inferential one, and, however correct it may be found to be, it is not infallible. We have already referred to the doubtful chronology of geological periods. Sir Roderick Murchison, and prudent writers, speak but of long periods of time. It is the reckless theorist only who, to serve a special purpose, transcends the powers of arithmetical expression, by reckoning geological intervals in myriads and myriads of years. It is the relative and not the absolute age of rocks that geologists have to determine; and it is owing to their having transgressed this prudent limit, and the improper use that has been made of their purely fanciful numbers, that it has become necessary to challenge their chronology. So deeply has the theorist plunged into the abyss of primæval time, that, "frightened at the sound himself has made," he stands arrested upon his primary rocks, afraid to look beneath them in space, and beyond them in time. Had he adopted a different unit, the grand truths of his science would have met with a warmer and a readier reception; and, free from the incubus of religious prepossessions, he might have looked deeper into the Earth, and anticipated cycles of life buried beneath his own. We have already, in a former article,* referred to this interesting topic, and have mentioned the probability that the earth was prepared for the residence of man in a comparatively short period. Under the influence of electric agency, and chemical and physical forces of higher activity, even secondary causes may have operated much more quickly than at present; but as creative power must have, at some period, acted by its mighty fiat, and actually did, even in the opinion of geologists themselves, by the direct creation of new life, after all pre-existing life had been destroyed, why should the same power be limited in its exercise, and myriads and myriads of years demanded for the preparation of a home for man? If the visible cycle of life, therefore, extending from the Silurian age to the present, has been comparatively short, may we not look for other cycles more remote than it, like the binary systems in the heavens far beyond our own, and to others remoter still, like the nebular worlds, which the science only of the present day has been able to resolve? See this Journal, vol. xxi, pp. 23, 24. Past and Present Political Morality of British Statesmen. 545 ART. IX.-1. History of England, from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles. By LORD MAHON. 7 vols. London, 1854. 2. Memoirs of George Bubb Doddington. London, 1785. 3. Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George III., from original Family Documents. By the DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM. 2 vols. London, 1853. 4. History of Party. By GEORGE WINGROVE COOK. London, 1836. 5. The Extraordinary Black Book. 6. The Morality of Public Men. Two Letters to Lord Derby. Third edition. London, 1853. 7. The Right Honourable Benjamin Disraeli; a Biography. London, 1853. 8. The British Cabinet in 1853. London & Edinburgh, 1853. PROBABLY few great philosophic statesmen,-few men, that is, who had acted intimately in public affairs as well as contemplated them from the closet,-ever quitted the stage without a feeling of profound discouragement. Whether successful or unsuccessful, as the world would deem them, a sense of sadness and disappointment seems to prevail over every other sentiment. They have attained so few of their objects,-they have fallen so far short of their ideal,-they have seen so much more than ordinary men of the dangers and difficulties of nations, and of the vices and meanness of public men. The work to be accomplished is so great, and the workmen are so weak and so unworthy, the roads are so many, and the finger-posts so few. Not many Englishmen governed so long or so successfully as Sir Robert Peel, or set in such a halo of blessings and esteem; yet, shortly before his death, he confessed that what he had seen and heard in public life had left upon his mind a prevalent impression of gloom and grief. Who ever succeeded so splendidly as Washington? Who ever enjoyed to such a degree, and to the end, the confidence and gratitude of his country? "Yet," says Guizot, "towards the close of his life, in the sweet and dignified retirement of Mount Vernon, something of lassitude and sadness hung about the mind of a man so serenely great, a feeling, indeed, most natural at the termination of a long life spent in men's concerns. Power is a heavy burden, and mankind a hard taskmaster to him who struggles virtuously against their passions and their errors. Success itself cannot wipe out the sorrowful impressions which originate in the conflict, and the weariness contracted on the scene of action is prolonged even in the bosom of repose.' "Mirabeau, Barnave, Napoléon, La Fayette, morts dans leur lit ou sur l'échafaud, dans la patrie, ou dans l'exil, à des jours très éloignés et très divers, sont tous morts avec un même sentiment, un sentiment profondément triste. Ils ont vu leurs espérances déçues, leurs œuvres détruites. Ils ont douté du succès de leur cause et de l'avenir. Le roi Louis Philippe a régné plus de dix-sept ans. J'ai eu l'honneur d'être plus de onze ans son ministre. Si demain Dieu nous appelait à lui, quitterions-nous cette terre bien tranquilles sur le sort de notre patrie ?"† With these passages fresh in our recollection, we recently ventured, at the close of some long conversations with a retired philosopher and statesman, who, for many years, was the first minister of a great kingdom, to ask him the following question: "You have lived through some of the most interesting and troubled times of human history; you have studied men contemplatively, as well as acted with them and governed them; you have long had the fate of your own country, and a portion of that of Europe, in your hands;-what feeling is strongest in your mind as you look back and look forward-hope or despondency for your country and the world-contempt and disgust, or affection and esteem, for your fellow-men?" His reply was, as nearly as we can recall it, this :-" I do not feel that my experience of men has either disposed me to think worse of them, or indisposed me to serve them; nor, in spite of failures which Í lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, and of the present gloomy aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. On the contrary, I hope; I see glimpses of daylight; I see elements of rescue; I see even now faint dawnings of a better day. The truth I take to be this:-The march of Providence is so slow, and our desires are so impatient, the work of progress is so immense, and our means of aiding it so feeble,-the life of humanity is so long, and the life of individual men so brief, that what we see is often only the ebb of the advancing wave; and thus discouragement is our inevitable lot. It is only History that teaches us to hope. No! I feel no disgust, no despair; my paramount feeling is simply a sense of personal fatigue. I am weary of the journey and the strife. Ego, Hannibal, peto pacem." Yet the statesman who spoke thus had witnessed stranger catastrophes, had encountered deeper discomfitures, had steered through mirier ways, had witnessed more cruelty, more cowardice, more tergiversation, more corruption,-had seen more splendid * Sketch of the Life of Washington, by M. Guizot. † De la Democratie en France, 1849. English Statesmen of the Restoration. 