m^mm m:mMEMMM : M 4/7 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://archive.org/details/cu31924029762790 THE CENTURY OF HOPE zA Sketch of Western 'Progress from 1815 to the Qreat War BY F. S. MARVIN AUTHOR OF 'THE LIVING PAST' Truth justifies herself, and as she dwells With Hope, who would not follow where she leads? The Recluse OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 1919 ^ v//„ OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY HUMPHREY MILFORD PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY ; A- / CONTENTS APPENDIX ON BOOKS INDEX PAGE I. The Legacy of the Revolution . . t II. The Political Revival . . . 23 III. The New Spirit in Literature IV. The Birth of Socialism . "*.*''. V. Mechanical Science and Invention ~ / a •■ (i VI. Biology and Evolution . T VII. Nationality and Imperialism VIII. Schools for All . IX. Religious Growth ... 215 X. New Knowledge on Old Foundations . 238 XI. The Expansion of the West .... 263 XII. Social Progress ...... 290 XIII. International Progress ..... 316 49 83 in 135 161 188 341 347 vi Preface sense of hope, which enshrines our sorrows and has overcome our most oppressive fears. Is not the new and abundant harvest of poetry one of the best signs of life and hope ? Of the many friends who have assisted me with good counsel and encouragement, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Miss Melian Stawell, who has helped me most generously throughout, and notably in the revision of the proofs. To Mr. T. H. Riches I am indebted for reading Chapters V, VI, and X, and for his invariably sound and careful advice upon them ; and to Miss G. N. Dewar for kind co-opeiation on the Index. F. S. M. Berkhamsted, 17 Dec. 19 1 8. THE LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION The eighteenth century — in this respect like the Middle Ages — has borne some shrewd blows from moralists and historians. To be called an 'Age of Prose' is perhaps a bearable reproach, for it was very good prose. But it has also appeared to many of them as mainly a time of relaxation, of moral and political depravity, after the strenuous efforts and glorious achievements of the seventeenth century. Walpole after Cromwell, Louis XV after Richelieu, even Voltaire after Descartes — the change seems a measure of decadence. But if we approach the matter from another angle and ask for ourselves and the other nations of the West one simple but far-reaching question, the answer will lead to a different and rather remarkable conclusion. At what period in history did modern life begin, life really like our own ? If it is an Englishman who answers first, he would probably reply that it is in Dr. Johnson's time that he first begins to feel at home. He would find sympathy there, in the club with Goldsmith and Burke, which would be wanting even in the Mermaid Tavern or the parlour of Queen Anne. The Eliza- bethans and Milton and Cromwell are heroic figures, belong- ing rather to another world. But we might have talked to Dr. Johnson had we dared, and we should have loved to discuss the war with Fox, and compare Napoleon with the Kaiser. It is not of course merely a question of language, though that counts for much. Many new things had lately entered into the national life, and still more were surging outside for entrance, of which the Elizabethans and even William of Orange had no 2170 R The Legacy of the Revolution 3 the dominating force in Europe. What the Revolution meant beyond that and beyond France, we shall consider in a moment. But it meant at least that for France, and France therefore, even more than any other country, looks to the end of the eighteenth century for the beginnings of modern life. The coincidence of so much national interest on the same period in history must give pause to the detractors of the cen- tury, and provides all of us with a problem. The question which must occur is this, Was there not a common cause, or set of causes, operating at least throughout l the Western World to produce results which have obviously much in common ; and if so, what were they? The only answer we can attempt here must be a brief one and must take a good deal for granted. For any true answer in history leads the mind farther and farther back, never stopping at any one point as a real beginning but finding everywhere threads that connect the sequel with something earlier, and so on into the infinite past. But of this change into a modern world we may discern some outlines. There was a time when the Romans, having welded together the lands adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea, governed them as a unit, on principles partly derived from their own experience, partly from the practice and philosophy of the kindred Greeks. Then came another time, when this rule and unity had disappeared, and there was a welter of conflicting principalities, held together loosely by the surviving traditions of Rome and more strongly by a new power, centred also in Rome, but exercising control over men's minds and conduct on different principles and with a different object in view. Such was the mediaeval system, which lasted for some thousand years after the Roman Empire broke up in the fifth century a. d. This fresh attempt at unity broke down in its turn, and we may fix for convenience the fifteenth century as the date for the opening of another act in B 2 z The Legacy of the Revolution inkling. There was the free speech of parliamentary leaders beginning to speak for a nation that was to govern itself. There was a new industry arising, which was to build the cities of the nineteenth century. There was a Britain overseas, asserting an independent life and pegging out estates for the free allied nations of the twentieth. If this was so for England, it was even more clearly a new epoch for the United States, for Germany, and for France. To the United States the latter part of the eighteenth century was the actual beginning of their existence as a nation. The wave that carried the rest of us to new moorings raised them for the first time above the gulf of time. And they in their turn accelerated that movement of change which was beginning to run at full flood throughout the world. The Germans — and we must think of them primarily as under the leadership of Prussia — go back also to the latter part of the eighteenth century for the foundation of the national existence which they now enjoy. Territory enlarged, internal organiza- tion strengthened, national pride created and national speech approved, a new spirit in Lessing and Goethe which was beginning to clear away the shallow formalities imported from France and to found the great era of German thought : all this comes between the accession and the death of Frederick and is again something to the credit of the eighteenth century. Frederick the Great died just three years before the French Revolution began. The Revolution, which was to put the stamp of novelty on so many things which had been growing quietly beneath the surface, makes the end of the century a new starting-point for France, in some ways more complete than even the War of Independence for America. There can be no doubt for any Frenchman that his modern world begins with the men who destroyed the ancien regime, who organized the nation, codified the law, and made his country for the time The Legacy of the Revolution f Let us then see in a little more detail how these changes had taken effect in the four countries we selected. New lands, new knowledge, new religious, moral, and political energy, this was the fresh matter thrown into the melting-pot of Europe. America is the simplest case, for she was born on one of the new lands which the Renaissance had added to Western civiliza- tion, and she was reborn in the eighteenth century by an act of severance, political and religious, from the Old World out of which she sprang. Not till our own day did she return to that community of older nations who have the world's fortunes in their keeping, and she returned with a rich experience of know- ledge organizing industry, liberty shaping government, and religion released from tradition. Germany was the other extreme of the four, for in the eighteenth century she had the maximum of antiquated politi- cal machinery and the minimum of outlook for industry or expansion. The fratricidal slaughter and destruction of the Thirty Years' War had postponed her development for a hun- dred years, but in the eighteenth century she resumed her place in the general movement. Frederick, so far as superficial culture went, borrowed from France and wrote French from preference till his dying day. Meanwhile he developed in Prussia the type of strong government and thorough organization from which the whole world has learnt — and suffered — since, and which lends itself so well to the requirements of a society based on science allied with industry. It is on this side of the modern movement that Germany, under Prussian guidance, has become a type. But at the end of the eighteenth century there was also in Germany an array of great writers and thinkers who handled all the new knowledge of the age and prompted its spirit in the same direction as those of Britain or France. It was, however, in France and England that the tendencies of the age were most clearly marked, though they had contributed 4 The Legacy of the Revolution the Divina Commedia of Man. But now it becomes more difficult to be sure of the characters and to hear all they say, for the stage is much vaster and we are soon taking part in the play ourselves. But we know that the action ever since has become more and more rapid than it was, and that we are now assisting at one of its most tremendous scenes. It may be thought that we have reached a contradiction to that conclusion as to the eighteenth century with which we started. But the explanation is easy. We asked at what time in modern history can the nations recognize themselves : and this, as we saw, would be towards the end of the eighteenth century. But the pioneers and premonitions of modernity appear some centuries before. Columbus, Luther, Galileo — to take the first great names that occur — were all pioneers of the modern world in which we live. Their influence began at once to spread in widening circles, but we may speak of ' modern history ' in the fullest sense when it has taken shape in social forms. Thus, the new lands discovered by Columbus in the West are now the thriving settlements of millions, and a power- ful factor in the order and progress of the world. This was first appreciable at the end of the eighteenth century. The new ideal, too, of personal and public morals apart from the Church, first becomes prominent in the same century, when rulers like Frederick the Great and Joseph II avowed them- selves the ministers of their people, and the people themselves first realized, as in France, that their interests were the true end of government. And it is the same century which saw the final alliance first cemented between science and industry which, in spite of war, in spite of the blindness of many who are actually carrying out the work, has continued ever since to transform the social and economic condition of the West. Here is the work of Columbus, Luther, Galileo, and their compeers of the Renaissance in its social form. The Legacy of the Revolution 7 and our Locke. But in the eighteenth century the differences which were to be ultimately resolved in the revolutionary war became more accentuated. In that age the intellect of France outdistanced ours, while we were accumulating a superiority in national resources which in the conflict with Napoleon proved decisive. Above all we had two advantages. Politically the nation was united, and by the Revolution of 1689 it had acquired the means of making its will prevail in constitutional forms. Practically, both in government and in industry, we had a greater power of adapting means to ends. While the French were classifying the elements of chemistry and compiling an encyclopaedia of all the sciences, we had found out the way to govern India with a handful of settlers and to make a steam- engine which would really work. The crisis came when at the end of the century France, intellectually the most advanced of European countries, gave a violent impulse to the forward movement which was going on throughout the West. As with the Greeks, as with Galileo on his tower, as with Columbus poring over Tuscanelli's map, it was then, as always, the critical mind which moved. v For if we accept the truth that not economic conditions nor geography nor the ambition of governments is the primum mobile in human affairs but the Spirit of Man itself seeking greater freedom and expansion, then we are bound to turn to the movement of thought which preceded the Revolution as the chief explanation of its occurrence and its results. The men K of the seventeenth century, looking back to the Greeks for inspiration and forward to the interpretation of Nature and the triumph of Man, had started a new impulse of human activity which came at the Revolution into violent contact with the old order in Church, Society, and State. England surmounted the crisis without a breach, but in France the conditions were sharply distinguished from our 8 The Legacy of the Revolution own. In religion the old Catholic regime, after a period of doubt in the time of Henri IV, had finally survived in nominal supremacy, while men's minds had drifted farther and farther away from her official doctrines. In England the multiplicity of ' Protestant variations ' had prevented the sharp conflict of orthodoxy and unbelief. The Crown in France had surrounded itself with a court of satellite nobles divorced from the land, and the burden of taxation fell upon a mass of peasantry, despised and neglected by those who lived on them and should have made their welfare the first object of concern. In England there was poverty enough and a drift of countrymen into the towns, but on the whole the landlords recognized a duty to their neighbours and lived among them, while the government of the State was in the hands of the same landlords, known to the people whom they had to govern. In the middle of the century there was a general movement, felt more on the Continent than in England, towards a reform in administration, towards making the welfare of the people, as understood by their rulers, the main object of government. There was also a growing belief, born of the scientific movement of the previous age and especially of Newton's triumphant generalizations, that the actions of men could, like the pheno- mena of nature, be reduced to simple principles and counted upon by philosophers and statesmen. The success of Frederick in Prussia was the best example of many similar attempts to govern on this plan. But France was in another case. Her Government was less capable and her people more enlightened than those of any other great State just before the Revolution began. Her Government was atrophied by selfishness and want of contact with the national life, and the nation was readier than any other to take its salvation into its own hands. The dominating mind in France, that general will which The Legacy of the Revolution 9 carried the nation through the crises of six years and finally left it an instrument in the hands of Napoleon, was inspired by several of the general or philosophic ideas of the time, which, crude and misleading as they sometimes appear in revolu- tionary mouths, will be found among the foundations of the nineteenth century. There was the notion of the infinite per- fectibility of human nature which finds so noble an expression in Condorcet. There was the passion for freedom and nature in Rousseau. There was the belief in the unlimited power and right of the sovereign people. Now all this, and the subsequent work of the Revolution, showed itself to a conservative mind like Burke's only on its destructive side. ' Man is born free,' ran Rousseau's famous motto, ' and everywhere he is in chains.' If this be so, the breaking of chains must be the preliminary of any free movement ; but the chains of Rousseau are to Burke the sacred and indispensable traditions which hold society together. On this plane of thought the conflict is eternal. Every age, every man will look on the past primarily either as a thing to flee from or a thing to follow, will either prefer to build a house for himself or to live in his ancestors'. What we need is a temper or a principle which will take us above this unceasing clash, some ideal for the sake of which we shall be content to abandon our father's house even if we love it, some plan to guide us in building the new one for ourselves if we are com- pelled to do so. Can we out of the so-called ' principles of the Revolution ' extract any constructive principles of this order ? Clearly we can, and they will become more and more appa- rent as we proceed. Take the republican watchwords of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Each had its purely revolu- tionary or destructive side, often salutary enough. But each contains also an element of reconstruction and growth. To the man of 1789 Liberty implied in the first instance the io The Legacy of the Revolution destruction of feudal obligations and, as the Revolution pro- ceeded, the destructive impulse spread to the abolition of all kinds of traditional authority. But it also carries with it the implication of freedom to develop the full capacity of the individual, and this capacity, as we are taught by the doctrine of perfectibility, is infinitely great. Equality meant in the height of the Revolution the striking down of any superiority : even the eminence of Condorcet or the science of Lavoisier weighed for nothing in their favour. But the idea of equality also contains the constructive notion that every human being should have an equal opportunity — so far as society can make it equal — of realizing his powers, and that every man should be equal before the law. Fraternity, though misused by republican armies when aggressive, was the most positive of all the watch- words, and, allied with freedom in the true sense, will be found a continuous force in society, growing in intensity down to our own time. Tolstoi, the figure of purest humanity in post- Revolutionary days, recreates the passion for us with no touch of violence, in the form of an ideal Christianity — a religion based on brotherhood and self-suppression. We know that all these good things were implicit in the ' principles of the Revolution ', and were sincerely and pas- sionately held by many of the actors in it ; but when we turn to their issue in the wars and reaction under Napoleon, still more when we compare the French ideals with the actualities of England, we are brought to an abrupt and bewildering pause. The world was not ripe ; the principles were inadequately thought out ; the means adopted were inconsistent with the ends proposed. Such are the various explanations that force themselves on the mind. Let us then retrace the main stages of the Revolution, having England mainly in our eye, and afterwards restate the under- lying principles with such corrections and enlargements as later The Legacy of the Revolution 1 1 experience has impressed upon mankind. It is only in this broader sense that the Revolution can be regarded as the seed- plot of the modern age. England, when confronted by the daring innovators of France, gave various response. There was the enthusiastic sympathy expressed by Wordsworth, but by no means confined to him. For the ideals of freedom and human progress, like all the greatest things in history, were current with us, and in Germany as well as in France. The spectacle of a great nation — the most famous in Europe— throwing off the fetters of an autocratic government, determined to control and to improve its fate, struck most intelligent observers with as much admira- tion as the Russian revolution aroused among us last spring. They knew the lot of the French peasants to be a poor one — worse, travellers said, than anything in England. Men rejoiced to see them entering into a new state of being, where the prospect of individual power and happiness was open to them, and the face of every man would brighten with the joy of others. But there were other thoughts. It has never been | the English way to obtain an object, however desirable, by a {violent breach with the past. We love, like the ancient Romans, to find some way of attaining our end which seems naturally to follow on what has gone before. Cromwell, our greatest revolu- tionist, strove to the last to preserve the ancient forms, and lost his, power when it was seen that between the old and new order there was no common link. The final settlement of 1689 suc- ceeded by keeping as close as possible to the ancient dynasty and constitutional law. This tendency of Britain's had been strengthened in the century which succeeded our own revolution. The Georges by their habits and language had thrown us back on ourselves. Scotland was at last assimilated, and the triumphs of Chatham East and West raised the national fervour again, in a larger i 2 The Lecracy of the Revolution theatre, to something like Elizabethan heat. Such was the background of Burke's immortal panegyric on constitutional order and social growth. The French portent and challenge came to men who had lived through and learnt all this. Across the channel, within sight of our coast, our rivals of the century were hewing down their own institutions right and left without restraint and without reverence. For this, though all were amazed, the wiser among us saw some reason, though a doubtful prospect. Then came the moral revulsion, abhorrence of the suffering inflicted on innocent people for reasons of State. Lastly, in the aggressive stage, the Revolution began to over- flow France and sweep away the rights and possessions of other people wherever they conflicted with its own interests : at this point the patriotism of 1793 was merged in the imperialism of Napoleon, and the whole world was driven to arms. We were so clearly right to resist Napoleon that it is the more necessary to insist on the value of the ideal elements in the earlier French movement. It was a light to the world, the flaming-up of subterranean fires which had been kindling the mind of Europe: and for France herself it burnt the dross and forged new tools. If we compare the state of England and France in 181 5 when the fires had at last died down, there can be no doubt that, in spite of revolutionary exhaustion and her final defeat under Napoleon, the civilization of France had been in many points advanced beyond our own. Her population as a whole was awakened, as ours was to be in a milder form by the Chartist agitation. The French were from that time forward ready, under repression, for the rebound. Her soil, by the sale of Church land and the increase in peasant proprietors, became able to support a far larger number of thrifty and contented people than our own. The Convention, on the eve of the Terror, hadplanned a general system of primary education which The Legacy of the Revolution 1 3 was a model for later years, and had actually established several higher schools in Paris of which we had no conception until well on into the following century. It had compiled a code of law which Napoleon completed and issued in his own name. He himself, while doing little to supply the educational needs, reformed the financial, judicial, and administrative system and set a permanent stamp on the abolition of feudal privilege. Merit, if it could be recognized, was henceforth to be the rule of promotion and the guidance of France, a wholesome advance on the chance and scramble of a pure democracy, and a rule for which we have struggled with imperfect success ever since. Now Britain during her conflict had done none of these things, but she was passing through the acutest stage of a parallel revolution in industry. She had grown strong at sea and rich as a nation of shop-keepers. Her constitution, by weathering the storm, had gained fresh lustre and added strength. Factories at home, fresh possessions and expand- ing trade abroad, confirmed the nation in its policy of isolation and internal strength. But this strength itself was subject to serious abatement when one looked beneath the surface. The public debt had risen mountains high, a greater weight in proportion to our wealth than the Great War had imposed upon us after three years. But actually more injurious were the poverty and degradation of the manual workers. They had crowded into the towns, their wages were at the lowest point, and the remedial legislation of the nine- teenth century had not yet begun ; it was not in fact con- templated by the accepted philosophy of the day. For the movement towards freedom, which in France had swept away thrones and privilege, had taken in England the form of removing the ancient restrictions on industry. The rules of apprenticeship, the limitations of the poor to their own parish for relief, all regulations which might hamper the extension of i4 The Legacy of the Revolution that commerce by which we had defeated France, were relaxed in the name of liberty : but it was liberty without the content of a human life. The first small effort to ameliorate the lives of young workers — the climbing boys — was not made till after the turn of the century in 1802. Politically the stream of reform which had begun to flow in the early days of Pitt was completely stayed. The removal of the least abuse in the political ma- chinery seemed like a step towards the abyss, and every one who asked for free speech or a free vote was a Robespierre in the making. Such was, for the time, the contrast established between the two leading nations of the West. Yet beneath the surface the same streams of thought were surging on. In England, when the war was over and the reaction dying down, Adam Smith and Bentham became the guiding stars in the first period of reform. Both of them were international in the fullest sense and strongly influenced by the group of men who gathered round Diderot's Ency dope die. The whole group in their turn, and all the philosophy of the day, drew largely from Hume, the most penetrating critical intellect of the age. There are continuous links on both sides, for Hume's thought goes back to Hobbes and the scientific movement of the seven- teenth century, while Kant in Germany begins by a reconstruc- tion based on Hume and is stimulated also by Rousseau, and Voltaire is largely indebted to Locke. And of the lesser but still important forces Helvetius, who sought by an analysis of the mind to establish the necessary identity of the interests of the individual and the whole community, set Bentham thinking, and thus leads in the early years of the nineteenth century to the doctrine of the utilitarians ; while Italy contributed Beccaria to the movement, who strove by an analysis of penal legislation to strengthen the elements of humanity and reason. The Legacy of the Revolution i y The growth of a general or European frame of mind was never more clearly demonstrated than at the period when our sketch begins. But it is one thing to believe in and to realize this, and quite another to trace its workings in the manifold difficulties and turnings of practical life. Here is the supreme task which faces any one who attempts what may be called a philosophical view of history — to satisfy our reason which demands some justification of human doings from a rational standpoint with- out falsifying the facts which are so often full of perversity and unreason ; in short, to reconcile the ideal with the actual. The one plan, ordinarily followed in special histories, is simply to narrate the sequence of events in the particular department or period of study without regard to the general coherence or purpose of the whole. The other extreme, represented by such a writer as Hegel, is to consider the whole merely as the evolu- tion in time of one or two general ideas and to evacuate these of nearly all their content, of personal passion, accident, and mistakes. Either alternative is gravely erroneous, but surely the worst of all errors is to ignore or deny the validity of the ideal aspect which is just as real a fact in the minds of men as the cannon-shot or the actions of leading individuals — things only put in motion by human thought in the mass. We shall endeavour in the twelve short chapters which follow to avoid the worst evils of either method while returning constantly to the main intellectual tendencies which seem to have marked the., last hundred years of Western history. They are new in their concurrence in so many independent centres of civilized life, new entirely in many of their applications, new in the strength with which they are held by multitudes of men, not new of course in their appearance in the world. Such newness, without root or preparation in the past, would be, if conceivable at all, only an evidence of transitory illusion. But newness in the other sense, of a wide-spread application of great ideas which 1 6 The Legacy of the Revolution had before been regarded as the visions of isolated dreamers, we hold to be manifest in the period of our review. It was, and is, a moment of new life such as the world has seen more than once before even in the short span of man's recorded history. The advent of Christianity was such a time, when into a world just knit up by Greek thought and Roman action there came a new . passion for moral purity and for living and loving in this world as a preparation for another. There came another moment somewhat like it when in the thirteenth century St. Francis and his fellows preached again a gospel of kindness. and simplicity after the reconciliation of Catholic theology and Greek philo- sophy. But the new birth of humanity at the Revolution and after brought even a larger store of thought and force and idealism together. We need before entering on a more detailed review to disentangle what appear to be the leading motives in the drama. We should put first the growth of knowledge, and of know- ledge"m*that connected and ordered form wEIch we call science. ~ The dominance of this factor in modern life has not escaped, could not escape, the notice of any philosophic mind which surveyed the field. One may find it amply dealt with in such an utterance as Mr. Balfour's presidential address to the British Association in 1900. But it is a reminder which we in England have always needed more than any other great nation in the modern world, much more than our neighbours either in France or Germany. We gave the world the greatest herald of the coming change in Francis Bacon, and we have contri- buted at least as richly as any other people to the progress of the scientific knowledge which Bacon hailed. But we have never appreciated knowledge as a nation or made it an ideal as others have. Those Englishmen, like Bacon himself or in our own time Spencer, who spoke as prophets of the value of science, have always found a readier hearing abroad and become greater The Legacy of the Revolution 1 7 heroes than at home. The French Encyclopedic of Diderot, which ushered in the Revolution, is an impressive symbol of respect for modern and coherent knowledge. It rallied the leading thinkers of France and gave them a platform which they could find nowhere else. They refer constantly to Bacon as their apostle and use his language to express their purpose. Like him they set out to found an ' empire of virtue ' and to increase human happiness by the growth and spread of science. Where shall we find such a group in England ? Hardly in that Club of Johnson's which was prevailingly Tory in politics, and did not attempt any work of sustained and collective intellectual labour. Perhaps the nearest parallel would be in Scotland, among the group of men who gathered round and followed Adam Smith and Dugald Stewart ; and there we should find an instructive contrast. The outcome of their intercourse, the nearest analogue as a piece of concerted effort by a group of advanced thinkers in Great Britain, was undoubtedly the Edinburgh Review, proposed by Sydney Smith in 1802 at the famous supper in Buccleuch Place and carried out by Jeffrey, Brougham, Horner, and Smith. Their motto, to be set beside the Encyclopaedists' ' empire of virtue by the spread of knowledge ', was Sydney Smith's, ' I have a passionate love for common justice and common sense'. For while the) best mind in France has been devoted to ideal con- structions and to science, the corresponding preference has been given in England to business and practical life in politics and elsewhere. But this will not prevent us from seeing in the growth, application, and appreciation of knowledge the first of the leading traits which characterize the modern world. The difference arises from the fact that the comparative political freedom of England had given a greater scope to talent in that direction. We are now, a hundred years later, entering on a time when it will be impossible thus sharply to distinguish 2170 c 1 8 The Legacy of the Revolution between the different nations in the Western family. In the interval the English political habit has overspread the world, and we, in our turn, have been learning the general value and fruitfulness of knowledge. We have still far to go on that road. But in the end we shall have learnt to prize, to teach, and to apply it as we already have taken our full share in building it up. This scientific structure, embracing more and more of our own nature and the surrounding cosmos, with its attendant develop- ments in industry and wealth and population and its attendant organization and specialization both of thought and life, is the first and most important of all the salient features of the modern age. The second feature is less easy to define, but no less certain, when once we apprehend it. To some men — Lord Acton was one — it seems supreme, the end of all our life and effort : and they call it freedom. It means, among a hundred other things, the opportunity for every one of exercising more power in the direction of his own life and the life of the community in which he lives. We shall see in the next chapter how a movement of this kind began again with vigour as soon as the repression of the French war was withdrawn. But personal and political freedom is allied to much else in the development of man's life, and belongs really to a larger conception which is perhaps better described in other words. There has been in this modern stage of history a progressive effort to gain for one's self and to secure for others a fuller life on all sides, the fullest life of which the individual is capable. This is the largest aspect in which we may regard the search for freedom ; and so regarded, the increase of knowledge by science, the deepening of thought in philosophy, the aspirations of the poet, the creations