Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of female innocents has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for; and the part he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of Touchstone. But his intervention has, at least, created an imperial situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine wifebeater that has ever fallen under my no tice, the criminal was somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a little, very alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes. To the human observer, he is decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems abhorrent. A thor ough, elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot order, he was born with a nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at their hands the most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimen tal banner; and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame who had been so cruelly misusing him, my little Great-heart gave but one hoarse cry and fell upon the tyrant, tooth and nail. This is the tale of a soul's tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly, in one hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare he would then have written “Troilus and Cressida" to brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of the ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence; but he had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral suicide; for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark, showing, as it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men; and that with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience loosens all. "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase, "the greatest sinner may return." I have been cheered to see symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope the period of Sturm und Drang is closed. All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and study them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye, somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, he was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very proud) re-opened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how he solved the prob lem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened, off posted Coolin to his uncle's, visited the children in the nursery, saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part, sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honor and jewel of his day his morning's walk with my father. And perhaps from this cause he gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length returned entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served him in another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened not long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not adore her as he adored my father - although (born snob) he was critically conscious of her position as "only a servant" - he still cherished for her a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same situ ation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of a faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem with a pound of tea at Christmas. No longer content to pay a flying visit, it was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary friend. And so, day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until (for some reason which I could never understand and cannot approve) he was kept locked up to break him of the graceful habit. Here, it is not the similarity, it is the difference, that is | ed; and how much more gladly would he worthy of remark; the clearly marked not have taken a beating than to be thus degrees of gratitude and the proportional wounded in the seat of piety! duration of his visits. Anything farther | I knew one disrespectable dog. He removed from instinct it were hard to was far liker a cat; cared little or nothing fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain for men, with whom he merely co-existed impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice of reason. There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people. But the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family. Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspic uous, a praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble. And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be Coolin's idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of virtue and the proxi. mate fall of the pillars of the earth. I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees. It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for though I think we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning to the phrase is technical to "rake the back ets" in a troop. A friend of mine, the master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that they had left one club and joined another; but whether it was a rise or a fall, and the result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than he could guess. And this illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs, their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At least, in their deal ings with men they are not only conscious of sex, but of the difference of station. And that in the most snobbish manner; for the poor man's dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps all his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his master. And again, for every station they have an ideal of behav. jor, to which the master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform. How often has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was disappoint as we do with cattle, and was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold him, and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I believe, a life of troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question in a trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the ancestral type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the nineteenth century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in love with respectability. A street-dog was once adopted by a lady. While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud, charging into butchers' stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a common rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into society, he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no more cats; and conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognize the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but to support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this self-made dog? We praise his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for all their scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them remain invincible throughout; and they live all their years, glorying in their virtues, but still the slaves of their defects. Thus the sage Coolin was a thief to the last; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs, whose soul's shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted