as part of a general revolution, political, social, and religious. Nihilism marks, by its all-embracing lust of destruction, the connection between the different revolutionary forces, while it exhibits them in their delirious excess. The English reform movement in the early part of the century was almost exclusively political; other agitations were called into being by the general disturbance, but they were secondary and subsided; the main object sought was the removal of abuses in government; the leaders were strict economists, and, far from seeking a social revolution, would have recoiled from the idea. But a momentous change has taken place since that time. The fermentation is now not only political but general. Political power is sought by the masses and their leaders, not merely for the sake of purifying the administration and reducing its cost, but in the hope that it may be used to effect a great social change. Secularism has become an important factor in the situation. Rate religious influence, and that of faith in a future state as low as you will, it can hardly be denied that the patience of the masses under the inequalities of the social system has hitherto been largely sustained by the belief that the system was a providential ordinance, and that those who did their duty in it, even if they suffered here, would be in some way made happy in the sum of things.

Nor has the doctrine of spiritual equality been without its effect in consoling the lowly for their inferiority of rank. Hereafter scientific conviction, derived from the study of the social organism, may supply the place of religious impressions as a motive for acquiescence in things as they are. At present it is the destructive process of science that has almost exclusively taken place in the mind of the Radical proletarian. Believing now that this world is all, he naturally desires to grasp his full share of its good things without delay. His sensibility having been quickened with his intelligence, he feels inferiority as well as privation, and is impelled by social envy as well as by desire. His education has advanced just far enough to enable him to imbibe theories which coincide with his wishes. If he cannot understand the fine reasonings of Mr. George, he can understand the confiscation, and he thinks that so much fine reasoning must make the confiscation moral. Communism and semi-communism are rife; there is a tendency to them even at the Universities, and in other high places. Perhaps the loss of faith in the Church leads some to see an indemnity for it in a communistic polity. If there is not in England, as there is in Germany, a strong Socialistic party, there appears to be a growing disposition to make a Socialistic use of the suffrage. There is certainly in many quarters an exaggerated idea of the powers and duties of the fictitious being styled the State. One conspicuous candidate for the succession to the leadership, at all events, is evidently holding out hopes of a Socialistic system of high taxation for the benefit of those who produce least, and he appears inclined to head a crusade against the property of all landowners, and of all owners of houses in towns. Nor is he without rivals in this quest of popularity on the Tory side. The ball of agrarianism which has been set rolling by recent legislation in Ireland, rolls on, and its course is not likely to stop in Skye. All this may be working for good. The writer of this paper, at all events, has no inclination to take the despondent view. But surely there is enough to warn statesmen that they must exercise forecast, that they must try, while they can, to secure to the nation a stable and rational government; that they must not hastily divorce power from intelligence and responsibility; that they must not plunge the country headlong into unorganized and unregulated democracy. If this Parliament comes to an end without having created any conservative safeguards, while it has instituted a suffrage destined evidently soon to be universal, the reins will have been thrown on the necks of the horses, and the last leverage of Conservatism will be gone. M. Taine has just shown us whither horses with the reins upon their necks may run, and what wreck they may make of their own hopes. It is true that great resignation, and even apathy, has been sometimes shown by the masses in times of suffering from dearth. No doubt the masses move slowly; but you incite them to move when you thrust into their hand the vote and send among them people to teach them that by a violent use of it they can raise themselves to the level of the rich. Able and powerful men of the ruling class itself are now, either from philanthropy or from party motives, doing their utmost to pave the way for a Socialistic revolution.

Of all the calamities that ever befell the human race, the greatest was the French Revolution. Wide, happily, is the difference between the France of a century ago and the England of the present day. In the case of England there is no Versailles, no deficit, no gulf between the aristocracy and the middle classes; while there is diffused intelligence instead of a night of political ignorance in which all sorts of spectres stalked, general habits of self-government in place of a paralyzing centralization, and a political character, as we may flatter ourselves, stronger and sounder than was that of the French. Still there are some points of similarity, especially the dangerous conjunction of social or agrarian with political revolution. In England, as in the France of the eighteenth century, scepticism has gained the minds of the ruling class; with their convictions their nerve is shaken, and it is difficult to see who would stop the avalanche if once it should begin to slide. Nor is there wanting a sybaritic Jacobinism which ominously reminds us of the Palais Royal. Pleasure-hunting and frivolity, athletic and of other kinds, appear to have reached a great height, and to public questions a sort of careless fatalism seems to prevail. No doubt there is still plenty of force and of seriousness in the country; but something like a convulsion may be needed to bring them to the front. The masses in France, though galled by the burdens of feudal lordship were not, properly speaking, Socialistic. Socialism proper can hardly be said to have shown its head before the conspiracy of Babœuf; and the nation was still at the core monarchical and Catholic, as was proved by the ease with which both monarchy and Church were restored by Napoleon. Should the manufacturing and maritime supremacy of England be still more severely challenged and continue to decline, an amount of suffering might be produced among her people hardly less than was, in reality, that of the people in France. If Socialistic legislation commences in earnest, and, as the inevitable consequence, property begins to shrink from circulation and investment, stoppage of industry and dearth of bread cannot fail to ensue, and we know what the effects of these would be in the middle of a Socialistic revolution. Much ought to be risked, if there were real hope of equalizing, by any political action, the human lot. But who seriously believes this to be possible? Who does not know that the things which we deplore and are slowly mending will only be made worse by convulsions?

Surely, if this work were in the hands of patriotic and comprehensive statesmanship, not in those of party, there would be, instead of a mere extension of the Franchise, a revision of the Constitution. Before, by the admission of a large popular element, the strain upon the conservative and regulative parts of the machine was increased, those parts would be looked over and put in order; this question of the Second Chamber would be settled, and if the result was a determination to reform the House of Lords, that determination would be carried into effect, and the institution would be placed in a condition to do its work, before the next general election.

In a reform of the House of Lords it is difficult to feel any confidence. The hereditary principle seems to be thoroughly dead. In the Middle Ages it had a root in the faith and in the ignorance of mankind; it had its temporary uses, and at the same time it had its correctives. A mediæval lord was obliged to exert himself that his lordship might not be taken by another. A mediæval king was obliged to exert himself if he wished to keep his crown upon his head. Now, except in the rare cases of men moulded of Nature’s finest clay, with whom nobility acts really as an obligation, hereditary rank and wealth kill duty in the cradle. It is found impossible to get a decent attendance in the House of Lords. In answer to Lord Rosebery’s appeal, a Peer says that he will be happy to attend if the nation will re-enact the Corn Laws, so as to enable him to keep a house in town. To indulge a mere whim, the hereditary wearers of the crown refuse to visit Ireland, and thus fling away the affections of the Irish people. The historical cause has been tried during this controversy and the issue is not doubtful. We have seen how the House of Lords, since it assumed its present character, which it did under the second Tudor, has worked. That it has acted as a court of mature wisdom, revising on grounds of impartial statesmanship the rash decisions of the popular House, is as complete a fable as its Norman pedigree. It has simply opposed the selfish resistance of a privileged order to change of every kind. Could it have its way, not only Rotten Boroughs and Sinecurism, but the old Criminal Code, Religious Intolerance, Arbitrary Imprisonment, the Censorship of the Press, the Paper Duty, even Slavery and the Slave Trade, would still be cumbering the earth; or, rather, long ago, the nation would have been compelled to choose between political death and revolution. To fear, on questions which caused national excitement, the House of Lords has at last given way; but not to reason and justice. A multitude of minor reforms it has strangled, by its obstructiveness, altogether. The only great measure of change which this organ of mature wisdom ever readily passed was the Franchise Bill of 1867, which was described by its own author as a leap in the dark, and had been devised with the view of swamping progressive intelligence in a flood of ignorance and beer. Nor has obstruction been the only sin of that order of which the House of Lords is the organ; it has given to the general policy of England a class bias; it stimulated the crusade against the French Revolution, and unlike the crusading Barons of the Middle Ages, it stayed at home revelling in high rents and in a mass of sinecures, of which it sacrificed not one penny, while the people bled and starved in a cause which was not theirs. It has fostered militarism generally as a diversion from domestic reform. On economic questions the legislation of the Lords has been mere landlordism. As mere landlords they have acted, from the day on which they sold the national religion to the Pope for a quiet title to the Church lands, to the day on which they passed the Arrears Bill, after showing their sense of its character, in order that they might recover some of their back rents. If twice in the course of their long history they have been for a moment on the side of freedom, fear for their Church lands, combined with jealousy of ecclesiastical favorites, was the cause. The period of their most complete ascendency, in the last century, was the epoch of political corruption; and the conduct of the House at the time of the railway mania, when it formed a Ring in the landlord interest, was, to say the least, not a proof that hereditary wealth lifts its possessor above commercial motives. Many histories are darker than that of the House of Lords; few are less heroic; and the facts are now deeply imprinted on the minds of the people. Faith in the “noble blood” of the scapegrace son of a law lord, once dissipated, is not likely to return. The hereditary wealth itself, which is the real basis of aristocratic influence, and without which the Peerage would be a thing of shreds and patches, is reduced by agricultural depression, and will be greatly broken up by the abolition of primogeniture and entail,—a change which is sure to come, for it will be found that the only antidote to agrarian communism is the free acquisition of land. The hereditary principle is dead, and can serve England or civilized humanity no more. Introduced into, or retained in, any Senate, it will carry with it the seeds of death. As soon as it obeys, as obey it certainly will, its obstructive instinct, the cry against it will be renewed. It will not become less odious by becoming weaker. If the life element which it is proposed to introduce remains antagonistic to the hereditary element, the tribunal of mature wisdom will be divided against itself and fresh conflicts will ensue. If it is assimilated, you will have the House of Lords over again, and more odious than ever, since the life element will be regarded as having apostatized and betrayed its trust.

Yet the whole theory of a Second Chamber as a necessary part of Parliamentary institutions appears to have no other origin nor any sounder basis than a mistaken view of the nature of the House of Lords, which all the world has supposed to be a Senate, when in fact it was an estate of the feudal realm, representing not a higher grade of deliberative wisdom but simply the special interest of the great landowners. The only valid argument in favor of the retention of the House of Lords is, in fact, the difficulty which the Bicamerists find in devising anything to be put in its place. Nomination is a total failure; the nominated Senate of Canada is a legislative cypher, the debates of which are not even reported, and the places in it are a mere addition to the bribery fund of the party leader. If both Chambers are elective, as in Victoria, the result is a collision and a deadlock, out of which, in the case of sovereign assemblies, there would be no colonial officer or governor to point a way. Co-option in any form, or election by an order, would give us the oligarchy over again, perhaps in a worse shape than ever, since the members would have to cultivate the good graces of a privileged and reactionary electorate. Not only as to the mode in which their Senate is to be elected are the Bicamerists at fault; they are equally at fault as to the special materials of which it is to be composed. If age or wealth is to be the qualification, impotence or odium will be the result. If the wisest are to have their seats in the Senate, the popular House will be deprived of its best leaders. Supreme power must centre somewhere; it will centre in that body which most directly represents the national will. Let the assembly, then, which is the seat of supreme power, be the seat of collective wisdom. Concentrate in it, as far as possible, all the best available elements, those of a conservative character as well as the rest. Frankly recognize its authority, and invest it at the same time with a full measure of responsibility. Notoriously the existence of a Senate diminishes the sense of responsibility in the popular chamber, and diminishes it out of proportion to the control really exercised; for a Senate soon gets tired of incurring the unpopularity of rejection. This surely is a more rational and hopeful plan than that of abandoning the seat of supreme power to popular impulse, and affixing by way of safeguard an artificial regulator to its side. Checks and balances belong to mechanics, not to politics; in mechanics you can apportion force, in politics force cannot be apportioned, though nominal authority may. That there are good and useful elements in the House of Lords, especially among the new creations, nobody doubts. Let them be transferred, with any social influence which in these democratic times may adhere to them, to a sphere where they can act with effect. At present they are ostracized by seclusion, as is clearly perceived by some Radicals, who on that ground deprecate a reform of the House of Lords. Let Lord Salisbury go to the Commons and Lord Hartington stay there. The Lords are warned by their partisans against imitating the foolish abdication of the French aristocracy in the famous holocaust of feudal titles. To that it may come, if they do not take care. But this is an earlier stage of the revolution, and the day of grace has not yet expired. Let the Lords do that which the French aristocracy ought to have done, and by doing which they might have averted the catastrophe. Let them at once go over frankly to the Tiers Etat, and strengthen by their accession the conservative forces in the national assembly. Convulsive efforts to retain an obnoxious privilege only inflame the revolutionary spirit, and at the same time make it still more desperately difficult for rational statesmanship to deal with the situation. Tory democracy is apparently a plea for founding aristocracy on demagogism, and for stemming Socialism by heading it and combining it with a foreign policy of violence. Can the House of Lords be so blind as not to see in what such a course must end? What has been the end of other attempts of privilege to save itself by an alliance with extreme Radicalism against moderate reform?

Not in a Second Chamber, patched up or newly created, but in a well-regulated franchise and a rational mode of election, are effectual securities for the permanent ascendancy of national reason over passion in the legislature to be found. The electorate has been dealt with by successive reformers in the belief that its functions, and therefore the necessary qualifications for it, have remained unchanged. But its functions have been greatly changed, and have become infinitely more important and difficult than they originally were. Instead of merely choosing delegates to give his assent to taxation, the elector is now called upon to choose a ruler, and, at the same time, virtually to decide upon the general policy of the country. This is beyond the capacity of any ordinary voter. Everybody knows what happens, and until an immense progress shall have been made in popular education, must happen—how the intelligent elector, even supposing him to escape bribery and all other corrupt influences, votes at best for the Blue or Yellow ticket, and too often votes not even for the Blue or Yellow ticket, but with reference to some merely local or personal question, some fancy or antipathy, leaving the broad interests of the country and the qualifications essential to a legislator altogether out of sight. The author of “Round My House” tells us how opinion among the French peasantry in certain districts was swept by an angry fancy about a reduction in the value of a coin. What chance would Chatham or Peel, representing a great national policy, have stood against the lowest demagogue if he had been on the unpopular side of the question about the Cider Tax or Wood’s halfpence? An ordinary citizen, occupied in trade or manual labor, has not the leisure, if he had the knowledge and capacity, to study the complex questions put before him. Yet there are reformers who desire to set Hodge to choose not only out of the worthies of his own neighborhood, but out of all the notabilities of the country, among whom the largest vote would probably be polled by the Tichborne Claimant. From selfishness the poor are at least as free as the rich; they would vote at least as well if they knew how; but the knowledge is to them unattainable. In no sphere but that of politics does anybody propose to thrust upon people power of which it is manifestly impossible that they should make an intelligent use. Not only is it manifestly impossible that the people should make an intelligent use of the power of direct election to the governing assembly and of determining its policy: it is morally impossible that they should really make use of it at all. They are unorganized, and, though they live in the same district, unconnected as a rule with each other: they have no means of taking counsel together for the selection of a member. The selection must therefore be made for them by some self-constituted agency. That agency is the Caucus, into the hands of whose managers and masters the representation, styled popular, really falls.

Both the party organizations in England are now adopting the system, and thus confiscating the suffrage which they profess by legislation to bestow. One of them at least already has the Boss, and both of them will soon have the complete machine, with a host of professional politicians, recruited from the class which prefers place-hunting to honest trades. Government, in a word, will fall into the hands of irresponsible intriguers, and will be dominated in ever-increasing measure by Knavery and corruption. Nor is there any assignable remedy for the evil; the wire-pullers and professional politicians alone can give their time to the elections, and therefore it is hardly possible to organize the means of casting off their yoke. Attending “primaries” is often preached as the duty of the patriotic citizen; but the patriotic citizen who does attend the primary finds everything arranged by the wire-pullers beforehand and himself impotent and a laughing-stock. This will not appear in the first flush of a revolutionary movement, while the present leaders retain their ascendancy, but it will appear as soon as the revolution settles down. Public education, it is true, has been introduced in England; but it has always existed in the United States, and it has not saved that country from the Boss. To save the country from the Boss is now the highest aim of the best citizens; but they will hardly succeed without a constitutional change.

American reformers, if they want to go to the root of the evil, have a light to guide their efforts in the successful working of their Senate, which, being elected indirectly, through the State Legislatures, is a body of remarkable ability, and possesses the general confidence of the nation; while the House of Representatives, elected directly by the people, that is, by the wire-puller, who usurps the functions of the people, presents a most unfavorable contrast. Those who have sat in both say the difference between the two political atmospheres is immense. Rid the Senate of Party, and it would be about as good a governing body as any nation could reasonably desire. Indirect elections through local councils is the plan which seems to promise the best central legislature; and it takes from the primary elector nothing which at present is really his. Ordinary knowledge and intelligence ought to suffice to enable a man to choose from among his neighbors those who are fittest to manage his local affairs. But the local councillors would be a comparatively picked body; they might reasonably be expected to give their minds to the central election; they would not be too many for concert; and they would exercise their power as a trust under the eyes of the people. As permanent bodies they could not, like the College of Presidential Electors, be reduced to the mere bearers of a mandate. A high trust, by adding to the importance and dignity of local councils, would be likely to draw into them better men. Through such an organization, apparently, opinion might freely and quietly flow from the people to the depository of power. Local and social influences would no doubt be strong; but they are more wholesome than that of the Boss, and, as was said before, it is easier to enlarge the parochial than to make the wire-puller honest. Parochialism, however, has been pretty well broken up by the press and the telegraph. Hardly anybody can now live in intellectual isolation. The Caucus itself, so far as it works fairly, is a tribute to the principle of indirect election.

To begin by passing a measure of Home Rule, not for Ireland alone, but for the United Kingdom, to reconstruct the local institutions, unloading upon them part of the now crushing burden of the central legislature, and then to base the central institutions upon them, is a policy which might at least claim attention, and, perhaps, deserve partial experiment, as an alternative to central revolution, if the nation and its leaders had not surrendered themselves to the revolutionary current.

