forgotten whether or not he was obliged to pay pecuniary damages; but I recall that the suit altogether cost him four hundred pounds. This marked the end of The Highlander. John Murdoch afterwards ran for Greenock in the election of 1885 in the interests of the Land Restoration movement. His expenses were paid by two enthusiastic old ladies. In spite of the assistance of Morrison Davidson, who contributed during the campaign a series of lively and humorous articles, Murdoch received only a few votes. There was a legend, and I believe a true one, that from his earliest youth Murdoch had worn the kilt, and that he had never desecrated his legs by clothing them in the trousers of the oppressive Sassenach. We saw the wall of the graveyard and we saw the house of the laird, but we found no other evidence of the episode. At Portree in the evening we were serenaded by songsters in a boat, who sang to us across the waters of the harbour "Over the Sea to Skye" and other locally appropriate melodies. From Portree we made our course northwards to the Gair Loch, landed and drove to Loch Maree, a beautiful inland water. Then we returned, sailing southwards to Oban, having spent three delightful and health-giving weeks among the Scots fiords. CHAPTER XX THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1887-1893 (MANCHESTER, BATH, Came they that kept our England's sea-swept hem, After them came They who pushed back the ocean of the Unknown Of ebbing mystery; And on their banner "Science" blazoned shone. FRANCIS THOMPSON, The Victorian Ode (1913). THE British Association meeting at Manchester in 1887 coincided with the Manchester Exhibition of that year. Although since then I have been at many meetings of the British Association, I have always looked back upon this one as in many ways the most interesting. There was a great assemblage, not only of British men of science, but also of foreigners. Perhaps the science best represented by the latter was biology. The most important foreign biologists were Weismann of Freiburg and Hubrecht of Utrecht. Weismann came to expound his theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm. He did so in German to a large audience, and Ray Lankester followed with a summary in English. There was some debate, but everyone was more interested in hearing Weismann expound his doctrine in person and in witnessing his dogmatic manner than in criticism of the doctrine itself at that moment. Even in 1887 there were many who refused to regard Weismannism as the final word, and who saw in his ultraDarwinian statement of the doctrine of evolution a contribution to discussion rather than an unimpugnable contribution to knowledge. Since that day even the word "evolution" has fallen into the background, the fashion of science has changed, and attention is now directed to the chemico-physical processes of life, and to heredity merely in so far as it throws light upon these processes.1 Sir William Thomson (not yet Lord Kelvin) was there of course. A new interest in inheritance of acquired characters, and therefore a revival of Lamarckism, has been introduced by the researches of Professor Pavlov of the University of St. Petersburg. At that time he was sixty-three years of age and in the prime of his amazing activity. I dropped into Section A (the Mathematical and Physical Section) frequently. Not only did he speak on almost every paper, but in general he was able to say that he had touched the special subject of it, in some paper of his own, twenty or thirty years earlier. It was as true of Kelvin in science as it was of Morris in art, that he never touched anything without in some way changing its history. The popular lecture was given by Sir Robert Ball, who, though not a great man of science, was an accomplished humorist. I recall the dexterity with which he gave a humorous twist to recondite things. Sir Frederick Bramwell, in proposing a vote of thanks, gave an account of his experiences on the switchback railway, which he had apparently seen for the first time at the Manchester Exhibition. Those who remember the enormous bulk of Sir Frederick can imagine the delight of his fellow-passengers, qualified by anxiety lest the railway should break down under the unusual strain. At Manchester I dined for the first time with the Red Lions, receiving from the Jackals my invitation as a cub. The fun was good; I think it was on that occasion that Harold Dixon, Professor of Chemistry at Owens College, made some amusing chemical demonstrations by way of taking off papers read at the Chemical Section. The British Association met at Bath in 1888. I stayed with Cedric Chivers, well known as a bookbinder. Chivers had married a friend of our Stranraer days, and he had therefore asked me to stay with him. Among the foreigners was P. J. C. Janssen, who established the observatory on Mont Blanc. Janssen was lame and heavy. Like Campbell, the blind alpinist, he had to be carried up the mountain on a chair by numerous porters. I spent several evenings in his company and found him a copious talker. My old friend John Brown, F.R.S. (of Edenderry), was there, so also were Herbert Foxwell and Henry Sidgwick. The Economic Section was enlivened by a paper read by George Bernard Shaw upon economic history. Like all Shaw's economic writings, the paper was amusing and superficial. The years 1886–88, as may be gathered from other passages in these memoirs, marked the moment when many students of economics, who for the previous ten years had been much influenced by Marx, were beginning to find out the deficiencies of his reasoning and to call in question the particular aspects of the materialistic interpretation of history upon which Marx had founded his predictions regarding the future of society. 