ernment in its recent exercise of power in Ireland, an exercise on many points, such as the seizure of the Irish People, at variance with Liberal principles was the fear lest, if Fenians once descended into the streets, we should witness one of those awful bursts of fury with which Anglo-Saxons respond to insurrection against themselves. We all know, who know ourselves, that to retain Ireland the nation would in the long run stop at nothing, would, if the insurrection began with massacre, sweep the Celt from the face of earth sooner then yield. Anything, even a sentence to Pentonville for keeping a green coat, is better than to let loose that awful passion of domination which has over and over again written such records against the English people. Bad enough even in Europe, that passion is among inferior races exasperated by the pride of colour, by the necessity for energy involved in excessive disproportion of numbers, and by the belief that it is morally better for the dark man to be ruled by the white, into a Berserkar frenzy, producing at once the noblest heroism and the most hideous cruelty. One man will contend to the death against a thousand, and then af ter conquering slay on, as if Heaven had issued, as the Jews imagined, a degree against the Canaanites. Numbers, weapons, circumstances make no difference. The Englishman so situated would fight on if the spirits of the air were visibly assailing him, aye, and feel while fighting that a warlike nation of thirty millions were insolent in daring to try conclusions of battle with eighteen thousand of "the hereditary nobility of mankind," and after winning as he invariably wins, would scatter death as if he were still fighting. The cry against Lord Canning's clemency was bitterest from men who were hourly engaged in combat, and in Jamaica it was the actual fighting men, men who like Ramsay had seen service, or like Mr. Ford turned out from civil life to the conflict, who were most relentless. This very man Ramsay, whom even Jamaica condemns, would, we doubt not, have stood up alone against a parish of armed blacks sooner than acknowledge for a second that his race was not entitled to rule. The axiom which associates cruelty with cowardice is as false now as it was in the days of Alva, or Tilly, or Claverhouse, each of them monsters of cruelty, who yet knew no fear. Fearless, insulted, and pitilessly logical in his resolve to rule, the Englishman in the struggle is apt, as the Septembrisers said, to get blood in his eyes," to yield to that horrible feeling which comes

over some men in action a mad crave to destroy, an anger which nothing except slaughter can appease, a lust of bloodthirstiness such as towards the end of a battle it has often perplexed English Generals to control. They are then just as dangerous as wild beasts, and almost, we trust, as irresponsible. Nothing but discipline, or its equivalent, the strong control of the only man they will obey, the representative of the national authority, will then hold them in, and it is for letting the reins go, as much as for what he did himself, that Mr. Eyre is responsible to the country.

This is, we believe, the true explanation of the slaughter; for the flogging there is a different one. Something is probably due in Jamaica to the old slaveholding tradition - the astounding case of the planter, for example, who is said to have flogged all his creditors-but many of the chief actors, Ramsay included, had no connection with slavery, had probably never seen the institution at work. The ready resort to the lash is due, we fear, to the tinge of barbarism which still infects our discipline. Men who have seen fifty lashes given for an insolent expression, as in Ireland this week, cannot realize the full barbarity of the punishment as men realize it who, like Frenchmen and the English cultivated classes, have absolutely surrendered its use, object to its inflection even on the most violent class of criminals. Failing prisons, such men fall back on the lash by the instinct of custom, and inflict it with a recklessness which suggests the strange doubt whether they do not secretly deem the punishment a merciful alternative to death. The flogging of women was exceptional, and is perhaps the very worst feature of the frightful scenes in Jamaica, as being the one of which the executioners best knew the horror. Not one such case occurred in India, and indeed the very opinion which was hungering for slaughter condemned every form of torture as unwarranted even by recent massacre, and to be defended only by demonstrable military necessity. There was cruelty in those acts, cruelty in the use of wire, cruelty in using human beings as targets which was foreign to the English Berserkar rage, and explicable only by the existence in the colony of an absolutely bad feeling, that ulceration of hate which arises when hatred has been indulged for years. That hate was pe uliar to Jamaica, but everywhere in the world, in Ireland as in India, among Cheyenne Indians as among Tasmanians, the most awful responsibility a governing man can incur is to

let loose, loose from conventional bonds and external discipline, the Anglo-Saxon lust for a dominion which, when acknowledged, he can use more leniently than any other race on earth.

From The Spectator, 24th March. THE CONFLICT AT WASHINGTON.

THE view taken in England of President Johnson and his recent quarrel with the majority in Congress, is probably wider astray from that warranted by the facts of the case than that of any critical American event since the outbreak of the war. There are several reasons for this, one, that the vulgar and inflammatory speech in which the President denounced the Radicals and accused them of intending his assassination was never printed in full in any English paper, was panegyrized most by those who did not dare to print it at all, and but faintly rebuked even by the most Liberal of all the English journals, which only published about half, and that not containing a full half of the wildest and most unworthy matter; another, that the Daily News, which hitherto has been far the wisest, soundest, and most thoroughly informed of all the English critics of American politics, has become, for some intellectual crotchet which we cannot explain, almost the mere advocate of the President, though of course an advocate profoundly convinced of the truth of its own case, and has ceased to our mind to square its judgments with the facts of the case. Add to this that Mr. Johnson's policy has in it a first appearance of generosity to a vanquished foe, that Mr. Stevens and the other Radical leaders, though far fairer and less violent in their language than Mr. Johnson, have been often silly and intemperate, that the full evidence as to the condition of the South and the condition of opinion in the Western States is never reproduced in the English journals, and we are not surprised to find the public mind more prejudiced, because more completely uninformed, upon the present political crisis in America than it has been on any of the American embarrassments of the last six years. Indeed the false issue so pertinaciously asserted to be the true one by Englishmen at the commencement of the war, -the issue of Protection versus Free Trade, and never better exposed than by

