conclusion. Let him paint his thoughts an inch thick, to this favour they must come. We need not, however, pursue the subject further. We are not writing to convince our readers of a stupendous truth, but to exhibit the absurdity of Mr. Morley's struggles against it. The history of mankind, he says, is to him "a huge pis-aller." He might as well say that the climate of the Pole was a huge pis-aller, because he can fancy camellia trees growing on an iceberg, and potatoes and truffles maturing themseves in the ice.

Let us pass on to certain further examples of the same confusion. Like all philosophers of his school, who conceive of our duty to society as the sole standard of Ethics, he is constantly introducing another of a wholly different kind, and that is Abstract Truth. His pages bristle with solemn allusions to this to 'Truth, alone of all words essentially divine and sacro-sanct.' * We need not multiply references. It is enough to say, that a large portion of his volume on 'Compromise' is devoted to maintaining that error can never be useful, and that, the more fully we look Truth in the face, the better it must necessarily be for us; or that, as he puts it elsewhere, 'the possession of ever more and more truth makes life ever better worth having, and worth preserving." And yet the moment he comes to apply this maxim to life, we actually find him deliberately and solemnly repudiating it. He admits that Carlyle is stating a profound truth in saying 'That the world is after all a show, a phenomenon or appearance, no real thing.' 'Yes,' replies Truth's apostle, but deep souls dealing with the practical questions of society, do well to push the vision as far from them as they can, and to suppose that the world is no show.'t

Still more remarkable is his way of applying his principles with regard not to Truth itself, but to the best means of arriving at it. The best means, as he says over and over again, is entire toleration, entire freedom of thought, entire liberty of teaching, entire renunciation of persecution. On no point is Mr. Morley more loud than this. On no crime does he pour forth such anger as on restraint of teaching and opinion. And yet when he comes to apply his principles to practice, we find him declaring with all the emphasis possible, that the attempt to teach a child the Catholic religion in its entirety, should be treated as one would treat an attempt at 'physical mutilation.' § But space warns us that we must be bringing our observations to a close. In analyzing Mr. Morley's inconsistency, we

* Miscellanies,' vol. i. 227.

Miscellanies,' vol. i. p. 187. Vol. 168.-No. 335.

T

+ Voltaire,' pp. 14.
§ 'Compromise,' p. 187.

began

began with his politics; we have now traced the same inconsistency through the entire framework of his thoughts; we have seen him as a worshipper of humanity industriously blaspheming his Deity; as prophet of the value of life, declaring life valueless; as the denier of free-will, shuffling out of the doctrine of necessity; as the advocate of Truth, telling us to forget one-half of it; and as the advocate of freedom of opinion, demanding with bitter gravity the suppression of opinions held by the majority of the Christian world. And now it remains to ask for the explanation of this. This brings us back again to his politics, for it is in his character as a politician that the explanation we require is to be found.

At what period in his life Mr. Morley first recognized himself as a Radical party man we do not know, and we are not concerned to enquire. But we do know-for his writings clearly show it to us - that he must have connected himself to Radicalism, heart and soul and intellect, long before he gave to the world the earliest of his republished writings. Without trespassing on any of those domains the privacy of which we should be the last persons to violate, his books supply us with a certain political biography of their author, which we are quite within our rights in treating as public property; and in this biography is to be found the explanation we are in search of. Mr. Morley's political creed, for whatever reasons he first embraced it, seems to owe all its details, all its proofs, and the assurance with which he holds it, to observation at second hand. He has not derived them from an understanding of his own country, or of his own age; but from literary study of another country, and of another age, from a study of France before and during the Revolution. So far as we can judge, he must have started on these studies with Radical sympathies already strongly developed; but be that as it may, sympathies of this kind are the only sympathies which have accompanied him through the course of his work, and he has seen events solely through their partial light. One result of this has been that, having been able to see only the evil in the old régime in France, he has become incapable of seeing, or at least of heartily appreciating, the elements of incalculable value in the established order elsewhere. Those who are familiar with the language and views of continental Socialists in London, tell us that numbers of them imagine that in this country every institution prevails which strikes them as most oppressive on the Continent; and that they perplex their English auditors by asking them, in terrible tones, how long they will submit to such an atrocity as the conscription. In the same way Mr. Morley, from his literary

studies

a suf

studies of France, has carried away with him the curious bugbear of Privilege. What in this country he means by privilege we might well be at a loss to say. The constitutional power of the House of Lords forms, we presume, some part of his ideas; but it plainly can form a very small part only; for he tells us that the destruction of privilege 'more than anything else' sums up the meaning of Radical progress in the world; and it is surely giving progress a very limited scope, to make the abolition of the House of Lords anything else but one of its minor objects. Nor again can he be thinking of any privileges which the Lords enjoy, outside those which come to them as constitutional legislators; for we have it on the high authority of Professor Thorold Rogers, that the only privilege of this kind which the Lords still retain is that of going into dinner in a certain order of precedence. We can quite fancy, that to Professor Thorold Rogers the destruction of this privilege may seem ficient justification of Radicalism; for in a moment of happy candour he instanced, as a typical triumph to be looked forward to by the faithful in the Radical millennium, the fact that Lord Salisbury would be reduced to 'plain Mr. Cecil.' But we can hardly imagine that this would content Mr. Morley. What then are the privileges which Radicalism exists to combat? Are they the privileges given by wealth, in the way of education, of travelling, and of leisure? They cannot be that, for Mr. Morley is no communist. What then are they? It would appear that they consist in this, and in nothing besides this-in the natural, and unwritten prestige, which the old landed families of the peers and country gentlemen have possessed and still possess, not as related to the Legislature, but as forming an integral and leading part in the social life of the country. The privilege which excites Mr. Morley's antipathy is thus a thing, which though difficult to describe, is yet familiar to us all. It is the complex product of centuries of national life; a thousand traditions, habits of thought, and customs endeared by use, have gone to the making of it.

