in the middle of his vacation, all the way from Davos, in
the easternmost corner of Switzerland, to Cambridge, solely that he
might record his vote at a parliamentary election, although the result
of the election was already virtually certain.

Sidgwick's attitude toward the Benthamite system of Utilitarianism
illustrates the cautiously discriminative habit of mind I have sought
to describe. If he had been required to call himself by any name, he
would not have refused that of Utilitarian, just as in mental
philosophy he leaned to the type of thought represented by the two
Mills rather than to the Kantian idealism of his friend and school
contemporary, the Oxford professor T. H. Green. But the system of
Utility takes in his hands a form so much more refined and delicate
than was given to it by Bentham and James Mill, and is expounded with
so many qualifications unknown to them, that it has become a very
different thing, and is scarcely, if at all, assailable by the
arguments which moralists of the idealistic type have brought against
the older doctrine. Something similar may be said of his treatment of
bimetallism in his book on political economy. While assenting to some
of the general propositions on which the bimetallic theory rests, he
points out so many difficulties in the application of that theory to
the actual conditions of currency that his assent cannot be cited as a
deliverance in favour of trying to turn theory into practice. He told
me in 1896 that he held the political and other practical objections
to an attempt to establish a bimetallic system to be virtually
insuperable. When he treats of free trade, he is no less guarded and
discriminating. He points out various circumstances or conditions
under which a protective tariff may become, at least for a time,
justifiable, but never abandons the free trade principle as being
generally true and sound, a principle not to be departed from save for
strong reasons of a local or temporary kind. His general economic
position is equally removed from the "high and dry" school of Ricardo
on the one hand, and from the "Katheder-Sozialisten" and the modern
"sentimental" school on the other. In all his books one notes a
tendency to discover what can be said for the view which is in popular
disfavour, even often for that which he does not himself adopt, and to
set forth all the objections to the view which is to receive his
ultimate adhesion. There is a danger with such a