No More Learning

The shoemaker
does not attempt to make his own clothes, but employs a tailor.
The farmer attempts to make neither the one nor the other, but
employs those different artificers. All of them find it for their
interest to employ their whole industry in a way in which they
have some advantage over their neighbors; and to purchase with


## p. 13533 (#347) ##########################################

ADAM SMITH
13533
a part of its produce or what is the same thing, with the price
of a part of it-whatever else they have occasion for.
What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can
scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country
can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can
make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce
of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some
advantage. The general industry of the country, being always
in proportion to the capital which employs it, will not thereby be
diminished, no more than that of the above-mentioned artificers;
but only left to find out the way in which it can be employed
with the greatest advantage. It is certainly not employed to
the greatest advantage when it is thus directed towards an object
which it can buy cheaper than it can make. The value of its
annual produce is certainly more or less diminished, when it is
thus turned away from producing commodities evidently of more
value than the commodity which it is directed to produce. Accord-
ing to the supposition, that commodity could be purchased from
foreign countries cheaper than it can be made at home. It could
therefore have been purchased with a part only of the commodi-
ties, or what is the same thing, with a part only of the price of
the commodities, which the industry employed by an equal capi-
tal would have produced at home had it been left to follow its
natural course. The industry of the country, therefore, is thus
turned away from a more to a less advantageous employment;
and the changeable value of its annual produce, instead of being
increased according to the intention of the lawgiver, must neces-
sarily be diminished, by every such regulation.
By means of such regulations, indeed, a particular manufacture
may sometimes be acquired sooner than it could have been other-
wise, and after a certain time may be made at home as cheap or
cheaper than in the foreign country. But though the industry of
the society may be thus carried with advantage into a particular
channel sooner than it could have been otherwise, it will by no
means follow that the sum total, either of its industry or of its
revenue, can ever be augmented by any such regulation. The
industry of the society can augment only in proportion as its
capital augments, and its capital can augment only in propor-
tion to what can be gradually saved out of its revenue. But the
immediate effect of every such regulation is to diminish its rev-
enue; and what diminishes its revenue is certainly not very likely


## p. 13534 (#348) ##########################################

13534
ADAM SMITH
to augment its capital faster than it would have augmented of its
own accord, had both their capital and their industry been left to
find out their natural employments.
Though for want of such regulations the society should never
acquire the proposed manufacture, it would not upon that ac-
count necessarily be the poorer in any one period of its duration.
In every period of its duration its whole capital and industry
might still have been employed, though upon different objects, in
the manner that was most advantageous at the time.
In every
period its revenue might have been the greatest which its capi-
tal could afford; and both capital and revenue might have been
augmented with the greatest possible rapidity.
The natural advantages which one country has over another
in producing particular commodities are sometimes so great that
it is acknowledged by all the world to be in vain to struggle
with them. By means of glasses, hot-beds, and hot-walls, very
good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too
can be made of them, at about thirty times the expense for
which at least equally good can be brought from foreign coun-
tries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation
of all foreign wines merely to encourage the making of claret
and burgundy in Scotland? But if there would be a manifest
absurdity in turning towards any employment thirty times
more of the capital and industry of the country than would be
necessary to purchase from foreign countries an equal quantity
of the commodities wanted, there must be an absurdity, though
not altogether so glaring, yet exactly of the same kind, in turn-
ing towards any such employment a thirtieth, or even a three-
hundredth part more of either. Whether the advantages which
one country has over another be natural or acquired is in this
respect of no consequence. As long as the one country has
those advantages and the other wants them, it will always be
more advantageous for the latter rather to buy of the former
than to make. It is an acquired advantage only which one arti-
ficer has over his neighbor who exercises another trade; and yet
they both find it more advantageous to buy of one another than
to make what does not belong to their particular trades.


## p. 13535 (#349) ##########################################

ADAM SMITH
OF MILITARY AND GENERAL EDUCATION
From the Wealth of Nations>
13535
HAT in the progress of improvement the practice of military
exercises, unless government takes proper pains to sup-
port it, goes gradually to decay,- and together with it, the
martial spirit of the great body of the people, the example
of modern Europe sufficiently demonstrates. But the security
of every society must always depend, more or less, upon the
martial spirit of the great body of the people. In the present
times, indeed, the martial spirit alone, and unsupported by a well-
disciplined standing army, would not perhaps be sufficient for
the defense and security of any society. But where every citizen
had the spirit of a soldier, a smaller standing army would surely
be requisite. That spirit, besides, would necessarily diminish very
much the dangers to liberty, whether real or imaginary, which
are commonly apprehended from a standing army. As it would
very much facilitate the operations of that army against a foreign
invader, so it would obstruct them as much if unfortunately they
should ever be directed against the constitution of the State.
The ancient institutions of Greece and Rome seem to have
been much more effectual for maintaining the martial spirit of the
great body of the people, than the establishment of what are called
the militias of modern times. They were much more simple.
When they were once established, they executed themselves, and
it required little or no attention from government to maintain
them in the most perfect vigor. Whereas to maintain, even in
tolerable execution, the complex regulations of any modern mili-
tia, requires the continual and painful attention of government,
without which they are constantly falling into total neglect and
disuse. The influence, besides, of the ancient institutions was
much more universal. By means of them the whole body of the
people was completely instructed in the use of arms. Whereas
it is but a very small part of them who can ever be so instructed
by the regulations of any modern militia, except perhaps that of
Switzerland. But a coward-a man incapable of defending or
of revenging himself-evidently wants one of the most essential
parts of the character of a man. He is as much mutilated and
deformed in his mind as another is in his body, who is either
deprived of some of its most essential members or has lost the
use of them. He is evidently the more wretched and miserable
―


