français, je crois devoir exprimer á leur commandant en chef les sentiments que je prouve pour la justice et l'impartialité dont il a fait preuve dans la mission difficile qui lui était confiée." Mr. Thiers himself, however, sent to General v. Manteuffel a copy of his historical work: Du Consulat et de l'Empire, with the dedication: "A son excellence le général de Manteuffel, en souvenir de son humaine et généreuse administration des provinces occupées françaises, dévoué A. Thiers."

Perhaps these were but phrases of courtesy? Oh, no! The French Ambassador, Comte St. Vallier, reports to his Government (March 7, 1872): “Manteuffel fully shares your view as to the interest which his country as well as ours has in not drawing out the occupation too long;" on July 7: "Manteuffel, as far as is in his power, will ease the heavy burden by his endeavours;" on February 23, 1873: "The generous sentiments of Manteuffel make the occupation bearable for the population;" and ultimately, on September 27, 1873: "Manteuffel, too, though he is Prussian, deserves a page of sincere gratitude in our historical records."

Mr. Stephane Lauzanne, however, without being able to cite a single outrage, calls the behaviour of the Germans during the occupation "bestial."

This judgment of Mr. Stephane Lauzanne I should like to contrast with the following letter of his famous compatriot, Comte Gobineau, directed to the Earl of Lytton, later British Ambassador in Paris. He writes: "It is possible that one will speak to you of the personal atrocities committed by the Prussians. I ask you to tell all those who talk like that, that I have had in my house sixty officers and 500 soldiers of all arms, and on my country estate 3,000 Prussian troops, and that neither a blade of straw has been stolen, nor a woman insulted, nor a child terrified."

HANS DELBRÜCK.

JOHN MORLEY: 1838-1923

BY W. L. AND JANET E. COURTNEY

"LIGHT rather than heat!" It is his own phrase, summing up what to him seemed the great need of the age in which he grew up to manhood. But it might well serve as an epitaph for the statesman and thinker-austere, remote, seeking always to keep burning the clear flame of truth undimmed by any concession to prejudice or superstition. His was not a personality to kindle enthusiasm, but he never failed to command respect, and as the years went on, and one by one the great Victorians passed into silence, John Morley came to symbolize for his countrymen that tradition of honesty, uprightness and uncompromising devotion to the truth as he saw it, which is the very opposite to the temper of the politician. Men might disagree with Morley,-they often did, especially with his Irish policy, but they never attributed his action to mean motives; they knew him at heart to be disinterested.

He was Lancashire born, a North Countryman through and through. His father, a surgeon, came from the West Riding of Yorkshire, and his mother was Northumbrian. He, himself, was born at Blackburn, then a newly risen Lancashire cotton town, lying in a valley between bleak moorland ridges, a hive of industry with little of beauty to soften life for its citizens. "The punctual clang of the factory bell in dark early mornings, with the clatter of the wooden clogs as their wearers hastened along the stone flags to the mill, the ceaseless search for improvements in steam power and machinery and extension of new markets, the steady industry, the iron regularity of days and hours, long remained in memory as the background of youth, with perhaps a silent passage into my own ways and mental habits from the circumambient atmosphere of some traits of my compatriots."

Though his up-bringing was not definitely Nonconformist, all

his surroundings were Puritan. The prevailing spirit of the Lancashire folk was, as he says, "stiffly Evangelical.' His own father had indeed turned from Wesleyanism to Anglicanism, why, his son never knew; but he retained an equal horror of Puseyites and German infidels, and he sent the boy to a school kept by an Independent. Young Morley seems to have inherited bookishness. His father carried pocket editions of Virgil, Racine and Byron about with him on his daily rounds, and strained his resources later to send his son to schools he could with difficulty afford; University College School in London, and then Cheltenham College. There the boy distinguished himself, especially in Greek verse-not, perhaps, the direction one would have expected. Indeed one of his tutors said of an attempt at a prize poem that his "verse showed many of the elements of a sound prose style". He won a scholarship, at the expense of a pious founder, to Lincoln College, Oxford, once the home of John Wesley, whose old rooms Morley now found himself occupying. The college at the moment had fallen on evil days; its Rector was a more or less illiterate clergyman, and its later famous Head, Mark Pattison, was sulking in his tents. But in Thomas Fowler, afterwards head of Corpus, Morley found a sympathetic tutor, who trained him in the Aristotelian philosophy congenial to his Lancastrian temperament. Conington on Virgil, A. P. Stanley (afterwards Dean) on ecclesiastical history, Mansel on the philosophy of intuitionalism, Goldwin Smith as an exponent of Liberalism, were amongst his teachers. He was a great hearer of sermons, having, as he confesses, "an irresistible weakness for the taking gift of unction" (how this must later have attracted him to Gladstone!) Newman's golden voice had long sunk to silence in another communion. Bishop Wilberforce now occupied the University pulpit, but he excelled in that special quality, his only later rival in Morley's opinion being Charles Spurgeon, the famous pastor of the South London Tabernacle, with his "glorious voice, unquestioning faith, full and ready knowledge of apt texts of the Bible, and deep and earnest desire to reach the hearts of congregations". It is interesting in this connection to recall that Morley himself had been destined to take Orders. Life at Oxford, he says, so far "shook the foundations" of his early

