would thus be possible to send mails and passengers to Perth in eighteen days instead of twenty-four, and thence by rail to Sydney in four days. A little consideration will explain how it comes to pass that Russia has displayed such energy and Great Britain such apathy in the construction of a railway line to the Far East. Russia's policy is modelled for her by statesmen and soldiers who are the inheritors of traditions shrewdly conceived, well understood, and consistently followed. England's policy is essentially hand to mouth, and varied to suit Parliamentary exigencies and the necessities of the moment; moreover, it is worth noting that British Ministers are drifting more and more into the practice of leaving the responsibility of all initiative to the public, the functions of Government, as understood at the Foreign and India Offices especially, being to take a purely neutral or negative attitude in most international enterprises. Under these circumstances the project of a through railway to China has never been seriously contemplated by us, much less advocated. Yet it is impossible to conceive of an undertaking which would more redound to Great Britain's prestige and material advancement. It would provide a rapid means of transit between Europe, India, and China for the huge and increasing crowd of civilians and soldiers whose business compels them to travel out and home; it would supply an equally rapid and safe means of transport for mails; while, as regards goods, it would enable the rich and multifarious products of the great intervening region between the Mediterranean and the Pacific-a country ranging over a hundred degrees of longitude to be interchanged; to say nothing of the British and other trade, which would be expeditiously conveyed to China, India, and all the populous regions of Southern Asia in less than half the time it takes to convey them at present. It would form the natural response to the Siberian Railway, and conduce enormously to Great Britain's prestige and power. Of course it is well known that Great Britain regards her position and influence in the Indian Ocean as paramount; the Muscat incident shows clearly that neither there nor at Bunder Abbas will she permit the intrusion of any foreign Power such as would cut off all prospect of uniting Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and India by a land route, and enormously increase the difficulty of holding our Eastern Empire. The building of such a line as I recommend would be a clear declaration to the world of intentions which, though known to statesmen, are only vaguely surmised by the public at large, and are ignored by the more restless and ambitious spirits of rival nations. Thus it comes to pass that though Great Britain controls and holds the Persian Gulf, and though along the coasts of Arabia and in the interior her influence is predominant, she lacks the great aid to consolidation that a railway would afford. Although accident or design might block the Suez Canal at any moment, we rely implicitly on the high seas as our means of communication with our Eastern possessions, forgetful that our responsibilities and commercial interests extend far beyond the limits of the countries we actually hold, and that an alternative and quick access to such regions as the Upper Valley of the Yang-tze, to Western China, to Southern Persia, or to Western Afghanistan might become vitally necessary at short notice. Our treaty engagements and obligations extend inland and beyond the range of our ships' guns, and for a Power with scattered possessions and colonies, and a comparatively small army to defend them, rapidity of communication is more important than it is for Russia, whose dominions from the Baltic to the Pacific are compact and uninterrupted, and whose military forces amount to millions in the aggregate. I feel sure that my countrymen on reflection will appreciate the importance of this great international requirement, parts of which have been long held to be of high commercial and political desirableness, and which in its entirety is still more urgently called for. It is as yet premature to enter on estimates, because these could be only satisfactorily framed after detailed surveys. The first thing to do is to arouse the public to the strong necessity for losing no more time in grappling with a perfectly practical project, which ought to be carried out promptly by Great Britain, with an eye to her own priceless interests, rather than by any of Great Britain's rivals, whose encroachment in our territorial sphere would inevitably conduce to our prejudice and national decline. C. A. MOREING. CARLYLE AS AN HISTORIAN Nor long ago a ceremony took place at the opening of Carlyle's house in Chelsea, which was calculated to leave a double impression on the world. On the one hand, it was an official canonisation of a new classic in English literature; but, on the other, the speakers appeared anxious to warn the public that this man was chiefly distinguished as a master of words, and that his view of life was further from the truth than the less strenuous and more tolerant culture that predominates to-day. As there are some sages who call him no sage, so there are some historians who call him no historian. It is for the latter opinion we feel most concern, for whereas the sages will not prevent any stiff-necked person from adopting Carlyle's philosophy of life, the historians may perhaps, by the weight of their authority as specialists in a science, succeed in persuading students to regard his historical writings as works of fiction where truth cannot even be gleaned. But this will not be the only evil result if the principle is once established that Carlyle is no historian. The question at issue affects the future not only of historical reading but of historical writing. The next time that our island has the good fortune to produce a writer of great power and greater originality, is he to be welcomed as a volunteer into the field of history, or is he to be warned off it as ground preserved for licensed practitioners ? It may be argued that Carlyle would not have cared what he was told, and would in any case have written on whatever subject pleased him best. But it must be remembered that in 1834 historical study had not been organised as much as it is even to-day, and that if present tendencies continue it may in another hundred years have become like the study of Medicine or Law. In