blame you for not having come before. You were quite right, but don't lose a moment now. Leave these boys of yours. The dirty little rogues must get on for a time without you. Don't think that I sneer at the noble work that you and your uncle are doing. God Almighty forbid; but you must leave it for a time and come here. "Don't argue or procrastinate, but come. I cannot go on being driven all over the country in November to keep him out of the way. Besides, if you don't come soon, I shall have finished all my true stories, and have to do what I have never done yet to lie. So make haste, my dear boy. "Yours affectionately, "SALTIRE." On the second day from this Lord Saltire was driven to Medmenham by George Corby, and prophesied to him. about it. When they neared home, Lord Saltire grew distraught for the first time, and looked eagerly towards the terrace. As they drove up, John Marston ran down the steps to meet them. Lord Saltire said, "Thank God!" and walked up to the hall-door between the two young men. "Are you staying in London ?" said George Corby. "Yes. I am living in London," said John Marston. "An uncle of mine, a Moravian missionary from Australia, is working at a large ragged school in the Borough, and I am helping him." "You don't surely mean James Smith?" said Corby. "Indeed I do." "Your uncle? Well, that is very strange. I know him very well. My father fought his battle for him when he was at variance with the squatters about... He is one of the best fellows in the world. I am delighted to make your acquaintance." Lord Saltire said to Lord Hainault, when they were alone together, "You see what a liberty I have taken, having my private secretary down in this unceremonious way. Do ask him to stay." "You know how welcome he is for his own sake. Do you think you are right?" "I think so." "I am afraid you are a little too late," said Lord Hainault. Alas! poor Charles. CHAPTER LVI. SCUTARI. ALAS! poor Charles. While they all were dividing the spoil at home, thinking him dead, where was he? At Scutari. What happened to him before he got there, no one knows or ever will know. He does not remember, and there is no one else to tell. He was passed from hand to hand and put on board ship. Here fever set in, and he passed from a state of stupid agony into a state of delirium. He may have lain on the pier in the pouring rain, moistening his parched lips in the chilling shower; he may have been jolted from hospital to hospital, and laid in draughty passages, till a bed was found for him as others were. But he happily knew nothing of it. Things were so bad with him now that it did not much matter how he was treated. Read Lord Sidney Osborne's "Scutari and its Hospitals," and see how he might have been, and probably was. It is no part of our duty to dig up and exhibit all that miserable mismanagement. I think we have learnt our lesson. I think I will go bail it don't happen again. Before Charles knew where he was, there was a great change for the better. The hospital nurses arrived early in November. In He thinks that there were faint gleams of consciousness in his delirium. the first, he says he was lying on his back, and above him were the masts and spars of a ship, and a sailor-boy was sitting out on a yard in the clear blue, mending a rope or doing something. It may have been a dream or not. Afterwards there were periods, distinctly remembered, when he seemed consciousconscious of pain, and space, and time— to a certain extent. At these times he began to understand, in a way, that he was dead, and in hell. The delirium was better than this at ordinary times, in spite of its headlong incongruities. It was not so unbearable, save at times, when there came the feeling, too horrible for human brain to bear, of being millions and millions of miles, or of centuries, away, with no road back; at such times there was nothing to be done but to leap out of bed, and cry aloud for help in God's name. Then there came a time when he began, at intervals, to see a great vaulted arch overhead, and to wonder whether or no it was the roof of the pit. He began, after studying the matter many times, to find that pain had ceased, and that the great vaulted arch was real. And he heard low voices once at this timeblessed voices of his fellow-men. He was content to wait. At last, his soul and consciousness seemed to return to him in a strange way. He seemed to pass out of some abnormal state into a natural one. For he became aware that he was alive, nay, more, that he was asleep and dreaming a silly, pleasant dream, and that he could wake himself at any time. He awoke, expecting to awake in his old room at Ravenshoe. But he was not there, and looked round him in wonder. The arch he remembered was overhead. That was all real enough. Three people were round his bed-a doctor in undress, a grey-haired gentleman who peered into his face, and a lady. "God bless me !" said the doctor. "We have fetched him through. at his eyes, just look at his eyes. sane an eye as yours or mine, and the pulse as round as a button." Look As "Do you know us, my man?" said the gentleman. It was possible enough that he did not, for he had never set eyes on him before. The gentleman meant only, "Are you sane enough to know one of your fellow-creatures when you see one?" Charles thought he must be some one he had met in society in old times and ought to recognise. He framed a polite reply, to the effect that he hoped he had been well since he met him last, and Charles was recovered enough to take his hand and thank him fervently, and whispered, "Would you tell me one thing, sir? How did Lady Hainault come here?" "Lady Hainault, my man?" "Yes; she who is standing at the foot of the bed." "That is no Lady Hainault, my man ; that is Miss Nightingale. Do you ever say your prayers?" "No." Say them to-night before you go to sleep, and remember her name in them. Possibly they may get to heaven the quicker for it. Good-night." "Prayer forgotten, eh!" How much of all this misery lay in that, I wonder? How much of this dull, stupid, careless despair-earth a hopeless, sunless wilderness, and heaven not thought of? Read on. But, while you