the spirit of inquiry, the watchfulness of men; it disciplines him in the art of fence, brings him each hour on the battle-field, where trial and victory combine to complete him with courage.

It is moreover the external and visible sign of internal convictions, and also of faith. For he is returning to or practising that rule of honour, and charity towards his fellow-men which Old and New Testament alike describe and enjoin. It is a bond between these who see and do.

It lifts a man into association with the good and great of former times. It separates a man from the vulgar and base; that is from his age.

It is evidence that he has put away insolence as regards his superiors, familiarity as regards his equals, and servility as regards his inferiors. So that he can be a poor man and not vain, a rich man and not a lie.*

Finally he gains in this contest-certainty; for, if not right in all points, that contest could not last an hour; or rather could not have even commenced.

The certainty he acquires that his grounds are sure, brings the counter-certainty that what he combats is equally, in all points, false. He has acquired the knowledge of the universality of error so as to feel as a man in complete armour, passing through, not combating an unarmed mob.

On the occasion above referred to, RICHARD HART said to me:"If you are not right, your words are so ridiculously false that a child "could expose them. If you are right, these are the only words "worth listening to."

I see that it is my epitaph that you imagine you were writing and you have done it generously.

At least no Editor in Great Britain or Ireland would have admitted my name into his pages, save in that shape. They awaited the death of Lord PALMERSTON, to condemn ; they will await mine to commend. In the one case, as in the other, the condemnation or approval will come too late for any benefit to themselves.

I do not wish to give you the trouble of answering this letter, but it would be a gratification to me if you would be so good as to indicate by a single word the "practical" ends to which you consider that I neglected to direct the energies of these men.

You also say that they "have failed." Such words, written and published in 1875, are startling-the Brussels Conference having broken down, the Declaration of Paris being about to be reversed! Of course, only reading the newspapers, you can know nothing now of their works any more than you would have known in 1857, had you not gone among them. I can tell you that during the interval they have broken down and stopped all the political, social, atheistical, and revolutionary agitations that have been attempted in England, either by sporadic infection or foreign design; and that their voice and action have been repressively felt in every great event which has afflicted and injured mankind, besides those which

* Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie.-Psalm lxii., 9.

they have prevented from taking place. These planned but arrested catastrophes include three European wars: for what I have been able to do with those who govern or influence, depended on the secondary effects of their action and existence.

You could not, however, have known, even at that former time, and on that occasion, when, alone among Englishmen without our pale, you acted so noble and patriotic a part, the part they had in moving the House of Lords to that condemnation of the crime in China which led to the dissolution of 1857.

When Lord DERBY rose to make his Motion he commenced with these words:

"I speak in the name of the country."

He said so on the faith of the enormous petition he had unrolled and presented, bearing 10,000 signatures. It was the petition of the Foreign Affairs Committees. Who else beside them and you cared for any crimes that were committed, or any ruin that might ensue?

Lord PALMERSTON met Lord DERBY by his appeal to the country, which obediently returned "his House of Commons," as it was then called. He knew well that Lord DERBY'S "Country" was only the Foreign Affairs Committees. Lord STRATFORD DE REDCLIFFE said to a body of them: "If there were more like you, evil measures would be resisted and honest ministers supported." And why were there not more? I had shown what might be made of the people of England; but there was no one to help me, or to do the like. My share in the thoughts of my countrymen was contempt, when not anger.

I have the honour to remain, Sir,

Your very obedient and humble servant,
DAVID URQUHART.

P.S. I learn from London that your article is to be reprinted for the use of the Committees. As I cannot allow this first mention of the existence of these bodies among Englishmen to contain, unrectified, a mistake on so vital a point as manners, I send a copy of the letter to accompany the reprint.

EXTRACT.

REPORT OF A CONFERENCE AT VERSAILLES.

(From the Diplomatic Review for April, 1874.)

