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of murder and assassination. But happily there are others who have taken a different view of the situation, and there are signs of the existence of more than one party in the State who heartily condemn the recent proceedings at Peking.

When the Court party were bestowIng their patronage on the Boxers, and encouraging them in their murderous career, two men stood prominently forward in the cause of law and order. These were Chang Chihtung, Viceroy of the two Hu Provinces, and Liu K'unyi, Viceroy of the two Kiang Provinces. These two officials govern the two most important viceroyalties In the Empire. Their territories border on the Yangtze Kiang, and cover an area of over 300,000 square miles. Over these provinces their power is supreme, and their recent action has shown that it extends beyond the boundaries of their Government, and that they are able to hold their own in opposition even to the mandates of the Central Government. Though by no means pro-foreign in their views, they yet have statesmanship and honor enough to recognize that the State is bound by its engagements, and wisdom enough to see that the integrity of the Empire can only be maintained by a judicious advance along the lines of progress. Chang Chihtung was one of the first officials of high rank who advocated the introduction of railways into the Empire, and, when Viceroy of the two Kwang provinces, he went the length of memorializing the throne in support of the construction of a grand trunk line from Peking to Hankow. This scheme was considered by the Government of the day to be too chimerical for adoption, but, as Chang was persistent, he was transferred from Canton to Hankow, with orders to construct the railway in which he had so much faith. Since his arrival at his present post, he has, in addition

to beginning the railway in question, done all in his power to advance the well-being of the people within his jurisdiction and to gain enlightenment for them. He has engaged the services of foreigners to develop the resources of the country, and has opened mines and factories for the production of minerals and the manufacture of steel and iron. But he has done more than this. Having become acquainted with the society which has been established for the translation of valuable European works into Chinese, and having studied the literature so produced, he has thrown all his weight on the side of the movement. He has subscribed to its funds, promoted the circulation of its works, and generally given it all the support in his power.

But the most distinct expression of his views is to be found in an extremely interesting work which he has lately published dealing with the present needs of China. In the first instance he would strengthen the army, which "is to the States what the breath is to the body." If, he adds, China had a strong army, "the world would fear her, the world would cultivate her friendship, and she would then control the destinies of Europe and Asia," realizing the dreams of Mr. Pearson! This is the gist of the book. He ridicules the idea of international law in relation to China, when, at the bidding of the Treaty Powers, she is forbidden to regulate their own tariffs, and to try foreigners in her own courts. A strong army would, he considers, remedy these wrongs, and an enlightened people would refuse to be hoodwinked by those whose interest it is to withhold the knowledge of their degradation from them. Western learning comes next as a requirement to 8 strong army in his program, and he advocates the establishment of colleges and schools throughout the country at which, on a basis of Confucian learn

ing, a superstructure of scientific and historical knowledge should be raised. He would encourage newspapers and exhorts his readers not to be angry at the lack of these sources of information, "but rather vigorously to correct the deficiencies." He scoffs at the idea of religious intolerance, and holds that Christianity will go the way of Buddhism and Taoism if only it be left alone. "Just now," he writes-and it is a strong testimony-"Christianity is in the ascendant; Buddhism and Taoism are decadent; their influence cannot hold its own. Buddhism has long since passed its meridian; Taoism has only demons, not gods," and so, he implies, it will be with Christianity. Why, therefore, persecute its adherents? What harm can they do?

These are the sentiments of a man who probably has more influence in China at the present day than any other official. He is a profound scholar -he was the third graduate of his year throughout the whole Empire he is well and widely informed and possesses an indomitable will. His loyalty to the dynasty has never been questioned, and he is notoriously free from the almost universal vice of corruption. Liu K'unyi is another man of the same sort, and the following in the Provinces which obey the behests of these two men is as numerous as it is weighty. All the more enlightened and thoughtful part of the community are on their side, and it is fair to assume that any cause which they champion will in all probability be carried to a successful issue. When the present war is over, and when it will become the duty of the Treaty Powers to call into existence a settled form of government, it is to these men that they should look. They are, speaking generally, devoted patriots. They are in favor of intellectual and mechanical reforms, and though they are not lovers of foreigners, they are able to see and are willThe Speaker.

ing to recognize, the good that is in them. They have the confidence of the people, as is proved by the way in which the two great viceroys have, by a single word, preserved peace in the midst of anarchy. The nation would therefore, rally to them and to any cause which they represent, and readily accept a yoke which would be light and a burden which would be easy.

