peculiar circumstances in which French society then found itself, is the same thing as binding yourself to apply their theories and to imitate their activity, under an entirely heterogeneous set of circumstances, in a different country, and in a society is the very height of political folly, and with wholly dissimilar requirements. That is the argument if we straighten it out. The childishness of any such contention is so obvious, that I should be ashamed of reproducing it, were it not that this very contention has made its appearance at my expense several times a month for the last two years in all sorts of important and respectable prints. For instance, it appears that I once said somewhere that Danton looked on at the doings of his bloodier associates with "sombre acquiescence." Argal, it was promptly pointed out-and I espy the dark phrase constantly adorning leading articles to this day-the man who said that Danton sombrely acquiesced in the doings of Billaud, Collot, and the rest, must of necessity, being of a firm and log. ical mind, himself sombrely acquiesce in moonlighting and cattle-houghing in Ireland. Apart from the curious compulsion of the reasoning, what is the actual state of the case? Acquiescence is hardly a good description of the mood of a politician who scorns delights and lives laborious days in actively fighting for a vigorous policy and an effective plan which, as he believes, would found order in Ireland on a new and more hopeful base. He may be wrong, but where is the acquiescence, whether sombre or serene? The equally misplaced name of fatalism is sometimes substituted for acquiescence, in criticisms of this stamp. In any such sense anybody is a fatalist who believes in a relation between cause and effect. If it is fatalism to assume that, given a certain chain of social or political antecedents, they will inevitably be followed by a certain chain of consequences, then every sensible observer of any series or events is a fatalist. Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, and secret ballot, have within the last sixty years completely shifted the balance of political power in Ireland. Land legislation has revolutionized the conditions of ownership. These vast and vital charges in Ireland have been accompanied by the transfer of decisive power from aristocracy to numbers in Great Britain, and Great Britain is arbiter. Is it fatalism or is it common sense, to perceive that one new effect of new causes so potent must be the necessity of changing the system of Irish government? To dream that you could destroy the power of the old masters without finding new, and that having invited the nation to speak you could continue to ignore the national sentiment, was and the longer the dream is persisted in the ruder will be the awakening. Surely the stupidest fatalism is far more truly to be ascribed to those who insist that Ireland was eternally predestined to turmoil, confusion, and torment; that there alone the event defies calculation; and that, however wisely, carefully, and providently you modify or extinguish causes, in Ireland, though nowhere else, effects will still survive with shape unaltered and force unabated. No author has a right to assume that anybody has read all his books or any of them, but he may reasonably claim that he shall not be publicly classified, labelled, catalogued, and placed in the shelves, on the strength of half of his work, and that half arbitrarily selected. If it be permitted to me without excess of egotism to name the masters to whom I went to school in the days of early manhood, so far from being revolutionists and terrorists, they belonged entirely to the opposite camp. Austin's "Jurisprudence" and Mill's "Logic" and "Utilitarianism" were everything, and Rousseau's "Social Contract" was nothing. To the best of my knowledge and belief, I never said a word about natural rights" in any piece of practical public business in all my life; and when that famous phrase again made its naked appearance on the platform three or four years ago, it gave me as much surprise and dismay as if I were this afternoon to meet a deinotherium shambling down Parliament Street. Mill was the chief influence for me, as he was for most of my contemporaries in those days. Experience of life and independent use of one's mind which he would have been the most ready of men to applaud - have since, as is natural, led to many important corrections and deductions in Mill's polit ical and philosophical teaching. But then we were disciples, and not critics; and nobody will suppose that the admirer of Wordsworth, the author of the essay on Coleridge, and of the treatise on representative government, the administrator in the most bureaucratic and authoritative of public services, was a terrorist or an unbridled democrat, or anything else but the most careful and rationalistic of polit ical theorizers. It was Mill who first held up for my admiration the illustrious man alike in action and in thought. It is plain that they are the direct opposite and contradictory of one another. whom Austin enthusiastically called the "godlike Turgot," and it was he who encouraged me to make a study of that great and inspiring character. I remember the To clench the matter by chapter and suspicion and the murmurings with which verse, I should like to recall what I have Louis Blanc, then living in brave and hon- said of these theories and principles in orable exile in London, and the good their most perfect and most important friend of so many of us, and who was really literary version. How have I described a literary Jacobin to the tips of his fingers, Rousseau's social contract? It placed, I remonstrated against that piece of what said, the centre of social activity elsehe thought grievously misplaced glorifica- where than in careful and rational extion. Turgot was, indeed, a very singular aminations of social