a grand scheme for assurance against the recurrence of famine had been postponed for two years-time now irrevocably lost.

As regards railways, with the exception of concessions granted by Sir C. Wood for one or two trifling lines, the works at present in progress in India are merely those of the main arterial lines planned by Lord Dalhousie, and to which the Government were committed before Sir C. Wood came into office. And so soon as those lines are completed, railway progress in India, so far as that statesman is concerned, will come to an end. Yet the financial success of the railways, even in their present incomplete state, has been abundantly shown already, and every consideration of policy points to a persistent and methodical extension of Indian railways, involving due forethought, and provision for the commencement of new lines as the first approach completion. The necessity for this provision has long been foreseen in India, and so far ago as 1863 a company was formed for the purpose of undertaking an extensive system of railways through the fertile and populous country north of the Ganges. But the arrangements between it and the Government never took a practical shape until the Conservative party came into office, and three years of valuable time have been lost.

The important subject of the Indian army would require an article to itself, and can be merely glanced at here. It may be freely admitted that in this case, at any rate, Sir Charles Wood's administration was not merely passive; and Mr West's admission that the Secretary of State's measures had to be submitted to the review of two successive Royal Commissions, each of which pronounced them to be more or less illegal, and that the changes which Sir Charles Wood thought to introduce by a couple of despatches in the beginning of

1861 were not concluded until 1866, and then by his successors, is sufficient commentary on the method in which this change was carried out. A more blundering mess of a great organic change was never perpetrated, nor is the reason why it proved such a failure far to look for. Sir Charles Wood on this occasion departed from the sound principle ordinarily observed, which we have endeavoured here to enunciate forcibly, under which the initiation of all administrative measures, and especially the elaboration of details, is left to the Government in India, while power of control and approval rests with the Government in England. The consequence was the preparation of a scheme which those competent to judge would at once have pronounced impracticable. All that was left to the Governor-General was to make the best of a bad bargain; but with every desire on Lord Canning's part to administer the details of the scheme, so as to meet the emergency of the case as far as practicable, while acting in the spirit of his instructions, the two conditions were not found compatible. Difficulties, unforeseen at the India Office, and which the Governor-General and his advisers were powerless to remove, arose at every point, involving endless references to England, and confused and contradictory rulings in reply, till at last the socalled amalgamation measure became a helpless muddle, and the complication was only got clear of, after five years of strife, by sweeping away the regulations which had formed the principal features of the original scheme. Even now Mr West seems not to have apprehended the nature of the difficulties which Sir Charles Wood created, any more than Sir Charles Wood understood them himself. He repeats the old defence put forward, that the Indian officers could not have a real

grievance, because the change had created such great advance in emolument and promotion. So it did; but the radical character of the change was that it divided the officers of the Indian army into two great divisions, one of which, and the larger, benefited vastly, while the position of the other was made not only relatively, but absolutely, worse. It is this minority which has been making all the noise. The lucky half has been well satisfied enough with its new situation, and has naturally made no sign; but a wise administrator would have foreseen the difficulty as regards the others, and would not have waited for the operation of time to discover that a body of several hundred men put on the shelf and maintained in idleness, and superseded in pay and promotion by their more lucky comrades, would naturally employ their enforced leisure in grumbling. Had these superfluous officers been got rid of in the first instance on liberal terms, a large saving of pay would have been practicable, and we should have heard nothing whatever of grievances.

There

would have been none left with a pretext for complaint, and the

unseemly spectacle of a body of officers appealing for justice against their masters at the door of Parliament would never have occurred.

As to the future, we believe it is a mistake to think that the matter has been finally disposed of. Lord Cranborne has solved the immediately pressing problem, by admitting the men whom Lord Halifax had left out in the cold to the snug provisions of the staff corps; and this liberal act, it may be admitted, was the best, if not the only, solution of the difficulty possible. All the Indian army has now been advanced and benefited by the amalgamation, and the officers are left absolutely without cause of complaint. But the result is an army expensive in an extraordinary and very needless degree, organised on a most faulty and cumbersome plan. Sooner or later a knowledge of this will force itself on attention; and we venture to predict that, although the matter may be staved off for a season, a second and thorough reorganisation of that army will have to be undertaken before many years have passed away, as one of the measures arising out of Sir Charles Wood's administration of Indian affairs.

