The property in the asylum is that either the contractors and the contract have now or the patients are being gone back to the nuns-Sisters starved. Which is it? Per haps both." Dr Douglas lived on at Quebec till 1875; he then consented to accompany his son to the United States. He had spent half a century in Quebec; he lived for eleven years longer in Phoenixville Pennsylvania, and in New York. Unsuccessful mining speculations had swallowed up whatever money he had accumulated, but we are glad to hear from his son of Charity, and the payment per head has been actually reduced from what it was in 1845. The result of such a vicious system is-nay, must be-that the contractors have to consider economy first of all, to put it before the comfort and wellbeing of the patients, and to make it impossible for them to introduce improvements which would tend to ameliorate their condition. "Under the present contract that "he left all care with system, whose highest recommendation is that the cost to Quebec Province per head is less than is expended on the insane by any other civilised community in the world, the only conclusion to be drawn his shattered fortune behind him in Canada, and the last years of his life were peaceful and happy." He rests in the cemetery at Mount Hermon, Quebec, which he was instrumental in creating. MUSINGS - SIR ROBERT MORIER-JOWETT AND ARISTOTLE -AT BERLIN ROBERT BURNETT MORIER, whose 'Memoirs and Letters '1 have been most skilfully edited by Mrs Rosslyn Wemyss, was destined to diplomacy from his cradle. The immortal creator of Hajji Baba was his uncle; his father was for many years Minister-Plenipotentiary to the Swiss Confederation; and long before Robert Morier was old enough to go to Oxford he was familiar with the mysteries of foreign policy, an interested frequenter of the Chanceries of Europe. Thus it was his good fortune to begin life with three languages and a knowledge of foreign countries, which for a young Englishman is the easiest key to unlock a knowledge of his own. Only for a moment did he waver in his allegiance to his ordained profession. An enthusiasm for 'Coningsby,' which he read at eighteen, turned his thoughts to the bar and the House of Commons. His mother speedily cooled his ardour for the author of 'Coningsby,' who, said she, "has the reputation of being an unworthy member of Young England," and after an interval of a few months he was 66 POPULAR able to declare that his "returning love for diplomacy grows warmer every day." He recognised that the age of rotten burghs was over, and that nothing could "be more noble than asserting one's country's high character before the astonished eyes of foreigners." He entered Oxford, therefore, with his mind made up, and he devoted the years of his sojourn there to the study of Humane Letters, the best preparation for the duty which was before him, of lying abroad in the service of his King. Nor did he ever underrate the debt which he owed to his University. He was not of those who take the learning that Oxford has to give and then complain that she did not teach him something else. "If I take stock of what Oxford did for me," he wrote to Jowett thirty years after he had taken his degree, "I can safely say it made me personally acquainted with one Jowett, one Thucydides, and one Aristotle. Number 1, thank God, has never parted from me, nor I from him. Number 3 did a deal for me for many years afterwards, and even to the present day. 1 Memoirs and Letters of the Right Hon. Sir Robert Morier, G. C.B., from 1826 to 1876. By his Daughter, Mrs Rosslyn Wemyss. 2 vols. London: Arnold. In these days of total moral anarchy it is well worth considering what that old ethical discipline of the unreformed Oxford schools did for the generations it educated. . . . Say what you will, it is incalculable what a body of ethical doctrine, assimilated partly as dogma and partly as science so as to become a very part of one for the rest of one's life, will do for a man. I very much doubt if speculations on the solar spectrum and the microscopic investigation of protoplasm will do as much. Number 2 has always haunted me as the poire pour la soif, that I should reserve for the day that I should really be called upon to do public work, having a dim but deep recollection of the concentrated political wisdom which it contained." After all, Aristotle and Thucydides are not bad sources for a diplomatist, and Morier was certainly wiser to drink at those fountains of wisdom than at the stagnant pools of ancient charters and forgotten treaties. Indeed, he neglected none of the benefits which Oxford has to bestow. He threw himself with all his vigour into the activities of the place. We find him moving at the Union "that the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Court of Rome is peremptorily called for by the present state of politics in Europe," reading with Temple in Oxford and at Bridlington Quay, forming a friendship with Stanley which endured with their lives, and all the while keeping up a keen are interest in the history of Europe. The year of universal revolution and disquietude could not pass him idly by, and the Easter of 1848 found him in Paris with Jowett and Stanley. He expresses his enthusiasm at the prospect with a boyish lack of restraint. "The extraordinary piece of good fortune," he writes, "which will thus throw me on intimate terms during the interesting period of their investigation of novæ res with the two very men whose acquaintance I most coveted, and who certainly the two greatest men of the age, and with whom the intercourse of five days would be equal to ten centuries of coaching, you may suppose I was not so great a fool as to throw away. It has all been settled in so inconceivably short a space of time, in fact, only ten minutes ago, that it was impossible for me to let you know, as we are off in half an hour, and intend to be in Paris on Sunday night." And yet Morier had more to teach Jowett and Stanley of Paris and revolution than he