of beauty, are all seen to contribute their share to the ideal. But the poets have done most to build it up in men's minds. For us in Britain Burns and Wordsworth and Shelley were the most powerful The Legacy of the Revolution 1 9 voices, but a hostof others join in chorus throughout the Western world. We shall see later how the literature of the age, and particularly the earlier part of it when the fervour of the revival was at its height, speak of a new ideal of life, free and full, in harmony with all sides of our own nature, in harmony too with something in surrounding nature which seems to call on us for a reply. To the reflective mind Wordsworth expresses this most fully ; to the simpler soul Burns is the trumpet-call, and the echo which his songs have roused throughout the English- speaking world, springs from the depth of passion. The social, friendly, honest man, Whate'er he be, 'Tis he fulfils great Nature's plan, And none but he. This is the basis of what is called the ' democratic ' movement in the nineteenth century ; and to this belief is added the necessary corollary that if the simple man, merely through his humanity, is the fulfilment of Nature, so he, by that very fact, can claim from society, as his own fulfilment, a share of all the goods that society has acquired. Hence the movement for social reform and popular education which we shall, trace ; and we rank" it second among the outstanding features of the modern world. If we call this, which to Lord Acton was freedom, by the wider name of the ' growth of soul ', another step will take us to the collective aspects of that growth which are no less obvious in the same age. The family, the town, the church, the State, have all such a real super-personal existence and affect us in ways distinct from the separate individuals who compose them. Of all these forms of collective being the Nation plays the largest part in modern history. Here again the nineteenth century is the period of chief expansion, not for a new or passing fashion, but for a fundamental condition of human life which had c 2 20 The Legacy of the Revolution been taking shape for ages and gained a special strength at the Revolution. France gave the national principle electric force by the violence of its internal struggle. So violent was it that in effect it was a new nation which flowed over Europe, doing vital work of preservation and of propaganda. By defence at Valmy and Jemappes, by conquest with Napoleon, France consolidated herself within and inspired other nations without, some by example, others by reaction. The Congress of Vienna and the 'Holy Alliance' which followed were unable for long to repress the current. First Greece and, through an un- broken course down to the tragedies of recent years, every part of Europe has since been struggling for a strong national system,. Yet even nationality is overshadowed by the still larger growth which marks the century of our study. For by a strange, apparent contradiction the bitterest and most determined struggles of nationality have taken place in a world tending to greater unity. We might, in fact, speak with equal truth of the age of rising internationalism as of competing nations. This will become clearer as we proceed. Science and industry have knit up the world, but it has not yet fully found its soul. That soul is nascent, just as the soul of France was nascent in Jeanne Dftrc and born in the Revolution, and the soul of England stirred in Chaucer and was born with Shakespeare. So in the world a wider consciousness, though nascent, has still 'to come. That we believe in its coming, even in the midst of the greatest war, is of all symptoms the most striking of an Age of Hope. And in this quality of Hope we have another of the profound characteristics of the age. Since the reforming pio- neers of the Revolution a hundred and fifty years ago, men have been living for the future and believing in it as they had never done before. Some writers have seen in this dominion of the future the principle of a religion, the solution of all the problems of our being. We are content here to observe it, as every The Legacy of the Revolution 21 student must, and to connect it with other aspects of modern life. With one other aspect the connexion is intimate and full of meaning* We have been living for the future and living in hope. Whence comes this assurance, on what do we rest this hope? It is not a blind or instinctive confidence ; and no undeniable ; external voice has in this recent period revealed it to us. We must unquestionably find the food for the belief, the impulse to the future, in the deeper knowledge and understanding of j the past that has developed with it. It is an age of history as truly as an age of hope. And history has taken shape in the same years, no longer as a statement — true and well explained as may be — of what took place at any given epoch in the past, but as the revelation of an illimitable upward process in which mankind and all creation are labouring together from moment to moment and age to age. History in this full sense is also the child of the eighteenth, the adolescent of the nineteenth century. And history has helped immeasurably to fortify the early hopes of reformers by showing -that, imperfect as we arc and bloodstained as our path has been, we yet have risen already from a lower state and have it in us to advance to one still nobler. A life which hope can turn to, but to be won by effort and hastened by stronger effort — this is the guarantee of history. The historical spirit of the century is thus closely bound up with that inclination to look forward and work for a better future which is also a mark of the times. The two interests do not always dwell together in the same brain, and might seem, like those of nations and of humanity, to be antagonistic. But, as in that contradiction, so here, the opposition is ulti- mately to be resolved in a deeper unity, until at last we may feel that in passing from one to the other we are really studying the obverse and reverse, concave and convex, of the same object. History can describe ',the past and give us some guaran- tee for the ideal future. It is for the poets to picture it and 22 The Legacy of the Revolution inspire the will. In that imaginative world, to which we turn in moments of aspiration and distant visions, Shelley among English poets reigns supreme. The darkest moments of the reaction did not extinguish Hope in him and what he wrote in 1819, 1 exaggerated by passion as it is, might well be taken as the paean of modern Hope sung in the hour of despair. At that day too, Time seemed to have grown grey in waiting for a better world ; and Hope alone of allTime's children was left, wandering distraught. At last, as she is lying in the street, waiting for the feet of Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy to trample her down, the lightning flashes and the clouds are seen piled up like giants in the sky ; and then the stars shine out and there seems to come a new presence in the air. And when the prostrate people looked, the maid had risen and, ankle-deep in blood, was yet walking on with a quiet mien. Suddenly she breaks out with that tremendous song in which patriotism, history, and humanity all conspire to stir the soul : Men of England, heirs of Glory, - Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty Mother, Hopes of her and one another ; Rise like lions after slumber ! 1 ' The Mask of Anarchy '. II THE POLITICAL REVIVAL We take certain dates and striking events in history as turning- points or starting-points in new epochs; and 1815 is one of them. But it would be a gross error to overlook the continuity of movements before and after the chosen point. France in 1815 lost all her conquests and returned to the monarchy of the ancien regime. But she had gained in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods a fresh national spirit, a compactness and a readiness to act, which she had not known before. Her judicial and administrative system had been recast and strengthened, and her peasant proprietorship enlarged. In these respects she was now in advance of us. But we too had been moving, even in the time of the strongest reaction against the Revolution. The reforming spirit of 1780 of which Pitt was the constitutional spokesman was never quite extinct. In the sphere of administration, for instance, inquiries and reforms were being constantly discussed and sometimes carried out. In 1809 a law was passed forbidding the sale of public offices ; in 1 812 a bill was introduced for the abolition of sinecures and the founding of pensions for public servants with the money saved : it was thrown out by the House of Lords but was not without certain indirect results. But the war and the king together were able to prevent any serious political changes, and the^ Prince of Wales, who had been the hope of Whigs and reformers when in opposition, became, when he succeeded as Regent and as George IV, a worse Tory than his father. We have to look outside government circles for the mainsprings of the reform which was to come. The growth of science and 24 The Political Revival industry, and, on another line which must ultimately coalesce with them, the growth of a new spirit of sincerity and humanity in religion, these were the deepest causes, and their action is clearly traceable even in the dark days before our proper story begins. Take three or four typical lines of action on which far-reaching developments were to follow. The evangelical movement in religion, with Wesley as its leading figure, had preceded the end of the century. It was a revolt against the coldness and formality of current religion, strictly and closely analogous to the revolt against artificiality in literature for which the great Romantics stand. The " methodist ', outside the official order, despised by the ' world', might well feel some of that quiet confidence which marked the Christian of the first and second century a. d. His time was to come, not perhaps in the distant personal visions which sometimes attracted him, but in a new earth where all slaves would be free. The campaign for the freedom of slaves, in the technical sense, had practically been fought out before the nineteenth century began. In 1807 the oversea traffic in slaves was abolished. It was another manifestation of the growing belief in the value and dignity of the individual human soul. Wilberforce and Clarkson were prophets of the Revolution as truly as Rousseau or Shelley, and they found ardent sympathizers in the French Convention. It was a proper and necessary application of their principles to go further and say, if you are so anxious by State action to prohibit certain relations between human beings abroad in the interest of the weak, why shrink from imposing, also in the interest of the weak, certain conditions on the employers of labour at home ? Not slaves in the legal sense, the miserable pauper child in the factory, the half-starved, half-naked woman in the coal-mine, were quite as unable to defend them- selves as the negroes on a plantation. Are they less needy of sympathy and protection because they are white ? This fight The PoHtical Revival if also was really determined in principle before our period begins. The first Sir Robert Peel had passed an Act in 1802 protecting the climbing boys, and Shaftesbury is in the succession of the humanitarians of the eighteenth century. Another humanitarian movement which arose in the eigh- teenth and led directly to the wider reforms of the nineteenth century was the agitation for the improvement of prisons, in which John Howard took the leading part. Howard's work was done before the Revolution broke out : he died in 1790. Mrs. Fry, who carried on the same task for women which Howard had begun for men, did most of her work in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century in the full swing of the political movement which we are now to consider. There are two points about all these and similar movements which should be laid to heart as soon as possible, and often re- called. One is their coincidence in history. We cannot avoid the conclusion that they are varied symptoms of one common and general movement in the mind of man. The other point confirms this. The same people who interest themselves in one branch of philanthropic work are nearly always led, so far as their time and powers permit, to extend their efforts to kindred subjects. Howard went on from prison-reform to the study and amelioration of sufferers from the plague. Mrs. Fry built schools for children as well as reforming prisons for women. The cause of the young, the weak, and the suffering is closely allied, and humanity is built up by manifold services. The movement for reform which we have called the ' Political Revival ' centres in England on the passing of the Reform Bill, and in France on the Revolution of July 1830. There was, as we shall see, an actual connexion between the two events as between so many critical steps in the two countries. The French landmarks are significant of the general trend of thought and very useful for us and other countries. The Revolution of 2 6 "The Political* Revival 1830 was middle-class like our Reform Bill of 1832. The Revo- lutions of 1848 were proletarian or working-class, and the corre- sponding movement in England came a little later in the Reform Bills of 1867 and 1884. Corresponding with the demo- cratic imperialism of Napoleon III we find a general reaction on materialistic and aggressive national lines which may be brought down roughly to the end of the century. Then, at last, with the new century we reach what we trust may be the permanent approximation of the liberal and reforming forces in the world, beginning to work out their problems of social progress deliberately and in consultation. The first phase which culminated in France in 1830 and in England two years later, while alike in its main features and issues, differed in its details just as the whole social and political systems of France and England then differed. The aim of the French Revolution of that time was to secure a system of con- stitutional government, ministers responsible to the elected chamber, and freedom of press and speech. The political issue for us in England appeared primarily as a clearance of abuses which had overgrown the system of freedom and justice, which is the birthright of every Englishman. So it has appeared at most of the crises in our national history, and it is well for us that we feel it so. The main public interest therefore in the first twenty years after 1815 was political, devoted to the task of securing a more perfect expression of the public will in both England and France. The Government in both countries was to act in accordance with what was then thought to be the best opinion of the nation. The story in England is a striking example of the political instinct of our people, and their concentration on one issue, remote apparently from the most urgent needs of the moment, and not in fact of immediate benefit to the great majority of those who were agitating to promote it. The Political Revival 27 For consider what were actually the most urgent needs of the country when the war with Napoleon came at length to a close. The first was, unquestionably, to reljejig, the^jjQyerty and distress of the people. Wages were extremely low and work was scarce. Some whole parishes were deserted by their inhabitants, who tramped the country in search of employment. The workhouses were teeming with inmates, and the poor law tended to increase, and not diminish, the number of paupers. The returning soldiers, for whom no foresight had been exercised by the State, swelled the stream of the workless poor. The price of corn was kept artificially high by corn-laws which were maintained by a landlord Parliament in the landlords' interest. To crown all this, came a succession of bad harvests ; that of 1816 was specially bad. This, then, was the primary and most pressing need. Next to this the impartial well-wisher for his country's weal would have put better provision for the education of the people. Sunday schools had been started by Robert Raikes before the end of the eighteenth century, and benevolent persons such as Hannah More and Sydney Smith had been setting these up in various places for general instiuction in the rudiments of reading and writing. But the supply was far too small and unorganized. The State knew nothing of it : and though George III and the Royal Dukes showed some interest in the schemes of Bell and Lancaster, just as Charles II had played with physical science, there was no attempt to support or regulate public education by State action until after the Reformed Parliament had met. Thirdly, in the order of national evils, our reformer would probably have put the barbarity of the law and the weakness and partiality of its administration. There were still, in 181 8, 223 capital offences known to the law, and in the same year 107,000 persons were counted in gaols. And just as there was 28 The Political Revival barbarity and excess of legal precaution in the. ^ defence of property, especially of all property connected with land, so there was a deficiency, in many cases a complete absence, of legal protection for the weak and poor. Some slight obligations in the matter of children's health and instruction were imposed by Sir Robert Peel's first Factory Act of 1802, but the mass of the workers were entirely unprotected. The Combination Laws punished severely any attempt by the workers to enforce better wages by a strike or even by an agreement ; but no employer was ever punished for open agreements to lower wages. An un- employed workman could be sent to prison for refusing to accept work on the employer's terms. Yet in spite of all this it was the corruption and inadequacy of the parliamentary system which finally rallied all the re- forming forces in the country. It was this which brought us several times near a popular rising, and the insistence on this which made each successive step in the improvement of the representation — in 1867, in 1884, in 1917 — an easier and a more generally accepted reform. Men felt, as Mr. Gladstone after- wards said, that if you wished to shave easily, you had better first sharpen your razor. It was quite in harmony with the general political keenness of the working classes that their first demonstration after the war — at Spa Fields in 18 16— displayed the tricolour and de- manded reform in a revolutionary spirit. The fires of France were still alight though smothered for the moment. Starving and oppressed, the predominant idea of the active- minded poor was not to rob or to destroy the rich, but to create a better political system which would guarantee happiness and justice to all alike. Unfortunately any suggestion of political reform, above all any overt connexion with revolutionary France, threw the governing class into a panic. It was the red flag of the Terror. Things were to become still worse before they began The Political Revival 29 mend. Spa Fields led to the imprisonment of Orator Hunt. ie demonstration at St. Peter's Fields near Manchester, which lowed in 1819 — forin those days Lancashire followed London was repressed with loss of life. It inspired Shelley's 'Mask of archy '. This was the nadir of the century. The Six Acts ich followed, limiting the right of public meeting and penaliz- ; political writing, were the turning-point in the reaction, blic meetings were held all over the country to protest against lassacre that seemed to mock Waterloo. In the West Riding : meeting was presided over by the Lord Lieutenant, a great big landlord. It was the first step to the hearty union of bigs and popular reformers which gave us the Act of 1832. [n the decade which followed 1819, before the Revolution of 50 gave the signalforourownconstitutionalchange,therewere :ee noteworthy political events, the repeal of the Combination ws engineered by the incomparable and indefatigable Place, : Catholic Emancipation won by O'Connell, and the revival a liberal policy abroad due to Canning. The last we shall il with in its place later, on. On the two former a word >uld be said before we pass to the struggle for the Reform 1 and its sequel. \11 the activities oi Francis Place,, are of extreme interest, coming between tlie^TrrTTTTTevolution, war, and reaction, ich 'culminates in 18 19, and that of the new age of social i political reconstruction which begins after the great form Bill. Place himself was one of the most remarkable and werful characters who have ever influenced from the back- )und our national history. Beginning life as a journeyman lor, he lived in his earlier years with his wife and the first one two of his fourteen children in a single room in the heart of ■ndon on the smallest income which could have sustained life, t at that very moment he was fully resolved, first, to make ortune ; second, to educate himself to the utmost limits of 30 The Political Revival his capacity; thirdly, to become a force inpolitics in theinterests of the working class to which he belonged. This was in 1795. Within twenty years he had built up a prosperous business as a tailor at Charing Cross, had accumulated in a room behind his shop what was probably the best library in London on modern social and political subjects, and had become the recognized friend and adviser of all the leading reformers of the day. His was the strongest practical head in the Mill, Grote, and Bentham group, and he alone kept the reforming party together in West- minster at the time when Westminster was the typical free constituency in the country. He took his part in all the forward movements of the time, supported the Lancastrian schools in their early days, protested against Peterloo, gained the repeal of the Combination Laws, invented the poster which ' stopped the Duke ' and secured the Reform Bill, drafted the People's Charter, and lived on to support the repeal of the Corn Laws. As a rule an enemy and merciless critic of both official parties, of Whig perhaps even more than of Tory, he was yet the strongest advocate of an alliance at any time when, as in 1831, it seemed the obvious means of reaching the goal. As a critic of the Whigs on the one side and the newborn Socialists on the other, he fits in admirably to this period of transition. The repeal of the Combination Laws exactly suited the temper and politics of Place and his closest allies, for it was a step towards the enlargement of personal freedom and the removal of a legal restriction which had operated in practice to the detriment of the poor and the advantage of the strong. ' Let workpeople and employers be free to make their own bargains without the interference of the State ' ; this was the gospel, and to it Place — the father of fourteen — added as a necessary corollary, ' Let working people restrict their families, so that there may not be so many of them competing for the same jobs.' The 'Political Revival 3 1 Both these propositions remind us, in their crude form, of how much had yet to be done by inquiry, by reflection, and by organization before government could approach the scientific state which the men of the eighteenth century had thought so easy to attain. The fight over the Combination Laws took place in 1824 and 1825. The irepeal of the laws against Catholics and Non- conformists was to follow in 1828 and 1829. The stiff reaction of the first years after the peace had begun to yield. The change in tone coincides with Canning's succession to' Castlereagh in 1822, and his influence was largely responsible for it. The growth of freedom which now set in, the greater confidence in the reasonableness and right feeling of mankind, was not confined to foreign policy, where for six years Canning was supreme. We may trace it also in home affairs, which always take on a similar hue. In this case the connexion and the explanation are clear enough. Castlereagh had been Foreign Secretary and practically Prime Minister from 1810 to his death in 1822. His character was so good, his life so strenuous, and his prestige 30 great, that the leadership of Lord Liverpool was not much more than nominal. Now Castlereagh had been on the diplo- matic side as much responsible for England's triumph and Napoleon's defeat as Wellington was on the field. Together they stood for England in the eyes of Europe, and they rightly gained a corresponding weight in the counsels of their country- men at home. This weight was always thrown on the side of sxtreme caution, of the least possible change, and, if necessary, rf forcible repression. Canning, inferior in character to either of them, was yet by mental outlook and by personal antecedents freer to take a new ,ine.« Doubtless we may trace his influence in the later diplo- matic papers of Castlereagh, which Canning used without 3 z The Political Revival alteration after his accession to full power in 1822. Thus the policy of England advanced without a break from the caution and moderation of Castlereagh's attitude at the Congress of Vienna to the bolder line of encouraging the aspirations of struggling nationalities which was the glory of Canning and finally severed us from the alliance of the reactionary Powers. After Canning's death in 1828, Wellington became Prime Minister within a year. By that time the die was really cast. Reform was bound to come in England and the bouigeois Revolution in France. But the Duke was then too old and too blind to read the signs. He agreed to give the Catholics their freedom, and then went out before the storm. It was his final term of power. For two short periods he joined Peel in later ministries and was still the staunch and patriotic friend of colleagues and of country. But the relief of the Catholics was his last, as it was his best, act of personal re- sponsibility. It was the leading political question in home affairs in the last years before Reform, and the concession by the Duke in 1829 prepared the way for the solution of the larger issue. When the Catholic religion, connected with traditions of disloyalty in England and with the recent re- bellion in Ireland, was at last declared no bar to office or a seat in Parliament, it began to dawn on many a timid mind that a larger and truer representation of the people might not be so terrible a risk. If we are to trust the Catholics, as even the Duke was at last prepared to do, may we not trust the whole nation ? So far as the Catholics were concerned, Pitt, who had aban- doned general reform under revolutionary stress, had remained liberal as long as possible. It was the well understood sequel of the Act of Union that, deprived of their independent Parliament, the Irish — including of course a Catholic majority — were to be free to sit at Westminster. But George III had found here an insuperable stumbling-block. His coronation oath to.maintain The Political Revival 3 3 the Protestant religion appeared to him to forbid his consent, and Pitt resigned in 1801. The straiter Tories (Eldon through- out, the Duke up to the last practicable moment) supported the King. Ireland herself, led by O'Connell, forced the pass. The Catholic Association, dissolved and quietly reconstituted, refusing to pay taxes and threatening an insurrection, at last broke down the resistance when George IV was king. It gave England an example which Birmingham and many other towns were ready to take up in 1832. The Reform agitation which led to the first great Act will always remain a little epic of English political life. The absurd and wellnigh incredible anomalies which had to be removed, the pleasure mixed up with the abuses, the humours of the contest, the grim determination of the few, the skilful mar- shalling of all the reforming camps into one striking and ultimately irresistible force, the exaggerated hopes of the enthusiasts, the quiet acquiescence of everybody when the deed was done, all this, with its strength and its weakness, we are ready to believe is typically English. What we do not recognize so readily is the coincidence of our national timepiece with the moments of the European clock. This Reform, like the Reformation, like the Tudor monarchy, like the rise of science and the Industrial Revolution, was synchronous, though in a different tone, with events abroad and especially in France. The confusion and corruption of the old franchises have been so oft and so fully described in the history books that we need not dwell long upon them. One or two facts will suffice. Of 658 members of Parliament 424 were nominated either by government agents or by private individuals. These, therefore, were in no sense representative of the constituencies, and in many cases the constituencies themselves had ceased to exist. They might lie under the sea, like Dunwich, where the 2170 n 34 The Political Revival proprietor took a boat on the polling day and conducted the election some fathoms above the ancient borough. Or they might be deserted sites on ground like Old Sarum or Bute, where one elector returned the member. Many large modern towns, even Manchester and Liverpool, had no member, while the whole of Scotland had only 45 to Cornwall's 44. In the election of 1818 there had been only 100 contests; and of these the majority, owing to the loose and open method of voting, the mustering of their tenants by the landlords, the jovial intimidation which prevailed, could not by any stretch of imagination be considered as a serious expression of opinion. The election was rather a rowdy meeting on a succession of market-days ; and when the Duke declared, on the eve of the final contest, that it would have been impossible to devise a more perfect system if we were starting afresh, a shout of indignant laughter ran through the country. The Duke had no sense of humour, and though an excess of this quality has sometimes proved fatal to a statesman, its complete absence may on occasion be found almost equally inconvenient. For we had at this crisis, more perfectly combined than at any other moment in our history, all the strongest forces of the nation against the feudal inheritance of a handful of landlords and their dependents. There was the solid commercial interest of all the rising towns, centred in Birmingham. There was working- class opinion, organized by Place and his friends in London, expecting no doubt more from Reform than it was ever likely to give them, but determined that the change should be made. And clinching all these, and giving them voice, was the intel- lectual element which had been struggling to power for fifty years in newspapers, pamphlets, and reviews, and had found its most telling expression in the Edinburgh. The day of triumph had come at last, and one can still hear the echo in that immortal story of Sydney Smith's mass meeting at Taunton Castle in The Political Revival 3f October 1831. There, before a keen and crowded audience of all classes, he acted, with vigorous gestures and every appearance of anger, the great apologue of Dame Partington determined to sweep back the waves of the Atlantic. The speech was dispatched by special post to London to be read by Lord Grey and his colleagues in the Whig Cabinet, which was to carry reform in the next session. Grey had taken office in 1830 after the accession of William IV. When the new king's first Parliament met, the Duke had assured them that 'human nature is incapable of attaining at one stroke so great perfection ' as the British Constitution. True in one sense as this undoubtedly was, the House of Commons had refused to accept the assurance as a reason for not attempting to make the Constitution even more perfect. Though the new king was more favourable to reform than the old, stern measures were still needed to clear the last obstacle, the adverse majority in the House of Lords. The final stage came on a wrecking amendment of'theLords in May 1832. For some days there was no Government. Grey refused to go on without assurances from the King. The Duke was egged on by the die-hards to take office, without Peel, against the Commons and the nation, and with increasing evidence that only armed force and a doubtful issue were before him. Birmingham and other places were preparing barricades on the new French pattern. Then came the famous placard 'to stop the du ke go for gold '. It was struck out by Place among his friends in the library at Charing Cross, and by the aid of his associates soon posted all over the country. The mere beginning of the run on gold, added to the other symptoms, completed the enlightenment of King and Duke. Wellington accepted his defeat, and Grey returned to power with the necessary pledge to create peers. The placard deserves its place, besides Smith's apologue, in d 2 3 6 The Political Revival our national annals. It was the marching orders of the man of action beside the mot of the man of wit. Together they symbolize the union at this crisis of working-class Radicals and middle-class Whigs. The first Reform Bill, in spite of the enthusiasm it aroused, was a very moderate measure of democracy. In this respect it was valuable rather for the removal of abuses than the wide extension of freedom granted. But it gave an impulse to other reform. Many measures were passed, and more discussed, in the ten years of Whig supremacy which followed. For as the Whigs had carried the Reform, they naturally dominated for some time the reformed Parliament which they had created. That Parliament, true to the principles of its founders, extended the representative system to the government of municipalities, first to Scotland in 1833, then to England in 1835, and, finally, after many years of conflict with the Lords,, to Ireland in 1840. It carried out the humanitarian spirit of the earlier reformers, conspicuously in the abolition of slavery in the colonies. The abolition of the venal boroughs at home at once led to the public purchase of the slaves' freedom for £20,000,000 in 1833. It carried further the amelioration of the criminal law which Peel had begun in 1821, when he removed 100 capital offences from the list. It set up a Central Criminal Court in 1834. On three other lines it commenced the work of social reform which becomes the predominant interest in the politics of later times. These three lines were education, poor law, and factory legislation. In education the first State grant was given to schools in 1833, and a Committee of Council appointed to inspect them in 1839. In poor law the great Act was passed in 1834 which formed unions from parishes, imposed a workhouse test, and endeavoured to check the growth of pauperism and of the poor-rates which in many places exceeded the annual rent of the land. In factory iegisla- 'The Political Revival 3 7 tion it passed the first serious Act, on Lord Shaftesbury's initiative, in 1833, prohibiting the employment of children under nine years of age, and limiting the work of women and young persons