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tainly, under the conditions of a modern age and our actual life, would ever think of devising such a chamber. But we will allow ourselves to do more than merely state this truism, we will allow ourselves to ask what sort of second chamber people who thought straight and saw clear would, under the conditions of a modern age and of our actual life, naturally make. And we find, from the experience of the United States, that such provincial legis

separate, with a national Parliament in | Dublin, with her own Foreign Office and diplomacy, her own army and navy, her own tariff, coinage, and currency. This is manifestly impracticable. But here again let us look at what is done by people who in politics think straight and see clear; let us observe what is done in the United States. The government at Washington reserves matters of imperial concern, matters such as those just enumerated, which cannot be relinquished without relinquish-latures as we have just now seen to be the ing the unity of the empire. Neither does it allow one great South to be constituted, or one great West, with a Southern Parliament, or a Western. Provinces that are too large are broken up, as Virginia has been broken up. But the several States are nevertheless real and important wholes, each with its own legislature; and to each the control, within its own borders, of all except imperial concerns is freely committed. The United States government intervenes only to keep order in the last resort. Let us suppose a similar plan applied in Ireland. There are four provinces there, forming four natural wholes or perhaps (if it should seem expedient to put Munster and Connaught together) three. The Parliament of the empire would still be in London, and Ireland would send members to it. But at the same time each Irish province would have its own legislature, and the control of its own real affairs. The British landlord would no longer determine the dealings with land in an Irish province, nor the British Protestant the dealings with Church and education. Apart from imperial concerns, or from disorder such as to render military intervention necessary, the government in London would leave Ireland to manage itself. Lord Spencer and Mr. Campbell Bannerman would come back to England. Dublin Castle would be the State House of Leinster. Land questions, game laws, police, Church, education, would be regulated by the people and legislature of Leinster for Leinster, of Ulster for Ulster, of Munster and Connaught for Munster and Connaught. The same with the like matters in England and Scotland. The local legislatures would regulate them.

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But there is more. Everybody who watches the working of our institutions perceives what strain and friction is caused in it at present, by our having a second chamber composed almost entirely of great landowners, and representing the feelings and interests of the class of landowners almost exclusively. No one, cer

natural remedy for the confusion in the House of Commons, the natural remedy for the confusion in Ireland, have the further great merit besides of giving us the best basis possible for a modern second chamber. The United States Senate is perhaps, of all the institutions of that country, the most happily devised, the most successful in its working. The leg. islature of each State of the Union elects two senators to the second chamber of the national Congress at Washington. The senators are the Lords - if we like to keep, as it is surely best to keep, for designating the members of the second chamber, the title to which we have been for so many ages habituated. Each of the provincial legislatures of Great Britain and Ireland would elect members to the House of Lords. The colonial legisla tures also would elect members to it; and thus we should be complying in the most simple and yet the most signal way possible with the present desire of both this country and the colonies for a closer union together, for some representation of the colonies in the Imperial Parliament. Probably it would be found expedient to transfer to the second chamber the representatives of the universities. But no scheme for a second chamber will at the present day be found solid unless it stands on a genuine basis of election and representation. All schemes for forming a second chamber through nomination, whether by the crown or by any other voice, of picked noblemen, great officials, leading merchants and bankers, eminent men of letters and science, are fantastic. Probably they would not give us by any means a good second chamber. But certainly they would not satisfy the country or possess its confidence, and therefore they would be found futile and unworkable.

So we discover what would naturally appear the desirable way out of some of our worst confusions to anybody who saw clear and thought straight. But there is little likelihood, probably, of any such way

being soon perceived and followed by our community here. And why is this? Because, as a community, we have so little lucidity, we so little see clear and think straight. And why, again, is this? Because our community is so little homogeneous. The lower class has yet to show what it will do in politics. Rising politicians are already beginning to flatter it with servile assiduity, but their praise is as yet premature, the lower class is too little known. The upper class and the middle class we know. They have each their own supposed interests, and these are very different from the true interests of the community. Our very classes make us dim-seeing. In a modern time, we are living with a system of classes so intense, a society of such unnatural complication, that the whole action of our minds is hampered and falsened by it. I return to my old thesis: inequality is our bane. The great impediments in our way of progress are aristocracy and Protestant dissent. People think this is an epigram; alas, it is much rather a truism!