The second party which stands opposed to the Empress's clique is that of K'ang Yuwei and his fellow reformers. Of these men the best that can be said is that they are enthusiasts, and though enthusiasm may be a great power, it lacks the solidity which is required for a political basis. A glance at the reforms which, in the plenitude of their short-lived power, they proposed for the Empire is, to say the least, enough to convict them of a desire for hasty legislation. These were as follows:-"(1) To abolish the essay system of examination which has been in vogue for 500 years. (2) To establish a university for the study of English and of Western science in Peking. (3) To convert temples into schools for Western education. (4) To establish a translation board for the translation of books on Western learning into Chinese. (5) To establish a patent office. (6) To protect Christianity without further evasions. (7) To make the reform paper, Chinese Progress, the official organ of the Government. (8) To make young Manchus study foreign languages and travel abroad." It is further stated that the Emperor actually discussed with his advisers the desirability of adopting Christianity as the religion of State, and of discarding the pigtail with the national dress.

A Shanghai writer describes this list as a "cluster of brilliant edicts," but it may well be doubted whether even this enthusiastic admirer would like to trust the administration of the Empire to such precipitate politicians.

Robert K. Douglas.

MR. FIRTH'S CROMWELL.*

This is an excellent book, a fascinating book, a decisive book. It tells the life-history of our mighty Puritan hero with all the fulness and accuracy which so many years of original research have made the privilege of the writer. It tells the story with a lucid vigor which must hold the interest of every reader, and it will pass with historians as the final estimate of the character and achievements of the Protector. It is a book to study, a book to enjoy, a book to live.

The outside public, which had heard of Mr. Firth mainly through his lives of Cromwell and the other Civil War leaders and notables in the "Dictionary of National Biography," his Clarke papers and other original documents edited by him for the Camden Society and the Royal Historical Society, might have supposed that a new life of Oliver, based on his "Dictionary" article and his other studies of documents, would bear more traces of the learned archivist than of the popular historian. The book before us justifies the belief of all the friends and colleagues of Mr. Firth, that he was quite able to combine vivid narrative and living portraiture with inexhaustible research and thorough scholarship. The result is a monograph in five hundred pages which must satisfy the expectations of the student no less than the curiosity of the public.

The distinctive point about the book is this: Mr. Firth for the first time combines a full and detailed narrative of Cromwell's entire career with exhaustive research into all the original sources. One or two very learned students of the documents have edited these, and have supplied us with ad

Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England, by Charles Firth, M. A., Balliol Col

mirable elucidations and sketches of the man and his times. There are also perhaps a score of lives of Cromwell, of greater or less merit, bulk and research, which are not the result of a long first-hand study of all the available material, whether manuscript or printed. Carlyle labored on the original papers and memoirs, and gave us an invaluable commentary, but not a real biography. Mr. S. R. Gardiner's monumental history, with all the mountains of research that he has condensed into five volumes, has not yet reached the close of the Protectorate; and his two short studies of Oliver, however valuable as estimates, are neither of them a complete biography. Mr. J. L. Sandford, Mr. F. A. Inderwick, Q.C., and others have published special studies and useful documents, but they have not written anything like continuous narratives. On the other hand, the many writers in England and in America who have published substantive biographies of more or less industry and skill-some suggestive, some eloquent, some dull, and many of them worthless-have not professed to base their histories on such exhaustive study of manuscript and contemporary authorities as Carlyle and Gardiner have done. Mr. Firth, with a firsthand knowledge of the whole extant material certainly not less than that of either Carlyle or Gardiner, has for the first time written an ample history of the man and his comrades, every line of which bears the stamp of original research.

The question as to which the reader will first desire to be satisfied is certainly this: What is Mr. Firth's general estimate of the character and achieve

lege, Oxford; in Heroes of the Nations, edited by Evelyn Abbott, M. A. (G. P. Putnam's Sons.)

ment of the Protector on the whole? He has left us in no sort of doubt.

Mr. Firth's Oliver is by no means the divinely inspired hero who can do no wrong, and whose commands mere men are bound to obey without reasoning or delay, as he appears to Carlyle and to some Puritan zealots in Eng. land and America. Mr. Firth shows us the defects of the Protector's great qualities, his inevitable limitations, his slow enlargement of purpose, and his anxious hesitations and changes of mind. On the other hand, he proves Oliver to have been a consummate soldier, a profoundly conscientious spirit, and a born statesman above all statesmen of his age, if not in our English history. Mr. Firth does not, like Carlyle, exult in Cromwell's part in regicide, in the Irish massacres, in his Scottish conquest, in his trampling on constitutional law and personal liberties. He faces all these problems squarely, not with Machiavellian scorn, but with historical insight into the temper and moral standards of the time; and he shows us how to weigh the great Puritan in the light of his surroundings and his ideals. On the other hand, he does not, like Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Morley, over-emphasize Cromwell's indecisions, illegalities, failures and arbitrary violence.

