What has become of this parliamentary title? Improvements, if they had been made, or were presumed to have been made by tenants anterior to the sale, have ceased to be the property of the purchaser, and he has at the same time been deprived of some of the plainest and most inseparable rights of property. He has lost the power of disposing of his farms in the open market, of regulating the terms and conditions on which he lets them, of removing a tenant whom he considers unsuitable, of taking the land back into his own hands when the specified term of a tenancy had expired, of availing himself of the enhanced value which a war or a period of great prosperity, or some other exceptional circumstance, may have given to his property. He has become a simple rent-charger on the land which by inheritance or purchase was incontestably his own, and the amount of his rent-charge is settled and periodically revised by a tribunal in which he has no voice, and which has been given an absolute power over his estate. He bought or inherited an exclusive right. The law has turned it into a dual ownership. A tenant right which, when he obtained his property, was wholly unknown to the law, and was only generally recognised by custom in one province, has been carved out of it. The tenant who happened to be in occupation when the law was passed can, without the consent of the owner, sell to another the right of occupying the farm at the existing rent. In numerous cases this tenant right is more valuable than the fee simple of the farm. In many cases a farmer who had eagerly begged to be a tenant at a specified rent has afterwards gone into the land court and had that rent reduced, and has then proceeded to sell the tenant right for a sum much more than equivalent to the difference between the two rents. In many cases this has happened where there could be no possible question of improvements by the tenant. The tenant right of the smaller farms has steadily risen in proportion as the rent has been reduced. In many cases, no doubt, the excessive price of tenant right may be attributed to the land hunger or passion for land speculation so common in Ireland, or to some exceptional cause inducing a farmer to give an extravagant price for the tenant right of a particular farm. But although in such instances the price of tenant right is a deceptive test, the movement, when it is a general one, is a clear proof that the reduction of rent did not represent an equivalent decline in the marketable value of the land, but was simply a gratuitous transfer, by the State, of property from one person to another. Having in the first place turned the exclusive ownership of the landlord into a simple partnership, the tribunal proceeded, in defiance of all equity, to throw the whole burden of the agricultural depression on one of the two partners. The law did, it is true, reserve to the landlord the right of pre-emption, or in other words the right of purchasing the tenant right when it was for sale, at a price to be determined by the Court, and thus becoming once more the absolute owner of his farm. The sum specified by the Court was usually about sixteen years' purchase of the judicial rent. By the payment of this large sum he may regain the property which a few years ago was incontestably his own, which was held by him under the most secure title known to English law, and which was taken from him, not by any process of honest purchase, but by an act of simple legislative confiscation.

Whatever palliations of expediency may be alleged, the true nature of this legislation cannot reasonably be questioned, and it has established a precedent which is certain to grow. The point, however, on which I would especially dwell is that the very party which most strongly opposed it, and which most clearly exposed its gross and essential dishonesty, have found themselves, or believed themselves to be, bound not only to accept it but to extend it. They have contended that, as a matter of practical politics, it is impossible to grant such privileges to one class of agricultural tenants and to withhold it from others. The chief pretext for this legislation in its first stages was that it was for the benefit of very poor tenants who were incapable of making their own bargains, and that the fixity of tenure which the law gave to yearly tenants as long as they paid their rents had been very generally voluntarily given them by good landlords. But the measure was soon extended by a Unionist government to the leaseholders, who are the largest and most independent class of farmers, and who held their land for a definite time and under a distinct written contract. It is in truth much more the shrewder and wealthier farmers than the poor and helpless ones that this legislation has chiefly benefited.

Instances of this kind, in which strong expediency or an absolute political necessity is in apparent conflict with elementary principles of right and wrong, are among the most difficult with which a politician has to deal. He must govern the country and preserve it in a condition of tolerable order, and he sometimes persuades himself that without a capitulation to anarchy, without attacks on property and violations of contract, this is impossible. Whether the necessity is as absolute or the expediency as rightly calculated as he supposed, may indeed be open to much question, but there can be no doubt that most of the English statesmen who carried the Irish agrarian legislation sincerely believed it, and some of them imagined that they were giving a security and finality to the property which was left, that would indemnify the plundered landlords. Perhaps, under such circumstances, the most that can be said is that wise legislators will endeavour, by encouraging purchase on a large scale, gradually to restore the absolute ownership and the validity of contract which have been destroyed, and at the same time to compensate indirectly—if they cannot do it directly—the former owners for that portion of their losses which is not due to merely economical causes, but to acts of the legislature that were plainly fraudulent.

There are other temptations of a different kind with which party leaders have to deal. One of the most serious is the tendency to force questions for which there is no genuine desire, in order to restore the unity or the zeal of a divided or dispirited party. As all politicians know, the desire for an attractive programme and a popular election cry is one of the strongest in politics, and, as they also know well, there is such a thing as manufactured public opinion and artificially stimulated agitation. Questions are raised and pushed, not because they are for the advantage of the country, but simply for the purposes of party. The leaders have often little or no power of resistance. The pressure of their followers, or of a section of their followers, becomes irresistible; ill-considered hopes are held out; rash pledges are extorted, and the party as a whole is committed. Much premature and mischievous legislation may be traced to such causes.

Another very difficult question is the manner in which governments should deal with the acts of public servants which are intended for the public service, but which in some of their parts are morally indefensible. Very few of the great acquisitions of nations have been made by means that were absolutely blameless, and in a great empire which has to deal with uncivilised or semi-civilised populations acts of violence are certain to be not infrequent. Neither in our judgments of history nor in our judgments of contemporaries is it possible to apply the full stringency of private morals to the cases of men acting in posts of great responsibility and danger amid the storms of revolution, or panic, or civil war. With the vast interests confided to their care, and the terrible dangers that surround them, measures must often be taken which cannot be wholly or at least legally justified. On the other hand, men in such circumstances are only too ready to accept the principle of Macchiavelli and of Napoleon, and to treat politics as if they had absolutely no connection with morals.

Cases of this kind must be considered separately and with a careful examination of the motives of the actor and of the magnitude of the dangers he had to encounter. Allowances must be made for the moral atmosphere in which he moved, and his career must be considered as a whole, and not only in its peccant parts. In the trial of Warren Hastings, and in the judgments which historians have passed on the lives of the other great adventurers who have built up the Empire, questions of this kind continually arise.

In our own day also they have been very frequent. The Coup d'etat of the 2nd of December, 1851, is an extreme example. Louis Napoleon had sworn to observe and to defend the Constitution of the French Republic, which had been established in 1848, and that Constitution, among other articles, pronounced the persons of the representatives of the people to be inviolable; declared every act of the President which dissolved the Assembly or prorogued it, or in any way trammelled it in the exercise of its functions, to be high treason, and guaranteed the fullest liberty of writing and discussion. 'The oath which I have just taken,' said the President, addressing the Assembly, 'commands my future conduct. My duty is clear; I will fulfil it as a man of honour. I shall regard as enemies of the country all those who endeavour to change by illegal means what all France has established.' In more than one subsequent speech he reiterated the same sentiments and endeavoured to persuade the country that under no possible circumstances would he break his oath or violate his conscience, or overstep the limits of his constitutional powers.

What he did is well known. Before daybreak on December 2, some of the most eminent statesmen in France, including eighteen members of the Chamber, were, by his orders, arrested in their beds and sent to prison, and many of them afterwards to exile. The Chamber was occupied by soldiers, and its members, who assembled in another place, were marched to prison. The High Court of Justice was dissolved by force. Martial law was proclaimed. Orders were given that all who resisted the usurpation in the streets were at once, and without trial, to be shot. All liberty of the press, all liberty of public meeting or discussion, were absolutely destroyed. About one hundred newspapers were suppressed and great numbers of their editors transported to Cayenne. Nothing was allowed to be published without Government authority. In order to deceive the people as to the amount of support behind the President, a 'Consultative Commission' was announced and the names were placarded in Paris. Fully half the persons whose names were placed on this list refused to serve, but in spite of their protests their names were kept there in order that they might appear to have approved of what was done.[45] Orders were issued immediately after the Coup d'etat that every public functionary who did not instantly give in writing his adhesion to the new Government should be dismissed. The Prefets were given the right to arrest in their departments whoever they pleased. By an ex post facto decree, issued on December 8, the Executive were enabled without trial to send to Cayenne, or to the penal settlements in Africa, any persons who had in any past time belonged to a 'secret society,' and this order placed all the numerous members of political clubs at the mercy of the Government. Parliament, when it was suffered to reassemble, was so organised and shackled that every vestige of free discussion for many years disappeared, and a despotism of almost Asiatic severity was established in France.