Like the mode of election, the qualification for the franchise has never undergone any rational consideration with reference to the changed status and duties of the elector, who, instead of being really a subject, is now a participant in sovereign power. Nothing has been thought of the property qualification, which by successive agitations has been reduced to the vanishing point, and the next time anybody wants to raise the political wind will finally disappear. The broader the basis of electoral institutions can safely be made the better, and with indirect instead of direct election to the central legislature, it would be safe to make it very broad. Still some qualifications are necessary, even for the primary elector; nor, if the writer may trust his own observation, is there any indisposition on the part of the intelligent working-classes to look at the matter in that light. A common education is now placed within everybody’s reach by the help of the State, and it entails corresponding obligations. A mode of ascertaining that the elector could read and write, or at least read, by means of a certificate or test, might surely be devised. Personal application for registration would also be a fair requirement, since a man would hardly be fit to share the sovereign power who did not care enough about his vote to ask for it; and it would probably act as a useful criterion, self-applied. With the full powers of a citizen should also go, in reason, the full duties—liability to serve on juries, to assist in the enforcement of the law, to take part, if called upon, in the defence of the country. There is a vague notion that all human beings, or all who pay taxes (which, directly or indirectly, everybody does), have a natural right to a vote, and this is carried so far that votes are about to be given to a multitude of Irish who openly profess themselves the enemies of the State, and announce that they will use the votes for its destruction. Perhaps this Irish experiment may help to bring us all to reason, and convince us that nobody has a right to the means of doing mischief to himself and his fellows, or to anything but that form of government which is practically the best for all.

Considering how our morality and happiness depend on the maintenance of right relations between the sexes, it is surely a proof of the desperate recklessness of party that the Conservative leaders should be willing to fling female character and ultimately the home into the political caldron for the sake of gaining the female vote. Their calculation may prove unfounded; at least on this continent the women of Conservative temperament seem to stay at home, while the revolutionary Megæra mounts the platform and, brandishing her torch among the Anarchists of Chicago, bids the poor trust in dynamite instead of trusting in God. That gentleness and purity will come with woman into public life is certainly not the decisive verdict of experience, so far as experience has gone. It rather seems that her gentleness and purity depended on her absence from the political arena. Will the government be improved by being made feminine? That is the question to be answered in the common interest of both sexes. The male nature, though not higher, is the more practical. Men, as a rule, alone are brought into daily contact with the world of action by the varied experiences and exigencies of which the balance of political character is formed. Men alone can be said to be fully responsible. Unless sentiment should undergo a total change, a female Member of Parliament or office-holder could not be called to account like a man. In this rough world how will a nation prosper which is swayed by the emotions of its women? The sexes may be co-equal, and yet, having different natures, they may have different parts to play in the community as they certainly have in the family. Laws have been made by man, because law, to take effect, must have force behind it, and the force of the community is male. If women made such laws as some of them threaten to make in the interest of their sex, men would refuse to execute the law. If women voted a war for some object of female enthusiasm, as the French women would for the defence of the Pope, men would refuse to march. The authority of government would then fall. A woman cannot support the police or take part in the defence of the country. Women are not a class with separate interests of its own, but a sex, the political interests of which are identical with those of their husbands and brothers. Their property is not of a special kind, nor can it be alleged to have suffered any wrong by general legislation. Assuredly general legislation has of late not been unfavorable to woman. Perhaps they get more from the chivalry of male legislation than they would get if, armed with political power, they were fighting for themselves. To the argument that property held by them is unrepresented, the answer is that no property is represented in any hands beyond the minimum required for a qualification in each case. This is a small hardship compared with the practical exclusion from voting of all our sailors, the flower of our industry, and of a large number of those employed by commerce in the work of distribution. Woman, if she has her disabilities, has also her privileges, which, with the general guardianship of affection, the majority of the sex would probably be unwilling to renounce for the sake of gratifying the ambition of a few. Conservatives especially may be expected to consider the effects likely to be produced on female character and on domestic life by the introduction of women into politics and the general revolution in the relations between the sexes of which that measure is an integral part. Female aspirations begin to take a new turn. An American apostle of woman’s rights told us plainly the other day that she considered maternity a poor aim for a woman’s ambition. Nature answers by dooming the race to decay.

A stable, though responsible, executive, invested with a reasonable amount of authority, commanding the general confidence of the people, and capable of exercising forecast and governing on a plan, especially with regard to foreign affairs, is a necessity of civilized life. How is it to be secured for the future to England? Have reforming statesmen asked themselves that momentous question, or has the necessity of answering it been hidden from their eyes by the illusion which surrounds the “ancient throne?” What basis has Government at present but party? Is not that crisis crumbling to pieces? Is not the Liberal party in the House of Commons split up into discordant sections and held together solely by the authority of a leader in his seventy-fifth year and without any visible heir of his power? Have not the Irish entirely severed themselves from it and taken up a position which renders a reunion with them hopeless? Is not even the Tory party, though as a party of reaction less exposed to disintegration than a party of progress, went by divergent tendencies towards Conservatism on one side and Tory democracy on the other? Is not everybody at a loss to conceive how, after next election, and when the number of Parnellites shall have been increased, a party broad and strong enough to support a government is to be formed? The disintegration is not confined to England; it extends to all countries in which Parliamentary institutions prevail. It is extending now to the United States, where the reforming Republicans voted in the Presidential election; and the other day the Liberal party in Belgium suddenly split in two. The consequences everywhere are the fatal instability and weakness of government, the only exception being Germany, where Bismarck holds himself above party, governs on a principle really monarchical, and makes up a majority from any quarter that he can? France, with her Chamber full of Sectionalism, cabal and unruly ambition, lives always on the brink of administrative anarchy: industry and commerce never knowing whether next day they will have the shelter of a government over their heads. The Executive in the United States stands on an independent though elective footing; if it depended for its existence from day to day on the factions of Congress, chaos would soon come. Is there any prospect of a return to party union and solidity? As intellects grow more active, idiosyncracies more pronounced, ambitions more numerous and keen, is it likely that divergences will become fewer and that patient submission to party discipline will increase? Is not the tendency everywhere the opposite way? What permanent claim has party on the allegiance of a moral being? What is it but a soft name for faction, the bane of States? Why should a good citizen surrender his conscience to it? Why should good citizens for ever divide themselves into two hostile camps, and wage political war against each other? Is an unpatriotic and anti-social principle to be accepted as the last word of politics? The supply of organic questions cannot be inexhaustible. When it is exhausted and divisions of principle have disappeared, on what ground of reason or moral motive are parties to rest? Must they not thenceforth become factions pure and simple? Have they not become factions pure and simple, whenever organic questions have ceased to be at issue? Party has been the organ by which in England the Long Revolution has been conducted to its issue, and power has been gradually wrested from the Crown and transferred to the Commons. Hence the belief, shared by the whole of Europe, that party was inseparable from Parliamentary institutions, and that in no other way could free government be carried on. If free government can be carried on in no other way, the prospect is dark, for party is apparently doomed, alike by morality and by the growing tendencies of the age. But there is obviously one other way at least in which free government can be carried on. Instead of making office the prize of a perpetual faction fight, the members of the Executive Council of State may be regularly elected by the Members of the Legislature for a term certain, under such a system with regard to the rotation of vacancies as may at once secure sufficient harmony between the two bodies and a sufficient continuity in the executive government. The responsibility of the Executive for the decisions of the Legislature, and its obligation to resign upon every Legislative defeat, which is a mere accident of English history and devoid of rational foundation, would then cease. The Legislature and the Executive would be at liberty each to do its own work. The Executive would be national, and would receive the general support of the community instead of being an object of organized hostility to half of it; it would be stable instead of being as it is now throughout Europe ephemeral as well as weak. Responsibility on the part of its members instead of being diminished would be increased. It would become individual, whereas now it is only collective, the whole Cabinet and the party majority being bound to support each Minister whatever may be his failure in duty. Personal aptitude might be considered in the elections to the offices, whereas at present little can be considered beyond the necessity of providing for all the leaders, and a good financier or Minister of Marine would not be turned out because he was in the minority on a Franchise Bill.

The nations have been so much engaged in taking authority out of bad hands, that they have forgotten that it is a good and necessary thing in itself. Government has become dangerously weak. The greater part of its energy is now expended, not in the work of administration, but in preserving its own existence. Not only is it exposed to the incessant attacks of an Opposition whose business is to traduce and harass it, but it is now hardly able to sustain itself against the irresponsible power of the press, wielded nobody knows by whom, but often under secret influences, which are a great and growing danger in all communities. To keep the popular favor, which is to them the breath of life, the members of the Cabinet have to be always on the stump, reserving to themselves little time for rest or reflection, and the stump orator is rapidly superseding the statesman. This vacillation of policy on the Egyptian question, the consequences of which all have been deploring, has not been so much that of the Government as that of the nation itself worrying and distracting the Government through the press. A country with an Empire and a world-wide diplomacy cannot afford to have an Executive, the policy of which is always shifting with the wind of opinion, and which can exercise no forecast, because it is not sure of its existence for an hour. In India, the danger is not so much from native disaffection as from British agitation, which the Company managed to exclude, but which, since India has been driven into the vortex of British politics, a party Government has no power to control. Those who are as far as is the writer of this paper from being Imperialists, must see, nevertheless, that while the Empire exists it creates a special necessity for a strong and undemagogic Government, and that on any hypothesis, a disruption, or general dissolution from a collapse of the central authority, is not the thing to be desired. The Radicals themselves are saying that what the country now wants is a strong government, by which, however, people often mean a government strongly imbued with their own ideas.

England ought not to be very much in love with the party system at this moment, for it has well-nigh laid her, with all her greatness and her glory, at the feet of Messrs. Healy and Biggar. Faction and nothing but faction has brought her to the verge of a dismemberment, which, by carving a hostile Republic out of her side, would reduce her to a second-rate Power, and condemn her to play a subordinate instead of a leading part in the march of European civilization. “England has lost heart” is the exalting cry of Mr. Parnell. She has lost heart because she is betrayed by faction, seeking under highly philanthropic and philosophic pretences to climb into power by bartering the unity of the nation for the Irish vote. With a truly national government she would soon be herself again.

There is another point which, while time for consideration remains to them, British statesmen will surely do well to consider. It would seem paradoxical to say that England, the parent of constitutional government, has no constitution; but it will be admitted at once that she has no legal constitution, at least that her legal constitution is not actual. Actually she has nothing but a balance of power, or rather the power no longer balanced of the House of Commons, which if the Crown attempted to govern would stop the supplies, and if the Lords attempted to vote would force the Crown to coerce them by a swamping creation, or incite the people to terrify them into submission. The term “Constitutional,” though it seems full of mysterious and august meaning, has never really denoted anything but the limit of practical force. If it has been unconstitutional for the Lords to amend a money Bill, but constitutional for them to reject a Bill respecting a tax, as in the noted case of the paper duty, the reason was that the rejection was final, whereas the amended Bill would go back to the Commons, who would throw it out. But while the Commons have annihilated the power of the Crown, and reduced that of the Lords almost to a cipher, they remain themselves liable to dissolution at the will of the party leader into whose hands that prerogative has come, and who can thus suspend at any moment the existence of the supreme government, reduce its members to private citizens, and, if they resist, deal with them as common rioters through the police. In the ordinary course of things the existence of the supreme government is suspended, and an interregnum ensues, whenever the regular Parliamentary term expires. This is hardly the sort of ship with which it is wise to put out on the wide waters of democracy. England, like other nations under the elective system, needs a written constitution, defining all powers and duties, guarding against any usurpation, and entrusted to the keeping of a court of law. Traditions and understandings, which may be maintained and serve their purpose so long as the government is in the hands of a family group of statesmen walking in the ancestral paths, will not command the same respect in a far different order of things. The written constitution is the political Bible of the United States, and without it all would soon be usurpation and confusion. A written constitution in no way interferes with the freedom of development which is the supposed privilege of the unwritten. It only provides that development shall proceed in the way of regular and legal amendment, and not in that of violent collision and intimidation by street parades. The system of constitutional amendment works perfectly well in the United States. The power might be safely reposed in the people at large. Men who are not competent to vote on the complex question of the general policy of the country, and at the same time on the merits of the candidate, are competent to vote on a single question submitted by itself, and with regard to which, moreover, there is little danger of corruption or illicit influence. But the nation at large ought, by petition sufficiently signed or in some other way, to have the power of initiating constitutional amendments or compelling their submission by the Government as well as of rejecting them when submitted. Elective rulers, once installed in power, are no more willing to part with it than kings. Such a body as the American House of Representatives, though it might become a sheer political nuisance, would never take the first step in reform. There ought to be a power of enforcing change, when the necessity for it has become apparent to the nation, without having recourse to a violent revolution, or even to intimidation such as is being used in default of a better means to wrest the veto from the House of Lords.

These are the views of one who has long been convinced that the day of hereditary institutions had closed, that the day of elective institutions had fully come, that the appointed task of political science was to study the liabilities, weaknesses and dangers of the elective system with a view to their correction or prevention, and that the mission of the Liberal party in England was to conduct the critical transition and guide Europe in accomplishing it without revolution. If such views are condemned as Conservative by Radicals, and as Republican by Conservatives, neither charge can well be repelled. They certainly cannot be congenial to any who exult in the prospect of a socialistic revolution. But the upshot of all that has been here said is that Democracy must be organized and regulated. Unorganized and unregulated, it will probably end in confusion.—Contemporary Magazine.

[SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS.][8]
BY WILLIAM LANT CARPENTER.

I am about to endeavor to set forth the life and work of Sir William Siemens, who was not only an ardent scientific discoverer, but one whose work for the last five or six years has interested the general public to a degree that has perhaps never before been the case with any man so devoted to science as he was. Of him it may be said, without fear of contradiction, that he has, beyond all his contemporaries, promoted the practical application of scientific discovery to industrial purposes. It has also been said by one who had the privilege of his friendship, that “no one could know him without feeling how lovely his character was. Wonderful as were the qualities of his mind, they were equalled by the nobleness of his heart.”

These two sentences, then, will serve to indicate my purpose. In telling, with necessary brevity, the story of the life of Sir William Siemens, I shall try to keep in view the fact that even his great powers, without his large heart, would never have produced the impression which he did upon the national mind. Hence, after I have given a sketch of some of the more important discoveries of the inventor, and their consequences to the national life, I shall, with the help of materials most kindly and liberally placed at my disposal by his family, try to show what manner of man he was, and what impression he made upon those who had the very great advantage of personal communion with him.

Charles William Siemens was born at Lenthe in Hanover on April 4, 1823, and was one among many of a family eminent for their scientific knowledge and practical skill. The possession of such unusual talents by a whole family is rarer, perhaps, in the intellectual life of England than in that of Germany; at any rate, in the absence of definite statistics such as those compiled with so much care by Mr. Francis Galton, the general impression is that such is the case. It is not difficult to discern in the scientific career of the Brothers Siemens some prominent characteristics of their race; and in the life of Sir William, the sympathy of the German mind for general principles, and the tenacity with which it clings to them, are well illustrated, and stand out in strongly-marked contrast to the usual indifference of the average English mind to theoretic conclusions, as opposed to so-called practical ones. It would be well-nigh impossible to find among Englishmen one instance in which an inventor has been so confident of the possible utility of a few grand general principles, that he has worked out from them several great inventions; and that he felt himself justified in this confidence after years of hard work is evidenced by his own saying that “the farther we advance, the more thoroughly do we approach the indications of pure science in our practical results.”

William Siemens received his early educational training at Lübeck, and in the course of it the stimulus afforded to excellence of workmanship by the German guild system made an early and lasting impression upon his mind, for he repeatedly referred to it in after life. From Lübeck he went to the Polytechnical School at Magdeburg, where he studied physical science with apparatus of the most primitive kind, and under great disadvantages, as compared with the facilities of our modern laboratories. After this he studied at Göttingen University, where, under Wöhler and Himly, he first got that insight into chemical laws which laid the foundation of his metallurgical knowledge, and here began to develop in him that wonderful thirst for discovery, which abundant success never quenched. Here, also, occurred what he has himself described as “the determining incident of his life.” Mr. Elkington, of Birmingham, utilising the discoveries of Davy, Faraday, and Jacobi, had devised the first practical application of that form of energy which we now call the electric current, and in 1842 he established a practical process of electro-plating. In the following year, as the result of his own and his brother Werner’s work, William Siemens presented himself before Mr. Elkington with an improvement in his process, which was adopted. This is the first on the list of inventions on the diagram behind me. Speaking of his first landing in London he says:

“I expected to find some office in which inventions were examined, and rewarded if found meritorious; but no one could direct me to such a place. In walking along Finsbury Pavement, I saw written up in large letters so-and-so (I forget the name) ‘undertaker,’ and the thought struck me that this must be the place I was in quest of. At any rate I thought that a person advertising himself as an undertaker would not refuse to look into my invention, with a view of obtaining for me the sought-for recognition or reward. On entering the place I soon convinced myself, however, that I had come decidedly too soon for the kind of enterprise there contemplated, and finding myself confronted with the proprietor of the establishment, I covered my retreat by what he must have thought a very inadequate excuse.”

Returning to Germany, he became a pupil in the engine works of Count Stolberg, to study mechanical engineering. While there he worked out a great improvement upon Watt’s centrifugal governor for regulating the supply of steam to an engine, and in 1844 he returned to England with his invention, and soon decided to stay here. His object in doing so was to enjoy the security which the English patent law afforded to inventors, for in his own country there were then no such laws. This chronometric governor, though not very successful commercially, introduced him to the engineering world; it was originally intended for steam engines, but its chief application has been to regulate the movement of the great transit instrument at Greenwich. Then followed in quick succession several minor inventions which met with varying practical success, such as the process of anastatic printing, which was made the subject of a Royal Institution lecture in 1845 by Faraday; a water meter, which has since been in general use; an air pump, &c., &c.

