'being his proposed extinction of the instincts of compe'tition and self-help '-would not even touch the actual causes of poverty, let us consider whether such a revolution can be regarded as a possible cure for it. We may grant at once that, under certain imaginable circumstances, it would be; but those imaginable circumstances would include other revolutions in the human being in addition to those that Mr. Whiteing so resolutely advocates. It is imaginable that the congenitally strong and the congenitally industrious might be persuaded to give to the congenitally stupid and the congenitally idle everything that they are too stupid and idle to make or to provide for themselves; but unless this remedy is to increase the evil it is designed to cure human nature must be altered not only by eradicating our selfishness, but by also eradicating a tendency in it which at present is universal, and which practically incapacitates a man from ever doing for himself anything which he can securely count on another man's doing for him. If Mr. Whiteing could accomplish all this, if he could make man's moral nature something totally different from what it is, there would no doubt result from the change a society totally different from anything that at present exists, and from anything that has ever existed. But if he considers that changes of such a radical kind are practicable, he might propose to accomplish his object in a considerably simpler way. Instead of revolutionising men's moral qualities, he might equalise their mental or quadruple their physical capacities. He might endow every one with the genius of a Columbus, a Watt, or an Edison. He might give them all wings; he might give them twenty hands; instead of providing them with fuel he might make them impervious to cold. All these changes would be easier and shorter cuts to the abolition of the pains of poverty than the revolution of their moral natures. Mr. Whiteing admits that the moral nature of mankind has never fundamentally changed from the dawn of history to to-day. What grounds has he for supposing that it will be fundamentally changed now? The operation of the human desires can be doubtless greatly modified--greatly for the worse, greatly also for the better, just as the body is susceptible of various degrees of health. But though a sick man may be made healthy, and a healthy man may be made sick, the respective functions of the organs always remain the same; the saint's mouth and the murderer's mouth are both between the nose and chin; and precisely the same truth holds good of the human

character. It can be indefinitely modified, as we see in the case of the sexual instincts, but it can never be fundamentally changed. If the sexual instincts had undergone no modifications, men to-day would be no better than monkeys. If the sexual instincts had been extinguished, as Mr. Whiteing proposes to extinguish the instinct of self-help, there would be to-day no men in existence. As soon as we lose the instinct to help ourselves we shall have but few resources out of which we may help others.

Mr. Whiteing's views, therefore, of the existing conditions of society, of the nature and origin of its evils, of the means by which its evils may be remedied, bear no relation as a whole to facts or possibilities at all. It may, then, be asked why we have been at some pains to examine them, and to this question we must give two separate answers. Our first answer is, that though Mr. Whiteing's views are absolutely false as a whole, yet they are urged as a whole with an earnestness, with a sincere conviction, and with what many readers will feel to be a singular persuasiveness, and are interspersed with observations and descriptions, individually true and accurate, which tend, in the eyes of the inexperienced, to render these views plausible. Now such views as Mr. Whiteing's, in proportion to their plausibility, are mischievous; they tend not so much to awaken social sympathy as to inflame it, to produce a fever of mind rather than a healthy activity, and to disqualify a man from dealing with poverty in proportion as they fix his attention on it. We have therefore thought it our duty to examine them with some minuteness, in order to exhibit to the reader their absolutely inisleading character.

But, in addition to this reason for doing so, we have also another. In examining these views we have examined them with constant reference to the character and capacities of the author who puts them forward, and besides pointing out how inaccurate these views are, it has been our purpose to consider a yet more important question-the question of How is it that the author has come to hold them? We call this question important because, as we have said already, Mr. Whiteing is a type-and a highly favourable type of a section of the community whose influence is often great. He is a type of a peculiar section of the English middle class which is distinguished less by any special intellectual qualities than it is by what we may call an idiosyncrasy of moral temperament. Its members for the most part are thoughtful and educated persons, and some of them have

mental gifts of a very high order; but it is not such gifts alone that make them a peculiar people. What makes them peculiar is the fact that associated with their mental gifts are a peculiar susceptibility to certain kinds of emotion and an exceptional pertinacity of purpose, which developes itself when their emotions are roused. These emotions are all of a marked and well-known character. They are essentially on the side of what those persons who feel them believe to be the right, or, as they usually call it, righteousness, and an element of right or righteousness invariably forms a part of them. But invariably also, together with this element of right, is a chronic disposition to believe that the world in general is wrong. It is a disposition which keeps them in continual readiness to protest, to point out evils, to denounce them, to make the most of them, and to lay them to the charge of those whose temperaments are different from their own. In itself this combination of emotion and instinctive protest, though it would of necessity often result in unfairness, might often be productive of far more good than evil, and would have, at all events, no general tendency to be mischievous, if to any efficient degree it were controlled by an impartial intellect. But this is precisely the thing that fails to happen. The persons to whom we are now alluding are, as we said just now, for the most part persons of active and educated minds. They are men of reading and observation, they are often skilful in argument, they have the mental capacities necessary for forming sound judgements; but their emotions. and the spirit of protest-which is a form of emotion-are so strong in them that, instead of being controlled by reason and adjusting their conclusions to what it tells them, it is not by their reason, but by their emotions, that they allow their conclusions to be shaped, and they merely employ their reason the conclusions having been settled already-to make out a formal case for them, and support them by an appeal to facts.

