Discourses on humility give occasion for pride to the boastful, and for humility to the humble. Those on scepticism give occasion for believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, few of scepticism doubtingly. We are but falsehood, duplicity and contradiction, using even to ourselves concealment and guile.
"Heaven forbid!" he answered, with a forced smile. "But I am more than ever struck by your eccentricity, Lizabetha Prokofievna. I admit that I told you of Lebedeff's duplicity, on purpose. I knew the effect it would have on you,--on you alone, for the prince will forgive him. He has probably forgiven him already, and is racking his brains to find some excuse for him--is not that the truth, prince?"
"Silence! This violence is all most repulsive:" and so, no doubt, she felt it. I was a precocious actress in her eyes; she sincerely looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and dangerous duplicity.
"Such demands as to retreat beyond the Vistula and Oder may be made to a Prince of Baden, but not to me!" Napoleon almost screamed, quite to his own surprise. "If you gave me Petersburg and Moscow I could not accept such conditions. You say I have begun this war! But who first joined his army? The Emperor Alexander, not I! And you offer me negotiations when I have expended millions, when you are in alliance with England, and when your position is a bad one. You offer me negotiations! But what is the aim of your alliance with England? What has she given you?" he continued hurriedly, evidently no longer trying to show the advantages of peace and discuss its possibility, but only to prove his own rectitude and power and Alexander's errors and duplicity.
In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on nothing, she walked on; but it would not do; in half a minute the letter was unfolded again, and collecting herself as well as she could, she again began the mortifying perusal of all that related to Wickham, and commanded herself so far as to examine the meaning of every sentence. The account of his connection with the Pemberley family was exactly what he had related himself; and the kindness of the late Mr. Darcy, though she had not before known its extent, agreed equally well with his own words. So far each recital confirmed the other; but when she came to the will, the difference was great. What Wickham had said of the living was fresh in her memory, and as she recalled his very words, it was impossible not to feel that there was gross duplicity on one side or the other; and, for a few moments, she flattered herself that her wishes did not err. But when she read and re-read with the closest attention, the particulars immediately following of Wickham's resigning all pretensions to the living, of his receiving in lieu so considerable a sum as three thousand pounds, again was she forced to hesitate. She put down the letter, weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality--deliberated on the probability of each statement--but with little success. On both sides it was only assertion. Again she read on; but every line proved more clearly that the affair, which she had believed it impossible that any contrivance could so represent as to render Mr. Darcy's conduct in it less than infamous, was capable of a turn which must make him entirely blameless throughout the whole.
Herbert had hardly attempted a systematic criticism of the Christian revelation either as a whole or in its details. Blount, a man of a very different spirit, did both, and in so doing may be regarded as having inaugurated the second main line of deistic procedure, that of historico-critical examination of the Old and New Testaments. Blount adopted and expanded Hobbes's arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and, mainly in the words of Burnet's _Archeologiae philosophicae_, he asserts the total inconsistency of the Mosaic Hexaemeron with the Copernican theory of the heavens, dwelling with emphasis on the impossibility of admitting the view developed in Genesis, that the earth is the most important part of the universe. He assumes that the narrative was meant _ethically_, not _physically_, in order to eliminate false and polytheistic notions; and he draws attention to that double narrative in Genesis which was elsewhere to be so fruitfully handled. The examination of the miracles of Apollonius of Tyana, professedly founded on papers of Lord Herbert's, is meant to suggest similar considerations with regard to the miracles of Christ. Naturalistic explanations of some of these are proposed, and a mythical theory is distinctly foreshadowed when Blount dwells on the inevitable tendency of men, especially long after the event, to discover miracles attendant on the birth and death of their heroes. Blount assaults the doctrine of a mediator as irreligious. He dwells much more pronouncedly than Herbert on the view, afterwards regarded as a special characteristic of all deists, that much or most error in religion has been invented or knowingly maintained by sagacious men for the easier maintenance of good government, or in the interests of themselves and their class. And when he heaps suspicion, not on Christian dogmas, but on beliefs of which the resemblance to Christian tenets is sufficiently patent, the real aim is so transparent that his method seems to partake rather of the nature of literary eccentricity than of polemical artifice; yet by this disingenuous indirectness he gave his argument that savour of duplicity which ever after clung to the popular conception of deism. Entry: DEISM
