less than £400,000, has been erected in Berlin. Might we not hope that the new Imperial Institute in London, though it is on a smaller scale, will undertake like work for London? It may be profitable if we inquire how far the education in Germany or in Switzerland tells upon one particular kind of industry, so I take the silk trade as an example. In the evidence given before the royal commission on the depression of trade it was stated that the silk industries of Coventry, Macclesfield, and Spitalfields had decreased to about one-fourth their old dimensions. Spital fields sank much lower, for its former 24,000 looms are now dwindled to 1,200. While Coventry was losing its trade in silk ribbons, Basle, in Switzerland, was making a like industry prosperous by establishing excellent schools for dyeing and design, and that town imports to this country what Coventry lost to it. The town of Crefeld in Germany is a still more striking illustration, because by its attention to education suited to its industries, it has within a few years doubled its population and quadrupled its trade. This small town, which has now grown to 83,000 inhabitants, has spent £215,000 on its lower schools, and £42,500 on a special weaving-school. Who has paid for this large educational expenditure? Quite possibly the consumers of silk in England, who get from Crefeld what Macclesfield and Spitalfields fail to produce with equal excellence. The melancholy result is this that the exports of English silks amount to only £2,670,000, while the imports to this country of foreign silks reach eleven millions. It is useless for our towns to battle by empiricism or by fiscal laws with foreign nations which have equipped their artisans to fight with trained intelligence in the competition. Technical education is simply the ratio nale of empiricism. It is a melancholy spectacle to see a town like Norwich, once famous for its shawls, actually contending with the charity commissioners because they wish to utilize its fine endowments by creating a system of technical education, while the civic authorities struggle for almshouses. Figs cannot grow on thorns, nor can ignorance among our workmen expect to compete with trained intelligence in our industrial competition with other nations. England is far behind in the technical training of our artisans, but there is hope that we have awakened to our shortcomings. When I first began to call attention to our dangerous ignorance in 1852, there were no higher colleges, except universities, in any town of the United Kingdom, except Owens College in Manchester, and Anderson's College in Glasgow. Now there is not a large town in Great Britain without such colleges. These are being adapted to the education of the upper classes, and a great step is gained; but continuation schools for the working classes, and technical schools adapted to their wants, are rising far too slowly. In London the progress is more rapid, and perhaps in a few years we will be able to boast that we have gone beyond Paris in polytechnics for the working classes, though we shall still be far behind Berlin and other manufacturing towns of Germany and Switzerland in relation to the population. Still I have faith that the movement is in progress, for stern necessity will rouse the manufacturers of England to train the intelligence of the producers. Working men are alive to the defects in their education, and their voices will soon be heard in the Parliament of this country. The wages of our artisans are higher than those in Continental countries, and so are their productive powers. I am informed by Sir Lowthian Bell, the highest authority in the iron trade, that it still requires nearly twice the number of workmen at a German blast furnace to produce the same quantity of iron as we employ in this country. It would require a man much wiser than myself to predict the future of our industries with certainty. One thing is sure, that they cannot recover from depression by putting on their back the old man of the sea in the shape of the fiscal proposal of the fair-trade party. England depends upon her export trade for her future prosperity, and as exchanges are made in commodities, not in bullion, the restriction of imports by taxation contracts exports to the same amount. Indeed, such a policy must lead to the tariff war which now prevails among most of the Continental States. No fact in political economy is more clear than that taxation on foreign commodities must ultimately be paid by the consumers, not by the producers. All taxation is a deduction from the fruits of labor and from the fertility of the soil of the country imposing it. No political economist has ever been able to show how prices to consumers can be lowered by increasing the cost of production. In countries with a protection policy there is as much depression, though one of greater intensity than in the countries with free trade. In the former there are constant £45. If we take all the civilized nations, adding the reserves to the permanent forces, 144 millions of the strongest men are or may be withdrawn from production. This is one man for twenty-four of the population, or, if we exclude the reserves, one out of eighty-one. That is the reason why I point to the United States as the great industrial nation of the future, for her armed forces represent only one man in 1,510 of the population. Luckily, her protection policy is an incubus upon her industry, and gives us breathing-time