 Section 25 of a History of Our Own Times, Vol. 2 by Justin McCarthy. On February 15, 1855, Lord Palmerston wrote to his brother. A month ago, if any man had asked me to say what was one of the most improbable events, I should have said my being Prime Minister. Aberdeen was there, Darby was head of one great party, John Russell of the other, and yet in about ten days' time they all gave way like straws before the wind, and so here am I writing to you from Downing Street as First Lord of the Treasury. No doubt Lord Palmerston was sincere in the expression of surprise which we have quoted, that there were not many other men in the country who felt in the least astonished at the turn of events by which he had become Prime Minister. Indeed, it had long become apparent to almost everyone that his assuming that place was only a question of time. The country was in that mood that it would absolutely have somebody at the head of affairs who knew his own mind and saw his way clearly before him. When the Coalition Ministry broke down, Lord Darby was invited by the Queen to form a government. He tried and failed. He did all in his power to accomplish the task with which the Queen had entrusted him. He invited Lord Palmerston to join him, and it was intimated that if Palmerston consented Mr. Disraeli would waive all claim to the leadership of the House of Commons in order that Palmerston should have that place. Lord Darby also offered, through Lord Palmerston, places in his administration to Mr. Gladston and Mr. Sidney Herbert. Palmerston did not see his way to join a Darby administration, and without him Lord Darby could not go on. The Queen then sent for Lord John Russell, but Russell's late and precipitate retreat from his office had discredited him with most of his former colleagues, and he found that he could not get a government together. Lord Palmerston was then, to use his own phrase, l'inévitable. There was not much change in the personnel of the ministry. Lord Aberdeen was gone, and Lord Palmerston took his place, and Lord Panmua, who had formerly as Fox Mall administered the affairs of the army, succeeded the Duke of Newcastle. Lord Panmua, however, combined in his own person the functions up to that time absurdly separated of secretary at war and secretary for war. The secretary at war under the old system was not one of the principal secretaries of state. He was merely the officer by whom the regular communication was kept up between the war office and the ministry, and has been described as the civil officer of the army. The secretary for war was commonly entrusted with the colonial department as well. The two war offices were now made into one. It was hoped by this change great benefit would come to our whole army system. Lord Palmerston acted energetically, too, in sending out a sanitary commission to the Crimea, and a commission to superintend the commissariat, a department that almost more than any other had broken down. Nothing could be more strenuous than the terms in which Lord Palmerston recommended the sanitary commission to Lord Raglan. He requested that Lord Raglan would give the commissioners every assistance in his power. They will, of course, be opposed and thwarted by the medical officers, by the men who have charge of the port arrangements, and by those who have the cleaning of the camp. Their mission will be ridiculed and their recommendations and directions set aside, unless enforced by the peremptory exercise of your authority. But that authority I must request you to exert in the most peremptory manner for the immediate and exact carrying into execution whatever changes of arrangement they may recommend. For these are matters on which depend the health and lives of many hundreds of men, I may indeed say, of thousands. Lord Palmerston was strongly pressed by some of the more strenuous reformers of the House. Mr. Layard, who had acquired some celebrity before in a very different field, as a discoverer, that is to say in the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, was energetic and incessant in his attacks on the administration of the war, and was not disposed even now to give the new government a moment's rest. Mr. Layard was a man of a certain rough ability, immense self-sufficiency, and indomitable egotism. He was not in any sense an eloquent speaker. He was singularly wanting in all the graces of style and manner. But he was fluent. He was vociferous. He never seemed to have a moment's doubt on any conceivable question. He never admitted that there could by any possibility be two sides to any matter of discussion. He did really know a great deal about the East at a time when the habit of traveling in the East was comparatively rare. He stamped down all doubt or difference of view with the overbearing dogmatism of Sir Walter Scott's touchwood, or of the proverbial man who has been there and ought to know. And he wasn't many respects admirably fitted to be the spokesman of all those, and they were not a few, who saw that things had been going wrong without exactly seeing why, and were eager that something should be done, although they did not clearly know what. Lord Palmerston strove to induce the House not to press for the appointment of the committee recommended in Mr. Robuck's motion. The government, he said, would make the needful inquiries themselves. He reminded the House of Richard II's offer to lead the men of the fallen tylors in surrection himself, and in the same spirit he offered on the part of the government to take the lead in every necessary investigation. Mr. Robuck, however, would not give way, and Lord Palmerston yielded to a demand which had undoubtedly the support of a vast force of public opinion. The constant argument of Mr. Layard had some sense in it. The government, now an office, was very much like the government in which the House had declared so lately that it had no confidence. It could hardly therefore be expected that the House should accept its existence as guarantee enough that everything should be done which its predecessor had failed to do. Lord Palmerston gave way, but his unavoidable concession brought on a new ministerial crisis. Sir James Graham, Mr. Gladston, and Mr. Sidney Herbert declined to hold office any longer. They had opposed the motion for an inquiry most gravely and strenuously, and they would not lend any countenance to it by remaining in office. Sir Charles Wood succeeded Sir James Graham as First Lord of the Admiralty. Lord John Russell took the place of Secretary of the Colonies, vacated by Sidney Herbert, and Sir George Cornwall Lewis followed Mr. Gladston as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Meanwhile, new negotiations for peace set on foot under the influence of Austria had been begun at Vienna, and Lord John Russell had been sent there to represent the interests of England. The conference opened at Vienna under circumstances that might have seemed especially favorable to peace. We had got a new ally, a state not indeed commanding any great military strength, but full of energy and ambition, and representing more than any other perhaps the tendencies of liberalism and the operation of the comparatively new principle of the rights of nationalities. This was the little kingdom of Sardinia, whose government was then under the control of one of the master spirits of modern politics, a man who belonged to the class of the Richeliers and Orange-Williams, the illustrious Count Cavuer. Sardinia, it may be frankly said, did not come into the alliance because of any particular sympathies that she had with one side or the other of the quarrel between Russia and the Western powers. She went into the war in order that she might have a locus standee in the councils of Europe from which to set forth her grievances against Austria. In the marvelous history of the uprise of the Kingdom of Italy, there is a good deal over which to use the words of Carlisle, morality is not a few must shriek aloud. It would not be easy to defend on high moral principles the policy which struck into a war without any particular care for either side of the controversy, but only to serve an ulterior and personal, that is to say, national purpose. But regarding the policy merely by the light of its results, it must be owned that it was singularly successful and entirely justified the expectations of Cavuer. The Crimean War laid the foundations of the Kingdom of Italy. That was one fact calculated to inspire hopes of a peace. The greater the number and strength of the allies, the greater obviously the pressure upon Russia and the probability of her listening to reason. But there was another event of a very different nature, the effect of which seemed at first likely to be all in favor of peace. This was the death of the man whom the United Public opinion of Europe regarded as the author of the war. On March 2, 1855, the Emperor Nicholas of Russia died of pulmonary apoplexy after an attack of influenza. In other days it would have been said he had died of a broken heart. Perhaps the description would have been more strictly true than the terms of the medical report. It was doubtless the effect of utter disappointment, of the wreck and ruin of hopes to which a life's ambition had been directed, and a life's energy dedicated, which left that frame of adamant open to the sudden dart of sickness. One of the most remarkable illustrations of an artist's genius devoted to a political subject was the cartoon which appeared in Punch and which was called Generale Vévrier, turned traitor. The Emperor Nicholas had boasted that Russia had two generals on whom she could always rely, Generale Jean Vieux and Generale Vévrier. And now the English artist represented General February, a skeleton in Russian uniform, turning traitor and laying his bony ice-cold hand on the heart of the Sovereign and betraying him to the tomb. But indeed it was not General February alone who doomed Nicholas to death. The Tsar died of broken hopes, of the recklessness that comes from defeat and despair. He took no precautions against cold and exposure. He treated with a magnanimous disdain the remonstrances of his physicians and his friends, as of Max Piccolomini and Schiller's noble play, so of him, men whispered that he wished to die. The Alma was