that logic and lucidity in commercial legislation was one of these wants to which we minister; however, it seems we do not. But, outside our own immediate circle, logic and lucidity are felt by many people to be attractive; they inspire respect, their absence provokes ridicule. Probably the Irish themselves, though they are gainers by it, laugh in their sleeve at the pedantries and formalities with which our love of liberty, Murdstone and Quinion's love of liberty, and their total want of instinct for logic and lucidity, embarrass our attempts to coerce them. Certainly they must have laughed outright, being people with a keen sense of the ridiculous, when in the information to which the traversers had to plead at the late trials, it was set forth that the traversers did conspire, combine, confederate, and agree together, to solicit, incite, and procure,' and so on. We must be Englishmen, countrymen of Murdstone and Quinion, loving liberty and a 'freedom broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent;' not fastidious about modern and rational forms of speech, about logic and lucidity, or much comprehending how other people can be fastidious about them, to take such a jargon with proper seriousness.

6

The dislike of Ireland for England the resistance of a lower civilisation to a higher one! Why, everywhere the attractions of this middle-class civilisation of ours, which is what we have really to offer in the way of civilisation, seem to fail of their effect. The puzzle seems to be,' says the Times mournfully, 'where we are to look for our friends.' But there is no great puzzle in the matter if we will consider it without pedantry. Our civilisation, as it looks to outsiders, and in so far as it is a thing broadly communicable, seems to consist very much in the Murdstonian drive in business and the Murdstonian religion, and in the Quinionian joviality and geniality. Wherever we go, we put forward Murdstone and Quinion, and call their ways civilisation, and our governing class nervously watch their ways and wishes, and back up their civilisation all they can, but it does not prove attractive. The English in South Africa will all be commercial gentlemen, says Lady Barker, their wives will be ladies, they will not even tend poultry. The English in the Transvaal, we hear again, contain a wonderful proportion of attorneys, speculators, land-jobbers, and persons whose antecedents will not well bear inspection. Their recent antecedents we will not meddle with, but one thing is certain their early antecedents were those of the English middle class in general. They have almost all, we may be sure, passed through the halls of a Salem House and the hands of a Mr. Creakle. They have the stamp of Murdstone or Quinion. Indeed we are so prolific, so enterprising, so world-covering, and our middle class and its civilisation so entirely take the lead wherever we go, that there is now, one may say, a kind of odour of Salem House all round the globe. It is almost inevitable that Mr. Sprigg should have been reared in some such establishment; it is ten to one that Mr. Berry is

an old pupil of Mr. Creakle. And when they visit Europe, no doubt they go and see Mr. Creakle, where he is passing the evening of his days in honourable retirement, a Middlesex magistrate, a philanthropist, and a member of the Society of Arts. And Mr. Berry can tell him of a happy country all peopled by ourselves, where the Murdstone and Quinion civilisation seems to men the most natural thing in the world and the only right civilisation, and gives entire satisfaction. But poor Mr. Sprigg has to report of a land plagued with a large intermixture of foreigners, to whom our unique middle class civilisation does not seem attractive at all, but they find it entirely, disagreeable. And so, too, to come back much nearer home, do the Irish.

So that if we, who are in consternation at the dismal prophecies we hear of what is in store for Ireland and England, if we determine to perish, as I say, in the light at any rate, to abjure all self-deception, and to see things as they really are, we shall see that our civilisation, in its present state, will not help us much with the Irish. Even if we gave them really healing measures, yet still, estranged as they now are, it would be further necessary to manage their tempers and cultivate their good affections by the gift of a common civilisation congenial to them. But our civilisation is not congenial to them. To talk of it, therefore, as a substitute for perfectly healing measures is ridiculous. Indeed, the pedantry, bigotry, and narrowness of our middle class, which disfigure the civilisation we have to offer, are also the chief obstacle to our offering measures perfectly healing. And the conclusion is, that our middle class and its civilisation require to be transformed. With all their merits, which I have not now much insisted upon because the question was how their demerits make them judged by unfriendly observers-with all their merits, they require, as I have so often said, to be transformed. And for my part I see no way so promising for setting about it as the abolishment of Salem House and of Mr. Creakle. This initiatory stage governs in a great degree all the rest, and with this initiatory stage we should above all deal. He has got on his old hobby again! I think I hear people saying. Really they ought rather to commend the strictly and humbly practical character of my writings. It was very well for Mr. Carlyle to bid us have recourse, in our doubts and miseries, to earnestness and reality, and veracity and the everlasting yea, and generalities of that kind; Mr. Carlyle was a man of genius. But when one is not a man of genius, and yet attempts to give counsel in times of difficulty, one should be above all things practical. Now our relations with Ireland will not in any case be easily and soon made satisfactory, but while our middle class is what it is now they never will. And our middle class, again, will not be easily and soon transformed, but while it gets its initiation to life through Salem House and Mr. Creakle, it never will. The great thing is to initiate it to life by means of public schools. Public schools for

the middle classes are not a panacea for our ills, but they are the indispensable preliminary to our real improvement on almost all the lines where as a nation we now move with embarrassment. If the consideration of our difficulties with Ireland had not, like so much else, brought me at last full upon this want which is capital, but far too little remarked, I should probably not have ventured to intrude into the discussion of them. However terrified and dejected by the alarmists, I should have been inclined to bear my burden silently in that upper chamber in Grub Street, where I have borne in silence so many sorrows. I know that the professional people find the intervention of outsiders very trying in politics, and I have no wish to provoke their resentment. But when the discussion of a matter tends inevitably to show the crying need which there is for transforming our middle-class education, I cannot forbear from striking in; if I do not speak of the need shown, nobody else will.

