'An infant crying in the night,

An infant crying for the light,

And with no language but a cry.'

Many of us still remember the shock which Mill's essay created. Mr Leslie Stephen was reported to have paced the room in indignation which could not be contained, while his wife yet further angered him by the poor consolation of 'I told you so. I always said John Mill was orthodox.' Mr John Morley, in the 'Fortnightly,' did not disguise his profound disappointment. Mr W. L. Courtney testifies to the 'consternation' caused among those of Mill's disciples who had fed themselves on his earlier work' by an essay which seemed to recommend the renunciation of reason in favour of the twilight of faith. The religious press was jubilant. And the religious party scored heavily in a long-standing combat.

Almost contemporaneously with the shock of 1874 came another cause of the declension of Mill's influence in the rapid growth in influence of the evolution philosophy. Mill had fully recognised historical evolution as formulated by Comte. But it was not one of his special subjects. And the application of the theory to philosophy proper was first made and with extraordinary thoroughness by Herbert Spencer. This was a second reason which led the negative thinkers to turn for guidance from the man who had betrayed them in the theological controversy to another. In the later seventies Herbert Spencer enjoyed much of the popularity which had once been Mill's.

Then came the new influence of German philosophy in England, especially of Hegel. Mill had on the whole despised Hegel and Fichte. And their followers now had full revenge. The thought of Oxford had been largely ruled by Mill in the sixties. In the eighties T. H. Green's alliance with his more orthodox Anglican pupils established the predominance of a philosophy based largely on the teaching of Hegel. And the Hegelians were quick to retaliate with the very note of contempt once sounded in their own regard by Mill. Hegel stood far more widely apart from Mill than from Spencer, with whom, indeed, as with Comte, the German has real points of affinity. With the change of dynasty came a great change in fashionable modes of thought. Mr Balfour Vol. 213.-No. 424.

decried Mill's 'thin lucidity.' The passion for clearness in expression, which still remained unabated in Huxley and largely in Spencer himself, gave place in the disciples of Green to a certain reverence for obscurity. While in science proper and in historical criticism lucidity was still a virtue and men worked together to reach definite scientific results, in speculative thought a certain scepticism as to the value of rational analysis supervened with faith as its correlative. Dim, half-expressed intuitions of deep truths commanded respect. Clearness was supposed to mean that the mind moved on a plane far below the deepest problems. Philosophy itself became largely a faith though illustrated and developed by reason. The new attitude, which still largely survives, issued in its best exponents in some very suggestive and powerful thought. But in the rank and file it had grave disadvantages. The common measure of minds to which Mill and his contemporaries had appealed in their dialectics was disregarded, and no satisfactory test distinguishing seer from charlatan was substituted. Inferior critics often hid poverty of thought by technical phraseology, and assailed with contempt rather than with the frank debate of earlier days. Something startling, something new, or something indefinable, was needed to please the palate of a jaded generation. The antithesis to the ways and manners of Mill was complete. The old painstaking discussion in which you had first to show your own capacity by restating an opponent's case and thus proving that you understood it, was no longer thought of. The critics absolved themselves from a task for which they were often incompetent by disparaging its value.

It is this modern repudiation of really adequate analysis, this making professed analysis almost as obscure as what is analysed, which has been the coup de grâce of Mill's influence. It is this which makes his philosophy now so little read. Yet so exaggerated a depreciation of candid and clear and often penetrating thought cannot last. Already there are whispers that even the Germans are puzzled at the uncritical worship in England of what they have themselves found seriously wanting; and Oxford is spoken of as the place where good German philosophies go to when they are dead. Moreover, where the world of fact is concerned there is always a touch

stone which brings thought back to reality. Thus while the ‘Examination of Hamilton' and most of the 'Logic' have long been quite neglected, students of political economy have never wholly ceased to read Mill; and the wisdom of many of his political utterances has recently been brought back to us with new power by the circumstances of the time, just as Burke's speeches of one hundred and fifty years ago are being read with fresh interest. The 'Liberty' and the treatise on 'Representative Government' are nearly as valuable now as ever they were. When Mill comes to be again more widely read than he is at present I believe he will be permanently recognised not indeed as a great constructive thinker, but as a very great critical thinker, with the accompanying quality of rare sympathetic understanding. It is the individual's office (he held) to contribute the best he can to the general stream of criticism and re-criticism. And in this task a critical thinker almost without prejudices, of very penetrating mind, and of unexampled candour and power of profiting by the thoughts of others, is not one to be set aside as of little or no account. Who shall sum up Mill's collective influence as an instructor in Politics, Ethics, Logic and Metaphysics?' writes Mr Bain. A multitude of small impressions may have the accumulated effect of a mighty whole.'

