LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
TWO VIEWS OF EMPIRE.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.']
SIR,—I have no wish to argue the points wherein you criticise my address in Newton Hall on January 1st; but I shall be glad if you will allow me to add a few words as to the way in which it must be understood. What you and other critics have seen is an abbreviated report of part of my argument. That argument was only part of a somewhat complex body of general views which I have endeavoured to state fully in a continuous series of addresses for many years past. Those whom I addressed are more or less familiar with the entire system of which I was explaining a fragment. Taken by itself, any fragment of any religions or social system might appear extravagant or unintelligible. Whatever I or others say at Newton Hall presupposes, as part of the argument, a coherent scheme for a reform of the social, moral, religious, and practical life of Western Europe as a whole. Each part of this scheme is perhaps not workable, or even intelligible, when assumed to be adapted to the present state of things in all the other parts. The Positivist view is that it is waste of time to attempt to get small sectional reforms by means of isolated nostrums, and
that the time has come to consider a deep co-ordinate recasting of thought, policy, industry, and religion. And it invites us to look for a new education, a new object of devotion, a new form of government, and a new type of manners. All this, of course, cannot be said in any single discourse in an hour. And those who speak at Newton Hall seek from time to time to- illustrate now one, now another side of the entire scheme. Our hearers, being familiar with it, are well able to make all neces- sary explanations for themselves. Those who come out of idle curiosity often go away as they came in. Reporters are not pro- vided with accommodation any more than they are in a church They do their business marvellously well under all difficulties, and with no assistance from us ; but, of course, their business is to furnish good " copy " for newspapers, not to present Positivism as a consistent scheme of thought and life. News- papers are almost wholly absorbed in considering how things will look when presented as Bills or motions in Parliament.. What is absurd in a House of Commons point of view, to them is absurd per se. That is not the point of view we take at Newton Hall. In speaking of any altered conditions of the Empire or of government, we assume that it can only rest on altered. conditions of social, moral, and religious life. I was glad to have your views about the Empire and the conquest of Africa from Alexandria to the Cape so fully and fearlessly stated. I was not aware that such ideas were seriously held in the present day. In my opinion, they are practically the same- as those on which dreams of universal empire and the pro- pagation of religion by the sword have always been based. They are, mutatis matandis, the ideas of Philip II. and the.
Caliph Omar.—I am, Sir, &c., FREDERIC HARRISON.
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