Russia, Holland and England speedily secured for themselves treaties similar to that concluded by Commodore Perry in 1854. But Japan's doors still remained closed to foreign commerce, and it was reserved for another citizen of the great republic to open them. This was Townsend Harris (1803-1878), the first U.S. consul-general in Japan. Arriving in August 1856, he concluded, in June of the following year, a treaty securing to American citizens the privilege of permanent residence at Shimoda and Hakodate, the opening of Nagasaki, the right of consular jurisdiction and certain minor concessions. Still, however, permission for commercial intercourse was withheld, and Harris, convinced that this great goal could not be reached unless he made his way to Yedo and conferred direct with the shogun's ministers, pressed persistently for leave to do so. Ten months elapsed before he succeeded, and such a display of reluctance on the Japanese side was very unfavourably criticized in the years immediately subsequent. Ignorance of the country's domestic politics inspired the critics. The Yedo administration, already weakened by the growth of a strong public sentiment in favour of abolishing the dual system of government--that of the mikado in Kioto and that of the shogun in Yedo--had been still further discredited by its own timid policy as compared with the stalwart mien of the throne towards the question of foreign intercourse. Openly to sanction commercial relations at such a time would have been little short of reckless. The Perry convention and the first Harris convention could be construed, and were purposely construed, as mere acts of benevolence towards strangers; but a commercial treaty would not have lent itself to any such construction, and naturally the shogun's ministers hesitated to agree to an apparently suicidal step. Harris carried his point, however. He was received by the shogun in Yedo in November 1857, and on the 29th of July 1858 a treaty was signed in Yedo, engaging that Yokohama should be opened on the 4th of July 1859 and that commerce between the United States and Japan should thereafter be freely carried on there. This treaty was actually concluded by the shogun's Ministers in defiance of their failure to obtain the sanction of the sovereign in Kioto. Foreign historians have found much to say about Japanese duplicity in concealing the subordinate position occupied by the Yedo administration towards the Kioto court. Such condemnation is not consistent with fuller knowledge. The Yedo authorities had power to solve all problems of foreign intercourse without reference to Kioto. Iyeyasu had not seen any occasion to seek imperial assent when he granted unrestricted liberty of trade to the representatives of the East India Company, nor had Iyemitsu asked for Kioto's sanction when he issued his decree for the expulsion of all foreigners. If, in the 19th century, Yedo shrank from a responsibility which it had unhesitatingly assumed in the 17th, the cause was to be found, not in the shogun's simulation of autonomy, but in his desire to associate the throne with a policy which, while recognizing it to be unavoidable, he distrusted his own ability to make the nation accept. But his ministers had promised Harris that the treaty should be signed, and they kept their word, at a risk of which the United States' consul-general had no conception. Throughout these negotiations Harris spared no pains to create in the minds of the Japanese an intelligent conviction that the world could no longer be kept at arm's length, and though it is extremely problematical whether he would have succeeded had not the Japanese themselves already arrived at that very conviction, his patient and lucid expositions coupled with a winning personality undoubtedly produced much impression. He was largely assisted, too, by recent events in China, where the Peiho forts had been captured and the Chinese forced to sign a treaty at Tientsin. Harris warned the Japanese that the British fleet might be expected at any moment in Yedo Bay, and that the best way to avert irksome demands at the hands of the English was to establish a comparatively moderate precedent by yielding to America's proposals. Entry: A
GUSTAVUS III. (1746-1792), king of Sweden, was the eldest son of Adolphus Frederick, king of Sweden, and Louisa Ulrica of Prussia, sister of Frederick the Great, and was born on the 24th of January 1746. Gustavus was educated under the care of two governors who were amongst the most eminent Swedish statesmen of the day, Carl Gustaf Tessin and Carl Scheffer; but he owed most perhaps to the poet and historian Olof von Dalin. The interference of the state with his education, when he was quite a child, was, however, doubly harmful, as his parents taught him to despise the preceptors imposed upon him by the diet, and the atmosphere of intrigue and duplicity in which he grew up made him precociously experienced in the art of dissimulation. But even his most hostile teachers were amazed by the brilliance of his natural gifts, and, while still a boy, he possessed that charm of manner which was to make him so fascinating and so dangerous in later life, coupled with the strong dramatic instinct which won for him his honourable place in Swedish literature. On the whole, Gustavus cannot be said to have been well educated, but he read very widely; there was scarce a French author of his day with whose works he was not intimately acquainted; while his enthusiasm for the new French ideas of enlightenment was as sincere as, if more critical than, his mother's. On the 4th of November 1766, Gustavus married Sophia Magdalena, daughter of Frederick V. of Denmark. The match was an unhappy one, owing partly to incompatibility of temper, but still more to the mischievous interference of the jealous queen-mother. Entry: GUSTAVUS
