remedies which, we apply to cure it. It is hardly too much to say that human improvement is due to the evils and difficulties of life overcome in the right way.
One last word. Men doubt about "absolute political ethics." Yet they do not doubt about absolute principles in physics, in chemistry, in biology, in psychology, or even in the ethics of private life. Does it never strike them that it is a mightily strange thing—requiring, I think, some explanation on their part to which they do not often condescend—that we should live in this world almost surrounded by order, or fixed law, on every side of us, and yet in one special department of it—that of political action—this order should suddenly he replaced "by disorder and uncertainty? Does it never occur to them that this strange inexplicable contradiction may be not in nature, but possibly only in their own minds? Does it never occur to Prof. Huxley, who is not an admirer, I suspect, of our party warfares, that the danger of modern civilization, the unscrupulousness, the corruption, the cowardice, the shiftiness, the untrue motives that flourish in public life have their stronghold in this belief that politics are an Alsatia, where alone in the wide universe the writ of the Great Power does not run? Does he not see that as long as politics are held to he outside moral law and scientific statement so long we shall he at the mercy of all those who for their own purpose try to persuade the people to believe the ignoble creed that whatever they desire is right, that the measure of their wants is the measure of the just and true? Some day, when possibly men may have forgotten "the heavy lesson" my friend Mr. Greenwood addresses to the philosophers, they may, warned by the great social dangers pressing upon them, turn round and see the full meaning of Mr. Spencer's work, and understand that he alone has pointed to them the path that leads out of the wilderness.
May I say that I am always glad to send some of our individualist tracts to any person who writes to me?
| I am, very faithfully, | Auberon Herbert. |
| Old-House, Ringwood, November 14th. | |
MR. GREENWOOD'S SECOND LETTER.
To the Editor of "The Times":
Sir: If the question is whether Mr. Herbert Spencer is right in endeavoring to purify the conduct of public affairs and discharge it of error by establishing a system of "absolute political ethics, or that which ought to be," I submit that he need not have said so much as he has lately said in your columns. Who doubts that he is right? Who doubts that he is wisely and nobly employed when his business is to discover the bases of true political morality, and to exhort mankind never to lose sight of them, what-
