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kind of prescriptive title to a portfolio, whenever his side comes into power. Lord Palmerston said that nothing is harder than getting a new man into the Cabinet except keeping out a man who has once been there. Lord Salisbury's sense of party loyalty did not permit him to overlook these considerations. Perhaps he might have made some effort to do so, if he had been possessed with a more fervent belief in the efficacy of political and administrative action. But a conviction of the mediocrity of things is easily reconciled with an acquiescence in the mediocrity of men. So he enlarged the size of his Cabinets, and contentedly tolerated the continuance in office of various second-rate Ministers, who could have had no great influence on the conduct of affairs. They were left to manage or mismanage their departments, while the direction of policy was kept in the hands of an Inner Cabinet, consisting of Lord Salisbury himself, and the four or five confidential and important colleagues by whose opinions he was really guided.

It would, however, be very unjust to represent Lord Salisbury's attitude in domestic politics as that of mere negation. He objected to "heroic legislation,” and constant tampering with the mechanism of Government, but he held that to frame well-devised measures of social reform was the proper object of Parliamentary action. He held, also, that while the Liberals were occupied with ambitious and hazardous, political changes, the Conservatives should specially devote them

2 The last forty years have brought us such an evil habit of believing that organic change is a necessary function of Parliament, that if the year has gone by, and nobody is despoiled and no institution is smashed, we say the Session has been wasted. Unless I mis-read the signs of the times, the feeling of the country is that this heroic legislation must now cease. ... My lords and gentlemen, the processes of destruction are in their nature irrevocable.

You can Do more set on foot an institution which has been cast down, than you can raise the dead. The continuity of existence 18

selves to improving the condition of the people. Hence his interest in the Housing Acts, in sanitation, and in industrial regulation. He urged his party to return to the excellent tradition of the time when Lord Ashley was able to carry the Factory Acts in the teeth of the opposition of Radical “reformers." In 1887 he asked whether the question of the unemployed was not worth a good deal more attention than politicians had been inclined to bestow upon it. "You know how the difficulty of the unemployed is rising; in the south there are vast masses of men who have no evil will, against whom no harm can be stated, who have only this one wish, this one demand-that the labor which they are prepared to give should be accepted, and bare sustenance given them in place of it. Is that no subject for the consideration of Parliament? Is it not more important than these organic questions on which we have spent so much time? Is it not more important that we should save men, well-to-do men from ruin, and working men from starvation, instead of bringing forward measures whose only effect can be to hound class against class and creed against creed?" He was even assailed with the imputation of "Socialism," which is commonly flung at anybody who endeavors to deal with social wrongs in earnest. It was an absurd charge in Lord Salisbury's case, but he met it frankly. "Do not tell me," he said, "that these are Socialistic sentiments. Nothing would induce me to adopt the Socialist remedies, but the socialistic cries broken, and the conditions that cling round it are dissipated. Its power for good is gone. It may be in the power of future Parliaments in some degree to repair the evil, but they never can recall the past. This, at least, they can do. They can put a stop to the further progress of assaulting interests for the purpose of showing the industry of Parliament. They may-and I believe that is the policy they ought to pursue -they may return to the paths of conciliatory legislation."--Speech at Hertford, October 17,

1873.

convince me that there is an evil, and that Parliament is deeply responsible for not giving its whole time to it." His attitude towards the "masses" was manly as well as humane. He refused to flatter the working-men, or even to consider them as a class apart from the rest of the population. In one of the brilliant speeches by which he established his reputation, in the debates on Mr. Gladstone's Reform Bill of 1866, he deprecated the adulation of "the future sovereign," who was expected to be "the great power in the State against which no other power will be able to stand":

My own feeling with respect to the working men is simply this, that we have heard a great deal too much of them, as if they were different from other Englishmen. I do not understand why the nature of the poor or working men in this country should be different from that of other Englishmen. They spring from the same race; they live under the same climate; they are brought up under the same laws; they aspire after the same historical model which we admire ourselves; and I cannot understand why this nature is to be thought better or worse than that of other classes.

This sane and straightforward remonstrance is worth quoting to-day, when "Labor" is more than ever inclined to regard itself as a distinct caste, and to separate itself, for political purposes at any rate, from the rest of the community.