## p. 13536 (#350) ##########################################

13536
ADAM SMITH
of the two; because happiness and misery, which reside altogether
in the mind, must necessarily depend more upon the healthful or
unhealthful, the mutilated or entire state of the mind, than upon
that of the body. Even though the martial spirit of the people
were of no use towards the defense of the society, yet to pre-
vent that sort of mental mutilation, deformity, and wretchedness,
which cowardice necessarily involves in it, from spreading them-
selves through the great body of the people, would still deserve
the most serious attention of government, in the same manner as
it would deserve its most serious attention to prevent a leprosy,
or any other loathsome and offensive disease though neither
mortal nor dangerous, from spreading itself among them; though
perhaps no other public good might result from such attention
besides the prevention of so great a public evil.
The same thing may be said of the gross ignorance and stu-
pidity which, in a civilized society, seem so frequently to benumb
the understandings of all the inferior ranks of people. A man
without the proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man is,
if possible, more contemptible than even a coward; and seems to
be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part of the
character of human nature. Though the State was to derive no
advantage from the instruction of the inferior ranks of people, it
would still deserve its attention that they should not be altogether
uninstructed. The State, however, derives no inconsiderable ad-
vantage from their instruction. The more they are instructed,
the less liable they are to the delusions of enthusiasm and super-
stition which, among ignorant nations, frequently occasion the
most dreadful disorders. An instructed and intelligent people,
besides, are always more decent and orderly than an ignorant
and stupid one. They feel themselves, each individually, more
respectable, and more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful
superiors; and they are therefore more disposed to respect those
superiors. They are more disposed to examine, and more capable
of seeing through, the interested complaints of faction and sedi-
tion; and they are upon that account less apt to be misled into
any wanton or unnecessary opposition to the measures of govern-
ment. In free countries, where the safety of government depends
very much upon the favorable judgment which the people may
form of its conduct, it must surely be of the highest importance
that they should not be disposed to judge rashly or capriciously
concerning it.


## p. 13537 (#351) ##########################################

13537
GOLDWIN SMITH
(1823-)
HE liberal movement in the politics and religious thought of
the present day is adequately represented by the intellec-
tual career of Goldwin Smith. Throughout his long life he
has been in the van of what he considers the progressive forces of
the time. His conception of progress, as primarily a moral process,
pervades the entire body of his writings whether he is dealing with
the Canadian question, with the question of Home Rule, with the
condition of the colonies, or with the tem-
per of the Establishment. So convinced is
he that the workings of the moral order
exceed in strength all other forms of power,
that he measures the importance and dura-
tion of various social and political institu-
tions by the degree of their conformance to
this order. In consequence he sees disinte-
gration where others see permanence; and
degeneration where others look for growth.
The charge of being of a negative and de-
structive spirit has been frequently brought
against him: he claims, however, by the
tacit testimony of his books on politics and
history, the privilege of a prophet, who can
foresee reformation only through the intervening spaces of disorder
and decay.

GOLDWIN SMITH
The fundamental principle underlying his judgments of contem-
porary affairs is contained in his early lectures on the 'Study of
History. ' He applies the principle of historical development - the
progress of mankind through the efforts of individuals-to present-
day matters. To understand his conception of history is to under-
stand to a degree his position towards the events of his time.
"That the human race is in a real sense one; that its efforts are com-
mon and tend in some measure to a joint result; that its several members may
stand in the eye of their Maker, not only as individual agents, but as con-
tributors to this joint result,-is a doctrine which our reason perhaps finds
something to support, and which our hearts readily accept. It unites us not
only in sympathy, but in real interest, with the generations that are to come
XXIII-847


## p. 13538 (#352) ##########################################

13538
GOLDWIN SMITH
after us, as well as with those that are gone before us; it makes each genera-
tion, each man, a partaker in the wealth of all: it encourages us to sow a har-
vest which we shall reap, not with our own hands indeed, but by the hands of
those that come after us; it at once represses selfish ambition, and stimulates
the desire of earning the gratitude of our kind; it strengthens all social and
regulates all personal desires; it limits-and by limiting sustains-effort,
and calms the passionate craving to grasp political perfection or final truth; it
fills up the fragment, gives fruitfulness to effort apparently wasted, and covers
present failure with ultimate success; it turns the death of States, as of men,
into incidents of one vast life; and quenches the melancholy which flows from
the ruins of the past,- that past into which we too are sinking, just when
great things seem about to come. "
It is this dispassionate spirit of world-citizenship, this ability to
"look before and after," which has led Goldwin Smith to attach him-
self permanently to no party, to hold fast by no creed, political or
religious. His manner of life has fostered this cosmopolitanism of
thought and feeling. He is by birth an Englishman. He was born at
Reading, Berkshire, August 13th, 1823; was educated at Eton, and at
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was graduated with high honors
in 1845; subsequently he was chosen Fellow and tutor of University
College. In 1847 he was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. In 1850,
and again in 1854, he served as secretary to the Royal Commission
of University Reform. From 1858 to 1866 he was a member of the
Education Commission, whose labors resulted in the Education Bill of
1870. At the same period he was Regius Professor of Modern History
at Oxford. He had devoted himself early in his career to the study
of contemporary politics. In 1861 he published 'Irish History and
Irish Character,' in which he endeavored to explain the events of
Ireland's history by the temperament of her sons. In the same year
he published the 'Foundation of the American Colonies,' and two
years later The Morality of the Emancipation Proclamation. ' He had
made a most careful investigation of the causes leading to the Civil
War; he understood the situation better perhaps than any one else in
England. His support of the North was strong and persistent; during
the period of the War, his letters to the Daily News went far to hold
a clear picture of the situation before English readers. As was usual
with him, he understood the importance of the moral question under-
lying the political; he foresaw the triumph of the Union, because it
was in the stream of the tendency towards righteousness. In 1865
appeared his 'England and America,' and in 1866 The Civil War in
America. In 1866 he published also his 'Lectures on the Study of
History. ' These are of great value, not alone for their princely style:
they exhibit a clearness of insight into social and political problems,
and into the laws of historical development, not surpassed by any
other modern historian. Goldwin Smith assumes that history cannot