3 A

VOL. CII.-NO. DCXXVI.

THE last three volumes of Count de Montalembert's book* come in appropriately enough at this moment, when ecclesiastical affairs take up so much of the public time and thoughts. Ritualism, Pan-Anglicanism, and all the curious commotions which have lately stirred the Church of England, should do something to prepare an audience, fit and happily not few, for the story of that Church's origin. It is not a story, as told in these fascinating volumes, which English Churchmen will be disposed to endorse; but there are lessons in it which might not be without effect upon us all, were they duly considered, as well as an inalienable interest in the tale. The Anglican Church, which carries matters with so high a hand in these days, and is so much more sure of her own sacred claims than she has ever been before during her distinct and separate existence, is not indeed the Church whose beginnings M. de Montalembert relates, with his usual grace and enthusiasm. But his book, as being more generally diffusible among the mass of English readers, more attractive and more easily within reach than the great bulk of purely Catholic productions, may afford to some of them a new sensation. In Scotland of recent days many good people have been shocked and irritated by certain little attempts at priestly impertinence on the part of stray Anglicans towards the Church of Scotland; but none of these can approach the quiet and matter-of-fact contempt with which the most tolerant Roman Catholic treats the Church of England. To him, as to a man on a mountain height, it mat

ters little whether the figures beneath him are on a plain of a hundred or a thousand feet above the level. They are all so far from him that the distinction between themselves is nothing in his eyes. Never did Anglican bishop ignore the existence of the humble Dissenter with more lofty calm than the humblest preacher, the most unknown writer on the other side, ignores the Anglican hierarchy and all its pretensions. Those overtures of union, those stretchings out of hands towards their ancient Mother, which a small body in the Church of England have been making, evidently attract no response in her bosom. We may be to our own consciousness a long-descended, well-born National Church, with our apostolical succession and patents of nobility unbroken; but to her we are but a vulgar modern sect, one "denomination" among the many Protestant Dissenters upon most of whom we look down so loftily. The position is quaint, and full of unconscious, unintentional irony upon the modern temper of ecclesiastical England. The Church of England has separated herself from the Churches of the Reformation. She is disposed to consider herself a distinct offspring of the primitive Church, more enlightened and purer than the Roman and Eastern branches, but equally apostolical, ready to hold communion with her elders, who alone are her equals, and standing at an immeasurable distance above all the ecclesiastical developments of the Reformation. This position she holds stoutly; but the unfortunate circumstance is, that her elder sisters stand unconscious, and recognise no difference. To the

Roman Catholic the whole Protestant world stands on the same level. There are no degrees to speak of within its bounds. The Scotch presbyter or the Dissenting minister is no worse and no better in his eyes than the Anglican clergyman, be he dean or bishop. It makes no difference. In the present position of affairs, the lesson thus taught may be not without advantage. It is one which is echoed by Roman Catholic opinion everywhere whenever it has a chance to express itself. Unless some wonderful change of mind should come about, of which at present there are no signs, any recognition of the peculiar claims of the Church of England by the Church of Rome, any step to meet her overtures, any union or communion between them, is simply impossible. It is more than impossible; judged from the Roman point of view, it is ridiculous, if not wicked. In this point, though to say so is a digression and abrupt departure from our immediate subject, M. de Montalembert's book, like every other Catholic book that has fallen under our observation, may be of special use at this moment to the Anglican ecclesiastical mind.

It is a narrative of the birth and early progress of a great, famous, and flourishing national Church-a Church full of vigour and expansive power, rich in this world, richer for the world to come, with many saints and many glories-a Church with distinct dates in its chronicles, showing when it was born, and when, nationally speaking, it died. It died, M. de Montalembert says, so far as nationality and general recognition was concerned. Our Bishops say it entered upon a new and purer phase of its life. For the latter doctrine we have our own opinion; for the former the belief of Roman Catholic Christendom. So far as our sins against Catholicism go, it is but natural that we should be tried by a Catholic jury-just as it

The

must be before honest men that every supposed transgressor of the eighth commandment must be arraigned. We say we are not guilty, but so does the thief; and after all it does not much matter what are the views of the culprit at the bar. Our jury is unanimous against us. We have good instincts, religious impulses, a national character which is worthy admiration (or horror); but we have no Church, no true teaching, no sacraments nor ordinances. We are wandering as sheep without a shepherd. It is worth while realising this as the genuine opinion about us of all good, all moderately good Catholics. Roman Catholic Church regards our great and wealthy establishment with a contempt much more sincere and thorough than that with which with which the High-Church clergy south of the Tweed regard the poor but stout-constitutioned Scotch establishment. It seems extraordinary to us, but such is the case; and perhaps, taking this into consideration, it might be more worth our while to descend to the depths of what is meant by Catholicism, and try whether we could not get at the spirit, and leave off stretching out towards the letter and outward form of it, such unavailing hands.

