into the distance, and the main results stand out in their just proportions, it will be little contested that the Church recovered in spiritual power as much and more by its decisions than she was about to lose in temporal authority by the fall of Napoleon III. And, incidentally, it will be seen, also, that Manning's statecraft had been profound. Thanks to him and to those who thought with him, the setting sun of Papal Rome lit up with its last rays the papal claims and left, at least for those to whom those claims seemed cogent, a glory where there would else have been a gloom.

Thenceforward his

The Vatican Council proved to be the consummation of Manning's Roman activities. influence waned, until under Leo XIII it seemed scarcely greater than his office involved. The time had come when acts, that in the heyday of his power could hardly have been contemplated, might be forced upon him. The late Duke of Norfolk was one of those who accomplish great things and render great services by virtue of directness and simplicity. He saw that Newman, now entering upon extreme old age, ought, for the sake of English Catholicism, to be honoured, and, because time was pressing, to be honoured without delay; and he knew that Manning, in whose eyes Newman's school of thought represented unsound phrases and unseasoned philosophy, was the only serious obstacle to his purpose. In company with Lord Ripon, he therefore interviewed the Cardinal and asked quite frankly for what he wanted, which was nothing less than the elevation of Newman to the purple. Manning appeared to consent and wrote an unexceptionably generous letter to the Cardinal-Secretary. Then followed an incident the treatment of which in Mr Leslie's biography is neither very happy nor very correct. Mr Strachey had been quick to observe that there appeared to be something rather shady about the remarkably slow progress of Manning's letter to Rome. It had been drafted in July, but it had not reached Rome by December. Mr Leslie not only does not attempt to explain the reason of this but fails to notice the fact. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary it is difficult to escape the suspicion that the Cardinal was in no hurry for the

letter to arrive. One need not suppose that the delay amounted to a deliberate device for going back upon his undertaking. Old age procrastinates habitually, and particularly in regard to what is unpleasant. But, unless the Duke of Norfolk had happened to be in Rome that winter, and had kept the project alive, the offer of the Cardinal's hat might never have reached Newman in the spring.

Even then another unfortunate thing occurred. Newman was too modest to say himself in so many words that he wished to accept the honour proposed, if, instead of having to reside in Rome, he might continue to live in Birmingham; and his reply, taken literally, might certainly have been construed, as Mr Leslie wishes us to believe Manning did construe it, as a refusal. Unfortunately, however, Newman's letter was accompanied and followed by two letters from Bishop Ullathorne explaining in unequivocal terms the true position. This has been very clearly shown in Ward's 'Life of Newman'; and an apologist of Manning's, in dealing with what Mr Leslie calls The Case of Dr Newman,' is dealing too lazily with his brief if he merely states, even though Manning says the same thing himself, that like most matter-of-fact persons, Manning construed this (i.e. Newman's letter) into a natural refusal.' No matter-of-fact person could possibly have misunderstood Ullathorne's communications. Old age,

with its sometimes provoking inability to recognise what it does not like, is the best excuse for Manningand not a very good one. So, too, we may hope that the simultaneous announcement in the Times' of Newman's supposed refusal of the purple, which must have emanated from Manning's circle, is to be reckoned among the indiscretions of advancing years.

But, when all has been said, the whole incident of Newman's Cardinalate remains the least convincingly susceptible to charitable explanation in the whole of Manning's career. Taken at the worst, however, it proves little more than that he put the cause in which he had believed before all else. Salus populi, we said with reckless frequency during the War, suprema lex. In his dealings with Errington, with Newman, and with the Jesuits, whose policy he distrusted and whose

influence he, the great champion of the secular clergy, disliked, Manning might plausibly have appealed to the same conviction. Having many intimate acquaintances but scarcely any personal friends, to him the Church was apt to seem everything, the individual or the Order apart from the work to be done for the Church next to nothing. Each busy day, full as it was of human contact, and on his side of human kindness, grew, as he told a friend, to seem no more by nightfall than just 'a river of faces.' He was, thus, in the deepest but assuredly in no superficial sense, a Christian Socialist. And again the contrast to Newman, both subjectively and objectively the most personal of men, comes out.