It may be fully conceded that the tragedy of December 4, when for more than a quarter of an hour some 3,000 French soldiers deliberately fired volley after volley without return upon the unoffending spectators on the Boulevards, broke into the houses and killed multitudes, not only of men but of women and children, till the Boulevards, in the words of an English eye-witness, were 'at some points a perfect shambles,' and the blood lay in pools round the trees that fringed them, was not ordered by the President, though it remained absolutely unpunished and uncensured by him. There is conflicting evidence on this point, but it is probable that some stray shots had been fired from the houses, and it is certain that a wild and sanguinary panic had fallen upon the soldiers. It is possible too, and not improbable, that the stories so generally believed in Paris that large batches of prisoners, who had been arrested, were brought out of prison in the dead hours of the night and deliberately shot by bodies of soldiers, may have been exaggerated or untrue. Maupas, who was Prefet of Police, and who must have known the truth, positively denied it; but the question what credence should be attached to a man of his antecedents who boasted that he had been from the first a leading agent in the whole conspiracy may be reasonably asked.[46] Evidence of these things, as has been truly said, could scarcely be obtained, for the press was absolutely gagged and all possibility of investigation was prevented. For the number of those who were transported or forcibly expelled within the few weeks after December 2, we may perhaps rely upon the historian and panegyrist of the Empire. He computes them at the enormous number of 26,500.[47] After the Plebiscite new measures of proscription were taken, and, according to Emile Ollivier, one of the most enthusiastic and skilful eulogists of the Coup d'etat, in the first months of 1852 there were from 15,000 to 20,000 political prisoners in the French prisons.[48] It was by such means that Louis Napoleon attained the empire which had been the dream of his life.

Like many, however, of the great crimes of history, this was not without its palliations, and a more detailed investigation will show that those palliations were not inconsiderable. Napoleon had been elected to the presidency by 5,434,226 votes out of 7,317,344 which were given, and with his name, his antecedents, and his well-known aspirations, this overwhelming majority clearly showed what were the real wishes of the people. His power rested on universal suffrage; it was independent of the Chamber. It gave him the direction of the army, though he could not command it in person, and from the very beginning he assumed an independent and almost regal position. In the first review that took place after his election he was greeted by the soldiers with cries of 'Vive Napoleon! Vive l'Empereur!' It was soon proved that the Constitution of 1848 was exceedingly unworkable. In the words of Lord Palmerston: 'There were two great powers, each deriving its existence from the same source, almost sure to disagree, but with no umpire to decide between them, and neither able by any legal means to get rid of the other.' The President could not dissolve the Chamber, but he could impose upon it any ministry he chose. He was himself elected for only four years, and he could not be re-elected, while by a most fatuous provision the powers of the President and the Chamber were to expire in 1852 at the same time, leaving France without a government and exposed to the gravest danger of anarchy.

The Legislative Assembly, which was elected in May, 1849, was, it is true, far from being a revolutionary one. It contained a minority of desperate Socialists, it was broken into many factions, and like most democratic French Chambers it showed much weakness and inconsistency; but the vast majority of its members were Conservatives who had no kind of sympathy with revolution, and its conduct towards the President, if fairly judged, was on the whole very moderate. He soon treated it with contempt, and it was quite evident that there was no national enthusiasm behind it. The Socialist party was growing rapidly in the great towns; in June, 1849, there was an abortive Socialist insurrection in Paris, and a somewhat more formidable one at Lyons. They were easily put down, but the Socialists captured a great part of the representation of Paris, and they succeeded in producing a wild panic throughout the country. It led to several reactionary measures, the most important being a law which by imposing new conditions of residence very considerably limited the suffrage. This law was presented to the Chamber by the Ministers of the President and with his assent, though he subsequently demanded the reestablishment of universal suffrage, and made a decree effecting this one of the chief justifications of his Coup d'etat. The restrictive law was carried through the Chamber on May 31, 1850, by an immense majority, but it was denounced with great eloquence by some of its leading members, and it added seriously to the unpopularity of the Assembly, and greatly lowered its authority in contending with a President whose authority rested on direct universal suffrage. More than once he exercised his power of dismissing and appointing ministries absolutely irrespective of its votes and wishes, and in each case in order to fill all posts of power with creatures of his own. The newspapers supporting him continually inveighed against the Chamber, and dwelt upon the danger of anarchy to which France would be exposed in 1852 and upon the absolute necessity of 'a Saviour of Society.' In repeated journeys through France, and in more than one military review, the President gave the occasion of demonstrations in which the cries of 'Vive l'Empereur!' were often heard, and which were manifestly intended to strengthen him in his conflict with the Chamber.

The man from whom he had most to fear was Changarnier, who since the close of 1848 had been commander of the troops in Paris, and whose name, though far less popular than that of Napoleon, had much weight with the army. He was a man with strong leanings to authority, and was much courted by the monarchical parties, but was for some time in decided sympathy with Napoleon, from whom, however, in spite of large offers that had been made him, he gradually diverged. He issued peremptory orders to the troops under his command, forbidding all party cries at reviews. He declared in the Chamber that these cries had been 'not only encouraged but provoked,' and when the intention of the President to prolong his presidency became apparent, he assured Odilon Barrot that he was prepared, if ordered by the minister and authorised by the President of the Chamber, to anticipate the Coup d'etat by seizing and imprisoning Louis Napoleon.[49] The President succeeded in removing him from his command, and in placing a creature of his own at the head of the Paris troops; but though Changarnier acquiesced without resistance in his dismissal, he remained an important member of the Assembly; he openly declared that his sword was at its service, and if an armed conflict broke out it was tolerably certain that he would be its representative. The President had an official salary of 48,000 l.—nearly five times as much as the President of the United States. The Chamber refused to increase it, though they consented by a very small majority, and at the request of Changarnier, to pay his debts.

The demand for a revision of the Constitution, making it possible for the President to be re-elected, was rising rapidly through the country, and there can be but little doubt that this was generally looked forward to as the only peaceful solution, and that it represented the real wish of the great majority of the people. Petitions in favour of it, bearing an enormous number of signatures, were presented to the Chamber, and the overwhelming majority of the Conseils Generaux of which the Deputies generally formed part voted for revision. The President did not so much petition for it as demand it. In a message he sent to the Chamber, he declared that if they did not vote Revision the people would, in 1852, solemnly manifest their wishes. In a speech at Dijon, June 1, 1851, he declared that France from end to end demanded it; that he would follow the wishes of the nation, and that France would not perish in his hands. In the same speech he accused the Chamber of never seconding his wishes to ameliorate the lot of the people. He at the same time lost no opportunity of showing that his special sympathy and trust lay with the army, and he singled out with marked favour the colonels of the regiments which had shown themselves at the reviews most prominent in demonstrations in his favour.[50] The meaning of all this was hardly doubtful. Changarnier took up the gauntlet, and at a time when the question of Revision was before the Chamber he declared that no soldier would ever be induced to move against the law and the Assembly, and he called upon the Deputies to deliberate in peace.

The Revision was voted in the Chamber by 446 votes to 278, but a majority of three-fourths was required for a constitutional change, and this majority was not obtained, and in the disintegrated condition of French parties it seemed scarcely likely to be obtained. The Chamber was soon after prorogued for about two months, leaving the situation unchanged, and the tension and panic were extreme. Out of eighty-five Conseils Generaux in France, eighty passed votes in favour of Revision, three abstained, two only opposed.

The President had now fully resolved upon a Coup d'etat, and before the Chamber reassembled a new ministry was constituted, St.-Arnaud being at the head of the army, and Maupas at the head of the police. His first step was to summon the Chamber to repeal the law of May 31 which abolished universal suffrage. The Chamber, after much hesitation, refused, but only by two votes. The belief that the question could only be solved by force was becoming universal, and the bolder spirits in the Chamber clearly saw that if no new measure was taken they were likely to be helpless before the military party. By a decree of 1848 the President of the Chamber had a right, if necessary, to call for troops for its protection independently of the Minister of War, and a motion was now made that he should be able to select a general to whom he might delegate this power. Such a measure, dividing the military command and enabling the Chamber to have its own general and its own army, might have proved very efficacious, but it would probably have involved France in civil war, and the President was resolved that, if the Chamber voted it, the Coup d'etat should immediately take place. The vote was taken on November 17, 1851. St.-Arnaud, as Minister of War, opposed the measure on constitutional grounds, dilating on the danger of a divided military command, but during the discussion Maupas and Magnan were in the gallery of the Chamber, waiting to give orders to St.-Arnaud to call out the troops and to surround and dissolve the Chamber if the proposition was carried.

It was, however, rejected by a majority of 108, and a few troubled days of conspiracy and panic still remained before the blow was struck. The state of the public securities and the testimony of the best judges of all parties showed the genuineness of the alarm. It was not true, as the President stated in the proclamation issued when the Coup d'etat was accomplished, that the Chamber had become a mere nest of conspiracies, and there was a strange audacity in his assertion that he made the Coup d'etat for the purpose of maintaining the Republic against monarchical plots; but it was quite true that the conviction was general that force had become inevitable; that the chief doubt was whether the first blow would be struck by Napoleon or Changarnier, and that while the evident desire of the majority of the people was to re-elect Napoleon, there was a design among some members of the Chamber to seize him by force and to elect in his place some member of the House of Orleans.[51] On December 2 the curtain fell, and Napoleon accompanied his Coup d'etat by a decree dissolving the Chamber, restoring by his own authority universal suffrage, abolishing the law of May 31, establishing a state of siege, and calling on the French people to judge his action by their vote.