About this time the researches of Joule, Carnot, and Mayer upon the relations between heat and mechanical work were attracting much attention among scientific men, and at the age of twenty-three, William Siemens adopted the hypothesis now known as the dynamical theory of heat. More than once I have drawn attention to the exact numerical relation between units of heat and units of work established by Joule, viz., that 772 foot-pounds of work is required to generate heat enough to raise the temperature of 1 lb. of water 1° Fah., and I have pointed out here and elsewhere that this was the first well-authenticated example of that grandest of modern generalisations, the doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, the truth of which is constantly receiving new illustrations.

With a mind thoroughly pervaded by this important principle, Siemens applied himself to the study of steam and caloric engines, and saw at once that there was an enormous difference between the theoretical and the actual power gained from the heat developed by the combustion of a given quantity of coal, and hence that there was a very large margin for improvement. He at once determined to try to utilise some of this wasted heat, and he conceived the idea (to which I invite your particular attention) of making a regenerator, or an accumulator, which should retain or store a limited quantity of heat, and be capable of yielding it up again when required for the performance of any work. In the factory of Mr. John Hicks, of Bolton, he first constructed an engine on this plan; the saving in fuel was great, but it was attended by mechanical difficulties which at that time he was unable to solve. The Society of Arts, however, recognised the value of the principle by awarding him a gold medal in 1850. Three years afterwards, his paper “On the Conversion of Heat into Mechanical Effect,” before the Institution of Civil Engineers, gained him the Telford premium (awarded only once in five years) and the medal of the Institution. In 1856 he gave a lecture upon his engine at the Royal Institution, considered as the result of ten years’ experimental work, and as the first practical application of the mechanical theory of heat; he then indicated the economic considerations which encouraged him to persevere in his experiments, pointing out that the total national expenditure for steam-coal alone amounted to eight millions sterling per year, of which at least two-thirds might be saved!

His efforts to improve the steam-engine, however, were speedily followed by a still more important application of the mechanical theory of heat to industrial purposes. In 1857 his younger brother, and then pupil, Frederick (who, since the death of Sir William, has undertaken the sole charge of the development of this branch of his elder brother’s work), suggested to him the employment of regenerators for the purpose of saving some of the heat wasted in metallurgical operations, and for four years he labored to attain this result, constructing several different forms of furnace. His chief practical difficulties arose from the use of solid fuel—coal or coke—but when, in 1859, he hit upon the plan of converting the solid fuel into gaseous, which he did by the aid of his gas-producer, he found that the results obtained with his regenerators exceeded his most sanguine expectations. In 1861 the first practical regenerative gas furnace was erected at the glass works of Messrs. Chance Bros. in Manchester, and it was found to be very economical in its results. Early in 1862 the attention of Faraday was drawn to this matter, and on June 20 of the same year, that prince of experimentalists appeared before the Royal Institution audience for the last time to explain the wonderful simplicity, economy, and power of the Siemens regenerative gas furnace. Age and experience have not diminished the high estimation in which it is held; after nearly twenty years of continuous working and extended application, Sir Henry Bessemer described it in 1880 as an “invention which was at once the most philosophic in principle, the most powerful in action, and the most economic, of all the contrivances for producing heat by the combustion of coal.”

The furnace consists essentially of three parts; (1) the gas producer, which converts the solid coal into gaseous fuel; (2) the regenerators, usually four in number, which are filled with fire-brick piled in such a way as to break up into many parts a current of air or gas passing through them; (3) the furnace proper, where the combustion is actually accomplished. In using the furnace, the gaseous fuel and air are conducted through one pair of regenerators to the combustion chamber; the heated gases from this, on their way to the chimney, pass through the other pair of regenerators, heating them in their passage. In the course of, say, one hour, the currents are reversed, so that the comparatively cold gas and air pass over these heated regenerators before entering the furnace, and rob them of their heat. While this is going on, the first pair of regenerators is being heated again, and thus, by working them in alternate pairs, nearly all the heat, which would otherwise have escaped unused into the chimney, is utilised.

By this process of accumulation the highest possible temperature (only limited by the point at which its materials begin to melt), can be obtained in the furnace chamber, without an intensified draft, and with inferior fuel.

It has been found that this furnace is capable of making a ton of crucible steel with one-sixth of the fuel required without it, and that while the temperature of the furnace chamber exceeded 4,000° Fahrenheit, the waste products of combustion escaped into the chimney at 240° Fahrenheit, or very little above the temperature at which water boils in the open air.

At the locomotive works of the London and North Western Railway at Crewe, where these furnaces have long been used, it was formerly the practice to lock a piece of pitch pine into the flue leading to the chimney, and if at the end of the week the wood was charred, it was evidence that more heat had been wasted than ought to have been, and the men in charge of the furnace were fined.

This all-important national question, the waste of fuel, which in modern phraseology may be truly called the waste of energy, was constantly before the mind of Sir William Siemens, who lost no opportunity, in his public utterances, of impressing his hearers, and that still wider circle which he reached through the medium of the press, with a sense of the weighty consequences which it involved. In an address at Liverpool in 1872, as President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, he estimated the total coal consumption of this country at one hundred and twenty million tons, which at 10s. per ton amounted to sixty millions sterling. He strongly asserted that one-half of this might be saved by the general adoption of improved appliances which were within the range of actual knowledge; and he went on to speak of outside speculations, which would lead to the expectation of accomplishing these ends with one-eighth or even one-tenth of the actual expenditure. In 1873 he delivered a famous lecture on Fuel to the operative classes at Bradford, on behalf of the British Association, in which he illustrated how fuel should be used by three examples, typical of the three great branches of consumption: a, the production of steam power; b, the domestic hearth; c, the metallurgical furnace. In connection with the last point he mentioned that the Sheffield pot steel-melting furnace only utilised one-seventieth part of the theoretical heat developed in the combustion, and contrasted with it his own furnace for melting steel. In discussing the question of the duration of our coal supply, he indicated what should be our national aim in the following suggestive and inspiring passage:

“In working through the statistical returns of the progressive increase of population, of steam power employed, and of production of iron and steel, &c., I find that our necessities increase at a rate of not less than 8 per cent. per annum, whereas our coal consumption increases only at the rate of 4 per cent., showing that the balance of 4 per cent. is met by what may be called our ‘intellectual progress.’ Now, considering the enormous margin for improvement before us, I contend that we should not be satisfied with this rate of intellectual progress, involving as it does an annual deficit of four million tons to be met by increased coal production, but that we should bring our intellectual progress up to the rate of our industrial progress, by which means we should make the coal production nearly a constant quantity for several generations to come.”

One of the direct results of this lecture, which was read and warmly commended by some of the most eminent men of the time, was that Dr. Siemens was consulted by Mr. Mundella in reference to parliamentary action by the Board of Trade in regard to the coal question.

In 1874 he received the Albert Gold Medal from the Society of Arts “for his researches in connection with the laws of heat, and for services rendered by him in the economisation of fuel in its various applications to manufactures and the arts,” and in 1877 he devoted nearly the whole of his address to the Iron and Steel Institute, of which he was then President, to the same subject, in which, as regards the probable duration of our coal supply, he had been for some time engaged in a controversy with the late Professor Jevons, maintaining that “the ratio of increase of population and output of manufactured goods would be nearly balanced for many years to come by the further introduction of economical processes, and that our annual production would remain substantially the same within that period, which would probably be a period of comparatively cheap coal.”

One of the most important applications of the regenerative furnace has been to the manufacture of steel, and he soon perceived that it was necessary for himself to solve the various difficulties which others regarded as practically insuperable. “Having,” he says, “been so often disappointed by the indifference of manufacturers and the antagonism of their workmen, I determined in 1865 to erect experimental or ‘sample steel works’ of my own at Birmingham, for the purpose of maturing the details of these processes, before inviting manufacturers to adopt them.” The success of experiments in 1867-68, in making steel rails, brought about the formation of the Landore Siemens Steel Co., whose works were opened in 1874. When Dr. Siemens was knighted, the employés of this company embodied their congratulations in an address, and had prepared for him a very beautiful model of a steel furnace in ivory and silver; the presentation of these was prevented by his premature death, but the address stated that “the quantity of steel made here to the end of last year on your process was upwards of 400,000 tons!” In the ten years ending in 1882, the annual production of open-hearth steel in the United Kingdom increased from 77,500 tons to 436,000 tons. During an action in the Superior Courts of the United States, it was stated that the inventor had received a million dollars in royalties, the annual saving in that country by his process being 3¾ millions of dollars! These statements refer mainly, I believe, to the conversion of cast or wrought iron into steel, either by the “direct” process of acting on pig-iron with iron ore in an open hearth, or by the “scrap process” (Siemens-Martin) of melting wrought-iron and steel scrap in a bath of pig-metal. Both of these require the preliminary treatment of the blast furnace, and in speaking of them in 1873, Dr. Siemens said that “however satisfactory these results might appear, I have never considered them in the light of final achievements. On the contrary, I have always looked upon the direct conversion of iron and steel from the ore, without the intervention of blast furnaces and the refinery, as the great object to be attained.” How far he succeeded in this may be gathered from the fact that in a paper read on April 29, 1883, before the Iron and Steel Institute, on the “Manufacture of Iron and Steel by the Direct Process,” he showed how to produce 15 cwt. of wrought iron direct from the ore in three hours, with a consumption of 25 cwt. of coal per ton of metal, which is one-half the quantity previously required for the production of a ton of pig-iron only, in the blast furnace! The long and costly experiments which ended in the realisation of his views extended over twenty-five years; and it is worthy of note that he told the Parliamentary Committee on Patents that he would not have continued them if the English patent law had not insured such a period of protection as would repay him for his labor.

Great, however, as the economic results of the gas-producer have been, its inventor looked forward to still more remarkable applications of it. In 1882 he told the British Association, in his presidential address, that he thought “the time is not far distant when both rich and poor will largely resort to gas as the most convenient, the cleanest, and the cheapest of heating agents, and when raw coal will be seen only at the colliery or the gas-works. In all cases where the town to be supplied is within, say, thirty miles of the colliery, the gas-works may with advantage be planted at the mouth, or, still better, at the bottom of the pit, whereby all haulage of fuel would be avoided, and the gas, in its ascent from the bottom of the colliery, would acquire an onward pressure sufficient probably to impel it to its destination. The possibility of transporting combustible gas through pipes for such a distance has been proved at Pittsburg, where natural gas from the oil district is used in large quantities.” It may be well to point out here that as a step towards this, it was a favorite project of his—practically carried out in some places—to divide the gaseous products of the ordinary distillation of coal into two, the middle portions being illuminating gas of 18 to 20 candle power instead of 16, and the first and last portions, which under this system may be largely increased, being heating gas; such gas he expected to see sold at 1s. per 1,000 cubic feet. The obvious and only practicable objection to the plan is the necessity for doubling all the mains and service-pipes. That we shall eventually burn gaseous fuel on the domestic hearth, as we have lately learnt to do on the metallurgical, I have not the smallest doubt; it is a mere question of the time necessary for the education of the public mind upon the question; the apter the pupil, the more speedy will be the desired result. Let it be thoroughly understood by every one that the soot which hangs in a pall over London in a single day is equivalent to at least fifty tons of coal, and then there will be no difficulty in seeing that the true and the only remedy for our London fogs, with all their attendant ills, is—gaseous fuel. May we not hope that, though Sir William Siemens has gone from among us, the great movement for smoke abatement, in which he so earnestly labored during the last three years of his life, may have full effect?

If I have dwelt thus long upon this particular branch of my subject, it is because I know of no other which so well illustrates two points in Sir William Siemens’ character which I have alluded to at the outset: his unwavering devotion to general principles and their consequences, and his ardent desire to promote the practical welfare of mankind. There is, however, as the late Professor Rolleston remarked to him, no subject which more impresses the minds even of persons who are laymen as regards science, than the history of Telegraphy (and I may perhaps be permitted to add, of Electrical Engineering generally), now so inseparably connected with his name. The University of Göttingen, at which he studied, was the cradle, if not the birthplace, of the electric telegraph in 1833. Shortly after, Sir Charles Wheatstone in England, and Mr. Morse in the United States, were simultaneously working at the same problem, and each claimed the honor of having solved it.

The telegraph, however, was still in a very undeveloped state when the Brothers Siemens began to study it, and their series of inventions, especially for long-distance telegraphy, largely aided in bringing it to its present condition. One of their first was the Relay, an electro-magnet so delicate that it will move with the weakest current. By the use of five of Siemens’ polarised relays, a message can be sent by the Indo-European Telegraph from London to Teherán, a distance of 3,800 miles, without any retransmission by hand, and during the Shah of Persia’s visit in 1873, Dr. Siemens arranged for messages to be thus regularly despatched from a room in Buckingham Palace. In 1858, Messrs. Siemens Brothers established near London the well-known telegraph works, and the construction by them in 1868 and following years of the Indo-European Telegraph—the overland double line to India through Prussia, Southern Russia, and Persia—was the first great undertaking of the kind. Writing of it in August, 1882, during the first Egyptian campaign, Dr. Siemens said, “At the present time our communication with India, Australia, and the Cape depends, notwithstanding the nominal existence of the line through Turkey, on the Indo-European Telegraph.”

The Messrs. Siemens were also pioneers in submarine telegraphy, the first cable covered with gutta-percha having been laid across the Rhine by Dr. Werner Siemens in 1847. The invention of the machine for coating the conducting wire with the insulating material, gutta-percha, or india rubber, is entirely due to Dr. William Siemens, who also subsequently designed the steamship Faraday for the special work of laying and repairing submarine cables. This unique vessel was launched on Feb. 16, 1874, and when she was completed, Dr. Siemens invited all his scientific friends to inspect her, and challenged them to suggest any improvements in her arrangements. She was first used in laying the Direct United States Cable, which is above 3,000 miles in length. In this connection I may perhaps be permitted to relate a very characteristic anecdote. When Dr. Siemens took a contract for a cable, the electrical tests of which were specified, it was his invariable habit to give out to the works a considerably higher test, which every section of the cable had to pass, or be rejected in toto. In the case of this cable, probably during manipulation on board ship, a minute piece of wire penetrated the insulating material, bringing down the electrical test to a point below the “works” test, but still decidedly above the contract test. The discovery was not made until so late that to cut out the faulty piece involved a delay of some days in the middle of the Atlantic, but Dr. Siemens insisted upon its being done; after this, stormy weather came on, and the cable had to be cut and buoyed, while the Faraday had to winter on the American side, and resume operations next spring. The money loss involved amounted, I am told, to more than £30,000. Perhaps the most remarkable of the later feats was the fulfilment of a contract with the Compagnie Française du Telegraphe de Paris à New York, who ordered a cable 3,000 miles long from the Messrs. Siemens in March, 1879, and it was handed over to them in perfect working order in September of the same year! There are now nearly 90,000 miles of submarine cable at work, costing about £32,000,000, and a fleet of thirty-two ships are employed in laying, watching, and repairing these cables, of which there are now eleven across the Atlantic alone.

In connection with the subject of telegraphy, and as an instance of the versatility of Dr. Siemens’s inventive powers, I may point out that in 1876 he brought out the pneumatic postal telegraph tube, by which, as is pretty generally known, written messages are blown or sucked through tubes on various metropolitan routes, instead of being transmitted electrically. About the same time, also, he constructed his ingenious bathometer, for ascertaining the depth of the sea at any given point, without the tedious operation of sounding; and some years previously he worked out his electrical thermometer or pyrometer, enabling the observer to read the temperature (whenever he desired) at any distant and inaccessible point, such as the top of a mountain, the bottom of the sea, the air between the layers of a cable, or the interior of a furnace.

Probably the most prominent idea associated in the public mind with the name of Siemens is that of electric lighting, and perhaps electric tram and railroads. As I have more than once pointed out in this room, the dynamo-machine, by which mechanical energy is converted into that form of energy known as electricity (which may be used both for lighting and for the transmission of power), is derived from a principle discovered by Faraday in 1831. Sir William Siemens’ devotion to this, and the important practical consequences which he deduced from it, constitute another example of that mental characteristic to which I have already alluded. Faraday’s discovery, briefly described, was that when a bar magnet was suddenly inserted into a coil of wire, or when a wire was suddenly moved through a magnetic field, a momentary current of electricity was developed in the wire. Although this current is exceedingly small and brief, it is capable of unlimited multiplication by mechanical arrangements of a simple kind. One means for accomplishing this multiplication was the Siemens armature of 1857, which consisted, at first, of a piece of iron with wire wound round it longitudinally, not transversely, the whole to be rotated between the poles of a powerful magnet; in its present form it is one of the most powerful and perfect things of its kind, and the evolution of the Siemens armature, as we now have it, from the rudimentary type of a quarter of a century ago, has been characterised by Sir W. Thomson as one of the most beautiful products of inventive genius, and more like the growth of a flower than to almost anything else in the way of mechanism made by man.

Ten years afterwards came his classical paper “On the Conversion of Dynamical into Electrical Force, without the use of permanent Magnetism,” which was read before the Royal Society on February 14, 1867. Strangely enough, the discovery of the same principle was enunciated at the same meeting by Sir Charles Wheatstone, while there is yet a third claimant in the person of Mr. Cromwell Varley, who had previously applied for a patent in which the idea was embodied. It can never be quite certain, therefore, who was the first discoverer of the principle upon which modern dynamo-machines are constructed. I need not describe here the way in which this principle is carried out in all dynamo-machines. Suffice it to say that they differ from Faraday’s magneto-electric machines in having electro-magnets in the place of permanent steel magnets, and that these electro-magnets are, if I may be allowed the expression, self-excited by the play of mutual give and take between the armature and the magnet.

It was the invention of the dynamo-machine which made practicable the application of electricity to industrial purposes. Experiments have shown that it is capable of transforming into electrical work 90 per cent. of the mechanical energy employed as motive power. Its practical application is still in its infancy. In 1785 Watt completed his “improvements” in the steam-engine, and the century which has since elapsed has not sufficed to demonstrate the full extent of its utility. What may we not expect in the next hundred years from the extension of the dynamo-machine to practical purposes?

