things should have continued unshaken, or been merely mended? It was not more opposed to the spirit of Christianity than destructive of the political liberty and commercial prosperity of the nation, while it was the open, deliberate, stonyhearted foe of social purity and happiness. Considerations from every quarter thus combined in calling aloud for a radical reform. The earnest efforts of men of all classes, each in his own sphere, with one aim in common, were imperatively required to root out abuses of which all had good reason to complain, and for bringing about a change of which all would share the advantages.1

But how might this be done? It could not at any rate be done by a sudden process, or by any one man; but like every movement which has become a power in the world, must be slowly born, and of mixed motives. No such movement can be either purely religious or purely secular. No such movement as this could be borne on to final success on mere selfishness. It was rooted in religious feeling, and was fed in its earlier stages by the religious spirit, as we have already partly seen: but it was impossible that selfishness and self-interest should not largely influence it in its future course. For had not every man, or nearly every man, some well-grounded grudge against the

M'Crie's Knox, 12.

as

Church? The particulars of her state as given above will furnish an answer. And these had just been seen in a new light by some eyes, and their number was increasing. Some might, some would turn them away heavenward, dumb with sad tonishment; others with darkening brows and flashing eyes would look closer, muttering wrathful words as they did so. And these last would be the greater number. The true light had shed its first gleam across their path, and they were men likely to avail themselves of it for personal ends. They were neither blinded nor frightened by superstition. Their intellect was not cajoled. Their understandings, though ill-furnished, were too shrewd by nature and too direct to sublimate absurdities into mysteries. However fierce and lawless, they were proverbially bold in speech and action; and whoever might be their proven foe, they had hitherto, wisely or unwisely, swiftly dealt with him as such.

Once let the Church be fully exposed, and the chances will be against her.

It will be strange, indeed, if the currents of national feeling, diverted into new channels, do not show all their well-known impetuo- a sity and turbulence. If they do, the fate reserved for the savourless salt, and that from all sorts of motives, will be the fate of the whole ecclesiastical system of Scotland. A. F.

FRASER'S

MAGAZINE.

WH

HEN the last shot had been fired at Waterloo, Great Britain was indisputably the first Power in the world. From that day to this we have run a career, almost without a check, of what has been called unexampled prosperity. Yet at the end of these fifty-five years English officers tell us that they can scarcely show their faces at a table d'hôte in Germany without danger of affront. English opinion is without weight. English power is ridiculed. Our influence in the councils of Europe is a thing of the past. We are told, half officially, that it is time for us to withdraw altogether from the concerns of the Continent; while on the other side of the Atlantic Mr. Emerson calmly intimates to an approving audience that the time is not far off when the Union must throw its protecting shield over us in our forlorn decrepitude. We are still able to make ourselves hated, we cannot save ourselves from being despised; and, however we may resent the attitude which the world is assuming towards us, we are painfully aware that we owe our exemption from immediate danger to our geographical position alone, and that if our fleet were accidentally disabled, and a well-appointed army of a hundred thousand men were thrown upon our shores, we could offer no effective resistance. We are perplexed, impatient, irritated;

VOL. III.-NO. XIV. NEW SERIES.

and with perfect justice. We are not conscious of any serious decay in our national character and spirit; we have not been niggardly in our supplies; even in our humours of extremest economy we vote sums annually for our military service which suffice elsewhere to provide troops in any numbers of the most admirable efficiency. There are some among us who conceive that we should catch at the first available opportunity the first affront or diplomatic embroilment to court a quarrel for its own sake, as if the discipline of war would rouse us out of our lethargy, put life into our languid movements, and enable us to let the nations know that our arms have not lost their sinew nor our hearts their courage.

