DEAR EBONY,—

The Pensées of Joubert have for long been regarded as containing the mature experience of a profound thinker upon nearly all the most important problems of life. Joseph Joubert was undoubtedly a master of language, and it was thought that the substance of his philosophy was as admirable as its style. But unless it be assumed that as a nation we are going not forwards but backwards (an inadmissible assumption, of course), I begin to fear that we must regard Joubert, and the conclusions at which he arrived, as quite out of date. I gather at random some half-dozen of his maxims; from which it will be seen that as regards many of the most important principles which affect society the State as well as the individual, -either he was or we are labouring under a profound delusion.

JOUBERT. I would fain coin wisdom,―mould it, I mean, into maxims, proverbs, sentences, that can be easily retained and transmitted. Would that I could denounce and banish from the language of men as base money—the words by which they cheat and are cheated!

THE MODERN APPLICATION. The capacity for saying in many sentences what might better be said in one is much to be commended.

If

THE MODERN APPLICATION. When the emotional side of the mind is warmed by enthusiasm or gushes with sympathy, mental duplicity is of no consequence. "Truth" will not conform to the opinion of the wisest and grandest and oldest men, so much the worse for "Truth."

JOUBERT. Statesmanship is the art of understanding and leading the masses, or the majority. Its glory is to lead them, not where they want to go, but where they ought to go.3

THE MODERN APPLICATION. Statesmanship is the art of leading the masses by going along with them. The mob, or the majority of the mob, are always right. So that to make a distinction between the way they want to go, and the way they ought to go, is absurd.

JOUBERT. Forms of government

become established of themselves. They shape themselves, they are not created. We may give them strength and consistency, but we cannot call them into being. Let us rest assured that the form of government can never be a matter of choice: it is almost always a matter of necessity.

THE MODERN APPLICATION. This is nonsense. The forms of government that have grown up and established themselves spontaneously are illogical and unsymmetrical. They should in all cases be swept away, and replaced by pen and ink and paper constitutions, evolved brand-new out of the inner consciousness of virtuous Radicals and democratic philosophers.

JOUBERT. One of the surest ways of killing a tree is to lay bare its roots. It is the same with institutions. We must not be too ready to disinter the origin of those we wish to preserve. All beginnings are

small.

about public affairs whose business it is to direct them. A sheltering tree is their emblem. It is truly of the first importance that, if private persons are to be relieved from these anxieties, the government should be efficient, that is to say, that its parts should be so harmonised that its functions may be easily performed, and its permanence ensured. A people constantly in unrest is always busied in building; its shelter is but a tent,-it is encamped, not established.1

THE MODERN APPLICATION. A nation should never be at rest. A contented people is a people that is moribund; and constant dissatisfaction with the institutions under which they live is the sign of vitality and health.

JOUBERT. What do the wise and good-those who live under the sway of reason and are the servants of duty-gain by liberty? It may well be that what the wise and good never allow themselves should be conceded to no one.

THE MODERN APPLICATION. The power to go to the devil, if they choose, is a right of which freemen (and freewomen) cannot be deprived. Moreover, the habitual exercise of this right is the best of education.

JOUBERT. Justice is truth in action.

THE MODERN APPLICATION. Occasionally not always. On the contrary, justice is sometimes, from the necessity of the case, falsehood in action. Thus, "Justice to Ireland" required our most upright statesmen to repudiate for the occasion the truths of political economy, as well as the laws of the Decalogue. [But then, to be sure,

the Irish landlords were mostly Tories, and, in the deepest sense, deserved what they got.]

JOUBERT. If you call effete whatever is ancient; if you wither with a name, which carries with it the notion of decadence and a sense of contempt, whatever has been consecrated and strengthened by time, you profane and weaken it. The decadence is of your own bringing about.1

THE MODERN APPLICATION. But that is precisely what we desire. No doubt we apply to the House of Lords every foul epithet that the copious Swinburnean vocabulary can furnish. But then our

object is to abolish the House of Lords. So we are quite logical.

These are a few specimens of that progress of opinion, of that sudden (mushroom-like ?) growth of popular insight and wisdom, which have already made Joubert a classic. That there is a vital divergence between the two points of view no one will deny; and perhaps the explanation may be found in one of the maxims which I have

not yet quoted: "You satisfy your minds with words, which, like a kind of paper-money, have a conventional value, but no solidity. This is why there is so little gold in your speeches and in your books."-I am, in the meantime at least,

YOUR BEWILDERED CONTRIBUTOR.