So far nothing has been said of Lord Salisbury as Foreign Minister; and it is difficult to say much since the detailed history of the fruitful years he passed in Downing Street can hardly be known to the world till the records of the European Chancelleries and Foreign Offices are laid open. Yet this was by far the most useful and distinguished period of his career, the part that was most congenial to himself, and that gave him his true rank among the

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statesmen of Europe. It was a happy turn of fortune which caused Lord Derby to resign the seals in the crisis of the Eastern Question in 1878, and allowed Lord Salisbury to find his true métier. At the Foreign Office he was happier and more successful than anywhere else. "It is not fanciful," said the late Mr. H. D. Traill, in his excellent sketch of Lord Salisbury, "to suppose that one of the attractions of the Foreign Office for him is that, of all thedepartments of the State, it is that to which popular criticism and populardemands have obtained least access, and the Minister in charge of which is least frequently called upon to explain and justify his proceedings before popular audiences. It is possible, even in these democratic days, for successful and trusted Foreign Secretary to feel something of that proudly inspiriting consciousness of power, and that elevating sense of responsibility which nerved the will, while it steadied the judgment, of the great ministers who have represented this country before the world in historic periods of the past; and one may suspect that it needs some such stimulus to Lord Salisbury's imagination to raise his interest in contemporary politics to the requisite pitch." At any rate, he was distinctly in his element in this office. The quiet, laborious work suited him, and gave full play to his judicial faculty, and his capacity for balancing arguments and alternatives. His calmly scientific outlook on men and things enabled him to keep clear of the sentimental impulses and the sentimental alarms which deflect the course of national policy. The momentary panics and transient enthusiasms passed him by, and no one was more impervious to the sensations of the platform and the newspapers. When one set of Imperialists had worked themselves into a panic over French acquisitions in the Sahara, he

reminded them that the new territory included a good deal of “rather light soil"; when others were taunted with a vision of the Cossacks on the Indus, be advised them to consult some "large maps"; when, more recently, there was much sensitiveness about Chinese railway concessions, he observed that it would take some time before the railways could be built.

In the great critical situations in which he found himself, he retained his deliberate self-possession, and refused to be hurried either into surrender or menace. He was accused of being unduly prone to a bargaining agreement with a foreign Government, and sometimes, as in East Central Africa, in Siam, and perhaps in the Far East, it was said that he had yielded more than the occasion required. That is an imputation which it is really impossible to deal with, in the present state of our knowledge of contemporary diplomacy; for we cannot tell what difficulties he had to encounter from the movements and combinations of the great European Powers, and how often concessions, which seemed on the surface doubtful, were more than justified by the necessities of the hour. What we do know is that in certain threatening emergencies he showed no lack of either judgment or firmness. He steered calmly through the Venezuela storm of 1895-96, and so handled it that the foundation was laid of a better understanding between Great Britain and the United States than had subsisted since the American Revolution. That alone was an achievement by which the whole Anglo-Saxon world was placed under an enduring obligation to him. He took the measure of Teutonic assumption at the time of the Jameson Raid, and of Gallic excitement over Fashoda, and brought both quietly to their bearings. But the highest of his services was to regain for English foreign policy, in a The Fortnightly Review.

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time of peculiar stress and difficulty, its reputation for steady consistency. which had been almost lost during the unfortunate period of Gladstonian rule. It was a consistency which found its basis in an equitable regard for British interests. His conception of the motives which should animate an English Minister was laid down in a speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet in 1876, at a moment when the country was agitated by reports of Turkish cruelty in the Balkans. "Those who are in office," he said, "have their feelings like other men, but they hold the resources of England not as owners, but as trustees. An owner may do what he likes, looking to his sympathies, his anxieties, and his wishes; but a trustee must act according to the strict rights and interests committed to his charge. These are the sentiments which must guide the Government in dealing with the difficult and painful task before them. We do not believe that in the long run the sentiments which are natural to the people of this country will be found at variance with the duties which policy imposes upon us. We believe that if we uphold the rights and interests of England, and adhere to the treaties by which England is bound, and look upon that course as the first and chief of those duties prescribed to us, we shall thereby be doing the utmost that in us lies to maintain the interests of peace, humanity, and civilization." Fortunate for the country it was that during the last few years of world-wide change and movement, its affairs have been directed by a statesman animated by that sound doctrine, and able to carry it into effect. When the true history of our epoch can be written it may be seen how much England, and the wider world outside, owed to the steadying influence, which was withdrawn from our politics before the Coronation of King Edward VII.

Sidney Low.

THE DEAD.

Strong are alone the dead.

They need not bow the head,

Or reach one hand in ineffectual prayer.
Safe in their iron sleep,

What wrong shall make them weep,

What sting of human anguish reach them there?
They are gone safe beyond the strong one's reign,
Who shall decree against them any pain?
John Leicester Warren.