above, has only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered the temptation. The eighth is his favorite commandment. There is something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal frailties of the best. Still more painful is the bearing of those "stammering professors" in the house of sickness and under the terror of death. It is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or other, the dog connects together, or confounds, the uneasi ness of sickness and the consciousness of guilt. To the pains of the body he often adds the tortures of the conscience; and at these times his haggard protestations form, in regard to the human deathbed, a dreadful parody or parallel. I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double eti. quette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough posse of attendant swains with unweary ing tact and gusto; and with her master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the same sensibility, but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our persistent ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see them with our weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed forgotten nature's voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership when they touch noses with the tinker's mongrel, the brief reward and pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the object of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze, giving and receiving flattery and favor; and the dogs, like the majority of men, have but foregone their true exist ence and become the dupes of their ambition. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. From The Spectator. CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS. WE have recently been occupied in the attempt to answer the question whether that scheme of society known as Social. ism derives any special sanction from Christianity. We would to-day return upon the relation between politics and religion from a wider point of view, and attempt to answer the question which several recent utterances must have sug gested to our readers, In what relation does political duty stand to Christian teaching? The noble protest against the notion that religion stands out of relation to political duty, which was elicited from the warden of Keble College by Mr. Harrison's account of the Positivist worship in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, must have met with a welcome from many who felt indignant at having it assumed that this was a specially Christian notion: although they may have been quite ready to allow both that the behavior of many Christians has encouraged it, and also that the behavior of many Positivists is an excellent rebuke to it. And the wish recently expressed in Mr. Seeley's lectures on the "Expansion of England" that history should become more political must have carried many thoughts in the same direction, if not exactly to the same goal. How far can those who consider that the most important truth is that which concerns the relation of God to man join in the wish that a record of human life should ally itself with the political spirit? It must be admitted at once that if by Christianity we mean something of divine origin, and if by politics we mean a theory of the relation between the governors and the governed, the idea that any connec tion exists between these two things would be confuted by history. There is no disputable theory of government which has not been defended by true Christians, and also opposed by them, at some time or other. If we confine our attention to our own time, it is, of course, possible to fancy that some such connection exists. We live on the edge of a great uprising against authority which was combined with a rejection of Christianity, and it is natural that two things opposed together should be remembered together; but if we had lived in the England of two hundred years ago, we should have seen an uprising against authority which was com bined with a strong and marked assertion of Christianity, and should have been inclined to look upon religious enthusiasm as dangerous to civil order and secular of Great Britain. And the ordinary conrule rather than to liberty. And if in the fifteen centuries since Christianity was dominant it has oftener been in alliance with the spirit of authority than the spirit of freedom, that fact tells us nothing whatever of its own character, only of the tendency of mankind to mix the assertion of truth with claims for their own authority. About the result of any scheme of government Christian men are, it is plain, promised no supernatural illumination. They may be mistaken about what tends to true liberty, as they may be mistaken about what tends to true order. But they are as much the less Christians if they fail in sympathy with liberty, as if they fail in sympathy with order. We cannot say that one principle is more sacred than the other. The Christian teacher should most urgently insist on that, whichever it be, which Christians are most likely to forget, and he may be as much mistaken on that point as any one else may. ception of Christianity is not a more shrunken fragment of the region which that word should mark out than is the ordinary conception of politics. "General Christians," as Lord Palmerston called them, are no better illustrations of the meaning of Christianity, than is the ordinary Tory or Radical of that science which deals with the duties of a citizen. Our participation in the relations of civil life varies greatly, but not more than our participation in individual relations does, and it would not be easy to decide which are the most important of the two. Conceive, for instance, the change that would come over the world if only one single political duty were rightly fulfilled, if no one either gave or withheld his gift for any needy claimant without a sense of responsibility. So miserably has the very idea of politics shrunk, that it will sound odd to reckon our duty to the poor as a political duty; yet of all the duties that belong to a polity, surely it is the one to which ordinary individuals would do best to give heed. Nevertheless, to allow that Christianity had no influence on politics would be simply to allow that Christianity was false. We are far from urging that the ordiDoes our duty to our neighbor need a nary meaning of politics refers to someless potent sanction when its object thing unimportant. It may be the duty changes from one to many? Do we re of every man of influence to stand by that quire a divine wisdom to enlighten us as party whose principles, on the whole, he to the duties which concern the happiness deems nearest the truth, and whose influof two or three, and can we dispense with ence, on the whole, appears to him most it when we come to duties which concern useful to the community. And the strugthe happiness of millions? The question gle between the two armies whose watch answers itself. If a man be not a better words are respectively "freedom" and citizen for being a Christian, then Chris-"order," however we may regret it, is