## p. 13539 (#353) ##########################################

GOLDWIN SMITH
13539
be studied as a whole until the moral unity of the race is thoroughly,
felt. He disclaims the theory of the positive school, that history
is governed by necessary laws, and can therefore come under the
domain of physical science; disclaims it on the ground that the moral
element in it renders it just beyond the calculations of science. It
is made up of the actions of men, and must be read in the light of
moral rather than material laws. It thus becomes the highest of all
studies. - the study of man's struggles upward from the beast to
the god. In another lecture on 'Some Supposed Consequences of the
Doctrine of Historical Progress,' he endeavors to show that Christian-
ity as a moral power has been ever on the side of civilization and
advancement: where it has conflicted with progress, its dogmatic, not
its moral quality has been in the ascendency.
(
In 1868 Professor Smith accepted the chair of English History in
Cornell University; in 1869 he published Relations between Eng-
land and America,' and a Short History of England. ' In 1871 he
removed to Toronto, where he was made a member of the senate of
Toronto University. From 1872 until 1874 he edited the Canadian
Monthly; he was then for a time the editor of the Bystander, a politi-
cal weekly. Afte the discontinuance of this paper, he edited the
Week until 1881.
In 1879 he published 'Political Destiny of Canada,' and in 1891
'Canada and the Canadian Question. ' He advocates the annexation
of Canada to the United States. He bases his arguments for annexa-
tion upon what he believes is inevitable in the course of national
development, the union of the English-speaking races on the North-
American continent. He is moreover a disbeliever in England's impe-
rialism: he does not favor the colonial system, being of opinion that
the greatness of a nation does not depend upon the extent of the
territory controlled by it; he believes, moreover, that England must
lose her colonies, as they grow in strength and in individuality.
In 1880 he published a 'Life of Cowper. ' It is not equal to
his 'Life of Jane Austen'; perhaps because he was more in sympathy
with the novelist's common-sense and impersonal outlook upon life,
than with the hypersensitive spirit of the gentle poet. In 1881
appeared Lectures and Essays'; in 1882 Conduct of England to
Ireland'; in 1883 False Hopes, or Fallacies, Socialistic and Semi-
Socialistic'; and in 1884 A Trip to England. In 1894 he published
'Essays on Questions of the Day. ' The first of these, on 'Social
and Industrial Revolutions,' throws sudden vivid light on many
old problems: it exposes the underlying weakness of socialism, com-
munism, anarchism, and other forms of socialistic tendency, but it
does not lay the blame entirely on one class or the other. The osten-
tatious rich, he maintains, belong to the dangerous class as truly as
-


## p. 13540 (#354) ##########################################

GOLDWIN SMITH
13540
the bomb-thrower. Throughout all his arguments can be traced his
belief in the orderly progress of events; his recognition of the fact
that "equality" is the most Utopian word in the language, of the
truth that reformation is a growth, not a revolution.
In his latest book, 'Guesses at the Riddle of Existence,' he touches
on some of the great religious problems of the day,- touches on
them merely as one who cannot afford to linger long over what can
after all, as he believes, be solved only in the domain of the moral
nature, not of the intellectual life. His faith, like the faith of many
of his contemporaries, would express itself in conduct rather than
in the subtleties of creed. For that reason he is drawn to the con-
templation of Christ as being in very truth the Light of the moral
world.
Of Goldwin Smith's position in the domain of literature it is diffi
cult to speak with justice. He is less a man of letters than a man
of affairs; yet, as a writer of sinewy English prose he is not surpassed
among his contemporaries. He handles words like delicate instru-
ments which may assist to the birth or may deal death. For this
reason, if for no other, he is a formidable adversary, a trustworthy
champion. His English is the English of the scholar, whose taste
and character have been formed by contact with the world as well
as with Homer, Lucretius, and Virgil. His culture as a poet is shown
in some admirable versions of Horace. Of the reasonableness of his
opinions in religion and politics, future generations alone can judge
with fairness. He is thoroughly representative at least of a transi-
tional age in the political and religious development of the modern
world.
JOHN PYM
From Three English Statesmen ›
P
Yм had been second only to Sir John Eliot as a leader of
the patriot party in the reign of James. He was one of the
twelve deputies of the Commons when James cried, with
insight as well as spleen, "Set twal chairs: here be twal kings.
coming. " He had stood among the foremost of those "evil-
tempered spirits" who protested that the liberties of Parliament
were not the favors of the Crown, but the birthright of English-
men; and who for so doing were imprisoned without law. He
had resolved, as he said, that he would rather suffer for speaking
the truth, than the truth should suffer for want of his speaking.
His greatness had increased in the struggle against Charles I.


## p. 13541 (#355) ##########################################

GOLDWIN SMITH
13541
He had been one of the chief managers of the impeachment of
Buckingham; and for that service to public justice he had again
suffered a glorious imprisonment. He had accused Manwaring;
he had raised a voice of power against the Romanizing intrigues
of Laud. In those days he and Strafford were dear friends,
and fellow-soldiers in the same cause. But when the death of
Buckingham left the place of First Minister vacant, Strafford
sought an interview with Pym at Greenwich; and when they met,
began to talk against dangerous courses, and to hint at advan-
tageous overtures to be made by the court. . Pym cut him short:
"You need not use all this art to tell me that you have a mind
to leave us. But remember what I tell you,-you are going to
be undone. And remember also that though you leave us, I will
never leave you while your head is upon your shoulders! " Such
at least was the story current in the succeeding age, of the last
interview between the Great Champion of Freedom and the
Great Apostate.
Pym was a Somersetshire gentleman of good family; and it
was from good families-such families at least as do not pro-
duce Jacobins - that most of the leaders of this revolution sprang.
I note it, not to claim for principle the patronage of birth and
wealth, but to show how strong that principle must have been
which could thus move birth and wealth away from their natural
bias. It is still true, not in the ascetic but in the moral sense,
that it is hard for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
heaven; and when we see rich men entering into the kingdom.
of heaven, hazarding the enjoyment of wealth for the sake of
principle, we may know that it is no common age. Oxford was
the place of Pym's education; and there he was distinguished not
only by solid acquirements, but by elegant accomplishments, so
that an Oxford poet calls him the favorite of Apollo. High cult-
ure is now rather in disgrace in some quarters; and not without
a color of reason, as unbracing the sinews of action, and destroy-
ing sympathy with the people. Nevertheless, the universities
produced the great statesmen and the great warriors of the Com-
monwealth. If the Oxford of Pym, of Hampden, and of Blake,
the Oxford of Wycliffe, the Oxford where in still earlier times.
those principles were nursed which gave us the Great Charter and
the House of Commons- if this Oxford, I say, now seems by her
political bearing to dishonor learning, and by an ignoble choice
does a wrong to the nation which Lancashire is called upon to