read, remember that poor Charles had had no domestic religious education whatever. The vicar had taught him his catechism and "his prayers." After that, Shrewsbury and Oxford. Read on, but don't condemn; at least not yet. That he thanked God with all the earnestness of his warm heart that night, and remembered that name the doctor told him, you may be sure. But, when the prayer was finished, he began to think whether or no it was sincere, whether it would not be better that he should die, and that it should be all over and done. His creed was that, if he died in the faith of Christ, bearing no ill-will to anyone, having repented of his sins, it would not go ill with him. Would it not be better to die now that he could fulfil those conditions, and not tempt the horrible black future? Certainly. In time he left watching the great arch overhead, and the creeping shadows, and the patch of light on the wall, which He shaped itself into a faint rhomboid at noon, and crept on till it defined itself into a perfect square at sundown, and then grew golden and died out. began to notice other things. But till the last there was one effect of light and shadow which he always lay awake to see-a faint flickering on the walls and roof, which came slowly nearer, till a light was in his eyes. We all know what that was. It has been described twenty times. I can believe that story of the dying man kissing the shadow on the wall. When Miss Nightingale and her lamp are forgotten, it will be time to consider whether one would prefer to turn Turk or Mormon. He began to take notice that there were men in the beds beside him. One, as we know, had been carried out dead; but there was another in his place now. And one day there was a great event; when Charles woke, both of them were up, sitting at the side of their beds, ghastly shadows, and talking across him. The maddest musician never listened to the "vox humana" stop at Haarlem with such delight as Charles did to these two voices. He lay for a time hearing them make acquaintance, and then he tried to sit up and join. He was on his left side, and tried to rise. His left arm would not support him, and he fell back, but they crept to him and set him up, and sat on his bed. "Right again, eh, comrade?" said one. "I thought you was gone, my lad. But I heard the doctor say you'd get through. You look bravely. Time was when you used to jump out of bed, and cry on God A'mighty. Many a time. I've strove to help ye. The man in his bed died while you was like that, a Fusilier Guards man. What regiment?" "I am of the 140th," said Charles. "We had a bit of a brush with the enemy on the 25th. I was wounded there. It was a pretty little rattle, I think, for a time, but not of very much importance, I fancy." The man who had first spoken laughed; the other man, a lad who had a round face once, perhaps, but now was a pale death's head, with two great star ing eyes, speaking with a voice which Charles knew at once to be a gentleman's, said, "Don't you know then that that charge of yours is the talk of Europe? That charge will never be forgotten while the world is round. Six hundred men against ten battalions. Good God! And you might have died there, and not known it." "Ah, is it so?" said Charles. "If some could only know it!" "That is the worst of it," said the young man. "I have enlisted under a false name, and will never go home any more. Never more. And she will never know that I did my duty." And after a time he got strong again in a way. A bullet, it appears, had struck the bone of his arm, and driven the splinters into the flesh. Fever had come on, and his splendid constitution, as yet untried, save by severe training, had pulled him through. But his left arm was useless. The doctor looked at it again and again, and shook his head. The two men who were in the beds on each side of him were moved before him. They were only there a fortnight after his coming to himself. The oldest of the two went first, and two or three days after the younger. The three made all sorts of plans for meeting in England. Alas, what chance is there for three soldiers to meet again, unless by accident? At home it would have taken three years to have made these three men such hearty friends as they had become in a fortnight. Friendships are made in the camp, in the bush, or on board ship, at a wonderful rate. And, moreover, they last for an indefinite time. For ever, I fancy, for these reasons. Time does not destroy friendship. Time has nothing whatever to do with it. I have heard an old man of seventyeight talking of a man he had not seen for twelve years, and before that for twenty-five, as if they were young men together. Craving for his company, as if once more they were together on the deck of the white-sailed yacht, flying before the easterly wind between Hurstcastle and Sconce Point. Mere continual familiarity, again, does not hurt friend ship, unless interests clash. Diversity of interests is the death-blow of friendship. One great sacrifice may be made-two, or even three; but, after the first, two men are not to one another as they were before. Where men are thrown intimately together for a short time, and part have only seen the best side of one another, or where men see one another frequently, and have not very many causes of difference, friendship will flourish for ever. In the case of love it is very different, and for this obvious reason, which I will explain in a few pages, if I entered into my own recognizances, in an early chapter of this story, not to preach. I fear they are escheated after this short essay on friendship, coming, as it does, exactly in the wrong place. I must only throw myself on the court, and purge myself of my contempt by promising amendment. Poor Charles after a time was sent home to Fort Pitt. But that mighty left arm, which had done such noble work when it belonged to No. 3, in the Oxford University eight, was useless, and Charles Simpson, trooper in the 140th, was discharged from the army, and found himself on Christmas Eve in the street in front of the Waterloo Station, with eighteen shillings and ninepence in his pocket, wondering blindly what the end would