Maybe but for him the mere element of disorder which at first attended the great and necessary Reform movement would have buried that movement under its own débris. All this it seems to us that Sir Herbert Maxwell has failed to acknowledge. He does not think that it was a mistake to carry Catholic Emancipation. He does not think that it would have been a good thing for England if the mere rick-burners, farm-looters, and machinery-destroyers had triumphed. He cannot quite think that the sober selfrestraint which Wellington imposed upon his unwilling followers in the presence of the early Reform cabinets was an unnecessary service to England. He cannot quite think that the establishment of the best police force in Europe, for the greatest city in the world, was inefficient service. Yet he thoroughly understands that it was the accumulated force of opposition to these acts that produced the majority against Wellington, and he thinks that the fact that there was such a majority is bad for his reputation.'

If our view of the facts be right, he has altogether underestimated Wellington's share in the creation of the London police. It is quite true that the names of 'peelers and bobbies' were popularly given to the police because Sir Robert Peel had been the great exponent of the police measure before the House of Commons; but Sir Herbert does not record the fact that the mob knew so well who was the man that devised the measure that broke the power of disorder in London, that they stoned Wellington expressly as its author when he was approaching Palace Yard, and that he was then with difficulty rescued out of their hands. Sir Herbert has not recorded, what was nevertheless the fact, that the police measure which Wellington had introduced when he was Secretary in Ireland, all the details of which he himself worked out, was the original model on which the London police was founded. Whatever Wellington's share might have been in the drawing up of the scheme for the London police which he had undoubtedly proposed, the fact that Sir Robert Peel had to defend the measure in the House of Commons would necessarily make him appear as its ostensible author. It is possible, certainly, that all records of the discussions between the two ministers which preceded the introduction of the measure may have been so completely lost that there is now no possibility of recovering them. Believing firmly, as we do, that of the two minds, the Duke of Wellington's and Sir Robert Peel's, it is incomparably more probable that a great measure of organisation of this

kind would be the work rather of the Duke than of Peel, we had always looked to the biographer who was to take up, as Sir Herbert Maxwell has done, this later period of the Duke's history, to have at least endeavoured to ascertain for us what his contribution had been to that magnificent achievement. Until better evidence is laid before us we shall always believe that the Duke organised the London police and that Peel defended the Duke's measure. The part which the Duke played in his extreme old age in the organisation of the defence of London against the Chartists illustrates the kind of power which he possessed for this sort of work, and is almost of itself presumptive evidence that in the inner councils of the Peel Cabinet he was the author of the police measure. That it was owing to him, and especially to his influence over the great landowners, that Peel was able to carry as quietly as he did the abolition of the Corn Laws, is one of the certain facts of the time. Sir Herbert Maxwell brings that out fairly enough, but he seems to consider that because that great measure left a majority of votes in opposition to the Duke of Wellington, therefore it was bad for his reputa6 tion' that he should have done this.

That the Duke was mistaken in many of his views the sequence of history has sufficiently proved. It is hardly too much to say that, in his dread of Reform in England, he entirely misread the nature of his own countrymen. What we are especially anxious to establish. is, that in order to realise the character of the man it is much too shallow a statement to treat the kind of mistakes that he made as due to the fact that he was a soldier. It may, perhaps, seem a bold thing to say of him who is either the first and greatest or one of the two first and greatest of our soldiers, but it is in a sense true that, properly speaking, Wellington's position in life was from the first not that of a soldier but much rather that of a statesman on the wide stage of the world, using soldiers for certain national purposes. He never was a soldier in the sense in which Moore and the Napiers, Wolseley and Roberts, have been proud of being soldiers. It was hardly possible that he should be so. To a large extent this was due to the circumstances of his time. To a larger extent it was due to the circumstances of his own life. In India he had employed for the purposes of his brother's great policy all sorts of military instruments, with whom personally he could have very little sympathy, Hindoos, Mohammedans, and servants of the East India

