and wrong meant only that which was conducive or detrimental to the increasing happiness of humanity, that they were referable only to human beings in their various relations with one another; that it was impossible to explain them, except with reference to human society, and that to ask for moral aims and moral methods of mere physical forces, which had no moral qualities, and which were not subject to social relations, or to ask for them of any Will hidden behind those forces, and who was equally independent of those human and social necessities which alone accounted for a distinction between right and wrong, was simply to expect one set of phenomena from objects which could only present a wholly different set of phenomena: to expect sound to be recognized by the eye, and light and colour to be perceived by the ear. In short, I understood that man was dissatisfied and angry with Nature, only because he had accustomed himself to think of Nature as only another man like himself, liable to human necessities, placed in human circumstances, and capable, therefore, of human virtues and vices, and that I had been in reality no wiser than the fool who flew into a rage with the echo, or the child who strikes the table against which it has hurt itself."

"I see," said Vere, bitterly, "your moral cravings were satisfied by discovering that Nature was not immoral, because Nature had never heard of morality. It appears not to have struck you that this utterly neutral character of Nature, this placid indifference to right and wrong, left man in a dreadful moral solitude; and might make him doubt whether, since morality did not exist for Nature, it need exist at all; whether, among all these blind physical forces, he too might not be a mere blind physical force."

"On the contrary," answered Baldwin, "when I came to understand why morality was not a necessity for Nature, I also understood why morality was a necessity for man; the rule of the road, the rule that each coachman must take a particular side of the street with reference to other coachmen, could certainly not exist before the existence of streets and of carriages being driven along them; but without that rule of the road, gradually established by the practice of drivers, one carriage would merely smash into another, and the thoroughfare be hopelessly blocked. Thus it has been with morality. Rules of the road are unnecessary where there are neither roads nor carriages; and morality would be unnecessary, indeed inconceivable, where there are no human interests in collision; morality, I now feel persuaded, is the exclusive and essential qualification of the movements of an assemblage of men, as distinguished from an assemblage of stones, or plants, or beasts, the qualification of man's relation, not with unsentient things, but with sentient creatures. Why go into details? You know that the school of philosophy to which I adhere has traced all distinctions of right and wrong to the perceptions, enforced upon man by mankind, and upon mankind by man, of the

difference between such courses as are conducive to the higher development and greater happiness of men, and such other courses as are conducive only to their degradation and extinction. Such a belief, so far from leaving me in moral solitude, and making me doubt of my own moral nature, brings home to me that I am but a drop in the great moral flood called progress; that my own morality is but a result of the morality of millions of other creatures who have preceded me and surround me now; that my morality is an essential contribution to the morality of millions of creatures who will come after me; that on all sides, the more society develops, there is a constantly increasing intricacy of moral connection between the present, the past, and the future. If I refuse to press on in the ranks of good, there will be so much the less havoc made in the ranks of evil; if I fall, those on either side of me will be less united and less vigorous to resist, those following after me will stumble; I must therefore keep in my place, be borne by the current mass of moral life, instead of being passed over and trampled by it."

Vere did not answer. He looked vaguely towards the window, at the ghostly billows of the downs, dark blue, bleak, unsubstantial, under the bright cold windy sky. The wind had risen, and went moaning round the farm, piping shrilly in all its chinks and crannies, and making a noise as of distant waters in the firs of the common. Suddenly in the midst of the silence within doors, there came from the adjoining room a monotonous trickle or dribble of childish voice, going on breathless, then halting suddenly exhausted, but with uniform regularity.

"It is Willie reading the Bible to his grandmother," remarked Rheinhardt; "the old lady is left alone at home with him on Sunday evenings, while her husband goes to the village. It is a curious accompaniment to your and Baldwin's pessimistic groanings and utilitarian jubilations."

"I think," remarked Baldwin, after a moment's fruitless listening to catch the words from next door, "I think in some matters we unbelievers might take a lesson from our neighbours. I was very much struck to-day, while listening to Monsignore's sermon, with the thought that that man feels it his duty to teach others that which he believes to be the truth, and that we do not."

"It is a priest's profession to preach, my dear Baldwin," put in Rheinhardt; "he lives by it, lives off his own preaching and off the preaching of all the other priests that live now or ever have lived." "We unbelievers-I should rather say we believers in the believable"-answered Baldwin, "should all of us be, in a fashion,

priests.

You say that Monsignore lives off his own preaching and the preaching of all Catholic priests that ever have been. Well; and do we not live spiritually, do we not feed our soul upon the truth which we ourselves can find, upon the truth which generations of men

have accumulated for us? If, in the course of time, there be no more priests in the world, I mean in the old sense, it will be that every man will be a priest for his own family, and every man of genius a priest for the whole of mankind. What I was thinking of just now is this: that this Monsignore, whom we consider a sort of clever deluded fool, and this old peasant woman, whose thoughts scarcely go beyond her village, are impressed with the sense of the responsibility incurred by the possession of what they consider superior truth-the responsibility of not keeping that truth to themselves, but participating it with others; and that herein they both of them assume a position far wiser, far more honest, far nobler, than do we unbelievers, who say, 'What does it matter if others know only error, as long as ourselves know truth?'"

