HEAD-MASTER AND BISHOP.•
!Nato'. WBLLDON has played many parts in the sixty years or so of his life, and he has not waited for old age to record his impressions of them. He has been Newcastle Scholar at Eton and Head-Master at Harrow, and since then he has been successively Metropolitan of India, Canon of Westminster, and Dean of Manchester. He has chosen his title well, for much of the volume consists rather of general reflections on the offices he has filled than on the incidents of his own tenure of them. But though the method is unusual, the result is satisfactory; and if at times we are told little about the author, we learn much about the persons among whom he lived. His intimate knowledge of two great schools enables him to draw an interesting parallel between them. The seven years which he spent as a colleger at Eton have, as is natural, left a deeper, because an earlier, mark than the thirteen years of the Harrow Head-Mastership. He feels, indeed, a peculiar interest in being related to both schools, and records with pride the possibility that " no one except myself has preached what was practically the same sermon in the Chapel of Eton College in the morning and in the Chapel of Harrow School in the evening of the same Sunday." But when he comes to institute direct comparisons they usually turn out slightly in favour of the school in which he was educated. It is Eton that " possesses a native dignity which is all her own," and a " great and grand way of looking at human affairs." Harrow " is a school which has made itself, and like self-made people it is proudly conscious of having fought its own way in the world." On the other hand, Old Harrovians, with a list of benefactions amounting, Bishop Welldon estimates, to £200,000 in the nineteenth century alone, have done more for their school than Old Etonians. A Royal foundation naturally makes fewer demands on the goodwill of its members. In spirit the two schools are very different. " The distinguishing characteristic of Eton is liberty ; of Harrow it is discipline." To the new Head-Master the school seemed like a German regiment. Bishop Welldon still prefers the freer system of Eton. He grants that a boy may be more likely to come to grief at Eton than at Harrow, but he thinks that in after life the chances are more against the Harrovian. The vernacular of each school is peculiar to itself ; the dress of the boys is different ; the school life is regulated in the one by the clock, in the other by the bell and even the ritual of flogging is not the same. Historically, Harrow has been a Whig school, and it "has never lost its Evangelical tradition." If Eton can claim to have educated the greatest number of illustrious statesmen, Harrow has produced, " almost in a single generation," five Prime Ministers. The fortunes of the two schools have been very different. The late Dr. Hornby used to say " that every Head-Master of Eton had governed more boys than any one of his predecessors "; while at if arrow, during Dr. Wordsworth's Head-Mastership, the school numbers had fallen to sixty-six. Yet Wordsworth had been Senior Classic and had played for Winchester at Lord's; whereas Dr. Vaughan, who came after him, and may be said almost to have rebuilt Harrow from its foundation, was " not only no athlete himself, but, unlike most Public School boys, he hated athletics." But while Wordsworth lacked the special art of managing schoolboys, Vaughan " possessed a will of iron beneath the softest of soft manners, which as soon as he became Head- Master at once commanded the obedience of the school." Here, probably, is the explanation of the contrast.
From Harrow Bishop Welldon went to India, and the three chapters he devotes to the four years he spent there will to many seem the most interesting in the book. The thing that most struck him on his arrival was the poverty of the people. Another Indian Bishop " was wont to say that only one who had seen the pains with which a gari- wallah, after lighting one of his lamps, would try to prevent the match from being extinguished by the wind before he could light the other could understand what Indian poverty really was." Next to this Bishop Welldon was most impressed by the famine of 1899-1900, in which a million lives were lost. The Government ;tried hard to save the sufferers, and often they died with food not far off. But to bring it to them transport was necessary, " and it is just the transport that fails." Except on a road or a railway, cattle are the only means of communi- cation, and the cattle die before the people. When the parents die the children must die too, unless some European feeds them and takes them to one of the homes set up to reo3ive them. But even rescue often comes too late, for Bishop Welldon says that of a party of rescued children passing through Delhi Station, three died on the platform while waiting for the train that was to take them to a home. White people, he thinks, were not meant by Nature to live in India, at least in the plains. " The pale wan faces of the English children who may be seen languidly playing on the Maiden at Calcutta in the cool of the evening just before the monsoon breaks, because their parents cannot afford to take them home or send them to the hills, are haunting memories." Nearly the whole of the Bish"op's stay in India was under Lord Curzon's rale, and he gives a description of the Viceroy's character in which great admiration is combined with equal frankness. He awards full praise to his hero's splendid industry, to his consummate ability, to his capacity for originating and elaborating large schemes and expounding them " with equal facility and authority whether in speech or writing," and, above all, to his " romantic and almost heroic devotion to all that
• Reosiketions and Reflection& By the Blahs Rev. I. E. C. Welldon, D.D. London : Cassell and Co. 112• net..1
h3 conceived as being the true and high interest of the people of India." But with these great qualities Lord Curzon had the defects which often accompany them. " The secret of accomplishing great administrative reforms without friction . . . was not altogether his," and, what is not, perhaps, so unusual as his critic seems to think it, he " preferred an inferior man who would follow him to a superior man who would resist him." He was at times " too careless, perhaps oven too contemptuous," of the feelings of those whom he sought to influence. He could and did meet opposition effectively, but it was by " putting his finger upon its intellectual weakness." He forgot that the secret of gaining support is to appeal to the affections of men rather than to their admiration. Whether the judgment that history will pass on Lord Curzon will agree with Bishop Welldon's it is too soon to determine. At all events, his errors, if errors they were, have not alienated the hearts of the people of India in the present war.
The remaining chapters deal with the Bishop's time at Westminster and at Manchester. The former is interesting alike from the genuine enthusiasm with which he regards the great Abbey, and from the detailed account, given as from behind the scenes, of King Edward's Coronation.
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