It was certainly not an appeal upon which great confidence could be placed. Immediately after the Coup d'etat, the army, which was wholly on his side, voted separately and openly in order that France might clearly know that the armed forces were with the President and might be able to predict the consequences of a verdict unfavourable to his pretensions. When, nearly three weeks later, the civilian Plebiscite took place, martial law was in force. Public meetings of every kind were forbidden. No newspaper hostile to the new authority was permitted. No electioneering paper or placard could be circulated which had not been sanctioned by Government officials. The terrible decree that all who had ever belonged to a secret society might be sent to die in the fevers of Africa was interpreted in the widest sense, and every political society or organisation was included in it. All the functionaries of a highly centralised country were turned into ardent electioneering agents, and the question was so put that the voters had no alternative except for or against the President, a negative vote leaving the country with no government and an almost certain prospect of anarchy and civil war. Under these circumstances 7,500,000 votes were given for the President and 500,000 against him.

But after all deductions have been made there can be no real doubt that the majority of Frenchmen acquiesced in the new regime. The terror of Socialism was abroad, and it brought with it an ardent desire for strong government. The probabilities of a period of sanguinary anarchy were so great that multitudes were glad to be secured from it at almost any cost. Parliamentarism was profoundly discredited. The peasant proprietary had never cared for it, and the bourgeois class, among whom it had once been popular, were now thoroughly scared. Nothing in the contemporary accounts of the period is more striking than the indifference, the almost amused cynicism, or the sense of relief with which the great mass of Frenchmen seem to have witnessed the destruction of their Constitution and the gross insults inflicted upon a Chamber which included so many of the most illustrious of their countrymen.

We can hardly have a better authority on this point than Tocqueville. No one felt more profoundly or more bitterly the iniquity of what had been done; but he was under no illusion about the sentiments of the people. The Constitution, he says, was thoroughly unpopular. 'Louis Napoleon had the merit or the luck to discover what few suspected—the latent Bonapartism of the nation.... The memory of the Emperor, vague and undefined, but therefore the more imposing, still dwelt like an heroic legend in the imaginations of the people.' All the educated, in the opinion of Tocqueville, condemned and repudiated the Coup d'etat. 'Thirty-seven years of liberty have made a free press and free parliamentary discussion necessary to us.' But the bulk of the nation was not with them. The new Government, he predicted, 'will last until it is unpopular with the mass of the people. At present the disapprobation is confined to the educated classes.' 'The reaction against democracy and even against liberty is irresistible.'[52]

There is no doubt some exaggeration on both sides of this statement. The appalling magnitude of the deportations and imprisonments by the new Government seems to show that the hatred went deeper than Tocqueville supposed, and on the other hand it can hardly be said that the educated classes wholly repudiated what had been done when we remember that the French Funds at once rose from 91 to 102, that nearly all branches of French commerce made a similar spring,[53] that some twenty generals were actively engaged in the conspiracy, and that the great body of the priests were delighted at its success. The truth seems to be that the property of France saw in the success of the Coup d'etat an escape from a great danger, while two powerful professions, the army and the Church, were strongly in favour of the President. Over the army the name of Napoleon exercised a magical influence, and the expedition to Rome and the probability that the new government would be under clerical guidance were, in the eyes of the Church party, quite sufficient to justify what had been done.

Nothing, indeed, in this strange history is more significant than the attitude assumed by the special leaders and representatives of the Church which teaches that 'it were better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all of the many millions upon it to die of starvation in extremest agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul ... should commit one venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth.'[54]

Three illustrious churchmen—Lacordaire, Ravignan and Dupanloup—to their immortal honour refused to give any approbation to the Coup d'etat or to express any confidence in its author. But the latest panegyrist of the Empire boasts that they were almost alone in their profession. By the advice of the Papal Nuncio and of the leading French bishops, the clergy lost no time in presenting their felicitations. Veuillot, who more than any other man represented and influenced the vast majority of the French priesthood, wrote on what had been done with undisguised and unqualified exultation and delight. Even Montalembert rallied to the Government on the morrow of the Coup d'etat. He described Louis Napoleon as a Prince 'who had shown a more efficacious and intelligent devotion to religious interests than any of those who had governed France during sixty years;' and it was universally admitted that the great body of the clergy, with Archbishop Sibour at their head, were in this critical moment ardent supporters of the new government.[55] Kinglake, in a page of immortal beauty, has described the scene when, thirty days after the Coup d'etat, Louis Napoleon appeared in Notre Dame to receive, amid all the pomp that Catholic ceremonial could give, the solemn blessing of the Church, and to listen to the Te Deum thanking the Almighty for what had been accomplished. The time came, it is true, when the policy of the priests was changed, for they found that Louis Napoleon was more liberal and less clerical than they imagined; but in estimating the feelings with which French Liberals judge the Church, its attitude towards the perjury and violence of December 2 should never be forgotten.

To those who judge the political ethics of the Roman Catholic Church not from the deceptive pages of such writers as Newman, but from an examination of its actual conduct in the different periods of its history, it will appear in no degree inconsistent. It is but another instance added to many of the manner in which it regards all acts which appear conducive to its interests. It was the same spirit that led a Pope to offer public thanks for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and to order Vasari to paint the murder of Coligny on the walls of the Vatican among the triumphs of the Church. No Christian sovereign of modern times has left a worse memory behind him than Ferdinand II. of Naples, who received the Pope when he fled to Gaeta in 1848. He was the sovereign whose government was described by Gladstone as 'a negation of God.' He not only destroyed the Constitution he had sworn to observe, but threw into a loathsome dungeon the Liberal ministers who had trusted him. But in the eyes of the Pope his services to the Church far outweighed all defects, and the monument erected to this 'most pious prince' may be seen in one of the chapels of St. Peter's. Every visitor to Paris may see the fresco in the Madeleine in which Napoleon I. appears seated triumphant on the clouds and surrounded by an admiring priesthood, the most prominent and glorified figure in a picture representing the history of French Christianity, with Christ above, blessing the work.

It is indeed a most significant fact that in Catholic countries the highest moral level in public life is now rarely to be found among those who specially represent the spirit and teaching of their Church, and much more frequently among men who are unconnected with it, and often with all dogmatic theology. How seldom has the distinctively Catholic press seriously censured unjust wars, unscrupulous alliances, violations of constitutional obligations, unprovoked aggressions, great outbursts of intolerance and fanaticism! It is, indeed, not too much to say that some of the worst moral perversions of modern times have been supported and stimulated by a great body of genuinely Catholic opinion both in the priesthood and in the press. The anti-Semite movement, the shameful indifference to justice shown in France in the Dreyfus case, and the countless frauds, outrages and oppressions that accompanied the domination of the Irish Land League are recent and conspicuous examples.

Among secular-minded laymen the Coup d'etat of Louis Napoleon was, as I have said, differently judged. Few things in French history are more honourable than the determination with which so many men who were the very flower of the French nation refused to take the oath or give their adhesion to the new Government. Great statesmen and a few distinguished soldiers, with a splendid past behind them and with the prospect of an illustrious career before them; men of genius who in their professorial chairs had been the centres of the intellectual life of France; functionaries who had by laborious and persevering industry climbed the steps of their profession and depended for their livelihood on its emoluments, accepted poverty, exile and the long eclipse of the most honourable ambitions rather than take an oath which seemed to justify the usurpation. At the same time, some statesmen of unquestionable honour did not wholly and in all its parts condemn it. Lord Palmerston was conspicuous among them. Without expressing approval of all that had been done, he always maintained that the condition of France was such that a violent subversion of an unworkable Constitution and the establishment of a strong government had become absolutely necessary; that the Coup d'etat saved France from the gravest and most imminent danger of anarchy and civil war, and that this fact was its justification. If it had not been for the acts of ferocious tyranny which immediately followed it, his opinion would have been more largely shared.

It is probable that the moral character of Coups d'etat may in the future not unfrequently come into discussion in Europe, as it has often done in South America. As the best observers are more and more perceiving, parliamentary government worked upon party lines is by no means an easy thing, and it seldom attains perfection without long experience and without qualities of mind and character which are very unequally distributed among the nations of the world. It requires a spirit of compromise, patience and moderation; the kind of mind which can distinguish the solid, the practical and the well meaning, from the brilliant, the plausible and the ambitious, which cares more for useful results and for the conciliation of many interests and opinions than for any rigid uniformity and consistency of principle; which, while pursuing personal ambitions and party aims, can subordinate them on great occasions to public interests. It needs a combination of independence and discipline which is not common, and where it does not exist parliaments speedily degenerate either into an assemblage of puppets in the hands of party leaders or into disintegrated, demoralised, insubordinate groups. Some of the foremost nations of the world—nations distinguished for noble and brilliant intellect; for splendid heroism; for great achievements in peace and war—have in this form of government conspicuously failed. In England it has grown with our growth and strengthened with our strength. We have practised it in many phases. Its traditions have taken deep root and are in full harmony with the national character. But in the present century this kind of government has been adopted by many nations which are wholly unfit for it, and they have usually adopted it in the most difficult of all forms—that of an uncontrolled democracy resting upon universal suffrage. It is becoming very evident that in many countries such assemblies are wholly incompetent to take the foremost place in government, but they are so fenced round by oaths and other constitutional forms that nothing short of violence can take from them a power which they are never likely voluntarily to relinquish. In such countries democracy tends much less naturally to the parliamentary system than to some form of dictatorship, to some despotism resting on and justified by a plebiscite. It is probable that many transitions in this direction will take place. They will seldom be carried out through purely public motives or without perjury and violence. But public opinion will judge each case on its own merits, and where it can be shown that its results are beneficial and that large sections of the people have desired it, such an act will not be severely condemned.

