their own instrumentality and consent, is to demand a contradiction and an absurdity. It is clear that to give independence to a small country with less than four millions of national citizens, surrounded by hostile and mighty neighbours and foes, would be to give her what she could not maintain. It is clear that to nationalise and liberate the four millions of Poles who reside within the kingdom, without restoring and reannexing to them the other three millions who dwell in outlying provinces, would be only to create a perpetual blister and a running sore in the heart of Eastern Europe. It is clear that these outlying provinces could only be reannexed at the cost of a desperate, sanguinary, general, and doubtful war. It is quite clear that such a war would be a great evil. It is not at all clear that such a re-creation of old Poland would be a great good. It is clear, therefore, in conclusion, that the silence of the English nation in the matter has been wise and right; and equally clear that the conduct of our Foreign Office in demanding the fulfilment of absurd and impossible arrangements, and announcing at the same time that there was not the faintest intention of enforcing this demand, was neither dignified nor judicious. It was a case, we fully admit, in which it was peculiarly difficult either to do nothing or to do right. But we need not have done at once so little and so ill.

When we turn our eyes from Europe to America, we are charmed to find a case in which the British people have been quite in unison with the British government, and in which no fault can justly be found with the conduct of either. The civil war which broke out more than two years ago between the two divisions of the great republic of the West offered a conjuncture in which there was every facility both for the nation and for ministers to go astray. The questions of right, of wisdom, of propriety, involved were numerous and very complicated. Both our sentiments and our interests were deeply and immediately concerned. We felt almost as vividly in the matter as if it had been an English question, and as if the struggle had taken place at home. Many of us had strong prepossessions and even affections in favour of one side or the other. Some of us detested and condemned both sides impartially. Vehement convictions and passions on the Slavery question inclined numbers among us to favour the North. Personal and national interests as to the supply of cotton, as well as logical regard for political liberty, disposed others to wish success and emancipation to the South. Nine-tenths of Englishmen found it impossible not in their hearts to rejoice at the dissolution of a Union which was fast becoming too powerful either for the tranquillity of others

or for its own good. The upper classes generally felt relieved by the écroulement of a violent and aggressive democracy, from which England had much to fear. The working-classes to a considerable extent mourned over the failure of republican institutions, from whose example and success they had hoped so much. Our merchants were severe sufferers by the interruption to their trade; and two millions of our most industrious and skilful population were menaced with the loss of their daily bread, and have actually had to endure much privation and to live on charity for two years. Scarcely any war could have interested us so keenly or affected us so much.

We need not go through the details of the struggle. The determination both of this nation and this government was taken at the outset. It was resolved to be absolutely impartial and to be very patient; to allow the established principles of international law to be carried out to their fullest extent, at whatever inconvenience and injury to ourselves; and to be as forbearing and considerate as possible whenever either belligerent, in haste or ignorance, in anger or under pressure, overstepped the recognised limits of respect or justice. In accordance with this resolution, we acknowledged both parties as belligerents, not only because we were bound by usage to do so, but because we could not have done otherwise in justice to either party or to our own commerce. In accordance with this resolution we resisted every temptation to go further, and to secure a supply of American cotton by breaking the blockade or acknowledging the South. We permitted without complaint the repeated seizures of our merchant-ships, when these were engaged in furnishing munitions of war or other articles to either combatant, and only remonstrated where belligerent rights were carried beyond all bounds of right, or were exercised with undue insolence and harshness. We have borne much which it is thought by many we should not have borne, and which other countries wonder at our bearing, because we feel that every allowance is to be made for men engaged in a struggle for political existence, and with all their passions wound up to the highest pitch. The Nassau correspondence supplies proof enough of the extent to which American audacity and British forbearance have been carried. Once only have we spoken and acted with peremptory indignation-viz. in the case of the Trent, when envoys were forcibly taken from the deck of a British packet-ship proceeding from one neutral port to another, and when the case was so clear that all Europe cried shame upon the Federals for the outrage. On this occasion we acted in the most friendly way possible. We demanded immediate restitution of the captured envoys, and the disavowal of the offending officer; and we

accompanied this demand by proceedings which showed the United States that we were peremptory and in earnest, and thus made it necessary and comparatively easy for them to make atonement before they had got committed to a wrong course by protracted controversy. Of late we have gone perhaps too far in soothing their susceptibilities and meeting their exacting claims. We have, at the instance of the government at Washington, ventured to seize a ship of war said to be designed for the Confederates,—and it is believed that we have given direction to detain two others:-it now appears that in acting thus our government has not only gone to the very verge of the law, but has probably outstepped it, and will have to pay heavy damages in consequence. On the whole, our conduct as a nation has been almost admirable. With every need for cotton, we have adopted no questionable steps to obtain it. With every wish for a dissolution of the Union, we have not aided it by any single partial proceeding. Under every provocation we have kept our temper. Under every inducement to action we have been absolutely passive,—and have induced others to be passive also. It is owing to discouragements from our government that France has not long since recognised the Confederacy, and broken the blockade, and consummated the disruption of the republic. Yet we meet with nothing but misrepresentation, enmity, and vituperation from those whom we have thus served in obedience to law and principle, and in defiance of our own interests and predilections. We do not expect that the United States will ever do us justice, but history most certainly will.