to him what Austerlitz was to pit. From the moment when the news of that defeat was announced to him, he no longer seemed to have hope of the campaign. He took the story of the defeat very much as Lord North took the surrender of Cornwallis as if a bullet had struck him. As forth he was like one whom the old scotch phrase would describe as fay, one who moved, spoke, and lived under the shadow of coming death until the death came. The news of the sudden death of the emperor created a profound sensation in England. Mr Bright at Manchester shortly after rebuked what he considered an ignoble levity in the manner of commenting on the event among some of the English journals, but it is right to say that on the whole nothing could have been more decorous and dignified than the manner in which the English public generally received the news that the country's great enemy was no more. At first there was, as we have said, a common impression that Nicholas's son and successor, Alexander II, would be more anxious to make peace than his father had been. But this hope was soon gone. The news are could not venture to show himself to his people in a less patriotic light than his predecessor. The prospects of the allies were at the time remarkably gloomy. There must have seemed, to the new Russian emperor, considerable ground for the hope that disease and cold and bad management would do more harm to the army of England at least than any Russian general could do. The conference at Vienna proved a failure, and even in some respects a fiasco. Lord John Russell sent to Vienna as our representative was instructed that the object he must hold in view was the admission of Turkey into the great family of European states. For this end there were four principal points to be considered. The condition of the Danubian provinces, the free navigation of the Danube, the limitation of Russian supremacy in the Black Sea, and the independence of the port. It was on the attempt to limit Russian supremacy in the Black Sea that the negotiations became a failure. Russia would not consent to any proposal which would really have the desired effect. She would agree to an arrangement between Turkey and herself, but this was exactly what the Western powers were determined not to allow. She declined to have the strength of her navy restricted and proposed as a counter resolution that the straits should be opened to the war flags of all nations, so that if Russia were strong as a naval power in the Black Sea, other powers might be just as strong if they thought fit. Lord Palmerston, in a letter to Lord John Russell, dryly characterized this proposition involving, as it would, the maintenance by England and France of permanent fleets in the Black Sea to counterbalance the fleet of Russia as a mauvaise plaisanterie. Lord Palmerston indeed believed no more in the sincerity of Austria throughout all these transactions than he did in that of Russia. The conference proved a total failure, and in its failure it involved a good deal of the reputation of Lord John Russell. Like the French representative, Monsieur Drourand de Louis, Lord John Russell had been taken by the proposals of Austria and had supported them in the first instance. But when the government at home would not have them, he was still induced to remain a member of the cabinet, and even to condemn in the House of Commons the recommendations he had supported at Vienna. He was charged by Mr. Disraeli with having encouraged the Russian pretensions by declaring at a critical point of the negotiations that he was disposed to favor whatever arrangement would best preserve the honour of Russia. What has the representative of England, Mr. Disraeli indignantly asked, to do with the honour of Russia? Lord John Russell had indeed a fair reply. He could say with justice and good sense that no settlement was likely to be lasting which simply forced conditions upon a great power like Russia without taking any account of what is considered among nations to be her honour. But he was not able to give any satisfactory explanation of his having approved the conditions in Vienna which he afterwards condemned in Westminster. He explained in Parliament that he did in the first instance regard the Austrian propositions as containing the possible basis of a satisfactory and lasting peace, but that as the government would not hear of them he had rejected them against his own judgment, and that he had afterwards been converted to the opinion of his colleagues and believed them inadmissible in principle. This was a sort of explanation more likely to alarm than to reassure the public. What manner of danger it was asked on all sides may we not be placed in when our representatives do not know their own minds as to proper terms of peace, when they have no opinion of their own upon the subject, but are loud in approval of certain conditions one day which they are equally loud in condemning the next. There was a general impression throughout England that some of our statesmen in office had never been sincerely in favour of the war from the first, that even still they were cold, doubtful and half-hearted about it, and that the honour of the country was not safe in such hands. The popular instinct whether it was right as to facts or not was perfectly sound as to inferences. We may honour in many instances, we must honour, the conscientious scruples of a public man who distrust the objects and has no faith in the results of some war in which his people are engaged, but such a man has no business in the government which has the conduct of the war. The men who are to carry on a war must have no doubt of its rightfulness of purpose and must not be eager to conclude it on any terms. In the very interests of peace itself they must be resolute to carry on the war until it has reached the end they sought for. Lord John Russell's remaining in office after these disclosures was practically impossible. Sir E. B. Lytton gave notice of a direct vote of censure on the minister charged with the negotiations at Vienna, but Russell anticipated the certain effect of a vote in the House of Commons by resigning his office. This step at least extricated his colleagues from any share in the censure, although the recriminations that passed on the occasion in Parliament were many and bitter. The vote of censure was however withdrawn. Sir William Molesworth, one of the most distinguished of the school who were since called Philosophical Radicals, succeeded him as Colonial Secretary, and the ministry carried one or two triumphant votes against Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Roebuck, and other opponents, or at least unfriendly critics. Meanwhile, the Emperor of the French and his wife had paid a visit to London, and had been received with considerable enthusiasm. The Queen seems to have been very favourably impressed by the Emperor. She sincerely admired him, and believed in his desire to maintain peace as far as possible, and to do his best for the promotion of liberal principles and sound economic doctrines throughout Europe. The beauty and grace of the Empress likewise won over Queen Victoria. The Prince consort seems to have been less impressed. He was indeed a believer in the sincerity and good disposition of the Emperor, but he found him strangely ignorant on most subjects, even the modern political history of England and France. During the visit of the royal family of England to France, and now while the Emperor and Empress were in London, the same impression appears to have been left in the mind of the Prince consort. He also seems to have noticed a certain barric room flavour about the Emperor's entourage, which was not agreeable to his own ideas of dignity and refinement. The Prince consort appears to have judged the Emperor almost exactly as we know now that Prince Bismarck did then, and as impartial opinion has judged him everywhere in Europe since that time. The operations in the Crimea were renewed with some vigor. The English army lost much by the death of its brave and manly Commander-in-Chief Lord Raglan. He was succeeded by General Simpson, who had recently been sent out to the Crimea as Chief of the Staff, and who his administration during the short time that he held the command was at least well qualified to keep Lord Raglan's memory green and to prevent the regret for his death from losing any of its keenness. The French army had lost its first commander long ago. The versatile, reckless, brilliant soldier of fortune, Saint-Augneau, whose broken health had from the opening of the campaign prevented him from displaying any of the qualities which his earlier career gave men reason to look for under his command. After Saint-Augneau's death the command was transferred for a while to General Conrobert, who finding himself hardly equal to the task, resigned it in favor of General Pellicier. The Sardinian contingent had arrived and had given admirable proof of his courage and discipline. On August 16, 1855 the Russians under General Leprondi made a desperate effort to raise the siege of Sebastopol by an attack on the Allied forces. The attack was skillfully planned during the night and was made in great strength. The French divisions had to bear the principal weight of the attack but the Sardinian contingent also had a prominent place in the resistance and bore themselves with splendid bravery and success. The attempt of the Russians was completely foiled and all northern Italy was thrown into wild delight by the news that the flag of Piedmont had been carried to victory over the troops of one great European power and side by side with those of two others. The unanimous voice of the country now approved and acclaimed the policy of Kavuar, which had been sanctioned only by a very narrow majority, had been denounced from all sides as reckless and senseless and had been carried out in the face of the most tremendous difficulties. It was the first great illustration of Kavuar's habitual policy of blended audacity and cool far-seeing judgment. It is a curious fact that the suggestion to send Sardinian troops to the Crimea did not originate in Kavuar's own busy brain. The first thought of it came up in the mind of a woman, Kavuar's niece. The great statesman was struck with the idea from the moment