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instruments at its disposal. Wherever we meet him he is bluff, careful, far-seeing, and, nine times out of ten, patently right. He is capable of enthusiasm without being mastered by it. He is tough without being hard. Determination never passes into obstinacy. And, withal, his comments make clear that few men were so shrewd in their judgement of the great public characters of the time. He did not, like Greville, see them through the distorted mirror of social rumour. He did not, like Macaulay, allow party ties to sway his opinion. Peel, Brougham, Russell, Huskisson, from them all he seems to strip the facade which statesmanship builds about its acolytes. He goes straight to the inner motive which the declared purpose serves so often to conceal. He is concerned only with the realization of right; and the touchstone of his judgements is the help they render in actual effort to the causes he had at heart.

Such is the figure that Mr. Wallas paints for us. It is difficult to overestimate the significance that attaches to his portrait. He makes evident, what Professor Dicey has shown us in the sphere of the law, the almost overwhelming creativeness of Benthamism. That creed, indeed, came at a time fortunate for its principles. The evils it came to deny were too glaringly obvious to be capable of effective defence. But there has never been in English history a group of men who so passionately or so singleheartedly worked out the application of their principles to the events with which they had to deal. Benthamism, it is not too much to say, made democratic England possible. It is easy now to see its faults. Its formulae are too simple for a complex world. It did not realize the inability of the average man to make headway against a fate which is, for most, an inescapable and tragic one. The power of combination did not sufficiently enter into its calculations. Yet not even the last word of criticism can conceal the creative destruction that it wrought. It was a creed of hope where the blind forces of the new industrialism seemed the progenitors of a new and bitter slavery. Nor did Francis Place fail to understand the obvious lessons of his effort. He saw how powerful are the forces opposed to change. Liberalism, in the simple sense of a well-meaning approval of advance, never attracted him. The liberalism for which he cared was either a concrete definiteness like that of Bentham or else an unflagging pursuit of the minutiae of organiza-