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that Russia would then change the hostile commercial policy which she has inaugurated. Wherever she goes, and however far she may extend, she will endeavor to block out all foreign manufactures to the exclusive benefit of her own by prohibitive tariffs, and to close all trade-routes passing through her dominions except to her own traders. Two interesting incidents bearing upon this subject have recently come to my knowledge. A British ship, bound for the Black Sea, shipped at Liverpool fifteen tons of nails and five tons of telegraph wire addressed to Batoum. Between the day of her departure and the day of her arrival, the duties on iron were so enormously raised that her Captain received telegraphic instructions to land neither nails nor wire, but to bring them back again. Another British ship bearing cargo for Constantinople and Odessa, first stopped to discharge at Constantinople. When the manifest was squared off at this port, it was discovered that three bales of goods which should have been landed, had got mixed up with the Odessa cargo. In order to save precious time and much trouble the Captain decided to go straight on to Odessa, discharge there, and leave the three bales at Constantinople on his return; to avoid possible difficulties he took with him declarations from the Constantinople Custom-House and from the English Consul, viséd by the Russian Consul. The three bales were duly discovered at Odessa, but as they were not accounted for in the Odessa manifest, the Russian douaniers declared them to be contraband All the declarations and signatures and visas with which the Captain had provided himself were of no avail; he was fined £120. Such policy as that shown by these two incidents is not propitious for shipping interests engaged in the Black Sea trade.

British trade with Turkey amounts, under present conditions, to twelve and a half million pounds sterling per annum. But the loss in trade which we should suffer by Asia Minor becoming a Russian province is not to be measured by that sum alone. It is not to be expected that Anatolia will always remain in its present primitive state. Schemes, some of them most excellent and practical, have existed for years for endowing

the country with a net-work of railways. The reasons why they have not been carried out were sufficiently clearly indicated in my former article; and to these may be added the extraordinarily, childishly, suspicious nature of the Sultan and his advisers. They cannot see or hear of any proposal without seeking laboriously for, and usually, as they suppose, finding some hidden treacherous political motive concealed in it. It has been well said that if Allah were to send one of his angels bearing a sack of five million purses as a little present to the Sultan, His Majesty would never reap any advantage from the gift, so engaged would he be in searching round and round it and through and through it, to discover what pitfall Allah had set for him therein.

But in spite of the many reasons militating against the development of Asia Minor at present, it cannot be indefinitely delayed. Pressure from without will be too strong for even the obstructive walls of corruption and unmanly terrors of cowardly suspicion; it may certainly be predicted that the next very few years will see railway works in Asia Minor well advanced. Trade in that country will then increase by leaps and bounds. It is naturally a very rich country; almost, perhaps quite the only reason that it now lies grovelling in poverty is the utter lack of communications at present prevailing. The removal of that overpowering disadvantage would mean the opening up of a vast and most profitable field to British commerce; with such an outlet for our products, the complaint of over-production would disappear. Can we say that it is of no interest to us whether such a field be closed to us forever?

Certainly of interest, I can imagine being answered, but not a thing to be fought for; a trade war is wicked and immoral, and would never be allowed by the enlightened electorate of England. Carried to its logical conclusion, this amounts to saying that wherever the commercial flag requires the support of the Union Jack, the Union Jack must be humbly furled, and the commercial flag go to the wall. I confess that this is to

an incomprehensible sentiment; and though the people of England may possibly with their lips set up

a self-denying ordinance of the kind, I cannot believe that in their hearts they approve so striking an illustration of the " happy despatch" principle, or that they would really allow their actions to be governed thereby. Admittedly England lives by her trade; her gigantic Empire has been formed by the trading enterprise of her sons, and preserved precisely by their willingness and capability to fight in support of that trade; her foreign policy is laid upon lines converging upon her trade interests and upon nothing else. To say that we will not fight for our trade is to say that we will not fight for our very existence. If when we see that the fight will be severe we are to run away, under the flimsy pretence that we are not interested (and this is what the advice of many of our modern Mentors amounts to), the spirit of the nation must be gone, and the decline of the British Empire, so often predicted, close at hand.