Only a few years ago, when the Exhibition of 1851 was opened in Hyde Park, we were supposed to be standing on the threshold of a new era. Commerce and free trade were to work a revolution which Christianity had tried to produce, and failed. War was to be at an end for ever, and the inhabitants of the earth were to compete thenceforward only in the arts of peace. The world smiled kindly on our enthusiasm, or seemed to share our expectations. When the first un

successful cable was laid across the Atlantic, the single message which it bore from Washington to England was 'Peace on earth, and

L 2

goodwill towards men.' The peace proved a cycle of storms which in one quarter or another have raged since scarcely with intermission, and, though at home our streak of sea has stood our friend, we have borne our share already in the East, and danger may very easily come to seek us at our own doors without our going out of the way to look for it. Many idle wars have been undertaken at one time or another for the sake of national prestige; but the notion of going into such a business for the sake of the moral improvement of our characters would have occurred to no one but an Englishman in the second half of the nineteenth century. If we are suffering from the 'long canker of peace,' it is to be hoped there are other ways of curing it besides sacrificing hundreds of thousands of our own people, and killing hundreds of thousands of others.

Before we look for enemies abroad we have enemies to make war upon among ourselves, or we shall gather little honour or profit in any other field of glory. And when our home war is over, when we have tracked out and disarmed the real sources of our weakness, we shall find perhaps that both our moral health our prestige abroad will have returned in the process without need of a more desperate remedy.

We are not respected because we are supposed to be powerless. Why are we powerless? We have money without limit, we have coal and iron, and with them ample command of all mechanical resources; and to make use of these things we have thirty millions of men and women in our own islands, and ten millions besides in our colonies, of a race which in times of trial has been found at least equal to any other upon earth. Individuals among us, or voluntary

combinations which we form among ourselves for special purposes, do their work punctually and effectively. Private English enterprise built up our Indian Empire, founded English-speaking communities in every quarter of the globe, realised in steamships, as Emerson says, the fable of Eolus's bag, and inclosed the four-and-twenty winds in their boilers; invented railroads and the telegraph, and in this very crisis of our supposed decadence holds a virtual monopoly of the commerce of mankind. Our time of degeneracy may come. We may founder on the rock on which every other commercial community has made shipwreck before us, and perish in the greediness of money-making. But the evil day has not yet arrived. The poison may be in the skin, but it has not touched the bones. Individual Englishmen can still do what they undertake to do as effectively as when English statesmen ruled the resolutions of the Congress of Vienna. Individuals, unless when they are deliberately dishonest, are as capable as ever they were; but the business of national defence belongs to the Government, and the touch of the Government is like the touch of a torpedo,' sending paralysis through the nerves and veins of every organisation which it ventures to meddle with. Here is the seat of the disorder, and here, if anywhere, it must be encountered.

All nations have their idols, the creatures of their own hands, which, having manufactured, they bow down before as gods. The Spanish peasant adores his image of the Virgin. The Englishman adores the British Constitution. It is his ideal of political perfection, and under the shadow of it, when it was once finished, he believed that he would be safe from the malice of his earthly ene

mies. The origin of the satisfaction in both instances is probably the same. Each is well pleased with a divinity which cannot interfere with him. So far as we are concerned at home, we have taken very good care that the Government shall be as powerless as the doll. We cannot, as the Times told us some months ago, have both good government and liberty; and liberty is the better of the two. There are persons who would reverse the position entirely, and maintain that good government was the essential of liberty-that there was no liberty in any human community without it. That, however, is not the present opinion of the citizens of the British Empire. So far as our domestic administration is concerned, we select, indeed, some conspicuous person to act at the head of each department; but we usually interpose so many checks upon his activity that he is virtually powerless. Had he the strength of a steam engine, unless he had Parliament in a state of excitement at his back, that strength would be exhausted in friction, and would issue in acts soft as the touch of a three-year-old child.