under eighteen to twelve hours a day. To reach the same point in French and European politics which we have now touched in home affairs we need first to retrace our steps. The Charter of 1814 under which the Bourbons returned to power was in some points, especially on paper, more democratic than the contemporary English system. The franchise, though high, was uniform, and every one was equal before the law and equally admissible to all public offices. So much of the Revolution was left unshakable. A good deal of the constitution was directly borrowed from ourselves: two chambers, one nominated by theCrown, the other the House of Representatives, elected by a small body of electors paying a considerable sum in taxes, from a still smaller body of those paying a still larger sum. There was thus legally constituted in France a ' governing class ' on a purely money basis, which one might compare instructively with those * governing classes ' of England, which had grown up irregularly, as the nation grew, in the manner that Burke had taught us to prefer. The French Charter also borrowed from England the theory of ' ministerial responsibility '. The King's ministei s were to answer to the chambers for the acts of government. But the Charter unfortunately also reserved to the Crown certain rights of making ' regulations for the safety of the State ', and the King was stated therein to have ' granted the constitution to his people ' by his own sovereign power. It was on this rock that the royal ship went down. The reign of Louis XVIII was a period of violent struggles between the rival parties in France, the ' liberals ' who aimed at widening the clement of popular control, the ' ultras ' or clericals who first took sanguinary vengeance on the old 38 The Political Revival republicans in the 'White Terror' and then definitely entered on that course of opposition to popular sovereignty and all freedom of thought which did not end till Dreyfus was set free. But while Louis lived the throne was safe. He was personally adroit and moderate, and averse from the extreme measures taken in his name. But towards the end of his reign, after the murder of the Duke of Berry, it became clear that the State of France was unstable. Secret societies, called ' la Charbonnerie ' after the kindred Carbonari of Italy, began to flourish. The Duke of Berry, heir to the throne, was murdered in 1820. The 'ultra' government replied by repression more and more severe. In 1823, just after Canning had given a more liberal turn to foreign policy in England, the ' ultra ' government in France, against the wiser feelings of the King and his prime minister Villele, but in concert with the sovereigns of the ' Holy Alliance ', sent a French expedition to suppress a popular rising in Spain. The immediate effect was a temporary triumph for the re- actionaries, and Charles X, who succeeded his brother in 1824, succeeded also to the most reactionary Chamber elected since the restoration, a chamber which at once voted itself seven years' power. It was like — and yet unlike — the blind confidence of the Iron Duke six years later in England. His eyes were always opened in time to save the country, though not his own system of government. Within eight years both systems, in England and in France, had crumbled never to revive. The relations between the Duke and the King of France in these last years before the Revolution of July are a curious study. Charles X, far from wishing to develop the French Charter on English lines, set out at once on a course of whittling down the scanty liberties which it provided. He declared that he would sooner saw wood than be king on the same conditions as a king of England. Various reactionary laws were passed The Political Revival 3 9 in the first three years of his reign, laws strengthening the rights of eldest sons, religious laws threatening savage punishments for thefts in churches, and, most serious and unpopular of all in France, laws penalizing the press by taxes and regulations — a worse edition of one of our own Six Acts. Public opinion was so much alienated that the next Chamber elected, that of 1827, had lost nearly all its reactionary majority. After a year and a half of uneasy government with a more liberal ministry, the King, on the advice of the Duke of Wellington, appointed Prince Jules de Polignac as premier, a man more reactionary and less enlightened than himself. For Polignac, besides being a son of one of the earliest emigres of 1789, had actually refused to swear to the Charter by virtue of which his master was on the throne. He had, he believed, a personal mission from the Blessed Virgin to save the country by other means. Such was the guidance which drove France in 1829 to the Revolution of 1830. Another election in 1830 gave a chamber even more hostile than the last to the King's policy. Paris was now awake, and organized by the intellectual leaders of the country. Four royal ordinances promulgated in July set fire to the train. By a violent misuse of the dangerous clause in the Charter, the King attempted to introduce a new and more limited body of voters and annulled the recent elections. Within four days the barricades were up and the King and his Government had gone. The Farce de Quinze Ans was over. The fall of Polignac in France undoubtedly hastened the defeat of his friend and patron in England. The Duke had known him when French ambassador in London, and thought him the best agent for averting a revolution and saving the Bourbon monarchy. He misjudged the situation on both sides of the Channel, and his complete and speedy discomfiture in France gave hope and courage to his opponents at home. 40 The Political Revival For the Revolution of July was a brilliant success for all the Liberals of Europe. It was prompt, moderate, and almost bloodless. Instead of their excesses of 1792 the French of 1830 were glad to accept a constitutional king, cousin of the deposed monarch. They preserved and improved their Charter of 1814; they maintained their Code Napoleon, and began to apply in a quiet and systematic way the principles of 1789 which in the hands of their first apostles had led to ruin. Englishmen might be pardoned for thinking that the common sense which they had always professed, was on its way to become the law of Europe. But they must lose no time in setting their own house in better order. The new government in France showed its kinship with the reforming movement in England. The same ideas may con- stantly be traced prompting legislative action on humanitarian and moderate democratic lines. Municipalities were reformed and created. The criminal law was softened as in England. Prisons and asylums were brought under better control. In two important matters the French at one stride outdistanced us. Their fundamental law establishing primary schools coincides exactly with the beginning of State action in England. Guizot's law was passed in 1833, when the first grants were voted in England. But whereas the French law imposed the obligation of establishing schools on every commune, and is thus comparable to our School Board Act of 1870, the English Government of the same date only offered a dole of ^20,000 to the existing societies. And in the matter of child labour, their first factorv law of 1841 prohibited the employment of children up to twelve years of age. But we have now to consider the parallel activity of the two Western Powers in the larger issues of nationality and interna- tional concert. The French Revolution had brought into prominence, both in France and other countries, the spirit The Political Revival 41 rv of nationality, which is one of the two greatest factors by which the peace of the world must be ultimately settled. The revolutionary wars had been wound up at Vienna by a treaty and an alliance which were a narrow but honest effort to recon- cile competing State interests in a larger and permanent system. The line taken by the two liberal Powers in response to these two impulses forms in view of the future the most important study of the historian who has an eye on the ideal. We cannot in either case make out a clear and consistent policy developed from the first. We are compelled in both instances to recognize many deviations and a large admixture of selfish motives and mistaken judgement. Yet on the whole the action of France and England tends to a common goal of general good. The hundred years which elapsed before the Great War prepared them for the crucial moment when they were to be allied in a determined struggle to assert a new order of national justice and the free union of nations. The Congress of Vienna was sitting, amid the tense expecta- tions of Europe, during the interval between the defeat of Napoleon in 1814 and his return for the ' Hundred Days ' in 181 5, and again after Waterloo ; but it failed in its greater object. It could not at that day establish a new and permanent polity for Europe on the principles of nationality and freedom which were beginning to inspire the hopes of the world. It led to the re-establishment of the status quo with certain changes mostly in the interests of those who had come strongest out of the fight. Holland and Belgium were united, and Sweden and Norway ; both unions were subsequently dissolved. England received the Cape of Good Hope and a few colonial islands. The great cases of nationality which called out for treatment — the Polish, the German, the Italian — were left unsettled, and the whole Eastern question was untouched. It gave a breathing space merely, but in the course of its 42 The Political Revival meetings the position of England and France were defined in relation to the three military Powers of the North and East — Prussia, Austria, Russia. Two great men had charge of their countries' interests at the Congress, Talleyrand and Castlereagh, and their actions from different motives tended to converge. It was Talleyrand's part to re-assert for France her due weight in the councils of Europe. It was Castlereagh's object to check the ambition of any individual Power and establish a stable equilibrium ; and he was charged by England to gain if possible one special object— the agreement of the Congress to the abolition of the slave trade. Both statesmen succeeded in their definite and limited objects and their pursuit brought the two Powers together. A further step towards their co- operation took place at the Congress of Troppau in 1820. The Eastern Powers, who after the Congress of Vienna had under the initiative of the Tsar Alexander drawn more closely together in the Holy Alliance, found themselves confronted by liberal risings in various parts of Europe. They went on to bind themselves to mutual help in suppressing any attempts of the peoples to alter their governments. Alexander had attempted to inspire the Alliance with Christian principles. Metternich, the Austrian minister, had supported it in the interests of autocratic power. Both were agreed that any movements of nations against their legal sovereigns must be put down by force. This at Troppau the three Eastern Powers agreed to do in common, and to exclude from the European Alliance any State which had undergone a revolution of which they disapproved, until, ' by peaceful means, or, if need be, by arms, they had brought back the guilty State into the bosom of the Grand Alliance '. This was the climax of Metternich's ascendancy and the definite breach with the Western Powers. For Castlereagh had already in 1819 protested against the policy of leaguing the Governments against the.peoples, and at The Political Revival 43 Troppau the representatives of France and England were shut out. It was a significant prelude to the series of revolutions which from 1822 to 1835 altered the Governments of Greece, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, all in the direction of national freedom and self-government and in each case with the assistance of England and France. But before this England and the United States had, from 18 10 onwards, supported the fight of the South American colonies for freedom from Spain. Englishmen had fought as individuals for Bolivar in his heroic lifelong struggle for the independence and union of the South American states, and Castlereagh had intervened in 1817 to prevent a European Congress from supporting the claims of Spain over them Again, after the French expedition of 1823 had revived the hopes of Spain, a movement for European intervention was frustrated by England and the United States. At last it fell to Canning in 1825 to recognize the revolted colonies as independent, and to conclude commercial treaties with them. In this early case England gave the signal to the other Powers. The case of Greece brings France and England into joint . action, and is a direct link with the politics of our own day. It is full of interest of every kind. The Turkish Empire was the part of the world where the idea of nationality was least developed and most deeply overlaid by a military depotism, alien in race and largely in religion. In the Balkans, the latent nationalities, much confused among themselves, were cherishing the memories of ancient greatness and national conflict with their present masters. When they regained their strength and full national consciousness, this alien mastership would be ended. With the decay of the Turkish power in the eighteenth century they began to stir, and north of Turkey lay the Musko- vite giant ready to abet every movement of the Christian 44 The Political Revival communities against their foe. Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century first avowed the Russian ambition by styling himself ' Petrus I Russo-Graecorum Monarcha '. Catherine II carried the idea farther and had her nephew baptized 'Constantine' in order to succeed to the Greek throne which was to be. The end of the century saw more than one abortive rebellion and the spread of a secret organization of Greek patriots to promote the independence of their country. In 1820 a war between Mehemet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, and his nominal suzerain the Sultan gave the Greeks the oppor- tunity they sought. The revolt of the Greeks in the Morea was followed by a war of extermination on both sides. The Greek patriarch Gregorius was executed by the Turks, and pyramids of Greek skulls adorned the headlands. Three things drove Canning to take action with the passionate sympathy of Western Europe behind him. The first was the romantic ideal of the West, which, half history and half hope, was beginning to project new national forms for the future wherever common deeds and common sufferings had laid a large foundation in the past. Greece struck this cultured imagination more strongly than any other land, and men dreamt with Byron that she might still be free, For standing on the Persians' grave, I could not deem myself a slave. Greece, the ancient mother of modern thought, thus became the leading case in the modern world of a struggling nationality brought to birth by the collective action of progressive Europe. The second motive, which led to England's intervention in 1823, was the apprehension of a war between Turkey and Russia, as the result of which the Northern Power would, or might, have become completely dominant in the East. This larger aspect of the problem came up again for solution in the Crimean The Political Revival 4y War, when for the first time the whole Balkan question passed under the joint review of the Concert of European Powers. On the first occasion, in 1823, England and France forced their way in by the side of Russia to wrest from Turkey the indepen- dence of the most easily detached of her dominions, and the most sentimentally attractive. The third motive, the actual occasion for our intervention, was the necessity- of making some one responsible for policing the seas of the Greek archipelago. The Turkish fleet was impotent, and piracy was rife. In 1823 Canning recognized the insurgents as belligerent. On this the Sultan made up his quarrel with Mehemet Ali, and, for the price of Crete, the Morea, Syria, and Damascus, an Egyptian fleet and army were sent to finish with the Greeks. In 1825 the Morea was overrun. In April 1826 Missolonghi, where Byron two years before had been drilling troops almost to the day of his death, fell at last. But in the same month the Duke of Wellington, who had been sent to Petrograd by Canning to concert joint measures with the new Tsar Nicholas I, had drawn up the protocol by which in three years' time Greek independence was secured. In the interval events hurried on. The Greeks made a formal application to England for help. Canning, relying on the agreement with Russia, went a step further and consented to a 'pacific blockade 1 of the Morea, which would have starved out the Egyptian fleet locked up in Greek harbours. France had come in, and a treaty of the three Powers was concluded on the basis of the protocol. The Turkish and Egyptian fleets, shut in by the fleets of the three protecting Powers in Navarino Bay, showed fight, and were annihilated on October 20, 1828, by the Allies under Codrington the British admiral. The death of Canning had unfortunately preceded this famous battle by two months, and the weakened English Government \6 The Political Revival proceeded to express diplomatic apologies to the Porte. But the deed was decisive. The fighting by land was carried on by the Russians, the military occupation of the Morea by the French. In 1830 the independence of Greece was agreed to by all the Powers, and, after the fall of Wellington, just before the Grey Government passed the Reform Act, the new Greek kingdom somewhat enlarged, under the Bavarian Prince Otto, was established by the Treaty of London in May 1832. The growth of a humanitarian entente with France, the anticipation of a triple entente with Russia, the sequel of these events in the Great War of to-day, all give a singular prominence to the story of modern Greece. The concurrent case of Belgium has a more tragic issue. But an Englishman will rejoice that the two pivots of our policy in Europe, East and West, have remained true to the same direction of national liberty in face of the varying dangers of a hundred years. In 1826 we played our part in winning the independence of Greece from the Turks while keeping Russia at our side ; in 1832, when Palmerston had succeeded to the inheritance of Canning, we secured the independence of Belgium from Holland with the assistance of France. The Revolution of Belgium was the immediate sequel to the French Revolution of July. The Belgians had chafed for fifteen years under their forced union with Holland, with a Dutch king and an administration largely Dutch. They were the more numerous portion of the combined kingdom, and mainly Catholic while the Dutch were mainly Protestant. They refused to coalesce. If we seek for causes of the failure farther back in history, we may find them in the premature death of William of Orange, which reduced the provinces of the Nether- lands, which might have been united in freedom, from seventeen to seven. That greatest of modern statesmen might The Political Revival 47 have achieved this union. Perhaps by doing it he would have averted the greatest of wars. But the crude handiwork of the statesmen of Vienna had no permanence. The Belgians hailed the outbreak in Paris as their signal, and rose against Holland. Palmerston, at the conference which met at London in November, persuaded the five great Powers to recognize the claim of Belgium to independence. Louis Philippe refused the crown for himself or his son, and a perfect compromise between England and France, Protestantism and Catholicism, was found in the kingship of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. He was a Protestant, widower of the English Princess Charlotte, and uncle of the Princess Victoria who was to succeed to the English throne ; and, within two years of his accession, he had married a daughter of Louis Philippe and satisfied the Belgian majority by contracting that the children of his marriage should be brought up as Catholics. The French by land and the French and English by sea had to complete the eviction of the Dutch. The famous treaty by which the neutrality of Belgium was guaranteed by the five great Powers was finally executed in April 1839. Canning's life-work and the earlier activities of Palmerston, /while he still made a good understanding with Paris ' the pivot of his policy ', complete our picture of England's attitude abroad in this first period of revival. It was a policy of making England's influence felt in the councils of Europe but strictly limiting the exercise of our powers, a policy of preserving a balance between the ambitions of competing countries and giving a chance, wherever possible, to other nations struggling for such liberties as we possessed ourselves. But the proper prudence with which we pursued these aims gave some colour to the charges of our critics that we did nothing for the good of others without an eye to our own advantage. Poland rose against Russia in the revolution year of 1830, but her struggle 4 8 The Political Revival gained no support from us. On behalf of Spain and Portugal, however, where a British fleet could come into play, Palmerston formed an alliance with France in 1834, which secured the constitutional parties against their clerical and reactionary foes. This was his most successful effort, and he carried it out almost single-handed. But the heavier tasks were still to be accomplished, the larger ideas to spread. Germany had yet to be made a nation, and Italy. And all the peoples of the earth had yet to come together and realize their common destiny and common duties. In 1831 an exiled Italian landed at Marseilles, a man in whom the passion for national independence was better tem- pered by an enthusiasm for the kindred good of all mankind than in any other thinker before his time. Mazzini, the Carbonaro, the man of letters, the life-long martyr to the humanitarian ideal, is the best link in this age between philosophy and the politics of nations. And in the league of ' La Giovine Italia ' which he founded as an exile in France, he proclaimed the gospel of the coming day — 'Moral unity and Fraternity in a faith common to all Humanity.' Ill THE NEW SPIRIT IN LITERATURE We saw that the eighteenth century was a period of prose, much of it great piose — the first modern prose in English, but predominantly prose. At the end of the century when the Revolution took place which was to transform industry, politics, and social life, a change came over literature as well. The next period was an age of poetry. Nothing to be said in this chapter can exceed the importance of this. Rightly understood, all we have to say is but a commentary on this text. One of the greatest poetic epochs in the world's history begins when Lessing and Goethe go back to Shakespeare, when Wordsworth turns to nature, when Victor Hugo tears up the conventions of the French stage and founds the Romantic movement. This simultaneous phenomenon and its place in general history are strong presumption for us that we are in presence of one of the turning-points in man's evolution. Homer and the poets of Athens appeared when Greece was founding the world's thought in which their works were to be part of a common inheritance. Lucretius and his successors were spokes- men of a society again at the head of civilization and laying the foundations for a world-order which was to follow. Dante in like manner speaks to us all of a common ordering of thought and life which, in his time, had come to its zenith. When, with the Elizabethans and Shakespeare, we come to the next great outburst of poetic power, it is dispersed among the nations, but still produces, in varied colours, common forms. The Spanish drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon is near of kin to ours, and is followed shortly by the classical drama of France. 2170 E fo The New Spirit in Literature So at the Romantic revival towards the close of the eighteenth" and the beginning of the nineteenth century there is again a general movement in the leading countries of the West, but its common features are more difficult to discern. The name, or father the want of a good name, perplexes us. ' Romantic ' is of all possible terms perhaps the least satisfactory. Literally it refers back to languages which derive from Latin, by association it suggests the creation of striking'but unaccus- tomed visions of life. Nothing could be less like Wordsworth, or the miin purpose, if not always the actual achievement, of Hugo. Let us search further and try to find the common points and connecting links without imposing any strain on our subject-matter, without ignoring the individuality of the men of genius who make up a ' movement '. Genius is complete but not isolated. This one assumption we must make at starting. The work of these poets and their successors, individual as each must be, distinguished as they also are by national divisions, has yet its common roots in the contemporary civilization of Western Europe, and has moulded the social life which followed, in some respects to common ends. To trace these is the histo- rian's primary object. The individual colours will brighten the picture and enliven us as we proceed. We are still perhaps too near these great men of a hundred years ago to give them their final place among the eminences. We are far enough away to discern the mountain chain, not yet far enough to place it in its due relations to those on other sides and behind .them. So far mankind has not agreed that any one of the group will rank with the very highest of the past, with Homer or Dante or Shakespeare, though some might, even now, give such a place to Goethe or to Victor Hugo. But on the group as a whole it may be safe to venture one or two conclu- sions. Has there ever been in the world before so rich an out- burst of creative power in literature within the same space of The New Spirit in Literature fi time, so varied, so well distributed among the leading nations, and, withal, so closely knit by common traits in its inspiration and its purpose ? The magnitude of the creative power is the first and most striking aspect. To most students the lifetime of Goethe seems to cover more of the best literature of Germany than all her other years ; and it is also the flowering-time in Germany for music and philosophy. For France the lyric and reflective poetry of the nineteenth century, especially its earlier portion, are of in- comparable value ; the bulk of their fiction falls within the same period, and their drama of the nineteenth deserves com- parison with that of the seventeenth century, the only other to be mentioned in their history beside it. In England our stretch of the greatest literature is longer — longer than that of any other people. Yet, putting Shakespeare out of the account, he would be a bold man who denied that the nineteenth century, especially its eailier portion, outweighed both in volume and in value any other period, some might even say the greater part of all the rest together. For in this time we have Wordsworth, i Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Browning, and Tennyson, as well as Scott and the greatest school of novelists in the world. It is attractive to set this great creative act of European mind beside the creations of other sorts proceeding at the same moment. Are they not all parts of one creation which is fashioning science, transforming industry, and widening liberty in parallel and related movements ? Man, it seems, was becom- ing conscious of all his powers at that revolutionary moment and found them more varied and of wider scope than even the Greeks or the men of the Renaissance, who had felt earlier stirrings of the same spirit. The infinite scope of science was now added to his aspirations and the possibility of organizing the whole world in the service of human good. We cannot doubt, though we cannot prove, that as with the Greeks of the E 2 J" 2 The New Spirit in Literature fifth century b. c, as with the artists and men of science of th sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a.d., so at the end of th eighteenth there was a real and intimate connexion betwee: all these creative acts in science, literature, music, and liberty A new s pirit of freed om is, next to its creajiye power, th most striking general feature in the* literature of the age. I is this which connects it most closely with the politica movement which we have sketched. Lessing's is the cleares voice of the new freedom in Germany, Victor Hugo's ii France, Wordsworth's in England. The accents must be a varied as Freedom is, as varied as the vision of the men \vh gave it utterance. To Germany, as to the ' Romantics ' a littl later in France, the freedom meant primarily the breaking o the conventions with which the French stage had bound itsel by a mistaken and narrow rendering of Aristotle. This may seen a small thing, and remote enough in origin and in distance fror the main interests of human life. Yet, when the issue cam to be fought out in France, all society was divided and an actua battle raged, as fierce as any contested election in politics. Th ' unities ' in a play had become a symbol of a literature wher everything — language, character, and action — was to follow th accepted types. Yet Shakespeare was the greatest figure ii the whole world of drama, and he was unconscious of thes categories of character, unities of time and place, convention of language. As a creator he made men and women living a& individual, and he used his material not as the topiary artis cutting live trees into dead birds, but as the sculptor usin rough blocks for new and vivid shapes. Hence for Lessinj Goethe, Victor Hugo, new life for the drama called for th study of Shakespeare, and since the Puritan revolution th drama meant foi France and for Germany incomparably mor than it did for us. This was one aspect of the new freedorr Rousseau had expressed it in other forms — in a new gospel c The New Spirit in Literature 53 freedom in education, and Diderot in a fresh and personal criticism of art. In England the drama does not express the change. We look rather to work of another kind, and find the same mark in ' Wordsworth's meditations on man and nature, in Byron's revolt and passion for liberty in his own days, in Shelley's visions of an ideal world. In all these there may be traced the same desire to break away from hampering traditions of the past, the same confidence that human nature, relying on its own impulses, may create a better world in the future, which were felt by Rousseau, Condorcet, Godwin, Turgot. Freedom, directness, and greater simplicity in language were to them, as to the French and German ' Romantics ', the badge of greater freedom of the spirit. For the new poets everywhere there was to be no court livery in the service of their mistress poetry. It is a fact akin to this that all these men get nearer to the truth of human nature. But here we must distinguish, and the distinction will throw light before and after in the line of literary evolution. The truth that these men aimed at in their delineation of life, was not the microscopic, photographic study of human nature which passes by the name of naturalism. Such study tends, as in later writers, such as Balzac and his successors, to an exaggeration of human faults. The search for truth of the earlier writers found it rather in the appreciation of those traits in character which tend to greatness. Idealism there must be in every work of art. Are we to look for it in a brilliant picture of the weak and little in our nature, thrown by a powerful magnifying light upon the screen, or in the delineation of those characters and those features in any character, which, subject to given trials of circumstance, become heroic, sometimes in action, sometimes in suffering, but always in growth ? This is also truth to nature, but truth developed to a higher power. ^4 The New Spirit in Literature It will be observed, of course, that in thus proceeding from the truth of human nature and idealizing it, the men of the new age in literature were doing no new thing. The greatest makers, Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare, had done it before and thus won their immortality. The test of greatness is, in fact, precisely the same with the new school of poets. Wordsworth and Scott take men and women of their own world, the poor countryman of the dales, the Scotch peasant, the Covenanting preacher, and show them as heroic in their own sphere, acting i with perfect truth to their own nature, as the chiefs of Homer or the Romans of Shakespeare. This is the glory of these new poets, and we can say it of no others before them since Shakespeare. But we come now to another feature in which the writers of the new age surpass those of any earlier period. It is not pri- marily an individual quality, but it is a debt which Scott, Victor Hugo, Thackeray, and all the writers of the time owe in varied measure to the spirit of the age. This is the historical spirit which we n6ted before as a general characteristic. Gibbon had lived, and Montesquieu ; the beginnings of history had been laid at the end of the eighteenth century. All succeeding writers appeal to history in different tones. Byron's free Greece of the future is the Greece of history. Shelley, the least attached to tradition, is constrained by the same spirit to appeal to the heroic past of England as well as the empire of Hellenic thought. Scott lived in a recreated past. Victor Hugo crowned his life's work by a Legende des Slides. In this respect their truth to nature aimed at another and deeper aspect of the truth, for the poets, often unconsciously, were compassing the same task which the historians and philosopheis had just begun of set purpose, i.e. to understand the being and destiny of. Man by studying his becoming. It is the supreme task of interpretation, the comprehensive truth of which but The New Spirit in Literature yf one facet here and another there will gleam through the minds of the greatest masters. Scott saw the past, but had no inkling of the forces which were transforming the present. Shelley saw a future so radiant that the present seemed but a procession of hideous crimes. Of the characteristics of the nineteenth century which we noted as emerging from the great industrial and political revolu- tion, two remain to be considered in their relation to the new- spirit in literature ; they are, we believe, to be the most decisive in the end. One is the force of s'cience, of organized knowledge, in framing and inspiring life. The other is the goal of human thought and activity, the comrnunity of all human beings con- spiring to a common end by diverse means. This is the problem of humanity, and it covers those partial aspects which we know as nationalism and