An aristocratical society like ours is often said to be the society from which artists and men of letters have most to gain. But an institution is to be judged, not by what one can oneself gain from it, but by the ideal which it sets up. And aristocracy if I may once more repeat words which, however often repeated, have still a value from their truth - aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary. Even to the imaginative, whom Lord John Manners thinks its sure friend, it is more a hindrance than a help. Johnson says well: "Whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings." But what is a Duke of Norfolk or an Earl Warwick, dressed in broadcloth and tweed, and going about his business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railways like the rest of us? Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way, and to leave us to the Norfolks and Warwicks of history.

I say this without a particle of hatred, and with esteem, admiration, and affection for many individuals in the aristocratical class. But the action of time and circumstance is fatal. If one asks oneself what is really to be desired, what is expedient, one would go far beyond the substitution of an

elected second chamber for the present House of Lords. All confiscation is to be reprobated, all deprivation (except in bad cases of abuse) of what is actually possessed. But one would wish, if one set about wishing, for the extinction of title after the death of the holder, and for the dispersion of property by a stringent law of bequest. Our society should be homogenous, and only in this way can it become so.

But aristocracy is in little danger. " I suppose, sir," a Dissenting minister said to me the other day, "you found, when you were in America, that they envied us there our great aristocracy." It was his sincere belief that they did, and such probably is the sincere belief of our middle class in general; or at any rate, that if the Americans do not envy us this pos session, they ought to. And my friend, one of the great Liberal party which has now, I suppose, pretty nearly run down its deceased wife's sister, poor thing, has his hand and heart full, so far as politics are concerned, of the question of Church disestablishment. He is eager to set to work at a change which, even if it were desirable (and I think it is not), is yet off the line of those reforms which are really pressing.

Mr. Lyulph Stanley, Professor Stuart, and Lord Richard Grosvenor are waiting ready to help him, and perhaps Mr. Chamberlain himself will lead the attack. I admire Mr. Chamberlain as a politician because he has the courage-and it is a wise courage to state large the reforms we need, instead of minimizing them. But like Saul before his conversion, he breathes out threatenings and slaughter against the Church, and is likely, perhaps, to lead an assault upon her. He is a formidable assailant, yet I suspect he might break his finger-nails on her walls. If the Church has the majority for her, she will of course stand. But in any case this institution, with all its faults, has that merit which makes the great strength of institutions-it offers an ideal which is noble and attaching. Equality is its profession, if not always its practice. It inspires wide and deep affection, and possesses, therefore, immense strength. Probably the Establishment will not stand in Wales, probably it will not stand in Scotland. Wales it ought not, I think, to stand. In Scotland I should regret its fall; but Presbyterian Churches are born to separatism, as the sparks fly upward. At any rate, it is through the vote of local legislatures that disestablishment is likely to

In

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come, as a measure required in certain | Mr. John Morley has now left journalism.
provinces, and not as a general measure There is plenty of talent in Parliament,
for the whole country. In other words, plenty of talent in journalism, but no one
the endeavor for disestablishment ought in either to expound "the signs of this
to be postponed to the endeavor for far time as these two men might have ex-
more important reforms, not to precede it. pounded them. The signs of the time,
Yet I doubt whether Mr. Chamberlain and political and social, are left, I regret to
Mr. Lyulph Stanley will listen to me when say, to bring themselves as they best can
I plead thus with them; there is so little to the notice of the public. Yet how in-
lucidity in England, and they will say I effective an organ is literature for convey-
am priest-ridden.
ing them compared with Parliament and
journalism!

ture

One man there is, whom above all others I would fain have seen in Parliament Conveyed somehow, however, they cerduring the last ten years, and beheld es- tainly should be, and in this disquisition tablished in influence there at this junc- I have tried to deal with them. But the Mr. Goldwin Smith. I do not say political and social problem, as the thinkthat he was not too embittered against the ers call it, must not so occupy us as to Church; in my opinion he was. But with make us forget the human problem. The singular lucidity and penetration he saw problems are connected together, but they what great reforms were needed in other are not identical. Our political and sodirections, and the order of relative im-cial confusions I admit; what Parliament portance in which reforms stood. Such is at this moment, I see and deplore. were his character, style, and faculties, that alone perhaps among men of his insight he was capable of getting his ideas weighed and entertained by men in power; while amid all favor and under all temptations he was certain to have still remained true to his insight, "unshaken, unseduced, unterrified." I think of him as a real power for good in Parliament at this time, had he by now become, as he might have become, one of the leaders there. His absence from the scene, his retirement in Canada, is a loss to his friends, but a still greater loss to his country.

