Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

The political situation, then, is becoming clearer. Three months ago it seemed to be a question rather of men than of measures. The Whigs alone, it appeared, could save the nation, by wresting the Government from the hands of men whose unhappy party connection disqualified them from comprehending even the elements of those modest administrative principles, 'peace, retrenchment, and reform.' Suddenly Lord Hartington, Mr. Forster, and Sir William Harcourt disappear from the scene, and the full blaze of Moral Liberalism is shed upon the situation, in the person of the statesman, who knows better than any man living how, beneath sublime religious sentiment, to disguise from himself, as well as from his countrymen, his inclination to surrender to physical force. Three months ago we were told that, however much the Liberal leaders might disapprove of the foreign policy of Her Majesty's Government, they would not attempt, when in power, to reverse it. All that is over now. Our position as a nation is to be determined by those true, moral, and Liberal principles which were embodied in the arrangement of the Three Rules of the Treaty of Washington, and in the surrender of the Black Sea Clauses of the Treaty of Paris. 'Happy England,' severed by the 'silver streak' from the brutal broils of the Continent, is told that, as far as international relations are concerned, its virtue is the same as that which Pericles praised in the Athenian women, political insignificance. Events too have brought within the range of practical politics' legislative measures hitherto undreamed of. Five bad seasons, and the farmers' consequent discontent, help to throw a flood of new moral light on the Law of Entail. Though the owner of personalty may without sin settle it on his children's children yet unborn, the owner of land, who claims the same liberty, traverses the beneficent designs of Providence.* And just as the explosion at Clerkenwell obtained 'justice for Ireland' in the shape of the Irish

* Of all the strange utterances of Mr. Gladstone during his recent visit to Midlothian, perhaps the most extraordinary is this: It appears to me that, if there is one law written more distinctly than another upon the constitution of human society by the finger of the Almighty, it is this-that the parent is responsible for making sufficient provision on behalf of the child. But the law of England is wiser than the Almighty; it improves upon Divine Providence. It won't trust the father to make provision for his son. It calls in the aid of the grandfather, commits to him the function of the parent, introduces a false, and, in my opinion, a rather unnatural relation even into the constitution of that primary element of society, the sacred constitution of the family. Not only, then, to liberate agriculture, gentlemen, but upon other grounds-and I will say upon what I think still higher grounds-I am for doing away with the present law of settlement and entail.' It is really saddening to find Mr. Gladstone having recourse to such fantastic considerations; and it makes us tremble lest the destinies of the country should again be entrusted to a man of such infirm judgment.

Church

Church and the Irish Land Acts, so the refusal of Irish tenants to pay their rents causes the representative of Religious Radicalism to reflect that the 'expropriation of the landlords' may some day have to be considered by the paternal wisdom of the State.

Our enquiry, inadequate no doubt, but, we submit, accurate and impartial, must be brought to a close. We asked for the Credentials of the Opposition, and we have found them. We have said nothing of that unprincipled parsimony which they are pleased to dignify with the fine epithets of economy and retrenchment, but, thanks to which, a Conservative Government, when first acceding to office, finds the public services starved into inefficiency. Nor have we alluded to the mischievous effects of that Short Service system, which has given us an army of boys, whom inexperience renders inferior in action, and whose youth and undeveloped constitution make easy victims to disease. The subject is a delicate one; and we are not anxious that the world should know what the Liberal Party have done with the British Army, until a period of peace shall enable the country to redress the mischief. We have preferred to ask what it is we may expect from them in the general government of the Empire, if, undeterred by the evils they have wrought, the country were to confide to them its destinies afresh. The enquiry has necessarily been long; but the answer to it can now be summed up in a single sentence. They seem to think they can make amends for their pusillanimity abroad, by indulging in boundless temerity at home.

Of useful, timely, and moderate reforms, there will always be ample need; and it is the business of an English Statesman, in periods of peace, to introduce them with promptitude and to carry them with decision. But there never must come a time when the rulers of this country think it within the province of their duty, even to contemplate as a possibility the smallest diminution of the territories of the British Empire, or to shrink from their forcible extension, if the only choice lies between advance and retreat. They should perpetually bear in mind that to the English race, as to the Roman, an imperial commission has been given.

'His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono;
Imperium sine fine dedi. Quin aspera Juno,
Quæ mare nunc terrasque metu caelumque fatigat,
Consilia in melius referet, mecumque fovebit
Romanos, rerum dominos, gentemque togatam.*

[blocks in formation]

6

6

Reading this prophetic passage, we sometimes like to think that our own aspera Juno,' our envious and embittered Opposition, consilia in melius referet,' will return to wiser and more patriotic counsels, and will yet dedicate itself to the honourable, and in the long run self-advantageous task of lending voice and vote to a Government that labours, night and day, to preserve intact and invulnerable that splendid inheritance, the British Empire. But if this pardonable hope be doomed to disappointment, and if the roar of faction should still drown the still small voice of patriotism, the duty of Lord Beaconsfield and his colleagues is plain. There is but one course for them to pursue; and that is to defy the opponents they have failed to convert, and to declare, with no uncertain voice, that they will never desist, while a single hour of office is left them, from unmasking the enemies, and maintaining the authority of England. They must forgive us for reminding them that this is an easier task than they sometimes seem to imagine. An appeal to the national pride of Englishmen was never made in vain; but it must be made without vacillation, and in a cause as clear as day. The abandonment by thousands of electors in Sheffield of the Party they had previously supported all their lives, in consequence of their disgust at the little concern displayed by the Opposition for the national honour, is an earnest of what will occur at the General Election in scores of constituencies, if the Cabinet only acts with vigour and speaks with plainness. Faction is not to be conciliated by compromise. The Liberal Party have strained every nerve, and adopted every manœuvre, in order to prevent the Government from propounding principles of Foreign Policy worthy of a great and valorous nation. They have failed. But they will yet succeed, if these principles be only tentatively and timorously applied from distrust in the magnanimous temper of the English people.

ART

THE

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

ART. I.-1. The Philosophical Works of David Hume. Edited by T. H. Green, Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford, and T. H. Grose, Fellow and Tutor of Queen's College, Oxford. 4 vols. London, 1874-5.

2. Hume. By Professor Huxley. London, 1879.

3. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. By Leslie Stephen. 2 vols. London, 1876.

4. Life and Correspondence of David Hume. By John Hill Burton, Esq., Advocate. 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1846.

5. The Student's Hume. New Edition, Revised and Corrected by J. S. Brewer, M.A., late Professor of Modern History and English Literature in King's College, London. London, 1880.

FOR

OR students of philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, who are abreast of modern speculative enquiry, the name of David Hume has a significance which it could not possibly have borne for his contemporaries or immediate successors, and which, in fact, it never acquired until the recent revival of attention to his contribution to abstract thought, after nearly a century of comparative oblivion. To the men of his time his chief aspect was that of a careless easy-tempered sceptic in religion, of a singularly subtle and perverse turn of mind, who delighted in gratifying his literary vanity by throwing out daring paradoxes, to startle simple believers and drive professed theologians to distraction. No doubt this was only too true of him; but had this been all, and had no greater achievement fallen to his lot than to give an impulse to deistic conceptions which stretched away into perilous contiguity to atheism, the course of modern philosophical thought would have been very different from that in which its main current, the current of its real progress, has flowed during the last hundred years. Placing him in connection with his immediate predecessors, Locke and Berkeley, from whom his inspiration was derived, and on whose foundations he set out with building; and tracing through Vol. 149.-No. 298.

U

Kant,

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »