with much laughing the Jubilee flag she had displayed at the cottage door on Jubilee Day. It consisted of a black strip with the word

"EVICTORIA"

worked in white on it. This seems to me a very allowable joke, especially as her neighbors here at Ballybrack are, with the exception of Murrough O'Brien, Castle people and members of the "landlord class." After which she sang us the "Wearing of the Green," and we wished them all good-bye and a safe deliverance from gaol.

Davitt, however, was not that year arrested, and finding himself out of harmony with the "Plan of Campaign," soon after went abroad. He was already beginning to be at personal variance with William O'Brien, who had become the hero of the moment in Davitt's own special province-the West of Ireland. With Parnell, too, he had never, I think, been quite in sympathy, partly regarding him as an aristocrat and member of the landlord class, but still more for his growing lack of practical energy, which by this time was becoming very apparent and of which he knew well the hidden cause. As long ago as the month of June, 1886, he had spoken his mind to me strongly on this head, complaining bitterly of Parnell's failure to attend to his duties, even in the House of Commons, and at the very moment when the fate of Ireland with Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was trembling in the balance. "It makes one's blood boil," he said, "at a moment like this, when every man of us ought to be working night and day, that he should be away. . . . There are a hundred people at this moment in London waiting to see him on important business, and nobody can say where he is. When I see that old man Gladstone attending meetings night after night in every part of the country, and think that our leader will not take the trouble even to look in for half an hour at a single

The Speaker.

meeting in London (Parnell had just failed to appear at the great Home Rule meeting in St. James's Hall or even to send a letter of excuse), I wonder our people are able to be patient. Why, the other day, when the Belfast bill came on and members were being

telegraphed for from distant parts of

Ireland in Parnell's name, Parnell himself could not be found and strolled in after all, just too late for the division. .. We all know it, and it will go hard with him some day, for we are getting very tired."

After 1888 I retired from all active interest in politics and saw but little of Davitt, but we still occasionally corresponded. The last letter I received from him is as follows.. It is dated, "House of Commons, July 5, 1898," and refers to the atrocities of our suppression of the native "revolt" in Mashonaland and his own retirement from Parliament. I quote it in full:

Dear Wilfrid Blunt-I am glad to hear from one Englishman who is ashamed of the untamed brutality of pro-British rule. I am sick of appealing to these civilized savages who govern this Empire for political foes (sic) in Ireland or elsewhere. They are as amenable to the pleas of clemency as a tiger is to those of humanity. And this is the nation that is now shamelessly wooing America for an alliance on the theory that both countries are alike the friends of humanity, civilization, and all the rest!

I never in all my life felt more incurably disloyal to all that England stands for in the rule of every spot of earth outside her own shores than I do as a result of the hopelessness of trying to obtain justice for anything or anybody inside this House.-With kind regards, yours very truly,

Michael Davitt.

His death is a terrible loss to Ireland, and to liberty throughout the world, for he was a fearless man, a hater of iniquity, and he had a tongue powerful in persuasion even with his foes.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

It is now certain that the construction of Canada's new transcontinental railway will add a second story to the Dominion. The results of the great adventurous survey of the route, the main sections of which are already plotted out in detail, prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the northern hinterland of the existing Canada possesses natural resources of a magnitude and variety but dimly foreshadowed in the tales of travellers-tales which were received in the past with cold incredulity. No longer will the patriotic American, pointing to the breadth as well as the length of his own colossal polity, be able to describe the Dominion as a "narrow-gauge state," or assert that there is not space in any part of it for two prosperous cities to exist on the same meridian of latitude. When, with the completion of the Grand Trunk Pacific in 1911 at latest, this gigantic New Canada is cast into the scales of British power in the New World it will be seen that the two Anglo-Saxon commonwealths of North America must sooner or later counterbalance one another in weight of wealth if not in numerical strength of population. In the first place the surveyors have discovered that the climatic conditions of the northward territories to be opened up for occupation by miners, lumbermen, and farmersthe first prepare the way for the second and the second clear the ground for the third-are not inferior, generally speaking, to those which obtain in the settled districts to the south. Indeed the climate grows appreciably milder in Ontario and the prairie provinces as one approaches the Hudson Bay, the Mediterranean of North America, which never freezes over from shore to shore, the water of which is a degree or two

warmer than that of Lake Superior, the other great mitigating influence in the climate of inland Canada. Trees and plants, witnesses which cannot lie, attest the truth of these assertions. Secondly, the chief necessities of a guerilla warfare of industrial conquest -timber for fuel and building, coal deposits, and the "white coal" of waterpower-are abundant along every section of the new highway between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