Company, against whose rascalities he was always struggling. In those early days he was using these fighting elements as mere instruments of higher policy. In the Peninsula his ranks were recruited, as he himself perpetually asserts, from the very scum of society. No one who has not read the memoirs of Larpent, who acted as his Judge-Advocate-General throughout the later years of the war, can realise the intolerable crimes with which in these soldiers Wellington had to deal. He had been too short a time a junior regimental officer ever to come into that close personal sympathy with the privates which Moore had cultivated among his officers, and which inspired the enthusiasm for them of William and Charles Napier. It never would have occurred to him to think of the strength and majesty with which the British soldier fights.' He knew nothing of the better qualities of the men, whom he flogged into submission to his authority or hanged to encourage the rest. The notion of taking pride in belonging to an army of which these men were the principal part was one altogether alien to his nature. He wanted the army as a means for breaking down the power of the revolutionary force in France, which he regarded merely as an anarchy. It is quite easy for us now, looking back over a hundred years, to see that the French Revolution in the long run produced enormous benefits for Europe: that it was a fire in which the rotten débris of the Middle Ages were consumed, and very necessarily consumed, and that out of the ashes a greatly improved new birth was to arise. Wellington and Nelson could not have done the services for Britain and for the world that they did, had they not both looked upon the Revolution with entirely different eyes from those with which we regard it now. For both of them the Revolution was a mere triumph of anarchy and disorder. Neither of them looked upon Napoleon as other than the most potent agent for the maintenance of a condition of things which it was their one business to destroy. To form out of the disorderly elements in England a body of men who, under military authority and crushed into subjection by the intense severity of the discipline applied to them, should be made into an instrument for breaking down the triumph of disorder in France and throughout Europe, was a very natural object for one who from his earliest years, as the associate, through his brother, of Pitt, was concerned in the counsels of English statesmen. That was Wellington's relation to the army.

Of an army as a great school exercising such moral influence through discipline as has induced many of the most philanthropic workers of our time, and especially philanthropic ladies, to desire to employ its methods for the good of the gamins of London, Wellington had had no experience. It was a conception altogether foreign to his ideas. Yet it is in our time becoming an exceedingly potent influence, and the history of the change is one that it is very interesting to trace. It has undoubtedly been largely connected with the adoption of universal service in Germany and with a consequent effect on thought in that country, or, at least, with the developement of a sentiment which treats it as something degrading for any member of a great country not to play his part in contributing his personal services to the defence of the State. In Great Britain and her colonies, and to some extent in America also, this has been met by the counter-pride in the services of a voluntary army. Various causes have contributed: the rise of the Volunteers, themselves almost inevitably taking as their model the regular army; the vast improvement in the education and status altogether of the classes from which the army is recruited; the generation, under quite other influences, of a sense of sympathy between class and class, and especially of a sense of responsibility among the more educated and influential classes for the condition of their countrymen. All these have tended to produce a change in the relation of officers to their men and of the country at large towards its soldiers, such as sometimes makes one start at the language one finds Wellington using in regard to the soldiers of his time. Yet in this one matter alone, where experience has proved the Duke wrong, Sir Herbert is not a modern. He accepts the Duke's ideas as perennially true and the only possible ones for dealing with an army.

Sir Herbert Maxwell has very rightly defended the Duke on two points in relation to the army, in which we agree with him that false impressions have been left as to his conduct. In the first place, it is undoubtedly true, as Sir Herbert says, that a man occupying such a place as the Duke of Wellington did in the society of such a country as Britain and the general society of Europe could not possibly much more than he did, from sheer lack of time and opportunity, have kept up his relations with officers of all sorts who had served under him. It was natural enough that they should on their part grumble. It was inevitable on his part that he should leave them cause to grumble. So,

VOL. CXCII. NO. CCCXCIII.

I

again, Sir Herbert has more effectively than we have ever seen done before set forth the perpetual remonstrances which the Duke of Wellington addressed to government after government as to the defenceless state of the country. There is one lesson which, perhaps, Sir Herbert might have drawn from the entire failure of these remonstrances. If the Duke of Wellington could not induce even Peel to listen to what he had to say when it was a question between the safety of the country and the budget, what hope is there that during peace-time the remonstrances of any other soldier, in whatever position he may be, will be effective in securing the safety of the realm and empire as long as statesmen do not recognise the relative importance of financial economy and of national existence ? If Gulliver was hopelessly impotent in the presence of the treasury of Lilliput, what hope is there that any other inhabitant of that realm when he is girt with the sword of the Commander-in-Chief of Lilliput will be able to effect that which Gulliver failed to do? It is a warning as to the causes which make for danger in the future which cannot just now be too strongly pressed upon the nation.

It has seemed to us so important to bring out those points in which Sir Herbert has in our judgement failed in producing an adequate portrait of the great man with whom he has had to deal that we are conscious that our review has scarcely done justice to what we nevertheless feel strongly, the extreme interest and value of the two volumes for this current year 1900. Neither of them has a dull page in them. The second volume in particular-from the end of the Waterloo campaign onwards-carries one along with it with all the interest of a novel. An immense mass of Wellingtoniana has gradually accumulated in the course of the years that have followed the Duke's death. Sir Herbert Maxwell has availed himself of them in order to throw a great number of sidelights upon the Duke's character, and upon his views of men and things, such as has hardly been possible before. The opportunity given him of seeing the Salisbury papers alone would have given an interest and value to the Life. The style in which the book is written is such as to make every sentence interesting. The illustrations, plans, and maps are in all but one respect as good as they well could be. It is almost a counsel of perfection to hope that we shall ever have a history of campaigns and battles in which the places named in the text are so illustrated by maps and plans that we can at once