GOLDWIN SMITH (1823 THE DISTINGUISHED LECTURER AND WRITER G OLDWIN SMITH has dwelt and made his mark in three separ ate soils. Born in England and educated at Oxford, he was made Professor of Modern History at that university in 1858. Coming to the United States in 1864, he was for four years Professor of English History at Cornell University. His life in Canada began in 1871. Here he made his home in Toronto, engaged in editorial work, authorship and lecturing. As a lecturer Smith ranks high among modern speakers, evincing much breadth and depth of thought and felicity in expression. He was in England an advanced Liberal in politics, and a champion of the American Union during the Civil War. In addition to his productions as an orator, his written works are numerous and valuable. GOD IN THE UNIVERSE [Goldwin Smith is not among those who think that science has probed to the bottom the mystery of things. Ambitious as are its efforts, and far and deep as it has reached, it still stands only on the threshold of the secret of time and space, with the creative Deity looming in impenetrable vastness beyond its ken. Such is the text of the extract we select from his eloquent and suggestive address delivered at Oxford on the Study of History.] What is the sum of physical science? Compared with the comprehensible universe and with conceivable time, not to speak of infinity and eternity, it is the observation of a mere point, the experience of an instant. Are we warranted in founding anything upon such data, except that which we are obliged to found on them, the daily rules and processes necessary for the material life of man? We call the discoveries of science sublime; and truly. But the sublimity belongs not to that which they reveal, but to that which they suggest. And that which they suggest is, that through this material glory and beauty, of which we see a little and imagine more, there speaks to us a Being whose nature is akin to ours, and who has made our hearts capable of such converse. Astronomy has its practical uses, without which man's intellect would scarcely rouse itself to those speculations; but its greatest result is a revelation of immensity pervaded by one informing mind; and this revelation is made by astronomy only in the same sense in which the telescope reveals the stars to the eye of the astronomer. Science finds no law for the thoughts which, with her aid, are ministered to man by the starry skies. Science can explain the hues of sunset, but she cannot tell from what urns of pain and pleasure its pensiveness is poured. These things are felt by all men, felt the more in proportion as the mind is higher. They are a part of human nature; and why should they not be as sound a basis for philosophy as any other part? But if they are, the solid wall of material law melts away, and through the whole order of the material world pours the influence, the personal influence, of a spirit corresponding to our own. Again, is it true that the fixed or unvarying is the last revelation of science? These risings in the scale of created beings, this gradual evolution of planetary systems from their centre, do they bespeak mere creative force? Do they not rather bespeak something which, for want of an adequate word, we must call creative effort, corresponding to the effort by which man raises himself and his estate? And where effort can be discovered, does not spirit reign again? A creature whose sphere of vision is a speck, whose experience is a second, sees the pencil of Raphael moving over the canvas of the Transfiguration. It sees the pencil moving over its own speck, during its own second of existence, in one particular direction, and it concludes that the formula expressing that direction is the secret of the whole. There is truth as well as vigor in the lines of Pope on the discoveries of Newton : “Superior beings, when of late they saw A mortal man unfold all Nature's law, If they could not show a Newton as we show an ape, or a Newton's discoveries as we show the feats of apish cunning, it was because Newton was not a mere intellectual power, but a moral being, laboring in the service of his kind, and because his discoveries were the reward, not of sagacity only, but of virtue. We can imagine a mere organ of vision so constructed by Omnipotence as to see at a glance infinitely more than could be discovered by all the Newtons, but the animal which possessed that organ would not be higher than the moral being. Reason, no doubt, is our appointed guide to truth. The limits set to it by each dogmatist, at the point where it comes into conflict with his dogma, are human limits; the providential limits we can learn only by dutifully exerting it to the utmost. Yet reason must be impartial in the acceptance of data and in the demand of proof. Facts are not the less facts because they are not facts of sense; materialism is not necessarily enlightenment; it is possible to be at once chimerical and gross. We may venture, without any ingratitude to science as the source of material benefits and the training school of inductive reason, to doubt whether the great secret of the moral world is likely to be discovered in her laboratory, or to be revealed to those minds which have been imbued only with her thoughts, and trained in her processes alone. Some, indeed, among the men of science