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NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
A FORECAST
*


NATIONAL
LIFE AND CHARACTER
42618
A FORECAST
BY
CHARLES H. PEARSON
HON. LL.D. ST. ANDREWS, LATE FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
AND SOMETIME MINISTER OF EDUCATION IN VICTORIA
AUTHOR OF 'A HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN THE EARLY AND MIDDLE AGES AND OF
'HISTORICAL MAPS OF ENGLAND'
'Dir wird gewiss einmal bei deiner Gottähnlichkeit bange'
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1893
All rights reserved
P

First Edition, January 1893
Reprinted, July 1893

BI ALA
7 - 1
sed
1
INTRODUCTION
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF THE HIGHER RACES
CHAPTER II
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
CHAPTER III
SOME DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
PAGE
1
29
•
86
134
¿
CHAPTER IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF AN ENHANCED NATIONAL FEELING
180
CHAPTER V
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
227
•
CHAPTER VI
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
259
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
INDEX
345
347
349

F
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NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
INTRODUCTION
The greatest statesmen have constantly failed to predict the immediate
future.-Yet there have been many successful prophecies of distant
and great events. In other words, we are fairly successful in ascer-
taining a general law of progress, but cannot define exactly how or
when it will be worked out. The statesman, moreover, prefers
dealing with the immediate future, which he can influence, to taking
precautions against great changes, which are most likely inevitable.-
For instance, the transportation of an inferior race, like the negroes
of the United States, to a country where they would be harmless, is
too vast, and of too uncertain benefit, to be readily attempted.—
Again, the tendency to increase the powers of the State, and invite
its interposition, is so strong that it would be difficult to check it.—
Still, we may reduce the dimensions of a danger, which we clearly
see, though we cannot avert it. This book was first suggested by
the observation, that America was filling up.-Later study has
added the conviction, that the higher races can only live in the Tem-
perate Zone.—If, however, emigration, which is the rough substitute
for the organisation of labour, becomes impossible, the tendency to
State Socialism, which is already strongly marked in certain British
colonies, will become more and more powerful.-Moreover, the ten-
dency to entrust the State with wider functions has long been
adopted in Continental policy, and is being acclimatised in England.
-This inquiry does not assume that State Socialism will be pushed
to its furthest development, but only that some of its simplest appli-
cations will become law.-Kings may easily put themselves at the
head of a movement for State Socialism, but personal rank and
transmitted wealth are likely to be viewed with jealousy in the new
order. The change from one form of political life to another is not
likely to be so momentous as the effects of the general change on
character.—The world may gain something to balance what it loses,
B
ملك
2
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
even in the direction of individualism; but (present conditions of
growth continuing) it cannot gain much.-Perhaps, the best it can
hope will be a general low level of content, and an exaltation of the
patriotic sentiment.
"" 1
EVER since men have committed their thoughts to
record, it has been a common-place, exulted in or de-
plored, according to the temperament of the moralist,
that it is impossible to predict the future. History
abounds in memorable instances of the rash forecasts
made by men, whose genius and experience entitled
their opinions to the highest respect. Lord Shelburne
was one of the ablest of English statesmen; and he pre-
dicted that, whenever the independence of America
should be granted, "the sun of England would set, and
her glories be eclipsed for ever. Lord Shelburne was
fated to be the instrument of negotiating the peace by
which American independence was recognised; and he
lived till the year when the battle of Trafalgar estab-
lished England in the position of the only maritime.
power. Burke, in the language of his greatest eulogist,
"had in the highest degree that noble faculty, whereby
man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the
distant and in the unreal." He was ripe in years and
experience of men when the French Revolution broke
out, and his counsels contributed largely to the part
which England took in opposing the French Republic.
Yet Burke so entirely misconceived the nature of the
changes that were passing under his very eyes, that in
1793 he was most concerned, lest France should be
partitioned, like Poland, between a confederacy of hos-
2
1 Mahon's History of England, vol. vii. p. 204. Compare "Fox on the
King's Speech," December 5, 1782. Lord George Germain used very
similar language in the debate of December 12, 1781.-Wraxall's Historical
Memoirs, vol. iii. p. 289.
2 Macaulay's "Essay on Warren Hastings," pp. 642, 643.
INTRODUCTION
3
tile powers.¹ Burke's distinguished contemporary, Fox,
parted from him on the question, how the conduct of
France ought to be judged; and where Burke was
absolutely wrong, it might be supposed that Fox would
be at least relatively right. He told Parliament in
1803, that he had opposed war with France, because
of its tendency "to effect the total destruction of the
influence of this country on the Continent."2 In the
day of her greatest humiliation, France was never in
danger of being partitioned; and the longer the war
lasted, the greater was the increase of English influence
on the Continent. The most eminent of the Parlia-
mentary generation that succeeded to Burke and Fox,
Mr. Canning, was fascinated by the prospects of the
South American colonies, anticipated that they would
grow up as the United States had grown, and being
challenged for his support of them, declared that he
had "called a
called a new world into existence to redress
the balance of the old "3 (1826). We who live two
generations later, are painfully aware that the South
American "new world" has produced little but civil
wars, national bankruptcies, paper constitutions, and
examples of declining civilisation. The Duke of Wel-
lington was deservedly trusted by a large portion of his
countrymen for his sound common-sense in matters
political; and his reputation was not confined to
England. He told a friend in 1832 that "few people will
be sanguine enough to imagine that we shall ever again
1 "Remarks on the Policy of the Allies."-Burke's Works, vol. iii.
p. 447.
Burke had said in the House, as early as February 9, 1790,
that he considered France as not politically existing," and as "expunged
out of the system of Europe."
2 Fox's "Speech on the Mediation of Russia," May 27, 1803.
3 Canning's "Speech on the Connection of England and Portugal,"
December 12, 1826.
4
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
2
be as prosperous as we have been."1 Whether we
measure prosperity by wealth, by empire, or by general
content, it can scarcely be doubted that the England of
1892 may challenge comparison with the country, as
it was at any time, which the Duke of Wellington is
likely to have had in his mind. Thirty years ago, a
great quarrel broke out between the Northern and
Southern States of the American Union. Sir G. Corne-
wall Lewis, whose sympathies did not mislead him, for
they were with the North, declared in 1861 that "their
true policy was to negotiate with the South, and re-
cognise the Secession"; and Mr. Gladstone in 1863 said,
that the Southern President had made an army, had
made a navy, and, more than that, had made a nation.
We now know, that the North was certain from the first
to win, if it was only true to itself; and that though Mr.
Davis created an army, he was powerless to do more.
These mistaken forecasts by eminent statesmen were
habitually in accord with public opinion; and the
general estimate of what is about to happen is as likely
as not to be curiously unwise. The English Press, with
very few exceptions, was as wrong in its judgment of the
American war as Mr. Gladstone; and English society
for ten or twelve years at least believed that
Louis Napoleon had founded a dynasty. Even when
the war of 1870 broke out, though a few military
experts were alive to the efficiency of the Prussian
organisation, the general opinion was that France
would win in the early part of the campaign; and
every map of the seat of war, published in London,
was a map of the Rhine Provinces, and of North
1 Raikes's Journal, vol. i. p. 68.
2 Sir G. Cornewall Lewis's Letters, p. 395. M'Carthy's History of Our
Own Times, vol. ii. pp. 138, 139.
INTRODUCTION
5
บา
Germany. Every map was accordingly useless after
a few days.
It would not, however, be difficult to produce in-
stances where remote and generally unexpected changes
have been prophesied with considerable accuracy. As
early as 1748, "reasoning men in New York foresaw
and announced that the conquest of Canada, by reliev-
ing the Northern colonies from danger, would hasten
their emancipation." "We have caught them at last,"
said Choiseul, when it was definitely agreed that Canada
should be surrendered (1763); and in fact little more
than twenty years elapsed before the English flag ceased
to wave over the States England had colonised.¹ Lord
Chesterfield, as early as 1753, declared that “all the
symptoms which I have ever met with in history,
previous to great changes and revolutions in govern-
ments, now exist and daily increase in France. “We
are approaching the state of crisis, and the age of
revolution," wrote Rousseau in 1762. "I think it im-
possible that the great monarchies of Europe have still
long to last; all have had their moment of splendour,
and every state which achieves this is ready to wane.
Goldsmith in the same year declared that "the French
are imperceptibly vindicating themselves into freedom";
and prophesied that the country would gain its liberties,
""
11 2
"3
“The
1 Bancroft's History of the United States, vol. iv. pp. 460, 461.
necessary result of such measures" (the annexation of Canada and Florida),
"perfectly foreseen at the time, was pointed out by Dr. Tucker, Dean of
Gloucester, as well as by others."-Wraxall's Historical Memoirs, vol. ii.
p. 78.
2 Chesterfield's Letters to his Son.
3 Emile, livre iii. p. 218. Some years later, Rousseau in his letters
expressed the opinion, that the Seven Years' War would have broken up
the French Monarchy, if it had not been for Choiseul.-Martin: Histoire
de France, tome xvi. p. 98. M. Schérer has noticed several minor pre-
dictions of the Revolution.-Littérature Contemporaine, p. 346.
6
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
"if they have but three weak monarchs more succes-
sively on the throne." It needed, as we now know, a
good deal less than the "three weak monarchs." Gold-
smith, who seems instinctively to have apprehended
the conditions of change in Europe, predicted also
with perfect accuracy that Sweden was hastening on to
despotism; that the German Empire was on the eve of
dissolution; and that Holland was only awaiting the
advent of a foreign conqueror.¹ The first of these
prophecies was fulfilled in ten years; the second in
1806; and the third in 1794. The American states-
man, Hamilton, of whom Talleyrand said that he had
"divined Europe," seems to have prophesied the con-
centration of commerce in London and New York as
the great emporia of the world with remarkable saga-
city.2 Arthur Young's predictions of the results that
France would derive from the Revolution-temporary
distress from its violence, and permanent well-being
from its reforms-were as wise as Burke's were unfor-
tunate. De Tocqueville foretold, thirty years before
the event, that the Southern States were the one part
of the American Union in which disruption was likely
to be attempted; Sir G. Cornewall Lewis recognised in
1856 that the outrage on Mr. Sumner was the first
blow in a civil war; and Victor Hugo appreciated the
importance of John Brown's execution by comparing it
4
5
1 Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, Letter 55.
2 Talleyrand's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 185. Hamilton predicted that
London would absorb Amsterdam, that Cadiz would be supplanted by an
American port, and that Marseilles would lose the trade of the Levant.-
Ticknor's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 16.
ance.
8 "The advantages derived to the nation are of the very first import-
On the other hand, the extensive and unnecessary ruin-all these
are great deductions from public felicity."—Arthur Young On the Revolu-
tion in France, pp. 343, 344.
4 Democracy in America, chap. xviii. p. 434.
5 Letters of Sir G. C. Lewis, p. 315.
INTRODUCTION
7
to the Crucifixion.¹
Heine, the most French in feel-
ing of Germans, predicted that if France came to
war with an united German people, she would be over-
borne.2
It will be observed that the most conspicuous in-
stances of strikingly false prophecies are taken from
the utterances of statesmen of the highest rank; while
those predictions that have been verified belong as often
as not to publicists, or to statesmen, like De Tocque-
ville, whose philosophy to some extent disqualified
them for active politics. The reason, however, is
probably not to be sought in any special fitness of
abstract politicians for making forecasts of the future;
but in the fact that statesmen are constantly tempted
to make predictions of immediate interest, whereas the
power of divination among men seems rather to concern
itself with general laws. Accordingly, the same man has
often been markedly right in his speculations about the
distant future, and curiously wrong in predicting the
possibilities of the next few years. Napoleon's alleged
prophecy, that all Europe would end by being Republican
or Cossack, seems more probable now than when it was
first given to the world; but his expectation that
3
1 In a drawing, which was engraved, and sold in London at the time ;
and which represented John Brown on the Cross.
2 "You" (the French) "have more to fear from liberated" (i.e. united)
“Germany, than from the whole Holy Alliance, together with all the
Croats and Cossacks.-Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie
in Deutschland, S. 269.
3 The part of the prophecy that relates to Russia seems the best
proved. "You are in the flower of your age, and may expect to live
thirty-five years longer. I think you will see, that the Russians will
either invade and take India; or enter Europe with 400,000 Cossacks,
and 200,000 real Russians."-O'Meara's Napoleon at St. Helena, vol. i.
p. 104.
"The Continent is now in the most perilous situation, being
continually exposed to the risk of being overrun by Cossacks and
Tartars."-Life, Exile, and Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon, by
Count de Las-Cases, part vi. p. 2.
8
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Wellington would make himself despotic in England,
because he was too great to remain a private person,
failed because it was founded on French analogies,
and on supposed conditions that were not true of
either Wellington or his nation. De Tocqueville's
general law, that "among European governments of our
time the power of governments is increasing, although
the persons who govern are less stable," is receiving
additional illustration every year; but De Tocqueville's
66
unquestionable statement," that, if any portion of
the American Union seriously desired to separate itself
from the other States, these would not be able, nor
indeed would they attempt to prevent it, was absolutely
disproved on countless battlefields within a generation.¹
Beyond this it may be observed, that any attempt to
fix the date at which a prophecy will be fulfilled is
especially hazardous. The break-up of the Turkish
Empire has been foretold for centuries. From Peter
the Great downwards, every sovereign of Russia has
speculated upon it; and several of these have arranged
treaties of partition with other sovereigns equally con-
vinced. Time after time these combinations have been
foiled, or only partially successful; and though no one
seriously doubts that the term of Turkish rule in
Europe is rapidly approaching its completion, few would
venture to declare when the result will be brought about.
The high courage of the race, the interests of the Western
Powers, and a general aversion to great change are re-
tarding causes, which constantly prove to be stronger
than was anticipated.
Leaving out of sight the fact, that certain statesmen
of great sagacity are able to calculate on what will
1 De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, book iv. chap. vi. and
book i. chap. xviii. p. 420.
INTRODUCTION
9
happen within a few hours or days,' and are trusted
and valued accordingly, it seems justifiable to say that
in a certain broad and vague way the tendency of the
times may be and constantly is appreciated, so that we
are landed in the apparent paradox of knowing better
what is remote than what is so near that it may seem
to be within every one's ken. Accordingly political
prophecies are for the most part little regarded. The
statesman of a modern parliament is not working for
results fifty years hence, but for the day's need; and
would be apt to distrust himself if he attempted any-
thing more. Perhaps there are cases when we see that
a more calculating policy would have been the wiser.
If England had granted Catholic Emancipation fifty
years before she did; if the American Congress had
bought up and expatriated the slaves while they were
still a mere handful; if France had followed Talley-
rand's policy, and confined herself to such acquisitions
as awakened no violent resentments; if Russian ad-
ministrations under Nicholas I. had been determinately
liberal, instead of absolutist, each particular country
would have gained, and the civilised world would have,
been the better for rancours and miseries averted. It
is idle, however, to discuss what might have been; and
almost equally so to discuss what might be under con-
ditions never likely to be realised. The distant future
of a country is so unimportant by the side of its im-
mediate needs to the men in possession, that even if
they were reasonably certain that a particular evil
2
1 For an instance of Talleyrand's sagacity in this line see his
directions to the Duke of Orleans, which placed that prince on the
throne.-Bulwer's Historic Characters, pp. 221, 222.
2 Memoirs of Talleyrand, vol. ii. part vii. pp. 97-100. Madame de
Rémusat in her Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 399, quotes Talleyrand as saying:
"To keep the Czar shut up at home by creating the natural barrier
which Poland offers, ought to have been the Emperor's design."
ΙΟ
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
ought to be guarded against at an immediate sacrifice,
they would rarely be possessed of the moral force re-
quired for the effort. As a matter of fact, however,
only a few persons can feel reasonably certain as to
the future, because only a few busy themselves with
distant speculations. Among these
Among these many will perhaps
believe that the manifest destiny of the human race
cannot be mitigated-much less averted by any
sacrifice or statesmanship.
One or two simple instances will explain why men
should be indisposed to work for a distant object. The
increase of the coloured population in the Southern
States of the American Union has for some time past
been the cause of very great alarm. It seems as if a
portion of that magnificent country was destined to
be handed over to a race who are incapable of being
citizens in the highest sense of the word. The most
reasonable proposal yet made for meeting this par-
ticular danger has been to remove the blacks in a body,
and plant them again in Central Africa.
To carry
out this proposal, however, in an equitable and humane
way, would mean an expenditure of many hundred
millions; a sum so vast that only the United States
could compass it; and that even the United States might
well demur to the cost. It is easy to suppose, however,
that a body of Southern statesmen, keenly interested
in this particular subject, might sketch the outlines of
a feasible plan, and force it upon the attention of the
community. Is it not also reasonable to assume that
they would be met with very strong opposition? The
Northern and Western States have only a remote in-
terest in clearing the country of the
negro. Some per-
sons believe that the negro is a valuable element in the
community, and others that he is at least indispensable
INTRODUCTION
II
for certain kinds of labour. The results of the last
census would be appealed to, to show that the coloured
race is not increasing at any disproportionate rate; and
it would be argued, that in proportion as he was
civilised, would his increase be slower still. The im-
possibility of transporting 8,000,000 of human beings
across the Atlantic, and establishing them in new
homes, would be pleaded. The probabilities are that
a scheme for doing effectually, what it is now almost
too late to do at all, would be debated, and voted down
into the establishment of a new Liberia; and would
have no more noticeable effect than to make the for-
tunes of a few contractors.
Again, let us assume a statesman to be convinced
that the present tendency to an increase of State action
is perilous to individual liberty, and to the development
of character. What power would such a man have of
giving effect to his views in Europe or in Australia?
The State has come in almost everywhere to protect
the masses against employers and landlords, or to
organise the forces of the community for general
purposes. State Education was first systematised on
something like its present lines in Prussia, because
Prussia, being relatively a weak power, saw the import-
ance of making every citizen as efficient as possible.
England and France, Austria and Italy have followed
in the steps of Prussia, because they dared not do
otherwise. Meanwhile, costless education has recom-
mended itself as a boon to parents; and workmen look
favourably upon the school attendance that diminishes
the competition of child-labour. A statesman who
should try to revert to the old order, because he con-
sidered the uniform routine of our State Schools de-
structive of originality, would soon find that he had
12
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
So, again,
to contend with very powerful interests.
with State limitations to labour. Whether the theory
of unlimited competition be true of ancient times or
not, it is certain that the influence of Adam Smith
and the circumstances of their time determined the
wealthy classes of England for three generations to hold
as an undoubted article of faith, that the law ought
not to interpose between employer and man. From
the day the first Reform Bill was passed, this theory was
doomed in England. Philanthropists first interfered to
protect women and children; after a time the Trades
Unions secured the legal recognition of their activity;
and at present it is only a question, how far labour can
be regulated by law, and how far it is best to leave
the task of restraining it to powerful associations. It is
easy to see that we are tending to a state of things we
did not altogether anticipate, and to some results that
are not absolutely desirable. It is difficult to see that
we could retrace a single step if we went back sixty
years. Most of the liberal changes of the century
have been nothing more than acts of justice; but
almost all have been unavoidable. Religious toler-
ance; the mitigation of the penal laws; the recognition
of the labourer's right to associate; the diffusion of
education; the extension of the suffrage, were measures
eminently defensible in themselves. To have withheld
education would have been to weaken the country in
the scale of nations; to have denied the other reforms
would have been to provoke revolution.
If we assume, then, that there is a limited power
of forecasting the general trend of human progress,
it does not follow that this power can be of any real
use in influencing events. The English coal-measures
will be exhausted, whether we foresee it or not, and
INTRODUCTION
13
no generation will stay its hand from using them in
order to cheapen fires for the next. Great cities will
continue to grow, if population goes on increasing,
though all the statesmanship in the world should be
in favour of spreading population. Whether a skiff
borne along the rapids of the St. Lawrence is wisely
or badly steered makes the difference of life or death
to its occupants, but does not affect its destination.
It must descend the stream. The object of this book
is to indicate in a very general way the direction
towards which we are drifting in political and social
life. It is not assumed, that any human sagacity can
avert the fatality of our acts for centuries past, or
of our characters, as we inherit or have fashioned them.
If it be true, for instance, as these pages attempt to
show, that the lower races are increasing upon the
higher, and will some day confine them to a portion
of the Temperate Zone, the result will have been the
work of our own hands; and yet we cannot change our
principles of action. We are bound, wherever we go,
to establish peace and order; to make roads, and open
up rivers to commerce; to familiarise other nations with
a self-government which will one day make them in-
dependent of ourselves. We cannot even allow them
to remain weak by destroying one another; and interest
and humanity constrain us to interpose when there is
a Tae-Ping rebellion in China, and when Africa is
desolated by Arab slave-dealers. Nevertheless, if we
cannot change manifest destiny, we may at least adapt
ourselves to it, and make it endurable. We may cir-
cumscribe the growth of China, though we cannot
altogether arrest it; and if we cannot hope that
Europeans will ever people Africa, we may at least so
work that European ideas shall one day be paramount
14
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. Again, it might
conceivably be of use if European statesmen could
understand that the wars which carry desolation into
civilised countries, are allowing the lower races time to
recruit their numbers and strength. Two centuries
hence it may be matter of serious concern to the
world if Russia has been displaced by China on the
Amoor, if France has not been able to colonise North
Africa, or if England is not holding India. For
civilised men there can be only one fatherland, and
whatever extends the influence of those races that
have taken their faith from Palestine, their laws of
beauty from Greece, and their civil law from Rome,
ought to be matter of rejoicing to Russian, German,
Anglo-Saxon, and Frenchman alike.
The first chapter of this book is practically an ex-
pansion, on a very large scale, of an article which I
published in the Contemporary Review of 1868.¹
Travel in the United States had convinced me that
that great country was filling up more rapidly than
was supposed in England, and would cease within
measurable time to offer any great inducements to a
large immigration. I predicted that "the Americans
will begin to be cramped for land by the time their
population numbers 20,000,000 more"; that is, by
the time it reached 60,000,000. I admitted that the
arrest of immigration would be "
very gradual," and I
pointed out that some temporary relief might be given
by the opening up of Manitoba, and by the development
of Southern States like Texas, or by the purchase of
new territory from Mexico. Substantially these calcu-
lations have been verified, though I was wrong in
1 "On the Land Question in the United States."-Contemporary
Review, November 1868.
INTRODUCTION
15
1
several minor points. The States have not increased
in population as rapidly as was expected: the Chinese,
on whom I had calculated as possible settlers, have
been deterred by public feeling from coming over in
any number; and though the British immigrants are
now relatively fewer than they were, this falling off
has been compensated by a great increase in the number
of immigrants from countries with a lower standard of
comfort; from Italy, Norway, Bohemia, and Russia.
Beyond this there was a period of great prosperity in
England between 1870 and 1879, when tens of thousands
found employment who in any ordinary year would
have gone across the Atlantic. On the whole, these
influences appear to have balanced one another; and
the result is, that while immigrants are still anxious
to pour in, there is a disinclination to receive them;
and the American Congress has passed two rather
stringent Acts (1885 and 1891) to limit immigration
to fit persons, and to forbid the wholesale bringing over
of workmen by employers. 2 Moreover, the emigrants
who now go over are attracted by high rates of labour
rather than by cheap rates of land. The best part of
the country has been taken up.
Twenty years' residence under the Southern Cross
has forced me to consider a new side of this particular
1 In the decade 1851 to 1860 the emigration from Great Britain
to the States was 1,257,000 (Mulhall's Statistics). In the last decade
it has been 1,462,000 (Statesman's Year-Book). The British population
of the first period was twenty per cent smaller than that of the second;
while the American population of the second period offered fifty per cent
more chance of employment.
2 << Already signs are not wanting to show, that stringent as are its
provisions, and drastic as are its regulations" (the Act of 1891), “a certain
section of American opinion is beginning to demand something more
stringent and more drastic still."-Wilkins on "Immigration in the
United States," Nineteenth Century Review, October 1891, p. 593.
Bryce's comment must be remembered: "Such laws are of course
difficult of enforcement."-American Commonwealth, vol. iii. p. 674.
16
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
question: whether the capacity of European races to
form new homes for themselves is not narrowly limited
by climate, and by the circumstances of prior popu-
lation. Australia is an unexampled instance of a great
continent that has been left for the first civilised people
that found it to take and occupy. The natives have died
out as we approached; there have been no complications
with foreign powers; and the climate of the South is
magnificent. Nevertheless, it is still a question whether
the white race can ever be so acclimatised as to live
and labour in the Northern parts; and it seems certain
that neither Englishman nor German can ever colonise
New Guinea. The fear of Chinese immigration which
the Australian democracy cherishes, and which English-
men at home find it hard to understand, is, in fact, the
instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience.
We know that coloured and white labour cannot exist
side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp
us with a single year's surplus of population; and we
know that if national existence is sacrificed to the
working of a few mines and sugar plantations, it is
not the Englishman in Australia alone, but the whole
civilised world, that will be the losers. Transform
the Northern half of our continent into a Natal with
thirteen out of fourteen belonging to an inferior race,
and the Southern half will speedily approximate to the
condition of a Cape Colony, where the whites are indeed
a masterful minority, but still only as one in four. We
are guarding the last part of the world, in which the
higher races can live and increase freely, for the higher
civilisation. We are denying the yellow race nothing
but what it can find in the home of its birth, or in
countries like the Indian Archipelago, where the white
man can never live except as an exotic.
INTRODUCTION
17
If, however, the white race is precluded by natural
laws from colonising on a large scale anywhere except
in the Temperate Zone, it seems certain that the con-
dition of old countries will be powerfully modified.
The eager and impetuous element that has hitherto
found an outlet in new communities, will be pent up
in the overpeopled countries of Europe. Either the
growth of population will be arrested, as in France, or
the State will have to concern itself, much more actively
than English economists will like, with the organisation
of labour. Now the history of the English colonies in
Australia and New Zealand is particularly instructive,
because it shows what the English race naturally at-
tempts when it is freed from the limitations of English
tradition. The settlers of Victoria, and to a great
extent of the other colonies, have been men who
carried with them the English theory of government:
to circumscribe the action of the State as much as
possible; to free commerce and production from all
legal restrictions; and to leave every man to shift for
himself, with the faintest possible regard for those who
fell by the way. Often against their own will the
colonists have ended by a system of State centralisation
that rivals whatever is attempted in the most bureau-
cratic countries of the Continent. The State employees
are an important element of the population; the State
builds railways, founds and maintains schools, tries to
regulate the wages and hours of labour, protects native
industry, settles the population on the land, and is
beginning to organise systems of State insurance.
Planted in Africa, the Englishman so adapts himself
1
1 It will be understood, that these statements are not equally appli-
cable to every colony. New South Wales is only beginning to protect
native industry, and New Zealand is the only colony that has experi-
mented with State insurance.
C
18
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
to the circumstances of the real population, the indig-
enous negro, that the black man finds his sufficient
paradise under the British flag, in Natal or at the
Cape, rather than in Liberia. Planted in Australia,
the Englishman, to whom St. Simon and Fourier are
names of derision, if they are even names, is rapidly
creating a State Socialism, which succeeds because it
is all-embracing and able to compel obedience, and
which surpasses its continental State models because
it has been developed by the community for their own
needs, and not by State departments for administra-
tive purposes.
Of course, it does not follow that
even a race so highly gifted with political intelligence
as the British is necessarily right in what it builds
up. It may be that the brain and hand are more
feeble than they were in the old time. Nevertheless,
it is surely safe to say, that political experiments
which half a dozen self-governing British com-
munities are instinctively adopting, deserve atten-
tion as an indication of what we may expect in the
future.
It may seem rash to anticipate that the State every-
where will be entrusted with larger and more intricate
functions because there is a tendency in this direction
in some of the more important British dependencies.
Let it be remembered, however, that every continental
State-even those of Germanic origin-has worked for
centuries upon these lines, and that in England itself
the first entrenchments of the laissez-faire system
have been forced. The State in England has bought
telegraphs, and reserved the right to monopolise tele-
phones; lends money for draining purposes, and has
lent it for the construction of roads; regulates the
hours of labour in factories; forbids women and children
INTRODUCTION
19
1
to work under certain conditions; and assists skilled
workmen to obtain a mastery of their trade. There
is every indication that the so-called "labour party"
will be stronger in future parliaments than it is (1891),
and will force the State more and more into what is
known as the organisation of industry. Nothing has
been assumed as possible or probable in this book
except what is already done in some civilised and
prosperous part of the world, or what is being worked
up to by some powerful party. The so-called national-
isation of land, though not an actual fact, is being
approached in a great many countries. Victoria has
reserved a great part of its land from sale, in order to
try the experiment of State landlordism. New Zealand
is considering the policy of buying back the land it has
alienated; and meanwhile is proposing to tax large pro-
perties on a graduated scale that may incline owners to
break them up. South Australia is discussing the same
problem. The proposals in England to buy out the
Irish landlords, and sell again to a small yeomanry, are
steps in the direction of land nationalisation, though
the object is to create new freeholds. For a time, at
least, the State will be a landlord on a large scale, and
in many cases may end by having the land left on its
hands. It is not perhaps probable that any uniform
system of landownership will prevail over all the world,
however much institutions may tend to become iden-
1 Mr. Rae's comment on this matter is instructive: "Professor
Sidgwick declares the Irish and Scotch Land Acts, which provide for
the judicial determination of a fair rent, to be the most distinctively
socialistic measures which the English legislature has yet passed; but in
reality these Land Acts are not a bit more socialistic than the laws which
fix a fair price for railway rates and fares," etc.-Rae's Contemporary
Socialism, p. 428. Compare Bryce's statement: "The new democracies
of America are just as eager for State interference as the democracy of
England," etc.-The American Commonwealth, vol. iii. p. 272.
20
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
tical. France, for instance, may consider that she gets
all the good she desires from her system of compulsory
subdivision, and may shrink from the costly and com-
plicated operation of buying back small parcels of land,
which it would be very difficult to administer. Even
in English-speaking countries, the preference for in-
defeasible property, which seems innate in human
nature, has acquired such strength by use that many
communities may desire not to go counter to it. In
that case they may attain very nearly the same results
as are aimed at in State landlordism by a progressive
land-tax, which will make it impossible to build up big
estates, and by taxing unimproved land as heavily as
improved. The essential of State Socialism in these
matters is not so much that the State should keep the
title-deeds of the land, as that no land should be mono-
polised by private persons for speculative purposes, or
to give political power, or as a mere instrument of
luxury.
As it has been an object in this inquiry to consider
only what it is possible to achieve by a slight extension
of existing machinery, the question whether the State
can ever control distribution by becoming the owner of
large stores, or production by taking agriculture or
mining or manufactures into its own hands, has not
been discussed. The assumption has been that certain
departments of labour will for a long time at least be
left open to private enterprise. It is proper to notice,
however, that there are numerous instances of mines
being worked by the State, and that where a mine can
be worked without loss, or at the smallest possible, but
would not return a profit sufficient to reward a specu-
lator, it would seem eminently in accordance with the
principles of State Socialism that Government should
INTRODUCTION
21
develop it. So, again, where the mineral produced is
one necessary, so to speak, to national existence, like the
coal of England or the salt of Wieliczka. Tobacco is a
State monopoly in some parts of Europe, and alcoholic
drinks in others. In Java and Egypt the State has
at times been a considerable employer of agricultural
labour, and still farms land of its own on a reduced
scale. It is therefore possible to conceive a com-
munity which, following only actual precedents, should
be the sole employer and the sole proprietor within its
own boundaries. It has seemed, however, unwise and
unnecessary to suppose that this extreme result will be
attained generally, or even often unwise, because it is
very rare to see a theory of any kind logically carried
out; and unnecessary, because if twenty per cent of any
given population were in the State service, their hours
of work and their wages would practically be the
standard of the whole community. In Victoria at this
time something like eight per cent of the adult male
population is in Government employ.' Assume the
Government to run steamers, as it has often been urged
to do, to buy up the various gas-works, to start works,
such as it must some day have for the manufacture of
ordnance, to take irrigation into its own hands, and to
supply medical aid through salaried employees, and it
is easy to see how the eight per cent might swell to
twenty per cent. Neither does it much matter for
1 Mr. Hayter in his Victorian Year-Book for 1890 reckons the adult
males at about 320,000 between the ages of 18 and 60. The persons
regularly employed by the Government were at the same time 24,816,
and those temporarily employed during 1889 numbered 5799. If we
deduct 2200 for female teachers, 1000 for temporary clerical employees,
who are only engaged for short periods, and 450 for female post-office
clerks and telegraph operators, the residue will pretty nearly represent
eight per cent. This number must, however, be regarded as an extreme
estimate, only true of a prosperous year.
་
22
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
practical purposes whether the State in all cases under-
takes work of this kind itself, or leaves it to be performed
by some other public body, amenable to the popular
vote. The State in Victoria, for instance, has handed
over some important functions, occupying hundreds of
employees, to the Melbourne Harbour Trust; but that
body is almost as directly under the control of Parlia-
ment as any Government department. Again, it is
quite conceivable that the conduct of gas-works, trams,
and water-works may often be left to municipalities;
but these in a democracy are controlled by the industrial
vote. The working men of Victoria attach great im-
portance and I believe rightly so-to the compara-
tively high standard of comfort which the State
maintains for all its servants. It is felt that, sooner or
later, the ideal recognised by the State will be the
measure for all; partly because otherwise the best
men will all seek employment under the State, and
partly because there will be an invincible reluctance to
accept less than the largest employer gives. If this is
to some extent the case already, the result is bound to
be far greater when the State's sphere of action is
doubled or trebled.
