23 JANUARY 1864, Page 9

SOLOMON.

Tv. STANLEY, Dean of iVestminster, has a habit of saying .1../ remarkable things. People who know the East as well as the West, who are aware that humanity includes races not familiar with Pall Mall, who have realized the great truth that there may be people for whom Christ died, but to whom comfort is, never- theless, not the ideal, do often say remarkable things. But Dean Stanley never said anything quite so remarkable as the few words in which, standing in Edinburgh before a Scotch audience,—an audience, that is, saturated with Biblical ideas, yet wanting in all Eastern knowledge,—he described the relation borne by Solomon towards all Asiatics. The good Presbyterians understood well enough his relation towards them, as the King whom the favour of God could not keep from falling away, who wrote proverbs nearly as popular in Scotland as the songs of Burns, and whose name had descended through the ages to a race who despise the Jews, as the type, and flower, and exemplar of all human wisdom. But his relation to Asiatics, his special place not among inspired or half-inspired men, but among kings, as politician rather than pro- phet, as ideal monarch rather than sage,—this was very new to their understandings. Solomon, said the lecturer, rising, we fear, some- what over the heads of his hearers, and half conscious of a wish to call his subject Solyman, " Solomon was the official representative of a vast but most unfamiliar world ; he was the true type of an Asiatic monarch. ' Europe,' said the philosophical Hegel, ' could never have had a Solomon.' But the whole East seemed to be represented to us in his person. He belonged not only to Judaea, but to the East generally, and the sense of his being the ideal and prototype of all great kings in the East was shown in the curious legend that the forty sovereigns who ruled over the world before the creation of man were all Solomons." If one could but drive that thought into the head of the British ten-pounder I Half our work in India would be done, and we should understand the meaning of the movements which so eternally puzzle us in the lands which, from the tradition of a forgotten geography, we still style " the East," and learn at last some tolerance for the vast civilizations in China, and Japan, and Russia, we are now so diligently breaking up. They may be bad, or incompetent, or effete, and we individually believe they are all three; but the ideal towards which they struggle so blindly, through such calamities and seas of blood, and, as it seems to Europeans, aimless and endless waste of power, is not the low one we are accustomed to believe. They want to set up a regime, a constitution, in which the supreme authority shall not be law—which to them seems a lifeless thing—but a living human will, a Power which can sympathize with their wants and their weaknesses, modify facts to them, not them to facts, give them justice flexible to circumstances, orders what to do instead of orders what to avoid doing, reproduce on earth the infinite benevolence and power which all races, when not blinded by Calvin- ism or other Pagan form of theology, ascribe to the living God. They don't get it, of course, any more than we Westerns get our regime of immutable but just and merciful law; but till we understand the object of their struggle we shall never understand them, never know why, when Turkey is all distracted, an order from the Sultan is still obeyed by Turks like a command from heaven ; why, when half China is in rebellion, the object of the rebels is to invest their own chief with attributes even more despotic, even more like those of a supernatural being than those the existing Emperor misuses ; why, in short, revolution in Asia has never for three thousand years produced any change save one of persons. The ideal of the East is Solomon, not Washington, and the features which to us seem defects in his character are, to Asiatics, but the natural attri- butes of the position he filled, and which it is their single political desire to see so occupied. They want a sovereign to sit as Solomon sat, in open hall, doing justice without forms, " crushing the evil, cherishing the good," as a deity might be expected to do, without laws, or limits, or rules, save the wisdom and love of justice which ought to be in his breast from on high. Solomon did precisely that. He "judged the people of Israel" before the people, reverencing no law but the divine one, careless of human life if in his judgment that life was forfeited, reckless of restraint if in his eyes restraint impeded justice. He orders, tentatively it may be, but still orders, the cleaving of an infant "by the sword" to settle its maternity, and his order is in the eyes of Asiatics the perfection of right, for it did settle it when other settlement was hopeless. Scotchmen think it is right in their eyes, too, because they think he was too weak to carry it out, and because it is recorded, though without a word of approval, in Scripture ; but let one of the Lords of Session only try a similar expedient ! Any Asiatic alive would hold the sovereign who tried it to-morrow to have shown marvellous intelli- gence and humanity.

