make any progress until persons like Lord Rosebery himself do not confine themselves to advice and exhortation, but think out the stages of reform, and use legitimate means to get them initiated. The national character may or may not be improved by sermons from the platform and the press. But to put right the definite faults in our institutions, in the management of our public offices, in our military organisation, in our educational system, in our supervision and regulation of commerce and industry-these are matters for the Statesman and the Parliamentarian. Here is a subject for the Liberal Imperialists, if they would join the Progressive Conservatives in bringing pressure to bear upon the Government in the interests of national reconstruction and administrative reform. From the Cabinet itself, without such pressure, little can be expected. For many months, perhaps for years to come, they will be occupied in quenching the flames of war in South Africa and restoring order and settled government in that distracted region. Yet Great Britain cannot wait while the Transvaal is being pacified. Conservative reformers will need all the strength they can obtain to get anything done, beyond those bare necessities of the hour in which Ministers are naturally absorbed. Backed by the Imperialist Liberals they might do much. And the latter could find a task into which they could put their heart, as well as their words.

The sincerity of those who have been preaching to the nation on the texts mentioned may be tested before long. On no point is there more general agreement than on the deficiencies of our technical and secondary education. If the American and the German manufacturers are passing us in the foreign markets, or even in our own, it is chiefly because their masters and their men are better instructed, especially the men. On this point, one need only cite the testimony of any expert who has recently considered. the facts. There is no better witness than Mr. Birchenough, whose admirable essay in the last number of this Review was based upon an examination of many great manufacturing establishments on the continent of Europe :—

It is only [he says] since other countries have begun to educate and train their people upon carefully thought-out scientific principles that their rivalry has begun to turn to our disadvantage. Just as undisciplined courage proves in the long run of no avail against disciplined forces in the field, so in industrial warfare, I fear, untutored natural gifts must eventually succumb to the superiority of careful professional training. Education is becoming for us a question of vital and imperial importance.

Mr. Birchenough states that a leading Berlin banker, with whom he discussed the question of British industry and foreign competition, put his finger upon our weak place without hesitation. You are,' he said, 'the first people in the world with your great Empire, and your great trade, your wonderful administrative gifts, and your inexhaustible

enterprise; but your danger lies in the want of education of your people. If you can overcome that, in my opinion, you have nothing to fear.' It would be easy to multiply evidence to the same effect. All those who are bidding us furbish our weapons for the industrial conflict are agreed that better education, particularly of the technical and scientific kind, is what we most need. But in this last month a damaging, almost a deadly, blow has been dealt at such popular secondary instruction as we possess. Slowly, and under many difficulties, the School Boards, with the aid of the Science and Art Department, and the rather languid encouragement of Whitehall, have built up a system of improved education for the young men and women of the great towns. Evening Schools, Continuation Schools, Science and Art classes, have been established; and it is possible in many places for the ambitious young artisan or clerk to learn mechanics, chemistry, shorthand, commercial arithmetic, book-keeping, and various other subjects which are taught in the communal or State schools of Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and Denmark. The judgment in the case of 'The Queen v. Cockerton' sweeps away all this progress at a stroke. Mr. Justice Wills and Mr. Justice Kennedy have decided that School Boards may only dispense elementary' education; that physics, drawing, history, French and German are not elementary; that the teaching in the Science and Art classes is not authorised by the Statutes and must not be paid for out of the rates or the education grant; and that only children may be taught out of the School Board funds whether in day or in evening classes. The decision may be upset on appeal; but there is no reason to suppose that the two learned judges of the Queen's Bench have not correctly followed the letter, and even the spirit, of the Act of 1870. The legislators of that year doubtless intended to institute little more than rate-aided and State-aided Ragged Schools: establishments where the children of very poor people could just contrive to pick up spelling, and writing, and simple arithmetic. But in the intervening years different and higher conceptions of the meaning of national education have gained currency. The various authorities have combined to place some adequate opportunities within the reach of the industrial classes. The practical defeat of the efforts of the School Managers, the Science and Art Department, and the Board of Education, to encourage higher-grade Board schools, is a national disaster. New legislation is imperatively required, either to authorise the expenditure which the Court of Queen's Bench has declared to be illegal on the part of the School Boards, or to establish secondary public schools in some other way. Otherwise, with all our talk of education, and with all the exhortations of eminent persons to thoroughness, alertness and the like, we shall enter upon the new century worse equipped than we were a decade ago. I venture to suggest that politicians who are at once Imperialists and Reformers

should take up this question and not suffer it to sleep till it is effectually disposed of. We cannot, for the reasons just stated, expect much from a Government, harassed to find the men, the money and the means to conquer first and pacify afterwards the States and Colonies of South Africa; we can hardly suppose that the Radicals will spare time to turn from the iniquities of Mr. Chamberlain to see that young workmen and shop-assistants are induced to spend their evenings at a drawingclass instead of a public-house. But moderate and progressive men of the two parties must take care that this really ruinous step backward is speedily atoned for by the Legislature. To equip our artisans to hold their own in the fierce rivalry with which they are threatened from abroad must be one prominent item in the policy of constructive Conservatism. Imperialists of either confession should be forward in the work. It is likely to be of more genuine value than many eloquent speeches on the dignity and splendour of the British Empire.