when she suggested it. He thought it over deeply, resolved to adopt it, and carried it to triumphant success. Of Section XXV. The repulse of the Chernaya was a heavy, indeed a fatal, stroke for the Russians. The siege had been progressing for some time with considerable activity. The French had drawn their lines nearer and nearer to the besieged city. The Russians, however, had also been throwing up fresh works, which brought them nearer to the lines of the Allies, and sometimes made the latter seem as if they were the besieged rather than the besiegers. The Malikov Tower and the Mamalan Battery in front of it became the scenes and the objects of constant struggle. The Russians made desperate night sorties again and again and were always repulsed. On June 7th the English assaulted the quarries in front of the Rodin and the French attacked the Mamalan. The attack on both sides was successful, but it was followed on the 18th of the same month by a desperate and wholly unsuccessful attack on the Rodin and the Malikov batteries. There was some misapprehension on the side of the French commander, which led to a lack of precision and unity in the carrying out of the Enterprise, and it became therefore a failure on the part of both the Allies. A pompous and exalting address was issued by Prince Gorchikov, in which he informed the Russian army that the enemy had been beaten, driven back with enormous loss, and announced that the hour was approaching when the pride of the enemy will be lowered, their armies swept from our soil like chaff blown away by the wind. On September 5th the Allies made an attack almost simultaneously upon the Malikov and the Rodin. It was agreed that as soon as the French had got possession of the Malikov the English should attack the Rodin, the hoisting of the French flag on the former fort to be the signal for our men to move. The French were brilliantly successful in their part of the attack, and in a quarter of an hour from the beginning of the attempt the flag of the Empire was floating on the parapets. The English then at once advanced upon the Rodin, but it was a very different task from that which the French had had to undertake. The French were near the Malikov, the English were very far away from the Rodin. The distance our soldiers had to traverse left them almost helplessly exposed to the Russian fire. They stormed the parapets of the Rodin despite all the difficulties of their attack, but they were not able to hold the place. The attacking party was far too small in numbers, reinforcements did not come in time, the English held their own for an hour against odds that might have seemed overwhelming, but it was simply impossible for them to establish themselves in the Rodin and the remnant of them that could withdraw had to retreat to the trenches. It was only the old story of the war. Superb courage and skill of officers and men, outrageously bad generalship. The attack might have been renewed that day, but the English commander-in-chief, General Simpson declared with naivete that the trenches were too crowded for him to do anything. Thus the attack failed because there were too few men and could not be renewed because there were too many. The cautious commander resolved to make another attempt the next morning, but before the morrow came there was nothing to attack. The Russians withdrew during the night from the south side of Sebastopol. A bridge of boats had been constructed across the bay to connect the north and the south sides of the city, and across this bridge Prince Gorchikov quietly withdrew his troops. The bombardment kept up by the Allies had been so terrible and so close for several days, and their long-range guns were so entirely superior to anything possessed by or indeed known to the Russians, that the defenses of the south side were being irreparably destroyed. The Russian general felt that it would be impossible for him to hold the city much longer, and that to remain there was only useless waste of life. But as he said in his own dispatch, it is not Sebastopol which we have left to them, but the burning ruins of the town which we ourselves set fire to, having maintained the honor of the defense in such a manner that our great-grandchildren may recall with pride remembrance of it and send it on to all posterity. It was some time before the Allies could venture to enter the abandoned city. The arsenals and powder magazines were exploding, the flames were bursting out of every public building and every private house. The Russians had made of Sebastopol another Moscow. With the close of that long siege which had lasted nearly a year, the war may be said to have ended. The brilliant episode of Kars, its splendid defense and its final surrender was brought to its conclusion indeed after the fall of Sebastopol. But although it naturally attracted peculiar attention in this country, it could have no effect on the actual fortunes of such a war. Kars was defended by Colonel Fenwick Williams, an English officer, who had been sent all too late to reorganize the Turkish forces in Armenia after they had suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of the Russians. Never probably had a man a more difficult task than that which fell to the lot of Williams. He had to contend against official stupidity, corruption, delay. He could get nothing done without having first to remove whole mountains of obstruction and to quicken into life and movement and apathy which seemed like that of a paralyzed system. He concentrated his efforts at last upon the defense of Kars and he held the place against overwhelming Russian forces and against an enemy far more appalling, starvation himself. With his little garrison he repelled a tremendous attack of the Russian army under General Moravyev in a battle that lasted nearly seven hours and as the result of which the Russians left on the field more than five thousand dead. He had to surrender at last to famine. But the very articles of surrender to which the conqueror consented became the trophy of Williams and his men. The garrison were allowed to leave the place with all the honors of war and as a testimony to the valorous resistance made by the garrison of Kars the officers of all ranks are to keep their swords. Williams and his English companions Colonel Lake, Major Teasdale, Major Thompson, and Dr. Sandwith had done as much for the honor of their country at the close of the war as Butler and Naismith had done at its opening. The curtain of that great drama rose and fell upon a splendid scene of English heroism. The war was virtually over. Austria had been exerting herself throughout its progress in the interests of peace and after the fall of Sebastopol she made a new effort with greater success. Two of the belligerents were indeed now anxious to be out of the struggle almost on any terms. These were France and Russia. The new emperor of Russia was not a man personally inclined for war nor had he his father's overbearing and indomitable temper. He could not but see that his father had greatly overrated the military strength and resources of his country. He had accepted the war only as a heritage of necessary evil with little hope of any good to come of it to Russia and he welcomed any chance of ending it on fair terms. France or at least her emperor was all but determined to get back again into peace. If England had held out it is highly probable that she would have had to do so alone. For this indeed Lord Palmerston was fully prepared as a last resource sooner than submit to terms which he considered unsatisfactory. He said so and he meant it. I can fancy, Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord Clarendon in his bright good humored way, how I should be hooded in the House of Commons if I were to get up and say that we had agreed to an imperfect and unsatisfactory arrangement. I had better beforehand take the Chiltern Hundreds. Lord Palmerston, however, had no occasion to take the Chiltern Hundreds. The Congress of Paris opened on February 26, 1856, and on March 30th the Treaty of Peace was signed by the plenipotentiaries of the Great Powers. Russia had been admitted to the Congress, which therefore represented England, France, Austria, Prussia, Turkey, and Sardinia. The treaty began by declaring that cars was to be restored to the Sultan, and that Sebastopol and all other places taken by the Allies were to be given back to Russia. The Sublime Port was admitted to participate in all the advantages of the public law and system of Europe. The other powers engaged to respect the independence and territorial integrity of Turkey. They guaranteed in common the strict observance of that engagement, and announced that they would in consequence consider any act tending to a violation of it as a question of general interest. The Sultan issued a Furman for ameliorating the condition of his Christian subjects, and communicated to the other powers the purposes of the Furman, emanating spontaneously from his sovereign will. No right of interference, it was distinctly specified, was given to the other powers by this concession on the Sultan's part. The article of the treaty which referred to the Black Sea is of a special importance. The Black Sea is neutralized, its waters and its ports, thrown open to the mercantile marine of every nation, are formally and in perpetuity interdicted to the flag of war, either of the powers possessing its coasts or of any other power, with the exceptions mentioned in Articles 14 and 19. The exceptions only reserved the right of each of the powers to have the same number of small armed vessels in the Black Sea to act as a sort of maritime police and to protect the coasts. The Sultan and the Emperor engaged to establish and maintain no military or maritime arsenals in that sea. The navigation of the Danube was thrown open. In exchange for the towns restored to him in an order more fully to secure the navigation of the Danube, the Emperor consented to a certain rectification of his frontier in Bessarabia, the territory ceded by Russia to be annexed to Moldavia, under the suzerainty of the port. Moldavia and Wallachia, continuing under the suzerainty of the Sultan, were to enjoy all the privileges and immunities they already possessed under the guarantee of the contracting