emergency, in which our new political machinery is to be brought to the test. This is the moment of all others, when it has to be seen whether a democratic constituency has sufficient self-control to respect the checks on unlimited popular interference. It is useless to shut our eyes to all that is involved in the crisis. Democratic institutions are not only inconvenient, they are absolutely fatal in an emergency of foreign politics, unless the people is content to leave immediate decisions and the delicate conduct of international dealings to its own representatives and to the ministers who command the confidence of these representatives. This is the very alphabet of political self-denial; if it is wanting, the safeguards against popular panic and the unthinking sentiment of the mob, and with them all the guarantees for ministerial responsibility, are at once lost. If this mutual compact of trust and responsibility is broken, the guarantees for the maintenance of the constitution vanish. And it is no hard self-abnegation, no relinquishment of its own will, that is demanded of the nation. The constituencies have only themselves now to thank if the Parliament of their own choosing is not fitly representative of the country's feeling. The elections took place in no moment of heated public excitement. The issues between the late and the present Government were clearly before the constituencies; and the verdict of the nation was given, not hurriedly or doubtfully, but deliberately, decisively, and with no reserve. Is this verdict to be recalled, this trust broken, at the very moment when a problem of enormous importance, but one altogether removed from the ordinary range of popular politics has to be decided? It seems strange that a question like this has to be asked. But it happens that our attempt to lay down the lines. of national duty in a great national crisis, comes at the very time when the authority of Parliament is scouted; when high political authorities are joined with the new-comers amongst the politicians in decrying its representative character; when an open appeal is made from its verdict to that of the mass of the people, who are summoned to recall their trust, to forget the respect due to the Constitution, to weaken the decision of the national will; to judge for themselves on a question, whose issues are incomparably momentous, but into whose intricacies they have never sought to penetrate. When we consider what are the principles on which they are told to base their judgment, we shall be able to judge whether these are such as make the responsibility of their advisers less grave.

In a recent number we endeavoured to recover some of its force

force and significance for the once-powerful, but now oftenscouted phrase, balance of power.' It is curious to find ourselves so soon obliged to point out the real meaning of another phrase of politics, exposed in many places to the same treatment that of national interests.' Like the other, this phrase of 'national interests' has of late years been held up to obloquy and abuse. A statesman using it in other days felt that he was appealing to the veriest truism of politics, that he could safely leave its interpretation to his hearers. But now it must be introduced with so many apologies, must be so guarded from misinterpretation, that it has evidently lost its authority with our younger school of politicians. Now it is held to be tantamount to a regardless selfishness which would set at naught international obligations or the dictates of humanity. The word which is now substituted for it, the consideration which claims altogether to supersede it, is what is known as ' national morality.' The influence of this phrase represents so much that is respectable and praiseworthy in the popular temperament, it attracts so much that is really good in the ideas of a certain section of the community, that we would by no means seek to level that useful authority which it has gained for itself, by reducing it to its strictly logical limitations. But when it assumes the right to interfere with national policy; when it becomes a facile tool in the hands of those who appeal to unthinking sentiment in place of reason, it is then urgently necessary to point out wherein it is fallacious, and wherein its fallacies are dangerous.

We are afraid we may offend many whose susceptibilities we are unwilling to wound, when we say, what has often been said before, but what is just as often forgotten, that this phrase is useful only so long as we recollect that there is a very imperfect analogy between national and individual morality; so imperfect, indeed, that unless we use the word, for the purposes of politics, in a metaphorical sense only, it is more than likely to mislead us. The basis of individual morality is singularly simple, especially in the form in which it is presented to us in the teachings of Christianity. But this is in great measure because the advance of civilisation leaves an ever-smaller sphere in which individual morality is called upon to act. By far the greater portion of our conduct is regulated by influences over which we, as individuals, have no control. Our life is in the main guided by law, by long-standing custom, by the unwritten, but not the less effective control, of social usage. Our respect for the lives, for the liberties, for the property of others, is not voluntary on our part, but is forced upon us by law. Even the

courtesies,

courtesies, the lesser civilities, the mutual helpfulness, which the members of any society afford to one another, are the creation of an unwritten code which leaves very little room to individual benevolence or individual caprice. The sphere in which individual morality has to work is proportionately restricted, and its rules are therefore the more simple. Where its action is visible, it must be in the exercise of spontaneous benevolence, in ungrudging self-sacrifice, in a voluntary subordination of self-interest to the calls of an absorbing enthusiasm of philanthropy. If it is to increase its influence, it must be by the inculcating of such self-abandonment, by preaching such selfsacrifice, by stirring up such enthusiasm of philanthropy as shall spend itself without stint. Individual morality does not require to trouble itself with casuistry as to the rights of selfinterest. The rights which we can claim from others are secured to us by other agencies than our own. Our efforts, therefore, are free for higher and purely unselfish aims, and the attainment of these aims becomes the chief business of individual morality.

