measure of light,-if I know aught of myself, and my duties and destination, it is to the study of your writings, more than to any other circumstance, that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always thank in reverence, with the feeling of a Disciple to his Master, nay as a son to his Spiritual Father. This is no idle compliment."

We are so little accustomed to courtly language in Carlyle's mouth, that we require his own assertion to support the sincerity of his claim for spiritual affiliation. This letter drew from Goethe a hasty acknowledgment, and, later, a warm commendation, which must have presented Carlyle with a powerful stimulus to further work. Along with this Goethe propounds some "general considerations," "long cherished in silence, and stirred up afresh' by the books Carlyle had sent him, which, when with some difficulty reduced to their lowest terms, amount to a project for effecting universal peace by a free interchange of translated literature-a gospel to which we will all cheerfully subscribe, if backed up by sound copyright laws and assurances of adequate remuneration to authors. Some pretty little presents accompany this note; and to us the frequent interchange of these cadeaux are the most natural features in an intercourse which is only too apt to seem pedagogic on the one side, and court-like on the other.

In 1828 Carlyle was a candidate for the Chair of Moral Philosophy in St Andrews University, and begged Goethe to support him with a testimonial. Hence arose the only amusing incident which is recorded in this volume. Goethe

does indeed bear warm testimony to the "single-heartedness, purity, effect, and influence" of Carlyle; but he does not miss the oppor

tunity of letting loose a HighDutch ethical hurricane, which, had not some kindly deity diverted on its course across the North Sea, must have burst upon St Andrews with the appalling force of a typhoon. The testimonial arrived too late; Carlyle was disappointed; and we think both he and St Andrews were to be congratulated on the result. But as a rule, the Carlyle-Goethe correspondence keeps within the easy and natural bounds of friendly letters,-kindly expressions of interest in, and little acts of assistance towards, each other's work and projects. In 1831, Carlyle, then engaged on 'Sartor Resartus,' drops a hint to his Weimar patron of this newest, and as yet most original, of his ventures. But "alas! it is not, after all, a Picture that I am painting; it is but a half-reckless casting of the brush, with its many frustrated colours, against the canvas: whether it will make good Foam is still a venture." A month after, August 1831, Carlyle is in London, "where the confusion in which I and all things are carried round must be my excuse for brevity, and almost unintelligibility. Often do I recall to myself the saying of poor Panthalis in 'Helena- 'the soulconfusing spell of the Thessalian Hag' and feel as if I too were a shade; for, in truth, this London life looks more like a Mephistopheles' Walpurgis Night than a real Heaven-encircled day, where God's kind sun is shining peaceably on industrious men."

This was the last letter which Goethe was to receive from his Scots disciple. In it Carlyle again reiterates his obligations to the Master.

"Never," he writes, was letter more gladly welcomed: it reached us in the calm summer twilight, and was itself so calm and pure, even like the

summer evening with mild sun-rays and the sheen of an everlasting morning already peering through! Endless gratitude I owe you, for it is by you that I have learned what worth there is in man for his brother man; and how the 'open secret,' though most are blind to it, is still open for whoso hath an eye."

Even if we are unable to shake ourselves free from the feeling that this is to a considerable extent the language of courtship, we must still regard the intercourse between Carlyle and Goethe, as revealed in these letters, as among the most genial episodes of a life in which softening tints are sadly wanting. And it must be recorded that Carlyle never wavered from his loyalty to Goethe. The Essay' on his death indicates real feeling, and is written in too deep lines to have either been dictated by mere enthusiasm, or to have been simply a response to the general outburst of admiring grief which the news of

the poet's departure called forth all over the world of letters. Had personal intercourse succeeded or supplemented the epistolary friendship, would the Goethe-Carlyle alliance have come down to us thus without a flaw to impair its lustre? We see reasonable grounds for doubting it. Each was to the other merely a voice, pleasant and animating, and there was none of that friction which the encounter of two strong individualities rarely fails to engender. As it happened, the interchange of friendship was evidently gratifying to Goethe's last years; it was eminently useful to Carlyle; and their letters are pleasant to the reader, as softening on the one side the imputation of selfishness that, with not insufficient reasons, has been ascribed to Goethe, and as brightening on the other a life that has been already too much overlaid by darker touches.

