M R. MORLEY sometimes condenses his thought, or at all events
the expression of his thought, a little too much. It is a rare fault in our day when the tendency is towards a slipshod diffuseness - but still it is a fault. We wish, for example, that he had 'a little expanded the most striking passage in his speech of last Saturday before the University of Edinburgh, so that his readers—and such a speech has a hundred readers for one hearer—might be a little more certain of his precise meaning. He regretted greatly the fewness, even among the eminent, of those who are really lovers of truth, quoting a friend of large experi- ence who had only found four such men. He did not mean, he explained, lovers of truth in its ordinary and limited sense, but " men who are free from the imprison- ment of formula ; I mean men who are tolerably free, tolerably detached from the affairs of party in Church and State, with width of apprehension, power of comprehen- sion, which, after all, is the true aim of culture, with the ability to adjust their opinions to the opinions of others, to recognise the opinions of others who differ from them— violently if you like—whom they regard—rightly if you like—as wrong." That opinion, coming as it does from one of the few thoughtful politicians left among us, has been accepted almost everywhere as wise ; but is it. alto- gether and universally sound ? It means, as we under- stand it, that detachment of mind is the ideal to be sought in culture, that men who possess that quality are the best educated, and therefore, on the whole, the best qualified for the affairs of life,—in which, by the way, Mr. Morley thinks it well for you to immerse yourself. We are disposed, in part at all events, to question the truth of that utterance. It is true, no doubt, perhaps supremely true, about those whose business in life is reflection, about authors, publicists, and the men who are the salt of great Universities. Europe would be a different place if all publicists had acquired, and were always disposed to dis- play, this lauded quality ; and perhaps the teaching caste might gain from it a new power of imparting wisdom to the taught. But we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that Shakespeare's opinion is at least equally true,—the opinion. which held it unwise for men of action to be " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Too much detachment, impartiality, love of .seeing. both sides, is often fatal to conviction, and with the weakening of co. nviction the power of action often becomes weak. The theologian, for in- stance, of all men, needs Mr. Morley's " love of truth," and the detachment which should follow it ; but the theologians who have founded Churches have rarely been distinguished for that quality. Mr. Morley would hardly declare the effectiveness of Erasmus equal to that of Luther ; and. the man who, of all uninspired men in history, held the minds of his followers in the strongest grip—viz.,. Mahommed—was probably of all men the one farthest from Mr. Morley's ideal. We should say ourselves—the thought is a disturbing one, we admit—that, in spite of the fact that the Founder of Christianity made His Gospel as wide as the divinity of His nature, the success of Churches within the Christian fold has often been in pro- portion to, their narrowness. The white heat of certainty fuses metals which the limpid water of detachment can only rust. This arises from the very nature of men, who, always conscious of the complexity of all problems, be it the deepest problem of theology or the best way to build a bridge, will rarely follow, and never believe, any one who can be seen thinking, or who admits' frankly that by any possibility the truth may be on the other side.
In politics the case is even stronger. Can Mr. Morley, who knows history so well, name a man who has done great things, and of whom he would unhesitatingly say that his moving impulse was a love of truth as defined by himself at Edinburgh ? He will hardly reply by quoting Mr. Balfour, who has a beautifully detached mind, which he uses to increase his adroitness ; and he will convince few if he quotes Mr. Gladstone, who, no doubt, loved truth, but always held that unanswerable truth was contained in the idea which at the time most strongly swayed him. Of the great and successful men who have crossed the European stage in his time, whom would he name as one who had trained his mind to the impartiality and detachment which he pressgs upon the students of Edinburgh University? Not the most successful of all, for Bismarck never was even just to an opponent's thought; nor Gambetta, who the moment the Church was con- cerned was as bigoted in the reverse direction as any Torquemada. Cavour came nearest to his definition ; but we suspect that Cavour's marvellous power of reading the minds of his opponents sprung from insight, such as is occasionally given to the prejudiced, rather than from detachment, though no doubt his idea of a free Church in a free State rose in a wonderful way above the adminis- trator's prejudice as well as the clerical's. But even he hardly understood the Papacy which he defeated. Intoler- ance of prejudice, in fact, is the prejudice of the detached, of the men who, in Mr. Morley's judgment, are seeking for truth only, and who in seeking it part company with the majority so completely that the fissure would of itself suffice to explain their failures in action. Would Mr. Morley, whose own detachment of mind is so nearly perfect, trust himself to draw up an Education Bill which all his opponents could accept ? We take it that a clever Old Whig, full at bottom of prejudices, but determined to pass his Bill, and aware of the gnarls in the minds of average Englishmen, would do the work much better. A certain narrowness is, in fact, essential to the success of a. politician,—first, because the masses are narrow, and will remain so ; and secondly, because the plans which will satisfy a detached mind are too big to be transmuted into action, or too hampered with reserves to excite the enthu- siasm which in modern States is the usual driving-power.
We should say ourselves that the great modern obstacle to progress was the decay of certainty, especially among the educated,—the disposition to believe that there is a good argument against every proposition, and therefore an increasing hesitation to act upon convictions, whether old or new. The better men are educated, the less are they cocksure, the more do they recognise the complexity of everything, and the less they are inclined to believe that any proposal will greatly improve the conditions under which men live. They see so many abuses which the reform of abuses would produce that they let the abuses remain unreformed. The result is that the driving-power which is essential to success in human affairs is transferred to the masses, who because they suffer, or think they suffer, are not weakened by any capacity for perceiving the other side. They drive on as a flood drives on, and may perhaps reach their end, which is just now a much wider diffusion of physical comfort.; but they are delayed by the resistance of those who "love truth," and who say, "Wait ,a while; let us think " ; and bewildered by the absence of their natural leaders, who perceive abuses quite clearly, but, perceiving also the reasons for those abuses, step out of the rush instead of showing the way. This is perhaps most visible in philanthropic work, the kind of fanatic who carried the Factory Acts and released little chimney-sweeps from cancerous maladies being now almost impossible. That illustration is, in truth, directly to the point. Does. Mr. Morley believe that if Lord Shaftesbury. had been a man who " saw all round," a detached man with a luminous mind and a tolerant faith, he would have been better able to compel Englishmen to put an end to the huge mass of misery which existed when he was born, and was extinguished before he died, mainly by what a perfectly just thinker of Mr. Morley's way of thinking might have been tempted to term " his narrow fanaticism" ?
ALCOHOL AND REVENUE.
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