THE DUBLIN REVIEW.*
WE observe with regret that Dr. Ward and Mr. Cashel Hoey retire from the editorship of this review after the present number. In their hands the Dublin has always been a real and important factor for the determination of the Roman Catholic opinion of the day,—and it is necessarily a great help to Protestant journalists to have so good an authority to consult, for what has certainly, of late years, been the dominant school of Roman Catholic thought. Moreover, whatever else the Dublin may have been, under Dr. Ward's editorship and Mr. Cashel Hoey's able political co-operation, it has always been conspicuously candid, confident, and sincere. If it had, as it sometimes had, theses to maintain, which to us seem marvellous as well as shocking, the Dublin never tried to dis- guise any aspect of its doctrine which was of that nature,—nay, many Catholics thought that it even accentuated the points of doctrine most notably incompatible with Protestant conceptions and with modern tendencies. There has been a certain chivalry of defiance at times, both in the theological and the political con- duct of the Dublin, which has always commanded our respect, while sometimes exciting both wonder and dismay. Cardinal Manning, in his tribute to Dr. Ward's management of the Dublin, refers chiefly to that aspect of his labours which has had the least interest for us, though we have often referred to his papers on this subject with a good deal of semi-political, semi- theological curiosity,—we mean his defence of the official infalli- bility of the Pope. But in another very different aspect of his • The Dublin Review. October, 1878. labours, we have frequently had to express our own sincere ad- miration for, and gratitude to, Dr. Ward,—we mean his masterly papers on the controversy between the Intuitionists and the Empiricists concerning the existence of necessary truth ; his very valuable and elaborate criticisms of Mr. J. S. Mill ; and his disquisitions, of which one of the ablest is transplanted into the new number of the Dublin from the pages of the Nineteenth Century of March last, on "The Reasonable Basis of Certitude." On these subjects Dr. Ward has contributed a very great deal of original thought, stamped with all that pre- cision of language and vigour of illustration, which, on subjects of this kind, often make the difference between arguments which carry conviction, and arguments which merely unsettle conviction and leave the ambiguities of the subject greater than they found it. We trust that in spite of his retirement from the Dublin, we
may not yet lose from its pages the philosophical contributions of his clear and vigorous mind.
Except Dr. Ward's paper,—which we noticed at the time of its appearance in the Nineteenth Century,—on "The Reason-
able Basis of Certitude," the most characteristic papers in the present number are those on " Mr. Senior's Character of M. Thiers," and on "The Peace of Berlin." We commented, in much
the same spirit as the writer of this paper, on M. Thiers' astonish- ing revelations as to the complete absence of any vestige of principle in his own statesmanship, when M. Senior's first conversation with M. Thiers was published in the pages of the Fortnightly Review. The Dublin reviewer criticises with much ability the vanity and evident untrustworthiness of some of his statements, and the wonderful mutual inconsistencies of many of them. His ridicule of M. Thiers' theatrical assertions about the character of his own administrative labours, is very happy, and there can, in fact, be no doubt that in much that Thiers said to M. Senior, he was drawing the long-bow with more than usual strength of arm :- "Let us begin with an example of the grotesque nonsense into which M. Thiers' conceit could on occasion vapour. Ho is describing his own exertions in preparing for a war, which never came to pass :— When I was preparing for war in 1840, I sat every day for eight hours with the Ministers of War, of Marine, and of the Interior. I always began by ascertaining the state of execution of our previous determin- ations. I never trusted to any assurances, if better evidence could be produced. If I was told that letters had been despatched, I required a certificate from the clerk who had posted them or delivered them to the courier. If answers had been received, I required their production. I punished inexorably every negligence, and even every delay. I kept my colleagues and my bureaux at work all day, and almo-t all night. We were all of us half-killed. Such a tension of mind wearies more than the hardest bodily work. At night my servants undressed me, took me by the feet and shoulders and placed me in bed, and I lay there like a corpse till the morning. Even my dreams, when I dreamt, were administrative. To do all this, a man must have an iron will, an iron body, and what is rarer than either, indifference to the likes and dislikes of those about him.' In only the previous page he says :— I could not bear to be an English Minister. The central Government has -so few organs either for information or for action ; its subordinates are so independent ; it is checked by so many local authorities, local privi- leges, and local mismanagement, that half of its duties are unperformed, and the greater part of the other half is ill performed. Even in France, which is governed on a much wiser system, the wisest and the most complete in Europe; where there is not a single independent local authority ; where the central power knows, and superintends, and indeed regulates, the concerns of every commune; where every pulsa- tion of the heart in Paris is instantly felt in the Pyrenees and on the Rhine,—even in Franco our internal administration has more of intelli- gence than of vigour.' The English Administration may or may not be worse organised than the French. But without assigning to it the character