powers but with no separate right of intervention in their affairs. The existing position of Serbia was assured. A convention respecting the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus was made by all the powers. By this convention, the Sultan maintained the ancient rule prohibiting ships of war of foreign powers from entering the straits so long as the port is at peace. During time of peace, the Sultan engaged to admit no foreign ships of war into the Bosphorus or the Dardanelles. The Sultan reserved to himself the right as in former times of delivering firmens of passage for light vessels under the flag of war implored in the service of foreign powers that is to say of their diplomatic missions. A separate convention asked the Black Sea between Russia and Turkey agreed that the contracting parties should have in that sea six light steam vessels of not more than 800 tons and four steam or sailing vessels of not more than 200 tons each. Thus the controversies about the Christian provinces, the straits, and the Black Sea were believed to be settled. The great central business of the Congress, however, was to assure the independence and the territorial integrity of Turkey now admitted to a place in the family of European states. As it did not seem clear to those most particularly concerned in bringing about this result, that the arrangements adopted in full Congress had been sufficient to guarantee Turkey from the enemy they most feared, there was a tripartite treaty afterwards agreed to between England, France, and Austria. This document bears date in Paris, April 15th, 1856. By it, the contracting parties guaranteed jointly and severally the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire, and declared that any infraction of the general treaty of March 30th would be considered by them a cause's belly. It is probable that not one of the three contracting parties was quite sincere in the making of this treaty. It appears to have been done at the instigation of Austria, much less for the sake of Turkey, than an order that she might have some understanding of a special kind with some of the great powers, and thus avoid the semblance of isolation which she now especially dreaded, having Russia to fear on the one side, and seeing Italy already raising its head on the other. England did not particularly care about the tripartite treaty which was pressed upon her, and which she accepted, trusting that she might never have to act upon it, and France accepted it without any liking for it, probably without the least intention of ever acting on it. The Congress was also the means of bringing about a treaty between England and France, and Sweden. By this engagement, Sweden undertook not to cede to Russia any part of her present territories or any rights of fishery, and the two other powers agreed to maintain Sweden by force against aggression. The Congress of Paris was remarkable too for the fact that the plenipotentiaries before separating came to an agreement on the subject of the right of search and the rules generally of maritime war. They agreed to the four following declarations. First, prefeteering is and remains abolished. Second, the neutral flag covers enemies' goods with the exception of contraband of war. Third, neutral goods with the exception of contraband of war are not liable to capture under an enemy's flag. Fourth, blockades in order to be binding must be effective, that is to say, maintained by a force sufficient really to prevent access to the enemy's coast. At the opening of the war Great Britain had already virtually given up the claims she once made against neutrals, and which were indeed untenable in the face of modern civilization. She gladly agreed therefore to ratify so far as her declaration went, the doctrines which would abolish forever the principle upon which those and kindred claims once rested. It was agreed, however, that the rules adopted at the Congress of Paris should only be binding on those states that had exceeded or should exceed to them. The government of the United States had previously invited the Great European powers by a circular to assent to the broad doctrine that free ships make free goods. At the instance of England it was answered that the adoption of that doctrine must be conditional, on America's renouncing the right of prefeteering. To this the United States raised some difficulty, and the declarations of the Congress were therefore made without America's assenting to them. With many other questions too the Congress of Paris occupied itself. At the instigation of Count Cavour the condition of Italy was brought under its notice, and there can be no doubt that out of the Congress and the part that Sardinia assumed as representative of Italian nationality came the great succession of events which ended in the establishment of a king of Italy in the palace of the Quirinal. The adjustment of the condition of the Danubian principalities too engaged much attention and discussion, and a highly ingenious arrangement was devised for the purpose of keeping those provinces from actual union so that they might be coherent enough to act as a rampart against Russia without being so coherent as to cause Austria any alarm for her own somewhat disjointed, not to say distracted political system. All these artificial and complex arrangements presently fell to pieces, and the principalities became in the course of no very long time an independent state under a hereditary prince. But for the hour it was hoped that the independence of Turkey and the restriction of Russia, the security of the Christian provinces, the neutrality of the Black Sea, and the closing of the straits against war vessels had been bought by the war. England lost some twenty-four thousand men in the war, of whom hardly a sixth fell in battle or died of wounds. Cholera and other diseases gave grim account of the rest. Forty-one millions of money were added by the campaign to the national debt. Not much it will be seen was there in the way of mere military glory to show for the cost. Our fleets had hardly any chance of making their power felt. The ships of the Allies took Beaumarizont in the Baltic and Kinburn in the Black Sea and bombarded several places, but the war was not one that gave a chance to a Nelson, even if a Nelson had been at hand. Among the accidental and unpleasant consequences of the campaign it is worth mentioning the quarrel in which England became involved with the United States because of our Foreign Enlistment Act. At the close of December, 1854, Parliament hurriedly passed an Act authorizing the formation of a foreign legion for service in the war, and some Swiss and Germans were recruited who never proved of the slightest service. Russia and America both complained that the zeal of our recruiting functionaries outran the limits of discretion and of law. One of our consuls was actually put on trial at Cologne, and America made a serious complaint of the enlistment of her citizens. England apologized, but the United States were out of temper and insisted in sending our Minister Mr. Crampton away from Washington and some little time passed before the friendly relations of the two states were completely restored. So the Crimean War ended. It was one of the unlucky accidents of the hour that the curtain fell on the Crimea upon what may be considered a check to the arms of England. There were not a few in this country who would gladly have seen the peace negotiations fail in order that England might thereby have an opportunity of reasserting her military supremacy in the eyes of Europe. Never during the campaign, nor for a long time before it, had England been in so excellent a condition for war, as she was, when the war-like operations suddenly came to an end. The campaign had indeed only been a training time for us, after the unnerving relaxation of a long peace. We had learned some severe lessons from it, and not unnaturally there were impatient spirits who chafed at the idea of England's having no opportunity of putting these lessons to account. It was but a mere chance that prevented us from accomplishing the capture of the Redan, despite the very serious disadvantages with which we were hampered in our enterprise as compared with our allies and their simultaneous operation. With just a little better general ship the Redan would have been taken. As it was, even with the general ship that we had, the next attempt would not have been likely to fail. But the Russians abandoned Sebastopol, and our principal ally was even more anxious for peace than the enemy, and we had no choice but to accept the situation. The war had never been popular in France. It had never had even that amount of popularity which the French people accorded to their emperors later enterprise, the campaign against Austria. Louis Napoleon had had all he wanted. He had been received into the Society of European Sovereigns and had made what the French public were taught to consider a brilliant campaign. It is surprising to anyone who looks calmly back now on the history of the Crimean War to find when an extravagant amount of credit the French army obtained by its share in the operations. Even in this country it was at the time an almost universal opinion that the French succeeded in everything they tried, that their system was perfect, that their tactics were beyond improvement, that they were a contrast to us in every respect. Much of this absurd delusion was no doubt the result of a condition of things among us which no reasonable Englishmen would exchange for all the imaginary triumphs that a court historiographer ever celebrated. It was due to the fact that our system was open to the criticism of every pen that chose to assail it, not a spot in our military organization escaped detection and exposure. Every detail was keenly criticized, every weakness was laid open to public observation. We invited all the world to see where we were failing and what were the causes of our failure. Our journals did the work for the military system of England that Matthew Arnold says Goethe did for the political and social systems of Europe struck its finger upon the weak places and said, Thou allest here and here. While the official and officious journals of the French Empire were sounding pay ins