540 



♦ KNOWLEDGE 



[September 1, 1886. 



tie their religion, anil the religion of thofe unwise enough 

 to trust in them, to rotten and illrooted stumps. If, as 

 false ideas give way, tr\ie thoughts are for a time swept away 

 with them, the fi\ult is not with those who displace the false 

 ideas, but with those who hare too long persisted in teaching 

 men to put their trust in those mistaken notions. 



* * * 



So far from admitting that there is danger in modern 

 astronomy, I consider that the science has emphatically reli- 

 gious and moral value. Apart from all other considerations, 

 astronomy, as the science which above all others teaches the 

 prevalence and universality of law, must teach also most 

 strongly what I take to be the most valuable of all lessons 

 for men, " the futility of lawlessness, no matter under what 

 high or seemingly sacred name disguised." 



Though I am a believer to the fullest extent in free 

 trade, regarding protection as a device only fit for nations 

 which have barely emerged from barbarism, I regard the 

 idea underlying fair trade as a sound one. Or, rather, I so 

 think because I am a free trader. 



Faie trade would be a sure way, in certain cases at any 

 rate, of destroying protection. For example, if England 

 put a five per cent, duty on American grain, the grain 

 States of the West would not long put up with the injustice 

 of a protective .system, >inder which they are already groan- 

 ing. Free traders who think more of the name than of the 

 thing m.ay be content to wait till Indian grain has killed 

 the American grain trade with Great Britain, and doubtless 

 the injury to America so brought about will be more deadly 

 that way — will, in fact, be irreparable — whereas a retali- 

 atory duty would be but temporary, and need even be little 

 more than a threat. But irreparable mischief to one 

 country means always mischief to other countries too. 

 England, for example, sulfers indirectly almost as much as 

 America from the destructive protective system adopted 

 by short sighted American "politicians." 



* * * 



A.MERICANS are confident that England is too thoroughly 

 committed to free trade to attempt retaliation. But if 

 England recalled how she got free ti-ade she would see the 

 probable efficiency of fair trade measures. For England 

 was herself driven from a protective system scarcely less 

 absurd than the American by the fair trade threats of other 

 countries, among which, by the way, America was the 

 loudest. 



* * * 



CoNsiDEEiXG the sad case of the royal family of Bavaria, 

 we in England may ask (with some right to put the ques- 

 tion) whether the royal family of England has escaped the 

 manifold afflictions, bodily, moral, and mental, resulting 

 from the intermarriage of cousins. The English royal family 

 has a tolerably wide range of German cousins, or cousins 

 german, to choose from — though, being itself of full German 

 blood, this indicates small room for escape from the evil 

 etlects of inter-breeding. Its German record has not been 

 satisfiictnry. ( leorge I. w.as a pig-headed bully, and George II. 

 only differed in being lather more .so. George III. was 

 never really sane, and often very insane. George IV. was as 

 mean a profligate as the annals of even royal scamps record. 

 Of William IV. the Greville Memoirs .show us enough to 

 leave little doubt in any reasonable mind that he was some- 

 thing between George 111. and George IV., or, as Sheridan 

 said (when George asked him whether he — Sheridan — was 

 more knave than fool, Sherry walking at the time between 



George and a companion of no very brilliant mind), he was 

 something between knave and fool. Of course, while William 

 lived, none of those who really knew his nature would venture 

 to say what they thought of him. 



* * * 



It is amusing, by the way, to find from the later Greville 

 Memoirs that Albert (the Good) used to get angry when any- 

 thing was said about the royal family. He wanted to insti- 

 tute a sort of inqui-sition for the punishment of those who 

 thus offended. Very likely there was enough to anger him. 

 Yet the English people pay a high enough price for the dis- 

 chaige of certain easy duties by their kings and queens ; and 

 every Englishman has therefore the right to express an 

 opinion as to the likelihood that these duties will be respect- 

 ably discharged. 



The disclosures about the social riots in Chicago reveal 

 depths of brutality such as only the dynamite outrages had 

 before suggested. Many receive with intense annoyance 

 and disgust the doctrine that men are akin to the higher 

 apes, and therefore to all orders of monkeys, and through 

 them to lower races of animals. If you ask why they thu-> 

 ol)ject to the alleged relationship, they speak of the great 

 ditference between man and all other animals, in that man 

 possesses reason, can distinguish between right and wrong, 

 has been made in fact but "a little lower than the angels." 

 Kinship with beasts not next door to angels, having no 

 sense of right and wrong, not indeed wicked, but absolutely 

 and necessarily wanting in moral goodness, they regard as 

 degrading. 



* * * 



It may be so or it may not be. It may be degrading to 

 be formed of the same materials^ to breathe the same air, to 

 feed on the same forms of food, as animals : or, on the other 

 hand, we may be quite mistaken in calling these poor rela- 

 tions of ours common and unclean even when in the same 

 breath we admit that they are our fellow- creatures. But if 

 it is degrading to be akin to apes and monkeys, and through 

 them to other animals, what depth of degradation ought we 

 not, by parity of reasoning, to recognise in our unhappy but 

 unquestionable kinship with creatures who, having reason, 

 having (we may pre.sume) the knowledge of good and evil, 

 are deliberately and of set purpose not only evil but hideously 

 wicked. If, being a little lower only than angels (alas, poor 

 angeldom !), we scom the thought of being akin to mere 

 animals, how are we to bear the C3rtainty that we are of 

 the very same race as some who are not higher than devils 1 



* * * 



I KNOW, indeed, as little about devils as I know about 

 angels. I take the ways of both on trust. Dante and 

 Milton have given us their ideas about devils, and here and 

 there scattered throughout literature, ancient and middle- 

 aged (but especially the latter), we find ideas thrown out 

 about the manners and customs of the wrong sort of angels. 

 I venture, bow-ever, to assert with considerable confidence 

 that if any writer, of prose or poetry, had gone so far as to 

 attribute to the blackest of Satan's crew such unutterable 

 wickedness as the dynamiters and bomb-throwers have dis- 

 played in deliberately planning the haphazard slaughter and 

 mutilation of men, women, and children, who had done them 

 and wished them no evil, then that writer would have been 

 justly charged with using tints too hatefully black even for 

 devils. 



* * * 



Hatred and malice, greed and lust, these as motives to 

 murder, and murders through such motives as these, we can 



