"No, we're not Protectorate officers; but, when you come to look at it, what else was there we could do?"

Thereupon the other laid a hand on his shoulder and laughed, as he said: "Just what I expected. Keep on the way you are going and you'll make fine men some day. As to the guide's pay and other matters, you need not trouble about that. I should say the Government is somewhat indebted to you, and I'll see the Vice-Consul writes to your firm at home. Neither need you be afraid of the raiders, for we will shortly bring them to their senses."

Hurried farewells followed, and when the launch steamed away the officer said to Halliwell:

"We are bound in honor to risk the utmost in our respective service. Those The Sunday Magazine.

lads have been taught little, and have no prestige to maintain, and yet they waited-because, as one of them said, there was nothing else he could dowith the forest open behind him to bolt for the settlements. Well, that is, perhaps, the reason why, so few in numbers, we rule in Africa."

The crushing of yet another rising has no place in this story, and such affairs are common in the Niger delta, but in due time Edward Halliwell gained a footing in the fetich district. Also, before that happened, the two young traders received a letter from the firm at home appointing them to the permanent charge of that factory, with a couple of white assistants and a reasonable salary.

Harold Bindloss.

I.

II.

The Spectator.

The cause of the Catholic University for Ireland was greatly advanced by the debate of Friday week in the House of Commons. It is true that the debate ended in a hostile vote of 177 to 91, and that the Irish members contributed to it little of any value, but, nevertheless, the advance was palpable and serious. The conversion of Sir W. Anson, Conservative of Conservatives and member for Oxford University, was of itself most significant; and so was the admirable speech of the member for the Arfon district of Carnarvonshire. Mr. William Jones is a Nonconformist, "a Protestant of the Protestants," as he called himself, a devotee of undenominational education, to which he attributes much of the content and prosperity of Wales, yet, in speech which extorted hearty applause from both sides of the House, he pleaded for a Catholic University in Ireland as essential at once to its cultivation and content. In the cause of enlightenment he postponed “an ideal principle” as, under the circumstances, inapplicable and injurious. That is a most significant sign of progress, as was the admiration which Mr. Jones elicited from opponents. Men who hold an

2 Sophocles, "Antigone," 355.

opinion with fanatic force do not cordially enjoy speeches which show that they are losing foothold with their strongest supporters. The event of the debate, however, was the speech of Mr. Balfour. The Unionist leader of the House, who certainly-as, indeed, he said of himself-has no leaning to Roman Catholicism, was obviously in passionate earnest, and though he commenced by declaring that he was, on this subject, an exhausted man, and had said all that was in him to say, he poured out a stream of argument so convincing, of illustration so apposite, and of reflection so enlightening, that he drew from Mr. John Morley an almost unprecedented compliment, and would, there is little doubt, had his party not been so afraid of constituents, have carried his Bill as completely as Macaulay carried his amendments to the Copyright Bill, and by the same weapon, irresistible argument, so presented that it awoke no fresh antagonism. Amid the hundreds of speeches that we have heard or read we can remember but one in which a speaker so nearly converted a hostile audiencethe one in which Mr. Gladstone proved that the exemption of charitable funds

from the Income-tax was wrong in principle, because fatal to the impartiality of the State. When Mr. Gladstone sat down on that occasion, after announcing that the proposal would go no further, his great opponent declared publicly that had he persevered the House must have given way, being intellectually borne down. Mr. Balfour is often accused of being too academic, but it is not the art of a professor which enables an orator to put the most offensive of all arguments for his proposal with a grace which extorts from those who favor it enthusiastic cheers. What Mr. Balfour wanted to say was that, as we see in Rhenish Prussia, education inevitably strips Roman Catholicism of its most injurious features, and he so presented that side of the question that every Roman Catholic in the House felt that his creed had been honored by the argument. "I do not, in the least, believe that university education will be an instrument for the conversion of Roman Catholics to Protestantism; but I do believe that, if the evils which we believe to result, at all events, from the growth of Roman Catholicism in some of its forms, exist now in Ireland, they will be diminished rather than aggravated by anything you can do in the way of higher education. Take the case of Germany. I do not believe that the actul proportion between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants in Germany has, in the last two or three generations, been materially altered. At all events, I have no ground for believing that it has been altered in favor of the Protestants. Yet there you have University education, and can see what education can do for the great Roman Catholic population, because the German Roman Catholics are, by universal admission, by the admission of every student in every branch of knowledge, the most advanced, the most enlightened, and the most learned