to prepare for the coming struggle. From Temple Bar. SCHOPENHAUER AND HIS MOTHER. But there is also another class attempts to cure the depression by adding | have 2,200,000 men withdrawn from being restriction after restriction in the hope of productive citizens, in order to be protecremedying the evil. It is the same oper- tive militants, at a cost for each man of ation as when a person dissatisfied with the working of a machine adds a new cog, then a spring, then a lever, forgetting that with every new addition he is increasing friction and lessening power. The great industrial machine of this country is good enough in itself, but it needs proper oiling to make the parts work smoothly; and I have tried to show that the technical education of working men is the lubricant which we so much require. I do not believe that it will again work so as to produce the large margin of profits which we enjoyed in the past. Still there is encouragement that we may carry on a good and steady trade. The cheapening and extension of distribution have probably reached their limits, and little more is to be expected in this direction. New inventions will continue to be made, but not with the same marvellous celerity that we have seen in the last fifteen years. If the United States alter its protection policy, and become a free-trade nation, it will be our great competitor in the world, though the time is not close at hand. Her large surplus revenue, amounting to twenty-two millions, has invited schemes of public plunder, and her pension list of old soldiers, and compensations to States for aid in the war, amount to a charge equal to a large standing army. But when these lapse by time, the United States, with a standing army of only twenty-five thousand men, will become a nation which has only to prepare herself for the progress of industry by new inventions without the cares and costs for the preparation of war. At the present moment the United States has 250,000 inventions protected by the patent law. This activity of invention shows ability and intelligence among her people, who are always ready to turn to account the forces of nature for the benefit of man. This country in her working men is rich in producers, and if their intelligence were trained in connection with their work, we need not fear the industrial competition of any European nation. All great foreign nations, except the United States, are terribly handicapped in the industrial race by excessive armaments. England is also weighted, but not to an equal extent. The strength of nations consists in peace, but they make a sad error by not knowing that the weakness of nations is in actual war, or excessive preparedness for it. France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Belgium, and Great Britain ... THEY who, instead of studying the thought of a philosopher, concern themselves merely with his biography, are like men who, in examining a picture, do but look at its frame, the quality of its carving, and the value of its of people . . . who, because a great genius gilding. discloses to them the treasures of his mind, and by means of the utmost exertion of his powers has brought forth works for the exaltation and enlightenment not only of his contemporaries, but of his posterity to the tenth and twentieth generation, because, also, he has given to his fellow-men a present beyond compare with anything else of the kind selves entitled to hale his moral personality . . therefore these rogues consider thembefore their judgment-seat, in order to see if they cannot discover a single spot or blemish about him for the mitigation of the torture inflicted upon them by the contemplation of a great genius. All officious censors of this kind show by such crying ingratitude and this spiteful passion for disparagement, that they are as degraded morally as intellectually, which is saying a good deal. These words are from the last of Schopenhauer's published writings, the "Parerga and Paralipomeni." Dr. Lindner, though himself in some sort a biographer of his master, echoes the caution: "If an ordinary man write the biography of a genius, and the genius come off badly in the book, must the latter bear the blame? ... Works of genuine greatness are not to be interpreted by the life history of their authors. On the contrary, these works luminantly interpret the lives of the writers. It were as reasonable to derive Mozart's 'Don Juan' from the beef and champagne he consumed while composing | diced man" she had ever known. She it..." etc. In spite of these warnings, big with certain humiliation for the luckless biographer who builds on evidence only, we have attempted the following sketch of the first and most important period in the life of Arthur Schopenhauer. "You are the philosopher of the nineteenth century," wrote Ottilie von Goethe, in congratulating him on his seventieth birthday. Schopenhauer himself would perhaps have broadened this statement. The nineteenth century would hardly do more than begin to esteem him according to his value; his fame was rather for the twentieth century. So much ahead of his intelligent contemporaries did he consider himself to be! Time will show how far his expectations are to be fulfilled; but it is probable that no name will stand higher in the record of German celebrities of the century than Schopenhauer's. Bismarck, as the embodiment of practical force, may press him closely, but it would be interesting, as a farther witness to the