My back was broken by Act of Parliament in 1854. In that year an Act was passed that made it unlawful for dogs to be employed in drawing carts. If you are old enough to remember clearly before 1854, you will recall the fact that, previous to that date, a very fine strong breed of dogs was in use for the purpose of drawing low carts. On a market-day you might then have seen scores and scores of little

people, like my father, sending their vegetable produce into market in small carts drawn by dogs. I don't believe the dogs suffered over - much. They were kindly treated. They were a marvellous convenience to poor folks; but, I reckon, laws are made for the oppression and extermination of poor folks, and under the plea of caring for dogs, the law-makers of this land did what they could to hurt us, who are of more value than many dogs. I don't myself allow that this same law was of much advantage to the dogs.

Now I am getting on in years, and am bent double. Moreover, I am on the brink of the grave. Before another week is out I shall be dead and buried. I'll tell you all about it, if you choose to listen.

I'm not a scholar. I don't, I daresay, write very good English; and I daresay there are as many bad spellings in this composition of mine as there were dogs went to market in olden time- that is, before the Act of Parliament which broke my back and spoiled my schooling.

If my style is not very beautiful, you'll please to excuse it and lay it all to the Acts of Parliament. As for the spelling, I've asked the

schoolmaster to put that to rights when I am no more. The schoolmaster's name is Nesbitt-Alex

ander Nesbitt a very respectable, gentlemanly man, I say, and deserves to have a better school than that he now rules. I have told this gentleman to correct my spelling, but he is not to alter my style. You see I don't want him to add to, or take away from, what is my own. If he was to smooth away this ruggedness and draw out that point, why he'd like enough make the whole thing more artistic; but it wouldn't be so truthful as what I put down right off my own head as it comes.

Now let me go back to what I was beginning to say when the dogs, or the schoolmaster, ran away with me.

I was observing that I am an oldish man, and have not many days to live; so I don't mind saying right out what I think, and what is the experience of my life.

Now this is what I think-that the more efforts them darned Radicals make to rectify abuses, the wusser evils they make. And my experience is this preserve me from reformers. stance in point.

Here is an in

Those good and pitiful gentlemen that sit in Parliament took a deal of thought of the dogs. They said their poor feet were never made to draw weights-as if in Greenland they did not draw sledges! So they made an Act against it. Now the sort of dog used before that Act was made was a big sort. You may go all through England and you won't find a specimen now. And why? Because the Act that forbade the

SO

use of the dog for draught to spare its feet exterminated the dog itself. Only poor folk kept those dogs then, and poor folk can't afford to keep dogs for ornament; they shot or cut the throats of their draught-dogs all through Britain, from Land's End to John O'Groat's House, when that Act passed-and so the breed was lost. If you want to get dogs of that sort now, you must go to Belgium for them; you will find the dogs in the market-places of Antwerp and Brussels, lying under the carts in which they brought in the sweet, fresh milk.

Now, there's Mr Chamberlain a very well-intentioned young man, no doubt, I read in my daily paper that he is all hot upon the merchant shipping. He is so tender about the poor sailors, that he want's to meddle with the ships. Well, what I'm afraid of is, that just as the gentlemen killed the dogs when trying to mend their condition, so Mr Chamberlain, in caring for the ships, will kill our shipping, and that owners will transfer all their vessels, and sail under foreign colours. Then, won't we be in a pretty pickle in the event of a foreign war!

I tell you candidly, that I shall be dead before the week is out. I've nothing the matter with me, but I shall die of reform. Our vicar's wife is an excellent woman, and because she is a reformer of abuses, is about to become a murderess. I shall be her victim. If you will read on you will hear how. My father owned a little land of his own-not much, but enough to get a living from, if it had not been for Act of Parliament. We had a couple of cows in milk, and a bit of ground which he worked for broccoli, carrots, Brussels sprouts, and so on, and a nice little penny he was able to pick

Fa

up by the sale of his vegetables in market. Act of Parliament has done for such little men, and they are thrown into the hands of the regrator, who goes round with a cart and buys their goods dirtcheap, and pockets the profits himself. Before 1854 father used to take his vegetables to market himself every day, along with his milk. The dog, Nero, a fine fellow he was,-used to draw the cart in which were the milk-cans and the vegetables. Sometimes father put my little sister in the cart too, but he never got in himself. I remember quite well those happy days. I was put to school, and was getting on famous. ther was happy, he'd put away a little money. Mother was killed by Act of Parliament two years before. That came about this way. We'd a flue in our kitchen that was not straight; it had a kick in it, and there was no possible means of cleaning it, except by firing it, and that, you know, is not lawful. The chimney went up of a slant, then turned sharp round, and then, which and what way it went afterwards, I'm blessed if I know, but it did draw very well, and the smoke went out of it right enough. Now that same chimney was used every day, and no mortal brush that man might devise could clean it; so mother would put a wisp of straw up, now and then, to blaze it out, and then the flue was right enough for six months after. Well, the police are mighty interfering, and they did interfere and caution mother, and at last so worked on her mind that she was afraid to fire the flue, and she let it go onone year, two years-till at last it fired itself, and that, of course, when no one was by to help her. Well, the fire came down in masses, and mother tried to damp