## p. 13542 (#356) ##########################################

GOLDWIN SMITH
13542
redress, believe me, it is not the university which thus offends,
but a power alien to the university and alien to learning, to
which the university is, and unless you rescue her, will continue
to be, a slave.
It is another point of difference between the English and the
French revolutions, that the leaders of the English Revolution
were as a rule good husbands and fathers, in whom domestic
affection was the root of public virtue. Pym, after being for
some time in public life, married, and after his marriage lived
six years in retirement; a part of training as necessary as action
to the depth of character and the power of sustained thought
which are the elements of greatness. At the end of the six years
his wife died, and he took no other wife but his country.
There were many elements in the patriot party, united at first,
afterward severed from each other by the fierce winnowing-fan
of the struggle, and marking by their successive ascendency the
changing phases of the Revolution: Constitutional Monarchists,
aristocratic Republicans, Republicans thorough-going, Protestant
Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, and in the abyss be-
neath them all the Anabaptists, the Fifth Monarchy men, and the
Levelers. Pym was a friend of constitutional monarchy in poli-
tics, a Protestant Episcopalian in religion; against a despot, but
for a king; against the tyranny and political power of the bish-
ops, but satisfied with that form of church government. He was
no fanatic and no ascetic. He was genial, social, even convivial.
His enemies held him up to the hatred of the sectaries as a man
of pleasure. As the statesman and orator of the less extreme
party, and of the first period of the Revolution, he is the Eng-
lish counterpart of Mirabeau, so far as a Christian patriot can
be the counterpart of a Voltairean debauchee.
Nor is he altogether unlike Mirabeau in the style of his
eloquence; our better appreciation of which, as well as our bet-
ter knowledge of Pym and of this the heroic age of our history
in general, we owe to the patriotic and truly noble diligence of
Mr. John Forster, from whose researches no small portion of my
materials for this lecture is derived. Pym's speeches of course
are seventeenth-century speeches: stately in diction, somewhat
like homilies in their divisions, full of learning, full of Script-
ure (which then, be it remembered, was a fresh spring of new
thought); full of philosophic passages which might have come
from the pen of Hooker or of Bacon. But they sometimes strike
-


## p. 13543 (#357) ##########################################

GOLDWIN SMITH
13543
the great strokes for which Mirabeau was famous. Buckingham
had pleaded, to the charge of enriching himself by the sale of
honors and offices, that so far from having enriched himself he
was £100,000 in debt. "If this be true," replied Pym, "how can
we hope to satisfy his immense prodigality; if false, how can
we hope to satisfy his covetousness? " In the debate on the Peti-
tion of Right, when Secretary Cooke desired in the name of the
King to know whether they would take the King's word for the
observance of their liberties or not, "there was silence for a
good space": none liking to reject the King's word, all knowing
what that word was worth. The silence was broken by Pym,
who rose and said, "We have his Majesty's coronation oath to
maintain the laws of England: what need we then to take his
word? " And the secretary desperately pressing his point, and
asking what foreigners would think if the people of England
refused to trust their King's word, Pym rejoined, "Truly, Mr.
Secretary, I am of the same opinion that I was, that the King's
oath is as powerful as his word. " In the same debate the court-
iers prayed the House to leave entire his Majesty's sovereign
power: a Stuart phrase, meaning the power of the king, when
he deemed it expedient, to break the law. "I am not able,"
was Pym's reply, "to speak to this question. I know not what
it is. All our petition is for the laws of England; and this
power seems to be another power distinct from the power of the
law. I know how to add sovereign to the King's person, but not
to his power.
We cannot leave to him a sovereign power, for
we never were possessed of it. "
The English Revolution was a revolution of principle, but of
principle couched in precedent. What the philosophic salon was
to the French leaders of opinion, that the historical and anti-
quarian library of Sir Robert Cotton was to the English. And
of the group of illustrious men who gathered in that library,
none had been a deeper student of its treasures than Pym. His
speeches and State papers are the proof.
SO
When the Parliament had met, Pym was the first to rise.
We know his appearance from his portrait: a portly form, which
a court waiting-woman called that of an OX; a forehead
high that lampooners compared it to a shuttle; the dress of a
gentleman of the time,- for not to the cavaliers alone belonged
that picturesque costume and those pointed beards which fur-
nish the real explanation of the fact that all women are Tories.


## p. 13544 (#358) ##########################################

13544
GOLDWIN SMITH
Into the expectant and wavering, though ardent, minds of the
inexperienced assembly he poured, with the authority of a veteran
chief, a speech which at once fixed their thoughts, and possessed
them with their mission. It was a broad, complete, and earnest,
though undeclamatory, statement of the abuses which they had
come to reform. For reform, though for root-and-branch reform,
not for revolution, the Short Parliament came; and Charles might
even now have made his peace with his people. But Charles did
not yet see the truth: the truth could never pierce through the
divinity that hedged round the king. The Commons insisted that
redress of grievances should go before supply. In a moment
of madness, or what is the same thing, of compliance with the
counsels of Laud, Charles dissolved the Parliament, imprisoned
several of its members, and published his reasons in a proclama-
tion full of despotic doctrine. The friends of the Crown were
sad, its enemies very joyful. Now, to the eye of history, begins
to rise that scaffold before Whitehall.
Once more Charles and Strafford tried their desperate arms
against the Scotch; and once more their soldiers refused to fight.
Pym and Hampden, meanwhile, sure of the issue, were preparing
their party and the nation for the decisive struggle. Their head-
quarters were at Pym's house, in Gray's Inn Lane; but meetings
were held also at the houses of leaders in the country, especially
for correspondence with the Scotch, with whom these patriot
traitors were undoubtedly in league. A private press was actively
at work. Pym was not only the orator of his party, but its soul
and centre; he knew how not only to propagate his opinions with
words of power, but to organize the means of victory. And now
Charles, in extremity, turned to the Middle Ages for one expedi-
ent more, and called a Great Council of Peers, according to Plan-
tagenet precedents, at York. Pym flew at once to York, caused
a petition for a Parliament to be signed by the peers of his party
there, and backed it with petitions from the people, one of them
signed by ten thousand citizens of London. This first great
wielder of public opinion in England was the inventor of organ-
ized agitation by petition. The King surrendered, and called a
Parliament. Pym and Hampden rode over the country, urging
the constituencies to do their duty. The constituencies did their
duty as perhaps they had never done it before and have never
done it since. They sent up the noblest body of men that
ever sat in the councils of a nation. The force of the agitation