In the development of appliances for the production of the electric light Sir William Siemens took a leading part, and, as is well known, his firm has been facile princeps at all the important electrical exhibitions. But while ever zealous to promote its progress, he never took a partisan view of its utility, candidly admitting that gas must continue to be the poor man’s friend. In 1882 he told the Society of Arts that “Electricity must win the day as the light of luxury, but gas will find an ever-increasing application for the more humble purposes of diffusing light.”

In the hands of Dr. Siemens the enormous energy displayed in the Electric Arc was applied to other purposes than mere lighting. In June, 1880, he greatly astonished the Society of Telegraph Engineers by exhibiting the power of an electrical furnace designed by him to melt considerable quantities of such exceedingly refractory metals as platinum, iridium, &c. He explained that he was led to undertake experiments with this end in view by the consideration that a good steam-engine converts 15 per cent. of the energy of coal into mechanical effect, while a good dynamo-machine is capable of converting 80 per cent. of the mechanical into electrical energy. If the latter could be expended without loss in an electric furnace, it would doubtless far exceed in economy any known air furnace.

Moreover Sir William Siemens may fairly be described as the creator of electro-horticulture. Some experiments which he made early in 1880 led him to the conclusion that the electric light could influence the production of coloring matter in leaves, and promote the ripening of fruit at all seasons of the year, and at all hours of the day and night. In the following winter he put these conclusions to the test of experience on a large scale at his country house, Sherwood, near Tunbridge Wells, and the results obtained were communicated to the British Association at York in 1881, in a paper, the value of which was recognised by its receiving the rare distinction of being printed in full in the annual report.

Some photographs, which he kindly allowed me to take, represent the difference between three kinds of corn grown under ordinary conditions, and the same corn, under the same conditions, with the added stimulus of the electric light from sunset to sunrise. He came to the conclusion that, although periodic darkness evidently favors growth in the sense of elongating the stalks of plants, the continuous stimulus of light was favorable to a healthy development at a greatly accelerated pace, through all the stages of the annual life of the plant, from the early leaf to the ripened fruit.

I have left until the last any notice of a field of work which the Messrs. Siemens may be truly said to have made peculiarly their own, viz., the electrical transmission and distribution of power; for I firmly believe that in the future, although not perhaps in the near future, the practical consequences of this will be such as are little dreamed of now; and this opinion is, I know, held by men far more competent to judge than I am.

In March, 1877, Dr. Siemens startled the world, in his address to the Iron and Steel Institute, by his proposal to transmit to distant points some of the energy of the Falls of Niagara. As I have before explained in this room, the electrical transmission of energy depends upon the fact that a dynamo-machine may be used either to convert mechanical into electrical energy, or to effect the reverse change. Hence to transmit power in this way, two dynamo-machines, connected by a metallic conducting rod, or cable, are necessary; the first, at the water-fall or other source of power, produces the electrical energy, which, in its turn, is reconverted into mechanical power by the second dynamo at the other end of the line. In his own grounds at Tunbridge Wells he made numerous experiments in this subject, distributing the power from a central steam-engine over various parts of his farm, there to perform different functions. The most interesting practical examples, as yet, are to be seen in the electric railroads erected and worked by Siemens Brothers in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, &c., and in the Electric Tramroad at Portrush. The special interest of this line lies in the fact that it was the first real application to railroads of “waste energy,” inasmuch as the cars are propelled by the power of a water-fall eight miles off! The last occasion on which I had the privilege of meeting Sir William Siemens was when, honored by his invitation, I was present at the opening of this line in September 28, 1883. On that occasion, which, half-a-century hence, will be as memorable as the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railroad, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland recognised the fact that this was an entirely new departure in the development of the resources of Ireland, and Sir William Siemens, in a most characteristic speech, admitted that, had he known the difficulties before him, he should have thought twice before he said “Yes” to Dr. Traill’s question as to whether the proposed line could be worked electrically, but that, having said “Yes,” he was determined to carry out the project. As illustrating the character of the man, I may here quote the saying common in his workshops, that as soon as any particular problem had been given up by everybody as a bad job, it had only to be taken to Dr. Siemens for him to suggest half-a-dozen ways of solving it, two of which would be complicated and impracticable, two difficult, and two perfectly satisfactory.

His extraordinary mental activity is shown in the fact that between 1845 and 1883 no less than 133 patents were granted in England to the Messrs. Siemens, 1846 and 1851 being the only years in which none were taken out. During the same period he contributed as many as 128 papers on scientific subjects to various journals, only three years in this case also being without such evidences of work, and in 1882 the number of these papers reached seventeen, the average being about seven patents and original scientific papers per year for more than the third of a century, a truly wonderful record of untiring industry. To show the impression his work made upon the world, I quote the following passage from the many which appeared in the newspapers at the time of his death. It is headed:

One Man’s Intellect.

Siemens telegraph wires gird the earth, and the Siemens cable steamer Faraday is continually engaged in laying new ones. By the Siemens method has been solved the problem of fishing out from the stormy ocean, from a depth comparable to that of the vale of Chamounix, the ends of a broken cable. Electrical resistance is measured by the Siemens mercury unit. “Siemens” is written on water meters, and Russian and German revenue officers are assisted by Siemens apparatus in levying their assessments. The Siemens process for silvering and gilding, and the Siemens anastatic printing, mark stages in the development of these branches of industry. Siemens differential regulators control the action of the steam-engines that forge the English arms at Woolwich, and that of the chronographs on which the transits of the stars are marked at Greenwich. The Siemens caststeel works and glasshouses, with their regenerative furnaces, are admired by all artisans. The Siemens electric light shines in assembly-rooms and public places, and the Siemens gas light competes with it, while the Siemens electro-culture in greenhouses bids defiance to our long winter nights. The Siemens electric railway is destined to rule in cities and tunnels. The Siemens electric furnace, melting three pounds of platinum in twenty minutes, was the wonder of the Paris Exposition, which might well have been called an exposition of Siemens apparatus and productions, so prominent were they there.

Almost alone among all these results, his theory of the “Conservation of Solar Energy” dealt with a question not affecting, or at least not immediately affecting, human welfare. A great authority has characterised this as “one of the highest and most brilliant flights that the scientific imagination has ever made.” While astronomers quietly accepted the conclusion that the sun is cooling down, and will become at some distant but calculable epoch a mere cinder hung in space, he endeavored to show that energy can no more be lost in the solar system than it is in the laboratory or the factory. Sir William Siemens’s theory assumed that the interplanetary spaces are filled with an exceedingly thin or rare atmosphere of the compounds of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, such for example as aqueous vapor and hydro-carbons. In this atmosphere the sun is revolving with a velocity four times that of the earth, and hence the solar atmosphere at his equator is thrown out to an enormous distance from his surface. One consequence of this is a perpetual indraught, at the poles of the sun, of the surrounding atmosphere. Thus the sun is everlastingly being fed, and everlastingly sending out its light and heat, which thus recuperate themselves: in this way the solar energy, which is sometimes assumed to be lost in the empty void of interstellar space, really acts upon the rare vapors therein, and converts the universe into a kind of vast regenerative furnace! Had the author of this ingenious theory lived but a few years longer, he would doubtless have labored to strengthen it with further observations and arguments. As it is, it must remain as a daring and original suggestion, the effort of a keen and sagacious mind to bring to fresh subjects the experience and the knowledge accumulated by work of quite a different kind. It is more scientific to believe, with him, that there is some restorative and conservative agency at work, than to suppose that the universe is gradually cooling down into a ball of slag, were it only because his theory does not require an effort of creation at once tremendous and futile. It leaves us free to avoid contemplating a time when the solar system was not, and another when it will cease to be.

Let us now take a brief glance at one or two of Sir William Siemens’s public addresses on more general subjects. His interest in education was so keen, and especially in that branch of education known as technical or technological, that these addresses almost invariably had this for their subject, and were frequently given at some public ceremony in connection with it, such for example as distributions of prizes. The most important of them, perhaps, was given on October 20, 1881, at the re-opening of the Midland Institute in Birmingham. He there surprised his audience by depreciating the German polytechnic system of colleges, on the ground that their students were wanting in originality and adaptability to new conditions. After recounting at some length the recent industrial applications of electricity, he said:

“My chief object in dwelling, perhaps unduly, upon these practical questions, is to present to your minds in a concrete form the hopelessness of looking upon any of the practical processes of the present day as permanent, to be acquired in youth and to be the staple occupation of a lifetime.... The practical man of former days will have to yield his place to the unbiassed worker who with open mind is prepared for every step forward as it arises. For this purpose it is necessary that he should possess, beyond the mere practical knowledge of his trade, a clear appreciation of the principles of action underlying each operation, and such general acquaintance with the laws of chemical and physical science as will make it easy for him to adapt himself to the new order of things.”

He urged the prime importance of the teaching of science being included in the curriculum of every school, and of an adequate supply of trained teachers, as well as of properly equipped laboratories of all kinds, wherein to train them. Replying to the proverb, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” he said: “A little knowledge is an excellent thing, only it must be understood that this little is fundamental knowledge,” and he endorsed Lord Brougham’s pithy saying, “Try to know something about everything, and everything about something.”

In 1878 and 1879 he gave addresses on the same subject in Liverpool, Tunbridge Wells, Paris, and elsewhere. In pointing out the results of the superior French system of technical education, he urged that we should not servilely copy it, but that we should imitate the French example with due regard to the idiosyncrasies of our own country. He approved the spontaneous and self-supporting nature of the English system, as more adaptable to free and vigorous development than a governmental system. His address to the Coventry Science Classes in October, 1882, upon Waste, in which he took as examples, waste of time, of food, of personal energy, of mechanical energy, and of fuel, was full of wise and sound practical advice, clothed in the simplest language.

In conclusion, let me try, with the aid of private letters and papers which it has been my privilege to peruse, to bring before you some of the personal characteristics of the man whose life-work we have been considering. Of his extraordinary perseverance in overcoming obstacles I have already spoken, and it has been well remarked that, to a mind and body requiring almost perpetual exercise, these difficulties supplied only a wholesome quantity of resistance. In the two valuable qualities of tenacity and pliancy of intellect he has perhaps never been surpassed. Suppleness and nimbleness of mind are rarely allied with that persistent “grip,” which, without them, is not unlikely to degenerate into obstinacy. In Sir William Siemens these qualities were happily balanced. His talents were the admiration of his contemporaries, and his memory will ever be respected and honored by all, friends and rivals alike; for the facility with which he applied his powers to the solution of the most difficult problems was equalled by the modesty with which he presented the successful result of his efforts. An eminent engineer said of him, “With all his great work, no envious word was ever mixed!” At the time when he received his honorary degree from the University of Oxford, a distinguished Oxonian wrote: “I believe an alumnus more distinguished by great ability, and by a high and honorable determination to use it for the good of his fellowmen, and to help forward man’s law of existence, ‘Subdue the earth and have dominion over it,’ never received a degree from the University of Oxford.” Of the other distinctions heaped upon him, it was often said that the Society rather than Dr. Siemens was honored; and when he was knighted, a well-known man of science, writing to congratulate him, said: “At the same time I feel that the ennobling of three such men as yourself, Abel, and Playfair confers more honor on the order of knighthood than even it does on science.”

The fame of Sir William Siemens was world-wide, as it deserved to be; but those who knew him best will be the most ready to acknowledge that the qualities of his heart were no less conspicuous than those of his intellect. Hear what his pupils and assistants said of him:—“How my dear old master will be missed, and what a gap in many walks of life will be unfilled!” “There are many younger members of our profession who will look elsewhere in vain for such genial uniform kindness and sympathy as his invariably was.”“The seven years I spent in his service were the happiest in my life.” “It was the loss of the kindest and best friend I ever had, and I have not known such sorrow since the loss of my older brother. The keenest incentive I had in my new work was the desire of showing him that his kindly recommendation was justified by the event.”In acknowledging the gift from Lady Siemens of some objects of remembrance, one writes: “They, as visible objects on which his eyes must have rested frequently, will, I feel certain, when I shall look at them, tend to encourage me in overcoming difficulties, of which there exist always plenty for those who wish to contribute their share, however small, to the progress of things of this world. It is this example which Sir William Siemens has given to all the world, which will, I believe, be the most beneficial for future generations, and for those who are wise enough to follow it.”

Of his character as a man of business let Messrs. Chance Bros. speak, as one testimony out of many: “Our firm having been the first to carry out in England on a large scale the Siemens regenerative process, we were brought into close and frequent communication with him, and had the opportunity of appreciating not only his extraordinary inventive powers, but also his thorough straightforwardness and integrity of character.”

I have spoken of his interest in education, and I quote two opinions thereon. Lord Sherbrooke, in conversation with a mutual friend, regretted immensely that he had not been a pupil of Sir W. Siemens, and spoke of him, and of those who were working with him to enlarge our sphere of knowledge, as the salt of the earth. A distinguished American expressed himself as strongly impressed not only with a sense of his great learning, but with admiration of the native strength of his mind, and the soundness of his educational views.

Many testified to his great benevolence. The German Athenæum wrote: “If the world of science has lost in your late husband one of its brightest stars, the poor, the striving student, as well as the struggling artist, have lost a liberal benefactor and a patron; and on hearing of his sad and but too early death, many will have exclaimed, ‘We ne’er shall look upon his like again!’” An eminent man spoke of him as one “whose life has been spent in an unselfish and unceasing devotion to God’s creatures.” Many of the letters which I have read convey the thoughts of some of his friends on hearing of his death, in language such as this: “We all felt struck down; realising how much poorer his loss had left the world, leaving us as he did when full of the vigor of his endless interests, and brightening all around him, not only by his genius and high intellect, but by his marvellous benevolence and tender consideration, so full was he of kind feeling and thought for others. He was in a high degree the possessor of those sweet domestic virtues which, while so simple and unostentatious, were so spontaneous and charming. What an eminently well-rounded life was his! Our children will always remember how he was held up to them as a man almost without an equal.” A confidential servant, who had lived in his family many years, wrote of him as the most Christ-like man she had ever met; and that he always reminded her of the Arab prince who asked the recording angel, when writing in his book the names of those who loved the Lord, to write him as one who loved his fellowmen; the angel wrote and carried the book to heaven, bringing it back again to show; and when the prince looked, lo, his name led all the rest!

Of his family relations, the Rev. Mr. Haweis thus wrote, in a sermon on “Friends!” “What a beautiful sight, too, was the friendship of the late Sir William Siemens for his brothers, and theirs for him! not less beautiful because lived out unconsciously in the full glare and publicity of the commercial world, into which questions of amity are not supposed to enter, especially when they interfere with business. But here were several brothers, each with his large firm, his inventions, his speculations, yet each at the other’s disposal; never eager to claim his own, never a rival! These men were often separated by time and space, but they were one in heart.”

One who had exceptional opportunities of knowing him wrote: “His characteristic of intensity in whatever he was engaged in was remarkable. Even in his relaxations he entered into them with his whole heart; indeed, it did one good to hear his ringing laugh when witnessing some amusing play—the face lit up with well-nigh childlike pleasure—no trace of the weariness which had been visible after a long day of work of such varied kinds, all demanding his most serious attention, involving often momentous world-wide results. As a travelling companion he was indeed the light and happiness of those who had the privilege to be with him. Everything that could lessen fatigue, or add to the enjoyment and interest of the journey, was thought of, and tenderly carried out, and the knowledge of the pleasure he was giving was his sweet reward. Young people and children clustered round him, and he spared no trouble to explain simply and clearly any question they asked him.”

The Rev. D. Fraser, in a funeral address, said: “The combination of mental power with moral uprightness and strength is always impressive. And this is what signally characterised him whose death we mourn. There have been very few more active and inquiring minds in this generation: the keenness and swiftness of his intellectual processes were even more surprising than the extent and variety of his scientific attainments. But such powers and such acquirements have, alas! been sometimes in unworthy alliance with jealous dispositions and a low moral tone. What will endear to us the memory of William Siemens is that he was, while so able and skilful, also so modest, so upright, so generous, and so totally free from all narrowness and paltriness of spirit. And God, whose wisdom and power he reverently owned, has taken him from us!”

Yes, God has taken him from us to a deeper insight into, and a greater work amongst and beyond, those works of His which he so loved and studied here. Can we imagine a greater fulness of joy than that which must now be his in the vast increase of his knowledge, and the satisfying of every wish of the great warm heart and noble nature which was so plainly but the beginning of better things? How can we doubt that for a nature so richly endowed there is higher scope alike for knowledge and for service in the great Eternity? Such beauty and grandeur and energy and power cannot be laid low—they are not destroyed, nothing is lost, but all will live again in ever-growing splendor! A noble, beautiful, and gifted spirit has passed to the higher and fuller life, and with us is left an influence for good which cannot die. Just as this generation is now profiting by the solar radiation which fell on the earth countless ages ago, so will the labors of Charles William Siemens form a store of knowledge, potential with respect to this and succeeding generations, and destined to confer advantages, greater than we can now estimate, on the ever-advancing cause of science, and on the moral, intellectual, and material progress of humanity!—Gentleman’s Magazine.

[A FRENCH DRAMA UPON ABELARD.]
BY A CONCEPTUALIST.

One warm evening in the summer of 1836, the late Count Charles De Rémusat, sauntering through the streets of Paris in that frame of mind which the French describe by the expressive word desœuvrement, was arrested by the affiche on the portals of the Ambigu-Comique. It announced a drama by MM. Anicet Bourgeois and François cornue, called Heloïse et Abelard. It had been running for several months; and the vacant politician entered the house and settled himself in a fauteuil d’orchestre. The future friend and colleague of Thiers, whom he preceded to the grave only by a narrow interval, was already a person of some distinction; but though in many respects a severe critic, he was singularly tolerant of the literary defects and the artistic shortcomings of dramas intended to propitiate the popular taste by fertility of incident and freshness of invention. That evening, however, he confessed himself displeased. The play violated familiar records without either heightening or purifying passion, and sacrificed history to fiction, without rendering it more philosophical.

