openness to conviction, provided the conviction be wrought by processes which they can understand. Nothing is sacred in America, and nothing elicits so much ridicule as an attempt to put anything or any person into the category of the unchangeable or unapproachable.

But, outside of politics, authority occupies a very different place. The scientific or literary man who addresses the people without any design of directly influencing their political action, or making his opinions felt in legislation, nowhere receives a more attentive hearing. The success of instructive lectures in this country, though greater some years ago than now, is still greater than anywhere else in the world. Scientific men, working in their own fields, are nowhere so widely known and respected by the masses. I do not need to speak of the wide diffusion in the United States of the reading habit. A large proportion of it-by far too large a portion of it perhaps is devoted to newspapers, which have their bad side, on which I will not dwell here. But they have one effect which makes any growth of ignorant conservatism, or any barbarous dislike of novelty, simply impossible. They fill every corner of the land with some knowledge of what is going on everywhere else. They tell the people something about every famous man in the world, and about the things which have made him famous. They familiarise them with every new idea or discovery. They, in short, prevent mental stagnation. By keeping people curious about the world outside their village, they keep them in a state of mental receptivity.

I might illustrate these things at considerable length, if I had not taken up so much space. But I shall, in closing, point out that one of Sir Henry Maine's examples of popular bigotry-the hostility of the United States to free trade-shows a singular ignorance of the exact nature of the tariff controversy in this country. The tariff is not a purely fiscal question here, and for that reason the difficulty of getting Americans to take a scientific view of it is greatly increased.

In the first place, the possession of a continent containing nearly every variety of soil, climate and product greatly diminishes the force with which the free-trade doctrine, that trade consists in the interchange of the results of special natural advantages, strikes the American mind. No other country can say that it finds within its own borders the means, as far as soil and climate are concerned, of producing nearly everything it buys from foreigners. In the next place, the prohibition of Customs duties between the States has given a larger area to free trade here than exists anywhere else, and has thus in a remarkable degree lessened the pinch of protection. Lastly, the enormous immigration-nearly a million a year-of consumers and producers, in the very prime of life, is constantly making new markets, which for many years postponed the glut which is now putting the high tariff in so much peril. The effect of this, in impeding the free-trade agitation, has been very like the effect of opening a small foreign State every year to American goods. In short, anybody who

imagines that the free-trade argument presents itself to the American voter in the neat compact shape in which Cobden and Bright were able to offer it to the British public in 1846, or in which Fawcett was able to offer it in 1880, is greatly mistaken. The American voter, though much deluded about the tariff, is not deluded to the same degree or in the same way as the British fair-trader. He has never had the notion that, as people say here, he could lift himself by his own boot-straps, or make money by swapping jack-knives. His vast reserve of waste lands has always been in his mind, something for a tariff to work on which no other nation possessed.

NEW YORK: January 1886.

E. L. GODKIN.

MR. GLADSTONE AND GENESIS.

I.

In controversy, as in courtship, the good old rule to be off with the old before one is on with the new greatly commends itself to my sense of expediency. And therefore it appears to me desirable that I should preface such observations as I may have to offer upon the cloud of arguments (the relevancy of which to the issue which I had ventured to raise is not always obvious) put forth by Mr. Gladstone in the January number of this Review, by an endeavour to make clear to such of our readers as have not had the advantage of a forensic education, the present net result of the discussion.

I am quite aware that, in undertaking this task, I run all the risks to which the man who presumes to deal judicially with his own cause is liable. But it is exactly because I do not shun that risk, but, rather, earnestly desire to be judged by him who cometh after me, provided that he has the knowledge and impartiality appropriate to a judge, that I adopt my present course.

In the article on 'The Dawn of Creation and Worship,' it will be remembered that Mr. Gladstone unreservedly commits himself to three propositions. The first is that, according to the writer of the Pentateuch the water population,' the air population,' and the land population' of the globe were created successively, in the order named. In the second place, Mr. Gladstone authoritatively asserts that this (as part of his fourfold order') has been 'so affirmed in our time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact.' In the third place, Mr. Gladstone argues that the fact of this coincidence of the Pentateuchal story with the results of modern investigation makes it impossible to avoid the conclusion, first, that either this writer was gifted with faculties passing all human experience, or else his knowledge was divine.' And, having settled to his own satisfaction that the first 'branch of the alternative is truly nominal and unreal,' Mr. Gladstone continues,' So stands the plea for a revelation of truth from God, a plea only to be met by questioning its possibility' (p. 697).

