OUR EPILOGUE

ON

AFFAIRS.

THE great event in men's thoughts as we go to press, is the peace with China. The Governor Yeh people at Pekin, whom some of our pacific and humane friends have taken under their protection as injured innocents, have proved true to their nature. The barbarians who have fallen into their hands have had rich experience of their clemency and magnanimity. Reason is for the reasonable, humanity is for the humane, but Manchoos know no law save the law of force. The great thing needed was, that those miscreants should be humbled in the face of the empire. That lesson has been administered, we hope for their benefit, and for the benefit of their victims. We now know something concerning the difference between the Chinese people and their present masters.

The quarter that has brought us good news from China, has brought us good news from France. The move in the direction of freedom of speech in the Senate, and the abolition of English passports, are not small matters. There is something in them, and they imply much more than they include. Sovereigns who are born amidst a mesh of dynastic traditions, are slow to innovate. To cede to pressure is to cede to an enemy, and to cede without it is to cede without reason-so there is no concession. Napoleon III. is more free than such people, and wiser, and seems destined to teach them a few things which they greatly need to learn. The Treaty, too, which certainly has cost us much, will be found, we doubt not, to do more than cover the outlay. Pity these signs of amity did not come earlier, so as to have precluded some signs of another aspect. But England is not likely to be less England, from being in possession of an augmented fleet, and of a grand National Guard, sufficient to supersede a large standing army.

Garibaldi has done his work. All honour to the man who has supplied an example so noble to an age so needing it. But Victor Emmanuel's great trouble will come from his last acquisition. The discarded functionaryism of the middle class will not be smoothed down in a day. The hereditary feculence of the lower class will hardly be cleansed out in the time of the present generation.

OUR EPILOGUE

ON

BOOKS.

LITERATURE.

The Limits of Exact Science as applied to History. An Inaugural Lecture, delivered before the University of Cambridge. By the Rev. CHARLES KINGSLEY, M.A., Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. Macmillan.-Many persons will have thought that Mr. Kingsley was not exactly the person to be raised to the function of Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. He is a generous and large-hearted man, and a man of unquestionable genius. But not a few of his judgments concerning men and affairs have been narrow and rash to an extraordinary degree, as coming from a man so gifted. Breadth, caution, patience of inquiry before adopting a conclusion, are among the qualities indispensable to the historian, and these are qualities in which Mr. Kingsley has not hitherto excelled. His passions and his imagination are potent, and, in realizing their objects, they have been allowed to make light of the control that should have been laid upon them by his higher faculties.

But Mr. Kingsley appears to have accepted the high trust conferred upon him with a due sense of his responsibility in so doing. There is hardly a department of wholesome teaching for youth that may not have a fitting place on the lips of the Professor of Modern History in Cambridge. And who does not see, that to make the true and the noble strong at the centre, is to do much towards making them strong at the circumference. In the opening sentences of this lecture Mr. Kingsley says, 'I can only promise that the whole of such small 'powers as I possess will be devoted to this professorate; and that it 'will be henceforth the main object of my life to teach modern history ' after a method which shall give satisfaction to the rulers of this Uni'versity.' We shall be sorry to lose Mr. Kingsley from those other walks of literature in which we have been wont to meet him, but his only wise course, was to decline the appointment, or to accept it after this manner.

In this inaugural lecture we have some of the characteristics of the author's genius as fresh as ever. One or two of his old crotchets come up, though the brains have been knocked out of them in more than one quarter. On the whole, however, the lecture is an admirable production, and promises well. It shows that Mr. Kingsley is a man far too healthy in soul to be a disciple of Mr. Buckle. His lecture is an onslaught on the narrow and heartless dogma which would make the

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science of history to be only another form of the science of statistics. He denounces, as it deserves, the teaching which places the moral world under the wheels of destiny in the physical world. He does not believe that in the progress of society knowledge is everything and virtue nothing. Nor does he admit that the premises on which Dr. Temple founds his conclusions in regard to the Education of the World' are such as to warrant those conclusions. We are glad to see that Mr. Kingsley has shown himself to be well aware that there is much more in this great theme than is dreamt of by some of the great philosophical people who have been recently meddling with it. We have said a little on this topic elsewhere (Art. I). What we have said was in print before Mr. Kingsley's lecture reached us, but we shall fortify our own statements by one or two extracts from Mr. Kingsley's pages. Speaking of those who make some general tendencies, which they call laws, over-ride moral agency, Mr. Kingsley

says:

'But we shall not agree with them, I trust, when they represent these invariable and immutable laws as resulting in any inevitable sequence, or irresistible growth. We shall not deny a sequenceReason forbids that; or again, a growth-Experience forbids that: but we shall be puzzled to see why a law, because it is immutable itself, should produce inevitable results; and if they quote the facts of material nature against us, we shall be ready to meet them on that very ground, and ask:-You say that as the laws of matter are inevitable, so probably are the laws of human life? Be it so but in what sense are the laws of matter inevitable? Potentially, or actually? Even in the seemingly most uniform and universal law, where do we find the inevitable or the irresistible? Is there not in nature a perpetual competition of law against law, force against force, producing the most endless and unexpected variety of results? Cannot each law be interfered with at any moment by some other law, so that the first law, though it may struggle for the mastery, shall be for an indefinite time utterly defeated? The law of gravity is immutable enough: but do all stones inevitably fall to the ground? Certainly not, if I choose to catch one, and keep it in my hand. It remains there by laws; and the law of gravity is there too, making it feel heavy in my hand: but it has not fallen to the ground, and will not, till I let it. So much for the inevitable action of the laws of gravity, as of others. Potentially, it is immutable; but actually, it can be conquered by other laws.

