speak Gaelic, while the Frenchmen of Canada are loyally on
At the same time, there exists in England for the dark races, our side. It does not lie in religion, for the English Catholics, unless indeed they are Hindoos with money, little beyond after all their sufferings, have been as loyal as their Protestant toleration. Grave officers question whether it will be possible neighbours ; and of the two creeds which rule in Canada the that Prince Alamayo, the son of an Emperor, with a Catholic is, on the whole, most inclined to defend the authority pedigree stretching through all time, and supported at of the motherland. Besides, no question of race, creed, or least by the tradition of an unbroken people, can safely language which divides us from the peoples among whom we be granted a commission in the Guards. The lot of have failed, can be compared in degree or extent with the a Lascar in Liverpool is very hard ; Magistrates have differences which separate us from people among whom we specially to protect the Chinese Embassy ; and an irruption of have succeeded. The wildest Irishman is our kinsman by the Chinese or Japanese workmen might, and probably would, pro. side of the Turanians of British Burmah, of all races in Asia duce most dangerous riots. What is the defect or virtue which the one most heartily ours in feeling. The Boer is in race a so irregularly moves English action, and yet is so certain in its brother, by the side of the Feejeean Chief who said to us, "Rule operation, that no Englishman discussing the annexation of over me." The American is a second self in presence of the Sioux, the Nile seriously argues that his rule would be either injurious who, once within British territory, turns on him and says, "I am or unacceptable at home, and under the protection of the Great Mother." The The answer to that question, if it could be given with cer- Catholic of Kerry or of Montreal, of Malta or of the Mauritius, tainty, would solve half the difficulties of the Empire. We is a co-religionist, when compared with the Hindoo of Nuddea, cannot affect to give it in its entirety—that is, as a philosophic the Oxford of Bengal, who would vote for the Briton before answer—except by a statement which teaches nothing ; but any ruler of his own faith. The difference of creed between we believe we can give it in great part, in the form in which a a Wesleyan and a Boer is scarcely perceptible, yet the Boer Whig politician like Lord Arthur Russell always desires a reply. • sacrifices all to escape our dominion ; while the single Oriental The ultimate cause of English failure among civilised races is race which is still Pagan, and yet not bound to the soil, has no doubt want of sympathy, arising from want of intelligence, everywhere elected the Englishmen as his special protectors. or in other words, from a lack of capacity to perceive the force Capture any city, or island, or place in Asia they will, and as of " sentimental " ideas. The Englishman does not understand the British flag goes up the Parsee opens his shop, his bank, why Irishmen long for respect and petting, why Ionians think or his shipyard, the picture of political content. No difference bad government by Greeks preferable to good government between English and French, or Dutch, or Gaelic great as the by barbarians, why Boers prefer a system which makes latter may be, can compare with the difference Gaelic, Eng- them feel like aristocrats to a system which only grants lish and the Semitic tongues, the languages written from them leave to be millionaire subjects if they can, why a Rou- right to left, and in which the very pivot of expression—the manian cannot bear even nominal vassalage to a Moslem Tartar ; comparative importance of the doer and the thing done—is and his cold, immovable conviction that any aspiration which the reverse of that on which we arrange our words, he does not entertain is senseless folly, produces an irritation What, then, is the cause of a failure which extends to our which no justice, no self-sacrifice, no impartiality ever descendants in America—who are hated by Hispano-Americans succeeds in removing. The dark races feel it just as much more than we are hated by any race—and which exists in as the white races, and only do not act on the feeling because they spite of, or rather by the side of, this amazing interruption to are in the stage in which the Englishman's good qualities secure the general law,—that in our own home, in the island in which them things infinitely more important than the things they lose we live, and which we govern as we please, the principle to through the Englishman's faults. When the races of India which Lord Arthur Russell alludes is directly and un- can give themselves what the haughty Englishman gives them, mistakably reversed. Here we welcome every immi- they will seek what he refuses ; and the Englishman will go, in grant, provided only he is white, and every immigrant of blood and fire, or peacefully, as he may at the time select. If our own colour