of character. Who, that is at all open to awe, can think without awe of the moral problem presented by a being like old Osborne? We constantly hear that Love is more than Justice, and includes it : and abstractly that is so. Again, it seems very difficult to understand how a man who is full of Benevolence can be short of Conscientiousness. And, as it is quite clear that perfect Love would include Justice, so it is clear that perfect Benevolence would. Only, how much of the question we beg in using the word "perfect" here! There is something almost terrible, by itself, in the bare fierceness of old Osborne's love of his son George. But it did not make him just, or near just, even to George. The distinction between kindness and justice is recognised in the well-known proverb, Be just before you are generous. And yet, see the intricacy of these questions!—there are plenty of cases in which we are bound to be what is called generous before we are what is called just. If I owed a heavy bill to a comfortably rich tradesman, and had no means of paying it, I should still be bound to assist a starving brother if the occasion challenged me; though the tradesman must go to the wall to the extent of the value of what I gave my starving fellow-creature.

There is no paradox here; the rationale of the case is as simple as possible. Yet it is certain that many of us, if not the majority, even though we should probably all act alike, would have a confused sense of an inexplicable conflict of duties. There are in fact two (among many) other elements in customary notions of right and wrong, which at this point suggest themselves. One is, the strength or weakness of the love of Order: the second, the strength or weakness of the deductive faculty, that which phrenologists sum up by the word Causality.

The sentiment of Order is in some minds very strong indeed, and it enters largely, very largely, into all customary virtue. Unfortunately it easily allies itself with Self-Esteem, and when that alliance has been formed, we have at once that peculiar and offensive product known as bourgeois, Philistine, or épicier morality. It is not very long since a juryman in France was so polite as to inform the judge that his disapprobation of the morality of M. Jules Favre was such that he could not listen to him as an advocate, without feeling an aversion that would prejudice the prisoner at the bar. The virtue of this exalted being was bourgeois or Philistine virtue,—almost entirely made up of Order and Self-Esteem. It was a rootless, stupid, unreasoned, wholly-artificial product, whose strength lay mainly in the conceit of its possessor. Probably the reader knows men, and women also, of the type in question: he is very lucky if he does not. I have one in my eye at the present moment, and will roughly describe him. He is an Englishman, well brought up, well fed, well housed, and of the most respectable connections; in fact, "a full-fed ruffian" of the vulgarly blameless order. He has perfect health, and, as far as I can judge, never had an anxiety. He is usually good-tempered, and

VOL. XI.

P P

he is perfectly honest, according to rule. On the other hand, he would be an exacting creditor; not cruel, but persistent. He strongly, though quietly, believes in the keeping up of order in society. He has severe feelings on matters of religion and morality; but of these the very essence is routine and conceit. He has not ten atoms of spontaneous reverence or modesty, but he treats with the utmost severity whatever violates the received maxims in these matters. As I am drawing from the life I cannot be specific, and must carefully refrain from strictly personal touches. In spite of his morality and his modesty, or rather his decorum, for modesty he has none, he is not a man of a perfectly pure life, he is a coldblooded violator of the morality which he cannot bear to see approached even by a totally unconscious innuendo from the lips of a simple girl or a playful child. When I say he is a cold-blooded violator of this morality, I mean that he looks upon a drifted woman as a creature who is by her own act put outside the circle of social sympathies; and as she is there to be used, he uses her and whistles her down the wind. Still, he is a man of extremely regular life, and there is nothing flagrant about him.

His whole conduct is as ordered

as his dress and his personal habits. He laughs at a bad joke, but cannot be made to understand a good one. Yet he is, to end, an acute man on the whole, and a very exact and trustworthy man of business.