to the honor of the emperor and his successes, to his generals, his officers, his commissariat, his transport service, his soldiers, his camp, pioneers and all, our leading papers of all shades of politics were only occupied in pointing out defects and blaming those who did not instantly remedy them. Unpatriotic conduct it may be said. I truly, if the conduct of the doctor be unfriendly when he tells that we have the symptoms of failing health and warns us to take some measures for rest and renovation. Some of the criticisms of the English press were undoubtedly inaccurate and rash, but their general effect was bracing, healthful, successful. Their immediate result was that which has already been indicated, to leave the English army at the close of the campaign far better able to undertake prolonged and serious operations of war than it had been at any time during the campaign's continuance. For the effect of the French system on the French army, we should have to come down a little later in history and study the workings of imperialism as they displayed themselves in the confidence, the surprises and the collapse of 1870. Still there was a feeling of disappointment in this country at the close of the war. This was partly due to dissatisfaction with the manner in which we had carried on the campaign and partly to distrust of its political results. Our soldiers had done splendidly, but our generals in our system had done poorly indeed. Only one first class reputation of a military order had come out of the war, and that was by the common consent of the world awarded to a Russian. To General Tothleben, the defender of Sebastopol. No new name was made on our side or on that of the French, and some promising or traditional reputations were shattered. The political results of the war were to many minds equally unsatisfying. We had gone into the enterprise for two things, to restrain the aggressive and aggrandizing spirit of Russia and to secure the integrity and independence of Turkey as a power capable of upholding herself with credit among the states of Europe. Events which happened more than twenty years later will have to be studied before anyone can form a satisfactory opinion as to the degree of success which attended each of these objects. For the present it is enough to say that there was not among thoughtful minds at the time a very strong conviction of success either way. Lord Aberdeen had been modest in his estimate of what the war would do. He had never had any heart in it, and he was not disposed to exaggerate its beneficent possibilities. He estimated that it might perhaps secure peace in the east of Europe for some 25 years. His modest expectation was prophetic. Indeed, it a little overshot the mark. Twenty-two years after the close of the Crimean Campaign, Russia and Turkey were at war again. End of Section 26 Section 27 of a history of our own times Volume 2 by Justin McCarthy. This Librovox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 29. The Literature of the Rain. First Survey. Part 1. The close of the Crimean War is a great landmark in the reign of Queen Victoria. This therefore is a convenient opportunity to cast a glance back upon the literary achievements of a period so markedly divided in political interest from any that went before it. The reign of Queen Victoria is the first in which the constitutional and parliamentary system of government came fairly and completely into recognition. It is also the reign which had the good fortune to witness the great modern development in all that relates to practical invention and more especially in the application of science to the work of making communication rapid between men. On land and ocean, in air and under the sea, the history of rapid travel and rapid interchange of message coincides with that of the present reign. Such a reign ought to have a distinctive literature, so in truth it has. Of course it is somewhat bold to predict long and distinct renown for contemporaries or contemporary schools, but it may perhaps be assumed without any undue amount of speculative venturesomeness that the age of Queen Victoria will stand out in history as the period of a literature as distinct from others as the age of Elizabeth or Anne, although not perhaps equal in greatness to the latter and far indeed below the former. At the opening of Queen Victoria's reign a great race of literary men had come to a close. It is curious to note how sharply and completely the literature of Victoria separates itself from that of the era whose heroes were Scott, Byron, and Wordsworth. Before Queen Victoria came to the throne, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, and Keats were dead. Wordsworth lived indeed for many years after, so did Southey and Moore, and Savage Lander died much later still, but Wordsworth, Southey, Moore, and Lander had completed their literary work before Victoria came to the throne. Not one of them added a cubit or an inch to his intellectual stature from that time. Some of them even did work which distinctly proved that their day was done. A new and fresh breath was soon after breathed into literature. Nothing perhaps is more remarkable about the better literature of the age of Queen Victoria than its complete severance from the leadership of that which had gone before it and its evidence of a fresh and genuine inspiration. It is a somewhat curious fact too, very convenient for the purposes of this history, that the literature of Queen Victoria's time thus far divides itself clearly into two parts. The poets, novelists, and historians who were making their fame with the beginning of the reign had done all their best work and made their mark before these later years and were followed by a new and different school drawing inspiration from wholly different sources and challenging comparison as antagonists rather than disciples. We speak now only of literature. In science the most remarkable developments were reserved for the later years of the reign. We use the words remarkable developments in the historical rather than in the scientific sense. It would be hardly possible to overrate the benefits conferred upon science and the world by some of the scientific men who made the best part of their fame in the earlier years of the reign. Some great names at once start to the memory. We think of Brewster, the experimental philosopher, who combined in so extraordinary a degree the strictest severity of scientific argument and form with a freedom of fancy and imagination which lent picturesqueness to all his illustrations and invested his later writings especially with an indefinable charm. We think of Michael Faraday, the chemist and electrician, who knew so well how to reconcile the boldest researches into the heights and deeps of science with the sincerest spirit of faith and devotion, the memory of whose delightful improvisations on the science he loved to expound must remain forever with all who had the privilege of hearing the unrivaled lecturer deliver his annual discourses at the Royal Institution. It is not likely that the name of Sir John Herschel, a gifted member of a gifted family, would be forgotten by anyone taking even the hastiest glance at the science of our time, a family of whom it may truly be said, as the German prose writer says of his dreaming hero, that their eyes were among the stars and their souls in the blue ether. Richard Owens is, in another field of knowledge, a great renown. Owens has been called the Cuvier of England and the Newton of Natural History, and there cannot be any doubt that his researches and discoveries as an anatomist and paleontologist have marked a distinct era in the development of the study to which he devoted himself. Hugh Miller, the author of The Old Red Sandstone and The Testimony of the Rocks, the devotee, and unfortunately, the martyr of scientific inquiry, brought a fresh and brilliant literary ability almost as untutored and spontaneous as that of his immortal countryman Robert Burns to bear on the exposition of the studies to which he literally sacrificed his life. If, therefore, we say that the later period of Queen Victoria's reign is more remarkable in science than the former, it is not because we would assert that the men of this later day contributed in richer measure to the development of human knowledge and especially of practical science than those of the earlier time. But it was in the later period that the scientific controversy sprang up and the school arose which will be in the historian's sense most closely associated with the epoch. The value of the labors of men, like Owen and Faraday and Rooster, is often to be appreciated thoroughly by scientific students alone. What they have done is to be recorded in the history of science rather than in the general and popular history of a day. But the school of scientific thought which Darwin founded and in which Huxley and Tyndall taught is the subject of a controversy which may be set down as memorable in the history of the world. All science and all common life accepted with gratitude and without contest the contributions made to our knowledge by Faraday and Rooster. But the theories of Darwin divided the scientific world, the religious world, and indeed all society into two hostile camps and so became an event in history which the historian can no more pass over than in telling of the growth of the United States he could omit any mention of the Great Civil War. Even in dealing with the growth of science it is on the story of battles that the attention of the outer world must to the end of time be turned with the keenest interest. This is, one might almost think, a scientific law in itself with which it would be waste of time to quarrel. The earlier part of the reign was richer in literary genius than the later has thus far been. Of course the dividing line which we draw is loosely drawn and may sometimes appear to be capricious. Some of those who won their fame in the earlier part continued active workers, in certain instances steadily adding to their celebrity through the succeeding years. The figure of Thomas Carlisle is familiar still to all who live in the neighborhood of Chelsea. It was late in the reign of Victoria that Stuart Mill came out for the first time on a public platform