BOOKS.
SIR HENRY MAINE.* FEW of our public men have the literary taste and skill of Sir Mountstnart Grant-Duff, and his wide acquaintance with men and affairs. His powerful memory and his appreciation of every kind of excellence give him a peculiar advantage, as those who remember, for instance, his papers on Matthew Arnold and the late Lord Arthur Russell will readily admit, when he is writing about one of the many eminent men who have been his friends. The introduction to the present volume of Sir Henry Maine's official speeches and minutes is no exception to this rule, and the book, as a whole, is most valuable to those who know the author only through his published works, for the light it throws on another, and hardly less important side of his career,—his admirable service to the State. As the memoir reminds us : " The slow irresistible pressure of law is the strongest British influence now working in India, and Maine, from 1862 to his death, had more to do than any other single man, I will not say with making Indian law, but with determining what Indian law should be."
We cannot hope in this place to follow the subject of the memoir through the various periods, as his biographer ex- presses it, of "his activity, from his academic preludings, through his professional and journalistic beginnings, to his Career as a jurist, statesman, and publicist ;" and we can only take at random one or two points for quotation and remark, without attempting to cover the wide field of hie achievement in literature and in public work. The pub- lication in 1861 of Ancient law made an epoch in the history of English legal education, and at once gave its author a high position among men of letters, leading in the following year to his appointment as Law Member of the Council of the Governor-General in India. The speeches (delivered in the Legislative Council of the Governor-General) and the minutes arranged and annotated by Maine's right- hand man in India, Mr. Whitley Stokes, himself after wards Law Member of Council, give a clear idea of Maine's legis- lative action in India ; and the minutes especially strike a layman as remarkable for their learning, caution, and reason- ableness, as well as for the ease, conciseness, and clearness of their language; but many of them are of a highly special and technical character, and relate to so great a variety of subjects, that it would be useless to select any one of them for notice. There are many, however, which, apart from their qualities of style and thought—those, for instance, on Over-Legislation, on Irrigation Works and Railways, on the Government of Bengal, on the question of the capital of India, and the memorandum on Mr. Caird's report on the condition of India—which are of high interest to any one who is interested in Indian questions,--fortunately, perhaps, but a small minority of educated Englishmen. Ignorance of India, indeed, Maine himself noticed as the more discreditable " because it requires no very intimate acquaintance with con- temporary foreign opinion to recognise the abiding truth of De Tocqueville's remark that the conquest and government of India are really the achievements in the history of a people which it is the fashion abroad to consider unromantic. The ignorance is, moreover, unintelligible, because knowledge of the subject is extremely plentiful and accessible, since English society is full of men who have made it the study of a life, pursued with an ardour of public spirit which would be excep- tional even in the field of British domestic politics." That is all very true; but is not this ignorance of educated men con- cerning India, discreditable as it may be, very fortunate for India P Would not Parliament be always meddling in India with insufficient knowledge—such knowledge, for instance, as- Mr. W. S. Caine's—if educated Englishmen knew as much of India as they ought to know P The biographer quotes at length the masterly sketch written by one of Maine's friends on his death. This writer tells us that in India he was sometimes "charged with idleness," a charge due to the fact that, all through life, he was " physi- cally incapable of severe, continuous drudgery." It was his almost preternatural quickness of understanding and facility of expression" which enabled him to excel nearly all his com- petitors in the three arduous professions which he followed.
* Sir Henry Maine : ¢ Brief Momoir of His Life. By the Right Hon. Sir at. E.
Grant-Doff, B.I. With some of his Talon Speeches and Minutes, Selected and edited by Whitley Stokes, D.O.L. London: John tturray. 1893.
He had " a power of seeing the general in the particular which we do not think has been equalled in literary history ; his sober and luminous generalisations were reached "not by any very elaborate study of detailed evidence, but by a kind of intuition." We have here, perhaps, the secret of his greatness as well as of his shortcomings. Sir Frederick Pollock's estimate of the writings of his predecessor in the Oxford Professorship seems to us admirably just, and we may quote the following few words from it :—" Maine," he said, " can no more become obsolete through the industry and ingenuity of modern scholars than Montesquieu could be made obsolete by the legislation of Napoleon. Facts will be corrected, the order and proportion of ideas will vary, new difficulties will call for new ways of solution, useful knowledge will serve its turn, and be forgotten ; but in all true genius, perhaps, there is a touch of art ; Maine's genius was not only touched with art, but eminently artistic ; and art is immortal."