Cases of conflicting ethical judgments of another kind may be easily cited. One of the best known was that of Governor Eyre at the time of the Jamaica insurrection of 1865. In this case there was no question of personal interest or ambition. The Governor was a man of stainless honour, who in a moment of extreme difficulty and danger had rendered a great service to his country. By his prompt and courageous action a negro insurrection was quickly suppressed, which, if it had been allowed to extend, must have brought untold horrors upon Jamaica. But the martial law which he had proclaimed was certainly continued longer than was necessary, it was exercised with excessive severity, and those who were tried under it were not merely men who had been taken in arms. One conspicuous civilian agitator, who had contributed greatly to stimulate the insurrection, and had been, in the opinion of the Governor, its 'chief cause and origin,' but who, like most men of his kind, had merely incited others without taking any direct part himself, was arrested in a part of the island in which martial law was not proclaimed, and was tried and hanged by orders of a military tribunal in a way which the best legal authorities in England pronounced wholly unwarranted by law. If this act had been considered apart from the general conditions of the island it would have deserved severe punishment. If the services of the Governor had been considered apart from this act they would have deserved high honours from the Crown. In Jamaica the Governor was fully supported by the Legislative Council and the Assembly, but at home public opinion was fiercely divided, and the fact that the chief literary and scientific men in England took sides on the question added greatly to its interest. Carlyle took a leading part in the defence of Governor Eyre. John Stuart Mill was the chairman of a committee who regarded him as a simple criminal, and who for more than two years pursued him with a persistent vindictiveness. As might have been expected the one side dwelt solely on his services and the other side on his misdeeds. Governor Eyre received no reward for the great service he had rendered, and he was involved by his enemies in a ruinous legal expenditure, which, however, was subsequently paid by the Government; but those who desired to bring him to trial for murder were baffled, for the Old Bailey Grand Jury threw out the bill. Public opinion, I think, on the whole, approved of what they had done. Most moderate men had come to the conclusion that Governor Eyre was a brave and honourable man who had rendered great services to the State and had saved countless lives, but who, through no unworthy motive and in a time of extreme danger and panic, had committed a serious mistake which had been very amply expiated.

The more recent events connected with the Jameson raid into the Transvaal may also be cited. Of the raid itself there is little to be said. It was, in truth, one of the most discreditable as well as mischievous events in recent colonial history, and its character was entirely unrelieved by any gleam either of heroism or of skill. Those who took a direct part in it were duly tried and duly punished. A section of English society adopted on this question a disgraceful attitude, but it must at least be said in palliation that they had been grossly deceived, one of the chief and usually most trustworthy organs of opinion having been made use of as an organ of the conspirators.

A more difficult question arose in the case of the statesman who had prepared and organized the expedition against the Transvaal. It is certain that the actual raid had taken place without his knowledge or consent, though when it was brought to his knowledge he abstained from taking any step to stop it. It may be conceded also that there were real grievances to be complained of. By a strange irony of fate some of the largest gold mines of the world had fallen to the possession of perhaps the only people who did not desire them; of a race of hunters and farmers intensely hostile to modern ideas, who had twice abandoned their homes and made long journeys into distant lands in search of solitude and space and of a home where they could live their primitive, pastoral lives, undisturbed by any foreign element. These men now found their country the centre of a vast stream of foreign immigration, and of that most undesirable kind of immigration which gold mines invariably promote. Their laws were very backward, but the part which was most oppressive was that connected with the gold-mining industry which was almost entirely in the hands of the immigrants, and it was this which made it a main object to overthrow their government. The trail of finance runs over the whole story, but it may be acknowledged that, although Mr. Rhodes had made an enormous fortune by mining speculations, and although he was largely interested as a financier in overturning the system of government at Johannesburg, he was not a man likely to be actuated by mere love of money, and that political ambition closely connected with the opening and the civilisation of Africa largely actuated him. Whether the motives of his co-conspirators were of the same kind may be open to question. What, however, he did has been very clearly established. When holding the highly confidential position of Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, and being at the same time a Privy Councillor of the Queen, he engaged in a conspiracy for the overthrow of the government of a neighbouring and friendly State. In order to carry out this design he deceived the High Commissioner whose Prime Minister he was. He deceived his own colleagues in the Ministry. He collected under false pretences a force which was intended to co-operate with an insurrection in Johannesburg. Being a Director of the Chartered Company he made use of that position, without the knowledge of his colleagues, to further the conspiracy. He took an active and secret part in smuggling great quantities of arms into the Transvaal, which were intended to be used in the rebellion; and at a time when his organs in the press were representing Johannesburg as seething with spontaneous indignation against an oppressive government, he, with another millionaire, was secretly expending many thousands of pounds in that town in stimulating and subsidising the rising. He was also directly connected with the shabbiest incident in the whole affair, the concoction of a letter from the Johannesburg conspirators absurdly representing English women and children at Johannesburg as in danger of being shot down by the Boers, and urging the British to come at once to save them. It was a letter drawn up with the sanction of Mr. Rhodes many weeks before the raid, and before any disturbance had arisen, and kept in reserve to be dated and used in the last moment for the purpose of inducing the young soldiers in South Africa to join in the raid, and of subsequently justifying their conduct before the War Office, and also for the purpose of being published in the English press at the same time as the first news of the raid, in order to work upon English public opinion and persuade the English people that the raid, though technically wrong, was morally justifiable.[56]

Mr. Rhodes is a man of great genius and influence, and in the past he has rendered great services to the Empire. At the same time no reasonable judge can question that in these transactions he was more blamable than those who were actually punished by the law for taking part in the raid—far more blamable than those young officers who were, in truth, the most severely punished, and who had been induced to take part in it under a false representation of the wishes of the Government at home, and a grossly false representation of the state of things at Johannesburg. The failure of the raid, and his undoubted complicity with its design, obliged Mr. Rhodes to resign the post of Prime Minister and his directorship of the Chartered Company, and, for a time at least, eclipsed his influence in Africa; but the question confronted the Ministers whether these resignations alone constituted a sufficient punishment for what he had done.

The question was indeed one of great difficulty. The Government, in my opinion, were right in not attempting a prosecution which, in the face of the fact that the actual raid had certainly been undertaken without the knowledge of Mr. Rhodes, and that the evidence against him was chiefly drawn from his own voluntary admissions before the committee of inquiry, would inevitably have proved abortive. They were, perhaps, right in not taking from him the dignity of Privy Councillor, which had been bestowed on him as a reward for great services in the past, and which had never in the present reign been taken from anyone on whom it had been bestowed. They were right also, I believe, in urging that after a long and elaborate inquiry into the circumstances of the raid, and after a report in which Mr. Rhodes's conduct had been fully examined and severely censured, it was most important for the peace and good government of South Africa that the matter should as soon as possible be allowed to drop, and the raid and the party animosities it had aroused to subside. But what can be thought of the language of a Minister who volunteered to assure the House of Commons that in all the transactions I have described, Mr. Rhodes, though he had made 'a gigantic mistake,' a mistake perhaps as great as a statesman could make, had done nothing affecting his personal honour?[57]

The foregoing examples will serve to illustrate the kind of difficulty which every statesman has to encounter in dealing with political misdeeds, and the impossibility of treating them by the clearly defined lines and standards that are applicable to the morals of a private life. Whatever conclusions men may arrive at in the seclusion of their studies, when they take part in active political life they will find it necessary to make large allowances for motives, tendencies, past services, pressing dangers, overwhelming expediencies, opposing interests. Every statesman who is worthy of the name has a strong predisposition to support the public servants who are under him when he knows that they have acted with a sincere desire to benefit the Empire. This is, indeed, a characteristic of all really great statesmen, and it gives a confidence and energy to the public service which in times of difficulty and danger are of supreme importance. In such times a mistaken decision is usually a less evil than timid, vacillating, or procrastinated action, and a wise Minister will go far to defend his subordinates if they have acted promptly and with substantial justice in the way they believed to be best, even though they may have made considerable mistakes, and though the results of their action may have proved unfortunate.