This will serve to show what amount of analogy there is between the moral obligations of nations and of individuals. The protection which the law and good order of society extends to individuals, thereby relieving them of the ceaseless struggle against antagonistic forces, does not exist for nations. Whatever may be the hopes of a millennium of international arbitration, when international law shall have received an effective sanction in the consciences of nations, that millennium has not yet come, and these hopes are as far as ever from realisation. Useful as have been the labours of the publicists, their theories are yet subject to being snapped like tow when they attempt to bind the strong limbs of national ambition. Self-preservation, resistance to encroachment, the maintenance of a determined opposition to aggression, all these become obligations of the first order in the morality of nations. Whether they may ever cease to be so is matter of merely abstract interest. Nations are not, for the present at least, free, as individuals are, to frame their conduct on a code of self-sacrifice, or to indulge in the luxury of a diffusive and self-forgetful benevolence.

Here, then, is one broad line of demarcation between the morality of nations and of individuals. All that an individual can do is to improve on what law requires of him, to relinquish something that law might secure to him; a nation is first, and with equal urgency, called upon to secure its own, otherwise unprotected, rights. But though this is the most important,

important, it is not the only distinction. Individual and national morality are divided also as regards the necessary relation of the agent to the person affected by his conduct. We are at liberty-nay, it may be our duty-to obey the higher dictates of self-sacrifice, so long as we are yielding what is ours, and ours only, to yield. When we are acting, not for ourselves only, but as agents for others, what would in the other case be a higher duty now becomes a crime. But the affairs of nations must always be conducted through such agency. However popular may be the constitution of a particular State, those who manage its foreign affairs must always act more or less on their own responsibility,__and they must act as guardians of the national interests. These interests it is absolutely beyond their functions to yield up in obedience to any Quixotic chimera which may infest their own brain, or may be repeated in the unthinking sentiment of any section of the people. Were they to guide the policy of their country as they might be at liberty to guide their own action in a case of individual morality, they would, it is not too much to say, be guilty of a criminal breach of trust.

This is precisely the sort of truth, which, however undoubted may be its authority, it is very difficult to impress upon a popular audience. A nation loves to believe that its acts are altogether such as would become the best amongst its individual members, and it is loth to imagine that there is any difference of principle between the action of the parts and that of the whole. The opposite appeal to national morality satisfies the unreasoning religious sentiment of a very respectable but not over-logical middle class; and it requires a bold politician to secure support while pointing out the fallacy involved in it. The more culpable, therefore, does it become for those who must necessarily shape popular opinion, soft as dough to the touch of such as are content to subordinate what is true to what is specious, to strain this respectable sentiment of national morality till it becomes dangerous to the maintenance of national interests. We have no belief in the paramount importance of strict logic in human affairs, and we are quite ready to admit an indeterminate employment of the phrase, so far as it may have a certain popular value; but when it is used as it is in the following passage, it becomes necessary to protest against it as a palpable but most misleading fallacy :

'Ladies and gentlemen, the case of states is just the same as the case of individuals. Here is our friend Mr. Dale. In dealing with individuals does he find it necessary continually to preach to his con

gregation

gregation and stimulate each of them to pay due regard to his own interests? I apprehend that if he did, he would be held in a much lower estimate than that in which you actually hold him. . . . To talk to nations of the necessity of maintaining their interests is throwing a dangerous temptation in their way.'-Mr. Gladstone's speech at Birmingham, May 31.

These words were not used by any tyro in political science, appealing to the most commonplace and surface analogies, and by these striving to produce a momentary triumph over the opponent of a juvenile debating society. They were used as words of grave political advice in a moment of the gravest crisis, to an audience of 30,000 people, by one who was recently the First Minister of the Crown, and who still commands an influence which might easily lead a large section of the nation into any blind and disastrous sentiment. To the question in hand, they are about as apposite as an extract from the Sermon on the Mount would be in the charge of a Chief Justice of the High Court of Appeal, when dealing with a knotty point of law. Does Mr. Gladstone mean to say that an appeal to English interests on the part of a British statesman would be analogous to an exhortation to the selfish feelings of the individuals amongst his congregation on the part of a Dissenting minister? And if he does not mean this, what do his words amount to but political claptrap, as unworthy of the speaker himself, as of the crisis at which he undertakes to instruct the nation?

These misleading commonplaces as to the basis of National Morality have never received a more exaggerated expression than in an article which the Duke of Argyll has contributed to the current number of the Contemporary Review.' We could not have wished, in order to illustrate the mistaken ideas to which we refer, for a more bald statement of an exploded fallacy than that presented to us by the Duke of Argyll. With the definite policy that is indicated in certain parts of that article we have, for the present, nothing to do. We do not seek now to follow the Duke of Argyll in his appeals to the dictates of Christianity as justifying a war of intervention, or in the statesmanlike and becoming assertions of the following sentence :

'It is now the solemn duty of the British nation, as a great war has arisen mainly out of their inaction, to see that through mistaken ideas of self-interest their Government does not interfere to prevent the population of Turkey from deriving whatever benefit may arise to them from it. This is the minimum of duty. I should say more.'

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