the Daily News of five years ago, has been deliberately adopted by it this week as accounting in great part for the Republican hostility to the President's policy of reconstruction, the motive being of course that it is the interest of the Eastern States, which are all violently Protectionist, to keep out the Southern States, which are nearly unanimous for free trade, until the financial policy of the future Union has been once firmly fixed. We confess that we are surprised to find this argument in the Daily News, when the truth unquestionably is that the Western States are quite as averse to the policy of Protection as the South, and for the same obvious reason, that they have no manufactures, and are great producers of the raw materials which Europe needs,and yet that nowhere, not even in Massachusetts, have the Radical party in Congress been so warmly supported in their opposition to the President as in Wisconsin and Iowa, where the State Legislatures have gone so far as to pass votes condemning the President's policy by enormous majorities, majorities of two to one, supporting those of their own Congressmen who have remained firm to their principles. We are persuaded that as a rule this plausible trick of accounting for the deeper differences on high political questions by selfish motives is founded in a complete misconception of the weight of political feeling. Bad tariffs cause revolutions sometimes no doubt, but where they do, their advocates do not try to disguise their motives under the form of a battle against slavery, or their opponents to plead State rights instead of Free Trade. The hatred of slavery now heartily unites the North-West and North-East, while the minor tariff question tends to divide them, and, so much greater is the cementing power of the higher principle, fails.

and

The real issue between the President and the Radical Republicans is, we believe, a vital one. The President, under the influence of his old Democratic principles, wishes to let both the South and the Union reconstruct itself. He desires to see the Southern State Legislatures-all, excepting only that of Tennessee (?) consisting of men hostile, without exception, to the North, and still more hostile to the civil rights of the negro freedmen-restored at once to their full powers; he would permit them, unopposed except by the feeble machinery of the present Freedmen's Bureau, to enact formally the most stringent negro vagrant laws, and to refuse the education to the negroes which the Freedmen's Bureau has hitherto given;

fess for about the dozenth time in the last few years that she has judged by hasty prejudices, instead of on a calm review of the real evidence, what are the real aims and the real merits of the conflicting authorities at Washington. We do not speak as mere friends of the negro, -but as politicians, looking at the general issue. Fortunately for the world the plain claims of justice and of statesmanlike policy are usually joined together by a power which men strive in vain to defeat when they would willingly put them asunder.

From The Spectator, March 24. THE COMING STORM IN EUROPE.

THE dull, dumb, instinctive wisdom of the British people, the wisdom which, like the swallow's flight southward instead of northward, does not depend on intellect, was never more clearly shown than in their view of this German quarrel. There never perhaps was a great Continental danger which excited so little interest. If we may judge from outside symptoms, or indeed from the anxiety with which some doctors of eminence speculate on the character of the pustules, Central Europe is very sick indeed, is in the most imminent danger. It is not only possible, but probable, that before our next issue appears the German people, perhaps of all existing races the one best able to appreciate and enjoy both the lives lived by mankind-the sensuous and the spiritual -the race least moved by illusions, yet most tenacious of ideas, the human family which of all others luxuriates in the simplest pleasures and the deepest refinements of thought will have commenced a civil war. Nearly a million of Germans may be in movement intent on killing each other scientifically, to secure an object which at that price is not worth securing, which could be secured quietly by arrangement, and which if not secured now, nevertheless is as sure to be secured as corn is to grow in an ordinary season. Englishmen do not care. The majority of Englishmen are infinitely more interested in the question whether Earl Grosvenor is wise or foolish in his motion on Reform, is giving expression to a thought, or simply obeying an order passed by the English substitute for a conseil de famille. We will not do our countrymen the injustice to suppose they are really indifferent, really careless whether mankind

suffers a calamity or not, so self-absorbed that they cannot look for a moment beyond questions about which they are at heart profoundly indifferent, but the truth is they do not believe in the hubbub. They have been so accustomed for fifty years to hear German potentates express great purposes, and discuss wide plans, and make a resonant fuss about resources without doing anything, that they cannot believe anything is going to be done now. During the lifetime of this generation Prussia has always been announcing her intention of taking something or other, which Austria has always refused her permission to take, and after an immense tintamarre neither party has obtained what it professed so strongly desire. Twice the Powers have appeared to be on the brink of war, once their armies have been drawn out in battle array, once both have seemed within a hairsbreadth of being absorbed in an organization which would have changed the face of Europe. Nothing has come of it all, and nothing, says the English ten-pounder, the most sensible and the most stupid human being now breathing, will come of this fanfaron, any more than of those which have preceded it. Some loophole will be found, some more or less absurd formula of words, and Germany will go on, and Lippe Detmold will think his estate a nation, and great princes will make speeches like American orations from the stump, and Germans will write matchless monographs and demand official permission to travel ten miles, as of old.

For once we agree to the bottom of our hearts with the ten-pounder. An instinct, probably identical with his, though less wise because less unconscious, compels us to believe that, despite all the fuss, and the clanging of arms, and the waving of feathers, and the careful intsruction in future words of command, Austria and Prussia will not go to war. Either Austria will at the last moment retreat, and taking a heavy bribe as solatium, sing a Te Deum for her victory over human pride; or Prussia, at the twelfth hour dreading the penalties of conquest, will sing the "Quare Fremuerunt Gentes," and exult over her Christian moderation. When two prizefighters can plead the weal of the Fatherland as an excuse for not coming to time, a cross is very easily arranged. But while sharing the instinct to the full, we are bound to admit that we do not share the intellectual impression. It is hard to realize the idea of Austria and Prussia at war, but still more hard to conceive the