## p. 13545 (#359) ##########################################

GOLDWIN SMITH
13545
triumphed for the moment, as it did again in 1832, over all those
defects in the system of representation which prevail over the
public interest and the public sentiment in ordinary times.
The
Long Parliament met, while round it the tide of national feeling
swelled and surged, the long-pent-up voices of national resent-
ment broke forth. It met not for reform, but for revolution.
The King did not ride to it in state: he slunk to it in his private
barge, like a vanquished and a doomed man.
Charles had called to him Strafford. The earl knew his dan-
ger; but the King had pledged to him the royal word that not a
hair of his head should be touched. He came foiled, broken by
disease, but still resolute; prepared to act on the aggressive, per-
haps to arraign the leaders of the Commons for treasonable cor-
respondence with the Scotch. But he had to deal, in his friend
and coadjutor of former days, with no mere rhetorician, but with
a man of action as sagacious and as intrepid as himself. Pym
at once struck a blow which proved him a master of revolution.
Announcing to the Commons that he had weighty matter to
impart, he moved that the doors should be closed.
When they
were opened he carried up to the Lords the impeachment of the
Earl of Strafford. The earl came down to the House of Lords
that day with his brow of imperial gloom, his impetuous step,
his tones and gestures of command: but scarcely had he entered
the House when he found that power had departed from him;
and the terrible grand vizier of government by prerogative went
away a fallen man, none unbonneting to him in whose presence
an hour before no man would have stood covered. The speech
by which Pym swept the House on to this bold move, so that, as
Clarendon says, "not one man was found to stop the torrent," is
known only from Clarendon's outline. But that outline shows
how the speaker filled the thoughts of his hearers with a picture
of the tyranny, before he named its chief author, the Earl of
Strafford; and how he blended with the elements of indignation
some lighter passages of the earl's vanity and amours, to mingle
indignation with contempt and to banish fear.
Through the report of the Scotch Commissioner Baillie, we
see the great trial, to which that of Warren Hastings was a par-
allel in splendor, but no parallel in interest: Westminster Hall
filled with the Peers-the Commons- the foreign nobility, come
to learn if they could a lesson in English politics-the ladies of
quality, whose hearts (and we can pardon them) were all with


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13546
GOLDWIN SMITH
the great criminal who made so gallant and skillful a fight for
life, and of whom it was said that like Ulysses he had not
beauty, but he had the eloquence which moved a goddess to love.
Among the mass of the audience the interest, intense at first,
flagged as the immense process went on; and eating, drinking,
loud talking, filled the intervals of the trial. But there was one
whose interest did not flag. The royal throne was set for the
King in his place; but the King was not there. He was with his
queen in a private gallery, the latticework of which, in his eager-
ness to hear, he broke through with his own hands. And there
he heard, among other things, these words of Pym: "If the his-
tories of Eastern countries be pursued, whose princes order their
affairs according to the mischievous principles of the Earl of
Strafford, loose and absolved from all rules of government, they
will be found to be frequent in combustions, full of massacres
and of the tragical ends of princes. "
I need not make selections from a speech so well known as
that of Pym on the trial of Strafford. But hear one or two
answers to fallacies which are not quite dead yet. To the charge
of arbitrary government in Ireland, Strafford had pleaded that
the Irish were a conquered nation. "They were a conquered
nation," cries Pym. "There cannot be a word more pregnant or
fruitful in treason than that word is. There are few nations
in the world that have not been conquered, and no doubt but
the conqueror may give what law he pleases to those that are
conquered; but if the succeeding pacts and agreements do not
limit and restrain that right, what people can be secure? Eng-
land hath been conquered, and Wales hath been conquered; and
by this reason will be in little better case than Ireland. If the
king by the right of a conqueror gives laws to his people, shall
not the people, by the same reason, be restored to the right of
the conquered to recover their liberty if they can? " Strafford
had alleged good intentions as an excuse for his evil counsels.
"Sometimes, my lords," says Pym, "good and evil, truth and
falsehood, lie so near together that they are hard to be dis-
tinguished. Matters hurtful and dangerous may be accompanied
with such circumstances as may make them appear useful and
convenient. But where the matters propounded are evil in their
own nature, such as the matters are wherewith the Earl of Straf-
ford is charged, as to break public faith and to subvert laws and
government, they can never be justified by any intentions, how


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GOLDWIN SMITH
13547
•
good soever they be pretended. " Again, to the plea that it was
a time of great danger and necessity, Pym replies:-"If there
were any necessity, it was of his own making: he, by his evil
counsel, had brought the King into a necessity; and by no rules
of justice can be allowed to gain this advantage by his own fault,
as to make that a ground of his justification which is a great
part of his offense. "
Once, we are told, while Pym was speaking, his eyes met
those of Strafford; and the speaker grew confused, lost the thread
of his discourse, broke down beneath the haggard glance of his
old friend. Let us never glorify revolution!
THE PURITAN COLONIES
From 'Lectures on the Study of History'
WITH
ITH popular government, the Puritans established popular
education. They are the great authors of the system of
common schools. They founded a college too, and that
in dangerous and pinching times. Nor did their care fail, nor
is it failing, to produce an intelligent people. A great literature
is a thing of slow growth everywhere. The growth of Ameri-
can literature was retarded at first by Puritan severity, which
forced even philosophy to put on a theological garb, and veiled ·
the Necessarianism of Mr. Mill in the Calvinism of Jonathan Ed-
wards. Now, perhaps, its growth is retarded by the sudden burst
of commercial activity and wealth, the development of which our
monopolies long restrained. One day, perhaps, this wealth may
be used as nobly as the wealth of Florence; but for some time
it will be spent in somewhat coarse pleasures by those who have
suddenly won it. It is spent in somewhat coarse pleasures by
those who have suddenly won it at Liverpool and Manchester,
as well as at New York. One praise, at any rate, American lit-
erature may claim: it is pure. Here the spirit of the Pilgrims
still holds its own. The public opinion of a free country is a
restraining as well as a moving power. On the other hand,
despotism, political or ecclesiastical, does not extinguish human
liberty. That it may take away the liberty of reason, it gives
the liberty of sense. It says to man, Do what you will, sin and
shrive yourself; but eschew political improvement, and turn away
your thoughts from truth.


