meeting in London during the week of the Church Congress, and that the subject for discussion will be the bearing of the Archbishop's Opinion' on the life and work of the Church. I congratulate the Union on the boldness of its policy. It is worthy of Lord Halifax, who has not inherited the high temper and strong will of the historic Greys for nothing. At that meeting some voices will surely be heard for Disestablishment; but I imagine that the more general demand will be for the restoration to the Church of her self-governing powers. What form are those powers to take?

Three centuries ago our forefathers threw off the yoke of the historic Papacy at Rome. Assuredly we are not going to submit to a brand-new papacy at Lambeth. The Bishops, as every Catholic gladly acknowledges, have their Divinely-given prerogative of perpetuating the sacred ministry and guarding the deposit of Faith; but the constitution of the Catholic Church is not modelled on the type of an Oriental despotism, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.' Only a priest can break the Bread of Life and bind up the broken-hearted in the name of Christ; but it is not in archbishops, nor bishops, nor priests, isolated from the general body of the baptized, that the life of the Church resides. In one of the neglected masterpieces of English divinity, Bishop Moberly taught us that the clergy, in their threefold order, are the representatives and ministers of the Church at large, which is the entire Spirit-bearing body' of baptized persons; and to no less an authority than that entire body can I, as a Catholic Churchman, look for the regulation of our English. worship.

It has [wrote Bishop Moberly] been generally held by theologians (excepting always those of the high Roman school) that the retrospective acceptance of the whole Church, including lay-people as well as clergy, is necessary in order to give conciliar decrees their full œcumenical character and weight. This view-the view of Gerson and his friends at Constance, and of the Gallican Church; of Archbishop Laud, and the Anglican High Church; of 'Janus' in modern Catholic Germany-involves the truth for which I desire to contend; and, borrowing the sentiment of my dear friend the late Rev. John Keble, I venture to say that, if the assent of the lay-people is thus necessary, even in the highest of all instances, the settlement of the Faith, it is matter, not of principle but of convenience and wisdom, to settle at what point, and in what proportion, this Christian counsel shall be listened to and acknowledged. . . . The full co-operation of the laity of the Church-not as a matter of benevolence or bounty, but as a matter of debt and duty-is not more absolutely necessary in practice than it is indispensable in theory to the full power and efficacy of the Church.2

Those wise words were written in full view of the difficulties of the Irish Church, then just disestablished, and suddenly deprived,* as the Bishop said, ' of the orderly but somewhat enervating direction of State control.' The principle which they express may, I think, 2 Preface to the Second Edition (1869) of Bishop Moberly's Bampton Lectures.

excellently serve for the guidance of the Church of England, when at length she makes up her mind to free herself from Acts of Uniformity and Church Discipline Bills and Archiepiscopal misrulings and State-made bishops; from the interference of outsiders, and the worship of the Jumping Cat, and the appeal to the Man in the Street; and all the degrading incidents in which Establishment has involved her.

GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL.

THE

NINETEENTH
CENTURY

No. CCLXXIII-NOVEMBER 1899

AFTER THE PRESENT WAR

It is of course far too early as yet to say that the war in South Africa is at an end. But it is not too early to say that the end, as no sane Englishman ever doubted, is a foregone conclusion, nor to direct public attention to the question what we are going to do after the war is over. The experience of the past, the experience for which our country will have paid so heavy a price not only in wealth but in precious lives, may serve at any rate to show us what we ought not to do. Before entering therefore on the consideration of the new order of things which must necessarily be established in South Africa, it is well to point out the lessons taught us by the past.

Now the first and foremost of these lessons is the one which Lord Rosebery had the courage to impress upon his fellow-countrymen at the outset of the war, namely that we must have no more of the policy which is known in South Africa as that of Majuba Hill. In tendering this advice the successor of Mr. Gladstone in the Premiership showed a knowledge of the Boer-Uitlander controversy which most of his late colleagues have hitherto been unable to realise, or at any rate to admit. The war of 1899 is as directly due to the capitulation of 1881 after our defeat at Majuba as the harvest is the result of the sowing. I am stating a matter of fact, not of opinion, when I assert that the unrest, the racial animosities, the political complications which have at last forced England to take up arms for the protection of her own people and the safeguarding of her Imperial interests, could never have assumed their recent proportions but for

