American Government as by every English statesman before Mr. Glad-↑ stone went out of office in 1874. It is the Liberal view which is ag→ gressive and innovating, and its assertion has led directly to the two gravest charges against the Ministry of Lord Beaconsfield. On Mr. Forster's assumption, it was not only unconstitutional in ministers to abstain from communicating to Parliament, in their inchoate stages, such designs and measures as the movement of the Indian troops, the conclusion of the convention with Turkey, and the final demand addressed to the Ameer of Cabul; but their right to maintain a certain reserve under the fire of incessant and unscrupulous questioning is denied. Upon the former part of the Liberal case rests the accusation of conspiracy against Parliamentary liberties; upon the latter, the charge of deliberate deception. Both fall together to the ground when the innovating doctrine, now first put forward by any statesmen of authority, is rejected.

The Opposition, during the most critical part of last year's negotiations, assailed the Government with questions which it was impossible to answer fully and frankly without detriment to the public interest. When information was refused, a cry against unconstitutional proceedings was raised; when it was given with such reserves as were indispensable, there were indignant protests against official equivocation, rising shrill and frequent into the clamour that now reverberates through the speeches of the Opposition. Probably this system of attack has damaged the Ministry: whenever plenty of mud is thrown, some of it is sure to stick. Reflecting men will be more concerned for its general effect upon Parliamentary character. No situation can be conceived less likely to maintain a high standard of political morality than that in which some of the Liberal leaders seem to luxuriate; in which the Ministry are forced to parry, and perhaps equivocate with, improper and injurious questions, while the Opposition stand screaming at the official insincerity they have laboured to develope. An Old Bailey cross-examination is a school of good manners and lofty morality compared with this strange exhibition.

The methods of controversy which the Liberal leaders have sanctioned are incompatible with the conditions under which English party warfare has been hitherto carried on. It seems that we are asked at once to surrender our confidence in the personal honour of public men, and to demand the abandonment of those reserves in the conduct of foreign policy without which no foreign governments will enter into any relations with this country. The Liberal leaders must count the cost of the former change, and decide for themselves whether they have more to gain or to lose by it. As to the latter, they may be fairly called upon to face the practical consequences of their arguments. They were bound to make some proposals for the conduct of business involving diplomatic negotiations which would supply guarantees to replace those they desire to abolish, but they have never so much as looked at this aspect of the matter. It is idle

to propose to play les cartes sur la table when we know very well.. that none of the other players would tolerate such an absurd defiance of the rules of the game.

If the Ministers of the Crown are henceforward to take counsel beforehand with the country in the conduct of foreign policy, some measures must be devised, at any rate, to prevent every diplomatic movement, every military precaution, from being scrambled over by fussy and garrulous ignorance in the House of Commons. If the leaders of the Opposition have been serious in protesting against the maintenance by Government of a reserve hitherto acknowledged to be necessary, why did they not suggest some plan by which the policy of Government might be from time to time submitted, under an obligation of secrecy, to a select body representing both parties and both Houses of Parliament? Such a body exists in the United States in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate, which, without having a strict claim to take cognisance of all that the Executive may do or design, has practically a consultative voice. A committee of this kind, chosen by the assent of the leaders of both parties, would have no controlling power over the acts of the Government, but, without compromising the speed and secrecy on which success in diplomacy and in war so largely depends, it would allow the protests of the minority to be heard in time. If such a committee had existed during last session, and if Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Forster had been members of it, they could have exposed to the Government all their objections to the movement of the Indian troops or the convention with Turkey. More than this they could not expect. Though Mr. Gladstone and his friends too readily impute faithlessness and fraud to the present Ministry, thẻ country is still inclined to trust its public men, and is prepared to believe that the obligation of secrecy would be observed by the minority even when their views were overruled. It would be necessary to limit the numbers of the committee, for experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain secrecy in bodies so large as the Austro-Hungarian Delegations, or the American Senate in Executive Session. There are, no doubt, obstacles in the way of this or of any other scheme for reconciling the indispensable conditions of an active foreign policy with the novel and extravagant pretensions of democracy. But, unless the criticisms of the Opposition were intended to be purely destructive and obstructive, the leaders of the Liberal party ought to have addressed themselves to this task of reconciliation. The subject must not be left in the state to which the reckless apathy of the Opposition would consign it. Those who are really solicitous for the future of Parliamentary government in England will not, it may be hoped, lose sight of the danger and the remedy.