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13548
GOLDWIN SMITH
The history of the Puritan Church in New England is one of
enduring glory, of transient shame. Of transient shame, because
there was a moment of intolerance and persecution; of enduring
glory, because intolerance and persecution instantly gave way
to perfect liberty of conscience and free allegiance to the truth.
The founders of New England were Independents. When they
went forth, their teacher had solemnly charged them to follow
him no farther than they had seen him follow his Master. He
had pointed to the warning example of churches which fancied
that because Calvin and Luther were great and shining lights
in their times, therefore there could be no light vouchsafed to
man after theirs. "I beseech you remember it: it is an article of
your Church covenant that you be ready to receive whatever
truth shall be made known to you from the written word of God. ”
It was natural that the Puritan settlement should at first be a
church rather than a State. To have given a share in its lands
or its political franchise to those who were not of its communion
would have been to make the receiver neither rich nor powerful,
and the giver, as he might well think, poor and weak indeed.
But the Communion grew into an Establishment; and the Puri-
tan Synod, as well as the Council of Trent, must needs forget
that it was the child of change, and build its barrier, though
not a very unyielding one, across the river which flows forever.
Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, were partly seces-
sions from Massachusetts, led by those who longed for perfect
freedom; and in fairness to Massachusetts, it must be said that
among those seceders were some in whose eyes freedom herself
was scarcely free. The darkness of the Middle Ages must bear
the blame if not a few were dazzled by the sudden return of .
light. The name of Providence, the capital of Rhode Island,
is the thank-offering of Roger Williams, to whose wayward and
disputatious spirit much may be forgiven if he first clearly pro-
claimed, and first consistently practiced, the perfect doctrine of
liberty of conscience, the sole guarantee for real religion, the sole
trustworthy guardian of the truth. That four Quakers should
have suffered death in a colony founded by fugitives from perse-
cution, is a stain on the history of the free churches of America,
like the stain on the robe of Marcus Aurelius, like the stain on
the escutcheon of the Black Prince. It is true there was no In-
quisition, no searching of conscience; that the persecutors warned
their victims away, and sought to be quit of them, not to take


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GOLDWIN SMITH
13549
their blood; that the Quakers thrust themselves on their fate
in their frenzied desire for martyrdom. All this at most ren-
ders less deep by one degree the dye of religious murder. The
weapon was instantly wrested from the hand of fanaticism by the
humane instinct of a free people; and the blood of those four vic-
tims sated in the New World the demon who in the Old World,
between persecutions and religious wars, has drunk the blood of
millions, and is scarcely sated yet. If the robe of religion in the
New World was less rich than in the Old, it was all but pure of
those red stains, compared with which the stains upon the robe
of worldly ambition, scarlet though they be, are white as wool.
In the New World there was no Inquisition, no St. Bartholomew,
no Thirty Years' War; in the New World there was no Vol-
taire. If we would do Voltaire justice, criminal and fatal as his
destructive levity was, we have only to read his 'Cry of Inno-
cent Blood,' and we shall see that the thing he assailed was not
Christianity, much less God. The American sects, indeed, soon
added to the number of those variations of the Protestant churches,
which, contrasted with the majestic unity of Rome, furnished a
proud argument to Bossuet. Had Bossuet lived to see what
came forth at the Revolution from under the unity of the Church
of France, he might have doubted whether unity was so united;
as, on the other hand, if he had seen the practical union of the
free churches of America for the weightier matters of religion,
which Tocqueville observed, he might have doubted whether
variation was so various. It would have been too much to ask
a Bossuet to consider whether, looking to the general dealings of
Providence with man, the variations of free and conscientious
inquirers are an absolute proof that free and conscientious inquiry
is not the road to religious truth.
In Maryland, Roman Catholicism itself, having tasted of the
cup it had made others drink to the dregs, and being driven to
the asylum of oppressed consciences, proclaimed the principle of
toleration. In Maryland the Church of Alva and Torquemada
grew, bloodless and blameless; and thence it has gone forth, as
it was in its earlier and more apostolic hour, to minister to the
now large Roman Catholic population of the United States, what-
ever of good and true, in the great schism of humanity, may
have remained on the worse and falser side. For in Maryland
it had no overgrown wealth and power to defend against the
advance of truth. Bigotry, the mildest of all vices, has the worst


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GOLDWIN SMITH
13550
things laid to her charge. That wind of free discipline, which,
to use Bacon's image, winnows the chaff of error from the grain
of truth, is in itself welcome to man as the breeze of evening.
It is when it threatens to winnow away, not the chaff of error
alone, but princely bishoprics of Strasburg and Toledo, that its
breath becomes pestilence, and Christian love is compelled to
torture and burn the infected sheep in order to save from infec-
tion the imperiled flock.
There have been wild religious sects in America. But cannot
history show sects as wild in the Old World? Is not Mormonism
itself fed by the wild apocalyptic visions, and the dreams of a
kinder and happier social state, which haunt the peasantry in the
more neglected parts of our own country? Have not the wildest
and most fanatical sects in history arisen when the upper classes
have turned religion into policy, and left the lower classes, who
knew nothing of policy, to guide or misguide themselves into
the truth? New England was fast peopled by the flower of the
Puritan party, and the highest Puritan names were blended with
its history. Among its elective governors was Vane, even then
wayward as pure, even then suspected of being more republican
than Puritan. It saw also the darker presence of Hugh Peters.
While the day went hard with freedom and the Protestant cause
in England, the tide set steadily westward; it turned, when the
hour of retaliation came, to the great Armageddon of West-
minster and Naseby; after the Restoration it set to the West
again. In New England, Puritanism continued to reign with all
that was solemn, austere, strange in its spirit, manners, lan-
guage, garb, when in England its dominion, degenerating into
tyranny, had met with a half-merited overthrow. In New Eng-
land three of the judges of Charles I. found a safer refuge than
Holland could afford; and there one of them lived to see the
scales once more hung out in heaven, the better part of his own
cause triumphant once more, and William sit on the Protector's
throne.
Among the emigrants were clergymen, Oxford and Cambridge
scholars, high-born men and women; for in that moving age the
wealthiest often vied with the poorest in indifference to worldly
interest and devotion to a great cause. Even peers of the Puri-
tan party thought of becoming citizens of Massachusetts, but had
enough of the peer in them to desire still to have a hereditary
seat in the councils of the State. Massachusetts answered this