so likes us that his children glide imperceptibly the Indians were as civilised as the Irish—we mean civilised into the population. The very Germans—the masters, as they in the way which secures the enjoyment of quiet life—out we say, of the world—do not in England teach their children should go, and so we should if the Irish were as numerous as German. As Mr. Lecky, in his recent suggestive book on the the Hindoos. This is the general explanation, and this, though Eighteenth Century, has pointed out with novel force six perfectly true, is, we honestly confess, of no practical use what- great waves of immigration struck our shore in one century, ever. The average Englishman may become a being who from France, from Belgium, and from Germany, and each sympathises with other ideas than his own, but he will become successive inroad was received with a welcome Bo warm that LORD ARTHUR RUSSELL ON ENGLISH the emigre's' descendants count a wholly unusual number of UNPOPUL ARITY. representatives among the Peers. About 1720, when London LORD ARTHUR RUSSELL, in his speech to his con- contained perhaps 600,000 people, holding a tenth of the stituents at Tavistock on the 10th inst., asked a political whole population of the island, there were thirty-five French question which has been frequently put before, but to which Protestant churches in the capital, and who now hesitates to there has never yet been a satisfactory reply. How does it acknowledge that he is of the Huguenot descent I German or happen that the English, who succeed so well in the govern- Italian, Frenchman or Hollander, every man becomes an Eng- ment of dark races or feeble races, of Hindoos and Negroes, lishman in a generation, and unless an hereditary Catholic- Fingoes and Arabs, who can keep a vast city like Calcutta, in which case a popular disability attaches equally to him and containing, for one element alone, 50,000 armed men from to his English co-religionist—he finds in his descent no bar to Northern India, as quiet as Cheapside, and can rule without fortune or to office. If we regard race alone, the Empire is espionage a cloaca gentium like Bombay, cannot conciliate presided over by a German, and governed by a Venetian ; its white men of their own civilisation ? The French in two greatest Viceroys in 1874 were Irishmen, one of them, as less than two centuries turned Protestant Germans into faithful he himself declared, pure Celt ; a German of Leipzic is a Frenchmen. No one doubts that within a century Nizzards powerful leader of Opposition ; an Italian calls and controls will feel for Paris as they never felt for Turin. The Celts of a workman's meeting in Exeter Hall ; a Dane, a Swede, and Brittany died in heaps to save France and even the Corsicans a Pomeranian rank among the first physicians, surgeons, and —a people whose persistency in then:hatreds has given a new oculists of London ; a German Jew represents Ailesbury, is a word to every language in Europe—would to-morrow vote for baronet, and will yet have a peerage ; an American is one of the France by an unanimous plebiscite. Why cannot England, most prominent commercial lawyers, and at least one Armenian asks Lord Arthur, do the same in Ireland ? Why are sat for years in the House of Commons ; while in every walk we still the objects in Ireland of an antipathy which of life, from the Peerage to the confectioners' shops, men of makes disaster to England matter of gratulation, of venom- foreign extraction are prominent, are welcome, and are re- ous dislike to the French of the Mauritius, of passive spected. The insular jealousy of nationality is, as regards scorn to the Boers of the Cape, of active scorn to the Ionian immigrants, absolutely dead. Who would distrust Lord Islanders, of hardly-concealed aversion to the hybrid race Eversley in a French war, or who eared that in 1854 the on whom we have bestowed such unmixed advantages, greatest " English " merchant in Calcutta was a Russian ? So the half-European, half-Arab population of Malta ? The thoroughly hearty is the reception, that the foreigner, so far answer does not lie in race, for the greatest revolt against our from being placed under disabilities, is accorded a special privi- rule was a revolt of our own people beyond the Atlantic, and lege, the mixed jury ; that a German missionary accused of her Majesty has no more devoted subjects than the fiery Celts murder, alone among men acquitted, receives a compensation ; of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. It does not lie in and that naturalisation has become a form about which no language, for the Americans spoke English and the Welsh one but an election agent ever takes the trouble to inquire. one by a process analogous to evolution, and lasting for a time beyond which only the dreamiest politicians speculate. But there is another very practical and very immediate partial answer to Lord Arthur's question. No man changes so greatly under cultivation, and especially cultivation in the work of governing, as the