Italian indignation at the French _coup de main_ was the deeper on account of the apparent duplicity of the government of the Republic. On the 11th of May the French foreign minister, Barthélémy Saint Hilaire, had officially assured the Italian ambassador in Paris that France "had no thought of occupying Tunisia or any part of Tunisian territory, beyond some points of the Kroumir country." This assurance, dictated by Jules Ferry to Barthélémy Saint Hilaire in the presence of the Italian ambassador, and by him telegraphed _en clair_ to Rome, was considered a binding pledge that France would not materially alter the _status quo_ in Tunisia. Documents subsequently published have somewhat attenuated the responsibility of Ferry and Saint Hilaire for this breach of faith, and have shown that the French forces in Tunisia acted upon secret instructions from General Farre, minister of war in the Ferry cabinet, who pursued a policy diametrically opposed to the official declarations made by the premier and the foreign minister. Even had this circumstance been known at the time, it could scarcely have mitigated the intense resentment of the whole Italian nation at an event which was considered tantamount not only to the destruction of Italian aspirations to Tunisia, but to the ruin of the interests of the numerous Italian colony and to a constant menace against the security of the Sicilian and south Italian coasts. Entry: F
GERRY, ELBRIDGE (1744-1814), American statesman, was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on the 17th of July 1744, the son of Thomas Gerry (d. 1774), a native of Newton, England, who emigrated to America in 1730, and became a prosperous Marblehead merchant. The son graduated at Harvard in 1762 and entered his father's business. In 1772 and 1773 he was a member of the Massachusetts General Court, in which he identified himself with Samuel Adams and the patriot party, and in 1773 he served on the Committee of Correspondence, which became one of the great instruments of intercolonial resistance. In 1774-1775 he was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The passage of a bill proposed by him (November 1775) to arm and equip ships to prey upon British commerce, and for the establishment of a prize court, was, according to his biographer, Austin, "the first actual avowal of offensive hostility against the mother country, which is to be found in the annals of the Revolution." It is also noteworthy, says Austin, as "the first effort to establish an American naval armament." From 1776 to 1781 Gerry was a member of the Continental Congress, where he early advocated independence, and was one of those who signed the Declaration after its formal signing on the 2nd of August 1776, at which time he was absent. He was active in debates and committee work, and for some time held the chairmanship of the important standing committee for the superintendence of the treasury, in which capacity he exercised a predominating influence on congressional expenditures. In February 1780 he withdrew from Congress because of its refusal to respond to his call for the yeas and nays. Subsequently he laid his protest before the Massachusetts General Court which voted its approval of his action. On his return to Massachusetts, and while he was still a member of Congress, he was elected under the new state constitution (1780) to both branches of the state legislature, but accepted only his election to the House of Representatives. On the expiration of his congressional term, he was again chosen a delegate by the Massachusetts legislature, but it was not until 1783 that he resumed his seat. During the second period of his service in Congress, which lasted until 1785, he was a member of the committee to consider the treaty of peace with Great Britain, and chairman of two committees appointed to select a permanent seat of government. In 1784 he bitterly attacked the establishment of the order of the Cincinnati on the ground that it was a dangerous menace to democratic institutions. In 1786 he served in the state House of Representatives. Not favouring the creation of a strong national government he declined to attend the Annapolis Convention in 1786, but in the following year, when the assembling of the Constitutional Convention was an assured fact, although he opposed the purpose for which it was called, he accepted an appointment as one of the Massachusetts delegates, with the idea that he might personally help to check too strong a tendency toward centralization. His exertions in the convention were ceaseless in opposition to what he believed to be the wholly undemocratic character of the instrument, and eventually he refused to sign the completed constitution. Returning to Massachusetts, he spoke and wrote in opposition to its ratification, and although not a member of the convention called to pass upon it, he laid before this convention, by request, his reasons for opposing it, among them being that the constitution contained no bill of rights, that the executive would unduly influence the legislative branch of the government, and that the judiciary