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Yet nowhere but in England even now, not in France, not in Germany, not in America, could there be found public men of that quality - so capable of fair dealing, of trusting one another, keeping their word to one another - as to make possible such a settlement of the Franchise and Seats Bills as that which we have lately seen. Plato says with most profound truth: "The man who would think to good purpose must be able to take many things into his view together." How homogeneous American society is, I have done my best to declare; how smoothly and naturally the institutions of the United Hardly inferior in influence to Parlia- States work, how clearly, in some most ment itself is journalism. I do not con- important respects, the Americans see, ceive of Mr. John Morley as made for how straight they think. Yet Sir Lepel filling that position in Parliament which Griffin says that there is no country callMr. Goldwin Smith would, I think, have ing itself civilized where one would not filled. If he controls, as Protesilaos in rather live than in America, except Rusthe poem advises, hysterical passion (the sia. In politics I do not much trust Sir besetting danger of men of letters on the Lepel Griffin. I hope that he administers platform and in Parliament) and remem-in India some district where a profound ⚫bers to approve "the depth and not the tumult of the soul," he will be powerful in Parliament; he will rise, he will come into office; but he will not do for us in Parliament, I think, what Mr. Goldwin Smith would have done. He is too much of a partisan. In journalism, on the other hand, he was as unique a figure as Mr. Goldwin Smith would, I imagine, have been in Parliament. As a journalist, Mr. John Morley showed a mind which seized and understood the signs of the times; he had all the ideas of a man of the best insight, and alone, perhaps, among men of his insight, he had the skill for making these ideas pass into journalism. But

insight into the being and working of institutions is not requisite. But, I suppose, of the tastes of himself and of that large class of Englishmen whom Mr. Charles Sumner has taught us to call the class of gentlemen, he is no untrustworthy reporter. And an Englishman of this class would rather live in France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, than in the United States, in spite of our community of race and speech with them! This means that, in the opinion of men of that class, the human problem at least is not well solved in the United States, whatever the political and social problem may be. And to the human prob

lem in the United States we ought certainly to turn our attention, especially when we find taken such an objection as this; and some day, though not now, we will do so, and try to see what the objection comes to. I have given hostages to the United States, I am bound to them by the memory of great, untiring, and most attaching kindness. I should not like to have to own them to be of all countries calling themselves civilized, except Russia, the country where one would least like to live.

MATTHEW Arnold.

From Chambers' Journal. A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF.

BY MRS. OLIPHANT.

CHAPTER VII.

"SHE has come to stay," Frances said. "WHAT?" cried Mariuccia, making the small monosyllable sound as if it were the biggest word in her vocabulary.

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She has come to stay. She is my sister; papa's daughter as much as I am. She has come - home." Frances was a little uncertain about the word, and it was only a casa that she said "to the house," which means the same. Mariuccia threw up her arms in astonishment. "Then there has been another signorina all the time!" she cried. ure to yourself that I have been with the padrone a dozen years, and I never heard of her before."

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my room, Mariuccia. The blue room is quite nice; it will do very well for me; but I should like her to feel at home, not to think our house was bare and cold. The blue room would be rather naked, if we were to put her there to-night. It will not be naked for me; for, of course, I am used to it all, and know everything. But when Constance wakes to-morrow morn. ing and looks round her, and wonders where she is oh, how strange it all seems! I wish her to open her eyes upon things that are pretty, and to say to herself: What a delightful house papa has! What a nice room! I feel as if I had been here all my life.""

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"Constanza - is that her name? It is rather a common name not distinguished, like our signorina's. But it is very good for her, I have no doubt. And so you will give her your own room, that she may be fond of the house, and stay and supplant you? That is what will happen. The good one, the one of gold, gets pushed out of the way. I would not give her my room to make her love the house."

"I think you would, Mariuccia."

"No; I do not think so," said Mariuccia, squaring herself with one arm akimbo. "No; I do not deny that I would probably take some new things into the blue room, and put up curtains. But I am older than you are, and I have more sense. I would not do it. If she gets your room, she will Fig-get your place; and she will please everybody, and be admired, and my angel will be put out of the way."

Papa does not talk very much about his concerns," said Frances in her faithfulness. "And what we have got to do is to make her very comfortable. She is very pretty, don't you think? Such beautiful blond hair and tall. I never shall be tall, I fear. They say she is like papa; but, as is natural, she is much more beautiful than papa."

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Beauty is as you find it," said Mariuccia. "Carina, no one will ever be so pretty as our own signorina to Domenico and me. What is the child doing? She is pulling the things off her own bed. My angel, you have lost your good sense. You are fluttered and upset by this new arrival. The blue room will be very good for the new young lady. Perhaps she will not stay very long?"