beliefs that this was out of the question; but he retained to the end many of the characteristics of a preacher and prophet.

Amongst other influences of the mid-Victorian period to which he belonged, his Oxford life fell in the decade 1850-60,-he mentions George Eliot and Cotter Morison. George Eliot in 1857 "began the career of story-teller 'in shadowy thoroughfares of thought' that laid such hold upon the reading England of her time and made critics of high authority, both French and English, both Catholic and Rationalist, call her the most considerable literary personality since the death of Goethe." No doubt this was an extravagant estimate. "Experience," as Morley says, "brings discrimination;" but he adds his own conviction that Acton was right when he called her teaching "the highest within the resources to which Atheism is restricted". Cotter Morison's influence was more personal. The Service of Man, that work with the "pregnant and moving name", was in Morley's opinion "a miscarriage both of thought and composition the rash attempt of failing days", though "it could not impair the captivating comradeship of his prime".

But Agnosticism, Rationalism, Atheism, or whatever name was attached to freedom of thought, was less the distinctive note of the period than Liberalism, using that word in its noblest and widest connotation. From the bankruptcy of creeds—“there is not a creed which is not shaken not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve", said Matthew Arnold of the time-young and ardent spirits turned to the hope of progress, to striving for the uplifting of man. Here is Morley's own definition of the true Liberalism; it may well stand as an expression of his life-long faith:

Respect for the dignity and worth of the individual is its root. It stands for pursuit of social good against class interest or dynastic interest. It stands for the subjection to human judgment of all claims of external authority, whether in an organised Church, or in more loosely gathered societies of believers, or in books held sacred. In law-making it does not neglect the higher characteristics of human nature, it attends to them first. In executive administration, though judge, gaoler, and perhaps the hangman will be indispensable, still mercy is counted a wise supplement to terror. General Gordon spoke a noble word for Liberalist ideas when he upheld the sovereign duty of trying to creep under men's skins-only another way of putting the Golden Rule. The

whole creed is a good deal too comprehensive to be written out here, and it is far more than a formalized creed. Treitschke, the greatest of modern Absolutists, lays it down that everything new that the nineteenth century has erected is the work of Liberalism.

What Morley felt about the counter theory, Militarism,"that point blank opposite of Liberalism in its fullest and profoundest sense, whatever the scale and whatever the disguise,' he was often later to testify, about Egypt in the 'eighties, at the time of the South African War, and most emphatically of all in 1914, when he withdrew from Mr. Asquith's Government.

To a young man of his views with slender means, the choice of a profession presented difficulties. The Church was barred, and Agnosticism was scarcely a recommendation for a teacher. He could not well afford to go to the Bar, though in later life he regretted the loss of "its fine gymnastic in combined common sense, accurate expression and strong thought". There was little left but journalism. He had not been able to afford the longer Honours course at Oxford and left with a Pass degree owing to the necessity of immediate earning. Obviously the Liberal press, such as it then was, was his appropriate destination, and he joined the staff of The Leader, edited by George Henry Lewes. This paper shortly expired, and so did a weekly called The Literary Gazette (later The Parthenon) which Morley edited for a short time. He next became a fairly regular, though anonymous, contributor to The Saturday Review, then at the height of its reputation, until in 1867 his old connection with Lewes brought him the reversion of the editorship of The Fortnightly Review.

This had been founded in May, 1865, by Anthony Trollope, Frederic Chapman and Lewes, with Lewes as its first editor. One of its fundamental principles, as appears from its original prospectus, was the signing of contributions. The Review was to be in no sense a party organ. Every writer was to be free "to express his own views and sentiments with all the force of sincerity"-provided he put his name to them. How revolutionary this proposal seemed to a public used to quarterlies directed by an editor of pronounced views and entirely regardless of any standpoint but his own, is clear from the criticism of an