of the people £70,000,000 a year, there is no power on earth can raise your poorer and suffering population from its present position."

H. K., in opening the affirmative side of this debate, has given us a lengthened article wholly devoted to a eulogizing of Free Trade. We believe that the principle of Free Trade is just and wise, but we do not look upon it as a fundamental principle of financial policy. It most certainly is the fundamental principle of the commercial policy of this country during the present century, and it also has an indirect bearing upon financial matters. We must, however, still look upon the Cash Payments Act of 1819, the Bank Charter Act of 1844, and the view taken of the income tax in the early part of the century as exclusively a war tax,"* and not Free Trade, as being the foundations of the financial policy of the nineteenth century. We would also remind H. K. that Free Trade has not been an unmixed good, for, in connection with a restricted currency, it did undoubtedly operate most disastrously at the time of the Irish famine and monetary crisis of 1847.

66

The four points adduced by T. R. W. to prove the affirmative of this question we most cheerfully accept as correct statements, but they really prove nothing in this debate, for they refer to merely superficial matters, and do not touch the fundamental principles of our financial policy.

A. P. L. argues, because the taxation and the population of this country have increased in 1800 in about the same ratio, notwithstanding that various elements of expenditure have been added to the governmental outlay during that period, that therefore the financial policy of this country has on the whole tended to economy. But this comparison is not just, because the circumstances of the country widely differ at the two periods mentioned. The year 1800 was a time of financial difficulty and war, 1869-70 belongs to a long-continued period of profound peace. F. M. has pointed out to us that the taxation of 1801 was equal to about £2 78. 6d. per head, on an average, and that of 1869 to about £2 10s. per head, on an average. The extra 2s. 6d. per head in 1869 would cover the elements of expenditure added to the Government outlay; and thus A. P. L.'s above-mentioned argument just amounts to this, that in the present time of peace the cost of the government and defence of this country has increased from what it was in 1800, a time when the country had for several years been engaged in a most harassing and expensive warfare, in the same ratio as the population has increased during the same period. The argument thus stated tends to prove that the management of governmental expenditure is less economical now than it was at the commencement of the century, and in support of this conclusion we may also adduce the consideration that the expenditure should not increase

See Sir G. C. Lewis's " Administrations of Great Britain, 1783-1830,"

pp. 219, 394.

in the same ratio as the population, because there are many items of expenditure which are not increased by an increase of population.

We have now briefly noticed the arguments of our opponents, we believe that the arguments in our opening article have not been overthrown, nor their relevancy to the subject of debate disproved, and therefore we still continue to maintain that, on the whole, the financial policy of the nineteenth century has not been just and wise. We are, however, looking with hope to the efforts of the present Government, believing that they are likely to introduce gradually a more just and wise financial policy. SAMUEL.

Literature.

HAS THE AGE OF SATIRISTS PASSED AWAY?

AFFIRMATIVE REPLY.

We have had in our literary history a very distinct and wellknown species of writing, called satire-wit excited by wrath, decency dunned into a dunce, politics pickled in poetry, punishment administered by pasquinades, evil assailed by epigrams, and sarcasms set to song. All along the course of our land's records there is a fringing of fun, frolic, scarifying satire, and libels done in the buffooning style. In the poetry of the past these are to be found as plentifully as blackberries in the September copses, or "like nettle flowers among the bluebells, and wild roses by the hill-side." Then it was deemed a right and proper thing to lash the failings of mankind generally with scornful energy, and to flagellate offenders against society with the scorpions of the intellectual forces. The satirist was as regularly engaged in looking out for a deserving subject as a vulture was ready to scent afar off the oncoming death in the desert; and such a poet as Pope could aver,

"I own I'm proud to see,

Men not afraid of God afraid of me."

But these days are past, and the satire is as obsolete as the fool's cap and bells, which used to wag at the royal table, and excite amusement in the noble's hall. With Walter Savage Landor the last of the great satyrical and satirical writers of our country was laid in the grave. We have no modern Aristophanes or Ben Jonson; no Horace and Juvenal, or Butler and Swift; no Erasmus and Buchanan, or Hall and Dunne; no Dryden and Pope, or Churchill 1870. 2 G

and Byron. It is not that we are free from foul social vices, or that there are no corruptions in the State or in society; it is not because religious bypocrisy has departed and cant is unknown, that political dereliction is less prevalent, or literary pretension less absurd, that no weapon of swingeing might is brought across the base part of the social circle; it is because the very foundations of moral energy are sapped, and nobleness of soul is too rare among us. We can vituperate, but we do it on the sly; we can vilify, but we do it with discreet evasiveness. We cannot now speak to the very soul of the criminal in high places, we can only fawn and flatter-and defame. The heroism of the satirist is lost as well as the keenness; the high moral tone of the frowner on sin, and the reformer of the ages, has been exchanged for the trite moralizing of the essayist, and the semi-maundering of the sermonizer. The patiently prepared and pithy pungency of the poetical satirist has disappeared from among us, and even the caricatures of the novelist have ceased to be graced with a moral purpose, or painted by the hand of an author strong to detest sin.

I have read the papers prepared by the writers on the negative of the question, and have compared them with those composed on the affirmative, and I cannot see that there is any possibility of hesitation concerning this question. If our opponents would only supply us with a list of the satirists of the present day, we might be at once put to silence. When a list is attempted it is a most complete failure. What name among the old satirists does not hold the first rank in letters? What names among the so-called satirists of modern times do occupy a foremost place among authors, and are acknowledged as the arbitri morum of the period? Douglas Jerrold was a jester, not a satirist. His were the smallest of possible punctures in the great body of the world's sins. Thackeray was a cynic in his writings, and dissected the weaknesses of men, not to cure them, but to show his clinical observations regarding the diseases to which that hideous thing, an unregenerate heart, was subject. He was an anatomist, not a surgeon, and his scarifications were performed on carrion. James Hannay-heaven save the mark is also named; but who that knows Hall or Dunne, or Swift or Barnes, would read Hannay ?

