to us.

and, as it were, the personal character which is desirable for healthy action. At none would all the elements be combined; at none would they meet in the same proportions. Each would be an integral living, organic, specific whole. But the point to observe is, that however feeble for a time this vital action, we do possess such ganglia" already. We have such centres, types of a true mode of action. Our aim should be to complete, as it were, the electric circuitFili hominis, viventne credis? Domine Deus, tu nôsti.' If means have for a while been crippled, local forces partly exhausted, we may remember that it is our own fault; that the neglect and misuse of grand means could no longer be borne with; we may take some comfort from the thought that if we have lost the power of applying them when we now perhaps have learnt wisdom to apply them, the resources are at least not any longer wasted. The treasure unvalued till lost is serviceable elsewhere; and legislation has given the singular but important right to restore every single stall to existence by the foundation of a small stipend. Past misuse does not make our 'centres,' our 'types,' our 'lines' less clear or less precious Let us gather up briefly the conclusions to which we are led. To solve in the most economical and in the most 'political' way the particular problems before us, we require and must effect the reconstruction upon a liberal and popular basis of a Cathedral System. Popular, first, as to the method of filling up the appointments, they must not be the joint-stock of a circle of families however wide, or the guerdon of political adherence, nor even be sacrificed as pensions. Well-earned repose has a value of its own; but for the present we want work out of these institutions, not repose. Capability for responsible posts must be the sole pretext on which they, like other offices, must be assigned. Popular, secondly, as to the simple, self-denying lives of those who hold them. Popular, thirdly, as to the publicity of the work done. The nation must have a guarantee that these, like other public servants, perform definite duties for their definite stipends. Superior officers can alone give the guarantee, and this points at once to the renewed intimity of the bishop. Precedent,' that potent cathedral spectre, though it rarely proves to be a hundred years old, must no more rule cathedrals than it rules any useful institution. Imagine a public school, a railway, a parish, a manufactory, in which nothing could be done which had not been done before!

But to develop the applicability of the institution to modern ends and needs, we

must come to details. And as essential to the renewed intimity' of the bishop, and to the counsel and service of the chapter to the practical ends required, the most important of all details is (1) the residence of the canons and prebendaries. This must be restored to the old perpetual or ‘major residence' of two-thirds of the year at least. The decay of practical usefulness began when the term of residence was altered and reduced to what had formerly been the term of non-residence, and in some cases even to less. The old foundations and the new were alike originally legislated for upon the idea of residence as fundamental; the unhappy change was introduced by Laud; and of all his church reforms' it was the most lastingly destructive. Since that time, the oncegrouped co-operating residentiaries have proceeded in solemn train through the year, like the Apostles in Strasburg clock, each seeing his predecessor's departing hood. What corporate action is possible for the most enlightened men so placed? Some of our least reforming cathedrals have the most reforming canons. But intercourse is essential for determinate action, and how is intercourse to be had? (2) The perpetual residence of the canons would probably lead to the resigning of parochial cures. This might possibly not be necessary, yet it would seem to be pure again. The prebendary is no longer needed to be the wealthy civiliser of a rural unsettled district. His prebend has become a simple parochial cure, and his presence is wanted at the cathedral church. Even in the time of Grosseteste, even earlier, in the time of Hugh, we have seen that those statesmen-bishops felt the latter need to be growing more urgent than the former, and would appoint no one to a stall who would not promise constant residence. The bishops have it still in their own hands. But, indeed, the difficulty is now less than it ever was. The canon's income is become a stipend; it is not derived from a separate estate, and if canonical work becomes a reality, the stipend will, like other stipends, be made adequate. A canon who kept a

major residence' anciently had larger allowances than those who resided on their cures, and the regulation is sufficiently simple. (3) We shall need the gradual but extensive restoration of suspended canonries. The havoc wrought by the statutes, 3 & 4 Vict. c. 113, and those succeeding it, when, for the time being, in the suppression of more than 360 prebends, 'the ancient polity of the Church of England was ruthlessly broken up,' left us still this opening. 'Power is given to remove the suspension of a canonry if an endowment of 2001. a year

is

us not permanently crippled, considering what the powers, what the liberality, what the willingness to provide funds for honest work, which still are extant in the Church; for every distinct round of fixed duties it will be no more difficult to provide such a sum than it is to provide a mastership in a school. And even if some are disposed to shrink at the thought that the Ecclesiastical Commission of the future may once again absorb such foundations, the possibility cannot affect the duty of supplying present needs, and obeying present convictions. But are the canonries of the future then likely for a while to be poor things'? We have seen that even in the best days some of them were but perexiles tituli,' and in this thought we rise at once to higher ground, and to principles which we are persuaded are not dead among us. The revived cathedral societies must be of necessity associations in which, as they always ought to have been, humility and self-denial shall be recognised elements. Those virtues are of an invigorating nature; and we want vigour. They promote companionship, and companionship was of the essence of the old cathedral life, and companionship will be the lifespring of the new societies. The Vicars' College at Hereford, with its common hall (never disused till the fire a few years back), suggests possibilities of associated families which should far excel the old companionships of solitary men, whether as regards happiness or as regards usefulness. There is none of the many benefits which the clerical family confers on the parish (and they have been often dilated on) which could not be multiplied indefinitely by such associations in the city. It is no new ideal. We conjure up difficulties as to how colleges of families would work. But the difficulty felt in England, and at Lincoln itself as late as the eleventh century, was as to how colleges of celibates would work. Henry of Huntingdon, himself, a canon, was son of Nicolas, Archdeacon of Huntingdon and Cambridge, and Canon Residentiary of Lincoln, that 'Stella Cleri, Splendor Nicolai,' so affectionately commemorated by the son, who dwells so bitterly on the anti-matrimonial policy and inconsistency of Rome.

