Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/137

Rh keep out "new ideas," he does well to cling to classical studies. They are the greatest barrier to new ideas and the chief bulwark of modern obscurantism. The new sciences have produced in their votaries an unquenchable thirst and affection for what is true in fact, word, character, and motive. They have taught us to appreciate and weigh evidence and to deal honestly with it. Here a strong contrast with classical training has been developed, not because classical training led men to be false, but because the scientific love of truth is something new and intense. Men of classical training rarely develop the power to go through from beginning to end of a course of reasoning on a straight line. They go on until they see that they are coming out at a result which they do not like. Then they make a bend and aim for a result which they do like, not regarding the broken continuity, or smoothing it over as carefully as possible. Classical training, in the world of to-day, gives a man a limited horizon. There is far more beyond it than within it. He is taught to believe that he has sounded the depths of human knowledge when he knows nothing about its range or amount. If any one wants to find prime specimens of the Philistinism which Matthew Arnold hates, he should seek them among the votaries of the culture which Matthew Arnold loves. The popular acuteness long ago perceived this, and the vile doctrines of anti-culture have sprung up and grown just in proportion as culture has come to have an artificial and technical definition, as something foreign to living interests.

, having been invited to allow his name to be submitted to the Liberal Association of Leicester as a candidate for Mr. Peter Taylor's parliamentary seat, has written a letter to the Rev. J. Page Hops, one of the committee, declining the invitation on several grounds. We reprint the communication: {{right|{{float right|$$\Big\}$$}}{{sc|38 Queen's-Gardens, Bayswater, W.,}} February 21.|1em}}

While I am gratified by the compliment, and by the manifestation of sympathy implied in your proposal, I fear I can not respond to it in the way you wish. Several reasons, each of them sufficient, deter me.

In the first place, my health is such that discharge of parliamentary duties would be impossible. When I tell you that until last night I have not dined out for nearly a year, because I have been unable to bear the amount of excitement involved, you will see that it would be absolutely out of the question for me to undertake the nightly wear and tear which the life of a member entails. Even in the best state of that variable health which I have had these twenty-eight years, I am able to write, or rather to dictate, only three hours a day; and such being the case, you will see that the labors implied by active political life, could I bear them, would make it impossible for me to do other work. As I regard such other work as by far the more important—as I think I can do more good by endeavoring to complete what I have undertaken than by occupying myself in listening to debates and giving votes—I should not feel that I was doing right in exchanging the one career for the other.

Far too high an estimate is, I think, made of the influence possessed in our day by a member of Parliament, now that he has come to be, much more than in past times, subject to his constituents—now that the House of Commons as a whole is more and more obliged to subordinate itself to public opinion; the implication is, that those who form public opinion are those who really exercise power. It is becoming a common remark that we are approaching a state in which laws are practically made out-of-doors, and simply registered by Parliament; and if so then the actual work of legislation is more the work of those who modify the ideas of the electors than of those who give effect to their ideas. So regarding the matter, I conceive that I should not gain influence, but rather should lose influence, by ceasing to be a writer and becoming a representative.

But, apart from these general reasons, there is the more special reason that, if chosen by the electors of Leicester, I should prove a very impracticable member. My views on political matters are widely divergent from those of all political parties at present existing. That which I hold to be the chief business of legislation—an administration of justice such as shall secure to each person, with certainty and without cost, the maintenance of his equitable claims—is a business to which little attention is paid; while attention is absorbed in doing things which I hold should not be done at all. As I could not agree to be merely a delegate, voting as was desired by those who sent me, but should have in all cases to act on my own judgment, I should be in continual antagonism to my