John Morley

THE Liberal cabinet which, with some changes of personnel but no deviation in policy, has governed the British Empire since 1906, will probably fill a wider space in the chronicles of time than any other group of English statesmen since the days of Cromwell. Upon it has fallen the task of retrieving, in so far as possible, the losses in wealth, prestige, and morality occasioned by the Boer War; of resisting the panics, spontaneous or contrived, which have tended to an unnecessary development of the navy; of finding means to restore the land to the people and the people to the land; of saving the poor from unemployment and starvation; of attempting to set the national free-school system beyond the reach of sectarian interference, and to transfer the franchise from property to manhood; of defending free-trade against specious arguments drawn from the examples of Germany and the United States and unscrupulously repeated by a far from disinterested press; of guiding, without jealousy and without giving occasion for irritation or loss of loyalty, the rapid adolescence of great colonial nations; of destroying the veto power of the House of Lords, and of definitely planning home rule for Ireland.

Some of these achievements and efforts are in line with the old Liberal tradition of Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone; some foreshadow, it may be, a new Liberalism, based upon a conception of property which would have been as unacceptable to the early Victorian Liberals as to the Tories of their day. When Mr. Asquith formed his first cabinet the prediction was made that it could not hold together long, because of the incongruity between its extremes. It was said that conservative Liberals, sired and bred in the individualism of the Manchester school, could not work in harness with Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. John Burns. The radical side of the cabinet, like the radical wing of the coalition majority, was socialistic, and would therefore prove unmanageable. The Labor members might sit below the gangway and hold the balance of power, together with the Irish Nationalists, but their views could not find practical expression in the cabinet without disrupting that intimate group.

Thus far — and it is already very far indeed — these predictions have not been fulfilled. The reason seems to be that the older and more conservative members of the cabinet are themselves much more advanced than was at first supposed. Mr. Asquith has shown himself not a whit less radical than Mr. Lloyd George, although of course it would be overstatement to say that he goes as far as Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, whose influence in the coalition might be thought to deserve official standing.

There is one member of this famous ministry who illustrates in person the evolution of old-fashioned Liberalism into its present form. Mr. John Morley, a disciple of Cobden and Mill, a friend of Gladstone, and a member of the House of Commons so far back as 1883, now Viscount Morley of Blackburn, and maintaining in the House of Lords an unflinching and joyful allegiance to the whole Liberal programme, is an epitome of progressive policy during the last fifty years. His views have changed less than the views of his party, because he entered public life from a very high level of Liberal theory. His associates have been overtaking him. He has had the satisfaction of seeing the ideals of his early manhood generally adopted, and to a considerable extent put into practice, by a triumphant majority. They have mellowed, but have lost hardly any of their original distinctness. This is remarkable, not only because he is seventy-three years old, but because he has, in three positions, been subject to influences which tend to convert the most radical Liberals into Conservatives. He has twice been Chief Secretary for Ireland; yet he remains a Home-ruler. He has been Secretary of State for India, wielding something like despotic powers over subject and alien races; yet he is an anti-imperialist. He is a lord; yet it was he who moved the adoption of the Parliament bill by the upper house.

Americans, as a rule, probably do not realize the thorough-going character of the new British Liberalism. We are surprised even by the fact that the older Liberalism came at, length to tolerate its own radical adherents, such as Bradlaugh. No public man in the United States entertaining opinions so revolutionary as those of Lord Morley and expressing them so pointedly would be returned to Congress for twenty-five years. The principles of an English viscount would be too democratic for the countrymen of Lincoln. A professed believer in the doctrines of the French Revolution would be regarded as dangerous in the nation that Thomas Jefferson helped to found. Mr. Morley used to be denounced as an agnostic; he perhaps was and may still be an agnostic; yet constituencies in England, where questions of religion are also questions of politics, sent him repeatedly to Parliament.

The philosophical opinions of this great public man are of a piece with his conduct in the legislature and in office. They are, moreover, extremely simple and unified. Between the publication of his Voltaire, in 1871, and the completion of his Life of Gladstone, in 1903, they do not vary except in emphasis. They are essentially the principles of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment translated, through the medium of an English mind, into terms appropriate to an age which has seen the conjectures of rationalism confirmed by natural science and historical criticism.

