by a speech of the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury, delivered about this time at Edinburgh. Lord Shaftesbury was actually speaking on behalf of one of Mrs. Chisholm's emigration projects when he declared that Sydney was not a fit place to which members of our families could be safely sent." Coming from such a man, so highly respected and so thoroughly well-meaning, this statement, one would think, was in itself enough to defeat even Mrs. Chisholm's efforts to secure a supply of respectable and untainted emigrants, chiefly from among the poorer classes. Under the circumstances, what could have been more opportune than the article in which the Times took Lord Shaftesbury to task: We believe that the morality of the lower classes at Sydney is rather superior to that of most seaport towns-Portsmouth, for instance-and, if there are causes that tend peculiarly to degrade it, there are others, and more powerful ones, which operate in a contrary direction.'

In another article he wrote: Of all the movements of this country in peaceful and industrial progress, there is none of which she has greater reason to be proud than the thriving and industrious communities on the shores of the unpeopled and remote continent of Australia.'

There would be nothing remarkable in a public writer making such assertions in the year 1892; but it was distinctly so at a time when Earl Grey had decided that Sydney should remain a penal settlement, and when, as a consequence, respectable people were hesitating whether even the existence of golden nuggets was a sufficient counter-inducement for them to entrust their lives and fortunes in such a community. Further, that such writings should have appeared in so authoritative a journal as the Times was an incalculable benefit to the Australian colonies at a most critical period of their existence; and it may be claimed, without fear of contradiction, that Lord Sherbrooke by this means largely influenced the stream of better-class emigration.

VOL. II.

D

Of the two great questions which were then agitating the public mind of England-the action of Pope Pius IX. in establishing the Roman Catholic hierarchy in this country, and the action of Louis Napoleon in having himself proclaimed Emperor of the French by means of the coup d'état-Lord Sherbrooke held, and expressed, very decided opinions. In no sense an irreligious man, he was always extremely anti-clerical. He regarded the question of Papal encroachment not, to use his own phrase, as a mere squabble about territorial titles,' but as a wanton interference on the part of a foreign potentate in the domestic affairs of this country. It was here that he so widely differed from Lord John Russell and the great bulk of his Protestant supporters throughout the land. They looked to the shadow, he to the substance. To Lord Sherbrooke it seemed to matter little what titles were assumed by the higher priesthood of the Latin Church in England; but he thought it of supreme importance that neither they nor the Pope should be permitted to interfere with such acts of domestic legislation as the late Lord Derby's national system of education in Ireland.

Those who have followed the narrative of Lord Sherbrooke's public career in New South Wales, and particularly his policy with regard to education in that community of 'mixed creeds and races,' will not fail to realise the true cause of his indignation against the Papal authorities who were so sedulously aiming to subvert Lord Derby's system. He thought then, as he did to his dying day, that the only hope for the future stability and civilisation of such a country as Ireland was the system of national unsectarian schools and colleges. He saw in the constitution of the Queen's Colleges, as well as in the national primary schools, a master-stroke of Imperial policy. The attempt of the advisers of Pius IX. to undo this good work seemed to him pernicious in the extreme. He therefore denounced their action in no measured words. Pope's policy, or rather in the way it had been promulgated,

He saw in the

an insidious attack on the very framework of our ancient laws and free institutions.

In a subsequent attack, directed mainly against Cardinal Cullen, he delivered the following eulogium on Lord Derby's Irish educational legislation, which will sound rather strange in ears familiar with the revelations of the Parnell Commission : If the later years of O'Connell were scant of that success which waited on his unrivalled powers of popular delusion, if the maniac ravings of Smith O'Brien and his companions found no response from the Irish nation, we are convinced that we mainly owe these results to the schools founded on Lord Stanley's system.' Before rejecting this theory, on the ground that down to our own day there has been no lack of followers of men like O'Connell and Smith O'Brien in Ireland, it is necessary to ascertain to what extent the Pope's emissaries from 1851 have succeeded in destroying or perverting the educational policy of the Earl of Derby and of the two Irish archbishops, who, though of different communions, so loyally and ably co-operated with him.