the international question. Now both of these kindred forces and ideals begin to be felt in the poetry of the early century, but do not yet transfuse it. Their presence and their growth during our period are palpable enough. Mott significant of all is their mutual relation. Those thinkers who appreciate best the meaning and the value of the scientific evolution are those to whom the ideal of humanity is most apparent. Of all the poets of the time Goethe is the most scientific, and he is also strongly international in spirit. Science is to him primarily a noble and attractive object of human interest- — ■ perhaps the most attractive of all — at times even more so than his own liege mistress poetry herself. At times he gives us also a glimpse of the organizing aspect of science as the product of joint human labour operating through the ages. But for the notion of science as the basis of social progress we have to wait. The social question, as we now understand it, did not exist till after the industrial revolution, and Goethe's mind is essentially pre-revolutionary. Wordsworth, as we shall see, takes us a step f6 The New Spirit in Literature farther/in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where he describes with marvellous insight both the right relation of poetry to science and the difficulties which hinder its realization. And Shelley, through his higher imaginative power, expresses the future ideal of knowledge transfused by love and power, more perfectly than any other poet of the age. It is to him that man appeared not as men but as ' Man, a chain of linked thought, of love and might to be divided not '. In this, the sublime chorus in the Prometheus Unbound, he attains a fuller vision than even Victor Hugo, to whom ' science is beautiful and Aristotle great, but Socrates and Zeno greater still '. On the whole the great writers of the Romantic school are more concerned to expound the heroic in the individual soul as supreme above any achievement of the collective mind. It is not till later in the century that writers appear, individually less magnificent, but primarily interested in the collective problem. Then the growth of science becomes the guiding thought and social progress the greatest subject. George Eliot is a type in England, Sully Prudhomme in France, and they speak with a voice of philosophic reflection, pitched in a lower and less passionate key. From similar causes national sentiments are stronger in the earlier writers than any feeling of the unity of mankind. It was an age of rising nationalities when France was recovering her national strength and Byron was breathing new life into the crushed frame of Greece and Canning setting free young nations in the New World. Hence nearly all the great writers of the age are full of national enthusiasm, and even the rebels among them, such as Byron and Shelley, cannot escape from it. If, like Byron, they find nothing to inspire them in their own country's achievements, they find a spiritual home elsewhere. For heroism, when it once advances beyond the Cyclops' cave, must have its fellows to work with, its traditions to feed on, its The Nerv Spirit in Literature $7 common goal of victory to attain. The larger ideal of a hero of humanity is as yet but faintly traced ; it is apt to take the form merely of a Man of Sorrows. Carlyle gives us no picture of the hero as Man of Science. But we can see its need in the national self-complacency of Englishmen in those early decades, in the lyrical exaggeration of patriotism such as Victor Hugo's. But the larger ideal is in the making ; it gains a philosophic expression in many writers : one day it will find its sacred poet. This new outburst of poetry may be dated from that famous year x when Wordsworth, Hegel, and Beethoven were born, ' 1770. Scott's birth followed in 1 77 1. Turner, the painter of nature, was four years younger. Within those five years therefore five men were born, makers of new things of the first moment in the thought of Europe. There is something kindred in their depth of feeling, their scope of imagination, their creative force. The two great national poets, Goethe for Germany, Victor Hugo for France, are not quite in this group. Goethe-> was just over twenty years senior and has firm roots in the ^ ancien regime. Victor Hugo is thirty years later and is a child of the nineteenth century. Goethe looks as much to the past"' as Hugo looks to the future. But the five men were on the watershed. From them the streams were descending, of which we will trace a few of the brightest stretches until they are lost in the great expanse of the later century. As we are tracing these great movements only, and within those limits endeavouring especially to see the common points and the contrasts between ourselves and France, it is necessary to select a very few of the acknowledged and most typical masters, and view the rest in relation to them. Taking the period from 1770, which was remarkable for the birth of so much genius, to 1850, when a fresh revolution had taken place in Europe and 1 • See Dr. A. C. Bradley in English Poetry and German Philosophy. $ 8 The New Spirit in Literature Wordsworth and Scott were dead, there can be no doubt as to the most representative names. We must take Wordsworth and Scott in England, Victor Hugo and Balzac in France. To select these is not to give four first prizes for genius. Genius is an individual and incomparable thing, and who shall say that Shelley is not as great a genius as Wordsworth ? In some of the most brilliant poetic qualities, in imagery, in glow of language, in creative imagination, he is manifestly his superior. But Wordsworth holds so central a position in English poetry, brings together so many threads of religious and philosophic thought and has spread his influence so wide in later literature, that no one can dispute his claim to the most serious study if we would understand the part that England played in expressing the new spirit of the age. To some critics this has become so clear that one distinguished French historian of the nineteenth century tells us that ' Wordsworth is, or is to be, the true national poet of England '.- 1 If this be so, we must yield an exclusive national possession of Shakespeare, and allow him to belong, like Homer, like Dante, like Goethe, primarily to all mankind. And clearly there is a sense in which this is true. There is a class of great poets for whom the world and humanity at large eclipse their national background. For all there are local roots and national and temporal attachments, but with some the branches spread so wide that they cover the earth and we are apt to lose sight of the narrower origin. Such were Homer and Dante, and Shake- speare and Goethe. Such was not Virgil or Milton or Racine. Such were not those whom we have mentioned as the most representative writers in France and England in the early nine- teenth century. Victor Hugo comes the nearest to universality but hardly reaches it, while Wordsworth, with all his kinship with German philosophy and all his early enthusiasm for the 1 M. Elie Halevy. The New Spirit in Literature fo French Revolution, ends as an E|H B| n or tne English. Byron and Shelley are of course mu^M Wfeosmopolitan than he, but ' cosmopolitan ' is not the proper name of this universal quality. The universal poets have all a strong and deep root in their local or national environment, but develop their nature to embrace mankind. Byron and Shelley rather turn to man- kind for comfort and redress against the ills, real and imagined, that they have suffered in their natural home. This is the mark of the cosmopolitan as distinguished from the more thoroughly human and universal quality of mind. Now of all the great writers who occupy the early part of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth most perfectly combines strong national feelings with a~ihind open to new thought. And all he received from without, from the impressions of nature and the converse of friends, from political revolutions and philosophic thought, he made his own and transmuted into one substance by an intensely individual and sympathetic temper. Thus, while not a great creative poet, in the Shake- spearean sense, not cosmopolitan in any sense, he became the first and most powerful of the philosophic poets, who, with the novelists, are the literary distinction of the nineteenth century. We find in him all those features which we analysed as the ideal legacy of the Revolution. ' We live by admiration, hope and love ', he tells us, and, in words that aim at science and might be taken as the motto of the age, Truth justifies herself, and as she dwells With Hope, who would not follow where she leads P 1 The Prelude gives us the ' growth of the Poet's mind ' — his education and early history ; above all the interest and passion aroused in him by his visit to France in the summer of 1790, when the French were celebrating their first National Fete 1 The Recluse. 6o The New Spirit in Literature and hailing their kiiig'asj&rst citizen and constitutional chief of a regenerated c«^*The generous enthusiasm, the love of freedom, the hope*for the future found an echo in his soul which never died. He supported the revolutionists until Napoleon's aggression alienated him, as it alienated the other greatest prophet of freedom, born in 1770, Beethoven. Then came that period of deep depression which turned him to science and the inward vision, and in which his poetry and even his sanity were preserved by the constant love and companion- ship of his sister. 1 Lyrical Ballads, one of the milestones in English poetry, appeared in 1798. It was the result of a visit of Coleridge to Wordsworth at the time when Wordsworth was living in Somerset. The friendship there formed was decisive for Wordsworth in many ways. Coleridge was able to introduce his friend to the thought of foreign philosophers, especially of Spinoza. He gave him confidence in his own powers, and the stimulus of another point of view, kindred and yet different from his own. The influence of Coleridge thus deepened and widened his own individuality. Coleridge, a mystic, with his mysticism strengthened by his philosophic training, inclined to supernatural subjects for poetic treatment. He contributed ' The Ancient Mariner ' to their joint book. Wordsworth, inclined to simple subjects of common life, wrote 'We are Seven', ' The Idiot Boy ', and many more of his familiar short poems. But the collection also contained the ' Lines above Tintern Abbey ', and most of the poems showed that deep insight into the natural, that power of seeing something beyond the natural in the commonest object which is his peculiar gift. In 1800 a second edition was called for. A number of new poems were added, some of Wordsworth's best, ' Ruth ', 1 Tbe Prelude, Book 11. The New Spirit in Literature 61 ' The old Cumberland Beggar ', ' Lucy Gray ' ; and he added a Preface, defending and explaining his poetry, which is one of the most important documents in English criticism. It stands to English poetry in much the same position in which Victor Hugo's Preface to Cromwell, published twenty-seven years later, stands to French. The contrasts as well as the communities of thought between the two manifestoes, equally famous in their own countries, are of the highest interest and significance. We will return to them when speaking of Hugo. The main points of Wordsworth's Preface are : his account of the nature of poetry itself and of the language in which it should be expressed. What is a poet, he asks, to whom does he address himself, and what language is to be expected of him ? ' He is a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul, than are sup- posed to be common among mankind ; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of theUniverse, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.' Wordsworth accepts the dictum of Aristotle that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing, for its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative ; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion. It is the image of man and of nature. And where the historian has a thousand obstacles of detail standing between himself and the person to whom he has to convey his picture, the Poet, granted his superior endowment of feeling and imagination, has no other obstacle except the necessity of giving pleasure to any human being ' possessed of that information which may be expected of him not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man '. 6x The New Spirit in Literature The necessity of producing pleasure is not to be regarded as a degradation of his art, but an acknowledgement of the beauty of the Universe and a homage to the native dignity of man, who knows and feels and lives and moves by the ' grand elementary principle of pleasure '. ' Pleasure ', understood in this wide sense of 'Joy', a sense in which Wordsworth agrees with more than one of the great contemporary schools of philo- sophy, is the universal ingredient and stimulus to action. The man of Science has no knowledge except so far as he has pleasure, and the Poet works by creating in the minds of his hearers or readers that degree of pleasure which is inseparable from sympathy with the complex of ideas and sensations which surrounds us all, and which the Poet idealizes and evokes. The man of Science has also to recreate and evoke the actual, but he ' seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor ; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude ; the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the im- passioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. He looks before and after ; he is the rock of defence for human nature, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, and language and manners, and laws and customs ; in spite of things silently gone out of mind or violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. If the labours of the man of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition or in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep no more than at The New Spirit in Literature 6$ present ; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if ever the time should come when these things shall be familiar to us as suffering and enjoying beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to man, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transformation, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of Man.' It is interesting to see this point recurring later in our century, when in 1906 we find Sully Prudhomme still lamenting the little influence exercised on the inspiration of poets by the prodigious conquests of science. But Words- worth's immediate lesson is that the Poet is the man of greater promptness in thinking and feeling the general passions and thoughts of men, and greater power in expressing t*hem. Science, therefore, has to pass into the common stock before it will be matter for the Poet to deal with. He must, if he is to do his own work well, express these matters of common interest in the language best fitted to put his reader into the closest communion with his own thought, and to give the appropriate pleasure in the highest degree. All rules of metre or of choice of language are dictated by these simple con- siderations. Metre also, he suggests, not only gives pleasure directly, but also enables us to bear a degree of pathos which is almost intolerable in prose. 1 It tempers and restrains our passion. In the longer poems — The Prelude and The Excursion with 1 Goethe makes a similar remark to Schiller about Faust. 6\ The New Spirit in Literature the lately published fragment of The Recluse — Wordsworth was labouring to express that complete synthesis of his ideas and feelings upon which he fell back after his early disillusion- ment with the Revolution. They are often long drawn out and full of passages little distinguishable from prose. But they are invaluable as the outpouring of a profound and faithful mind struggling to set forth in simple terms the beliefs which he had arrived' at in a long life of concentrated thought. These beliefs contain a glimpse of the great truth, first dawning on the men of his day, that the mind of man is a progressive thing, gaining depth and power from age to age ; but he is dominated by the idea, in which also he was a spokesman of his time, that this evolving mind of man is in communion with something behind Nature, which has a kindred existence and is qualified in some deep and half-inscrutable way, to call out a response from the human soul. Byron and many more had also given expression to this feeling ; he tells us in Childe Harold : I live not in myself but I become Portion of that around me ; and to me High mountains are a feeling. But to Wordsworth it was a far deeper, more constant and more governing thought than to Byron«or to any other man. He gave himself in all his later life to the lakes and mountains and the society of a few, simple congenial spirits in order that this frame of mind might be supreme ; and it is his reward, like that of other men — an Augustine, a Descartes, a Comte — who concentrate wholly on one line of thought, to become its immortal prophet and expositor. We may pass on to Sir Walter Scott through the medium of a sentence in Carlyle's essay on him. He says — it is one of many suggestive partial truths in the midst of a generally inadequate and unappreciative treatment — that ' a great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed by an idea '. The New Spirit in Literature c?y By this test we have judged Wordsworth great, and Carlyle would have us judge Scott not great. Obviously it is only a test of one type of greatness, and inappropriate to creative genius of vast and varied scope. Shakespeare would not be great, judged by this standard, nor Homer nor Moliere. Words- worth had this mark of greatness, as we have seen, and, of the greatest poets, Dante. Each had a philosophic moral idea which possessed him and transfuses all his work. Scott was a genius of the other order, receptive, creative, abundant. He was born in the year after Wordsworth, and bears many traces of the same environment. But his mind being of a different temper, he used his material to quite another purpose. He was from his earliest years fed on the wild legends of the Border country in which his own Scott ancestry played a large part. A born storyteller like the Homeric rhapsodes of ancient Greece, he began to think, in adult years, of how best to make use of the rich stores with which his mind was full. It was the raw material of epics such as the Norse Sagas or the books of Joshua and Judges, or the primitive lays which grew into the Iliad. Then some one introduced him to Christabel and to the German ballads of the Rhine, and he began his work in verse. He went on to translate Goethe's Gdtz of the Iron Hand. But his poetry, which was at this time reckoned second only to Byron's, seems to us now too facile, too little analytic, with too little insight into character. In this respect he is clearly not in the main line of nineteenth-century development. But in other points, perhaps, of equal moment for our present purpose, he is fully representative of the age. As heartily as Wordsworth or Hugo, he eschewed the stilted artificial images and language of the eighteenth century, and spoke in simple words which glowed as they ran and carried the eager mind along with them. 2170 F 66 "The New Spirit in Literature Many lines, such as the ' unwept, unhonoured, and unsung', have become a part of ourselves. The prose romances, on which mankind has rightly decided to rest his chief fame, had been begun with Waverley quite early in the century at the time of the first ballads ; but they were laid aside. In 1814 Waverley appeared, and from 1814 to 1832 when he died, the year of Goethe's death, followed the unmatched series. The tragic side of the story — the business speculations, the heroic labours to pay off debt, the premature exhaustion of a strong physique — this does not con- cern us here. We take with admiration and gratitude the greatest gift of British genius to the imaginative reconstruction of the past since Shakespeare, for we know that but for Scott long stretches of our national annals would still have lain but faintly illuminated in the national consciousness. Through him the France and Flanders of Quentin Durward — scene of our greatest struggle in the war — the Highlands of The Fair Maid of Perth, the Lowlands of Old Mortality, the England of Ivanhoe, have taken on as vivid a colour in our minds as the England of Shakespeare. Herein we touch Scott's chief link with the nineteenth century, and it leads us on to the great French master of romance, who carried the historical spirit a stage further, and combined with it a creative power in poetry of all kinds. Hugo was born in 1802, when ' ce Steele avait deux ans'. He is thus more entirely the child of the nineteenth century than either of the great masters of whom we have just spoken. He shows his modernity in a fuller appreciation of the historical process than either Scott or Wordsworth. Scott was historical by virtue of living in the past, but democracy had not dawned for him. Wordsworth had an inkling of the contributions of the past and shows it in various passages of The Prelude and The New Spirit in Literature 67 The Excursion, but his supreme interest was the unfolding of the individual soul in communion with nature and living men. To Victor Hugo the historical pageant was the dominant thought : he sees it moving on to the future as well as issuing from the past, and the future was a vision of democratic freedom and happiness and triumph. Here especially he represents the nineteenth century, and above all France. He was himself the son of one of Napoleon's generals, and spent a large part of his childhood in Spain, imbibing the language, the literature, and the spirit of that home of romance. That element, therefore, held through life a larger place in his mind than the philosophy of Germany or the science of the West. Devoted to his father, he was always loyal to his father's chief, and his later democracy and freedom in religion were grafted on a stem originally Catholic and authoritative, carefully nur- tured by his mother, a royalist of La Vendee. With him, too, there was a ' growth of the poet's soul ' towards freedom, and he gives some account of this in various passages of his work. In the Preface to Cromwell, at the age of twenty-five, he threw down the gauntlet to the conventional spirit which still held the stage in France : it was taken up and the battle fought out on the production of Hemani three years later, in 1830. To compare and sum up the differences between this Preface and Wordsworth's is the essay in criticism which we suggested above. Brilliance and breadth in the Frenchman, thoroughness and profundity in the Englishman, would be on our balance-sheet. Hugo does not attempt to tell us what superiorities distinguish a poet's mind, nor does he touch the question of how poetry will ultimately appropriate and express the achievements of science. Here Wordsworth cuts deeper than Hugo, though his tool produces less finished, less varied, less attractive images. Hugo sets out to explain how different ages in history F 2 68 The New Spirit in Literature have been expressed by different types of poetry, and how the drama, if allowed to develop, would be the perfect and complete type of poetry. He is primarily a dramatist, as Wordsworth is a philosophic poet, and to him the drama is ' la poetic complete '. He decries any system of thought, but, like a true French- man, at once throws his sketch of poetic history into systematic form. When the primitive man awakes in the primitive world, poetry awakes with him. His first word is a hymn. His thought being fugitive and passionate, the earliest type of poetry is lyrical. Then as society settles round the priest and the king, another and more connected type of poetry appears. It is the epic which commemorates the migrations and conflicts of peoples. It sings of the lapse of ages, of nations, and of empires. Homer is born, who sums up and dominates all ancient society. Even the historians,, with Herodotus at their head, were epic poets. The ancient drama is but another form of this all-per- vading epic. Not only are all their stories drawn from Homeiic sources, but the same religious, heroic, gigantic spirit runs through them all. What the rhapsodes sang, the actors now declaim : that is all the difference. Then with Christianity a real change comes. Poetry becomes more spiritual, more true to nature, more full of melancholy and of the grotesque. Shakespeare at last appears, the summit of modern poetic art, combining by one supreme genius grotesque and sublime, comic and tragic. Shakespeare is drama itself, because he is the whole of life, seen at the angle of the stage. Here is another law of the three stages, to be set beside the kindred thoughts of Comte and Hegel, and recalling Vico's earlier suggestion of a triple sequence — divine, heroic, human. Hegel's order, as given in his Aesthetic, is nearest to Hugo's, and must, one would think, have contributed something to the latter's. Hegel finds in art a progress from the ' Symbolic ', The New Spirit in Literature do typified by such, monuments as the Pyramids, through the ' Classical ' of the Parthenon and the Greek drama — beautiful, complete, and limited — to the ' Romantic ' of modern times, when the infinite breaks up the perfect, finite sufficiency of the Greek spirit. To Hugo the Bible is the model of the first stage, thelliadof thesecond, and Shakespeare of thethird. ' Lasociete, en effet, commence par chanter ce qu'elle r'eve, puis raconte ce quelle fait, et enfin se met a peindre ce quelle pense ' ; and he illustrates this with a wealth of brilliant epigrams and figures. The early ode is like the lake among the mountains, the epic is the river that rises from it and rushes down, watering the land and dividing the nations, the drama is the ocean in which all waters are finally collected and the world of the skies is reflected for ever. But he is far from attempting to carry out this division in any rigid wa}\ Every stage has some elements of all, and every form of literature some germs or examples of the others. The supreme merit of the drama is that, to be complete, it must actually contain both the others. It must have its story to be unfolded, and this is an epic in petto ; and in the highest form of drama, as in Shakespeare, it contains abundant lyrical and emotional poetry. Just as Wordsworth had his own public to convince, and uses his philosophy of poetry as an introduction to arguments about the legitimacy of his methods, so to Hugo these wide generalizations and brilliant apercus are but the substructure for the new drama which he was about to launch in France. He is really proving two things of which the latter is a corollary of the former. The drama is a picture of life, and has grown up and changed its character with the society from which it springs. And if it is to be a picture of life, its language and its technique must be free from the restrictions which the 70 The Nerv Spirit in Literature eighteenth century had been imposing upon it in the name of Aristotle and decency and order. Thus the national poet of France and the future national poet of England are struggling to the same goal from different starting-points and by different methods. Of these differences the most striking is the greater promi- nence given to the drama in France. Hugo uses his first play as the stalking-horse of his new and wider theory of poetic art, new to his generation, but true because it rests upon the natural and permanent relations between man's social and intellectual attainments and his means of expressing them in beautiful language, appealing to the emotions. To the French- man, as to the German, the drama first occurs as the obvious way of doing this. Lessing had raised the banner of the free drama sixty years before, and Goethe, who had won the same fight over Gotz in 177 1, completed it by Faust. Both Germans and French looked back to Shakespeare as- their unsurpassable model. But England, which had given birth to Shakespeare, had since his day lost its national taste for drama. None of our great poets of the revolutionary age makes his appeal through the stage. In England the battle of Hernani was fought out over Lyrical Ballads. The ' This will never do ' of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review of 1 815 was the protest of con- ventional England corresponding to the scene in the Theatre jrancais on October 24, 1829, when the groans of the bourgeois in the boxes were borne down by those wild youths with long hair and flaming waistcoats who had sworn allegiance to Hugo as the new master and the rising hope of revolutionary poetic France. By 1830 the battle was won for the new drama as it was for the Constitution, so that a poet and an official historian 1 of French poetry can declare that as 1789 created ' noire patrie 1 Catulle Mendes. The New Spirit in Literature 71 politique, 1830 a cree notre patrie litteraire'. Two years later Goethe died, the acknowledged king of German literature, while in England Wordsworth was at last acknowledged. In poetry the three great Western nations were keeping pace. But true to our insularity, our greater exclusiveness in the early century, we never went to France for our poetic models as the French went to jus. In politics there had been Corre- sponding Societies but not in literature'. Young France wor- shipped Shakespeare, admired Byron, imitated Scott, but it was a rather prevalent belief in England, not yet extinct, that there is no real poetry in French. The forms of poetry are, in fact, a strong national boundary. Poetry does not, in spite of Wordsworth's glowing language, unite all nations as abstract science does. Not only is the national language different while an equation is the same for all, but the language of poetry being by its very nature more carefully chosen than that of prose, and fitted into forms that are not universal like the forms of science, may be an additional barrier to community of thought. And in these matters of form and the choice of language in poetry the French have the stricter standard. Hence, while the nineteenth-century Englishman has read his French novel on the sofa, not always to his profit, the splendours of French poetry — the heroic figures and thrilling verse of Hugo, the quiet melancholy of Lamartine, the inspiration and historic sense of de Vigny — have been only the treasure of a few. We have named three of the early masters : they stand at the head of a glorious succession. The growing union of French and English minds at which we are now assisting, will never go very deep, until the noble stream of French poetry which has flowed in swelling volume throughout the century, finds a public here, comparable at least to that of the French play or novel. It has 72 The New Spirit in Literature a disciplinary value like that of the best Latin verse. Its music arid its pleasure-giving power may be felt by all who have once taken the trouble to turn the key. And as the years of our age of hope roll on, it comes more and more into contact with those deep problems of life and thought which Wordsworth has taught us are the proper subject of poetry. Indeed when we think of Cazalis and Sully Prudhomme — to name no others — it may appear that France has done more even than England in our century to promote that union of poetry with science and philosophy which the English poet indicated at its commence- ment as the task of the future. But Victor Hugo is not only the dramatist and the leader of young France in song, he is also one of the greatest writers of prose romance. In no one else is the kinship so strongly marked between poetry in the strict sense and the novel, which is the prevalent type of imaginative literature in the nineteenth century. What are the causes of this growing predominance of the novel, which coincides with Scott's own change of method from the poetic narratives of his early years to his main life-work in the novel ? Since then the novel has largely displaced the essay, the sermon, the epic, the narrative in verse. It has become the leading form for literature in the modern world. As in so many other changes we must go back to the eighteenth century for its first clear manifestation. There, in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, we have the exemplar of the modern novel, the book in prose which interweaves reflections on modern prob- lems with the development of a leading character amid typical scenes and events. Perhaps it is mainly the complexity of modern life and the growing analysis of science which have engendered the novel as we have it. But there are powerful subsidiary causes which have assisted the process. The novel is The New Spirit 'in Literature j$ much, easier to write and to read than'fthe poem. Carlyle, not without fury, saw men reading Scott's novels ' all their lives upon the sofa ' ; and^as to writing, compare Les Miserable;, poured out volume after volume, or the torrent of Scott's and Balzac's novels with the Legende des Siecles — epic on the grandest scale, but slowly chiselled in a few short and finished poems. The novel, too, gives the author a double chance, much more difficult to secure either in the drama or in verse. He can ex- press his views freely and at length, and he can describe the social background with adequate fulness and detail. Of the two French writers who lead the century, Victor Hugo's novels belong to the earlier and more romantic stage, Balzac's to the later and more analytic. Victor Hugo has four great novels which will survive — Les Miserables, Nqtre-Dame de Paris, Quatre-Vingt-Treize, and Les Travailleurs de la Mer. But one wonders already whether he has that band of faithful followers who read him through once a year, as people in England read their Scott or Jane Austen. He gives you magni- ficent rhapsodies and long, interesting, but unnecessary digres- sions, such as the account of Waterloo in Les Miserables, or the growth of his own mind in the person of Marius, from the simple and passionate loyalism of his youth to the larger vision of freedom which he achieved in later life and foresaw in the future. Yet Les Miserables, the longest and most diffuse of his books, has been the most read, and a modern gospel to many a man in his youth. Balzac, the better observer, the greater artist in prose, never brought a gospel to any one. He is the bridge between the romantic and the realistic school, and it is not the business of the realistic novel to inspire. He was born in 1799 and died in 1850 — the year of the death of Wordsworth, and Peel and Louis Philippe. Much was passing away just then, 74 The New Spirit in Literature of thought as well as of life, at the turning-point of the century. Balzac was outlived for thirty- five years by Victor Hugo, who pronounced his funeral oration. His special quality, as Hugo then said, was to combine a high degree both of imagination and of observation. It is thus that he serves as a link between different schools of novel-writers. A strong admirer of Scott, he began with historical romance in direct imitation of him, and unintentionally he followed Scott also in his revolt against the legal career which had been chosen for him by his father, and in his lifelong struggle under a burden of debt. The histori- cal sense remained with him throughout, and prompted him again and again to such revelations of the inward eye as — ' I'his- toire de France est la tout entiere \ of a street in Saumur. But whereas Scott's absorbing interest was in the past, Balzac lived in the present, the life of France, and especially of Paris, in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This life he saw with an intensity of vision, a realism, which makes him a pioneer in the psychological school which bulks so largely in later years. With Balzac, as with so many writers who practise this acute analysis of characters and action, the resulting picture is sombre and often poignant. He sees his world black, and can only console us with an occasional ' Vhomme ne fait fas tnal toujours '. Sometimes we refuse to believe the perversity of wickedness which he describes, as in that story of V Auberge rouge, where two apparently innocent, light-hearted young men, just off for a walking-tour, are tempted to murder a genial old German merchant who had lain down to sleep beside them in the inn with a great box of gold under his pillow. One of them cuts off the merchant's head and escapes, to reappear in a later story. The other, who nearly succumbs to the same temptation, is deserted by his companion and left to die on suspicion. This prevailing The New Spirit in Literature j$ darkness Balzac attempted deliberately to lighten from time to time with a tour deforce of virtue, as in the Medecin de campagne, or of religious mysticism as in Seraphita. But more affecting and convincing are the glimpses we have in nearly all the novels of deep human feeling in the midst of a world of horrors. There is the unshakable, extravagant affection of Pere Goriot, prose- brother of Lear, stripping himself of all his property for his two daughters, who leave him to die in misery while they pursue an almost equally unhappy life of selfish luxury. There is the quaint genius and kindly weakness of Cousin Pons, who, to get good dinners, bears the snubs of his wealthy connexions and is stript of all his treasures on his death-bed by a crowd of harpies, feebly kept at bay by an old German friend, exquisitely drawn, and a dissolute ballet-dancer. There is the quiet love and suffering of Eugenie Grandet, who bears every hardship from her miserly father, and thanks and kisses him when for selfish motives he releases her at last after months of solitary confine- .