It is of persons who feel, who argue, who convince themselves thus, and who, being convinced themselves, endeavour to influence others, that Mr. Whiteing offers so interesting and so complete an example, and he is an example which he himself has enabled us to examine and analyse. His books are, as it were, working models of his own personality, and they show us that type of personality in its strongest and its weakest parts. Though we cannot regard him as a first-class writer, his writings show us, as we have taken

pains to explain, that he is not only a well-meaning, but an exceptionally gifted man. He would probably, if his emotions did not enslave his intellect, be an acute social philosopher instead of a blind enthusiast. Of the parliament of philanthropists he might be a shrewd and sagacious member. But his natural sagacity and the natural fairness of his judgement are enslaved by his emotions, and put to inverted uses. His very powers of accurate observation. help to mislead. His whole book, Number 5 John 'Street,' is one prolonged illustration of this fact. The mental and emotional processes exemplified in that book are these: Mr. Whiteing starts with a knowledge, not peculiar to himself, that even in the richest of countries there is a great deal of miserable poverty. Wherever he goes examples of it meet his eye. They touch him profoundly. They excite and fill his imagination, and his imagination gradually represents to him this miserable poverty as so general that nothing rises above it but the riches of the unjustly rich. He then says to himself, 'But 'I will not trust to my feelings; I will see of my own experience if this general poverty be really so miserable 'as I feel it to be.' He accordingly selects a house in one of those London streets which correspond most completely with his idea of what poverty is, and in this house he lives for six weeks, consorting with its inmates and earning his bread as they do. At the end of this period he says, 'Now I know all about it. My emotions told me truly. I have chapter and verse for everything.' He describes his experiences. He gives them to the world as a challenge, and to any one who maintains that his views as to the miseries of the poor are exaggerated, he replies, "I am better qualified to speak about them than you, for, unlike 'you, I have known them and felt them personally.'

6

The whole fallacy of Mr. Whiteing's procedure, and the procedure of those represented by him, is here exemplified. It is a fallacy of a double kind. In the first place, it is reasoning in a circle. His great thesis is that miserable poverty is general that it is not confined to an exceptional part of the population. He studies minutely poverty among the part in which it is admitted to exist; he gives a vivid picture of its misery as he there finds it; and because he has succeeded in showing that it is miserable where it admittedly exists, he imagines himself to have demonstrated that it exists very nearly everywhere. He might as well give us a vivid study of Bedlam, and then

argue that the whole of England was mad. The "two propositions have nothing to do with one another. To show how miserable a part of the population is does nothing to show how large a part of it is miserable. In the second place, even when dealing with the nature of the admitted misery, Mr. Whiteing-though here he has done his best to be accurate-is prevented by the strength of his emotions from being as accurate as he might be. The tears in his eyes make him see double. He not only sees John Street as its habitual inhabitants see it, but he sees it also as it is seen by a stranger with different habits and standards. He sees it as an Egyptian might see the life of the Esquimaux if he were suddenly taken from the Nile to the North Pole. Such a man would not only see that the North Pole is colder than Egypt-he would imagine that the natives felt it to be as cold as he did. Thus even the more accurate part of Mr. Whiteing's observations is exaggerated. His description of John Street presents us with a confusion of two different and distinct contentions. One is that its inhabitants are pitiable because their own condition revolts them; another is that they are miserable for the precisely opposite reason-that it does not revolt them as much as it revolts him. Both contentions may, in part, be equally true; but they are contentions which deal with distinct sets of phenomena, and to give either its value the two ought to be separated. In Mr. Whiteing's case, however, this error is trivial-though it is not so in the case of many writers of similar sympathies-compared with the error he commits in taking the part for the whole, and fancying that because he has shown how really deplorable is the condition of a fraction of the population, he has shown that it is common to the larger part of the remainder. That he should be capable of fancying this will to many people seem incredible; but a similar mental procedure is the distinguishing characteristic of the whole class of social reformers to which Mr. Whiteing belongs. Susceptible as they are to human wrong and suffering, they have an irresistible tendency to confuse the intensity of suffering with its extent. Because they feel that it is impossible to exaggerate the one, they are led to think that it is impossible to exaggerate the other; and so possessed are they by this conviction, that if anybody cooler-headed than themselves presumes to tell them that any social evil, horrible though it may be in itself, is relatively small in extent, they denounce such a critic as an indifferentist, who