conditions, and carehero with whom to open the career of lit- ful and rational effort to modify them. erary Jacobin. So was Burke, the au- It substituted a retrograde aspiration for thor of those wise sentences that still ring direction, and emotion for the discov in our ears: The question with me is, ery of law. It overlooked the crucial not whether you have a right to render difficulty - namely, how to summon new your people miserable, but whether it is force, without destroying the sound parts not your interest to make them happy. It of a structure which it has taken many is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, generations to erect. Its method was but what humanity, reason, and justice geometric instead of being historic, and tell me I ought to do. Nobody shall per- hence its desperate absurdity." suade me, where a whole people are con- whole theory was constructed with an cerned, that acts of lenity are not means imperfect consideration of the qualities of conciliation." Burke, Austin, Mill, of human nature, and with too narrow Turgot, Comte, what strange sponsors a view of society. It ignored the great for the "theories and principles of the fact that government is the art of wisely Terror "! dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. It "gives us not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government.' What these opinions came to, roughly speaking, was something to this effect: that the power alike of statesmen and of publicists over the course of affairs is strictly limited; that institutions and movements are not capable of immediate or indefinite modification by any amount of mere will; that political truths are always relative, and never absolute; that the test of practical, political, or social proposals is not their conformity to abstract ideals, but to convenience, utility, expediency, and occasion; that for the reformer, considerations of time and place may be paramount; and finally, as Mill himself has put it, that government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, and shall be, depends less on institutions than institutions depend upon it. If I were pressed for an illustration of these principles at work, inspiring the minds and guiding the practice of responsible statesmen in great transactions of our own day and generation, I should point to the sage, the patient, the triumphant action of Abraham Lincoln in the emancipation of the negro slaves. However that may be, contrast a creed of this kind with the abstract, absolute, geometric, unhistoric, peremptory notions and reasonings that formed the stock in trade of most, though not quite all, of the French Revolutionists, Its Such language as all this is hardly that of a disciple to a master, in respect of theories and principles which he is making his own for the use of a lifetime. “There has been no attempt" [in these pages], I said in winding up, "to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the social contract. But there is another side to its influence. We should be false to our critical principle, if we do not recognize the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless." Any writer would have stamped himself as both unfit for the task that I had undertaken, and entirely below the level of the highest critical standard of the day, if he had for a moment dreamed of taking any other point of view. As for historical hero-worship, after Carlyle's fashion, whether with Jacobin idols or any other, it is a mood of mind that must be uncongenial to anybody who had ever been at all under the influence of Mill. Without being so foolish as to disparage the part played by great men in great crises, we could have no sympathy with the barbaric and cynical school, who make greatness identical with violence, force, and mere iron will. Cromwell said, maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it. in vindication of himself, that England every circumstance, every consideration, was had need of a constable, and it was true. The constable, the soldier, the daring counsellor at the helm, are often necessities of the time. It is often a necessity of the time that the energy of a nation or of a movement should gather itself up in a resolute band or a resolute chief; as the revolutionary energy of France gathered itself up in the greater Jacobins, or that of England in Oliver Cromwell. Goethe says that nature bids us "Take all, but pay." Revolutions and heroes may give In conclusion, the plain truth is that all us all, but not without price. This is at parallels, analogies, and similitudes bethe best, and the best is the exception. tween the French Revolution, or any part The grandiose types mostly fail. In our or phase of it, and our affairs in Ireland own day, people talk, for example, with are moonshine. For the practical poliadmiration of Cromwell's government in tician his problem is always individual. Ireland, as if it were a success, instead For his purposes history never repeats of being one of the worst chapters in the itself. Human nature, doubtless, has a whole history of Irish failure. It was weakness for a precedent; it is a weakforce carried to its utmost. Hundreds ness to be respected. But there is no were put to the sword, thousands were such thing as an essential reproduction of banished to be slaves of the planters in social and political combinations of cirthe West Indies, and the remnant were cumstance. To talk about Robespierre driven miserably off into the desolate in Ireland is just as idle as it was in wilds of Connaught. But all this only Robespierre to harangue about Lycurgus prepared the way for further convulsions and deadlier discontent. and Brutus in Paris. To compare the two is to place Ireland under a preposterIt is irrational to contrast Carlyle's ous magnifying-glass of monstrous dimenheroes, Cromwell, Mirabeau, Frederick, sion. Nor is disparity of