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ever intended to draw. But he understood some of the worst dangers of democ racy as it was but too necessary that they should be understood. If he had also understood its strength, and the solidity it gives to popular institutions, he would have been the greatest of Mr. Gladstone's and Mr. Disraeli's contemporaries. But he had too much in him of the icy spirit of negation.

From The Speaker.

ROBERT LOWE.

OF all the "extinct volcanoes" to whom Mr. Disraeli once applied a stolen simile, there was none more completely extinguished by the snows of age than the man who will live in history as Robert Lowe. Of Viscount Sherbrooke the world knew little and cared less. People, indeed, were puzzled when they encountered the name in print to realize the identity of its owner. He had ceased to be a figure

impressed him, and a national genius is not visible, while a railway or a telegraphwire is. Yet he did perhaps his best work at the Education Office; as chancellor of the exchequer he was less successful, because he gauged ill the strength of popular feeling; and as home secretary he was least successful of all, probably be cause his peculiarities and his imperfect appreciation of the individual characters of men rendered him unable to gauge the tendencies of public feeling, and to discern exactly how much he should say, and how far he should be reticent, in justifying the application of general principles to particular cases. In the first organization of education, it was of the highest moment to insist on results, and to show that these results could really be weighed and measured; but in the better understood and more fully developed departments conversant with taxation and justice, what was rather needed was an insight into those finer shades of public interest and public sentiment into which his own peculiarities, and his somewhat unsympathetic nature, rendered it difficult for him to penetrate. on the stage. The last occasion on which He understood the value of a physical the present writer saw him was a couple basis better than that of an elaborate of years ago at a garden party at Dollis superstructure. Even in the Education Hill. Mr. Gladstone had invited his old Office, his rather cavalier use of the colleague to the gathering, and there he authority of the departmental chief excited was- a feeble, blind old man; moving an irritation which led the House of Com- about under the careful guidance of his mons to form a very unjust judgment on wife; always muttering to himself; taking his official career. In all his official rela- no note of those around him; his mind, tions he did himself less than justice. if not absolutely vacant, filled with dreams His imperfect sight, his unsympathetic and ancient memories. It was with a manner, and his strong disposition to let thrill of pity that one realized that this the ordinary rules take their course, with- pathetic figure was all that remained of out the modifications needful to adapt "Bob Lowe," once the terror of a party them to particular cases, gained him a and the idol of the House of Commons. reputation for harshness which he did not The morning papers have done justice to really deserve. It was the defect of his his great career, and have shown how the mind to attach too much importance to Times leader-writer became one of the the most visible and memorable elements foremost figures in the State. But they of knowledge, wealth, and legal justice. have failed to reveal the double secret of And that tendency was not in any degree his rise and his downfall. Only those checked by quick perceptions or sensitive who remember the House of Commons in sympathies. He used the disciplined in- 1866 and 1867 can really understand how tellect of a successful Oxford tutor to it was that Mr. Lowe gained so great a make light of intellectual discipline, and place in public life. Never in this cen to run down moral and spiritual as com- tury has Parliament listened to a series of pared with physical and economic achieve- speeches which can compare in concenments; and this habit gained him a much trated force, in brilliancy of diction, in more cynical reputation than he really almost ferocious courage, with those deserved. His statesmanship, no doubt, which Mr. Lowe made in defence of the gave forth a materialistic ring, which was Adullamites. One sometimes wonders, especially unpopular in a day when the when men talk of Mr. Chamberlain's gifts recognition of the claims of "our own as a debater, whether the leader of the flesh and blood" was becoming more and Brummagem party ever heard Mr. Lowe more essential to political success. And at his best, and whether, if he did, he his sarcastic wit drew more blood than he could retain any belief in his own powers.

The Adullamites were the forerunners of
the Liberal Unionists. They represented
society and the classes. They were Lib-
erals in name alone. For the most part
they were dull persons, of the mental
calibre of their nominal leader, the pres-
ent Duke of Westminster. But they had
two men of more than average capacity
among them
Mr. Horsman, the "supe-
rior person," and Mr. Lowe. The latter
they held in some contempt. The gen-
eral belief of the dukes and their allies
was that he had eked out a precarious
livelihood in Australia by keeping a
school, and that he now supported himself
by writing for the press-and in those
days so near and yet so far, the "news-
paper man
was held in abhorrence in the
House of Commons. Probably most of

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the Adullamites at the outset of their battle against reform would have been better pleased if Mr. Lowe had not joined them. But in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, he made himself their master and their chief. In those speeches in which he did such fierce battle against the spirit of democracy he gave splendid expression to those sentiments which lay too deep for utterance in their own dumb breasts. He found them the brains they lacked; he supplied the tongue which in their own case was paralyzed. And as they saw him striking blow after blow in defence of privilege and wrong and old-world abuses, they cheered him with frantic enthusiasm, and deluded themselves with the belief that at last one had been found to stay the advancing tide of democracy.

privilege he had defended so brilliantly. All that he had accomplished was to overthrow a ministry and to transfer the task of carrying the great Reform Bill from the hands of men who believed in it to those of men who loathed it.

But his personal success was not the less marked because he had failed as completely as Dame Partington in his battle with the in-flowing sea. When the turn of the tide came in 1868 and Mr. Gladstone found himself called to the head of the State, everybody felt that Mr. Lowe had earned a place among ministers, and so the ex-Adullamite became the Liberal chancellor of the exchequer. It was at that time (December 6th, 1868) that he wrote these touching lines:Success is come — the thing that men desire; The toil of office, and the care of State. Ambition has naught left her to acquire. Success is come! But ah, it comes too late.

Where is the bounding pulse of other days

That would have thrilled enchantment

The lips that would have loved to speak my
through my frame;
praise,

The hearts that would have kindled at my
name?