The Autobiography will ever remain as a most pathetic human record, the story of an unnatural experiment in mental vivisection exercised on a little child, issuing in a somewhat maimed and impoverished nature, and of an heroic and partly successful attempt at recovery. The figure it presents to us in mature life is filled in by these letters. It is that of one endowed with an almost unique sense of public duty and indifference to personal motives, making the very best of the powers which had been unduly developed and of those which had been unduly stunted. Those who knew him best set hardly any limit to his selfless devotedness. And their testimony is on record. Like Howard in Bentham's felicitous eulogy,' writes an intimate friend, Mill might have lived an apostle and died a martyr.'

The saints are seldom universally popular, and the 'saint of Rationalism' will be no exception. The constant exhibition of devotion to duty is dull. And dullness is to

the present generation especially almost a crime. Indeed it was in part Mill's own living influence that kept alive the high moral standards of criticism which led to his full recognition. Unregenerate human nature will reassert itself when such guides disappear. Even candour will be assailed from time to time, as it was by Canning: 'Hail, most solemn sage,

Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age.'

But another generation as strenuous as Mill's own will place the moral virtues of his intellect very high and will reinstate his reputation, although his philosophy as a whole is not likely again to be a living force. Other and more personal drawbacks will no doubt also remain. I think that a certain want of virility and lack of imagination will always be felt by his readers. As one dwells on him one cannot conjure up the full picture of the hero or the great man who is born, not made. Much that was born was killed early by his one-sided training. Nearly all had to be made. But he was taught early how to make; and one sees him taking infinite and pathetic pains to recover artificially much that was irretrievably lost. Yet as one can deeply reverence a Christian saint and owe much to his influence though one sees that he is not a boon companion or even a gentleman, so it is with such a unique intellectual and moral character as Mill's. One admires, though the aesthetic pleasure afforded by buoyancy, richness, spontaneousness, creativeness of mind, is absent. The ascetic sacrifices the realisation of the many-sided possibilities of life and human nature in order to accomplish the all-important tasks prescribed by duty. And something akin to the sentiment of admiration which we give to the persistent religious devotee will, I am convinced, be accorded by posterity to Mill, in spite of all he lacked whether by nature or in consequence of his early training. When told that he was dying he said four words, 'My work is done.'

WILFRID WARD.

Art. 12.-THE CONFERENCE AND THE COUNTRY. THE country is at present engaged in trying a novel experiment; novel, that is, in recent political history and never very common in the business of politics. In commerce it is an everyday matter, and half the legal disputes which arise are settled amicably out of court. But, though we are a nation of business men, we have an odd dislike of business methods in our government. To compromise, to confer, even to hint at the possibility of conference, seems to our party stalwarts a confession of weakness, not, perhaps, without a hint of moral défaillance. The feeling, honourable enough in a sense, arises from our curious confusion of moral and political issues. Compromise in the sphere of ethics is a very different thing from the humdrum adjustments of the business world. To tamper with the stern categories of the moral law may be evidence of a perverted soul, and in any event is an intricate and heart-breaking enterprise. But to try to understand an adversary's point of view, to content ourselves, for the sake of an ultimate good, with less than we think we can lawfully claim, is surely a proof of good sense and good feeling. In these obscurantist days it is pleasant to contemplate a practice which recognises the importance of reason. The essence of compromise is that a man, instead of denouncing his neighbour's point of view, makes an effort to understand it. Knowing that a quiet life is worth a sacrifice, he forgoes for its sake something which, in spite of all the mutual enlightenment which conference gives, he may still think he has a right to. Every one knows that in private life a politician may be appreciative of his adversaries, and very candid in admitting their merits. It is only on the party platform that he draws the world as a device in snow and ink. Political compromise is in effect the resolve in some matter of great national concern to drop the party standpoint for a little, and look squarely at a question like reasonable men. a method with many successes in its record. The United States of America and a united South Africa are examples of what can be done in the way of sinking differences if opponents mean business and try to

It is