-^ ment for having lent a few gold pieces to her needy cousirh v> . These things have the Shakespearean ring, and they are told with a wealth of wit and aphorism as biting and brilliant as Voltaire's. But at the end of it we ask ourselves whether the picture is on the whole a true one, whether any great society can really be compounded of such a mass of selfishness and jealousy, the worship of money and the obsession of sex : and beyond this, again, whether the greater artist is not the man who sees the better things in human nature more clearly than the worse, and whether, as he must select by the very nature of his art, there is not a place, the highest place of all, for the artist who, while preserving the general truth of his picture, yet idealizes in such a way as to inspire by the beauty of goodness and the hope that goodness may at least survive. This short chapter gives, of course, no scope for the discussion 76 The New Spirit in Literature of the aesthetic principles of the novel. But a few comparisons of its leading exponents will give some material for an opinion on a question as important as it is difficult. The life-story of Tolstoi, the greatest novelist in the latter part of the century as Scott and Balzac in the earlier, is a personal illustration of the issues involved. The Russian, like his great French and English fellows, had imaginative power of a high order. In observation he is more akin to Balzac than to Scott. In geniality and breadth of sympathy and hopefulness he is nearer Scott, but nearer than either to the ideal novelist we have suggested. In mid-career he was arrested by the problem of the right use of his art, and set himself to work on lines of deliberate edifica- tion. It is no condemnation to call it this ; but it leaves us only to surmise what the full harvest might have been. Yet Tolstoi and his somewhat earlier contemporary Turgueniev approach perhaps more closely than any other novelists of the century to our ideal. They have both the wide sympathy and imaginative power which make their characters live : they both tended, without falsifying their picture, to that idealization of goodness which is essential if the new art is to take rank beside the great art of the past and help to build up the humanity of the future. In the future, as in the past, there will be tempers like Virgil's and tempers like Juvenal's, and each will see the world with somewhat different eyes. But the subject of their pictures is the same vast whole, — human life developing through the ages into the infinitely varied and complex forms which we have around us in the modern world. It is with this complex and changing scene that the modern novel mainly deals, and it is so full, of new and interesting sights that the novelist is mostly devoted to acquainting his readers, confined, to one corner of the bustling fair, with the doings — real or imaginary — of their The New Spirit in Literature 77 contemporaries who are hidden from them in the crowd. But we believe that one day the tumult will subside, and the new life become a more settled and better ordered thing. As Wordsworth anticipated the absorption of science in poetry, so we may look forward to a society which has at last assimilated the triumphs of mechanical power, enlightened as to the laws of its own nature, reverent to the past, open-eyed to the ideal. Then we may see in romance as well as drama an imaginative art beside which the current novel would be as a film picture to Velasquez or Michelangelo. Russia, France, and England — Goethe apart — have been throughout the century the leaders in novel-writing. We have seen how some of the Russian writers, developing rather later than those of the West, have approached nearest to the ideal by a combination of knowledge and sympathy with creative power and inspiration. France has throughout the period maintained a steady flow, with work always penetrating, lucid, and polished, and with occasional figures of giant power such as Hugo and Balzac. What of England ? In volume the English novel, including that of the United States, must be far larger than that of any other country. It is the chief reading of a large part, perhaps the majority, of people who read anything at all beyond the newspaper. It would be marvellous therefore' if this mass of work were all, or even mostly, of the highest quality. To a sane judgement it will appear a great achievement that there are so many people who can write so well. But let us compare the better part of our English novels with the better part of the French, and draw our examples mainly from the earlier half of the nine- teenth century. The comparison fits in well with our review of the joint work of France and England in developing the ideas of the revolutionary age. 78 The New Spirit in Literature Jane Austen and the Brontes, Dickens and Thackeray, and, in the next period, George Eliot and George Meredith— we should all agree that these are the greatest names which follow Scott. They are the writers whom it is usual to call Victorian or Early Victorian, sometimes with the suggestion that their style is out of date, and their books, like venerable maiden aunts, upon the shelf. Well, there are three main points about them which will strike any impartial critic in a general survey. The first is their strongly individual character, the mark of English genius in art. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, Dickens and Thackeray, couples always to be named together, are yet so different that their rival merits have exercised the argumentative wits of their admirers ever since they wrote. Jane Austen, the earliest in date, beginning to write before the end of the eighteenth century, and describing the placid orderly society of English country life before the steam-engine, the bicycle, or the motor-car had disturbed its quiet pleasures and its routine, yet describes it with a humour, a realism, and an acute analysis of character which make her in some ways the most modern of them all. Charlotte Bronte, with the new industrial life bursting into her wild Yorkshire valleys, is yet more absorbed by personal passion than all her contemporaries, and idealizes the love of man and woman more vividly than any other novel-writer of the age. Dickens, the philanthropist and humanitarian reformer, is the most typical of the times, for he began writing as the first Reform Bill was going through, described the new middle-class in England, thexlass of little culture and much (if ignorant) benevolence, and created for that class types of eccentric vigour, generous humanity, and per- verted strength which have become part of our English being. Thackeray, the most delightful, the man of widest education and most European outlook in that early group, has, next to The New Spirit in Literature 79 Scott, made more of our history live again than any other writer of romance, and has given us the permanent picture of the Victorian upper middle-class with the satirist's touch and the humanist's pathos. So varied are they and yet all so typically English. That is our second main point ; we can group them all together, in spite of their differences, by eertain characteristics in which they are unmistakably divided from other national groups, and perhaps most clearly from the French. French art and knowledge are more complete and perpetrating. They often tell us more of the realities of life and thought than our English writers. They send flash-lights into dark, sometimes horrid depths, while English writers spread a dimmer light more equally around. Compare the genial amateurishness of Thackeray discoursing on painting in the Newcomes with the master-touch of Balzac in Le Chef (PGLuvre Inconnu. The French seem so often to be grown-ups by the side of children. Their form is nearly always better, which is the reason of their triumph in the short story, from Balzac downwards, and our comparative failure. Our countrymen ramble on, believers in Scott's doc- trine of the plot, that it is only justified by the good things that you can hang upon it. Good things and a good heart : these are the strong points in the English novel, if it is not too proud a boast to claim them. There is no doubt less naked truth in the English writers, but there is more kindliness and humour. Think of the hosts of men and women whom we wish to remember because they were themselves well-wishers to their kith and kind, the Caleb Balderstones, the Monkbarns and the Nicol Jarvies of Scott, the Mr. Woodhouse and the Miss Bates of Jane Austen, the Colonel Newcome of Thackeray, the Cheerybles and Aunt Trotwood of Dickens, all people with patent oddities and foibles, but all lovable because of their essential goodness and kindliness of heart. These are the 80 The New Spirit in Literature glory of English fiction. We have, too, in the English novel another standard of love, and picture-galleries of women and children that are almost wholly wanting in French fiction. There is of course deliberate reticence in the Victorian novel, and the avoidance of certain topics. On this matter there was a revolution in English taste which coincides broadly with the end of the eighteenth century and the revival of religion. But the difference in the view of woman and the standard of love between the typical English novel and the typical French in the nineteenth century goes much farther and deeper than this. Love is the main theme in both, but go back as far as you will in the century, take the women of Jane Austen, living in the narrowest circle and with the smallest mental equipment, they are free women, choosingtheir husbands and wsighingtheir fate, compared with the women of Balzac. In the typical French novel there is no assumption that marriage is the consecration of love, a partnership in all joys and sorrows entered into with full consent by both parties. Marriage is rather a matter of business, and ideal love rather more likely to be outside it than within. That they are acting on another theory is the strength and the supreme grace of the English heroine, of Di Vernon and Dorothea Brooke, of Elizabeth Bennet and Shirley Keeldar. Herein they triumph and herein their social order led the world in the early nineteenth century. It is surely no idle fancy to connect this with the prominence that children and young people hold in English as compared with French novels. They are the pledge of love and the hope of the future, and in this forward glance, this self-restraint in the present for the sake of the greater good to come, we find the third main feature of the school — that aspect of English fiction in which it has most strongly served the ideal tendency of the age. "The New Spirit in Literature 8 i The little lonely woman who poured out her soul in the parsonage at Haworth had a dim but true inkling of this when she addressed herself to Thackeray in the preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. ' I think ', she says, ' I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized. I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day — as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things. No com- mentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him. They say he is like Fielding : they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture.' Unjust to Fielding, she is true to the main current of English fiction. She spoke of what she knew in her own passion and her own ideal, and she points the way to those who were to continue the work with fuller knowledge in a later day. Middlemarch and Beauchamp's Career are higher flights by wings akin to hers — the wings of hope and of love for our fellow-men. Thus we have seen in the new literature of the early century all those thoughts moving which we had traced as the legacy of the Revolution ; the love of nature, strong in \& Scott and Byron', in Hugo and Lamartine, a religion in ^ Wordsworth ; the sympathy with common human nature ^ which speaks to us in Burns and Beranger; the passion for freedom of which Shelley's is the purestffyoice. To these we '"xf must add that ideal of perfect beauty which Keats gave us £J in the short life which ended in 1821. This stream of poetry, flowing broadly through the century, unites with the greater volume of prose romance to make one of the world's greatest ages of imaginative literature. And by its side we have to place the equal effort of the Western mind to recreate its -v past, the work of the historians. From Gibbon to our & own day this has been growing, and later science, the Jj 2170 G 82 The New Spirit in Literature discoveries of biology and archaeology, have given it fresh substance and fresh direction. But in all these writers one note may be detected, deeper than the rest and linking all the rest together. It sounds in the history of Carlyle, as in the poetry of Shelley, in the novelists as clearly as in the philosophers. A new order is being born, in which mankind is all to share in a life of greater freedom and beauty, worthier activity, and mere unselfish happiness than the world had known before. IV THE BIRTH OF SOCIALISM ' Social regeneration ' was the final note of that new spirit in literature which we have just described. Charlotte Bronte discerned it beneath the glamour of Vanity Fair. Dickens made his art an engine to force social reforms. Balzac por- trayed a Comedie Kumaine as terrible as the lower circles of the Divina Commedia, and laid the blame for its horrors on the greed of money and the selfishness of competition. The poets were all awake to usher in a new and brighter day. We have now to look at the same problem from another point of view. Side by side with the new literature and the new industry, another impulse of thought and effort was issuing from the same spirit of progress, aiming directly at the redress of social inequality, at curing the diseases of poverty, at substituting co-operation for competition as the master motive in human life. Our task in sketching the early stages of this movement is to isolate the relevant facts sufficiently to appreciate them, without separating them entirely from their context. We have primarily to consider Socialism in the narrower sense in which the word was first applied to Robert Owen and his nearest of kin, without forgetting the looser sense in which, as Sir William Harcourt said ' we are all Socialists ', and in which we have become much more Socialist since his time. In this wider sense we may trace back Socialism to Christian- ity, to the teacher who told us that ' we are all members one of another ', or to Plato and the Republic, or even to the earliest thinkers who realized that every human society exists by G 2 84 "The Birth of Socialism co-operation and prospers by the welfare of all its members. But to do this would be to lose sight of the finished and indi- vidual organism in the study of its undifferentiated germ. In the egg all creatures are alike, and in general benevolence and in taking joint action to meet an emergency all men are Socialists. To gain an intelligible definitionof modern Socialism we must connect it with the development of the capitalist system which first became prominent in the eighteenth century. The Industrial Revolution gave Socialism birth, and its first home was England. Socialism implies in this stricter sense the possession, or at least the complete control, of capital and all the means of production by the community, in the interests of the whole body of workers. We cannot go back to the ancient world for comparison because of slavery, and in the Middle Ages, though class distinctions were clear enough, they were not based primarily on wealth or on the possession of the means of production, but on status. The small man as well as the big had his rights to the land, the small man as well as the big had his own tools and made his own clothes, furniture, or weapons for use or sale. It was the merging of all these little things in great concerns which made the industrial revolution and industrial classes — great wealth, and by its side masses of level poverty. This was the world in which Socialism was born. To put the social position of England at the end of the eighteenth century as briefly as possible, we should say that man's powers of production and of controlling nature had out- run his moral powers and his social organization. ' The steam- engine had been invented too soon ', as one writer phrased it ; or, as we may say in a less debatable form, the steam-engine worked more quickly to transform industry than man's mind worked to absorb its product and reorganize society. For the moment the machine controlled the man. Hence two sharply The Birth of Socialism 8 y contrasted views of the social conditions of the time were thrown up which it is our business, if possible, to reconcile. On the one hand we have the easy optimism of a man like Macaulay, who saw nothing but progress in the growth of wealth and population, the power of machinery over nature, the improvements in commerce and communication, the triumph of England in the continental war. On the other hand, less articulate but more widely and deeply felt, was the depression of the labourer, the helpless poverty and deadened life of the new manufacturing and mining towns, the unthink- able cruelty to the children. Both aspects are true; but it was from the latter, the cry of suffering, the. demand for justice, that Socialism arose. There is another contrast which will command our attention, after the procession of principles which have passed before us in preceding chapters. Freedom was one of the chief of these. It figured in poetry, in politics, in social life. It was the breath of life to most of those whom we have sought to honour. But in this region of industrial competition, freedom seems at first sight ill at ease and drooping to death, an eagle which soars majestically on the mountain, but is singularly out of place in the coal-mine and the factory. For freedom had been invoked in the early days of the factory system by its promoters, and sometimes for good ends, but on the whole for evil. It was good in the name of Freedom to abolish mediaeval restrictions on apprenticeship and rates of wages, and to ensure that paupers were relieved only in their proper parishes. It was good to grant the labourer ' freedom ' to choose any place of work which he thought fit. But in practice the latter ' freedom ' was only nominal. And it was altogether bad in the name of Freedom to allow the employers to impose any conditions of hours, wages, fines, housing, sani- tation, protection from injury, which the labourer would %6 The Birth of Socialism accept. And in practice the evils of the new liberty far out- weighed the relief from the removal of the old restrictions. For in practice only the minimum could be secured which would sustain the worker's life, and it was often even less than this. During many years, for instance, the death of miners by accident in Durham and Northumberland was so common, and so easy to hush up, that inquests were not held upon them. Freedom, to be a real good in this sphere, implied the mutual dealings of equals, and equality was impossible between one man who possessed all the instruments by the use of which a livelihood could be gained and another who had to use them in order to live. Still less was it possible in the case of children, who were sent as chattels to the mill by the Guardians of the Poor, and taken habitually by their parents as soon as they could be of any use at the machines. In 1833, the great year of political reforms, a fifth of the 200,000 persons working in cotton factories were under fourteen years of age, considerably more than a third were under eighteen. Before, therefore, freedom in the higher sensecould be enjoyed, the attitude of complete laisser-jaire had to be abandoned by the State, and fresh restrictions introduced on ' free ' contract between employers and workpeople in order to secure for the latter the minimum conditions of decent life. From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, small measures began to be passed for the protection in the first place of children and then of women. But each step was sharply contested. There was the socially conservative group, in which both Whigs and Tories might be included, who would interfere as little as possible and trust to the working of normal causes — competition, the ordinary means of relief, the progress of enlightenment. But in most of such conservatives there was too little knowledge of the facts, too little sympathy with the mass The Birth of Socialism 87 of unrealized suffering, or interest in its causes or its cure, to make their opinion weighty. There was a great gulf between this class of opinion and the next, the school of Godwin and Place and Bentham and James Mill, the radical reformers who aimed first at justice. This school did not desire the intervention of the State, least of all in owning or controlling the means of production. But they were profoundly convinced of the iniquity of the existing social order. They revolted against the complacency which saw in the British Constitution the last word of political wisdom, and in the parson and squire the twin pillars of an ideal com- munity. They aimed at more equality, and hoped to gain it by curbing the unequal working of existing institutions and by raising the whole body of the people through self- government and education. The fight over the Combination laws, mentioned in Chapter I, was typical of their policy. The masters had always been practically free from any check in combining against their workpeople, and formed all kinds of tacit agreements to keep wages down and refuse better conditions. But the workmen were indicted and severely punished for any attempt at united action to improve their own state. This was the typical injustice which the radical reformers attacked, and by their partial success in ^824, com- pleted in the emancipation of the Trade Unions in 1868, they contributed their share, and a large one, to the later rise of the working classes in welfare and power. But by the side of this class of reformers, and in some cases emerging from it, came the third group, at first small, a few scattered individuals in England, France, and Germany, who looked for a much wider and swifter redress of social grievances, and had no theoretical objections to invoking the State. These were the pioneers of nineteenth-century Socialism, and, as with our other origins, we go back to the eighteenth century for its beginnings. 8 8 The Birth of Socialism Robert Owen for England, St. Simon for France, Karl Marx for Germany, these are the obvious founders in the three leading nations of the West, and Robert Owen and St. Simon were born close to that year of genius which produced Beethoven and Wordsworth. Owen was of 1771, contemporary with Scott, St. Simon was ten years older. Marx was wholly of the nineteenth century. Owen was one of our brilliant and persuasive Celts. He combined high practical ability and the power of moving men with a rich fund of useful notions and a burning zeal for the good of his fellows. He was born at Newtown in North Wales, the son of a man who was the saddler, ironmonger, and post- master of the little town. Beginning, after a few years at the village school, as a shop assistant, he became in his twentieth year the manager of a cotton-mill in Manchester with five hundred workpeople under him. This was just after the steam-engine had been introduced into the mills. Owen was one of the new men who seized the opportunity for making money rapidly, but, unlike most of them, he never swerved from his purpose of using his power and money for the benefit of those who worked under him. Before the new century began he had married the daughter, and acquired the business, of Dale of New Lanark. Here all his social and educational experiments were tried, and his reputation founded. His aim in dealing with his workmen was primarily an educational one. He believed that a virtuous and unselfish temper could be created by removing temptations and sur- rounding people, especially the young, with pleasant sights and healthy occupations. And of all the virtues, harmony and the love of others took the highestplace. His rules for New Lanark deserve to be commemorated, for the last hundred years have been spent in securing for everybody what Owen secured for his workpeople at once. No children were admitted The Birth of Socialism 8 9 to the mill until they were at least ten years old, and he was prepared later on to advance this age. Schools were founded on Pestalozzian principles. Gymnastics for the boys, house- hold work for the girls formed part of the curriculum, and no prizes or punishments were (officially) allowed. The work- rooms were made as clean, healthy, and attractive as possible, and a co-operative shop was open on the premises where good things could be bought cheaply. Pension societies were started for sickness and old age, and when in 1806 a business crisis threw a number of hands (for a time) out of work, Owen paid them their wages as usual. In fact, you have in miniature most of the social programme which the State has been carrying out in the last three or four decades at the public expense and with armies of officials. If this had been done generally by manufacturers, either as individuals or in groups, we should have had Patriarchalism instead of Socialism ; nor would Robert Owen in his early years have objected to this. He would probably have preferred the manufacturers to take the initiative, expecting that as the workpeople became educated, they would by degrees have taken the management of their various interests into their own hands. The might-have-been is an attractive vision, and Owen's ideal may some day yet be reached by one of history's circuitous mountain paths. But Owen was no impracticable theorist : he always hunted his quarry to the death. As his fellow-masters did not follow him, and as the bulk of the employers were immersed in money-making and the employed in misery, he turned to the State. In 181 5 he tried to gain support in his agitation for factory-reform by tacking it on to a movement for repealing the import-duty on raw cotton. This repeal was supported by all the manufacturers. As soon as peace came, it was possible for the Government to begin remitting taxes, and the cotton trade was first in the field. To Owen the repeal of the duty was 90 The Birth of Socialism only a preliminary to the better treatment of all those, especially the children, employed in the trade. The manufacturers snatched at the jam but left the pill. Owen failed with them at a meeting he summoned in Glasgow, and his failure made him turn to the press with a burning denunciation of the factory system. We had founded our wealth and our power on a system which for the first time had treated children not as human beings but as machines, and subjected all employed persons to dangers and evils unknown in earlier times. Were we to demand free- trade in cotton, which would give a further extension to the system, and pass a sentence of death on thousands of our fellows ? Better that the whole industry, and the power of England with it, should go to the ground, for the system was worse than American or African slavery. But we could remedy the abuses to some extent by regulations such as those which had been in force at New Lanark — no labour for those under twelve, a working- day of ten hours and a half, including intervals for meals, compulsory schooling up to twelve, hygienic rules enforced by inspection. The older Peel was more open to reason than the body of the manufacturers, and in 1819 the first general Factory Act was passed, based on Owen's proposals though falling far short of them, nine instead of twelve for the age of work, twelve hours instead of ten and a half for the working-day, and no inspection. After 1815 Owen began to turn to a wider public than his fellow-manufacturers in the North, and extended his pro- gramme. He attended congresses in London, and he went abroad to interview leading men in France, Switzerland, and Germany. His report to the Parliamentary Committee of 1817 on the Poor Law gave the gist of his ideas, to which he remained faithful throughout. Poverty and the want of employ- ment were the result of the industrial system and were capable of cure, but the cure must be applied by those responsible- The Birth of Socialism $> 1 for the system, the manufacturers, or, failing them, the whole community which profited by the gains of the trade. The old methods of poor relief were insufficient and unsuitable to the purpose. Provision for unemployment thus becomes a public responsibility, and the way was opened to the National Work- shops of the Second French Republic. To Owen the remedy for social evils was to be found in a reorganization of society in communities similar to that of New Lanark, and instituted either by individuals or local bodies or the whole State. The patriarchalism of his original attitude gave way as he became more and more conscious of the selfish and unyielding temper of the manufacturers, and as the working-class leaders rallied round him. This change took place about the year 1820. At that time his principles, which had begun as the ex- pression of his own ideals and the result of his own experience, were taken up by one wing of the advanced labour movement, and the internal fight developed which it was the special object of Francis Place to avoid. The Chartist movement contained both elements, those who put political reform first, and those who, inspired by Owen, were working for a socialistic or communist State. Place succeeded in keeping the political programme in the forefront, and Owen, disap- pointed of immediate regeneration in England, turned to North America. He bought the Rappite Colony of New Harmony in Indiana and emigrated in 1825. It had been founded a few years before as a religious communist society by a German called Rapp, and was extended under Owen's influence to about a thousand members ; but after two or three years it broke up, and Owen returned to England an impoverished man, to spend the rest of his life, till 1858, as the head of a propagandist organization, spreading the principles of Socialism and Secularism by means of lectures, pamphlets, and books. The successful business man of early life failed o 2 The Birth of Socialism when he attempted a wholesale reorganization of society without regard to its religious and social traditions. His failure was the prototype, in the more stable conditions of England, of the failure of the Second Republic in France. Both efforts were symptoms of that ardent spirit of hope and confidence which arose at the end of the eighteenth century and reckoned on sweeping the world clean by one determined drive. Right, as we now see them to have been, in their main contention, and high as was their purpose, they failed at the time from want of judgement and from exaggerat- ing one aspect of social progress. They misjudged the future, as the greatest reformers of all ages have been apt to do — the Platonic Socrates, dreaming of his ' Fair City ' ; the early Christians looking for the Second Coming ; Dante calling for the regeneration of Italy; Comte announcing the establishment of a Western Republic. If men, they thought, can only realize what is clear as day to us, they will at once enter on the better way. A hundred years of wars, obstruction, conflict, and delay have proved how slow and difficult is the approach to the most glorious goal. The aspect of progress on which they, and especially Owen, laid undue stress was the influence of the environment on the individual will. 