But of all forms of prestige, moral prestige is the most valuable, and no statesman should forget that one of the chief elements of British power is the moral weight that is behind it. It is the conviction that British policy is essentially honourable and straightforward, that the word and honour of its statesmen and diplomatists may be implicitly trusted, and that intrigues and deceptions are wholly alien to their nature. The statesman must steer his way between rival fanaticisms—the fanaticism of those who pardon everything if it is crowned by success and conduces to the greatness of the Empire, and who act as if weak Powers and savage nations had no moral rights; and the fanaticism of those who always seem to have a leaning against their own country, and who imagine that in times of war, anarchy, or rebellion, and in dealings with savage or half-savage military populations, it is possible to act with the same respect for the technicalities of law, and the same invariably high standard of moral scrupulousness, as in a peaceful age and a highly civilised country. In the affairs of private life the distinction between right and wrong is usually very clear, but it is not so in public affairs. Even the moral aspects of political acts can seldom be rightly estimated without the exercise of a large, judicial, and comprehensive judgment, and the spirit which should actuate a statesman should be rather that of a high-minded and honourable man of the world than that of a theologian, or a lawyer, or an abstract moralist.

In some respects the standard of political morality has undoubtedly risen in modern times; but it is by no means certain that in international politics this is the case. A true history of the wars of the last half of the nineteenth century may well lead us to doubt it, and recent disclosures have shown us that in the most terrible of them—the Franco-German War of 1870—the blame must be much more equally divided than we had been accustomed to believe. Very few massacres in history have been more gigantic or more clearly traced to the action of a government than those perpetrated by Turkish soldiers in our generation, and few signs of the low level of public feeling in Christendom are more impressive than the general indifference with which these massacres were contemplated in most countries. It was made evident that a Power which retains its military strength, and which is therefore sought as an ally and feared as an enemy, may do things with impunity, and even with very little censure, which in the case of a weak nation would produce a swift retribution. Among the minor episodes of nineteenth-century history the historian will not forget how soon after the savage Armenian massacres the sovereign of one of the greatest and most civilised of Christian nations hastened to Constantinople to clasp the hand which was so deeply dyed with Christian blood, and then, having, as he thought, sufficiently strengthened his popularity and influence in that quarter, proceeded to the Mount of Olives, where, amid scenes that are consecrated by the most sacred of all memories, and most fitted to humble the pride of power and dispel the dreams of ambition, he proclaimed himself with melodramatic piety the champion and the patron of the Christian faith! How many instances may be culled from very modern history of the deliberate falsehood of statesmen; of distinct treaty engagements and obligations simply set aside because they were inconvenient to one Power, and could be repudiated with impunity; of weak nations annexed or plundered without a semblance of real provocation! The safety of the weak in the presence of the strong is the best test of international morality. Can it be said that, if measured by this test, the public morality of our time ranks very high? No one can fail to notice with what levity the causes of war with barbarous or semi-civilised nations are scrutinised if only those wars are crowned with success; how strongly the present commercial policy of Europe is stimulating the passion for aggression; how warmly that policy is in all great nations supported by public opinion and by the Press.

The questions of morality arising out of these things are many and complicated, and they cannot be disposed of by short and simple formulae. How far is a statesman who sees, or thinks he sees, some crushing danger from an aggressive foreign Power impending over his country, justified in anticipating that danger, and at a convenient moment and without any immediate provocation forcing on a war? How far is it his right or his duty to sacrifice the lives of his people through humanitarian motives, for the redress of some flagrant wrong with which he is under no treaty obligation to interfere? How far, if several Powers agree to guarantee the integrity of a small Power, is one Power bound at great risk to interfere in isolation if its co-partners refuse to do so or are even accomplices in a policy of plunder? How far, if the aggression of other Powers places his nation at a commercial or other disadvantage in the competition of nations, may a statesman take measures which, under other circumstances, would be plainly unjustifiable, to guard against such disadvantage? With what degrees of punctiliousness, at what cost of treasure and of life, ought a nation to resent insults directed against its dignity, its subjects and its flag? What is the meaning and what are the limits of national egotism and national unselfishness? There is such a thing as the comity of nations, and even apart from treaty obligations no great nation can pursue a policy of complete isolation, disregarding crimes and aggressions beyond its border. On the other hand, the primary duty of every statesman is to his own country. His task is to secure for many millions of the human race the highest possible amount of peace and prosperity, and a selfishness is at least not a narrow one which, while abstaining from injuring others, restricts itself to promoting the happiness of a vast section of the human race. Sacrifices and dangers which a good man would think it his clear duty to accept if they fell on himself alone wear another aspect if he is acting as trustee for a great nation and for the interests of generations who are yet unborn. Nothing is more calamitous than the divorce of politics from morals, but in practical politics public and private morals will never absolutely correspond. The public opinion of the nation will inevitably inspire and control its statesmen. It creates in all countries an ethical code which with greater or less perfection marks out for them the path of duty, and though a great statesman may do something to raise its level, he can never wholly escape its influence. In different nations it is higher or lower—in truthfulness and sincerity of diplomacy the variations are very great—but it will never be the exact code on which men act in private life. It is certainly widely different from the Sermon on the Mount.

There is one belief, half unconscious, half avowed, which in our generation is passing widely over the world and is practically accepted in a very large measure by the English-speaking nations. It is that to reclaim savage tribes to civilisation, and to place the outlying dominions of civilised countries which are anarchical or grossly misgoverned in the hands of rulers who govern wisely and uprightly, are sufficient justification for aggression and conquest. Many who, as a general rule, would severely censure an unjust and unprovoked war, carried on for the purpose of annexation by a strong Power against a weak one, will excuse or scarcely condemn such a war if it is directed against a country which has shown itself incapable of good government. To place the world in the hands of those who can best govern it is looked upon as a supreme end. Wars are not really undertaken for this end. The philanthropy of nations when it takes the form of war and conquest is seldom or never unmixed with selfishness, though strong gusts of humanitarian enthusiasm often give an impulse, a pretext, or a support to the calculated actions of statesmen. But when wars, however selfish and unprovoked, contribute to enlarge the boundaries of civilisation, to stimulate real progress, to put an end to savage customs, to oppression or to anarchy, they are now very indulgently judged even in the many cases in which the inhabitants of the conquered Power do not desire the change and resist it strenuously in the field.

In domestic as in foreign politics the maintenance of a high moral standard in statesmanship is impossible unless the public opinion of the country is in harmony with it. Moral declension in a nation is very swiftly followed by a corresponding decadence among its public men, and it will indeed be generally found that the standard of public men is apt to be somewhat lower than that of the better section of the public outside. They are exposed to very special temptations, some of which I have already indicated.

The constant habit of regarding questions with a view to party advantage, to proximate issues, to immediate popularity, which is inseparable from parliamentary government, can hardly fail to give some ply to the most honest intellect. Most questions have to be treated more or less in the way of compromise; and alliances and coalitions not very conducive to a severe standard of political morals are frequent. In England the leading men of the opposing parties have happily usually been able to respect one another. The same standard of honour will be found on both sides of the House, but every parliament contains its notorious agitators, intriguers and self-seekers, men who have been connected with acts which may or may not have been brought within the reach of the criminal law, but have at least been sufficient to stamp their character in the eyes of honest men. Such men cannot be neglected in party combinations. Political leaders must co-operate with them in the daily intercourse and business of parliamentary life—must sometimes ask them favours—must treat them with deference and respect. Men who on some subjects and at some times have acted with glaring profligacy, on others act with judgment, moderation and even patriotism, and become useful supporters or formidable opponents. Combinations are in this way formed which are in no degree wrong, but which tend to dull the edge of moral perception and imperceptibly to lower the standard of moral judgment. In the swift changes of the party kaleidoscope the bygone is soon forgotten. The enemy of yesterday is the ally of to-day; the services of the present soon obscure the misdeeds of the past; and men insensibly grow very tolerant not only of diversities of opinion, but also of gross aberrations of conduct. The constant watchfulness of external opinion is very necessary to keep up a high standard of political morality.

Public opinion, it is true, is by no means impeccable. The tendency to believe that crimes cease to be crimes when they have a political object, and that a popular vote can absolve the worst crimes, is only too common; there are few political misdeeds which wealth, rank, genius or success will not induce large sections of English society to pardon, and nations even in their best moments will not judge acts which are greatly for their own advantage with the severity of judgment that they would apply to similar acts of other nations. But when all this is admitted, it still remains true that there is a large body of public opinion in England which carries into all politics a sound moral sense and which places a just and righteous policy higher than any mere party interest. It is on the power and pressure of this opinion that the high character of English government must ultimately depend.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] This sentence may appear obscure to English readers. The explanation is, that by an ingenious arrangement, devised by Lord Beaconsfield, the professors of the Jesuit College in Stephen's Green are nearly all made Fellows of the Royal University, those of the Arts Faculty receiving 400l. a year, and three Medical Fellows 150l. each. By this device the Catholic college has in reality a State endowment to the amount of between 6,000l. and 7,000l. a year. This fact considerably reduces the grievance.

[43] See e.g. the death-bed counsels of Henry IV. to his son:—

'Therefore, my Harry, Be it thy course to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out, May waste the memory of the former days.' Henry IV. Part II. Act IV. Sc. 4.

