Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/152

 42 Reviews of Books Hobhouse was a Liberal of the old school, somewhat doctrinaire, though in theory he scorned a priori reasoning, a little hard and lacking in sympathy, perhaps incapable by temperament of understanding the point of view of, for instance, the New Imperialism. He was high- minded and courageous; his biographer quotes with something like awe the statement that he bearded even Lord Rosebery in the London County Council. So public-spirited and so resolute a friend of freedom was he that, while not agreeing with Bradlaugh's and Holyoake's views, he helped them because their fight was, he thought, the fight for liberty. He could defy the opinion of his order as, for instance, when he was one of the few peers who supported Home Rule and when he declared for radical reform of the Upper Chamber. War with all its terrible con- sequences he hated, and, when his niece was deported from South Africa because of her agitation against the British concentration camps, he took up her cause with earnest asperity. Though such men serve society well, the biography is somewhat melancholy reading. We hear much of things going wrong, little of their going right. There is no touch of humor or of picturesqueness, though a career such as Lord Hobhouse's must have furnished abundant opportunity for both. Of abuses in every form Hobhouse was the resolute enemy, and when he was first appointed to the Charity Commission there were plenty of them to attack. Large funds were still devoted to useless or eccentric purposes. The ringers at Abbey Church, Bath, had been bequeathed £50 a year by one Thomas Nash " on condition of their ringing, on the whole peal of bells, with clappers muffled, various solemn and doleful changes, allowing proper intervals for rest and refreshment, from eight o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock in the evening, on the four- teenth of May in every year, being the anniversary of my wedding-day; and also on every anniversary of the day of my decease to ring a grand bob-major and merry mirthful peals, unmuffled, during the same space of time, and allowing the same intervals as before mentioned, in joyful commemoration of my happy release from domestic tyranny and wretch- edness." It required a stern fight to get Parliament to interfere and change such endowments from their original purpose. The same fight was neces- sary to get the funds of endowed schools really devoted to education and not, as in many cases, to the practical pensioning of useless masters doing nothing to fulfil the purposes of the endowments. Here too were silly provisions to override. A founder at Barton had made a condition under which " All the children are to be taught to read, but none are to be taught the dangerous arts of writing or arithmetic, except such as the lord of the manor shall think fit." The city companies of London furnished another paradise of abuses ; with an income of £440,000 a year they spent £150,000 on public and benevolent objects, £175,000 on the cost of maintenance and £100,000 for banquets. Lord Hobhouse's was just the type of mind to get to the heart of such absurdities. In the