in London after a life divided between official work and the most various reading and study. A life divided too between the seclusion of Blackheath and the more poetic seclusion of Avignon among the nightingales whose song was afterwards so sweet to his dying years. He came strange and shy into a world which knew him only in his books and to which the gentle and grave demeanor of the shrinking and worn recluse seemed out of keeping with the fearless brain and heart which his career as a thinker proved him to have. The reign had run for forty years when Harriet Martinot was taken from that beautiful and romantic home in the bosom of the Lake Country to which her celebrity had drawn so many famous visitors for so long a time. The renown of Dickens began with the reign and his death was sadly premature when he died in his quaint and charming home at Gadshill in the country of Falstaff and Prince Hall some thirty-three years after. Mrs. Browning passed away very prematurely but it might well be contended that the fame or at least the popularity of Robert Browning belongs to this later part of the reign even though his greatest work belongs to the earlier. The author of the most brilliant and vivid book of travel known in our modern English, Eothen, made a sudden renown in the earlier part of the reign and achieved a new and different sort of repute as the historian of the Crimean War bordering the later part. Still if we take the close of the Crimean War as an event dividing the reign thus far into two parts we shall find that there does seem a tolerably clear division between the literature of the two periods. We have therefore put in this first part of our history the men and women who had distinctly made their mark in these former years and who would have been famous if from that time out they had done nothing more. It is with this division born in mind that we describe the reign as more remarkable in the literature of the earlier and in the science of these later years. It is not rash to say that although poets, historians, and novelists of celebrity came afterwards and may come yet the literature of our time gave its measure as the French phrase is in that earlier period. Alike in its earlier passages and in its later the reign is rich in historical labours. The names of Grote, Macaulay, and Carlisle occur at once to the mind when we survey the former period. Mr. Grote's history of Greece is indeed a monumental piece of work. It has all that patience and exhaustive care which principally mark the German historians and it has an earnestness which is not to be found generally in the representatives of what Carlisle has called the driest dust school. Grote threw himself completely into the life and politics of Athens. It was said of him with some truth that he entered so thoroughly into all the political life of Greece as to become now and then the partisan of this or that public man. His own practical acquaintance with politics was undoubtedly of great service to him. We have all grown somewhat tired of hearing the words of Gibbon quoted in which he tells us that the discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion, and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers, the reader may smile, has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire? Assuredly, the practical knowledge of politics which Grote acquired during the nine or ten years of his parliamentary career was of much service to the historian of Greece. It has been said indeed of him that he never could quite keep from regarding the struggles of parties and Athens, as exactly illustrating the principles disputed between the liberals and the Tories in England. It does not seem to us, however, that his political career affected his historical studies in any way, but by throwing greater vitality and nervousness into his descriptions of Athenian controversies. The difference between a man who is mingled anywhere in the act of life of politics, and one who only knows that life from books and the talk of others, is specially likely to show itself in such a study as Grote's history. His political training enabled Grote to see in the statesmen and soldiers of the Greek peoples men and not trees walking. It taught him how to make the dry bones live. Mr. Grote began life as what would have been called in later years a philosophical radical. He was a close friend of Stuart Mill, although he did not always agree with Mill in his opinions. During his parliamentary career he devoted himself for the most part to the advocacy of the system of vote by ballot. He brought forward a motion on the subject every session as Mr. Charles Villiers did at one time for the repeal of the Corn Laws. He only gave up the House of Commons in order that he might be free to complete his great history. He did not retain all his radical opinions to the end of his life so thoroughly as Mill did, but owned with a certain regret that in many ways his views had undergone modification and that he grew less and less ardent for political change, less hopeful, we may suppose, of the amount of good to be done for human happiness and virtue by the spread and movement of what are now called advanced opinions. It must be owned that it takes a very vigorous and elastic mind to enable a man to resist the growth of that natural and physical tendency toward conservatism or reaction which comes with advancing years. It is as well for society on the whole that this should be so, and that the elders, as a rule, should form themselves into a guard to challenge, very pertinaciously, all the eager claims and demands for change made by hopeful and restless youth. No one would more readily have admitted the advantage that may come from this common law of life than Grotes friend Mill, although Mill remained to the close of his career as full of hope in the movement of liberal opinions as he had been in his boyhood, still, to quote from some noble words of Schiller, reverencing as a man the dreams of his youth. In his later years, Grote withdrew from all connection with active political controversy and was indeed curiously ignorant of the very bearings of some of the greatest questions around the settlement of which the passions and interests of another hemisphere were brought into fierce and vast dispute. We have already had occasion more than once to speak of Macaulay, the great parliamentary debater and statesman. It is the less necessary to say much of him as a historian, for Macaulay will be remembered rather as a man who could do many things brilliantly than as the author of a history. Yet Macaulay's history of England, whatever its defects is surely entitled to rank is a great work. We do not know whether Graves scholars will regard it as to the honor of the book or the reverse, that it was by far the most popular historical essay ever produced by an Englishman. The successive volumes of Macaulay's history of England were run after as the Waverly novels might have been at the zenith of their author's fame. Living England talked for the time of nothing but Macaulay's England. Certainly history had never before in our country been treated in a style so well calculated to render it at once popular, fascinating and fashionable. Every chapter glittered with vivid and highly colored description. On almost every page was found some sentence of glowing eloquence or gleaming antithesis, which at once lent itself to citation and repetition. Not one word of it could have failed to convey its meaning. The whole stood out in an atmosphere clear, bright and incapable of misty illusion as that of a Swiss-Lagan summer. No shade or faint haze of a doubt appeared anywhere. The admirer of Macaulay had all the comfort in his studies that a votary of the Roman Catholic Church may have. He had an infallible guide. He had no need to vex himself with doubt, speculation or even conjecture. This absolute certainty about everything was beyond question one great source of Macaulay's popularity. That resolute conviction which readers of a more intellectual class are especially inclined to distrust has the same charm for the ordinary reader that it has for children who never care to hear any story if they suppose the narrator does not know all about it in such a way as to render question or contradiction impossible. But although this was one of the causes of Macaulay's popularity, it was not the most substantial cause. The brilliancy of his style, the variety and aptness of his illustrations in the animated manner in which he contrived to set his ideas of men, places and events before the reader, these were among the sources of success to which his admirers must look with the greatest satisfaction. It is of late somewhat the fashion to disparage Macaulay. He was a popular idol so long that in the natural course of things it has come to him to have his title to worship or even to faith very generally questioned. To be unreasonably admired by one generation is to incur the certainty of being unreasonably disparaged by the next. The tendency of late is to assume that because Macaulay was brilliant he must necessarily be superficial. But Macaulay was not superficial. He was dogmatic, he was full of prejudice, he was in all respects a better advocate than judge, he was wanting in the calm, impartial, balancing faculty which an historian of the highest class ought to have. But he was not superficial. No man could make out a better and stronger case for any side of a controversy which he was led to espouse. He was not good at drawing or explaining complex characters. He loved indeed to picture contradictory and paradoxical characters. Nothing delighted him more than to throw off an animated description of some great person who having been shown in the first instance to possess one set of qualities in extreme prominence was then shown to have a set of exactly antagonistic qualities in quite equal prominence. This was not describing a complex character. It was merely embodying a paradox. It was to solder close as Timon of Athens says, impossibilities and make them kiss. There was something too much of trick about this, although it was often done with so much power as to bewilder the better judgment of the columnist reader. But where Macaulay happened to be right in his view of a man or an