It used to be made a reproach to the English Liberals
that they were always agitating for reforms connected
with the machinery of government-manhood suffrage,
the ballot, or the abolition of the House of Peers-and
never appeared to have any use for the power they had
already wrested from the aristocracy. A review of what
has been done during the last sixty years will perhaps
show that this accusation is not borne out by facts.
The reforms made have been so great as practically to
remodel English society. The penal code has been
changed from one of great barbarity into one that is
INTRODUCTION
23
reasonable and humane;¹ the game laws have been made
fairly tolerable; the poor-law system has been remodelled
with great intelligence, though not very sympathetically;
popular education has been introduced; the landlord's
protective duty on food has been abolished; trades
unionism has been legalised; nonconformity has been
freed from its shackles; and Parliament has familiarised
itself more and more with the idea of interposing
between employer and employed, between landlord and
tenant. If it should appear that the complement of
these changes-the complete organisation of labour, and
State insurance against want-can only be attained
under a democratic form of government, then we may,
I think, expect a republic to be established everywhere.
On the other hand, it seems more than conceivable that
wise sovereigns, or wise aristocracies, if they believe
these changes to be inevitable, and on the whole good,
will determine to guide the popular movement instead
of opposing it. Wherever this is done, experience
indicates that the working classes will look first to
their real wants, and will acquiesce in any form of
government that satisfies these. Therefore it has not
appeared necessary for the purposes of this argument to
consider whether thrones will be overturned or aristo-
cracies abolished. The chances perhaps are that the
world will adopt the republican form of polity more and
1. The recent publication of Sir Robert Peel's early Letters by Mr.
Charles Parker shows that in 1828 he was preparing to resign office if
George IV. refused to sign the death-warrant of a young man who had
been guilty of forgery under circumstances of peculiar temptation (Peel's
Letters, p. 317). Indeed, so strong had the old law been, that Blackstone
boasts: "There is hardly a case possible to be conceived, wherein forgery
is not made a capital crime."— Commentaries, book iv. chap. xvii.
The penalty of death for forgery was, however, abolished in 1832; that
is, as soon as the House of Commons was converted to the necessity of
reform; and in 1833 one of the first acts of the reformed Parliament
was to appoint a Commission for revising the whole Criminal Code.
..
24
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
!
J
more, because there are many instructive examples that
it is not easy to replace a dynasty that has once been
dispossessed. On the other hand, if there should be a
succession of such exceptionally able and patriotic
sovereigns as several European countries have enjoyed
during the last fifty years, and if these should identify
themselves with popular movements, it is open to
believe that kings may hold their own for centuries to
come. None the less, there does seem to be a natural
antagonism between aristocracies of privilege or wealth
and an industrial society. It is difficult to conceive
that a hereditary House of Lords will long be maintained
in England; and though the millionaire may be a
feature of all time, the example of the United States
shows that he may be deprived of political power.
Personal rank and transmitted wealth accordingly seem
a little less likely to maintain themselves than the
centralisation of State absolutism in one hereditary
monarch. Even titles, however, will perhaps be modi-
fied and transformed rather than absolutely effaced.
Nothing is more remarkable in human nature than its
determination to retain old forms while it invests them
with a new life. Christianity took its temples, its
statues, its sacred days from Paganism; Protestantism
mostly copied the old Church; and the most noticeable
form of anti-Christian worship has been a servile
parody of Catholicism. Humanity, as it were, outgrows
its vestments; but it does not cast them off and go
naked; it patches them and drapes them about itself
in new folds.
What therefore we are most concerned with is not
the limitation of the higher races of man to a small part
of earth; not the evolution of a new form of society—
an autocratic and all-pervading State, instead of a State
INTRODUCTION
25
that gave free scope to individual ascendency-but the
question, what man himself will become under these
changed conditions of political life, and under the influ-
ence of other changes that seem inevitable. If towns
are to predominate over the country; if the State is
largely to supplant the churches in the direction of life,
and parents in the bringing up of the family; if the
new conditions of intellectual work are unfavourable to
originality; if, in a word, the man seems to dwindle as
the union of men grows in strength and importance, the
result cannot be without interest for those who are on
the brink of this future. To some it will perhaps seem
that the expectation of great changes for the better in
the constitution of political society is unreasonably
sanguine; and that the industrial classes, when they
come to the full consciousness of their power in any part
of the world, are certain to attempt impracticable experi-
ments or violent changes which will throw the world
back. It has been no part of this argument to consider
such possible contingencies. Here and there no doubt
blunders will be made, and ignorant tribunes of the
people will try their hands again at some of the old
failures unlimited issues of State paper; violent con-
fiscations; or the appointment of State officials generally
by the ballot. We are bound, however, to assume that
what is unreasonable will perish of itself, and that what
is reasonable will by degrees prevail. Moreover, the
experience of the last century ought to guard us against
a repetition of the worst blunders of the past. On the
whole, it is surely correct to say that the relations of
rich and poor are incomparably more healthy now than
they were a hundred years ago in all matters that are
regulated by law. It would be grossly unfair to charge
the excesses of the Reign of Terror in France upon the
26
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
French people; they were the work of a few fanatics,
and of a great many recruits from the criminal classes.
So far, however, as they were tacitly justified by the
public at the time of their perpetration, it was because
absolute power in the State and privilege in districts
had been so intolerably abused that the people scarcely
considered themselves secure unless the representatives
of the old order were exterminated. At present the State
is everywhere regarded as the protector from whom the
people have most to hope. The popular impulse is not
to set the action of government aside, but to awaken it
to what is conceived of as a healthier activity; and this
belief in the omnipotence of law is a great guarantee for
order and peaceable change; though it may of course be
that the man who cries to the State to help him, when
he ought to help himself, will gradually suffer paralysis
of strength and will.
The tendency of the age is to be hopeful, and it
may be admitted that a great deal in the past history
of the world encourages us not to despair of the future
of humanity. The best types of any given high race are
demonstrably stronger, taller, healthier than their ances-
tors two hundred or a thousand years ago; enjoy better
laws and many more comforts; are more humane,
better educated, and have a larger inheritance of trans-
mitted thought. That the pariah class in our great
cities is in the lowest abyss of misery may be conceded;
and it is probable that the working class generally has
now and again had glimpses of a better life than it
enjoys; but the whole tendency of modern reforms is
to improve the condition of the masses. The argument
developed in these pages supposes that there will actually
be change for the better. What is assumed also is that
the gradual decay of faith, the diminished importance
1
INTRODUCTION
27
i
of family life, and the loss of original power, as genius
is deprived of its noblest fields, will be serious offsets to
the material development of life; and that even phy-
sical conditions will be worse, as cities grow upon the
world, and as the field of adventure in unsettled regions
is closed. There is room for cheerful prognostication in
this direction also. Mr. Morris has conceived a charm-
ing vision of an England in which great cities shall
have been exchanged for country homesteads with an
occasional street, and in which brain work shall be
gradually discarded for manual labour. To attain all
these results, however, Mr. Morris is compelled to im-
agine a great upheaval of society; and his conclusions
appear to indicate that two-thirds of the population
must have perished or left the country, the other third
remaining stationary. Such a dream of the future differs
essentially from that of the following pages, which only
professes to consider what is likely to happen if we go
on for two hundred years more as we have gone on for
the last three-quarters of a century.
To the writer of these pages, what really seems most
hopeful in the outlook for the future is the prospect
that violent upheavals of society will be less and less
attempted as the State appears to be the best expres-
sion of the wishes of the majority; and that some
falling off in the energy and acquisitiveness, which are
fostered by individualism, will be compensated by the
growth of what we may call patriotism, as each man
identifies himself more and more with the needs and
aspirations of his fellow-countrymen. That men gener-
ally should look up to the State to take the lead in
industrial undertakings is probably undesirable, and is
perhaps never likely to occur. Whatever administra-
tions may do, they can hardly monopolise more than a
28
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
small portion of the field of human enterprise. Mean-
while, it is surely in the interests of all that the poorest
man in the country should feel that he owes inestimable
blessings to the political order under which he lives:
not only protection from foreign enemies, but equality
before the law, the certainty of employment in bad
times, education for his children, security for the purity
of his household life, and a fair chance of rising out of
the ranks if he possesses the requisite ability. If this
ideal has not been absolutely attained in the civilised
countries of the world, it is not because the best states-
men of all times have not been habitually working
towards it, but because individualism has meant privi-
lege-privilege for rank, for wealth, and for influence—
and because the outworks of individualism have been
guarded accordingly. More and more as we approach
the stationary state-as there are no countries to receive
immigrants; as war is more and more dreaded for its
chances, or recoiled from for its barbarity; as commerce
and invention are restricted because there are no new
regions to open up-will the old outlets for discontent
or unsatisfied ambition be closed. What are now the
governing classes will have to arrange reasonable com-
promises, by which the condition of the poor is made
endurable. It may be that there will be less enthusiasm
in those days, because there will be less hope; but it
may be assumed that there will be less misery, more
resignation, and it may even be more content. Life in
itself is an inexhaustible delight to all but a few; and
the conditions of life will be more tolerable, though the
sky above may be more gray.
CHAPTER I
THE UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF THE HIGHER RACES
There is a general belief that the higher races are bound to gain more
and more upon the lower.-North America, the Argentine Con-
federation, and Australia furnish the grounds of this belief.—The
races exterminated have not been industrial races.-The character
of a race determines its vitality more than climate.-Chinamen,
Hindoos, and negroes cannot be exterminated.—The Cape Colony is
not predominantly white, though settled under the most favourable
conditions.-Natal is already not a white man's colony, and is bound
to pass more and more into the hands of the coloured race.—Much
more are the parts of Africa north of Natal bound to remain negro.
-Were the whole emigration of Europe turned into Africa, it could
not build up a white people there. The negro would increase faster.
-Practically, too, there will always be parts where the white man
cannot live. Malaysia is uninhabitable by the white man, as a
colonist, building up families.-Central Asia is likely to be peopled
chiefly from China.-The Aryan race can only make small gains in
Europe, and in the Temperate Zone districts of Asia, Africa, America,
and Australasia.-China is a serious competitor for empire; even in
Tonquin and Burmah.-Chinese colonisation of the Straits Settle-
ments shows what the race is capable of.-The Chinese are bound
to people, and probably to rule Borneo.-There is a possibility of
Chinese expansion to the North and West.—It is conceivable that
the Hindoo race may spread over Beloochistan and Southern Persia.
-Great parts of Southern and Central America cannot be peopled
by the white race. The autochthonous races are gradually growing
upon the descendants of the Spaniards, and will absorb them and
possess the country.-These Indians are showing themselves capable
of self-government. If the Indians do not supersede men of Euro-
pean descent, negroes or Chinamen will.-Only the parts of America
from which Indians have already been driven are fitted to be the
homes of the white race.-Brazil will pass more and more into the
hands of the negroes, as certain of the United States are believed
to be passing.—The most fertile and populous parts of the earth are
therefore the inalienable freehold of the inferior races, though the
higher races may contribute, and be needed in the first instance, to
organise and develop them.-The development of a race within the
30
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
limits of a country-India or China-is no impediment to its expan-
sion abroad.—Emigration abroad will often stimulate the growth of
a population at home. The increase of population in Europe has
been retarded for eighteen centuries by misgovernment and internal
wars.-The general law is that the lower race increases faster than
the higher.—The English aristocracy is favoured by a great many
circumstances that would seem calculated to promote increase.—Its
families are constantly dying out.-The French and the negroes of
the United States furnish characteristic instances of slow and rapid
growth. England is an apparent but not a real exception to the
rule that a race with a high standard of comfort increases slowly.-
The condition of the Jews in Russia has been one of inferiority, but
not of intolerable hardship.-Having a strong motive to make money,
and no temptation to spend it freely, they have increased so rapidly
as to become a danger to the Empire.-The increased humanity of
war is telling in favour of the weaker races. -So are sanitation, and
the increased means of transport afforded by railways.-Therefore,
when we are swamped in certain parts of the world by the black and
yellow races, we shall know that it has been inevitable.
It seems to be generally assumed that the higher races
of men, or those which are held to have attained the
highest forms of civilisation, are everywhere triumphing
over the lower. North America is almost occupied by men
of European ancestry, and in South America the Euro-
pean element has received notable accessions in Brazil
and the Argentine Republic. Australasia is British;
Central Asia is being Russianised; and the Turk is
being driven out of Europe, where his heritage is bound
to fall to some race that has assimilated modern ideas
better than the Ottoman. In Africa the North-west
is passing under French influence, and has received a
leaven of French or Spanish colonists. Egypt is prac-
tically part of Europe; South Africa is English or
Dutch; and it seems scarcely questionable that England
and Germany will divide Central Africa. We are per-
petually assured that countries which till now were
assumed to be unfitted for European colonists, will
really allow them to multiply and prosper if they will
only comply with such reasonable conditions as the
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 31
climate exacts.
Central and Southern America, the
regions of the Congo, of the African Lakes, and of
Matabele and Mashonaland, Northern Australia and
Borneo, are among the parts which have been recom-
mended for European colonisation at various times;
and it is not uncommon to hear those who know India
declare that the Hill districts offer great opportunities
for European settlement. No one, of course, assumes
that the Aryan race-to use a convenient term-can
stamp out or starve out all their rivals on the face of
the earth. It is self-evident that the Chinese, the
Japanese, the Hindoos, if we may apply this general
term to the various natives of India, and the African
negro, are too numerous and sturdy to be extirpated.
It is against the fashion of modern humanity to wish
that they should suffer decrease or oppression. What
is assumed is that the first three of these races will
remain stationary within their present limits, while the
negro will contribute an industrial population to the
states which England and Germany will build up along
the Congo or the Zambesi. The white man in these
parts of the world is to be the planter, the mine-owner,
the manufacturer, the merchant, and the leading em-
ployee under all these, contributing energy and capital
to the new countries, while the negro is to be the field-
hand, the common miner, and the factory operative.
Here and there, in exceptional districts, the white man
will predominate in numbers, but everywhere he will
govern and direct in virtue of a higher intelligence and
more resolute will.
If we ask on what these calculations are based, we
shall probably be referred to the experience of the past
in America and Australia. In Canada and the United
States the red man is little more than a memory. The
32
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Carib has practically disappeared from the West India
Islands. In the Argentine Confederation the Indians
are a powerless minority, and the number of European
immigrants to that country and to South Brazil seems
likely to increase year by year. In Australasia, and in
the islands of the Pacific, where Europeans have settled,
or where they trade much, the Maori, the Kanaka, and
the Papuan are dying out. We cannot close our eyes
to the fact that certain weak races-even when, like
the Kanaka, they possess some very high qualities-
seem to wither away at mere contact with the European.
Modern legislation tries to protect them; missionaries
endeavour to seclude them from fatal influences; but
the good as well as the bad in civilisation tells mis-
chievously for a time upon unaccustomed constitutions.
The mere wearing of clothes, as savages do it without
changing them, and the disuse of artificial tribal restric-
tions on the inter-marriages of relations, are believed, by
some of those who know the Australian aboriginal best,
to be almost as much responsible for his decay as the
diseases of European origin that scourge immorality.
It will be noticed that these evanescent races—
different as they are in many respects—have two
features in common, that they have never been very
powerful numerically, and that they have never been
able to settle down in any steady way to industry. The
Kanakas (among whom we may include the Maories)
were of course limited by area. They could not do
much in the small islands they peopled. The best of
them, however, have conciliated the respect of Euro-
peans rather as soldiers and politicians than by any
aptitude they have displayed for regular work. Had
Chinamen or Japanese descended upon New Zealand
instead of the Maories, those islands would long ago
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 33
have been covered with a population of several millions,
such as no modern European power would have attempted
to displace. We may say even more certainly of the Red
Indians, that if they had chosen to learn agriculture
from the first European settlers, they would soon have
been numerous enough to bar all progress to the West.
The Indians of Mexico, of Central America, and of
Peru, who had attained to this level were not exter-
minated, though they were treated for generations with
the most atrocious cruelty. At this moment pure or
half-caste Indians predominate in all the Spanish
colonies that lie to the north of Chili, and their pre-
dominance is becoming more marked every year.
Without wishing to deny or depreciate the fine
qualities of a race that has produced such men as
Juarez and Mejia, and the heroes who fought at
Humaita, we may surely say that the Indians whom
Cortez and Pizarro conquered were not civilised up to
the level of modern Hindoos or Chinamen, and had
not the physical stamina of the negro race. All the
more remarkable is it that they have survived and
multiply.
How far climate has co-operated in circumscribing
the spread of the European race in America seems
difficult to determine. We can hardly suppose it is
accidental that the proportion of pure whites should
be smallest in the tropical parts of America, Guatemala
and Nicaragua, and largest in temperate latitudes. At
the same time, considering the great flexibility of the
human constitution, and the fact that whites can and
do labour in Texas, in Mexico, and in the districts of
the Lower Plate, we may probably say, that the char-
acter of the population of America has been determined
more by the varying adaptability of its primitive races
D
I
34
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
i
་
for civilisation than by climatic conditions. Had the
native Indians of Mexico and Peru been as untameable
as the Araucanians were or the Apaches are, the white
man could not have existed side by side with them.
He must either have exterminated them or have been
driven out. In fact, however, if the Indians whom
Cortez or Pizarro found had been essentially warlike,
they would not have been as numerous as they were,
and the work of destroying them, tribe after tribe,
would have been comparatively easy, as it has been
easy for the people of the United States to make a
clearance of Narraganset, Mohegan, Seneca, and Semi-
nole Indians.
It is probably safe to say, that the Chinaman, the
Hindoo, and the negro are in no danger of anything
like the fate that overtook the aborigines of the New
World at the hands of a foreign conqueror.
A com-
pact nation of 400,000,000 may be endangered by
revolts like that of the Tae-Pings or that of the
Mahommedans of Yunnan- for in both those cases
the war waged was one of extermination-but has
little to dread from a civilised power, except temporary
humiliation or tribute. Now that massacres on a large
scale are not sanctified by religion, there exists no
reason why a conqueror-if we can suppose a foreign
conqueror of China-should do more than levy taxes,
or exact a levy of conscripts or of forced labourers.
India left to itself might be rent for a time by the
war of Mussulman and Hindoo, but India is too
populous for any large part of its people to be exter-
minated; unless indeed wars were waged in the Chinese
fashion. That either Russians or Frenchmen, or indeed
any European race, could colonise any province acci-
dentally left desolate seems on the face of it impossible.
:
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 35
The climate would be fatal in a generation, except in
the hills; and that a remote province like Cashmere
could be cleared of its present people, settled by Euro-
peans, and kept free from the intrusion of native labour,
seems the most fanciful of speculations. There remain
therefore only Central Asia, Malaysia, and Africa as
possible outlets not yet used for the surplus population
of Europe, and of these Africa is naturally that which
is especially attracting the attention of Englishmen at
the present moment. It has been opened up very
much by English enterprise; its resources prove to
be vaster than was at one time supposed; and the
climate of large tracts appears to be tolerable. We
have arranged its partition with the most important
of our neighbours; and the posts we hold along the
Western Coast, in the Cape and Natal, and in Egypt,
are so many points of vantage for our empire. It seems
as if England for the moment was a little weary of
India, and disposed to regard the Colonies as rather
troublesome allies than dependencies, but was actively
sanguine of possibilities in the Dark Continent.
We may put aside the Portuguese and French
settlements of Mozambique, Angola, and Senegambia.
No one of these has succeeded in attracting colonists;
but the failure may be explained by climate or by an
administration that aimed rather at commerce than at
settlement. The case of the Cape and the sister
colonies seems to be more in point. The Dutch occu-
pation of the Cape dates from 1652, and the early
colonists were to a great extent picked men; many
of them French Huguenots. The natives with whom the
settlers came in contact were Hottentots and Bushmen,
weak races, of whom the Bushmen were not fitted to
be slaves, while the Hottentots were not very valuable.
Į
36
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Practically the Bushmen were exterminated; and when
the English conquered the colony in 1795 the Hot-
tentots were only as 14,500 to 21,000 whites.¹ Never-
theless, the convenience of slave labour had been found to
be so great that the coloured population of the colony
altogether was roughly as two in three, and that propor-
tion has been maintained ever since or increased, though
slavery has been abolished, though thousands of British
settlers have been poured into the country, and though
the diamond-fields have attracted thousands of immi-
grants. As many as 30,000 Kaffirs are said to have
taken refuge under British rule during the governorship
of Sir George Grey alone.2 Meanwhile it must be borne
in mind, that the outlying parts of the Cape colony
have always been very largely peopled by Dutch Boers,
who have to some extent stemmed the influx of free
coloured settlers by their constant wars with the
natives, and by, their disinclination to admit them
except as slaves. The Cape therefore shows us Euro-
pean influences at their strongest in Africa; and their
strongest is for the most masterful of European races
to be a decided, though at present a governing minority.
Still the influx of blacks at the Cape is not yet so great
as to have made manual and unskilled labour discredit-
able to white men.
The case of Natal is more instructive for what may
be expected in Africa generally. Natal was seized by
the British in 1842, the Boers who had occupied it,
and to whom it was valuable for its sea-board, being
a mere handful of men among natives who accepted
them for the moment as deliverers from the Zulus.
Nevertheless, the number of black inhabitants at that
1 Theale's Compendium of South African History, chap. xiv.
2 Wilmot's History of the Cape Colony, p. 83.
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 37
time, though great in comparison with the Dutch, was
so inconsiderable as to be only five to the square mile.¹
The new possession offered great advantages of soil and
climate. A great deal of it is rich land, and it rises
in plateaus from the coast, so that several varieties of
temperature may be enjoyed. During the first years
of settlement there was no danger from the Zulus,
whose warriors had almost been exterminated in
Dingan's wars. From time to time assisted immigrants
were poured literally in thousands into the country.
In 1878-79 the presence of a large British army made
the fortunes of contractors and farmers.
For years
the diamond-fields and gold-diggings of the Orange
Free State have reflected prosperity over Natal. Never-
theless, in 1891, nearly fifty years after its first settle-
ment, Natal has only 36,000 Europeans out of 481,000
settlers, the remainder being chiefly Zulus, though
partly Hindoos and Chinamen. The lower races have
nearly doubled in proportion since 1863, when one-
seventh of the population was European. The reasons
of this are not far to seek. British rule means order
and peace, industry and trade, and the enjoyment of
property under fairly equal laws. To the African
native the establishment of a colony like Natal is like
throwing open the gates of paradise. He streams in,
offering his cheap though not very regular labour, and
supplying all his own wants at the very smallest expendi-
ture of toil. Where he multiplies, however, the British
race begins to consider labour of all but the highest kinds
2
1 "Before the Dutch occupied it, the blacks were only as one to six
square miles.”—Aylward's Transvaal, p. 5.
2 Although the Dutch rule is far less tender to the natives than the
British, the immigration of natives began from the establishment of
government by the Dutch in 1839. "In their own expressive way of
speaking, they could sleep without fear under the shield of the white
man.”—Theale's South African History, chap. xxxi.
38
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
dishonourable; and from the moment that a white
population will not work in the fields, on the roads,
in the mines, or in factories, its doom is practically
sealed. It is limited to supplying employees, merchants,
contractors, shopmen, and foremen to the community.
Sooner or later the black race will be educated to a
point at which it will demand and receive a share in
these employments and in the government.¹ Whenever
that happens, the white race will be either absorbed
or disappear. The mass will gradually depart, but a
few, who have lost the sense of superiority, will remain,
intermarry, and be perpetuated in the persons of a few
hundred, or it may be a few thousand, mulattoes and
quadroons.
Now the fate of Natal is bound to be the fate of
those parts of the African Continent which lie north
of Natal and south of the desert of Sahara. It is quite
conceivable that tracts will be discovered with rich
gold-fields, like those of California and Australia, and
with a climate allowing white men to labour. Tens of
thousands of diggers may be attracted there, and may
determine to keep the gold deposits to themselves, and
to debar blacks or Chinamen from working them. Even
in this case the blacks will still press into the country
that they may enjoy the security of English rule, and
will be field-hands, domestic servants, and generally
drudges of every kind, reinforcing the original negro
population, so as to keep it always superior in numbers
to the whites. Before long the surface and easily
worked deposits will have been exhausted. Inde-
pendent miners will be replaced by companies, and
1 This is already the case, to some extent, at the Cape. Mr. Theale
remarks, that as landholders the Fingoes are entitled to vote for
members of Parliament, and large numbers avail themselves of this
privilege."-South African History, chap. xxvii.
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 39
companies will employ the cheapest labour they can
secure, which will always be that of the native and
inferior race.¹ Let it be remembered that a country
as big as Great Britain, which would be a mere patch
on the Continent of Africa, would have a native popu-
lation of half a million if it were peopled as Natal was
when the British Government took it over. Can it be
conceived that England could send out half a million
settlers to balance these, unless the attraction were as
great as that of Australian gold was for a time? And
even assuming the half-million to come, where would
they be at the end of a century with the black race
increasing faster by births, and recruited by constant
accessions from the populous interior of the continent?
Can it be supposed that such a state would fare better
than Georgia or South Carolina has fared? The best
chance for a community so constituted would be to
declare itself independent, as the Boers of the Trans-
vaal have done, and so maintain the supremacy of
the white race. Such a country, however, would not
escape the fate of all countries into which an inferior
people is admitted in large numbers. Its colonists
would soon be divided into a wealthy ruling caste,
planters or miners, and mean whites; while the blacks,
servile or semi-servile, would increase year by year,
because their labour was necessary to maintain and
extend the fortunes of the governing caste. Such a
community might last for generations, but its chance
of perpetuity would be far smaller in Africa, where it
was surrounded by dense masses of an unfriendly popu-
lation, than it was in Louisiana, where slavery might
1 "In capacity the African is fit to work; in inclination he is
willing to work; and in actual experiment he has done it.”—Drum-
mond's Tropical Africa, p. 65.
t
1
40
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
}
have lasted to this day if slave-owners had been content
to obey the law, and had not been infatuated with the
: arrogance which is the curse that avenges unrighteous
domination.
So far the argument has only sought to establish
that no emigration of the English people, or of these
reinforced by other races, can make any such impression
on any part of the African Continent as to transform
regions that are now peopled however sparsely by blacks
into regions peopled by whites. To take an extreme
assumption, however, we may suppose the whole emigra-
tion that now leaves Europe for America and Australia
diverted suddenly to Africa, either because prospects in
Africa became suddenly so attractive as to kindle the
popular imagination, or because the people of America
and Australia had restricted the influx of settlers by
legislation. The whole excess of emigrants over immi-
grants from Great Britain may be put roughly at a
quarter of a million; and the settlers carried from
French, German, and Italian ports can hardly exceed
200,000 more. In the course of twenty years this would
mean that a population of 9,000,000 had been trans-
ported to a new home, and the most favourable estimate
of the natural increase of these settlers will not raise
their number above 12,000,000. It must be admitted
that a great settlement of this kind would involve
organisation and administrative capacity of a very rare
order. The colonists will not bear to be discharged
by steamers at the rate of nearly 1200 a day at a single
port, and left to find work and sustenance as they can.
They will have to be distributed by railways over
different parts of the continent; and the work of
clearing the jungle, building roads, draining swamps,
and developing mines may of course find employment
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 4I
for any number. Meanwhile, wherever they penetrate
they will bring security and employment to the black
races of the interior. These are now roughly estimated
for Central Africa alone at 100,000,000. If they increase
only at the rate of one per cent a year during the twenty
years that have been assumed, the increase will be more
than double the influx of whites. If they multiply as
the blacks in the United States were once multiply-
ing, they will have grown at the rate of 50,000,000,
while the whites by an impossible rate of progression
will only number 12,000,000. Under these circum-
stances, can we conceive any large part of the continent
where the whites will be able to settle down, and
develop an industrial civilisation, such as is found in
any part of America and in Australia?
In all this discussion it has been assumed, for pur-
poses of argument, that our imaginary European immi-
grants will be able to spread and establish themselves
everywhere. No one can seriously expect this. There
must be large tracts more or less like Senegambia and
the parts about Sierra Leone, where only white men of
exceptional constitutions, and submitting to a very
strict regime, can live and do work. In the struggle
for existence the African race, which can flourish every-
where in its native habitat, is bound to have an advan-
tage over the race that can only thrive in the best parts
of the continent.¹
It has seemed important to argue out the case of
Central Africa at some length, because no other part of
the world is supposed to furnish so magnificent an
1 "The really appalling mortality of Europeans is a fact with which
all who have any idea of casting in their lot with Africa should seriously
reckon. . . . The malaria spares no man no prediction can be made
beforehand as to which regions are haunted by it and which are safe.”-
Drummond's Tropical Africa, p. 44.
42
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
outlet to the teeming myriads of Europe. The assump-
tion is, that it is to be another Australia, an assumption
which leaves out of account the fact that the Australian
aborigines have been weak and few, and that the climate
of the settled parts of Australia is magnificent. Next
in importance to Africa for western Europeans are the
islands of the Malay Archipelago, which cover an extent
of land equal to half Europe, and which are at present
most imperfectly peopled by a population which may be
roughly put at between 30,000,000 and 40,000,000.
It cannot be extreme to say, that an additional
200,000,000 might easily settle in those of the islands
which, like Celebes, Sumatra, New Guinea, and Borneo,
are not peopled up to one tithe of what they could
support.¹ It is almost equally certain that these
colonists cannot be white men. After holding Java
for centuries, the Dutch are still nothing more than a
garrison, a civil service, and a collection of foreign
traders. They number about 30,000, while the native
population has more than quadrupled during the cen-
tury, and is now nearly 20,000,000. Settlement by
Dutchmen in Java is not prohibited, and a good many
old employees live in the hills; but the climate is better
suited for natives, and this is even truer of Borneo and
New Guinea, the countries which offer most attraction
to immigrants. These, except in favoured parts, have
1
1 The four islands specified have alone an area of 837,000 square
miles, and a population roughly estimated at about 8,000,000. Java
and Madura with less than a sixteenth of this area have a population of
20,000,000. But besides these islands, there is Luzon as big as Ireland;
"eighteen more islands are on the average as large as Jamaica" (4193
square miles); more than a hundred are as large as the Isle of Wight"
(135 square miles).—Wallace's Malay Archipelago, p. 3.
Five years ago,
Obi Major, with an area of 600,000 acres, and "apparently both fertile
and healthy," was still uninhabited.-Guillemard's Cruise of the Marchesa,
vol. ii. p. 235.
I
UNCHANGEABLe limits of hIGHER RACES 43
the hot damp climate which is deadly to the native
of the Temperate Zone. That any great number of
European immigrants could be acclimatised in them
seems more than doubtful; that even if they came they
could compete with the Chinese labour, which follows
the English rule everywhere in Malaysia, is not to be
believed. The work of the European in this archi-
pelago is to organise government, maintain peace, make
roads, and form plantations.
There is a vast tract of country in Central Asia that
offers great possibilities for settlement. Eastern Afghan,
and Western Turkestan, with an area of 1,500,000
square miles, have a population which certainly does
not exceed 15,000,000, or ten to the square mile.
Were they peopled as the Baltic provinces of Russia
are-no very extreme supposition-they would support
90,000,000.¹ It is conceivable that something like this
may be realised at no very distant date, when railroads
are carried across China, and when water-the great
want of Turkestan-is provided for it by a system of
canalisation and artesian wells. Meanwhile, it is im-
portant to observe that whatever benefit is derived
1 Marvin in the second chapter of his book on Merv brings evidence
to show that the districts between the Atrek and Goorgan, and the Atrek
and Sunbar rivers, the country between Astrabad and Meshed, and
between Meshed and Herat, are for the most part eminently fertile. He
adds on good Russian authority that great parts of the steppes that are
called desert could be transformed into excellent pasture by irrigation.
Schuyler says of the valley of Shahrisubs: "Kitab, Shaar, and even
Yakrbak and Tchirakahi with their surrounding villages looked like forests
rather than cities from the number of gardens and orchards” (Turkistan,
ii. p. 62). Of the district between Bukhara and Varganzi, a distance of
thirty miles, he says: “The whole road led through well-cultivated
gardens and fields" (Turkistan, ii. p. 114). Bukhara, however, is one
of the least promising parts of Turkestan; and Schuyler notes elsewhere,
that the desert is gaining upon the cultivable land (Turkistan, ii. p.
312). Of Eastern Turkestan, a region containing at least 250,000 square
miles, and only 1,000,000 inhabitants, Boulger says, that it has been
called "the garden of Asia" (Life of Yakoob Rey, p. 2).
