with all that was most admirable. Genius, except in exceedingly rare cases genius even as lofty as that of Shakespeare or Bacon -is notoriously accompanied by a want of balance in character; and the physical defects with which, in Carlyle's case, the finest qualities were associated, will be recognised, now that the whole of the truth is known, as bringing into a true, a most moving and atoning perspective a long series of errors and even brutalities which, because they have hitherto been not entirely explicable, have been by his angry and aggrieved admirers set down as perverse fictions.

As to whether Mr. Froude was right, from his own point of view, in attempting to soften the harsher and more painful details of the case with which it was his unwilling lot to deal, opinions may well be divided. He resembled Mr. Gladstone in having three courses open to him. One was to draw a conventional picture of his hero, from which every fault which could suggest psychological criticism had been unscrupulously touched out, as in the flattering negative of a photographer; another was to tell two-thirds of the truth, in such a manner that Carlyle's typically human, and, consequently, mixed character, should exhibit some of its contradictions, but not exhibit them fully. The third course was to lay the whole of the truth bare, as it has at last been laid bare now. After the event it is proverbially easy to be wise; and my own opinion, formed in this easy way, is that Mr. Froude would have been better advised had he told the whole truth at once. But the fact is now made evident that his error, if error it was, was due to those very qualities of loyalty and over-sensitive friendship in which his ignorant traducers declare him to have been so scandalously and conspicuously wanting.

It may be added that few biographers have ever had a task laid on them so beset with difficulties as that which Carlyle imposed upon Froude. As the reader will see, not only from Froude's notes, but from Sir James Stephen's letter, Carlyle was continually changing his mind with regard to the manner in which his own sorrows and greatness, and those of his wife, should be commemorated. Carlyle was, indeed, on the present occasion, at all events, a singular mixture of grim coyness and megalomania. One-half of his nature made him shrink from exhibiting any anxiety that his own poor private life should be presented to the world at all. Another side of his nature made him see it on a scale so magnified that, in his eyes, it would, if written, be a new Book of the Bible; and three of his nearest friends, who were busy men of the world, would be honoured by devoting most of their remaining years to making "earnest survey of his illegible notes, and "their sub

an

sidiaries." 1 To Mr. Froude's difficulties, and to Carlyle's own responsibility for them, Sir James Stephen, in his letter, pays an eloquent tribute. Mr. Froude may, quite possibly, have made certain mistakes; but it is the opinion of those who were really conversant with the business that his mistakes were few and the integrity of his conduct absolute.

manner.

To a certain extent, no doubt, the attacks made upon Mr. Froude may have been made in good faith, and have certainly had their origin in ignorance. At the same time, if I may imitate Mr. Lilly's style, there are "eminent men" and "highly gifted women still living, and still prominent in London, to whom the facts now revealed to the general public were matters, from the first, of private and intimate notoriety, and that Mr. Froude's assailants should have known nothing about them shows how illequipped they were for dealing with the matter in question. It is interesting also to notice how much childish and reckless virulence these critics have imported into their dealing with matters as to which they had every means of arriving at sound conclusions. An amusing example of this is afforded by Professor Norton, who in his eagerness to inflict at all costs some personal discredit on Mr. Froude, has attacked his accuracy in the following most original He takes the first five pages of the text of the first edition of the Reminiscences as edited by Mr. Froude, and complains that Mr. Froude, in transcribing Carlyle's manuscript for the press, has made no less than a hundred and thirty errors; whilst another critic, taking a similar calculation as a basis, has declared that in the whole work the probable errors amounted to something like eighteen thousand. Of the hundred and thirty errors at which Professor Norton is so severely indignant, seventy-two are neither more nor less than ordinary corrections of punctuation, such as the omission or insertion of commas, or the substitution of colons for semicolons; fifty-two are simply omissions of capital letters, and with the exception of four illegibly written words which Mr. Froude may have perhaps misread, the other errors are all equally trivial. Professor Norton does not even pretend that Mr. Froude altered the meaning of the passage in any appreciable way, and yet on this babyish foundation persons apparently educated have sought to establish the contention that it was impossible to trust Mr. Froude as a biographer, as an historian, or as a man. Mr. Froude, like many historians, may have made many errors in detail, just as Turner, in his magnificent landscapes, made many errors which would be wanting in a house-agent's photograph; but "these word-catchers who live in syllables," as Pope called their prototypes, merely weaken their case by showing that they are driven to fortify it in Professor Norton's way.

(1) See Carlyle's Will, as printed in the present volume.

Finally, to return to the matter which immediately concerns us here, I subjoin two letters, from Mr. Carlyle's nearest relatives, addressed to Mr. Froude himself, which alone are sufficient to show the worthlessness of the whole outcry raised against Mr. Froude in connection with the Carlyle Memoirs :—

To J. A. FROUDE, ESQ., LONDON.

Newlands Cottage, Ecclefechan, N.B., August 8th, 1881. DEAR SIR,-We have heard that it is possible that you may decline altogether to write the life of our late brother Thomas. Knowing the great esteem and regard entertained for you by Thos. Carlyle, and having respect to his express wishes, we should view such a conclusion with great regret. And we take this method of assuring you of our perfect trust in you, and particularly of our own non-participation in the vexatious dispute now going on. [The rest of the note expresses confidence in Mr. Carlyle's executors.] We are, dear sir, yours respectfully,

JAMES CARLYLE, MARY CARLYLE AUSTIN.

