THOMAS CAMPBELL, JOINER, POET, AND PLAYWRIGHT. THE following simple story of real life-plainly told as it is-possesses much interest, and carries the sympathies of the reader in sorrow to the far-off Queensland grave in which the eager, ambitious, and persevering lad is now laid, whose life-tale is comprised in this brief newspaper summary which we quote from the Ayrshire Express :— 66 : 'Campbell's life was a short and very eventful one. We remember once praising some of his verses. He laughed, and said he had no doubt we were quite right, for he was sent into the world in the same year that the other Tom Campbell was called out of it. At the age of eleven he ran away to sea, but returned after a two years' voyage, when he got employment as a clerk in Ayr. It was about this time that he commenced verse-making. The confinement of the counting-room soon tired him, and he determined to learn the trade of a joiner, part of which he acquired in Ayr, and part in Kilmarnock. While in Kilmarnock he continued to fill note-books with verses; commenced writing several plays; attended night schools, and learned some French and a little Latin; and took to saving money. He wrought in Glasgow for two or three months after he left Kilmarnock, but the great object of his ambition was to see his 'Chinese Drama' on the stage in London. This was one of his earliest productions, and was a great favourite with him to the last. Arrived in the metropolis, he wrote a new copy of the play, and proceeded at once to Mr. Macmillan, the publisher, whose patronage, he was told, it would be of some consequence to secure. We have heard him relate the interview often. The great publisher received him very kindly; asked him where he came from; spoke about Mauchline; and turned over the pages of the drama. Then followed question and answer and advice. 'You intend placing this on the stage, do you? Very good but it is not easy to manage that. I'm very glad to hear that you have got a trade. You'll get plenty of work here. Don't mind the drama just now. Continue as before to improve your mind. Be sure, Mr. Campbell, and call again; I would like to know how you get on.' The advice was followed to the letter. He worked every day at his trade; attended elocution classes; gave readings at working men's clubs at least once a week; wrote two three-volume novels and added greatly to his list of songs and plays. The mere physical labour must have been terrible. It soon told. His lungs were declared to be affected. He came home about September, last year [1865], with a heavy purse and ruined constitution. After a good deal of blistering he seemed to revive a little. Much against the will of his friends, who feared any great trial of his strength, he gave a series of readings in Ayr and Kilmarnock. Before leaving for London, in January, he published 'Pope Sixtus V.: an Historical Play, in Four Acts.' In the preface he says, while addressing a certain order of critics, 'It would not, perhaps, be politic to tell such people that the following drama was written by its author at eighteen; and it would perhaps make bad much worse if they were told that it is now three years since it was written.' When he reached London he got worse. He was advised to try Queensland. He sailed in February. The day before leaving London he wrote the author of this paragraph that if he remained where he was other six weeks, he would require six feet in God's acre.' He was carried [in May, 1866] to the hospital at Brisbane [Queensland] completely exhausted, and was fated to live only some two days in a country whose climate he fondly hoped would restore him to health, and enable him to prosecute his darling plans with renewed vigour. He was only twenty-two years of age." The Eloquence of the Month. SELECTIONS ON SOCIAL SCIENCE. CONTROVERSY is asserting for itself an important position in modern thought. It is organizing men into considerateness, and proving itself to be the friend of progress, intelligence, and philanthropy. That which was, at one time, thought to jeopardize men's holiest convictions and most tenaciously held principles, is now welcomed as a favourite of truth and a furtherer of righteousness. Science more than quarter of a century ago founded the British Association, and was not long in finding that, to be truly useful, its proceedings must be in part controversial. Archæology has chosen controversy for an ally too, and in its congresses admits debatable topics and keen discussions. The Social Congress some ten years ago sprang forth as an amateur parliament,- -a great public debating society a meeting intended to promote not individual only, but national improvement. Controversy-which had long been legally employed in the consideration of political topics, and had been found to produce good results in regard to science and sociology-has of late been taken into favour by the church too, and church congresses are employing debate for the advancement and improvement of ecclesiastical influences and the religious life of men. Industry has also had its International Controversial Congress at Geneva. Now moral science claims the aid of controversy too, and there has been instituted a Moral Science Congress. All this is hopeful. It points forward to a time when reasoned thought shall prevail among men, and honest belief or doubt will gain a fair hearing; when impartial discussion will be welcomed, not tolerated, and when men shall be truly willing to welcome the Truth where'er 'tis found, On heathen or on Christian ground." In the month of October we had a much larger amount of eloquence and discussion than usual. We have had brought before us, in the early part of the