CANADA, THE EMPIRE, AND MR. CHAMBERLAIN.

About a quarter of a century ago there was to be seen posted on the church doors in England a proclamation of the Privy Council respecting the Colorado beetle in which Ontario was designated as "that town." Just after the settlement of the Alabama claims by the Treaty of Washington a Canadian visitor to England was invited to a meeting on emigration held in a city reputed highly intelligent. He spoke of the warm feelings of Canadians towards the Mother Country and was followed by a speaker, evidently a well-educated man, who expressed his pleasure at what he had heard about Canadian feeling, adding that he hoped, now the Alabama question was settled, there was nothing to separate the two nations from each other! This ignorance, and the indifference of which it was the ludicrous manifestation, have passed away. They have given place to an extraordinary access of interest in Canada and an enthusiastic expectation of the part to be played by her in the unification of the Empire, which, though far more gratifying to her than the previous neglect, may in turn be somewhat misleading in its way, especially if British visitors

confine their observation to official Ottawa or the specially British circles of Toronto and Montreal.

The first condition of real knowledge and sound inference about Canada is the use of the physical in place of the political map. At the time of the Jubilee the Canadian Post Office issued a stamp with a miniature map of the British Empire and the motto "We Hold a Vaster Empire than Has Been." Canada appeared as an unbroken expanse of territory, colored the Imperial red, including the North Pole, and equal in extent to all the remaining members of the Empire put together, Great Britain appearing as a mere pigmy in comparison. A common Englishman looking at this stamp would certainly have imagined that the whole of the vast expanse was habitable and cultivable and that the population of the whole of it was British. Such is the political fancy.

The physical fact is that of this vast area by far the greater part belongs to the region of ice and snow. Canada may be described as the northern section of the habitable and cultivable continent, much broken and indented, and with a great and at present unde

fined projection to the north formed by Manitoba and the Territories newly opened. The Dominion is made up of four separate blocks of Territory divided from each other by wide spaces or great barriers of nature. The Maritime Provinces, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, are divided from Quebec and Ontario by the tract through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight for ■ great part of the way. The territory including Quebec and Ontario again is divided from Manitoba and the NorthWestern Territories by desert and Lake Superior, a great inland sea. Between the North-Western Territories and British Columbia there is a triple range of mountains. The proportion of habitable and cultivable land in the Maritime Provinces is not great; nor is it very great in Quebec. In Ontario, hitherto the premier province, it is much larger. In Manitoba and the North-West Territories the extent of habitable and cultivable land is vast, how vast is not yet known. In British Columbia there is not much cultivable land, though there is mineral wealth which is attracting a swarm of adventurers, and timber abounds on the mountains.

Of the population, the homogeneity of which is suggested by the uniform red color on the stamp, the British, though the predominant race, are not the majority. The majority is made up of French-Canadians, Celtic and Catholic Irish, Germans, Americans, and other miscellaneous nationalities, including those which the Government has been importing into the NorthWest. The French are gaining ground. They have ousted the British from the district south of the St. Lawrence

It was probably to flatter French sentiment that cruel charges were brought by a party in the Canadian Parliament against the character of General Sir Fred. Middleton, who had com

called the Eastern Townships, they are advancing in Eastern Ontario and to the North, along the line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Americans are pouring into the North-West, which, owing to their superior aptitude for prairie farming and life, seems destined to be theirs.

apace,

The French of Quebec are, or have hitherto been, a simple, contented, and devout people, kindly and courteous, though generally little educated and unprogressive; rather a refreshing exception to the surrounding whirl of progress. They multiply their priests inculcating early marriage on moral grounds. The priests, whose ascendancy has hitherto been complete, have made the French-Canadian moral in an ecclesiastical way, and FrenchCanada is probably about the best thing that Roman Catholicism has to show. The French-Canadians are content with British institutions. Their leaders are satisfied with office or the position and salaries of Members of Parliament at Ottawa. The revolutionary spirit of 1837, its causes being extinct, has died away, though the antagonism of race still remains and sometimes shows itself in the jury-box. A Quebec "Red" is merely anti-ecclesiastical and Liberal. But the belief that the French people are Anglicized, or converted to British Imperialism, is unfounded. Their nationality is still strong. Their language is still the French patois. Their popular flag is French. Their hearts were with Riel and the French half-breeds who rebelled in the NorthWest. Two battalions of their Militia were called out but not sent to the front, while the colonel of each of them obeyed his political sympathies and withdrew. It may be easily judged whether they would fight against

manded against the French Half-breeds. The charges, that which was probably their political object having been served, were allowed to fall to the ground.

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