To Maine's latest work, one which appealed to a more general public, and provoked more controversy than his. earlier books, Sir M. Grant-Duff does little more than allude.. Popular Government, a brilliant if somewhat unconvincing work, attracted attention, more, perhaps, by a certain audacity of ultra-conservatism than by its more real philosophic merits: It is full of good writing, of witty and pointed criticism of received shibboleths, of suggestions which a reader does not forget, of paradoxes which sound like truths, and truths which sound like paradoxes. It is impossible not to be- interested or impressed when the author speaks, for instance, of the blindness engendered in the present generation by the extraordinary good-luck enjoyed by this country during the present century; when he insists on dislike of change as beings a far more permanent and more powerful force in human history than love of progress ; when he remarks that "all that has made England famous, all that has made England wealthy, has been the work of minorities, sometimes very small ones" (a consideration, by-the-bye, which anti-demo- cratic advocates of the " Referendum " should not overlook) ; or when he gives it as his opinion that all improvement has hitherto sprung from that form of political and social ascendency which goes by the name of aristocracy. Most dispassionate readers, however, will feel that Mr. John. Morley was right when he said that Maine hardly brought• to the study of modern democracy the ripe preparation of detail which be gave to ancient Law. His extraordinary facility in generalisation is here applied to a subject perhaps. too large to be so treated, save by an Aristotle or a. Bacon. He constantly speaks, for instance, of the evanescent character of democracy as a form of government. It is true, as he says, that England and the United States are- examples of the only two such Governments which have lasted, and their life has only been a century or less. But. when in the history of the world has there been a civilisation. in the least resembling ours ? What other form of govern- ment is equally suited to present conditions P and is it. not just as reasonable to assume that those conditions,. and the form of government dependent on them, will continue for a long period as for a short one P Two or three years ago, Mr. Balfour, a statesman who is also. a philosopher, said a few words about democracy which gave• evidence of a much sounder political instinct. " I take it," he said, "that a democracy is merely one method among many of organising for collective action the forces of the community which exist. It is very often good for some condition of society, while it is bad for other conditions of society, and in my own personal belief, which I avow without hesitation and• without shame, at the present stage of the evolution of the English community, deinocracy is not only the safest, but is the most conservative form of government possible ; and holding that view, and using the word democracy in the sense in which I have used it, which, in my opinion, is the proper one, I frankly proclaim myself to be a democrat."' But if it may be argued that the very real dangers of popular government might have been more effectively- pointed out if there had been less indiscriminate deprecia- tion, it will equally be admitted that, in one respect, this, book has rendered a memorable service. The admirable analysis and criticism of the United States Constitution has done much to remove a prejudice that Republicanism means -anarchy, and to draw attention to the weakness and even danger of our own Constitutional arrangements. To English,
politicians who fear and dislike the perpetual tinkering of the machinery of the Constitution, which is still the staple of our legislation, the question he asked—whether there was any insuperable objection to making a dis- tinction between ordinary legislation and legislation which, in any other country, would be called Constitutional—seemed one of real importance. Mr. Morley's rather disappointing reply to the book would have been more useful and effective if he had grappled with this question, instead of meeting Maine's generalities by others, more plausible perhaps, but scarcely more fruitful.
The Home-rule controversy has had one very definite and useful result, that of increasing—among politicians at all events—interest in, and familiarity with, Constitutional pro- blems. The battle which has raged in books, periodicals, newspapers, and speeches, between such public men as Pro- fessor Dicey, Mr. Bryce, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Hartington, Lord Thring, and the late Professor Freeman, has produced a mass of critical literature not inferior in importance, if it could only be collected and arranged, to the classical Federalist of Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues, to which Maine's work drew renewed attention in this country. Popular Government, appearing, as it did, at the beginning, though not in consequence, of the Irish controversy, gave the signal for, and anticipated in some of its lines, a Constitutional disputation, with which it is not inappropriate that the name of the greatest of English judicial writers should be thus associated.
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