44
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
from an increase of population in these regions will
mostly fall to China. That empire possesses the better
two-thirds of Turkestan, and can pour in the surplus of
a population of 400,000,000. Russia can only con-
tribute the surplus of a population of about 100,000,000;
and though the Russian is a fearless and good colonist,
there are so many spaces in Russia in Europe to be
filled up, so many growing towns that need workmen,
so many counter-attractions in the gold-bearing dis-
tricts of Siberia, that the work of peopling the out-
lying dependencies of the empire is likely to be very
gradual. Indeed it is reported that Russia is encourag-
ing Chinese colonists to settle in the parts about
Merv.
Thus far the argument has aimed at showing that
the most highly civilised races of the world, being those
at present which are more or less purely Aryan, are
not likely to wrest any large tracts of territory from
half-civilised or savage peoples. That the races which
now occupy the United States and Canada will people
the countries they are in, with some possible exceptions
to be noted hereafter, seems scarcely to be doubted.
It may be hoped that this population will be numbered
by hundreds of millions. That France and Italy will
gradually Europeanise Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli, seems
very possible. It may even be that Morocco will be
absorbed. These countries are rich and sparsely in-
inhabited, and their native populations of Arabs and
Kabyles may easily be assimilated to their European
conquerors. In the south-east of Europe it seems
certain that the Turk will sooner or later die out or
cross back into Asia. His failure to establish himself
permanently is incidental evidence how hard it is to
change the population of a country. The Osmanli
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 45
made life almost unendurable to the subject people for
centuries, but though he depopulated the country, and
paralysed its progress, he stopped short of extermina-
tion. The inevitable result has been that the industrial
races have increased, while the military race has de-
clined; so that the Turks proper in Europe, who were
numbered at from 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 in the reign
of Solyman I. (1520-1566)¹ can only now be estimated
at a little more than a million and a half. The succes-
sion of the Turk at Constantinople is certain to devolve
upon a civilised people, and whether it fall to Russia,
Austria, or one of the emancipated states, will mean
that the higher race has entered again upon part of its
natural habitat, from which it had been irregularly
expelled. Beyond this it is possible that Russia may
contribute a large immigration to Western Turkestan;
that English settlers may reinforce the white population
of the Cape, so as to keep it dominant; and that the
Australian feeling against Asiatic immigrants may keep
Northern Australia free from any overwhelming influx
of Chinamen or Hindoo coolies.
Meanwhile, the small triumphs which the Aryan
race may achieve in these directions are likely to be
more than balanced by the disproportionate growth of
what we consider the inferior races. China is generally
regarded as a stationary power which can fairly hold
its own, though it has lost Annam to France, and the
suzerainty of Upper Burmah to England, and the Amoor
Valley to Russia, but which is not a serious competitor
in the race for empire. There is a certain plausibility
in this view. On the other hand, China has recovered
Eastern Turkestan from Mahommedan rule and from a
Russian protectorate, is dominating the Corea, and has
1 Creasy's History of the Ottoman Turks, p. 199.
46
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
stamped out a dangerous rebellion in Yunnan. No one
can doubt that if China were to get for sovereign a man
with the organising and aggressive genius of Peter the
Great or Frederick the Second, it would be a very for-
midable neighbour to either British India or Russia.
Neither is it easy to suppose that the improvements,
now tentatively introduced into China, will not soon be
taken up and pushed on a large scale, so that railways
will be carried into the heart of Asia, and large armies
drilled and furnished with arms of precision on the
European model. In any such case the rights which
China has reluctantly conceded or still claims over
Annam and Tonquin, over Siam, over Upper Burmah,
and over Nepaul, may become matters of very serious
discussion. At present the French settlements arrest
the expansion of China in the direction most dangerous
to the world. Unfortunately, the climate of Saigon is
such as no European cares to settle in, and the war to
secure Tonquin was so unpopular that it cost a French
premier his tenure of office. It is difficult to suppose
that France would make great sacrifices for such a pos-
session. It seems not unlikely that she might consent
to sell her rights, or to exchange them for some com-
mercial advantage, or for some territorial equivalent,
such as China might have to offer in the future. Should
some arrangement of this kind ever be made, China will
incontinently resume the old protectorate over Siam,
and will become very much more formidable than she
is even at present from her inherent strength.
Whatever, however, be the fortune of China in this
direction, it is scarcely doubtful that she will not only
people up to the furthest boundary of her recognised
territory, but gradually acquire new dominions. The
history of our Straits Settlements will afford a familiar
I
47
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES
1
instance how the Chinese are spreading. They already
form half the population predominating in Singapore
and Perak, and the best observers are agreed that the
Malay cannot hold his own against them. They are
beginning to settle in Borneo and Sumatra, and they
are supplanting the natives in some of the small islands
of the Pacific, such as Hawaii. The climate of all these
countries suits them, and they commend themselves to
governments and employers by their power of steady
industry; and they intermarry freely up to a safe point
with the women of the country,2 getting all the advan-
<<
1 Baron von Hübner says: "On my first visit to Singapore in 1871,
the population consisted of 100 white families, of 20,000 Malays, and of
a few thousand Chinese. On my return there, in the beginning of 1884,
the population was divided, according to the official census, into 100
whites, 20,000 Malays, and 86,000 Chinese.”—Von Hübner's Through
the British Empire, vol. i. pp. 387, 388. Previous attempts by the
Chinese to settle had failed from time to time, in consequence of the
hostility they invariably provoked. Thus Miss Bird says of Sungei
Ujong: "In 1828 the number of Chinese working the mines here was
1000, and in the same year they were massacred by the Malays. They
now number 10,000, and under British protection have nothing to fear."-
Golden Chersonese, p. 188. "Throughout the length and breadth of
Malaysia," says Dr. Guillemard, "the Chinaman has made his way.
How he swarms in Singapore we are all aware; but that he is equally
at home in the Aru Islands, and bids fair to monopolise the trade of
the Philippines, is perhaps not so generally known. At Macassar he
shares the mercantile plum with the German. In the Moluccas the vast
amount of graves around Ternate testify to the number of his race who
have lived and died there. In New Guinea alone he is not to be found
for neither white man nor Malay has as yet fairly established himself there,
and the Celestial is rarely or never a pioneer."—Cruise of the Marchesa,
ii. p. 126. "Every town from Northern Burmah south, and throughout the
vast Indian Archipelago," says Mr. Harrison, "has already fallen into his
(the Chinaman's) hands. Even the farms and gardens about the towns are
becoming his.”—Race with the Sun. Of Bangkok Mr. Harrison says (p.
134): "The wily Chinese monopolise the gambling-houses, as indeed
they do nearly all the avenues of wealth, and nearly all kinds of business
which require industry and skill." "A considerable portion of the
population" (of Palembang, in Sumatra) "are Chinese and Arabs."-
Wallace's Malay Archipelago, p. 122.
;
2 "Les premiers Chinois, qui se sont établis à Malacca, ont épousé
des Malaises. Aujourd'hui ces familles ne s'allient plus qu'entr'elles.
En observant rigoureusement cette coutume, ces hommes singuliers sont
48
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
tages of alliance, yet not sacrificing their nationality.
Several causes have retarded their spread hitherto the
regions enumerated have mostly been too insecure for
an industrial people to flourish in, until the British or
the Dutch established order; the government of China
has hitherto discouraged emigration; English adminis-
trations have been obliged to be rather wary in their
dealings with a people who showed at Sarawak and
Penang that they were capable of combining for pur-
poses of massacre;¹ and the Chinese superstition about
burial in the sacred soil of the Celestial Empire made
the great majority of the emigrants birds of passage.
All these causes are disappearing. Malay piracy is
becoming a thing of the past; the policy of China is
being modified; and it can hardly be supposed that
the regard for a family burial-place will long continue
to keep millions of not very imaginative men from
making their homes in the countries in which their
labour will be most valuable. Lastly, it is more than
conceivable that some of these countries will
pass under
Chinese rule. The alternatives are that they should be
left under foreign protectorates, as at present, till Malays
and Dyaks have increased in the same proportion as the
Javanese, or that they should be peopled by emigrants
from Europe.
Now, the former of these is the only imaginable
alternative to Chinese settlement. Europeans cannot
flourish under the Tropics, and will not work with the
hand where an inferior race works. What we have to
consider, therefore, is the probability that the natives
parvenus à confectionner des femmes parfaitement semblables à celles de
Fokien, et de Kuan Tong."—-Yvan: De France en Chine, p. 237.
1 Mr. Thompson points out that the Chinese guilds are not only a
menace to political administration, but are apt to make war with one
another.—Malacca, Indo-China, and China, p. 15.
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 49
who are giving way to the Chinese in the Malay Penin-
sula will be able to make head against them in Borneo
or Sumatra. Borneo is nearly six times as big as
Java, and if it were peopled like Java would support
a population of nearly 100,000,000. It has actually,
by recent estimates, less than 2,000,000 upon it, and
these are distributed among several different races. Of
these, the tribes in the interior are more likely to be
exterminated than reclaimed; and the Dyaks and Malays,
numbering between them about 1,500,000, are the
only races strong enough to compete in industry with
Chinamen. Obviously there is at present room for both
in the island, and the British North Borneo Company is
stimulating the immigration of coolies, both from China
and from the Malay Peninsula. In the long run the
Chinese, who outnumber the Malays as sixteen to one,
who are more decidedly industrial, and who organise
where they can in a way that precludes competition,
are tolerably certain to gain the upper hand. They
may not destroy the early settlers, but they will reduce
them to the position of the Hill tribes in India, or of
the Ainos in Japan. Assume fifty years hence that
China has taken its inevitable position as one of the
great powers of the world, and that Borneo has a popu-
lation of 10,000,000, predominantly Chinese, is it easy
to suppose in such a case that the larger part of Borneo
would still be a dependency of the Netherlands? or that
the whole island would not have passed, by arms or
diplomacy, into the possession of China? Assume Eng-
land-or it might be Germany, as administering the in-
heritance of Holland-to possess a nominal suzerainty,
would Borneo any the less be Chinese, to all practical
purposes, in its commerce, in its political sympathies, in
its civilisation, and in its influence upon its neighbours?
E
50
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
1
The expansion of China towards the south and
south-west seems most probable, because there is here
most natural wealth to develop, and because the cir-
cumstances are specially favourable: administrations
guided by commercial principles, and populations too
weak to resist immigration. Nothing but the vigilant
opposition of the Australian democracies has kept the
Chinese from becoming a power on that more remote
continent; and at one time within the last forty years
the Chinamen actually in Victoria numbered something
like 13 per cent of the adult male population.2 It
cannot be held, however, that the Chinese are debarred
from gaining territory to the north or west. Even if
we choose to regard the Corea and Thibet as already
Chinese, there is Nepaul, which might easily be annexed
on the Indian frontier if England were crippled or occu-
pied; and there are parts of Turkestan which might
be wrested under some similar conjuncture from Russia;
or, more naturally still, China might first people and
then occupy the provinces along the lower course of the
Amoor, which she ceded very reluctantly under pressure,
at a time when she was in dire need. There are those
who believe that the Chinaman is likely to supersede
Spaniard and Indian alike in parts of South America.³
Without assuming that all of these possibilities are
likely to be realised, there is surely a strong presump-
tion that so great a people as the Chinese, and possessed
of such enormous natural resources, will sooner or later
1 "Necessity has made the law" (against emigration) " a dead letter."
-Williams, Middle Kingdom, vol. i. p. 278 (c. 1883).
2 In 1857 Victoria had a total male population of 297,547. Of
these the Chinese numbered 34,874.-Hayter's Statistical Summary of
Victoria from 1835-81 inclusive; Fairfax's Handbook to Australasia for
1859.
3 Or, le Chinois, ce me semble, dominera un jour ce monde, qui dès
maintenant dépend de lui.—Wiener, Pérou et Bolivie, p. 36.
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 51
overflow their borders, and spread over new territory,
and submerge weaker races.
It is difficult to suppose that the motley populations
which occupy India and British Burmah can ever be
welded into anything as homogeneous as the Chinese
Empire. Meanwhile, it is important to observe that
British rule, so far as it has any effect, is tending to
obliterate the religious differences between Mahommedan
and Hindoo, and the racial differences between the Ben-
galee and the Ghoorka, the Sikh and the Madrassee.
Whether England retain her rule or be superseded by
some other power, or give place to an independent state
or states, it is permissible to hope that the old days of
sanguinary misrule, when whole tracts were desolated
by Pindarees, are never likely to recur. Even if we
assume a state of things such as has been witnessed in
South America, a cleavage into a number of small states,
incessant revolutions and wars, there seems no reason
why the Peninsula should not recover itself, as South
America has to some extent done, so that population
and wealth might increase in it. It can maintain a
much greater population than it has within its own
borders-50 per cent more if it be peopled as China
is; and it is barred from any great increase to the east
by the fact that its people could hardly hope to contend
against the Chinese. To the west, however, there is a
possibility of expansion over Beluchistan, which is not
all desert,¹ and over Afghanistan, which is not all moun-
1 Of the five provinces forming Beluchistan, Makran, the ancient
Gedrosia, seems to be the worst, but the others have large patches of good
land, the area of which might be increased by irrigation. Brahmi Khan
(1755-95) introduced gardens with considerable success (Oliver's
Across the Border, chap. ii.) Captain Christie says of the little district
of Seistan: "The country, although now inhabited by Afghans and
Beloochees in felt tents, still bears the marks of former civilisation and
opulence, and there are ruins of villages, forts, and windmills along the
52
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
tain. An industrial race coming in gradually under the
protection of British arms may easily reclaim large por-
tions of these districts, and swamp the military tribes
now settled in them. Those who bear in mind that
Persia, with a territory three times as large as that of
France, has a population not half as large again as that
of Belgium,¹ will perhaps incline to believe that here
also in the southern and eastern provinces are re-
gions which may ultimately come to have their fields
tilled by coolies, and their commerce carried on by
Banyahs.
Some who admit the possibility that the Chinese
and Hindoo races may spread over new territory and
absorb other populations in Asia may doubt the future
of the American Indians, and hold that Southern and
Central America are as much the destined inheritance of
the white man as the greater part of Northern America
seems already to be his estate. Wiener, who travelled
among the Indians of Peru and Bolivia, declares that
the fine qualities of the aboriginal race have been de-
stroyed beyond the power of recovery by the degrada-
tion of centuries of misrule, that the half-caste Indian
is fit for nothing but servitude, and that the free Indian
has reverted to savagery. 2 Professor Orton, who saw
the Indian in Ecuador and along the Amazon districts,
where he is perhaps at his lowest, declares that “yet a
whole route from Podbar to Dushak, the capital."-Travels in Beloochistan,
Appendix, p. 407. Seistan is no doubt more Afghan than Beluch.
However, even of Makran, Marco Polo speaks as a country where the
people had abundance of food, and to which many merchants resorted
by sea and land.—Book iii. chap. xxxiv.
1 This is taking the largest estimate that adopted by the Almanach
de Gotha-of nearly 8,000,000 souls. It is characteristic of the un-
certainty attaching to estimates of population in countries like Persia
that the Statesman's Year-Book puts the population at only 4,400,000,
or 20 per cent less than that of Belgium.
2 Wiener's Pérou et Bolivie, pp. 731-738.
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 53
little while and the race will be extinct as the dodo."¹
Meanwhile Wiener goes so far as to say that the acclim-
atisation of the white man has only given good results
where there is a cross with native blood. "Families of
pure white race generally begin to die out in the third
generation, and become the hopeless victims of scrofula.” 2
Orton makes the admission, that few of the whites in
the Amazon valley "are of pure Caucasian descent."
A later American traveller, Mr. Curtis, declares that
the interior of Brazil is unsuited to Europeans. "The
climate is so enervating that, after an experience of two
years, the German colonist will be found by his Portu-
guese predecessor sitting in the shade of the fig-tree,
and hiring a negro to do his work." Mr. Curtis adds,
that even in the southern provinces the success of
colonists has been very small. "Most of the colonies
have broken up," and many of the members "have suc-
cumbed to the influences of the climate and died of
fever." If these statements are true, and there is a
good deal to support them, it would seem as if Southern
and Central America, north of Uruguay, are never likely
to be the home of the white man in dense masses.
If the Indians are dying out, like the pure-blooded
Spaniards, the country will be peopled by half-castes or
by negroes, or it may be by Chinamen, who have got a
footing in Peru, or by coolies, such as are working
profitably in British Guiana.
Meanwhile, it must be borne in mind that some
observers take a much more promising view of the
prospects of the Indian than M. Wiener and Mr. Orton.
Mr. Curtis distinguishes the races in Ecuador as divided
1 Orton's Andes and Amazon, p. 316.
2 Wiener's Pérou et Bolivie, p. 30.
3 Curtis's Capitals of Southern America, p. 706.
54
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
into a Spanish aristocracy, half- caste artisans and
mechanics, and Indian cultivators and servants.¹ Some-
thing like this seems to be the general division, and if
it embraced all the inhabitants of the country, it would
mean that the families of Spanish descent were an
insignificant minority who must sooner or later be
absorbed into the inferior population. Statistics, in
fact, show that the whites so-called are only as one in
eight of the whole nation of Ecuador. Now Ecuador is
a good specimen of a country in which the white race
holds its own. When we go farther north, we find Mr.
Boyle, a very acute observer, and who spent some time
in Central America, declaring his conviction, "that the
descendants of the Spaniards, after the lapse of three
centuries, are still but squatters in the land; round
them on every side are the sons of the old races.” 2 Mr.
Boyle estimates the free Indians of Guatemala at
1,000,000 at least; and official statistics declare that
in the capital itself only one-tenth are pure-blooded
whites. That anything like an accurate census has been
taken, or is possible in these countries, may be doubted.
Wild Indians will not give in returns; and among the
free the tendency till lately must always have been to
claim affinity with the dominant caste. Meanwhile, it
may be noticed of the capital of Guatemala, that
Whetham declares few of the inhabitants to have
Spanish blood, and of Mexico, that the Europeans, who
in 1810 were classed as one in six of the population,
3
1 Curtis's Capitals of Southern America, p. 329.
2 Boyle's Ride Across a Continent, vol. i.
p.
157.
3 Across Central America, p. 22. Mr. Boyle says that in Masaya, 4
miles distant from Granada, out of 18,000 inhabitants nine-tenths are
pure-blooded Indians. He adds a striking testimony to the thickness of
the old Indian population: "In no part of the country, savannah, shore,
or forest, can you dig without encountering pottery."-Ride Across a
Continent, p. 7.
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 55
are now set down as little more than a twentieth. If
we take the popular estimates, we find Humboldt in
1790 putting the pure Indians in Mexico at two-fifths
of the population;¹ while Alison, taking the date 1810,
calculates the Spaniards in Mexico, Guatemala, and
Caracas at about 1,600,000 in a total population of
8,500,000, or rather less than 20 per cent.² The
numbers given for this year in the Statesman's
Year - Book make the descendants of the Spaniard
at most 1,200,000 out of a population of more than
12,000,000 in those countries. On the whole, I believe,
that in Spanish America, excluding Chili and the
Argentine Confederation, the pure or nearly pure de-
scendants of the conquerors are not as one in four to
half-castes and Indians, and that these latter amount to
about 25,000,000, pretty evenly divided.*
3
It may be admitted at once that the position of
those of Indian blood is still very secondary. Still, the
evidence is, that they are conquering a place for them-
selves in other ways than by increasing and multiplying.
General Porfirio Diaz," says Mr. Curtis, "the foremost
man in Mexico to-day, and one whose public career will
fill pages in the history of that republic, is the repre-
sentative of mixed Spanish and Aztec ancestry, like all
of the famous native leaders of the last half-century.
In fact, however, the most distinguished of all, Juarez,
was a pure-blooded Indian, as were also Mejia and
"15
1 Humboldt, La Nouvelle Espagne, livre ii. chap. vi. Stephens says
that the Indians constituted (c. 1842) "three-fourths of the inhabitants of
Guatemala."-Central America, vol. i. p. 305.
2 Alison's History of Europe, vol. ix. p. 185.
³ Even in Chili the population is far from being of pure European
descent. "The Chilian soldier is by race more than three parts Arau-
canian," says Mr. Morris (Dark Days in Chili, p. 283).
4 See Appendix A.
5 Curtis's Capitals of Southern America, p. 30.
56
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
.
Mendez, two of Maximilian's best generals. In Guate-
mala the pure - blooded Indian, Carera, defeated the
ablest revolutionary leader, the Spaniard with a dash
of Corsican blood-Morazan; and having been raised
to power by the Church, had the sagacity to discard it,
and establish a secular polity. The most distinguished
of his successors, Barrios, was a half-caste. Guardia, one
of the best presidents of Costa Rica, was a half-caste; and
even in Peru, where the tradition of Pizarro's brutality
was long maintained, and assisted to depress the natives,
there has been a half-caste president, Castilla. There,
too, the old rule that reserved office and the priesthood
for the descendants of the conquerors has fallen into
disuse.¹ Wiener stayed with a half-caste priest, and
Orton carried a letter to an Indian governor. Even in
Mexico the ruling class is still essentially white; and
everywhere the whites are fighting and intriguing for
the spoils of office, while the native people remains
passive and seemingly unobservant, and barely contri-
butes here and there a successful leader to a popular
movement. Meanwhile, the general level of the autoch-
thonous race is being raised; it is acquiring riches and
self-respect, and must sooner or later get the country
back into its hands. The Guaranis of Paraguay, whose
race is widely diffused over the south, cannot be very
inferior to the Aztecs. Literature is the last growth of
a new country, but more than two centuries ago a de-
scendant of the Incas, Garcilasso de la Vega, conquered
an honourable name for himself in Spanish literature.²
1 L'Église est devenue, en effet, à Pérou depuis peu de temps seule-
ment endurante à l'égard des métis, qui veulent embrasser la carrière
ecclésiastique. Jadis tout homme de couleur en était effectivement
exclus.-Wiener, Pérou et Bolivie, p. 299.
2 "His commentaries are a striking and interesting book," says
Ticknor (History of Spanish Literature, vol. iii. p. 190).
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 57
However, the question whether the Indians will
people part of South America, and the whole of Central
America again, is comparatively an unimportant issue.
What seems certain is that no European race will take
their place. The weakest of the American states, be it
Honduras or Nicaragua, is protected by climate from
the Anglo-Saxon or German immigrant. M. de Lesseps
in 1880 defended the climate of the district through
which his canal was to pass by the statement, that out
of 2000 Chinamen engaged on the construction of the
Panama Railway only 500 had died during the work,
and that of these half had committed suicide; but even
this mortality of adult males will appear considerable to
most men; and M. de Lesseps was compelled to admit
that the mortality among the Irish had been much
greater. He explained this away as the effect of
drunken habits.¹ It seems proved that Europeans who
are naturally strong, and who commit no excess, have a
fair chance of life in the higher parts and in the re-
claimed parts of Central America. This, however, is as
much as can be maintained. M. de Verbrugghe, who
has vindicated the reputation of the district marked out
for the Panama Canal, admits that many parts on the
Nicaragua route, such as Grey Town, the mouths of the
Atrato, and the marshes of the Trinidad are absolutely
pestilential. Generally it may be said that immigrants
from the Temperate Zone are likely to repeat the experi-
ence of Paterson's party, until the jungle and the
swamp have been brought back into cultivation. The
work of reclaiming them, however, can only be done by
races tolerant of heat, and more or less insensible to
2
1 Lanier's L'Amérique, p. 348.
2 Verbrugghe's Le Canal Inter-Océanique de Panama, cited in Lanier's
L'Amérique, pp. 347-350.
58
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
fever, and when these have established themselves in
large numbers, there will be no place left for the
white man. The southern planters who subsidised
Walker, intended to turn Nicaragua into another
Louisiana. Now that slavery is abolished, the country
can only be developed by free Indians or by free
negroes coming in from the states. These are the two
natural sources of the coloured labour that is indis-
pensable.
Of the other countries-one and all-that have been
classed as predominantly Indian, it may be said that
they are not likely to encourage European immigration
on a very extended scale, or, if they did encourage it, to
attract it. The circumstances of the Argentine Republic
are exceptional. "It is estimated," says Mr. Curtis,
"that the extent of agricultural land in the Argentine
Republic equals 600,000 square miles; an area equal to
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee,
Arkansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri,
Iowa, and Wisconsin, and capable of producing every
crop in these states."1 Let it be added that these
enormous tracts lie fairly near together, that they are
traversed in great part by railways, that the climate is
that of Southern France, and that Indians are hardly a
more real danger than in the United States. It is easy
to understand 600,000 immigrants pouring into such a
paradise in the space of ten years.
of ten years. Contrast Ecuador,
Peru, and Bolivia, which are in a great measure tropical
Switzerlands; Quito, for instance, being 2000 feet higher
than the Hospice of the Great St. Bernard in Europe,
and Cuzco and Potosi and the capital of Bolivia higher
still. The fertile niches of these countries are already
occupied by Indians. The reclaimable parts can only
1 Curtis's Capitals of Southern America, p. 584.
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 59
be developed by irrigation, and lie at a distance from
one another, so that foreign immigrants could not enjoy
congenial neighbourhood. There remain, of course, the
states of Colombia, Venezuela, and the three Guianas.
The richest parts of these, the valleys of the Orinoco,
the Magdalena, and smaller rivers, are all either swamps
or liable to inundation districts that may, at some
future day, maintain a population of many millions, but
in which small bodies of foreign immigrants would find,
under worse climatic conditions, what Dickens painted
in his sketch of Eden. Venezuela is graphically de-
scribed by Eastwick as "a forest larger than France,
steppes like those of Gobi, and mountain tracts which
it would take many Switzerlands to match." Last of
all, it must be remembered that it is more than doubt-
ful if native governments or populations would encourage
or tolerate immigration on a large scale. The Church
would oppose an influx of heretics, and the Spanish
governing caste would hesitate lest they should see the
precedent of Texas repeated.
Brazil stands by itself among South American states
in one important particular. Its indigenous Indians
were to a great extent less docile and reclaimable than
the Aztecs, the Quichuas, and the Guaranis of Para-
guay have proved themselves. Brazil accordingly has
a large element of negro population; how large may
be estimated from the fact that, in 1850, the slaves
were set down at 2,500,000. It seems probable that
negroes and negro half-castes compose the better
half of the 12,000,000 who are calculated to people
Brazil; the pure Indians are estimated by a liberal
calculation at 1,000,000; while the Portuguese, Ger-
mans, and half-caste or civilised Indians make up the
1 Eastwick's Venezuela, p. 25.
60
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
remainder.¹ What all observers are agreed upon is that
there are very few families of pure Portuguese blood,
and the climate of Brazil, except in the Highlands, is
opposed, as has been noticed, to the perpetuation of any
European people in its full vigour. It seems difficult
to doubt that Brazil will pass more and more into the
hands of the negroes; the Indians, perhaps, maintain-
ing themselves, and spreading in the northern and more
inaccessible central parts; while the white may continue
for a long time to be numerous in the cities, and in
parts of exceptional healthiness.
The possibilities for Brazil may be illustrated by
what is taking place before our eyes in the southern
states of the Union. In 1790 the coloured population
of the Union was about three-quarters of a million
in an estimated population of less than 4,000,000—
that is, it numbered nearly 20 per cent of the whole
nation. Fortunately for the world, the American
Government adopted the policy, first, of prohibiting the
importation of slaves, and then of encouraging white
immigration with a result which can hardly be esti-
mated at less than an influx of 16,000,000 whites in the
century. Accordingly, the proportion of the coloured
population to the American people has decreased decade
by decade, till it is now only about 13 per cent of
the whole. Meanwhile, it is important to observe that,
till lately, the negroes have increased, after a fitful and
uncertain fashion, not only absolutely, but relatively in
the seven states that are sometimes known as the Black
Belt, that stretch from North Carolina to Louisiana
inclusive, that were the seats of the old slave planta-
1 The Census of 1872 gave an estimate of less than 4,000,000 of
European descent; less than 500,000 Indians; and about 6,000,000
negroes and half-castes of all kinds.--Almanach de Gotha.
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 61
tions, and that are eminently favourable to the black
race by climate or the opportunities of congenial toil,
while they are at least a little dangerous or debilitating
to the white man. Briefly, it may be stated that the
whites were as 7 to 6.25 in those states in 1860; that
they were as 19 to 18.5 in 1880; and that they are
as 23 to 21.4 in 1890. The forecast of the Statistical
Bureau in 1860 estimated that, in 1880, the blacks
would be 6,618,350 in a total population of 56,450,241.¹
As a fact, when that year came, the blacks were as
6,577,151 in a population of 50,152,166. They had
multiplied in spite of the Civil War almost up to a san-
guine estimate; the whites had fallen short of expec-
tation by 13 per cent. It was believed, for a time,
that the "extinction of slavery in widening the field
for white labour and enterprise will tend to reduce the
rate of increase of the coloured race; " and that "the
coloured population in America is doomed to compara-
tively rapid absorption or extinction." No such anticipa-
tions are entertained now. Professor Gilman believes
that, in 1920, the blacks in the eight old slave states
will be at 17,400,000 to 9,390,000 whites-that is,
within measurable distance of being two to one.
It is,
of course, possible that the causes which were expected to
operate twenty years ago in reducing negro increase will
be more effectual when education is diffused, and that the
black will multiply more slowly as he acquires a higher
standard of comfort. On the other hand, there is also
a possibility that whites will find it more and more
uncongenial to live in negro states, controlled by negro
legislatures, subjected to the competition of negro labour,
and sometimes, it may be, overshadowed socially by
1 See note on the Tenth Census of the United States, by F. J. Mouat
(Journal of the Statistical Society, 1880, p. 579).
62
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
negroes. In that case, the Black Belt will deserve its
name year by year more distinctively.' Its people of
course are bound to remain a part of the Union, so that,
in this case, a black commonwealth will not be con-
stituted politically. What is remarkable is, that the
blacks should be increasing so rapidly in a country
where they are outnumbered vastly by the whites
altogether; where the conditions are incomparably more
favourable to white enterprise than in Brazil or Africa;
and where the negroes possess no other advantage than
immunity from fever up to a certain point, and a readi-
ness to live cheaply. The first of these advantages must
not be exaggerated. Mr. Olmsted, in 1862, brought a
great deal of evidence to show that whites were really
healthier than negroes in every part of the southern
states, except perhaps the Rice Coast.2 What made
the negroes dense in early days was that, while they
were slaves, field labour was considered dishonourable,
except on a man's own land, and the whites accordingly
congregated in the towns. What keeps the blacks
numerous is that, in many kinds of labour, they can
undersell the whites, because their standard of require-
ments is not high, and again, because neither race can
endure to live with the other on equal terms. The
blacks find the north uncongenial; the white immigrant ||
goes to the west, or to Manitoba, rather than to the
1 For fuller statistical details on this subject see Appendix B.
2 "There are grounds for doubting the common opinion that the
negroes at the south suffer less from local causes of disease than whites.”
Mr. Olmsted goes on to show that, by the vital statistics of Charleston,
the average mortality during six years has been of blacks alone, 1 in
54; of whites alone, 1 in 58.-Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton
Kingdom, vol. ii. pp. 258, 259. The United States Census for 1880
says, p. 1706, “In a population of 43,402,970 whites there are recorded
640,191 deaths, giving a death-rate of 14·74 per 1000. In a population
of 6,752,813 coloured there are recorded 116,702 deaths, giving a death-
rate of 17.28 per 1000."
I
63
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES
more fertile south, where he has to measure himself
against the negro. If the negro increases to an extent
that makes the southern states of the Union too small
for him, the chances perhaps are that he will overflow
in the direction of Central America rather than add a
new unit of population to the north and Canada.
The result of all these considerations seems to be
that by far the most fertile parts of the earth, and
which either are or are bound to be the most populous,
cannot possibly be the homes of what it is convenient
to call the Aryan race, or indeed of any higher race
whatsoever. In Asia the population of India and China,
with the countries inextricably bound to them, is already
incomparably greater than the collective sum of Russians,
Persians, Turks, Arabs, and Syrians, and the dispro-
portion is likely to increase. A conquest by Russia of
Turkey in Asia would hardly affect the populations of
Syria and Karamania, except by giving Syrians and
Armenians the opportunity of increasing under orderly
rule. In Africa the vast regions between the Tropics,
abandoned to barbarism and anarchy, as with trifling
exceptions they have been, have none the less five times
the population of the north and south, parts of which
have enjoyed English and French administration.¹ In
1 I have adopted the calculations supplied by Mr. Ravenstein to Mr.
Silva White for his Development of Africa, and have deducted
Algeria and Tunis
5,370,000
Egypt and Tripoli
7,980,000
Cape and Natal .
1,730,000
Dutch Free States
513,000
Morocco
6,076,000
Total
21,669,000
From Mr. Ravenstein's total estimate of 127,038,370 for Africa, this
leaves 105,369,370 for Tropical Africa. About a tenth of this, under
64
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
America, taken as a whole, the white population is at
present larger than the coloured, almost as two to one,
and this proportion seems likely to be maintained for a
time, till the western parts of the Union and Canada,
and the undeveloped tracts of the Argentine Confedera-
tion, are settled in after a fashion. Meanwhile, the
mere fact that the white race naturally prefers these
parts is giving the Indians and the negroes time to in-
crease in the tropical and semi-tropical parts of America,
so that nothing short of extermination on too great a
scale to be even dreamed of will be able to dispossess
them. Neither must it be forgotten that the lower
races of men increase faster than the higher; so that
fifty years of absolute peace might mean as much for
Honduras or Benguela as a hundred years for England
or Italy. On the whole, it seems difficult to doubt that
the black and yellow belt, which always encircles the
globe between the Tropics, will extend its area, and
deepen its colour with time. The work of the white man
in these latitudes is only to introduce order and an
acquaintance with the best industrial methods of the
west. The countries belong to their autochthonous
races; and these, though they may in parts accept the
white man as a conqueror and organiser, will gradually
become too strong and unwieldy for him to control, or
if they retain him, will do it only with the condition
that he assimilates himself to the inferior race.
