and who in his work on Irish Nationalism makes at times a profession of disclaiming any assumption as to race tendencies, nevertheless lapsing repeatedly into expressions which set down Irish troubles to "ineradicable" vices of primeval Irish character. Mr Lecky is now in political alliance with the Duke of Argyll ; and Mr Lecky, being not a more but perhaps even a less consistent teacher than the Duke, is inevitably following the Duke's intellectual path in this matter. Like Maine, he has failed to reach any coherent sociology; and as we find him, on the hustings, making the declaration "I am a Christian," after writing a great deal which implied that he was not, so we find him unconsciously lapsing into the ordinary Conservative view of the Irish problem, after doing a great deal to put that view out of court.

For there is a certain psychological compulsion, so to speak, on nearly all opponents of Irish nationalist claims, to revert in some way to the attitude of race prejudice. Mr Lecky, having begun literary life as a sympathiser with the cause of the country in which he was born, was saved like Burke from the ordinary English prejudice against it; and it would certainly be difficult for him to get into the attitude, say, of the late Mr Froude, or of Mr Goldwin Smith. But under pressure of party ties Burke came to hold a tolerably Anglican tone towards the Irish Catholics; and Mr Lecky's work on Democracy serves to show how his temperament is settling for him the practical problems of sociology. He is coming to the political philosophy of the Duke of Argyll and the author of the Speaker's Handbook—a philosophy which consists in making out all Irish nationalist claims, protests, and discontents to be utterly unreasonable, and to be the manufacture of unscrupulous men. From this it is but a step to the surmise that these unscrupulous men are so because they come of a bad stock, and that the people who listen to them must be of a bad stock too.

All political strifes, broadly speaking, may be resolved into oppositions of interest, when they are not strifes of simple religious fanaticism, or of mere habitual faction. Now, the Unionist party cannot well concede, even as regards their main body, that

But that

they are proceeding upon the mere habit of opposing Liberal measures or upon the mere inspiration of religious bigotry. Either they must admit that there are real interests involved— that the Irish majority stands on its interest, and that the English majority, in so far as it reasons, stands with the contrary interest -or they must fall back on the imputation of some general vice of character to the Irish people. They might argue, of course, that national interests are often misunderstood, and that the Irish people in the mass misunderstands its interest. relatively humane way of arguing comes too near the attitude of reasoning reform to be compatible with the policy of a party which in the case in hand has no reform to offer. So, whatever may be the humanity of numbers of the silent adherents of what we may call the anti-Irish cause, and whatever may be the former scientific teaching of some of its nominal authorities, the ostensible reasoning of the mass tends always to assume what Mr Gladstone calls the savage form. Hence it has seemed well to track down that species of argument to its roots of ignorance and animal instinct.

I say its roots, meaning simply that the conviction originates in or can be traced back to these elements, not at all that it is cherished only by the ignorant and the unreflecting. It must be expressly admitted, as I have already done, that the habit of imputing specific and permanent characters to nations in the lump is to be seen among men of great acuteness and abundant information. The most intellectual of our living novelists, Mr Meredith, evidently expresses to some extent his own views when he makes certain of his characters expatiate on national characteristics, especially contrasting the German and the English. In his pages, Germans talk in Mr Meredith's tongue of "you" and "us," making out Germans, collectively, to be of one habit of mind and action, and Englishmen, collectively, to be of another.1 Mr Meredith, despite a strong tincture of the militarist spirit, has the merit of holding the scales pretty even between the anti-English and the pro-English view, giving us a

1 See, in The Adventures of Harry Richmond, chapter 29, and compare One of our Conquerors, and Lord Ormont and his Aminta, passim.

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good deal of each, but rather more of criticism than of patriotism, as an intelligent man had need do. On their merits, however, Mr Meredith's generalisations are rather more arbitrary than even those of somewhat arbitrary nationalists, having perhaps the excessive symmetry which belongs to nearly all presentments of life and thought in fiction. No real German thinker and observer could well have quite such cut-and-dry conceptions of an English genius and a German genius as are heaped upon us by Mr Meredith's Germans. These personages are really dramatic mouthpieces for the novelist's own verdicts, which do but represent the imaginative and epigrammatic play of a tendency that, in minds of a lower order, comes out in more or less absurd docketings of the characters of villages, parishes, towns, counties, provinces, and denominations. Thus it is that the Manxman in Mr Brown's tale of Betsy Lee1 calls the loblolly boys Irish curs," when his own Manx dialect proves the largely Irish kinship or derivation of his own people. There is in all of us, in fact, a primordial psychological tendency to simplify the vast labour of judgment in human things, by child-like artifices of classification, following on the lines of demarcation which first obtrude themselves. Not only the amateur sociologist-and in sociology the novelist, as such, cannot be more than an amateur without ceasing to be an artist—but the special student of history and institutions, is found resorting at times to this primordial device, against whose seductions there is no safeguard save a vigilant habit of analysis. When the case has been put in this way, with an eye to human nature in general, there may perhaps be less resentment than before set up by the suggestion that the whole tendency is biologically traceable to the kind of blind animal instinct which in general divides dog and cat, while setting up a special friendship between dog and cat of one household, and a further potential enmity between dog and dog.

