The sheet-anchor of plain folk, both in the precise line between fact and fiction in political and speculative questions, is a the newspapers; but we can by many unrecourse to first principles. By whatever failing, if somewhat rough, tests, learn to means we may have become possessed of distinguish between sense and nonsense, them, we all have some few convictions, between what is admitted on all hands, according to which we do consciously or and what is put forward for a purpose; unconsciously judge all human conduct. between what is essential and what is Whether originally derived from experi- beside the question. To do this roughly ence or from intuition, these principles is necessary for the transaction of the were at least in possession of our minds most ordinary business; to do it perfectly, long before we ever heard of the particular one of the highest achievements of the questions with which we are now con- trained intellect. The intense emotional cerned; and their proof or disproof must interest of such questions as are now floodrest upon wider grounds than the answers ing every region of modern life almost to any of the questions of the day. No forces the use of these logical exercises doubt, in the process of referring practical upon many who in quieter times might questions to first principles, there are at have been content with dreams or with every step a multitude of risks. Suppos- practice. If the eagerness of discussion ing our principles to be all right, we make | induces us, as it should do, to cross-quesstrange blunders in applying them, from a tion ourselves as to our own exact meanwant both of logical faculty or training, ing, to look to our definitions, to become and of knowledge of facts which may be more and more precise and cautious in essential to the case. Or there may be our statements, limiting them more rigidly some fundamental flaw in our first prin- to what we really know, it is doing us ciples themselves, which must vitiate all valuable service. How many people, for our judgments. Better be stupid and instance, have of late been driven to ask ignorant than wrong-headed. themselves (in the first place, perhaps, with a view to refuting others) what they really mean by justice, by international morality, by imperial policy, and by many other expressions, upon the true meaning of which half the controversies of the day really turn? If these controversies drive us into any degree of clearness on such questions, they will have served a purpose much more lasting than that of determining our immediate action.

All this is true, and fatally affects the value of our conclusions if considered as verdicts. But it does not affect the value of the process by which we arrive at them when considered as mental discipline, nor does it wholly destroy the moral value of our judgments as engines to be used in the cause of right.

By what means, indeed, can we acquire logical habits of mind if not by exercising our faculties upon imperfect information? If we do not regard the weighing of evidence as a part of the art of reasoning, we shall have to confine that art to the region of pure mathematics.

The problems which come before us in such bewildering profusion every morning in the newspapers supply abundance of exercise for our logical and moral faculties - an exercise which would be not a whit the less stimulating and invigorating if Russia and Turkey and Afghanistan and all the telegrams relating to them were fictions of the editors' brains. We might certainly find that we had gone considerably astray in practice if this proved to be the case; but our wits would none the less have been sharpened by our disputes if on some blessed day we should awake and find that the Eastern question was but a dream. We have, however, in these very faculties, the means of ascertaining but too clearly that it is no dream. We cannot, without an amount of leisure and ability which belongs to very few, draw

Not only the intellect, but the conscience, may find both food and correction in the process of groping painfully among the perplexities of imperfect information. Some of us, especially I should imagine some women, suffer to a degree which is perhaps unreasonable, though not unnatural, from the sense of ignorance combined with intense interest in the moral issues involved in large public questions. It may serve to quiet and at the same time to encourage those who are thus harassed, to be reminded that the value of our moral verdicts does not wholly depend upon our being rightly or fully informed as to the facts of the case. The legal value of a judgment in a court of law does not depend entirely upon the correctness of the evidence. The award might be reversed if the evidence proved to have been incorrect or imperfect, but any points of law which might have been cleared up by the judgment would, I take it, remain clear after its hypothetical basis had been disproved. And so in controversies involving (as what important