Already it is possible to make a forecast, accurate in its essential features, of the economic development of this vast northward extension of the Dominion. Passing from East to West and interpreting the black-and-white symbolism of the map in the spirit of the late N. F. Davies-whose Epic of the Dawn gives us an heroical vision of the Canada that was and the Canada that shall be-we find that the new railway with its tentacles will double the area of agricultural land at present accessible to the habitant of Quebec who looks for his North-West in his own Province beyond the church spire of some northernmost village. As the bold curve crosses into Ontario it enters the new Silverado which, if the amazing wealth of the Cobalt mining camp be an indication of what lies buried further north (and geologists believe it to be so, since all that monstrous country-side lies within the selfsame geological horizon), will some day equal the record of Nevada and the other silver-bearing States of the Cordillera Belt. Colbalt, which is but a hundred miles north of North Bay (where the Government section of the new transcontinental line begins), and within easy reach of a lakeside resort where the people of the Eastern cities renew each year their ancestral love of

the wilderness,has already earned many millions of dollars and its fissure veins may be said to form the Comstock of Eastern Canada. Further westward the route passes into the great "clay belt" of Northern Ontario, a newer and nearest North-West. This stretch of agricultural soil is a thousand miles long and one hundred broad, and the typical Ontarian, the "Man with the Axe" who cut upper Canada out of the primæval forest, is busily farming here -awaiting the arrival of the iron trail. Everywhere in Northern Ontario are deposits of iron, copper, nickel, silver, and even gold which can be profitably developed the moment the railway comes in. Entering the prairie-region the new road, taking the nearest way from Winnipeg to Edmonton, passes through territory which has even now traces of settlement. As it passes the countryside will become populous, wooden villages will grow into towns of stone, and the basis for a trans-Saskatchewan system of branch railways will have been well and truly laid. Then the colonization of the northern portions of Saskatchewan and Alberta, provinces of which not the half of 1 per cent. has yet been ploughed up, will begin in downright earnest. The Grand Trunk Pacific crosses the Rockies by the easiest pass (avoiding the picturesque difficulties which the Canadian Pacific Railway overcame at the cost of tying itself into a knot at "The Loop") and will have no break-neck gradients-so that it is bound to become the chief freight route between the Nearer and the Farther West. In crossing British Columbia it will bring the historic placer-camps of Caniar and Omenica within reach of the mining capitalist, who is even now preparing to work out in detail the preliminary assay-map of the upper half of the province, which could be constructed from the records of the northward dispersal of Bret Harte's Argonauts and those who fol

lowed them with pick and pan. At the newly discovered haven of Prince Rupert (south of Port Simpson, and out of sight of the islands given under the Alverstone compromise to the United States) the Grand Trunk Pacific finds its blue-water terminus. There, as Earl Grey has prophesied, the ruling price of wheat may be made for the world's markets in a wheat-pit deeper and more clamorous than those of Chicago and Duluth.

In one sense, paradoxical as it may seem to say so, the development of the million square miles of Canada's North

ern

hinterland brings the Dominion nearer to the Mother-country of more than half its inhabitants and nearly all its institutions. To grasp this truth the largest map or projection of the planet's surface must be laid aside. We must look at the terrestrial globe itself, and think in planetary terms. New Canada lies along higher parallels of latitude than the old, and is nearer to these market-islands in the Northern seas. Therefore the centre of gravity of the old with the new Canada is nearer to us than was the centre of gravity of last century's Dominion. And as the northern limit of Canadian settlement approaches the shores of the Hudson Bay, that centre of economic weight, the magnetic pole of the capitalist's imagination, will draw nearer and nearer yet. Many Canadians are beginning to see that this inevitable result of the northward extension of their polity will eventually compel them to revise their transportation system. The Saskatchewan Legislature has unanimously resolved that it is expedient to utilize the Hudson Bay route from the Inner West without a moment's unnecessary delay. A glance at the terrestrial globe will show that this route during the four or five months of the year when it was open would bring the western farmlands two thousand miles nearer to Liverpool. A railway to Fort Churchill

on the Bay, having steamship connections, would suck up wheat and live freight not only from all the prairie provinces but also from the upper tier of Western States. Again, it would be an Imperial strategic route (as indeed it was in the old fur-trading days when the Hudson's Bay Company held the west for us against the powers of New France and, later, against the pioneers of the Western States) and would enable the Empire to hold the central line of the continent. There is no other form of assurance against a successful invasion of Canada from the South. This route will undoubtedly be opened

The Outlook.

up, under the compulsion of Western opinion, and it will be a concrete preference in itself. The hammer that drives home a spike on any one of Canada's new railways, the spade that helps to dig out a new canal along Canada's rail-and-water route from the West-these are working to-day and will work to-morrow for the realization of our great ideal as surely as does the endorsement of the Canadian Preference by Mr. W. S. Fielding, or those winged words of Mr. Chamberlain which have the strength to fly through the whole circuit of the King's dominions.