[44] Lord Lanesborough v. Reilly.

[45] See Tocqueville's Memoirs (English trans.), ii. 189, Letter to the Times.

[46] See Maupas, Memoires sur le Second Empire, i. 511, 512. It is said that, contrary to the orders of St.-Arnaud, the soldiers, instead of immediately shooting all persons in the street who were found with arms or constructing or defending a barricade, made many prisoners, and it is not clear what became of them. Granier de Cassagnac, however, altogether denies the executions on the Champ de Mars (ii. 433).

[47] Granier de Cassagnac, ii. 438.

[48] L'Empire Liberal, ii. 526.

[49] Memoires d'Odilon Barrot, iv. 59-61.

[50] Memoires d'Odilon Barrot, iv. 56, 57.

[51] See Lord Palmerston's statements on this subject in Ashley's Life of Palmerston, ii. 200-211. Tocqueville, however, utterly denies that the majority of the Assembly had any sympathy with these views (Tocqueville's Memoirs (Eng. trans.), ii. 177). Maupas, in his Memoires, gives a very detailed account of the conspiracy on the Bonapartist side. It appears that the 'homme de confiance' of Changarnier was in his pay.

[52] Tocqueville's Memoirs, ii.

[53] Ashley's Life of Palmerston, ii. 208.

[54] Newman.

[55] See Ollivier, L'Empire Liberal, i. 510-512.

[56] Second Report of the Select Committee on British South Africa (July, 1897).

[57] Parliamentary Debates, July 26, 1897, 1169, 1170.



CHAPTER XI

The necessities for moral compromise I have traced in the army, in the law, and in the fields of politics may be found in another form not less conspicuously in the Church. The members, and still more the ministers, of an ancient Church bound to formularies and creeds that were drawn up in long bygone centuries, are continually met by the difficulties of reconciling these forms with the changed conditions of human knowledge, and there are periods when the pressure of these difficulties is felt with more than common force. Such, for example, were the periods of the Renaissance and the Reformation, when changes in the intellectual condition of Europe produced a widespread conviction of the vast amount of imposture and delusion which had received the sanction of a Church that claimed to be infallible, the result being in some countries a silent evanescence of all religious belief among the educated class, even including a large number of the leaders of the Church, and in other countries a great outburst of religious zeal aiming at the restoration of Christianity to its primitive form and a repudiation of the accretions of superstition that had gathered around it. The Copernican theory proving that our world is not, as was long believed, the centre of the universe, but a single planet moving with many others around a central sun, and the discovery, by the instrumentality of the telescope, of the infinitesimally small place which our globe occupies in the universe, altered men's measure of probability and affected widely, though indirectly, their theological beliefs.

A similar change was gradually produced by the Newtonian discovery that the whole system of the universe was pervaded by one great law, and by the steady growth of scientific knowledge, proving that vast numbers of phenomena which were once attributed to isolated and capricious acts of spiritual intervention were regulated by invariable, inexorable, all-pervasive law. Many of the formularies by which we still express our religious beliefs date from periods when comets and eclipses were believed to have been sent to portend calamity; when every great meteorological change was attributed to some isolated spiritual agency; when witchcraft and diabolical possession, supernatural diseases, and supernatural cures were deemed indubitable facts: and when accounts of contemporary miracles, Divine or Satanic, carried with them no sense of strangeness or improbability. It is scarcely surprising that these formularies sometimes seem incongruous with an age when the scientific spirit has introduced very different conceptions of the government of the universe, and when the miraculous, if it is not absolutely discredited, is, at least in the eyes of most educated men, relegated to a distant past.

The present century has seen some powerful reactions towards older religious beliefs, but it has also been to an unusual extent fertile in the kind of changes that most deeply affect them. Not many years have passed since the whole drama of the world's history was believed to have been comprised in the framework of 'Paradise Lost' and 'Paradise Regained.' Man appeared in the universe a faultless being in a faultless world, but he soon fell from his first estate, and his fall entailed world-wide consequences. It introduced into our globe sin, death, suffering, disease, imperfection and decay; all the mischievous and ferocious instincts and tendencies of man and beast; all the multitudinous forms of struggle, terror, anxiety and grief; all that makes life bitter to any living being, and, even as the Fathers were accustomed to say, the briars and weeds and sterility of the earth. Paradise Regained was believed to be indissolubly connected with Paradise Lost. The one was the explanation of the other. The one introduced the disease, the other provided the remedy.

It is idle to deny that the main outlines of this picture have been wholly changed. First came the discovery that the existence of our globe stretches far beyond the period once assigned to the Creation, and that for countless ages before the time when Adam was believed to have lost Paradise, death had been its most familiar fact and its inexorable law; that the animals who inhabited it preyed upon and devoured each other as at present, their claws and teeth being specially adapted for that purpose. Even their half-digested remains have been preserved in fossil.

'Death,' wrote a Pagan philosopher, in sharp contrast to the teaching of the Church, 'is a law and not a punishment,' and geology has fully justified his assertion.

Then came decisive evidence showing that for many thousands of years before his supposed origin man had lived and died upon our globe—a being, as far as can be judged from the remains that have been preserved, not superior but greatly inferior to ourselves, whose almost only art was the manufacture of rude instruments for killing, who appears in structure and in life to have approximated closely to the lowest existing forms of savage life.

Then came the Darwinian theory maintaining that the whole history of the living world is a history of slow and continuous evolution, chiefly by means of incessant strife, from lower to higher forms; that man himself had in this way gradually emerged from the humblest forms of the animal world; that most of the moral deflections which were attributed to the apple in Eden are the remains and traditions of the earlier and lower stages of his existence. The theory of continuous ascent from a lower to a higher stage took the place of the theory of the Fall as the explanation of human history. It is a doctrine which is certainly not without hope for the human race. It gives no explanation of the ultimate origin of things, and it is in no degree inconsistent with the belief either in a Divine and Creative origin or in a settled and Providential plan. But it is as far as possible removed from the conception of human history and human nature which Christendom during eighteen centuries accepted as fundamental truth.

With these things have come influences of another kind. Comparative Mythology has accumulated a vast amount of evidence, showing how myths and miracles are the natural product of certain stages of human history, of certain primitive misconceptions of the course of nature; how legends essentially of the same kind, though with some varieties of detail, have sprung up in many different quarters, and how they have migrated and interacted on each other. Biblical criticism has at the same time decomposed and analysed the Jewish writings, assigning to them dates and degrees of authority very different from those recognised by the Church. It has certainly not impaired their significance as records of successive developments of religious and moral progress, nor has it diminished their value as expressions of the loftiest and most enduring religious sentiments of mankind; but in the eyes of a great section of the educated world it has deprived them of the authoritative and infallible character that was once attributed to them. At the same time historical criticism has brought with it severer standards of proof, more efficient means of distinguishing the historical from the fabulous. It has traced the phases and variations of religions, and the influences that governed them, with a fulness of knowledge and an independence of judgment unknown in the past, and it has led its votaries to regard in these matters a sceptical and hesitating spirit as a virtue, and credulity and easiness of belief as a vice.

This is not a book of theology, and I have no intention of dilating on these things. It must, however, be manifest to all who are acquainted with contemporary thought how largely these influences have displaced theological beliefs among great numbers of educated men; how many things that were once widely believed have become absolutely incredible; how many that were once supposed to rest on the plane of certainty have now sunk to the lower plane of mere probability or perhaps possibility. From the time of Galileo downwards, these changes have been denounced as incompatible with the whole structure of Christian belief. No less an apologist than Bishop Berkeley declared that the belief that the date of the existence of the world was approximately that which could be deduced from the book of Genesis was one of the fundamental beliefs which could not be given up.[58] When the traveller Brydone published his travels in Sicily in 1773, conjecturing, from the deposits of lava, that the world must be much older than the Mosaic cosmogony admitted, his work was denounced as subverting the foundations of the Christian faith. The same charges were brought against the earlier geologists, and in our own day against the early supporters of the Darwinian theory; and many now living can remember the outbursts of indignation against those who first introduced the principles of German criticism into English thought, and who impugned the historical character and the assumed authorship of the Pentateuch.

It is not surprising or unreasonable that it should have been so, for it is impossible to deny that these changes have profoundly altered large portions of the beliefs that were once regarded as essential. One main object of a religion was believed to have been to furnish what may be called a theory of the universe—to explain its origin, its destiny, and the strange contradictions and imperfections it presents. The Jewish theory was a very clear and definite one, but it is certainly not that of modern science.

Yet few things are more remarkable than the facility with which these successive changes have gradually found their places within the Established Church, and how little that Church has been shaken by this fact. Even the Darwinian theory, though it has not yet passed into the circle of fully established truth, is in its main lines constantly mentioned with approbation by the clergy of the Church. The theory of evolution largely pervades their teaching. The doctrine that the Bible was never intended to teach science or scientific facts, and also the main facts and conclusions of modern Biblical criticism, have been largely accepted among the most educated clergy. Very few of them would now deny the antiquity of the world, the antiquity of man, or the antiquity of death, or would maintain that the Mosaic cosmogony was a true and literal account of the origin of the globe and of man, or would very strenuously argue either for the Mosaic authorship or the infallibility of the Pentateuch.