The wish was father to the thought. But Frances took no notice of the suggestion. She said briskly, going on with what she was doing: "She must have

"I am such a horrid little wretch," said Frances, "that I thought of that too. It was mean, oh, so mean of me. She is prettier than I am; and taller; and yes, of course, she must be older too, so you see it is her right."

"Is she the eldest?" asked Mariuccia. Frances made a puzzled pause; but she would not let the woman divine that she did not know. "O yes; she must be the eldest. Come quick, Mariuccia; take all these things to the blue room; and now for your clean linen and everything that is nice and sweet."

Mariuccia did what she was told, but with many objections. She carried on a running murmur of protest all the time. "When there are changes in a family; when it is by the visitation of God, that is another matter. A son or a daughter who is in trouble, who has no other refuge'; that is natural; there is nothing to say. But to remain away during a dozen years, and then to come back at a moment's

"I have thought of that too," said Frances. "But my sister is not a prodigal; and papa has never done anything for her. It is all quite different. When we know each other better, it will be delightful always to have a companion, Mariuccia - think how pleasant it will be always to have a companion. I wonder if she will like my pictures? Now, don't you think the room looks very pretty? I always thought it was a pretty room. Leave the persiane open, that she may see the sea; and in the morning, don't forget to come in and close them, before the sun gets hot. I think that will do now."

notice - nay, without even a moment's | of, and who now was one of them, nearer notice in the evening, when all the beds | to her than anybody, except her father. are made up, and demand everything that But all this being done, she had the strangis comfortable! I have always thought est difficulty in going back, in thrusting that there was a great deal to be said for herself, as imagination said, between the poor young signorino in the Bible, he them, and interrupting their talk. To who had always stayed at home when his think that it should be such a tremendous brother was amusing himself. Carina, matter to return to that familiar room, in you know what I mean." which the greater part of her life had been passed! It felt like another world into which she was about to enter, full of unknown elements and conditions which she did not understand. She had not known what it was to be shy in the very limited society she had ever known; but she was shy now, feeling as if she had not courage to put her hand upon the handle of the door. The familiar creak and jar of it as it opened seemed to her like noisy instruments announcing her approach, which stopped the conversation, as she had divined, and made her father and her sister look up with a little start. Frances could have wished to sink through the floor, to get rid of her own being altogether, as she saw them both give this slight start. Constance was leaning upon the table, the light of the lamp shining full upon her face, with the air of being in the midst of an animated narrative, which she stopped when Frances entered; and Mr. Waring had been listening with a smile. He turned half round and held out his hand to the timid girl behind him. "Come, Frances," he said; "you have been a long time making your preparations. Have you been bringing out the fairest robe for your sister?" It was odd how the parable which had no signification in their circumstances - haunted them all.

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"Indeed, I hope it will do after all the trouble you have taken. And I hope the young lady is worthy of it. But, my angel, what shall I do when I come in to wake her? Does she expect that I can talk her language to her? No, no. And she will know nothing; she will not even be able to say good-morning."

"I hope so. But if not, you must call me first, that is all," said Frances cheerfully. "Now, don't go to bed just yet; perhaps she will like something some tea; or perhaps a little supper; or I never asked if she had dined."

Mariuccia regarded this possibility with equanimity. She was not afraid of a girl's appetite. But she made a grimace at the mention of the tea. "It is good when one has a cold; oh yes," she said; "but to drink it at all times, as you do! If she wants anything, it will be a great deal better to give her a sirop, or a little red wine."

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"Your room is quite ready whenever you please. And would you like tea or anything? I ought to have asked if you had dined," Frances said.

"Is she the housekeeper? How odd! Do you look after everything? Dear me ! I am afraid, in that case, I shall make a very poor substitute for Frances, papa."

Frances detained Mariuccia as long as "It is not necessary to think of that," she could, and lingered herself still longer, he said hastily, giving her a quick glance. after all was ready in the room. She did Frances saw it, with another involunnot know how to go back to the drawing-tary, quickly suppressed pang. Of course, room, where she had left the two together, there would be things that Constance must to say to each other, no doubt, many be warned not to say. And yet it felt as things that could be better said in her absence. There was no jealousy, only delicacy, in this; and she had given up her pretty room to her sister, and carried her indispensable belongings to the bare "I dined at the hotel," Constance went one, with the purest pleasure in mak- on, "with those people whom I travelled ing Constance comfortable. Constance! with. I suppose you will have to call and whom an hour ago she had never heard be civil. They were quite delighted to

if papa had deserted her and gone over to the other side. She had not the remot est conception what the warning referred to, or what Constance meant.

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