Traits" of the Philosopher of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1856). Here, at all events, is one more reason for the prevalent feeling against England.

Certainly we have all admired, during the last six months, the firmness with which England has met her initial reverses in the South African war. We have all done homage to her tenacity and perseverance, though we knew all the time that it was a mere question of money. I use the expression in its best sense, and am far from desiring to re-echo any calumnious personal accusation. But I do mean to say that it was perfectly clear, from the beginning, to the European mind that England did not intend to allow the Transvaal to escape from her politico-economical "sphere of influence;" and that she did intend to keep hold, if not precisely of the gold mines of the Rand, at least of the "plant which they represent." Really and truly, if there had been no gold mines, the English would have left the Boers alone. They have merely undertaken to seize by force a source of riches which, for the last twenty years, they have tried in vain to get by diplomacy, by intrigue and by endeavoring to swamp the Boer element in the foreign one. I do not know when, or to what extent, they will succeed in this enterprise. But their success will not alter the fact that they have acted in exact opposition to all which Europe has been trying to do in the present century by way of introducing into international relations a justice more in accordance with that which individuals practise among themselves, in exact opposition also to that which England is justly proud of having realized upon her own soil.

Whence comes this contradiction? It certainly seems, we say again, as though the conscience of the individual was nowhere more delicate, more anxious, more scrupulous than in England. Nowhere else are folk so anxious about

morals and morality. In an order of ideas with which, in my character of professional critic, I am quite familiar, it is not the novels of Tolstoi and Dostoievsky, nor those of George Sand, but the romances of Dickens, Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Mrs. Humphry Ward, it is the strictures of Carlyle and the æsthetics of Ruskin which have brought in humanitarian and socialistic ideas. Can it be that it is all only decoration and stage-setting? This is what the enemies of England say— the people who do not love her, though without knowing why. For my own part, I do not believe anything of the kind. It is, if I am not mistaken, only another form of that Anglo-Saxon pride which seems to be the groundwork of the race. The personal morality of Englishmen and the political immorality of England spring from the same

source.

Protected by his geographical isolation and, as it were, intrenched in his island; intoxicated by that great prosperity in which, if temperament, sagacity, good sense and national moderation have their part, circumstances also have surely gone for something; imbued with that feeling of security which results from the possession of wealth, but which also degenerates so easily into a sense of personal importance; accustomed to a manner of living which differs in many respects from ours, and which glories, under the name of eccentricity, in defying our customs; all these discrepancies and peculiarities have passed, insensibly, among the English of our day, into a consciousness and conviction of the superiority of their race. Origins and idiosyncrasies go for little. Brachycephalous or dolichocephalous, blonde or brown, Celt or Saxon, Norman or German, Manchester manufacturer or city merchant, governor at the Cape or peer of England, the contemporary Eng

lishman is, in his own eyes, a man apart, the product of a unique process of selection, the aristocratic variety, so to speak, of the human race. We continentals have sometimes spoken of this temper of mind as the Englishman's insolence; but the expression is not wholly just. Other people's insolence is deliberate; the Englishman's appears to be involuntary and almost unconscious. He cannot exactly be said to despise other men. He ignores them. But from this ignorance or insolence, whichever it be, one thing results. An Englishman does not apply the same rule to his own actions as to those of other men. He overlooks in others certain things which he would never permit himself to do, that is his self-respect; but he also permits himself to do to others what he would never overlook if they did it to him, and there we have the principle of his foreign policy!