We know what it is quite well; but what we want to know is the reason of Mr. Morley's antipathy to it. And this question is one that is of more than personal interest; for, if Mr. Morley is representative in any of the points we have alluded to, he is representative in being possessed by this odd antipathy also. We can readily imagine any one, who had not watched English Radicalism carefully, being utterly unable to credit

* Compromise,' pp. 125, 126.

the

the fact, that the entire temper and cohesion of a great political party should depend on a common hostility to a privilege' of so harmless a kind as this-a privilege wholly dependent on the character of those who enjoy it, and the suffrages of those who naturally and willingly accord it. It may well be powerful for good. It cannot be powerful for evil. It may oil the wheels of progress; it cannot stop their revolution. we not then, let us ask, amusing or abusing ourselves with a fancy, when we reduce Radicalism to this childish and irrational prejudice, equally unworthy of men of thought, and of honest men of the world? To answer this question we need go no further than one of Mr. Morley's latest and most important utterances.

Are

We refer to a speech delivered by him last month, at Clerkenwell, in which, as is said by a leading Radical paper, he deliberately set himself to formulate a programme,' which should rally the disaffected masses of London to the Liberal banner.' In one way this speech, as we willingly bear witness, does him great honour. Though its arguments as a whole were miserable, its tone was admirable. Views, suggestions, and proposals, as hollow as those of the most bitter and ignorant agitator, were urged with a noble self-restraint worthy of the most enlightened philanthropist; and we can only regret that we must make the ungracious criticism, that the temper in which they are urged, by a really pathetic contrast, does but serve to make their substance the more pitiable.

6

For what does the reader suppose that Mr. Morley's programme consists of? He shall have it first summed up in Mr. Morley's own concluding words; and then we will see briefly what are its points in detail. Attack we must,' he says, and attack we will. Privilege, caste ascendency, selfish interests—we must smite them hip and thigh.' It is true he told his audience that Radicalism did not mean only fighting; but in so far as it did mean fighting, these things were the things against which its fight was directed. And now, working back through Mr. Morley's speech, let us see the particular evils described under the general terms. As for selfish interests, we may take the mention of them as a mere rhetorical flourish. Mr. Morley could not mean seriously that we could 'smite them hip and thigh;' for only a few minutes before he had been warning his hearers not to expect a millennium, because we could not change human nature. But for his mention of 'privilege and caste ascendency' we can bring him to book more definitely. Reduced to tabular statement,' says the Radical Paper, Mr. Morley's programme is as follows:

(1) Free

(1) Free education. (2) Appropriate the endowments of the City Companies. (3) Tax the ground rents of the living; (4) and the real estate of the dead. (5) Municipal control of the police. (6) Abolish the leasehold system.' Here then are Mr. Morley's proposed reforms. Which of them are the reforms that are to further the vital work of Radicalism, and smite privilege and caste ascendency hip and thigh? Free education is certainly not one of them; nor the municipal control of the police, for the grounds on which Mr. Morley demanded this were merely grounds of economy; nor, we gather, except in a very limited way, is the appropriation of the endowments of the City Companies. All these reforms may be excellent in their degree; but the main work of Radicalism, the abolition of privilege, is evidently comprised in the three others, taxation of the ground rents of the living, and the real estate of the dead, and the abolition of the leasehold system. These reforms, for Londoners at any rate, mean the destruction of those accursed things, privilege and caste ascendency; a destruction which, as Mr. Morley has deliberately told us in his works, sums up the meaning of Radical progress, more than anything else.'

And now let us ask how, in what conceivable way, have Privilege and Caste Ascendency anything to do with these reforms whatever? How are they involved in, or assailed by, them? To this seemingly unanswerable question, Mr. Morley in one short and truly singular passage, gives us what, to his mind, is the answer. If you and I,' he said to his hearers, save a little money, and we leave it either on deposit or in shares and stocks and so forth, we pay one rate upon it; if we are great landlords, we pay another and a very much lower rate. That is a shameful thing.' The whole meaning of this statement, from the Radical point of view, is comprised in one single word—the word 'great,' as applied to landlords. It is solely the application of this word that enabled Mr. Morley, either to his own mind, or to the minds of his hearers, to represent the landlord's position as a position of caste or privilege, or to draw that contrast so essential to Radicalism as analyzed by himself, between the treatment met with by the duke with his millions on the one side, and the common citizen with his little hoard of savings on the other.

Now, has Mr. Morley any justification for this use of the word 'great'? And is there any reality in the contrast which it enables him to draw? We do not ask if there is much reality, but if there is the slightest reality; not, if Mr. Morley has much justification, but if he has the slightest justification.

Merely