Mr. Frederic Harrison is in the field against Sir John
Lub- bock, as candidate for the suffrages of the University of London, and his supporters boast that he has over three hundred pro- mises. As Sir John Lubbock counts over a thousand promises, that does not give Mr. Harrison much chance, and, indeed, he has none. He has, however, great faith. Mr. Harrison has put forth a letter to Mr. Picton, in which he expresses an "unhesi- tating conviction" that the Irish "are capable of a National Government, and will work it as regularly and as successfully as their neighbours." And se has also published an eloquent pamphlet, with the sensational title, " Mr. Gladstone ! or Anarchy !" in which that alteinative, inclusive of its two notes of admiration, is discussed in periods set forth with all Mr. Harrison's usual wealth and felicity of diction. "Nationality," he says, "is a thing which will force itself to the front," and to cry out that Irish Home-role will be bad for Ireland, bad for England, bad for the Empire, is "like mocking a woman in labour with excellent advice not to bear a child." Mr. Harrison appears to us to be a prophet of the premature. He personally conducted English pilgrims to Paris the other day to see the disused writing-desk and old clothes of Auguste Comte, on whom he pronounced an animated eulogium as the teacher of the future. At all events, Comte is not the chosen teacher of any great number of existing thinkers. Ireland, too, may become a nation, but the time is not ripe ; and Mr. Harrison may become a statesman, but the time is not ripe for that either. The London University will certainly not discard the calm and wise services of Sir John Lubbock for the philosophic enthusiast who, overburdened as he is " with a grotesque old French pedant on his back," to use, if we remember rightly, Matthew Arnold's phrase, yet blandly proposes to usher into the political world the expected offspring of an unnatural union between Fenian anarchy and sacerdotal intrigue.
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