month only, a debate in a Free Church Presbytery in Glasgow upon heresy; some exciting discussion on what is called, in Scotland, the Union Question, i. e., a motion for a reunion of most of the Dissenting bodies in that church-fellowship divided country, and the controversies which have gone on in the Social Science Congress at Manchester, the Evangelical Alliance at Bath, and the Church Congress at York. To these we have had added a debate on public improvements in Edinburgh, the great reform demonstrations at Leeds, Glasgow, &c., and the speeches of a great number of M.P.s to their constituents, as well as not a few addresses to literary associations. With some diligence we have read and with some deliberation we have weighed the contending claims of the various matters, and we have decided on placing the following selections on Social Science before our readers, as embracing at once much elegantly expressed and highly useful thought. LORD BROUGHAM ON EUROPEAN AFFAIRS AND THE EVILS OF WAR. Lord Brougham, as President of the Council of the Social Science Association, delivered a clear and well-thought-out address. He who was once Demosthenic in his denunciations has become almost courtier-like in his fondness for paying compliments. He made some appropriate and feeling remarks on the losses sustained by the council through death-Sir C. Hastings and Lord Glenelg,and then turned to his living colleagues, Mr. Plunket, Lord Napier, Sir E. Wilmot, &c. He spoke of courts of conciliation, the law of evidence, bribery, the Atlantic cable, the United Kingdom Alliance movement, co-operation, refuges, infirmaries, and lastly, of foreign affairs and war. We quote the peroration, but cannot help remarking, as we think, that this able exhibition of eloquence at eighty-four years of age closes inartistically. "Have we anything to console us when we turn our eyes abroad? The accounts are so conflicting that we cannot pronounce anything with certainty on the state of the Continent, as to what may be the distribution of dominion or the continuance of peace. Let us, however, hope that the error will not be committed of giving a preference to one, even the best, especially to Hungary. The great body of the Germans must be considered, and the weight of Austria, both by land and sea, must never be forgotten, and the united powers of Germany in all its departments be fully recognized. On the whole, there can be no doubt that the cause of progress is in a hopeful condition. There is a general tendency towards free institutions, and the states of Germany are in confident expectation of legislation more or less within the direct influence of the people. It should seem that the Protestant interest has gained considerably, and certainly against the great evils of Austria's defeats must be set their unquestionable tendency to lessen the papal power and to hasten the departure of the French from Rome, as well as their securing the liberation of Venice, at which all our friends must rejoice on account of the Venetians, and by no means because the kingdom of Italy had the least right to obtain this extension of its territories. In France there is so strong an opposition to the Imperial Government, and so general a desire of material prosperity, that there seems good ground for a belief in greater freedom of discussion being given to public bodies, and even of some relaxation in the laws respecting the press also. This, too, is unquestionable, that great sacrifices have been made somewhat unexpectedly for the termination of hostilities, that the Emperor's conduct to prevent their continuance has been highly meritorious, and that at length a general peace is concluded. Yes! peace is restored on the Continent, and all friends of social science must heartily rejoice. Its conditions and the arrangements left by the war are of great importance notwith standing; and I cannot help reflecting on the statement which I made more than once in Parliament, that if bystanders see more of the game than those who play it, as the common saying purports, there is a bystander now who, besides seeing the game, will most probably have some claims to profit by the result, whichever party gained, and so it has turned out that the claims have been made, but most properly they have not been insisted upon. Whether the peace concluded is to be durable, or only a truce, remains to be seen. But whatsoever doubt may hang over the future, on the grievous aspect of the past there can be none. the middle of the nineteenth century a wide-spreading war has raged, and tens of thousands have perished or been consigned to a life of wretchedness by their wounds, and all this has been made to secure an extension of dominion or increase of affluence. The wars of the first Napoleon were hardly more costly of blood, and yet he was excused for his lust of conquest by the service he had rendered in closing the anarchy of the Revolution-an excuse which belongs not to the authors of the late hostilities. Yet is it any real excuse for Napoleon? and how much is his nephew to be preferred for his love of peace, and for feeling by his actual presence and expressing his deep sense of all the horrors of war? Although the glory of war lends its horrible atrocities a false glare which deceives us as to its bloodguiltiness, in what does the crime of Napoleon, when he sacrificed thousands of lives to his lust of foreign conquest, differ from that of Robespierre, when he sought domestic power by slaying hundreds of his fellow-citizens? In one particular there is more atrocity in the crimes of the latter; they were perpetrated under the name and form of justice, whose sanctity they cruelly profaned; but, on