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GOLDWIN SMITH
13551
demand by the hand of one who had himself made a great sacri-
fice, and without republican bluster: "When God blesseth any
branch of any noble or generous family with a spirit and gifts fit
for government, it would be a taking of God's name in vain to
put such a talent under a bushel, and a sin against the honor
of magistracy to neglect such in our public elections. But if God
should not delight to furnish some of their posterity with gifts fit
for magistracy, we should enforce them rather to reproach and
prejudice than exalt them to honor, if we should call those forth
whom God doth not to public authority. " The Venetian seems
to be the only great aristocracy in history, the origin of which is
not traceable to the accident of conquest; and the origin even of
the Venetian aristocracy may perhaps be traced to the accident
of prior settlement and the contagious example of neighboring
States. That which has its origin in accident may prove useful
and live long; it may even survive itself under another name, as
the Roman patriciate, as the Norman nobility, survived themselves
under the form of a mixed aristocracy of birth, political influence,
and wealth. But it can flourish only in its native soil. Trans-
plant it, and it dies. The native soil of feudal aristocracy is a
feudal kingdom, with great estates held together by the law or
custom of primogeniture in succession to land. The New Eng-
land colonies rejected primogeniture with the other institutions
of the Middle Ages, and adopted the anti-feudal custom of equal
inheritance, under the legal and ancestral name of gavelkind. It
was Saxon England emerging from the Norman rule. This
rule of succession to property, and the equality with which it is
distributed, are the basis of the republican institutions of New
England. To transfer those institutions to countries where that
basis does not exist would be almost as absurd as to transfer
to modern society the Roman laws of the Twelve Tables or the
Capitularies of Charlemagne.
In New York, New Jersey, Delaware, settlements formed
by the energy of Dutch and Swedish Protestantism have been
absorbed by the greater energy of the Anglo-Saxons. The rising.
empire of his faith beyond the Atlantic did not fail to attract
the soaring imagination of Gustavus: it was in his thoughts when
he set out for Lützen. But the most remarkable of the Ameri-
can colonies, after the New England group, is Pennsylvania. We
are rather surprised, on looking at the portrait of the gentle and
eccentric founder of the Society of Friends, to see a very comely


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13552
GOLDWIN SMITH
youth dressed in complete armor. Penn was a highly educated
and accomplished gentleman; heir to a fine estate, and to all the
happiness and beauty, which he was not without a heart to feel,
of English manorial life. "You are an ingenious gentleman,"
said a magistrate before whom he was brought for his Quaker
extravagances: "why do you make yourself unhappy by associat-
ing with such a simple people? " In the Old World he could
only hope to found a society; in the New World he might hope
to found a nation, of which the law should be love. The Con-
stitution he framed for Philadelphia, on pure republican princi-
ples, was to be "for the support of power in reverence with the
people, and to secure the people from the abuse of power. For
liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without
liberty is slavery. " He excluded himself and his heirs from the
founder's bane of authority over his own creation. It is as a
reformer of criminal law, perhaps, that he has earned his bright-
est and most enduring fame. The codes and customs of feudal
Europe were lavish of servile or plebeian blood. In the repub-
lic of New England the life of every man was precious; and
the criminal law was far more humane than that of Europe -
though tainted with the dark Judaism of the Puritans, with the
cruel delusion which they shared with the rest of the world on
the subject of witchcraft, and with their overstrained severity in
punishing crimes of sense. Penn confined capital punishment
to the crimes of treason and murder. Two centuries afterward,
the arguments of Romilly and the legislation of Peel convinced
Penn's native country that these reveries of his, the dictates
of wisdom which sprang from his heart, were sober truth. We
are now beginning to see the reality of another of his dreams:
the dream of making the prison not a jail only, but a place
of reformation. Of the two errors in government, that of treat-
ing men like angels and that of treating them like beasts, he
did something to show that the one to which he leaned was the
less grave; for Philadelphia grew up like an olive-branch beneath
his fostering hand.
In the Carolinas, the old settlement of Coligny was repeopled
with English, Scotch, Irish, Germans, Swiss; the motley elements
which will blend with Hollander and Swede to form in America
the most mixed, and on one theory the greatest of all races. The
philosophic hand of Locke attempted to create for this colony a
highly elaborate constitution, judged at the time a masterpiece of


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GOLDWIN SMITH
13553
political art. Georgia bears the name of the second king of that
line whose third king was to lose all. Its philanthropic founder,
Oglethorpe, struggled to exclude slavery; but an evil policy and
the neighborhood of the West Indies baffled his endeavors. Here
Wesley preached, here Whitfield; and Whitfield, too anxious to
avoid offense that he might be permitted to save souls, paid a
homage to the system of slavery, and made a sophistical apology
for it, which weigh heavily against the merits of a great apostle
of the poor.
For some time all the colonies, whatever their nominal gov-
ernment,—whether they were under the Crown, under single
proprietors, under companies, or under free charters,-enjoyed,
in spite of chronic negotiation and litigation with the powers in
England, a large measure of practical independence. James I.
was weak; Charles I. and Laud had soon other things to think
of; the Long Parliament were disposed to be arrogant, but the
Protector was magnanimous; and finally, Charles II. , careless
of everything on this side the water, was still more careless of
everything on that side, and Clarendon was not too stiff for pre-
rogative to give a liberal charter to a colony of which he was
himself a patentee. Royal governors, indeed, sometimes tried to
overact the King, and the folly of Sir William Berkeley, governor
of Virginia, all but forestalled and well would it have been if
it had quite forestalled - the folly of Lord North. With this
exception, the colonies rested content and proud beneath the
shadow of England, and no thought of a general confederation
or absolute independence ever entered into their minds.
As they grew rich, we tried to interfere with their manu-
factures and monopolize their trade. It was unjust and it was
foolish. The proof of its folly is the noble trade that has sprung
up between us since our government lost all power of checking
the course of nature. But this was the injustice and the folly
of the time. No such excuse can be made for the attempt to tax
the colonies in defiance of the first principles of English gov-
ernment begun by narrow-minded incompetence and continued
by insensate pride. It is miserable to see what true affection
was there flung away. Persecuted and excited, the founders of
New England, says one of their historians, did not cry Fare-
well Rome, Farewell Babylon! They cried, Farewell dear Eng-
land! And this was their spirit even far into the fatal quarrel.
"You have been told," they said to the British Parliament, after
the subversion of the chartered liberties of Massachusetts, "you
XXIII-848
-


