by stipulations in their bills of lading, are under heavy liabilities for accident and danger in Courts of Law. Actions for damage and loss of cargo appear constantly in the Law Reports. Once admit Government control, and these liabilities are at an end. The Government certificate is an answer to any passenger or shipper who sues for damages, or to any insurer who disputes his liability. No one can find fault with a shipowner for that which the Government has sanctioned. With a system of control, even Government inquiry will be useless, for the Government officers would be inquiring into their own acts. It is scarcely necessary to add that the reasons against Government control which are above advocated, are entirely consistent with a thorough system of Government investigation of accidents. The function of throwing light on all practices of the trade; of investigating all dangers, and of ascertaining the true cause of accidents, is one which the Government can exercise with the utmost possible advantage and without fear of dangerous results. It is one which is useful to the shipowners, for it points out to them real sources of danger. It brings to bear on them the powerful motives of fear of loss of traffic, and of legal liability for damages. And it does this without ulterior ill consequences. But for the reason above given it is inconsistent with Government control. It is still more needless to add that the above observations are consistent with and support a strict enforcement of the legal responsibilities of the shipowners. It is, we are satisfied, in this latter direction, and on this principle, that legislation can and ought to be made effectual. Under the wholesome doctrines of the Common Law, the shipowner is liable for any loss or injury sustained in consequence of his own neglect or that of his servants, by any passenger or shipper of goods. He would also, but for insurance, be himself the loser by accident to his ship. But the Legislature has, probably wisely, limited the liability of the shipowner to a certain fixed amount; and he, not satisfied with this, too often gets rid of it altogether by stipulations introduced into his bills of lading. He can further not only cover himself by insurance against all possible loss, but can turn a loss into a gain; and in doing this, he is protected and encouraged by the present state of our law. It is true that he is now made liable criminally for criminal neglect, and that he cannot by contract rid himself of this liability. But it is not easy to prove criminal neglect; nor is a public prosecutor animated by the same constant motive of self-interest which prompts the civil remedy. A court and a jury jury are ready to give a decision against a shipowner when the question is one of damages between him and a sufferer by his neglect, where they would hesitate to find him guilty of a crime. To enforce this civil liability, and to prevent insurance from becoming a temptation to negligence, would go much farther and deeper than all the superficial remedies which philanthropists are so ready to prescribe; it would reach the motives of the shipowner, and in this way would operate, not on one particular outward symptom, but on all the points on which there is any temptation to negligence or any possibility of precaution. If every shipowner is made to feel, as no doubt the great majority of shipowners do feel, that his real interest lies in the safety and success of his enterprise, and that the loss of the ship, cargo, passengers, and crew is his loss, it will make him look-and he is the only person who can effectually look-to everything which can conduce to her safety, to her build, her equipment, her loading, her manning, and her navigation. It will not interfere with the good shipowner, for he does this already, and has a motive for doing it. But it will test and punish the bad shipowner far more severely than any system of legislative rules or Government supervision, all of which he well knows how to meet and evade, and which, indeed, he is quite ready to accept, because he knows that they save him from a responsibility which he dreads above all things. Add to this, the very important consideration that remedies of this description, unlike the supposed remedy of official supervision, will reach the Foreign shipowner who carries on trade in our ports or who seeks his remedy in our Courts of Law, equally with the British shipowner. To legislate on these points is no easy matter. The measures necessary for this purpose are difficult to frame, and still more difficult to carry, since they do really touch the tender sore. But the present state of public feeling affords a great opportunity, and it would be ten thousand pities if the motive power, for which we are so much indebted to Mr. Plimsoll, were allowed to waste itself in the false and mischievous remedies of prescription and supervision, instead of effecting a vital reform by making the responsibility of the shipowner certain and indefeasible. ART. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-A Short History of the English People. By J. R. Green, M.A. With Maps and Tables. London. 1874. THE HE extraordinary popularity of Mr. Green's Short History' must be regarded as one of the most curious literary phenomena of the day. Within the space of a brief twelvemonth, or a little more, it has reached the unprecedented sale of 32,000 copies, according to the announcement of its publisher. The fact is noticeable. Had Mr. Green suddenly dawned upon the world as a delightful poet or fascinating novelist of the latest stamp, his success could not have been more remarkable. The reading public are not so indulgent to historians in general. A second or third edition moves off languidly enough. The sale of a few thousand copies satisfies the most ambitious expectations of author and publisher. But here is an author comparatively unknown, or known only to a small circle of friends, who distances at once all competitors-not in some new field of inquiry, not in the pathways of scientific discovery, but in the well-trodden arena of English history. Those who have little acquaintance with the subject, and those who are, or at least profess to have been, familiar with it from their childhood, who are fully persuaded that there are no fresh facts to be elicited, and no further discoveries to be made, are equally loud in Mr. Green's praises. Hostile criticism in every quarter is fascinated and disarmed. The secret of this extraordinary success it is not difficult to divine. Mr. Green's style is eminently readable and attractive. A lively imagination, not always under the most rigid control, imparts its own colours to the dry details of history, where a more scrupulous or conscientious writer would have wearied himself, and fatigued his readers, unwilling to venture beyond the arid region of facts. Every one nowadays demands that whatever else history may be it shall be made interesting. It must trench as closely as possible on the borders of fiction. The Vol. 141.