Hevietc of Revtftoi, iO/UO'i. 



BOOKS OF THE MONTH. 



THE LIFE OF ARCHBISHOP TEMPLE. 



Ttie last time 1 saw the late Primate was on the 

 day of the late Queens funeral service at Windsor. 

 His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, with his 

 wife by his side, walked down the hill from the 

 Castle to the railway station, carrying in his hand 

 the bu" with his canonicals. He was eighty years 

 old, but he disdained a carriage. He was nearly 

 blind, but no one would have surmised it from his 

 bold and resolute gait. He was successor of Augus- 

 tine, Primate of England, and the first subject of the 

 King, but he trampe<J through the mud, portmanteau 

 in hand, just as if he had been an ordinary bagman. 

 That man leapix-ars in these Memoirs, strong, 

 simple, unostentatious, unconventional, resolute, a 

 bold figure of a man, with his woman by his side. 

 For Frederick Temple, whether schoolboy or Arch- 

 bishop, was always true to his womenfolk. No man 

 was more male than he. His face, his figure, his 

 mode of speech, his habit of thought all were mascu- 

 line exceedingly. But perhaps because there was a 

 little of the woman inside, he clung more tenaciously 

 ro the woman outside. • His devotion to his mother 

 was most touching. He continually wrote to his sis- 

 ters. And his wife was his complement. He was, 

 although his seven friends omit to mention the fact, 

 a stou^t friend and true to the cause of Woman's 

 Suffrage. 



A REGRBTrTABLE SUPPKESSIO VEBI. 



Their reticence on that point suggests the possi- 

 bility that thev may have also slurred over other 

 opinions of the Pri'mate with which they did not 

 agree. I am rather disposed to believe this because 

 of the scurvy wav in which the author of the London 

 Memoir, the fifth friend, " the Ven. H. E. J. Bevan, 

 M.A., Archdeacon of Middlesex, Prebendary of St. 

 Paul's, and Rector of Chelsea," passes over the cour- 

 ageous action of Dr. Temple at the time of " The 

 Maiden Tribute." Possibly the venerable archi- 

 diaconal fifth friend may have disapproved of the 

 action of the then Bishop of London. Possibly he 

 may have considered that he was doing a pious 

 action in concealing the part which Dr. Temple 

 played on that occasion. But a biographer has no 

 right to suppress facts because they jar upon his 

 delicate susceptibilities. No one who reads the 

 Memoirs of these .seven friends can form even the 

 remotest riotion of what was perhaps one of the most 

 conspicuous acts of moral courage in the whole of 

 Frederick Temple's life. How much courage it 

 needed is proved, if proof were necessary, that after 

 his death, in the volumes which are intended to be 



♦'■Memoirs of Arclibisliop Temple." by Seven Friends 

 2 vols., with photosravures and portraits. Macmillan and 

 Oo. 36s. net- 



the ixTmanciu ni-Jinonal ul his lile, his friends deem 

 it necessary to suppress, as far as possible, any refer- 

 ence to the part which he played in securing the 

 passage of a law raising the Age of Consent from 15 

 to 16— in other respects strengthening the protection 

 which the law gave to inexi)erienced, innocent girl- 



^°° " THE STORY OF THE .MAIUEN TRIBUTE." 



The facts of the case are brieHy as follows : —In 

 the spring of 1885, the fall of .Mr. Gladstone's Go- 

 vernment entailed, among other things, the abandon- 

 ment of a Bill which had been twice belore intro- 

 duced and dropped, raising the age at which girls 

 were legally competent to consent to their own rum. 

 The Bill was passed upon a report by a Commiiiee 

 of the House of Lords, which declared that the 

 .spread of juvenile prostitution was so appalling a 

 moral danger as to imperatively call for repressive 

 legislation. They recommended that the age of con- 

 sent should be raised from thirteen to sixteen, and 

 that other stringent remedies should be provided 

 against criminal vice. The subject, although ad- 

 mittedly important, was unsavoury. It did not con- 

 cern the daughters of legislators. It was deemed as 

 bad form to speak about it in the House of Com- 

 mons as to write about it in a Memoir, and so it came 

 to pass that session after session the Bill was intro- 

 duced and crowded out. In 1885, by way of render- 

 ing it more palatable to the indifferent legislature. 

 Sir W. Harcourt proposed only to raise the age to 

 fifteen. But even this timid and tentative measure 

 was abandoned when Mr. Gladstones Ministry fell. 

 Lord Salisbury, on assuming control, decided that no 

 legislation could be attempted, and a special private 

 co°nfidential appeal made to him on behalf of the 

 Age of Consent Bill onlv elicited the reply that no 

 exceptions could be made, and that the Bill for the 

 protection of girls must share the fate of all the other 

 Bills of the late Government. 



WHY IT WAS WRITfEN. 



The friends of the measure were in despair. The 

 thfii Chamberlain of the City of London came to 

 thf Pa/l Mall Gazette, which I was then editing, and 

 implored me, in the name of the womanhood of 

 Britain, to do what I could to compel the Govern- 

 ment to pass the Bill. Mrs. Josephine Butler joined 

 her entreaties to his, and most reluctantly I con- 

 sented to do what I could. The task was as diffi- 

 cult and as uncongenial as could possibly have been 

 laid upon the shoulders of a journalist who was then 

 at the verv zenith of success. I knew nothing about 

 the subject. A son of the manse who married at 

 twenty-three, to whom seduction had ever seemed a 

 worse' moral offence than murder, was a strange in- 