The vulgar objection which may be raised from the pitifulness and pettiness of life is one which ought to melt away, as society advances, before the steadfast application of true principles of self-denial and humility. Truth and reality of daily life, severe simplicity with perfect culture would be, next

*First Rep. p. xiii. 17.

Societies have arisen and done their work on these principles against far more and greater impediments, and with far less to sweeten and to sanctify. Les pères de familles, ils sont capables de tout.' The sting of Talleyrand's evil wit lies, as in so many of his sayings, in the very fact that he describes his objects by inverted ideals of their class. The father of the family' is one who by his very duty to that family ought in idea to be, and commonly is, rendered by them incapable of what can sully or corrupt; for them he grows to hate what is ignoble, by them he forgets self-seeking. But make that father of the family a voluntary priest, and let a company of such priests with their houses, and like-minded' laymen with them, be for the extension of religion, for the 'kindling of a greater natural light,' for the help of the helpless, together dedicated and associated by the most powerful motives and resolutions, by the most splendid memories of the past, by the most trustful hopes of the future, in a word by devoted love to Christ and His Church, and let the wholesome light of public life stream ever in on the society and its work, and once again we should seem to possess a vehicle of that Word 'which is powerful to the casting down of strongholds' such as might face the evils of our time, and last until its use was in its turn outworn. It would have all the elements of durability about it. It would be calm and strong. Its form would be at once Catholic and Protestant, and eminently English.

beings may be slaughtered or crippled; but the broad issue will be the same. The strength of France is broken; her territory is severed; the splendid lustre of military fame that has shone for four glorious centuries is quenched. The future offers a piteous prospect for any Frenchman to look upon; it is not without gloom even for the coldest and most selfish bystander. It will be the occupation of our statesmen for many years to come to calculate the effects upon the European equilibrium of the diminution of the political influence of France; and against some of them it may tax all their energies to struggle.

But there is another class of reflections which the war suggests as it draws towards its close. War is the great test of institutions. In time of peace, if the people be by habit orderly and law-loving, very clumsy and very unjust arrangements will often work with very tolerable success. If sufficient time only be allowed, political machinery is self-adjusting. Much of the sting is in practice taken out of inefficient or oppressive institutions by the interest in the common welfare which all persons and classes are made by experience to feel. So far as periods of tranquillity are concerned, the fact that institutions work well may often prove not that the laws are good, but only that the people are sensible. The outbreak of a war, especially in these times of scientific slaughter, is a far more trustworthy test; it searches out with fatal accuracy every weakness in the machinery of government, every flaw in the structure and composition of a nation. It is true, that after the state of war has continued for a long period, all the nations engaged in it sink to the same half-barbarous level of a purely military existence. But the first shock, the sudden transition from the sleepy routine of peace to the exigencies of a struggle for existence, tries the work which institutions have done for a nation. It detects at once whether they have welded its classes into a homogeneous mass; whether they have endowed it with a sound and supple organization; whether they have bred up a race of honest and capable public servants. We have not been tried by this fierce test-may the ordeal be far from us! for no honestminded man among us could look forward to it without much sinking of heart. But we have stood by while it has been pitilessly applied to two great and noble neighbours, who were thought six months back to be no unequal competitors in the race for the supremacy of the world. We have watched the progress of the trial day by day, and its smallest incidents have been laid before us

with marvellous fidelity. These things are written for our learning. It concerns us nearly to investigate the causes that have led to the overwhelming defeat which men are still too much astounded fully to understand. It has lessons of the deepest import for political students of all nations; and if we in England do not learn them from the experience of others, we may chance some day to learn them from our own.