'Man', said Owen, and Socialists have as a rule approved his saying, ' is but the creature of his antecedents and his surroundings. Let us, or let the State, put the surroundings right, and the desired end will follow.' If we could grant this of the present environ- ment — and we clearly cannot — the whole weight and driving force of antecedents, that is of history, would still remain unaltered. The life of Saint Simon, the founder of French Socialism as Owen was of English, is an interesting parallel to that of his fellow-worker. The Welshman was primarily a business man, drawn to reform by the sight of the actual evils around The Birth of Socialism. 9 3 him and the proved effectiveness of his own measures to redress them in his own immediate sphere. The Frenchman arrived at very similar conclusions from an opposite starting-point. He was a younger member of an old and famous family, and at the same age at which Owen was acting as shop assistant, he was fighting for the Americans in their War of Independence. But he was full of reforming schemes from his earliest youth, and studied in books rather than in life for the right principles of social action. He tended, as life went on, to a religious rather than a practical point of view, but the sect he founded contained many men of weight. Buchez, President of the Assembly in the Second Republic, was one of his followers. He died in 1825, before Socialism became a revolutionary force. His doctrine was that we needed to reverse, or at least to supplement, the course of the French Revolution by a con- structive policy in which the supremacy of labour should take the place of the supremacy of military chiefs in the old feudal system. The Revolution had destroyed the feudal system, but so far had put nothing in its place. The industrial chiefs of the new order were obviously the successors of the war-lords in the old, and in the place of the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, we had now the leadership of men of science. The parallels are exquisitely neat and suggestive : they are in fact very largely true. But there are fallacies in such historical analogies which the nineteenth century has not failed to demonstrate. • In the first place, the military system is by no means extinct, though it becomes more subordinate as modern countries become industrial and free. We have seen its desperate efforts a hundred years later in a country which in some respects is the most highly organized on the industrial side as well. And in the second place, the patriarchalism in which St. Simon agreed with the earlier attitude of Owen has not become the 94 The Birth of Socialism dominant type of social reorganization. The State in all countries has been compelled to take the lead, while enlisting as far as possible the co-operation of the industrial chiefs. The comparative fortunes of the two movements, in France and in England, offer an even more instructive study than the lives of their chiefs. Both come to a climax in 1848, the next great revolutionary year in Europe. Chartism in England and the republican-socialist movement in France were analogous products. Both were inspired by industrial discontent ; both aimed at strong measures for immediate redress ; both, after the mid-century, were gradually absorbed by the policy of progressive social reform which we shall have to sketch later. But the differences in the early years, before our present notions of constitutional government and orderly reform had gained full sway, are highly instructive and characteristic of the two countries. In England as in France the Refortn movement of 1830-32 put for a time the more far-reaching agitation into the back- ground ; but in both countries it was soon discovered that the advantages which Reform had promised to all, and to which all had given their support, were in practice to be enjoyed almost exclusively by the middle class. This was admittedly the case with the franchise, which in each case had been granted only to the fairly well-to-do. But this could never last. That industrial chiefs should hold sway, as St. Simon and Auguste Comte had proposed, might be arguable, if they had given evidence of their general probity, competence, and high pur- pose. The many might conceivably consent to be governed by the few who held important posts through merit, and justified their position by its general success. They could not possibly acquiesce for long in the rule of those whose only claim was that they were able to pay a little more rent for their houses. Why, that was what everybody wanted for himself, and a vote The Birth of Socialism yf into the bargain ! Hence the political grievance was a leading element in the new agitation after 1832 on both sides of the Channel. But poverty and social misery were at the bottom in both cases. In England the Chartist movement contained two sections avowing their respective preference for the social and the politi- cal side of the programme ; but, thanks to the stronger political instinct of Englishmen and the organizing skill of Francis Place, the radical and parliamentary section held the field. The 'People's Charter ', which Place drafted in 1838, comprised all the points of the radical reformers — manhood suffrage, the ballot, annual parliaments, the abolition of the property qualification for members and their payment — and it only added to these a demand for equal electoral districts. The fact that it was possible to hold together and extend, during ten years of agitation and great social discontent, a working-class move- ment, numbering at one time some 40,000 members, in support of such remote and abstract objects, is striking evidence of the political training of the nation. The special distress of the year 1848 and the example of France led to the final scene on the 10th of April. But it was not a conspiracy to overturn the Government and proclaim a republic behind barricades. The culminating act of the Chartists was a demonstration on Kennington Common, whence hundreds of thousands were to set out for Westminster to present a giant petition to the Parliament which they desired to reform. How far this crowd would have remained faithful to their peaceful and constitu- tional programme can never be known, for the procession was forbidden and a large force of special constables enrolled to prevent disorder. The mustering of these and their conceal- ment under the bridges on the route were among the last acts of the Iron Duke. One of the constables was the future Em- peror of the French, Louis Bonaparte, who was soon to take $6 The Birth of Socialism the crowning part in the suppression of the corresponding movement in France. Contemporary events in France and on the Continent make an interesting and, on the whole, an encouraging study for Englishmen. The capital difference was that in England we had a much more stable political system than anywhere else in Europe. There was never an appreciable chance of a revolution with us, and a formal Republic or a Socialist State always re- mained in the ideal region of pure theory. But it was otherwise abroad. In Italy and Germany there was yet no national government at all, and the revolutionary movement which soon broke out all over the Continent took in those countries the form of insurrection to obtain the first elements of a national freedom. France was in outward seeming much more like ourselves. She had obtained, just before our Reform Bill of 1832 a constitutional monarchy largely modelled on our own. As we have seen, it rested, like ours, on a limited middle-class franchise, and had, especially in its earlier years, passed many measures of moderate reform. But there were differences which led to the Revolution of 1848 and the subsequent re- action. One was the unstable foundation of the monarchy itself ; another, the presence and influence of a larger class of advanced writers and thinkers than with us ; a third, the greater spread of the doctrines of revolutionary Socialism. In France, then as always, pure intellect held more sway than with us, and it was working there in an atmosphere of less restraint and livelier passions, without our solid structures of immemorial custom and real, though limited, liberty. The English political system, stronger in itself than the French, was further strengthened in the Victorian period by the fact that a woman was on the throne, who was loved and revered, and, being a woman and reigning so long, fitted well into a constitutional order which demanded continuity and The Birth of Socialism 97 reverence for the past, while allowing free play to party conflicts and changing currents of opinion. In France the head of the State at this time, though estimable personally, did not inspire enthusiasm or even general respect. Louis Philippe could not rely either on the historical sanctity which surrounded the legitimate branch of the Bourbon House, nor on the glory of the Napoleons, nor on the strength of his own character. He had always against him the ardent con- victions of a powerful republican party, and he weakened his precarious position by playing, feebly but obstinately, for his own hand. He was constantly coming to Parliament for large money grants for his children, and, as his reign wore on, he leant more and more on Guizot and the extreme right, whose policy was to resist reform and preserve the interests of the capitalist middle-class. The crisis came, significantly enough, after an estrangement from England. The normal policy, both of Louis and of Guizot, was to keep on good terms with England. ' Entente Cordiale ' and ' Socialism ' first appear in our common political vocabulary some time in the 'thirties. In their amicable intentions Louis and Guizot had cordial sym- pathy from Sir Robert Peel and his Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen. But with the fall of Peel in 1846, after the repeal of the Corn Laws, Palmerston returned to the Foreign Office. He was then in his second and aggressive manner, which, as we saw, superseded his earlier and wiser way of making a good understanding with France the ' pivot of his policy '. He now held the dangerous, though in this case happily unjustified, belief that a war with France was sooner or later inevitable, and in the French Chamber Guizot's lifelong opponent, Thiers, was constantly feeding the same flame by attacking the French Government for its weakness in dealing with England. The competitive world-expansion which plays so large a part in the later years of the century was already beginning to throw its 2170 H 9 8 The Birth of Socialism sparks over a wide area— Tahiti, Morocco, the Gold Coast. But ' the actual estrangement came over the marriage of the young Queen of Spain. Was her husband to be a Coburg and thus akin to the English throne, or a Bourbon and thus allied to the reigning house in France ? The unfriendly attitude of Palmer- ston and the reciprocated suspicion in France at last incited Guizot and his sovereign to a distinctly hostile act. Two Spanish marriages, of the young queen and her sister, to a cousin and a son of Louis Philippe, in violation of his under- takings, were forced through, and destroyed the Entente. This led Guizot into more reactionary ways. Breaking with England, he had to find his friends among the three great absolutist Powers of the North and East— Russia, Austria, and Prussia. This was in 1846. In February 1848 the French monarchy had fallen, and Louis Philippe was in retreat to England. Guizot's stiffer and stiffer resistance to reform of any kind and his general incompetence in administrative work destroyed any prestige that his Government had gained by the dynastic success over England. It is poor comfort that your king, himself on sufferance, should marry two of his kinsmen to royalties in another land, if you have no voice in the govern- ment of your own. Only 200,000 citizens had a vote — those who paid over .£8 in taxes ; and on this point the prejudice of the king, if less religious than that of George III against the Catholics, was equally obstinate. During the winter, political banquets had been held all over France, demanding parlia- mentary reform. The last of these, fixed for February 22, was arranged by its promoters, the leading reformers and journalists of Paris, to take the form of a public demonstration and pro- cession. It was prohibited by the Government, and a popular rising immediately followed. Guizot was dismissed. In a collision with the troops, thirty-five people were killed and The Birth of Socialism 99 many more wounded. The corpses, carried in procession throughout the city, aroused a flame of passion which within forty-eight hours had swept away the king and all his family. Nearly four years elapsed between the fall of Louis Philippe and the coup d'etat of December 2, 1851, which installed Louis Bonaparte as Napoleon III. This is the period of the Second French Republic, and its story is second in interest only to that of the First. The similarities and the contrasts between the first and the second occasions on which France, and espe- cially Paris, were for a time given up to social and political anarchy are as instructive as the comparison between England and France from which we started. We cannot pursue either topic far, as we are passing on to consider the part which Socialism played — perhaps the most considerable in the drama of the Second Republic. On both occasions there was a marked want of governing capacity shown by the middle-class intel- lectuals thrown into power by the force of events. In both there was a sharp and sanguinary conflict between the moderate incapables who first headed the mo.vement and the extremists, aided by the Parisian mob, who disputed authority with them. In each case leaders and led were exalted by oratory above the careful study of the dangers which were undermining their position, until it was too late to arrest the downfall. But the Second Republic, in spite of these likenesses, bore many marks of fifty years' experience and a change of mind. Among these we note a much greater appreciation of public order. The first governors of the new Republic were, it is true, incompetent men, but their most anxious thoughts throughout were for the reconciliation of parties and the preservation of social peace. They had lived in the shadow of the Terror, and though the most bloody civil conflict ever known in Paris — the insurrection of June 1848 — took place in their time, they were all free from complicity in it. Even in that moment of disaster H 2 i oo The Birth of Socialism there was more tolerance shown and more humanity than can be traced in the horrors of the First Republic. The place that Lamartine occupied in the early months of the Second Republic is significant of the spirit to which France then aspired, though she was not to reach it for many years. The tender poet of harmony, the man of moving eloquence and perfect language, held for four months, during the most dangerous crisis, the post of President of the Executive Council. He had neither govern- ing capacity nor experience in governing. The contrast is conspicuous with the England of Wellington on the one hand and the France of the First Republic on the other. But the point which specially concerns us here is the invasion of the new Socialism into this troubled order. While, after the abdication of Louis Philippe in February, a Provisional Government was being appointed by the National Assembly, with Lamartine at its head, another list of new governors was being drawn up at the office of the most powerful reforming newspaper. This consisted of extreme Democrats and revolutionary Socialists, including Louis Blanc, and was thrust upon Lamartine and his colleagues when they left the National - Assembly to take possession of the Hotel de Ville. The Hotel de Ville was the necessary stronghold of every revolution in France, and to secure it, and with it the support of the more advanced section of the Parisian population, Lamartine and his friends admitted the rival Government to a share of their power. It was this section, or the failure of the majority to consolidate and control them, which led to the catastrophe. Within two days the majority had made the fatal concession to the Socialist extremists of the decree granting the ' Droit au Travail '. The Government's admission of the Right to Work was followed by the establishment of the National Workshops, which led ulti- mately to the insurrection of June. The Revolution had shaken credit and led to a large reduction of industry all over the The Birth of Socialism 101 country, and this was the moment taken to open Government workshops and yards, and guarantee a franc a day to every registered workman. The result was of course inevitable. Small as was the wage offered, it was better than destitution, and crowds poured into Paris from all over France. At the maximum, just before the workshops were closed down in June, there were over 100,000 men collected, with nothing for them to do but to plant ' trees of liberty ' in rows. The growing drain upon an empty treasury, the demoralization of the people, the sedition hatched by idle and half-starving workmen, at last convinced the National Assembly that a step backward must be taken. But it was too late to take it without disaster. The proposal in the middle of June to disband the workshops and find work elsewhere, if possible, for the workmen was the signal for the most serious rising which the Second Republic had to face. During four days the greater part of working-class Paris, the East End, and especially the St. Antoine district in the north-east, was held by a determined body of forty to fifty thousand men, starving, desperate, and skilful in defence. Forty to fifty thousand regular troops with the bulk of the National Guard, all under the direction of General Cavaignac, were needed to reduce them, and at last all the barricades were levelled and order returned to desolation. Cavaignac had been given absolute powers to suppress the insurrection, and he resigned them loyally when it was over. The Republic, its supporters said, had gained its most signal triumph and was now firmly established in the confidence of a re-united nation. But the bells of triumph were really ringing the death-knell of the Republic. The reaction from the chronic uncertainty and spasmodic violence of the spring and early summer was overwhelming. Men longed for peace and order and the security of property. Mean- while the old gang were impenitent to the last, and when, in 102 The Birth of Socialism September, the question of the National Workshops was finally debated, they all agreed to defend the disastrous experiment, which had in the first instance been forced upon their better judgement by Louis Blanc. Lamartine's concluding speech on the subject was a brilliant exhibition of the good hearts and weak heads of the republican junta. ' A une epoque de sinistre memoire ', he cried, ' Danton disait : De Vaudace ! de Vaudace ! et encore de Vaudace ! Et nous, nous dirons : Du cceur ! du cceur ! toujour s du cceur four le feuple ! et le peuple en retour vous donnera le sien.' The Assembly, however, was in- exorable. It disbanded the workshops, suppressed the ' Droit au travail ', and substituted, not even the 'Droit d' 'assistance ' which was at first proposed, but the ' Devoir de bienfaisance '. General Cavaignac, who had conquered the insurrection, proved himself in the end not strong enough for the dictator- ship which the country craved for. He made enemies on both sides, while Louis Bonaparte (nephew of the first Napoleon), who after the fall of Louis Philippe had been working his way back to France through many adventures, succeeded in captur- ing the goodwill of all parties except the strict Republicans and extreme Revolutionists. He corresponded with Proudhon and Louis Blanc, and showed enough but not too much sympathy with Socialism. He supported the temporal power of the Pope to please the Catholics, and wrote a Manual of Artillery to please the army. In June he was elected to the reluctant National Assembly as member for five departments. Once in the House, he continued a policy of reserve, conciliation, and secret propa- ganda until in December, at the first general election for a Presi- dent of the Republic, he was returned by an enormous majority (five and a half millions to one and a half) over Cavaignac, the only other serious candidate. From the President of 1848 to the Emperor of 1852 was an inevitable progress. It meant personally the success of a good-hearted, clever, but unstable The Birth of Socialism 103" adventurer, who profited by a great name and the confusion in affairs to seize the helm. It meant, as a milestone in history, the close of the first period of nineteenth-century reform and the beginning of a period of new men, new ideas, and comparative reaction. To France it was a wound self- inflicted and, in the end, disastrous. But we are thinking mainly in this chapter of the early days of Socialism ; and the fall of the Second Republic in France, coming soon after the Chartist fiasco in England, marks truly and clearly a definite change from the early, hasty, and unscien- tific spirit in dealing with the social problem to the later, more careful and scientific approach. The history of Karl Marx and the contemporary attempts at revolution in Germany coincides exactly with what we have seen of the French and English movements. Marx was born in 1818, and mixed as a student with the group of young Hegelians in Berlin. He gained from this a more complete and philo- sophical view of the social revolution than any other Socialist leader ever reached. But for action he turned to France. There he found, early in the 'forties, in full activity, those men whose influence counted for so much in the inception and the downfall of the Second Republic — Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux, and the followers of St. Simon. In them he thought he saw the pioneers of an approaching social regeneration for all Western Europe as well as France, for ' the day of German resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallic cock '. The famous saying had been already verified, not only in the first French Revolution which had brought into Germany the strong hand of Napoleon and the subsequent revival, but also in 1830, when the July Revolution had led to constitutions being granted in several of the German States. It was again to be verified in 1848, and verified not only in a general uprising but in a speedy reaction. The French Revolution of February 1848 ic>4 The Birth of Socialism was followed by risings all over Germany and in Hungary, Bohemia, and Italy. Metternich was overthrown in Vienna. Frederick William IV of Prussia granted a constitution, and marched through the streets of Berlin wrapped in a German tricolour. A national Parliament for all Germany began its meetings at Frankfort. Self-government and national unity were the leading motives in all these movements, but the Socialist element was not wanting. Marx had returned to Germany soon after the Revolution broke out. He had made friends in Paris with Engels, the son of a German cotton-spinner, who had come to Paris to meet him after two years of work with the Owenites and Chartists in England. A close and lifelong friendship was the result of this meeting, and they went together to Cologne in May 1848 and set up a revolutionary socialist-democratic paper to take advantage of the upheaval. But in November the King of Prussia dissolved his National Assembly, and Bismarck's policy began. Marx and Engels advised armed resistance and the refusal of taxes. In the state of siege which followed, their paper was suspended, and Marx was next year expelled from Prussia and finally settled in London for the remaining thirty-four years of his life, which he spent in writing and organizing the International Association of Working Men. One sees how closely connected the Socialist movements were in the three leading nations of the West. One sees also the sources of Marx's special strength. Born a Jew, and brought up as a Protestant Christian, he added to a legal training a long and systematic study of history and philosophy. Then, by his sojourn in France and his knowledge, through Engels, of the English industrial system, he was able to put all this dialectical training at the service of labour, to turn ' upside doun ', as he said, all the theories he had learnt. He ' saw things whole ' from his own angle of vision, and did not attempt, as most of The Birth of Socialism ioy the Socialist leaders had done, to separate the political revolution from the social. He preached the use of political means to gain socialist ends, and in this the later movement has followed him, with the difference that, where he was revolutionary, we are Fabian — the Fabian of wise delay. On the other side of his teaching there is an equally significant likeness to the general current of modern thought and an equally significant difference. He presented his socialist gospel as the last stage in an historical evolution. The capitalist organization of industry had followed as a necessary stage in the evolution of great societies, and must be followed in its turn by the complete reversal of this order and the organization of industry by and for those who create its values, namely the workers themselves. In thus appealing to the force of historical sequence, Marx appealed to one of the strongest beliefs of the nineteenth century, but his premises, when examined, have been found too narrow to bear his con- clusions, even by his professing followers. As they have become more Fabian in practice, so they have become more evolutionary in theory. The modern exponent of Marx, a man like Edouard Bernstein, finds his theory marred by too great simplification, by undue emphasis on the opposition of classes, above all, by seeking the mainspring of human progress in a materialist im- pulse and not a spiritual. Herein the doctrine of Hegel, which Marx turned upside down, was nearer to the truth than his own. The coup d'etat in France, the failure of the Frankfort Parliament to achieve a constitution for a united Germany, the suppression of all the revolutionary movements in Europe, combine to mark a wide and real reaction in which England also had her share. It was less marked with us, partly because the previous tendency to revolution was less strong ; but it will be noticed that, although the Liberals were in nominal power, no considerable reform was attempted until the second Reform Bill of 1867, which was carried as the result of the two io6 The Birth of Socialism great parties playing for power. Till 1870, when Gladstone came in with a large majority and a definite programme, it was a time of party strife at home and war abroad — the Crimean War in which we were engaged with Louis Napoleon in the doubtful enterprise of propping up the Turkish Empire, and the Indian Mutiny, in which we were imposing a more effective rule on our largest dependency. In each of these cases we were imposing, for the time and for what seemed to us then inevitable necessities, an alien and repressive regime upon people struggling, according to their possibilities of action and by foul means as well as fair, to be free. Both cases will call for fuller treatment later on. But from the European point of view, the two critical points were the rule of Napoleon III in France and the policy of Bismarck in Prussia. Militarism was the result of each ; and the good which was accomplished — in some points great good — was achieved, not by the methods of discussion and free decision — which was the ideal of the earlier reformers — but by diplomacy and the strong hand and the play of competing Powers. Bismarck's famous speech after the failure of the palavers at Frankfort was typical of much more than the unification of Germany ; and when we read his con- viction that ' the German question would not be settled by speeches and parliamentary decrees but by blood and iron ', our minds revert to the teaching of the great popularize!" of German thought in England, Thomas Carlyle. In 1839, when the Chartist agitation was at its height, Carlyle published his book on Chartism, and its motto was : ' It never smokes but there is fire.' In 1850, after the set-back, he wrote Latter-Day Pamphlets. Both are unmistakably the work of the same mind, strong, poetic, prophetic : both are as clearly marked by the impress of contemporary events. They are so full of instruction, both as to the genesis of Socialism The Birth of Socialism 107 and the lines of its development, and their author has counted for so much in the history both of England and Germany, that we must examine their teaching for a moment and see how it fits in with the general course of things. Carlyle's was not a systematic mind, like that of Marx or St. Simon or Comte. He had no practical experience behind him to suggest reforms like Owen's. Of all his predecessors in social reform, he was most like a Hebrew prophet. He saw the flagrant evils around him, and he had a passionate sense of human suffering and human worth. But he was impatient and intolerant, impatient of slow methods as well as of what seemed to him corruption and pretence, intolerant of those who differed from him, either in their views or way of life. Hence the profound good he did in shaking the current optimism of the British mind ; hence also the serious evils and dangers which he provoked both at home and abroad. He saw the fatal cleft between the ' Two Nations ' in English life, which the industrial revolution had deepened, and he saw it with an intimate and prophetic vision and not with the suave detachment of the author of Sybil. To Carlyle the ' Condition of England ' was the supreme question, to which the easy-going reformers of the Whig Parliament were ludicrously, criminally blind. This is the burden of Chartism, and he lashes the complacency of the governing classes with every thong — sarcasm, invective, humour, pathos. The new Poor Law had just come into force. ' To read the Reports of the Poor-Law Commissioners ', he says, ' if one had faith enough, would be a pleasure to the friend of humanity. . . . Let there be workhouses, and bread of affliction and water of affliction there. It was a simple invention ; as all truly great inventions are. . . . A still briefer method is that of arsenic. Rats and paupers can be abolished.' It is the fiercest and most telling diatribe against laisser-faire that was ever penned — a call for government and for work. Even the starveling Poor Law is a step in advance i 68 I'br Birth of Socialism as a recognition of the need for work, lie passes on to I lie stale of Ireland, just ripening for llie liorrors of the potato-famine in 1846. ' Mas Ireland been governed and guided in a " wise and loving" manner f A government and guidance of white European men which has issued in perennial hunger of potatoes to the third man extant Ml men, we must repeat, were made by God, and have, immortal souls in them. The Sans-potato is of the selfsame stuff as the super-finest Lord- 1 lieutenant . . . with Immensities in him, over him, and round him ; with feel- ings which a Shakespeare's speech would not utter ; with desires illimitable as the Autocrat of all the Russias.' There speaks the fellow-peasant, the fellow-countryman, the fellow-democrat of Burns. Within twenty years of the writing of these words, the population of Ireland had been reduced by famine and emigration from eight millions to less than six. But when we go on to what he says about the I'icnch Revolu- tion, the weakness of the other side of his position begins to appear — the. want of any definite constructive ideas by which this gospel of government and work can be put into clfcct. The French Revolution appeared to him merely as a great destruc- tive portent, the clearing away of corruption and shams, bringing home to mankind the severity of the naked truths of life. The French Convention, the first experiment in self- government by a large modern community, had, he tells us, to cease being a free Parliament before it could so much as subsist. ' Democracy, lake it where you will in our Furopc, is found but as a regulated method of rebellion and abrogation. . . . Not towards the impossibility, self-government of a multi- tude by a multitude, but towards some possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Furopc struggle.' And in the Latter-Day Pamphlets of 1850 he abandons himself narrowly to this vague or, at the best, Utopian ideal, and denounces without restraint all the methods and actions of democratic The Birth of Socialism too government, especially as he saw it at work in his own country. Sympathy for the claims of the oppressed and hopes for their future are now in the background, and he is rapidly descending the slope at the bottom of which is the defender of Governor Eyre in Jamaica, the denier of freedom to the Irish. ' Free men,' he tells them, 'alas, had you ever any notion who the free men were, who the not-free, the incapable of freedom. The free men, if you could have understood it, they are the wise men; the patient, self-denying, valiant ; the Nobles of the World ; who can discern the Law of this Universe, what it is, and piously obey it.' Such is the other side of the picture, brought into vivid prominence by the force of reaction playing upon a passionate and impatient mind. But for the sake of historical truth, especially on the subject of the present chapter, we must be careful not to allow the impression of this last phase of Carlyle's teaching to efface the rest. He was the strongest influence towards Socialism, in the wide sense of the word, among English writers of the nineteenth century, the first great writer to appreciate the supremacy of the social question and to burn it into the public conscience by eloquence and profound conviction. It was for others, in various degrees of socialistic tendency, to consider the pioblems in detail and apply the methods of patient study which Carlyle swept so impetuously aside. Among these thinkers the most important of all his contemporaries was John Stuart Mill. Mill was an actual living link between the old radical reformers of whom his father was a leader, the world of triumphant science of which his teacher and correspondent Comte had just appeared as the prophet, and the Socialists whom he carefully studied and whose ideas influenced him more and more throughout his life. His Political Economy, the book which shows best the con- vergence of all these streams, was published in 1848. A more 1 1 o 'The Birth of Socialism cautious and steadier mind than Carole's, though without his inspiration, he admitted with reservations the interference of the State in industrial matters. It was to be gradual, and so far as possible avoid weakening the vigour of individual effort. ' Government aid,' he says, at the end of the Political Economy, ' when given merely in default of private enterprise, should be so given as to be as far as possible a course of education for the people in the art of accomplishing great objects