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"pressing hard upon the limits of subsistence," who contrive to obtain the bare necessaries of life at the cost of unremitting labour. Now upon this class, comprising as it probably does the great majority of the "working classes," any very considerable increase of taxation falls with disastrous and terrible effect. It is indubitable that any measure by which the national expenditure is largely increased makes, especially in this country, to many the difference between bare subsistence and destitution, to many more the difference between tolerable comfort and bare subsistence. It is a fact from which there is no escape. Either in the enhanced price of the commodities which they consume, or, if the additional taxation is so adjusted as to fall in the first instance upon the richer classes, in a reduction of the wages of labour consequent on the diminution of the fund available for its employment, those to whom the option is given of work, the workhouse, or starvation, will bitterly feel the change; and, before the nation determines to take a step which is not required of it, and largely to increase its expenditure for the purpose of intervention on behalf of others, it is bound to consider whether it has a right to inflict such an amount of suffering upon its own poor. If the measure

were

demanded by international justice-that is, by the duty which a state owes to the general community-the case would be different. But no such demand (as we have seen) is made. The question is one not of justice, but of generosity of self-sacrifice not for imperative duty, but for gratuitous benevolence--an object for which, it may safely be said, no nation has a right to inflict acute misery upon a large part of its population.

From these considerations it seems to follow that any nation in which, as in this country, there is a class of any numerical importance which is habitually on the verge of poverty, ought to abstain from all interference in international transactions not concerning itself which involves any material ad

dition to its fiscal burdens. If, on the other hand, it can intervene, with a probability of success, and without any such addition to its expenditure, there is no objection, on the score of a due regard for its own welfare, to intervention; and the self-sacrifice which such an act involved would then be laudable. Such, for instance, might be the case where the nation against which the intervention was directed was greatly inferior in military strength, or where, by obtaining the assistance of other nations, the intervening state could bring against it a great superiority of force. It must be borne in mind, too, that the increase of expenditure objected to is such an increase as would seriously affect the indigent classes, and that, although every addition to taxation must in some degree affect them, it is only by a very large and decided addition to it that they can be materially injured.

A mere literal fulfilment, however, of the condition here insisted on would not be sufficient. For a nation may be able to take up arms for the purpose of intervention without any addition to its expenditure, simply because it is in the habit of supporting large armaments in order that it may be in a condition to interfere whenever it pleases in the disputes of foreign states. For the due observance of the rule it is necessary that the force to be employed should not be considerably more expensive than that which the nation is compelled to maintain for the defence of its own territory and the protection of its own rights and interests. The maintenance of large armaments with a view to contingencies not affecting the national interests is in itself a violation of the rule. Thus, in order to justify the late intervention of France on behalf of Italy, it ought to be shown not only that she made for the purpose no such addition to her military establishments as added largely to her expenditure, but that those establishments were not habitually more costly than they would have been but for her general practice of interfering in quarrels

in which she is not concerned.

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It appears, then, that, in order to determine whether, in any given transaction of the class in which (as we have found in reply to the first question) the mere right" of intervention exists, it ought, either singly or with other powers, to intervene, a nation has to consider, first, with reference to the general interest, whether its intervention would not occasion an amount of violence and bloodshed such as would be a greater evil than the wrongdoing which it is intended to prevent; and, secondly, with reference to its own interest, whether the proceeding would not involve so great an increase of taxation as would bring serious calamity upon a large number of its people. If these questions can be satisfactorily answered, intervention becomes in every such instance not only a right, but a duty.

In the preceding observations an attempt has been made to arrive at some intelligible and rational rule by which a nation may be guided in any question of armed interposition in international or civil dissensions which do not concern itself. It would seem, indeed, that in this country the difficulty has been summarily solved by the determination to abstain absolutely from all such interference. But, as this determination, in so far as it is not the product of mere selfishness, appears to rest on a very vague and indefinite foundation, it can scarcely be expected to be permanent. In the meantime, there is another kind of intervention, which appears to be tolerated by public opinion, and which, for want of a better term equally concise, may be called "moral intervention;" that is, interposition in the way of censure, protest, or remonstrance. This species of interference is the subject of much controversy. Some persons consider that a nation may properly and laudably exercise it in all instances of conduct on the part of one foreign state towards another, or of one party in the same state towards another party in it, of which that nation disapproves. Others are of opinion that such interposition ought