be, but no more dreaming of begging from those who had known him formerly than of leaping off Waterloo Bridge. Perhaps not half as much. To be continued. A FEW REMARKS ON MR. HARE'S SCHEME OF REPRESENTATION. BY G. O. TREVELYAN, B.A., SCHOLAR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.1 MR. HARE has observed, with just pride, that his system of contingent representation "has been received with en"thusiasm by many of the most scruti"nizing and enlightened minds of nearly "every rank, class, and opinion." That system has been pronounced by Mr. Mill to possess "the almost unparalleled merit "of carrying out a great principle of go"vernment, in a manner approaching to "ideal perfection as regards the special object in view, while it attains inci"dentally several other ends of scarcely 1 We present this article, not because we agree with its anticipations respecting Mr. Hare's scheme, but because we are anxious to contribute to the discussion of Mr. Hare's ideas even by exhibiting, in a strong form, what may be said against them. To us Mr. Hare's views seem of the very greatest importance -constituting, when taken collectively, a real stroke of inventive genius in a department of practical politics in which it was supposed, a little while ago, by almost every one, that the "last word" had been spoken through the mouths of our ordinary party politicians, and the wall reached beyond which, for those whom this "last word" did not satisfy, there was no farther hope or chance of progress.— ED. "inferior importance." It is difficult to believe that in a scheme which has been sifted and approved by Mr. Mill there can exist any radical defect which has escaped his observation. It is still more difficult to imagine that the grievance, the prevention of which constitutes, in his opinion, one of the principal merits of that scheme, is little more than imaginary. And yet it is hard to deny that there is one grave drawback inherent in the very nature of Mr. Hare's system, and that the abuse, which according to Mr. Mill can be remedied by that system only, cannot actually exist, in this country at least, under any system of equal representation. 66 The grievance in question is stated at length in the seventh chapter of the Treatise on Representative Government. Suppose that in a country governed "by equal and universal suffrage there "is a contested election in every constituency, and every election is carried by a small majority. The Parliament "thus brought together represents little more than a bare majority of the peo 66 66 66 46 66 ple. This Parliament proceeds to legis"late, and adopts important measures "by a bare majority of itself. What guarantee is there that these measures "accord with the wishes of a majority "of the people? . . . It is possible, and "even probable, that the opinion which "has prevailed was agreeable only to a "minority of the nation, though to a "majority of that portion of it whom "the institutions of the country have "erected into a ruling class." This may be, and, no doubt, often is, the case when the measures in question are such as do not greatly interest the mass of the nation. If the opinion of the constituent bodies was taken on the Bill for the Protection of Servants when employed in cleaning windows, it is not impossible that it might differ from that of the majority of the House of Commons. But when the measures in question are of vital importance, when they attract the attention and appeal to the feelings of the English people, then there is nothing more certain than that the English people will have their own way; and woe be to those who attempt to bar them from it. In 1784, the Coalition Ministry was supported by a majority of the House of Commons at a time when they were unpopular with the nation at large. That is to say, the opinion which then prevailed concerning their measures was agreeable only to a minority of the nation. If the two eminent statesmen at the head of affairs had yielded for the time to the popular voice, the great law of reaction would soon have brought the tide of success again to their feet. But they clung to office to the last; the public discontent waxed more bitter daily; and when their fall came, it was complete and irreparable. At the last debate before the dissolution, Parliament censured their opponents by a majority of one; that is, it adopted an important measure by a bare majority of itself: but at the ensuing election a hundred and sixty of their supporters lost their seats, and they found themselves doomed to a lifelong, fruitless, hopeless opposition. Again, in 1831, the Reform Bill the great heart of the nation was set on the Reform Bill, and in the next parliament the Whig majorities swept everything before them. And these things happened in the old days, before that great and bloodless revolution, which effected a change as deep and lasting as did ever the Revolution of 1688. Since the Reform Bill, public opinion is brought to bear on all the questions of the day with much greater rapidity and precision than in former times. Before 1832, in the case of measures which did not involve the selfish interest of large classes, the wishes of the nation speedily made themselves heard. But in a case in which the power and interest of the ruling classes was concerned, the popular voice had need to call longer and louder than at present before it could command attention and respect. That this was so may be seen by comparing the long and weary throes by which the Reform Bill was brought to the birth with the rapid passage of free-trade principles from the heads of advanced political economists to the statute book of England. It is not difficult to ascertain the cause of this phenomenon. In those days many flourishing cities were unrepresented; many boroughs, which now bear on their lists two, three, five thousand voters, were misrepresented by the nominees of small and close corporations. In those days, when the elected of Cambridge were carried forth from the portals of the town-hall to receive the congratulations of the citizens whose interests should have been the same as their own, the dead cats immediately began |