philosopher's potency, to know what Prince Bismarck thinks of Schopenhauer, and how far he has made him a rule of inner life. Arthur Schopenhauer was born at Dantzig on the 22nd February, 1788. In after life he used to fancy that there was some occult connection between his birth and Spinoza's death, which took place on the 21st February, 1677. His parents were both persons of character, though by no means cast in the same mould. The father was a merchant of repute and wealth, severe and passion ate, devoted to his work, yet fond of society, and of inviolable good faith in business. In his appearance he was not engaging large of body, broad-faced, with a turned-up nose, and a projecting under jaw. He was, moreover, dull of hearing. When, on the morning of Arthur's birth, he entered his office and said laconically, "A son born!" "A pretty baboon he will be, if he grows up like his father," observed one of the clerks by way of congratulation, presuming upon his employer's deafness. As a matter of fact, saving the exceeding brilliancy of his eyes, and his small hands, Arthur Schopenhauer himself was never a handsome man. Schopenhauer's mother was but eighteen when she left her home as a bride. Her marriage with Councillor Schopenhauer (a man more than twice her age) was strictly de convenance on her side; but she felt the honor of the alliance, and did her best to please "the most unpreju was a pretty woman, with bright blue eyes, and light-brown hair, enthusiastic and intellectual. Her husband took her to his country house, on a wooded hill overlooking the red roofs of the town, and the shores of the Baltic, and spared no money to give her pleasure. How I enjoyed it all [she wrote in after years]: the splendid garden, with its adjacent terraces full of fruits and flowers; the fountains; the great pond, with its parti-colored gondola, which my husband had procured for me from Archangel, and which was so light that a six-year-old child could easily manage it; the horses, with which I could drive out whenever I chose; the two little Spanish dogs; the eight lambs, which seemed to me snowwhite and spruce beyond compare with any others, and each with a bell of different note round its neck, so that the bells in unison and the poultry; and the ancient carp in the a complete octave; the hen-house pond, that used to hurry towards me when they heard my voice, and with gaping mouths fought for the scraps I threw them from my gondola. . . . Sometimes a slight feeling of discontent or ill-humor came over me; but one look at the wonderful scenery around me, and it was gone. In the morning, if I had forgotten to close my shutters, I was awakened by the first beams of the sun shining upon me sounded ... across the eastern waters, etc., etc. The advent of young Arthur must have made this paradise complete. To her, the baby was "the most beautiful and intelligent child, with the sweetest disposition of any on God's earth." Schopenhauer, in his cradle, might have smiled sardonically at this judgment of his mother's. It was the father's earnest wish that his child should be born in England, so strong was his admiration of the English constitution, literature, and nature. But events made this impossible; and it was perhaps in some measure to console himself, that the merchant called his son Arthur-a name common to all countries, and therefore well befitting a merchant. Still more fit for a philosopher, he might have argued. Of young Arthur's earliest years there is little to say. Tales of the childhood of men of genius are often somewhat apocryphal. One day, however, when three or four years old, the boy was found in strenuous entreaty by the side of a big bowl of milk. He had thrown one of his shoes into the bowl, and was beseeching the shoe to jump out unaided. This is not a little significant of the man who fifty years later went so far as to explain the preva lent table-turning by the will-power inherent in the wood of the table. As a child, moreover, he was subject to nervous ter- You must try to make advances to people. In every social relationship one of two must make the first step, and why should it not be you as well as the other, who, although he may be older than you, has not had the advantage you have had thus early of living so much with strangers, and who may be holding back from bashfulness, because he has not the From this period of his history dates Schopenhauer's aversion for the English clergy-an aversion of so distorted a nature that it led him to see in the “Pickwick Papers" only an attack upon the Anglican establishment "the established humbug," as he grotesquely calls it, "that devours annually £3.500,000." In the corollary to his great book, "The World as Will and Representation," he is still more embittered. To the "nefarious influence" of the Protestant priesthood, he ascribes not only the bigotry but the poverty and ignorance of the nation, in spite of the natural intelligence of the people. Indeed, it were difficult to say which body of men he thought the worse of; the professors of philosophy of his own country, or the clergy of Protestant England. Under the circumstances, no doubt young Schopenhauer was delighted to quit the Wimbledon boarding school. Not even the permission to visit London once every week during this period of penance, nor the ardor and reverence he felt whenever he visited St. Paul's Cathedral or the Abbey at Westminster, could set him at peace with the dull academical routine. With his