event, he made his convictions clear with an impressiveness and a brilliancy such as no modern author has surpassed. The world owes him something for having protested by precept an example against the absurd notion that the dignity of history required of historians to be grave, pompous, and dull. He was not a Gibbon, but he wrote with all Gibbons the light and the picturesqueness of a subject and Gibbons resolved to fascinate as well as to instruct his readers. Macaulay's history tries too much to be an historical portrait gallery. The dangers of such a style do not need to be pointed out. They are amply illustrated in Macaulay's sparkling pages. But it is something to know that their splendid qualities are far more conspicuous than their defects. Perhaps very recent readers of history too may feel disposed to be grateful to Macaulay for having written without any profound philosophical theory to expound. He told history like a story. He warmed up as he went along and grew enamored, as a romances does, of this character and angry with that other. No doubt he frequently thus did harm to the trustworthiness of his narrative where it had to deal with disputed questions although he probably enhanced the charms of his animated style. But he did not set out with a mission to expound some theory as to a race or a tendency and therefore pledged beforehand to bend all facts of the physical, the political, and the moral world to the duty of bearing witness for him and proclaiming the truth of his message to mankind. End of Section 27 Section 28 of a history of our own times Volume 2 by Justin McCarthy This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Pamela Nagami. Chapter 29 The Literature of the Rain First Survey Part 2 Macaulay was not exactly what the Germans would call a many-sided man. He never was anything but the one Macaulay in all he did or attempted, but he did a great many things well. Nothing that he ever attempted was done badly. He was as successful in the composition of a pretty Valentine for a little girl as he was in his history, his essays, his lays of ancient Rome, and his parliamentary speeches. In everything he attempted he went very near to that success which true genius achieves. In everything, he just fell short of that achievement. But he so nearly attained it that the reader who takes up one of Macaulay's books or speeches for the first time is almost sure to believe under the influence of the instant impression that the genuine inspiration is there. Macaulay is understood who have for a long time thought of writing romance. If he had done so, we may feel sure that many intelligent readers would have believed on the first perusal of it that it was almost on a level with Scott, and only as the first impression gradually faded and they came to read it again, have found out that Macaulay was not a Scott in fiction any more than he was a Burke in eloquence or a Gibbon in history. He filled, for a long time, a larger space in the public mind than any other literary man in England and his style greatly affected literary men. But his influence did not pierce deeply down into public feeling and thought as that of one or two other men of the same period undoubtedly did and does still. He did not impress the very soul of English feeling as Mr. Carlisle, for example, has done. No influence suffused the age from first to last more strongly than that of Thomas Carlisle. England's very way of thinking was at one time profoundly affected by Carlisle. He introduced the English people to the great German authors very much as Lessing had introduced the Germans to Shakespeare and the Old English Ballads. Carlisle wrote in a style which was so little like that ordinarily accepted his English that the best thing to be said for it was that it was not exactly German. At one time it appeared to be so completely molded on that of John Paul Richter that not a few persons doubted whether the newcomer really had any ideas of his own. But Carlisle soon proved that he could think for himself and he very often proved it by thinking wrong. There was in him a deep strong vein of the poetic. Long after he had evidently settled down to be a writer of prose and nothing else, it still seemed to many that his true sphere was poetry. The grim seriousness which he had taken from his Scottish birth and belongings was made hardly less grim by the irony which continually gleamed and scowled through it. Truth and force were the deities of Carlisle's special worship. The eternal verities sat on top of his Olympus. To act out the truth in life and make others acted out would require some force more strong, ubiquitous and penetrating than we can well obtain from the slow deliberations of an ordinary parliament with its debates and divisions and everlasting formulas. Therefore to enforce his eternal verities, Carlisle always preached up and yearned for the strong man, the poem and action whom the world in our day had not found and perhaps would never appreciate. If this man were found it would be his duty and his privilege to drill us all in some vast camp and compel us to do the right thing to his dictation. It cannot be doubted that this preaching of the divine right of force had a serious and sometimes a very detrimental effect upon the public opinion of England. It degenerated often into affectation alike with the teacher and the disciples. But the influence of Carlisle in preaching earnestness and truth in art and letters and everything else had a healthy and very remarkable effect entirely outside the regions of the moralist who in this country at least has always taught the same lesson. It is very probable that individual men were made much more truthful in England by Carlisle's glorification of the eternal verities than they would have been without it. But his influence on letters and art was peculiar and was not effinescent. Carlisle is distinctly the founder of a school of history and a school of art. In the meanwhile we may regard him simply as a great author and treat his books as literary studies and not as gospels. Thus regarded we shall find that he writes in a style which every sober critic would feel bound to condemn but which nevertheless the soberest critic is forced continually despite himself and his rules to admire. For out of the strange jargon which he seems to have deliberately adopted Carlisle has undoubtedly constructed a wonderfully expressive medium in which to speak his words of remonstrance and admonition. It is a mannerism but a mannerism into which a great deal of the individuality of the man seems to have entered. It is not holy affectation or superficiality. Carlisle's own soul seems to speak out in it more freely and strenuously than it would in the ordinary English of society and literature. No tongue says Richter is eloquent save in its own language and this strange language which he has made for himself does really appear to be the native tongue of Carlisle's powerful and melancholy eloquence. Carlisle is endowed with a marvelous power of depicting stormy scenes and rugged, daring natures. At times strange, wild, piercing notes of the pathetic are heard through his strenuous and fierce bursts of eloquence like the wail of a clarion thrilling between the blasts of a storm. His history of the French Revolution is history read by lightning. Of this remarkable book John Stuart Mill supplied the principle material for Mill at one time thought of writing a history of the revolution himself but giving up the idea placed the materials he had collected at the service of Carlisle. Carlisle used the materials in his own way. He is indebted to no one for his method of making up his history. With all its defects the book is one of the very finest our age has produced. Its characters stand out like portraits by Rembrandt. Its crowds live and move. The picture of Mirabeau is worthy of the hand of the great German poet who gave us Wallenstein. But Carlisle's style has introduced into this country a thoroughly false method of writing history. It is a method which has little regard for the dry light which Bacon approved. It works under the varying glare of colored lights. Its purpose is to express scorn of one set of ideas in men and admiration of another. Given the man we admire then all his doings and ways must be admirable and the historian proceeds to work this principle out. Carlisle's Mirabeau is as truly a creature of romance as the Montecristo of Dumas. This way of going to work became even more apparent as the mannerisms became more incessant in Carlisle's later writings. In the Frederick the Great for example the reader dares not trust such history. It is of little value as an instructor in the lessons of the times and events it deals with. It only tells us what Carlisle thought of the times in the events and the men who were the chief actors in them. Nor does Carlisle bequeath many new ideas to the world which he stirred by his stormy eloquence. That falsehood cannot prevail over truth in the end nor simulacra do the work of realities is not after all a lesson which earth can be said to have waited for up to the 19th century and the coming of Carlisle. And yet it would be hard to point to any other philosophical outcome of Mr. Carlisle's teaching. His value is in his eloquence, his power, his passion and pathos, his stirring and lifelike pictures of human character, whether faithful to the historical originals or not, and the vein of poetry which runs through all his best writings and sometimes makes even the least sympathetic reader believe that he has to do with a genuine poet. In strongest contrast to the influence of Carlisle may be set the influence of Mill. Except where the professed teachers of religious creeds are concerned, there can be found no other man in the reign of Victoria who had anything like the influence over English thought that Mill and Carlisle possessed. Mill was a devoted believer in the possibilities of human nature and of liberty. If Rousseau was the apostle of affliction, Mill was surely the apostle of freedom. He believed that human society might be brought to something not far removed from perfection by the influence of education and of freedom acting on the best impulses and disciplining the emotions of men and women. Mill was a strange