There is perhaps one consideration which may be
regarded as an offset to the enormous probabilities of
Chinese and Hindoo expansion. Both China and
Hindostan afford ample space for growth within their
French and English rule, like Senegal and Sierra Leone, or under a
moderately good native government, like the Azores and Madeira, is not
abandoned to barbarism and anarchy.
I
65
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES
own limits. China proper, for instance, is as large as
twenty-two Englands, or by some estimates as twenty-
six, and, on the same basis of population, might maintain
at least 650,000,000 or even 750,000,000, or, in other
words, might increase for fifty years before it required
to relieve itself by an exodus. In fact, it is supposed
that from its superior fertility, China could carry more
than England to the square mile, and might double its
numbers before it needed to trouble its neighbours.
Putting, on the one hand, the sufficiency of land at
home, and, on the other hand, the conservative genius
of the administration, which discourages emigration, and
of the people who do not readily accept it, it may be
argued that half a century, or a century hence, we
shall find China no further advanced than she now is,
while the English, French, and Dutch settlements in
the Indian Ocean will have consolidated themselves.
Those who argue in this way may be reminded that
a Tae- Ping rebellion, which lasted fourteen years,
is estimated to have cost China from 20,000,000 to
50,000,000 of population; and that, while the inhabitants
of a single province, Szechuen, increased by 45,000,000
between 1842 and 1882, there was a loss by official
estimates of 100,000,000 in the other provinces. The
nation altogether is calculated to have decreased by
at least 30,000,000 in this period.¹ Yet China was
1 The population of China is said by official records to have been :
201,013,344 in 1760.
414,686,994 in 1842.
382,078,860 in 1879.
Dr. Williams treats as specially authentic the censuses of 1762 and
1812:
1762
1812
198,214,553.
362,467,183.
These seems to show that the population under favourable conditions
F
66
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
T
able during the whole time to spare colonists to Siam,
to the Straits Settlements and Malaysia, to the United
States and Peru, and to Australia, besides those whom
the Government poured into Ili. The settlement in
Siam took place under the disadvantage that Chinamen
forfeited the rights of citizenship in their own country,
and were not protected in case of injury; nevertheless,
the Chinese element of the population is now 3,000,000,
or about one-fourth. If this has taken place during
a period of conservatism and decadence, what are we
to expect as year by year the population of the Celestial
Empire increases, and its rulers adopt the aggressive
policy of the West?
It must be borne in mind, too, that a country may
often find its numbers too large for it when it is very
far from having reached the limits of its productivity.
England in 1840 had a population of 16,000,000, and
was over-peopled, so that except for America and
Australia it is difficult to see how a great part of her
people could have supported life. England in 1890
has a population of 29,000,000, and maintains them, if
anything, more easily than she did the smaller number.
No one supposes that the extreme limits of her possible
increase have been reached. There can be little doubt
that a large emigration from China would remove the
congestion of some of its districts, and powerfully
stimulate Chinese trade, as colonies needing Chinese
products were formed. There seems no reason why
doubles in less than sixty years. Dr. Williams regards the census of
1879 as too high by 25,000,000.-The Middle Kingdom, vol. i. pp.
263-270. Mr. Smith treats every Chinese census as fanciful.-Chinese
Characteristics, pp. 235, 236.
The population of Szechuen was 22,256,964 in 1842, and 67,712,897
in 1882.—Arbeiten der Kaiserlichen Russischen Gesandschaft, 1852-1857,
übersetzt von Abel, Band ii. S. 193; Journal of the Royal Statistical
Society, 1887, pp. 688-694.
I
67
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES
millions of Chinamen should not pass over into Borneo,
as freely as they transferred themselves to Siam or to
Szechuen, and make themselves new homes a little
outside of the empire as well as within it. English-
men never dream of settling in Ireland, though Ireland
has sometimes offered very good openings. They will
have a warmer welcome and more chance of bettering
themselves in America or Australia. As the provinces
of China fill up gradually, that great displacement of
the population which has been going on within the
empire is bound to die out, and men who have to
carve out new homes will naturally seek the countries
where there is waste land.¹
2
1
It is, no doubt, matter of extreme difficulty to
predict what the rate of increase in any particular
country, or at any given time, will be. Gibbon has
estimated the number of Roman subjects under Claudius
at 120,000,000. If this population had doubled once
in every 150 years, it would long ago have reached
a total which no one supposes the world capable of
maintaining. As a fact, the population of the countries
that constituted the empire is not more than about
200,000,000.³ Misgovernment, war, and pestilence
1 It may be noticed that there is one strong reason in the genius
of the Chinese people to limit fresh settlement within the empire, at
least in districts that have already been settled. "Immense tracts in
the north and west of the province (Yunnan) have lain waste since the
Mahommedan rebellion, and owing to the antipathy of the Chinese to
settle on lands which they look upon as the property of people who
may still be living, or whose descendants may still be living, it must be
many years before the agriculture of the province is properly developed.”
Hosie's Three Years in Western China, pp. 205, 206.
2 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. ii.
3 The countries reckoned in are: Italy, 29,000,000; France,
37,000,000; Belgium and Holland, 10,000,000; Great Britain, 33,000,000;
Spain and Portugal, 21,000,000; Turkey in Europe, 15,500,000; Hungary,
Dalmatia, and Bosnia, 17,250,000; Turkey in Asia, 16,000,000; and
North Africa, 14,000,000; altogether about 202,000,000.
68
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
have perpetually foiled nature, and it is only within
the last century that anything like the annual increase,
upon which we are now apt to count, has been attained.
In Gibbon's time these same countries could not have
mustered much more than half the population of the
old empire.¹ Even now there is a great difference
perceptible between them. The increase of France
is very slow, and the Turkish provinces are almost
stationary. England has added largely to her popu-
lation in the last fifty years, and Ireland in the same
period has lost one-fourth of her numbers. Neither
are these changes always coincident with national
advance or decline. France, for instance, though
nearly stationary, is still one of the richest countries.
in Europe, and England has not been impoverished
by her increase.
The wealth of France appears to
attract immigrants from other countries; but not-
just now, at least to stimulate the growth of the
native French population.
What, however, we seem able to say is, that in the
long run the lower civilisation has a more vigorous life
than the higher, the unprivileged gains upon the privi-
leged caste, and the conquered people absorbs the
conqueror. There is no perceptible trace of ancient
Greek or Roman blood in Asia Minor or in Turkey
in Europe. The Turk- himself a barbarian — has
destroyed or driven out or depressed all the higher
races he came across, and the population under him
is now Syrian or Armenian, Albanian or Bulgarian. The
1 Gibbon compares them with the population of all Europe, and
puts it at 105,000,000 or 107,000,000. Excluding Germany, Russia,
and Poland, Scandinavia, and Ireland, this would be reduced to about
60,000,000. The African provinces would hardly exceed 5,000,000 at
that time. Napoleon says that Egypt, when he knew it, had only from
2,500,000 to 2,800,000 souls.—Mémoires de Napoléon, ed. 1823, tome ii.
p. 206.
I
69
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES
Greece that has been restored represents a very small
portion of the country in which Greeks were superior
by numbers, or by social influence and commercial
activity, under Alexander, or even under Claudius.
In Transylvania the Saxons are being crowded out
by Roumanians, and in Hungary the Magyars¹ and
Germans can barely stem the uprising nationalities
of Slavs and Roumanians. In Northern Africa the
Carthaginian, the Greek, the Roman, and the Vandal
were successively effaced, and until the French conquest
of Algiers the country was given up to Arabs of a not
very pure breed, to Berbers, and to blacks. The Irish
were reckoned by Petty in 1672 at 1,100,000 in their
own country, and there cannot then have been
many outside Ireland. They are now probably from
16,000,000 to 20,000,000, counting only those who
can be distinctly recognised as of Irish descent. Before
the time of their great dispersion to America and
Australia, they had increased within the British Isles
from being about a sixth to being nearly a third of
2
1 As the Magyars are of the same race as the Turks, though with
a larger admixture of Aryan blood, it seems desirable I should point
out that from first to last I use the words "higher" and "lower" with
no reference to the essential value of a race, which it would be hard to
determine, but with regard to its actual position in the world. The
Slowack may have finer natural capabilities than the Magyar. At
present, I believe, it is correct to say that the Magyar population has
a larger proportion of educated men, and of men owning property, and
is more capable of self-government.
2 Mr. Hallam calls Petty's conjectures "prodigiously vague" (Const.
Hist. vol. iii. p. 392, note y); but Swift in 1729 says, that the popular
estimate then was 1,500,000 ("Letter on Mr. M'Culla's project about
halfpence"). Macaulay seems to follow Petty, and estimates the Catholics
at 1,000,000 in 1686, whom Petty had put at 800,000 in 1672 (History,
chap. vi.) I have estimated their present numbers at 5,250,000 for
Ireland, 1,000,000 for England and Scotland, 800,000 for Australasia,
1,000,000 for the Dominion of Canada, and from 8,000,000 to
10,000,000 for the United States. They are also well represented at
the Cape and in South America.
70
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
་
the population.¹ Compare the increase of Sweden, with
a population of the highest type, at once warlike and
industrial, during a rather longer period, and it will
seem very small indeed. Sweden with its old province
Finland has increased at most fourfold; the Irish
people at least fifteenfold.²
Lest it should be supposed that these are specu-
lative calculations, or based upon casual instances, it
may be pointed out that under present conditions of
society, a class or a people which values comfort and
position highly cannot possibly increase as rapidly as
the class that contents itself with bare existence. The
English aristocracy is a typical example of the way
in which a close corporation dies out. Its members
are almost always wealthy in the first instance, and
their estates have been constantly added to by favour
from the Crown,³ by something like the monopoly of the
1 By the highest estimate, Mulhall's, they were as 13.2 to 64 in
1672. In 1849 they were as 8·19 to 18.65.
2 "It has been calculated," says Fryxell, "that at the beginning of
Charles XI.'s reign the population of Sweden and Finland of those times
consisted of 1,775,000 persons."-Svea Rikes Historie, xviii. s. 155.
Sweden and Finland-the latter enormously benefited by the neigh-
bourhood of St. Petersburg-contained in 1880 a population of about
6,500,000. The emigration from these countries will not add more than
half a million to this estimate.
3 It is generally supposed that William III.'s grants to Bentinck,
Keppel, and the husband of Lady Elizabeth Villiers, are the last in-
stances of royal gifts on a large scale to favourites. This, however, is
not quite the case. Mme. de Walmoden had a peerage and money from
George II.
Lord Bute is supposed to have received at least £300,000,
which the Princess of Wales had saved out of her large revenue (Walpole's
Last Journals, i. p. 19), and Greville says of Lady Conyngham, whom
George IV. admired: "The wealth she has accumulated by savings and
presents must be enormous" (Memoirs, vol. i. p. 212). George III.
wrote to Lord North in 1777: "I must insist you will now state to
me whether £12,000 or £15,000 will not set your affairs in order; if
it will, nay, if £20,000 is necessary, I am resolved you shall have no
other person concerned in freeing them but myself."-Letter 410, ed.
Donne. But this is a very small part of what the North family got from
royal favour. Compare George III.'s letter of December 12, 1778:
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 71
best Government appointments, and by marriages with
wealthy heiresses. They are able to command the field
sports and open-air life that conduce to health, and the
medical advice that combats disease. Nevertheless,
they die out so rapidly that only five families out of
nearly six hundred go back without a break, and in the
male line, to the fifteenth century.¹ It is sometimes
thought that the untitled landed gentry represent a
more permanent aristocracy, better blood, and longer
connection with land than the peers. This is only the
conceit of county notabilities. The late Mr. Evelyn
Shirley made a list of all the families in England who
could show unbroken connection with the squirearchy
since the Wars of the Roses terminated, and though
he was most liberal in his inclusions his list went easily
into a single thin volume. It is perfectly true that
a certain number of Englishmen with large landed
estates descend from ancestors who held land anciently
somewhere; but it will generally be found in such
cases that the ancestors were yeomen, or at most
squireens. An analysis of modern landowners in a
county will habitually prove that not more than six
or eight, owning 3000 acres, descend from ancestors
who owned as much in the time of Elizabeth. The
peers, modern as they are, represent a larger average
of old families than the country squires. The great
device for perpetuating untitled families has been the
law of entail, which has really been a most potent
2
"Lord Barrington is to wait on Lord North to know what can be done
for him. I therefore authorise you to make such a provision as you may
think fit."
1 Stanley (of Derby), Neville (of Abergavenny), Courtenay (of Devon),
Lumley (of Scarborough), Stourton (of Stourton).
2 3000 acres is the amount taken by Mr. Bateman in his Great
Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland to be the qualification of a great
landowner.
72
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
+
engine for destroying them, by forcing successive
generations to saddle the land with encumbrances.
On the other hand, the fascination of a title for
Englishwomen is so great that peers, beggared by the
prodigality of their ancestors, are constantly able to
retrieve their fortunes by marriage with heiresses.
Now, if we inquire why it is that noble families die
out, we shall find that the reason lies in the desire of
all their members to maintain themselves in the class
they are born into. It is an unwritten law that they
must marry money, or not marry at all; and the result
is, that when the heir to the title, marrying perhaps
late in life, finds his wife sterile-and heiresses are the
outcome of families that tend to be sterile—it may
easily happen that his younger brothers have not
married at all. Often, of course, it is not too late for
them to take wives; but if the peer in possession has
daughters on whom the unentailed property will be
settled, a man confirmed in bachelor habits will often
hesitate before he marries only to continue the title.
Now it is the boast of Englishmen that our aristocracy
is a supremely reasonable one, that there is no nobility
clinging to the children of cadets, and that the highest
peer marries freely into the commercial classes, and has
done so for centuries past without requiring sixteen
quarters in a wife, or even two generations of gentility.
All the more noteworthy is it that family after family
passes away as if it were laden with a mysterious curse.
The instance cited above, which shows how few of our
nobles are as old as the first Tudor, may seem an unfair
one, as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
times of unsettlement, when many families were
deprived of the peerage by attainder, or ruined by
confiscations. An example from comparatively modern
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 73
155 peers
times will therefore be more instructive.
were summoned to the first Parliament of James
II. In 1825, only 140 years later, only forty-eight
of these nobles were represented by lineal descendants
in the male line. The family has in several instances
been continued by collaterals begging the peerage,
which they could not have claimed at law, and in
this way the change may seem less than it has really
been; but the broad result appears to be that
left to itself from 1688, with new creations abso-
lutely forbidden, the House of Lords would by this
time have been practically extinguished. Of Charles
II.'s six bastards, who were made dukes, only three
have perpetuated the race. Three peerages have been
lost to the Howard family, three to the Greys, two to
the Mordaunts, two to the Hydes, two to the Gerards,
and two to the Lucases. A religiously-minded anti-
quary of Queen Elizabeth's time attempted to show
that a curse attached to all the families which had been
enriched by sharing the spoils of ecclesiastical property.
At the present day, we know that a normal percentage
of those families is still enjoying the fruits of the
Parliamentary settlement, which it has pleased divines
to call sacrilege. What was really valuable in Sir
Henry Spelman's researches was the proof they afforded,
that men high placed enough to enjoy court favour are
rarely the founders of long-lived families. It is in the
lower strata of society that we have to seek for the
springs of national life.
It is a very small matter to the world at large
whether titled and landed aristocracies show a tendency
to gradual extinction, but it cannot be accounted matter
of indifference if the higher races increase very much.
more slowly than the lower. Even if we assume higher
74
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
and lower to be merely relative terms, and that the
negro is capable of becoming as fine a specimen of
humanity as the Englishman or the Frenchman, it has
to be recognised that very favourable conditions and
a long period of time are required for the transmutation,
which, after all, is more than a little doubtful. Now to
take two extreme instances, the French, who are a very
important factor in civilisation, will only double them-
selves in two centuries if they retain the rate of pro-
gression of the last seventy years; while the negroes of
the Southern States are doubling themselves once in
forty years. Wealth is supposed to have increased
more than fivefold in France since the peace of 1815.¹
This wealth is to a great extent distributed by the
stringent law of succession; and the position of the
small landowner, and of the artisan, is incomparably
better than it has been at any previous time. The
population does not emigrate to avoid the conscription,
or because the pressure of the taxes is intolerable. It
shows its sense of enhanced national burdens, if indeed
it shows it at all, by increasing from decade to decade
more slowly. Perhaps, what really retards the growth
of families is the tacit but universal resolve on no
account to submit to a lower standard of food or
clothing, or of whatever conduces to comfort and self-
respect.2 At any rate, for one reason or the other,
either because the State, or because the family and the
individual make greater claims on economy now than
they made in past times, France is receding, year by
year, from her old high place among populous states.
1 From £1,800,000,000 in 1815 to £9,070,000,000 in 1882.
Fournier de Flaix on the national wealth of France.-Statistical Journal,
March 1886, p. 197.
2 Mr. Hamerton mentions thrift and luxury as two causes that retard
the growth of population in France.—French and English, pp. 252, 253.
I
UNCHANGEABle limits of HIGHER RACES 75
In a more or less small degree, what is true of France is
true of Continental Europe, taken as a whole, exclusive
of Prussia; and, if we allow for immigrants of the
white population, in America. At the end of a long
term of prosperous years, none of the great nations
have increased in numbers, as negroes and Hindoos
have increased, or, as there is reason to think, Chinamen
would have multiplied under similar circumstances.
England has been a singular instance of an old
country that has increased its numbers at something
like the Oriental rate of progression, while it has carried
on exhausting wars, and sent out millions of emigrants.
It may be contended, therefore, that an equally wise
administration, promoting manufactures and colonies
and adopting free trade, may do for Europe in general
what England has achieved. On examination, it will
be found, however, that precisely the poorest and most
backward part of the British Isles, Ireland, is the part
that increased most rapidly, till its progress was arrested
by famine and wholesale emigration. The population
of Ireland is given by Mulhall as 2,373,000 in 1752.
In 1841 it was 8,195,000, that is, it had increased
between three and fourfold. During the same period,
England had increased from 7,000,000 to 16,000,000,
or from two to threefold, and Scotland from 1,265,000
to 2,620,000, that is, had just about doubled itself.
The most thrifty and progressive of the three countries
showed the smallest increase. Such as this increase
was, however, it was undoubtedly due in part to an
immigration from Ireland. Since the peasantry of Ireland
have earned higher wages, and acquired a larger pro-
prietorship in their native land, they have ceased to
increase at any rapid rate. England, therefore, is now
the capital example of a highly civilised country that
76
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
doubles in sixty years; for even Germany cannot exhibit
anything like the same rate of progression. The average
for all Europe is to double in about a century.¹ Against
this, we have the negro doubling in forty years, and the
Hindoo in about eighty,2 under circumstances which
have no doubt been highly favourable, but which are
not unlikely to last. China, down to 1842, doubled at
the rate of once in eighty years. Her progress was
then suspended by a gigantic calamity. If she can
preserve peace and benefit by the outlets which England
offers her in the Indian seas, is there any reason why
she should not increase even more rapidly than in the
best period of the past?
It has been no part of this argument to consider
whether an inferior race may not to some extent displace
a superior in a country where the superior race has
been supreme in power, and unapproached in numbers
for centuries. Such a case as that of the Mauritius,
where the French colonists are dwindling away, and
where such civilisation as they had established is giving
place to the inroads of Chinamen and Hindoos, who are
gradually acquiring land and trade, may be regarded
as on too small a scale to be conclusive. Russia shows
3
1 In 1849 Alison wrote that the population of the Russian Empire
was about 64,000,000, and was likely to be 130,000,000 by natural
increase before 1900. In 1887 it was returned as 107,000,000, but of
these 5,000,000 are accounted for by acquisitions in Central Asia.
Russia, however, confirms the general rule that nations with a low
standard of comfort increase faster than nations with a high standard
under fairly similar conditions of peace and order.
2 In 1881 the population of British India amounted to 198,790,853
persons. In 1891 it was estimated at 220,500,000. The acquisition of
Upper Burmah accounts only for 3,000,000.
3 In 1832 the population of the Mauritius was 89,610, of whom
63,500 were slaves, Africans by race, the rest being mostly of European
descent, pure or mixed. In 1888 the population consisted of 260,000
Hindoos and 117,000 of all other nationalities, including Chinamen,
who are a new and noticeable element. It is evident, that in fifty-six
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 77
us the curious spectacle of a race that is credited with
the possession of high qualities, that has not been
outrageously ill-treated in the immediate past, and that
is only slightly inferior in concrete civilisation to its
rulers, increasing so rapidly as to be thought a danger
to the Empire. The Jews have spread into Russia
from Poland, where they enjoyed exceptional privileges,
and though they suffered in 1832 for their supposed
complicity in the Polish War of Independence, they
have generally been protected by the law, and only
restricted from settlement in certain parts of the Empire.
They were for a time encouraged to colonise parts of
the Ukraine, and though it may seem futile, and even
tyrannical to settle Jews on the land as agriculturists,
it must be remembered that instances were on record
in which Jews had taken to a country life of themselves,
or had been induced to adopt it. Clarke, who travelled
through Poland in 1778, tells us that there "Jews
cultivate the ground, and we frequently saw them
engaged in sowing, reaping, mowing, and other works
of husbandry."
"" 1 Maria Theresa actually established
Jewish agricultural colonies with partial and temporary
success in Bohemia. Therefore, we need not assume
that the race is incapable of husbandry; and that the
Jews in Russia have generally abandoned or sub-let
their land in the Ukraine is probably due to the fact
that they have seen more profitable and congenial
employment open to them in the cities. Their position,
though not a dignified or pleasant one, has been, till
years there has been no increase of the original population; and all who
know the island are aware that a great deal of the land has passed from
its old French proprietors to companies, and is passing from companies.
to the Hindoos.-Lanier's L'Afrique, p. 862; Colonial Year Book, 1890,
p. 354.
2
1 Clarke's Travels in Poland, book ii. chap. vii. p. 237.
2 Wallace's Russia, pp. 374, 375.
78
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
lately, tolerably endurable to a people that has no
recent memories of independence. As long as they
retained their faith they were shut out from the court,
from office, and from society; but as contractors, mer-
chants, tradesmen, money-lenders, middlemen, and
smugglers, they have been able to do a great deal of
profitable business. They were trusted and employed
by the police during the unsuccessful Polish rising of
1864-65; and now and again some of the brighter of
them, such as Jessy Helfman and Aaron Zundelevitch
have sympathised with the plans of the Nihilists, and
have worked with Russians for reforms, as the more
ardent Russians conceive them. It is almost needless
to add, that in a country like Russia it has always
been possible to evade the laws restraining Jewish
industry or settlement by bribing officials.
Now the conditions just described are precisely
those which are most favourable to an increase of
population. Given security to life, limb, and property,
which there has been till very lately, the power to
enjoy wealth being limited, while its value as a safe-
guard is enhanced, and all the checks of self-restraint
being removed, the Jewish population has had no
motive to limit its reproductive powers. There is
reason to think that the Jewish people is exceptionally
healthy and fertile; but any race would increase which
had the wit to make money—a strong stimulus for
making it in the need to purchase protection-and no
private use to spend it on, except food, and the rearing
of a family. The Jew has no reason for living in a
palace, for keeping up unnecessary servants, or for
spending extravagantly on social pleasures; and is,
indeed, wise if he avoids all ostentation. His risk of
attack from the populace, and the percentage he pays
I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES 79
to officials, will be less in proportion as he is shabbily
dressed and poorly housed. Naturally he accumulates
money, and naturally, also, he marries young and does
not dream of limiting his family. Is it wonderful if the
rapid increase of the race has begun to provoke alarm?
In 1778 the Jews of Poland and Lithuania cannot have
much exceeded from 300,000 to 400,000.¹ Those in
the other parts of Russia were at that time an inappre-
ciable quantity.
The smallest estimate now puts the
Jews of Russia at more than 3,000,000, and the highest
makes them amount to 6,000,000.2 Rejecting as ex-
travagant the calculation which makes them double
every fourteen years, we may surely admit that the
ruling powers have some cause to be alarmed if a race
that dislikes agriculture, mechanical industry, the life of
a sailor, and the profession of arms, that does not inter-
marry with its neighbours, that does not share their tradi-
tions, or aspirations, or faith, increases, let us say, twice
as rapidly. Eighty years ago it might have been suffi-
cient to deal with the Jews of Russia, as the wise policy
3
1 According to the last capitation there were 166,871 Jews in Poland,
exclusive of Lithuania (c. 1778) Clarke, Travels in Poland, book i.
chap. vii. p. 119. The population of Lithuania was probably about half
that of Poland at this time. This would make the number of Jews about
250,000; but it is safer to put it higher, as they were reputed to be
skilful in evading the capitation tax.
2 The Statesman's Year-Book for 1891 gives the number of Jews in
Russia as 3,000,000, but the calculation is manifestly inadequate, as only
80 per cent of the population of the Empire is accounted for in the table
of faiths. Lanier puts the Jews at 3,100,000, but his calculation is de-
fective in the same way. M. Metchersky, as quoted in the Contemporary
Review (March 1891, p. 320) declares that there are 6,000,000 Jews in
Russia. It seems as if 4,000,000 would not be an excessive estimate.
In that case they have increased tenfold, while the rest of the population
has increased rather less than threefold. If this rate of relative progres-
sion is continued, they will be one-ninth of the population, instead of as
now one-twenty-sixth, in 110 years.
3 Prince Metchersky, indeed, goes further, and says: "There are
already in Russia 6,000,000 Jews; in twenty years time there will be
20,000,000 Jews."-Contemp. Review, March 1891, p. 320.
J
1
80
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
L
of Napoleon dealt with those of France, and to give
them absolute social and civil equality. The Jews of
France are Frenchmen of another faith, and show no
tendency to disproportionate increase, being, in fact, as
nearly stationary as the rest of the population. The
remedy is not as simple in Russia, because the Jews are
now a nation in themselves-herding together, too
numerous, and, it may be feared, too detested to be
absorbed into the general population. However, it is
not an object in this place to discuss how the Jews
in Russia ought to be treated. What is desired is to
show that since it has become impossible to deny in-
ferior races the protection of the law in civilised com-
munities, they are bound to increase faster than the
privileged part of the nation. The case of the Jews
in Russia is peculiarly instructive, because they were a
mere fraction of the population when Lithuania and
Poland were first incorporated, and are now numerous
enough to appear a danger to the Empire. Neverthe-
less, even now they would hardly provoke any general
hostility if they were not swamping the middle-class
in cities. Were they content, like the Roumanians
in Hungary, to do field drudgery, their increase
would hardly have been noticed till it had become
irresistible.
It may be said that the arguments of this chapter
assume the progress of the world to be henceforth in
an opposite direction to that which has been pursued in
the past. Taking Europe, for instance, we find here
and there the remnants of inferior peoples, whose an-
cestors were once widely spread, and whom invaders of
a higher type have exterminated or supplanted. The
Basques, the Lapps, the Letts are familiar instances;
and a very superior race, the Kelts, though they continue

I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER K.
to exist, and have always been an appreciable e
in Europe, have been Romanised and Teutonised
partial conformity with more vigorous conquerors.
may seem to some as if we might expect the same
process to be repeated in Asia and Africa; even if we
concede what has been contended for above, that under
the conditions which exist in a British or Dutch colony
in tropical zones, the native is bound to increase faster
than the European. Those who argue in this way must
bear in mind that the modern world differs so entirely
from the ancient in certain conditions of primary im-
portance, that we are bound to expect a different
evolution. For instance, Cæsar is said to have killed
a million Gauls, and made slaves of another million.¹
Even if we reduce these estimates by half and allow for
Gaul having been a fourth larger than France, it will
yet seem probable that a fourth of the male population
was either killed or sold out of the country. The last
war of modern times, conducted as pitilessly as war was
by a Greek or Roman general, was the Thirty Years'
War in Germany; and it cost that country four-fifths
of its population. "Wurtemberg, which before had
a population of half a million, was reduced after the
1 The estimates given are Appian's, but according to Pliny (lib. vii.
cap. 20) Cæsar used to boast that 1,192,000 had fallen in battle against
him, besides those who perished in the civil wars.-Hume's Essay on
Population. Cæsar tells us that 368,000 Helvetii entered Gaul; and
that the survivors allowed to return home were 110,000. In the case of
the Nervii their senators were reduced from 600 to 3, and their fighting
men from 60,000 to 500.-De Bello Gallico, i. 29; ii. 28. Procopius
declares that the wars of Justinian destroyed 1,500,000 persons in Italy
alone. « Μυριάδας πεντακοσίας ἐν Λιβύη
év . Ἰταλία δὲ οὐχ ἧσσον ἢ
τριπλασία Λιβύης οὖσα ἐρῆμος ἀνθρώπων πολλῷ μᾶλλον,” etc.—Anec-
dota, c. 18. Even if we admit the compiler of the Anecdota to be not
Procopius, as seems probable, it is noticeable that he writes of Africa,
where he estimates the losses at 5,000,000, from personal observation,
and in language that might almost have suggested Burke's description of
the Carnatic.
G

NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
CHAP.
of Nordlingen to 46,000."
Now it may be rash
ay that the world is really better than it was; but
s undoubted, that for more than two centuries-and
even in countries where regulars were fighting against
partisans nothing has occurred to parallel or recall
these horrors of old time. Neither is this mitigation of
war confined to Europe. Burke tells us that when
Hyder Ali ravaged the Carnatic, "a storm of universal
fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed
every temple." When the British armies traversed this
district eighteen months later, "through the whole line
of their march they did not see one man, not one woman,
not one child, not one four-footed beast of any descrip-
tion whatever."2 Less than a century later, when there
was a mutiny in India, which roused the worst passions
of religious fanatics and the ferocity of insurgent
soldiers, fighting with the halter round their necks,
neither the Sepoy outrages nor the terrible reprisals
of English soldiers were even comparable to Hyder
Ali's style of warfare. The last specimen of the old
style of war was seen when the Chinese troops stamped
out rebellion in Yunnan and in Ili. Now, although
it would not be wise to calculate that there will be no
revival of the old savagery, it is reasonable to expect
that the accepted practice of civilised nations will on
the whole maintain itself, and will influence the pro-
cedure of conquerors in Southern Asia, in Africa, and in
South America. Meanwhile the effect already produced
has told visibly in favour of the growth of population ;
and its chief effects have naturally been seen in the
increase of those who suffered most from war formerly.
1 Niebuhr's Lectures on Ancient History, vol. ii. p. 234.
2 Burke's Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, vol. iii. pp. 160, 161,
Bohn's ed.

I
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RA
China and India are the two most striking insta
The Tae-Ping war, which cost China many mill
of people, was put down practically by British aid. Ou
policy could not allow the Chinese trade to be paralysed,
and our humanity was horrified by the news of massacres
which Gustavus Adolphus, Cromwell, or Turenne would
have looked upon as the regrettable but necessary con-
sequences of war. Then, again, in India, for one war
that we have waged, we have prevented twenty by
the mere establishment of a strong central authority.
Accordingly the population of India has increased at
least fourfold, probably fivefold, within a century.
There is another way in which we are the blind
instruments of fate for multiplying the races that are
now our subjects, and will one day be our rivals. We
carry the sanitary science and the engineering skill of
Europe into the East. The Indian official who wishes
to obtain favourable notice at headquarters is very apt
to promulgate a new plan of some crowded native town,
by which broad streets are to replace the sinuous alleys,
and before which the worst quarter will disappear. No
native can be compelled to build in conformity with the
new regulations, but every native who refuses to do it
knows or thinks that he will be a marked man with the
police, and compliance is very general. The system does
not make our "Raj" popular, but it compasses great
good for the people at a comparatively small cost, and
familiarises the masses with elementary notions of
decency. Five years ago a Governor of the so-called
66
benighted Presidency," Madras, Sir M. E. Grant Duff,
put it on record, that "nearly all municipalities are now
willing to undertake the" (sanitary) "conservancy of
private dwellings for a small fee." Accordingly, though
1
1 Review Minute of 20th September 1886, by H.E. the Governor.

NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
CHAP.
1
is still the breeding-place of cholera, its epidemics
much more manageable than they were; and this
nough the conditions of health in an increased popula-
tion are more difficult to compass. Anciently, there
were periodical famines, sweeping away, it might be,
millions at a time. At present, what with irrigation
works and enhanced security, the produce of the country
is far greater than it used to be, and railways enable
it to be more rapidly distributed. A famine, like that
which destroyed three-quarters of a million and one-
fourth of the population in Orissa as lately as 1866,
is becoming every year more and more improbable.
