Commission, that the members were struck with the advance made in this famine by most of the Durbars towards bringing their relief into line with the humane policy of the British Government.'

The good results of this influence have been large and numerous; only one or two striking instances can be quoted here. The premier state of Hyderabad was first among the native states of India, not only in size and rank and dignity, but also in maladministration and torpor and decay. The Nizam, a prince of good abilities and a fine sense of honour, was averse from public business. His state was crammed full of abuses; his finances were decaying; his officials were notoriously obstructing the efforts of the British Residents. The great unsettled grievance of Berar had now lain in abeyance for more than twenty years; and the most experienced Residents had been wont to warn their Governments of the danger of touching on this ancient sore. Lord Curzon invited the Nizam to Calcutta, and paid him a return visit at Hyderabad. The Nizam made promises, and kept them with scrupulous fidelity. He renewed his interest in public business; he reduced his personal expenditure; he accepted the services of a British officer to reorganise his finance. The Nizam's famine administration was officially commended by the Secretary of State. Above all, the question of Berar was finally and honourably settled; and in the settlement the Nizam agreed also to make a large reduction in the number of his irregular troops. There are plenty of reforms left to accomplish; but no one will deny that, in the first few years of the new century, Hyderabad has made a substantial advance.

Another instance of awakening is the case of Jaipur. The Maharaja of Jaipur had been a recluse in his palace; the government was in a Babu's hands. Not only is the Maharaja now administering his own affairs, but he has filled the position of adviser to the Indian Government on points of ceremony, and has appeared before the English public as a model leader of orthodox Hindus. Emulating each other in the race for distinction by merit are two young princes of high qualities-the Maharaja of Gwalior and the Maharaja of Bikanir. The child of a race of turbulent forefathers, himself a model pupil of the Aitchison College, the young Nawab of Bahawalpur

burns with zeal to show by hard work that he deserves the honour of his installation by the Viceroy. Everywhere among the ranks of the princes we see the awakening of conscience and the rise of new standards of Imperial duty and new conceptions of what loyalty means.

There is another side to the picture. Of course not all the princes have risen to the Viceroy's appeal. There have been, and are, some cases of persistent neglect of duty; and for these the Government has only stern discouragement in word and deed. There is a story that a Babu, who sat outside the Viceroy's tent during an interview which had been granted to an unruly and troublesome Nawab from beyond the border, reported that the chief had issued from the Lord Sahib's presence 'sweated and surprised.' The hand of the Government has fallen heavily on Central India. Two ruling chiefs, tried and convicted of capital offences, have been deposed. The bearer of the proud name of Holkar has been permitted to abdicate, and his son rules in his stead.

If we look round for a sign of the general adoption by the princes of the Imperial burden, we find it in the Delhi Durbar. Sixty-six chiefs attended the Durbar of 1877. One hundred and two chiefs attended the Durbar of 1903. In 1877 they attended as spectators of an Imperial pageant. In 1903 they attended as participators in an Imperial rite. Every important ruling chief, who was not either excused for poverty or prevented by an unavoidable reason, attended the last Durbar. In that great ceremony the chiefs of India signified their active acceptance of the policy of co-operation; and with that acceptance a new era in Indian history has begun.

Art. XI.-THE LIFE AND PHILOSOPHY OF HERBERT SPENCER.

1. An Autobiography. By Herbert Spencer. Two vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1904.

2. Social Statics. By Herbert Spencer. London: Chapman, 1850.

3. A System of Synthetic Philosophy. By Herbert Spencer. Ten vols. London: Williams and Norgate, 1862–96. And other works by the same author.

It was eminently in accordance with the fitness of things that the philosopher of evolution should end by writing the evolution of himself; and in spite of its ponderous length and other palpable faults, the result is a very interesting human document. If Spinoza said that he would treat of God and the mind exactly as if he were concerned with lines, planes, and solids, Spencer analyses himself in these pages much as he might dissect a natural history specimen. If we add to the outspoken candour of its self-analysis the unconscious revelations of mind and character of which it is full, and the details which it furnishes of his early upbringing and the history of his ideas, it is manifest that the two volumes give us a much more intimate knowledge than we have hitherto possessed, both of the antecedents of the man and the milieu in which his work was produced. Consequently they must be an important aid to a better estimate of that work, both in its strength and its limitations. The history of an idea or a set of ideas is often the best criticism that can be offered. Of the Autobiography' itself, as a literary product, it would be easy to speak too harshly. Some allowance must be made for the circumstances of its composition. Dictated as a rough outline of facts so early as 1875, it was taken up again in 1886 after the last and most serious breakdown in Spencer's health, when more serious mental work was impossible. A little time was spent daily in putting the memoranda into shape; but even this was not done in chronological order. Haunted, as he was apt to be, by the thought that he might not survive to complete the record, he decided to take up first the sections which he deemed of most importance, passing thus freely back and forward