Lord Morley is one of t he most eminent biographers and reviewers in the English-speaking world. Other names are perhaps more frequently on our lips, but death could make no more noticeable breach in the ranks of living English writers than by robbing us of his presence. His services as editor of the English Men of Letters Series will be remembered, though it is not publicly known how much attention he gave to the details of that undertaking. His essays on Wordsworth, on Byron, on Carlyle, on Macaulay, on Emerson, on John Stuart Mill, on George Eliot, on Machiavelli, on Guicciardini, are among the most solid and thoughtful critical reviews in our language. The history of English Liberalism is written in his lives of Cromwell, Walpole, Burke, Cobden, and Gladstone. The books with which he established his authority as a student of the eighteenth century and of the French philosophes are his Voltaire, published in 1871, his Rousseau, in two volumes, 1873, his Diderot and the Encyclopédists, in two volumes, 1878, together with his Burke, originally published in 1807 and again, much revised, in 1879, and his essays on Vauvenargues, Turgot, Condorcet, Robespierre, and Joseph de Maistre. Nineteen volumes, almost all very compactly written, would be enough, without any political activity, to free a man from the reproach of an idle life.

One alone of Lord Morley’s books is not directly historical, the noble essay, On Compromise. It is expressly theoretical. Yet it contains no characteristic ideas which, to a sympathetic and intelligent reader, are not perceptible in the lines or between the lines of the other books. It is the moral portrait of the author, and although drawn so long ago as 1874, it is still true in every feature to the prolific writer and active statesman who developed in later years.

One step in his long course that might possibly seem incongruous with his principles was the acceptance of a peerage. But Lord Morley has remained unfalteringly faithful to democratic principles. Not many peers of such quality would be required to overturn or transform the aristocracy. He has sometimes been reproached for the severity with which, in ruling India, he repressed sedition. But it was his duty to uphold the laws, and both humanity and common sense forbade any temporizing with tendencies that might have deluged India with blood and severed a connection which, however guilty its origins, is now almost certainly a blessing to three hundred million people. One of the net results of his Indian administration is that henceforth natives will be associated with Englishmen in the legislative and administrative departments of the Indian government. He retired from this office of immense responsibility in 1910, having been raised to the peerage in 1908.

It must serve a useful purpose to set forth the personal opinions upon historical tendencies, chiefly religious and political, which constitute the philosophy of such a man. They have the tonic vigor, the fortifying sting, of the unperfumed and impartial sea. They brace the mind against comfortable sophistry. They are fatal to flabby growths of emotion expatiating in the semblance of reason.

A man need be no moralist to perceive that the time has come when many of the reactionary illusions which diverted the movement of thought in the nineteenth century, even while they imparted to the stream a transitory glow, must in all decency be given up. Our sentiments have lagged behind our intellectual perceptions. We cling, heartsick at the sure intimation of change, to institutions of which we have long since perceived the imperfect origins and realized the impending doom. It is humiliating to be obliged to confess that men of clear vision a century and a half ago, not by any moral virtue in them other than their clearness and love of truth, not by any charm in them, but rather in spite of their many personal disfigurements, might have saved us and the three or four generations preceding us from frantic deviations and farcical struggles, if we and our fathers had not cried them down as ‘mere rationalists.’

One need be no prophet to guess that the next stage in the evasive process will be an attempt to grip harder than ever the symbols, the terms, the authority, the emoluments, and the aesthetic apparatus of a religion of which the historical and psychological foundations have been sapped. We shall be implored, in the name of ‘the stability of society’ and in the interest of ‘beauty,’ not to touch walls that totter and the ivy that clings to them. No blandishment is more suave, scarce any pathos more poignant, than the appeal of decaying ordinances wherein a mighty spirit once dwelt. But if the spirit has enlarged its sphere, if it breathes through the unimprisoned air, if it floats abroad where the world’s work is done, if it hangs

then not to follow it and live in its vitalizing touch is inexpiable treason.

Not force, but clearness, not profusion, but simplicity, are what the new age needs. The advocates of force and profusion are many, and by their very nature conspicuous. They proclaim on every hand the virtue of enthusiasm. Have faith! is their cry. Through some subtle connection, which it would be worth while for a psychologist to explain, they associate faith with fireworks, with the devil’s fireworks known as navies and armies. As to the direction of all that energy which they adore, they give us no counsel, or none that is above the lowest elements of the commonplace.