never to take place unless where the interposing state is prepared to follow up its remonstrances by war. Neither the one nor the other of these opinions seems to be founded in reason. With respect to the first, we have seen that it is only in a certain class of international dissensions, which it was the object of the first of the questions above proposed to define, that any state can properly claim to pass judgment, while in civil dissensions, properly so called, it has no right to pass judgment at all; and, on on the other hand, there seems no reason why it should abstain from expressing its opinion merely on the ground that, from considerations of its own and of the general interest, it would not be justified. in a declaration or a menace of war. The only reasonable ground (as it would seem) on which such an expression of opinion could be considered inexpedient is, that it would be useless. But this is certainly far from being the case. The instances in which judgment would be given are those in which some generally admitted rule of public law, or some broad and elementary principle of justice, has been unquestionably violated; and in these there can be no doubt that the influence of public opinion in other countries operates with a highly deterrent effect upon wrongdoers, or that a firm and temperate remonstrance on the part of any influential state may have the best effect, if not in preventing or mitigating the wrong, at least in preventing its recurrence. In evidence of this, it is sufficient to point to the circumstances attending the French occupation of Rome; in which the wrong done was not only clear to all rightminded persons, but the wrong done, and the effect of public opinion in ultimately requiring its discontinuance, have recently been admitted by the perpetrator himself. The error so frequently committed by nations is not in protesting where they will not strike, but in protesting where they have no right to protest; that is, in cases not belonging to the category of those in which only they are entitled to pronounce an opinion. Upon the mischievous character of such

proceedings there is no need to dwell. If they happen to be based on an erroneous judgment, they are, of course, directly productive of evil. If not, the nation. whose conduct is condemned, firmly believing, and not without some reason, in the justice of its own cause, and at the same time feeling that, even if it were in the wrong, the dispute is not one on which its censor has a right to decide, rejects them with indignation or with ridicule, and the entente cordiale between the two countries is endangered, to the prejudice of the cause of peace; while, as regards the repetition of the same conduct by the same or any other nation,

such remonstrances are wholly without preventive influence.

"Intervention" has here been treated of in the more usual and limited sense of the term, in which it does not include either interposition for the purpose of protecting any rights or interests of the interposing state, or any action taken by a nation on account of the treatment of its own subjects in another. Such transactions fall within the scope of other branches of the general inquiry as to the circumstances under which a nation is justified in making or in threatening war.

DEAD MEN WHOM I HAVE KNOWN; OR, RECOLLECTIONS OF THREE CITIES.

BY THE EDITOR.

REMINISCENCES OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY-PROFESSORS AND
DEBATING SOCIETIES.

OFF one of the main streets in the Old
Town of Edinburgh, at a spot where
you would not be apt to look for it, lies
the large block of building occupied
by Edinburgh University. It is a

modern structure in the Græco-Italian style, erected at very great cost between 1789 and 1834, in lieu of the older edifices which had served for the University from its foundation by James VI. in 1582. Entering from the street by a portico with Doric columns, you find yourself in a spacious, cold, grey, quadrangle, fringed round with a raised and balustraded stone walk, whence at various points doors and flights of steps give access to the library, the museums, and the class-rooms of the four Faculties of Theology, Law, Medicine, and the Arts.

Into this quadrangle flock at the beginning of every November the students, to the number in late years of from 1,200 to 1,500 in all, who are then to commence, in one or other of the Faculties, their annual five months of attendance on the classes. For the

Scottish Universities differ from the English in this, that, whereas the English have three terms of study in the year, extending from October to June, the Scottish crush the entire work of the year (save that there are certain special summer-courses) into the five winter months between the beginning of November and the beginning of April. Of the students who thus every November appear in the University quadrangle, making it once more. busy after its unearthly summer quiet, by far the greatest proportion are of that Faculty of Arts which is preliminary to all the three professions in common. Next in number are the students of medicine; then those of law; and the students of theology are much the fewest. The Professors in each faculty are in approximate, but not exact, proportion to its relative number of students. There are now 4 Professors in Theology, 6 in Law, 14 in Medicine, and 12 in Arts, making a total teaching body of 36 Professors, in

addition to the Principal. The students in each faculty are gathered from far and wide. A considerable nucleus in each consists of Edinburgh natives or residents. Of the rest many are from other parts of Scotland; but a goodly proportion are from England, Ireland, and the Colonies. There is no means of discriminating the students of the different faculties from each other, so long as they are wending their way to the college portico from the surrounding streets, unless it be by the comparative juvenility of most of the students of Arts, and by those minute physiognomic differences which enable an expert to distinguish a jolly young medical from a prematurely-sharp leguleian, and either from the solemn dedicatee to divinity. Nor, indeed, is there any means in Edinburgh of distinguishing between Town and Gown in the streets at all. The taste of modern Athens has disdained, or long discarded, any academic costume for the students. While in Oxford or Cambridge, the townsmen, awed by the constant stream of caps and gowns, must feel themselves but as Vaisyas and Sudras in a city of the Brahmins, and while in all the Scottish University-towns, except Edinburgh, the streets in winter days are made picturesque by the far-seen bits of scarlet on the backs of the students of Arts, in Edinburgh you might walk. about the streets all day without knowing that there was a student in it.