tianity is a dream. It might be argued, one which we are forced to regard as a with much plausibility, and not without permanent incident of national life. Alsome truth, that no other relation affords though between the ideas of freedom and so sure a test of a man's moral condition of order themselves there is no opposition, as does that which he holds to the com- yet, as the whole of history shows us that munity of which he forms a part. Before the men who make each of these things we condemn a man who has failed, how their object are actually enlisted under ever unquestionably, as son or husband, different banners, this battle seems a part we have to learn the character of the of the system of things, which we have to other member of the relation; but if he is accept and make the best of. Loyalty to a bad citizen, he cannot expect the com- a party is, in many cases, a duty; and munity to divide the blame with him. We there is no doubt that it may be sacrificed do not mean to deny that other points in to many things much lower than itself. the comparison suggest an opposite con- But it may be at once confessed that this clusion; but still it is true, on the whole, is a duty which Christianity tends to that while few duties are so important as make more difficult. Christian belief has political duties, there are none in which a no tendency to endow a man either with man's responsibility is so absolute, as far political knowledge or political ability, any as it goes. To ask whether political duty more than it has a tendency to endow him should be influenced by religion is like with arithmetical accuracy. It makes him asking whether Scotland is a part of Great wish to be an honest man, and, so far, it Britain. But if we defined Great Britain helps him to keep his accounts accurately, as stopping short at Edinburgh, and Scot-- and that wish is a real help. And so it land as bounded on the south by the is a real help towards party loyalty, to a Grampians, Scotland would form no part certain extent. But a religious faith tends to increase the claimants on a man's loyalty; and no true claimant to loyaltyand we fully allow the claim comes so low down in the scale as a party does. No kind of valid claim is so much subject to revision from the side of considerations that spring from Christian ground. Christianity is, in reference to what many people call politics, a disturbing element. The attitude which a profoundly Christian mind is apt to take towards party questions was well illustrated in all the political utterances of Mr. Maurice. He would always seek for the true principle at the root of any outgrowth of party feeling, would point out the distortion to which it was liable, and the failure which awaited it just so far as it admitted any influence from this distortion, and there he would stop. He never led his hearers to see that one side was right and the other wrong. And that is just what a politician a politician, that is to say, in this narrow sense of the word, which we are obliged to give in to, even while we protest against it. has to see, However, in all this there is nothing specially characteristic of Christianity, except so far as Christianity has been the moral faith which men have felt most earnestly. All such faith originates sympathies and beliefs which tend to confuse and trouble party union. The very protest from which we have taken our text fully allows that Christians owe to Comtists a most valuable reminder of that side of their political duties, however we name it, by which party feeling is cast into the shade. No body of men have done more to uphold the claims on politicians of "morality touched with emotion" than the Positivists have; and if they have not had to meet the accusation of "humanitarianism," "want of patriotism," and the like, it is only because it has not been felt worth while to make it. They have shown the truest patriotism in urging the duties of their country on those who represent its external action, and are as much bound to consider its duties as each one of us is to consider our own duties; but they have shown also exactly that interference of religious feeling with party feeling which provokes most hostility on the part of politicians. We may call it religious feeling, since it is their religion, though its object is humanity; and we may call the feeling with which it interferes party feeling, though its object is a country; for patriotism sinks to the level of party feel ing when our country is regarded as a corporate being with claims, and without duties. And if Christians had been as true to their creed as Positivists had been to theirs (they are no worse men, but the task has been more difficult), they would have been better politicians in the larger sense, and worse in the narrower sense. Humanity is not the object of their worship. But it is the object of sympathies touched with new life from their creed, and of duties taking a new sanction from the same source. Who can doubt, for instance, that if Christianity had been a living, predominant influence, the antislavery movement would have been a distinctly Church movement? And who doubts now, whatever be his political creed, that the abolition of slavery was a great political step, and that every one who helped it on was not only a better Christian, but a better politician, a soldier fighting on the right side, even if you mean by the right side nothing but the side which is going to win? At the same time, it must have happened more than once that this question weakened a party, even when a party was working for good. Nothing in Macaulay's prosperous life is so interesting as the sacrifices which he made to his father's principles, but at the time it must have seemed to many, and, perhaps, sometimes even to himself, as if he were sacrificing not so much his interest to his duty, as his political feeling to his personal feeling. Yet now there is no act of his life which would be felt so conspicuously right, in a political sense, by every one. There is no subject which more distinctly exhibits the difference between the amalgam of Christian belief with ecclesiastical feelings which represents Christianity to the world, and its true spirit, as the history of slavery does. We must confess that there have been men who would have laid down their lives to make other men Christians, and did all they could to keep them slaves; perhaps this must be said, for instance, of Whitefield. Of course, the very motives which make men cowardly about giving offence and careful of preserving their influence take strength from sources that call themselves Christian. But there can be no doubt in an unprejudiced mind what has been the influence of Christianity on slavery. "Ce n'est pas Spartacus qui a supprimé l'esclavage, c'est bien plutôt Blandine," says a historian whose testimony to anything Christian will not be received with suspicion,- - M. Renan. It is surprising that that tribute to the martyred slave-girl has not aroused more attention. It is a tribute not to this or that form of Christianity, but to the teaching of Jesus. He said, -- |