Our age, on the other hand, sated with wealth and abounding in excessive force, ready to follow with faith and zeal the leadership of wise men and fools, — our age, one would think, needs direction. That it is a new age we are all conscious. The indescribable change has been felt in this country; it has been felt and acknowledged in Europe; it has announced itself with the crash of empires in Asia. The rights of man are beginning to reassert themselves, as contrasted with the rights of property. The solidarity of human interests is being recognized as never before. Constitutions and laws which seemed adequate for nations that were predominantly agricultural, and for evenly distributed peoples, are proving unfit to regulate industrial systems that reach from country to country, affecting the vital resources of all mankind, and unfit for the dense urban life of our time.

Only superficial thinkers imagine that these regenerating impulses can be either furthered or effectively opposed without an appeal to the deepest of all sanctions. Whether the old order is to be defended or attacked, the ultimate arguments must be founded on instincts so profound,! so personal, and so historic, that they amount to nothing less august than religion. One of the commonest ‘evidences of Christianity’ is the claim that it has made the old order possible and may yet serve to support it. And many men who feel that the old order is unjust invoke what they call pure or primitive Christian practice in favor of the changes they advocate.

On the other hand, rationalists, reattaching themselves to the philosophy of Locke and Hume, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, of Paine and Jefferson, of the German Aufklärung, of Godwin, of Comte, of Mill, leap free from this entanglement of Christianity with social problems, and declare that the pursuit of justice and mercy is reliligion. They repeat boldly after the ancient prophet this universal and simple creed: ‘He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?’

In this line stands John Morley. If it appear strange that, by virtue of his cabinet positions, a man who openly avows such principles should have had a share in the power to nominate bishops of the Anglican Church, this is not the oddest anomaly of the Establishment. It is surely a tribute to his impartiality that the once frequent attacks on him as an agnostic adviser of the Crown have almost ceased. He is by deliberate choice, and therefore probably by some original bias of his nature, a religious teacher. If he has opposed the popular form of religion it is not because he has undervalued the importance of faith. He too has had his convictions. He has not, however, like Froude and many another writer, irritatingly assumed that his own beliefs were the axioms of all enlightened thinking. This offense, and not the looseness of statement for which he has been too severely blamed, is what really mars much of Froude’s work. Huxley was not quite free from it, nor was Lecky. The author of On Compromise, on the other hand, has spoken as one who knew he belonged to the minority. But he has always spoken boldly, and has fairly won the enviable title, ‘honest John Morley.’

Lord Morley is not a Comtist, though evidently he accepts the negations of Positivism and some of its active doctrines. He appears to feel that the Religion of Humanity is adequate for moral support and guidance. To state that he is neither so methodical and precise nor so imaginative and constructive as Comte, is only to say that he is English and not French. His temperament is practical and moderate, inclining him to esteem simple and common-sense views and to disregard small inconsistencies, and even pretty big ones, in order to hold fast a few strong positions. He does not appear to be by instinct skeptical. Merely he shows no tendency to yield to the fascination of mystical natures. For this reason, he is, as a psychologist, far less rich in haunting sympathies and profound and delicate observations than Sainte-Beuve, for example. The play of religious and political forces in the region of practical intellect, not purely speculative or purely active intellect, but mediatory between literature and life, may be better observed, for the period between 1826 and 1869, in the life and works of the great French crit ic than anywhere else. For the preceding fifty years, Goethe performs the same office. For the period since SainteBeuve’s death, one who would follow the course of the game might content himself with Matthew Arnold and Morley. The latter alone would not suffice. There is not enough poetry in him, nor enough breadth of feeling.

Morley begins almost precisely where Sainte-Beuve ended, with a sure grasp of several elementary principles; but apparently he has never entertained so many conflicting emotional sympathies. After wandering well up the height of more than one slope of thought and aspiration, Sainte-Beuve found himself at last, weary and disillusioned, clinging to the rock of positive humanitarianism, with a distinct, though slight, trust in progress, but half-fainting with the perfumes from vanished gardens of more luxuriant faith. There is no flavor of regret in Lord Morley’s writings, no tone of renouncement, above all, no sentimentality.