Meanwhile, the people, as is only natural, are taking
advantage of the prosperity by multiplying rather than
by raising their standard of comfort. The education,
the contact with other people, that could make the
present form of existence appear deficient, are wanting.
The ryot asks for little more than to be freed from the
worst exactions of the money-lender, to be secured a
continuance of peace and reasonable prices, and to be
let alone by the English official.
The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant,
when the European observer will look round to see the
globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and
yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under
tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in govern-
ment, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and
circumscribing the industry of the European; when
Chinamen and the nations of Hindostan, the States of
Central and South America, by that time predominantly
Indian, and it may be African nations of the Congo
and the Zambesi, under a dominant caste of foreign
rulers, are represented by fleets in the European seas,
1 Hunter's Orissa, vol. ii. p. 185.
I
85
UNCHANGEABLE LIMITS OF HIGHER RACES
invited to international conferences, and welcomed as
allies in the quarrels of the civilised world. The citizens
of these countries will then be taken up into the social
relations of the white races, will throng the English
turf, or the salons of Paris, and will be admitted to
intermarriage. It is idle to say, that if all this should
come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated.
We were struggling among ourselves for supremacy in
a world which we thought of as destined to belong to
the Aryan races and to the Christian faith; to the
letters and arts and charm of social manners which
we have inherited from the best times of the past. We
shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and
perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked
down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always
to minister to our needs. The solitary consolation will
be, that the changes have been inevitable. It has been
our work to organise and create, to carry peace and law
and order over the world, that others may enter in and
enjoy. Yet in some of us the feeling of caste is so
strong that we are not sorry to think we shall have
passed away before that day arrives.
CHAPTER II
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
The break-up of the Roman Empire has shown that a splendid political
organisation may be destroyed by the concert of inferior or less
highly developed races. Although this was the birth of a new
world, it involved the extinction of thought, art, and style for
centuries.-Parallels may be found in the histories of Greece, of
Peru, and of Cambodia. The fortunes of Spain and Turkey are
striking illustrations of the same law from modern times.-The
supremacy of the inferior races in the future is likely to be achieved
by industrial progress rather than by military conquest.—The
Englishman is changing from faith in private enterprise to faith
in State organisation. The change is likely to affect the character
of the race for vigorous originality. We see the beginning of de-
cadence in the decline of speculative thought.—We find a decay
of mechanical invention, and even more, that a less hearty welcome
is given to it.—With impaired faith in himself, the Englishman
will trust more and more to the State, and to State Socialism, which
is likely to be accompanied with a change to the stationary order,
population and wealth ceasing to increase.—This change may not
necessarily be bad, but it will be great.-Yet, in fact, great parts of
State Socialism have already been adopted, and the arguments against
the remainder, even if valid, are not demonstrably irrefutable.
What democracies really aim at, that Governments shall give im-
mediate effect to the popular will, need not be a source of unrest
and instability if some satisfactory order can be achieved, and if
there are the conditions for maintaining it.—The military spirit
will not die out, because the instinct of existence is driving every
State to aggrandise itself, that it may not be absorbed.-It seems
certain, too, that sooner or later China must become a formidable
military power.-For all nations, except perhaps the United States
and England, military strength means a strong executive organisa-
tion, large forces, and the power to mobilise them rapidly.—The
belief of some Liberals, that a strong militia may supersede the
necessity for a highly trained army, is refuted by the precedents of
CHAP. II THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
87
American history. In revolutionary France the Republic was not
saved by raw levies, but by militia and regulars, commanded by
trained generals, and operating in superior numbers.-Napoleon
disapproved of short-service men, and lost battles from the time he
began to employ them.-The Spanish volunteers were of no use,
except behind walls. The partial successes of the Boers against
England admit of easy explanation.-Therefore military absolutism
will be combined with industrial Socialism in the communities of
the future. When they are not State soldiers, citizens will very
commonly be State servants.-This form of polity is congenial to
Eastern nations; and these, as they become powerful, will begin to
influence European habits and thought.-As, however, the English-
man has a higher standard of comfort than the Chinaman, he cannot
hold his own, other things being equal, against the Chinaman.—The
ideal of the European Socialist is, however, not to intensify toil, but
to diminish it, and to increase the material and moral well-being of
the man. Throughout Europe this may be done by industrial com-
bination; but Chinese competition will force the European either
to protect himself by hostile tariffs or to limit the increase of
population.—The belief that the stationary state has been reached
will produce general discouragement, and will probably affect the
intellectual energy of the people concerned.—If the Mahommedans
succeed in becoming dominant in China, China will be an aggressive
military power; but this is perhaps less to be dreaded than its in-
dustrial development.
THE preceding pages have aimed at showing that certain
races which we regard as inferior, and the highest of
which is certainly our inferior in military and political
organisation, are likely to increase very largely in com-
parison with the races which at present constitute what
claims to be the civilised world. Such an event has
happened once before under such circumstances, that its
character and results are tolerably well known. An old
order, which we call in the first period of its existence
the Roman Empire, broke up as invaders poured down
upon it from Germany and Russia, from Central Asia,
and from Persia. It seems at first incredible that so
magnificent a polity as Trajan succeeded to should not
have been able to maintain itself. Lying centrally
round the sea which was then the great highway and
artery of commerce, the Roman dominion was traversed
88
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
!
by roads, which gave its armies the great advantage of
concentrating rapidly on any point that was menaced.
Its population was incomparably greater than that of
any neighbour; its generals and engineers and the
equipment of its troops were unsurpassed in the world;
and the emperors of capacity were sufficiently numerous
to have atoned for the incompetence of a few. An
observer speculating upon manifest destiny, and knowing
nothing more of the earth than was known a little
earlier to the elder Pliny, might surely have said with
reason in Trajan's time, that sooner or later the eagles
would certainly fly in triumph over the whole habitable
world. Even now, though we can trace the stages of
decadence, it is difficult not to be astonished at the
completeness of the ruin. Summing up the most obvi-
ous causes, we seem to see that the institution of slavery
deprived Italy of a large part of her natural and best
defenders; that the burden of taxes produced a de-
population in the provinces, as men ceased to marry, or
escaped across the border and joined the barbarians;
and that while Rome was thus losing her life-blood,
Germans and Parthians were acquiring the arts of war,
and becoming conscious of their strength. Even so,
we have to fall back upon other explanations—upon
famines and pestilences that desolated provinces, and
upon an upheaval of peoples in the far East, resulting
in an exodus of Tartars across Europe-fully to under-
stand why the attack on the Roman Empire became so
strong, and was at last so weakly combated.
Optimists are fond of showing that, after all, all
happened for the best in the best of all possible worlds.¹
A larger polity, making country life and local institu-
tions possible, supplanted the rule by municipal garri-
1 Guizot, La Civilisation en Europe, Leçons 2 and 4.
II
89
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
,
•
sons, the centralisation under prefects and emperor,
which Rome had imposed upon her provinces. The
German, whom Tacitus had admired, superseded the
polished, servile, and profoundly immoral society which
Tacitus and Juvenal had denounced. The cross sur-
mounting the Capitol; Telemachus sealing with his
blood the decisive protest against the atrocities of the
Coliseum; the guild-hall taking the place of the basilica;
charitable institutions sown broadcast over the earth;
freedom for national life everywhere, and, after a time,
freedom for industry, are the obvious contrasts between
the old order and the new. There is an element of
truth in all this, but it is not a complete statement of
the case. We are apt to forget that the process of
transformation lasted over centuries. One of the first
results of the conquest of the Roman world was that
all the highest science and thought, the tradition of the
public opinion of the best men, died out with the upper
classes, who were its depositories. In Roman law the
world lost the jurisconsult while it retained the notary;
in the arts of construction, it kept the mason and lost
the architect; while in art, in poetry, in philosophy,
and in history, it unhappily lost everything. Whether
the Germans of a generation later than Arminius were
quite as virtuous as Tacitus thought them may reason-
ably be doubted. What admits of no doubt is, that the
Germanic conquerors of France were as vicious and sensual
as Tiberius or Vitellius, without being educated up to the
level which made a Roman patrician capable of carrying
on the government of a civilised country. Even the
times of Roman decadence give us Marcus Aurelius,
1 The late Professor Maurice put these ideas very happily when he
said that the title of Gibbon's great work had expressed its limitations;
that Gibbon had understood the decline and fall of the old order, but
had not appreciated the birth of a new society.
90
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Lucian, and a succession of great fathers, with Appian,
Arrian, and Dio Cassius among historians; and Roman
poetry may be said to have died out worthily in
Claudian. The six centuries that succeeded the in-
vasion of Attila are almost absolutely barren of thought
and style. The races that produced Charlemagne and
Alfred, Eginhardt and Bede, and to which we owe the
Nibelungen Lied, and a host of minor poems, were
certainly not wanting in original power, or even in
literary capacity. Only criticism, and the appreciation
of the best models, and the instinctive apprehension of
perfect form had died out; and though the fraternity
of great thinkers began again with Anselm, it was not
till the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the new
world seemed able to create poets of the first order, or
historians like Joinville and Froissart, whom the charm
of expression has endeared to all time.
Now the disastrous gap made in civilisation by the
destruction of the Roman Empire has many parallels in
history on a smaller scale. There can be little doubt
that the wars of Alexander's successors, and the Roman
conquests in Greece and Asia, destroyed a very high
form of Greek literature,¹ and that Roman supremacy
arrested the spread of Greek influence in the East. In
Germany, the terrible Thirty Years' War threw back
the country in the estimation of good judges for two
centuries at least, though in this case the eclipse of
2
1 "Professor Thiersch, with whom I once discussed this period, said
that in his opinion there never existed a period more charming, in an
intellectual point of view, than the age of Menander at Athens.".
Niebuhr, Lectures on Ancient History, vol. iii. p. 49.
2 "When Germans tell us, as they often do, that their country is
only just recovering the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, we are, at
first, tempted to smile; but if we examine into the matter closely, we
shall find that the statement is literally and perfectly correct.”—Grant
Duff, Studies in European Politics, p. 249, published in 1866.
II
91
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
•
literature was less noticeable than the injury inflicted
on population and industrial progress. A striking ex-
ample of the way in which a people civilised up to a
certain point may be plunged again into barbarism, is
exhibited by the fate of the native Peruvians. This
people could build roads and aqueducts, such as the
Spaniards only knew of by inheriting them from Rome ;
and the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco was admitted by
the Spanish historian, Sarmiento, to be surpassed only
by two buildings in Spain, which at that time possessed
all really good that it has now.¹ A Spanish conqueror
has left it on record, that the Government was so
admirable that there was perfect administration, abso-
lute security of property, and a morality far higher than
that of the Christian conquerors. It was all swept
away within a generation, and we only know of it
by the labours of antiquaries. Cambodia and Cochin
China are covered with magnificent ruins, which the
present occupants of the country cannot account for,
and do not claim for their ancestors. No one knows
2
3
1 "The road from Quito to Peru is variously estimated at from 1500
to 2000 miles long, built of heavy flags of freestone.”—Prescott, Conquest
of Peru, p. 27. "The aqueduct that traversed the district of Condesugu
measured between 400 and 500 miles."-Prescott, Conquest of Peru, p.
57. The aqueduct of Chimu is still more than 60 feet in height.—
Squier's Peru, p. 118. Mr. Squier says that the fortress of the
Sacrahuaman can only properly be compared with the Pyramids, or
Stonehenge, or the Coliseum. He also calls it "the most massive among
monuments of similar character, either in the old or the new world.”
Of Chimu Mr. Squier says, that a plain from 12 to 15 miles long, by
5 to 6 broad, is thickly studded over with the ruins of the ancient city.
—Squier, Peru, pp. 468, 469, 118; Prescott, Conquest of Peru, p. 41.
2 Will of Manco Sierra Lejesama. - Prescott, Conquest of Peru,
Appendix iv.
3 For good popular descriptions of these ruins, discovered in 1861
by M. Henri Mouhot, see Thomson's Malacca, Indo-China, and China,
pp. 135-152; Cotteau's Un Touriste dans l'Extrême Orient, pp. 409-414
and Vincent's "Rival to Solomon's Temple," printed in his In and Out
of Central America, pp. 146-181. The date is conjecturally assigned to
;
92
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
whether the race which constructed them was exter-
minated, or has emigrated, or has relapsed into bar-
barism. We can only say that a people of eminent
architectural genius, and wielding great resources, and
probably Buddhist in faith, once occupied these regions,
and that its place is now taken by a mongrel population
of the Chinese type, and which has contributed nothing
to the world's history.
The illustrations of complete ruin in the cases of
Rome, Peru, and Cambodia, may seem to belong to
times when the forces of the world were not properly
equipoised, and when it was impossible to predict how
the balance of strength would ultimately incline. At
present, large states are very much contained within
natural boundaries, and there is a general consent that
none shall be aggrandised by inordinate extensions of
territory. Napoleon himself, though he was ruined by
aiming at too much, did not propose to keep Spain, or
any large part of Germany in his own hands; and the
annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by conquest may still be
regarded as a hazardous experiment. Those who think
in this way, may turn profitably to two instances of
comparatively modern history.
The Spain of Queen Elizabeth's time possessed
Portugal, Naples, Milan, Franche-Comte, and Flanders in
Europe; the greater part of what is now called Spanish
America, and a line of important settlements in Africa,
India, and Malaysia.¹ Its European dominions included
between 1295 and 1373. Mr. Wallace notices similar ruins in Java,
and states that they far surpass those of Central America, perhaps even
those of India. He also notices that the present inhabitants "look upon
these relics of their forefathers with ignorant amazement, as the undoubted
productions of giants or of demons.”—Wallace's Malay Archipelago, pp.
104-106.
1 "From Borneo to California the great ocean was but a Spanish
lake."-Motley's United Netherlands, iii. p. 485.
II
93
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
most of the highly civilised and wealthy parts of Europe;
the tribute of gold and exotic products that it received
from its colonies appeared fabulous to its contemporaries.¹
Spanish state-craft was more highly esteemed in courts
than even Italian subtlety; Spanish armies were the
best in the world; and Bacon, who held that "no nation
which doth not directly profess arms, may look to have
greatness fall into their laps," declared that of Christian
Europe, only the Spaniards had an effective military
organisation. Neither was the greatness of Spain only
material. It was the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola who
restored the old faith, making it again a militant power,
even among thoughtful men; and no country of that
day, except England, can show such names in literature
as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Mendoza.
2
What Spain was for the western world, Turkey with
even greater pageantry of power was for the eastern.
"While its Sultan reigned in the palace of the Cæsars by
the shores of the Bosphorus, his viceroys gave law in the
halls of the Caliphs at Bagdad in the east, or collected
tribute beneath the shadow of Atlas in the west. From
Aden in the south, his banners emblazoned with the
cross scimitars were unfurled to the Indian sea; and at
Buda in the north his pashas quaffed their sherbet in
the libraries and the galleries of the poet-king, Matthias.
The Shah of Persia, the chief of the Holy Roman Empire,
and the proud republics of Genoa and Venice were
reckoned among the vassals whose tribute swelled his
1 "Contarini estimates Philip II.'s American revenues for the year
1593 at 2,000,000 of scudi, which is certainly not too high."-Ranke's
Spanish Empire, p. 96. Motley estimates the revenue from Mexico at
from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000 of dollars.-United Netherlands, vol. iii.
p. 487. The English public expenditure in years of peace averaged
about £400,000 in the first part of the reign of James I.—Gardiner's
History of England, vol. ii. Appendix viii.
2 Bacon's Essays, No. xxix.
94
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
annual revenue.” ¹ The observer, who looks to moral
conduct as one of the forces of empire, must have
admitted that Turk and Spaniard were distinguished
in private life by intense religious conviction, by loyalty
to the chief of the State, by a temperate habit of life,
such as monasteries profess and the service of arms
exacts, and by scrupulous fidelity to their word once
given. Their vices were those of soldiers in every age,
lawlessness to all but their own chiefs, a cynical licen-
tiousness and ferocity; drawbacks no doubt to a perfect
character, but not very much in excess of what was
held to be permissible at the time. With all these
elements of strength, the Spaniard and Turk were justly
regarded as a menace to the existence of other nations.
Luther spoke of the Turk as the personified wrath of
God, and modern criticism declares that the Turk
saved Europe by curbing the power of Spain. No one
doubted the strength of the two great Empires. Yet
within a century from the death of Philip II. the
cabinets of Europe were discussing in what way Spain
should be dismembered, as they have been discussing
for two generations past on whom the inheritance of
the Turk in Europe shall devolve. It can hardly have
been religious bigotry that destroyed Spain, for its
place in Europe was taken by France, which, under
Louis XIV., was almost as intolerant of heresy as Spain
had ever been. It can hardly have been the drain of
colonies, for those colonies were fostering Spanish trade
and contributing revenue to the exchequer; and colonies,
poorer and not much more wisely administered, made
England a great power. It can scarcely have been
3
1 Stirling-Maxwell's Don John of Austria, vol. i. pp. 289, 290.
2 Luther's Tisch-Reden, Band iv. S. 656.
3 Michelet's Histoire de France, Réforme, chap. xv.
II
95
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
comparative barbarism that ruined the Turk, for the
conquerors of Constantinople compared as well for civi-
lisation with the degenerate race they overthrew as the
Poles and Russians, who have inflicted the severest
losses upon them, compare with the Turks. The truth
surely is, that we may extend Bacon's axiom, by saying,
that if the nation which cultivates war absorbingly is
bound to achieve great success, it is bound also to do it
at the cost, within measurable time, of its place among
the nations of the world.
It may be argued that all the instances quoted are
those in which the immediate agent of dissolution has
been defeat in war. It is easy to imagine the inferior
races increasing more rapidly than they do upon the
higher, but difficult to suppose that they will ever be
in such numbers as to crush superior skill and energy
by brute weight. It is not, however, the purpose of
this argument to assume that Europe is ever likely to
be overrun by the Chinese, or North America subject
to insurgent negroes. Each century has its own way
of doing its appropriate work, and though in the face
of Europe under arms it may seem perilous to count
upon any dying out of the military spirit, every year
seems to increase the pre-eminence of industrial over
essentially martial nations. 1 The Chinese would be
1 Even as regards the size of armies, it would be a mistake to suppose
that the armies now maintained in time of peace are much larger than
was the case anciently. Prussia, in 1740, had an army of 83,468 men
to a population of 2,240,000. This is larger in proportion than the
Prussian army on the war footing now is. Russia, with a population
estimated at 12,000,000, had a peace establishment of 92,000 regulars
and about 80,000 irregulars. It has now a population of 107,000,000,
and a peace establishment of 841,000. France, in consequence of
Fleury's pacific policy, had the smallest army proportionally of any
great power at that time-only 130,000 regulars and 36,000 militia, to
a population a little under 20,000,000. But the peace establishment in
the last years of Louis XIV. had been 360,000 men to a smaller popula
96
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
*
¿
less dangerous than they are if they were as warlike
as the Turks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
because, in that case, they would waste their reproduc-
tive forces in arms. The danger for Europe, and for
the higher races everywhere, if the black and yellow
belt encroaches upon the earth, will not be the risk
that St. Petersburg or London may be made tributary
to Pekin, but that the expansion of Englishmen and
Russians and other like nations will be arrested, and
the character of the peoples profoundly modified, as
they have to adapt themselves to a stationary condition
of society. Beyond this there is the more subtle danger
that, while the lower races are raising themselves to the
material level of the higher, the higher may be assimi-
lating to the moral and mental depression of the lower.
It is fashionable to talk regretfully of the unrest of
modern civilisation. We have become conscious of the
cravings for something better than they have which
animate almost all classes of society, but especially
those who toil with the hand. Emigration to America
or Australia is the great outlet for the most energetic
in Western Europe; the less imaginative merely go
from the country into the large towns, and many of
these latter, as they find their hopes disappointed, are
seized with the desire to reconstruct society. "If the
Englishman," said Fortescue, four hundred years ago,
"be poor, and see another man having riches, which
may be taken from him by might, he will not spare to
do so.
The Englishman is a little less disposed now
to right himself by violence, but he has a power of
righting himself by law which he did not possess in
"" 1
The
tion. -Histoire de mon Temps, Euvres de Frédéric II. chap. i.
numbers given by Frederic for Prussia have been altered in accordance
with the corrections of the editor, Herr Preuss.
1 Fortescue on Monarchy, chap. xiii.
II
97
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
Fortescue's days, and which may be used with very
notable consequences. His tendency in Australia,
where he is carrying out modern ideas with great
freedom, is to adopt a very extensive system of State
Socialism. He goes to the State for railways and irri-
gation works; the State in Victoria provides him with
costless schooling for his children; the State in New
Zealand insures him; the State everywhere provides
work for him if times are bad; and it is more than
probable that the State will soon be called upon to run
steamers, to work coal-mines, and at least to explore
for the miner in any kind of ore. In Victoria, and
more or less in all the colonies, though least of all at
present in New South Wales, the State tries to protect
its citizens from foreign competition. These changes
from English policy have been adopted gradually, and
are partially explained by the peculiar circumstances
of a young country. What is noteworthy is that they
entirely recommend themselves to public sentiment. It
is difficult to suppose, that if emigration from England
suddenly received a great check, the mother country,
confronted with the task of providing for its yearly
surplus of population within its own boundaries, would
not gradually and cautiously resort to a Socialism like
that of Australia. Even as it is, English statesmen
have had to make remarkable concessions.
The very
existence of a Poor Law is the affirmation of the right
of every man to have State support in the last extremity.
The rights of property and the right of free contract
have alike been disregarded in Ireland, when it became
a question of the many against the few. The landlord
has been assisted to drain with cheap money out of the
public exchequer; English diplomacy and arms have
been freely employed to open up new markets for
H
98
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
British manufactures.
•
The corn of India has been
transported at unremunerative rates upon Government
lines, in order that the food of the people might be
cheapened.¹ There is now a cry for giving free primary
education to every one. All these are absolute departures
from the time-honoured English principle of leaving
every man to do the best for himself, and fare as he
may. Some of them are unconscious concessions, and
others are conscious approaches to State Socialism. It
is scarcely conceivable that we have seen the end yet.
There seems nothing overstrained in supposing that the
State in England, as elsewhere, may undertake the
construction of railways, or the reclaiming of land from
the sea; and may, in fact, engage largely in industrial
enterprises, so as to ensure work and support for a large
part of the population. Again, it may buy up existing
railways, as it has bought up telegraphs; and in this
case a great body of workmen possessing votes will
look to the State as paymaster, and will have a voice
in determining what they are to get. Lastly, it is
more than conceivable that education of every kind will
be made free. The expediency of giving intellect, in
every condition of life, its chance to assert itself will
recommend this change, and the upper classes are certain
to contend that if the State relieves parents in one class
of life from the charge of their children's schooling, it is
bound to relieve all.
Now, it is impossible to say beforehand whether
these changes will be for good or ill. What seems
•
1 "The railways, so far from being a commercial success, have entailed
the very heavy burden of over £47,000,000 on the Indian taxpayer.
The Indus Valley and Sind-Punjab and Delhi Railways are the most
signal instance of bounty-supported lines, but to a less extent; all the
wheat-carrying lines are only worked by the help of the State.”—Connell
on "Indian Railways and Indian Wheat," Statistical Journal, 1885, pp.
244-253.
II
99
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
evident is that they are bound to affect the character
of the whole people. Nowhere in the world has the
struggle for existence been so fierce as in Great Britain;
and it has been the mainspring of English energy. In
the sixteenth century Meteren declared that Englishmen
were as lazy as Spaniards.¹ They were, in fact, like the
Spaniards of that time, ready for adventure, able to
endure great hardships, unsurpassable explorers and
privateers, but indisposed to the plodding industry for
which Germans and Flemings were conspicuous. Two
centuries later Holberg declared that the greatest
examples of human indolence were to be found among
the pauper class in England, and the best examples of
well-applied toil among the English adventurers and
merchants.2 The praise, though Holberg uses the word
3
industry," is evidently directed to English enterprise.
A greater thinker than Holberg, Kant, was peculiarly
impressed by the factitious self-reliance and capricious
originality of the English character; and taking the
general estimate of our nation in that century, we may
say that it was a popular reflection of Kant's judgment,
though commonly more favourable. The Englishman
of old French novels is habitually an original, disre-
gardful of the opinion of the world, ready to measure
1 Quoted in Motley's United Netherlands, vol. i. p. 291. This is the
criticism of a foreigner, but it is incidentally confirmed by the negative
testimony of the Venetian Ambassador, Andrea Trevisano, of Nicander
Nucius, of Borde, and of Lely, who agree in omitting all mention of
industry as a feature in English character. It must be borne in mind
that the ploughman was scarce in times like the sixteenth century,
when most of the land was in pasture, and that we owe our manufactures
to Flemish settlers. The two classes most distinguished for steady toil
were, therefore, scantily represented.
one.
2 Holberg's Betänkning over nogle Europäiske Nationer, S. 232.
3 Kant's Anthropologie. Kant's estimate is distinctly an unfriendly
He calls the English "a people of whim :" glances at their "brutal
pride:" (stolze Grobheit) and suggests that English self-assertiveness is not
natural, but the result of circumstances.
UorM
100
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
"" 1
himself against any odds, and taking nothing upon
trust. Peterborough and Clive, the knights-errant at
the head of armies and councils, were in fact glorified
instances of the Englishman, as his contemporaries
appraised him. The reputation which the Englishman
of Great Britain enjoyed has now been in great measure
transferred to the Anglo-American. The original race
has grown "bulbous, heavy-witted, material,” as Haw-
thorne cynically puts it; is careful of its bank-balance
and of the proprieties; is weighted with an ever-present
sense of responsibilities. No Peterborough or Clive
would now be allowed a free hand by his Government.
The first impetuous act would provoke a recall by
telegram. The conquest of an Empire would only
terrify the British Cabinet with an apprehension of
Parliamentary criticism.
Now, this change, which we see most conspicuously
in matters of foreign policy, is one that may be traced
in every direction.
"The English," says Holberg, "as
soon as they hear of anything they are not familiar with,
take hold of it at once, examine it, accept it, and teach
it publicly." Holberg referred to new opinions; and
the contrast between the English school of free thought,
which moulded religious enlightenment in the eighteenth
century, and the utter sterility of our literature in the
nineteenth, except for a single name, is sufficiently re-
markable. Heine has said, that the most stupid
Englishman can talk sensibly about politics, and that
it is impossible to extract anything but nonsense from
the best educated Englishman when religion is discussed.2
The reason is not that educated Englishmen are uncon-
scious of the movement of speculative thought all the
1 Hawthorne's Our Old Home, vol. i. p. 99.
2 Heine, England: Die Emancipation der Katholiken, Band xi. S. 115.
II
ΙΟΙ
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
world over, but that they deliberately shrink from the
impulse to explore new regions, at the cost of surrender-
ing certain accepted and acceptable conclusions. Cer-
tainly no one can now say, as Holberg did, that there
is a ready taking in and promulgation of new thought.
The results of Biblical criticism in Germany have never
been tolerated in England, till they were so nearly
superseded in their native country as to appear com-
paratively Conservative; and even the scientific con-
clusions of the Englishman Darwin were being
disseminated in text-books on the Continent while
English society was reading refutations of them, or at
best taking refuge in half-hearted attempts to reconcile
the doctrine of evolution with the teaching of Genesis.
Still, it is probably true to say that English speculation
is more fearless in physical science than in metaphysics
or Biblical exegesis, or the critical reconstruction of
history. A great many persons are glad to acquiesce
in the view that the conclusions of science may be al-
lowed to stand by themselves, and that when they are
absolutely opposed to those of faith, it is not necessary
to disbelieve either.
Perhaps one of the best instances of the decadence
of English energy is in the imperfect welcome accorded
to mechanical invention. The end of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth were con-
spicuous in England by the number of new inventions
given to the world. The industrial supremacy of the
globe was achieved almost at a bound by the men
whose catalogue of names includes Arkwright and
Hargreaves, Watt and Bramah, Brinsley and Stephenson,
Wedgwood, Maudsley, and Davy. There is no reason
why this inventive faculty should not have continued
in the country. Nasmyth, Bessemer, Whitworth, and
102
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Armstrong are conspicuous instances that the race
retains the power of magnificent conceptions, and the
great multiplication of factories and workshops in Great
Britain ought to have stimulated the thought, as it
has trained the eyes and hands of a large industrial
population. Indeed, it may be said that England still
contributes the larger half of the world's inventive
fertility; but England no longer gets or deserves the
credit for it. If we look back to actual history, we
shall find that many of the best patents, such as the
steam-plough, the sewing-machine, and the electric
telegraph had to cross back to England from America
before they could obtain recognition.¹ Even Nasmyth's
steam-hammer was employed in Creuzot before the
foundries of his own country adopted it.2 The English
inventor is still more than the equal of his rivals; more
fertile in expedients than the German, and more patient
than the American. Where he fails is when he carries
his work to market. The instinctive feeling in England
is, that if an invention were really valuable it would
have been hit upon before; the feeling in America, that
1 It may be added that the electric telephone was first invented by
Mr. Graham Bell of Edinburgh, who had studied the subject under his
father in Scotland, though he took out the first patent in America.—
Moncel's Le Téléphone, pp. 6, 33. A reaping-machine, resembling the
Australian stripper, has been traced back to the Belgae as known by
Pliny; and Mr. Smiles shows that one was in use in France in the
sixteenth century (Industrial Biography, p. 173); while the present form
was invented by Commin of Denwick (1812), and Patrick Bell of Dumfries
(1827), before M'Cormick patented it in America.
was first invented by Saint in England, c. 1790.
proved it, and sold the patent for a trifle (£250) to Thomas in England.
Thomas neglected to bring it out, and Howe bought it again and made
it a success in America.
The sewing-machine
Howe in America im-
2 Smiles's Industrial Biography, p. 287. Compare Goethe's remark:
"Der Engländer ist Meister das Entdeckte gleich zu nützen, bis es
wieder zur neuen Entdeckung, und frischer That führt.
Man frage nur,
warum sie uns überall voraus sind.”—Ueber Naturwissenschaft, Band iii.
S. 268.
II
103
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
whatever is new ought simply because it is new to
have a trial. Naturally, perhaps, the Conservative
impulse is strongest in our military administration.
In 1848 the Prussian needle-gun attracted so much
attention in the campaign against Denmark, that a
committee of officers was appointed to report upon
it. They agreed that it was quite unnecessary to give
up Brown Bess, and the change to a long-range rifle
had accordingly to be made during the Crimean War.¹
We hold our empire and preserve national existence
on the condition of being stronger at sea than any other
power, and yet France-a formidable rival and possible
enemy—was allowed to outstrip us for a time in the
construction of ironclads.2
1
Now, the Conservatism of an ancient society, which
shrinks instinctively from change, because any change
may lead to dangerous combinations, is most remark-
able in England, because England has in many matters
been the principle of ferment in the modern world.
It has changed Catholicism for Protestantism, and
tempered Protestantism with free thought; it has
limited monarchy; it has given a peculiar meaning to
aristocracy, making that elastic and flexible which is
rigid everywhere else; it has associated the working
classes with government; it has experimented in
making labour free, and in freeing the exchange of
labour from fetters; and it has popularised the feeling,
1 My authority for this is an officer who was on the committee.
2 In the summer of 1866 the English ironclad fleet consisted of
36 vessels, carrying 637 guns; the French ironclad fleet of 33 vessels,
carrying 777 guns. Even if ships chiefly valuable for coast defence were
deducted from these lists, the French still remained superior in guns by
613 to 526, though inferior in the number of sea-going ships by 17 to
27.—Statesman's Year-Book, 1886-87. "France undoubtedly was the first
to construct sea-going ironclads, a policy we at first thought folly, and
then were constrained to follow."-Eardley Wilmot: The Development
of Navies, p. 249.
104
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
!
that men may make themselves a country anywhere
under the sun. It has boasted that it makes the
functions of the State small in order to leave the
widest possible sphere to energy and enterprise. There-
fore, if England becomes temporising in her policy, if
her best literary work is circumscribed to the criticism
of style, and the construction of literary mosaics; if
her wealth is more and more withdrawn from specu-
lative adventures; if her industry is less and less
originative; if her people appear to be losing the im-
pulse to better themselves outside of England, or are
denied the opportunity, we may surely assume that
these changes will be accompanied with a trans-
formation of character. Crushed or cowed by the
forces that surround him, the Englishman will invoke
the aid of the State. Universal suffrage, which was
inevitable, has given him the machinery for moulding
all the forces of Government to his purpose, and he
will in all likelihood employ them to introduce an
extended socialism of the Australian type. It is quite
possible that these changes will be worked out slowly,
temperately, and wisely. There is no reason why they
should be attended with any forcible confiscations of
property or cancelling of national obligations. It is
conceivable that the soil of England and Scotland
might be bought back from its present proprietors, as
different statesmen have proposed the soil of Ireland
should be, by the creation of a large three per cent
stock, the interest on which should be paid by a
peasant proprietary. The coal-mines of England might
be resumed in the same way, and worked for the
State. The question is not whether these changes are
desirable and would answer the ends expected, but
whether they are not possible and even likely. The
II
105
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
case assumed is, that the races of Europe have very
nearly reached the extreme limit of expansion, that
they will wrest nothing from the inhabitants of tropical
countries, and are even likely to lose a little to them,
and that when the Temperate Zone is fairly peopled,
so that immigration on a large scale will be discouraged
by every country, England, which unites a small terri-
tory to a dense population, will find itself face to face
with the problem how to feed and clothe its people.