Oh Vanity of Vanities! For Truth

And Time dry up the source where joy was
Teach us we are but shadows of our youth,
rife,
And mock us with the emptiness of Life.

When one reads these lines one realizes a side of "Bob Lowe's" character which It was a wonderful spectacle, upon was certainly not conspicuous in the eyes which some of us must even now look of the world. As a minister he was the back with a thrill of emotion. Then, in- hardest, most matter-of-fact, and most deed, did the giants do battle before the unsympathetic person who ever sat upon eyes of the sons of men. Lowe, Glad-the Treasury bench. He delighted to rub stone, Disraeli, Bright, all threw themselves into the struggle with their whole hearts. When one recalls the great debates of those days and contrasts them with the House of Commons which has just died, one seems to have fallen upon the age of the pygmies. But grand and heroic as were the mental stature and intellectual equipment of Mr. Lowe, the task to which he had committed himself was a hopeless one, and twelve months after he had heard the rafters of the House ring with the rapturous cheers of Tories and Whigs as he boldly proclaimed the unworthiness of his fellow-men to exercise the right of self-government, he had the mortification of seeing those who had then applauded him engaged in trampling down the very bulwarks of class

people— not antagonists only, but friends and even colleagues the wrong way. Most of us remember the blunt question he put to the deputation of country bank. ers, provincial notables every man of them, when they had complained that they positively could not live if some measure of his were carried into effect: "And pray, why should you live?" All Mr. Gladstone's older colleagues can recall the fight between Mr. Lowe and Mr. Baxter which led to the resignation of the latter, and which caused Mr. Lowe's removal from the chancellorship to the Home Office. A hundred stories might be told of the offence which was given to people of importance by the brusque cynicism and downright brutality of the chancellor of the exchequer. But even these char

acteristics do not furnish the secret of is the cocoanut-palm. Another peculMr. Lowe's downfall. It was not merely iarity of this region is the ubiquitousness his contempt for others, but that contempt of the dwarf Pandanus, probably the same plus his admiration for himself, which as the P. odoratissima of Fiji, the fibre of proved fatal to him. He delighted in his which is used in the manufacture of grassown cleverness, and he could with diffi- cloth, and is usually known to foreign culty be induced to abandon his ill-starred trade here as hemp. Much of the land match-tax because he had invented the was under sweet potato cultivation, and punning "Ex luce lucellum," as the motto every household seemed to possess a few to be placed upon the stamps. People pigs, of the very superior and stereotyped bore his contempt, but they could not bear Hainan variety, black as to the upper and his self-adulation, and so in the end he white as to the lower part of the body, fell fell more completely and suddenly with a dividing line of grey running along than any other man of his time who had the side from the snout to the tail. These risen so high. In 1880 he was sent to the wholesome-looking pigs are fattened on House of Lords and to him the Upper the sweet potato, and do not rely for susChamber was no better than a tomb. A tenance upon precarious scavengering, as man of splendid intellectual force, of great is the case with the repulsive and uneloquence, of gifts many and precious, but cleanly animals of north China. Land utterly lacking in that insight into char- contiguous to the river is irrigated by acter which flows from sympathy, and ab- enormous wheels, forty feet in diameter, solutely devoid of that spirit of reverence of very ingenious construction, moved by which is the hall-mark of the truly wise, the current, needing no attention, and disMr. Lowe was destined after achieving a charging perhaps one hundred gallons of wondrous triumph to see his inferiors pass water in a minute into the trough above, him in the race, and to spend an old age day and night without intermission. He of impotent regrets. passed several large pottery establishments; but as at the New Year all business and cultivation are suspended for a few days, the opportunity was not a very good one for gathering precise information. The temperature during the week ranged between 50° and 60° F. Game seemed plentiful everywhere, and he mentions that a German resident has recently made a very fine collection of about four hundred Hainan birds, embracing one hundred and fifty-four species, which will shortly be on their way to a Berlin Museum. One of the commonest birds in the river is a spotted white and black kingfisher of large size. Amongst the trees which attracted his attention was one locally called the "great-leafed banyan,” which looks remarkably like the guttapercha tree; the natives seem to use its gum mixed with gambier, in order to make that dye "fast; " but there is some doubt whether it is not the sap of the real banyan-tree which is used for the purpose. A very strong silk is made from the grub called the celestial silkworm," or, locally, "paddy-insect." This grub is found on a sort of maple. When fullgrown it is thrown into boiling vinegar, on which the "head" of the gut, or "silk," appears; this is sharply torn out with both hands drawn apart, and is as long as the space between them, say five feet; it is so strong that one single thread of it is sufficient to make a line with which to catch the smaller kinds of fish.

HAINAN.

From Nature.

THE great island of Hainan, off the south-eastern coast of China, is but little known to Europeans, although since 1877 there has been a treaty port there. Mr. Parker, the consul at Kiungchow, the port in question, lately made a short journey in the interior of the island, of which he gives some account in a recent report. He travelled about sixty miles up the Poh-Chung River, to within a mile or two of Pah-hi, which is, at most seasons of the year, considered the limit of navigation for all but the smallest craft. He walked round the walls of Ting-an city, one of the disturbed districts during the recent rebellions, on New Year's day (February 9); they are just one mile in circuit, and differ little from those of other Chinese cities. Wherever he had an opportunity of walking diametrically across lengthy curves of the river he found the inclosed

area

to be extremely well cultivated; though not so flat, its general appearance recalled many features of the Tonquin delta, especially in its great wealth of bamboos. The productions of the soil are much the same, the papaw, areca-palm, sweet potato, turnip, ground-nut, orangetree, etc.; but a peculiar Hainan feature

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