controversy does not involve?) questions | his own views. And we may with much of right and wrong, all who take part in more confidence assert that the moral them necessarily do something to raise or judgments of the learned will be usefully to lower the tone and spirit in which they corrected by the simpler, and perhaps are conducted, even without being in full stronger, but at any rate more active, feelpossession of the facts, and without, there- ing of those to whom the facts may be fore, being in a position to do strict justice comparatively new. to the actors in the affairs in question. Let us try for a moment to trace out the No doubt it is often difficult, when the province of right-minded ignorance in remoral sense is strongly roused, to avoid gard to a particular question. A painfully doing injustice; and, no doubt, it becomes apposite instance is before us all in the us all, in proportion to our ignorance, to case of the Afghan war. Ordinary people be slow in making, and ready to retract, need not be much ashamed if they have to practical and personal applications of our confess the fact that before the meeting of virtuous sentiments. But it is perfectly Parliament they would have been utterly possible, while wholly suspending our without the materials for an outline of our judgment as to the degree in which a par- relations with the ameer since the concluticular kind of praise or blame may have sion of the last war. We may perhaps be been deserved by particular persons, to forgiven for feeling that it would even now arrive at true and useful views of the de- be very difficult to relate them at all fairly gree in which a given course of action from memory. In a long series of more would merit such praise or blame. To do or less complicated transactions there is this rightly is to exercise a really important scarcely one which has not been told on function. We should be adding nothing high authority in such different ways as to to the common stock by ascertaining in all change its character again and again. their detail and complexity all the facts What actually passed between the ameer already known to the few, but we are add- and the successive viceroys, and between ing to the common stock by taking the the viceroys and the home government, right side on any practical question. And may be so told as to convey several dif many such questions arise in which we can ferent impressions; and when to what truly, though roughly, discern the general was actually said and done we add what drift from the broad and unquestioned out- was felt and intended and suggested, lines presented to us. Strict and detailed | these transactions can be infused with coljustice cannot be awarded by the multi-oring matter at discretion. Again, the tude; but a righteous course will be secured only by the common consent of all. Our facts must be supplied to us by the learned; our logic and our moral choice must be of home growth.

Thus in referring the questions which come before us to first principles, we, the ignorant many, are at once educating ourselves, and taking the best means within our reach of helping the cause of right. And it would almost seem as if there were one useful function belonging to the ignorant as such. It is that of affording a certain indispensable check to the tendency of cultivated minds to run into subtleties, and to attach undue importance to the conclusions at which they have arrived by long and laborious processes. If the ig. norant are sufficiently determined to hold fast to their principles and to sit loose to their conclusions, they may, while receiving instruction and correction, also be the means of imparting it. It would perhaps be going too far to say that no theory is worth much which cannot be justified to intelligent ignorance, but it is certain that no theorist could fail to find in the endeavor to do so a useful test of the clearness of

facts respecting the comparative strength of our present and of various other conceivable frontiers are both doubtful in themselves, and capable of being very variously represented; while the bearing of our relations with Russia and our responsibilities in India, upon our rights and duties towards Afghanistan, is obviously a problem of the utmost difficulty and importance. To attempt to bring out from the mass of disputed and entangled evidence before us on all these points a clear and duly-balanced judgment of the conduct and veracity of those whose policy and statements have been called in question on this occasion, would be for most of us ridiculous presumption. Yet is any intelligent person likely to rise from a moderately careful reading of these debates without having received, and being not only entitled but bound to entertain, and on occasion to express, some strong impressions as to the moral character of the war upon which we have entered? Can we not see for ourselves, without under. taking to verify a single disputed fact, how these different questions hang together? Can we not trace the different degrees of

and our blame a restraint, there is indeed reason enough for not shrinking from the stormy atmosphere of discussion, even though we may know that a complete mastery of the questions at issue is beyond our grasp. No man, however full of information or of theories, is really indiffer. ent to the sympathy and approbation of his comparatively ignorant wife or friend. Those whose imperfect knowledge compels them to remain on the defensive and to keep to the modest rôle of inquirers, have for that very reason an immense advantage in debate. By resolutely maintaining a high standard for the quality (both logical and moral) of the explanations offered as the price of our sympathy, we impose a more effectual check than we are often ourselves aware of upon our instructors. It is worth while to consider deliberately the importance of the sifting office of inquirers who are resolute in not being convinced except upon good grounds, because it is just those who are best qualified to exercise it who are most likely to shrink from it. The very gifts of heart and mind, the reasonableness, the logical faculty, and the keen sense of right and wrong, which make people worth convincing, give them also a strong sense of their own ignorance; and for such people the task of grappling with moral questions without complete