"You forget," answered Rheinhardt, " that both Monsignore and our landlady are probably persuaded that unless they share their spiritual knowledge with their neighbours, they will be responsible for the souls of those neighbours. And if you remember what may, in the opinion of the orthodox, happen to the souls of such persons as have been slightly neglected in their religious education, I think you will admit that there is plenty to feel responsible about."

"You mean that there is nothing for us to feel responsible about. Not so. Whatever may happen to the souls of our fellows will indeed not happen in an after-world, nor will they suffer in a physical hell of Dante, or enjoy themselves in a physical Paradise of Mahomet. But there is, nevertheless, for the souls which we know, for the souls which look up to us for instruction and assistance, a hell. A hell of moral doubt and despair and degradation, a hell where there is fire enough to scorch the most callous, and ice enough to numb the warmest, and mud to clog and bedraggle the most noble among us. Yes. There is a hell in the moral world, and there is heaven, and there is God; the heaven of satisfied conscience, the God of our own aspirations; and from this heaven, from the sight of this God, it is in our power to exclude those most beloved by us. Shut them out because we have not the courage to see them shiver and wince one moment in the cold and the light of truth; shut them out and leave them to wander in a world of phantoms, upon the volcano crust of that hell of moral disbelief, unaware of its existence or, aware too late, too suddenly of the crater opening beneath their feet. That old woman in the next room is teaching, feels bound to teach, her child the things which she looks upon as truth. And shall a man like you, Vere, refuse to teach your children what you know to be true? Will you leave them to believe that the world and man and God, the past and future and present, are wholly different from what they really are; or else to discover, unaided, with slow anguish or sudden despair, that all is different from what they thought, that there is falsehood where they relied on truth, and evil where they

looked up to good; till falsehood and evil shall seem everywhere and truth and good nowhere? You spoke of the moral happiness and safety of your children; will you let them consist in falsehood, and depend upon the duration of error? Will you let your children run the risk of losing their old faith, without helping them to find a new one? Will you waste so much of their happiness for themselves, and of their usefulness for the world?"

Vere did not answer; he remained as if absorbed in thought, nervously tearing the petals off a rose which stood in the glass before him.

"Do please leave that flower alone, Vere," remonstrated Reinhardt ; "that is just the way that all you pessimists behavepulling to pieces the few pleasant things which Nature or man has succeeded in making, because the world is not as satisfactory as it might be. Such a nice rose that was, the very apple of our landlady's eye, who picked it to afford you a pleasant surprise for supper, and you have merely made a mess of it on the tablecloth. That's what comes of thinking too much about responsibilities. One doesn't see the mischief one's fingers are up to."

And Rheinhardt, who was a tidy man, rose, and carefully swept the pink petals and the yellow seeds off the table into his hand, and thence transferred them into a little earthenware jar full of dry rose leaves, which he kept, in true eighteenth-century style, on his writing table.

"That is the difference of our philosophies," he remarked, with satisfaction; "you tear to pieces the few roses that are given us, and we pick up their leaves, and get the pleasant scent of them even when withered."

"The definition is not bad," put in Baldwin, throwing a bundle of faggots on the fire, and making it crackle and flare up lustily, flooding the room with ruddy light.

Vere turned away his face from the glow, and looked once more, vaguely and wistfully, into the bleak blueness of common and downs lying chill and dim in the moonlight.

"What you have been saying, Baldwin," he at last remarked, "may perhaps be true. It may be that it would be wiser to teach my children the things which I believe to be true. But you see I love my children a great deal; and- Well, I mean that I have not the heart to assume the responsibility of such a decision."

"You shirk your responsibilities," answered Baldwin, "and in doing so, you take upon yourself the heaviest responsibility of any."

VERNON LEE.

NATIVE COUNCILS IN FIJI.

("NA VEIMBOSE VAKA TURANGA.")

1875-80.

THE

HE communal polity, and system of government by councils, with which we are all familiar from Indian and other examples, does not prevail among races of Aryan descent alone; and when, with the unwilling assent of Her Majesty's Government, the islands of Fiji, some nine years ago, passed into the possession of the British Crown, such a system was found in vigorous existence there.

Always regarding himself as one of a community, the Fijian has been accustomed in all his acts, and even in all his thoughts, to move in concert with his fellows, with his immediate family, his village, his sept, his tribe, his district, as the case requires. Even the highest chiefs recognized their position as members of the tribe, and, arbitrary as their acts towards individuals occasionally were, they invariably acknowledged, in matters of general policy, the superior authority of the councils, which they indeed called together, but in which, when assembled, they only bore a part, and the decisions of which they were unable to disregard.

Nothing was done in the way of communal work, nothing of importance was ordered by any chief, without a previous Veim Bose, or discussion. Every village had, in addition to its chiefs and hereditary office-bearers, a council of elders. The chiefs of villages discussed, with the Buli of the district, all matters of general interest to the tribe, and the Bulis themselves formed a council to the Roko Tui, or kinglet of the province. Such was at least, roughly speaking, the general theory, modified in practice by many causes, and by none more profoundly than by the residence in the group of white men, whose influence was invariably exerted either to strengthen the despotism of the chief, who protected them, or to replace all other authority by their own.