6 to the College, burst out into a strain of bitterness against the North, he said, with a gentleness which gave the more force to his rebuke: Madam, do not train up your children in hostility 'to the Government of the United States. Remember we are one country now. Pray dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring them up to be above all Americans.' And all this was whilst his own feelings as to the original act by which he broke with the Union remained unaltered. For when asked directly by the Reconstruction Committee, 'What are your own personal views on the question [of the original Act of Secession]?' he replied unhesitatingly: 'It was my view that the act of Virginia in withdrawing herself from the United States carried me along with it as a citizen of Virginia, and that her laws and acts were binding on me.' The past tense here being plainly employed to signify, what he constantly expressed in private, that the arbitrament of the sword to which the seceding States had appealed had quenched the supposed rights claimed by them before the war, without affecting their original legitimacy. Pages of anecdotes might here be gathered to illustrate his care for his other main object, the welfare of his students. That this took a deeply religious form will surprise no one who knows that during the war he had never ceased the regular use of the well-worn pocket-bible which had been his constant companion before it, and which still bore the name of R. E. Lee, Lt.-Colonel, U.S. Army.' In his comparative retirement, and meditating constantly over the sorrows of his country, which he had little power to heal, it was most natural that this spiritual side of his character should become more plainly developed. He held to the Episcopal Church in which he had been brought up, but never showed any trace of that sectarian feeling, which is almost as much a reproach to American Christianity as to that of our own country: and when once pressed by a forward inquirer for his opinion upon Apostolical Succession, he expressed his simple faith in the words: I have not cared to think of these things; I have aimed to be a Christian.' Of his limited income a large part was regularly devoted privately to charity. And his feelings for his students were expressed to one who congratulated him on the high state the College had attained under him, in words expressed with all the earnestness of the heart's nearest wish: I shall be disappointed, sir; I shall fail in the leading object that brought me here, unless the 'young men I have charge of become real Christians.' In saying this, it is recorded, tears sprang to his eyes; for his feelings were ever warm and sympathetic, and his heart, as his chief biographer has well said, was so open to every touch of "gentle and quick emotion, as to show that beneath his heroic "character was a vein of almost feminine softness.' A noble action,' are Mr. Cooke's words, flushed his cheek with emo'tion; a tale of suffering brought a sudden moisture to his 'eyes; and a loving message from one of his old soldiers has 'been seen to melt him to tears.' Thus living and thus minded, he was ready when the end came suddenly. No failing strength of body or faculty gave token of the approaching close of that great life. The unruffled health, which in long years of war as of peace he had enjoyed unfailingly, never seemed to leave him till the last. But his heart, long bowed down by the weight of his country's sorrows, at last gave way. His death may have been professionally ascribed to cerebral congestion; but the medical attendants unanimously declared this to be but the effect of long-suppressed sorrows: and that this was the exciting cause no one could doubt who knew how his hope of complete peace and restored tranquillity was deferred from year to year, and how the mental depression he struggled in vain to cast off increased as post after post brought him piteous appeals for assistance from those who had served under him, many of whose families were starving. On September 28, 1870, he had spent the evening at a vestry meeting of the church he attended, and had headed a liberal subscription for the object which brought it together. On his return to the sitting-room where the evening meal awaited him, his wife remarked that he looked very cold. 'Thank you, I am well. wrapped up' was his answer; but the words were the last he ever spoke articulately. He sat down and opened his lips to say grace-a habit, it is remarked, he had never failed to preserve amid all the haste of war-but no sound came from them, and he presently sank back in his chair in a half-insensible state, from which he never rallied, expiring tranquilly on October 12, with his family around him. So passed away the greatest victim of the Civil War. Even in the farthest North, where he had once been execrated as the worst enemy of the Union, the tidings caused a thrill of regret. But though America has learnt to pardon, she has yet to attain the full reconciliation for which the dead hero would have sacrificed a hundred lives. Time can only bring this to a land which in her agony bled at every pore. Time, the healer of all wounds, will bring it yet. The day will come when the evil passions of the great civil strife will sleep in oblivion, and North and South do justice to each other's motives, and forget each other's wrongs. Then history will speak with clear voice of the deeds done on either side, and the citizens of the whole Union do justice to the memories of the dead, and place above all others the name of the great chief of whom we have written. In strategy mighty, in battle terrible, in adversity as in prosperity a hero indeed, with the simple devotion to duty and the rare purity of the ideal Christian knight, he joined all the kingly qualities of a leader of men. It is a wondrous future indeed that lies before America; but in her annals of years to come as in those of the past there will be found few names that can rival in unsullied lustre that of the heroic defender of his native Virginia, Robert Edward Lee. ART. IV.-1. The Licensing Act, 1872; with Explanatory Introduction and Notes. By W. A. HOLDSWORTH, Esq. London: 1872. 2. Convocation Report on Intemperance. London : 71869. 3. Report from the Select Committee on Habitual Drunkards. 