THE GRAVER MAGAZINES.
THE best paper by far in the present number of the Fortnightly is Mr. Morley's on "Compromise," though the one which, for temporary reasons, most interests us is Mr. Auckland Colvin's, on "The Indian Famine and the Press." It is, of course, a defence of the official opinion about the famine, as opposed to that main- tained by the Press, but it is, for a controversial paper, unusually fair, and even kindly. Its main idea is that the Government, allowing for a few possible failures to be expected from the magni-
tude of the task, and for a partial deficiency of foresight about transport, has, on the whole, done its best ; that the drama is still unfolding, and that the great catastrophe may not occur, but that the Press has, by its disinterested exhortations, and as Mr. Colvin evidently thinks, by its unconscious rhetorical exaggerations, warmed the heart of Great Britain till it realises the magnitude of the calamity. Naturally, we believe that without the Press the Indian Government would have done scarcely anything except tease the public for petty subscriptions, and buy a large stock of rice—take, merely as one instance, the snub administered to Mr.
Robinson about Dinajpore—and therefore think that to the Press, and the pressure it applied here and in India, most of the saving of lives, if they are saved, will be due ; but if they are saved, we willingly surrender that point, and will assign the whole credit to any official on the spot, be it Lord Northbrook, or Sir George Campbell, or Sir Richard Temple, or the relief officers, who may, in the later stages of the crisis, which only began a fortnight since, and must last eight months yet, really meet the wants of the people. Our only objections to Mr. Calvin's view are,—first, that it is a little feeble to ask the Press to strengthen Lord Northbrook's hands, and "not distract him by regrets, remonstrances, or reproaches," when he is as unfettered as a Czar, need never read a syllable of anybody's articles, and wants, above all officials concerned, to be made aware that buying rice "in secret" is only one morsel of his work. One of Sir R. Temple's orders about transport is worth a good many of the Viceroy's statements that only six persons have died, statements which are no doubt strictly true officially, and make the Indian Government the laughing-stock of Europe. Secondly, it would be as well, perhaps, to distinguish, in an article of the kind, between the papers criticised. Mr. Colvin says the figures have shown a tendency to swell. We have never departed by a hair's-breadth from the Viceroy's own figures, invariably quoting them literally, though adding that his calculation of the per-ceutage of paupers, ten per cent., is too low by a tenth, or as it may prove, and has proved in Tirhoot, by two-fifths. We heartily hope Lord Northbrook is right, but be has little experience of Bengal, and no particular foresight, and may very easily be in the wrong. Thirdly, Mr. A. Calvin's quite fair and very humourus hint that the Spectator was a little nensational in writing a description of the Bengalees, when the famine rages mainly among the Beharees, who, we are told, with a perhaps needless overflow of kindness, "are a different people," is less just than the author deems it to be. If Mr. Colvin will read the first pages of that wonderful " Abstract " which pretends to give the early history of the famine, he will see that the officials thought as we did,—that the pure Bengalees, the people to whom our description applied, would be struck as heavily, though not as quickly, as the Beharees ; that the very centre of the districts we referred to —the 24-Pergunnahs—was the one in which the deficiency of rain was most carefully marked ; and that outside the Eastern counties the Bengalees, taken as a nation, had only half a crop. We naturally pleaded the cause of the weakest people, and are sorry to say we adhere to the opinion that the great slaughter. which cannot be estimated until August, will occur, if Govern- ment does not save them, among the feeble, low-living, timid people, who are to all other Indians what the Parisians are to Dutchmen ; who rise through all India, and especially in native States, like Scotchmen ; and who, having supplied the surplus revenue with which we have conquered India, have a separate claim for extra charity at our hands. We snake those three demurs, however, in all amicableness, for Mr. Auckland Colvin can perform that rare or impossible feat,—defend optimist officials, without thinking it necessary to insult outsiders, unhappily unable to forget that officials, as a rule, foresee nothing, if the something to be foreseen involves change. They can calcu- late eclipses for a hundred years, but would not believe a perturba- tion in eclipses after they had seen it. They believe that only six people have yet died, and what can you say after that ?
Mr. Morley's paper on "Compromise,"—or rather the intro- ductory chapter, for the second, on "The Possible Utility of Error," involves different considerations—is one of the best we have ever seen in the Fortnightly. Its main object is to concentrate the evidence that there has rarely been a time when there was so much flabbiness and so little governing principle in English thought as there is to- day, and to explain the causes of that temporary degeneration, which Mr. Morley thus describes :—
" The consequences of such a transformation, of putting immediate social convenience in the first place, and respect for truth in the second, are seen, as we have said, in a distinct and unmistakable lowering of the level of national life ; a slack and lethargic quality about public opinion; a growing predominance of material, temporary, and selfish aims over those which are generous, far-reaching, and spiritual; a deadly weakening of intellectual conclusiveness, of clear-shining moral illumination, and lastly, of a certain stoutness of self-respect for which England was once especially famous. A plain categorical proposition is becoming less and less credible to average minds ; or at least, the slovenly willingness to hold two directly contradictory propositions at one and the same time is becoming moro and more common. In religion, morals, and politics, the suppression of your true opinion, if not the positive profession of what you hold to be a false opinion, is hardly ever counted a vice, and not seldom even goes for virtue and wisdom. One is conjured to respect tho beliefs of others, but forbidden to claim the same respect for one's own."