Englishman, no one gains so much tolerance, and no one acquires in so supreme a degree that faculty of restraining impulses which, though not sympathy, is in practical life almost its equivalent. He is still cold, and still in the last resort haughty ; but the governing Englishman has learnt that sentiments are forces, that whether obedience is cordial or sulky, depends on feeling, that if he would have a quiet time he must understand and attend to aspirations as well as interests. Now, with a single exception, which we shall notice directly, in dealing with white men it is the average Englishmen who govern, and in dealing with dark men it is the English statesmen even if only colonists. It is the trained politician who makes laws for the Indians, and regulates the rights of Kaffirs, and will settle how Fellaheen are to be treated if we annex Egypt ; while it is the average English- man, the "constituent," in one form or another, who settles how American Colonists and conquered Frenchmen and Dutchmen and Maltese are to be regarded and treated. The statesmen, left to themselves, without restraint from opinion, would have conciliated Ireland a century ago, would have established Catholicism, bought up the granted lands and sold them to the tenantry, and have established a system of law and justice, a Code and a Magistracy, closely analo- gous to that which makes Brittany orderly, prosperous, and content. It was average English opinion, the opinion of the body of English people, which made these measures impracticable, when the English statesmen were not only ready to complete them, but stood pledged up to the lips that they should immediately be completed. The English settlers in India are a better class than Englishmen at home believe ; but if the settlers governed India as the English electors govern Ireland, we could not stay there three years. The whole native population, to put the case in a broad, but short exaggeration, would be pat into decent trousers and sent to church, or at the least deprived of all its "ridiculous privileges of caste, so unfavourable to productive industry." It was the body of the people, headed by that typical average Englishman, George DI—the man who thought it virtuous to eat mutton and turnips, which he happened to like—who first irritated and then lost the American Colonies, while the statesman Chatham was defending them with the whole force of his rhetorical genius. It was not till the average English, in despair and weariness, surrendered the white Colonies into the hands of the statesmen, Molesworth, Grey, and the Peelites, that the Colonists, previously as fretful as Irishmen, recognised the extreme value of connection with a world-wide empire. Average Englishmen in the Jamaica Assembly drove the island to a revolt, which a statesman terminated. It was Lord Durham, not the electors, Lord Durham, per- sonally the most harsh and overbearing of mankind, but a statesman nevertheless, who reconciled the Colon- ists of French Canada, men who, if the British elector really knew and could legislate for their present grievances, would again be driven into rebellion. He would pass a Public Worship Act under which the prosperous, contented, super- stitious habitant would go mad with hate and fear for his soul's health, whereas Lord Dufferin and the Canadian statesmen, who want French votes as well as English, will get through the difficulty well enough. We need not, however, run over the list of examples. Our case is sufficiently proved by the uni- versally recognised fact that the hearty welcome of white emigres comes from the law-givers, and the oppression of dark emigres comes from the populace, except in the single case where, for a moment and accidentally, the workmen fear white immigrant rivals, and try to act without straining their views through the higher intelligence of their representatives who govern. The fact is so, and if anybody says that it is discreditable, the answer is patent through all history that the one thing democracies cannot be trusted to do is to govern subject races well.
There is, of course one marked exception to this otherwise invariable rule. Whenever the grievance is big enough and visible enough to excite the passion of pity, or to appeal to the moral instinct of the people, then, and only then, demo- cracy displays even towards subject races its good side. The people, not the politicians, released the slaves. The people, not the politicians, made teaching from pulpit, press, and platform free in India. The people, not the politicians, are going to save us from the huge crime of rearming the Turkish Pashas for plunder and spoliation. But that exception only proves the great rule of our modern history, that the more completely the settlement of all questions not strictly moral connected with the government of subject-races is left to the statesmen and the officials, the less will be the discontent with English rule which those races will display.
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