To J. A. FROUDE, ESQ., LONDON.

Newlands Cottage, Ecclefechan, N.B., 28th April, 1883. DEAR SIR,-My father desires me to thank you for the three volumes of Letters and Memorials which came quite duly. He [father] enjoys them much, being better able to recall events and circumstances referred to than he can remember what has transpired a few days ago. Again thanking you for your kind and prompt attention, I am,

Yours faithfully, JAMES CARLYLE, JUNIOR.

W. H. MALLOCK.

NOTE. Since writing the above, I have seen in The Morning Post a letter from Sir James Crichton-Browne, announcing that in one of this month's reviews he is preparing to pulverise Mr. Froude anew. His letter illustrates his curiously uncritical temper. He is going, he says, to expose a certain "base" imputation made against Carlyle's character in Mr. Froude's private notes. In the imputation referred to there is nothing base whatever. It is the imputation of no moral fault, but of a purely natural defect. It is an imputation of precisely the same kind as that which Sir James makes against the state of Mrs. Carlyle's nerves. The only baseness possible in such a case would not be in making such an imputation, or even in making it erroneously; but in making it knowing it to be erroneous. The idea that Mr. Froude, whom Sir James admits to have been an honourable man in the ordinary affairs of life, was guilty of this conduct, is an idea too absurd to require refutation or discussion.

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THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. CCCCXL. NEW SERIES.-AUGUST 1, 1903.

PREFERENTIAL TARIFFS AND MR. CHAMBERLAIN.

I.

COBDENISM AND THE COLONIES.

IT has been shown in the previous paper that the free imports system is unfavourable to the efficiency of capital. The Free Traders admit the charge when they assert that American or German protection forces the expansion of enterprise at the expense of the consumer. But they are in this dilemma. If universal Free Trade and the removal of hostile Tariffs would be to our advantage, the present unequal system must be a disability. It is unanswerably proved that while we import more and more finished goods from competitive countries, we export less and less manufactures to them. This tendency is in its nature fatal, and would long ago have compelled an alteration of our fiscal system if the rising demand of the Colonies had not concealed the true state of our recent relations with our commercial rivals.

While Tariffs shut out competition in their own countries, and free imports facilitate their sales in this country, Americans and Germans must have an expanding market. The British trader, attacked on all sides in his home sphere by those who exclude him from their preserves, must have by comparison a narrowing market. He is forced into dearer production in spite of cheap food, since relative quantity of output is the overbearing factor in determining relative cost. At the same time, the institutions of his country aid his foreign competitors to extend their trade and to cheapen their output. The straiter sect of Cobdenism used to argue that hostile duties abroad were a positive advantage to this country. Who maintains that now? No one denies that the Tariffs of the competitive nations have inflicted profound injury upon the position of British trade, while not preventing the countries imposing them from extending commerce, amassing capital, and improving social conditions as they had never done before. We cannot equalise matters by obtaining universal Free Trade which, without a total change in national ideals, and the complete political reconstruction of Europe as a

VOL. LXXIV. N.S.

result of great wars, will remain a dream as fond and vain as that of universal peace. We can equalise matters by restricting the market of those who restrict our market. There is no other way.

But if free import is unfavourable to the efficiency of capital, what follows in the first instance from the standpoint of Imperial policy? Modern sea-power is the adjunct of capital. It is infinitely less dependent than military power upon mere population. But it is inseparable from wealth and high technique. The German output of iron and steel is already absolutely greater than our own, while that of the United States is twice as great. We have sacrificed the productive power of the country to the temporary comfort of the average consumer. Unless we can recover supremacy upon this side of the Atlantic in the output of iron and steel, we cannot permanently retain shipbuilding and carrying supremacy, nor can we permanently keep the sea. Under twenty years of Protection Germany has risen from the third to the second place in iron and steel, and we have sunk from the first place to the third. In the last decade our textile trades have shown a slight but positive decline. They will ultimately share, under present methods, the fate of iron and steel, as iron and steel are unmistakably threatened with the fate of agriculture. How will Lord Rosebery's Charlottenburg remedy this state of things, when our rivals, in the absence of any retaliatory power upon our side, can always adjust their Tariffs to neutralise our efficiency? We can only expand our output by securing our market at home and extending our market in the Colonies. Tariffs restrict our field. Preference alone can enlarge it. To sacrifice everything to cheap consumption means living to eat-to encourage production means eating to live, and it is what really increases your industrial appetite in the long run and improves your industrial digestion. What would Cobden have thought if he could revisit the world to-day, when Germany, France, Belgium, and even the United States,1 with all its internal resources, are increasing their import of raw material far faster than we areas fast, let us say, as we are increasing our import of finished manufactures? All this, let it be repeated again and again, is the real process which is bringing about the slowing down of home production and relaxing the whole driving power of Empire. It must ultimately destroy our power to retain Colonial trade, and if it does that we must lose commercial and Imperial supremacy alike. Let us more narrowly examine that issue.

(1) When France, for instance, is sending us quite as much silk as Cobden anticipated, but is also sending us more cotton than she buys, and about four times as much woollens as she buys!