POLEMICAL CONVICTIONS.
NO one who has taken the trouble to examine such a con- troversy as was closed last week in the rimes as to " What the Canons saw," can doubt that some of the most passionate of our unbeliefs or beliefs are of a very worthless character,—indeed, that in some sense the more passionate they are,—the more, that is, they disturb the surface of the mind,—the less they can be relied on. Mr. Wilfrid Ward, in that admirable little book of his, " The Wish to Believe," which discusses so subtly the relation of our deeper and shallower desires to our convictions, has, indeed, proved to the satisfac- tion, we imagine, of every impartial reader, that the deepest sort of wish to believe does not produce credulousness, but a great dread of credulousness, a firm resolve not to be taken in by our hopes. When our peace of mind in the deepest sense depends upon the truth of any statement,—as, for example, a physician's assurance of the recovery of one whose life lies in the balance,— we are so afraid of being misled into a false acceptance of it, that we scrutinise in the narrowest way everything that makes for credulity, and do not let ourselves accept on easy terms what may turn out a pleasing illusion, and therefore a cruel disappointment. But what is tree of any conviction on which our peace of mind in the deepest sense turns, is evidently not true at all of that large number of beliefs about which we feel passionately because they only serve us by making our opponents look foolish, or only serve our opponents by making us look foolish, though at bottom they are really of very little consequence either way. Such precisely was the dis- pute as to " What the Canons saw." It is of no real im- portance to any one now whether there was or was not one additional victim of Turkish and Mahommedan cruelty in 1876. It would be almost as sensible to quarrel elaborately as to whether, in a great battuo, one particular sportsman did or did not shoot one particular pheasant. No one doubts for a moment, as Woods Pasha,—perhaps the most capriciously self- willed, though not the most bitter, of all the combatants,— himself admits, that terrible atrocities were committed by Turks during the Bulgarian insurrection, though he main- tains,—which, whether true or false, is absolutely irrelevant to the question "What the Canons saw,"—that atrocities quite as bad were committed by the Christians on the Turks. Moreover, no one who has the least common-sense doubts that such atrocities were committed by Turkish officials elsewhere than in Bulgaria about the same time. Lord Derby and his Ambassadors and Consular agents themselves denounced them, and demanded the punishment of those who committed them, though they afterwards took a great deal of pains to disprove the reality of one or two cruel acts which were of no more sig- nificance than the others. Bat the very fact that two Anglican clergymen had given their evidence on the subject of one of these cruelties, seems to have specially irritated some of the pro- Turk party. Whatever they admitted or did not admit, it became a matter of quite artificial importance to them to discredit" what the Canons saw." And eleven years after that testimony was first given, they have returned to the task of impeaching Canon Liddon's and Canon MacColl's evidence with a hungry avidity which reminds one more of Parnellites attacking the Secretary to the Lord-Lieutenant, than of a historical investigation of any kind. For example, one of Woods Pasha's highly a priori arguments against the supposed impalement on the banks of the Save, ran thus :—" Abdul Medjid was noted for his gentleness and clemency, and the present enlightened Sultan has well followed in this respect the example of his father. I venture to assert that no Turk in authority would have dared, even in those troubled times, to countenance such deeds, knowing well how such conduct would have been viewed by his Imperial Majesty." To this Canon MacColl, speaking of this appeal to the well- known character of the Sultan's clemency as an appeal to Caesar, replied very pertinently that when Lord Derby, fully satisfied as to the horrible character of Chefket Pasha's cruelties in Bulgaria, asked for his degradation and punishment, the Sultan, who had decorated him, took no notice, and afterwards pressed to know whether he might not give this atrocious criminal a high command without offending the British Government,— to which proposal, unfortunately, Lord Derby was weak enough to yield. Well, surely that demolished the a priori argument against the willingness of Turkish officers to offend the Sultan by such a cruelty as impalement,—and a very superfluous argument too, as no one had maintained that the evidence of this particular impalement would necessarily reach the Sultan's ears. But Woods Pasha, though he must have seen clearly enough that this appeal to the highly sensitive and gentle temperament of the Sultan was the " appeal to Caner " of which Canon MacColl spoke, angrily declares in his reply that Canon MacColl has constituted him- self the Caesar to whom appeal was made, and, after severely rebuking him for such arrogance, declines to take the least notice of the Canon's evidence as to the Sultan's gentleness of disposition, stoutly asserting that none of the evidence produced by him as to the atrocities formally denounced by Lord Derby to the Porte, affects him (Woods Pasha) in the least. Quite so ; but if he had only told 98 at the beginning that such evidence on that side would have no effect on him, no one would have read his lettere. The British public did not want to know what a man thought who was not in the least affected by even such evidence of Turkish