We can scarcely believe that M. R. N. and "R. Fielding" can be serious in maintaining that the authors whose names they quote are really satirists in the good old sense of stern rebukers of social sins, moral misdoings, political profligacy, commercial cozenry, religious hypocrisy, and the chastisers of those who, being above or beyond the law, required to be made amenable to the pure moral code of God.

We are quite conscious that we bring a very serious charge against our age when we assert that it is not an age of satirists. We charge it with deficiency of moral heroism, and with submissiveness to shams; we charge it with conventional hypocrisies so hollow that they will not bear even the chipping of the small stones

flung from the slings of the wits; we charge it with being so cankered in the core that no surgeon can venture to use the scarifying knife without its being also a sacrificial one. We want serious, earnest convictions, and our great authors only tickle the surface of the social sores with the soft fibres of their goosequills. In sober earnestness may we not doubt that our moral sense is becoming thoroughly depraved, when there is not among us conscientiousness enough to keep up the witnessing for God's truth and God's law which the satirists gave? Is the soul of the whole nation seared as if with a hot iron ? Or are we shortly to see a new school of satir ists arise, who shall slip off the masks from our lives and make us contemn ourselves ?

A. C. S.

NEGATIVE REPLY.

As a mere matter of fact this question seems at a first glance to be trivial and uninteresting; and judging from the slight quantity of argumentation which it has induced, it has been deemed so by the contributors in general, if not by the readers also. But both as a fact in criticism and a fact in morals the question is of great moment. As regards criticism, for instance, the debate involves the falling out of our literature of one of its richest, ripest, most pungent and most powerful characteristics,-characteristics which flash into our mind at the mention of Chaucer, Shakspere, Donne, Hall, Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Burns, Cowper, Byron, Disraeli, Bulwer, Bailey, Browning, &c. While in regard to morals, the debate, if affirmed in the mind as a fact, would involve the belief that the power to chastise successful vice, to cause the glow of shame to suffuse the cheek and touch the heart, to stir the conscience to quiver and tremble, had been lost by our thinkers, or that the very sense of shame and ridicule had left the spirit. Has human life got so shut up in the strongholds of commonplace that nothing is possible to touch its dull uniformity and self-sameness, or stir the deep stagnation of the souls of men? We cannot believe that it is sɔ, and that the whole age is tainted with that Gallio-like impassivity which " cares for none of these things" which satiric wit brings under the lash.

Can it be possible, for instance, that a section of society is able to hear with blushless and unheeding stolidity of the query attributed to one of its drawing-room habitues,-"Friends!-has the word a plural ?-has it aught else than an associative signification? This is a sarcastic satire on the unfriendly friendships of the beau monde.

Is it true that "Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences, out of the suffering we feel, in the suffering we may have caused? Our moral sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when others smile. But when some rough person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to take part against us" (Adam Bede, vol. ii. p. 266). If it is not, and man is naturally

inclined to see with ire and hate his own wrongheadedness and to condemn himself, sorrying in dust and ashes; then it may be of little consequence that the age of satire, which gives rough names to disgraceful actions, has passed away. But if it is, and man is naturally inclined to the use of "all-screening-self-excuse," unless some strong hand remove the pleasing falsity from before us by some keen satiric touch, then it would be a matter of moral grief and social sorrow if we should be forced to conclude that the age of satire has passed away.

All that our opponents have been able to prove is that satire is more diffused in our age, that it occupies a wider field of activity, and yet does not get concentrated into single works in the same mode as formerly. They have been compelled to admit that in poems and plays, in dramas and histories, in newspapers and in magazines, in parliamentary speeches and in drawing-room conversation, in street slang and in concert-hall jargon, in club epigram and church epistolary productions, in novels and in sermons, in sculpture and painting, in comic journals and in blue books, satire is to be found; having acquired in immensity what it has lost in intensity, and having been compelled to lose its ribaldry by the prevailing might of a sensibly administered law of libel. Satire in our age requires to restrain itself within the true and the provable, and must not, as in the days of old, outstep the bounds of the correct and approvable. Men have become at once more keen in their sense of the ridiculous, and more clean in the use of ridicule. The witchery of wit is now more in demand than the switchery of it; the multitude of the impressions of it produced intensifies the impression it produces; and satire now depends more for its efficacy on its truthfulness than its cleverness. It may have lost some of its Byronry, but it has certainly not lost any of its irony.

The rough and ready, brusque, and rude satire of Fielding has been exchanged for the keen causticity and pure vivacity of Thackeray; Richardson's acute and minute tracery and trickery of incident has been replaced by the good humour and nice observation of Dickens; Smollett's dash and splash has been succeeded by Trollope's not less robust but more modest impersonations; and Cruickshank etches his sketches with a power and appositeness not less effective than the pencil of Hogarth. We may not be able to match the virulent rancour and absolute asperity of Churchill, but Walter Savage Landor could quicken the spleen and excite the ire of the most cool and collected when he gathered into the neat little pellets of verse the concentrated essence of a heart's hatred. We have now neither professed nor confessed satirists, but if satire has ever been written in encaustic, some of Robert Browning's bits are among them, while the rare glare of a heart-whole hate of sin issues from the floodgates of the molten irony of Thomas Carlyle. Wilson and Aytoun and Lockhart belong to this age, though they have personally passed away; so also did à Beckett and Douglas Jerrold, Sterling Coyne, and Mark Lemon; as do the Mayhews, Tom Hood