There is hardly a trace in him of sympathy with the great reactionary movements that enriched the imagination of Englishmen and Americans in the nineteenth century: the mediævalism of Sir Walter Scott, the metaphysical apologetics of Coleridge, Newman’s narcotic plea for the surrender of private judgment, Carlyle’s revolt against reforms which he thought merely hedonistic. These were all instinctive, temperamental impulses, originating in character and experience rather than in deliberate weighing of evidence. They made the imagination of our race more flexible, but they perhaps, in some important respects, enfeebled judgment. They amassed a gorgeous store of figure and color, of hope and fear, but it is questionable if they strengthened the walls of the treasurehouse. They opened vapory vistas into the past, but it may be doubted if they helped to make present duty plainer and the future course more clear. The panic of reaction against the French Revolution, which was the psychological basis of all these movements and of several less illustrious ones, impeded and still impedes social progress, and has diminished by an immense amount the sum of human welfare. Corresponding movements in France were expressed in literature by Joseph de Maistre, Chateaubriand, Cousin, Guizot, and Hugo in his early manhood. They attracted and in turn repelled Sainte-Beuve, exciting his thought and determining its direction, until near the end of his life. He was never free and frank, never bold, direct, and measurably happy, until he turned his back on the phantom flood and rejected the haunting fear that intuition might, after all, be the better part of reason, that Pascal and Bossuet, the Jansenist recluses and the Jesuit saints, orthodox Protestants and Catholics on their common ground of supernaturalism, might be nearer the truth than Montaigne, Bayle, and the Encyclopædists.

It was probably the influence of John Stuart Mill that freed Morley in early manhood from apprehensions of this sort. By reading Mill On Liberty and then immediately Morley On Compromise, one can see the filiation, and incidentally receive plainer instruction in truth-telling than all the thundering pages of Carlyle afford. This short course on the duty of clear thinking and candid speech is urgently recommended as a ductor dubitantium. To many a tired doubter it offers peace. To many a person whose energies are wasting, unused, because his sensibilities entice him, while his reason forbids him, to enter the conventional and ancient paths of spiritual activity, it would reveal other and unbarred ways of practical expression, by showing how many and how beautiful are the religious obligations of truth. Lord Morley’s writings are full of tributes to his austere master. They are, in their totality, a monument to that great man. On every appropriate occasion the reverent pupil pays to the memory of Mill acknowledgment of vast moral indebtedness. It is of Mill, whom he came to know intimately, that Morley wrote the tenderest pages in all his works. The same deep tones run through the works of both writers, the same respect for intellectual conviction in themselves and in others, the same sense that no man lives to himself alone, the same recognition that a considerate and sympathetic hearing is due to fresh and untried opinions.

Mr. Morley entered Oxford when the influence of Newman had long passed its height. Mill had succeeded to the intellectual throne. An influence more immediate, and not dissimilar, was exercised in Mr. Morley’s own college, Lincoln, by the peculiar and somewhat awful personality of Mark Pattison.

As we have seen, his writings fall into three groups: his lives of English statesmen, his lives of French philososphers, and the unique book, On Compromise. There are, besides, his essays on various men and women of letters, but t hese may nearly all be regarded as by-products of his studies in French rationalism and English liberalism, and belong in the first or the second of the two main groups accordingly.

The biographies of Englishmen are probably the less significant of the two series. There is not so much unity among the members, and the author makes less of an attempt to penetrate motives. Furthermore, Walpole, Cobden, and Gladstone are, of course, far less interesting personalities than Voltaire and Rousseau, and their respective times were humdrum in comparison with the momentous epoch of French history just before the Revolution. The Burke, one of Lord Morley’s most readable and artistically successful books, belongs in the French fully as much as in the English series. The Walpole contains a jarring note of forced apology for that statesman’s faults. It is, moreover, a work of far less compass than any of the others. The Oliver Cromwell, though of great value as a narrative, is hardly a successful portrait. It suffers, as all other lives of Cromwell must suffer, when compared with Carlyle’s speaking picture. Lord Morley is no painter. He has few colors on his palette, and they are ready-mixed. Nor has he anything like Carlyle’s matchless gift of power to show a man visibly and audibly moving about, full-bodied, amid the tumults or the quiet fields where he actually did move. Tacitus, Saint-Simon, Carlyle, — it is not for even the best biographers of our day to be set over against these re-makers of men and scenes. What Lord Morley’s pages possess in the way of superiority even to Carlyle — and it is a strong advantage, surely — is the sense they communicate that nothing is being cautiously withheld or purposely distorted, that the author is giving us the plain truth as he knows it. The plain truth about Cromwell, as anybody living knows it, has not enough consistency to form a satisfactory homogeneous portrait.