by individual energy and voluntary co-operation.' Here is a definite principle, difficult no doubt to apply but easy to understand, a definite preference indicated for trying to do things in one way rather than another, while still admitting the rightness of exceptions if the general good appeared to demand it. In Mill's view the highest form of social good would be for the whole people voluntarily to do great things, and grow by co-operation and service. Mill's voice is also one of the boldest in the century for hope. ' All the great sources of human suffering ', he tells us, ' are in a great degree, many of them entirely, con- querable by human care and effort.' Some of the efforts we have witnessed in this chapter. The ' care ' involves the orderly and prescient, i. e. scientific, use of the intellect, the results of which we are now to consider. V MECHANICAL SCIENCE AND INVENTION The soil on which Socialism had sprung was Western Europe, prepared by the industrial revolution, and this industrial revo- lution was the result of the application of science and larger organization to some of the fundamental occupations of mankind. The forging of metals, the transport of goods, the weaving of garments, these and many more were transformed some hundred and fifty years ago by new methods which enormously increased production, brought vast masses of men together in mushroom cities, knit up the world by mechanical means, and threw into the spiritual and political arena a new and dominating problem of which we studied the first attempts at solution in the last chapter. We propose in this chapter to give some account of the process from its scientific side, to see by what channels science entered the industrial sphere and became linked with invention. The science we have to con- sider in this connexion is physical and chemical, and in the early part of the development largely mechanical. The movement culminates, practically, in the triumph of the railway in the 'forties ; theoretically, in the establishment of the principle of the conservation of energy in 1848. It had its public glorifica- tion in the first International Exhibition of 1851, held appro- priately enough in England, the first home of the industrial revolution. At that point we shall stop in this chapter, and take up the further development of physical science later on. Now our first consideration is ' Tools and the Man '. Man has always used thought to improve his tools, from the first moment when he parted company from the other arboreal 112 Mechanical Science and Invention primates. The history of any flint implement gives ample proof of this. But the application of science in a modern machine goes so much farther that we are bound to treat it as something different in kind. Take for comparison two great typical in- ventions, the wheel and the locomotive steam-engine, one born in primaeval times of practical intelligence and necessity alone, the other the result of scientific intellect combining with practical necessity and intelligence. Both inventions have a similar purpose, the facilitation of transport. Both made epochs in human history, the wheel the epoch of migrations and conquering empires, the locomotive the age of world- communication and colossal engineering. But the differences are so great that they obscure the resemblances. The simple wheel, the common element in both, is overlaid by a complex mass of new machinery, involving adjustments of the most elaborate and finest kind and many scientific principles, the fruit of age-long thought. A new motive- power is added, superseding animal assistance and immensely extending human agency, and a new steel-way is laid, an indispensable part of the whole machine, and itself composed of many parts carefully thought out and gradually adapted to the general purpose. The simple wheeled vehicle, developed in milleniums from logs, wagons, carts, chariots, and coaches, was due to successive modifications of external objects as given to us in nature. The locomotive engine propelled by steam had its genesis in man's thought exploring the secrets of nature and applying the results to new ideal purposes of his own. Now this examination of nature to find rules of her working not obvious to the passer-by is scientific thinking, and the Greeks were the first people to show us how to do it. How was it that the transformation of industry on scientific lines did not follow immediately on the discoveries of the Greeks ? Why had the world to wait two thousand years for Mechanical Science and Invention 113 the harvest ? The answer rests mainly on social grounds ; it is a warning to all who are inclined to anticipate a speedy triumph for some progressive cause from the achievements of the elite, without reference to the general conditions in which the elite may be working. For the Greeks were by no means backward in mechanical invention. They made many applica- tions of their abstract science to instruments of peace and war. Archimedes, their greatest man of science, was chiefly famous in his own day for ingenious inventions involving applications of his scientific discoveries, the lever to raise the laden ship, the water-screw for irrigating the fields of Egypt, the giant catapults for harassing the invading Romans. And Hero of Alexandria, some three hundred years later, towards the end of Greek science, describes scores of instruments based on some scientific principle, one for land-surveying like our theodolite, and more than one involving the expansive force of steam, prototypes of machines that have been in use for minor purposes ever since. But there were at least two grave reasons which prevented any industrial advance following on these discoveries at that rime. One was that industry itself was despised by the intellectual class. Not only Plato and Aristotle — the types of intellectual aristocracy — but Archimedes himself, most fertile of inventors, considered such work as unworthy of the man of pure science, who dwelt, or ought to dwell, in a higher sphere. In conse- quence of this the arts of life were left to slaves or base-born men, between whose activities and those of the philosophers a great gulf was fixed. Moreover, at the time when Greek science was making strides, the whole social condition of the West was so unstable that no great industries could have taken root. War was desolating the world until the short span of good govern- ment and comparative peace under the Antonines, and by that time the scientific and inventive genius of the Greeks had flickered out. 2170 1 ii4 Mechanical Science and Invention More than a thousand years elapsed before science made a second and a more permanent appearance in the world. In the interval the social order of the ancient world had been so far transformed that in the leading countries of the West labour was free and strongly organized in guilds and town- communities, holding their own against the feudal lords who had succeeded the Romans. Thus science came for the second time, into a world where domestic and industrial slavery had disappeared, and at her second coming she began to rule the earth. The first achievement of modern science was the building up of the mechanical laws of force and motion which we connect with the names of Galileo and Newton. The pioneers of the sixteenth century had gone back faithfully to the Greeks, but by the seventeenth century the new mathematics had secured a momentous advance. Laws of motion had been added to the simple conceptions of equilibrium which were the summit of the mechanics of the Greeks. And to achieve this, the mechanics of the heavens had been called in by Newton to confirm and generalize the mechanics of the earth. Means of measuring, too, incomparably superior to those of the ancients, were introduced by the logarithms of Napier and the calculus of Newton and Leibnitz. The way was being made plain for the modern steam- engine. The first essential was the extension of mathematics, including both mechanics and better means of measuring. Close on this came the earliest discoveries in modern physics. The most relevant to the coming invention were Boyle's and Mariotte's law of the expansion of gases and Black's investiga- tions into the nature of latent heat. They are in the direct line of the steam-engine's ancestry. By the middle of the eighteenth century this necessary scientific work had been accomplished, and it is worth noting how near was the succession of the pio- neers. Newton was born in 1642, the year of Galileo's death. Mechanical Science and Invention 1 1 f He died in 1727, the year before the birth of Black, whose collaboration with Watt led to the invention of the condensing steam-engine. Boyle was the contemporary of both Galileo and Newton, and published his law of gases somewhere between 1660 and 1670. About these modern men of science there was a healthy symptom which distinguished them from the Greeks and promised well for the advance of industry. Like the Greeks they were full of inventions, but, more enlightened than the Greeks, they were proud of them. Boyle, while agreeing with Archimedes and the Greeks that the acquisition of knowledge is the supreme end of science, yet interested himself in many practical devices. He invented an improved air-pump, and experimented on the transmutation of metals in the course of founding chemistry. As soon, of course, as men get interested in the working rules of the world around them, they begin to improvise methods of altering its arrangements to their own advantage. The seventeenth century is full of new science and fashionable inventors. Napier, the father of logarithms, in- vented a warlike machine much like an infant Tank. Kings and nobles loved to dabble in laboratories and make new scientific toys. The Marquis of Worcester, a rather older contemporary of Newton's, invented a sort of steam-engine a hundied years before Watt. It is described in his Century of the Names and Scantlings of such inventions as at present I can call to mind to have tried and perfected. The Marquis describes, but without much detail, two simple engines for raising water by the expansion of steam. The raising of water was, in fact, the purpose of all the early steam-engines, including Watt's own first invention. Savery, Denis Papin, and other inventors down to Newcomen were all concerned with a simple steam-engine of perpendicular movement for raising water. It was while repairing a model of Newcomen's engine 1 2 1 1 6 Mechanical Science and Invention that Watt fell upon the capital improvements which made his 1 invention the turning-point in the industrial revolution. The occasion was so modest, but yet so carefully prepared by circum- stance and thought, that it deserves our close attention if we are to understand the conditions which made it a great event. James Watt was a man of good general education, well trained on the mathematical side, and he was established in 1760 at Glasgow as mathematical instrument-maker to the University. He was on intimate terms with Joseph Black, the lecturer on chemistry who had just discovered the principle of latent heat, and with John Robison, the professor of natural philosophy. It was an ideal combination of Homo Faber the smith and Homo Sapiens the man of science. They frequently discussed the possibility of improving the steam-engine, which was just then in great demand for the pumping of coal mines. Watt tried several experiments in the early years of that decade, and in 1764 a model of Newcomen's engine in the college museum was given him to repair. Watt noticed that the steam being condensed by water in the cylinder itself, under the piston, between each stroke, occasioned such a loss of heat that the machine could never on that principle work economically. The consumption of fuel was too great. Then came the illumi- nating flash : Keep the piston always at the same high tempera- ture by condensing the steam in a separate chamber, to which it would be led after each stroke. This idea created the ' con- j densing steam-engine ' which gave Watt his chief title to fame and became the chief mechanical agent in the industrial revolu- tion. It converted the old, cumbrous toys and curiosities into a commercial success. Watt's other improvements, important and ingenious as they were, are comparatively minor matters. The straight, perpendicular 'action of Newcomen's engine had to be converted into circular motion before the machine could be used for general purposes beyond the pumping of water from Mechanical Science and Invention 117 mines. This was effected by an arrangement of a crank and a fly-wheel. The third improvement worth noting here was the steam-indicator, which draws a diagram during the stroke of the piston, showing the amount of the pressure of steam and its ratio to the volume. It was important commercially as enabling the engineer to estimate and control the work, and it is interesting scientifically as a typical example of mathematical methods applied to physics. Watt became a successful man of business in partnership with Matthew Boulton of Birmingham. In 1785 one of his engines was installed to drive a cotton mill in Nottingham ; in 1 7S9 one began in Manchester. The industrial revolution was installed in England at the same moment as the States-General in Paris. It is quite as necessary to study the general conditions of the times as the personal factors which led to Watt's success. Industrial changes were taking place all round him as he worked. The manufacture of steel was being transformed and extended by the use of coal in smelting. The more abundant steel was available for Watt's engines, which in their turn had been first needed to pump out water from the coal mines. There was thus a circle of co-operation. The changes in agriculture forti- fied the same movement. Larger holdings were being formed by enclosure, and numbers of country people were displaced and driven into the towns to find work. Here they became the ' hands ' of the new factories, the unincorporated citizens of the new mining and manufacturing towns. The steam-engine was thus the offspring as well as the creator of the new epoch, the age in which ' manufacture ' ceased to mean a thing ' made by hand ' and came to mean " made by machine '. The age of organization had begun, in which machines, created by man- kind for their own ends, too often assumed the mastery of those who had to work them, and the whole of industrial society seemed to become for a time a huge machine destroying the 1 1 8 Mechanical Science and Invention initiative and lowering the vitality of the great mass of the workers. The installation of the steam-engine and the attendant factory-system are, strictly speaking, antecedent to the period of which we are speaking in this book, just as the French Revo- lution, with its clearance and its new plantings, was antecedent on the political side. But it is necessary to go back to it here, because all the sequel is truly a development of the conditions which were established before the nineteenth century began. Organization is the leading note, organization of society parallel to organization of thought, and the flagrant evils which meet us in our course can only be overcome, as we shall see, by assimilating the new state of things and rising superior to it. There can be no turning back. The human mind, to gain a step forward, has to accept the work that it has accomplished in the past and use it for still higher purposes in the future. The inter-dependence of action and thought in human progress is well illustrated when we compare the order of industrial scientific inventions with the natural order of the sciences themselves. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology have their accompanying applications in that order. Mechanical science, and in the first instance the mechanics of masses, was the first achievement of the men of the Renaissance, taking up the work of the Greeks. This was almost immediately followed by some of the elementary laws of physics. Look now to the earliest practicable applications of science to industry, and you will see that they depend on these earliest generalizations of the simpler kind. The steam-engine, based on these elementary laws of mechanics and physics, comes first of the inventions based on science. Its sequel in the locomotive, and a thousand other applications, follows close. Then comes the first-fruits in practice of a more obscure branch of physics, the telegraph based on the earliest laws of electricity. Chemistry, which, as Mechanical Science and Invention 1 1 $> the more abstruse, was the later-organized science, has its practical results after these : we seem only now to be entering on the full harvest of chemical inquiry. In chemistry the earlier results with inorganic, as compared with organic substances, is reflected in the derived processes ; while the whole science of living things, biology, including organic chemistry, has hardly yet begun to exercise its due effect upon our action. But the latter part of the century gives evidence of its growth in numerous medical theories, in experiments on the best methods of cultivating useful plants, in the ideals of eugenics, or the best physical methods of cultivating ourselves. Thus the order of practical inventions bears out what we should have inferred from the nature of the sciences themselves, and there are two other general considerations worth noting before we return to the course of the story itself. One is that the sciences have, broadly speaking, become applicable to useful ends, in proportion to the degree in which they have become exact. Mechanics was constituted as a science, and became applicable to industry, when motion became measurable and predictable ; and so on with all the rest. Lavoisier, by rigidly applying the balance to chemistry, created another branch of exact science, and biologists are now constantly extending similar methods to the infinitely more complex case of living things. The other, that practical applications of science have become more and more abundant in proportion to the mutual aid of the sciences among themselves. The greatest output of practical results in recent times has been due to the combination of physical with chemical inquiry, especially in the case of electricity. The analysis and synthesis of various materials by electricity, the production of useful substances in larger quantities and purer forms by artificial means of this kind, is perhaps the most striking application of science to industry in recent years. In all cases this has involved exact quantitative 120 Mechanical Science and Invention methods, i. e. the infusion of mathematics, and also to an increasing degree the breaking down of the barriers between the separate sciences — autonomous a hundred years ago, auto- nomous no longer. But we must return to the sequel of Watt's capital invention. We saw that one of the conditions and one of the objects of the steam-engine was the improvement and the increase in the smelting of iron and the making of steel. Down to the end of the seventeenth century most of the smelting took place in the south of England, especially in Sussex, where wood was abun- dant, and where such names as ' Hammer Pond ' still recall the ancient industry. Gradually the fine old forests began to be exhausted, and the industry itself, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, was leaving England in favour of Sweden and Russia. Then, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the experiment was tried of ' running iron-ore with pit-coal '. It was first done successfully at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, where the coal and the iron were found lying conveniently close together. This new step meant the transfer of the industrial centres to the coalfields where iron was also to be found : it meant the rise of the North, the Midlands, the South of Wales, and the Lowlands of Scotland. It also meant the necessity of pumping the new coal-pits which came quickly into use. We saw that the first steam-engines were called for to pump the mines, and the early connexion with coal is clearly marked at every stage of the industrial revolution. The great industries grew up within easy reach of the coal and iron, and the first experiments in steam-transport took place in connexion with collieries. The application of the steam-engine to transport was the most momentous extension of Watt's machine. He had him- self thought of a steam-locomotive, and left some drawings among his papers. But he became conservative in his old age, and did not press even his own new ideas. It was not Mcibarica! Science and Invent ion 121 till 1SC4 that the first locomotive was made and used by Richard Trevithick near Merthyr Tydvil. Between this and George Stephenson's final success in 1 S ^ 5 various experi- ments were tried, some with coes and rack. " Purring Billy ' hauled coal from the Wylam colliery near Xev. castle in 1S15. md in 1S14 Sterhenson made an engine which drew a train of 50 tons up a gradient of 1 in -).;o at tour miles an hour. The decisive success, however, he won with the Stockton and Darlington Railv.ay by which, in is;;, passengers were con- veyed, and the price of coal reduced in Darlington from i>.\ to >.. 6d. a ton. This led to the Liverpool and Manchester Ri.il v. ay of I Si- for which the ' Rocket ' was invented, the first locomotive of the modern type. It drew a train o: 15 tons at forty-four miles an hour. Ens-land was the pioneer 0: the railway as sne had been of the steam-engine. Within a decade from the birth of the " Rocket ", railways were being made all over England, and were berlnnin? to be seen in the United States and in most parts of Europe. Only the more backward countries, such as Turkey and Greece, delaved till after the middle of the century. By 1S44 railway promotion was at its height, and the over-specula- tion had some share in the financial crisis of 154." and the troubles of 1S4.S. The first harvest of the steam-engine was now being gathered in, and it is curious to note how the stages of its progress kept pace with the eenerai political movement. The first steam- propelled cotton-mill was started at Manchester m i"^d. tne year of the outbreak of the French Revolution. The nrst railway ushers in the Reform Bill and Louis Philippe. The failure of the Charters and of the Second Republic in France follow immediately on the failure of the railway boom. Some reaction seemed general, but the First Lniversal Exhibition of 1S51, in London, gave a formal and cosmopolitan stamp to r 22 Mechanical Science and Invention the industrial revolution, and was followed shortly afterwards by the corresponding Paris Exhibition of 1855. Le Play, who visited our Exhibition in 185 1, had a leading share in organizing the Paris sequel, and his work in studying the conditions of working-class life all over the world, with a view to its ameliora- tion, is the introduction to a later period of social reform. Transport by water has been, from the earliest days, at least as important to mankind as transport by land. Nature's pro- vision in ocean, sea, river, and lake was supplemented by man from the time of the ancient empires of Egypt and Assyria onwards. The Romans, as well as the Chinese, made canals, and Charlemagne planned a great system of waterways connecting the Danube with the Rhine. But the invention of locks, which was not accomplished until the fifteenth century, was essential to give canals a wide extension. Locks were invented either by the Dutch or the Italians, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the French had taken up the work and made full use of it. In this matter they anticipated us and have always maintained their lead. England did not seriously begin the construction of canals until the latter part of the eighteenth century. Then James Brindley, working as engineer for the Duke of Bridgewater, built the Bridgewater Canal connecting the Duke's collieries at Worsley with Manchester. Again the use of coal was the motive. Brindley's work was followed by others, and England bade fair to have as useful and complete a system of canals as continental countries. But with us the railways won too complete a triumph. The canals were cheap competitors, and the railway companies saw their interest in buying them up and otherwise obstructing their use. But water, like fire, if a dangerous enemy, is one of man's surest and most available servants. There were no landlords to buy out on the ocean, and no costly legal bills in fighting their claims. Hence ocean transport by steam, which wsr, an easier Mechanical Science and Invention 123 adaptation of Watt's invention than the railway, made quicker strides than steam transport by land. A usable steamboat was floated on the Forth and Clyde Canal in 1802, and a regular service with the Comet began upon the Clyde in 18 1 2. In the interval an American inventor, Fulton, who had made experi- ments on the Seine, started in 1807 a paying steamer on the Hudson with engines made by Boulton and Watt. Next to steam-locomotion, the telegraph is probably the most powerful mechanical agent invented for promoting the unification of the world. Their joint effect on the life and thought of mankind is beyond our calculation, and it may be that the rapid transmission of thought which the telegraph has effected has been really more potent than the transport of men and things due to the railway and the steamer. The two inventions marched side by side from the eighteenth century onwards. In the middle of that century, when the Leyden jar was the greatest curiosity of electric science, the transmission of signs by current began to be discussed. All the later dis- coveries in electricity — the identity of magnetism and electricity, the cells of Volta, the dynamos of Faraday — were turned to account by experimenters, who finally produced a working machine about the year 1836. The possibility and the main principle had long been clear. The difficulties turned on the details. How was the current to make intelligible signs ? Should you have a separate wire to move separate pieces of paper marked with the letters of the alphabet — this was the first idea — or, if not, how could you make a sufficient variety of signs by using only one, or a very small number of wires ? Morse in America in 1835, Cooke and Wheatstonein England, first solved the problem in a practical way. They were the Stephensons of the telegraph, and the telegraph wires were first laid along the newly-constructed railways. The London and North Western Railway had them in 1837, and the Great i 24 Mechanical Science and Invention Western Railway opened the first public service from Padding- ton to Slough in 1843. The beginning of oceanic cables followed shortly after. It is an exciting chapter in the story of man's struggle with nature. The first cable of all was laid between France and England in 185 1, and marks the year of the first International Exhibition, held in Hyde Park. But the fight took place in making the connexion between the Old World and the New. Storms, accidents, mistakes, filled up most of 1857 ; but skill, largely on the part of Lord Kelvin, and perseverance, on the part of English and American seamen, succeeded at last, and messages began to go through in 1858. During the 'sixties several cables were got to work between both England and France and the United States. By the end of the century 162,000 nautical miles of cable had been laid, of which 75 per cent, were British. In all this earlier application of science to industry, England took the leading part and the lion's share in the profits. France kept close to us, often anticipating us in a new idea, as in the case of the canals and of Montgolfier's beginnings in aero- nautics at the end of the eighteenth century. But it was not till the latter part of the nineteenth century that our clear pre- eminence disappeared, and this, as we shall see, was mainly in one sphere demanding the patient and well-organized labour of hosts of experts. Here Germany outstripped us, and founded the art and industries of synthetic, chemistry within the last thirty or forty years. The great inventions which we have sketched, together with many improvements in munitions of war, gave the West its undisputed material primacy in a world just awakening to a sense of oneness. The story suggests one or two reflections of a general kind which it will be well to note before we pass on to other aspects of the industrial evolution. Note first that the inventions which we have so far studied Mechanical Science and Invention I2J" were in the main applications of the governing principles in mechanical and physical science which had been established by the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And just as the laws had been built up by careful observation of fact after fact, fitting one into another through consecutive toil, illumi- nated by occasional flashes of synthetic vision, so the machines were the growth of innumerable adaptations of innumerable details, governed by the main idea of doing a particular piece of work more economically than it could otherwise be done. Every valve and rivet in the engine, every bolt in the permanent way, is the result of special study, the adaptation of some pre- viously existing means to a new end. Thus in a machine man has projected into space an embodiment of his thought, which works out his will more powerfully than his own limbs could do. The steam-engine, especially the locomotive, is the great type of this result. It was the fruit of abstract thought applied to practice, and, in its turn, paid back its debt to science by leading to the greatest and most fruitful generalization which had yet been reached. This was the principle of the conservation of energy, arrived at in 1848. Before the end of the eighteenth century, a general truth had been observed which may be regarded as the first sketch of this principle. This was the idea of the conserva- tion of matter, which arose from the analysis of the air by the eariy chemists. Lavoisier, by the use of the balance in all his work, showed that nothing was lost in weight by any chemical reaction. The products of the combustion of the candle in the bell-jar are exactly equal in weight to the sub- stances concerned before they enter into combustion. The action of the steam-engine carried the question a step farther. By the burning of a ton of coal in the engine work was done. The heat generated was, by the expansion of, the steam, con- verted into motion, first the motion of the parts of the machine, 126 Mechanical Science ana Invention then of the dead-weight of passengers, goods, and carriages moved along by it. The indicator which Watt himself in- vented was an instrument of thermodynamics, the science of the relations of heat and work. Sadi Carnot, son of the organizer of victories under the First Republic, is the next name in the story. Dismissed from political work after the Restoration, he devoted a keen and indefatigable mind to science, and, in parti- cular, studied the action of heat in the newly popularized steam-engines. By this study he was the first to arrive in 1 824 at the law of the equivalence of heat and work which was established in a general form later on by Mayer and Joule. He saw that the passage of heat from a hotter to a colder body does work, just as the falling of a body may do work — the waters of Niagara, for instance, as they drive the dynamos which create to-day millions of pounds of artificial graphite. And the work done by the engine is exactly equivalent to the heat communicated. Mayer was a German who approached the problem twenty years later from another and extremely interesting point of view. He was a doctor in the Dutch service in Java, and noticed, on the occasion of a bleeding, that the venous blood of the patient was unusually red. This suggested to him that the organic combustion of the body was less than normal, and he connected it with the greater heat of the climate, which caused less loss of heat in the body. All the actions of the body must, considered physically, result from the energy of this combustion, and he thus arrived at the same equivalence of heat and work in the organic machine as Carnot had reached in the steam-engine. Joule argued to the same purpose from an electric battery. The consumption of the zinc reappears in the heat generated, and this may be recovered through the conductor, and made to do work in the decomposition of water, or absorbed in friction. Here again material consumed is connected with heat generated and work done. In 1847 all these results were summed up and Mechanical Science and Invention 127 described by Helmholtz in a decisive paper on The Conservation of Energy, read to the Physical Society of Berlin. Thus the middle of the century saw the establishment of the greatest generalization of science, extended now beyond the limits of inanimate nature to all energy. All physical changes being measured by the mechanical work done as the result, and this measure being called energy, then the sum of all energies is a constant quantity. The later work of Cleric Maxwell and others, by which the equivalence of heat, light, and electricity has been further elucidated, and the different lengths of the waves of motion calculated exactly, merely unfolded in accurate detail further implications of this simple governing conception reached by the middle of the century. Beginning with the obvious effects of combustion, seen first in the expan- sion of gases and then in the work done in a machine propelled by this expansion, the fact was traced further in the subtle and marvellous phenomena of electricity, until its presence was discovered in the light of day itself, coming to us from the common source of light and heat. And so man's primitive worship and dependence on fire came home again. It was his earliest distinction and his earliest boon. He recognized its greatness from the first moment when he re- flected on the laws that ruled his fate. Fire, he then thought, had a superhuman source, and he deified the man who stole a spark from its heavenly owners. The history of science has given the cult a fresh and deeper meaning. It was by fire that the mediaeval alchemist tested his elements in the crucible. The burning of a candle led to the discovery of the elements in the air and the foundation of chemistry. The combustion in our bodies which follows respiration started the scientific thinking which constituted physiology. The oft-observed effect of fire upon the most familiar of liquids gave men ultimately the most important of machines. In our own day the equivalence 128 Mechanical Science and Invention of all forms of physical energy — the greatest generalization of science — has been evolved from the study of the effects of heat. It would be well for the world if the unification of scientific theory had had its counterpart in the unification of sentiments and aims in life. But progress in inventions, and especially in the use of fire, has been as fruitful in producing more and more effective ways of destroying the life and work of man as it has been in protecting and promoting them. One hopeful fact, how- ever, may be recorded. Nearly all the achievements of science in fabricating weapons of destruction can be converted with little change into constructive channels. The process of manu- facturing the most deadly explosive is near akin to that of producing the most effective fertilizers of the soil. Dynamite prepares the way for railroads as surely as it levels forts. And the skill of the engineer, which adjusts the bearings of the •75 gun with the admired perfection of the French, can, when occasion offers, be applied with equal ease to fitting telescopes. The earlier developments of applied science rested mainly on mechanics and those branches of physics which deal with matter rather in the mass than in the molecule. And they tended on the whole in a very marked degree to the unification of the world. Steam-ships, steel-rails, and telegraph-wires were the chief agents, and later improvements, the turbine engine, the internal-combustion engine worked by oil, wireless tele- graphy, are all developments arising directly from foundations laid before the middle of the century and all tending in the same direction. The inhabited world thus moves on clearly to a common goal just as the members of the solar system are all one in their concerted movements round the one source of light and heat and motion. After the middle of the century the centre of interest for industry and the main source of new industrial inventions was transferred to chemistry, which aimed at penetrating farther Mechanical Science and Invention 129 and farther into the constitution of matter. But here again, for the beginnings we have to refer to times before the nineteenth century began. Of the atomic theory, in its ancient origins and its modern expansion, we shall have to speak in a later chapter ; but the figure to which we naturally turn as the chief founder of chemistry applied to the arts of life is Sir Humphry Davy, one of the great band of men of genius born just before the French Revolution began. His greatest discoveries were made in the sphere of the chemical agency of electricity. For the first time he prepared potassium and sodium by electro- lysis, and thus opened the way to the chemical isolation and preparation of substances which have played so large a pait in recent industry. In 1806, while the French war was going on, he won the medal and the money prize which Napoleon offered for the best improvement made each year in the construction of electric batteries. The reward was handed over in spite of actual hostilities at the time. No Defence of the Realm regulations proclaimed him a traitor ; no national jealousy prevented the French emperor or the French public from doing him honour. In 181 3, the war still raging, he lectured in Paris, taking Michael Faraday with him as assistant. But the simple application of a scientific experiment which has made his name a household word took place in the year after peace was re-established. In January 1816 he ex- plained to the Royal Society the use of wire gauze as a protection for miners' lamps from the explosion of fire-damp. The tem- perature of the flame within the lamp was lowered below ignition point, as it issued into the air outside; by the introduc- tion of a substance able rapidly to carry off the heat. This in- vention, simple as it was, was his crowning glory, recognized by the coal-owners, the miners, and the Government alike. It enabled light to be thrown without danger to life in one of the vital spots of modern industry. 