But though he walked homeward with that sense of dissatisfaction which is generally experienced by persons of education and sensibility after a visit to the modern theatre, the play continued to haunt him. With its subject he must have been already thoroughly familiar, for are not Eloisa and Abelard the most celebrated lovers in history? But though at college he had been distinguished by the elegance of his lyrics, De Rémusat had attained the meridian of life without acquiring, or even attempting to acquire, a distinct reputation as a man of letters. Like most of the aspiring spirits of his time, he had betaken himself to political journalism, trusting that it would conduct to parliamentary honors, and obtain for him a share in the direction of affairs of State. At first a somewhat docile pupil of Guizot, by the time the famous Globe was started he had shaken himself entirely free from the influence of that doctrinaire statesman, and he shortly became one of its most indefatigable contributors. How successfully he had employed his pen may be surmised from the fact that his name appears in the list of signatures to the famous Protest against the Ordonnances of Polignac, which caused the Revolution of July. The first Parliament summoned after the accession of Louis Philippe found him, at the age of thirty-three, Member for Muret a constituency in the Haute Garonne which he continued to represent till the Revolution of 1848. Justifiably ambitious of power, that he might advance the cause of Constitutional Government, he abstained from associating his reputation with non-political compositions; and this sternly practical resolve seemed, through long persistence, at length to have weaned him from all interest in the more subtle workings of the intellect.

But there is something stronger than the resolves of the most resolute man, and that is innate disposition, or natural bent, which, try to rid himself of it as he may, tamen usque recurret. De Rémusat flattered himself that, in strenuously devoting his faculties to political journalism, in writing leading articles on the current topics of the hour, in examining Parliamentary Bills, and in composing Legislative Reports, he had stifled in himself the original taint of an evil passion for literature. That accidental visit to the Ambigu-Comique, the representation of that inferior and distorted play, stirred in him afresh his native passion. He could not get rid of the figure of that strange personage, at once exalted philosopher and frensied lover, belonging unquestionably to history, yet made, it would seem, expressly for the purposes of romance. On the very morrow of that eventful evening, he might have been seen in the library of the Chamber of Deputies, asking for the volume that contained the correspondence of Abelard and Eloisa. The chamber was not sitting, for it was vacation time; and he carried the book with him to Lafitte, in the Haute Garonne, where he had recently established his household gods. He perused it without delay or intermission; for the man who, taking up the correspondence of the separated lovers of the Paraclete, could lay it down unfinished, may rest assured that he has little genuine interest in the more romantic workings of human nature. But on the 6th of September the Ministry of Casimir-Périer was overthrown, and Count Molé was summoned to form a Cabinet. His Minister of the Interior was M. Gasparin, and De Rémusat was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the same department. Had the career of the new Ministry been a protracted one, it is possible that time would have divorced his attention from Abelard and mediæval philosophy. But in less than a twelvemonth Molé’s Cabinet was overthrown, and the liberated Under-Secretary buried himself once more in the passions and dialectics of the twelfth century. He spent much of the winter of 1837 in studying the period in which the Gallic Socrates—Gallorum Socrates, it was the pleasure of Abelard’s followers to designate him—had lived, triumphed, and suffered; and in the course of the summer of the following year a “Philosophical Drama” on the subject was completed. For nearly forty years it lay in manuscript in the author’s drawer, though he occasionally permitted himself the indulgence of reading portions of it in the intellectual salons of Paris which he frequented. Its success in those select but critical circles was considerable; and it was probably the encouragement thus extended to him that led to his writing Abélard, sa Vie, sa Philosophie, et sa Theologie, the best account extant of the great Conceptualist, his metaphysics, and his fate.

The latter work was published as long ago as 1845. Why, then, was the drama kept back? The reason is a curious one. Perhaps in foraging so extensively among the records of the twelfth century, De Rémusat had become impressed with the mediæval motto, “Beware the man of one book.” He was afraid, so his son assures us, to risk his reputation with the public as a statesman and a man of affairs, by appearing before it as the writer of a drama, even a “philosophical” one, on a subject notoriously romantic.

“Il faut bien dire,” says M. Paul De Rémusat, “que la première raison de mon père pour refuser de publier le drame d’Abélard, c’était la pensée que, dans notre pays, les hommes sont d’avance et dès leur début, et qu’il ne voulait point sortir de la situation littéraire et politique où il s’était d’abord placé. Il avait vu trop souvent la défiance accuellir une œuvre nouvelle et étrangère aux premiers essais d’un écrivain. L’idée d’un homme universel, ou seulement doué de talents variés, est rarement acceptée, et ce qu’on gagne en étendu paraît presque toujours perdu en profondeur. L’example de Voltaire, qui était si longtemps discuté et contesté, est plus effrayant pour les audacieux que rassurant pour les timides. Mon père n’espérait pas que l’on fit en sa faveur une exception à la loi commune de la spécialité de l’esprit. Il lui semblait qu’il n’eût acquit en littérature quelque réputation qu’au dépens de son autorité politique.”

These scruples, at least in the case of De Rémusat, seem excessive. The French bourgeoisie have never had that rooted antipathy to men of genius which is characteristic of the middle class in England; and it certainly would not have taken the better part of fifty years to convince them that the author of Vivian Grey had in him the stuff of a practical and hard-headed statesman. Moreover, a philosophical drama, by the very sobriety of its title, protects its author against the charge of excessive literary levity. Finally, the political career of the author of Abélard, though not devoid of distinction, was hardly of that commanding sort which might console some men, at its close, for the sacrifice of more congenial tastes and more enduring fame. He became Minister of the Interior, for a brief period, in Thiers’ Cabinet of 1840, and after the Revolution of 1848 he remained a member of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. But the Coup d’état practically put an end to his political prospects. It is true he reappeared, for a short interval, as the fides Achates of Thiers during that statesman’s brief tenure of power after the Franco-German War. But he was too advanced in years, and too completely overshadowed by his conspicuous friend, who concentrated all business and all distinction in his own person, to add anything to his former reputation as a politician. His son observes that, in withholding the publication of his drama upon Abélard, he perhaps remembered one of the most touching observations of his hero, “Dieu punit en moi la présomption des lettrés.” I read the moral of De Rémusat’s life differently. The penalty attached to the presumption of men-of-letters he undoubtedly escaped. It was the politician whom Heaven punished, for presuming to think that a man can arrange and map out his career irrespectively of the gifts with which it has endowed him, or that it is permissible, in deference to the prejudices of the vulgar, to protect one’s brow against the imperishable bays of the poet, lest they should be denied the tinsel and quickly-fading wreaths of the popular politician. He lived, we will trust, to estimate the relative value of things more wisely, though he might have learnt, while studying the fate of Abélard, that notoriety, which is the nearest approach to fame to be secured by a politician, is “fantastic, fickle, fierce, and vain.” But if he learned the lesson, he learned it in long years of exclusion from worthless power. He returned to his books when universal suffrage, allied with despotism, brought forth that atrocious bastard, Imperial Democracy; and he found in pursuits, his native passion for which he had once been half ashamed to own, something more than compensation for the loss of personal rivalries and sterile debates.

At the same time, let us beware of doing De Rémusat an injustice. That he was one of those men who caress their reputation, and, in doing so, too often mar it, is certain; for we have his own avowal of the infirmity, corroborated by the statements of his son. But, in accounting for the suppression of his drama upon Abélard, we must allow something to genuine and, let me hasten to add, excessive modesty. It is not the voice of the literary coquette, but of the diffident literary workman, that we overhear in these charming sentences, to be found in the preface to his prose labors upon Abélard:

Changeant de but et de travail, je m’occupai alors de mieux connaître l’Abélard de la réalité, d’apprendre sa vie, de pénétrer ses écrits, d’approfondir ses doctrines; et voilà comme s’est fait le livre que je soumets en ce moment au jugement du public. Destiné à servir d’accompagnement et presque de compensation à une tentative hasardeuse, il paraît seul aujour d’hui. Des illusions téméraires sont à demi dissipées; une sage voix que je voudrais écouter toujours, me conseille de renoncer aux fictions passionnées et de dire tristement adieu à la muse qui les inspire.

. . . . . . Abi

Quo blandi juvenum te revocant preces.

No doubt a mere literary succès d’estime would not have satisfied one who had been an Under-Secretary of State; and great literary reputations were being made in France at the time this resolution was taken. But De Rémusat goes on to say that he “tenait à expier en quelque sorte une composition d’un genre moins sévère,” and frankly stating that the drama was “une de ces œuvres enfin qui n’ont qu’une excuse possible, celle du talent,” he, with sincere humility, put it back in his drawer.

Was he right? Having read his Philosophical Drama, I am of opinion that he was wrong. It exhibits literary faculty of a high order, and it is deficient in none of those penetrating qualities of intelligence which serve to render the imagination at once free and efficient when engaged in dramatic work. We do not say that it reaches the heaven of invention; and, indeed, its author was inspired by no such soaring ambition. He writes in prose, and prose which, though always classical and often eloquent, never seeks to pass the boundary between prose and poetry invariably respected by the judicious. But he had saturated himself with the atmosphere of the time in which the action of his drama is laid; and he had represented to himself in clear and well-defined outlines the character of his central figure. To do all this is surely to write a work of no little difficulty with no little success.

Shortly after quitting Nantes by the post-road that conducts to Poitiers, the traveller passes, before reaching Clisson, a village consisting of one long street, which, if he thinks it worth while to inquire, he will be told is called Le Pallet. No one, however, will concern himself to add that behind the unpretending but venerable church which stands on a slight elevation to the left, above the last cottages in the place, are to be seen some all but submerged walls, and here and there the choked vestiges of an ancient moat. These are all that remain of the castle of Le Pallet, which was levelled with the ground more than four centuries and a half ago, in the course of the wars that succeeded the attack directed by Marguerite de Clisson against John V., Duke of Brittany. Hard by is an insignificant stream, known as the Sanguèze, and which evidently owes its name, like the Italian Sanguinetto that flows into the Lake of Thrasymene, to the blood of battle that is recorded to have once dyed its waters.

In 1079, the Castle of Le Pallet stood intact on its little eminence; and in that year, though on what day of the calendar cannot be said, the famous dialectician, Pierre Abélard, was born within its walls. His father, its lord, was called Bérenger; his mother’s name was Lucie. This much may be asserted, with every probability that it is true; but these bare facts are about all that tradition has preserved, or literary industry unearthed. Bérenger, though inured, like everyone in his position in those warlike times, to the exercise of arms, manifested a predilection for letters rarely encountered in his class, and is said to have intentionally inspired his sons with a love for philosophical studies, not easily reconciled with the performance of knightly duties. There were, at least, three other sons of the marriage, Raoul, Porcaire, and Dagobert, and a daughter, Dényse; and if we may trust the testimony of the first of the Letters which compose the famous correspondence of Eloisa and Abelard, into all Bérenger’s sons alike was inculcated the notion that distinction in knowledge is a worthier object of ambition than the trophies of war. Pierre manifested a much readier disposition than his brothers to accept the paternal estimate of the relative value of courage and culture; and though he was the eldest-born, he waived his rights of inheritance in order more freely to pursue the path indicated by his parent. The story is a strange, not to say an incredible one, for times when the sword was the only true badge of honor; and we are driven to conclude either that Abelard sought to remove from himself the stigma which he would have incurred by such a choice, had he not surrounded it with the halo of filial duty, or that his biographers were determined that dramatic completeness should attend his character from the very outset of his career. His own words are that he deliberately abandoned the court of Mars in order to shelter himself in the lap of Minerva. Probably the only conclusion that can safely be drawn from all the statements respecting his selection is, that he developed at an early age extraordinary talents for the acquisition of learning and the conduct of philosophical discussion, and that he was freely permitted to indulge his bent by parents who had no interest in thwarting him.

It was impossible, however, that he should cultivate his passion for letters and philosophy within the boundaries of Brittany, then, as now, perhaps the least instructed portion of what was not yet territorially known as France. He travelled from place to place in search of persons who taught dialectics, and even thus early he prided himself upon imitating the ancient philosophers to the extent of being a peripatician or vagrant. Among his preceptors at this period, the name of one only is known to us; nor is it possible to say where it was that Abelard reaped the benefit of his teaching. Jean Roscelin, Canon of Compiègne, was already under ecclesiastical ban for his uncompromising Nominalism, when Abelard entered upon his teens, and for a time at least had to take refuge in England. Some have contended that Abelard must have passed a portion of his youth upon our shores; but the supposition is as utterly without proof as the assertion of Otho of Frisingen that Roscelin was Abelard’s first instructor in philosophy. It is more probable that the young catechumen encountered the ostracised teacher in some of those more hidden and remote conferences of learning, to which the hostility of his ecclesiastical superiors had compelled him to limit his philosophical energy.

But what was that which Abelard wished to learn and that Roscelin, or any teacher, or, as we should say, Professor of the period, had to communicate? And how was the knowledge, which some sought to impart and many to acquire, conserved? Universities had not yet been called into being; and no great centres of recognized learning drew to themselves the youth or crystallized the opinions of an entire nation. In their stead, and operating as yet as sole substitute, were Episcopal Schools, under the immediate protection and supervision of the Archbishop or Bishop of the diocese; and it depended almost as much on the ambition of a Prelate as upon the importance of his See, whether his School acquired a wide renown, or remained the obscure head-quarters of local instruction. Deriving his faculties from the Bishop, there presided over each Episcopal School a clerical lecturer, or “scholastic”; and all those who attended his classes, or course, were termed his scholars. The success of his teaching and the number of his followers necessarily shed lustre on his episcopal superior and upon the province in which the latter resided; and the emulation which burned among the more intelligent and aspiring members of the Episcopate, in their endeavors to secure for their respective schools Masters of erudition and eloquence, was almost an exact anticipation of the spirit of honorable rivalry that subsists among the Governing Bodies of modern German Universities. Those who favor the doctrine that there is nothing new under the sun, will perhaps be disposed to look backward rather than forward for a parallel to the influence of the Scholastics of the Middle Ages. Hippias, Prodikos, Gorgias, and other less famous men, whose names have been preserved to us by Plato, passed from city to city in ancient Greece, teaching and disputing. Some, we are told, amassed considerable fortunes; while one and all gathered about them the restless brains of their generation, who carried through the land the fame of their doctrines and the brilliance of their rhetoric.

De Rémusat’s drama opens in the cloister of Nôtre-Dame, where a number of scholars are assembled to hear a lecture by Guillaume de Champeaux. The master has not yet arrived; and the first scene is passed in what the undergraduates of the nineteenth century call chaff. Finally, the great lecturer makes his appearance; the scholars crowd around him, and he proceeds to expound his thesis of the reality of Universals, or the substantiality of abstract ideas. In a word, he is the champion of Realism as opposed to Nominalism, and maintains, for example, that Man exists as really and essentially as any individual man, and that Humanity is not a mere name or intellectual abstraction, but just as much an entity as a building composed of so many stones. At the end of his discourse he says, “Are you all satisfied, or is anyone present harassed by doubt? If so, let him speak, and I will answer him.”

Abelard rises. He is unknown equally to master and to scholars, but he soon enchains attention by the vigor of his dialectic. He involves the lecturer in a series of contradictions, and ends by establishing his proposition that Universals are neither realities, nor mere names, but Conceptions, and by winning over the whole class to his views. In vain Guillaume de Champeaux pronounces the word heresy, and points out that Abelard bases his theories on the dangerous foundation of human reason. The remainder of the First Act, which is entitled “La Philosophie,” is devoted to depicting the supremacy gradually obtained by the brilliant young Breton over the students of Nôtre-Dame, until, Guillaume de Champeaux finally abandoned by his scholars, Abelard can exclaim, “Maintenant l’Ecole de Paris, c’est moi!”

The Second Act, the scene of which is laid at Laon a year later, is headed “La Théologie”; and in it Abelard acquires over Anselme of Laon, in theological controversy, a victory analogous to that he had previously won over Guillaume de Champeaux in the realm of metaphysics. The audience is the same, for the students of Nôtre-Dame have followed Abelard to Laon; and the same is the weapon with which his triumph is achieved. “When theology,” he exclaims in the course of a warm disputation with Anselme, “is not seconded by dialectic, vainly does it knock at the door of the spirit; it is reason that holds the key, and opens to the truth.” Anselme replies with anathemas. Then Abelard bursts out:—

“You hear him. My friends, he is old and feeble. Be good to him, but lead him away. His advanced age unfits him for these wrestlings with science. Take him into the air. Alas! Saint Matthew was right when he said you may not put new wine into old bottles.”

His words are received with acclamation; and the overthrow of Anselme de Laon, in spite of his friendship with Saint Bernard, is as complete as the dethronement of Guillaume de Champeaux. In an incredibly short space of time, Abelard has seen the fulfilment of his most ambitious dreams, and he finds himself surrounded by a band of scholars who regard him as the oracle of his age. Yet in the midst of these astounding triumphs, he experiences “a mixture of impatience and weakness, of ardor and weariness,” and thus soliloquizes:—

“My fondest hopes have been surpassed. Withal a secret disquietude, the source of which escapes me, leaves me dissatisfied. I feel agitated, fatigued, worn out. Everything with me has succeeded; nothing is wanting to me that I can name, and yet I am not happy. A vague sense of irritation, which I cannot overcome, prevents me from delighting in anything; this life of struggle is arid and devouring, and in the glowing eyes of my scholars I often discern more joy than I can attain by all the efforts of my intellect.”