father, mother, and little sister (born some ten years after him) he now had a fresh spell of sight-seeing. They went through the Netherlands and Belgium, and thence to Paris. Here guidance of Mercier, an author of repute. two gay months were spent under the able All the pleasures of the city were open to them, including that of being present at a levée of the first consul. It is remarkable that, as a boy of fifteen, Schopenhauer was more impressed by comedy than trag edy. Talma could not charm him; his to the world, Arthur should settle down declamations were to the boy "rough and soberly among the invoices and samples unnatural." But twenty years afterwards of his Hamburg warehouse. Doubtless the philosopher could exult gloomily in he believed that by this time the fancy for the harmony between the teaching of the any other career had been racketed out of nobler works of Shakespeare, the German the boy's head. The lad's eccentric dedramatists, and the old Greek stage, and velopment affected him less than it affected his own philosophy. The aim of tragedy, his wife. His faith in the salutary influhe said, is to divert us from the will to ence of commercial life was probably so live. In so far, therefore, the stage is a strong that he could afford to laugh at religious or metaphysical force. such fits of melancholy and abstraction. A man of strong will, indeed, but narrow mind, he strove to give the boy a veneer of cosmopolitanism. Hence we may understand the following from a letter written to Arthur soon after his confirmation at Dantzig, whither mother and son had gone to end their long holiday:— During this tour, Joanna Schopenhauer discovered in her son much that disturbed her peace of mind. She enjoyed the sunshine, the beauties of nature, and the contrasted specimens of humanity they came face to face with. But the boy was less easily pleased. His tastes and hers were clearly discordant. In Paris, for example, Arthur was much interested in the deaf Since you now give me your promise that and dumb institution of the Abbé Sicard. you will study to acquire a beautiful and flowAnd why? Because the serene and gen- edge of arithmetic, I will also ask you to try ing style of handwriting, and a perfect knowltle expression on the faces of the inmates and walk upright like other men, else you will had set him thinking; and he had come get a round back, which looks dreadful. An to the conclusion that their mental tran-elegant attitude at the desk, and in the posquillity was due to nothing less than the tures of daily life, is alike useful; for if partial surrender of life which had been go into society with a bent back, you will be exacted from them. In a subsequent taken for a tailor or cobbler in fine clothes. letter he elaborated this notion in the following remark upon the beneficence of suffering: That a man may cultivate lofty ideas, and turn his thoughts from Time to Eternity, in one word, that his better consciousness (later, the denial of the Will), may move within him, sorrow, suffering, and distress are as necessary to him as a load of ballast is to a ship, without which ballast the ship would draw no water, become a mere plaything of the winds and the waves, disobey her rudder, and shipwreck easily. It was the same elsewhere. The mother moved from place to place, fully determined to enjoy every moment of this June month of her life; but the son constantly intruded with a chill question about this or that distressful subject: "Why are the people here so miserably poor?" "Is there no one to cure these villagers of their ague?" Surely, it is through a wrong dispensation that whole families like these should live in this horribly deformed manner." She did what she could to silence the boy, but his consequent broodings were not the less effectual as a wet blanket upon her gaiety. 66 The personality of Herr Schopenhauer is not so definite to us as that of his wife. The father did not live long enough to give the son an opportunity of judging him impartially. It was the wish of his heart that after this superb introduction you I wish you would try to make yourself agreeable to people. You would then give Herr K. less occasion to speak to you at table. And about conducting yourself properly -I advise you to ask some one to give you a knock when you omit to thank others for this or that service. But this "best of fathers," as Schopenhauer calls him, came to an untimely end in April, 1805. He either fell or jumped from a high loft of his own warehouse into the canal beneath, and was drowned. His behavior previous to his death, and the circumstances of the tragedy, point only too convincingly towards suicide. Mental derangement or prostration seems to have been in the Schopenhauer family, seeing that both the councillor's brothers were suspected of insanity, and that neither of them did anything of credit to disprove the suspicion. Be that as it may, his father's violent death must have had a very serious influence in determining the bent of young Schopenhauer's inner life. To persons illversed in the method of Schopenhauer's philosophy, it may seem that suicide and the surrender or denial of the will to live, which is the most comfortable tenet of his doctrine, are identical; and that, therefore, Schopenhauer père, in taking his own life, did the best possible thing for himself. But this is not so. Rather the contrary. the suicide is so far from having brought his will into subjection, that in the supreme For |