the other hand, far more blood was spilled, far more widespreading and lengthened misery occasioned to unoffending provinces, by the invasions of Spain, and Switzerland, and Germany, and Russia, than by all the acts of the Committee, the Convention, and the Revolutionary Tribunal. Nor will mankind ever be free from the scourge of war until they learn to call things by their proper names, to give crimes the same epithets, whatever outward form they may assume, and to regard with equal abhorrence the conqueror who slakes his thirst of dominion with the blood of his fellow-creatures, and the more vulgar criminal, who is executed for taking the life of a wayfaring man, that he may seize upon his purse. We hesitate not to shed the blood of the common felon, and even those most averse to capital punishment make an exception against the murderer. Thus there is no difficulty in prosecuting murderers, and the juries convict, who in cases of theft or embezzlement, or even forgery, would hesitate. Such is the universal horror of murder, or even of attempts to commit it, and of partial committal. Then why do the same parties regard the slaughter of tens of thousands, some with tolerance, and some even with approval ? 'One to destroy is murder by the law, And gibbets keep the lifted hand in awe; Young, Universal Passion,' sect. vii. Such is the result of war, and while men will fight, and slay their tens of thousands, the crime of murder on the largest scale must go on unpunished and unrepented. Yes, unpunished in this world. But our heavenly Father bestowing free-will on His creatures hath declared them accountable for its abuse; and administering justice in mercy towards the numbers deceived or compelled into bloodguiltiness, He condemns those that have betrayed or forced them as their accomplices or their instruments to the unspeakable and enduring torments of hell." Lord Shaftesbury is a nobleman enthusiastic in his zeal for social reform, for labours of love, and for the promotion of religious views. He is much bent on promulgating his theoretical opinions; but he is also laudably anxious to promote practical work in behalf of humanity. Of his more recent appearances on the religious platform, some may disapprove of his keen speech against certain writers whose views differ from his own, and that of the party of which he is a leader. In politics some may think him less liberal than he might be; but in sociology his efforts can scarcely fail to satisfy, for he works with a will to do the instant duties that Christian humanity suggests. He has now held office as President twice in the Social Science Congress. The speech delivered this year was less eloquent than that of his former presidency, and we shall limit our excerpt to his exordium, an intermediate passage, and his peroration. After a few introductory explanations and complimentary phrases his lordship spoke as follows: "We are now about to celebrate our tenth anniversary, and we may be summoned to show cause why our existence should be prolonged,-we may hear that the questions are exhausted, and the perpetual repetition of the same details is wearisome and useless. But let it be observed that the repetition of the same details is not in the same places, and before the same audiences; and even if it were so, there steps in the language of the apostle, 'To write the same things to you, to me indeed is not grievous; but for you it is safe;' safe, because we speak of things which come home to every man's life, and almost to every man's bosomthings which cannot be neglected, if ignorantly, without danger, and if wilfully, without both danger and crime. It is true, no doubt, that we have given to the world several volumes of transactions, abounding in most valuable reports of our discussions and proceedings. They are rich in argument and facts on all the subjects embraced in our programme; and were the curious and the sympathizing disposed to study them, we might be spared, for some time at least, any further efforts in this direction. But such is not the case; and we must trace it to a spirit at all periods strong, but peculiarly so in our own generation, a love of things, actually or apparently, new. An old thought, an old fact, an old inference, dressed up in a new garment, and presented in a fresh light, has all the charm of novelty, even to minds well conversant with the subject; and hundreds, no doubt, who would shrink from the dull and solitary pursuit of facts diffused through numerous and bulky octavos, are fascinated by the human voice in the delivery of eloquent addresses, or in the lively, vigorous, and profitable discussions that follow so frequently on the close of the several papers. But though we have old subjects, see how constantly we are aided by new men-and herein lies one great advantage of our system. Latent science, latent zeal, latent energy, latent intellect, latent through diffidence, want of opportunity, or subject-matter, are brought to the light of day before your assembled Congress. Each one who has contributed an essay, or taken part in the deliberations, returns to his home, and becomes recognized as a centre of influence and practical knowledge. Thus the spirit and power of active service are widely diffused, silently working in times of health, but prompt and loud in times of disease; and I cannot but attribute, under God's good providence, the suppression of the late epidemic, in no small measure, to the larger views, the readier knowledge, the greater capacity for imposing discipline, or submitting to it, and to the faculty, so recently and so advantageously exhibited, for immediate and effective co-operation among functionaries |