Mr. Frederic Harrison's New Year's address at the Positivist Chapel,
Newton Hall, was a strange jumble of rhetoric and prejudice, interspersed, however, with some sen- sible things. After very rightly inveighing against inflated Imperialism, he went on to denounce the folly of talking about our recent reverses as defeats :—" An army was defeated when it was driven back from its positions disorganised and demoralised. Nothing of the kind had occurred on any single engagement, unless it were in the small affair at Stormberg." The gallant Boers had been many times driven from their positions, the British forces never once. The heroic devotion of the British soldier and his officers bad been proved on a dozen bloody fields. The total loss, sad as it was, had really been very moderate. That is excellent, and may be set against the assertion that during the last thirty years we had, as a nation, coarsened and mate- rialised, and become more practical and more combative. We do not believe one word of it. Such railing at the present age is, in reality, nothing more than the conventional "good old times" run into the cranky Positivist mould. On the whole, however, we greatly admire Mr. Harrison's pluck even if misguided. His address, as a whole, can perhaps best be described in a phrase of the time of the Common- wealth,—" something between a speech and a preach."
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