"An hour and a half having been expended in the reception, the Deputation rose to withdraw, and the Addresses were placed in the hands of the Duc de PASQUIER who undertook to present them to the Assembly, and who in emphatic terms expressed the satisfaction that he and his colleagues felt on the occasion.

"After the meeting broke up, the conversation was continued in groups throughout the hall. On their final retirement, the Duc de PASQUIER stepped forward to bid adieu to the deputation by shaking hands with the Deputy from Keighley, who stood nearest to him. The latter made an obeisance, and after a momentary pause of embarrassment, requested one of the gentlemen present to explain to the Duke, that if they were opposed to the world in opinions, so were they also in manners; that to shake hands would be on their part an act of improper familiarity; that they held that

the modern custom of substituting that form for a salutation, which had been propagated by elections in England, was generally an insincerity, always a familiarity; that familiarity led to a sense of equality, and equality to communism and revolution; that it destroyed respect between man and man, and that from disrespect there was but one step to all the dangers which threaten from the International."

"PRACTICAL ENDS," MEASURES, AND MEN.

[We print separately and under the above title, a second letter to Mr. STAPLETON, so that there may be a reference to this first exposure of a most delusive term.]

Montreux, March 27, 1875.

HAVING received no answer to my letter of the 8th, in which I requested you to inform me of the "practical ends" to which I had failed to direct the energies of the working men, I again venture to urge the compliance with that request.

You had pronounced a posthumous judgment on me. A man seldom has the chance of listening to such judgment, while his ear can still hear. You, in regard to one of the fields of my labours, and the most important of all, as it was that of my countrymen, could alone pronounce such a judgment with data before you; as you are the only Englishman, beyond the pale of my own disciples, who has seen with his eyes, or heard with his ears, the evidence on which rests the claim that will be put forward for me hereafter, of having withdrawn men from their factions and having restored them to the use of their natural faculties, so as to become honest men and loyal subjects. Many have indeed seen them as deputations, but you alone have gone and sat by their firesides, and noted their comings in and their goings

out.

Whilst in suspense, awaiting your answer, I have been revolving in my mind what it could be that I had neglected; and what it is that a man belonging to the present age can and would consider a practical end.

I cannot, as to the first head, discover the omission. I have even turned to the records of that synoptic exposition which I made at the time of my election to represent in Parliament a portion of my fellow countrymen, when, as opposed to each and all of the factions, I was elected; and where, after four years of service in the House of Commons, I obtained the unanimous adhesion of the electors, as all those who had not voted for me in 1847 signed a requisition in 1852.

The ends, which one entire constituency had united to carry into effect, and which would have been carried into effect had others joined, seem to me now as then the desirable ones. But their practicability depended not on their desirability, but on extraneous support or opposition. I had only to do with what it was right or wrong to do. The effecting of the one or the preventing of the other depended solely on the amount of intelligence and honesty still remaining in the rest of the people, or the amount of stupidity and dishonesty arrived at, at the particular moment.

If a practical end is, as it must be, an end to be practised, it is already a practice. Then it has not to be discovered, to be expounded, or pursued. I do not therefore find any meaning in the words "practical ends."

I have found much to do, but that has consisted in convincing men and convicting men. I had to convince them of the truth they ignored to convict them of the crimes they committed or suffered.

It is thus that I understand practice or doing; nor do I see how a private man can do anything save by thought. I had to say: "This "or that is wrong, therefore it ought to be prevented; this or that is "right, therefore it ought to be done." Even so a pilot on board a ship, a guide in the desert, says: "Avoid that shoal: follow this "track. The doing of this appertains to the arms of the ship's company, or the legs of the camels.

Those purposes, which the people of Stafford concurred with me in judging that the people of England should put in practice, could become practicable only by the concurrence of a certain number of other persons. Such concurrence evidently could have been obtained, had the same means been employed with other constituencies, since not one man in Stafford agreed with me when I first opened there my lips. In themselves those purposes were the simplest of all things, being the suppression of "Parliamentary usurpations" of modern date, that is statutes; and the suppression of "Cabinet usurpations," also of modern date, that is crimes. This I find, in the records of speeches and addresses, to have been my definition of ends,-in other words. "repeal and abolish, and so save England from herself."