It is not difficult to surmise the disease from which Abelard was suffering. It was

The dreary desert of the mind,

The waste of feelings unemployed;

and it is just as easy to guess the cure that is forthcoming. The Third Act is called “L’Amour,” and we find Abelard installed, for so many hours a day, in the house of Fulbert, Canon of Nôtre Dame—for the scene has again shifted to Paris—indoctrinating his erudite niece Eloisa into all the learning of the time. In De Rémusat’s drama she is represented as already in love, if not with the person, with the renown of Abelard; and before his second visit she thus communes with her thoughts:—

He is coming. I cannot read, except with him. I understand nothing, except through him. Before he came I fancied I knew something, appreciated the ancients, and felt what is beautiful. I was a child feeding upon memory; that is all. It is he, he alone, who has revealed to me the secret of things, who has shown me the essence of my thoughts, who has initiated me into the mysteries of the spirit.

He arrives, and the lesson begins. She is all attention. But Abelard wanders from the theme. He would fain, he says, tear himself from the crowd, and study with her. “We would read, we would work together—or rather, for what avails this study that consumes the soul—we would enjoy tranquillity, long walks, a bright sun, a beautiful country, a boat upon the river, or the fire-side, even as we are now. Should we not be happy?” Her answers do not satisfy him, for they are modest and measured. “You do not understand me,” he exclaims, with impatience, and she begs to be forgiven for being so inapt a scholar. No, it is not that. They resume the lesson, but this time it is the Heroides of Ovid that lie before them. Together they read Hero to Leander, and Leander to Hero, those two exquisite Love Letters, which will always make Ovid a contemporary. “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” says Dante, in that unmatched description of the Tempo de’ dolci sospiri, and Di dubbiosi desiri; and what happened to Francesca dà Polenta and Paolo Malatesta when reading

Di Lancilotto, come amor lo strinse,

happened equally to Abelard and Eloisa when reading the imaginary correspondence of Hero and Leander. “O, tu es si belle!” “C’est toi qui es beau.” “Beau de notre amour.”

Very French, no doubt. But it is done with considerable skill, and occupies almost as many pages as I have devoted to its words. Love scenes cannot be compressed. They are, of necessity, long, except to those who figure in them. Whether this was the portion of his philosophical drama which the serious statesman was fond of reading aloud in the intellectual salons of Paris, I cannot say. But, if it was, I suspect that some of the more staid matrons among his audience repeated the words put by the author into the mouth of his heroine, “C’est comme la vapeur de l’encens, cela enivre.”

Meanwhile, Abelard neglects his public duties, and his attachment to one fair student becomes the subject of speculation and banter among his scholars. By degrees the weakness of the great Scholastic is bruited in the streets, and ballads are sung at night in the public places associating his name with the niece of Fulbert. One of these Abelard himself overhears. Here is one strophe with its refrain:—

C’est l’histoire singulière

A se raconter le soir,

Du maître et l’ecolière,

De l’amour et du savoir.

Fillettes, fillettes,

Trop lire est mauvais.

Cueillez des violettes

Au prè Saint-Gervais.

He is alarmed, and his consternation is increased when he learns from Eloisa that the suspicions of her uncle have been aroused. There is but one remedy—marriage. Eloisa protests; for will not marriage rob Abelard of glory and preferment? At last she consents, but with the utmost reluctance, to secret nuptials. Abelard himself, in the celebrated letter written by him, Ad Amicum, declares that Fulbert was privy to their union, and that it was the self-sacrificing denial by Eloisa, after the marriage, that any union had taken place, which roused the vindictiveness of her uncle. De Rémusat, I suppose for the sake of dramatic effect, represents Fulbert as ignorant of the marriage, until the mutilated body of Abelard lies at her feet:—

Fulbert.

Tenez, voilà votre fiancé.

Heloise (se jetant sur son amant).

Mon mari!

Fulbert.

Son mari! Je suis perdu.

So ends the Third Act. The fourth is called, somewhat arbitrarily, “La Politique,” and is mainly concerned with the condemnation of Abelard by the Council of Soissons. True, the authority of the King is invoked against him; but the enemies by whom Abelard is pursued are theologians, and it is they who humiliated him by compelling him publicly to burn his treatise on the Trinity. But for the reappearance of Eloisa at this critical juncture, the Fourth Act would be somewhat tedious. There is no historical foundation for her intervention; but it is strictly in harmony with what we know of her character, and De Rémusat turns it to admirable account. Abelard asks why she seeks out one who is condemned, who is proscribed, who is silenced? She replies that she has come to be with him on the greatest day of his life. Nothing was wanting to his glory but martyrdom; and now he has obtained it. His work is finished; let him abjure the world that has treated him so ill.

Viens, allons-nous-en, quittons le siècle, fuyons ce pays, la France, le monde chrétien. Chez les infidèles nous trouverons plus de repos, nous serons plus ignorés, nous vivrons plus heureux. Cherchons la retraite la plus profonde, la plus lointaine, la plus perdue; cachons à tous notre vie et notre bonheur.

Next she invokes the seductive allurements of nature, and presents to him a picture of rural loveliness and felicity, recalling the famous invitation to sunny climes in The Lady of Lyons:—

Nous irons vers ces climats vantés où le ciel est si pur, l’air si doux, la fleur si embaumée.... Ensemble, nous verrons se lever l’aurore; ensemble, nous verrons le jour finir, et ta main dans ma main, mon cœur sur ton cœur, nous n’aurons qu’une vie pour deux âmes?

Is it that these glowing words recall to Abelard what she has utterly forgotten, and what she was too tender and disinterested a spirit even to remember? He cannot rise to the height of her great argument. “Fuyez, que je ne vous revoie jamais,” he replies. “Votre présence est un supplice, laissez moi!” Her answer reveals the secret of her whole nature:—

En vérité, je ne vous comprends pas. Vous êtes malheureux, opprimé, abandonné, et vous repoussez le seul être au monde qui vous aime et qui vous reste.

But it is all in vain. She still fails to understand him, and, with the faith and humility of all true love, she asks if she has offended him:—

Non, je ne suis pas offensé, remettez-vous, je vous remercie. Héloïse, vous êtes bonne et dévouée, je suis profondement touché de vos soins. Vous allez retourner à votre monastère. Vous savez combien cette maison a besoin de votre présence; ne m’oubliez pas, priez pour moi, vous et vos religieuses.

Growing still colder, his last words are, “Adieu, Madame, je me recommande à vos prières.” She kisses his hand, and exclaims, “Et qui priera pour moi?”

The Fifth Act, entitled “La Mort,” is passed in the Convent of Cluny, where Abelard is a sort of ecclesiastical prisoner under the supervision of Saint Bernard. His one sole desire is to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to explain his doctrines to the Pope, and to get the ban of heresy removed from his teaching. But he is broken in health, and troubled in brain. His mind wanders. In sleep he murmurs the name of Eloisa. His sole consolation is the faithful attachment of a former pupil, who brings him ever and anon news of her who is living and praying at Paracleta. At last he expires; and the drama closes with the tolling of the convent bell.

I have given, I fear, but an inadequate idea of the merits of the play; for its chief value is in the full and varied picture it presents of the life and manners of the time. It is almost needless to say that it is not a stage but a closet drama, and it has the necessary defect of every such composition; it is a little wearisome. But no form, and no treatment, could blunt the interest that must ever cling to the pathetic story of Abelard and Eloisa; and I should be surprised to hear that any reader could close the book without feeling that it is suffused with the lachrymæ rerum that unfailingly touch the human heart.

For the rest, I do not know that anyone could treat the story of the unhappy lovers of the Paraclete, imaginatively, in such a way as to disarm criticism. I do not refer to any technical difficulty, arising out of the central catastrophe in Abelard’s life. To the true imaginative artist, that would mean as little as it meant to Eloisa. Indeed, it would assist him to obtain compassion for Abelard, just as it made Eloisa love him only all the more. It is the something beyond compassion of which Abelard stands in need, that would baffle the most skilful artistic handling. He would necessarily have to be the hero, and, unfortunately, he is not heroic. Were it not that such a woman as Eloisa loved him, I should be inclined to say that he was hateful. I doubt if there ever lived the man altogether worthy of such a love as hers; yet one would be sorry to think that hundreds of men do not exist more worthy of it than he was. One forgives him much for her sake; yet it is her perfection that makes him look the more imperfect. The contrast between her simplicity and his complexity, between her single-minded devotion to him and his many-sided calculations of what would be best for himself, ends by making him odious; and one is compelled to acknowledge the truth of that bitter saying of Rousseau, “Tout homme réflechi est méchant.”

It is to no man-of-letters, recent or remote, neither to Bussy-Rabutin nor to Colardeau, neither to Pope nor to De Rémusat, but to the famous Correspondence of the pathetic pair, that we must turn if we are to understand either their character or their story. The first letter is written by Abelard, not to Eloisa, but to “a Friend,” and relates the leading incidents of his life. Nowhere, it has often been remarked, does a man so thoroughly, because so unconsciously, betray the secret of his disposition as in his letters. Raconter mon histoire is, to this day, a favorite occupation with Frenchmen; and Abelard is garrulous about his own merits, his own grief, his own successes. He speaks contemptuously of William of Champeaux, and with just as little respect of Anselm of Laon. It was, however, customary in the Middle Ages for controversialists to treat each other with scant courtesy; the flattering consideration which people who sneer at each other in private nowadays exhibit towards each other in public not having yet come into fashion. It is when Abelard narrates how he made the acquaintance of Eloisa that we get the full measure of his fundamentally coarse and selfish nature. Fancy a man writing of a woman who had loved him, and loved him as Eloisa loved Abelard, that she was per faciem non infima, or, as we should say in English, “not bad-looking”! Fancy his being able to remember, let alone to describe without intolerable shame, that, having heard of her accomplishments, he deliberately planned to win her affections, adding that he felt sure this would be easy, because “tanti quippe tunc nominis eram, et juventutis et formæ gratia præeminebam, ut quamcunque feminarum nostro dignarer amore nullam vererer repulsam,” that he was so celebrated, so young, and so good-looking, that he had no fear of being repulsed by any woman whom he honored with his love! The repugnance inspired by such language would be great, even if he had afterwards appreciated the prize he had begun by coveting so basely. It is not easy to forgive Saint Augustine for his conduct towards the mother of Deodatus. But he, at least, describes the passions of his youth with sincere humility and profound remorse; whilst Abelard recalls without a pang the colloquies and correspondence he planned in order to influence Eloisa. In the same spirit he narrates the tender, passionate passages that ensued. He is equally ignoble when Fulbert discovers their attachment. He excuses himself by reminding her uncle “quanta ruina summos quoque viros ab ipso statim humani generis exordio mulieres dejecerint,” how many of the greatest men, from the beginning of time, have been ruined by the seductions of women. By way of compensation, he tells us that he offered to marry Eloisa on condition that their union should be kept secret, ne famæ detrimentum caperem, lest, forsooth, his fame should suffer detriment. If, instead of hiring a couple of bravos Fulbert had taken him by the heels and flung him into the Seine, one’s sense of justice would have been better satisfied.

Turn we a moment from the composed reminiscences of this circumspect dialectician, to the woman per faciem non infima, whose heart he had broken and whose life he had ruined. In obedience to his wish she had taken the veil, and writes to him from the Convent of the Paraclete, made over to her by him, and of which she was now the Lady Abbess. She has read his letter “To a friend,” of which she says, with unconscious irony, that though it was composed to soothe that friend’s sorrows, it is full of the sorrows of the writer himself. She finds this the most natural thing in the world; and all she asks is that to her, too, he will write, and that he will instruct her, who gave herself entirely to him, how to direct those who have given themselves entirely to God. She reminds him, not reproachfully, but in order to convince him that she has need of him still, that at a word from him she had completed her own ruin, and that, though he was the only object of her love, she had promptly taken the veil at his bidding, “ut te tam corporis mei quam animi unicum possessorum ostenderem,” in order to show that she belonged to him, and to him alone, body, heart, and soul. “God is my witness,” she goes on, “that in loving you I loved yourself only, not anything you could give or bring me.” Then, going to the utmost limit and horizon of feminine love and self-sacrifice, she adds: “Et si uxoris nomen sanctius ac validus videtur, dulcius mihi semper extitit amicæ vocabulum; aut, si non indigneris, concubinæ vel scorti; ut, quo me videlicet pro te amplius humiliarem, ampliorem apud te consequerer gratiam, et sic etiam excellentiæ tuæ gloriam minus læderem.” How completely Pope has falsified this sentiment in his famous paraphrase! His Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard is, no doubt, an admirable composition; but it is unfair to Eloisa, since its main note is passion, not self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice was the beginning, middle, and end of her love for Abelard. Once only she reproaches him. He had made her take the religious habit before assuming it himself. Why? Did he doubt her? She is overwhelmed with grief at the thought; for does he not know that she would have gladly either preceded or followed him into the jaws of hell? Nay, she must perforce have done so, for her heart was not hers, but his. Why, then, does he not write and console her? Was it concupiscence, rather than affection, that made them one? For her part, she has no difficulty in answering the question. “Dum tecum carnali fruerer voluptate, utrum id amore vel libidine agerem incertum pluribus habebatur.” Can they, she asks, be in any doubt now? “Nunc enim finis indicat quo id inchoaverrim principio.” The end surely shows by what motive she was impelled at the beginning. Everything she has given up—himself, the world, pleasure, and freedom; reserving to herself nothing but the luxury of still executing his will. Of a truth, it was so; and reading this extraordinary correspondence, anyone who is curious on the subject may discover for himself the eternal distinction between

Short-memoried lust and long-remembering love.

With an utter unconsciousness of his own baseness, Abelard recalls the arguments employed by Eloisa to dissuade him from the marriage insisted on by him solely from dread of the anger of Fulbert and the reproaches of the world. She invoked, he tells us, the name of every writer, Pagan and Christian, in whose pages are portrayed the drawbacks and disadvantages domestic life presents to a man of genius and ambition. Cicero, Theophrastus, St. Paul, St. Jerome, all are pressed into the service to prove that a man cannot attend both to a wife and to philosophy. “Where is he,” she asks, “that, wishing to dedicate himself to meditations upon the Scriptures or upon philosophy, can put up with the cries of the nursery, the songs of the nurse that lulls a babe to sleep, the perpetual coming and going of domestics?” Rich men can sometimes avoid these interruptions and inconveniences; but philosophers are never rich, and she cites Seneca to convince him that she would be a chain round his neck, a tether to his feet. The title of lover would be more honorable and more safe for him; and as for her, she cares not what she is called, so long as he loves her. Her sole ambition is to retain his affection by tenderness, and not by worldly ties. Finding him unconvinced—for Abelard well knew that such arguments would have no weight with Fulbert—she declared, with sobs and tears, that it was the one step to be taken if they wanted to destroy their happiness and to prepare for themselves a sorrow as profound and lasting as their love. After recalling this outburst of tender desperation, he observes, with the fine tranquillity of a truly critical spirit, that Eloisa thereby demonstrated, as the whole world has since acknowledged, that she was endowed with the gift of prophecy!

In order to understand and appreciate what some persons will perhaps consider the perverse and even unfeminine expostulations of Eloisa, it must be remembered that, in the twelfth century, marriage was supposed to disqualify a man for a career of distinction. The celibacy of the clergy, for which Hildebrand had battled so unremittingly, was now definitively established, and all who aspired to employment in or about the precincts of the Church had to sanction, by their practice, the slur thus passed upon women. When Abelard first met Eloisa he was not an ecclesiastic. But he was saturated with ecclesiastic ideas; and if he was to pursue his study and exposition of Theology, he could do so only under episcopal protection, which would never have entrusted the defence of spiritual truths to one who had openly contracted a carnal union. It is easy to perceive what immense value Abelard attached to the recognition of his powers, and to the establishment of his fame; nor is there any difficulty in surmising that he often expatiated to Eloisa on a theme so interesting to them both. It has been said—

Man dreams of fame, but woman wakes to love.

But, waking or dreaming, Eloisa thought only of Abelard’s glory, Abelard’s advancement. Her secret, unacknowleged love was to feed his fame, as the hidden root and unnoticed tendrils feed the swelling trunk, impelling it into blossom and leaf and fruit. Well might Mr. Cousin declare, when a discussion was once raised as to who is the greatest woman that ever lived, that Eloisa towers above all competitors. But for the self-obliterating tenderness of her heart, the self-asserting strength of Abelard’s intellect would long since have been forgotten. Fancy a man worrying himself to death in order to establish that he is not heterodox in his views concerning the reality of Universals, while such a woman offers him, in her own particular person, the sum and abstract of all that is worth having in the world!

Yet, in some sort, Abelard expiated his faults. I fail to see in him the passionate champion of free thought, which De Rémusat and others sometimes appear disposed to represent him, or it would be more easy to extend to him the indulgence which, for that reason, has to be yielded to a tortuous egotist like Voltaire, or to a cold-hearted sentimentalist like Rousseau. As far as I can see, he entertained certain metaphysical opinions, which, whether sound or otherwise, are not of the smallest practical importance, and upon which the dignity and happiness of mankind in no degree turn. Accused of heresy, he was condemned; and the condemnation was peculiarly wounding to his vanity. But he made his peace with the Church, and in one of the latest of his letters to Eloisa is particularly anxious to convince her that he has done so. No doubt it was not easy to battle with the strongly-organized Theology of the times; but if anyone should ask what Abelard was to do when accused of heresy, the answer might be that of the mother of Horatius, who, when asked, “Que voulez vous qu’il fasse contre trois?” replied: “Qu’il mourût!” Eloisa had died a thousand times over for his sake. Could he not die once for his precious Universals and his tenets on the Trinity, if he really thought them true, and so very important!

