LORD SHERBROOKE.
TORD SHERBROOKE'S death recalls one of the most brilliant episodes in our Parliamentary history. He had the courage to take up the cause of Conservatism when the late Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli were preparing the way for that desertion of it which a year later they accom- plished. It would have been wiser, perhaps, if Mr. Lowe had given his support to the very moderate reform which Lord Russell's Government proposed, on the principle that a concession frankly given at an early date, often averts a much more dangerous concession a few months later, and also educates the people gradually for the use of larger powers. But Mr. Lowe was a believer in the principle of obsta principiis. He never anticipated that the true danger of revolution could proceed from the Tory Party and not from the Liberals, and supposed that in con- testing the field with Mr. Gladstone, he was face to face with the only dangerous foe. Circumstances proved that he was quite mistaken. Probably his insight into individual character was not nearly as keen as his insight into the meaning of democracy. But so far as the dangerous side of democracy was concerned,— he never seems to have contemplated its better aspects, —his insight was certainly very keen indeed. He was a courageous, cold, and remorseless critic of its short- sightedness and rashness. Those who heard some of his great speeches can recall even now the cold, metallic ring of those keen sarcasms on uninstructed enthusiasm which deserved more attention, though they attracted much less, than his more celebrated thrusts at the ignorance, venality, and intemperance of the class whom it was proposed to enfranchise. Mr. Lowe never showed the searching character of his rather depreciating intelligence more vividly than when he attacked, not the corruption and selfishness, but, on the contrary, the intellectual sensibili- ties and eager heats and ardours of the half-educated classes. "It is not the educated and reflective," he said, "who are influenced by ideas, but the half-educated and the unreflective ; and if you show to the ignorant and poor and half-educated, wrong, injustice, and wickedness anywhere, their generous instincts. rise within them, and nothing is easier than to get up a cry for the redress of those grievances. We feel the injustice too; but we look not merely at the injustice itself; we look before and after, at the col- lateral circumstances, atwhat must happen to trad.e,revenue, and our own position in the world ; and we look also to what must happen to the very poor persons themselves, before we commit ourselves to a decided course. Persons who have something to lose are less anxious to lose it than they who have little at stake often, even though these last may by the loss be reduced to absolute poverty." That was the speech of a statesman who fully understood how potent is the power of ideas over minds which are quite incapable of estimating the difficulty of embodying these ideas adequately in practice. That passage indicates a far keener insight into the dangers of democracy than the celebrated denunciation of the working classes for venality, which Sir Algernon West has recently been airing on behalf of the Gladstonian cause. Indeed, the support that has been so frequently given by local English politicians to Irish Home-rule, is one of the best illustrations that could be found of the extreme danger which is caused by these rashly generous sympathies in untrained minds when they discern a fancied injustice without discerning the political peril of applying the superficial remedy. Lord Sherbrooke was one of the greatest masters of a physical species of scorn of whom the English Parliament has ever been able to boast. The vibration of his voice, which always reminded one of the stroke of a tongue of glass on a glassy surface, as he pushed his pungent ques- tions as to the nature of the abstract rights for which the reformers pleaded,—whether, for instance, they would not equally have justified the concession of a Parliament to the beasts, such as is described in " Reineke Fuchs,"—or how far these abstract rights would go, and whether, if the fleas had but been unanimous, they would not have been in their strict right in pushing Curran out of the bed,— struck his audience as representing the ne plus ultra of human contempt. We call his scorn, scorn of a physical species, because he always asked, as he asked in the Education Department, for "payment by results ; " and the results for which alone he was inclined to pay, were results that could be weighed and measured, and which were not to be estimated in any appre- ciable degree by general moral and intellectual impres- sions. In the same year in which he made his great speeches against Reform, he attended an annual dinner of the Association of Civil Engineers, and pronounced a. great panegyric on their characteristic works and achieve- ments, on the ground that their profession does pay by striking and indeed gigantic results, as compared with the results of almost any other profession that could be named. "The Civil Engineers," he said, "were the heirs of all the ages, and the field of their investigation was boundless." "He hoped, if ever the day arrived, when the Universities, rising to the true level which they should occupy, became really national establishments, the science of engineering would be admitted. to at least a perfect equality with every other branch of knowledge." Civil engineers might well be proud, he insisted, of their railways and electric telegraphs, "which enabled us to exchange thoughts in spite of those petty districts into which the selfishness of mankind had divided the universe." It was something very different from the selfishness of mankind, we think, which constituted nations and the different species of national genius ; but it was characteristic of Lord Sherbrooke that he thought little of the finer inward tendencies and qualities which cement nations, and much of the physical means of com- munication which tend to the disintegration of nations, and of the denationalising influence of cosmopolitan in- tercourse. It was visible results which impressed him, and a national genius is not visible, while a railway or a telegraph-wire is. Yet he did perhaps his best work at the Education Office ; as Chancellor of the Exchequer he was less successful, because he gauged ill the strength of popular feeling; and as Home Secretary he was least successful of all, probably because his peculiarities and his imperfect appreciation of the individual characters of men rendered him unable to gauge the tendencies of public feeling, and to discern exactly how much he should say, and how far he should be reticent, in justifying the appli- cation of general principles to particular cases. In the first organisation of education, it was of the highest moment to insist on results, and to show that these results could really be weighed and measured ; but in the better-under- stood and more fully developed departments conversant with. taxation and justice, what was rather needed was an insight into those finer shades of public interest and public sen- timent into which his own peculiarities, and his some- what unsympathetic nature, rendered it difficult for him to penetrate. He understood the value of a physical basis better than that of an elaborate superstructure. Even in the Education Office, his rather cavalier use of the authority of the departmental chief excited an irritation which led the House of Commons to form a very unjust judgment on his official career. In all his official relations he did himself less than justice. His imperfect sight, his unsympathetic manner, and his strong disposition to let the ordinary rules take their course, without the modifications needful to adapt them to particular cases, gained him a reputation for harshness which he did not really deserve. It was the defect of his mind to attach too much importance to the most visible and memorable elements of knowledge, wealth, and legal justice. And that tendency was not in any degree checked by quick perceptions or sensitive sym- pathies. He used the disciplined intellect of a successful Oxford tutor to make light of intellectual discipline, and to run down moral and spiritual as compared with physical and economic achievements ; and this habit gained him a much more cynical reputation than he really deserved. His statesmanship, no doubt, gave forth a materialistic ring, which was especially unpopular in a day when the recognition of the claims of "our own flesh and blood" was becoming more and more essential to political success. And his sarcastic wit drew more blood than he ever intended to draw. But he understood some of the worst dangers of democracy as it was but too necessary that they should be understood. If he had also understood its strength, and. the solidity it gives to popular institutions, he would have been the greatest of Mr. Gladstone's and Mr. Disraeli's contemporaries. But he had too much in him of the icy spirit of negation.
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