In a well-reasoned epilogue Mr. Firth sums up his general estimate of Cromwell. Though not myself accepting it without sundry qualifications and "surrebutters," as lawyers say, I will endeavor to give the sense of this interesting chapter.

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part on a smaller stage; but he "bestrode the narrow world" of Puritan England "like a Colossus." As a soldier he not only won great victories, but created the instrument with which he won them. Out of the military chaos which existed when the war began he organized the force which made Puritanism victorious. [P. 467.]

Cromwell inspired his men not only with confidence in himself, but with his own high enthusiasm. He created an army, said Clarendon, "whose order and discipline, whose sobriety and manners, whose courage and suc. cess made it famous and terrible over the world." "What remains clear," says Mr. Firth (p. 473), "is that Cromwell could adapt his strategy with unfailing success to the conditions of the theatre in which he waged war and to the character of the antagonists he had to meet. His military genius was equal to every duty which fate imposed upon him.

Turning to the problem of his character, Mr. Firth shows us how uniformly down to 1845 Cromwell was spoken of as a hypocrite and a self-seeker. Carlyle, says Mr. Firth, "effectually dispelled the theory of Cromwell's hypocrisy. 'Not a man of falsehoods, but a man of truths,' was Carlyle's conclusion, and subsequent historians and biographers have accepted it as sound." Though Cromwell was not a "fanatic" in Hume's sense, "religious rather than political principles guided his action, and his political ideals were the direct outcome of his creed" (p. 476).

Cromwell's conception of his duty to his Maker and to his people was to do God's will-"to do that which is the will of God." The puzzle was to find out what, in things political, this will was, what it enjoined men to do. Some of Cromwell's comrades professed to have this revealed to them by their own personal convictions. "Cromwell

He

never did so. 'I cannot say,' he declared in a prayer-meeting where such revelations had been alleged, 'that I have received anything that I can speak as in the name of the Lord" " (p. 477). Cromwell believed in "dispensations" rather than "revelations." sought to extract the purpose of God from the visible trend of events; that is to say, he was a religious opportunist. His habit of waiting upon Providence till the providential design was clear was in effect a statesmanlike survey of all the conditions and surroundings. There never was so systematic an opportunist. This made him often so very slow to make up his mind and so willing to change it, even if he had to make a complete volte-face. Along with this went his fiery passion to execute his purpose when once he had finally resolved on action. This is the key to Cromwell's nature and career, his

inconsistencies, his cautiousness and his occasional furies.

This ingrained temper of watching the development of events explains the apparent want of sincere principle with which he was so unjustly charged, and explains also the mistakes into which his zeal in action sometimes led him. He never pretended to look very far ahead. "These issues and events, he said in 1656, have not been forecast, but were sudden providences in things" (p. 479). Cromwell himself owned that he sometimes made too much of "outward dispensations"-i.e. of the finger of God in passing events. He sometimes mistook the ulterior meaning of facts, but he did not misunderstand the present importance of facts. He judged facts as they were. "If the fact be so, he said, why should we sport with it?" It was this made Cromwell more practical and less visionary than other statesmen-more open-minded and better able to adapt his policy to changing circumstances and needs. He had no program, no

formulas, no doctrines. Forms of government were not good or bad per se; all depended on the conditions of the time, the temper of parties, and the ultimate success of the cause. He varied his means, but his ends remained the same. His end always was to strengthen the religious spirit of the English nation. That was the Cause.

Hence to Cromwell "religious freedom was more important than political freedom" (p. 483). He always held that spiritual interest must take the lead over civil liberty. And he clung to this, notwithstanding that the majority of the English people did not believe this view, and he knew that he was leader of only a godly minority for the time being. He was no democrat-but neither was he a tyrant.

Cromwell wished to govern constitutionally. No theory of the divine right of an able man to govern the incapable multitude blinded his eyes to the fact that self-government was the inheritance and right of the English people. He accepted the first principle of democracy, the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, or, as he phrased it, "that the foundation of supremacy is in the people and to be by them set down in their representatives." More than once he declared that the good of the governed was the supreme end of all governments, and he claimed that his own government acted "for the good of the people, and for their interest, and without respect had to any other interest." But government for the people did not necessarily mean government by the people. "That's the question," said Cromwell, "what's for their good, not what pleases them," and the history of the Protectorate was a commentary on this text. (Firth, p. 484.)

This, however, is not, as Mr. Firth seems to think, "the first principle of democracy." It is the cardinal idea of Whiggism, or rather of the whole

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