The Cobden and, even more, the Gladstone lose in unity what they gain in fullness, from being largely compilations of speeches and letters. Still, they are, for this reason, among the richest and truest of biographies. If they are not works of art in the highest sense, they are replete with fact and comment, holding as much of the truth as could be crammed into their many hundreds of pages. It is interesting to observe the new Liberalism emerging in the author, his way of looking back to Cobden as having been left behind at a stage already remote. Mentioning with approval certain bills to protect labor, he remarks complacently: ‘It cannot be seriously denied that Cobden was fully justified in describing the tendencies of this legislation as socialistic. It was an exertion of the power of the state in its strongest form, definitely limiting in the interest of the laborer the administration of capital.’ And after referring to what thirty years more of such legislation accomplished, between 1847 and 1877, he adds: ‘We find the rather amazing result that in the country where Socialism has been less talked about than any other country in Europe, its principles have been most extensively applied.’

He points out that Cobden was hindered by his zeal for personal liberty from perceiving the need for equality, which is the crying need in all industrial countries. Upon a much later occasion, in his overwhelming review of Lecky’s Democracy and Liberty, 1896, he associates himself with Mill in a searching criticism of certain commonplaces which both the Conservative and the Liberal schools of political thought had always accepted without question: —

‘He [Lecky] talks, for instance, of the sense of right and wrong being the basis of respect for property and for the obligation of contract. This will never do. It begs the whole question. The Socialist believes that he can make an unanswerable case the other way, namely, for the proposition that the unsophisticated sense of right and wrong, so far from being the root of respect, for property, is hostile to it and is at this moment shaking it to its foundation all over the modern world. . . . The classes, Mill observed, which the present system of society makes subordinate have little reason to put faith in any of the maxims which the same system of society may have established as principles.’

The Life of Gladstone is a work of immense labor loyally bestowed upon a sympathetic theme. The personal reminiscences in which it abounds are one of the chief elements of its value. They throw light on many obscure points in recent history, such as Gordon’s mission to Khartoum. The author modestly keeps himself in the background, but it is evident that for many years he was not only very intimate with Gladstone, but closely associated with him in politics as counselor and agent. The Life has done much to restore the reputation of Gladstone, or rather to revive it, after the inevitable reaction which followed his amazing popular triumphs.

But it is in another field that Lord Morley’s authority is most generally recognized. He first became known to the public as a student of the philosophy which prepared the French Revolution, the philosophy of the Enlightenment. As a fighting man in a conflict that still rages, it is through these early works that he most directly affects opinionHe occupies high rank, with Arnold, Leslie Stephen, and Mr. Frederic Harrison, as a spiritual leader, as a medium of communication between England and France, especially as a defender of plain speaking.

That plain speech on the subject of religious conformity in its connection with progressive social life is necessary, few would deny in the abstract; but in practice we are all too much disposed to act as if liberty were a settled possession and bigotry forevermore powerless, Startling examples are not wanting, however, to prove that such a feeling of security is unfounded. The following extract from a widely circulated pamphlet may serve as an illustration: —

‘To establish and make universal the principles of pure democracy is the ob ject, whether consciously or unconsciously, of the great thought-movements of our era. . . . Not only is the Bible, with its peremptory assertion of supremacy and control over mankind, directly counter to the democratic movement, but it is now the only real obstacle to the complete independence of humanity.’

These are not the words of a freethinker. They occur in a book which has been widely distributed with the professed purpose of promoting a world-wide revival of evangelical religion. Those who separate the Bible unnaturally from the rest of history and literature, and fail to perceive its emancipating spirit, are capable of believing such statements. And if they also happen to dislike and fear democracy they will cherish popular Christianity as a check upon what they consider to be the wayward, innovating impulses of humanity. They are the most determined foes of progress.

Of such a nature, and more oppressive only because it was more strongly intrenched in all the high places of church and state, was the power that Voltaire made it his life-work to destroy. And for his tenacity and selfsacrifice in performing so much of the task as any one man could, Morley honors him, in a book that is at once a biography, an essay, and a eulogy.

Voltaire was not an enemy of religion; neither is his admirer. ‘It cannot be too often repeated,’ says the latter, ‘that the Christianity which Voltaire assailed was not that of the Sermon on the Mount, for there was not a man then alive more keenly sensible than he was of the generous humanity which is there enjoined with a force that so strangely touches the heart, nor one who was on the whole, in spite of constitutional infirmities and words which were far worse than his deeds, more ardent, and persevering in its practice.’ Neither was Voltaire an enemy of social order. He valued highly the culture of the rigidly settled age in which he was born. ‘The epoch,’ says Morley, ’was one of entire loyalty to itself and its ideas. Voltaire himself perceived and admired these traits to the full. The greatest of all overthrowers, he always understood that it is toward such ages as these, the too short ages of conviction and self-sufficience, that our endeavor works. We fight that others may enjoy; and many generations struggle and debate, that one generation may hold something for proven.’