No; the only hold he has upon our indulgence is that time and suffering at length awakened in his heart a tardy tenderness for Eloisa, and inspired him with something like an appreciation of her unrivalled goodness. He handed over to her his refuge of the Paraclete; and when she wrote to him for comfort, for counsel, for spiritual explanations, he did not withhold them. He could not be so blind, or so unmindful of the past, as not to read between the lines, and not to perceive that under the exposition of the difficulties she was experiencing in directing the community of which she had become the head, there still palpitated the recollection of the earliest instruction she had received at his hands. Then he expounded Ovid. Now he comments on the Scriptures. But the master was the same, and the same the pupil; and over and over again the Abbess of the Paraclete recalls the niece of Fulbert. We feel that she almost invents doubts, that she multiplies scruples, and that she entangles herself in perplexities, in order that he may solve them. In a word, she is as unchangeably in love with him as ever. He is measured and circumspect in his replies; but a certain vein of spiritual tenderness underlies them, and we feel that his nature has grown nobler, and his heart is, at last, less pre-occupied with self. Perhaps he had discerned now, when it was too late, the value of a woman’s love, and the worthlessness of worldly notoriety. Before he died, he begged that his body might be carried to the Paraclete. Thither, accordingly, it was secretly transported and lovingly interred by her who, as the Chronicle of Tours says, “était veritablement son amie.”

For twenty years more, Eloisa lived on, a model of sanctity and wisdom. Even Villon, in one of his ballads, speaks of her as “la très sage Heloïse.” When she died, her sole request was that she might be laid by the side of Abelard. Her injunction was obeyed; and as her body was being lowered into the grave, that of Abelard was for an instant reanimated, so tradition affirms, and he opened his arms to receive her.—National Review.

[THE UNITY OF THE EMPIRE.]
BY THE MARQUIS OF LORNE.

Lord Beaconsfield called the English an enthusiastic people, and there is some danger that we may hastily infer that if our fit of enthusiasm for new schemes of Imperial Federation be not at once caught up by the colonies, a permanent union with them is impossible. It must be “either a closer union or disintegration,” say some. But let us not be too hasty in assuming that sudden developments are necessary.

If Mr. Goschen will allow us to say so, “after all” it is no bad thing that the Federation League should have been formed, although it may produce just now more “fads” than federation. The formation of the Society shows that men’s minds are alive to the value of the colonies. It is to be hoped that there will be less said of drawing “the bonds between us and our children closer,” and more of confirming their position where satisfactory, and of securing their commercial aims. The position of a listening and helpful friend should be ours, rather than that of a dictatorial parent. Where colonists have spoken of federation, they have often meant reciprocity in trade. Where Englishmen have spoken of it, they have often meant only colonial contribution to common defence. Our long-established trade has taught us that defence means defence of trade-interests, wherever they lead. Our sons’ minds have been more set on creating industries at home, and they have hardly begun to think of wars which come from opening new markets. Although the different lines of thought lead to the same conclusion, namely, organised union for common interests, we may be somewhat premature in laying down plans for Imperial co-operation. They who have as yet spoken of these plans are, for the most part, British politicians. It is, however, significant that the Prime Minister of Canada was present at a meeting of the “Imperial Federation League,” and gave a general promise of Canadian aid in any “wars of defence.” It remains to be seen how far Canada would be willing to impose a permanent charge on her Treasury for other than home defence. As yet she has had too much to do in developing public works to attain to more than the maintenance, in a poorly organised and badly officered condition, of a force of about 20,000, out of a nominal roll of 40,000 militia, whose fine physique and great individual intelligence make them worth a great deal more than their small numbers imply. She has shown that she looks to England to do armed marine duty for her, and she is not desirous to garrison her one important fortress near her Atlantic coaling stations—namely, Halifax. But she is showing her knowledge of her inadequate military condition, and is training officers and is voting larger sums for the annual drilling of the militia. Her population, expanding over vast surfaces, is being strengthened both for civil and military cohesion by a thorough railway system; but she will need all the consciousness her best men have, that defence means preparation and organisation, if she wishes to inspire respect for her ever-increasing and ever more vulnerable possessions. One of her statesmen, formerly her High Commissioner to England, has suggested that a tonnage duty, levied on all ships sailing under the British flag, be devoted to fortification of coaling stations. It is to be feared that the shipowning provinces of the Dominion would object to this excellent proposal, although it might meet with the approval of those who are less directly interested in marine property, and would be an indirect tax which might commend itself to inland provinces and to some of the Australian colonies.

If Canada, then, has but recently shown striking aptitude to realise the conditions necessary for adequate defence, how does it stand with Australia and the Cape? The Cape Government’s past attitude may be described in few words: “Be always taking what you can, and seeking how you can get more; our contribution towards necessary expenses being one corps of Rangers.” With Australia it is different. She has shown a natural desire to prevent her neighborhood from being garrisoned by convicts or the forces of warlike States, and she has been quite ready to pay handsomely for any English assistance she requires. Some of her colonies have exhibited a most spirited desire to share the expenses of maritime as well as land defence, and have even offered their vessels for offensive operations. The excitement attending the outbreak of war, with the sympathy for the mother-country, may be depended on to produce offers of assistance whenever England needs them. It is the permanent contribution for a common policy in the piping times of peace which presents more difficulty. Her division into several colonies, often showing a good deal of jealousy of one another, has prevented any combined scheme of national defence; but she, like Canada, may be relied upon to slowly improve her opportunities. The spirit is willing, but the stress is weak. She has not known the pinch of danger. Until a Customs Union exists throughout her continent, and railways bind her together, she will not be able to do justice to the patriotism so conspicuous among her people, or take the place due to herself in the Imperial union of States.

There is always a minority among all English-speaking peoples who deem military expenditure so much waste, a mere thing of vanity, of fuss and feathers. There is in the colonies a certain minority who, as with us, deem patriotism to mean anxiety for the welfare of those only who may for the time have identical ideas as to trade, or who may reside within easy distance of certain centres, geographical or manufacturing. Their ideas are not to be left out of account, for they embody one of the most powerful of human sentiments—namely, the imagination (for it is not the reality) of immediate interest. It is important to show such parties that anything proposed to be done is devised not only for Australian, or Canadian, or British purposes, but for mutual and general good. We adopt free trade because we think it suits us. The colonies have no direct taxes, and have a high revenue tariff because they think such arrangements suit them. It does not follow that we need not care for them because they are not free traders. In giving us more favored treatment than they give to foreigners, and in taking far more of our goods than they take of foreign goods, they yield to us more than we yield to them, for we treat them and foreigners equally. Our gain from their affections and trade connection far outweighs the cost of the navy we keep to protect the ships which carry the commerce. But in asking them to look to their own defence we exercise a legitimate moral influence, which is not for British interests only, but for theirs also. We must not ask too much or more than their legislatures will freely sanction. There has been no sign as yet that Colonial Parliaments desire to shirk the legitimate expenses of common defence. They have much to do with their money, but will listen to any reasonable representation for the general weal. It is probable that maritime war, except as regards shore-torpedoes, can be best and most cheaply undertaken by the British Navy, while it may be reasonable to ask the colony requiring the service of the ships for any special duty affecting their coasts to contribute to the expense of maintenance during the time they are so engaged. War is becoming a common danger for all parts of the empire. It is so in a greater degree, the more the colonies develop, and possess, or are connected with, great areas around the original settlements. Any hostile force would in the Pacific attack at once the Australasian cities and the valuable coaling stations of Vancouver, thus injuring at once Australia and Canada. It is the same in case of war with Russia. These colonies have, therefore, a right to have their wishes consulted, to be informed of all that is passing that may lead to war, and in case of the non-observance of that consideration which should be shown by the Imperial Executive, would acquire a right to refuse supplies and declare neutrality. The only way to reduce the danger of temptation to such action is to admit them in some form into Imperial Councils. It should not be possible that a Secretary of State can settle payment to America for alleged outrages by New England fishermen, without consulting Canada and Newfoundland, and then expect these colonies to pay the damage assessed without their knowledge. It should not be possible for Downing Street to negotiate with France about the abrogation of her fishing rights in Newfoundland, without informing Canada of what is contemplated. It should not be possible for British Ministers to propose that France be given islands in the Pacific in lieu of rights in Newfoundland, without consulting Australia. If we take powers of attorney, it should be by express commission.

In commercial matters we have ceased to assume the power of attorney. It is a mark of the great change which has been wrought by the growth of our so-called dependencies that Lord Grey, who twenty years ago specially claimed for the mother-country the right of directing the fiscal policy of the colonies, should be the first to propose the immediate adoption of the suggestion, made at the Colonial Institute in 1884, to have a “council of envoys.” The Board of Advice he proposes is nothing else. It would be a Committee of Privy Council holding regular meetings, and able to advise, check, and direct the Secretary of State. It would advise the consummation of different commercial bargains made for the advantage of different parts of the Empire with foreign nations. Made under the auspices of England, these would always give to England the most favored nation treatment. But they would not be made on England’s basis of free trade, and hence the dislike of some among us to the proposal. The council or board would further agree how best to defend the interests created by such treaties. It cannot be too strongly stated that the making of such separate treaties is no new thing. Since the appointment by Canada of a High Commissioner to represent her in England, she has had the fullest latitude given to her to send her envoy to make separate bargains with Spain and France, the English ambassador acting as introducer and coadjutor in the negotiations undertaken by the Canadian. This was a great and new departure at the time, but it marked a recognition by England of actual facts, which will grow clearer and clearer to the eyes of all men every year. The situation of our Empire is an entirely new one. Nothing like it has ever existed since the world began. There is no precedent for it. Our union with our sons must be strengthened, not by tying them to our commercial programme, but by helping them to realise that which they desire to adopt. The partners in the Imperial firm must pursue each his own line to benefit himself, and so raise the reputation of the partnership as being composed of men of wealth and enterprise. In affairs affecting the standing and credit of the whole number, or of several, they may meet the senior in consultation, and, as each represents important property, a new policy is not likely to be adopted lightly, nor will any project calculated to enhance profits lack good backing. The statesmen in Canada, who have been in office since this new departure has been fully inaugurated, are perfectly satisfied with the position of their country in this most important of all matters. The leader of the Opposition, before he knew of this freedom given to the Canadian envoy, spoke of his countrymen as “the subjects of subjects,” for that was indeed the position in which the old British policy placed them, and it was one which could not survive an increase in their own power. “We want,” said Sir John MacDonald last month at Montreal—“we want no independence in this country, except the independence that we have at this moment. What country in the world is more independent than we are? We have perfect independence; we have a Sovereign who allows us to do as we please. We have an Imperial Government that casts on ourselves the responsibilities as well as the privileges of self-government. We may govern ourselves as we please; we may misgovern ourselves as we please. We put a tax on the industries of our fellow subjects in England, Ireland, and Scotland. If we are attacked, if our shores are assailed, the mighty powers of England on land and sea are used in our defence.” And under this so-called “protection” government the tariff against English goods is one-half less than that imposed against us by the Americans; and the merchandise bought from us is immense in quantity, Australia taking even more proportionately than does Canada. Australia, probably owing to the want of a common tariff, has not as yet shown a wish to have her representatives put on the same footing as that secured, by Canada’s desire, to her envoy. The Sydney Convention, indeed, rather gave the Agents General to understand that they were not sent in any way as quasi-ambassadors. This alone shows the unreadiness to undertake common action and to push common interests, for there is no strong central government having any definite will and policy which it is necessary to have explained and illustrated and pushed by personal conference and contact with the Home authority in Downing Street. I fear that the Cobden Club have more tribulation in store, for it is highly probable that all Australia will have a common high revenue tariff. Then will come, as has already come in British North America, the desire to push a national commercial policy in alliance with England.

The work, then, of any friends of Imperial Union should be first to ascertain the desires of the colonists. If any special scheme be thought good here, it should be submitted to the colonial governments by the Association before it is pressed on the public for acceptance. We can form, as it has been suggested, a vigilance committee in Parliament at home to take cognisance of anything affecting the colonies, and this we can do without consulting anybody but the men who may desire to serve. But it is difficult to believe that any Australian or other administration can have been consulted and can have given a favorable reply to such proposals as the following, namely:—1. The proportional representation in one unwieldy Parliament of the colonies. The House of Commons has too much to do now, and hardly attends to Indian affairs. It is not to be imagined that colonial M.P.’s would like to be constantly out-voted by a British majority, nor is it conceivable that, when the colonial population is larger than ours, England would submit to be out-voted by the colonies. Mere difficulties of personal attendance would make the scheme hard of execution, and its unpopularity makes it impossible.

2. Nomination to the House of Lords of prominent politicians from distant parts of the Empire. It may be sufficient to ask what politician, having good influence in his native Parliament, would leave it to sit in a House which has little weight even in England, and less in deciding Imperial issues? And if any man chose a seat in the House of Peers in preference to a place in his own Parliament, how could he be considered a representative of the Government in power in his own country? If he be not that, he would have no right to speak in the name of his own country, nor could his vote bind her action. If not a prominent man, his acceptance of such a nomination would only excite ridicule. Who would be a Viscount Wagga-Wagga or Marquis of Massa Wippi? A man elected to sit in the present House of Lords would only be one voter in an assembly of several hundred, and would have no special weight.

3. Conference of Trades Unions. This would be useful as indicating where the unemployed or well-provided emigrants had best direct their steps. It may be safely assumed that the workmen of towns where high wages may be had would not invite others to come and thus depress the standard of the remuneration earned by labor.

4. A council like that of the German “Reich.” This would be more easily accepted than the sending of a contingent to either House of Parliament, but it has not been discussed.

Other suggestions might be mentioned which all partake too much of the fault of looking at Federation as a means of making more powerful the British vote in a general union, and in not being endorsed by colonial voices. We should make vocal their desires rather than press upon them our own. The idea of a Board of Advice, composed of their representatives, has the merit of giving them opportunity of speech and of knowledge. It would not “draw closer the bonds” so much as prevent any strain on those which exist. Do not let us do anything “behind the backs” of those whom our action in their behalf may touch, however indirectly. Let no Minister in a colonial Parliament be able to say, “We are threatened with this or that in consequence of Imperial action; but it was not until the danger had been incurred that we knew there was any likelihood that it would arise.” We need have no misgiving that the colonies would be unreasonable in their fears, or averse to incur the danger if fully informed, any more than we apprehend from an English House of Commons repudiation of the responsibility of the Executive charged with the responsibility of war or peace. But the danger of repudiation becomes less, the more those affected by the determination are taken into confidence. The revival in some form of a Committee of the Privy Council, to advise “on trade and the plantations,” would be the most certain method of giving for the present knowledge and voice to the combined colonial representatives. If the colonial Governments do not care for this, the “question falls” for the time, and we may patiently await the demand, taking care in the meantime to fully inform each individual representative of our rising “auxiliary kingdoms” of what is passing, and granting them free access to all persons and papers they desire to see, if these may be shown to Parliament. It has been objected that delay would be caused by any council. If the council be small, this is not likely, because telegraphic communication makes Australia as near to the Colonial Office as is Victoria Street. The time, if there be any delay, may be well spent in avoiding future misunderstanding. There is hardly any conjuncture where a Secretary of State must act with lightning rapidity in colonial affairs; but, if the necessity arose, the British Government must, as they do now, take the responsibility. It is also said against the plan that in most cases the members of the council whose countries are not affected by the business would only sit twirling their thumbs. This objection applies to all boards, councils, and Parliaments, and is an argument for autocracy. It is also alleged that the Indian Council Board is an analogy, and has been proved a nuisance. But the Indian councillors represent only their own opinions, and these often formed on past experience, whereas the men on the Privy Council Board of Advice would represent those whose voices would be potent factors in deciding questions submitted, because they are the mouthpieces of living nations and of living policy. A minute drawn up by Australia, dissenting from a given policy, would not be looked at so lightly as is a minute by an Indian councillor who may object to an addition to a salt tax. We should therefore consult with the colonial cabinets, and ask them if they do not think that we can obtain, by regular and recognised conference with their envoys, more intimate knowledge of the desires of their people; further opportunity for them to bring their wishes directly to the notice of England and of brother colonists; a better chance for them to combine to further the views of one of their number, or to declare against any impracticable project; less danger that any imprudent course shall be entered on by any one colony without consultation with others and with Britain; a time of discussion for any schemes for joint defence—in short, less isolation, and consequently greater strength for any policy taken up with forethought. The Secretary of State would be supported in adopting any given line by knowing he had the Empire at his back, or, by finding himself alone, would know when to advise withdrawal. But it is a question whether the day for any such plan is yet come. It is only yesterday that Canada became a Pacific Power. It is only to-day that the Australians are being united by railroads, and they are still sundered in fiscal policy. The Cape has not yet become possessed of a people sufficiently powerful to make themselves felt. In any case let the colonies speak out, and we can wait, for “all’s well” at present with the loyal sentiments of our scattered brethren.

During this last fortnight they have again proved that they are heart and hand with us in time of trouble. Let us, if they desire it, make their voices be heard in council. They have told us that their cannon shall speak for us in the field.—Nineteenth Century.

[ODD QUARTERS.]
BY FREDERICK BOYLE.

My record of campaigns and outlandish travel includes in its barest shape, Borneo, Upper Egypt, Central America, the Cape, the West Coast of Africa, the Danubian Principalities, Afghanistan, India, Turkey, Greece, Egypt a third time; were I to count the episodes, it would swell into a geographic catalogue. In such journeying I have found many odd billets, a few of which I purpose to sketch just as they occur to mind in writing, without story or connection. But, so far as may be, I shall avoid those scenes which have been made familiar to the public through historic events, and through the descriptions furnished by my own “Special” fraternity.

No eccentricity of fortune surprises me now, though it brings vastly more discomfort for the time than in earlier days; and my recollections grow weaker proportionately. However strange one’s quarters, however distressed or frightened one may be, an abiding consciousness dwells in the soul that one has seen and done and gone through the same experience already. The power of observation is not dulled, nor the sense of fun, still less that of alarm; but the circumstances do not seem worth remembering particularly. If one reflects more, one feels less. After his first visit to the Antipodes, so to speak, a boy has stories inexhaustible of anecdote, remark, and adventure; but from each succeeding journey he brings back shorter and drier reports, until a trip to the moon would seem hardly worth telling at length: after stating the facts, he has done. Last week I entertained a confrère just returned from El Teb and Tamasi; we have served together in divers parts, and the public, I understand, has been interested in our stories; but all through the evening not fifty words were exchanged touching on matters personal in his late vicissitudes. It seems less and less worth while to dwell upon impressions and to carry them away, the more impressions one gathers. This is not the common belief. We read of men in novels, who having been everywhere and done everything, are always ready with a tale of adventure that thrills the heroine. I will venture to say that such a personage has not been far into terra incognita, nor has served in many wars, unless, of course, he is a professional talker.