who have given us sweeping theories of the world, seem to be not only one-sided in their view of the facts, leaving out of sight the phenomena of our moral nature, but to want one of the two faculties necessary for sound investigation. They are acute observers, but bad reasoners. And science must not expect to be exempt from the rules of reasoning. We cannot give credit for evidence which does not exist, because if it existed it would be of a scientific kind; nor can we pass at a bound from slight and precarious premises to a tremendous conclusion, because the conclusion would annihilate the spiritual nature and annul the divine origin of man. SIR WILFRID LAURIER (1841 THE GREAT LIBERAL REFORMER T HE Dominion of Canada, as is well known, has a population made up of two distinct races, the French and the British, representing to-day the successive ownership of that great Though these are amalgamated to a considerable extent, their original diversity has by no means disappeared, the French stratum of the population retaining its old language and many of its old ideas. In 1896 the Canadian French became more intimately affiliated with the Government than ever before, when Wilfrid Laurier, a statesman of their race, was appointed to the high dignity of Premier of the Dominion, the first of his people to hold that position. He was invested with the honor of knighthood in the following year. For many years the Conservative party had been predominant in Canada. With Laurier the Liberals came into power, after a long interregnum. They could not have done so under an abler leader than Sir Wilfrid, who is considered by many as the ablest orator Canada has ever known, and is distinguished "not more by the finished grace of his oratory than by the boldness and authority with which he handled the deepest political problems" in the Dominion House of Commons. He designates himself "A Liberal of the English school, a pupil of Charles James Fox, Daniel O'Connell, and William Ewart Gladstone.” GLADSTONE'S ELEMENTS OF GREATNESS [Laurier's political orations are numerous, and many of them evince great ability. We append from these an example of his powers as a political orator, but we give in precedence his eulogy of Gladstone, as one of the most appreciative, striking and brilliant estimates of the character of the great English statesman.] The last half century in which we live has produced many able and strong men, who, in different walks of life, have attracted the attention SIR WILFRID LAURIER 245 of the world at large; but of the men who have illustrated this age, it seems to me that in the eyes of posterity four will outlive and outshine all others-Cavour, Lincoln, Bismarck, and Gladstone. If we look simply at the magnitude of the results obtained, compared with the exiguity of the resources at command; if we remember that out of the small kingdom of Sardinia grew United Italy, we must come to the conclusion that Count Cavour was undoubtedly a statesman of marvelous skill and prescience. Abraham Lincoln, unknown to fame when he was elected to the presidency, exhibited a power for the government of men which has scarcely been surpassed in any age. He saved the American Union, he enfranchised the black race, and for the task he had to perform he was endowed in some respects almost miraculously. No man ever displayed a greater insight into the motives, the complex motives, which shape the public opinion of a free country, and he possessed almost to the degree of an instinct the supreme quality in a statesman of taking the right decision, taking it at the right moment, and expressing it in language of incomparable felicity. Prince Bismarck was the embodiment of resolute common sense, unflinching determination, relentless strength, moving onward to his end, and crushing everything in his way as unconcernedly as fate itself. Mr. Gladstone undoubtedly excelled every one of these men. He had in his person a combination of varied powers of the human intellect rarely to be found in one single individual. He had the imaginative fancy, the poetic conception of things, in which Count Cavour was deficient. He had the aptitude for business, the financial ability, which Lincoln never exhibited. He had the lofty impulses, the generous inspirations, which Prince Bismarck always discarded, even if he did not treat them with scorn. He was at once an orator, a statesman, a poet, and a man of business. As an orator he stands certainly in the very front rank of orators of his country or any country, of his age or any age. I remember when Louis Blanc was in England, in the days of the Second Empire, he used to write to the press of Paris, and in one of his letters to Le Temps he stated that Mr. Gladstone would undoubtedly have been the foremost orator of England if it were not for the existence of Mr. Bright. It may be admitted, and I think it is admitted generally, that on some occasions Mr. Bright reached heights of grandeur and pathos which even Mr. Gladstone did not attain. But Mr. Gladstone had an ability, a vigor, a fluency which no man in his age, or any age, ever rivaled, or even approached. That is not all. To his marvelous mental powers he added no less marvelous physical gifts. He had the eye of a god; the voice of a silver bell; and the very fire of his eye, the very music of his voice, swept the |