of absolute perfection, it may, we think, claim that it does its work, which is immeasurably vaster, more various, and complicated than that of the French Administration, tolerably well. It directly governs or indirectly controls a considerable part of the human race ; and it continues to do so, ministry after ministry, generation after generation, never utterly breaking down, rarely proving unequal to emergency, neither hastening nor loitering over its prodigious, world-wide task. What would become of it, wo wonder, if a sharp, fidgetty little man of the literary talent, without any previous experience of the art of government and habit of office, were to be, as the supreme result of a street revolution, pitchforked from a newspaper desk into the post of First Lord of the Treasury, with a preconceived determination that every- thing must be wrong, and everybody else a dolt! Would any one who knows anything of the real spirit and method of public business— would, for example, each a past-master of its system, detail, and philo- sophy, as Sir Henry Taylor, acquainted as well as ho with the order in which a great statesman really goes through his work, recognise the account M. Thiers gave Mr. Senior of his ways in office, as an accept- able example of administrative energy ? Admit all the superiority that M. Thiers claims for the French over the English Civil Service, can any one conceive that it could be necessary for an English Minister to begin the day by requiring certificates from his clerks that his letters of the previous day had been posted ? Or, knowing how much must depend, in the last rosort, on his complete command of his physical and intellectual energies, can we imagine that ho would so waste his strength on those details which it was the business of his Under-Secretaries, and Private Secretaries, and Chief Clerks to attend to, as to have to be undressed and put to bed every night 'like a
corpse' by his servants, leaving his colleagues and their staffs half- killed' by the same time? "
But we cannot in the least sympathise in the writer's evident disposition to apologise for Louis Napoleon at M. Thiers' ex- pense. The two men were but two different types of utter in- difference to anything that can be called political principle. Both of them were self-seekers, both, in all probability, in a very poor and flashy sense, were patriots,—though egotists first, and patriots afterwards,—both believing that the salvation of France ought to come through themselves ; both regarded religion as nothing but the instrument of politicians ; both were indifferent to truth, and both more or less indifferent to freedom. Thiers, however, was much the vainer and much the cleverer man ; Louis Napoleon was much the dreamier, and much the longer- headed. Thiers did much the less harm and much the more good to his country, Louis Napoleon much more harm and less good. But to our minds, it is impossible to look at the career of either without a certain impartiality of dislike. That Thiers, after being one of the most serious enemies of the Republic, really founded it at last, was rather his good-luck than his merit, except so far as there is merit in the shrewdness which discerned, after the collapse of the Empire, the inevitable necessity of the hour. In the article on " The Peace of Berlin," the Dublin is almost more Urquhartian than the late Mr. Urquhart himself, and we cannot but wonder that any thoughtful and well-informed writer can give way so completely and un- resistingly to so vehement a prepossession. What he says of English Liberals, for instance, that "whenever the honour and interests of Russia and England conflict, they are Russian first, English a long way afterwards," sufficiently marks the tone of the article. For ourselves, we will say this,—that while caring much for the interests of the populations of Eastern Europe, much for the safety of our Indian Empire, and much too, (though less), for the mere prestige of England, we have not only never desired any accession of power to Russia, but have honestly and heartily desired to see her power restrained ; and could it have been restrained by the co-operation and control of Europe in the reforms rendered essential by the rapid decomposition of the Ottoman Empire, we should have deemed it one of the greatest, of advantages for Europe. But, of course when no Power was willing to do the necessary cleaning and sweeping in the East of Europe, except Russia, and the whole energy of our feeble and flashy Cabinet was devoted to impeding that work, it became inevitable that, mixed and probably far from pure as many of the motives of Russia were, those who wished to see the demo- lition of the Ottoman Empire hastened, should regard with a certain reluctant and modified satisfaction the steps taken by Russia to achieve it, even though Russian despotism be dangerous. We hardly know whether we differ most completely from the Dublin reviewer's estimate of the facts of the present crisis, or from his estimate of the dangers which arise out of those facts. Nevertheless, the paper is an interesting one, as illustrating the Ultramontane view of the situation. By whom, we wonder, in all Europe, has Austria ever been " hitherto regarded as a Power of almost punctilious honour, and one eminently Conservative of the sanctity of treaties?" We should hardly have expected the Dublin itself to speak thus of one of the prime movers in the dis- memberment of Poland, and the one which, later, absorbed the independent State of Cracow in complete scorn of Treaty rights. We should have said that a more broken reed than Austria to rely upon, for giving effect to any kind of European engagement, is hardly to be found. She was a broken reed to England and France in 1854 ; and she is a broken reed to Lord Beaconsfield. and the Sultan now.
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