It has often been compared with that of the ancient Romans, and, allowing for two thousand years' distance of time, there are certainly some analogies between them. Neither an Englishman nor a Roman ever doubted for one moment his right, or even his duty, to do anything whatsoever for the greatness of Rome or the enrichment of England. This fact was eloquently set forth only a short time ago in the Revue des Deux Mondes, by Dr. Kuyper, deputy to the General Assembly of Holland. But there are differences as well, important ones, too; and without attempting to rehearse them all, which would be tiresome, beside savoring of a rhetorical exercise, we may emphasize as the chief difference of all, this:-that while the Romans adapted themselves readily to the peoples whom they conquered and adapted those populations to themselves, the English never assimilate a subject people, and still less do they assimilate themselves to it. Before a hundred

years had elapsed, after the conquest of Spain and Gaul, those countries were entirely Roman. The ancient world had its Syrian and its Thracian emperors. But the English in Indianot to mention Australia, New Zealand, the Cape or the Congo-guard themselves in the most jealous manner from all contact, intermingling, or community of race. I shall be told that there are exceptions, but I speak of the general rule. I am even willing to admit that there are strong reasons in favor of such a policy. It is a serious question whether the mixture of races in South America, and even in India itself, has not been disastrous upon the whole. The Portuguese could tell us something on this head. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the haughty isolation of the Englishman amid a subject population has had the effect of transforming his practical sovereignty into a confused but obstinate and powerful sentiment of the heterogeneity of the Anglo-Saxon race. The conditions of English supremacy all over the world are such as to intensify the pride of blood. Like the Pharisee in Scripture, the Englishman, in all his acts, thanks God that he is not as other men are. Could anything be more opposed to that broad sentiment of humanitycaritas humani generis - which genius of the Latin race displayed in the universe conquered by its arms? In this respect the English are no Romans. If their prototype is to be sought in history-a fanciful proceeding in any case I should find it in the Carthaginians.

the

Now, suppose this feeling transferred to international relations, and how can the English themselves wonder if the pride of other nationalities is outraged? Every race has its qualities. Neither the Frenchman, the Dutchman, the German, the Spaniard or the Italian has any occasion to regard himself as inferior to the Anglo-Saxon. The su

periority of the latter is a mere matter of circumstance, and it looks as though the English, with all their pride, were beginning to get an inkling of the fact. Have they not shown considerable alarm in these late years at the progress of French colonization, Russian expansion and German commerce? How, then, would it be with them if they had also to bear the military burdens of Germany, Russia and France, and keep four or five hundred thousand men on a war-footing every year? We greatly admire, as I said before, the cool and steadfast valor with which the British have met their reverses in South Africa. This may have been an affair of temperament, but is it not possible that the disasters in question, humiliating though they were, and mortifying to the pride of the whole nation, actually decimated only armies of mercenaries? It was only officers belonging to an aristocracy which is now a small minority, or soldiers by trade, for whom death on the battle-field is but a "professional risk," calculated and paid for in advance, who were touched in their personal and family relations. Moreover, the war, even in the most unfavorable event, would neither have threatened London with a siege nor Liverpool with bombardment. What, one asks, would become of British "sang-froid" should such a case really arise? God forbid that we should desire it; but the fact is that when we come to look closely into what English vanity so readily describes as the result of natural superiority, we find it to be the product of a combination of circumstances, possibly provisional, but certainly contingent. And who does not know that in international, no less than private relations, there is nothing which the mass of men bear less patiently than the pride of those who take credit to themselves for the favors of fortune. The Philip Seconds, the Louis Fourteenths and the Napoleons

of our race have learned this truth by cruel experience.

We shall be reminded, perhaps, that all this is mere pettifogging; and, apart from any question of the superiority of race, we shall be asked if we presume to deny, however the fact may be explained, the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization. A comparison will be drawn between English and Boers, and we shall be requested to say whether or no we think that the substitution of the former for the latter,-of that mighty nation of merchants, artisans, warriors, statesmen, savants, thinkers, artists and men of letters for a handful of farmers, huntsmen and shepherds, would be favorable to the progress of humanity.