blending of political economist and sentimentalist. It was not altogether in humorous exaggeration that somebody said he was Adam Smith and Petrarch and one. The curious occlusion in which he was brought up by his father, the wonderful discipline of study to which in his very infancy he was subjected would have made something strange and striking out of a commonplace nature and Mill was in any case a man of genius. There was an antique simplicity and purity about his life which removed him all together from the ways of ordinary society. But the defect of his teaching as an ethical guide was that he made too little allowance for the influence of ordinary society. He always seemed to act on the principle that with true education and noble example the most common placement could be persuaded to act like heroes and to act like heroes always. The great service which he rendered to the world in his political economy and his system of logic is of course independent of his controverted theories and teachings. These works would if they were all he had written place him in the very front rank of English thinkers and instructors. But these only represent half of his influence on the public opinion of his time. His faith in the principle of human liberty led him to originate the movement for what is called the emancipation of women. Opinions will doubtless long differ as to the advantages of the movement but there can be no possible difference of judgment as to the power and fascination of mill's advocacy and to the influence he exercised. He did not succeed in his admirable lesson on liberty. In establishing the rule or principle by which men may decide between the right of free expression of opinion and the right of authority to ordain silence. Probably no precise boundary can ever be drawn and in this as in so much else lawmakers and peoples must be content with a compromise. But mill's is at least a noble plea for the fullest possible liberty of utterance and he has probably carried the argument as far as it ever can be carried. There never was a more lucid and candid reasoner. The most difficult and obstruous questions become clear by the light of his luminous exposition. Something too of human interest and sympathy became infused into the most seemingly arid discussions of political economy by the virtue of his emotional and half poetic nature. It was well said of him that he reconciled political economy with human feeling. His style was clear as light. Mill said one of his critics lives in light. Sometimes his language rose to a noble and dignified eloquence. Here and there are passages of a grave keen irony into the questions of religious belief which arise in connection with his works, it is no part of our business to enter. But it may be remarked that his latest writings seemed to show that his views were undergoing much modification in his closing years. His opponents would have allowed as readily as his supporters that no man could have been more sincerely inspired with the desire to arrive at the truth and that none could be more resolute to follow the course which his conscience told him to be right. He carried this resolute principle into his warmest controversies and it was often remarked that he usually began by stating the case of the adversary better than the adversary could have done it for himself. Applying to his own character the same truthful method of inquiry which he applied to others, Mill has given a very accurate description of one at least of the qualities by which he was able to accomplish so much. He tells us in his autobiography that he had from an early period considered that the most useful part he could take in the domain of thought was that of an interpreter of original thinkers and mediator between them and the public. I had always a humble opinion of my own powers as an original thinker except in abstract science logic, metaphysics and the theoretical principles of political economy and politics but thought myself much superior to most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn from everybody as I found hardly anyone who made such a point of examining what was said in defense of all opinions however new or however old in the conviction that even if they were errors there might be a substratum of truth underneath them and then in any case the discovery of what it was that made them plausible would be a benefit to truth. This was not assuredly Mill's greatest merit but it was perhaps his most peculiar quality he was an original thinker despite his own sincere disclaimer but he founded no new system he could be trusted to examine and expound any system with the most perfect fairness and candor and even where it was least in harmony with his own ideas to do the fullest justice to every one of its claims. Harriet Martinot's career as a woman of letters and a teacher began indeed before the reign of Queen Victoria but it was carried on almost without interruption during nearly 40 years of the reign she was political economist novelist historian biographer and journalist and in no path did she fail to make her mark few women could have turned to the occupations of a political writer under greater physical disadvantages and no man in this line of life however well furnished by nature with physical and intellectual qualifications for success could have done better work she wrote some exquisite little stories and one or two novels of more ambitious character it is praise enough to give them when we say that although fiction certainly was not work for which he was most especially qualified yet what she did seems to be destined to live and hold a place in our literature she was so far as we know the only English woman who ever achieved distinct and great success as a writer of leading articles for a daily newspaper her strong prejudices and dislikes prevent her from being always regarded as a trustworthy historian her history of the 30 years piece for it may be regarded as holy hers although Charles Knight began it is a work full of vigorous thought and clear description with here in their passages of genuine eloquence but it is marred in its effect as a trustworthy narrative by the manner in which the authoress yields here and there to inveterate and wholesale dislikes and sometimes though not so often or so markedly to an overwrought hero worship Miss Martino had to a great extent and essentially masculine mind she was often reproached with being unfeminine and assuredly she would have been surprised to hear that there was anything womanish in her way of criticizing public events and men yet in reading her history one is sometimes amused to find that that partisanship which is commonly set down as a specially feminine quality affects her estimate of estatesmen hers is not by any means the carlylean way of starting with a theory and finding all virtue and glory in the man who seems to embody it and all baseness and stupidity in his opponents but when she takes a dislike to a particular individual she seems to assume that where he was wrong he must have been wrong of set maligned purpose and that where he chanced to be right it was a mistake and in despite of his own greater inclination to be in the wrong it is fortunate that these dislikes are not many and also that they soon show themselves and therefore cease to be seriously misleading in all other respects the book well deserves careful study the life of the woman is a study still more deeply interesting others of her sex there were of greater genius even in her own time but no english woman ever followed with such perseverance and success a career of literary and political labor the blue peter has long been flying at my formast and now that i am in my 90s second year i must soon expect the signal for sailing in this quaint and cheery way mary summerville many years after the period at which we have now arrived in this work described her condition and her quiet waiting for death no one surely could have better earned the right to die by the labors of a long life devoted to the education and improvement of her kind mary summerville has probably no rival among women as a scientific scholar her summary of laplace's mécanique céleste her treatise on the connection of the physical sciences and her physical geography would suffice to place any student man or woman in the foremost rank of scientific expounders the physical geography is the only one of mrs summerville's remarkable works which was published in the reign of queen victoria but the publication of the other two preceded the opening of the reign by so short a time and her career and her fame so entirely belonged to the victorian period that even if the physical geography had never been published she must be included in this history i was intensely ambitious mrs summerville says of herself in her earlier days to excel in something for i felt in my own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in creation than that assigned to them in my early days which was very low it is not exaggeration to say that mrs summerville distinctly raised the world's estimate of woman's capacity for the severest and the loftiest scientific pursuits she possessed the most extraordinary power of concentration amounting to an entire absorption in the subject which she happened to be studying to the exclusion of all disturbing sights and sounds she had in a supreme degree that which carlyle calls the first quality of genius an immense capacity for taking trouble she had also happily for herself an immense capacity for finding enjoyment in almost everything in new places people and thoughts in the old familiar scenes and friends and associations hers was a noble calm fully rounded life she worked as steadfastly and as eagerly in her scientific studies as harriet martinot did with her economics and her politics but she had a more cheery less sensitive less eager and impatient nature than harriet martinot she was able to pursue her most intricate calculations after she had passed her 90th year and one of her chief regrets in dying was that she should not live to see the distance of the earth from the sun determined by the transit of venus and the source of the most renowned of rivers the discovery of which will immortalize the name of dr. livingston end of section 28