misdeeds as had convinced Lord Beaconsfield's pro-Turkish Administration. We only wanted to know what could be said by those who were not less open to conviction than the partisan Government in question. But the truth is, that Canon MacColl might from the very first have seen that the operation in which he engaged so vigorously was the operation called "slaying the slain." And we cannot help thinking that while there is not a tittle of evidence in the whole correspondence that makes against the testimony of the Canons, the indefatigable pugnacity with which Canon MacColl performed that operation, suggests that he attaches a great deal more importance to showing the world that be was right, than a mind of perfect impartiality would have felt that it deserved. Though he holds the obviously reasonable view of what he himself saw, he is too eager to demonstrate to the world that he is reasonable in holding it. And we all do this in relation to what we may call the combative opinions with which we identify ourselves. We spend three times the zeal in establish, ing an insignificant fact with the evidence for which we have personally identified ourselves, than we are always inclined to spend in establishing the most important fact in the world only for the sake of our own instruction and contemplation. Canon Liddon observed most pertinently in his first letter on the subject, "that when the human will is strongly disposed to ignore the practical consequences of a fact, it has a subtle and almost unlimited power of blinding the intellect even to the moat elementary laws of evidence ;" and we think we may formulate the equally true inference from this correspondence, that when the human will is strongly disposed to insist on the practical consequences of a fact, it has an almost unlimited power of artificially enhancing the importance of that fact, and convincing itself that even heaven and earth should be moved to confute the obstinately incredulous. Canon MacColl can hardly have indulged, we are sure, so wild a hope as that he could convince either Woods Pasha, or Colonel Johnson, or Mr. Fairfield against a will that was so " strongly disposed to ignore the consequences" of the Turkish Government's unscrupulous cruelty. But he proceeded to demonstrate and redemonstrate what no reasonable reader of the correspondence could have doubted, with a pertinacity that seems to us very like the attempt to persuade by painstaking evidence a man in bed with a brain- fever that he is not charging in a cavalry troop, or struggling with a Bengal tiger.
The truth seems to be that convictions which are the subjects of a vehement polemic become morbidly sensitive and exaggerated, whether they be right or wrong, though this over.nourishment,—" hypertrophy," as the doctors call it,—is apt to be much more serious in the case of wrong convictions than in the case of right. Canon MacColl's con. notion that what he and his companions saw was an impaled man, is a sound one, but a little over-nourished ; the conviction of Woods Pasha, of Colonel Johnson, and the rest, that " what the Canons saw " was either a mass of beanstalks or a watch man on a pole, is obviously unsound, but is still more morbid and hypertrophied ; and Mr. Fairfield's apparent conviction that. the Canons are absolutely untrustworthy men who were con- spiring to deceive us, is the most morbid of all, and reminds one, in relation to its moral conditions, of the over-nourished fat about the heart,—of which, under the name of " fatty degeneration," men so often die. But the controversy should warn us all against getting our convictions into the con- dition into which constant polemics so often bring them,—a condition, we mean, of much too great excitability,—a con. dition wanting in that depth and equability of mind which ignores unintelligent attacks. Men who either believe or dis- believe more vehemently in the face of contradiction than they do when no one challenges their attitude of mind, should begin to• distrust themselves, and try to get out of the polemical atmo- sphere as soon as possible. It is not real conviction which grows with the ardour of battle. The least excitable convictions are, as a rule, the moat trustworthy. No man would get excited if he were told that he did not know his way home, or had no knowledge of the multiplication-table, or that he was not the man he knew himself to be. We get all the more sensitive the less deep and immovable is our conviction, and are most vivacious in our aggressiveness on others when we have least
confidence in ourselves. The real test of conviction is not polemical dexterity in defending them, but the steadiness of belief in solitary moments of comprehensive survey. We believe that the Canons saw what they said they saw, not only because all the antecedent probabilities of the case were on that side, and not a tittle of evidence on the other, but because they showed far lees disposition to lay stress on small points, and took a much calmer and wider view of the whole situation than their opponents. But this means that though they were the persons assailed, they were perfectly conscious that there was no case to be made against them, and, strong in the position which they held, had no reason for resenting the assault. And so it has proved ; but we cannot help warning Canon MacColl, while recognising to the fullest extent his large knowledge of the literature of the subject and his absolutely exhaustive refutation of his adversaries, that even a sound conviction may assume overgrown proportions if one is over- anxious to confute all the innumerable forms of error by which -.sound conclusion may be assailed.
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