ART. X.-THE LATE SIR G. C. LEWIS.

A Dialogue on the Best Form of Government. By the Right Hon. Sir G. C. Lewis, Bart. M.P. London, 1863.

FEW more curious sights were, not long since, to be seen in London than that of Sir G. Lewis at the War Office. What is now a melancholy recollection was, when we used to see it, an odd mixture of amusing anomalies. The accidental and bit-bybit way in which all minor business is managed in England has drifted our public offices into scattered, strange, and miscellaneous places. It has drifted the war minister into the large drawing-room of an old mansion, which is splendid enough to receive fashionable people, and large enough to receive a hundred people. In this great and gorgeous apartment sat, a few months since, a homely scholar in spectacles, whose face bore

traces of sedentary labour, and whose figure was bent into the student-stoop. Such a plain man looked odd enough in such a splendid place. But it was much more odd to think that that man in that place supremely regulated the War Department of England. The place should have been a pacific drawing-room, and the man was a pacific student. Ile looked like a conveyancer over deeds, like a scholar among treatises, like a jurist making a code; he looked like the last man to preside over martial pomp and military expeditions.

So unique a man as Sir George Lewis has, in truth, rarely been lost to this country. Most men, most politicians even especially fall easily into some ready-made classification, belong to one of the recognised groups of ordinary character. Political life has gone on so long that we have ascertained the principal species of statesmen, and have a fixed name ready for each. But Sir George Lewis, as all who knew him in the least well will testify, did not belong exactly to any received type. People were puzzled how to classify a man who wrote on the Astronomy of the Ancients, the Fables of Babrius, and Roman History before there was history, and who was yet able to fill three difficult cabinet offices in quick succession. He wrote what most cabinet ministers would think it too much and too hard to read. No German professor, from the smoke and study of many silent years, has ever put forth books more bristling with recondite references, more exact in every technicality of scholarship, more rich in matured reflection, than Sir George Lewis found time, mind, and scholarlike curiosity, to write in the very thick of eager English life. And yet he was never very busy, or never seemed

so.

In the extremity of the Trent difficulty, when, as he was inclined to think, a war with America was impending, when a war minister might be pardoned for having no time for general reflection, Sir George Lewis found time, at three o'clock on a busy parliamentary day, to discuss with the writer of these lines, for some twenty minutes, the comparative certainty, or rather uncertainty, of the physical and moral sciences. It was difficult to know what to make of such a man.

The difficulty was the greater because he made no pretence to be a marvel of versatile ability. When Lord Brougham was chancellor, he was always doing-his enemies said for display, his friends said from a certain overflow of miscellaneous activity -many out-of-the-way matters. According to one legend, he even wrote a treatise on hydrostatics for the Society of Useful Knowledge which was so full of blunders that it could not be published. Many statesmen have had the vanity of variety. But if ever there was a plain man, an unpretending man, a man who in matters of business affected to be par negotiis neque

supra, that man was Sir George Lewis. The objection to him was that he was too prosaic, too anxiously safe, too suspicious of every thing showy. It was not possible for an enemy or for an opponent-for he had no enemies-to hint that Sir George Lewis's miscellaneous books were written from a love of display. They were written from a bent of nature-from the born love of dry truth.

To those, however, who had an opportunity of accurately observing Sir G. Lewis there was no difficulty in making him out. He was so simple and natural that he explained himself. His principal qualities were all of a plain and homely species, and though it may not be possible to give a likeness of them, yet a brief description may easily give an idea and an approximation. The specialty of his mind was a strong simplicity. He took a plain, obvious view of every subject which came before him. Ingenuities, refinements, and specious fallacies might be suggested around him in any number or in any variety, but his mind was complication-proof. He went steadily through each new ambiguity, each new distinction, as it presented itself. He said, in unadorned but apt English, "The facts are these and these; the new theory concerning them is so and so it accounts for facts Nos. 1, 2, and 3, but fails to account for facts Nos. 4, 5, and 6." Of course he was not uniformly right. We shall show that there were some kinds of facts, and some sorts of events, which he was by mental constitution not able wholly to appreciate. But his view of every subject, though it might not be adequate, though it might be limited, was always lucid. His mind was like a registering machine with a patent index. It took in all the data, specified, enumerated them, and then indicated with unmistakable precision what their sum-total of effect precisely was. The index might be wrong, though it pretty generally was right; but nobody could ever mistake for a moment what it meant and where it was.

Few men ever kept apart, in civil matters, so well what, in medical matters, would be called the diagnosis and the prescription. Most men mix, even to themselves, their view of what is with their suggestion of what should be. You could not have made Sir G. Lewis mix the two. His mind on such points was almost a tedious formality. He would say, "The facts proved are so and so; from these there are the following probable inferences. If you wish to alter the present circumstances and to produce others, you must do so and so." When a man came to him with a plan, he asked, "What is your object?" Until he got a plain answer to that, and a proof that the object was good, he never looked at the plan. All this in theory may seem very obvious and very trite. Nothing is so