That is true, if a philosophical paragraph ever was true, and Mr. Morley traces the decadence to the slow working-out of all the great causes in which England believed, such as emancipation, to the growth of material luxury—doubtful, for idealism seems to linger among the luxurious—to over-reverence for the general consensus; to the influence of daily newspapers, which replace individual thought by overbearing truisms ; to the special form of scepticism produced by the French Empire, viz., a doubt whether corruption would rot—the doubt of the Roman patrician, who stole from all nations every vice, and then fought like a hero— and to "the slow transformation in the spiritual basis of thought," which, as Mr. Morley happily says, produces in most minds "a decisive reluctance to commit oneself," and makes of the second generation of successful men "spiritual neuters." With some of his illustrations—as, for instance, his apparent notion that a State Church must hinder strong thought—we are unable to agree, though we recognise only too fully the logical difficulties of a law- made Church ; but the whole paper is worthy of attentive read- ing, and the following numbers of it will, we hope, contain some opinions on this point of practical interest, "Can the flabbiness disappear till a new couche sociale has fought its way to the top ?" There is a most readable paper also—a second one—on "Louis Quatorze," which, however, does not give the monarch quite sufficient credit for the one quality he possessed. He could choose strong men, and could support them unflinchingly. It is nonsense to talk of his Ministers in high terms of eulogy and give him no credit for selecting them. We believe also that Mr. Morison makes a mistake about the sale of nominal offices. These offices conferred no privilege except exemption from direct taxation, and their sale, which was an invention of the Popes',—whose finance wants study,—merely amounted financially to a sale of life annui- ties. They were sold too cheap, and the method was invidious, but financially the notion was a clever one.
Fraser is to our minds very dull, though we may except the admirable paper on " Green London," a chatty account of the open greeneries which make the metropolis always so separate and sometimes so beautiful, written with that love for trees or affec- tation of love for them necessary to make such subjects interesting, and with a profusion of out-of-the-way knowledge. There is a sameness about the magazine, a tendency towards a single line of thought, that rather tires the reader, who, if he has the capacity to care about Fraser at all, is probably slightly sick of discourses on the difference between the religious propositions men appear to accept and those they really believe, or of arguments about the conflict between Rome and Germany or Switzerland, which cover whole chapters, and may all be summed up in this single extract :—
"A Parliament freely elected, and by suffrage all but universal, votes a set of Bills. Those measures are domestic in their nature ; Bills affecting none save Prussian subjects. Kaiser Wilhelm signs them, as King of Prussia, and his Government proclaims them in a legal form. These Bills are law, which every subject must obey until they are repealed. A pontiff, seated at the Vatican, announces his dis- pleasure with these laws and his determination to oppose them. How has he acquired this right to interfere ? a Prussian asks. This priest
is not a German, with a title to be heard as such The Prussian Bishops, on a hint from Rome, take ground outside the law. For them, the Chambers and the King appear to have no existence as an independent legislative power. According to their views, the Prussians are not masters of Prussia, and the Germans have a ruler out of Ger- many. They treat their country like a conquered State, in which they can make their will the measure of their right. They tear the statutes, they impeach the judges, they denounce the Parliament, and they defy the laws. This kind of opposition is an outrage on the principles of moral and material order."
In other words, there is no law above the will of a majority. Suppose our freely elected Parliament to pass a law declaring that all men in Cornwall shall be slaves. Would a Cornishman be bound to obey, or would it be his moral duty to rebel till he was dead? The Pope may be claiming an absurd power, but still he does claim it, and for those who accept his claim, what are German laws, or what on earth does it matter whether he is a German, an Italian, or a Louisiana negro ? We agree with the writer that the Sacred College is imprudent, and even silly, in making of the Pontifical throne and the great institutions which support it Italian monopolies ; but how is a Catholic to be made to see that, when he believes that the Pope is selected by inspira- tion? The Germans might just as well object to Christianity because Christ was a Jew, as object to the Papacy because it happens to be Italian. He may bate to be influenced by any non-German mind, but if he does, he and the Catholic have no common ground to argue upon. It is very well to say that a Church pretending to teach all mankind should not be governed in perpetuity by men of one race, but how many races were represented among the Apostles? It is wearisome to read articles against the Catholic system which would be unanswerable against any other, but which, as against ttieir nominal object, have no meaning at all. The Pope is not the permanent channel of communication between God and man, but if he were, his nationality would matter about as much as the colour of his hair.