Yet the need is, certainly, great and urgent enough to attract notice; but then the middle class is very strong and self-satisfied, and every one flatters it. It is like that strong and enormous creature described by Plato, surrounded by obsequious people seeking to understand what its noises meant, and to make in their turn the noises which might please it. At best palliatives are now and then attempted, as there is a company, I believe, at this moment projected to provide better schools for the middle classes. Alas! I should not be astonished to find presently Mr. Creakle himself among the directors of a company to provide better schools for the middle classes, and the guiding spirit of its proceedings, so far as his magisterial functions, and his duties on philanthropical committees and on committees of the Society of Arts, permit him to take part in them. But oftener our chief people take the bull by the horns, and actually congratulate the middle class on the character and conditions of its education. And so they play the part of a sort of spiritual panderer to its defects and weaknesses, and do what in them lies to perpetuate them. Lord Frederick Cavendish goes down to Sheffield to address an audience almost entirely trained by Salem House and Mr. Creakle, and the most suitable thing he can find to say to them is, he thinks, to congratulate them on their energy and self-reliance in being so trained. But this is an old story, a familiar proceeding, for which the formula has long since been given: namely, that the upper class do not want to be disturbed in their preponderance, nor the middle class in their vulgarity. But if we wish cordially to attach Ireland to the English connexion, not only must we give healing political measures, we must also, and that as speedily as we can, transform our middle class and its social civilisation.

I perceive that I have said little of faults on the side of the Irish, as I have said little of the merits which accompany, in our middle class, their failure in social civilisation; and for the same reason—

because the matter in hand was the failure on our part to do all in our power to attach Ireland, and how to set about remedying the failure. But as I have spoken with so much frankness of my own people and kindred, the Irish will allow me, perhaps, to end with quoting three queries of Bishop Berkeley's, and with recommending them to their attention :

1. Whether it be not the true interest of both nations to become one people, and whether either be sufficiently apprised of this?

2. Whether Ireland can propose to thrive so long as she entertains a wrong-headed distrust of England?

3. Whether in every instance by which the Irish prejudice England, they do not in a greater degree prejudice themselves?

Perhaps, also, they might do well to perpend the good bishop's caution against'a general parturiency in Ireland with respect to politics and public counsel; ' a parturiency which in clever young Irishmen does often, certainly, seem to be excessive. But, after all, my present business is not with the Irish but with the English-to exhort my countrymen to healing measures and an attractive form of civilisation. And if our countrymen insist upon it that attractive their form of civilisation is, or ought to be, then we who think differently must labour diligently to follow Burke's injunctions, and to dispose people to a better sense of their condition.'

MATTHEW ARNOLD.

THE DUKE OF ARGYLL AND THE

IRISH LAND BILL.

THE retirement of the Duke of Argyll from the Government, and his separation from colleagues with whom he has been associated throughout his political career, is at once the subject of universal regret to Liberals, and the strongest testimony to the strength of his objections to the proposed land legislation for Ireland, so cogently expressed in his article of last month. Although in the interval the Land Bill has been fully discussed in the House of Commons, it may be worth while to deal with these objections more specifically than has yet been done, with a view to the consideration they are likely to receive in the Upper House, where they will have most weight, and may influence the fate of the measure.

The tone, however, of the article is so temperate and fair, and so much is conceded, that we may hope the Duke's treatment of the measure when it reaches the Lords will not be of a very destructive character; his attitude may probably be not different from that of the present Lord Chancellor, who, under somewhat similar circumstances, refused office in 1869 under Mr. Gladstone, rather than be a party to the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. This did not, however, prevent him joining the Ministry after the passing of a measure which his personal feelings and regard for consistency disabled him from supporting, but which his statesmanship recognised as inevitable.

It is, indeed, evident that the Duke of Argyll admits in the fullest manner the necessity of reopening the question of Irish Land Legislation, which it was hoped the Act of 1870 had finally determined. Like many others, he shows an unexpected and somewhat tardy interest in the development of the policy for multiplying ownerships among the occupiers of land in Ireland by means of State assistance and loans. He is prepared to go a long way in this direction, with the object of bringing into existence a class of small owners, who may prove a support and prop to the rights of property. He thinks, however, that the clauses of the Bill which have this object are contradictory to those which give further security to existing tenants; and he fears that so much is conceded to tenants under