I am a simple-minded person, wholly devoid of subtlety of intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings attainable by

my poor plummet. Still there are a good many people who suffer under a like intellectual limitation; and, for once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of attaining that position of a representative of average opinion, which appears to be the modern ideal of a leader of men, when I make free confession that, after turning the matter over in my mind with all the aid derived from a careful consideration of Mr. Gladstone's reply, I cannot get away from my original conviction that, if Mr. Gladstone's second proposition can be shown to be not merely inaccurate, but directly contradictory of facts known to every one who is acquainted with the elements of natural science, the third proposition collapses of itself.

And it was this conviction which led me to enter upon the present discussion. I fancied that if my respected clients, the people of average opinion and capacity, could once be got distinctly to conceive that Mr. Gladstone's views as to the proper method of dealing with grave and difficult scientific and religious problems had permitted him to base a solemn 'plea for a revelation of truth from God' upon an error as to a matter of fact, from which the intelligent perusal of a manual of paleontology would have saved him, I need not trouble myself to occupy their time and attention with further comments upon his contribution to apologetic literature. It is for others to judge whether I have efficiently carried out my project or not. It certainly does not count for much that I should be unable to find any flaw in my own case, but I think it counts for a good deal that Mr. Gladstone appears to have been equally unable to do so. He does, indeed, make a great parade of authorities, and I have the greatest respect for those authorities whom Mr. Gladstone mentions. If he will get them to sign a joint memorial to the effect that our present palæontological evidence proves that birds appeared before the 'land population' of terrestrial reptiles, I shall think it my duty to reconsider my position-but not till then.

It will be observed that I have cautiously used the word 'appears' in referring to what seems to me to be absence of any real answer to my criticisms in Mr. Gladstone's reply. For I must honestly confess that, notwithstanding long and painful strivings after clear insight, I am still uncertain whether Mr. Gladstone's Defence' means that the great plea for a revelation from God' is to be left to perish in the dialectic desert, or whether it is to be withdrawn under the protection of such skirmishers as are available for covering retreat. In particular the remarkable disquisition which covers pages 11 to 14 of Mr. Gladstone's last contribution has greatly exercised my mind. Socrates is reported to have said of the works of Heraclitus that he who attempted to comprehend them should be a 'Delian swimmer,' but that, for his part, what he could understand was so good that he was disposed to believe in the excellence of that which he found unintelligible. In endeavouring to make myself

master of Mr. Gladstone's meaning in these pages, I have often been overcome by a feeling analogous to that of Socrates, but not quite the same. That which I do understand, in fact, has appeared to me so very much the reverse of good, that I have sometimes permitted myself to doubt the value of that which I do not understand.

In this part of Mr. Gladstone's reply, in fact, I find nothing of which the bearing upon my arguments is clear to me, except that which relates to the question whether reptiles, so far as they are represented by tortoises and the great majority of lizards and snakes, which are land animals, are creeping things in the sense of the Pentateuchal writer or not.

6

I have every respect for the singer of the Song of the Three Children (whoever he may have been); I desire to cast no shadow of doubt upon, but, on the contrary, marvel at, the exactness of Mr. Gladstone's information as to the considerations which affected the method of the Mosaic writer'; nor do I venture to doubt that the inconvenient intrusion of these contemptible reptiles- a family fallen from greatness' (p. 14), a miserable decayed aristocracy reduced to mere skulkers about the earth' (ibid.)—in consequence apparently of difficulties about the occupation of land arising out of the earth-hunger of their former serfs, the mammals-into an apologetic argument, which otherwise would run quite smoothly, is in every way to be deprecated. Still, the wretched creatures stand. there, importunately demanding notice; and, however different may be the practice in that contentious atmosphere with which Mr. Gladstone expresses and laments his familiarity, in the atmosphere of science it really is of no avail whatever to shut one's eyes to facts, or to try to bury them out of sight under a tumulus of rhetoric. That is my experience of the Elysian regions of Science,' wherein it is a pleasure to me to think that a man of Mr. Gladstone's intimate knowledge of English life during the last quarter of a century believes my philosophic existence to have been rounded off in unbroken equanimity.

However reprehensible, and indeed contemptible, terrestrial reptiles may be, the only question which appears to me to be relevant to my argument is whether these creatures are or are not comprised under the denomination of everything that creepeth upon the ground.'

6

Mr. Gladstone speaks of the author of the first chapter of Genesis as 'the Mosaic writer'; I suppose, therefore, that he will admit that it is equally proper to speak of the author of Leviticus as the Mosaic writer.' Whether such a phrase would be used by any one who had an adequate conception of the assured results of modern Biblical criticism is another matter; but, at any rate, it cannot be denied that Leviticus has as much claim to Mosaic authorship as Genesis. Therefore, if one wants to know the sense of a phrase used in Genesis, it will be well to see what Leviticus has to say on the matter. VOL. XIX.-No. 108. 0