If we assume a nation, so circumstanced, to become
stationary, as France is tending to do, that in itself
involves a very great change in character and habits
of life-a change, perhaps, quite as great as the adop-
tion of State Socialism. If, on the other hand, we
suppose, as perhaps is more probable, that the passage
to a stationary condition has to be spread over several
generations, in that case there must be some means
of supporting the ever-pressing burden of fresh lives.
The case of England has been taken because
England is of all countries that which has benefited
most by emigration, that which will suffer most when
emigration is checked, and that in which socialistic
theories have so far found least favour. There are
some European countries, like Spain and Russia, which
will admit of a very large increase within their own
boundaries, and which accordingly need not feel the
pressure of population till long after it has become
a factor in British politics. There are others again,
like France and Italy, which will perhaps readily adapt
themselves to the stationary state. Meanwhile we
may surely say of all, that it means a great deal for
them if dispersion over the earth is checked, and a
great deal also if liberty and enterprise come to be
powerfully trammelled in the country which hitherto
ད
106
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
has furnished the greatest argument for their utility.
It is possible, of course, that the new order, in which
the individual withers and the man is less and less,
may have compensating advantages of its own. To
some it has seemed that the struggle for existence,
which the English theory of unlimited competition
involves, is unutterably brutal, and that the survival
of the fittest in industrial war means the extinction
of all who are weak, of all who have other interests
than gain, of all who are scrupulous. It is not the
purpose of this argument to consider whether there
is any truth in this point of view. All that is con-
tended is, that if anything like the democratic pro-
gramme of the day comes to be realised; if every man,
weak or strong, skilled or unskilled, is assured work
on fairly equal terms; if the hours of labour are
limited; if the State takes the employment of labour
more and more into its own hands, buying up lands
and factories and mines, the change will practically
be as great as that which has transformed serfs or
slaves all over the world into free labourers.
It will also be a change that will reproduce many
conditions of primitive society and conditions that we
associate with inferior races. The proprietorship of
land by communities, as distinct from private property,
has existed, to quote M. de Laveleye, "in Germany and
ancient Italy, in Peru and China, in Mexico and India,
among the Scandinavians and the Arabs, with precisely
similar characteristics." 1 A change in the practice of
the Western nations has accustomed us to regard this
stage in a nation's life as a rude and ephemeral one.
It is difficult even to assume a modern State deriving
rent from all the land in the country, and running all
1 Laveleye on Primitive Property, p. 2.
II
107
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
the factories. Yet, as a matter of fact, we administer
India in conformity with the primitive rule;¹ and every
State has been compelled to organise great establish-
ments for the construction of ships, or for providing
warlike stores. In addition to this, there are numerous
instances of mines belonging to the State, like the salt-
mine of Wieliczka, and the quicksilver mines of
Almaden. The railways are owned by the State half
the world over, and there are cases where the State
runs commercial steamers, 2 though the more usual
practice is for the State to subsidise them. Habitually,
the European Governments have only instituted manu-
factures when the article to be produced was one of
limited demand, like the porcelain of Sèvres and
Meissen, or the tapestry of the Gobelins, or when it
was important to naturalise a new industry, as was the
case for some time in Russia. Frederick the Great's
practice, approved by Mirabeau and by Mr. Carlyle,
of forcing the rich abbeys to establish manufactures,
was the action of an exceptional man, more vigorous
than economically intelligent, in an exceptional time.
If, however, we ask why the best economists, especially
in England, have always disapproved of the State
mixing itself up in industrial undertakings, we shall
find the reasons to be such as would not weigh much,
if at all, with Trades-Unionists. Mr. Mill, for instance,
argues, that a people whose work is found for them
become deficient in initiative; that as a general rule
the business of life is better performed when those who
3
1 The State in India derives more than £23,000,000 from the rent
of land.
2 The Russian Volunteer fleet-seven ships, bought by subscription,
and presented to the Crown—is used for commercial purposes in time of
peace.
3 "Friedrich was not the least of a free-trader," etc.-Carlyle's
History of Frederick the Great, vol. vi. p. 365.
108
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
1
have an immediate interest in it are left to take their
own course, uncontrolled either by the mandate of the
law, or of any public functionary; above all, that it is
exceedingly dangerous to multiply State functionaries,
and concentrate all the power of organised action in a
dominant bureaucracy. It is a corollary from these
principles that Government work cannot be as cheaply
done as the work in private establishments. A Socialist,
however, will only regard the first of these arguments
as important, and will probably demur to its validity.
He will argue, that in private establishments the work-
man's improvements are habitually confiscated for the
use of the master; and that if men continue to invent,
where they reap only trifling advantages, they will
probably have their wits sharpened when their work
is secure of recognition, because the Government has
no interest in defrauding them. He will maintain that
the logical tendency of unlimited competition is to
make profits by sweating the operative, and that the
State, which can command its own market, is not liable
to this temptation. A Socialist is not afraid of increasing
the power of the State, or of multiplying State function-
He wishes the interest of the community to be
paramount, and that all should be in the State's service.
Neither does he think cheap production the main object
to be aimed at. It is important, because it economises
the wage-fund of the administration; but the real
essentials are that the work done should be good, and
the workman adequately requited.
aries.
This argument has assumed throughout that the
progress of the world is not, as is commonly taken
for granted, to democracy, but to some form of State
1 Mill's Political Economy, Book iii. chap. xi. s. 26; Hearne's Plutology,
chap. xxiii.
II
109
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
Socialism. It is not contended for a moment that
democracy may not be, or indeed is not likely to be, a
temporary form of political growth. What, however,
does democracy mean? Not necessarily the extinction
of hereditary kingship, for a sovereign, and even a line
of sovereigns, may be approved the best possible ex-
ponents of the popular will. Not necessarily, or per-
haps conceivably, the destruction of social inequality,
for even if a House of Lords be swept away, men who
are pre-eminent by practical ability or by wealth will
always make their superiority felt, and if they use their
power wisely may count upon a generous recognition.
What democracy seems really to mean is the vesting of
power in the people in such way that their changes
of purpose may have instantaneous effect given to them.
It is this approval of mutability which statesmen dread.
It may mean that a war will be declared wantonly, and
given up disgracefully; that an alliance of long standing
will suddenly be discarded; that ruinous expenditure
will be incurred; that a national debt will be repu-
diated, or property confiscated to relieve temporary
pressure; that inexperienced men will be put at the
public helm in virtue of a certain talent of voluble
speech, and a fertility in plausible expedients. Perhaps
all these dangers have been exaggerated.
The most
real of all seems to be the risk of profuse expenditure;
and even in this respect it would be difficult for a
democracy to transcend the extravagance of the old
military monarchies. At any rate, it seems likely that
two great causes will so far modify the democratic un-
rest as to make political society in the rather distant
future more stable, more wary, and more compactly
cemented than it is now. In the first place, the growth
of new military powers, such as China, or the augmen-
I IO
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
tation of old empires, if we assume Hindoos and negroes
to be subject to European States, will make it more
and more necessary for every country to keep its
armies and fleets in a high state of efficiency. In the
next place, Socialism, which gives an industrial pro-
gramme, is almost certain to be the complement of
democracy, which only gives the power of adopting a
programme. Socialism, however, which strives to anni-
hilate the struggle for existence, competition, and the
collision of capital with labour, aims at a millennium
of orderly progress from which the pressure of want
and the stimulus of ambition shall be excluded.
It may be argued, that as the nations of the world
become more and more enlightened, the barbarism of
war will tend more and more to be discarded; and the
fact noted above, that purely warlike nations cannot
hold their own against the industrial races, seems to
indicate that the earth may some day be covered with
States, all of which desire peace. Unhappily, the dream
of peace, which was very prevalent fifty years ago,
has been succeeded by a period of wars causing more
eventful changes than have been known for many
centuries; and Europe is now little better than a camp
of instruction. The great cause that has determined
this activity seems to be the conviction that only
powerful empires can maintain themselves in the im-
mediate future; and that for purposes of self-preser-
vation the weak must unite, and the strong secure
themselves by anticipating their neighbours.
gross results are, that Prussia, which could be dis-
regarded thirty years ago, is now a first-rate Power;
that Italy has become important as an ally, and that
Russia is as strong as ever in Eastern Europe, and
incomparably stronger in Central Asia. Meanwhile,
The
II
III
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
France, Austria, and Turkey are all weaker than they
were. Unless we assume the Powers that have gained
strength to be satisfied with what they have got, and
the nations that have lost to be convinced they cannot
retrieve their losses, the war which is always being
anticipated is certain some day to break out. The
accident of a military sovereign, or an ambitious
minister, of troubles at home or possibilities abroad, will
be sufficient to determine it. More than this, the great
Powers see what they may gain by annexing dominions
which will give them soldiers or revenue, or outlets for
their commerce. Russia is as certainly working for a
harbour in the Persian Gulf as for one in the Dardanelles.
Even if we assume that the next fifty years will bring a
settlement of all these questions, can any one believe
that finality will have been reached? The larger any
empire becomes, the more numerous will be the points
of contact with its neighbours and possible enemies.
There will always be the little adjoining province that
is desirable to round off the Imperial territory.
Neither does it seem possible to imagine that the
great inert force of China will not some day be organ-
ised, and rendered mobile and capable of military
aggression. Almost the most secluded of the nations
in early times, China was barred from a career of con-
quest by the mountains of Thibet, the desert of Gobi,
and the snows of Siberia. She was swept over by
Tartar conquerors, and the repeated attempts of her
people to trade or colonise in the Malay Archipelago
were met with restrictive measures,¹ or foiled by mas-
Gradually, her policy became one of deified
sacres.
1 Thus at Bantam, in the 16th century, the Chinese used to be con-
fined to a quarter of their own outside the town.-Voyages des Hollandais,
tome ii. p. 41. Kerr's Travels, vol. viii. p. 143.
112
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER .
inactivity. She tried to concentrate all the energy of
her people upon her own soil, and was as unwilling to
let the labourer depart as to welcome the merchant.
Her great resources went to feed the luxury of a court
and the greed of officials. We have compelled her to
come into the fellowship of nations. She has adopted
steamers, and European artillery and army organisa-
tion; she has accepted the telegraph; she is about to
introduce railways; and she has credit enough to carry
out the changes she needs with foreign capital. On
three sides of her lie countries that she may easily
seize, over which very often she has some old claim, and
in the climate of which her people can live. Flexible
as Jews, they can thrive on the mountain plateaux of
Thibet, and under the sun of Singapore; more versatile
even than Jews, they are excellent labourers, and not
without merit as soldiers and sailors; while they have
a capacity for trade which no other nation of the East
possesses. They do not need even the accident of a
man of genius to develop their magnificent future.
Ordinary statesmanship, adopting the improvements of
Europe without offending the customs and prejudices of
the people, may make them a State which no Power in
Europe will dare to disregard; with an army which
could march by fixed stages across Asia; and a fleet
which could hold its own against any the strongest of
the European Powers could afford to keep permanently
in Chinese waters.
It is not the purpose of this argument to anticipate
what the career of military conquest may be in Europe
or Asia. All that is aimed at is to show that, though
the world may become more and more industrial in its
tendencies, the most powerful States will still continue,
and indeed must continue, to keep up large armaments,
II
113
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
and to be prepared at a moment's notice for defence or
aggression. This, however, implies a strong and toler-
ably permanent Executive. The cases of the United
States of America and of England offer no parallel to
the condition of the continent of Europe, of Asia, and
of part at least of Africa. The United States have no
neighbour who can threaten them, and can afford to run
the risk of being over-mastered at sea for a few weeks.
The Power that ventured on such an experiment would
be apt to expiate its short-lived triumph severely. Eng-
land has a first line of defence for her own shores in her
navy. But England is compelled, even now, to keep her
Indian army more efficient and more easily mobilised
than her forces at home; and this obligation will grow
upon her with every decade.
decade. For the rest of the world
outside the American continent, something like the
state of preparation in which France, Germany, Austria,
Russia, and Italy keep themselves at present, seems to
be inevitable to all time. Even if a general reduction
of armaments were agreed to, it is doubtful if it would
much alter the equilibrium. One administration would
always be in advance of another, by giving more instruc-
tion during the same term of service in the militia; so
that, when war was declared, it would have an advan-
tage of six weeks over an opponent. But, beyond this,
it is difficult to conceive how a great reduction of arma-
ments could ever be effected. Russia, for instance, may
need less defence than was once the case on the side of
Turkey and Sweden; but she has to guard an infinitely
larger frontier against Germany and Austria, against
England and China, and against the allies which any
one of these powers might succeed in influencing. From
the moment China becomes as strong as Roumania is
now—that is, can dispose of a corps of 100,000 trained
I
: 114
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
men, or their equivalent, she becomes a power that
must enter into the combinations of England, Russia,
and France. It seems, therefore, as if the utility of
armies was likely to endure; and, if so, it can hardly
be doubted that, under present conditions, the ability
to handle them promptly and vigorously will also be
indispensable. In other words, every State must have
a strong military executive more or less independent of
party combinations, and more or less autocratic. The
alternative is that it ceases to exist, and in this case it
will be organised by its conqueror.
It may be argued, on the other hand, by a few
Liberals who love peace, that, under free institutions
which endear the existing order to every man, it will be
easy to enforce an universal conscription of volunteers,
militia, or landwehr, on such a scale as to make inva-
sion a danger only to the invader. Unfortunately, the
conclusive evidence of history shows that half-trained
troops are perfectly valueless in the open field against
trained; that even where the troops are fairly matched
enthusiasm is a very imperfect substitute for general-
ship; and that, other things being equal, those who
wage a purely defensive war are at a disadvantage. If
we take the most thoroughly accepted of the views
referred to, the belief in volunteer soldiers, we shall find
it to rest very much on the success of the Americans
in the War of Independence against England; on the
victories of the French Republican armies in 1793-94; on
the tenacious resistance of the Spanish guerillas to the
French armies; and on the defeat of a body of English
soldiers by the Boers at Majuba Hill. Now every one
of these supposed instances can be shown to tell the
other way. Whether the Americans, many of whom
had seen active service against the French, were not
II
115
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
more than an ordinary militia may be fairly questioned.
It may be conceded that they were less than regulars,
and they were accordingly beaten, not dishonourably,
but decisively, at Bunker's Hill, at Brooklyn, at Chatter-
ton's Hill, at Germantown, at Brandywine, at Camden,
and at Guildford, though the English generals were never
more than second-rate, though half the English troops
were German mercenaries, and though the Americans
latterly were, of course, trained soldiers. The one great
success that the militia really achieved was in the third
year of the war, when, with an army of 13,216 effectives,
it obliged a British force of 3500 to capitulate at Sara-
toga. Except for the support of the French army
under Rochambeau, it is more than doubtful if the
Americans could have maintained the struggle in the
last year of the war against an English army which
never mustered more than 8000 in the field. In this
instance, we must bear in mind that the Americans,
from their great poverty, were unable to keep their
forces together the whole year round, so as to give
them the habit of concerted action which distinguishes
regular from irregular troops. In 1812 their militia did
incomparably worse against the veterans sent out under
Ross of Bladensburg, and a little body of 4500 men
marched where it liked, defeated armies of 7400 and
6400 successively, burnt Washington, and would prob-
ably have taken Baltimore in the teeth of 15,000
militia, if the enemy had not sunk ships to make the
co-operation of the British fleet impossible. It may be
said that the same year witnessed the defeat of a
highly-trained British force under Pakenham before
New Orleans. In that case 6000 men, without artillery,
and without fascines or scaling ladders, were hurled
against strong works defended by twice the number, and
116
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
were shot down.¹ It is no discredit to the Americans
to say that, with equally good strategy, and an equally
strong position, almost any troops in the world could
have repelled the attack which Pakenham ought never
to have made.
The second supposed instance of a defeat of regular
soldiers by insurrectionary levies is when France was
invaded by the Duke of Brunswick in 1793, and by the
Prussians, Austrians, and British in 1794. The popular
assumption is that the old French army had been dis-
banded or allowed to disappear, and that under the
influence of revolutionary excitement hundreds of
thousands of citizen soldiers sprung to arms under the
command of citizen officers, drove the invaders back,
and overflowed Italy, Spain, and the Low Countries.
"O youth, O hope, O infinite strength of the conscious-
ness and the feeling of right—who could resist them?'
says M. Michelet poetically, while he develops this
view; and General Foy, a much higher authority on
military matters, says that from "the year 1794 inclu-
sive, our young army, commanded by new men who
had escaped from studies and counting-houses, was
seen to demolish the reputation of old armies and old
generals." General Foy probably refers to Moreau,
who had been a lawyer, and to Jourdan, who, after
serving as a private in the American War, had settled
down as a draper. Taking now the facts of history, we
shall find that the poetical view requires to be largely
discounted. The army of the monarchy was never
disbanded, though it lost a great many of its officers
and men by emigration, or otherwise, and was more or
2
1 Gleig's Washington and New Orleans, chaps. vii.-xiv. and xxi.-xxiii.
2 Michelet, Hist. de la Révolution, tome iv. p. 68.
3 Foy, Guerre de la Péninsule, tome i. p. 100.
II
117
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
less demoralised. The work of reorganising it was
constantly going on. "The regulation of the infantry
manœuvres of 1791," says Foy, "is a model of concision
and clearness," and he explains that in that year a
change, bringing privates into closer contact with their
officers, was introduced.¹ "If in 1792,” says Napoleon,
"France repelled the aggression of the first coalition, it
is because she had had three years to prepare in, and in
which to levy 200 battalions of the National Guard; it
is because she was only attacked by armies of at most
100,000 men. If 800,000 men had marched under the
orders of the Duke of Brunswick, Paris would have
been taken, in spite of the energy and the onward rush
of the nation."2 What really happened then in 1792 is
that a very inadequate though efficient army, under the
Duke of Brunswick, prepared to march upon Paris,
capturing fortresses and defeating armies on its way.
The French troops, though not good enough to be called
soldiers, were a great deal better than volunteers. They
consisted partly of regiments out of the old army, and
partly of the National Guard, under experienced officers.
Dumouriez, Kellerman, Rochambeau, Lafayette, Luckner,
Montesquieu, Dillon, Beurnonville, Custine, Biron, and
Beaurepaire the men who are responsible for the failures
and successes of 1792-were all old officers of the aristo-
cratic régime. They could not at first give cohesion or
self-confidence to the troops under them. Brunswick's
army advanced, taking Longwy and Verdun, and win-
ning two victories at Grand-Prè and Vaux,—in the
latter of which 1500 Prussian hussars scattered a whole
corps of 10,000 men in a disorderly flight which carried
1 Foy, Guerre de la Péninsule, tome i. p. 109. Compare Stephen's
French Revolution, vol. ii. pp. 197-200, and 451.
2 Napoleon, Notes et Mélanges, tome ii. p. 294, edition of 1823.
·
118
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
some of the fugitives to Paris.¹ Gradually, however,
Dumouriez received reinforcements, and was able to
keep his men together in the entrenched camp of Valmy
under a cannonade which only cost each side 800 men
out of 70,000 or 80,000 brought into the field. The
mere fact that the French forces were able to hold their
position was equivalent to a victory under the circum-
stances. From that time forward the French were on
the aggressive, and before the end of the year the
victory of Jemappes, in which, however, they were two
to one against the Austrians, gave them possession of
Austrian Flanders.2 Valmy and Jemappes, such as they
are, are the only victories that can be claimed for the
French insurrectionary levies. They were won by
soldiers and militia troops under veteran officers; and
if their leaders had had a little more time in which to
weld together their excellent but discordant materials,
the army would have been a more than average speci-
men of a well-trained French force of those days.
During the years next succeeding its composition
steadily grew better. Carnot, a man of genius, organ-
ised it; and the opportunities given to privates and
young men of rising to important command were taken
advantage of by a number of able officers. Still, Moreau
is perhaps the one instance of a civilian who rose
rapidly to distinction in the army. Hoche, Ney, Jourdan,
Junot, Massena, Bernadotte, and Berthier, had all been
privates or non-commissioned officers in the Royalist
army before they rose to command under the Republic.
1 "At the very outset the French encountered the most ludicrous
reverses. The French troops had proved as worthless as their leaders
were incapable. Whole brigades turned tail, crying that they were
betrayed, casting away their weapons as they ran, and betraying the
most abject cowardice and terror."-Griffith, French Revolutionary Generals,
p. 4.
2 Alison says 40,000 to 19,000.-Hist. of Europe, vol. ii. p 188.
II
119
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
We know what Napoleon's opinion of short-service
men was. Decrès once said to him in council, “I can-
not extemporise a sailor as you do a soldier. It takes
seven years to make a sailor. You turn out a soldier
in six months.' "Taisez-vous," said Napoleon. "Such
ideas are enough to destroy an empire. It takes six
years to make a soldier."1 On another occasion he
wrote of himself: "The First Consul did very good
things, he put everything in the right way, but he
did not work miracles; the heroes of Hohen-Linden and
Marengo were not recruits, but good and old soldiers." 2
Evidently Napoleon's knowledge of the levies of 1792
and 1793 had not inclined him to suppose that en-
thusiasm can be a substitute for drill. His own experi-
ence was, in fact, very significant. The French navy,
deprived of its best officers and gunners, who were
largely Royalist, had to trust to reconstruction under
such administrators as the man who wound
up his
official report with the words, "Legislators, these are the
impulses of an ingenuous patriot, who has no guiding
principle but nature, and a truly French heart"; or the
other, who appended a marginal note to his acceptance
of resignations from the old staff: "there are plenty
more to be got. The result was seen in those engage-
ments when ships, officered and manned by men who
for courage were worthy foes of Nelson and Colling-
wood's heroes, were constantly out-manoeuvred and
destroyed in the first engagement. Napoleon's fall is
"3
1 Thiers quoted by Senior, Conversations, vol. i. p. 291.
2 Napoleon, Notes et Mélanges, tome ii. p. 218.
3 Jurien de la Gravière, Guerres Maritimes, tome i. pp. 138, 139.
4 "In 1810 or 1811," said Admiral Mathieu, "I was on board a
French corvette, which fought an action with an English vessel, the
Lively. We passed three times under her stern, and raked her each time.
We ought to have cleared her decks. Not a shot touched her."—Senior's
Correspondence of A. de Tocqueville, tome ii. p. 202.
"
120
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
the record of a struggle by volunteers handled by some
of the best leaders in the world against men only a
little better drilled, and who scarcely dared face them.
If half the conscripts who fought at Leipzig could have
been exchanged for an equal number of the veterans
sacrificed in Russia, the map of Europe would be very
different now from what it is. Raw levies did not save
the Republic in 1792, but they ruined the Empire in
1814.
As little can it be said that irregular levies or
guerillas saved Spain during the war with the French
that began in 1808, and only ended when Wellington
crossed the Pyrenees in 1813. The capitulation of
Baylen and the defence of Saragossa are the only
important instances during the whole of that period
when raw Spanish levies did good service against a
regular force. At Baylen, where the French general
was incapable, perhaps half-hearted, where his forces
were divided, and where two Swiss regiments turned
against him in the battle, the Spanish regulars were
twice as numerous as the French actually engaged,
and the presence of a few thousand armed peasants
only gave solidity and confidence to the regular force.¹
At the first siege of Saragossa the defenders were as
two to one compared with the investing army, and, in
spite of a heroic defence, must have capitulated if the
news of Baylen had not forced the French to retire.
At the second siege, where the besieged were as many
in number as the besiegers, they were forced to surrender
1
1 Foy reckons the French force actually engaged under Dupont at
12,000 against 40,000 Spaniards. After Dupont's surrender, Vedel's
division came up, and was forced to capitulate.—Guerre de la Péninsule,
tome iv. p. 68. Alison puts the army of Castanos at 28,000 foot and
2000 horse, who appear, however, to have received reinforcements.
Alison ascribes the victory to the Swiss and Walloon guards, and to the
Spanish artillery, all regulars.—Hist. of Europe, vol. vii. pp. 359-362.
1
II
121
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
2
after a defence in which three-fourths of their number
had perished.¹ In short, even behind walls, and when
they were largely mixed with regular troops, volunteers
could not hold their own against military experience
and discipline. Of the guerillas, Napier tells us that
they could do nothing against even a house or church,
of which the French had barricaded the entrance. They
were excellent for cutting off stragglers, intercepting
communications, and generally giving annoyance, es-
pecially when they were backed by a regular army;
but as a rule they were more formidable to their friends
than to the enemy. The attempt to employ them has
never again been made, except during the French
occupation of Mexico, and then also it was a complete
failure. Under generals of very ordinary talent, a small
body of French troops kept the country down, as long
as they were allowed to remain there.
The successes of the Boers in the Transvaal against
British troops have revived in some quarters the belief
that men who are good shots, and know the country,
may be employed against well-disciplined troops, even
in the open field. It must be borne in mind that one
of the great sources of weakness in irregulars-their
liability to get in one another's way-scarcely occurs
when only handfuls of men are brought into action.
The Boers had also seen service enough in Kaffir wars
to be free from the liability to sudden panics. The force
which Sir George Colley led to three separate defeats
consisted altogether of less than 1100 men. They were
1 Thiers estimates the troops actually before the walls at 18,000
(Consulat et Empire, livre 33); Alison at 16,500 (vol. vii. p. 243); while
the troops inside Saragossa are put by Thiers at 40,000 to 45,000, and
by Alison at 40,000. French troops, variously estimated at 17,000 to
26,000, were, however, employed in keeping open communications.
2 Napier's Peninsular War, book xv. chap. i.
122
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
wasted in attacks on strong positions in the hills, and
at Majuba Hill a portion of them were sent to occupy
ground of which they knew nothing, surrounded by an
enemy in superior force, whom they had neither cannon,
Gatlings, nor rockets to dislodge.¹ Such defeats, how-
ever creditable to the Boers who inflicted them, could
not have affected the issue of the campaign. The
English forces within striking distance of the enemy
were overwhelming, and must have dispersed the in-
surgents, if a peace, politically defensible, but more
remarkable in its surrender of military honour than
the capitulations of Kloster-Zeven or Baylen, had not
been hastily rushed through by the British Government.
It has seemed important to discuss this question of
defence without defiance at length, because if there be
any organisation by which a great State can secure
itself from attack, without spending large sums on its
army and navy, and using up many years of its subjects'
lives in forced service, there can be no doubt but that
the wisest statesmanship will adopt it; and in that case
the military influence, which is essentially absolutist,
would be withdrawn from politics. What, however,
we have to anticipate is, that every State will have to
be constantly on its guard against dismemberment or
subjugation; and this not only as now, but more than
now, because some new States will have been formed,
or even more, because some old ones will have become
very formidable.
If, however, the industrial require-
ments of old States have led to something like State
Socialism, we may expect this to take an all-pervading
form. The child will be taught at State schools, and,
perhaps, taught the elements of a craft, and drilled
there. The youth will be compelled to take service
1 Bellair's Transvaal War, chap. x.
II
123
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
in the State forces; when he is discharged from service
will have employment found for him by the State; and
will be supported in sickness or old age from a State
Insurance Fund. He will find it increasingly difficult
to emigrate; and as the principal forms of labour will
have been monopolised by the State, he will find it
difficult to invest his savings in anything but the pur-
chase of State funds. It is conceivable that loafers
and vagrants will be hunted down and punished under
this régime, with incomparably more severity than any
modern State attempts.
Even the institution of an
idle Monday may be put down, when labour is regarded
as a due to the country, and not as the private property
of the individual, which he may sell or withhold at
pleasure. States organised on the democratic basis for
giving labour its greatest possible return, and citizens
compelled to submit impartially to military discipline,
are likely to approach the problems of life with great
seriousness, and to be very intolerant of the Bohemian
element in rich and poor. Besides, if private specula-
tion has been to a great extent extinguished by the
State monopoly of some form of enterprise, large for-
tunes will gradually be subdivided, and the privileged
class, that spends lavishly and claims to exempt itself
from the ordinary burdens, from the conscription or the
obligation to work, will become very unimportant.
Now it is noticeable that this form of society will
be an approximation to old forms, which are eminently
consonant to the genius of those races-the Chinese,
the Hindoo, and the American Indian-which it has
been shown are likely to increase in numbers and
become strong. If we can assume a really powerful
China, and an united India, independent, or practically
so, and a strong Central African State, or federation of
I
124
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
F
!
States-suppositions which are at least possible-we can
hardly suppose that they will be without influence upon
the States of European growth. The conquest of India
not only introduced the Nabob into English society, but
naturalised the vulgar profusion to which adventurers in
the East had become accustomed. Algeria was a very
small province to have any effect on French society,
but many Frenchmen declare that it infected their
soldiers with what is known in France as "the vice.
of Algeria." To take the strongest instance of all, no
one can doubt that the planters and mean whites of
the Southern States were powerfully modified by their
contact with the black race, becoming imperious, licen-
tious, and disdainful of patient toil. It is the habit
in England to assume that the reprobation of Chinese
vice-from opium-eating and gambling to nameless im-
morality—which Australians and Californians feel is mere
political affectation, because there is a vicious white class
in every great city. The fact, however, is, that a com-
munity is distinctly injured by the introduction of new
forms of immorality, which attract some for whom the
old would have no fascinations. In all the instances
cited, the foreign element and influence have been
comparatively weak. If, however, China were organ-
ised, as she is likely to be; if her flag floated on every
sea, and her naval officers visited every great port as
honoured guests; if her army was an important factor
in the peace of the world, and her diplomatists respected
in consequence; if her commerce was world-wide; if
her literature was achieving a success of esteem for
style and thought, it is inconceivable that these in-
fluences would not tell upon the character and conduct
of mankind. It is not assumed that this effect would
necessarily be all evil. The Chinaman might, for
11
125
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
instance, be an example of patient toil; and this, with
certain reasonable limitations, is to be admired. What,
however, seems probable is, that as the Chinese race
forced itself into a position of equality with its neigh-
bours, the spectacle of lives consumed in labour, lives
rewarded by nothing but the supply of animal wants,
would cease to be considered repulsive and humiliating.
European Socialism aims at distributing labour and
wealth, so that every man may have leisure and the
opportunity of becoming better than he is. The prac-
tical Socialism of the East has never aimed at more
than the satisfaction of material needs. The question
is, whether, when the two forces are measured one
against the other, that which has the lowest aims is
not bound to starve the other out of the field.
No one in California or Australia, where the effects
of Chinese competition have been studied, has, I believe,
the smallest doubt that Chinese labourers, if allowed to
come in freely, could starve all the white men in either
country out of it, or force them to submit to harder
work and a much lower standard of wages. In Victoria,
a single trade, that of furniture-making, was taken
possession of, and ruined for white men within the
space of something like five years. Only two large
employers excluded Chinamen altogether; and white
men, where they were retained, were kept on only to
supply a limited demand for the best kind of work.¹
Now, what Chinamen can do in Melbourne, where only
"Yes;
1 See the evidence upon Technical Education in Victoria taken before
a Commission in 1888. Mr. Svenson, a cabinetmaker, was asked, “You
think that the Chinese competition has interfered with you."
very much. I hardly know one of what I may call my mates in the
cabinet-making line. They have all gone to other occupations." Mr.
Harwood, a cabinetmaker, said, "The lower branches of the trade are
monopolised by the Chinese."-Blue Book, pp. 37 and 46, published
1889.
126
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
the worst workmen go, and where these receive wages
which would be thought high in China, Chinamen at
home could do incomparably better, if they worked in
establishments fitted up with the best machinery, and
were directed by foremen knowing the European taste.
Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China
will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap trans-
port by railways and steamers, and will have founded
technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever
that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world's
markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and
Germany. The alternative will be that England-
having adopted and developed the principles of State
Socialism—will enforce a rigidly protective tariff against
the cheap industry of her rival. How far this can be
practicable with the races subject to England may be a
question. The Hindoo may strongly resent having to
purchase English muslins, if he can get a better article
at half the price from Canton. What, however, it is
really important to notice is, that a reversion by England
to a protective tariff would be a very powerful modifica-
tion of English thought and policy; and, if there be
any truth in Free Trade, would be financially disastrous
to England herself in the long run. Probably, however,
it would be evaded, as regarded the East, by the estab-
lishment of Chinese factories upon English soil in some
part of the Straits Settlements.