And while changes of this kind have been going on in one direction, another great movement has been taking place in an opposite one. The Church of England was essentially a Protestant Church; though, being constructed more than most other Churches under political influences, by successive stages of progress, and with a view to including large and varying sections of opinion in its fold, it retained, more than other Churches, formularies and tenets derived from the Church it superseded. The earnest Protestant and Puritan party which dominated in Scotland and in the Continental Reformation, and which refused all compromise with Rome, had not become powerful in English public opinion till some time after the framework of the Church was established. The spirit of compromise and conservatism which already characterised the English people; the great part which kings and lawyers played in the formation of the Church; their desire to maintain in England a single body, comprising men who had broken away from the Papacy but who had in other respects no great objection to Roman Catholic forms and doctrines, and also men seriously imbued with the strong Protestant feeling of Germany and Switzerland; the strange ductility of belief and conduct that induced the great majority of the English clergy to retain their preferments and avoid persecution during the successive changes of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, all assisted in forming a Church of a very composite character. Two distinct theories found their place within it. According to one school it was simply the pre-Reformation Church purified from certain abuses that had gathered around it, organically united with it through a divinely appointed episcopacy, resting on an authoritative and ecclesiastical basis, and forming one of the three great branches of the Catholic Church. According to the other school it was one of several Protestant Churches, retaining indeed such portions of the old ecclesiastical organisation as might be justified from Scripture, but not regarding them as among the essentials of Christianity; agreeing with other Protestant bodies in what was fundamental, and differing from them mainly on points which were non-essential; accepting cordially the principle that 'the Bible and the Bible alone is the religion of Protestants,' and at the same time separated by the gravest and most vital differences from what they deemed the great apostasy of Rome.

It was argued on the one hand that in its ecclesiastical and legal organisation the Church in England was identical with the Church in the reign of Henry VII.; that there had been no breach of continuity; that bishops, and often the same bishops, sat in the same sees before and after the Reformation; that the great majority of the parochial clergy were unchanged, holding their endowments by the same titles and tenures, subject to the same courts, and meeting in Convocation in the same manner as their predecessors; that the old Catholic services were merely translated and revised, and that although Roman usurpations which had never been completely acquiesced in had been decisively rejected, and although many superstitious novelties had been removed, the Church of England was still the Church of St. Augustine; that it had never, even in the darkest period, lost its distinct existence, and that supernatural graces and sacerdotal powers denied to all schismatics had descended to it through the Episcopacy in an unbroken stream. On the other hand it was argued that the essential of a true Church lay in the accordance of its doctrines with the language of Scripture and not in the methods of Church government, and that whatever might be the case in a legal point of view, the theory of the unity of the Church before and after the Reformation was in a theological sense a delusion. The Church under Henry VII. was emphatically a theocracy or ecclesiastical monarchy, the Pope, as the supposed successor of the supposed prince of the Apostles, being the very keystone of the spiritual arch. Under Henry VIII. and Elizabeth the Church of England had become a kind of aristocracy of bishops, governed very really as well as theoretically by the Crown, totally cut off from what called itself the Chair of Peter, and placed under completely new relations with the Catholic Church of Christendom. In this space of time Anglican Christianity had discarded not only the Papacy but also great part of what for centuries before the change had been deemed vitally and incontestably necessary both in its theology and in its devotions. Though much of the old organisation and many of the old formularies had been retained, its articles, its homilies, the constant teaching of its founders, breathed a spirit of unquestionable Protestantism. The Church which remained attached to Rome, and which held the same doctrines, practised the same devotions, and performed the same ceremonies as the English Church under Henry VII., professed to be infallible, and it utterly repudiated all connection with the new Church of England, and regarded it as nothing more than a Protestant schism; while the Church of England in her authorised formularies branded some of the central beliefs and devotions of the Roman Church as blasphemous, idolatrous, superstitious and deceitful, and was long accustomed to regard that Church as the Church of Antichrist; the Harlot of the Apocalypse, drunk with the blood of the Saints. Each Church during long periods and to the full measure of its powers suppressed or persecuted the other.

In the eyes of the Erastian and also in the eyes of the Puritan the theory of the spiritual unity of these two bodies, and the various sacerdotal consequences that were inferred from it, seemed incredible, nor did the first generation of our reformers shrink from communion, sympathy and co-operation with the non-episcopal Protestants of the Continent. Although they laid great stress on patristic authority, and consented—chiefly through political motives—to leave in the Prayer-book many things derived from the older Church, yet the High Church theory of Anglicanism is much more the product of the seventeenth-century divines than of the reformers, just as Roman Catholicism is much more akin to the later fathers than to primitive Christianity. No one could doubt on what side were the sympathies and what were the opinions of Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, Jewell and Hooper, and what spirit pervades the articles and the homilies. A Church which does not claim to be infallible; which owes its special form chiefly to the sagacity of statesmen; in which the supreme tribunal, deciding what doctrines may be taught by the clergy, is a secular law court; in which the bands of conformity are so loose that the tendencies and sentiments of the nation give the complexion to the Church, appears in the eyes of men of these schools to have no possible right to claim or share the authority of the Church of Rome. It rests on another basis. It must be justified on other grounds.

These two distinct schools, however, have subsisted in the Church. Each of them can find some support in the Prayer-book, and the old orthodox High Church school which was chiefly elaborated and which chiefly flourished under the Stuarts, has produced a great part of the most learned theology of Christendom, and had in its early days little or no tendency to Rome. It was exclusive and repellent on the side of Nonconformity, and it placed Church authority very high; but the immense majority of its members were intensely loyal to the Anglican Church, and lived and died contentedly within its pale. There were, however, always in that Church men of another kind whose true ideal lay beyond its border. Falkland, in a remarkable speech, delivered in 1640, speaks of them with much bitterness. 'Some,' he says, 'have so industriously laboured to deduce themselves from Rome that they have given great suspicion that in gratitude they desire to return thither, or at least to meet it half way. Some have evidently laboured to bring in an English though not a Roman Popery; I mean not only the outside and dress of it, but equally absolute.... Nay, common fame is more than ordinarily false if none of them have found a way to reconcile the opinions of Rome to the preferments of England, and be so absolutely, directly and cordially Papists that it is all that 1,500l. a year can do to keep them from confessing it.'[59]

No wide secession to Rome, however, followed the development of this seventeenth-century school, though it played a large part in the nonjuror schism, and with the decay of that schism and under the latitudinarian tendencies of the eighteenth century it greatly dwindled. Since, however, the Tractarian movement, which carried so many leaders of the English Church to Rome, men of Roman sympathies and Roman ideals have multiplied within the Church to an extraordinary degree. They have not only carried their theological pretensions in the direction of Rome much further than the nonjurors; they have also in many cases so transformed the old and simple Anglican service by vestments and candles, and banners and incense, and genuflexions and whispered prayers, that a stranger might well imagine that he was in a Roman Catholic church. They have put forward sacerdotal pretensions little, if at all, inferior to those of Rome. The whole tendency of their devotional literature and thought flows in the Roman channel, and even in the most insignificant matters of ceremony and dress they are accustomed to pay the greater Church the homage of constant imitation.

It would be unjust to deny that there are some real differences. The absolute authority and infallibility of the Pope are sincerely repudiated as an usurpation, the ritualist theory only conceding to him a primacy among bishops. The discipline and submission to ecclesiastical authority also, which so eminently distinguish the Roman Church, are wholly wanting in many of its Anglican imitators, and at the same time the English sense of truth has proved sufficient to save the party from the tolerance and propagation of false miracles and of grossly superstitious practices so common in Roman Catholic countries. In this last respect, however, it is probable that English and American Roman Catholics are almost equally distinguished from Catholics in the Southern States of Europe and of America. Still, when all this is admitted, it can hardly be denied that there has grown up in a great section of the English Church a sympathy with Rome and an antipathy to Protestantism and to Protestant types of thought and character utterly alien to the spirit of the Reformers and to the doctrinal formularies of the Church of England.

It is not very easy to form a just estimate of the extent and depth of this movement. There are wide variations in the High Church party; the extreme men are not the most numerous and certainly very far from the ablest, and many influences other than convinced belief have tended to strengthen the party. It has been, indeed, unlike the Tractarian party which preceded it, remarkably destitute of literary or theological ability, and has added singularly little to the large and noble theological literature of the English Church. The mere charm of novelty, which is always especially powerful in the field of religion, draws many to the ritualistic channel, and thousands who care very little for ritualistic doctrines are attracted by the music, the pageantry, the pictorial beauty of the ritualistic services. AEsthetic tastes have of late years greatly increased in England, and the closing of places of amusement on Sunday probably strengthens the craving for more attractive services. The extreme High Church party has chiefly fostered and chiefly benefited by this desire, but it has extended much more widely. It has touched even puritanical and non-episcopal bodies, and it is sometimes combined with extremely latitudinarian opinions. There is, indeed, a type of mind which finds in such services a happy anodyne for half-suppressed doubt. Petitions which in their poignant humiliation and profound emotion no longer correspond to the genuine feelings of the worshipper, seem attenuated and transformed when they are intoned, and creeds which when plainly read shock the understanding and the conscience are readily accepted as parts of a musical performance. Scepticism as well as belief sometimes fills churches. Large classes who have no wish to cut themselves off from religious services have lost all interest in the theological distinctions which once were deemed supremely important and all strong belief in great parts of dogmatic systems, and such men naturally prefer services which by music and ornament gratify their tastes and exercise a soothing or stimulating influence over the imagination.

