than the social law that the prisoner of war was to be his captor's slave. Here then is one of the great trains of causation in the history of the human race. War brings on slavery, slavery promotes agriculture, agriculture of all things favors and establishes settled institutions and peace. Such, by the evidence of ethnology, have been the beneficial results of war and slavery. Yet of late years the mind of the civilized world has been set, and rightfully and successfully set, on putting down slavery. It had arisen in the savage state of culture, and done its work there and in the barbaric stage, but in spite of much survival and revival it proved incompatible with the civilized stage, and men thrust it out. This is the teaching of ethnology concerning slavery, and what is its teaching concerning war? Among low hunting tribes, war was simply a social necessity; had the Australians and Red Indians been at peace for a century, they would have exterminated the buffalo and the kangaroo. War has always been an admirable school of manly virtues, endurance and courage; we have here noticed how it has acted in condensing weak loose clans into strong united nations, and aided in the organization of regular government; and these merits it has still. Practically, the rights of defence and conquest are to this day, as of old, the basis of all national existence. Yet there is a growing sense in the civilized world of the savagery and barbarity of war, to use these words again in the double sense which conveys that strongest lesson of ethnology, the repugnance of the higher civilization against the ferocity proper to the lower.

Any Englishman who will read the history of war can recognize the change of manners or morals, since the not very remote days when any freeman who thought himself aggrieved might gather his friends around him, and go to war with his adversary. Private war has only disappeared during our last thousand years, and the same causes which did away with it seem to be acting gradually against public war, and bringing the world to look with increasing favor on political arrangements shaped to control all nations jointly, so as to throw back to rarer emergencies the last resort to arms. That the resources of modern civilization are in our day summoned to make an army a more powerful engine of destruction than ever, is true

enough, but it is not the main point. The adaptation of modern arts to institutions of the barbaric world is no unknown thing. For centuries the revived slavery of the European colonies was helped and fostered by modern civilization; a slave might be seen working a steam-engine, the negro made acquaintance with the printing-press as a machine for advertising runaway slaves. But the alliance was unsound, and did not last. And though war may have a future of centuries yet of help from intellectual men, and respect from good men, it has fallen from its old rank. Savage and barbaric nations still keep up the old-world notion that man's noblest calling is to slaughter and plunder. We of the civilized world have come to talk of deplorable necessity, and of the end justifying the means.

Thus, from age to age, social and political institutions change. It is not a mere shifting hither and thither. Civilization breaks down often, and falls back sometimes, but there is no such permanent set backwards as there is forwards. Dr. Adolph Bastian tells a pleasant story of a belief the Brandenburg people have about their Lake Mohrin and the monstrous Craw-fish that lives in its depths. When that monster shail come ashore, the town will go to rack and ruin, and all things will go (crab-like) backwards; the ox will go back to a calf, the bread to meal and the meal to corn, the shirt to thread and the thread to flax, the rector will be scholar again, and everybody will turn little and weak and silly as he was when a child. But years go on, we wait and wait on the shore, yet this monster of personified Retrogression scarce shows a claw; he has been so long coming that perhaps he may not come at all. Meanwhile, Mr. Herbert Spencer may rejoice to see society moving as steadily as ever in his line of evolution, organizing itself more and more accurately to its special ends. In its course, seen as ethnology can show it from savagery onward, many an old institution which in its time did its work and earned its rightful praise, has had at last to be given up. is not for us, sitting in judgment on the men of the past, to try them by our modern views of morals and politics. Their various grades of culture had each àccording to its lights its standard of right and wrong, and they are to be judged on the criterion whether they did well or ill according to this standard. Much that to

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them did good and was good, is changed or replaced in our time. For myself, when I consider what blood-revenge and slavery have done in savage and barbaric ages to promote the higher culture destined to abolish them, I think of Mr. Emerson and his definition of evil, that it is good-in the making. Of yet more practical account than what we think of institutions of the past, is our approval or condemnation of the institutions we live among, our support in conservatism and our guide in reform. Such evidence as I have here brought forward may help to make good the claim of ethnology to aid in such prac

tical judgments. We could not if we would wipe out history, and begin the world afresh on first principles. Whether we will or no, the morals and politics of future generations must bear, like our own, the stamp of their origin in primitive society. But our social science has a new character and power, inasmuch as we live near a turning-point in the history of mankind. The unconscious evolution of society is giving place to its conscious development; and the reformer's path of the future must be laid out on deliberate calculation from the track of the past.-Contemporary Review.

to noble uses. Yet the fulness of our grief is softened by a certain greatness and solemnity in the event. The teachers of men are so few, the gift of intellectual fatherhood is so rare, it is surrounded by such singular gloriousness. The loss of a powerful and generous statesman, or of a great master in letters or art, touches us with many a vivid regret. The Teacher, the man who has talents and has virtues, and yet has a further something which is neither talent nor virtue, and which gives him the mysterious secret of drawing men after him, leaves a deeper sense of emptiness than this; but lamentation is at once soothed and elevated by a sense of sacredness in the occasion. Even those whom Mr. Mill honored with his friendship, and who must always bear to his memory the affectionate veneration of sons, may yet feel their pain at the thought that they will see him no more, raised into a higher mood as they meditate on the loftiness of his task and the steadfastness and success with which he achieved it. If it is grievous to think that such richness of culture, such full maturity of wisdom, such passion for truth and justice, are now by a single stroke extinguished, at least we may find some not unworthy solace in the thought of the splendid purpose they have served in keeping alive, and surrounding with new attractions, the difficult tradition of patient and accurate thinking in union with unselfish and magnanimous living.