It might be supposed that one great advantage of an age of faith would be that it enables men to shake off undue solicitude about religion and escape the obsession of theology. But this is paradox; the facts have not been so in history. The so-called ages of faith have been ages crushed and absorbed by theology. Voltaire no doubt felt the charm of the seventeenth-century ideal, but he perceived clearly enough that the central pillar of that wide-branched vault was authority. And the material of this pillar could not withstand his analysis. He realized without flinching that the arches must fall, for the pillar was rotten. He was not alone in this. His splendid and for some time unshared advantage was, however, that he saw the connection between oppressive government and the denial of reason. As Morley affirms, ‘The companionship between these two ideas of disrespect for the rights of man and disrespect for reason, or the highest distinction of man, has been an inseparable companionship. . . . To Voltaire, reason and humanity were but a single word, and love of truth and passion for justice but one emotion.’

It is the keynote of his own character that Morley here strikes, or rather its grand chord, the harmony of two kindred notes; an ardent devotion to the welfare of all mankind, and a clear, unqualified allegiance to the rational understanding. How much the world needs that these two principles should be boldly affirmed is only too apparent as we observe the power of comfort and wealth to make men scoff’ at equality and doubt the possibility of continual progress, inclining them to acquiesce blandly in all evils which do not touch them and to drop with a grim smile and a sigh of relief into the city of refuge maintained by mysticism.

The hostility to Voltaire, and to rationalism generally, proceeds very naturally from those, to quote Morley again, ‘who are apt to measure the merits of a philosopher by the strength of his sympathy with existing sources of comfort.’ And that a settled religious faith, a sacred bond between us and our fathers, a common ground of hope and activity with those we love and desire to help in our own generation, the object and subject of all art, the motive of all knowledge and all endeavor — that a settled religious faith must be a comfort, and more than a comfort, the glory and crown of life, Morley never denies. Neither, in fact, did Voltaire. The latter knew, fully as well as his enemies, that religion is the centre of the great wheel of human life, from which radiate all the supports and impulses that keep life in the track of progress. With no other philosophy than common sense, and scarcely more of scholarly equipment than many other well-read and experienced men possessed, he scrutinized the ‘supernatural evidences’ of Christianity and found them startlingly inadequate to uphold its claims of dominion over conscience. His analysis, though audacious and often rancorous, was seldom, if ever, prompted by levity. His instruments were slight, but his purpose was earnest and his hand sure. He has done more to purify and simplify Christianity, to eliminate its imperfections, and bring its universal, permanent properties into credit and activity, than any man since Luther. Or, again, as Morley puts it, he has forced the defenders of Christianity ‘to plead for the tolerance of rational men on the comparatively modest ground of social fitness.’

But in thus estimating the validity of Christian doctrine we are exposed to a new danger, peculiar to our own era. We are now solicited by certain pleaders to neglect the promptings of rational understanding, not because they are contrary to an easy faith, but because they are unnecessary. Popular Christianity, they insinuatingly tell us, is workable. It is the best form of spiritual order which the ages have brought forth. It satisfies the cravings of the heart. It promotes a morality which is, on the whole, the best available. Its value is very high. Let us rest content with what is, so long as it is thus good and practicable, and not inquire too carefully into its origin or its essential nature. Even if reason should decide against Christianity,— and we do not assert that it might not., — we should still hold fast to it in practice. Let us retain the symbols, the historic spirit, the aesthetic satisfactions, the soul of goodness in things, — well, not evil of course, but questionable, if you please, — and turn a deaf ear to all disturbers of our peace. Let us not be so illiberal, so uncultured, so crude and harsh, so puritanical and philistine, as to listen any longer to mere reason. It would blight our sensibilities, narrow the luminous sphere of our emotions, make pale and wan the many-colored dome under which we dwell at ease, and, above all, render extremely awkward the task, already so difficult, of bringing up our children! This is the murmur, too gentle and droning to be called the cry, of many ‘Modernists.’ The ringing sentences of Morley fall like whips of wire upon those who sell such doves for sacrifice in the forecourt of the temple.