It is not to be denied, indeed, that propositions as to racecharacter are sometimes made not only in complete good faith, but without any semblance of prejudice. Thus Mr Hoffman, the

1 Fo'c's'le Yarns, 1881, p. 54.

author of an industrious compilation on the negroes of the United States, is found declaring that "there lie at the root of all social difficulties or problems, racial traits and tendencies which make for good or ill in the fate of nations as well as of individuals."1 Yet the work to which this doctrine is prefixed not only gives no proof of such primordial "race tendencies" as it alleges, but on the contrary shews that a race's tendencies are constantly determined by its environment. Here the fallacy is

one of uncritical use of terms. And I take leave to offer a similar explanation of the results reached by Mr Grant Allen, when, after impartially enough deciding that probably "not one half the population of the British Isles is really of Teutonic descent" (meaning pure Teutonic descent), he goes on to formulate in the old fashion "our" possession at once of the "Teutonic " qualities of "general sobriety, steadiness, and persistence . scientific patience and thoroughness, political moderation and endurance, . . . impatience of arbitrary restraint," etc., and the "intellectual quickness and emotional nature of the Celt."2 In the same breath Mr Allen speaks of the Teutonic differentiation of " our somewhat slow and steady character from the more logical but volatile and unstable Gaul." I can see no scientific coherence in these generalisations. To be impatient of arbitrary restraint is not to be enduring; to be volatile and unstable is to be the reverse of logical; and if the Celt, as Gaul, be volatile and unstable, that is, impatient, he ought, on Mr Allen's principle of chemical mixture of character, to have given the due proportion of volatility and instability to the "impatient" English blend, where "almost all at the present day possess at least a fraction of Celtic blood." Again, if the volatility and instability of the Gaul go with logicality, it would seem to follow that the lack of them in the Teuton would infer excessive illogicality, which can hardly be compatible with general sobriety and scientific thoroughness. Yet again, if Teutonic mixture so modified Celtic characteristics in Britain, it ought to have similarly modified them in France,

1 Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, by Fred. L. Hoffman, 1896, Preface. (American Economic Association's series of publications.) 2 Anglo-Saxon Britain, pp. 228-229.

where it certainly took place on a large scale. And yet again, the Gaul, qua Celt, taken as unmodified by Teutonic mixture, ought in the terms of the theory to possess "the Celtic wealth of fancy," "poetry and romance," as well as volatility and instability. But it happens that conventional ethnology credits to the slow and "unimaginative" Teuton of Mr Allen's system a far greater share of "poetry and romance" than it allows to the "Gaul,” who, further, is sometimes explained as having been made unpoetical by the large admixture of Norman (i.e. Norse, i.e. Teutonic) blood in the Middle Ages! So Mr Allen's terms had to be gingerly handled; and yet withal we have a series of inconsistencies within the scope of his own statement, inconsistent as that further is with other schemata.

In view of such incoherence, which will be found exemplified in nearly every form of the race-doctrine dealt with in the following pages, it will at least be allowed to be worth arguing whether the doctrine be not fundamentally fallacious, and whether we ought not to look for the cause of differences of national culture and well-being in institutions, political and other, and for the cause of these in preliminary conditions of environment, natural and political-in anything, in short, rather than in primordial and perpetual qualities of "race." The suggestion may seem the more specious, at least, when it is found that all the methods yet employed to make out a case for one race, as the Teutonic, can be and have been employed to make out a contrary case for the other, as in that very pro-Celtic treatise The New Exegesis of Shakspere (1859) attributed by M. Littré, in his review of it, to a Mr O'Connell, but fitted to serve, in respect of its utter arbitrariness of theory, as a "typical" example of a kind of philosophy often held to be peculiarly Teutonic.

I am well aware that I have against me not only Teutomaniacs and Celtomaniacs in turn, but much cultured opinion, and that I shall be opposed by many who are not only incapable of race animosity in the ordinary sense, but highly cosmopolitan in feeling. Even in the felicitous work of Mr W. M. Fullerton on Patriotism and Science, so excellent in temper and intention, I find a variety of assumptions made as to national types of char