scale the only Napoleon, with men like Washington or difference, vital as that is. In no one of Lincoln. The circumstances were differ- the leading characteristics of a community ent. The conditions of public use and in a state of ferment, save the odium that of personal greatness were different. But surrounds the landlords, and that not uniif we are to talk of ideals, heroes, and versal, does Ireland to-day really resemble models, I, for one, should hardly look to the France of a hundred years ago. ManFrance at all. Jefferson was no flatterer ners, ideas, beliefs, traditions, crumbling of George Washington; but his character institutions, rising aspirations, the orderof Washington comes far nearer to the ing of castes and classes, the rivalry of right pattern of a great ruler than can be creeds, the relations with the governing found in any of Carlyle's splendid dithy-power-all constitute elements of such rambs, and it is no waste of time to recall and to transcribe it: - His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more judiciously. But if deranged during the course of the action, if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in a readjustment. He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until radical divergence as to make comparison for any more serious purpose than giving a conventional and familiar point to a sentence, entirely worthless. the moral of Irish commotions in the inIt is pure dilettantism, again, to seek surrection of La Vendée. That, as somebody has said, was like a rising of the ancient Gauls at the voice of the Druids, and led by their great chiefs. It will be time enough to compare La Vendée with Ireland when the peasantry take the field against the British government with Beresfords, Fitzgeralds, and Bourkes at their head. If the Vendéans had risen to drive out the Charettes, the Bonchamps, the Larochejacquelins, the parallel would have been nearer the mark. The report of the Devon Commission, the green pamphlet containing an account of the famous three days' discussion between O'Connell and Butt in the Dublin Corporation in 1843, or half a dozen of Lord Clare's speeches between 1793 and 1800, will give a clearer insight into the Irish problem than a bushel of books about the Vendéan or any other episode of the Revolution. Equally frivolous is it, for any useful purpose of practical enlightenment, to draw parallels between the action of the Catholic clergy in Ireland to-day and that of the French clergy on the eve of the Revolution. There is no sort of force in the argument that because the French clergy fared ill at the Revolution, therefore the Irish clergy will fare ill when self-government is bestowed on Ireland. Such talk is mere ingenious guess-work at best, without any of the foundations of a true historical analogy. The differences between the two cases are obvious, and they go to the heart of the matter. For instance, the men who came to the top of affairs in France were saturated both with speculative unbelief for one thing, and with active hatred of the Church for another. In Ireland, on the contrary, there is no speculative unbelief, as O'Connell used so constantly to boast; and the Church being poor, voluntary, and intensely national and popular, has nourished none of those gross and swollen abuses which provoked the not unreasonable animosity of revolutionary France. In truth, it is with precisely as much or as little reason that most of the soothsayers and prognosticators of evil take the directly opposite line. Instead of France these choose, as they have an equally good right to do, to look for precedents to Spain, Belgium, or South America. Why not? They assure us, in their jingling phrase, that Home Rule means Home Rule, that the priests will be the masters, and that Irish autonomy is only another name for the reign of bigotry, superstition, and obscurantism. One of these two mutually destructive predictions has just as much to say for itself as the other, and no more. We may leave the prophets to fight it out between them while we attend to our business, and examine facts and probabilities as they are, without the aid of capriciously adopted precedents and fantastical analogies. Parallels from France, or anywhere else, may supply literary amusement; they may The Church did not fare so very ill, after all. The State, in 1790, undertook the debts of the Church to Budget of rather more than that amount. (Boiteau's Etat de la France, p. 202.) the tune of 130,000,000 livres, and assured it an annual furnish a weapon in the play of controversy. They shed no light and do no service as we confront the solid facts of the business to be done. Louis the Fourteenth was the author of a very useful and superior commonplace when he wrote: "No man who is badly informed can avoid reasoning badly. I believe that whoever is rightly instructed, and rightly persuaded of all the facts, would never do anything else but what he ought." Another great French ruler, who, even more than Louis, had a piercing eye for men and the world of action, said that the mind of a general ought to be like a field-glass, and as clear; to see things exactly as they are, et jamais se faire des tableaux, -never to compose the objects before him into pictures. The same maxim is nearly as good for the man who has to conquer difficulties in the field of government; and analogies and parallels are one way of substituting pictures for plans and charts. Just because the statesman's problem is individual, history can give him little help. I am not so graceless as to depreciate history or literature either for public or for private persons. "You are a man," Napoleon said to Goethe; and there is no reason why literature should prevent the reader of books from being a man; why it should blind him to the great practical truths that the end of life is not to think but to will; that everything in the