1 The paper is to be found in The Fabian Essays. These years also marked the moment when some of the Fabians, who had affected to be merely students and had disclaimed propaganda, discarded the rôle of students and became avowed Socialists. The difficulty of public adherence to a propaganda is that a much greater amount of courage is required to leave than was required to enter a movement. The demands of an active propaganda permit few opportunities for serious study, and very rapidly there arises a disposition to reject any evidence and every argument that may seem to militate against the interests of the propaganda. The ecclesiastics have no monopoly of intolerance. Indeed, of all groups of men in modern times probably the Marxists are the most bigoted, the most contemptuous of opinions about society and its problems other than their own. At this period Shaw had recently espoused Marxism, and had publicly taken the vows of a convert. To him the new gospel afforded an adequate explanation of the past as well as guidance to the future worthy of implicit obedience. Had Shaw been otherwise than he was he would have been by so much the less effective as a propagandist. He was quite in earnest so far as he went; if he had been able to place Marx more justly in relation to his time, Shaw would not have been so much in earnest. His thesis was, of course, intended to be a destructive criticism of the system of private property, and of all that that implies. Discussion would have been futile. Henry Sidgwick, with his customary urbanity, took the paper seriously; and in his inimitable and delightful stammer said, "Under no circ-c-cumstances c-c-could I c-c-c-consent to a g-g-gospel of p-p-public plunder." I afterwards went off with Shaw and had some tea. He came from London to read his paper and returned by the afternoon train, taking no interest in any other proceedings. Among the people at the Bath meeting was George Jacob Holyoake, then a very old man. I had some walks with him and tried to draw him out about Robert Owen. I was aware that Owen had looked upon Holyoake as a rather light-weight, and I was interested to find out how Owen appeared to him after the lapse of more than forty years since they were allies. Holyoake spoke of Owen as arbitrary and domineering. I was quite prepared for this, for I knew that at least on one occasion Owen had snubbed Holyoake in public. Holyoake had mellowed into a pleasant old man. He had seen many of his early enthusiasms become widely influential. The Co-operative movement, of which he was the earliest although not the most critical historian, had come into its own; and if the country had not adopted secularism as its credo, it had become so widely secular in its practice that secularist propaganda had almost ceased to have any field to work upon. The Newcastle meeting of 1889 brought to my mind tender and sad recollections, for I had not been on the Tyne since 1885, when I spent some time at Low Walker with my brother Ivan, who was then manager of the shipbuilding yard of Hawthorne, Leslie and Co., Jarrow. At this meeting I met old friends like Edgeworth,1 Foxwell,2 Cunningham, and Patrick Geddes. Cunningham and Henry Sidgwick had a bout at the Economic Section, in which the old quarrel of economic theory and economic history practically petered out. Sidgwick, in his address as President of the Section at the Aberdeen meeting of 1885, had offered a sharp criticism of the attitude of the economic historian who abjured theory and devoted himself to the task of recorder. He had also attacked vigorously the article on Political Economy in the Encyclopædia Britannica, written by Dr. J. K. Ingram. He said what was perfectly true, that to ask Dr. Ingram to write this article was equivalent to asking Professor Huxley to write the article on the Bible. Illuminating as Ingram's article was, his summary dismissal of much of the current discussion of economic doctrine as contestations steriles was hardly just, and was, moreover, rather apt to lend support to less well-instructed critics. These were prevalent enough at the time, and they were disposed to regard lightly all laborious efforts to grapple with the difficulties inherent in all economic problems. While Ingram was right in insisting that economic discussion should not degenerate into hair-splitting comparable only with the scholastic disputations of the Middle Ages, he was wrong in so far as he appeared to discourage the application to economic problems of scientific methods universally employed in other sciences. Yet he only, after all, appeared to do so. His central philosophical position-that of a Comtist-would alone have prevented him from really falling into the error of discrediting sound scientific method. The quarrel had really arisen through the influence of German economic historians, of whom Roscher was the most conspicuous, who went so far as to insist that the formulation of all economic theories should be suspended until a much greater quantity of data had been collected. This was equivalent to saying that data should be collected 1 Professor of Political Economy at Oxford. Professor of Political Economy at University College, London, and Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Rev. Wm. Cunningham, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Professor of Greek, Librarian and afterwards Provost of Trinity College, Dublin. |