Although I have been drawing from life, it will probably appear as if there were very little that is individual in this portrait, and I can almost overhear the comment, "Why, you have been sketching the typical Briton!" But the point in which I have failed-because I dare not tell characteristic anecdotes-is that of bringing out the thoroughly routine and self-conceited character of this man's morality. He is by nature disposed to keep going in any groove in which he is set, and once he is in motion there, it has immediately become "my" groove, and all his personal dignity and importance (as unconscious in him as a wolf's cruelty) is pledged to persistence. For another person to break the rule that he keeps is a personal affront—a breach of order, and, above all, a breach of the order that "I" live by. But it is indispensable to a nature like this to have its regulated latrinæ (observe the regulated), and he has them. Now, when we break, as is natural, into hearty exclamations that a warm-hearted rake is better than a cad like the one described, we are often told that we are wrong; for the cad is an exceedingly useful member of society. But our hearts remain unconvinced, and reply that society had better go to pieces than be supported on pillars like this.

The remark is not uncommon-I have seen it recently-that persons of heretical opinions are often of heretical life also. There is not much force in the remark; for orthodox persons, too, are often of heretical life; and, at all events, we have no statistics. But that is not the chief point. It is highly probable in the nature of things that the same independence of thought which leads to difference of

opinion in theology should lead to difference of opinion in morals. A person who has the force of character and the courage to upheave from himself the dead weight of custom in one particular, will be likely enough to do it in another. It may be from bad reasoning in both cases; or it may be from good reasoning;-anyhow, the quality and vigour of the reasoning faculty are intimately concerned in the outcome of opinion and practice. Let us suppose a man of property brought up among Trinitarians becomes an Arian, and avows it. Let us also suppose that he has children, and that, being convinced the law of primogeniture is a wicked law, he finds out something which enables him to evade it in favour of his daughters. The supposition is a wild one; but no matter. It would surely be rather idle to remark that here, as usual, heresy in practice was associated with heresy in belief. But the point is, that whether the man was right or wrong in either case is a question of ratiocination. You might talk for a thousand years of law and conscience and society. He would reply, "I claim that my conscience is a sounder conscience than yours; that I am moral and you are immoral." You then go on, perhaps, to say, "It is admitted that we ought all to obey the law, though we may all strive to get it altered." And he replies: "Admitted by whom? Not by me. I admit it as a proposition of general public convenience, but not of ultimate morality. On the contrary, there is nothing more important than that bad laws should occasionally be defied." Now it is obvious that all this, and much more that would necessarily arise in such a case, is matter of argument, and that considerable power of thinking would probably have gone to such divergences as we have supposed.

I am aware that a great deal of comic writing might be expended upon these illustrations, but the emerging of another point arrests my sense of comedy. It is quite certain that a man who acted in any such manner as we have been supposing would not have as large an organ of Veneration as Sir Roundell Palmer* or Keble. But he might, and probably would, have in great strength that sense of personal rights which is as important to our well-being as the sense of superior Powers outside and above us. He might have a strong sense of Order; but it certainly would not be a tyrannising one. And he would not have that love of routine,-that self-compelling instinct of going with the crowd and following all respectable social initiations which may be said to determine the conduct of the majority of mankind in every nation and condition, from the lowest savages to the most civilised races under heaven. Here we have "struck ile " afresh; and we will, with your permission, consider in another paper the relation of the instincts of Beauty and Gregariousness to notions of right and wrong. HENRY HOLBEACH.

* Now Lord Chancellor, as all the world knows.

A TRAMP IN THE BUSH.

MR. M. A. TITMARSH, it may be remembered, once had no money and lay in pawn, a stranger in the town of Lille. On one occasion I found myself in a very similar predicament in an Australian township. A facetious friend had borrowed my purse and then taken his departure, leaving me to pay his hotel bill and my own, with more than seventy miles of my up-country journey still before me. Not knowing a soul in the place, and being anxious to get to my journey's end, I was forced to leave my traps with the innkeeper, as security for his account, and start on foot, with a shilling or two in my pocket for food and drink.

