honesty in seeking truth, his candour and courage in avowing error !

Sir Robert Peel was a scholar, and a liberal and discerning patron of the arts. He was a man of fine and sensitive organisation, and of judicious and ready benevolence. Though not social, he had many literary interests, and much elegant and cultivated taste. Possessed of immense wealth, with every source and avenue of pleasure at his command, it was no slight merit in him that he preferred to such refined enjoyment the laborious and harassing service of his country. He had his recompense. By his unblemished private character, by his unrivalled administrative ability, by his vast public services, by his unvarying moderation, he had inspired, not only England, but the world at large, with a respect and confidence such as few attain. After many fluctuations of repute, he had at length reached an eminence on which he stood-independent of office and of party-one of the recognised potentates of Europe; face to face, in the evening of life, with his work and his reward ;-his work, to aid the progress of those principles on which, after much toil, many sacrifices, and long groping towards the light, he had at last laid a firm grasp; his guerdon, to watch their triumph and their influences. Nobler occupation man could not aspire to; sublimer power no ambition need desire; greater earthly reward, God, out of all the riches of his boundless treasury, has not to bestow.

V.

EMPLOYMENT OF OUR ASIATIC FORCES IN

EUROPEAN WARS.1

In a remarkable article

THE startling and novel step-for which, like so many novelties, we are indebted to the erratic genius who rules our destinies at this critical conjuncture-of summoning our Asiatic subjects to fight our European foes, and (to borrow Canning's phrase) calling the East upon the scene to redress the menaced balance of the West, has roused the most thoughtful and suggestive of our journalists to discuss the secondary and remoter consequences of that measure. full of foresight and reflection, which well merits the grave consideration of both patriots and statesmen, the Spectator points out how pregnant with the widest and mightiest results the proceeding may not impossibly turn out to be, and how essential it is that at the very outset England should clearly and thoroughly realise those speculative issues, and make up the national mind whether they are to be regarded as fraught with evil and danger, or with beckoning prospects of the most magnificent and dazzling order. In following out this prophetic vision, however, which

1 Fortnightly, June 1878.

it does in a spirit of anxious and thoughtful inquiry, it commits itself to views both of morals and .philosophy prevalent enough no doubt, but to my mind so very questionable, that a searching examination of them is greatly to be desired. One of the Spectator's positions I regard, as utterly unsound; I am inclined to see hope and opportunities where it sees only peril and the probability of wrong; and the patriotic temper breathing through the article, while more moderate than is customary, seems curiously at variance with the advanced and daring doctrines generally promulgated in its columns.

We shall have to quote rather largely, but it is necessary to lay before our readers the entire substance of the argument we propose to question, and in the main to controvert.

"With an audacity which, as we frankly concede to those who follow him, has in it something splendid, Lord Beaconsfield has broken through the traditions of a century, has broken through them successfully, and has at a stroke changed all the relations previously existing between India and the United Kingdom. He has changed India from a far-away Empire, secluded in the depths of Asia, to a closely-connected dependency, situated for all purposes of practical politics, and especially for war, upon the Mediterranean. Talk of Russian intrusion into that sea, Lord Beaconsfield has brought India into it, with her whole army, and her boundless resources for the supply of men. In profound secrecy, without a previous vote of Parliament, without a hint being given to the people, while his leader in the Commons was pledging himself to the lips that nothing was being done, he has ordered the Indian Army into Europe, avowedly to fight a European people, and the Indian Army has obeyed him with delight.

"So far as observers well accustomed to Sepoys can perceive,

there would be no difficulty, except money, in landing 60,000 native troops, officered, drilled, and provided like Europeans, in any part of the Mediterranean. We could conquer the Turkish Empire in Asia from the European side, and never expend an Englishman.

"No such alteration in the position of this country as a fighting Power has occurred since she substituted Regular regiments for train-bands and feudal retainers, and it involves the entire future relation of the English people to themselves and to the world..

"We are constrained to believe, and we would gladly believe the contrary, that it will affect those relations for evil. We cannot think it well for any nation to be able to fight by deputy, to be able to wage war without making sacrifices, to be able to win territories for themselves through the aid of men who have no control over their policy, and who are not to be responsible for the successes they achieve—and we believe such a position especially bad for the English people. Already the worst tendency of that people is the one we may call the Carthaginian-the desire for empire to be created by mercenary swords. They have fought their greatest campaigns by the aid of subsidised allies. They have resolutely rejected a conscription, so resolutely that, by a strange perversion of ideas, they have boasted of their freedom from it as if it were a proof of superior virtue. They have refused even to submit to the universal military training which every statesman among them of both parties would, if it were politically safe to speak out, tell them was directly for their good -would make them healthier men, more active men, and men with more capacity for command, for obedience, and for organisation. With the employment of the natives of India as Imperial troops, the grand restraints on the English haughtiness and disposition to crush down instead of conciliating opposition will be removed.

"We cannot believe that a power so terrible, and to be used with so little responsibility to its subjects, can be trusted to any government or any nation without moral and political deterioration. The single check on the military governments of the Continent, the one barrier against grand wars of aggrandisement, is that the army is the nation, that if Prince Bismarck, or Prince Gortschakoff, or M. Gambetta engage in wars of conquest, they must conquer by expending those who ultimately rule them.

The English people are about to throw even that check away, and embark on huge enterprises in the security, or at least in the belief that they have behind them the soldiers of a continent whom they rule, but who are not themselves, to whom they need only give pay and honours. That the men come voluntarily, willingly, even delightedly to the work does not alter the case, which is this,—that they are not us, that the burden of the sadness of their loss does not fall on English homes. Take them in the very best point of view, a true point, it would seem, for the hour, as our willing allies, and still they relieve us of a strain which, if it ought to be borne, ought to be borne alone by the nation which decides that it has to be endured. There are no allies on earth to whom a people like the English, with their secular history of effort and of freedom, ought to entrust their work. There is in the whole arrangement a shifting of the burden from the rulers on to their dependants, a reliance on expense as an equivalent for self-sacrifice, a postponement of national duty for the sake of national ease, which can produce no good. Can it be well that at this moment, when temper and reason are still struggling, that the second restraining force should be removed. that they should be reminded that they can dispose of other races than their own, that they have a recruiting-ground in Asia which costs them nothing but money, and which cannot be exhausted? We say nothing of what appears to us the wickedness of ruling India because Europe is nobler than Asia, and then calling in Asia to beat down Europe; nothing of the fierce jealousy which all Europe will henceforth feel of our possession of the mighty Empire at last brought home to its doors-an Empire which, if its people will fight on our side, becomes a seventh Great Power, stronger for invasion than any of the six, except, perhaps, Germany and confine ourselves to the single and, as we believe, unanswerable question,-Is it well, for the sake of success in a single quarrel, to deteriorate the nation, to make universal military training impossible, to rely on Asiatic swords instead of our own, to sink from the Roman position, of which we were so proud, to the Carthaginian? The nation seems for the moment intoxicated with its new strength, but when the statesmen meet again, we trust that among them, at least, we shall find a few who can think of the future as well as the present, and plead that national strength can never be found in a measure which, so far as it succeeds, must emasculate the national character.