Unfortunately, there is too much reason to believe that destruction and obstruction only were and are contemplated by the Liberal leaders. There is no desire among the Opposition to make an active foreign policy possible. The Government, ac

cording to Mr. Forster, has gone in a wrong direction, on a wrong track.' The time has come when England's policy will again be 'minding England's own business.' 'Imperialism' is dying, and the suffering which, as Mr. Gladstone says, 'stalks through the land in forms and measures unknown to our modern experience,' has given it the death-blow. The leaders of the Opposition, exulting in this prospect, have something else to do besides devising plans for the conduct of foreign policy. Possibly they are mistaken alike in their premisses and their conclusions. The suffering which Sir M. Hicks-Beach has been censured for calling exaggerated is not greater than was shown by the returns of pauperism to prevail in 1870 under Mr. Gladstone's Government; it cannot be compared with that against which this country bore up in 1811, when, in spite of the efforts of a factious Opposition, Wellington prolonged the struggle for European freedom in the Peninsula. It suits Mr. Forster's polemical purpose to dabble in the fallacy of question-begging names,' and to hold up this Imperialism to execration as the cast-off raiment of Bonapartism. But the Imperialism which in truth disquiets those whose ideal of policy is England's minding her own business is an old, not a new, habit of mind with Englishmen-a native, not a borrowed, principle of government. It is rooted in the conviction that England has inherited other interests and obligations besides those of her domestic prosperity, her accumulated wealth, and her profitable commerce. To guard the multiform and complex interests of our Indian dominions, our colonies, and our dependencies all over the world, seems to the majority of the English people a duty that they owe to those who went before them, and to those who will come after them. To turn aside deliberately from watching the enterprises of a great and aggressive power does not appear to them to be minding England's own business,' in any large and generous sense, but rather an indolent and cowardly rejection of national responsibilities. The time is not opportune for drawing back. To recede from the position which the country has occupied would be to incur enormous risks, and to impair an inheritance that is not ours to fling away. Now, more than at any time since the close of the Revolutionary Wars, is it manifest that all the empires of the earth are on their trial. If England is unable to hold her own, the ruin of her retreat cannot be measured. A nation on which have devolved the cares of a worldwide empire dares not be deaf to the warning of Goethe:

Du musst steigen oder sinken;

Du musst herrschen und gewinnen,
Oder dienen und verlieren ;

Leiden oder triumphiren,

Ambos oder Hammer sein ! 3

JANUARY 20, 1879.

EDWARD D. J. WILSON.

Thou must rise or fall; must conquer and subjugate, or serve and surrender; must suffer or triumph; must be anvil or hammer.'

By the favour of the Editor of the Nineteenth Century I was permitted some time ago to propound a theory concerning the place of conscience in evolution, and to show that certain moral phenomena, commonly called innate or intuitional and thought to be of specially Divine creation, were precisely such as might be looked for in the constitution of man if the doctrine of evolution were true. By the same favour I am now about to propound a parallel theory concerning the origin of will, in the hope that any attempt, however humble, to extend and confirm the domain of evolution will receive recognition at the hands of those who, like myself, have come to regard that doctrine as a revelation not merely of physical and material, but also of moral and spiritual truths. In making this attempt I desire to express the thanks due from isolated and unknown thinkers for the opportunity thus considerately bestowed.

The nature of the will is perhaps a more difficult and less attractive subject than the nature of the conscience; at any rate the controversy concerning it occupies comparatively a much smaller place in the history of philosophy than that concerning good and evil. For the most part, men, the great writers especially, have been content to state their opinions briefly, and then to leave the matter as one upon which argument was, on the whole, of little or no use. Modern philosophy, so fruitful in other regions, has neither added nor claimed to add much beyond what older writers—for instance, LockeVOL. V.-No. 25. CC

have condensed into a few sentences; and in spite of a good deal of more or less interesting discussion in quite recent years, the subject, so far as the public mind is concerned, appears to be left pretty much where Milton's fallen angels left it a good many centuries ago, when, like many a human being since their time, they found at once their doom and its solace

In reasoning high

Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

It is very necessary to remark at the outset that, although the will owes by far the greater part of its interest as a subject of discussion to its connection with moral questions, will and conscience are nevertheless two perfectly distinct things, and that the former must be examined and its origin traced independently of the latter. If we begin by bending our conception of will to some supposed moral necessity, such as the assertion that the freedom of the will is essential to morality, we shall for certain go wrong. The will is simply that which does, the conscience that which does rightly: the product of the one is action; of the other, conduct. Hence the angels were philosophically in the right when, turning from the mazes of fate and will to more hopeful fields of thought

Of good and evil much they argued then.

We must also remind ourselves that there is, as of course there could not help but be, the same kind of controversy concerning the nature of will, as we saw there was concerning the nature of conscience. The Intuitionalist affirms that the will is free, by which is meant that it is able to act against the stronger motive; that it is a kind of spontaneous creation of fresh force; that the capacity of free will has been bestowed upon us by the Creator Himself; and, as a consequence, that it must be accepted as an ultimate but inexplicable fact. The opposite school of thought, which in this connection we may fittingly call by the name 'Determinist,' affirms, on the contrary, that the will is in all cases determined by motives, whereof the previous character and history of the agent (themselves the result or storehouse of previous past motives) form a chief and even decisive element. I hasten, it need hardly be added, to avow myself as strongly as possible to be upon the side of Determinism. I know of no proposition in the whole range of philosophical literature (with which, however, I do not pretend to have an extensive acquaintance) so plainly and powerfully commended to us by the consensus of the best minds, by the stress of argument, by the suggestions of common sense, by the history of improvement in morals, by the requirements of positive thought, and finally, let me not forget, by any conceivable theory of rational religion. The theory of free will, as commonly understood, is, after