THE AMERICAN EDITION OF BAGEHOT'S WORKS.* Tins is a curious

monument of the genius of American , enterprise. It is an extremely careful edition of Bagehot's works in five handsome volumes, corrected (perhaps a little over-corrected) by a most painstaking and indefatigable admirer of Bagehot, which the Travellers' Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut, have published as a sort of literary gift to their constituency out of the surplus profits of their enterprise. Bagehot appears to have been selected mainly because his genius combines so curiously practical sagacity and insight into the science of economy with literary brilliance, and partly because no uniform edition of his works existed even in England before this edition was undertaken. Mr. Forrest Morgan is a hearty admirer of Bagehot, as literary and poli- tical, as well as economical thinker, and unquestionably he has spent enormous labour, and apparently procured the spending of a great deal of labour by others, to rectify the many slips of memory, negligences of style, and inaccuracies of quotation which abound in Bagehot's works. Naturally enough, having devoted so much labour to the work, Mr. Forrest Morgan magnifies his office, and edits a little too much in the style of a schoolmaster who corrects a boy's exercise. He exaggerates a good deal the seriousness of misquotations apparently made from memory, and not unfrequently rather improved than injured by that process; though, of course, we do not mean for a moment to say that when an author is professedly quoted, he should not be quoted accurately, rather than altered, even though he be improved, in the quotation. For instance, Mr. Forrest. Morgan is fond of the expression " mangled " to indicate that Bagehot has misquoted his author. Now, the word " mangled " can only apply where the whole effect is marred by the degenerate form in which the quotation is made. But Mr. Forrest Morgan uses it where there is no real marring of the effect,—where, indeed, if the author had written his sentence as Bagehot quotes it, we might even have slightly preferred the altered version. For example, Mr. Forrest Morgan speaks of this quotation from

Pickwick as " mangled :"—

" PICKWICK." BAGEHOT'S MANGLED' VERSION-

" It's always best to do what "'Always shout with the mob,' the mob do.'—' But suppose said Mr. Pickwick.' = But sup- there are two mobs ?' suggested pose there are two mobs ?' said Mr. Snodgrass.= Shout with Mr. Snodgrass.= Then shout the largest,' replied Mr. Pick- with the loudest,' said Mr. Pick-

wick.'" wick.' "

Surely there is no " mangling " there. There is inaccuracy ; but if Dickens had really written what Bagehot remembered, and Bagehot had remembered what Dickens really wrote, there would have been just as much cause for saying that he had mangled Dickens as there is now. Again, in the same article, Bagehot said that Mr. Carlyle, " in his Chartism' we think," observes of the Poor-Law Reform :—" It was then above all things necessary that outdoor relief should cease. But how P

What means did great Nature take for accomplishing that desirable end? She created a race of men who believed the cessation of outdoor relief to be the one thing needful."

This Mr. Forrest Morgan describes as a " mangled " form of Carlyle's sentence, which ran thus :—" Their Amend- ment Act was imperatively required to be put in practice, to create men filled with a theory that refusal of outdoor relief was the one thing needful. Nature had no readier way of getting outdoor relief refused." There, so far from " mangling," we think that Bagehot definitely improved the form of Carlyle's sentence, and as he gave his readers notice, in the words "we think," that he was quoting from memory only, we do not regard the inaccuracy as even censurable. He gave Carlyle's remark a better form than that in which Carlyle himself had given it. Again, now and then Mr. Forrest Morgan puts in a schoolmasterish rebuke when it is he who is mistaken and Bagehot who is right. In the paper on Sir Robert Peel, Bagehot describes the difference between the view of politics taken by the first manufacturers, even when they were, like Sir Robert Peel's father, strict Conservatives, and the view taken of politics by the hereditary landowners. And, dwelling on this, Bagehot wrote :—" A harsh laborious- ness characterises the one, a pleasant geniality the other. The

habit of industry is ingrained in those who have risen by it ; it modifies every word and qualifies every action; they are

• The Works of Walter Bagehot. Now first published in hill by the Travellers' Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut. Edited by Forrest Morgan. 5 vols. Hartford, U.S.A. DM.

Aoirowoot of work." To the word Airovoor, Mr. Forrest Morgan appends this note :—" Mechanics, handicraftsmen. The word has no pertinence here ; he evidently means incarna- tions' or materialisation.'—En." Mr. Forrest Morgan is mistaken. Bagehot meant nothing of the kind. He referred, of course, to the well-known passage in Aristotle's Ethics, in

which a sketch is given of the pgiyaueoc, or illiberal-minded man who over-estimates his own importance in the world, and cannot see how narrow he is. There are various other little mistakes in the corrections. In the preliminary memoir, Mr. Forrest Morgan has adopted two conjectural emendations in the text of the letters on the Coup d'Etat, both of which are, in the present writer's belief, blunders. Mr. Bagehot certainly could hardly have called the Greek genius " narrow." It was not narrow, and though " human " is not a very good expression, it would mean in this context that it was a genius which concerned itself with man as a whole, and not with regions of science and art that take you away from man as a whole. Again, the adjective applied to the aged attorney who condemned the youthful barrister for being "too sharp by half," was certainly not " dense," and in all probability Bagehot really wrote " donee," the Scotch term describing a canny, good-tempered disposition. At all events, that was the word which the writer of the memoir, who saw and puzzled

