very noblest, purest, holiest men and women we know how. The recognition of the supremacy of Personal Duties appears to be the first step towards the right performance of the highest Social Duties.

Deprived of two-thirds of its original empire and dethroned from its high seat of judgment, does there yet perchance remain for Duty, as understood by the Agnostic, some special sanctions, some more close and tender, if not equally lofty and solemn claims, than those which belonged to it under the older Theistic schemes? Such would seem to be the persuasion of many amongst those who have felt the "Responsibilities of Unbelief," perhaps of all the best minds amongst them-Mr. Morley, Mr. Harrison, George Eliot, and now, obviously, of Vernon Lee. This thoughtful writer is actually of opinion that the belief in an immortal life is an "enervating" one, and that there is a "moral tonic" in believing that "there is no place beyond the grave where folly and selfishness may be expiated and retrieved, and that, whatever good may be done, must be done in this world." It is hard to realize the mental conditions out of which such a judgment as this can have arisen. It is true that an immeasurable pity, an almost limitless indulgence, seems seems the natural sentiment which should flood the heart of one who looks on his brother-men, and thinks that all their pains and sorrows are to lead only to the grave; that all their aspirations and struggles and prayers are destined to eternal disappointment; that all the love of which their hearts are full is ready to be spilled, like precious wine, in the dust. But these mournful feelings are assuredly the" enervating" ones, for nothing can be so enervating as despair. What "moral tonic" can there be in the conviction that, whether we labour or sit still, sacrifice our life-blood for our brother, or sacrifice him to our selfishness, it will soon be all one to him and to us?

We have all heard much from pulpits of the virtue of Faith and the virtue of Charity; but I think we hear too little of the virtue of Hope, which completes the trinity, and is an indivisible part of it. We are so constituted that it is impossible for us to exercise Charity persistently without both Faith and Hope, like Aaron and Hur, to sustain our sinking arms. Without Faith in the divine germ of goodness buried in every human breast, we cannot labour for the higher welfare of our brother, or afford him that nobler sympathy, without which to give all our goods to feed him profiteth nothing. And without Hope in a future, stretching out before him in infinite vistas of joy and holiness, we cannot attach due importance to his moral welfare; we cannot measure the sin of misguiding and corrupting him, or the glory of leading him to virtue. Nay, in a larger sense, philanthropy and the Enthusiasm of Humanity, the very flowers of Agnosticism, must wither, if unwatered by Hope. We must needs

work on one hypothesis or the other. Either all men are destined to an immortal existence, or else they will perish at death, and the earth itself will grow old and sustain life no longer on its barren breast, and then all the hopes and virtues and triumphs of the human race will be buried in oblivion, no conscious mind in all the hollow universe remembering that Man ever had existence.

Is it not a paradox to say that the former idea is "enervating," and the latter a "moral tonic ?" moral tonic?" A moral curare, I should take it to be, paralyzing will and motion.*

But if Agnostic ethics be thus miserably defective-if they be narrow in their scope and poor in their aim of conferring transitory happiness on a perishing race-if they have no basis in a pure reason or a divinely taught conscience, but appeal only to a shifting and semi-barbarous prejudice-if, even from the point of view of sentiment, they lack the motives which are best calculated to inspire zeal and selfsacrifice; then it is surely time for high-minded Agnostics to recognize that their laudable efforts to construct a morality on the ruins of religion has failed, and must ever fail. The dilemma is more terrible than they have yet contemplated. They have imagined that they had merely to choose between morality with religion, or morality without religion. But the only choice for them is between morality and religion together, or the relinquishment both of morality and religion. They were sanguine enough to think they could rescue the compass of Duty from the wreck of Faith; but their hope was vain, and the well-meaning divers among them who have gone in search of it have come up with a handful of seatangle.

Much false lustre has, I think, been cast over a creed which is in truth the "City of Dreadful Night," by the high Altruistic sentiments and hopes of certain illustrious Agnostics. George Eliot's aspiration to join the "choir invisible," whose voices are "the music of the world;" Mr. Frederic Harrison's generous desire for "posthumous beneficent activity," have thrown, for a time, over it a light as from a sun which has set. For myself, I confess

* We are now told, as the latest grand discovery of Darwinism, that Man in some generations to come, will be "a toothless, hairless, slow-limbed animal, incapable of extended locomotion. His feet will have no division of toes, and he will be very averse to fighting."-See Nineteenth Century, May, 1883, p. 759. I congratulate those who think it sufficient reward to anticipate "posthumous activities" among these "men of the future!" Even as I write this page a profound remark on the heartparalyzing effects of Agnostic hopelessness on a very noble intellect has come to my hand. In a letter in the Spectator, May 12, 1883, Mr. Eubule Evans, writing of George Eliot says: "Whoever holds that human life is little better than a vast waste-heap of blighted possibilities will, however tender he may be towards the objects of specialized affection, yet naturally fail in that keenness of love towards all living, which is the only safeguard against the subtler process of cruelty. Beneath her philosophy lay a heart feminine when stirred to tenderness towards the individual, but hopeless, and therefore in a way merciless, towards the race. The atmosphere of the worker is the leaden atmosphere of fate in which human frailty meets no mercy, and human longing can find no hope."

there seems to me something infinitely pathetic in these longings of men and women, who once hoped for a "house, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," amid "the spirits of the just made perfect," but who are fain now to be content with such ghosts of Hope as these. The millennium of Darwinism for the "surviving fittest" of the human race-those toothless, hairless, slowmoving creatures, with all peaceful sentiments bred in, and all combative ones bred out-is, after all, no such vision of paradise as that even the purest Altruist can find in it compensation for the belief that all the men and women whom he has ever known or loved, are doomed to annihilation long before that new race-such as it will be can arise.