I certainly do not wish to say that we should fight to establish for ourselves a trade-monopoly ; but I do intend to convey that where a change of conditions, where the annihilation of one Power by another, means our perpetual exclusion from a splendid commercial field, we should not hesitate to prevent the change, and to uphold the weaker Power against the stronger. If we do not adopt that policy, it is because we are afraid to do so; then let us have the honesty to confess our fear to ourselves, and not seek to hide it under the irritating cant and phraseology of mawkish sentiment.

Our trade interests are not involved in Asia Minor only. I have already pointed out that by whatever route Russia reaches Constantinople, it is more than probable that the intervening countries between that city and Bessarabia, and between the Black Sea and the Adriatic will fall also into her hands. Our trade with Roumania is £4,500,000,

that with Bulgaria and the other countries mentioned (exclusive of Greece) about £3,500,000 more. And again, let me remind my readers that, with the exception of Roumania, these countries are in an almost wholly undeveloped state, and that trade with them is capable of being surprisingly extended. Greece and Servia were to share the fate of the others, which is by no means an improbable supposition, it would cause us a further annual loss of about £4,000,000 of trade. Thus there appears for us in Europe, exclusive of our commerce with Turkey itself, a probable direct loss of about £12,000,000 of trade annually; the prospective loss cannot be estimated.

I have endeavored to point out within the short space of this article what would be the effects of Constantinople becoming a Russian city. Resumed briefly, they would stand thus :-the stability of our Indian Empire, and our position in the Mediterranean, and therefore altogether in Europe, dangerously threatened; to meet these dangers our military expenditure in India and at home, and our naval expenditure in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean enormously increased; no advantages to counterbalance this increased expenditure, but a valuable present trade, and an invaluable future trade in Asia Minor wholly lost; a valuable trade in Central Asia wholly lost; and equally lost a valuable trade in Europe capable of great extension.

These points are easy to see, and not, I think, easily gainsaid. I hope, with all my power of hoping, that the English people may see and realize them before it is too late to act. I can only repeat what I said in my former article, that we should by all means promote the construction of railways and material development in Asia Minor, and to this I now add that we should firmly resolve to prevent further Russian encroachments upon Turkey. --Murray's Magazine.

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THE PROGRESS OF THOUGHT IN OUR TIME.

BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

If we attempt to seize the main fact in the intellectual development of the last half-century, we shall find, I think, that this may be described as the restoration of spirituality to our thoughts about the universe. What that means I hope to make clearer in the course of the following pages. We have gained our present standing-point by a long process of scientific and philosophical labor, which has been carried on through three centuries in Europe, and which culminated recently in the hypothesis of Evolution. This hypothesis cannot be separated from those sciences which demonstrate the cosmic unity, analyze the elements of matter, investigate the origins of life, and explore the obscure stages of primitive human history. It cannot be dissociated from those metaphysical speculations regarding man's relation to the world, which found poetic utterance in Goethe. Evolution, in the widest sense of the term, has rather to be viewed as a generalization, which combines the data of previous scientific and philosophical thought in a new conception of the universe. Like all such generalizations, it is hypothetical, provisional. Least of all does Evolution, as its name and as its principles imply, claim for itself finality. Its adaptation, however, to the present conditions of the human mind, is proved by the rapidity with which it has penetrated every department of speculation.

This idea is undoubtedly the most potent which has entered the sphere of human thought since Copernicus published his heliocentric theory. The merit of testing, applying, and developing it belongs in the main to two Englishmen-Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. I do not, of course, mean that either Darwin or Spencer, or that both of them in partnership, invented and patented what we call Evolution. Everybody knows that, in the realm of metaphysic, no less than in the province of natural philosophy, the conception had been latent, half-emergent, ready to assume predominance, since the day when Giordano Bruno was burned at