With regard to Napoleon III. and the coup d'état, the present generation can have no notion of the great stir produced in England by the public movements in France in 1851. But early in 1852 Lowe contributed to the Times an article dealing with the oft-threatened invasion of England, in which he put the case of her comparatively defenceless state in a remarkably vivid light; the analogy between the condition of England at the accession of Harold, and her condition during the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria, is very striking. The article also shows that the writer, though an economist and a free-trader, was in no sense a follower of Cobden and Bright on the subject of our international policy and relations :—

At the accession of Harold to the Crown the English had enjoyed a peace of nearly fifty years, purchased by the final expulsion and destruction of their Danish invaders; they were becoming more and more enamoured of the arts of peace, and had made consider

able progress in such civilisation as the times allowed. Agriculture was pursued with great assiduity and success, and the national mind began to appreciate the benefits to be derived from foreign trade and commerce. The military spirit which had animated the descendants of Hengist and Horsa was gradually dying out, and the nation, united under one head, looked back with disgust and contempt on the obscure and bloody civil wars of the Heptarchy. The fortifications of the towns were allowed to fall into decay, and the equipment and discipline of the troops were almost entirely neglected. Dwelling in peace and security under their free elective institutions, the English looked with gradually increasing disfavour on the profession of arms. While the male chivalry of Normandy were carrying their banners even to the islands and peninsulas of the Mediterranean, the Saxon was content to fight on foot, and to protect himself from the blows of a steel-clad man-at-arms by the imperfect defence of a surcoat of hide. His offensive arms were as imperfect as his defensive: he relied almost exclusively on the ponderous battle-axe, which, requiring both hands to wield it, necessarily left the person of the soldier exposed to the lance or the arrow.

Yet with all this the nation was possessed by a spirit of the most overweening confidence and self-satisfied security. Proud of the exploits of their ancestors, believing in the perpetuity of the long peace they had enjoyed, satisfied with their republican institutions, and mistaking internal freedom for external strength, they looked with inert tranquillity on the gradual increase and organisation of the power which was to overwhelm them; and when at last the blow fell, the nation at once confident in its valour and impatient of military fatigue and privations, flung away its hopes in a single unequal conflict, rather than endure the slow and desultory tactics which must have worn out the strength of the invader. The English met the enemy with one-t e-third of their number, believing as devoutly as the pothouse heroes of our own time that one Englishman to three Frenchmen was a perfectly equal match, and that the total absence of cavalry and artillery on their side would be easily compensated by superior personal bravery. The nation was, at any rate, perfectly content to abide the trial, thinking that, even if this army miscarried, it would be easy to overwhelm the invaders by a general rising. . . . We also have been in the enjoyment of a long and profound peace, and have learnt to consider a war as something almost impossible. We also have entirely outlived the military spirit of the earlier years of this century, and in the pursuit of wealth and in the development of civilisation have half-learnt to believe in the preachers of the Millennium. . . . We mistake the internal balance and equipoise of our polity for the power of resisting external force.

... We talk of our old victories by land and by sea, and forget that they were gained by men whose arms and training placed them on an equality with their antagonists. We rely on our insular position, which protected us so efficiently against Napoleon the Great, and insist upon the impregnable trench that surrounds us, although science has effectually bridged it over for Napoleon the Little. We forget the existence of the new power of steam, and the means of organising combined and unlooked-for movements afforded by the electric telegraph. We believe that if the storm with which France is now pregnant does burst, it will be upon the great military Powers of the Continent who sympathise with the proceedings of her Government, who possess enormous military resources, and who offer but a poor prize to the victor, instead of upon us, whose free institutions are a daily reproach to the tyranny and slavery which disgrace France, whose military resources are such as we have described, and whose rich shores have not seen the footprint of a foreign army since the time of King John.

Such good common-sense prose as this, aided subsequently by the stirring verses of the late Laureate, led to the establishment of our Volunteer army; but if Lord Wolseley were to peruse this extract from Lord Sherbrooke's old Times leader, he would in all probability declare that it is not wholly inapplicable to the state of this country at the present time.

In a subsequent article Lowe directly attacked Cobden by name for the attitude which he had assumed with regard to the question of our national defences. In the year 1848 Cobden delivered a speech at Manchester in which he went so far as to take the Duke of Wellington severely to task for proposing to put our armaments into a state of thorough efficiency for all defensive purposes. It is needless to say that the Duke in this controversy stands out as the great patriot-statesman, single-minded, and quite above all considerations of party; while Cobden, well-meaning and excellent as he always was, displayed the most complete ignorance of our past history and of our actual position, surrounded by the huge armaments of jealous and contending States.

It was, I think, the poet Clough who said that everything