As the years passed and as his position became more assured, Manning had grown into a famous public figure. The Cardinal's hat, which had come in 1875, added interest to his person; and increasing age doubtless stimulated generosity in his critics. He used his prestige wisely, and put it at the service of the poor. He preached an economy older than that of the classical economists, one which brought him into a strange companionship with men like Ruskin and Dilke, and Stead and Henry George. His economic doctrines, indeed, would startle no man now, and are professed more or less assiduously by all rising politicians, relying, as they can do with security, upon modern Governments to break their pledges for them. But Manning took the old Catholic economy seriously, and with his usual statesmanship saw that it was the natural point of contact between the Church and democracy. Thus we find him in 1872 sitting on that Housing Commission over which King Edward as Prince of Wales presided, and in 1889, old man of eighty though he was, intervening in the Dock Strike, and winning the hearts of the dockers. And Mr Leslie is at some pains to show that leading propositions in Leo XIII's Encyclical of 1891 on Labour reflect closely the Cardinal's previous utterances. Age had not impaired his insight into the problems of the future.

Thus Manning in his last phase showed himself the friend pre-eminently of the poor; and, when he failed, they followed him in throngs to the threshold of the everlasting habitations. But for the student his life can never possess the romance of Newman's, for the essence

of romance is knight-errantry. Manning was essentially a man of affairs moving with wisdom and circumspection in the realms of faith; and he must be ranked rather among the children of Martha than those of Mary. Yet, behind his practical, business-like, half-soldierly method of approaching the work of human salvation, there lay an inner life of the soul, of which Mr Strachey is hardly sensible and which Mr Leslie has not fully probed. A concentrated sketch of the progress of his spirit across the evangelical teaching of Miss Bevan, through the restrained Anglicanism of the 'forties, into the atmosphere of the Paradisus Anima'-a book of devotion little known outside the circle of his own communion, but which formed his own constant and apparently favourite devotional reading-seems, however, to be an indispensable adjunct of any final portrait of his character. But his countrymen would follow such a study with no more than languid attention. For them his public career, with its purple close and its disputable motives and its patriotic philanthropy, remains the interesting thing about him; and, if Mr Strachey must be commiserated for having reminded us so cleverly of its more vulnerable points, Mr Leslie may be congratulated upon having revived the recollection of its striking merits. Among those merits members of Manning's own communion will hold it not the least that he, a Cardinal with his faith in Rome, satisfied without sign of effort the claims both of a Catholic imperialism and of that imperial idea which his own countrymen were just then bringing to birth and which he himself did something to nurse into existence. 'Between the Universal Church and the Universal Empire,' says Mr Leslie in language in which patriotic pride has for a moment got rather the better of actual fact, he saw the possibility of common appreciation and understanding.' It is perhaps enough to say that he knew how to approve himself at once as a great Catholic Churchman and a good British subject, so that in the end his fellow-citizens learned to listen for the beating of an English heart beneath the suspected, unfamiliar folds of the Roman purple.

·

ALGERNON CECIL.

Art. 12.-TWO RUSSIAN STATESMEN.

1. The Memoirs of Count Witte. Translated from the original Russian MS. and edited by Abraham Yarmolinsky. Heinemann, 1921.

2. The Memoirs of Alexander Iswolsky, formerly Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs. Edited and translated by C. L. Seager. Hutchinson, 1921.

3. Diplomatic Reminiscences before and during the World War, 1911-1917. By A. Nekludoff. Translated from the French by Alexandra Paget. Murray, 1921.

CURIOUS musings on the causes which further the rise and hasten the fall of empires, and on the part that may be played in the destinies of states and peoples by individuals of light and leading, are once more set astir by the reminiscences of two statesmen of very different types and mental calibres, a portion of whose biographies will be for ever interwoven with a chapter of the history of a most critical period in the fortunes of Russia and Europe. For several years of the reign of Alexander III Sergius Witte ruled the Tsardom with the overrated power of an absolute monarch, and showed what feats of statesmanship a clear-sighted, constructive ruler could achieve, even within the narrow limits set to his activities by the predatory character and hampering structure of the Tsardom, whose destinies he was working to control. During an equal number of subsequent years Alexander's son and successor demonstrated how easily and effectually a shiftless individual invested with power, but devoid of will or vision, could pull down the fabric that had weathered the storms of ages, gathering into one focal centre and radiating thence the destructive forces which had long been scattered over his Empire. It was while this disintegrating process was going forward that M. Izvolsky had the direction of Russia's foreign policy in his hands, and was striving by argument, suasion, and innocent little stratagems to induce his imperial master, at least, to refrain from thwarting the constructive schemes of his responsible advisers who had the advancement of his people and the safety of his Empire at heart.

These two volumes of memoirs complement and correct each other, being mainly two versions of the