It is because he did such things, because his volition was absolute but employed for the good of his people, that Solomon became the Asiatic ideal, till his traditions fill all lands, till his power is represented as extending over all, save God, and sovereigns are judged by the degree in which they approach

him. The vices and foibles attributed to him are the vices and foibles which, provided the post is filled, are pardoned by all Asia to its kings. What mattered the heavy taxa- tion, if but the poor got justice and the spectacle of that glorious munificence? what signified the crowd of women in his harem, any more than in that of the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid ? He was fulfilling his trae function, that of high priest as well as king, and the release from restraints shown in his vices as in his magnificence was but a new example of that supreme volition, that law-creating will, which Asiatics seek in their lord. Rome, with its definite and legal habit of thought, reduced this crave to form when it declared its Augustus solutus a legibus, and so in- troduced the phrase which with Western men implies all that is abominable in political life. Solomon, in Asiatic eyes, did but justice when he slew Adonijah for asking Abishag the Shunamite to wife, for the request was an insult to his own God-given rank,—or when he murdered Shimei for his father's grudge, for who should judge of the propriety of giving life and death except the king ? So completely is he the representative king, that the Rabbins and the Mussulman doctors vie with each other in exaggerating his great- ness, tell how year by year all the tribes of earth and air, men, and beasts, and birds, and genii flocked to the golden throne of Jerusalem to do him honour ; how, when he was hot, the hoopoes formed a canopy over his head, and the lions brought him venison when he was hungered with his labour in hunting them. Why not? Why should not that sovereign volition, which can redress all wrong and grant all right, be obeyed by the inferiors of man as well as by man himself ? That is the ideal ever before the Oriental mind, the great King, beautiful as the morning, sitting in his hall, attended by all the tribes of earth and all the sons of men, to hear complaints, and draw from his own bosom the thoughts and orders which can redress all wrongs. This is the secret of the non-resist- ance of Asiatic society, of the rooted belief that while ministers are scoundrels and the agents of authority evil demons, obedience to the direct command of the ruler is a moral duty,—of the fact that a Mussulman accepts the bowstring, if only sent by the Sultan, as his passport to eternal bliss. To this hour the Asiatic requires years of study to force into his mind the thought that there can be limits to supreme power, and natives travel from the uttermost parts of India, fifteen hundred miles on foot, to beseech the Viceroy to do them justice in some civil snit, and depart believing him malignant because he can but refer them back to that dead " law " which has failed to secure to them their right. During the mutinies the natives rarely broke up the administrative system ; but in all instances they made its supreme motive power the justice of the -chief and not the law.

There is something to Western minds infinitely slavish in this theory, for they perceive that all granted to the sovereign is taken from themselves,—that if the ideal Solomon were ever possible, they would dwindle into grains of sand wafted hither and thither by his will. But it must be remembered that the West has never accepted the idea of fatalism, which underlies all Oriental thought— the notion that they are contending with a power which may as well be malignant as benign, and which it needs a human being possessed of all power as well as inspired with the true sense of justice to correct. We Westerns all admit that in this life, while the State can suppress the evil, it cannot reward the good, and submit to that failure as part of the order of Providence. The Asiatic does not submit at all, he simply thinks it the height of injustice, and sweeps all restraints away in order to create a human provi- dence who can reward as well as punish, who can bid the good man walk up higher as well as fling the evil down. He wants a justice higher than law can give, a justice as of God, a justice which shall supersede his own need of taking thought and trouble, and is consequently compelled to rely on his earthly providence as if he were God, to cease to judge Solomon for the death of Shimei, because he must, as King, know the right. The Asiatic accusation against a bad king is not despotism but neglect, not that he claims too wide a power, for he cannot claim his due, but that he will not take the trouble to use it. And we are bound in justice to add that this universal consensus has its effect on the kings, that, as a rule, an Oriental sovereign, if his subjects can only perform the almost impossible task of getting at him, does, as a rule, do justice, very stern justice always, sometimes very whimsical justice, but still something appreciable by men as bear- ing some relation to the divine law, as being the very opposite, for example, of Sir George Grey's recent acts. That is the reason why Asiatics appreciate so intensely men of Sir John Lawrence's type, men whose will is so strong that it bends law to their own decrees, and enables them to do justice even when all the formulas seem to stand in the way. And it is also the reason why British law, which does secure real justice, which they know to be beyond fear, or favour, or bribe, which is to their own institutions as a law of nature is to ours, seems to Asiatics so contemptibly insufficient. They seek something which they think higher than that, something they will never find, but the crave for which has suspended among them all efforts towards new forms of rule,—the ideal king whom we are accustomed to call Solomon but whom they know and name sultans after as " Solyman."