over the original MS., believes that Bagehot used. No one can deny the care and diligence which Mr. Forrest Morgan has devoted to this edition, and no doubt in some cases he has corrected frightful blunders, as in the really " mangled" passage from The Prelude quoted in the essay on Lord Althorp. But he has shown a little too much zeal. He greatly exaggerates the amount of "murdered grammar and impossible syntax" in Bagehot's

writings, and several of his smaller corrections are evidently due to misunderstandings of his own. But Mr. Forrest Morgan has appreciated the genius of Bagehot to the full, and he does not in his own mind exaggerate the importance of his inaccuracies, though he has been tempted to take up too much the attitude of an astonished and displeased tutor who resents the blunders and the blots in his favourite pupil's brilliant essay.

But none the less Mr. Forrest Morgan's own criticisms are discriminating, thoughtful, and often sound, and no one can doubt that his essay will do much to recommend Bagehot's writing to American readers. Indeed, we should expect a great increase to his reputation from the diffusion in the United States of these five goodly volumes. It is obvious that

the literary buoyancy, the reflective depth, and the econo- mical originality of Bagehot's genius have recommended his writings to the special interest of the American people ; and Mr. Forrest Morgan has shown that he appre- ciates thoroughly all these aspects of Bagehot's mind.

Whether Bagehot's singular detachment of intellect, his power of looking at men and institutions from a point of view at once

sympathetic and critical, so that he not only appreciates exactly what they attempt and intend, but what they did not

attempt and intend which it would have been well that they should have attempted and intended, has also been a source of attraction, it is more difficult to say. Mr. Forrest Morgan appears to be quite candid enough to see the force of a good many of Bagehot's criticisms on the political life of the

United States, while he very naturally repudiates a, good many of his conclusions :- " The 'English Constitution' is ostensibly not a brief for that system, but a judicial work on comparative constitutions ; and from such a standpoint it is a serious flaw that he ignores wholly the factor of stability, to which everywhere else he attaches supreme value. All progress and even good government must be sacrificed if necessary to keep the political fabric together, is the entire raison d'ttre of the Letters on the Coup d'Etat' ; if a government cannot keep itself alive, it makes no difference how good it is. Much of 'Physics and Politics' and Economic Studies' rests on the same thesis : unity of action is of such prime importance to the world that a disciplined band of semi- barbarians often crushes out an advanced but loose-knit society; the same idea recurs again and again in his other writings. Yet when he contrasts the English with the American system, national feeling triumphs over abstract philosophy, with the result of exactly reversing the relations of the two systems. The evident fact is, that the nominal aristocracy of England is really an unchecked democracy, committing the fate of the polity at every moment, through the cabinet system and the lack of a written constitution, to the crude emotions of the mass; while the nominal democracy of America is so curbed by its written Con- stitution and fixed executive terms, accessory institutions, and the division of power between national, State, and municipal bodies, that its working is even ultra-conservative. Nor is it true, as he was wont to argue in the Economist, that such barriers are only useless irritations, and are always broken through as soon as the people are really excited. The failure of Johnson's impeach- ment is one proof to the contrary; and though the Supreme Court could be swamped and packed, that process cannot be indefinitely repeated. On the whole, the curbs curb,—and a good deal too much ; for I must not be understood as objecting much to what he says, but only to what he does not say. His positive criticisms are mainly of the highest value and justice, and the severest ones are the truest. The dangers and degradations and follies, the scanting of decent political thought and the outlawry of indepen- dent political thinkers, the riot of low minds and coarse natures in authority for which they have no fitness, the lowering into the mud of the standards of political cleanliness, inevitable to such a polity, are so far from being overstated that his expressions are tame beside the facts. My contention is, that every point he makes in favor of the English system—and his arguments are of immense weight and often unanswerable—is an equal point in favor of pure democracy and against his own distrust of the people, by showing that the freer they are left to their own will the better they manage. Nothing can be truer than that a cabinet system keeps the political education of the masses at the highest pitch, and that one like ours injuriously stints it. But thoroughness of political education results from directness of political power ; and while a champion of democracy is perfectly consistent in thinking this an advantage and favoring cabinet government, its advocacy by Bagehot on that express ground presents the grotesque spectacle of a great thinker employing his best powers in confuting his own creed. And it is certainly not proved that the hard and fast line he draws between the two systems is inevitable : that free countries are shut down forever to a choice between two evils, neither of which can be lessened; that they must take either a pure cabinet system, with the throttle valve always under the hand of the mob, or a pure presidential system, with irresistible party power yet no party responsibility, little direct power of the executive for good and limitless indirect power for mischief, and the bread of many thousands of families at once a bribe and a threat to turn elections into a farce. I believe that the two can be made in some measure to work together ; and if either finally absorbed the other, it would be the surest possible proof that the survivor was best fitted to the needs of the country."

It will be seen by these moderate and sagacious criticisms, that in this, as in other respects, Mr. Forrest Morgan's pre- face is well worth reading as a thoughtful and solid contribu- tion to the study of a very original thinker's political reflections, as well as to the correction of a sometimes rash as well as masterly critic's occasionally rather random shots.