Rome in 1600 for proclaiming the [homogeneity of substance in the universe and the infinity of worlds in space. But England was destined to bring this potent embryo to birth. The English intellect at its best combines grasp of detail with comprehensiveness of survey, poetical imagination with practical common sense, capacity for patient labor with aptitude for daring speculation, in very exceptional proportions, Precisely this combination of qualities was required from thinkers who essayed to present Evolution to the world in forms which should secure for it credence, and establish it upon a solid basis. They had to test the hints of earlier workers by their own experiments and observations, to accumulate stores of corroborative materials, and at the same time to maintain the attitude of seers, forecasting a wide and hitherto undemonstrated theory of the universal order. They might be compared to architects who were obliged to fashion with their own hands each stone and each brick of the edifice they had designed, or at least to select these with a workman's criticism of their suitableness. Englishmen, for the reasons Į have just suggested, were eminently fitted for this task. Accordingly, Darwin and Spencer, proceeding upon different lines and with different qualifications, furnished the idea of Evolution with substantiality. They made it current; they gave it a force that had to be reckoned with; they indicated its applicability to the majority of those problems which exercise human curiosity, and in the solution of which the vast machinery of German subjective idealism had failed.

I have said that the Evolution theory can only be compared in its importance to the Copernican system of astronomy. This assertion requires some explanation. If we inquire into the nature of religions, we shall find that they are all of them at root attempts to account for the universe and to demonstrate man's place in the sphere of things. This being the case, it follows that every new cosmological idea, every fresh hypoth

esis regarding the origin of the world, every alteration in the theory of Nature, will induce changes in the current systems of theology, metaphysic, morals. Now the mythological elements of Christianity took shape in the intellects of people who conceived our earth to be the centre of the universe, who were accustomed to believe that God made the sun and moon and stars to shed light on us; and who fancied that the divine purpose in creating nature was to form a dwelling-place for man. The dogmatic elements of historical Christianity in like manner assumed their fixity by slow degrees under the dominance of Ptolemy's geocentric system of astronomy, and in harmony with a metaphysic which accepted that view of the universe. The discovery, published by Copernicus in 1543, by simply shifting the position of our globe in space, shook the fabric of Christian theology to its foundations. The deductions made from his discovery by subsequent thinkers, beginning with Giordano Bruno, still more seriously compromised a large part of that edifice. The earth appeared not merely as a satellite of the sun, but the sun himself, with all his court of planets, took rank as only one among innumerable sidereal companies. Space spread into infinity. Up and down, heaven above and hell beneath, were now phrases of symbolical or metaphorical significance only. It was no longer possible to imagine that the celestial bodies had been created in order to give light by day and night. Man's station of eminence in the kosmos ceased to seem manifest. It became difficult to take the scheme of salvation, God's sacrifice of his own son for the advantage of a race located on a third-rate planet, literally. Some mythical parts of the religion, which had previously been held as facts, were immediately changed into allegories. For instance, For instance, the ascension of Jesus from the mountain lost its value as an historical event when the brazen vault of heaven, or the crystal sphere on the outer surface of which God sat, had been annihilated; when there was no more up or down, and when a body lifted into ether would obey the same laws of attraction as a meteoric stone.

The Copernican discovery very ma

terially influenced Christian dogma and mythology by thus converting at a stroke what had been previously accepted as matter of literal and historical fact into symbol, allegory, metaphor. It humbled human pride, and destroyed the overweening sense of man's importance in the universe. The nature of this revolution in astronomy made it of necessity destructive to the external coatings and integuments of religion. At the same time, it stimulated the growth of a new metaphysic, the first manifestations of which we owe to Bruno, and which was destined to react upon theology through the idealistic speculations of the last two centuries.