‘The modern argument,’ he declares, ‘in favor of the supernatural origin of the Christian religion, drawn from its suitableness to our needs and its divine response to our aspirations, must be admitted by every candid person resorting to it to be of exactly equal force in the mouth of a Mahometan or a fire-worshiper or an astrolater. If you apply a subjective test of this kind, it must be as good for the sincere and satisfied votaries of one creed as it is for those of any other’; and again he speaks with scorn of ‘a fatal substitution of bland emotional complacency for robust cultivation of the reason, and firm reverence for its lessons as the highest that we can learn.’ These words were drawn from him by the sight of the followers of Newman chloroforming their tortured minds. They might be applied, with pungent restorative effect, to souls that feel the lure of a new and insidious suggestion of relief, like the fickle city in Dante’s reproachful phrase,

Morley very properly emphasizes the fact that Rousseau represents the most important aspect of the Revolution, its social side, to which Burke signally failed to do justice. ‘The pith of the Revolution up to 1790,’ he declares, ‘was less the political constitution, of which Burke says so much, and so much that is true, than the social and economic transformation, of which he says so little.’ Rousseau formulated the central principle of the Revolution, which was, to simplify life. ‘This in a sense is at the bottom of all great religious and moral movements, and the Revolution emphatically belongs to the latter class.’ The impulse to disentangle life, to shake off intricacies, ’is the mark of revolutionary generations, and it was the starting-point of all Rousseau’s mental habits.’ In social relations it means equality, in literature and art a return to nature. It is fitting that Rousseau should be judged according to the measure in which he remained true to this grand principle. He did remain true to it, and this explains his immense hold on the minds of men engaged in the struggle. His many enormous disqualifications for intellectual and moral leadership all counted for nothing in comparison with the fact that he was sincere and tenacious in affirming the deep principle that animated the whole movement.

On this question of simplicity, which has begun again to agitate the world, Morley sounds no uncertain note: he is for the coming revolution, if it is to mean a just equality. ‘As against the theory that the existing way of sharing the laboriously acquired fruits and delights of the earth is a just representation and fair counterpart of natural inequalities among men in merit and capacity, the revolutionary theory is true, and the passionate revolutionary cry for equality of external chance most righteous and unanswerable.’ He goes on to deny, as sensible people must deny, that all men have the same capacity for serving the community, yet he does not comfort himself with the thought that our present arrangements are fair, and expresses the hope that ‘generations will come, to whom our system of distributing among a few the privileges and delights that are procured by the toil of the many, will seem just as wasteful, as morally hideous, and as scientifically indefensible as that older system which impoverished and depopulated empires in order that a despot or a caste might have no least wish ungratified for which the lives or the hard-won treasure of others could suffice.’

He recognizes in Rousseau the contrary to much that gave him satisfaction in Voltaire. Yet some of Rousseau’s aims were necessary correctives of the Voitairean tendencies. Voltaire and the other Encyclopaedists ‘forgot that imagination is as active in man as his reason, and that a craving for mental peace may become much stronger than passion for demonstrated truth.’

In his Diderot and the Encyclopædists he does not depart from the positions taken in his earlier volumes, nor add to the fundamental ideas therein expressed. Turgot and Condorcet are rendered in admiring terms. Wise and good men, fully accepting the revolutionary philosophy, but knowing the economic facts of their time and country, they kept steady where other men lost their balance. Turgot is Morley’s great hero. But he is equally just to Joseph de Maistre, who detested the Revolution and labored to undo its work. This modest, duty-loving man is depicted in winning contrast to Holbach, Grimm, and Helvétius, who remain detestable despite all our author can do to proclaim their ultimate usefulness in advancing the cause of free thought. And quite as likely as not, they injured it, after all.

Morley’s Burke is more delightful than any of his other books that deal with the Revolution, in which aphorisms and judgments too often hem the flow of narrative and argument. Its style is less exuberant. The author was evidently limited in regard to space, a restriction which would not have proved harmful in the other cases. He of course points out the unfortunate results of Burke’s ignorance of the true cause of the French Revolution. If Burke had possessed half of Arthur Young’s knowledge of economic conditions in France, he could hardly have taken the course he did. His natural love for ordered systems, ‘that worked by the accepted uses, opinions, beliefs, prejudices of a community,’ blinded him to the necessity of the revolt. When the timorous, the weak-minded, and the bigoted in England were aroused to the danger to which it was supposed that the conflagration in France exposed their country, ‘Burke gave them the key which enabled them to interpret the Revolution in harmony with their usual ideas and their temperament.’ For this it is hard to forgive him. They seized upon the least worthy parts of his Reflections with avidity, but were little affected by the large political philosophy which makes that work immortal.