547 glory tarnished, more gorgeous hopes frustrated, more brilliant promises belied, than any previous period of modern history could have displayed; but he was profoundly acquainted with the past annals of other countries as well as of his own; and one of the most unquestionable and encouraging facts which these annals bring out into day, is full of promise and of consolation, viz., the gradual improvement in the character of public men, the higher standard of morality they set before themselves, and the far greater purity which the world exacts from them now than formerly. This is seldom perceivable from year to year-not always even from generation to generation-not always and at all times in every country-but no one who compares age with age will hesitate to record it as one of the great truths of history. And in no country does it stand out in such clear relief as in our own; and all will acknowledge, that no surer indication and no more powerful instrument of national improvement can exist, than the moral progress of the men to whom the national destinies are committed. We need not go so far back for comparison as the dark times of the Restoration, when a long period of storms and revolutions, of doing and undoing, of frantic violence in one extreme followed by frantic reaction in another, had prepared men to commit tergiversations with scanty scruple, and to witness them with scanty condemnation; when the sword and the scaffold, long reckoned among the ordinary weapons of party warfare, had broken down the integrity of the timid, and worn away the susceptibilities of those whom they had not dismayed; when skill in detecting and flexibility in availing themselves of the signs of the times, were the most essential qualities to every public man who wished either to maintain his position or his head; when scarcely any statesman could afford to keep a conscience, and few indeed could boast of a conviction or a faith; when the English king was a pensioner of the French monarch, and when Parliamentary patriots, of high character and what was deemed stubborn virtue in those days, not to be behind-hand with the royal example, accepted from the same quarter pecuniary gratifications, which, if not bribes for abandoning their duty, were at least ignominious wages for performing it; when even Algernon Sydney, it is sad to know, did not consider himself dishonoured by intriguing with a foreign enemy against the plots of a native traitor, and would have accepted the aid of a French despot to realize his dream of an English republic; and when, of all the friends of liberty, Lord William Russell and Lord Hollis alone seem clear from the charge of having tampered with these unclean transactions. Nor will we pause even over the statesmen of the Revolution, who were all deeply tainted with the same immorality, and might trace it in a great measure to the same fatal education. They assisted James II. through the main portion of his illegal oppressions; they deserted him when the Prince of Orange, whom some of them even had invited over, was safely landed with a formidable force; they professed the most unbounded loyalty up to the very moment of desertion; they were as unfaithful to their second as to their first allegiance, and intrigued with the expelled monarch while holding the seals of office under his successor. The Earl of Sunderland was about the worst of the set. This man, ambitious, covetous, cowardly, without principle and without conviction, but amply gifted with that sagacity and cunning which are qualities more valuable than genius in the times in which he lived, was Secretary of State under James II., and his most trusted counsellor. To obtain power, he betrayed the liberties of his country to his sovereign, -to obtain money, he betrayed his sovereign to France,-to obtain immunity in the hour of danger, he betrayed the master whom he had encouraged in iniquity to the invader who came to avenge it. For a long time he supported James in all his worst outrages on the constitution. He constantly communicated to the French ambassador any schemes of the Court which might be unwelcome or hostile to France, and stipulated to receive from Louis a pension of 25,000 crowns, on condition of preventing, if possible, the re-assembling of the English Parliament. When James began to push his prerogative and his zeal for the Church of Rome to lengths which Sunderland deemed dangerous, that minister ventured timidly to warn and disapprove, but finding that his credit was weakened by his moderating counsels, he made a desperate and successful effort to recover the position which was slipping from under him, by a public abjuration of Protestantism. He amassed vast sums of money by fines and forfeitures, as well as by the sale of places, titles, and pardons. When he was at the height of power, and enjoying the most unbounded confidence of the King, he discovered at once the plan for placing the Prince of Orange on the throne, and the great probability of its success. He thought only of his own safety, of the manifold sins by which he had been heaping up wrath against the day of wrath,-of the tremendous retribution which awaited him in the event of a Protestant revolutionand he resolved, with little hesitation and with no scruple, to sell his present to his future master, and to do it in the most infamous and efficacious way. He opened negotiations with William through his wife and his wife's lover, and he remained with James and used the influence he had obtained over him by obsequiousness and apostacy, to lull him into security and to |