The Contemporary is unusually good this month. Archbishop Manning replies to Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's article on " Ctesarism and Ultramontaniam " in a manner which has not for us any great interest, except as regards the opening passages, in which the Archbishop touches with a somewhat fine irony Mr. Fitzjames Stephen's calm assumption that the world is divided into "not very wise laymen" and "laymen who hold my views." For the rest, the Archbishop takes some pains to prove, what needed no proof, that most Christian Churches have hitherto, whether consistently or inconsistently with their practice, held highly anti- Erastian views, and generally assumed that a certain sort of spiritual infallibility was, somehow or other, within their reach. That is perfectly true, and as we hold, a very natural mistake for a body to which a divine revelation had been committed, to make. Nothing seems more natural a priori than that if God reveals any truth to man, he should take precautions for exactly defining and preserving the truth so revealed :—otherwise, the revelation would be misunderstood, and so far as it was misunderstood, would be no revelation. But then, as a matter of fact, as we are just beginning to understand, God has not provided any infallible means of preserving and interpreting his revelation, and the paradox that he has not done so, has been of late so keenly felt, that it has driven a great many into denying the evidence of any real revelation at all, evidence which we at least hold to be more than adequate. Religion is the world of paradox, though of high and keen and stimulating paradox, and we do not see that this paradox is greater than many others connected with the subject. However, this conviction of ours deprives of all interest Archbishop Manning's proof that the conception of the Church as a spiritual body, which ought jealously to preserve its organisation as the sole casket of revealed truth, has been hitherto so nearly universal. Let us add that, as far as we can see, what the Archbishop establishes is not the thesis he proposes to establish, namely, "that Jesus Christ established a Church with a constitution and powers that I claim for my Church," but only that Christ has been hitherto generally understood by Christians of all ages to have done so. Even that the,Archbishop establishes only in the widest possible acceptation of the terms "with the constitution and powers that I claim for my Church," since a large number of his illustrations are taken from Churches which consider that a very different kind of constitution, and very different kinds of powers, were bestowed by Christ on his Church, from those which the Archbishop claims for his own. Mr. Ralston has one of his pleasant papers on Russian life, con- taining some beautiful translations of Russian idylls. And there is a very able paper by Mr. Bagehot, on what he calls "The Meta- physical Basis of Toleration," but which really covers both the political and the psychological basis of toleration. On both sides of the question he is acute, and on the latter very subtle. We hold generally with his conclusion, and should push it even farther than he himself is willing to admit, for we can hardly believe that, in any age when real discussion could take place at all, intolerance of serious discussion can be wise or right. However, we think that he should have given some con- sideration to a side of the subject which he has not touched. Though it is true that discussion is exceedingly useful even in defining the limits of first principles, and of truths which must be assumed and cannot be established, we cannot doubt that when such assumptions have been at the route of a vivid and complex growth of human affections, discussion does tend dangerously to weaken those affections. We will follow Mr. Bagehot's example in keeping wide of the religious area, and ask, therefore, if it can be doubted that the searching discussions as to the justification of patriotism or the various kinds of loyalty, have done a great deal to weaken the growth of the emotions in which the idea of country and of recognised authority was formerly enveloped, —or that this weakening has resulted in a great loss of power and even of happiness ? Mr. Haweis gives us a very interesting paper on "Emanuel Deatech," the almost superstitions earnestness of whose nature is curiously brought out in it. There was some- thing more than a joke in the following remark made to Mrs. Hawaii :—" Do you know, mother," that was his name for her, "there is a frightful curse,—a nameless curse,—laid on the man who touches or divulges certain sanctities in the Talmud, and I, the first man for hundreds of years who could read the secrets, have done it, and the curse is come upon me'? But Mr. Deutsch was compelled by his sufferings to take a good deal of opium, and such a fancy as this was probably due more to the opium than to himself. Lord Arthur Russell contributes a paper on "The Speculative Method," in which he gives that term a much wider interpretation than has been common in this country, regarding it not as a method of deducing the facts of the universe out of a priori necessities of thought, but only as a mode of ideally inter- preting and harmonising the bewildering maze of experience, or the assumption that all fact traces its genealogy up to intellectual principle. Finally, there is a very ably-written paper on "The Tory Press," "by a Tory,"—the Tory is Mr. Arthur Murphy,— in which, however, the writer does not adequately realise the enormous difficulty of establishing, by the method of pecuniary subvention, a paper at once of fixed principles and great ability. By that method it is easy enough to establish a paper of great ability, but not of fixed principles,—for money will obtain clever writers, but will not obtain unity of conviction. Moreover, an editor of fixed principles is sure to differ from his- proprietary as to the proper mode of working out those principles, and to be utterly paralysed,—the spring of his professional ardour broken,—by the fear and expectation. of that difference. To establish a true Con- servative paper of a high order of merit, the Conservatives must either find men who themselves have the money, who are competent for the work and enjoy it, and who will not suffer interference,—or they must try for something quite different, a paper of Conservative nuances, but of no steady or fixed view at all, admitting contributions front all aides, on thesole condition of ability and culture, and without much regard to political or intellectual con- sistency. That might be possible to the resources of money. The other and, as we think, better kind of paper could not be created by anyone who was not independent of an external proprietary.
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