-"Having started on this career [of speaking in public], he will endeavour with all his might to keep true to the ideal with which he has begun,-devotion to God's service." He was eagerly welcomed by large audiences of working men in the North, whom he addressed for hours without the help of notes. His graceful and classical appearance did not hinder them from recognising that he was a true friend of the people, and that he understood their wants, and had a great sympathy with their higher aims. Yet there was also a sense in the mind of some of his hearers that for such efforts he was physically unfitted, and that it might have been better for him if he had abstained from them.

The two works to which Arnold Toynbee devoted the last four or five years of his life were a new Political Economy, and the reform of the Church. He did not ignore the benefits which the elder generation of English Economists had conferred upon mankind. He knew that their doctrines were in the abstract true, but he believed that they had done their work, and that the world had got beyond them, and stood in need of something more. If they were not to become odious and even mischievous, some "second thoughts" must be added. He was as strongly in favour of freedom of labour, and freedom of trade, of sound principles of currency, of the modification (if not the abolition) of the Poor Law, as the straitest of the sect. He would not have denied the famous Theory of Rent, nor would he have confounded an extension of credit with an increase of capital. He admitted that the condition of the lower classes had improved, and he would have acknowledged that this increased prosperity was

in a great measure due to free trade. Neither was he slow to recognise the sacrifices which the upper classes, and especially the landed aristocracy, had often made for their good.

But he thought that the old Political Economy was only half the truth, and in practice had turned out to be the reverse of the truth. He quarrelled above all with the extreme abstraction of the science; it was a mere hypothesis which had no near relation to facts, and was often contradicted by them. The laws which regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth require the pressure of a severe and equable competition before they can take effect. But competition can hardly be said to exist in Eastern countries, or in many parts of our own. The world was moving on at different rates of progress in different trades, and at different times and places; Political Economy seemed to assume that these rates of progress were always the same. The Economists spoke of a principle of the greatest wealth, which happened to coincide with the interests of the upper and middle classes, and also coincided with the prodigious extension of manufacturing industry which took place at the beginning of the century. They preached the accumulation of wealth, leaving the distribution to take care of itself. They assured the poor man freedom of labour, but without education, without the chance of emigration, confined as he was to his original place of abode by the action of the old Poor Law, the freedom given to him was under ordinary circumstances only a liberty to starve. The contract which he made with his master was a contract not of equal with equal, but of equal with unequal, in which the

labourer had no chance of gaining a proportionate share of the increasing wealth of the country. He considered also that while professing merely to state the laws of wealth, the theories of Political Economists did indirectly tend to promote a grasping spirit both in nations and individuals. A subject which at one time occupied his thoughts a good deal was the practicability of equalising supply and demand at any given time or place, with a view to the prevention of waste. As far as I remember, this scheme, which was never fully worked out, depended upon the possibility of collecting statistics, which were to be daily and hourly conveyed from one market to another.

These remarks will enable the reader to understand the attitude taken up by Arnold Toynbee towards the old Political Economy. He did not, perhaps, sufficiently recognise that economical laws, though operative in different degrees in different states of society, are never altogether set aside, but have some effect in all ages and countries (for however complex human life may be, the relation of men to each other in trade or exchange is one of the simplest, and may be the thread to guide us through all the rest). Neither was he always consistent in his appreciation of the great economist, Ricardo, whose famous treatise he greatly admired, and yet in one passage of his writings has denounced " as an intellectual imposture." It was natural that he should entertain a dislike to an hypothesis which was so easily misapplied. He wanted to begin where Ricardo left off; and he was surely right in thinking that something more was needed than had satisfied the last generation and that which preceded

it. The new Political Economy must be nearer to factsmore helpful in relieving the wants of great cities; must teach duties as well as laws-must not be satisfied with true doctrines of rent or of money; but must reconcile humanity with science, the reason of men with their feelings. As he wrote in one of his letters: "The political economy of Ricardo has not vanished; it has only been corrected, re-stated and put into the proper relation to the science of life." The older school of Economists had shown the danger of Government interference; the new was to show how and when governments ought to interfere; it might even be hoped that combination and co-operation promoted by the State would create new forms of industrial society. By a more general diffusion of statistics, production and consumption might become more nicely adapted to one another; as formerly in small villages, so now throughout the whole country and in the markets of the world. Again, perhaps, he did not sufficiently consider how difficult it would be to reduce to uniform laws the commerce of the world. He himself would certainly have been far from asserting that he had said the last word, or discovered the final harmonies of economic science.

The peculiarity of Arnold Toynbee's position was this-He was not a socialist or a democrat, though he had some tendencies in both directions. He was not a party politician at all; but he had a strong natural sympathy with the life of the labouring classes, and he was a student of history. Beginning with the a priori hypotheses of Ricardo and Mill, he turned aside from them to study the actual condition of the poor in past

times, especially the progress of enclosures, the growth of the factory system, the remuneration of the labourer, the administration of the Poor Law; by the use of the "historical method" he thought that he would better understand the altered country in which we are now living. He had learnt how to distinguish these two lines of inquiry, and yet was able to combine them. This further point of view has been reached by few; no one has started from it. Nor has any one associated such studies in the same manner with a personal knowledge of the working classes. For several months in successive years he resided in Whitechapel, and undertook the duties of a visitor for the Charity Organisation Society. There he lived in half-furnished lodgings, as far as he could after the manner of working men, joining in their clubs, discussing with them (sometimes in an atmosphere of bad whiskey, bad tobacco, bad drainage) things material and spiritual—the laws of Nature and of God.

The other subject in which he took an active interest during the later years of his life was the Reform of the Established Church. He felt strongly the ever increasing separation between the clergy and laity; the great gulf which divided churchmen and dissenters; the grow ing opposition of science and religion; the hollowness and formalism of many religious beliefs. He knew that this antagonism and unreality was the source of many serious evils, political and social. He lamented the unwillingness to take Orders which prevailed among able young men at the Universities. He saw the double mischief which arose out of this reluctance both to themselves and to the Church. The clergy were undertaking a