value attached by different speakers to moral and to material considerations, to personal and to national interests? May we not gather, in spite of all the reticences, and the cross purposes, and the transient exigencies of Parliamentary debate, some just though perhaps vague notion of the different ideals of national greatness and of justice and duty which different leaders would hold up before us? And have we not a right, is it not even our duty, to choose between them accordingly? We may feel quite unable even to guess whether any and what amount of fresh territory would really strengthen our frontier; but each one of us is quite as much bound, and nearly as well qualified, as any states man to form an opinion as to the comparative value of a scientific frontier and of an unbroken pledge. It seems to me even clear that the habit of public debating, not to say the traditions of official life, tends in some degree to confuse moral with political ideas. How can we otherwise account for the significant fact that all public speakers and writers, on both sides of this question, so far as I can remember without exception, teach us that our duties and our interest lie on the same side? Why else do all those who think we have no just cause for war add that we have none for alarm? Why do all those who recognize a pressing necessity for the rec-knowledge is often acutely painful. They tification of our frontier also think the conduct of the ameer unjustifiable? Why do those who think that India should bear the expense of a war for the defence of India also consider our Indian finances to be Such sensitiveness, however, is clearly a prosperous and improving, while those snare, and the plea of ignorance no real who take a gloomy view of the prospects exemption from our responsibility in matof our Indian revenue can always see so ters of common concern. For, after all, plainly the imperial character of the war? the fact is that in all questions of the day The moral significance of certain rap- many of the most important elements are prochements is at least as striking to those only those of our own daily experience who are new to the subject as it can be to "writ large;" and to be ignorant is not veteran partisans; and while it is only be- necessarily to be either inexperienced or coming in us outsiders to bow to any cor- uncultivated. Those who are least burrections on matters of fact which may be dened with the results of conscious study vouchsafed to us by the initiated, it would often possess in a high degree that strange be mere weakness to let our feelings be instinct by which the intellectual comparaswayed by sympathy with authority. No tive anatomist seizes upon the backbone amount of ignorance can deprive us of the of a new subject as unerringly as Professor right to exercise our judgment with regard Owen lays his finger on the rudimentary to such facts as we do know or assume limbs of a strange beast. Ignorance with to be true. All that we have to do is to a hearty appetite, the full use of its limbs, distinguish clearly between what we assume and an abundant supply of raw material, and what we know, and to keep our as-is not so very badly off even in this wellsumptions open to correction. While we informed age. do this our praise and blame are not likely to be worthless, even though they may be occasionally and provisionally misplaced.

If we can make our praise worth having

are often strongly tempted to retire altogether into serener regions, and to desert the cause of right just because they care so much about it.

The appeal from special knowledge to universal experience is not in these days in much danger of being disallowed. But the sense either of ignorance or of power may

hinder us from using our scanty materials may be provided by the diligent study of intelligently and under a due sense of re- some subject which is limited enough for sponsibility. The great thing is to fix our grasp. There is no better way of rightly the scale upon which we can hope testing the trustworthiness of our guides to construct a tolerably complete chart of than to take their opinion on some subject any subject which comes before us. A which we really do understand, and no pocket atlas may be as correct in its pro- better chance of increasing our store than portions as an ordnance survey of an inch to possess ourselves of a good solid nuto the quarter of a mile; but the propor- cleus of truth round which other truths tion may be as easily destroyed by enlarg- may group themselves. If we bestowed ing one part as by diminishing another. more pains upon correcting the bearings Carelessness about details is not necessa- and strengthening the foundations of our rily the result of blind presumption. It central framework, and less upon extendmay be part of a wise economy of mental ing the circumference of our information, space. An over-crowded mind is as bad a the sense of our ignorance might become thing as an empty one, and less remedi- less oppressive, and its effects would at able. The worst fate is to become a mere | any rate be less disabling. What most of dust-bin for the accumulation of chance us need is not so much to acquire more scraps, without choice, without arrange- knowledge, as to acquire a more complete ment, and without vent. For what we mastery of the knowledge we have, and at want to know is not what are the exact the same time to practise a more unflinchdetails, but what are the true bearings, ing obedience to it. C. E. S. and the comparative weight, of the different considerations by which action must be determined. Without some principle of arrangement, details are as oppressive as they are worthless.

If the ignorant have an important part to perform with regard to public affairs, we may with still better reason "magnify our office" with regard to the moral and religious questions which so deeply agitate | the whole mental atmosphere of our times. In these questions individual experience furnishes not only important analogies, but a large part of the very subject-matter in debate; and however difficult may be the art of rightly interpreting it, the unlearned have as large a share as any one else in "creating history." We allow ourselves to be too much troubled by the speculations of others upon subjects wholly beyond our grasp (if not beyond theirs), and we are not half careful enough to keep our own path straight, or our own windows clear. Upon these awful subjects light is to be found less through answering questions than through "obeying the truth" we do know.

The ignorant, however, like their bet ters, are of necessity treading a perilous and perplexing path, leading them across misty morasses of imperfect information, and no aid within their reach is to be despised. If first principles may be compared to the stars, by which (when we can see them) our course must be guided, there are other helps which, though less permanent and less infallible, are in foggy weather more available. These are the stepping-stones laid down for us by the judgment of others, and the compass which

From The Spectator.

THE INTELLECTUAL STATUS OF

ABORIGINES OF VICTORIA.

