RESPONSIBILITY.

HAT is responsibility? There is a certain life in words, a soul about them, which should not be killed out. It may be all very well for a German

composer to write songs without words, but it will not do for any of us to utter words without meanings; and there are too many people who babble away through life, talking for talking sake, hinting here, suggesting there, doubting this man's faith or that man's truth, without really meaning what they say, or having the most remote idea that they are morally responsible for a great wrong.

Perhaps they are puzzled by a long word. Perhaps they do not know that that word means that we shall all have to give a certain account of what we do, and how we have done it. "All men," writes Carlyle, "if they work not as in a Great Taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, will work unhappily for themselves and for you." That is, if they shirk their responsibility. But many men never think of it. If a railway-train runs off the line, if a steamboat blows up, if a chemist's sleepy assistant administers arsenic instead of salts, if a cabman runs over your child, or a sportsman, firing too

near the road, lodges his number eight shot in the calf of your leg, you can understand responsibility then. The law understands it perfectly. The railway company has to pay compensation, the chemist is censured, his assistant punished, the cabman is fined, and the sportsman has to pay your doctor's bill; and yet, in comparison with all these accidents -for, unphilosophically speaking, they are so there is nothing so responsible as an idle word, a misused talent, and (the sum of all) a wasted life. We all want looking after. "If the master," says quaint old Thomas Fuller, a writer not nearly so well known as he should be, "takes no account of his servants, they will make small account of him, and care not what they spend who are never brought to an audit.”

Perhaps the most admirable feature in Abraham Lincoln's character was a trait which we have seen throughout the whole of his very difficult and distressful term of office, and that was a determination never to shirk responsibility. This is all the more admirable, as it is to a great extent uncommon. In our own misfortunes during the Crimean war we could not get the heads of the different departments to be answerable for anything. We do not know to this day whether Lord Lucan or Lord Cardigan was responsible for the disastrous charge at Balaklava. The public, incensed, turned round savagely on all concerned. Again, during the Crawley Court-martial we had a very sad exhibition of this sad state of things. One would have thought that a reference to general or regimental orders would have at once answered the question who was responsible for poor Sergeant-major Lilley's death; but, instead of answering this question like men and gentlemen, the lawyer-soldiers went into a question

of brandy, fever, tent regulations, and other utterly irrelevant matters. Now, when a whole army has been lost in America, as there has been, and possibly might be again, we have found Lincoln, with a noble simplicity, coming forward and taking his share of the blame. We do not find that country called upon to pay more than twice ten thousand pounds for a trial which has filled every just and sensitive man with shame for English law and justice, and disgust at the rulers of the army. Nor do we find pamphlets written, in which, in savage bitterness, the great question "Whom shall we hang?" is debated with regard to our ministry. A great deal of this sneaking and indecisive manner seems to be hereditary with us. Once upon a time, to satisfy the clamours of the people when we had been defeated, we took a brave admiral and shot him on his own quarter-deck, "just," said Voltaire, with admirable satire, "to encourage the others ;" and many a deserving officer has been cashiered and broken to excuse the blunders of a superior. It is true, in some way, we do acknowledge responsibility in politics; but, with an artfulness worthy rather of Tom Monkey than John Bull, our great people make cats'-paws of others, and do not take the responsibility on themselves.

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But not only is it the great ones who will have to submit to an audit of their accounts." Thank Heaven !—and we should have cause to be even more heartily thankful were the duty more widely felt-we have all of us, rich and poor, to look forward to that; and were we to take away from man the rightfulness of a final balancing of accounts, it would be impossible to conceive to what unbridled lengths tyranny would go. But, disguise it as we may, each

of us feels more or less answerable for his actions. This feeling we term Conscience; and, although it may be laid quietly asleep for years, there will come a time when it will awaken with terrible force.

But it is not only towards others, it is towards ourselves that we should remember we are responsible. If we are channels and agents of good or evil to each other, we are infinitely more so to ourselves; and, notwithstanding a mere selfish idea of aggrandizement may fill the inventor's mind, or an empty love of fame the mind of the poet, yet activity on the part of these two will result in good to their fellows. Hence we are answerable, not only for our doings, but for our restings.

For an instance of this let us take Lord Bacon. That great man has, through the cultivation of an inquiring spirit, done more good than any one of his century—perhaps of his country. "His mission," said John Henry Newman, "seems to have been the increase of physical enjoyment and social comfort; and most wonderfully, most awfully has he fulfilled his conception and design. Almost day by day have we fresh shoots and buds, and blossoms which are to ripen into fruit, on that magical tree of knowledge which he planted, and to which none of us, perhaps except the very poor, but owes, if not his present life, at least his daily food, his wealth, and general well-being. He was the Divinely provided minister of temporal benefits to us all,-so great, that, whatever I am forced to think of him as a man, I have not the heart, from mere gratitude, to speak of him severely." Lord Bacon had indeed great gifts and grave faults. So hard is it to form a correct opinion of any one, and so foolish is it to judge harshly

of a great man passed away, that we nowadays hesitate to pronounce Pope's sentence upon him, that he was

"The brightest, wisest, meanest of mankind."

That he was bright and wise we know; that he was fond of money, and mean, is hard to believe. But certain may we be of this, that Bacon hardly ever let a day or an hour pass without working with all his thought, his mind, and heart in one direction—in the path of discovery—and in laying down that way for others to discover, which has resulted in so much good. Yet he could, had he so chosen, have gone through life a mere courtier, a chancellor, a creature of the king's, and no more. Or he could, like Sir Nicholas Throgmorton and others of his time, have spent his life in trying to found a family estate, in adding acre to acre and field to field, in despising as well as pillaging the poor, in getting appointed the curator of some charity which he could rob, the guardian of some half-idiot heir whom he could pillage and despoil; for such were the ways of noblemen and gentlemen in the days of Elizabeth and James, and on such bases have many of our great ancestral estates been founded. The very crows were not birds of so great pillage, nor could they scent carrion so well, as the great lords who were ruffling courtiers, wearers of silk and velvet, and who prosecuted their fortunes at court. Bacon, too, we are told, has some of this dirt sticking to him; but he has given a noble account of the better part of himhis mind. He pursued Philosophy not as a merely pleasing system of thought, not as a school exercise, but, as he said, as a means of bringing comfort and happiness into the houses of common men and the homes of the people.