The extreme High Church party has, however, other elements of attraction. Much of its power is due to the new springs of real spiritual life and the new forms of real usefulness and charity that grew out of its highly developed sacerdotal system and out of the semi-monastic confraternities which at once foster and encourage and organise an active zeal. The power of the party in acting not only on the cultivated classes but also on the poor is very manifest, and it has done much to give the Church of England a democratic character which in past generations it did not possess, and which in the conditions of modern life is supremely important. The multiplication not only of religious services but of communicants, and the great increase in the interest taken in Church life in quarters where the Ritualist party prevail, cannot reasonably be questioned. Its highly ornate services draw many into the churches who never entered them before, and they are often combined with a familiar and at the same time impassioned style of preaching, something like that of a Franciscan friar or a Methodist preacher, which is excellently fitted to act upon the ignorant. If its clergy have been distinguished for their insubordination to their bishops, if they have displayed in no dubious manner a keen desire to aggrandise their own position and authority, it is also but just to add that they have been prominent for the zeal and self-sacrifice with which they have multiplied services, created confraternities, and penetrated into the worst and most obscure haunts of poverty and vice.

The result, however, of all this is that the conflicting tendencies which have always been present in the Church have been greatly deepened. There are to be found within it men whose opinions can hardly be distinguished from simple Deism or Unitarianism, and men who abjure the name of Protestant and are only divided by the thinnest of partitions from the Roman Church. And this diversity exists in a Church which is held together by articles and formularies of the sixteenth century.

It might, perhaps, a priori have been imagined that a Church with so much diversity of opinion and of spirit was an enfeebled and disintegrated Church, but no candid man will attribute such a character to the Church of England. All the signs of corporate vitality are abundantly displayed, and it is impossible to deny that it is playing an active, powerful, and most useful part in English life. Looking at it first of all from the intellectual side, it is plain how large a proportion of the best intellect of the country is contented, not only to live within it, but to take an active part in its ministrations. Compare the amount of higher literature which proceeds from clergymen of the Established Church with the amount which proceeds from the vastly greater body of Catholic priests scattered over the world; compare the place which the English clergy, or laymen deeply imbued with the teaching of the Church, hold in English literature with the place which Catholic priests, or sincere Catholic laymen, hold in the literature of France,—and the contrast will appear sufficiently evident. There is hardly a branch of serious English literature in which Anglican clergy are not conspicuous. There is nothing in a false and superstitious creed incompatible with some forms of literature. It may easily ally itself with the genius of a poet or with great beauty of style either hortatory or narrative. But in the Church of England literary achievement is certainly not restricted to these forms. In the fields of physical science, in the fields of moral philosophy, metaphysics, social and even political philosophy, and perhaps still more in the fields of history, its clergy have won places in the foremost rank. It is notorious that a large proportion of the most serious criticism, of the best periodical writing in England, is the work of Anglican clergymen. No one, in enumerating the leading historians of the present century, would omit such names as Milman, Thirlwall and Merivale, in the generation which has just passed away, or Creighton and Stubbs among contemporaries, and these are only eminent examples of a kind of literature to which the Church has very largely contributed. Their histories are not specially conspicuous for beauty of style, and not only conspicuous for their profound learning; they are marked to an eminent degree by judgment, criticism, impartiality, a desire for truth, a skill in separating the proved from the false or the merely probable. Compare them with the chief histories that have been written by Catholic priests. In past ages some of the greatest works of patient, lifelong industry in all literary history were due to the Catholic priesthood, and especially to members of the monastic orders; even in modern times they have produced some works of great learning, of great dialectic skill, and of great beauty of style; but with scarcely an exception these works bear upon them the stamp of an advocate and are written for the purpose of proving a point, concealing or explaining away the faults on one side, and bringing into disproportioned relief those of the other. No one would look in them for a candid estimate of the merits of an opponent or for a full statement of a hostile case. Doellinger, who would probably once have been cited as the greatest historian the Catholic priesthood had produced in the nineteenth century, died under the anathema of his Church; and how large a proportion of the best writing in modern English Catholicism has come from writers who have been brought up in Protestant universities and who have learnt their skill in the Anglican Church!

It is at least one great test of a living Church that the best intellect of the country can enter into its ministry, that it contains men who in nearly all branches of literature are looked upon by lay scholars with respect or admiration. It is said that the number of young men of ability who take orders is diminishing, and that this is due, not merely to the agricultural depression which has made the Church much less desirable as a profession, and indeed in many cases almost impossible for those who have not some private fortune; not merely to the competitive examination system, which has opened out vast and attractive fields of ambition to the ablest laymen,—but also to the wide divergence of men of the best intellect from the doctrines of the Church, and the conviction that they cannot honestly subscribe its articles and recite its formularies. But although this is, I believe, true, it is also true that there is no other Church which has shown itself so capable of attracting and retaining the services of men of general learning, criticism and ability. One of the most important features of the English ecclesiastical system has been the education of those who are intended for the Church, in common with other students in the great national universities. Other systems of education may produce a clergy of greater professional learning and more intense and exclusive zeal, but no other system of education is so efficacious in maintaining a general harmony of thought and tendency between the Church and the average educated opinion of the nation.

Take another test. Compare the Guardian, which represents better than any other paper the opinions of moderate Churchmen, with the papers which are most read by the French priesthood and have most influence on their opinions. Certainly few English journalists have equalled in ability Louis Veuillot, and few papers have exercised so great an influence over the clergy of the Church as the Univers at the time when he directed it; but no one who read those savagely scurrilous and intolerant pages, burning with an impotent hatred of all the progressive and liberal tendencies of the time, shrinking from no misrepresentation of fact and from no apology for crime if it was in the interest of the Church, could fail to perceive how utterly out of harmony it was with the best lay thought of France. English religious journalism has sometimes, though in a very mitigated degree, exhibited some of these characteristics, but no one who reads the Guardian, which I suppose appeals to a larger clerical public than any other paper, can fail to realise the contrast. It is not merely that it is habitually written in the style and temper of a gentleman, but that it reflects most clearly in its criticism, its impartiality, its tone of thought, the best intellectual influences of the time. Men may agree or differ about its politics or its theology, but no one who reads it can fail to admit that it is thoroughly in touch with cultivated lay opinion, and it is in fact a favourite paper of many who care only for its secular aspects.

The intellectual ability, however, included among the ministers of a Church, though one test, is by no means a decisive and infallible one of its religious life. During the period of the Renaissance, when genuine belief in the Catholic Church had sunk to nearly its lowest point, most men of literary tastes and talents were either members of the priesthood or of the monastic orders. This was not due to any fervour of belief, but simply to the fact that the Church at that time furnished almost the only sphere in which a literary life could be pursued with comfort, without molestation, and with some adequate reward. Much of the literary ability found in the English Church is unquestionably due to the attraction it offers and the facilities it gives to those who simply wish for a studious life. The abolition of many clerical sinecures, and the greatly increased activity of clerical duty imposed by contemporary opinion, have no doubt rendered the profession less desirable from this point of view; but even now there is no other profession outside the universities which lends itself so readily to a literary life, and a great proportion of the most eminent thinkers and writers in the Church of England are eminent in fields that have little or no connection with theology.

Other tests of a flourishing Church are needed, but they can easily be found. Political power is one test, though it is a very coarse and very deceptive one. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the most superstitious creeds are often those which exercise the greatest political influence, for they are those in which the priesthood acquires the most absolute authority. Nor does the decline of superstition among the educated classes always bring with it a corresponding decline in ecclesiastical influence. There have been instances, both in Pagan and Christian times, of a sceptical and highly educated ruling class supporting and allying themselves with a superstitious Church as the best means of governing or moralising the masses. Such Churches, by their skilful organisation, by their ascendency over individual rulers, or by their political alliances, have long exercised an enormous influence, and in a democratic age the preponderance of political power is steadily passing from the most educated classes. At the same time, in a highly civilised and perfectly free country, in which all laws of religious disqualification and coercion have disappeared, and all questions of religion are submitted to perpetual discussion, the political power which the Church of England retains at least proves that she has a vast weight of genuine and earnest opinion behind her. No politician will deny the strength with which the united or greatly preponderating influence of the Church can support or oppose a party. It has been said by a cynical observer that the three things outside their own families that average Englishmen value the most are rank, money, and the Church of England, and certainly no good observer will form a low estimate of the strength or earnestness of the Church feeling in every section of the English people.