of any of their co-religionists." If that triumph of sympathetic dialectics is academic, would that we had more professors in the Commons to raise debate to higher planes. And surely it was insight as much as unusual knowledge of a special history which enabled Mr. Balfour thus to make of ScotlandPresbyterian Calvinistic Scotland-an unanswerable illustration of the advantages of a Roman Catholic University. "I remember that of all parts of the United Kingdom, Scotland is the one where University education has, perhaps, done more good, where it has penetrated more completely through every section of the population-upper class, middle class, lower class-and I ask myself whether that result would ever have been attained if the Scotch universities in the periods of their earlier activity had not been in active religious and political sympathy with the people. We are now told that the Irish Roman Catholics are throwing away their opportunities for higher education in not going to a university whose atmosphere is Protestant, but whose doors are open to them. Supposing the Universities of Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and St. Andrews had manned their teaching staffs from top to bottom with Roman Catholics since the Reformation. Supposing that the main bulk of the students of these universities had been, in consequence of that fact, Roman Catholic, does any human being believe, knowing anything of history or of human nature, that these four great universities would have been used by the Scotch as they have been used to such great advantage for four hundred years?" Mr. Balfour might have added to his arguments from Germany and from Scotland that Rhenish Prussia, being at once educated and Catholic, is devotedly loyal to the greatest of Protestant houses, one, moreover, which is as distinctively Protestant as any Nonconformist; and

that Scotland, which at first resented the union as strongly as ever Ireland did, is as cordially part of Britain as England is; but perhaps he felt that, at this moment, when Irish Catholics are dying in heaps for Queen Victoria, that argument from loyalty was superfluous or out of place.

To accept such devotion from Irish Roman Catholics, yet refuse to grant the one method of intellectual elevation for which they all petition, and which their clergy regard as absolutely essential, seems to us almost monstrous, and, in truth, we believe it seems so to a majority within the House. It is not the member who knows of Germany, and remembers how many Continental sceptics have been trained in the seminary, who requires to be convinced, but the average Protestant elector, who cannot rid himself of a vague impression that as education strengthens the man who receives it, in educating Catholics in the Catholic way, and amidst a Catholic atmosphere, he is strengthening Catholicism, which, at heart, he believes to be a creed that is both untrue and unBritish. It is most difficult to reach him, for his conviction is born of prejudice rather than reason, and the Catholic Church is, for the moment, fanning its fire by betraying in every direction anti-English sympathies, but we believe that in the end even he will be converted.

Englishmen have always this mark of sense about them, that in the end they follow their leaders; and as they submitted to Catholic emancipation, which they hated and dreaded with all their hearts, so they will submit to see Irish Catholics who are emancipated educated as well as Protestants without more than low-voiced murmurs. Indeed, we are not sure even of the murmurs. They must see in the end, as Mr. Balfour told them, that this is not an ecclesiastical ques

tion, but a lay question; that the men to whom they are refusing the means of culture are not priests, but laymen who in every walk of life, and specially on the battlefield, are struggling for the same causes as themselves; who, if they are degraded, degrade the Empire, and if they are elevated, elevate the whole community, Protestant as well as Catholic. If it is truth which is in question, how can they diffuse the mental power of receiving truth more directly than by educating thoroughly the misbeliever? And as for the loyalty, let them ponder the newspaper "great fact" of the day. The Duke of Norfolk is sailing for South Africa to fight at the head of a corps which he himself has raised on the side to which the electors are wishing success. The Duke, at least, is not seeking to improve his own position or maintain himself in comfort. He is sacrificing for the flag almost everything which makes life enjoyable, and a great official position besides; and he is not only the premier peer and the recognized leader of English Catholics, but he is a believer of whose fidelity to his church no one ever entertained a doubt. The average Protestant elector is, after all, a person of sense, and we should just ask him whether, if all Irish Catholics shared the sentiments and the education of the Duke of Norfolk, he would think of Ireland as more dangerous or less dangerous than at present? It is not a pleasant argument to use in a cause which ought to succeed because the English people love justice, and will face a risk on its behalf; but it is an intelligible one, and we would ask the average elector where his answer is.

We shall be told, of course, that the Irish Roman Catholic can go to the Protestant university if he pleases, but the assertion is in all but form untrue. He can go just as an English Evangelical can go to be educated at Stony