from one period of his life to another, and gradually filling up the gaps of the narrative as destiny proved kinder than his fears.

Such a desultory mode of composition explains many redundancies and repetitions; and the ebb-tide of mental energy during which much of it took shape may also explain the frequent slackness of style and the prolixity of non-significant detail through which the reader has often to plough his way. There is a lack of proportion in the narrative, especially as it advances in the second volume. Sometimes it is as if the writer were at the mercy of his memoranda; and we have a chronicle of journeys and incidents possessing no interest beyond the fact that they happened at a certain date, and help Spencer to block out the blank spaces of his memory. At other points an association of ideas betrays him into general reflections; and he airs for a page or two some of his favourite 'nonconformities,' with which readers of his works are already sufficiently familiar. It is at times -an unkind reader might say in the author's style-as if the centres of inhibition had temporarily abdicated their function. Shall we say that such causes as these help to explain the 1098 pages to which the volumes run? or must this damning fact be ascribed to an egotism so massive and unconscious that it loses all the pettiness of ordinary vanity? Spencer makes an excuse for the egotistic suggestion which the autobiographical form necessarily involves, but it does not seem to have occurred to him that the scale of his posthumous monument would be taken as the true measure of his self-absorption.

Still, after all these grave deductions have been made. the Autobiography' somehow succeeds in holding the reader's interest and even engaging his sympathy. It lies in the nature of the man who is its subject that we find in it neither the beautiful simplicity of character which charms us in Darwin, nor the vivid personality which gives light and animation to Huxley's 'Life.' Spencer's story owes its attraction chiefly to its frankness, to the transparent honesty of the narrator, and the absence of all affectation or pose. Paradoxical as the statement may seem in view of Spencer's achievement, the mind here portrayed, save for the command of scientific facts and the wonderful faculty of generalisation, is commonVol. 200.-No. 399,

R

place in the range of its ideas; neither intellectually nor morally is the nature sensitive to the finest issues. Almost uneducated except for a fair acquaintance with mathematics and the scientific knowledge which his own tastes led him to acquire, with the prejudices and limitations of middle-class English Nonconformity, but untouched by its religion, Spencer appears in the early part of his life as a somewhat ordinary young man. His ideals and habits did not differ perceptibly from those of hundreds of intelligent and straight-living Englishmen of his class. And to the end, in spite of his cosmic outlook, there remains this strong admixture of the British Philistine, giving a touch almost of banality to some of his sayings and doings. But, just because the picture is so faithfully drawn, giving us the man in his habit as he lived, with all his limitations and prejudices (and his own consciousness of these limitations, expressed sometimes with a passing regret, but oftener with a childish pride), with all his irritating pedantries and the shallowness of his emotional nature, we can balance against these defects his high integrity and unflinching moral courage, his boundless faith in knowledge and his power of conceiving a great ideal and carrying it through countless difficulties to ultimate realisation, and a certain boyish simplicity of character as well as other gentler human traits, such as his fondness for children, his dependence upon the society of his kind, and his capacity to form and maintain some life-long friendships. A kindly feeling for the narrator grows as we proceed; and most unprejudiced readers will close the book with a genuine respect and esteem for the philosopher in his human aspect.

For the student of Spencer's personality and ideas the opening chapters of his natural history,' in which he depicts the stock of which he came and the social surroundings in which his early years were passed, are probably the most valuable. This account of his ancestry -in particular the picture of his father and of the uncle who superintended his education-gives us already, ‘in large letters,' some of the most striking intellectual and moral features which we associate with the philosopher. Spencer sums up the outstanding characteristics of the race as 'independence, self-asserting judgment, the tendency to nonconformity, and the unrestrained display of