On the whole, to a stranger-student from any other part of Scotland the conditions of Edinburgh University, on his first arrival, and for some time afterwards, do seem unsocial. It is not only that the students do not reside in the University, meet at no common table, live in no sets of chambers built for the purpose, but are scattered all over the town, where they will and how they will, in lodgings or with relatives. In this the University of Edinburgh does not differ from the other Scottish Universities. Nor does the absence of academic costume contribute much to the feeling, though it may contribute somewhat. It is partly the numerousness of the

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students, preventing them from ever seeing themselves all together, and obliging their dispersion into classes, meeting simultaneously and independently at all sorts of hours; and partly, I think, it is the chill elegance of the quadrangle itself. For a strangerstudent, after a walk in a dull November morning through a city all otherwise strange, to arrive for the first time in this quadrangle, with its columns, its balustraded stone-walk, and its doors leading he knows not whither, is perhaps a unique experience of inquisitiveness struggling with loneliness. feels that he is committed to a mode of life of which the possibilities are undiscerned, and, in retrudging his way through the streets, thinking of it all, he wonders what is to come of it. is to come of it! There is to come of it, if all goes well, and the connexion with the University lasts long enough, a love for the University, and a pride in having belonged to it, as great as any man can feel anywhere for the place where he has been educated. Not even the affection of Oxford and Cambridge men for their universities, or for the particular colleges where they had rooms on well-remembered stairs, can exceed that which the alumni of Edinburgh University bear to it, though their recollections of it are not of resi dence within its walls, but chiefly of attendance on their appointed classes in it for three or four consecutive winters. For the University was not only the building, but the whole student-life of which the building was the centre. The walks and talks with fellowstudents all over the city and about its suburbs, no less than the solitary readings and ruminations of individual students at their firesides, were part of the University, and had their occasion and inspiration from within its walls. And within the walls themselves what memorable things happened! What enthusiasms swept round the cold quadrangle, what glorious scenes there were in its class-rooms, what varied excitement was there communicated, what friendships were formed, what breaks there

were into the woods and forests of knowledge, showing vistas along which it might be a delight to career throughout a long future, till only the sunset of life should close in the enchantment!

Much of the peculiar power and distinction of the Edinburgh University has consisted in its having generally had among its professors contemporaneously two or three men not merely of admirable working ability, but of exceptional genius or greatness. The professorial system, on which this, like the other Scottish Universities, is constituted, certainly has its drawbacks. In these modern times, when the whole encyclopædia of knowledge, in every department, is accessible in books, colleges and universities, it may be plausibly argued, are either of no use, or are of use only in so far as they organize the business of private reading, promote it, direct it, make it more accurate and exquisite, and surround it with splendid moral and sentimental accompaniments. To some extent, in the English Universities, they have conformed to this notion of the universities as a means for organizing, aiding, and drilling private perseverance in reading. They speak there of reading mathematics, reading physics, reading chemistry, reading political economy. The phrase, in this generalized sense, is unknown in Scotland. Pinkerton's complaint, made seventy years ago, that his countrymen, with plenty of natural ingenuity, were unable to turn it to substantial account for lack of a sufficient nutriment of learning, and were often whirling their ingenuity elaborately in vacuo, is true in a great measure yet. Connected with this deficiency, partly as cause, and partly as effect, is that professorial system in the Scottish universities according to which knowledge in the great subjects of liberal study is supposed to be acquired by listening to courses of lectures on those subjects, prepared and delivered by men who have made them especially their own. Aware of the defects of this professorial method, the Scottish Universities have recently been taking pains to remedy them, not only by an increased use of that spur of examina

tions of which there has been so general an application of late throughout the country, but also by introducing as much of the tutorial method as possible in aid of the professorial. And yet, on the other hand, no one whose experience is wide enough to enable him fully to appreciate the merits of both methods but will maintain the enormous superiority, in certain circumstances, and for certain effects, of the professorial over the tutorial. It is not only that the majority of young men will not read and do not read, and that it is at least something if these are physically detained for a session or two in a room where certain orders of notions are kept sounding in the air, and where, unless they are deaf, they must imbibe something of them. In addition to this there is the fact that certain subjects-they are those, I think, which do not consist so much of a perpetually increasing accumulation of matter as of a moving orb of ideas, undergoing internal changes do admit of being more effectively learnt, with something like symmetry and completeness, from competent oral exposition to large numbers at once than from reading under tutorial superintendence. But, whether in these subjects or in any others, the grand advantage of the professorial system lies in the chance it affords of the appearance of men of great intellectual power in a position, relatively to the rising generation, of the utmost conceivable influence. Nowhere is there such an action and reaction of mind, such a kindling and maintenance of high intellectual enthusiasm, as in a university class-room where a teacher whose heart is in his work sees day after day before him a crowded audience of the same youths on the same benches, eager to listen, and to carry away what they can in their note-books. Nowhere is a man more likely to be roused himself by the interest of his subject, and nowhere are the conditions so favourable for the expeditious and permanent conveyance, not only of his doctrines, but of the whole image of himself into other minds. Whenever, accordingly, it does chance that men of exceptionally powerful

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