Thus it happens that a man’s earliest memories of travel are the strongest, though they be insignificant compared with others he might have collected on the same ground at a later date. I have a hundred cabinet pictures of Egypt as I knew it, an idle boy, but not one worth sketching from the late campaign. That was a very big business;—one recorded the facts, stored them for use, and forgot the incidents. It is only by an effort that I recall scenes therein quite otherwise impressive than that unforgotten experience of Esné by night, which struck me twenty-one years ago, and still remains fresh of color. At that time the banished sisterhood of Almeh, Ghawazee, dancing and singing women, still dwelt at the spot assigned them—or many did. We had seen a performance in going up, and had ordered something more special for our return. An old negress who kept what one may describe as the box office, in a vile mud hut, assured us with conviction that the best dancer and the loveliest woman in those parts would attend at nightfall. A respectable Arab addressed us returning to the dabeah, and asked permission to go with our party. In the evening he followed to a hut, somewhat larger but not less vile than the box office. The only lights were set on the mud floor, one by each of the musicians, who squatted there smoking hasheesh to nerve them for special exertions. In a line across the back, their faces hardly to be distinguished, sat the Ghawazee, arrayed in silks and muslins of the brightest hue, the coins that decked their heads twinkling and faintly jingling as they moved restlessly. The police-officer sat beside us, on one of our chairs, in snowy uniform and gold belt. Everybody smoked, including specially the candles, and the spiral cloud from every mouth had a curious effect so long as it was visible.

The band struck up, with voice and instrument—a metallic hum, a nasal scream, a twang of strings so loose that they seemed to take their note from the wood itself, a dull beat of tomtoms. Presently a Ghawazee arose. You have all read descriptions of the performance, but it must be seen in its natural habitat, as here, to keep any sort of interest. I have never beheld it, that I recollect, in the pitiless glow of gas, when, no doubt, it is grotesque. But in that dim and ruddy twilight, the long robes and full trousers of the Ghawazee, quivering to the tremulous movement of her limbs, have sudden strange effects of sheen and shadow. The arms out-curved, with small castanets betwixt the index and the thumb, the head thrown back, the closed eyelashes, the white teeth gleaming, have significance and charm also in that misty air, though they seem prurient affectation under strong light. But the entertainment is monotonous. Before our programme was half through, we called for the prima ballerina, and she came forward—a good-looking woman, helmeted with coins—put out her small bare foot, the toes turned up, rounded her arms, and tinkled her castanets with the air of a mistress. At the instant our guest sprang by and seized her, shouting—the musicians tumbled this way and that—the candles upset—a woman took fire—the police-officer bawled—and we were a struggling mass in the doorway! The dragoman afterwards explained that this man’s son had married the dancer, on an understanding, of course, that she dropped her profession. He heard that the box-keeper had tempted her, with her husband’s consent, to perform for our benefit, and hence the interruption.

A series of earthquakes alarmed Nicaragua in January, 1866, and the municipality of the capital asked us to explore Mombacho, an ancient crater from which the disturbance was supposed to come. My companion and I rode out, with guides, and at nightfall reached Dirioma, an Indian village. A superb avenue of organo cactus leads to that secluded settlement; the trunks, ten feet high, looked like fluted pillars of marble in the pale glow of starlight. Dirioma is much the same now, probably, as the Conquistadores found it, a marvel of color, softness, and grace of form. Each dwelling, framed of bamboos and sticks, like a bird-cage, stands in its own compound; the road runs straight and broad and smooth in front; palms droop over the cactus hedge, black against the night sky as ostrich plumes, and behind them lies a dusky mass of foliage, gleaming red in the glow of the hearth. All day and all night the place is still, for Indian children, if they play, are silent.

Our billet assigned was such a hut, hung round with hollow logs used as beehives; in dismounting we upset one, but the insects were familiar with disasters of the sort, and they took it kindly. We asked about “Carib Stones,” as usual—all antiquities are called Carib Stones in Nicaragua—and the guide led us into another compound, where a very old man crouched beside an enormous fire, with three or four Indians about him. When our inquiries were explained, with difficulty, the veteran brightened and began talking like a machine. Some feathers of the quetzal bird lay beside him; these he snatched up, waved, and shook to emphasise his statements. We could understand very little of the patois, more than half Indian; but the naked old man’s shadow played grotesquely on the lattice wall behind, the brandished plumes flashed emerald and sapphire, the elders sat round like wrinkled effigies in bronze, their small eyes fixed upon us with never a wink. The ancient hero did not tell much—he spoke of the golden temple which, as everybody knows, is hid somewhere in the neighboring woods; but gave no precise information. Afterwards we learned that this was a lineal descendant of the old caciques of Dirioma, who gave four thousand axes of gold—or whatever the number may have been—to Gil Gonzalez de Avila. Though he worked as a slave before the emancipation, the Indians revere and obey him to such degree that a Secretary of State thought worth while to ask of us what his remarks had been.

Many odd quarters we knew on the West Coast, where men and circumstances have a character all their own. Quisa recurs to my mind just now; I could not tell why, for we saw places as strange under more exciting conditions. This is the first town, or was, within the Ashanti realm proper. It looked almost civilized to us, marching from the coast—for refinement is comparative—and decidedly picturesque. Quisa might be called a town, its ways streets, its dwellings cottages of unusual form. A row of fine shade-trees in the middle of the chief thoroughfare had earthen benches at their feet, where the elders sat for council and gossip. The king’s house stood at the intersection of the main streets. It had not the alcove or box in the outer wall, so conspicuous in the architecture of Coomassie, but the façade, of polished stucco, was broken by niches, and moulded arabesques, two inches in relief, covered it all over. What they represented or signified we could not make out with confidence, so thoroughly had the style been “conventionalized” by generations of artists; but in the original idea they were human figures probably, engaged in war and ceremonies of state. The wall was colored in Venetian red, with a pleasing gloss upon it, and it stretched twenty yards or so on either side the doorway. This was a Moorish arch, of wood, the same in type as those we are familiar with at Sydenham, and gaily painted. Inside and out all was clean and perfect.

Through this doorway a passage, smoothly coated with chunam, and tinted red, opened into the cour d’honneur. On the right hand, just inside the door, stood a fetich niche, very like an exaggerated font for holy water. It contained the usual medley of rubbish—bones and sticks and teeth and roots and tangles of string; a lot of eggshells also, pierced and tied together. Opposite to this niche was a hollow in the wall, two steps above the ground, just long enough and broad enough for a man to lie; the quarters, doubtless, of a slave who kept the door. What I have termed the cour d’honneur was a small quadrangle, unroofed, with alcoves much like boxes at a theatre on three of its sides. The middle one, that fronting the entrance, occupied the full breadth of the wall, saving a doorway that led through to the next court; the others were smaller. These boxes stood on a level, perhaps five feet above the floor of the yard. They had no way in from the back, but access was gained by steps from below, and the parapet, of mud and chunam, was cut away at that point. Wooden columns and arches, of Moorish design and color, marked the king’s box—that in the middle. They had hangings apparently, for pegs were there, and I found a silk “cloth” on the ground.

It was not difficult, with our experience, to refill this courtyard with the pride and pomp and circumstance of Quisa royalty. There sat the king on his earthen bench, wrapped in a spotless robe of cotton, home-spun, and home-dyed in graceful patterns. His sandals, with a golden sole and little, solid, golden figures for ornament, rested on a patchwork carpet of silk. His arms were bare, but loaded with bracelets; some of the costly Aggry bead, some a bristling string of nuggets unworked. Arab charms, wrapped in small leather cases, sewn with gold, encircled his wrists and elbows and knees, and they dangled from the arch above. On the floor at either hand crouched a page, one holding his pipe, silver-bound, one his drinking calabash, mounted in gold and carved. Behind these favorites squatted the bearer of the toddy jar, Dutch earthenware, set in silver, and the drinking calabash, carved and bound in gold; of the silver-mounted stool and gun, the silver spittoon, and knives with silver hafts in a belt of leopard-skin—in short, the retinue essential to his majesty’s comfort. Nearest of all stood the executioner, with his four-handled sword of office, looking like a toy-stool of gold with a clumsy blade thrust through the seat. The royal councillors sat upon the cross-benches, and the smaller alcoves were occupied by wives and slaves, handsome enough, many of them, their lips full but not thick, their noses straight, their skins brown with a shade of gold. A mass of ornaments, in bullion or filagree, decked the long wool of these ladies, combed to all manner of fantastic shapes: eccentricity has no bounds in dealing with that stiff and elastic material, which grows to a surprising length amongst Ashantis and Fantis. I have seen it drawn out, kinkles and all, eighteen inches from the skull, and thus remain stark on end, until the lady had time to get it arranged in, for instance, the exact similitude of a pine-apple, divided into lozenges, with a neat curl in the centre of each.

So the king of Quisa sat to display his magnificence daily, and to administer justice. It is the inclination of us superior beings to imagine that “off with his head,” is the monotonous refrain of every judgment pronounced by negro royalty. The notion is gathered perhaps rather from burlesques and comic songs than from inquiry, and I suspect that shrewd comment and patient debate were often heard in that pretty court. The general effect of it, even empty, astonished us all, from Sir Garnet to Tommy Atkins. But we showed our emotion in various ways. I entered with two young doctors, who had their billet at the palace. After going through and surveying it in silence, one of them hurriedly unpacked a trunk, produced his everlasting banjo, and sang an air of the day: “You know it all depends upon the way in which it’s done!” This exercise finished, he was equal to discussion.

A natural halting-place, as one may say, at the end of the first march from Jellalabad is the castle of a great Ghilzai chief, whose name I forget. He had been an active enemy in the late war; but for reasons unknown the political department long refused to let us take possession of this building, which is called Rosarbad, though it was empty; nor would they even permit us to encamp in the fields and groves about it. Accordingly a very small post was established on a bleak hillside in the neighborhood, a spot so stony and barren that pegs would not hold in the soil. Two nights I passed there are scored in the blackest of chalk among my experiences of mere wretchedness; for a gale was always blowing and tents were always collapsing: if one’s own escaped, the yelling and roaring of other sufferers made life almost as miserable. As for the horses, they enjoyed a battle scarcely interrupted, and the squealing all night, with the shouting of furious troopers, banished sleep. A detachment which had three weeks’ duty at that outpost lost a quarter of its strength by invaliding, the result of sheer fatigue. When I add that a night attack was always probable, and often threatened, the least fanciful of readers may conceive that existence at Boulé camp was not happy.

It was an aggravation and a mockery for these unfortunates to see the great tower of Rosarbad above the cypresses and planes but a thousand yards away, to know that it was confiscated by the laws of war, and that no human being dwelt in those comfortable quarters. The state of things became unbearable at last, the Politicals were overruled, and when I came down country from Gandamuck I found the castle occupied. It was late in the month of April. Quitting the barren, rocky highway, we rode across a bridge, rough but neat, through a screen of trees, and found ourselves in a landscape thoroughly and charmingly English. The crops were strange, no doubt, but they looked familiar. The stalwart peasantry who toiled there had dark faces and outlandish dress; but, buried to the waist in green, stooping above their work, they passed, at a glance, for English husbandmen. And the trees that bordered these pleasant fields, full-leaved, deepshadowed, resembled our native elm. Even the atmosphere was English, the still golden haze of a midsummer evening. We pulled up, each struck with thoughts not lightly to be breathed. The foreign landscape, the parched hills and dusty road behind, were all shut out. One might fondly dream for an instant that war and exile had come to an end, that these ruddy turrets peeping above the trees marked the ancient, hospitable home where we were eagerly expected. Our orderly looked and stared, and gazed and muttered—the stupid exclamation does not signify; it was meant to suggest wonder and delight and feeling beyond an honest trooper’s power of expression.

Envious fancy had done its utmost among those poor fellows camped at Boulé, in picturing the spot they were forbidden to approach. But it surpassed anticipation. I am not going to describe the scene, for I made no sketch, and some who will read this did, whilst every one who halted there keeps a recollection of Rosarbad. Nothing like it did we see in any part of Afghanistan. Though built of mud, its lofty walls, brand new, had almost the sharpness of granite, and they were thick enough to stand some pounding of solid shot. Frosts have tried them now, doubtless, rains have channeled them, the battlements are ruinous, and not one right angle remains; but it was mighty handsome in our day, looking like a feudal fortress, with a gate-tower almost majestic overlooking a grove of cypresses on the other side the moat: so dense was the foliage of this copse that daylight could not pierce it. A miscellaneous throng of bunniahs had converted its twilight arcades into a bazaar, hanging bright cottons from trunk to trunk, and establishing booths full of cheap glitter. Sowars and sepoys, in flowing, picturesque undress, strolled hand in hand through the chiaroscuro. Giant Pathans prowled up and down, all beard and eyes and dirt, gazing with rapt, vulture-like expression at the luxury displayed. Sometimes a yell arose, a sound of scuffling, a rush of frightened traders and of sepoys to the rescue; then from the struggling mass a prisoner was dragged, and perhaps a groaning comrade was borne to the gate.

Within the portcullis and the vaulted approach lay a garden, actually a garden, bordered on one side by the durbar hall, on another by a row of small latticed chambers. In the hall, which was raised several feet above the level, stood an enormous tub, into which a column of water fell by a shoot. It was forced to the upper story, and thence descended. Of all surprises that befell a visitor to Rosarbad, none equalled this. A soothing cataract, a shower-bath, and a fish-pond all in one make a convenience for the drawing-room hardly known in Europe. After the first enthusiasm, however, certain disadvantages betrayed themselves. The middle of the hall was a quagmire, and if in the zeal of admiration one approached too near, the mud held one fast while the shower wet one through. But this made part of the day’s fun. The officers of the little garrison cherished their odd quarters, and they applied their leisure to gardening, with such success that visitors were sometimes presented with a rose. I need scarcely say that the name of the castle has no connection with botany. The Pathan seems to be acquainted with five flowers only—jasmine, rose, chrysanthemum, iris, and narcissus. Painful to an enthusiast is the most successful of Oriental gardens. Though they bear a mass of flowers so that Peshawur, for instance, has an air laden with scents, the individual bloom is mean and the tree pitiful.

In contrast to the glories of Rosarbad, I recall a billet on the other side of Afghanistan. We had been snowed up in the Kojak pass—a miserable time, and when a thaw released us I pushed on with a comrade towards Quetta—a ride to try one’s good humor; for with the thaw came rain, which made that bare desert as slippery as ice—a peculiar condition dreaded under the name of ‘put.’ We got off the track somehow beyond Abdallah Karez, and very glad were we to find an empty village, where a Baboo go-master was posted to collect stores of forage and grain. He had three sepoys to protect him—a guard much less formidable than a score of Pathan dogs, left by their masters, I suppose, which fed upon the carcasses of camels lying all around. This Baboo was an ingenious man. The mud huts had been dismantled perhaps; anyhow, they were roofless and badly gapped. In the long frost our go-master had a bad time; the thermometer below zero at night, or always close upon it, and no better protection than a tent for his southern limbs. Moreover, there was some chance that the enemy might swoop down, or he thought so. Superstition loses its awful power in the extremity of wretchedness. The Baboo, who was forbidden to touch a dead insect or even to look at it, employed sepoys and muleteers, and anyone he could catch, in building a fortification of dead camels all round his store-house; and he lived therein, shuddering with remorse, but warm and secure. While the frost lasted it was mighty comfortable, but the thaw had reduced that Baboo to sore distress. His wall was decaying visibly under conditions which I need not suggest, and to enter the enclosure needed more heroism and more cotton wool than the average mortal is provided with. A camel’s is a heavy and unwieldy carcass when frozen hard: a regiment of scavengers could not have cleared away those scores of bodies when loosed by the thaw. The Government stores were protected after a fashion hitherto thought peculiar to Chinese warfare, by “stink-pot” torpedos in effect, and neither friend nor foe dared approach. I do not know the end of that story. If it is the traveller’s privilege to see queer incidents, it is too often his ill-luck to miss the explanation and the catastrophe.

A scene I cherish with especial tenderness is that passed at Changhi, behind Singapore. A Malay fishing village lay beneath our bungalow, upon a broad and snowy beach. In barbarous regions of the North men live underground, but these dwellings were suspended in the sunny air amongst plumes of cocoanut and betel; behind them rose the shadowy jungle. There was no cultivated land in sight, for the Malay finds his harvest and his garden in the sea. The smooth sand below high-water mark was a parterre of sponges, green and red, and purple blue, intermixed with coral. Old-fashioned people in Europe cherish certain round masses of limestone, daintily fluted, and put them under a glass case for ornament. Imagine their beauty in the spot where nature places them, every lip and hollow on the cream-white surface traced out in vividest pencilling of green, with the seaflowers of sponge around them.

But after the first impulse of delight, one almost comes to overlook this charming foreground; for beneath the water lies a tangle and a maze of all things lovely for shape and color and growth and motion. Coral takes a hundred flowery forms, weeds branch like trees or wave like serpents, sponges are cups of amethyst and ruby. When waves lie still, one sees just as clearly into the depths below as into the air above, and almost as far, as it seems. The vegetation is gigantic in its loveliness. There are coral growths shaped like an Egyptian lily and as white, but three feet in diameter, wherein a mermaid might take her bath. Others break into a thicket, each twig covered with snowy rosettes which bear a morsel of green velvet in their bosoms. Others are great round hillocks diapered with emerald, with here and there a bush of scarlet thorn springing from their sides. Through and over the garden, long silvery weeds tremble and quiver in a net. Small fish as quick as humming-birds, and almost as gay, dart to and fro. Water snakes float past in coils like Indian enamel of every shade, in red and brown and yellow and purple. I am grateful that fate allowed me three weeks of life at Changhi.