It will be observed that both the changes at work
within English society and the change resulting from
the organisation of labour in the Black and Yellow Belt
will tend to intensify toil, and to diffuse it more uni-
formly throughout the strata of society. Socialism,
however, is aiming at something very different. Its
desire is to abolish competition, to secure a fair day's
II
127
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
work at a fair day's wage to every man, and to arrange
for intervals of toil,—a day and a half or two days in
every week,—when the body may recruit strength, and
the attention be relaxed. It is certain that neither the
days of slavery, nor those of serfdom, nor the palmy
times when capital and labour were left to make their
own terms, have ever given the workers an even toler-
able existence, except it may be now and again for
brief intervals. The best Professor Rogers is able to
say for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is, that
it was tolerably easy to support life, and that "the
poorest and meanest man had no insurmountable and
absolute impediment put in his career, if he would seize
his opportunity, and make use of it."1
The most
grudging requirements of modern legislation demand
that a family shall live in wholesome tenements, that
children shall be educated up to a certain low level,
that children shall not be stunted by overwork, and
that women shall not be allowed to unsex themselves
by certain kinds of rough labour. Practically, however,
only a part of all this is enforced. Is it too much to
say that, in the general interest, separation of the sexes
in homes might be insisted on, with the result that,
instead of families living in a single room, there should
be three bedrooms at least to every married man's
domicile? Ought not the average of wages to be such,
that every able-bodied man could bring up his family
in a house good enough for self-respect, on food good
enough to maintain the body at its highest efficiency,
and at the same time to make a provision against sick-
ness and old age? ? Is it not for the interest of the
State that every child should be well taught, that the
most capable should be able to rise out of the ranks,
1 Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp. 183, 184.
+
128
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
and that all should have a little sunshine, some respite
from toil during their early years? There is so little
in all this that is extravagant, that in fact everything
suggested is being cared for in one country or another
by philanthropists or the law. It would, no doubt, be
a great step to see all carried out together in the same
society, but it would not be as great a change as the
transition from slavery to free labour has been.
For Europe and North America to be brought up to
this state of development-other things being as they
are-would imply a levelling-up of wages that is not at
first sight impossible. Practically, the highest-paid
artisans hold their own in the race for supremacy, so
that England and the United States have nothing to
fear from the competition of Russia and Austria. In-
deed, in America the opportunities of money-making
afforded by a young country are so great, that private
enterprise is not as yet seriously threatened by Socialism,
except in the bastard form of Protection. In England
the principle that men who will work must not starve
has always been admitted, though in a somewhat grudg-
ing fashion law and the unions are limiting the hours
of labour and fixing the wage-rate; and little remains
to be done beyond providing State employment on a
large scale. Probably the Continental workman would
require to be content with a little less than his rival in
Birmingham or Manchester, because his employer would
have to get similar results to the English on a larger
expenditure upon coal; but it cannot be impossible to
adjust differences of this kind. In that case, we may
assume that all the races possessed of the same, or
nearly the same civilisation, will belong, so to speak, to
the same trades-union, so far as production is concerned,
but will more or less rigidly exclude one another's
II
129
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
མ
manufactures by protective tariffs. England, of course,
might not conform to this policy; but if England stood
alone in her Free Trade, the exception would be unim-
portant. She would not be able to force her products
upon her neighbours; she might lose to some of them,
and find her industries dying out one by one. It is
quite conceivable, for instance, that she might lose the
carrying trade in the eastern seas to China, as her
steamers there are already very largely manned by
Lascars and Chinamen.
Now, it is surely probable that the European nations,
with their production limited, and its price enhanced
by Socialism, and with exchange among themselves
fettered by protection, would find themselves at a great
disadvantage in competing with a really industrial
China. The resources of China are immense, the
capacity of its people for toil is almost unlimited, and
their wants are of the slenderest. The great mass of
the people lives ascetically, and retains its habits, even
when it is thrown among wasteful races like the English
of America and Australia, who despise and distrust
asceticism. The organisation of labour appears to be
largely in the hands of employers, who maintain their
ascendency by murder. We may assume all this to be
modified, but we cannot assume the change to be so
sudden and complete that Chinese industry will conform
to the standards of the western world. What is true of
the Chinese is true more or less of Hindoos and negroes.
A hundred years hence when these races, which are
now as two to one to the higher, shall be as three to
one; when they have borrowed the science of Europe,
and developed their still virgin worlds, the pressure of
their competition upon the white man will be irresistible.
He will be driven from every neutral market and forced
K
:
130
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
E
:
to confine himself within his own. Ultimately he will
have to conform to the Oriental standard of existence,
or, and this is the probable solution, to stint the
increase of population. If he does this by methods
that are inconsistent with morality, the very life-springs
of the race will be tainted. If he does it by a patient
self-restraint that shows itself in a limitation to late
marriages, national character will be unimpaired, but
material decline will have commenced. With civilisa-
tion equally diffused, the most populous country must
ultimately be the most powerful; and the preponderance
of China over any rival-even over the United States of
America-is likely to be overwhelming.
Let us conceive the leading European nations to be
stationary, while the Black and Yellow Belt, including
China, Malaysia, India, Central Africa, and Tropical
America is all teeming with life, developed by industrial
enterprise, fairly well administered by native govern-
ments, and owning the better part of the carrying trade
of the world. Can any one suppose that, in such a
condition of political society, the habitual temper of
mind in Europe would not be profoundly changed?
Depression, hopelessness, a disregard of invention and
improvement would replace the sanguine confidence of
races that at present are always panting for new worlds
to conquer.
Here and there, it may be, the more
adventurous would profit by the tradition of old
supremacy to get their services accepted in the new
nations, but as a rule there would be no outlet for
energy, no future for statesmanship. The despondency
of the English people, when their dream of conquest in
France was dissipated, was attended with a complete
decay of thought, with civil war, and with a standing
still, or perhaps a decline of population, and to a less
II
131
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
1
degree of wealth. The discovery of the New World,
the resurrection of old literature, the trumpet of the
Reformation scarcely quickened the national pulse with
real life till the reign of Elizabeth. Then, however,
there was revival, because there were possibilities of
golden conquest in America, speculative treasures in the
reanimate learning of Greece, and a new faith that
seemed to thrust aside the curtain drawn by priests,
and to open heaven. It is conceivable that our later
world may find itself deprived of all that it valued on
earth, of the pageantry of subject provinces and the
reality of commerce, while it has neither a disinterred
literature to amuse it nor a vitalised religion to give it
spiritual strength.
The foregoing argument has assumed that the growth
of China will be gradual and peaceable, and that India,
if it ever becomes independent of England, will split up
into a cluster of states, federated it may be, but not
capable of an aggressive foreign policy. There is one
possible alternative to this future too important to be
disregarded. We are not yet able to say whether
Mahommedanism has ceased to be a ferment and a great
organising influence. It was beaten in the Indian
Mutiny; it has been stamped out in Yunnan and Ili,
(C
1 "The population of this island does not appear to me to bear any
proportion to her fertility and resources.”—Italian Relation of England,
c. 1500, p. 31. "Hereof is much experience had in England, France,
and other lands, and cause hereof is this that evermore the world
decreaseth in people.”—Pecock's Repressor of overmuch blaming of the
Clergy, p. 306, c. 1449. When we remember that the population of
England was never in excess of 2,500,000, and was often less," down
to the end of the sixteenth century, it will be evident that the Wars of
the Roses, when as many as 30,000—by one estimate 38,000—perished
in a single battle, that of Towton, must have reduced the population for
a time nearly one-half. It is noticeable, that while 108,000 men were
brought into the field at Towton, not more than about 30,000 were
present at Bosworth.—Pauli's Geschichte Englands, Band v. SS. 359, 360,
511; Lingard's History of England, vol. v. pp. 173, 174, 270.
132
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
after wars in which millions of lives were destroyed;
and its solitary success in the Soudan has not been
followed up, and was due very much to the fact that it
was combined with a national uprising against a de-
tested foreign rule. Still it is impossible to forget that
an active Mahommedan propaganda is being carried on
in China, and that the province of Yunnan was, at one
time, almost in the hands of the followers of the Pro-
phet. Father Girard says that, in a single instance,
when there was a famine in the province of Chan-tong,
the Mahommedans bought ten thousand children, whom
they educated in their own faith.' The whole number of
Moslems in the Empire "is estimated by some officials
at 20,000,000 to 25,000,000."2 Observers agree that
the Mahommedan may commonly be distinguished from
his Buddhist countryman by his erect bearing and fear-
less tones. Islam, in this country also, transforms its
votaries into military fanatics. As the popular Bud-
dhism is nothing more than Paganism of a rather gross
kind, though, with a fairly good ethical code, it may,
in spite of the advantage it possesses of being the faith
of the large majority, and backed by the Government,
go down before a monotheism that has already been
embraced by the Turkish division of the Tartars, and
which is the predominant religion in Malaysia. The
accident of a leader of genius arising to combine the
Mahommedans in a common organisation might conceiv-
ably transfer sovereignty to a follower of Islam. In
that case it is difficult to suppose that China would not
become an aggressive military power, sending out her
armies in millions to cross the Himalayas, and traverse
the Steppes, or occupying the islands and the northern
1 Girard, France et Chine, tome ii. p. 250.
2 Balfour's Waifs and Strays from the Far East, pp. 31, 32.
II
133
THE STATIONARY ORDER IN SOCIETY
parts of Australia, by pouring in immigrants protected
by fleets. Luther's old name for the Turks, that they
were "the people of the wrath of God," may receive a
new and terrible application. It seems reasonable to
suppose that such a visitation can only be possible in
the distant future, and not unreasonable to hope that
it may never occur. Should it, however, take place,
the ultimate effect would probably be to drain China of
population and wealth, which die out gradually where-
ever the Crescent floats in triumph. The military
aggrandisement of the Empire, which would provoke
general resistance, is, in fact, less to be dreaded than its
industrial growth, which other nations will be, to some
extent, interested in maintaining. Still, even a ten
years' conflict against forces far greater than Tamer-
lane's, and inspired with as ferocious a spirit, would be
something so horrible that we may well pray for it to
be never anything more than an evil dream.
CHAPTER III
SOME DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
Large armies, large towns, and large national debts are said to be causes
of national decline. As nations increase, large armies will be more
and more a necessity, even though statesmen may be pacific.—There
are compensations to standing armies in the education given and
the feelings called out by military training. Neither is war itself
an unmixed evil. The tendency of populations to concentrate in
towns is becoming more and more marked.-People flock to towns
for work, for large profits, and because the growth of railways tends
to concentrate business in a few large centres.-Beyond this, excite-
ment, amusement, social intercourse, economy, are determining
motives; and the townsman, once formed, contracts a dislike for
country life. The ancient idea was that city influences elevated
and civilised men. Many remarkable men have found their only
congenial sphere in a city.-Cities, however, though they attract
great men, and develop the life of society, have no tendency to
create genius or intellectual distinction.-One drawback to city life
is that it destroys physical stamina, though science has done a great
deal to eliminate disease and protract life. And though legislation
has promoted the well-being of the labourer, and though some de-
scriptions of city labour are not unwholesome. On the other hand,
the city type is changing for the worse, though the cities are still
vitalised by the best life-blood of the country districts.-As cities
become of monstrous dimensions, the higher society that grows up
in them is too various, and habitually too frivolous, to be of much
civilising potency.-Even more does the lower class suffer by being
shut out from nature and debarred the sympathy of neighbours.—
The conditions of life in large cities are unfavourable to the privacy
and self-respect without which family life cannot grow to any per-
fection. Social reforms may counteract some of the evils arising
from this tendency, but cannot be a cure for all.-Women are special
gainers by the great wealth and variety of amusement in towns.-
Nevertheless, amusements in towns are not more intellectual than
they were, but less so. The lecture has been killed by the book or
CHAP. III DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
135
newspaper; the higher drama by the novel.—It is only an apparent
exception that the drama maintains itself in Paris, and that Ibsen
has had a success of esteem.-The city music-hall is not appreciably
superior to the city tavern.--The sordid frugality of a country popula-
tion is due to its circumstances, and the changes imminent in city
life are such as will naturally engender avarice.-National debts
may be incurred for justifiable and good reasons.-Countries with
great natural resources appear to be warranted in mortgaging their
future, in order to develop their resources.-There may, however,
be periods of depression, even of decline for prosperous states.
Under the influence of theories of State Socialism, a country may
engage in a vast speculation, such as buying up the land and leasing
it to small cultivators; and this speculation may prove to be unre-
munerative.—In such a case, there might be a danger of the tax-
payer repudiating his engagements to the fund-holder, and, indeed,
that he could not fulfil them.-Examples of national bankruptcy
are very numerous in the past.-Repudiation lowers the tone of
national character; and the impoverishment of the fund-holders
would extinguish a class that is very conservative of certain valuable
qualities. Whether large armies, large cities, large debts are to ruin
modern society, depends upon how we use the armies, how far we
can neutralise town influences, and whether we allow the indebted-
ness to corrode national morality.
THE late Mr. Ticknor, a learned student of history, and
who was also a sagacious observer of modern society,
used to express the opinion that the "ancient civilisa-
tions of the world had been undermined and destroyed
by two causes-the increase of standing armies, and
the growth of great cities; and that modern civilisation
had now added to these sources of decay a third in
the hypothecation of every nation's property to other
nations."1 It has been a part of the argument in these
pages to show that the maintenance of large armies,
easily mobilised, is as much a necessity now as it has
been in past times. For many years to come the nations
of the Temperate Zones will be trying to encroach upon
one another, or on the uncivilised parts of the world,
not necessarily because the spirit of an Alexander or a
Napoleon animates any modern monarch, but because
1 Ticknor's Life, vol. ii. p. 403.
136
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
every statesman has come to believe that national exist-
ence is only possible for great Empires. Meanwhile,
the nations of the Tropics that have adopted European
improvements, and it may be solidified and grown
strong under European control, will inevitably adopt
the policy of large armaments; all the larger because
the individual Hindoo, Chinaman, or Negro is inferior
to the individual European. It is quite conceivable
that the soldier may be rather less of an obtrusive
element in the future than he has been in the past.
This, however, is not likely to be because armies will be
relatively smaller, but because universal conscription
will have become the rule, and military education, up
to a certain point, will be part of the stock-in-trade
with which every citizen is equipped when he enters
life.
This conception of a world always ready for war is,
of course, very different from the dreams which pacific
optimists have nursed. We have been told that, as the
military caste of kings and nobles is dispossessed; as
society becomes more sensible and understands the
waste of war; as it is informed with a higher morality
and comprehends its wickedness; as the class to which
war means privation and misery is able to make itself
heard in the councils of the State; perhaps, too, as the
risks of dismemberment to States and annihilation to
combatants become more formidable, war will be re-
placed everywhere by international arbitration. All
this may be true, but, even so, it is difficult to suppose
that arbitration will not be influenced by a calculation
of the forces every power interested can bring into the
field; or that war will not now and again be resorted to
where arbitration fails to reconcile conflicting interests,
or where a decision is opposed to a high-spirited people's

III
137
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
sense of justice. We are bound to remember that wise
and good statesmen have constantly endeavoured to
promote a general peace. It may be instructive to
take two comparatively modern instances. In 1736
England was administered by the peace-loving Walpole,
and France by the peace-loving Fleury, Austria had
almost disbanded its army, Russia was only dangerous
to the Turks, and the South of Europe was profoundly
lethargic. Five years later the whole civilised world.
was in flames. A Parliamentary intrigue had embroiled
England and Spain, and the ambition of a petty German
sovereign had begun a war which immediately spread
beyond the limits of Germany, and led to changes that
remodelled the map of Europe. Cuba and Puerto Rico
and Georgia, Scotland and Bohemia, were among the
countries that suffered for quarrels about which the
inhabitants knew and cared little. In this instance,
it may be observed that the Spanish war would have
been a trifle in itself. The real trouble was the ambition
of Frederic II., whose army, before his accession, was
scarcely regarded as a factor in European politics, and
was chiefly talked of for its pedantic discipline, and its
regiment of tall men. Rather more than a century
later, the same experiment was renewed. The genera-
tion that remembered Napoleon's wars was passionately
anxious for peace, and English statesmen, in particular,
had learned by bitter experience that the glory of
animating Continental alliances was dearly purchased at
the price of overwhelming debt and general jealousy.
In 1847 England was almost without army or navy;
the King of France was as peace-loving as any English
Premier; the King of Prussia was perpetually irresolute
and unready; Austria desired only to avoid complica-
tions of any kind; and the King of Belgium was always

138
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
}
It is
ready to mediate when difficulties sprung up.
doubtful if even the Emperor Nicholas would deliber-
ately have risked a great European war.¹ Nevertheless,
in 1848-49, there was war, or rumour of war, everywhere,
and in 1853 the three greatest races of the civilised
world, as it then was, were waging a very desperate
struggle for supremacy. The advent to power of an
adventurer, who believed that he would consolidate his
position by short and brilliant campaigns, was sufficient
to transform Europe into a cockpit or a camp of instruc-
tion; and at this moment the standing armies of the
Continent are 50 per cent more than they were forty
years ago, and the forces kept in reserve, and ready to
strike, incomparably greater. The vision of inspired
Manchester men, that the angel of Peace was to descend
on the world in a drapery of untaxed calico, is still as
far from accomplishment as the vision seen in Patmos.
Trade is no freer than it was, and war is a more per-
vading presence.
Meanwhile, an optimist is entitled to claim that
a state of military preparedness is not an unmixed evil.
The Archduke Constantine, who objected to a campaign
because it spoiled his troops,2 probably meant some-
thing more than that drill was neglected and that
uniforms were ruined during a campaign. He meant
that the mortality of war fell upon men whom the
regiments and the country could not spare. There
can be little doubt that the army has been a very
1 Martin, Hist. Populaire de France, tome v. p. 408.
As late as
February 12, 1854, Thiers thought the Emperor would give way.
Senior's Conversations, vol. i. p. 232. On his deathbed Nicholas told the
Empress that it had been his wish to leave the Empire at peace.—
Oustrialoff's History of Russia, vol. ii. p. 508.
2 The words reported are: "I do not like war. It spoils the
soldiers; dirties their uniforms, and destroys discipline."-De Cusine's
Empire of the Czar, vol. ii. chap. xv. p. 28.
III
139
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
admirable school for the lower orders of European
society. The recruit is forced to acquire habits of
cleanliness; has his frame developed by athletic exer-
cises; is taught some elements of knowledge in the
regimental schools; learns implicit obedience, and
acquires traditions of honour and loyalty to his
colours and his comrades, that on critical occasions
raise him above regard for this perishable life. The
French cuirassiers who rode time after time to certain
death at Reichshoffen and Froeschwiller;¹ the German
cavalry that courted annihilation in order to win time
for a movement of the infantry at Mars-la-Tour; the
English infantry at Inkerman; and, even more perhaps
than the heroes of any war, the men of the Birkenhead,
are among the innumerable evidences that the service
of arms can transform generous feeling and irresolute
impulse into a steady and exalted heroism. Neither
is war all savagery. When England first declared
war against the French Republic, the feeling in France
was so bitter that the Directory issued orders for no
quarter to be given; orders which the French generals,
to their honour, refused to obey. After nearly thirty
years of struggle, the feeling between Wellington's. and
Soult's soldiers became one of cordial respect; acts of
chivalrous consideration were common on both sides,
and the outposts used to mingle freely whenever there
was a halt or an informal rest of any kind. A civil
2
3
1 Martin's Hist. de France, tome vii. pp. 183, 184.
2 A single naval officer, the captain of La Boudeuse, carried this order
into execution in the case of a prize. On his return to France he found
himself universally shunned, and committed suicide.-De Vigny in
Napier's Lights and Shades of Military Life.
3 Thus at San Sebastian Sir T. Graham told the officer charged to
arrange a capitulation: "Sir, when people defend themselves as your
troops have done they are not conquered; they have a right to dictate
their own terms; write what you will."-Brialmont, Life of Napoleon,
140
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
war is in general one of indiscriminating bitterness ;
but scarcely a reproach of violence to non-combatants
rests upon the great armies that decided the War of
Liberation in the United States. So, again, the
Germans who entered France under Von Moltke
were appreciably more humane and better disciplined
than the soldiers whom Blücher commanded, and this
to an extent that is not altogether explained by the
absence of recent provocation. It seems, therefore,
possible to hope that war, terrible and to some ex-
tent pitiless as it must always be, may come to be
conducted without intentional injury to non-combat-
ants, and with the smallest possible damage to private
property. When horrors, like those which attended
the storm of Tarragona by Suchet, and that of San
Sebastian by Wellington,¹ are reprobated as atrocities
by public opinion-even in military circles-and
punished with unsparing severity by courts-martial,
the worst influence of war will have been abolished.
Lastly, when all is said, we cannot escape from a
certain truth in Shakespeare's view of war, that it
is "the great corrector of enormous times." Many
vol. ii. p. 140. During the inactive interval of a fortnight that elapsed
before the battle of Salamanca, "the soldiers of both sides bathed
together, and frequently swam over, and interchanged civilities with
each other.”—Secret Despatch quoted in Buckingham's Memoirs of the
Court of England, vol. i. p. 385. "Towards the close of the war
•
so good an understanding prevailed between the outposts of the two
armies, that Lord Wellington found it necessary to forbid all com-
munication whatever. . . It was a sort of custom the French and
British guards visiting each other by turns."-Gleig's Subaltern, p. 158.
1 Of Tarragona, Napier says: "That every barbarity commonly
attendant upon the storming of towns was practised may be sup-
posed . . . and it would be unjust to hold Suchet responsible.”-
Peninsular War, book xiii. chap. v. Of San Sebastian, where some cir-
cumstances were of unusual atrocity, Wellington writes only: "I am
convinced it is impossible to prevent a town in such a situation from
being plundered."- Letter to Right Hon. Sir H. Wellesley, K.B.,
October 9, 1813.
III
141
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
a nation dates its moral regeneration from a defeat
that seemed to shatter it. Russia emancipated her
serfs because she was beaten before Sebastopol; Austria
tore up her Concordat and liberalised her govern-
ment because she was vanquished at Solferino; France
rid herself of the impurities of the Second Empire at
the price of Sedan. There are also communities
that have been the better for success. The United
States became a nation with a consciousness of great
destiny and of her duty towards the human race after
the War of Independence. Italy conquered liberty and
self-respect on the same battlefields. We may stop
short of the splendid paradox of De Maistre, that war
is divine in virtue of its supernatural results,¹ and
content ourselves with believing that it has its place
in the economy of human society, as volcanoes and
earthquakes have in the physical world. It took all
the courage of Voltaire, less than a century and a half
ago, to explain that an earthquake was not necessarily
the judgment of God upon an immoral city.2 At
present not even a theologian sees anything outrageous
in Herschel's statement that "earthquakes may form
part and parcel of some great scheme of Providential
arrangement which is at work for good and not for
ill." 3
It seems not unreasonable to suppose that a
warlike spirit is as inseparable from human nature as
the love of money or sexual impulse, and that like
these it may have its uses, though its excess is
lamentable.
1 "La guerre est divine par ses conséquences d'un ordre surnaturel ;
tant générales, que particulières."-De Maistre, Soirées de St. Pétersbourg,
Septième Entretien.
2 "Direz-vous en voyant cet amas de victimes,
Dieu s'est vengé; leur mort est le prix de leurs crimes?"
Voltaire, Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne.
3 Herschel's Familiar Lectures, p. 2.
142
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
That the growth of large towns is bound to go on in
a constantly increasing ratio seems more than probable.
England, the greatest example, is in some respects ex-
ceptional, because the existence of large properties there
has hitherto been accompanied with a system of farm-
ing which only men with some capital could attempt,
and because the passion of a wealthy class for field-
sports induces them to make some sacrifice of rental, and
deny themselves the profits which small tenants might
bring. Moreover, the old poor-law system and the doc-
trines of Malthus co-operated in inducing many squires
to keep population down on their estates. It was a
direct gain that the land should not be charged with
the support of paupers, and a prospective advantage
that population should not increase beyond the means
of support. Then, again, the development of mines
and the growth of manufactures have constantly drawn
rustics from their native villages, and as the towns
have been able to relieve themselves when they were
over-peopled by exporting emigrants to America or
Australia, there has been no reason to suspect the
practice gradually established of unsoundness. The
urban population of England is accordingly now nearly
double the rural, and would undoubtedly be larger
still if a great many miners and sailors were not in-
cluded in the population of the country. No other
country, except Scotland, shows anything like this
ratio; but Holland, Belgium, Australia, France, and
the United States are making rapid progress in the
same direction, and the townsmen in these highly
prosperous communities are from one in five to as
many as two in five of the nation. Naturally, the
towns are least prominent as a rule in the nations
that have an extensive area. Altogether, however, the
III
143
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
tendency to congregate in towns seems strongest in
Anglo-Saxon countries. For instance, the proportion
of townsmen in the United States (22.5 per cent
in 1880)¹ and in Australia (25 per cent) is very
large, though in both of these countries the area of
land is considerable, and there is a great deal not
taken up.
Now, if we inquire into the causes that attract
population to towns, we shall find them very various,
and for the most part sufficiently simple. One is, that
the discoveries of science in many cases enable the
farmer to substitute machinery for hand-labour. The
steam-plough, or common ploughs of improved con-
struction, reapers and binders, and threshing-machines
have now come largely into use in all highly-developed
countries, and the result is that a few well-trained
and well-paid labourers are substituted for a great
many poorly paid. Then, again, the gradual evolution
of macadamised roads, canals, and railways has enor-
mously diminished the proportion of men engaged in
the transport of produce, and has also diminished the
need of over-production. Formerly, there might be
a famine in Gloucestershire when corn was rotting
in Kent,2 because communication between the different
parts of England was so difficult and costly, and then
every district had to keep corn stored, or to sow
1 United States Census for 1880, p. 8. Mr. Bryce, excluding the
small towns, makes the urban population only one-seventh; but raises
it to one-fourth if towns of 8000 inhabitants are reckoned.-American
Commonwealth, vol. iii. pp. 45, 676.
2 Thus in 1261 the Annals of Bermondsey say, that the quarter
of corn (frumentum) was sold for 24s. in London, and all over
England. The average for England, however, according to Professor
Rogers, was only 4s. 3d. to 9s. 9d. "The prices from Oxfordshire,"
says Mr. Rogers, "are exceedingly low."-History of Prices, vol. i.
pp. 187, 226.
144
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
We
more than was likely to be needed; but now the
best-developed countries can produce with the nicest
economy. Again, science has not only cheapened pro-
duction and transport, but it has increased production.
An acre in England yields at least three times as much
at present as it did in the fourteenth century,¹ and
though deep ploughing and draining and the use of
artificial manures involve rather more labour than was
needed under the old system, there is still a large
margin to the benefit of the modern farmer.
may add to this that railways give the shops and
professional men in towns a great advantage over their
rivals in the country. Every new line that is opened
induces a certain number of the country people to
make their purchases where the stores are largest,
and where the goods can be sold cheapest; and a
man troubled about his health or his property prefers
to consult the ablest city practitioner of whom he has
read or heard. So it happens that the small country
stores are reduced in number and importance, and that
the professional class gets more and more averse to a
country practice. It is scarcely wonderful if for these
reasons alone large towns appear to absorb all the
natural growth of the community.
It is rather
wonderful that the remoter and less attractive parts
of the country should not be generally deserted, and
that the building up of towns should not go on even
more rapidly than it does. We must allow, however,
for the tendency of some townsmen to make their
1 “In 1333-1336, the average produce in cheap, that is, abundant
years, as all these years are, is nine bushels of wheat and fifteen of
barley. Rogers, Economic Interpretation of History, p. 52. "I do not
believe that the average yield of England at this time" (1868) “exceeds
twenty-eight bushels."--Caird in Statistical Journal, vol. xxxi. p. 130.
The average for four recent years (1886-1889) has been 29.22
bushels.
III
145
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
actual homes outside city precincts, and also for the
disinclination of most men to change their careers
and habits suddenly. The exodus to towns takes place
very much through the young, who have come to think
that their best chances of employment and enjoyment
are great cities, and whom their elders do not care to
dissuade, and do not like to keep back from what seems
certain gain.
1
There is, however, another very potent cause that
is contributing to build up towns. Every great country
has established State schools, and made education of
some kind compulsory. The instruction given is in
no case very profound or far-reaching. It is generally
more or less confined to reading, writing, and arith-
metic, with so much knowledge of geography and of
the national history and literature as can be given in
popular text-books. Still, what difference there is
between the primary education of our own days and
the "sound commercial education" of a few years back
is rather to the advantage of the primary State school,
which professes to teach a little less, but, as a rule,
teaches what it does thoroughly and expeditiously.
Accordingly, the children of the poorest classes in all
English-speaking countries, and in parts of the Continent,
have been raised in one important respect to the level of
a higher class, have acquired its tastes and ambitions,
and are able to compete with it in commerce. Naturally,
the cleverest boys of the village school do not care to
remain plough-boys; they yearn for the speculative
1 Dr. Ogle, who has made the question a study, takes this view.
"The decline was brought about by the migration of young people,
mainly under twenty-five years of age, from the rural to the manu-
facturing districts, and of young men in greater proportion than young
women." Ogle on the alleged depopulation of the rural districts
in England," Statistical Journal, vol. iii. p. 231.
L
:
י3
146
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
gains of commerce, for the "large excitement" of city
life, or at least for the fleshpots and the shelter from
sun and rain that are incidental to existence as a town
models it. To the yokel, London or New York or Mel-
bourne is an inexhaustible romance; to the cockney of
every nation, the country, except as a suburb or an
ornamental farm, represents only what is repulsive in
toil and uncongenial in society. Even more do the
amusements of towns, the club, and the theatre, the
exhibition, the race-course, and the ball, create wants
that it is almost impossible to relinquish. Anciently,
there were some compensations in the sweetness of
village homes and the rough abundance of country
life. At present, the educated person of small means,
widow or school-teacher, or country surgeon's wife,
who is doomed to live at a distance from a town, finds
that the country is mostly tenanted by those who are
too unintelligent to succeed elsewhere; and that the
price of necessaries is at least as high as in the city,
while the price of luxuries is greater, and many con-
veniences or economies, such as tram-cars and co-opera-
tive stores, and the teachers of accomplishments, are
unattainable. Of course this state of things is in some
respects bound to be transitory. The farmer is rapidly
changing into a highly-educated man; the primary
school-teacher is rising in the social grade; State in-
spectors and employees of the higher class are being
multiplied; and railways are already carried into almost
every small district in England. Still, the attractions
of town-life very much overbalance those of the country
even now; and the industrial reasons which urge the
rising generation to throng into the metropolis, or at
least into towns of some kind, are powerfully enhanced
by the requirements which education and a higher re-
ī
III
147
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
finement bring with them. It seems difficult to doubt
that for many years to come towns will grow everywhere
at the expense of villages. They would grow even if
they were not more attractive, because rural labour does
not expand as rapidly as factories and shops; but they
have a fascination of their own, and they rarely relax
their hold on those whom they have drawn in. A year's
life amid "the crowd, the hum, the shock of men" is
apt to give a distaste for that life amid green fields and
pastures which poets have consented to praise; the years
that make a man a confirmed townsman unfit him,
morally and physically, for any other life than in
populous streets. It is not often that he wishes to
change, but he cannot if he would. Even the passion of
the wealthy Englishman for field-sports only draws him
into the country during the months sacred or possible
to these. Habitually he prefers, like Dr. Johnson,
to "watch the full tide of life at Charing Cross."
To
Now, the influence of cities on civilisation is em-
balmed in language itself. Almost every word that
designates the higher life among men implies town-
breeding; every word appropriated anciently to country
use has acquired a certain savour of contempt.
the Greeks man was by nature social, or a city-dweller
(TOMITIKÓS); the polite townsman (ȧoreîos) was contrasted
with the rough dweller in fields (ȧypoikós). The Romans
repeated and enforced the idea that the body politic was
in the fashion of the city (civitas), and that the city man
was naturally courteous (urbanus), while the dweller
outside was uncouth in manners (rusticus), and the
maintainer of an outworn creed (paganus). Later on,
we find the legal synonyms for country labourer (“ colo-
nus"
" and "villanus") passing into our language as
"clown" and "loon" and "villain." The French
1
:
148
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
vocabulary is at least equally rich in terms of this kind.
We cannot disregard the historical fact, of which these
etymological trifles are confirmation, that what we call
progress was in antiquity at least the outcome of city
life under certain favourable conditions. Something,
no doubt, has to be allowed for the perpetuity of order,
which at the time was scarcely possible except within
city walls or under their shadow. If Attica had been
as open to an invading army as Lacedemon, we can
hardly imagine that Athens would have been of much
more account in the world's history than Sparta. Still,
the contact of mind with mind is perhaps the main
factor in intellectual development; and the incom-
parable benefit of Athens to its poets, its thinkers,
and its orators seems to have been, that it supplied
them with a society that was quick to catch at ideas,
and keen to sift them. To us, who confound writers
of ten centuries and fifty different places under the
convenient name of "classical," it is difficult to under-
stand why a man banished from Athens or Rome felt
that the whole world was, so to speak, closed to him.
The lamentations of Cicero when he was forced to leave
Italy, but had nearly every great city, except Athens,
open to him in Greece or Asia;¹ even the complaints of
Ovid at being sent to a garrison town in what is now
Bulgaria,2 seem as unmanly and incomprehensible as
the wailings of Philoctetes over his wound would appear
to the maimed private of an English regiment. Yet
Cicero and Ovid only expressed the feeling of every
educated Roman. Later on, Juvenal winds up the
panegyric of a country life by remarking that it cannot
1 "Quod si auderem, Athenas peterem." "In hunc me casum vos
vivendi auctores impulistis."-Epist. ad Atticum, iii. 7 and 9.
2 "Vix ope castelli defendimur.”—Tristia, lib. v. 10.