The misery of his hopeless creed has been felt, I cannot doubt, in all its bitterness by the writer of this eloquent paper. No more affecting words have been penned for many a day than those in which he makes one of his speakers exclaim :-"The worst of death is not the annihilation of ourselves. Oh no, that is nothing." The intolerable agony he has truly felt to be the apprehension of the hour when the soul we love will not merely depart and leave us lonely on the shore, but be itself lost-drowned in the ocean of existence never to live again. We may easily read between the lines of his dialogue, that it was the first shock of this tremendous, this unendurable thought which drove Vernon Lee out of the "Palace of Art," to seek, if it might be found, the solution of the "riddle of the painful earth." Alas! that so noble an intellect, destined, I cannot doubt, to exercise wide influence in the coming years, should have found no better explanation of that enigma than the wretched doctrine of Hereditary Conscience, and the supposed discovery that Nature contains no moral elements, and has no moral power behind it! A happier conclusion might surely have been reached by the mind. which penned the burst of eloquence placed in the mouth of the speaker Vere: "It is love which has taught the world for its happiness that what has been begun here, will not for ever be interrupted, nor what has been ill done for ever remain unatoned, that the affection once kindled will never cease, that the sin committed can be wiped out, and the good conceived can be achieved-that all within which is good and happy, and for ever struggling here, virtue, genius, will be free to act hereafter, that the creatures thrust asunder in the world, vainly trying to clasp one another in the crowd, may unite for ever." That love which invents immortality, is itself, I think, the pledge and witness of immortality. It is the Infinite stirring within the finite breast.

FRANCES POWER COBBE.

NATIVE INDIAN JUDGES: MR. ILBERT'S

BILL.

THE

HE indifference of Englishmen to Indian subjects has been the subject of long and repeated remark. It is of course the result of distance and ignorance. But it is also the parent of ignorance, which, on the rare occasions when interest is excited, produces results partly grotesque and partly alarming. We are just now witnessing a phænomenon of this kind. A proposal made by the Government of India for the further utilization of Natives in their service is distasteful to many of the English community there, who utter an exceeding bitter cry; upon which a number of writers in newspapers and speakers on platforms rush to the conclusion that what really is a small portion of an old well-established and thoroughly discussed policy, has had its origin in the brain of some speculative politician who wanted to strike out something new. Because the thing is a novelty to them, they treat it as though it were a novelty to men who know Indian politics.

When I sat down to write this paper I had selected some passages from newspaper articles and reports, as illustrations of my meaning. But on opening the Times of the 30th of March, I found a speech delivered by Lord Salisbury at Birmingham, which I take as reported there. And I prefer to take his speech as a starting-point, not for the sake of personal controversy with him, but because his position gives to his utterances a great importance. If an able and experienced statesman like Lord Salisbury, who for several years held the reins of Indian administration, can, after time for inquiry, so misconceive an Indian problem as he appears to have done, misconception by others sinks into comparative insignificance.

It is true that there has since been a debate in the House of Lords on Lord Ripon's policy, which was attacked by the Conserva

tive leaders. But the main assault was directed to the point of local self-government, which I do not propose to discuss in this paper. For though the encouragement of local self-government rests on the same broad grounds of policy as the employment of Natives in the Civil Service, it has a different history, which would take space to exhibit. to exhibit. I will only say of it here, that Lord Ripon's policy seems to me to be nothing but a cautious advance in the direction indicated by Lord Lawrence, and followed by Lord Mayo and Lord Northbrook.

It is remarkable that Lord Lytton, who led the attack in a very temperate and thoughtful speech, treated the excitement over the Jurisdiction Bill as being due not so much to the demerits of that Bill as to its having come on the back of "other and more sweeping measures," meaning those which relate to local government. In fact, I do not find in the debate any new argument against the Jurisdiction Bill. Lord Salisbury, as reported by the Times, repeated what he said at Birmingham, though not so pointedly or fully. He therefore remains the most prominent assailant of the measure, and his Birmingham speech remains the most important of his arguments upon it, and therefore a proper and indeed necessary guide for those who wish to defend it against misconception.

His Lordship is reported to have spoken thus:

"There is only one other matter with respect to which I wish to point out to you the importance of a truly national policy as opposed to the various theories and sentiments which are suggested now. I do not know if you have looked at the papers lately sufficiently to be aware that a great and vital question has been raised in India . . . . the question whether Englishmen in that part of the empire shall or shall not be placed at the mercy of Native Judges."

Then, after referring to the protection given to English litigants in Turkey and other countries, he continues:

"What would your feelings be if you were in some distant and thinlypopulated land, far from all English succour, and your life or honour were exposed to the decision of some tribunal consisting of a coloured man?

"What will be the effect of this ill-advised measure, which has been adopted in defiance of national interests and for the sake of those sentiments and theories of which I spoke ?"

And he then answers his question by saying that capital will flee away from India, and the prosperity of the country, and our trade with it, will be destroyed.

There is not a sentence of this speech which is not pregnant with misconceptions of the small measure now pending, as I expect to make apparent before I have done. But though the measure is small, it rests on the broadest and deepest principles of policy. The suggestion that a question has just been raised for the sake of novel sentiments and theories has no basis in fact. The question raised, not by the Government of India, who are only moving on well-marked