2170 K 130 Mechanical Science and Invention The early nineteenth century saw the beginning of many kindred inventions for making artificial light and heat more accessible to man. Friction producing heat was the im- memorial method for making fire. The savage, with his two polished sticks, our grand-parents with their tinder-boxes, were all employing this primitive means. Chemical inquiry now disclosed fresh substances which would easily ignite when com- bining with the oxygen of the air. White or yellow phosphorus, the most inflammable, the most poisonous of these, was also the most common. It was an instance like so many more — like poisonous gases or bombing aeroplanes in war— of the dangers which, side by side with benefits, beset the application of science to industry. It began to be used for matches in 1833. It took more than half a century before protective modifica- tions were insisted on by law to save the workers, who had contracted horrible diseases from handling and inhaling it. Safe phosphorus is now practically universal in the civilized world, and in the course of its production wide experience has been gained of the oxidizing powers of other substances. The same story might be told of a hundred other things, the story of wider and wider investigation, deeper and deeper penetra- tion into nature. Candles, soap, oil, fuel of various kinds, glass, and many foods were all improved so materially as often to be entirely re-made by the science of the nineteenth century. A French chemist, Chevreul, in 1823, gave us the modern candle by the chemical treatment of fats and oils. A Scotchman, Murdoch, who worked in Boulton and Watt's factory at Birmingham, first developed an illuminating gas by heating coal in closed vessels away from the air. This was at the end of the eighteenth century. Gas came into general use within the next twenty years and before the invention of matches. It was from Scotland, too, that mineral oil first came for illumi- nating purposes. The shale beds in the Lowlands preceded the Mechanical Science and Invention 131 petroleum wells of America, Russia, Rumania, and the Persian Gulf. The larger scope of chemistry which has dawned recently upon mankind, especially in its relations with electricity, belong rather to a later period than we are considering here. But the one supreme physical problem which has begun to possess men's minds in our generation arises so directly from what we have been reviewing in this chapter that we cannot pass it by. Long ago men learnt that matter was indestructible, and chemistry has been, of late, discovering a growing multitude of fresh means of disengaging and re-combining the elements, of form- ing and converting common substances. On this side the vista seems illimitable. And on the other ? Energy we have also learnt is constant and indestructible. But in the forms available for man's life it may disappear. Can we, by transformation, again make available the energy that we need — we, the living organism of thousands of millions of separate organisms inhabit- ing this globe ? Here again, though our progress has been less, there seems no necessity to limit our hopes. It is true that the familiar storehouses, on which large inroads have already been made by the industrial revolution, will be soon exhausted, as the universe might reckon time. Coal-fields, peat-mosses, and oil-wells must have a comparatively early end. Hence men are looking more and more to other sources of available energy, and exploring the constitution of the world more deeply to be able to recover both energy and matter for their ultimate security and greater use. Light comes on many paths of this endeavour, and the future will disclose things not yet dreamt of. Electri- city — one form of universal motion — is inexhaustible. Oil and fuel of other kinds than those immobilized in the earth's crust will always be obtainable so long as vegetation lasts ; and to promote vegetation the sun's light and the stores of nitrogen held in the air are practically endless. One of the latest k 2 132 Mechanical Science and Invention scientific ventures is the fixation of the atmospheric nitrogen, and in this the Germans have preceded us with success. With an abundant vegetable kingdom, supplies are accessible of carbon compounds of infinite variety and illimitable uses. No possible wa nt of food or power while this grey world is green ! And here is but one source of untapped power. The sun's light and heat fall on us largely unemployed and often harmful. One day this too will be husbanded, and we shall use too the almost untouched energy of wind. The force of gravity, moving the incalculable masses of the world's water in tides and water- falls and rivers, will play its part. Already at Niagara and a thousand other falls it drives industrial dynamos. And in the constitution of the atom, reservoirs of force have been discovered which surpass conception and stagger our imagina- tion by their unfathomable depths. So towards the future the world, at least the material world, looks bright. Its resources are illimitable, and man's powers of dealing with them have grown in the period of our review beyond all previous attainment. We shall see later on how far these powers have been employed during the same time to make the life we live a fuller and a fairer thing. But be the answer to that question what it may, the fact of mechanical power, that man has within the last hundred and fifty years multiplied his resources a thousandfold, brought land and air and water and the hidden stores of nature into subjection to him, is a stupendous one. It gives us the pride of creation, amazement at our infinitely expanding strength, and a weight of new re- sponsibility. Our past achievements are there, in the mammoth steamship, in the tunnel which pierces the mountain-chain, in the canal which makes a new passage between two continents, in the engines which have added a thousand million ' hands ' to our production. These works are permanent, to be extended and employed for the sustenance and the further building-up Mechanical Science and Invention 133 of the myriads of fresh inhabitants which the same process has added to the population of the globe. The past therefore becomes from this aspect, more perhaps than from any other, an object of surpassing interest, of inspiration, of guidance, and of warning. We may quite justly put first the inspiration, for it is in these achievements that man has found himself as the continuous creator. His thought, growing from age to age, has linked itself in the work with his active and inventive powers, and gone on adding strength to strength. It is the application of his knowledge which proves to him both its foundation in reality and his own capacity for using these realities for his own ends. From this comes confidence and a vista of fresh conquests awaiting him in the future. The guidance comes from reflecting on the conditions which have made this progress possible. The thought lying at its basis is a collective thing, not limited by any national boundaries, but spreading freely wherever it finds congenial elements, just as a Frenchman, an Englishman, and a German co-operated to establish the law of the con- servation of energy. The fact that such co-operation is often unconscious is the strongest evidence of the inherent like- ness in the workings of all human minds and of the common process which unfolds itself continually throughout the world. Unconscious and obscure as the first workings of this thought may be, when once announced and applied to the world of facts it proceeds to create an organization of life as complete and unbreakable as the links which bind the thoughts themselves together. This is the patent and most significant result of the triumph of applied science in the last century, as true and striking as the social nature of the science itself. Society has become, in all those countries where industry has been organized and developed by science, a far more united and stable thing than it was before, or than it is in other regions less advanced in 134 Mechanical Science and Invention this respect. Later chapters will illustrate the point more fully both in regard to social and to international progress, but lest we may seem to be chanting an indiscriminating paean of the factory and the steam-engine, we must add here the limiting condition which contains the war-ning. The organization and closer union which result from the application of science to industry and life are only to be considered good — satisfactory, that is, to the ideal which we are tracing in these pages — if they express themselves ultimately in a fuller and nobler life on the part of all the individuals who are enmeshed in the system and made to work as wheels, and parts of wheels, in a great machine. That it has not done so yet, the slums of any industrial city, the banks of the Congo, or the jungles of Putumayo are there to tell us. But just as the humblest worker in a great observatoiy may feel some glow in the revelations of the telescope above him, or the fitter on ,the railway bridge reflect that his work is vital to the lives of thousands and the welfare of a continent, so we may believe that all organized industry is capable of inspiring this feeling and giving the worker this foothold in a universal scheme. The human problem aroused less interest in the early stage and was met with less determination than the mechanical. Its solution, therefore, lagged behind. But it was not insoluble. The same period which gave mankind the triumphs of the mechanical arts which we have sketched contained also in germ the principles of the humane sciences, the belief in fore- sight, the instincf.of brotherhood, which were to bear fruit in later times. ••» VI BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION In the last chapter, when dealing with physical science and its applications, we were constantly referring to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this, which is to treat of the sciences of life, our sources will be mainly in the nineteenth. Great as were the achievements of mechanical science in the last century, its foundations were firmly laid before the century- began. Physics had felt the touch of Galileo, Mathematics of Descartes, Astronomy of Newton, Chemistry of Lavoisier. But in the sciences of life it was not so. Aristotle, ' the master of those who know ', was, it is true, a biologist ; but his knowledge, though marvellous, was too inaccurate, and his generalizations, though profound, were too vague, to serve by themselves as a basis for a scientific structure. The actually operative con- ceptions in biology and in all the kindred sciences — anthro- pology, psychology, sociology — were a birth of the nineteenth century, its supreme and characteristic fruit. The climax of the last chapter could be fixed at about the middle of the century, for 1848 saw established the doctrine of the conservation of energy, and in 1 851 the first international exhibition was held, which was the official apotheosis of science applied to industry. For this chapter the following decade may well be taken as the turning-point, for 1859 saw the publication of The Origin of Species. That publication will always remain a landmark, not because the teaching of Darwin was final, but because it put for the first time in a clear and realizable form a theory which had long been floating vaguely in men's minds, because it gave an 136 Biology and Evolution unparalleled stimulus to research, because it fitted in with other contemporary movements in thought and action, and thus gave a new direction to religion, a new philosophy to politics, and in its widest sense a new foundation to hope. The progress made in the exact sciences and their applica- tions was amazing, but when we turn to the sciences of life, the mind is still more overwhelmed with admiration at the changes the century brought forth. The knowledge amassed in the last hundred years in biology, the growth of distinct sciences as branches of the great whole, the insight of new possibilities, the weaving of new connexions between old facts, the ferment of opinion, the conflict between giants of research, the ardour and the patience of the seekers — all these things make the sciences of life not only the most striking intellectual achievement of the age, but perhaps the greatest collective effort of man's mind in the history of thought. The world of living things thus revealed surpasses in interest and variety and beauty the best that we can conceive of inanimate nature. Splendid as is the rainbow, awe-inspiring the march of the heavenly bodies in illimitable space, marvellous and unfathomable the dance of the infinitesimals of matter, yet when we turn to the world of life, though confined only, as we know it, to our own planet, its wonders outstrip all that the merely physical world can display ; and — greatest wonder — ■ we are here a part, the crowning part, of the scientific structure itself. Now all this thought, in spite of the contributions of earlier ages, in spite even of Aristotle himself, has taken shape in the last century. But this world of wonder, which we build up into science by our thought, has not yet taken, perhaps will never take, the same exact well-ordered shape which we know in physics or mechanics. The process of science in all its branches consists in ordering our knowledge at the same time that it extends its scope. The nineteenth century achieved the Biology and Evolution 137 crowning triumphs in this advance, so great that some good judges have held that all the science or organized knowledge acquired by man. in earlier centuries could not compare in extent or value with that of the nineteenth century alone. And the nineteenth century in science is above all the century of life. Yet the way of advance in the sciences of life, great as it has been, is not exactly comparable in method with that of the physical sciences. For them the railway, one of the most powerful fruits of science, would be a useful type. Like a railway, the physical sciences lay down a permanent way through the territory which they explore. The new branches all connect with the main line, and, though the system may be indefinitely extended and its working quickened and altered in a hundred ways, it is the same system to the end. Newton stands firm. But in the sciences of life, progress follows different lines. It reminds one rather of that other more modern form of communication by travel in the air. There is no permanent way. We travel quickly ; we feel our way and dart hither and thither to escape a contrary wind. But the speed, the exhilara- tion, the prospect are superb, and the solid world recedes beneath our flight. It is more difficult in such a changing scene to trace a leading principle, but one may be detected, and it is mainly Darwin's work which has made it visible. It first comes dimly into view at the end of the "eighteenth century ; it gathers strength as the nineteenth century goes on; in its philosophic form it is one of the governing principles of the age, and powerfully reinforces the rest ; it will prove in the end, when fully under- stood, a guiding star to action in the future. What is this principle, applicable to biology and human history alike, which biology, and especially the work of Darwin, has made predominant in the last century I It is this : that every organism — and in this broad sense we may treat every 138 Biology and Evolution human society and mankind at large as an organism— is an historical being, to be explained by its history. We do not understand it, whether the living thing be an amoeba or a vertebrate species or a human institution, unless we know its history, and when we know it we see that every living thing is its own history, embodied and making fresh history. When we treat Darwin's work as the greatest illustration and enforcement of this principle, we are, of course, deliberately putting in a subordinate place the particular method of develop- ment to which Darwin gave his name and his chief thought. ' Darwinismus ' means specially, and above all to the systematic German, the theory that living beings vary naturally in all directions, and that those varieties are ' selected ' and tend to survive which give their possessors a superior chance in the universal struggle for existence. Darwinism, as we shall see, has in this restricted sense been subjected continuously since Darwin to a more and more close and sceptical examination. But we are as fully justified in treating Darwin as the pro- tagonist of evolution in the wider sense as we were in taking Robert Owen and Karl Marx as types of nineteenth- century Socialism. In each case the man who has impressed the idea on his generation was possessed and carried forward by a con- ception larger than he was able to express in his own personal categories, and the aspects of the conception on which he dwelt have been found subsequently to have been exaggerated to the point of fallacy. But when flying in the air, we can correct our bearings if the light is good, and such a temporary deflection in our course is but a slight deduction from the gratitude we owe the man who gave us the wide expanse of view and the confidence of flight. The wider view to which his teaching leads is abundantly present in Darwin's work. He feels himself to be the leading exponent in his generation of the doctrine that all living things Biology and Evolution 139 are the result of an immemorial development by gradual steps from simpler forms; that they are all akin; that we can speak with as much truths of the growth of a species, and of all species, as we can of any individual being which grows before our eyes. This is, in the broad sense, the historica l spirit which has transformed in the last hundred years all theliciences of life, and Darwin was its clearest voice. ' When we no longer look ', he tells us, in one of the concluding paragraphs of his most famous book, * at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension ; when we regard every production of Nature as one which has had a long history ; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing-up of many contrivances each useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical invention is the summing-up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen ; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting — I speak from experience— does the study of natural history become.' There speaks the modesty of a master-builder, commending to the world a supreme achievement on the ground of the simple pleasure it has given him to build it ; and the remark itself is of extreme interest as s ummin g up the advance made in the nineteenth century in the conception of life. It indicates the relation of the dominant biology of the century towards the dominant physics and mechanics of the centuries before : they had created wonder-working machines ; the new century was applying its intelligence to understand the most wonderful of all machines which comes to us ready-made. It strikes the keynote of modern biological and sociological thought — the organism is to be interpreted historically as the issue of an infinite process of growth and adaptation, the fitting of the being to the fullest use of its environment. And in the 140 Biology and Evolution comparison of the living organism to the lifeless and manu- factured machine, it suggests the danger of the narrower type of Darwinism which omits the action of the organism in making itself. We shall develop these hints from the great master, with the necessary criticism, in the few pages which follow. The nineteenth century can claim all the greatest advances in the doctrine of evolution, but, as so often in other chapters, we find clear finger-posts" before the century began. Goethe, who points the way to so many things in the modern world, was profoundly interested both in plant and animal life and profoundly stimulating on their problems. He held the balance, as every competent and open-minded inquirer must, between the two opinions which divide our mind in dealing with the development of life — does function determine form or form function ? does the creature make its life, or are its life and its shape imposed upon it by outside forces ? Such are some of the eternal antinomies which force themselves upon us in this, the higher sphere of scientific thought ; nor can we hope to surmount them fully till we are able to rise above ourselves and above the temporal conditions of which life is built. Goethe, as the poet-philosopher, strove to see things whole, so far as man may, and refused to rest on either side of the dilemma. We analyse the living thing, he tells us, into its elements — and since Goethe's time the analysis has become more and more minute and mechanical — but if then we think we have found the clue, we have only lost it the more com- pletely by the thoroughness of our search. For life is the common action of all these parts, and escapes as they are separated. In philosophical biology, as in so many other ways, Goethe became a pioneer, through his length of life, his breadth of mind, and his power of work. Backwards he came in touch with men Biology and Evolution 141 and thoughts and movements from the classical past, and he stretched forward into the evolutionary future. In biology he brought a breath of Aristotle into the new science which was being built up with the aid of microscope and scalpel. Like Aristotle he looked on living beings as all striving to express an idea by activity from within. And this was true not only of the individual but of the whole world of animate things. The forming power shapes all according to one harmonious plan. He was very near, but just missed the historical link which was to come. Instead of asking, as the evolutionary biologist now does, how did this being come to be what it is, historically, by the process of hereditary growth, he saw with a philosophic eye that certain parts of plants and animals resembled one another in shape and position, and decided that they must be the same thing transformed. Thus, in his morphology of plants, he had the true intuition of leaves, petals, stamens, as all modifications of the original plant- appendage; in the famous case of the skull- theory he held with Oken, though in a detailed sense which later research has not supported, that the cranial bones are vertebrae transformed. Goethe thus deserves our memory here, both for his in- sistence on the unity of plan, and for his appreciation that life is an artistic thing, that the creature is also a creator, part- maker of himself. But for the more strictly scientific founders of biology we must turn to France — Lamarck, Cuvier, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Bichat. Lamarck gained fresh glory in the later century as a pioneer of Darwin, and in our own time a third immortality has accrued to him as the prophet of another theory of develop- ment which seems now to many biologists necessary as a supple- ment, if not a preferable substitute, for the general variation of pure Darwinism. But in his original greatness he was the continuer of Linnaeus in the work of classifying the natural 142 Biology and Evolution groups of plants and animals. Beginning with plants, he went on to animals, and before the nineteenth century began he had recast Linnaeus's orders, and for the first time brought system into the realm of invertebrate zoology. He revived Aristotle's main division of all animals into Vertebrate and Invertebrate, and in the latter sub-kingdom arranged ten classes. He was the first systematic explorer of this, the largest branch of animal life, and his work on the subject, which began to appear in 1 801, fitly ushered in the new century. His more famous work, the Philosophic Zoologique, appeared eight years later, in 1809, the birth-year of Darwin. His labours in classifying the invertebrates had shown him the difficulty of separating species, and deciding between a species and a variety. ' The more we collect the productions of nature,' he tells us, ' the more do we see almost all the gaps filled up and the lines of separation effaced. . . . Nature has ia reality formed neither classes, nor orders, nor families, nor genera, nor constant species, but only individuals, which succeed one another and resemble those that produced them. Now these individuals belong to infinitely diversified races, shading into one another, and each maintaining itself without change, so long as no cause of change acts upon it.' But Nature has worked upon them all with a plan of organization in her mind, proceeding from the simpler to the more complex. Clearly, the more we fill up the gaps, the more we realize the kinship of all animate things ; and Lamarck, in his early labours at classification, was doing similar work to that of the post- Darwinian palaeontologists who have been finding horses of all sizes between the primitive tiny creature of the American strata and the elephantine cart-horse of to-day. Lamarck found the closeness of contemporary forms, especially of the lower orders, so great that he inferred inherited relationship. The post- Darwinians have been striving to make it actually complete in Biology and Evolution 143 historical sequence as well as in theory. Lamarck had intuition and a vague philosophy ; his successors in the last hundred years have been accumulating proofs. It is much the same story as in other branches of nineteenth-century progress. The prophets of freedom, equality, and fraternity were not in error ; they were only trap simpliste — crude and vague like the child who thinks he can make a flying-machine with a pen-knife and a stick. The intuition was right and inspiring : it remains for maturer minds to work out the thousand details of the truth. It is interesting to note the kinship of Lamarck's biological philosophy with the general currents of revolutionary thought. We find in him, as in Turgot or Condorcet, frequent mention of an inherent tendency to progressive improvement in living things. Nature was compelled, by a law the Supreme Being had imposed, to proceed by the constant fresh creation of the simplest forms, the monads of life which are the only beings directly created. These then develop by gradual steps towards the highest level of intelligence and organization, partly through their own innate tendency to perfection, partly through the force of external circumstances, the variations in physical conditions on the earth and their relations to other beings. What is this, one may ask, but a short and general statement of beliefs held by a large part of all subsequent thinkers on the subject ? The difficulties arise when we attack the problems of how these general principles have worked in practice. Lamarck assumes boldly that it is the mode of life, the action of the creature, that have determined its form and its faculties, subject of course to the supreme consideration that a universal per- fecting is going on. Take the case of web-footed creatures, such as frogs, ducks, or otters. They were not made web-footed in order to swim, but, coming to the water in search of food, they stretched out 144 Biology and Evolution their toes in order to swim more quickly, and as they kept stretching them out for generations, the skin acquired the habit of extension, and the new broad membranes were formed. So with the giraffe's long neck and the light agile bodies of the antelope or the gazelle. Lamarck imagined that the stretched- out skin was transmitted from parent to child and continually became more stretched-out until the final form was reached which suited best the animal's needs ; variations acquired during the lifetime of the parent could be transmitted to the offspring : and on this, as we know, a keen and unsettled controversy has raged and is raging still. But for our present purpose it imports most to note that Lamarck had achieved the capital point of regarding the organism as an historical being. He brought decisively into biology the category of time. We have talked and thought since then of man learning to walk upright, of his brain growing backward to take in more of the spinal cord, of vertebrates acquiring backbones, or birds gaining wings, not merely as individual acts, still less as injunctions of a supreme authority once immediately conveyed, but as age-long processes in which each creature has been approaching its final nature by an infinite number of intermediate steps, transmitted or accumulated from generation to generation. Historical progress, which man had begun to trace in his own social existence since the later Greco-Roman Age, could now be studied as one instance, though the highest, of a universal movement, identical with the nature of life itself. It happened, however, that at the time when Lamarck was excogitating. his theories, French armies were for four years in occupation of Egypt, and with them were men of science who disinterred the mummies of consecrated animals embalmed in the tombs. Multitudes of cats, dogs, bulls, apes, and crocodiles were found perfectly preserved, as well as wheat and other • useful plants. It was observed that all these were as much like Biology and Evolution 145" contemporary specimens of the same species as the human mummies were like contemporary men. Cuvier, the greatest anatomist of the day, declared, on this and other grounds, against the supposed evolution of species, for some of these animals, such as the cat, have been transported since Egyptian days to every corner of the earth and every variety of climate : yet they remain practically unchanged. Lamarck had his answer ready, and palaeontology was beginning to furnish evidence to support his views. In Egypt it was clear that climatic conditions had varied so little since the days of the rock-tombs that there was no reason to expect any change in the animals. The animals transported to other climes were mostly living in special domestic conditions, and, in any case, the time available was a mere clock-tick compared with the geologic time in which Lamarck began to look for the setting of evolu- tion. ' If the physical geography, temperature, and other natural conditions of Egypt had altered as much as we know they have done in many countries in the course of geological periods, the same animals and plants would have deviated from their pristine types so widely as to rank as new and distinct species.' 1 Here was the key to the solution of the doubt, the first hint of the correlation between earth and life, geology and biology, Lyell and Darwin, which was ultimately to win universal assent for the doctrine of evolution. The influence of Lamarck, indeed, led up to Lyell as well as to Darwin. Since the Italian school of geologists at the end of the seventeenth century, men had been learning to connect the fossil remains in the earth's crust with the formation of the strata in which they are found. Lamarck, in a work on geology published about the same time as the beginning of his Philo- sophical Zoology, threw himself strongly on the side of those who 1 Philosopbie Zoologique, 1809. 2170 L i4