Cambridge well deserves the best thanks and congratulations of all who have the real interests of education at heart. Last year's proposal to make Greek optional at the Little-go was lost by five hundred and seven votes in a poll of two thousand six hundred and eleven. The proposal which the Cambridge University Senate has now thrown out by seven hundred and fortyseven votes to two hundred and fortyone was less sweeping, but more insidious. It aimed at the bifurcation of the B.A. degree into two degrees, one for letters and one for science, and gave to candidates for the latter an option between Greek and Latin. This suggestion recommended itself to many who were altogether opposed to making Greek optional at the Little-go. The Times of Friday, May 25, had a leader strongly supporting it, and claiming for it the sanction of Professor Butcher's authority. But the less violent change would in the end have been equally fatal to the study of Greek. In pointing out this I would recur to some of the arguments put forward in the Conference of Headmasters in De

cember, 1890, when the proposal to make Greek optional in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge was defeated by only two votes in a poll of sixty.

It was urged then by the advocates of the maintenance of Greek that, if the resolution brought forward by the headmaster of Harrow were carried, the study of Greek in England was doomed. This argument was met by the innovators with silent contempt or by improved declarations that "no one fears that Greek will cease to be studied in England," and that "Greek can take care of itself." It is curious that the very contrary of the last proposition was the utterance of one who was among the greatest ornaments of English scholarship. In 1873 George Grote declared his conviction that it was Latin and Greek which required to be fostered, that Greek would soon cease to be studied if it were made optional, and that the sciences would "take care of themselves."

For to make Greek optional for any class of students in the Universities would infallibly be to bring about a premature and excessive specializing

even in the course of the boy's school training. If the question whether he would pursue a scientific or a classical career in the University be left to the boy, in the great majority of cases he will decide against Greek. The study of Grammar is distasteful to the beginner, however apt, though to the advanced student it is full of interest and affords a discipline of the reasoning faculties at least as good as that supplied by Euclid or logic. The boy will vote for cotyledons and coelenterata, and his master will have to explain-if, indeed, he knows himself-what these words mean, and that they were used by a people whose commerce and manufactures were small, which had no Stock Exchange, and could not make "corners" in anything-which, therefore, can be of no use or interest for a lad who has to face the pressure of modern life and contend with "the struggling, eager crowds which beset every avenue to success." Specializing would begin at school, and in the course of a generation or two Greek would be in the position now occupied by Hebrew and Sanscrit, and the Greek masters in the public schools would have so little to do that they would be obliged to "double" the parts of instructors in (perhaps) writing calisthenics.

or

No attempt has ever been made to show that the passman carries into his subsequent life from the University more mathematics or mental or natural philosophy than Greek. In this connection I may perhaps quote some words of my own on this subject from the Quarterly Review (343) of January, 1891:

Let all subjects be optional, or let us have a reason why one subject should be optional rather than another. The truth is, the rank and file of examinees are not now capable, never were capable, and never will be capable, of attaining to a knowledge of Greek, Latin,

German, trigonometry, mechanics, or any other branch of study, in the sense in which the term "knowledge" is understood by real scholars and savants. But that is no reason why the passman should not reap great and permanent advantage from being induced to pursue these studies to a certain point, which is in many cases as far as their intelligence will allow them to go. It has been urged by the innovators that "it will be difficult to find in Greek literature a passage which would not pluck at least half of the candidates if anything like a creditable, even a respectable translation were exacted." Would more than half the candidates in an examination in Natural Science display a knowledge which would seem to a master of the science creditable, or even respectable? Moreover, it is fair to call to mind that when a student is required to translate an unprepared piece of Greek, he is asked to show that he has a grasp of the principles of the language. A question of analogous difficulty in the sciences would “pluck” the whole class; but such questions are not put at pass-examinations in science. The point to be dwelt on is, that no attempt has been made to show that the passman carries away from the University a greater or more abiding knowledege of mathematics or mental or natural philosophy than of Greek, yet no one has proposed to make all these subjects optional.

There was a time when professed Latinists knew very little Greek. "Græcum est: non potest legi" is a comment often to be met in the schoolmen when a Greek expression occurs in a Latin text. There are now French and Italian Latinists who have but slight acquaintance with Greek. It is the boast of English scholarship that for more than two centuries Greek and Latin have been studied with equal success and reciprocal illumination. If Greek were ever put on a level with Hebrew and Sanscrit, and if the study of it were confined to a few specialists, even Latin would suffer. Fancy a Greek less Munro or Robinson Ellis, or