The international horizon, though still overcast, has cleared a good deal during the last few weeks. It may not be entirely satisfactory to our feelings to find that Mr. Kruger occupies a position in the popular imagination on the Continent such as men like Garibaldi and Kossuth held in this country. But it is some consolation to know that, though the crowds may cheer and the newspapers rave, the governments will do nothing. If any hope remained to Mr. Kruger, after the polite negative tendered to him at the Quai d'Orsay, it must have been destroyed by the German Emperor's refusal to see him, followed by the extraordinarily candid statements of Count von Bülow in the Reichstag. The German Chancellor declared the policy of Germany with a quite Bismarckian plainness. His two very able and statesman-like speeches were not animated by effusive friendliness towards this country, perhaps because, in the present state of popular feeling among the Germans, any extravagant professions of amity would be misunderstood or resented. But the substance more than compensates for any lack of cordiality in expression. Count von Bülow made it perfectly clear that Germany is supremely conscious of the fact that France has not yet forgiven her, and that she cannot afford to quarrel with England while she has a watchful, armed rival on her Western frontier. Whether the significant references to the events of the Jameson Raid, and the possibility of an Anglo-French alliance against Germany, were intended as a warning to France or an invitation, may be matter for conjecture. At any rate, it is enough for us to know that no Power will disturb us in our work in South Africa. In that region itself the occurrences of December, the 'reverse' at Nooitgedacht, the dash of De Wet through our lines at Thabanchu, and the raids into Cape Colony, have made matters look worse than they did three months ago. It is fortunate that the grim business of wearing

down the resistance of the toughest enemies we have had to encounter for a century will not be complicated by interference from outside. Even so, we shall use up a good many troops before we get the guerilla war under, and we shall need a large permanent force to keep the smouldering embers from flaming up again.

Our absorption in the melancholy South African imbroglio may perhaps account for our comparative indifference towards other important events abroad. The final agreement of the Powers on the joint demands which are to be presented to the Chinese Government has passed almost unnoticed. There was a time when a tempest would have raged in England over the virtual repudiation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty by the United States Senate. As it is, we take it very calmly indeed, and there is scarcely an echo of the excitement which the action of the Senate has aroused in America. Yet the maintenance of an open and neutral waterway between the two Oceans is not exactly a question to be ignored by those who are responsible for the destinies of Canada, Jamaica, and Australasia. To gratuitously abandon all our rights in regard to the Central American Isthmus-rights for which we have steadily contended for two generations, and for which we more than once almost risked a quarrel with the United States-is hardly to be contemplated. But Englishmen-or that minority of them who give any attention to the matter-decline to be alarmed, for several reasons. In the first place, they decline to take the jingoism of the United States Senate seriously. They believe that it is partly a mere demonstration, and partly engineered by the railway interests, which do not want an 'American Canal' or any Canal at all, and are only anxious to get the Hay-Pauncefote treaty rejected, and the Construction Bill burked. Nothing, indeed, would embarrass certain influential parties in the United States more than the acceptance by England of the ratified and amended Treaty. This, however, is not likely to happen. If the arrangement negotiated in the spring falls to the ground, we have still the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and Englishmen do not for a moment believe that the American Government would imitate the Senators and denounce' it. They are satisfied that, if it is given up, it will be as the result of a bargain, by which adequate compensation for the surrender will be obtained by Great Britain, either in the Western hemisphere or elsewhere. They remember that the abrogation of the Treaty of 1850 would not be so much pure gain to the United States. Great Britain would also be released from her self-denying ordinance in reference to Central America, and would be entitled to negotiate for the acquisition or retrocession of those naval bases and coaling-stations which she claimed or coveted fifty years ago. On the whole the feeling on the subject is optimistic; though whether the optimism is really justified by the facts, or is only prompted by our earnest desire not to acknowledge the existence of further international complications, I should not like to say. SIDNEY LOW.

THE CATHOLIC DOCTRINE OF

INDULGENCES

THE Catholic doctrine of Indulgences seems to be one of those puzzles which no efforts at explanation on the part of Catholics can succeed in making clear to certain non-Catholic minds. The reason, no doubt, is partly this that the word 'indulgence' is in England a marked and branded word, especially when it occurs in connection with sin. I remember being once engaged in a mild newspaper controversy with a venerable dignitary of the Establishment who wanted to fasten upon me the immorality of indulgences' by quoting what Gloster flings in the face of the Bishop of Winchester in Henry the Sixth, First Part, Act i. sc. 3. I had to point out to him that the ecclesiastical meaning of the word 'indulgentia' was by no means identical with the literary force of the term 'indulgence.' Whatever may have been the primitive source of the Latin word, the Canon Law has adopted it from that post-classical period in which it came to signify 'remission,' as of punishment or taxation. In this sense it is used, for example, in the Theodosian Code to designate the law of clemency by which, every five or every ten years, lesser criminals had their punishment remitted. It bears a similar sense in the Capitularies of Charles the Bald, where it occurs more than once. This was the meaning it came to bear in the Canon Law-remissio poenae.'1 It is therefore very inadequately expressed by our modern word 'indulgence.' The old English 'pardon' is better; it does not, at least, suggest that the Church is allowing a man to enjoy himself. But 'pardon' may be of many kinds, and would always require some interpretation. The German Ablass, although better than 'indulgence,' is also too indefinite. In fact, the peculiar kind of spiritual 'remission' which is intended to be designated by the ecclesiastical and canonical indulgentia' cannot be defined by any one English term. And that is the reason why all serious persons who talk about 'indulgence' should be ready to listen to an explanation.

There are two inquiries on the subject of Indulgences which may be said to include the greater part of what is of interest. The first

1 See Ducange, Glossarium, s.". Indulgentia.