would be oppressive. Subsequently he served as an Anti-Federalist in the national House of Representatives in 1789-1793, taking, as always, a prominent part in debates and other legislative concerns. In 1797 he was sent by President John Adams, together with John Marshall and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, on a mission to France to obtain from the government of the Directory a treaty embodying a settlement of several long-standing disputes. The discourteous and underhanded treatment of this embassy by Talleyrand and his agents, who attempted to obtain their ends by bribery, threats and duplicity, resulted in the speedy retirement of Marshall and Pinckney. The episode is known in American history as the "X Y Z Affair." Gerry, although despairing of any good results, remained in Paris for some time in the vain hope that Talleyrand might offer to a known friend of France terms that had been refused to envoys whose anti-French views were more than suspected. This action of Gerry's brought down upon him from Federalist partisans a storm of abuse and censure, from which he never wholly cleared himself. In 1810-1812 he was governor of Massachusetts. His administration, which was marked by extreme partisanship, was especially notable for the enactment of a law by which the state was divided into new senatorial districts in such a manner as to consolidate the Federalist vote in a few districts, thus giving the Democratic-Republicans an undue advantage. The outline of one of these districts, which was thought to resemble a salamander, gave rise in 1812, through a popular application of the governor's name, to the term "Gerrymander" (q.v.). In 1812, Gerry, who was an ardent advocate of the war with Great Britain, was elected vice-president of the United States, on the ticket with James Madison. He died in office at Washington on the 23rd of November 1814. Entry: GERRY
The establishment, in 1671 and 1676 respectively, of the French and English national observatories at once typified and stimulated progress. The Paris institution, it is true, lacked unity of direction. No authoritative chief was assigned to it until 1771. G.D. Cassini, his son and his grandson were only _primi inter pares_. Claude Perrault's stately edifice was equally accessible to all the more eminent members of the Academy of Sciences; and researches were, more or less independently, carried on there by (among others) Philippe de la Hire (1640-1718), G.F. Maraldi (1665-1729), and his nephew, J.D. Maraldi, Jean Picard, Huygens, Olaus Römer and Nicolas de Lacaille. Some of the best instruments then extant were mounted at the Paris observatory. G.D. Cassini brought from Rome a 17-ft. telescope by G. Campani, with which he discovered in 1671 Iapetus, the ninth in distance of Saturn's family of satellites; Rhea was detected in 1672 with a glass by the same maker of 34-ft. focus; the duplicity of the ring showed in 1675; and, in 1684, two additional satellites were disclosed by a Campani telescope of 100 ft. Cassini, moreover, set up an altazimuth in 1678, and employed from about 1682 a "parallactic machine," provided with clockwork to enable it to follow the diurnal motion. Both inventions have been ascribed to Olaus Römer, who used but did not claim them, and must have become familiar with their principles during the nine years (1672-1681) spent by him at the Paris observatory. Römer, on the other hand, deserves full credit for originating the transit-circle and the prime vertical instrument; and he earned undying fame by his discovery of the finite velocity of light, made at Paris in 1675 by comparing his observations of the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites at the conjunctions and oppositions of the planet. Entry: G
Notwithstanding their composite origin, their wide geographical distribution and their cosmopolitan instincts, the modern Greeks are a remarkably homogeneous people, differing markedly in character from neighbouring races, united by a common enthusiasm in the pursuit of their national aims, and profoundly convinced of their superiority to other nations. Their distinctive character, combined with their traditional tendency to regard non-Hellenic peoples as barbarous, has, indeed, to some extent counteracted the results of their great energy and zeal in the assimilation of other races; the advantageous position which they attained at an early period under Turkish rule owing to their superior civilization, their versatility, their wealth, and their monopoly of the ecclesiastical power would probably have enabled them to Hellenize permanently the greater part of the Balkan peninsula had their attitude towards other Christian races been more sympathetic. Always the most civilized race in the East, they have successively influenced their Macedonian, Roman and Turkish conquerors, and their remarkable intellectual endowments bid fair to secure them a brilliant position in the future. The intense patriotic zeal of the Greeks may be compared with that of the Hungarians; it is liable to degenerate into arrogance and intolerance; it sometimes blinds their judgment and involves them in ill-considered enterprises, but it nevertheless offers the best guarantee for the ultimate attainment of their national aims. All Greeks, in whatever country they may reside, work together for the realization of the Great Idea ([Greek: hê Megalê Idea])--the supremacy of Hellenism in the East--and to this object they freely devote their time, their wealth