The disintegration of those factors which are merely temporal, and doomed to dissolution, in Christianity, has been advancing so rapidly, through the application of various critical methods and the growth of sciences, that little of a purely destructive influence was to be expected from the theory of Evolution. Some points, however, may arrest attention. Preceded by geology and primitive anthropology, Evolution dealt a death-blow at the assumptions of human self-conceit. We have accepted the probability of man's development from less highly organized types of animal life with tolerable good humor, after a certain amount of rebellious disgust. The study of primitive humanity, together with the suggestions of the Evolution hypothesis, render any doctrine of a Fall more and more untenable. Instead of Paradise, and man's sudden lapse from primal innocence, we are now convinced that history implies a slow and toilsome upward effort on the part of our ancestors from the outset. ceded, in like manner, by the demonstrated theories of Conservation and Correlation of Energies, Evolution dealt a death-blow at the old conception of miraculous occurrences. A miracle, a freak of power, is no longer conceivable in Nature; and if Lazarus were raised from the dead before our eyes, we should first ascertain the fact, and next proceed to investigate the law of the phenomenon. Evolution, again, dealt a deathblow to teleology. The habit of mind which recognized design and providential interference in special adaptations of living creatures to their environment,

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has been superseded by what may be termed a consistently biological view of the universe. The whole scheme of things is now regarded as a single organism advancing methodically through stages of its growth in obedience to inevitable laws of self-expansion. This does not dispel the mystery which surrounds life. It does not yield the world to chance, or remove the necessity by which we postulate the priority of thought, intention, spirit, to all manifestations of material existence. But it compels us to regard this form-giving spiritual potency as inherent in the organism as the law of its life, not as the legislation of some power extraneous to it. In another very important point Evolution has reacted destructively on popular Christianity. By penetrating our minds with the conviction that all things are in process, that the whole universe is literally in perpetual Becoming, it has rendered it impossible for us to believe that any one creed or set of opinions possesses finality. Religions, like all things that are ours and human, have their day of declension; nor can Christianity form an exception to the universal rule. What is perishable in its earthly historical manifestation must be eliminated; and the permanent spirit by which it is animated, the truth it reveals, will be absorbed into the structure of creeds destined successively to supersede it and be superseded.

For the moment I must put aside the consideration of those aspects in which the Evolution theory tends to construct thought in the higher spheres of metaphysics and religion. Its force will ultimately be found to have more of organizing than of disintegrating value. But in this relation the special achievements of the evolutionists have to be regarded as factors in the total scientific product of the nineteenth century; and to this point I shall return, after casting a glance at the important modifications which the idea has introduced into history and criticism.

The fundamental conception which underlies the evolutionary method of thought is that all things in the universe exist in process. No other system has so vigorously enforced the truth that it is impossible to isolate phenomena from their antecedents and their consequents.

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No other system has given the same importance to apparently insignificant details and to apparently monstrous divergences from normal types, in so far as such details supply links in the sequence of development, or such divergences can be used to illustrate the growth of organism. It follows that the line of thought which Europe has dubbed Darwinism infuses a new vitality into those inquiries which we collectively call history, into every study of the past. I will select a single instance, not because it is the most significant, but because I can speak with the firmest personal conviction upon this topic. I have chosen for my instance the province of literature and art, the department of criticism with which I have myself been occupied. When I was a young man, in the sixties, I remember that we students of European culture had to choose between connoisseurs and metaphysicians for our guides. On the one hand were the people who praised the "Correggiosity of Correggio," or "swore by Perugino," or promulgated the preciousness of Fra Angelico," as though Correggio, Perugino, and the Dominican painter of San Marco were respectively descended full-formed from the skies to instruct an unenlightened world. Each connoisseur sailed under his self-chosen flag, proclaimed his own proclivities, and preached the gospel of his particular taste. There were not wanting even folk who pinned their faith to Sir Joshua and the Caracci. Caprice on this side governed judgment; and what I have stated with regard to figurative art was no less obviously true of poetry and literature. There seemed to be no light or leading in the chaos of opinion. On the other hand were ranged the formal theorists, who constructed a scheme of art upon subjective principles. They bade us direct our minds to the idea, the Begriff of art; and having thence obtained a concept, we were invited to reject as valueless whatever would not square with the logical formula. tween these opposed teachers, the pure connoisseurs and the pure metaphysicians, Goethe emerged like a steady guiding star. His felicitous summary of criticism, "Im Ganzen, Guten. Schönen, resolut zu leben" ("To live resolvedly in the whole, the good, the

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