'I really beg your pardon for occupying you here with such truisms: but I must put the students of this University in mind of them, as long as too many modern thinkers shall choose to ignore them.

Even if then, as it seems to me, the history of mankind depended merely on physical laws, analogous to those which govern the rest of nature, it would be a hopeless task for us to discover an inevitable sequence in History, even though we might suppose that such existed. But as long as man has the mysterious power of breaking the laws of his own being, such a sequence not only cannot be discovered, but it

cannot exist. For man can break the laws of his own being, whether physical, intellectual, or moral. He breaks them every day, and has always been breaking them. The greater number of them he cannot obey till he knows them. And too many of them he cannot know, alas, till he has broken them; and paid the penalty of his ignorance. He does not, like the brute or the vegetable, thrive by laws of which he is not conscious: but by laws of which he becomes gradually conscious; and which he can disobey after all. And therefore it seems to me very like a juggle of words to draw analogies from the physical and irrational world, and apply them to the moral and rational world; and most unwise to bridge over the gulf between the two by such adjectives as 'irresistible' or 'inevitable,' such nouns as order, sequence, law'-which must bear an utterly different meaning, according as they are applied to physical beings or to moral ones.'

The brute force of the ignorant, and the force of another kind in the case of the great men who are born from time to time to wield the forces in all other men, are irregular and disturbing powers which break through all average order or law, and leave but a slight base to the ideas about progress that are often founded upon them.

'Understand me, I beg. I do not wish (Heaven forbid !) to discourage inductive thought; I do not wish to undervalue exact science. I only ask that the moral world, which is just as much the domain of inductive science as the physical one, be not ignored; that the tremendous difficulties of analyzing its phenomena be fairly faced; and the hope given up, at least for the present, of forming any exact science of history; and I wish to warn you off from the too common mistake of trying to explain the mysteries of the spiritual world by a few roughly defined physical laws (for too much of our modern thought does little more than that); and of ignoring as old-fashioned, or even superstitious, those great moral laws of history, which are sanctioned by the experience of ages.

'Foremost among them stands a law which I must insist on, boldly and perpetually, if I wish (as I do wish) to follow in the footsteps of Sir James Stephen: a law which man has been trying in all ages, as now, to deny, or at least to ignore; though he might have seen it if he had willed, working steadily in all times and nations. And that is that as the fruit of righteousness is wealth and peace, strength and honour; the fruit of unrighteousness is poverty and anarchy, weakness and shame. It is an ancient doctrine, and yet one ever young. The Hebrew prophets preached it long ago, in words which are fulfilling themselves around us every day, and which no new discoveries of science will abrogate, because they express the great root-law, which disobeyed, science itself cannot get a hearing.

For not upon mind, gentlemen, not upon mind, but upon morals, is human welfare founded. The true subjective history of man is the history not of his thought, but of his conscience; the true objective history of man is not that of his inventions, but of his vices and his virtues. So far from morals depending upon thought, thought, I

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believe, depends on morals. In proportion as a nation is righteous, in proportion as common justice is done between man and man, will thought grow rapidly, securely, triumphantly; will its discoveries be cheerfully accepted, and faithfully obeyed, to the welfare of the whole commonweal. But where a nation is corrupt, that is, where the majority of individuals in it are bad, and justice is not done between man and man, there thought will wither, and science will be either crushed by frivolity and sensuality, or abused to the ends of tyranny, ambition, profligacy, till she herself perishes amid the general ruin of all good things; as she has done in Greece, in Rome, in Spain, in China, and many other lands. Laws of economy, of polity, of health, of all which makes human life endurable, may be ignored and trampled under foot, and are too often, every day, for the sake of present greed, of present passion; self-interest may become, and will become, more and more blinded, just in proportion as it is not enlightened by virtue; till a nation may arrive, though, thank God, but seldom, at that state of frantic recklessness which Salvian describes among his Roman countrymen in Gaul, when, while the Franks were thundering at their gates, and starved and half-burnt corpses lay about the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that in doomed Jerusalem of old, were drinking, dicing, ravishing, robbing the orphan and the widow, swindling the poor man out of his plot of ground, and sending meanwhile to the tottering Cæsar at Rome, to ask, not for armies, but for Circensian games.'

Yes; these frivolities and vices, which have come so commonly along with the higher forms of civilization, do so commonly undo all that better causes have done, as to demonstrate the absurdity of all dreams about human perfectibility, so long as that perfectibility is left to come from merely human influences.

Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Orally collected, with a Translation. By G. F. CAMPBELL. Two vols. Hamilton.-The ballads and tales of nations bring us into acquaintance with the thought and heart of the people. The mirth and sadness of their homes, and of their social life, come out in this form. Robin Hood, and Clim of the Clough, may not have been all that our old stories relate concerning them, but we know something of our ancestors when we read the literature which delighted them, and which was, in part at least, created by them. Mr. Campbell is entitled to much praise for the pains he has taken in collecting these tales, for it could only have been done by much travel, and much patient effort. Here is a peep at the travel our author performed, and at the people he met with.

'Every horse I met on the road stopped of his own accord. Every man asked my news,-'Whence I took the walking,' where I lived, and why I came ? Saddles were often sacks, stirrups a loop of twisted bent, bridles the same, and bits, occasionally wood. Dresses were coarse, but good; but there was an air of kindly politeness over all, that is not to be found in homespun dresses in any other country I know. When I was questioned, I answered, and told my errand, and