## p. 13554 (#368) ##########################################

13554
GOLDWIN SMITH
•
have been told that we are seditious, impatient of government,
and desirous of independence. Be assured that these are not
facts, but calumnies. Permit us to be as free as yourselves, and
we shall ever esteem a union with you to be our greatest glory
and our greatest happiness; we shall ever be ready to contrib
ute all in our power to the welfare of the whole empire; we shall
consider your enemies as our enemies, and your interest as our
own. But if you are determined that your ministers shall wan-
tonly sport with the rights of mankind; if neither the voice of
justice, the dictates of law, the principles of the Constitution, nor
the suggestions of humanity, can restrain your hands from shed-
ding human blood in such an impious cause,- we must then
tell you that we will never submit to be 'hewers of wood and
drawers of water' for any nation in the world. " What was
this but the voice of those who framed the Petition of Right
and the Great Charter? Franklin alone, perhaps, of the leading
Americans, by the dishonorable publication of an exasperating
correspondence which he had improperly obtained, shared with
Grenville, Townshend, and Lord North, the guilt of bringing this
great disaster on the English race.
There could be but one issue to a war in which England was
fighting against her better self; or rather, in which England
fought on one side and a corrupt ministry and Parliament on the
other. The Parliament of that day was not national; and though
the nation was excited by the war when once commenced, it by
no means follows that a national Parliament would have com-
menced it. The great national leader rejoiced that the Americans
had resisted. But disease, or that worse enemy which hovers
so close to genius, deprived us of Chatham at the most critical
hour.
One thing there was in that civil war on which both sides
may look back with pride. In spite of deep provocation and
intense bitterness, in spite of the unwarrantable employment of
foreign troops and the infamous employment of Indians on our
side, and the exasperating interference of the French on the
side of the Americans, the struggle was conducted on the whole
with great humanity. Compared with the French Revolution,
it was
a contest between men with noble natures and a fight
between infuriated beasts. Something, too, it is that from that
struggle should have arisen the character of Washington, to
teach all ages, and especially those which are inclined to worship
violence, the greatness of moderation and civil duty. It has


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GOLDWIN SMITH
13555
been truly said that there is one spectacle more grateful to
Heaven than a good man in adversity,—a good man successful in
a great cause. Deeper happiness cannot be conceived than that
of the years which Washington passed at Mount Vernon, looking
back upon the life of arduous command held without a selfish
thought, and laid down without a stain.
The loss of the American colonies was perhaps, in itself, a
gain to both countries. It was a gain, as it emancipated com-
merce, and gave free course to those reciprocal streams of
wealth which a restrictive policy had forbidden to flow.
It was
a gain, as it put an end to an obsolete tutelage, which tended to
prevent America betimes to walk alone, while it gave England
only the puerile and somewhat dangerous pleasure of reigning
over those whom she did not and could not govern, but whom she
was tempted to harass and insult. A source of military strength
colonies can hardly be. You prevent them from forming proper
military establishments of their own, and you drag them into
your quarrels at the price of undertaking their defense. The
inauguration of free trade was in fact the renunciation of the
only solid object for which our ancestors clung to an invidious
and perilous supremacy, and exposed the heart of England by
scattering her fleets and armies over the globe. It was not the
loss of the colonies, but the quarrel, that was one of the great-
est-perhaps the greatest disaster that ever befell the English
race. Who would not give up Blenheim and Waterloo if only
the two Englands could have parted from each other in kindness
and in peace; if our statesmen could have had the wisdom to
say to the Americans generously and at the right season, "You
are Englishmen like ourselves: be, for your own happiness and
our honor, like ourselves, a nation"? But English statesmen, with
all their greatness, have seldom known how to anticipate neces-
sity; too often the sentence of history on their policy has been
that it was wise, just, and generous, but "too late. " Too often
have they waited for the teaching of disaster. Time will heal
this, like other wounds. In signing away his own empire over
America, George III. did not sign away the empire of English
liberty, of English law, of English literature, of English religion,
of English blood, or of the English tongue. But though the
wound will heal,-and that it may heal, ought to be the earnest.
desire of the whole English name,—history can never cancel the
fatal page which robs England of half the glory and half the
happiness of being the mother of a great nation.


## p. 13556 (#370) ##########################################

13556
SYDNEY SMITH
SYDNEY SMITH
(1771-1845)
YDNEY SMITH'S reputation as an English wit is solid,—if that
word can be applied to so volatile a quality. But wit that
endures generally implies other characteristics behind it;
and Sydney Smith is no exception. He was a man of great intellect;
an advanced thinker on politics, philosophy, and religion, and one of
the most potent and salutary influences of his day in England. His
brilliant social traits should not obscure this fact. Naturally, how-
ever, it is the sparkling bon-mot that is easiest remembered. He had
the art, as had few men of his time, of
saying a deep or pregnant thing in a light
way.
He was the son of an English country
gentleman of marked eccentricity of charac-
ter, and was born at Woodford, Essex, June
3d, 1771.
He went to Winchester school;
then to Oxford, where he was a Fellow in
1792. A brief residence in Normandy gave
him a command of the French language.
His subsequent career was that of a tal-
ented and ambitious cleric in the Church
of England. It is significant that the bar,
not the pulpit, was his choice for a pro-
fession: it is easy to see that he would
have been successful in the former calling. In 1794 he became
curate of a remote parish on Salisbury Plains; and in 1796 went
to Edinburgh, where he officiated for five years at an Episcopal
chapel. It was during this Edinburgh residence that he formed
the intimacy with Brougham, Jeffrey, and other clever young liter-
ary men, which resulted in 1802 in the foundation of the Edin-
burgh Review, with Sydney Smith as chief editor. He contributed
seven articles to the first number, and kept up his connection
with the magazine as a contributor for a quarter of a century. The
position taken by this famous review was largely due to the impress
given to it by Sydney Smith. From Edinburgh he went to Lon-
don, and was a popular preacher there until 1806, when he was given
the Yorkshire living of Foston-le-Clay; in 1809 he received that of



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