No one who cares for human welfare and is not forbidden by his own religious or political philosophy to see any good whatever in the French Revolution, can read Morley’s works on that convulsive effort of mind without feeling indignant at the all-too-common assumption that it failed, and deserved to fail. Burke and Carlyle between them have unduly influenced opinion on this subject in the English-speaking world. The Terror and the usurpation of Napoleon will perhaps be seen some day in their true light, as aberrations and unfortunate incidents of a movement necessary, conscientiously planned, and on the whole beneficial. Even the famous code of law which replaced the old chaos of French custom has been mistakenly called the Code Napoléon. Let any one ask himself what would have been the history of modern Europe if France, which has in the long run remained faithful to the Revolution, had not led forlorn hopes and served as an example for the last hundred and twenty years. Of her claims to honor, no worthier vindication exists in our language than Morley’s studies of the great critical movement.

His essay On Compromise is a work of extraordinary value. Not to have read it is to have missed a powerful stimulus to right living. It was published in 1874, and has been often reprinted. The author first disposes of the fallacy that error may possibly be useful. He then deals with the effects of immoral compromise in politics, which are always evil, though ‘ in the positive endeavor to realize an opinion, to convert a theory into practice, it may be, and very often is, highly expedient to defer to the prejudices of the majority.’ But the spirit of politics has often intruded upon the sphere of private conduct, and particularly upon religious organizations. In the celebrated chapter on religious conformity, the author treats with clear-eyed precision the cases of conscience which emerge in the conflict between social opinion and personal conviction. Since heresy is no longer traced to depravity of heart, persons are not often put under much public pressure to conform to religious usages from which they inwardly dissent. Painful difficulties do sometimes arise, however, between husbands and wives and between children and parents. Is it ever the duty of a husband to conform in order to please his wife? Should children carry obedience to parents, or filial gratitude, so far as to profess beliefs which they do not entertain? What course should be followed in bringing up children, when the parents differ, one being a believer, the other an unbeliever? The replies are not always trenchant, for some of the cases are very complex, but the discussion is straightforward and helpful. A simpler problem arises where both parents dissent from the popular creed. Here the most elementary morality forbids teaching what is believed to be false, and yet it is not fair to make children peculiar, or incline them to a priggish aloofness, or bring them up without a large part of the culture of mind and heart which is associated with Christianity.

Of the ministers of the church, Morley declares that they ‘vow almost before they have crossed the threshold of manhood that they will search no more. They virtually swear that they will to the end of their days believe what they believe then, before they have had time either to think, or to know the thoughts of others. They take oath, in other words, to lead mutilated lives. If they cannot keep this solemn promise, they have at least every inducement that ordinary human motives can supply to conceal their breach of it. . . . Consider the seriousness of fastening up in these bonds some thousands of the most instructed and intelligent classes in the country, the very men who would otherwise be best fitted from position and opportunities for aiding a little in the long, difficult, and plainly inevitable work of transforming opinion.’

He speaks of the expression, ’lower and narrower forms of truth,’ as a ‘fine phrase for forms of falsehood.’ This is sound casuistry indeed! It is by the tacit acquiescence of enlightened opponents, he asserts, and by the dissimulation of timid unbelievers, that stupid men in power maintain pernicious creeds. And they are pernicious just because they are not true. There is keen satire in his remark that ‘ resolute orthodoxy, however prosperous it may seem among the uncultivated rich, has lost its hold upon thought.’ He argues, quite in the spirit of Milton and the sternest Puritans of the seventeenth century, against ‘an hireling ministry,’ speaking hotly and perhaps intemperately of ‘the essential and profound immorality of the priestly profession — in all its forms, and no matter in connection with what church or what dogma — which makes a man’s living depend on his abstaining from using his mind, or concealing the conclusions to which use of his mind has brought him.’

That there is heat and passion in the essay, these extracts, perhaps with disproportionate emphasis, prove. On the whole, however, it is a temperate, philosophical discussion of the larger cases of conscience which arise among men and women bound together, as we all are, by ties of political and religious order.

Men do not crowd, with noisy acclamation, round a quiet speaker of truth who denies himself the specious advantages of emotional appeal and depends solely upon plain reason. But they do come at length to respect him. John Morley, believing that‘the spiritual life of man needs direction quite as much as it needs impulse, and light quite as much as force,’ has stood patient, sober, and tenacious of his ideals throughout a generation when the contrary doctrine was insistently taught.