It is a curious fact that the most unmistakable mark of himself which it appears likely that Mr Bright will leave behind him on our Statute - book is to be found in the Army Act. Up to the year 1867 the preamble of the Mutiny Act had always declared that the purpose for which the army was maintained was "the safety of the United Kingdom, the defence of the possessions of her Majesty's crown, and the preservation of the balance of power in Europe."

But when Mr Bright became a Cabinet Minister in Mr Gladstone's Administration, the words referring to the "balance of power in Europe" were, at his instance, dropped out; and as the preamble to the annual Act now stands, our army exists only for "the safety of the United Kingdom and the defence of the possessions of her Majesty's crown.

As a rule, abstract questions, such for instance as the purposes for which we maintain armed forces at all, are not in England thrashed out. A writer here or there propounds a theory which obtains a certain amount of acceptance; and a few years later one finds it taken for granted by the careless and the thoughtless that certain assumptions, on which no adequate Areopagus has ever decided, are to be accepted for the future as the primary data of all discussion. Then some fine morning a Cabinet Minister gives practical effect to the abstract discussion, and we discover that the reasonings, which appeared to be too little serious to need the attention of men absorbed by everyday work, have had the most momentous effect, on practi

cal politics at least, if not on business and life.

Mr Bright, then, has duly dismissed to the shades the wicked dream of our great statesmen of the past, that it was not for the wellbeing of England that any one Power on the Continent should assume a position so preponderating that it could dictate tyrannically to all its neighbours. History would appear to confirm the view that for any State to acquire, as Spain did under Charles and Philip, or France did under Louis XIV. and Napoleon, or as Russia did under Nicholas, a position of overweening power, is a matter dangerously affecting the liberties of nations. In former days our statesmen thought that, for the safety of England herself, she ought to be ready to join hands with other nations in defending the liberties of Europe. They believed that nations, like individuals, have their duties as well as their rights, and that the neglect of one, or carelessness in regard to the other, is sure, sooner or later, to meet with punishment. They embodied these ideas in the phrase, "the balance of power in Europe." It may or may not have been a happy one. We have no anxiety to see it restored to the preamble of the Army Act. Still it had its advantages. It avoided all terms of pharisaical assumption, yet it declared to other nations our readiness to play some other than a purely selfish part. It naturally made them ready to meet us on the do ut des principle-the principle, that is, of mutual co-operation for national independence. But what we cannot help noting with some amusement is the quaint

humour with which, in these matters, Time brings his revenges. Here, in the month of June 1887, we have a writer of the extremest Radical school concluding a series of articles-on what? Well, he says they are on "The Position of European Politics." But we call Mr Bright himself to witness that we are setting down nought in malice, -"the trail of the serpent is over them all." "The balance of power in Europe " is the subject which this very able writer finds himself at every turn compelled to deal with. Dismissed from the preamble of the Mutiny Act, it forces itself into practical politics from the moment politics cease to be insular-that is, from the moment that, in guiding the helm of the State, the pilot does not sleep, and, sleeping, dream that he can escape all storms because he sees none that are rising.

We have this month from three distinct quarters an earnest demand that the country shall really make up its mind for what purposes it maintains its military forces, and what those forces are expected to do. Differing on nearly every other subject, the Fortnightly Reviewer and the Adjutant-General of the Army are agreed in this, that it is utterly impossible that we can have our armed forces on a satisfactory footing until some authoritative body determines what we ought to expect from them. In so far as Sir James Fitz-James Stephen's Commission has had opportunity, it has earnestly pressed upon us the same sound principle.