Much will one day have to be said as to the precise value of Mr. Mill's philosophical principles, the more or less of his triumphs as a dialectician, his skill as a critic and an expositor, and his originality as a discoverer. However this trial may go, we shall at any rate be sure that with his reputation will stand or fall the intellectual repute of a whole generation of his countrymen. The most eminent of those who are now so fast becoming the front line, as death mows down the veterans, all bear traces of his influence, whether they are avowed disciples or avowed opponents. If they did not accept his method of thinking, at least he determined the questions which they should think about. For twenty years no one at all open to serious intellectual impressions has left Oxford without having undergone the influence of Mr. Mill's teaching, though it would be too much to say that in that grey temple where

they are ever burnishing new idols, his throne is still unshaken. The professorial chairs there and elsewhere are more and more being filled with men whose minds have been trained in his principles. The universities only typify his influence on the less learned part of the world. The better sort of journalists educated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired a habit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whose treatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during his lifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railway novels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively as his most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their own questions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. An eminent American who came over on an official mission which brought him into contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe, said to the present writer:-"The man who impressed me most of them all was Stuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you sought his opinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which they might fairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations, and then handed you a final judgment in which nothing was left out. His mind worked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with raw material, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product." Of such a man England has good reason to be very proud.

He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He is the latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, in which, as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, and Bentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line of succession— the school whose method subordinates imagination to observation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge in

experience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, one of his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; his constant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in social speculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom and ingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity is given by social arrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at present beyond our powers of conception. Per

haps the sum of all his distinction lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of rigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous hope. He told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, that in his younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he was in the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so without recovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printed something in this Review comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminsier with the dismissal of the great minister of Louis XVI., he wrote:-"I never received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Turgot; it is indeed an honor to me that such an assimilation should have occurred to you." Those who have studied the character of one whom even the rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike Turgot,' know both the nobleness and the rarity of this type.

Its force lies not in single elements but in that combination of an ardent interest in human improvement with a reasoned attention to the law of its conditions, which alone deserves to be honored with the high name of wisdom. This completeness was one of the secrets of Mr. Mill's peculiar attraction for young men, and for the comparatively few women whose intellectual interest was strong enough to draw them to his books. He satisfied the ingenuous moral ardor which is instinctive in the best natures, until the dust of daily life dulls or extinguishes it, and at the same time he satisfied the rationalistic qualities, which are not less marked in the youthful temperament of those who by-andby do the work of the world. This mixture of intellectual gravity with a passionate love of improvement in all the aims and instruments of life, made many intelligences alive, who would otherwise have slumbered, or sunk either into a dry pedantry on the one hand, or a windy, mischievous philanthropy on the other. He showed himself so wholly free from the vulgarity of the sage. He could hope for the future, without taking his eye from the realities of the present. He recognised the social destination of knowledge, and kept the elevation of the great art of social existence ever before him, as the ultimate end of all speculative activity.

Another side of this rare combination was his union of courage with patience, of NEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 2

firm non-conformity with silent conformity. Compliance is always a question of degree, depending on time, circumstance, and subject. Mr. Mill hit the exact mean, equally distant from timorous caution and self-indulgent violence. He was unrivalled in the difficult art of conciliating as much support as was possible and alienating as little sympathy as possible, for novel and extremely unpopular opinions. He was not one of those who strive to spread new faiths by brilliant swordplay with buttoned foils, and he was not one of those who run amuck among the idols of the tribe and the marketplace and the theatre. He knew how to kindle the energy of all who were likely to be persuaded by his reasoning, without stimulating in a corresponding degree the energy of persons whose convictions he attacked. Thus he husbanded the strength of truth, and avoided wasteful friction. Probably no English writer that ever lived has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the very root of the theological spirit, yet there is only one passage in the whole of his writings-I mean a well-known passage in the book on Liberty-which could possibly give any offence to the most devout person. His conformity, one need hardly say, never went beyond the negative degree, nor ever passed beyond the conformity of silence. That guilty and grievously common pusillanimity which leads men to make or act hypocritical professions, always moved his deepest abhorrence. And he did not fear publicly to testify his interest in the return of an atheist to parliament.

His courage was not of the spurious kind arising from anger, or ignorance of the peril, or levity, or a reckless confidence. These are all very easy. His distinction was that he knew all the danger to himself, was anxious to save pain to others, was buoyed up by no rash hope that the world was was to be permanently bettered at a stroke, and yet for all this he knew how to present an undaunted front to a majority. The only fear he ever knew was fear lest a premature or excessive utterance should harm a good cause. He had measured the prejudices of men, and his desire to arouse this obstructive force in the least degree compatible with effective advocacy of any improvement, set the single limit to his intrepidity. Prejudices were to him like physical predispositions, with which

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