We reply in the first place that we know nothing about it; and in the second, that even if we did know, or thought we knew, we are forbidden by the principles of political economy to put upon anything a higher value than it will bear. Let us endeavor, just here, to define what may be called the "colonial sophism." Where we are really only striving to place our ironmongery, our cotton and woollen fabrics, our felt hats and other millinery, we flatter ourselves that we are diffusing the blessings and the light of civilization. Not merely has the greed of gain often blinded us (nay, it does so still, and every day of our lives) to the immorality of trade, as when we opened up China, at the cannon's mouth, as a market for our opium and deluged the Kanak and the Moori with the poison of our alcohol, but we have come to confound what we call "progress" with an increase of business. Nay, more, we have actually persuaded ourselves that any kind of violence is permissible for the attainment of such a result. The English hold the same belief, and after four hundred years, during which their historians have been eloquently reviling the Spaniards for the cruelties

which accompanied the conquest of Mexico and Peru, their statesmen find it perfectly right and natural to annihilate, in the name of Anglo-Saxon civilization and its "superiority," a small nation of the same race, the same religion, the same communion even, as theirs.

Did not Mr. Chamberlain himself say, totidem verbis, in the House of Commons on the 5th of February, 1900: "The differences between ourselves and the Transvaal are not the work of any government. They are the product of circumstances, of the deep disparities existing between Boer character and English character, Boer civilization and English civilization, Boer education and English education. These are the true causes of the present state of things." Exactly so! and Mr. Chamberlain has, at least, the merit of frankness. Let Boer civilization, education, character even, perish if they are incompatible with those of the English. The world has got to be Anglicized, and not merely "moralized," as a condition of its future progress! The only thing which Mr. Chamberlain has forgotten, or neglected to tell us, is what the disparities in question are, and what the signs whereby the superiority of a civilized nation is recognized.

What is there, in fact, so "superior" about the civilization so extravagantly lauded? Setting aside the Boers, of whose customs, character and education I must confess that I know very little, what vast advantage would accrue to the rest of the world by accepting the English standard in these matters? A motion was introduced into the House of Commons recently for extending the penalty of flogging to various crimes and misdemeanors, at present punished by imprisonment only. The motion was not carried, but the Times was quite disgusted by its failure, and took the opportunity to set forth at length the great penal efficacy

of corporal punishment. What is the conclusion, if not that there is as yet no adequate sense in England of the degradation involved in bodily chastisement, alike to the wretch who endures, the executioner who inflicts and the society that tolerates it?

Take another case, the way in which England recruits her armies. What Frenchman, German or Russian would not blush for the human race were he to see the coarse bait offered to the soldiers of the Queen in the regions about St. Martin's Lane and Trafalgar Square in this year of grace 1900? Not only is British civilization in no respect superior to the German or French article, but I do not believe there is to be found at the present time any other great nation where popular customs are so bound up in a network of tradition and habit, and of prejudices which elsewhere it is the glory of modern civilization definitely to have abjured. Rigidly economic, Manchesterian and liberal, Darwinian also and individualistic, the civilization of England is adapted to England only; and it is because the world is beginning at last to suspect as much, because the importation of English fashions threatens to destroy, in other European nations, the feeling of their own personality, because this much vaunted "superiority" will frequently be found to lie solely in the facilities which English customs offer for the gratification of a selfish spirit,-it is for these reasons, and such as these, that England has found the opinion of Europe almost unanimously hostile to herself.

Need we add that in no case would "superiority" of civilization create what is called a "right"? It may involve duties, but it is no more authoritative than superiority of intellect or of strength. This is a point which mighty England has too often overlooked during the century now nearly

ended. Being unable, in the words of Pascal, to establish the fact that justice is synonymous with strength, she has forgotten that the problem is not solved by decorating strength with the name of justice. But sooner or later she will have to acknowledge the truth. Whatever may be the issue of the war in the Transvaal, England is beginning to be enlightened about the attitude of Europe. If these words of mine might The Quarterly Review.

contribute in ever so slight a degree to this result, I should be only too happy. I should not regret, and I would offer no apology for whatever in it may be displeasing to a good many Englishmen. It is an old proverb which says that our flatterers are our worst enemies, and the highest mark of esteem one can offer to a great people, as to an honest man, is loyally to point out an error as soon as it is descried. F. Brunetière.

warm.

The Leisure Hour.

Nora Hopper.