1872. HOWEVER much an Englishman may admire the social organisation of Continental nations, he has little tolerance for the doctrines of that school which would throw upon Government the obligation of taking entire charge of the people, and providing for all their interests. Imbued with the principles of modern political economy, and always jealous of his individual liberty, he never desires himself to feel, or to be compelled to recognise, the existence of Government in the business of daily life. For he knows that the grandeur and extent of our commercial enterprise, and the vastness of our various industrial associations, by which Great Britain has become the richest, and perhaps most powerful, nation in the world, are due not to Government organisation, but to private energy and skill. There are indications, however, that the Englishman has begun to discover that in some things the State may still act with advantage, without any undue interference with individual liberty. It will be generally acknowledged that if our English system has secured freedom, we pay dearly for the blessing; and if the Continental system has repressed individual energies and capacities, and not allowed scope enough for the development of general enterprise, it has still something to show for its policy in the widely-diffused comfort of all classes, and in the general simplicity and decency of life. We have perhaps carried our policy of laissez faire a little too far; and now, while we still hesitate to enlarge to any considerable extent the sphere of interference by the State, we are quietly opening our minds to those larger notions, in which the protection and restraint of Government may be recognised as legitimate. We have made up our minds to this necessity in the determined attempt to extirpate the vice of drunkenness, which is known to lie at the root of a large part of our social miseries and scandals, and which we have already for generations done so much to encourage and so little to check. For a long period public opinion seemed to look upon the ravages of intemperance with a curious but helpless anxiety, if not with a fatalism which regarded the injuries it inflicted on society as we regard the frosts of winter or the heats of summer. But it has come at length to present a bulk of concrete fact far too vast and hideous to be any longer endured, shocking at once the moral sense and social order of mankind; and public opinion has been still further excited by the fact that the adversary is not only strong in numbers and position, but has been recently swelling its ranks by fresh reinforcements, and extending its lines in every direction. The people of this country are spending in drink a hundred millions sterling a year. A trade has grown up in this kingdom, with a capital of a hundred and seventeen millions sterling, and a constituency of a million and a half engaged in the management of its 150,000 establishments-a trade more powerful far than the cotton industry with its capital of eighty-five millions, or the woollen trade with its twenty-two millions, or the iron trade with its twenty-five millions-a trade which consumes in the manufacture of drink an amount of grain equal to the whole produce of Scotland-which returns to the revenue 29,126,000l., or nearly half the actual taxation of the United Kingdom-and which, after all, in its legitimate exercise, provides but a luxury, and in its illegitimate, the most insidious of all social temptations. These are facts of uncommon interest and significance. We have little sympathy with the exaggerated accusations brought by temperance orators against the manufacturers or the sellers of liquor; but we have even less patience or respect for the arguments of those Parliamentary representatives of the trade, who insist that the licence to sell liquor is as legitimate and beneficial as a licence to sell bread or snuff. We readily admit that it is possible for people to hurt themselves by excessive eating as well as by excessive drinking, but the evils of chronic indigestion are not for a moment to be weighed against paupers created by the thousand, gaols swarming with culprits, and lunatic asylums crowded with victims, through the excesses of the traffic in drink. We are also fairly entitled to argue that other trades in their extension bring nothing but benefit to the country, but the over-extension of the drink-trade brings nothing but misfortune. Nobody is tempted into buying too much bread or meat by the multiplication of butchers' or bakers' shops, but the prevalence of intoxication is found to increase in the direct ratio of the number of public-houses. It is this conviction that leads the nation at present to hail any measure to reduce the national expenditure upon drink as nothing short of a national blessing. The case, however, has become doubly serious with the growing wealth and prosperity of the country. We have reached a period in our national history when the industrial classes, who constitute the majority of the people, have attained a position of unexampled comfort and prosperity. They have risen for years past in skill, in education, in organisation, and in expenditure; and the course of legislation has of late years gone out of its way in every instance to relieve them of all burdens or obligations, whilst very recently they have made new terms with their employers, in the exercise of the right they undoubtedly possess to revise from time to time the conditions of their service, and as the country prospers, to obtain an increasing share in its gains. We wish we could say, however, that the abounding prosperity now so general is tending to increased frugality and thrift. We have always lamented the reckless improvidence, the brutal drunkenness, the gross sensualism so rife among the English working-classes; but it is all too certain that the mass of the working-men, as they have found their earnings increase, now spend the surplus in animal enjoyments, in idle sports, or in actual debauchery, shirking their tasks for several days in every week, and devoting their leisure, not to improvement or refreshment, but to drink.* Professor ་ Captain M'Neill, chief-constable of the West Riding of Yorkshire, testified last year, before Mr. Dalrymple's Committee on Habitual Drunkards, as follows:- Colliers who used to make 3s. 6d. a day can now make 5s. or 78., and they will work three or four days, and drink 'for the rest of the week, remaining perfectly idle.' Mr. Wetherell, another witness, says: A man has time now on Saturday to get drunk twice before he goes to bed.' Another witness, speaking of Sunday dissipation, remarks that Tuesday, at mid-day, is the recognised time with a large class of workers to begin the week's work. It is |