MR. LOWE'S PRINCIPLES.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR"] SIR,—Utilitarianism has lost one of its most conspicuous professors. Mr. Lowe, who in 1866 turned out Mr. Gladstone, because he could not bear to hear of any right but expediency, now comes before the world as a preacher of abstract justice. Let me place side by side two passages, the one from the preface to the Speeches on Reform, which Mr. Lowe republished last year ; the other from the peroration of his brilliant speech on Ireland on the night of the 13th. In the one Mr. Lowe says:— " When I find a book or a speech appealing to abstract a priori principles, I put it aside in despair, being well aware that I can learn nothilig useful from it."
Contrast this with the other passage :—" At any rate, let us not do injustice ourselves, nor let any one in Ireland do it ; not the tenant against the landlord, not the Protestant against the Catholic, not the Catholic against the Protestant, nor the Catholic hierarchy against the Catholic laity. Let us do justice ourselves, and require justice to be done by others ; and then, whatever come of it, we shall have satisfied our conscience and wiped out the opprobrium which has too long rested upon us."
T. H. W.
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