-No. 282. influence X. influence of a great writer amongst us, who has poured such unmeasured contempt on the Dryasdusts of this and a past generation, has created the belief that the unimaginative historian must also be an incompetent historian. So the demand for history-lively, attractive, and sparkling at all hazards—has produced the required supply. The temptation is great, and Mr. Green has not always been able to resist it. It was not in his nature to do so. For him, the animated, the poetical, and the picturesque exercise an irresistible fascination. He has a natural tendency to supply from his own fertile and fervid imagination the dramatic details that are wanting in his cold and colourless originals. It is true that in this respect he does not stand alone. It is also true that from the days of Lord Macaulay historians have justified themselves by his example in the use of rhetorical exaggeration on the supposition that in no other way is it possible to represent to the dull and jaded perceptions of modern times the stirring incidents and emotions of the past. Mr. Green may think that he has sufficient warrant for following a precedent sanctioned by such eminent authority. We think otherwise. Not even in histories written for readers whose judgment and knowledge may be mature enough to prevent them from being misled, and whose skill may be sufficient to distinguish between truth and error, ought the baseless suggestions of the imagination to intrude upon the strict province of fact-of facts resting on unquestionable evidence. But in histories for the young-if Mr. Green's book be intended for the young-for the inexperienced and uninitiated, who are sure to take upon trust all that their teacher tells them, and are likely to be more impressed by the fictitious than the true, this licence is even less justifiable. Many readers of English history will never go beyond Mr. Green's book. They will place implicit confidence in a writer whose style and whose genius they cannot fail to admire. Their conceptions of social progress, their judgment of past events, of the great personages that have moulded or modified our national destiny, will be determined exclusively by a perusal of Mr. Green's pages. his case, therefore, strict accuracy is more important than in works which make no pretensions to speak with authority. In That such a caution is by no means unnecessary in this case may be inferred from the careless and indiscriminate applause lavished on the labours of Mr. Green by the journals and periodicals of the day. We will do him the credit to believe that no one is more conscious than himself of his own defects and imperfections. No one knows better than he the vastness of the task he has undertaken, and the impossibility, in the present state state of historical literature, of doing justice to all portions of the subject alike. On some it is clear he has bestowed greater care and attention than on others. If in some parts of his work we trace the conscientious study and examination of original authorities, in others he has trusted exclusively to secondary sources, attempting little more than a reproduction, after his own fashion, without exercising much independent judgment, and not always with rigid accuracy, of the opinions and conclusions of his predecessors. What else could he do? Mr. Green, we presume, has not yet attained to the age of Methuselah. He has not the brazen entrails' or iron frame of the celebrated Greek Father, for he distinctly announces in his Preface that his work was 'written in hours of weakness and ill-health,' and he urges this as an apology for the faults and oversights,' of which he is only too conscious;' an apology which all who know anything of the immensity of his task will be ready enough to accept. But such being the case, it is not easy to understand the extraordinary assertion of the leading journal of the day, that this history of Mr. Green will be found an able guide to every student of history through the latest as well as the earliest portions of the political and social life of England.' To those who have taken the trouble to examine the book with the slightest attention, such praise must appear extravagant and ridiculous. In the latest portions' of his history, Mr. Green has been satisfied with producing a meagre outline of the main facts of the time, bestowing very little attention on the political or social condition of the country. Whilst his history of England to the death of Queen Anne occupies 700 pages, the narrative from the House of Hanover to the year 1873, including the political complications under George III., the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Peninsular War, the Battle of Waterloo-not to mention the religious reforms of the Wesleyans, the attempts of the Pretender in 1715 and 1745, the victories of Clive in India, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the financial schemes of Pitt-is despatched in little more than a hundred pages. To "the battles of the crows and kites,' as Milton stigmatises somewhat contemptuously the pre-Norman history of this country, Mr. Green has devoted more than twice the space he has allotted to the whole of the nineteenth century and the Victorian era. We do not quarrel with him for this want of proportion in his work; but it must be obvious how little historical criticism can be trusted when it can discern no difference in the study, |