Nor, indeed, would it seem wise, according to the principles on which Ministers are selected for their several posts, to trust them with larger powers than they possess. The Lord Chancellor, indeed, is necessarily the most eminent person in the legal profession who can be found among the adherents of the party in power; but all the remaining seats in the Cabinet are treated simply as the prizes of the Parliamentary campaign, and are distributed, not only without reference to the special acquaintance with their subjects of the persons who are to occupy them, but with a disregard of all particular qualifications so cynical as to show that the possession of fitness for the work is held a matter of no consequence whatsoever. In the House of Commons there are some eminent en

gineers, some eminent merchants and bankers; but an engineer is not selected for the Board of Works, or a banker for the Exchequer. Cabinets are not composed of distinguished soldiers or sailors, distinguished men of business, or men of science. When a Ministry is formed, the selection lies between peers of great territorial influence, for whom places must be found as the price of their support to the party, and politicians remarkable for readiness of speech, debating power, and dexterity in influencing divisions. The object of the party in office is to secure its working majority in the Lower House; and this or that prominent person has to be provided for-to be appointed, that is, to the headship of some important department of public business, though he may be guiltless of the faintest acquaintance with the work which he undertakes to guide, and though his claim to the situation be merely some Parliamentary service which it is necessary to reward, or the possession of debating abilities which it may be dangerous to drive into opposition.

Pieced together as the members of the Cabinet are, upon such terms as these, we are not surprised afterwards at any fresh redistribution of seats which may take place in them. We see noble lords and right honourable gentlemen shifted from one department to another-a Colonial Minister goes to the War Office or the Foreign Office, an Irish Secretary to the Board of Trade, either as if these high officials had been trained into omniscience and were masters of every subject which could be entrusted to them, or as if they were like the Tulchan bishops in Scotland, stuffed figures, intended to do nothing but draw their salaries and impose on the simplicity of fools, while the most singular part of the business is that all this passes as a matter of course. It is one

of the outcomes of the most perfect constitution which the world has ever seen, and we are SO unreasonable as to expect that public business shall be conducted successfully under a system which would bring a private commercial company to immediate ruin. If Sir William Armstrong requires a manager at one of his foundries at Newcastle he does not pick out a man who knows nothing of mechanics; the captain of a Cunarder is at least expected to understand navigation; but a noble lord may be set to preside over the War Office who at the date of his appointment did not know the difference between a brigade and a company. In a few months, when his work has become less entirely strange to him, he is removed perhaps to the India Office and made supreme ruler of our Eastern Empire. How India may fare under his administration no one cares to ask or think: so long as he can be crammed by a subordinate, and skilfully reply to inconvenient questions in Parliament, he answers every purpose which either his chief or his country expects of him.

The consequence of this method of managing public business is precisely what might be expected; and now the British public, which looked upon it as natural and reasonable, is oddly surprised at the inevitable result. The state of the Army is at present distracting us. We spend fifteen millions annually upon it-more than France spent under the Empire a great deal more than Prussia spends-and the result is, or was a short time ago, a mob of Militia and Volunteers, fifty thousand really available troops, and malice says, perhaps with some exaggeration, six batteries of field-guns. What else could we expect? The Army indeed is distinguished above all the departments by the singularity of its management. The Army has two chiefs -one, selected as other Cabinet

Ministers, a civilian, who by the nature of the case can know nothing of his duties; the other-well, there is no occasion to say anything of the other. But if England requires a real army she need not vote another shilling, but she must abolish once and for ever all leaderships of incapable or gilded phantoms; she must look for the ablest soldier that she possesses, who has devoted his life to his profession. She must not ask him if he can make a speech in Parliament; she should rather insist that he and Parliament should be held as far apart as possible; she must require only that he understand thoroughly in all its parts and requirements the business of war, and, being satisfied on that point, she must give him authority to carry ont what may be necessary without the liability of being called to account on every detail by the amateur critics of the House of Commons. She must resolve, or she must allow him to resolve, upon an organised method which has been thought out in all its parts, and when decided on shall be strictly adhered to-not chopped and changed from session to session to suit the budget of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or catch the votes or the applause of the million.

There would then, it is said, be no responsibility. Rather, responsibility would then for the first time come really into being; the country would know the person to whom it had distinctly delegated its powers, and could call him to account for the use which he had made of them. She would not displace him when he was doing his work effectively because the Prime Minister happened to be defeated in the House of Commons on some irrelevant question. had appointed him to his post to create an effective Army. If he had provided the Army; if it was there in adequate numbers, with its appointments in sound condition,

She