of lucid exposition which is the most formidable of all arguments. Of working men, as I have said, he knew very little, though many of them read and appreciated his books. But with the upper and middle classes of society, their principles and prejudices, their faults and failings, he was thoroughly well acquainted. Nothing in his life is more honourable to him than the persistent efforts which he made, for more than twenty years, to get a decent system of secondary education established in this country. Only now, when he has been dead nearly fourteen years, is this question being really taken up in a practical spirit by a responsible Government. On the other hand, he seldom mentions political dissenters, whose importance he recognised, except in terms of caricature; and of the great driving force which, apart from his more conspicuous accomplishments, Mr. Gladstone wielded, he had a most imperfect idea. He took the superficial view of Whig coteries that the author of the Irish Land Acts, and the greatest financier of the age, was a rhetorical sophist, a man of words and phrases, not of business and its execution. This view finds frequent utterance in the second volume of the published Letters. The piety or prudence of Mr. George Russell has in most instances suppressed the name of his former chief; but a schoolboy far less intelligent than Macaulay's would find no difficulty in filling the blank.

Mr. Arnold's first incursion into practical politics was not a fortunate one. He was a strong, almost a fanatical, opponent of the Burials Bill. He did not take the line, logically unassailable, that an Established Church comprises the whole nation, that all its rites, including the Burial Service, are national, and that

as Dissenters were entitled to burial in national cemeteries with national rites, they had no grievance. If he had been a true Erastian, that is what he would have said. But he chose to argue that the permission of other services would produce scandal, would be, as he repeated about fifty times, like the substitution for a reading from Milton of a reading from Eliza Cook. The twenty-three years that have elapsed since the Burials Bill received the Royal assent have completely falsified this gloomy prediction. No statute has worked more smoothly. Even the foolish clergymen who discovered to their delight that it did not compel them to let the bell be tolled for a schismatic have long since ceased to excite any interest. That the Act is inconsistent with the principle of an Established Church seems to me clear. But the people of England, though just, are not logical, and the removal of this grievance, which was really part of a much larger one, made the larger one more difficult to redress. Like many freethinkers, Mr. Arnold had a horror of disestablishment. He was opposed to it even in Ireland, where the nature of things might be said to demand it. The last fifteen years have vindicated his belief that in England public opinion was against it, and that the political power of Nonconformity was on the decline.

Mr. Arnold's volume of Mixed Essays-an unhappy title, suggesting biscuits-contains two or three which may be classed as political, and which are therefore fit to be treated here. "Equality" is an elaborate argument, which never took any hold upon the English people, against freedom of bequest. Mr. Arnold had the support of Mill, but he had not the

support of the public. He saw clearly enough that the Real Estates Intestacy Bill, with which Liberals used to play, would have had no practical result, for a man who wanted to defeat it had only to make a will. There is much to be said for his case. The earth, as Turgot put it, belongs to the living, and not to the dead. It is no infringement of human liberty to prevent a man from fettering those who come after him. But this is a subject on which the most eloquent and the most profound philosophers would contend in vain with the customs and instincts of the English people. They did not mind Lord Cairns's Settled Land Act, which enables the owner of a life interest in land to sell it if he invests the money for the benefit of the reversioner. They would perhaps tolerate the complete abolition of all limited ownership in land. But of the compulsory division of property after death, which prevails on the Continent, they will not hear. Mr. Arnold tells an amusing story of an American who was asked what could be done in the United States, with its freedom of bequest, if a great landed estate were strictly entailed. The American replied, with more humour than candour, that the will could be set aside on the ground of insanity. Such is the difference of sentiment between the old country and the new. In this case Mr. Arnold rode his hobby too hard. The feudal origin of our land laws is indisputable, and their practical inconveniences are numerous. Yet it is not freedom of bequest, it is influences far more subtle and profound, which have "the natural and necessary effect under present circumstances of materialising our upper class, vulgarising our middle class, and brutalising our lower class." But, indeed, vulgarity is confined

to no class. It is, and always must be, a property of the individual.

"I do not," Mr. Arnold wrote (Mixed Essays, 2nd Ed. p. 108), "I do not profess to be a politician, but simply one of a disinterested class of observers, who, with no organised and embodied set of supporters to please, set themselves to observe honestly and to report faithfully the state and prospects of our civilisation." This passage, which fairly and modestly describes himself, is taken from his admirable essay on "Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism," in which Mr. Bright entirely concurred. Unlike freedom of bequest, this subject is full of vivid interest and high import at the present time. An Irish Catholic University, for which Mr. Arnold pleads, is the subject of the best and most thoughtful speeches Mr. Balfour has ever delivered. It is a point upon which he and Mr. Morley quite agree. A Royal Commission was appointed to consider it last year, and though no Government will take it up, it has enlisted the sympathies of eminent men on both sides of politics. The question is beset with difficulties, and cannot be settled offhand by any formula. One of these difficulties is how a Catholic University should be defined. For Trinity College, Dublin, is a Catholic University in the sense that it admits Catholics, if only they would go there. And for a Catholic University endowed with public money but inaccessible to Protestants nobody asks. Mr. Arnold answers the question in a sentence. "I call Strasburg a Protestant and Bonn a Catholic University in this sense: that religion and the matters mixed up with religion are taught in the one by Protestants and in the other by Catholics." In this essay Mr. Arnold intimates his

opinion that "the prevailing form for the Christianity of the future will be the form of Catholicism; but a Catholicism purged, opening itself to the light and air, having the consciousness of its own poetry, freed from its sacerdotal despotism, and freed from its psuedo-scientific apparatus of superannuated dogma.” It hardly seems probable. But the curtains of the future hang. The Professors in Mr. Arnold's University would be "nominated and removed not by the bishops, but by a responsible minister of State acting for the Irish nation itself." A minister of what State? This simple question, which Mr. Arnold does not answer, raises the whole issue of Home Rule. Mr. Arnold was very anxious that a religious census should be taken in England, as it is in Ireland. In Ireland everybody is either a Catholic or a Protestant, and nobody attempts to conceal which he is, bad as his Protestantism or his Catholicism may be. In England such a census would be fallacious, because persons holding Matthew Arnold's religious opinions would describe themselves on the census-paper as Churchmen.

In three essays, besides his official Reports, Mr. Arnold pleaded earnestly for the establishment in the United Kingdom of secondary or intermediate schools. One of them is in Mixed Essays, the other is in Irish Essays, of which I shall have more to say in connection with Ireland. One of them is called "An Unregarded Irish Grievance." The other two have the quaint titles taken from the Vulgate, of which Matthew Arnold was almost as fond as Bacon, "Porro unum est necessarium," "But one Thing is Needful"; and "Ecce Convertimur ad Gentes," "Lo, we turn to the Gentiles." This last was a lecture delivered to the