and their talents; the large fortunes which they amass abroad are often bequeathed for the foundation of various institutions in Greece or Turkey, for the increase of the national fleet and army, or for the spread of Hellenic influence in the Levant. This patriotic sentiment is unfortunately much exploited by self-seeking demagogues and publicists, who rival each other in exaggerating the national pretensions and in pandering to the national vanity. In no other country is the passion for politics so intense; "keen political discussions are constantly going on at the cafés; the newspapers, which are extraordinarily numerous and generally of little value, are literally devoured, and every measure of the government is violently criticized and ascribed to interested motives." The influence of the journals is enormous; even the waiters in the cafés and domestic servants have their favourite newspaper, and discourse fluently on the political problems of the day. Much of the national energy is wasted by this continued political fever; it is diverted from practical aims, and may be said to evaporate in words. The practice of independent criticism tends to indiscipline in the organized public services; it has been remarked that every Greek soldier is a general and every sailor an admiral. During the war of 1897 a young naval lieutenant telegraphed to the minister of war condemning the measures taken by his admiral, and his action was applauded by several journals. There is also little discipline in the ranks of political parties, which are held together, not by any definite principle, but by the personal influence of the leaders; defections are frequent, and as a rule each deputy in the Chamber makes his terms with his chief. On the other hand, the independent character of the Greeks is favourably illustrated by the circumstance that Greece is the only country in the Balkan peninsula in which the government cannot count on securing a majority by official pressure at the elections. Few scruples are observed in political warfare, but attacks on private life are rare. The love of free discussion is inherent in the strongly-rooted democratic instinct of the Greeks. They are in spirit the most democratic of European peoples; no trace of Latin feudalism survives, and aristocratic pretensions are ridiculed. In social life there is no artificial distinction of classes; all titles of nobility are forbidden; a few families descended from the chiefs in the War of Independence enjoy a certain pre-eminence, but wealth and, still more, political or literary notoriety constitute the principal claim to social consideration. The Greeks display great intellectual vivacity; they are clever, inquisitive, quick-witted and ingenious, but not profound; sustained mental industry and careful accuracy are distasteful to them, and their aversion to manual labour is still more marked. Even the agricultural class is but moderately industrious; abundant opportunities for relaxation are provided by the numerous church festivals. The desire for instruction is intense even in the lowest ranks of the community; rhetorical and literary accomplishments possess a greater attraction for the majority than the fields of modern science. The number of persons who seek to qualify for the learned professions is excessive; they form a superfluous element in the community, an educated proletariat, attaching themselves to the various political parties in the hope of obtaining state employment and spending an idle existence in the cafés and the streets when their party is out of power. In disposition the Greeks are lively, cheerful, plausible, tactful, sympathetic; very affable with strangers, hospitable, kind to their servants and dependants, remarkably temperate and frugal in their habits, amiable and united in family life. Drunkenness is almost unknown, thrift is universally practised; the standard of sexual morality is high, especially in the rural districts, where illegitimacy is extremely rare. The faults of the Greeks must in a large degree be attributed to their prolonged subjection to alien races; their cleverness often degenerates into cunning, their ready invention into mendacity, their thrift into avarice, their fertility of resource into trickery and fraud. Dishonesty is not a national vice, but many who would scorn to steal will not hesitate to compass illicit gains by duplicity and misrepresentation; deceit, indeed, is often practised gratuitously for the mere intellectual satisfaction which it affords. In the astuteness of their monetary dealings the Greeks proverbially surpass the Jews, but fall short of the Armenians; their remarkable aptitude for business is sometimes marred by a certain short-sightedness which pursues immediate profits at the cost of ulterior advantages. Their vanity and egoism, which are admitted by even the most favourable observers, render them jealous, exacting, and peculiarly susceptible to flattery. In common with other southern European peoples the Greeks are extremely excitable; their passionate disposition is prone to take offence at slight provocation, and trivial quarrels not infrequently result in homicide. They are religious, but by no means fanatical, except in regard to politico-religious questions affecting their national aims. In general the Greeks may be described as a clever, ambitious and versatile people, capable of great effort and sacrifice, but deficient in some of the more solid qualities which make for national greatness. Entry: A