The fix was rather awkward, but, in spite of one or two little inconveniences, I thoroughly enjoyed my tramp. One little inconvenience at starting was a mile or two of road which recent summer rains had turned into hopeless bog. A few fitful attempts had been made to "corduroy" the red and yellow slush with logs and tree-trunks, but the effort had been fruitless. Bogged drays, with their bronzed, blue-bloused drivers seated, doggedly smoking, on the topmost bales, the liberated bullocks having struggled to dry land, breeched and waistcoated with furry mud, seemed to be sinking into the miry abysm like foundering ships into the sea. When the mailwaggonette came along, the driver wisely altogether left the road, and sent his vehicle reeling and bumping--his passengers holding on to their seats with white-knuckled hands, but, nevertheless, popping about like parched peas-between the standing and over the felled trees at the roadside. Farther on the fierce December sun had baked the red road into cracked brick, with ruts yawning like Curtius-gulfs. Here and there, at wide intervals, stood a grey slab hut with an overlapping roof of ragged bark and a bulging fireplace and chimney of badly made brick. A somewhat smarter cot called itself an "accommodation-house," professing to sell only food and tea, and lemonade and ginger-beer; but probably a familiar customer might have obtained a brandy-bottle to convert the latter two bibibles into "spider" and "stonefence." A farmer's wife, some sixty years of age, rode by in a sun-bonnet, and with a pair of fowls, a sucking-pig, a bunch of greens, and a pumpkin dangling from the off-side of her saddle. A tall, spare "currency-lad," in shirt sleeves and belted, parti-coloured moleskins, with his lank black hair flying loose from his sun-and-rainbrowned cabbage-tree hat (a greasy black cutty pipe, like a plump, perspiring nigger sprite, peeping out from the rusty-black ribbon), and the long lash of his short-handled stock-whip coiled like a snake around his arm, dashed by like an express steam-engine on his three-parts

blood, greyhound-barrelled, bright chestnut gelding. I passed two almond-eyed, monkey-nosed, lemon-skinned Chinamen trudging along in blue chemises and baggy breeches, and beehive hats, under which their pigtails were twisted up like a woman's back-hair; each with a bamboo pole over his right shoulder, from the two ends of which dangled his two bundles of " swag," like the pails of an eccentric milkman who, in sailor's phrase, should have peaked instead of squared his yoke. Then I came to a little township, and had some muttonchops that made me think of charred saddle-flaps, in a verandahed public-house, with a hollowed tree-trunk in front to serve as horsetrough. The township was a very little one, but it had two or three more such places of entertainment for man and beast in it. Beyond the little township the rough red road became more and more like a mere track.

A lonely roadside public-house, that looks as if a dozen murders per diem might be committed there with impunity, if only so many people could be got to call, and then not another house for miles. Straight, sometimes fenced, but oftener not, ran the rough red road through the verdigris-coloured scrub, from whose stiff leaves there steamed up an aromatic fragrance. Motionless in the rich sunlight stood the taller trees, some clad in bark-tatters like beggars' rags, and others bare and white as a bleached bone. The locusts filled the forest with their hammer-on-iron clatter. Flies swarmed on one's hot back like a heap of black currants. Big ants swarmed angrily out of their red hills when the foot came down upon their homes. Now and then a black snake wriggled out of the path. Bright-eyed little lizards basked on the black tree-stumps, and crows and magpies hopped, croaking and fluting, about the silver-grey logs and fallen branches, whilst flocks of paroquets darted with a scream and a jewellike flash across the sunshine. By-and-by I came upon a dusty, shaggy-coated brood-mare with her foal at foot, and a little farther on a wood-cart stood loaded in the bush. Then there came a maize paddock, and then a little cottage almost smothered in pumpkin vine, and inhabited by three generations of broad-faced Germans with greenish-yellow hair and skim-milk eyes. They could speak very little English, and I could speak no German. Our intercourse therefore was limited. However, they gave me a light for my pipe and a great gore of rosy-fleshed water-melon, and I went upon my way comforted.

A mile or two farther on I turned in for the night, on a green flat dotted with low trees. The sun had not yet gone down, but I was very tired, and a red cloud of dust moving over the tree-tops in the distance showed that a flock of sheep was going home. Not very far off there was an almost dried-up chain of ponds over which hummed a swarm of mosquitos; but they did not trouble me, since I had been long enough in the colony to have grown mosquito-proof. Just before I turned in, I flushed a couple of snipe. Then a flock of white