such a case it may well be doubted whether even a Carlyle would trouble himself to invade the monopoly of a regular profession, and would not rather confine himself to general literature and speculation. Hence the question whether Carlyle is an historian is not a mere matter of words, but involves a grave principle affecting the future of English letters and science. Fortunately there is not unanimous agreement among our historians that Carlyle is to be excluded from their brotherhood. It is significant that Mr. Morse Stephens, who has spent years in studying the latest materials of French Revolution history, who knows as intimately as any man the exact nature of the mistakes into which Carlyle fell, still consents to speak of him as a great historian,' and as one who, when he erred, erred 'not wilfully but from the scantiness of the information at his disposal.' But there are some authorities who insist that he should be put out of court, really because they do not understand him owing to the eccentricity of his language, but nominally on account of his inaccuracy. Nowadays the mere suspicion of this dreadful crime, like the mere suspicion of heresy in a town under the Inquisition, will in itself drive from a man's side all fair-weather friends who fear the powers that be. But an historian must needs be very criminal in this respect before it is fair to cast him out from among his brethren. Who is there that is accurate? There have been great histories that once stood like monuments heaven-high, casting the light of correct knowledge on a darkened world; but in twenty, fifty, or a hundred years, the waves of new truth have crept up round them all; and yet they stand firm amid the flood because they were based on the ground of honesty and good sense, or carved out of the rock of genius. Every historian who feels inclined to throw stones at Carlyle, forgets that he himself pursues his studies in a glass house, however the walls may be hung with tapestries and the floors lined with carpet. Has not Bishop Stubbs, whom we have always been taught to revere as the master of a school which prides itself first on its accuracy, seen his historical theory of Anglican relations to Rome overthrown by Professor Maitland? Inaccuracy is inevitable; dishonesty alone cannot be pardoned. If an author withholds the evidence against his side; if he chooses out one part of a document which by itself bears a meaning it did not bear in the context; if, like Froude, he relates only what is creditable to one party and only what is discreditable to another, it is just that he should stand in the pillory, and to the pillory, sooner or later, he is sure to come. But this method was never adopted by Carlyle. He tells the reader, with almost childish frankness, the gist of all the evidence he has collected, and narrates each event without fear and without reproach. The forcible and possibly biassed comments which he then pronounces, may be themselves passed in judgment by the reader who has not been deprived of the means of forming his own opinion by a garbled narrative of one-sided facts. Carlyle often bullies the witnesses in the face of the court, but he never tries to keep them out of the box. Nevertheless his faults are faults of omission. His field of research was wide, but it did not cover certain obvious departments of history. His view of past events was broad and deep, but ' Preface to Mr. Morse Stephens' French Revolution, 2nd edition. while it spread out and down over regions invisible to most historians, other things which the traditions of their craft rightly taught them to regard as important, were totally unseen by him. Before we pass on to consider the value of his additions to the sphere of history, let us first examine the seriousness of his failures. The most obvious want in the French Revolution is the absence of any adequate study of institutions under the Ancien Régime. Not having the materials to forestall de Tocqueville and Taine, he was undoubtedly right when he decided to confine his history to the immediate causes and ultimate course of the Revolution. Yet possibly, even if he had had access to a great body of evidence, he would not have been the man to study the inner workings of France under the Bourbons. Institutions are his weak point. They soon begin to be a bore to him.' The details of legal, economic, and even social questions he finds a weariness. Thus he not only omits the institutions of the Ancien Régime, but he disdains to make clear the constitutional position and functions of the various revolutionary authorities. In the same way he does not attempt to judge the legal aspect of the questions at issue between Charles the First and his Parliaments. But it is only the details that he neglects, never the institutions themselves. It is an essential part of the 'clothes philosophy' to believe in the great effect that custom, law, and organisation have in directing human activity and thought, and he is always true to that idea throughout his historical works. It is because he is wholly absorbed in the actual effect which an institution produced on its age, that he neglects the formal details of its construction. Thus the real power which the Jacobin Club exerted over men is examined and stated in a masterly fashion; the actual relations of the Court to the National Assembly, of the army to the royal and then to the revolutionary executive, are made admirably clear. In the little that he has left us on the subject of Scotch History, he never loses sight of the fact that the Presbyterian Church is the moulding and creative force from the time of Knox to the time of the Covenanters; and although he tells us nothing about its laws and its Assemblies, he tells us much of the real change which it made in Scotch men and women.3 It is because he sees the wood like no other man that he refuses to go in among the trees. But he is also guilty of another sin of omission. He sometimes fails to give any adequate account of the motives and aspirations of important bodies of men. He does not misrepresent; he simply ignores. Thus, in his treatment of the Parliamentary struggle in England, he does not do justice to the Cavaliers or to the High Churchmen. But we must remember that though he has left us a life of Cromwell and the superb fragments lately published as Historical Sketches, he wrote no history of that period. All he 2 Historical Sketches. 3 Ibid. and Portrait of John Knox. |