THE LATE MR. HENRY RICHARD.* WORTHY man as he was,
the late Mr. Henry Richard did nothing to call for two biographies,—indeed, for anything of permanent and enduring influence that he accomplished, he might have been left without any biography at all. It is rather as a representative man—representative, that is, of the ideas and aspirations of a large and powerful class in the community—that he is best deserving of remembrance. We may fairly accept his authorised biographer's estimate of him as a man who, beginning life as a humble Nonconformist minister, gradually rose by inherent ability and force of character to become the Apostle of Peace, the accepted spokes- man of his Welsh fellow-countrymen, and the recognised representative of English Non-conformists in Parliament; but, having gone so far with Mr. Miall, we should be inclined to differ entirely with him as to the value and importance of Mr. Richard's work in each of these three spheres of activity. Mr. Miall is the biographer who has been chosen by Mrs. Richard to write her husband's life, and entrusted with his papers ; but not content to leave the task in his hands, as it might well have been left, Mr. Lewis Appleton has come forward with a small volume of memoirs, dealing almost exclusively with Mr. Richard's activity as Secretary of the Peace Society, and compiled mainly from the columns of the daily Press. Mr. Miall's biography is founded on fuller knowledge and information, and Mr. Appleton's should have been superfluous; but it is hard to call it so, seeing that it affords, perhaps unwittingly, a truer picture of the impracticable and fanatical character of Mr. Richard's peace doctrines than is to be found in Mr. Miall's pages. The omission of the latter to make any mention of the position Mr. Richard was led to assume in relation to the war between North and South is simply inexcusable. We think no worse of Mr. Richard for the course he adopted in that crisis ; but it was a reductio ad absurdum of his principles, and, creditable or discreditable, it was too important an episode in his career to be passed over without a word.
It was in 1848 that Mr. Richard resigned his charge of a Congregational chapel in the South of London to become Secretary of the Peace Society, a position he filled until 1885. Those were the halcyon years of the Society, when it was holding Congresses in the capitals of Europe, and preaching to a generation not wholly sceptical an era of universal peace and disarmament. Mr. Miall quotes largely from Mr. Richard's diaries, which contain lengthy and enthusiastic descriptions of the proceedings at Brussels and Paris and Frankfort ; but for a practical result of all this talk and enthusiasm we shall look in vain. Any illusions that may have been produced in the public at large were shattered by the outbreak of the Crimean War; but still, Mr. Richard and his fellow-workers went indefatigably on, and even managed to score a limited success by inducing the plenipotentiaries to insert a " pious opinion " in favour of arbitration in the Declaration of Paris.
The idea entertained by Mr. Richard and his friends, that all war, for no matter what cause, is wicked, is not only im- practicable—give it any application, and, as the Bishop of Peterborough tersely said, the British Empire could not last a week—but, further, it cannot be considered either a very noble or a very Christian view, being founded on a false and distorted estimate of the value and sacredness of human life. Blood is not to be lightly spilt, but neither is everything to be sacrificed to keeping the greatest number of people alive as long as
* (1.) Henry Richard, M.P.: a Biography. By Charles S. Miall. With a Portrait. London : Cassell and Co. 1889.—(2) Memoirs of Henry Richard, the Apostle of Peace. By Lewis Appleton, F.R.E.S., Hon. See. of the British and Foreign Arbitration Association, &c. London : Trabnor and Co. 1889.
possible. Alike for the nation and the individual, it is better to live well than to live long; better that thousands of American citizens should have their days shortened than that a great nation should suffer disruption, and slavery be per- petuated. If ever there was a cause worth fighting for, it was that of the North against the South. But Mr. Richard did not think so. He would have seen slavery endure for ever, and the Union go to pieces, sooner than shed a single drop of blood ; and this view made him a strong partisan of the South, and brought him into keen conflict with Garrison, Beecher, and the leading Abolitionists. Mr. Appleton finds his action perplexing in the extreme ; Mr. Miall prefers to say nothing about it ; but, in fact, he was only following out his principles to their logical conclusion, and thereby demonstrating their absurdity.
Has the Peace movement been a failure? Mr. Miall is disposed to find some evidence that it has not in the increased alarm and unrest with which the bloated armaments of modern Europe are regarded. But to give credit to the Peace Society for the deterring effects of modern armaments, it would be necessary to prove that the Society had some part in calling these armaments into existence. Evils have a way of working out their own cures, without much regard for such bodies as the Peace Society. A more plausible claim is that the increased disposition to submit matters to arbitration is due to its propa- ganda. But this disposition may easily be exaggerated. No nation would be willing to submit any issue about which it really. cared to arbitration. Germany will not go to arbitration about Alsace and Lorraine, or Italy about Rome, or Russia about a step in her advance onward. On the other hand, hi matters of small importance, or in which one side is anxious to give way, arbitration may usefully be resorted to. On the principle of " anything for a quiet life," England was no doubt wise to submit the 'Alabama' claims to arbitration ; but her experience was not such as to encourage her to repeat the ex- periment on a larger scale. She had to consent previously to be tried by an ex-post-facto law, and to abandon all claims against the United States for the very breaches of duty for which she was herself being held to account. For the Fenian raids into Canada, the American Government was at least as responsible as England was for the damage done by the Con- federate cruisers.
In 1868, Mr. Richard was elected for Merthyr, for which seat he continued to sit down to the time of his death last year. His part in the House is within recent recollection, and Mr. Miall has nothing new to tell us about it. His great triumph came in 1873, when he secured a snatch-vote in favour of a permanent system of arbitration, on the strength of which he made another Continental tour for the propagation of peace principles. His action on the Education and Disestablishment questions was such as might have been expected from a leading Nonconformist. He also earned for himself the title of "the Member for Wales," by devotion to what he regarded as Welsh interests. Of late, Mr. Miall tells us, he was inclined to act as a restraining force on some of the younger Members, and, though responsible for conjuring up a spirit of Welsh nationality antagonistic to everything English, we cannot find that he was ever in favour of the crowning folly of Welsh Home-rule. His personal character endeared him to his own side, and his reasonable and inoffensive way of putting even the extremest views won him the ear and respect of the House. Of his private life Mr. Miall does not tell us much, probably because there is not much to tell ; but he quotes some interesting notes of conversations Mr. Richard had with Cobden. His book will have more interest for a limited circle than for the outside public, and might be described as adequate, were it not for the inexcusable omission to notice Mr. Richard's part in regard to the American War, an episode which throws more light on the value of peace principles than the rest of the life of the Apostle of Peace.
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