If, on the other hand, I turn to inquire of myself what a man of this age can mean when he uses the, to me, unmeaning words, "practical ends," I can only find these two: making more laws (statutes), or increasing the votes on the one side and diminishing them on the other, so as to accelerate the oscillation of the beam which casts up or knocks down certain sets of men who call themselves by a particular factious name. Sir R. PEEL has compressed it all into three words "Register, register, register!"

If there be anything more than this, you will perhaps inform me; or if there be any omission in those ends, which I desired should be put in practice, it is your duty to inform me. Nor can I see how you can leave undefined a vague expression which, being undefined, constitutes a censure, if not a condemnation.

The Judge on the bench, after hearing the charge, examining the proofs, and listening to the defence, charges the jury, before they give their verdict, on the law of the case. You, seating yourself on the bench of Minos, cannot do less, even though calling before you one not as yet within your jurisdiction.

If doubt, not certainty, is conveyed by a sentence, it is, it must be, that the terms which compose it are of doubtful and not certain meaning; that is, that they are ambiguous or amphibological. Such terms have then to be themselves analysed; they are invariably derived from a foreign tongue; have been needlessly introduced into our own, and in it have passed to a meaning which differs from that which they

had in their own. The doubt is at once removed if the English equivalent be substituted: that is, if they are got rid of.

The word in this case is "practical." It is the adjective of "practice;" at least, it is the substitute for "practicable," the true adjective. "Practice" is a substantive of English construction from the Greek verb prattein (parte), to do.

Thus "practice" means " doing," "practicable" a thing that "can "be done," "practical" a thing "being done."

Why, then, use these terms instead of the English ones? For this reason, that they are amphibological; that is, they have two faces or double meanings, and are therefore as desirable for those who speak without knowing what they mean, or who have a purpose they wish to disguise, as they are odious and repugnant to those who, in speaking, have a meaning to convey.

With the substantive (practice) I have had already much to do.

The bold design to deprive England of her arms in war and her power of self-defence entirely rested on philology. The instrument employed as the lever of this uprooting of the public judgment was an amphibology, a Greek term with two faces. It was the word practice." The proposition cast upon the world was: "We must "assimilate the principles of war at sea with the practice of war on "land." (See my "Reply to Mr. Cobden," Hardwicke, 1862.)

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The people of Manchester are not learned in the Greek tongue; at least, the ancient one. Supposing, however, Mr. COBDEN to be a professor of that tongue; they entered his canoe and paddled him for a time on the muddy and glassy stream. But I made a grasp at their unnautical coat-tails, and holding up a placard with part in large letters, with a tabular demonstration of tenses, conjugations, and derivatives, they did make a return on their consciences (that is their ignorance), which in 1862 had not yet been declared to be either a "king" or a "priest." (See Dr. Newman's answer to Mr. Gladstone.)

The placard was secretly passed from hand to hand across the desks of clerks; finally the Chamber of Commerce discovered that Mr. COBDEN'S boat had the tide against it. The great agitator, his occupation ebbing away, remained from that hour with closed lips and an idle pen.

The battle of maritime power was therefore fought on the substantive. The term "practice" being exploded, the plan which had been based upon it ceased to be "practical" or "practicable." Now, after thirteen years of stupid somnolence, the English people awake and find it to have been a hoax and an imposture.

This, then, is my practical experience of the value of what are termed practical ends, or practical measures, and, consequently, of the men who employ such a term. That is, that these men either mean something that they wish to hide, or, having no meaning, wish to appear to have one.

You, sir, are not an agitator. You have no ends, no designs. I conclude, therefore, that you have only made use of our ordinary form of speech, beneath which may really lurk some just conclusion, the fruit of your long experience; and that you may have detected