It has been noticed already by some of those who have criticised the work of the Fortnightly Reviewer, that he has strangely ignored the conditions under which modern armies engage; and that, whether his statistical calculations of numerical force be accurate or

not, his balance is not a true balance, because he treats the value of a soldier as a quantity absolutely independent of all his fighting qualities and national characteristics. Yet Napoleon was in the habit of reckoning the elements of the forces with which he dealt, for practical purposes and as a matter of business, on the principle that a man of one nationality might be taken as the equivalent of so many more of another. Whatever was the case in his day, it is perfectly certain that in ours a mass of men incapable of acting so as effectively to use modern arms becomes simply a broader target for shot as its numbers increase. Moreover, the writer throughout treats force, latent somewhere or other in a country, as though that could be reckoned as the actually available fighting - power on the battle-field. He laughs, not with

out

some justice, in his latest article that on England-at Mr Howard Vincent for speaking of the ultimate forces of the British empire as 2,250,000 men, "without telling us anything of the time that it would take to place even a tenth of this force in line near London." Yet in the 'Fortnightly' article on Russia, he himself does precisely the same thing as regards the Russian forces. He treats the vast numbers of armed Russians available somewhere or other among the great deserts and mountains and roadless morasses of Russia, as though they had all to be reckoned with on the frontiers of Germany and Austria whenever it pleased the Tzar to issue his fiat that they should move thither. He complains that those who dispute the accuracy of the picture he has drawn of the colossus of the north do not appreciate the improvement that has

taken place in the Russian army since the Turkish war of 1877-78, yet he utterly fails to show how the weaknesses which then existed have been remedied. He gives no hint that he is aware how amazing was the weakness which Russia actually displayed in the Turkish campaign; and indeed in some parts of his latest article, when he is having his wicked will of the "Jingoes," a safe pastime always for a Radical politician in distress, -he demonstrates absolutely that he either does not know it, or finds it convenient for the purposes of his argument to suppress

the fact.

Holding, therefore, with the Fortnightly Reviewer, Sir James Fitz-James Stephen's Commission, and the Adjutant-General, that it is of vital consequence for us to determine in military matters "what we want," what we want it for, and whether we can afford to pay for it, we propose, in a series of articles, to discuss the military relations of the great Powers of the Continent at the present moment, and how far those relations affect our own

military power. We propose to take up those precise aspects of the question which have been altogether ignored by the Reviewer. We purpose not only to study the armed forces of the Continent, as they exist on paper, as well as our own, but we intend further to take account of the medium in which those forces have neces

sarily to interact. That is to say, we mean to allow for the influence of those conditions of modern warfare, conformity to the laws of which determines what the effective fighting-power of nations really is, almost as much as any numerical estimate of their fight ing men can possibly determine it. We are convinced that the

whole tendency of the articles which have dealt with the "Position of Modern Politics" has been to put these matters in a false light. We are sure that their writer would have us believe that England is weak where she is strong, and strong where she is weak, and that he has misjudged the other forces among which her power has to act. In particular, as regards Russia, he has, as we believe, put her strength for weakness, and her weakness for strength. He has not taken account of the effect upon the position of England in Europe of the rise of the new power Italy, whose army and whose politics he has in many respects most admirably described. many most important respects misjudged the strength of Austria, of Germany, and of France. In almost every instance, not from an inaccurate statement of bare facts, so far as he has given them, but from assumptions radically false, he has tended to lead our statesmen astray. We therefore look upon it as a duty, for the sake of our national future, to endeavour, whilst there is yet time, to remove the false impressions which have been produced on the minds of men by these attractive papers.

He has in

For the most part, we shall state our own convictions, and the grounds on which they are based. We shall not weary our readers with lengthy controversy. Indeed we shall have little need to do so. The writer, as a rule, deals only in dogmatic assertion on military matters. He is sure, for instance, that the French frontier and the Russian frontier against Germany are much stronger than the German against either. He gives no grounds for his assertion, and he does not describe the character of the frontiers. We hope to be able