world has its decisive moment, which statesmen know and seize; that the genius of politics, as a great man of letters truly wrote, has not All or Nothing" for its motto, but seeks on the contrary to extract the greatest advantage from situations the most compromised, and never flings the helve after the hatchet. Like literature the use of history in politics is to refresh, to open, to make the mind generous and hospitable; to enrich, to impart flexibility, to quicken and nourish political imagination and invention, to instruct in the common difficulties and the various experiences of government; to enable a statesman to place himself at a general and spacious standpoint. All this, whether it be worth much or little, and it is surely worth much, is something wholly distinct from directly aiding a statesman in the performance of a specific task. In such a case an analogy from history, if he be not sharply on his guard, is actually more likely than not to mislead him. I certainly do not mean the history of the special problem itself. Of that he cannot possibly know too much, nor master its past course and foregone bearings too thoroughly. Ireland is a 66 great standing instance. There is no more striking example of the disastrous results of trying to overcome political difficulties without knowing how they came into existence, and where they have their roots. The only history that furnishes a clue in Irish questions is the history of Ireland. From The Leisure Hour. WILLIAM BARNES. DORSET is proud of William Barnes. It is not too much to say a wider England owes him affectionate remembrance. His poems in the dialect of his native county made his name popular, but he himself was much more than the best of them. He was an admirable type of a class which no country is wise to forget -a man of original faculty, of abounding knowledge, eager-thoughted, large-hearted, yet content to discharge the duties which fell to him without thought of place or gain. Such men are the salt of a people. The biography, by one of his daughters, recently published, will be a surprise to many readers; it is a worthy memorial, written with modest and graceful reserve, yet with full recognition of his various work.* The Vale of Blackmore is one of the choicest parts of Dorsetshire. Here the poet was born; his childhood was nurtured in its old-world ways, his genius found first food in its sequestered beauty: His father was a tenant-farmer. The first Dorset Barnes is said to have come southward in the train of King John. There are records which show that in the time of Henry VIII. a certain William Barnes had a grant of land in these parts for service rendered to the king. The family took root and flourished, but in the course of years lost its position. Thus it came about that in 1800, Rushay, a farm near Pentridge, was the birthplace of William Barnes. His father began life an orphan, with the charge of three small sisters, and acquitted himself honorably in the strug gle. His mother, Grace Scott, of Fifehead Neville, is described as "a woman of refined tastes, and with an inherent love of art and poetry." It is told of her that she used to grieve over her boy, for in those earliest years he was small and delicate. As she took his little tapering • The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philologist. By his Daughter, Lucy Baxter ("Leader Scott."). VOL. LXII. 3180 Macmillan. LIVING AGE. "Poor fingers into hers, she would sigh child! how will he ever gain his living? But said one rural comforter, "Never you mind what he looks like; he'll get his living by learning-books, and such like." She herself died while he was still a child; but doubtless the boy drew from her much of the inspiration of his manhood. The little lad learned his letters at the village dame school, but he learned much more as he wandered in the fields and by the riverside. Afterwards he went daily to Sturminster, where he attended a grammar school in which both girls and boys upon him in a new light. A local solicitor, were taught. Suddenly the world broke wanting a boy to copy deeds in a good hand, called at the school to inquire for one. with the concurrence of his father, he was The choice fell upon Barnes, and, quickly transferred to Mr. Dashwood's office. Three or four years later we find him removing to the office of Mr. Coombs, at Dorchester. Both lawyers remained among his lifelong friends. These stages are chiefly of interest now began his course. as marking the limitations under which he There was nothing in these external relations to prompt the accumulations of knowledge for which he afterwards became remarkable. His learn. ing seems to have been almost as much impulse to acquire came from within. We a fruit of his genius as his poetry. The have no full account of the successive steps by which he advanced. This lad of eighteen does not appear to have planned architecturally or built by system; he reared his habitation of wisdom by an instinct akin to that with which the birds build; no straw or twig of fact escaped him, and almost unconsciously he wove whatever he own living thoughts. came across into a fitting home for his This activity of mind was one of the most notable features of his life. He read with avidity; out of office hours he was always learning something. Now it was music from the organist, and now classics from the clergyman. At Dorchester the rector of St. Peter's gave him access to his library, and helped him by evening lessons to lay the foundation of his philological studies. Presently he began to write poetry. In 1822 he published "Orra, a Lapland Tale," the frayed by his first efforts in wood engravcosts of which venture were in part deing. In this art he had acquired sufficient skill to supply some blocks for a local volume, and it remained an occasional means of replenishing his exchequer or of recreation with him. At this time he |