could learn of them, and no doubt they were conscious of their advantage in his companionship. Stanley, at any rate, has left & vivid sketch of Morier, "a Balliol undergraduate of gigantic size, who talks French better than English, is to wear a blouse and to go about disguised to the clubs." During Morier's stay at Oxford his father had been recalled from Berne by Lord Palmerston in circumstances of his constant companion, he holds our interest without difficulty. His Memoirs, in brief, might be described as The Compleat Diplomatist, or the Politician Displayed; and we can imagine no better introduction to the tangled politics of Europe than these well-edited volumes. peculiar injustice, and David Morier rightly deemed it inconsistent with his sense of honour to demand a nomination for his son in the diplomatic service. Robert Morier was compelled, therefore, to waste some years in the office of the Privy Council; and it was not until Lord Clarendon went to the Foreign Office in It was levelled as a reproach 1852, that Morier was ap- against Morier, by those who pointed an unpaid attaché at thwarted his advancement, that Vienna. Thus he began the he was obsessed with a fixed real work of his life at a idea. For many years he was later age than falls to the haunted by the thought of a lot of most, though it must friendship, fairly and justly be remembered, in compensa- cemented, between Germany tion, that he set out with and England. The hope of so profound a knowledge of such a friendship, the best foreign affairs as few am- guarantee as he thought of bassadors may boast, even at European peace, held his the end of their careers. The dreams and waking thoughts. long years spent abroad im- From the moment that he was mediately bore fruit. For him transferred, in 1858, to Berlin, no period of probation was he worked to this end and with necessary. "For better or this purpose. He went to worse, politics are what I Berlin under what might have live for," he said many years seemed the best auspices. His afterwards; and he threw him- knowledge of Germany was self into them with all the wide and deep. His friends enthusiasm of youth. So it in the country were many and is that, from the moment highly placed. Such a master when he was appointed to of diplomatic experience as Vienna, Mrs Wemyss' book Stockmar took "an extraordiceases to be a biography, and nary fancy" to him, called him becomes a collection of brilliant "his adopted son," and reState Papers. To whomever garded him for the last eight Morier wrote henceforth, he years of his life as "his most wrote as a diplomatist. trusted and intimate friend." letters to the most intimate Above all, he went to Berlin friends differ little from his at the urgent rehest of Prince despatches to Foreign Ministers. Albert, who wished him to be He speaks as seldom of himself the adviser of Prince Frederick as of the arts. It is the fate William of Prussia and his of nations that engrosses him; Princess. Moreover, he had a and as his energy never perfect faith in the triumph of flagged, as his courage was a free Constitution, which he unchecked even by the gout, believed imminent. His faith VOL. CXCI.-NO. MCLV. His H was doomed to disappointment. The very advantages which he believed would attend him in Berlin were turned against him. His friendship with the Crown Prince aroused active and implacable jealousies. Whatever was said or done by either of them was instantly suspected. From the very first Bismarck was his powerful and unscrupulous foe, and though in 1858 none could foresee the rapid rise of Bismarck to omnipotence, it was soon evident that Morier would suffer defeat in the unequal combat. Morier's dislike of Bismarck is intelligible enough. The champion of Liberalism could not be expected to love the man of blood and iron. But Morier did not merely dislike Bismarck: he underrated him. Judging from his point of view, he was right to denounce him as "one of the most sinister figures that has ever been painted on the canvas of history." That is a perfectly intelligible opinion. When he speaks of "the mere ephemeral symptoms of Bismarckism and the like," or tells Stanley that Bismarck is "a straw in the current of opinion," we cannot help thinking that the wish fathered the thought. Our knowledge of Bismarck and his aims is drawn from sources which were inaccessible to Morier. We are none the less surprised that he, with his genius for affairs and his keen insight into the motives of men, should have looked upon Bismarck, sometimes at any rate, as a politician without a plan. The reasons why the two should have hated one another are evident, as we have said. Morier's friendship with Prince Frederick William was of itself enough to incur the Minister's displeasure. And then, while the one was a champion of absolute, the other was a champion of constitutional government. "Let the military question be solved as the King and Bismarck desire," wrote Morier in 1863, "and Prussia falls out of the ranks of Constitutional States and returns to the category_of enlightened despotisms. Let it be solved as the country and the Chamber wish, and Prussia exchanges her formal Constitutionalism for a bond fide popular government." If the King and Bismarck had not triumphed, the German Empire would not hold the place which to-day it holds in Europe and the world. This Morier did not foresee. He was an idealist, who looked forward to a German future "with a body created worthy of the soul, of which Goethe, Schiller, and Kant were but the scintillations." Bismarck, on the other hand, was a practical pupil of Machiavelli, who believed that the end always justified the means, and that a statesman's business was not to illustrate a theory of government, but to ensure victory. Some years after, Morier himself had a clearer vision of Bismarck's ambition. "I shall not, I think, be doing Bismarck an injustice," he wrote, "if I affirm that politics present themselves to him less in the abstract than in the concrete ; |