THE

THERE is one unpleasantness, to us at least, in reading about Australian savages. They have been very carefully observed by very intelligent men, almost as carefully observed as the children of a household, and those men always seem to us to come to two conclusions: first, that the savages are men; and secondly, that the power of accumulation, the power which more than any other differentiates men from animals, is in them exceeding low, or rather, positively limited. The power exists, that is demonstrable, but its exercise involves, with some tribes, such fatigue that they will not employ it unless driven by sharp and continuous necessity, and not alway's even then. They consequently remain, and will remain always, not animals, but little children, never advancing, and never capable of cumulative advance, but living on unchanged till the conditions around them become too much for their limited powers, and then dying sadly out. not a pleasant thought, by any means, though no more inconsistent with the Providential scheme than the existence of congenital idiotcy or hereditary insanity,

It is

because it suggests that in each race there may be an inherent line beyond which it will not pass, and that no race, therefore, is certainly capable of indefinite advance, but it will obtrude itself sometimes. We have a huge book before us,

for example, a present from the govern- on them disagreeable restrictions, and ment of Victoria, in which Mr. Brough which sometimes require great efforts of Smyth, a gentleman employed for sixteen memory, just as children will act upon years in the Department for the Protection mamma's rules, and recollect long strings of the Aborigines, gives to the world much of things forbidden, apparently without of what he has collected about the aborigi- using their minds at all. Mr. Brough nes of Victoria. He had intended to give Smyth gives one example of this, which is all he had accumulated, but was prevented to us new and strangely suggestive, a cusby "circumstances," for which, unless they tom that seems to have tumbled out of were very unpleasant to him, we are heartily another world, or to have descended from grateful. God knows what his book would another civilization. The aborigines of have grown to, if his design had been per- Victoria will eat the most loathsome things fected. It is extremely valuable, however, -tree-worms, slugs, snakes, and so on — and interesting, in spite of its gigantic and it was at first believed that they would scale; and it is impossible to read the eat anything. It was, however, discovered chapters we have read those bearing on that not only were certain articles of food the mental status of the aborigines with forbidden to the young, the object being to out the thought we have described. The reserve them to the old, who govern the aborigines of Victoria, who, it seems cer- tribes, and who cannot hunt vigorously, tain, were all originally alike, and who all but that they had a classification in their speak dialects of one tongue, seem stricken minds binding animate and inanimate with perpetual childhood. They have all things together, in some inexplicable tribal the capacities of other races, physical and connection. They hold, as it were, that mental, except the capacity of advance; hares and Campbells have a relation, and they produce as many children to the Frasers and wombats, so that any Fraser family, a statement often denied; Count may eat any hare, but no Campbell may; Stzrelecki's often-quoted account of the while a Campbell may dine off a wombat, sterility of their women, after bearing chil- while a Fraser may not. The statement dren to white men, is a fable; and the is so strange, that we give it in the origipopular notion of their low vitality is a de- nal:lusion, they recovering from severe wounds with singular ease and rapidity. Their young shift for themselves very early, as "early as the kangaroo," showing great quickness and readiness in hunting up food for themselves; and they are quite as active as Europeans, though not so enduring or so strong. They have good memories, but it is in the way children have, memories, for instance, for words, and for stories, and for the customs of the house, but not for anything requiring separate and original mental exertion, nor, it may be suspected, for things that are long past. They learn English, for example, very readily, and sometimes very perfectly, just as children in India will learn two or three languages apparently without any mental effort, and certainly without any draft upon the intelligence, which remains as undeveloped in the trilingual child such, for example, as the well-to-do child in Pondicherry often is, and the English children in Calcutta always are — as in the monolingual one. They know great numbers of myths, wild and rather grotesque stories about the origin of things, and the flood, and the feats of the bunyips, or evil spirits, just as children know fairy-stories, but are without any system of theology. And they remember and obey customs which they cannot explain, which impose

The statements made in his letter to me by Mr. Bridgman, of Queensland, and the peculiar arrangement under one and the same division, as ascertained by Mr. Stewart, of Mount Gambier, of things animate and inanimate, show that much is yet to be learned natives in placing in classes all that comes respecting the principles which guide the within their knowledge. The two classes of the tribes near Mackay in Queensland are Youngaroo and Wootaroo, and these are again subdivided, and marriages are regulated in accordance therewith. But the blacks say alligators are Youngaroo and kangaroos are Wootaroo, and that the sun is Youngaroo and the moon is Wootaroo. Strange to say, this, found at Mount Gambier. There the pelican, or something as nearly like this as possible, is the dog, the blackwood-tree, and fire and frost are Boort-parangal, and belong to the division Kumite-gor (gor=female); and tea-tree scrub, the duck, the wallaby, the owl, and the crayfish are Boort-werio, and belong to the division Krokee. A Kumite may marry any Krokeegor, and a Krokee may marry a Kumite-gor. And Mr. Stewart says a man will not, unless under severe pressure, kill or use as food any of the animals of the division in which he is hunger compels him to eat anything that bears placed. A Kumite is deeply grieved when his name, but he may satisfy his hunger with anything that is Krokee. These divisions and subdivisions have an important influence in all arrangements between natives, not only as