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the folly of our virtual surrender to the Boers after the signal defeats we had sustained throughout the disastrous campaign of 1881. To-day the millions spent, the misery caused, the brave lives thrown away, the homes made desolate, the industries ruined throughout South Africa, are due to the policy of which the conclusion of the Treaty of Pretoria on the morrow of Majuba was the crowning shame. I am willing to grant that Mr. Gladstone seriously believed that for England to make peace without an attempt to re-establish her impaired prestige was an act so magnanimous as to be certain to secure the admiration of mankind, to bring about a union of hearts between Boers and British, and to inaugurate an era of good will and peace, not only in the annals of South Africa but of the British Empire.. The conception, I fully admit, was grand, but a failure is a failure, no matter what may have been the nobility of the motives by which its authors were inspired.

The net upshot of the act of renunciation which England was induced to commit under Mr. Gladstone's influence, was to impress upon the Boers the firm conviction that they could defeat the English without serious risk or loss; to convince the rulers of the South African Republic that England could never be induced to engage in another war with the Transvaal; to encourage the Afrikander party throughout South Africa in the idea that the Dutch were in a position to recover their lost supremacy, and to lead the world at large to believe that the British Empire was a Power which might be aggravated and flouted without fear of reprisals.

No nation, however powerful, can afford to be despised by any antagonist, however insignificant. What we called magnanimity was regarded by the Boers, to speak the honest truth, as pusillanimity; and the result of this appreciation of our conduct after Majuba is to be seen to-day in the war we have been obliged to wage in order to show the Boers that it is we, and not they, who are, and intend to remain, masters in South Africa. I feel therefore that a debt of gratitude is due to Lord Rosebery for letting it be known that in his opinion there must be no repetition of the Majuba Hill policy. This opinion is one which cannot fail to commend itself to the good sense of his fellow-countrymen. England, rich, powerful, and courageous as she may be, cannot afford the expense, moral as well as material, of a succession of Boer campaigns. Having, against our wishes and our will, been driven to take up arms for the vindication of our supremacy, we cannot with common prudence lay down our arms till we have established our supremacy beyond the possibility of further attempts to impugn it on the part of the Dutch colonists. We have got to make it clear not only to the Boers and the Afrikander Bond, but to the world at large, that henceforth South Africa is to be part and parcel of the British Empire, a self-governing

province administered on terms of absolute equality for all white inhabitants of the country, but administered under the absolute and undisputed supremacy of Great Britain. If this is to be done, the superiority of our force must first be made manifest, and any such manifestation is impossible unless we discard once and for all the ideas which lay at the bottom of our cession of the Transvaal after our defeat by the Boers at Majuba Hill. This is the first lesson the experience of the past teaches us with regard to the future.

Then again any impartial study of the last two decades will convince the student whose mind is open to evidence that the instincts of the British public are those of an imperial race. Accidental circumstances, passing waves of popular thought, strong individual influences may for a time divert England from her normal attitude, but in the long run the exuberant energy, the love of adventure, the passion for rule, the curious combination of greed, ambition, philanthropy, and religion which differentiates the AngloSaxon from all other nations, must inevitably drive the country back to the courses which have made these small islands the centre of a world-wide empire.

At heart, whatever may be their differences in party politics and home issues, the vast majority of Englishmen are Imperialists, or, to express the same idea in other words, hold to the conclusion that it is our manifest destiny to develop, to extend, to aggrandise as well as to maintain, the empire which our forefathers founded in virtue not so much of any deliberate purpose as of the unconscious instinct of mastery.

From a variety of sources which it would take too long to discuss at any length, the British public during a considerable period of the present reign-a period which may perhaps be best defined as the International Exhibition era-was very much under the influence of the Manchester school of politicians, whose policy was based upon the theory that with the advent of Free Trade we were on the eve of a sort of industrial millennium. The policy in question was out of harmony with the Imperial idea. The millennial creed, however, had too little basis of hard fact to be of long duration in such a country as Great Britain. Nothing venture nothing have' is the true motto for an empire and Englishmen soon began to realise that under the influence of what in no offensive language may well be described as politics of sentiment, the relations between the Mother Country and her colonies were becoming weaker instead of stronger.

The failure of our Free Trade system to enlist the support of foreign countries; the rapid growth of protective systems abroad, whose avowed aim and object was the exclusion of British trade from foreign markets; the fiasco of the policy of conciliation by which Ireland was to be united in heart to England by our governing the sister country in accordance with Irish ideas; the collapse of every attempt to win the