The proximate causes of French disaster are sufficiently obvious, and scarcely require comment. At the outset their numbers were too few, their military preparations were absurdly insufficient, their generals were luxurious and incapable, their soldiers destitute alike of discipline and of endurance. Later on, when the army was destroyed, the faults of other portions of the community came in to contribute to the national ruin. The levity with which at a bidding of a street riot the Paris mob threw down a Government but newly sanctioned by a vast majority of the nation-the entire surrender of the lead to a few political fanatics, to whom the victory of their crotchet was paramount to all considerations of national wellbeing-were errors that would have endangered a far more promising cause. The two great parties of France share the reproach of her present condition in tolerably equal portions. It is difficult to decide whether the corrupt inertness of the Imperialists or the disordered frenzy of the Republicans have been the most efficient instruments of ruin. But this is the very symptom which directs us back to ulterior causes. It is the universality of the failure which indicates that some evil of wider and more permanent operation has been at work than a caprice of fortune, or the accidental incapacity of a few individuals. Much must, no doubt, be allowed for causes of this kind. The qualities displayed on both sides have been exceptional, and must not be taken to represent a probable future average. The French may hope for rulers somewhat more energetic than Napoleon III. and his marshals, and somewhat less frothy than Gambetta. The Prussians cannot look forward to a perennial succession of Bismarcks and Moltkes. But still, after all allowances have been made for the peculiar character of the personages who have played the foremost parts in this strange drama, there must be deeper forces at work to account for its tragic ending. And the characters of these personages themselves are among the effects of which we are seeking to find the causes. How is it that Moltke and Bismarck were so happily selected and so well sustained? How have they been able to organise this

great success through so many years of preparation? How is it that the generals and ministers of Napoleon III. were entrusted with a power they were so unfit to exercise, that their policy was so reckless, that their preparations were so inadequate and hollow? The intellectual vice, whatever it is, is one that has affected the nation as a whole; and the weakness shown by a few individuals is but one among many symptoms of the national disease.

It is no accidental failure, no passing malady, that has caused this ruin. It lies deep in the heart of French political society. It is the direct result of a history reaching now for three generations back. It is feebleness of the very principle of Government, caused by chronic revolution, that has mainly brought about these vast disasters. Eighty years ago, the French began a revolution and they have continued it ever since. They have never agreed upon a form of government to replace that which they overturned. The principle of submission to an established authority has disappeared; and every attempt to restore it has been baffled by the spirit which originally destroyed it. Like some lingering but malignant disease, the passions and theories of 1793 sleep for a time, and seem to have lost their force; and then suddenly breaking out with fresh violence, dash all the hopes of recovery which had been encouraged by an interval of repose. After each burst of fury has exhausted itself, the quieter part of the community-the classes who have something to lose have done what lay in their power, to construct some kind of political edifice out of the ruins, and restore so far as possible the guarantees of social order. But the task, arduous in any case, has in theirs been well nigh impossible. They might choose a master, and give him a paper constitution; but they could not give back cohesion to the atoms of a dissolved society they could not revive the social training and discipline out of which enduring institutions grow. They have shown no great fastidiousness in the choice of the various systems to which they have successively consented. They have not quarrelled about names or ideas, so that they might have security. Twiee they accepted a dictature from the soldiers; once they submitted to a restored monarchy from the European coalition; once they took a 'Citizen King' from the doctrinaires. But in each case, as has been recently observed, the new constitution lasted for less than the period of an ordinary farm lease. The dictatures leant upon the soldiery, were bound to find them employment and promotion, and

perished in the wars to which they were driven by the conditions of their existence. The monarchies were more contemptuously overthrown by the restless turbulence of street mobs hounded on to revolt by the most reckless press in Europe. Each of these violent changes has left the nation advanced one stage upon the road of which anarchy is the end. The general belief in the necessary instability of all governments has become more and more confirmed: and the stability of governments, like the sol vency of traders, is destroyed as soon as it is generally doubted. Governments could not be firmly founded; because no sooner was one set up, than men began to speculate on its successor.

The evils of such a state of things extend to all departments of civil life. To the government it almost involves a negation of all the benefits which the institution of Government is intended to confer. Security to the enterprises and calculations of industry is out of the question. No man can venture on undertakings which require a lengthened effort to bring them to perfection—or of which the fruit can only be reaped after the lapse of many years. The gains of the capitalist must be swift if he is to count on them at all: and they are proportionally speculative and hazardous. In such a country capital can never make a home. It shrinks from any obligation or partnership that ties it to the soil. The philanthropic writers of the revolutionary school may well complain that industry fails to earn a decent livelihood, and that wages are depressed to starvation point. That it is so is their own proud achievement. The rate of wages is low because the number of mouths that depend upon the money that is spent on wages is out of all proportion to its amount. Those who have the capital to spend will not risk it on a revolutionary soil. ̧ Either they carry it to other and safer markets, or, more commonly, they abandon the hope of making it reproductive. They are content to squander it on the pleasures of the hour, because they know that beyond the hour they have no right to count.

These evils are patent enough, and except by a school of revolutionary writers, are generally recognised. But there is another and more subtle class of dangers to which sufficient attention has hardly been devoted. The injurious effects of chronic revolution upon the feelings of the governed are serious enough; but they receive a terrible intensity from the parallel influence which is produced upon the minds of those who have to govern. A sense of security is necessary to every man in the conduct of his affairs; for without it he can neither forecast widely nor act with