M. de Montalembert's book is about an ecclesiastical corporation which, according to his idea, exists no longer; which attained its Golden Age in the seventh century, and came to a violent end under Henry VIII.; and which, being thus cut short nationally by a premature end, can be judged of with all its virtues and imperfections, as the dead are judged. It is not necessary to say that the history is eloquent and graceful, that it is full of picturesque details and admirable pictures, or that it overflows with a generous enthusiasm for all goodness, and sympathy for everything that is noble and natural, even in a race fallen out of the Roman pale. All these qualities are implied in

the name of the distinguished author; whether it is to be received with perfect reliance as well as hearty admiration, and whether its claims as history are as high as its claims as literature, is a question into which we will not now enter.

The story commences far away in the morning ages of Christianity, when even human nature, though in fact bearing the snows of many ages, seems young and fresh in the distance. Even our historian can make little of St Ninian and St David, of the Armorican Cadoc, and the holy Winifred whose well, more certain than her story, still bubbles up on the northern borders of Wales. They planted a problematical Christianity and lived a monastic life almost before the general world knew what Christianity and monasticism were, amid the wild yet (according to M. de Montalembert) melodious Gael. Our own poor barbarous progenitors, the Picts, get but few plaudits at his hands, but the Celts of Wales make a pretty picture in the foreground. This is how he describes that poetic people:

"Nothing can describe them better than that provision of their ancient laws which forbids the seizure by justice in the house of any Welshman of three things-his sword, his harp, and one of his books; the harp and the book because in time of peace music and poetry were regarded as the best occupa tion of an honest and free man.

From

infancy, accordingly, all the Welsh cultivated these two arts, and especially music, with a universal and unwearying passion. It was the favourite form and gracious accompaniment of hospitality; choirs of singers everywhere offered a welcome to the traveller. From morning till night every house echoed with the sound of the harp and other instruments, played with a perfection which delighted the foreign listeners, who, how ever, were always struck, in the midst of the skilful exercises of musical abil ity, by the constant recurrence of sweet and melancholy chords, in which, as in the music of Ireland, the candid genius and cruel destiny of the Celtic

races seemed to be reflected."

In such a harmonious world lived the holy Archbishop Dubricius, who crowned King Arthur in 516; but naturally there is little known about this pontiff, though he is reported to have founded a great monastery in Cambria, and to have preached to as many as a thousand hearers. We cannot, however, linger on the faint figures appearing through the mist, to whom not even the skill of M. de Montalembert can give life or reality. The first true portrait on his canvass comes before us boldly with a certain human solidity about it, which identifies the man as flesh and blood. It is the form of Columba, the first great missionary of the British Isles, which thus rises out of the obscurity, not a dove as the name imports, nor even possessing many saintly qualities, at least in the first part of his life; but a fine genuine pugnacious hotheaded and somewhat shifty Irishman, proving the unchangeableness of race by his strongly marked national features, as well as do those Saxons whose riding and foxhunting M. de Montalembert takes such pleasure in remarking. Columba was of royal race, and in the line of direct succession, so that he too might have been king, as kings were in those days among the turbulent tribes of the Island of Saints. Notwithstanding the curious optimism with which chiefs and clans, whole masses of people, seem to have precipitated themselves into the monkish ranks, as who should say, "Here is the best thing-let us all seize upon it," the state of the country does not seem to have been paradisiacal. Monastic foundations

were innumerable, but rapine and murder, fire and flame, intestine struggles of the most violent kind, prevailed everywhere. The government, such as it was, was in the hands of provincial kings, professedly subordinate to a general suzerain. But "nothing," M. de Montalembert admits, was more contested or more stormy than this