III
149
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
When
be endured for five days continuously.' The Greek and
Roman had a feeling for Athens and Rome which only
Paris among modern towns has inspired in a similar
degree, and for something of the same reason.
Mdme. de Staël would have sacrificed everything but
conviction for the right to live again in the Rue de Bac,
what she regretted was the French salon, which could
give her nothing superior in kind to what she found
in Germany, in Russia, and in England, but which yet
gave her the only intellectual atmosphere in which she
could breathe freely. Half her shades of meaning, all
that was best in her style, and much that was good in
her thought, could only be understood by the people
of whom she was one. Only they could tell her, and
they only in the indirectness of social intercourse, how
far she had gone home to the hearts and minds of her
countrymen. It is quite conceivable that she really
did better work for being thrown upon herself, just as
we may assume that Dante drew concentration and
energy from the "salt savour" of bread eaten in exile,
and Milton from the enforced seclusion of his later years.
There can be little doubt that genius is now and again
apt to fritter itself away on things that are of the earth
earthy; and Dante might have been squandered away
in municipal intrigues, Mdme. de Staël in party-giving,
if the poet had not been driven from Florence, and the
publicist from Paris. All that is contended for is that
minds of the highest order are very sensible to the
need of human intercourse, and are apt to feel their
own want of criticism and sympathy to an extent that
is sometimes incompatible with self-reliance. City life
has been praised, perhaps beyond its deserts, because
1 "Facere hoc non possis quinque diebus continuis."-Juvenal, Sat.
xi. 206, 207.
150
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
2
it has brought thinkers into touch one with another,
and has stimulated the divine impulse to originate by
sympathy or antagonism.
It must be noted, however, that the instances of
societies in which men of the highest distinction have
been fairly numerous are so few and far between that
it seems impossible to deduce any law from them. The
popular examples are Athens from Aeschylus to Demos-
thenes, Rome from Lucretius to Juvenal, Florence in
the time of Michael Angelo, London in the period
from Elizabeth to Anne, Paris in the latter half of
the seventeenth century, and perhaps some circles
in Germany for part of the eighteenth century. No
doubt a long and brilliant list could be filled with
names that do not belong to any one of these times and
places. Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Voltaire, Darwin,
and Victor Hugo may almost be said to make epochs.
in themselves; and no one dreams of disputing their
ability or the influence they have exercised on style
and thought. The point contended for, however, is,
that individuals cannot be claimed as the direct outcome
of city life in the same way that a literary set can be.
Homer may have owed more than we suspect to the
comments of crowds in Asia Minor, Dante may have
been a representative Florentine, and Voltaire certainly
seems a representative Parisian; but even Voltaire,
though he founded a school of thought, had no rivals
or critics or colleagues comparable with himself, except,
perhaps, Rousseau, who was quite dissimilar, and who
derived whatever was best in him from Geneva. The
remarkable point is that even in modern society, when
population is so much larger, when thought is compara-
tively unshackled, when burning questions are in the
air, when the public is a better Maecenas than Martial
III
151
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
prayed for, there are periods in the life of large com-
munities which seem almost as sterile as the later
centuries of the Roman Empire. Whom did England
produce between Swift and Byron, outside of politics,
who will be read for either power or beauty of form
as an imaginative writer? What Frenchmen, except
Chateaubriand and Courier, were literary in the real
sense of the word in the fifty years that elapsed after
Voltaire's death? 1 Is Italy adequately represented in
literature by Alfieri and Leopardi for the three centuries
that have passed since the death of Tasso? and is Spain
represented at all for two centuries? It is easy to say
that the genius of England had a worthy expression in
Gibbon and Burke during a time otherwise barren; and
it is perhaps true that the nation was throwing itself
into politics and invention at that period. France may
reasonably claim that she put her life and thought into
the glory and waste of the Revolution and of the First
Empire. What is difficult to explain is the complete
break of intellectual continuity. No one can suppose
that Brindley, Wedgwood, or Watt would have been
poets if they had not been inventors; and it seems
accordingly difficult to understand why one order of
genius comes to the front, while another, not neces-
sarily, but often, recedes, and is lost for a time. The
natural inference would appear to be, that neither
ordinary city life, nor the presence of one or two great
thinkers or artists in a community is a guarantee that
1 The possible exceptions seem to be Mdme. de Staël, Joubert, Senan-
court, and Bichat; all, it may be said, more remarkable for thought than
for form, and of whom only Bichat is in the first rank for thought. Yet
this decadence was not from want of interest in literary matters. De
Tocqueville told Senior that when he was a boy politics were never talked
of, and "literature was one of the standing subjects of conversation.
Every new book was read aloud."-Correspondence of A. de Tocqueville,
vol. i. p. 137.
152
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
there will be any general activity or real elevation of
thought. We have examples of countries where millions
of men have succeeded one another for generations, even
for centuries, and produced nothing more than a few
competent administrators without statesmanship, soldiers
without strategy, and literary men without the power
to originate. Civilisation, such as is the outgrowth of
populous communities, appears to guarantee little more
at best than a wise habit of municipal administration,
some energy and deftness of commerce, and certain
gracious formalities in human intercourse. The official,
the merchant, and the diner-out represent the outcome
of city life when society is torpid.
one.
Now the compensating drawbacks to these advan-
tages of general acuteness and occasional distinction
are sufficiently formidable. It is very doubtful whether
townsmen of many generations do not lose stamina, and
decline in stature, to a degree that implies perilous de-
generacy.¹ The question, no doubt, is not a simple
So far as the evidence of coats of armour goes,
the ancestors of the English people must have been
smaller-chested and of less stature than average men
at present. On the other hand, the prowess of the
English archers shows that their small stature was
compatible with great muscular strength; and it is
perhaps reasonable to suppose that incessant wars re-
duced the average height, as the tallest men were the
first picked off. The wars of the first Napoleon produced
an effect which is sometimes thought to be still noticeable
in the conscription. Yet this argument cannot be pressed,
as on the Continent, where the object is that no man
should be exempted from military service, it is important
to keep the standard of height as low as possible; while
1 Wealth of Nations, book i. chap. viii.
III
153
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
in England the reductions that have been found neces-
sary to keep the regiments filled may be due to the
fact that the attractions of private employment are
now greater than they were. It must be admitted
also that the average of life in England is now longer
than it was, a fact which seems inconsistent with re-
duced vitality. Still, it may be questioned if we can
infer more from this than that science, to some extent,
compensates the disadvantages that result from the city
life carried to excess.
What science has done cannot
easily be over-estimated. Leprosy, smallpox, the Black
Death, the plague, and the sweating sickness, are little
more than memories of the past. In 1349 the Black
Death carried off at least a third of the population of
all England, the deaths in London alone being reckoned
at 100,000.¹ The cholera of 1831-32 only carried off
5275 in a ten times larger London, and was scarcely
felt except in the slums of great cities.² The sufferers
from plague in old times used to comfort themselves
with the expectation that if they recovered they would
be disease-proof for the future; but the records of
mortality show that these terrible visitations carried
off not only two-thirds of those who were attacked,
but left the remainder with debilitated constitutions.
As late as Adam Smith's time the mortality among
the children of the poor was enormous.
“In some
places," he says, "one-half the children born die before
they are four years of age; in many places before they
1 Pearson's English History in the Fourteenth Century, p. 154. Com-
pare Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages. "It probably killed a third
of the population."-Rogers's Economical Interpretation of History, p. 22.
2 Martineau's Thirty Years' Peace, vol. ii. p. 486.
3 "It was the opinion of the most eminent physicians of that time
that the plague was itself a sufficient purge, and that those who escaped
the infection needed no physic."-Defoe's History of the Plague, p. 198.
Compare Thucydides, ii. cap. 51 and 58.
154
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
are seven, and in almost all places before they are nine
or ten."1
The mortality of children under five is still
very great, but it is not half of Adam Smith's highest
estimate, and the mortality between five and ten is not
so great as that of ordinary adults.
Not only have sanitary conditions been improved,
but labour has been regulated with the best possible
results. The horrors of the factory system have been
mitigated or removed by the legislation Lord Shaftesbury
initiated; and the increasing power of Trades-Unions is
making the revival of overwork on a large scale im-
possible. Compulsory education is assisting to keep
children from that toil in stifling rooms which used
to be the fruitful cause of stunted frames and impaired
vitality. Some occupations that were poisonous have
now been made reasonably safe. A certain proportion
of the workers in large towns-such as dock labourers,
coalheavers, workers in foundries, and men in the build-
ing trade-work under conditions that are favourable
to muscular development as well as to health, and are
in a great many cases better fed than they would be in
the country. Mr. Booth's very careful analysis of the
population in some of the poorest parts of London has
shown that only a fraction are paupers or loafers, and
that not quite 20 per cent are casual or intermittent
wage-earners.2
It is probably correct to say that
even in London, the typical instance of concentration,
the poverty is still manageable, though now and again, in
hard times, many thousands of men and women willing to
1 It is already found necessary to pick the members of the London
Police Force chiefly from men born in the country. The following statis-
tics were obtained by Mr. Llewellyn Jones in 1888-
London born, 2910.
Country born, 11,606.
-Hobson's Problems of Poverty, p. 56.
2 Statistical Journal, vol. 1. pp. 326-391, and vol. xli. pp. 276-331.
III
155
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
work are within measurable distance of starvation. Still,
if we could be certain that great cities would not con-
tinue to increase even faster in the future than they have
done in the past, we might fairly hope that the wisdom
of statesmen would contrive a remedy for present evils.
Unhappily, there is another side to the question.
We have to take into account that the great English
and Scotch towns have been draining the life-blood of
the country districts for more than a century. Forty
years ago the population of towns and country districts
in England was nearly equal. In 1881 the towns were
to the country as three to two; and in 1891 they are
as seven to four. We must either assume that during this
period the natural increase in the country has been very
small, or that it has all been carried off by emigration,
or that a portion of it has been attracted to the towns.
Dr. Ogle, who has made a study of the subject, gives
reasons for supposing that there has been a "con-
tinuous migration of the most energetic and vigorous
members of the rural communities into the manufac-
turing districts." 1 So long as this lasts, and is on a
large scale, we are not in a condition to appreciate how
far town-life tells upon the physique of the people.
Not only do the vigorous countrymen replenish the
towns with new life, but they have a tendency to crowd
out and starve the weaker and more stunted specimens
of humanity, who are the outcome of several generations
that have grown up without proper access to light and
air, and without muscular exercise. Before long, how-
ever, the country immigrants will be an imperceptible
addition to any great English or Scotch city. What,
1 Statistical Journal, vol. lii. p. 231. "An estimate, based upon
returns from thirty-one of the largest cities of Europe, shows that of
every 1000 increase in urban population, 215 only spring from excess of
birth-rate over death-rate."-Adams's Public Debts, p. 349.
156
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
E
for instance, will 20,000 immigrants a year mean
to the swarming life of a metropolis with four or five
millions of inhabitants? Is it not unavoidable that the
city type should become more and more pronounced?
Is it not probable that the type elaborated will not be
so much that of the mobile, critical, originative Athenian,
who was practically an aristocrat among slaves, as of the
Manchester or Bellevue operative, with an inheritance
of premature decrepitude, with an horizon narrowed to
parochial limits, with no interests except those of the
factory or the Trades-Union; with the faith of the
Salvation Army, that finds expression in antics and
buffoonery, or with that even more lamentable scep-
ticism to which the bestial element in man is the only
reality?
It must be borne in mind that the city life which
we associate from history with ardent public spirit and
susceptibility of great ideas was never trammelled by
the limitations which cramp a great capital in modern
times. The Athenian could pass in a couple of hours
from the Acropolis into a country solitude; he was
perpetually serving as soldier or sailor, or was tra-
versing mountain paths to consult an oracle, or to
attend a festival. The free population of Rome may
have amounted to nearly three-quarters of a million
in part of its best literary period; but these numbers
were closely packed within a circuit of thirteen miles;
the country with its breezy plains or umbrageous
forests or little townships was close at hand; and
society was so small that, for one period at least, we
know all about its leaders and their family scandals,
and the places of amusement, and the chief professional
1 Ramsay's Antiquities, p. 2; Gibbon's Decline and Fall, vol. iv.
chap. xxxi. p. 89; note by Smith.
1
III
157
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
men, as well as we know about the England of Queen
Elizabeth's time. In Rome, as in Paris and London
during their best days, though the city was too big
for a single set, and though we can perceive that the
younger Pliny and Tacitus moved in a different world
from Juvenal and Martial, just as Fox and Sheridan
scarcely ever met Dr. Johnson, there were still points
of contact between the salons, and in this way there
was, as it were, a literary commonwealth, whose
members exchanged ideas and reproduced each other's
thoughts with variations. Boston, not being overgrown,
has been able to combine this best feature of town
intercourse with a singular charm of its own during
our own generation. At present London is either too
vast for such a society to exist, or if it exists it is
effaced by the multitudinous life of statesmen, pro-
fessional men, millionaires on every side. There may
be even more talent than there was in the days of
Burke and Gibbon and Horace Walpole; but it is
dissipated in space, or attracts no attention outside.
The successful proconsul, the daring traveller, the
scientific discoverer, are now passed round for a season
from salon to salon, invited to air themselves in re-
views, and relegated to the second place. The world
at large is just as reverent of greatness, as observant
of a Browning, a Newman, or a Mill, as it ever was;
but the world of society prefers the small change of
available and ephemeral talent to the wealth of great
thoughts, which must always be kept more or less in
reserve. The result seems to be that men, anxious to
do great work, find city life less congenial than they
did, and either live away from the metropolis, as
Darwin and Newman did, or restrict their intercourse,
as Carlyle and George Eliot practically did, to a circle
158
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
of chosen friends. The same feature of human inter-
course appears to be noticeable in France, though in
France the Second Empire broke up the thinking and
talking world so completely, that even the semblance
of that brilliant society which existed under the last
monarch has never been reconstituted. An outside
observer, at least, remembers that Littré and Renan
and Victor Hugo have been relics of the old world,
and that Lamartine and De Musset, De Tocqueville and
Michelet and Thierry, George Sand and Balzac have
left no counterparts.
It is, perhaps, too early to decide whether town life
is dying at the top. It may well be, that even in one
of our overgrown capitals a society may spring up
which shall not allow itself to be absorbed in the riot
and the ennui of fashionable gatherings, which shall
find better use for its thought than to tone it down
into commonplace, and nobler use for its style than
the affectation of epigrammatic smartness.
Such a
body of men might easily recover the influence and
dignity which was enjoyed by the best circle of
George III.'s reign during the American War; by
the French Liberals under the House of Orleans; and
by the Boston Transcendentalists while the struggle
of slavery was undecided. All that can be said with
certainty is, that as towns grow to dimensions never
dreamed of as possible, it must be increasingly difficult
for a few men, however brilliant, to give direction to
the thought of the whole urban community. What,
however, can admit of no doubt is, that if wealth and
numbers and uniform habit of life and speech and
opinion may tend to set aside genius or cramp
originality even when they act on a small coterie,
they are incomparably more calculated to exercise an
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DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
influence for evil upon the masses. The dweller in a
great city is tending more and more to become a very
small part of a very vast machine. It is not only that
his daily work is less varied, and makes less demands
on resource and fertility of expedient than it did, but
his whole horizon is narrowed. Put, on the one hand,
the elevating influence of the State school, which has
taken him through a primary reader series, and add,
it may be, an occasional visit to the museum; and
assume, on the other hand, what is becoming more
and more a fact, that the artisan's daily walk from
the house to the factory represents his knowledge of
God's earth; that he has never wandered by the sea-
side, or in the woods; knows nothing such as village
children know of life in the hedges and the farmyard;
never sees the dawn whiten and flush over heather,
or has looked up at the stars except through an inter-
vening veil of smoke and fog. Does any man dream
that an excursion train, with its riotous mirth and
luncheon-baskets, and few hours' freedom to stand on
a pier or stroll through the streets of a country town
can compensate to millions of human beings for nature
quite shut out? What kind of children will those
be who grow up when the best sanitary laws have
restricted the intercourse with animals even more than
is now customary in towns; who have never picked
buttercups and daisies; who read in poems of the
song of birds that they cannot hear, and of a beauty
in the seasons which they only know by vicissitudes
of hot and cold? Will not their eyes be dimmed
for all sights but those which a shop window can
afford? and will not their minds be the poorer by
many bright memories which their mothers had? Yet
these are not even the chief losses which a city life
160
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
entails.
There is an inevitable companionship in
country life which draws rich and poor together.
At the cricket-ground and in the hunting-field, in
church and in social gatherings, from harvest-home to
school-feast, squire and parson, farmer and hind, meet
together animated for the hour with the same kindly
thoughts. In the great majority of villages, at least,
the cottager looks for sympathy in his troubles to the
Rectory and the Hall. Even where the clergyman has
been torpid and the landowner non-resident, the village
has still been a community of neighbours interested
in one another. In the multitudinous desolation of
a great city contact between rich and poor is scarcely
possible, and as there are no abiding homes there are
no real neighbours. Strangers who will help with relief,
or, it may be, close the dying eyes of the destitute, are
a poor exchange for families that have lived near one
another, toiled together, taken holiday together for
generations.
In very small communities the family life is deepened
and intensified by isolation. Families intermarry, and
it comes to be thought a scandal that any one should
marry out of the clan. The result is seen in a certain
rough loyalty of all who are so connected to one
another, in a storing-up of family traditions, and in
an enhanced self-respect. The obvious drawbacks to
this kind of life are, that the interbreeding is some-
times carried to excess, though this is not often the
case where the conditions of life are healthy, and that
feeling for the parish or the district seems to supersede
national sentiment. In large towns this sort of family
life is impossible, and the traditions of old burgher
families, tradesmen, or artisans, who lived in the same
street for generations, is rapidly becoming extinct.
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DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
:
The apprenticeship system that gave young men a
family training of a kind has to a great extent dis-
appeared. The workman is very constantly a bird
of passage; at least an immigrant from the country or
abroad. He marries, or forms an irregular connection
with some chance acquaintance. The lodgings are
constantly changed, so that no home associations can
grow up; the husband may be absent for weeks or
months at a time; the children live, out of schooltime,
in the court or the streets, their homes being mere
feeding and sleeping places; the boys scatter as they
grow up, and the girls find work in a factory, where
it is impossible for the mother's eye to follow them.
Of course there are thousands of cases in which the
conditions are even less favourable to domesticity;
where two or more families live in a room, so that
not only is no separation of the sexes possible, but
that an entire family cannot enjoy the privacy without
which the communication of thought in counsel or sym-
pathy is impossible. No doubt the imperishable instincts
of human nature will assert themselves with perpetual
miracles of gracious spontaneity in the slums as well
as in Arcadia. Hermann and Dorothea will rehearse
the "old, old story" in whispers or hints, and during
hours when all is hushed; the mother will glow with
all the hope and love of womanhood as the babe, pre-
destined to scrofula or typhus, smiles up or crows in
her face; and the father, worn out with the week's toil,
will feel a Sabbath rest as he looks round upon his
children, even though he cannot talk freely, or pray,
or walk in green fields with them. No one can doubt
that the moral sentiment is inextinguishable who re-
flects how the instinct of purity has maintained itself
among English women, living as they have done for the
M
•
162
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
last three generations in conditions of domesticity that
even in the country were often only a little better than
they now are in the less crowded parts of our great
cities. What it seems impossible to question is, that
the old family feeling, with which self-respect, loyalty
to kindred, discipline and sexual purity were intimately
associated, must in course of time disappear from large
towns, unless some radical change should make home-
life possible to the toiling and thrifty part of the
population.
Now the State Socialism which is growing upon
us, and the scientific teaching which we are all disposed
to admit, are combining in some respects to a hopeful
solution of some of these difficulties. Science, dis-
regarding the "let-alone" theory, which declared that
the State had no right to interfere with the workman's
demand for lodgings, or the capitalist's supply, is in-
structing us that it is at our own peril if we allow the
conditions of disease to exist anywhere, and that the
lives and fortunes of the whole community are at
stake if we overlook crowded rooms, bad drainage,
foul drinking-water, or diseased food. The scientific
man will probably content himself with very practicable
requirements, but he will hardly be satisfied with less
than a proportion of cubic feet that means separation
for every family, and an abundant water-supply. The
temperate State Socialism that is coming in goes natur-
ally beyond this, and asks that the State shall make
itself a large employer of labour, so far as to assure a
reasonable wage to every man ready to work.
We can
already see tendencies of progress towards a more
advanced point. Philanthropists are trying to get
large spaces reserved as parks or recreation-grounds
in the neighbourhood of our towns, to get gymnasiums
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163
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
attached to our schools, and to arrange for occasional
excursions into the country. If we assume every family
to be living in a five-roomed house,¹ every working-man
in England to be earning his thirty shillings a week, the
Saturday half-holiday to be introduced, every child to
be trained in gymnastic exercises, and every young man
to have the opportunity of football, cricket, or drill, we
shall assume no more than would seem very moderate
and perhaps inadequate in Australia; and yet changes
of this kind would mean a new life for millions of human
beings in such cities as London and Glasgow, Paris and
Lyons, Berlin or Vienna, New York or Chicago. Never-
theless, even these reforms, which perhaps are possible
and probable, would only be of partial efficacy as regards
health. They would restore the sanctity of family life,
but they could not bring back the old authority of family
ties; and they would scarcely touch the deplorable isola-
tion of the townsman from that world full of sweet sights
and sounds, that divinity of hill and glade and running
stream which were anciently the inheritance of the whole
human race.
Let us now set off against these positive losses the
advantage in variety of amusements which operates so
largely in attracting the youth of the country districts
to a town. For women, in particular, the gain seems
to be incalculable. There are the theatre, the music-
hall, or the opera, the picture-gallery, the comic enter-
tainment, the lecture, the class-room, and a very
considerable resource in what is known as "society"
for all, except, of course, the very poor. Even if we
admit that the racket and incessant change of life in
very fashionable circles are carried to excess, and that
1 I assume three sleeping-rooms, a kitchen, and a sitting-room to be
the smallest amount compatible with health and decency.
164
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
the very poor are apt to be thrown upon worse associates
than they would find in the country, the broad fact
remains that to the great mass of women the streets
within a mile of their town-house contain greater variety
than they can find in a whole county. That the town
acquaintanceships are as a rule perfectly superficial, that
a large visiting list may not contain a single friend, or
one with that sympathy of custom which neighbourhood
in the country is apt to engender, may be said to be
partially compensated by the comparative absence of
small rivalries and petty scandals. Then, even if we
assume that the old paramount influence of the best
set in a metropolis has ceased to be as noticeable as it
once was, there is an immense wealth of secondary, and
even very high talent. The city absorbs the most prac-
tical intellects of the country, and competition keeps
them from rusting. To put the case briefly, if human
life in the great centres has less intensity and tenderness
than in the provinces, it has also less ennui; and to
the nervous, excitable, modern temperament relief from
ennui is the primary condition of a healthy and desirable
existence. We must probably console ourselves with this
reflection, for it seems likely that the amusements of a
large town rather lose than gain in character as it grows.
To take the lecture-room, which is perhaps the most
intellectual of all, it is noticeable that Coleridge and
Carlyle had very moderate success, that Thackeray and
Dickens were better received in the provinces than in
London, and that Matthew Arnold was a failure in
America, and had no encouragement to lecture in
England. The fact probably is, that most people
prefer to read a lecture in the columns of a newspaper
or in a book; and if they go to a lecture at all, go only
from curiosity to see or hear a distinguished man. There
III
165
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
trivial stage
is nothing unreasonable in this view, but if it becomes
universal, one kind of amusement that stimulated the
mind in no unworthy way will be retrenched. The
theatre is not likely to suffer in this manner. Hardly
any one derives as much pleasure from reading a play
as from seeing it well put on the stage. Even a very
ordinary cast of actors, giving only the
tradition with no original renderings, will present one
of Shakespeare's plays in such a way as to stimulate or
instruct a critic. Unfortunately, the age is no longer
tolerant of work with a high aim. It has become a
proverb that Shakespeare spells ruin, and the exceptions
to this are where popular actors give the stage version
more or less infamously garbled, with such gorgeousness
of costume and surroundings that the mind is diverted
from the words to the presentation. Putting aside
Shakespeare, and admitting that where Shakespeare is
only tolerated his great contemporaries cannot claim
to be heard, we find that the serious work of modern
times is never even regarded. Shelley, Browning, and
Tennyson are experimented on from time to time, and
put away almost instantly; Byron's name has not
recommended his dramas; Swinburne has never even
been tried; and the comparative success of Bulwer
Lytton and of Sheridan Knowles, if we can draw any
inference from it, would seem to show that the public
is really tolerant of the drama only when it is bad.
may be said that the world has become unfamiliar with
strong emotions and incredulous of violent effects;
that the hardness of Lear's daughters, Othello's jealousy,
Iago's villainy, Macbeth's crimes, are too sensational
properly to impress a society that is no longer prone
to stormy impulses, and that can hardly understand
impulses that outrage decorum. This, however, will
It
166
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
not account for the fact that even the highest style of
comedy has fallen into disrepute. Modern counterparts
of Much Ado about Nothing, or The Merchant of
Venice, of Tartufe or Le Misanthrope, seem to be
as little attempted as the old form of tragedy. The
popular form of amusement in England is broad farce
or the extravaganza; and some of Mr. Gilbert's work
in this last direction is so admirable as to show that
genius may impress its own stamp upon its master-
pieces, and yet be popular, if it consults the spirit of
the age. Perhaps it is most reasonable to assume that
the novel has killed the drama as a delineation of
human energy and suffering. The novel makes less
demand upon the attention, can reiterate strokes and
deepen colours where the first effect has failed, and
can be produced in endless variety. There is a certain
class of work, the minute and progressive analysis of
a character undergoing change, that the novel perhaps
achieves better than the play. Meanwhile, the sub-
stitution of the book for the counterfeit presentation
in the higher range of subject may surely be said to
have debased one large and important class of amuse-
ment by restricting it to pageantry and sensational
effects or vulgar allusion; to shifts of dresses, to the
jokes of a Jack-Pudding, to pugilistic encounters, or
to the bringing of a whole farmyard in feather and
fleece on the stage.
It is, no doubt, to be borne in mind that although
the English drama was incomparably the best in the
world at one time, and though the English dramatists
are the only moderns who will bear comparison with
the Greeks, the French have excelled us for two centuries
and a half in the average excellence of their work, and
in the capacity for criticism. Now, the decadence of the
III
167
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
drama in France is by no means so marked as it is in
England. Victor Hugo's best dramas seem to many of
us who are foreigners superior for dramatic situations
and for the expression of fine feeling even to Corneille;
and of the younger Dumas and Sardou we may at least
say that they are good enough to be read and repro-
duced or plundered everywhere. No one supposes that
a Corneille or Victor Hugo can be born in every genera-
tion; and therefore, if the best work of these men is
still appreciated in their own country, if there are
men, however inferior, still working upon the same
lines, it would not be safe to say that the character
of the drama in that country has deteriorated. Let
us admit this, and allow that Paris-even though it
is an overgrown city-retains one very perfect form
of amusement which has seemed to decay in England
as the novel superseded it for the highest work. Still,
Paris is only one city, and the taste of the French
people may have given them an exceptional advantage,
though it has not saved even Paris from being the home
of opera-bouffe. The other apparent exception to the
proposition, that the taste for serious dramatic art is
declining, is to be found in the vogue that Ibsen's
dramas have attained to. Writing in a tongue almost
unknown to the world, translated at first only into
German, as careless of popular taste and as reflective
as Browning, as prone to violent effects as Webster,
Ibsen has nevertheless obtained a moderate recognition
even in England, where his best works are comparatively
unread; altogether, I believe, unacted.¹ Probably it is
fair to say in this particular instance that the generous
appreciation of scholars and experts has forced Ibsen's
1 The reference is to Brand and Peer Gynt, though the latter is
partially known as an opera.
168
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
$
plays upon the attention of a public that grudges the
time it gives them, and would prefer Orpheus in Hell
to Peer Gynt.
It is scarcely necessary to inquire if the music-hall
or the comic entertainment minister to a sound or
elevated taste. What may probably be urged, how-
ever, with truth is, that they are to a great extent
the relaxations of a class that had no relaxations
anciently, or only such as were coarse and brutal-
the bear-bait, the bull-bait, or the cockpit. It may
even be better that men and women should listen to
a stupid and indelicate song trolled out by a pro-
fessional singer than that there should be a large
literature of tavern catches and obscene songs, such
as have come down to us from every century, of
which we have copious literary remains, and such as
were freely sung at private parties. It may reasonably
be contended that the popular music-hall production
of to-day never sinks quite as low for grossness as
songs that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson have em-
balmed, and that the decay of literary form in this
lowest phase of brainwork is due to the enhanced
self-respect which prevents any but the lowest crafts-
men from pandering to the most debased taste.
that the present argument seeks to establish is, that
certain forms of amusement which a city provides,
and which are considered among the attractions of a
city, are really not more intellectual or elevating,
though they are unquestionably more garish and
fascinating, than the riot and coarse jocularity of a
village tap-room.
All
Perhaps the most genuine advantage of city life
is, that though the greed for gold is naturally as fierce
in towns as in the country, it has a tendency to be
III
169
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
less sordid. The French peasant as Balzac has painted
him, the Spanish villager as Galdos describes him,¹ are
very intense types of what country toil tends to pro-
duce everywhere-an absolute concentration of the
mind upon small economies, or, it may be, small pilfer-
ings, and a thorough deadening of the moral sense.
Countries where the wage-rate is low, and where the
peasant is disinclined to move on the chance of better-
ing himself, seem to be those in which the feeling is
strongest, and the Scotchman, who has always had a
harder struggle for existence than his Southern neigh-
bour, is, in spite of his superior self-reliance, habitually
more frugal than the Englishman. On the other hand,
countries where life is easy, and where splendid chances
are numerous-such countries as California and parts
of Australia have been for a generation—may possess
a free-handed, speculative race of countrymen-miners,
and even yeomen-with none of the economical char-
acteristics of the European peasant. The greater frugality
of the country population is therefore due to its circum-
stances and its needs, and the comparative lavishness
of town life is chiefly noticeable in cities where wealth
circulates freely, and where chances are numerous.
There is reason to suppose, accordingly, that this
1 "There has been much declamation against the materialism of
cities. . . but there is a more terrible plague in the materialism of
villages, which petrifies millions of human beings, killing all noble
ambition in them, and confining them within the circle of a mechanical,
brutal, and gloomy existence. For the covetous villager there is
no moral law, or religion, or clear notion of right. Under his hypo-
critical frankness is concealed a sombre arithmetic, which, for acute-
ness and perspicacity, surpasses all that the cleverest mathematicians
have devised. A villager who is enamoured of coppers, and dreams of
changing them into silver, to convert them later on into gold, is the
most ignoble beast conceivable; for he has all the man's malicious and
subtle imaginings, and a terrible persistency of aim."-Galdos, Marianela,
pp. 41, 42.
·
170
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
advantage of the city over the country is not in its
nature permanent. If we can assume a form of State
Socialism which monopolised investment, taxed accu-
mulated wealth heavily, and secured the labouring man
work on equal terms wherever he lived, the reasons
for the frugality of the villager would to a great extent
disappear. Even if we assume the changes effected
to be much less noticeable, a closing up of the outlets
for emigration would deprive a large class in cities
and in some country districts of the opening and
chances to which they now trust in place of economy,
and a severe competition of highly-developed countries,
one with another, might easily reduce wages. The
motives for frugality would become imperative, and
the "Père Grandet" of French romance would have
his counterpart in every London court.
Mr. Ticknor, as reported, put the case against a
national debt as if it were only dangerous when it
was held by the foreign creditor. On that assumption,
the English, French, and United States debts, which
are chiefly held in their respective countries, would
be no serious evil. It seems more reasonable to con-
sider whether a community that has anticipated its
future progress to any great extent is not always in
some peril. Such an inquiry will, of course, be in-
dependent of the question whether the debt was not
contracted on reasonable grounds, or perhaps unavoid-
able. National existence would be regarded by most
reasonable men as worth paying for, and when a states-
man, by a nice calculation of chances, raises his country
from being a second-rate state into the position of a
first-class power, at the cost, it may be, of less than a
year's income, the world does not censure his policy
as extravagant. The peaceable acquisition of a State
III
171
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
like Alaska by purchase is even less open to criticism.
The cost of slave emancipation to Great Britain has
always been considered a reasonable charge, and we
now know that if the United States had emancipated
the blacks in the Southern States at double their
market value, instead of freeing them by war, it would
have been an extremely sound bargain. The debts
contracted for the purchase of a telegraph system, or
for the construction of railways or water-works, are
generally allowed to be right in principle. As a rule,
we may perhaps say that a community is only censured
when it charges current expenses or unproductive in-
vestments, such as fortifications, to posterity. Indeed,
it is sometimes held, that as fortifications are a pro-
vision against future as well as immediate dangers,
part of the expenditure on them may fairly be charged
to the generation that will reap the advantage. Alto-
gether, a State is practically justified for borrowing
wherever it is a question of permanent acquisition or
improvement; but an administration is not at present
allowed to speculate on the chances of the market
as a syndicate, a merchant, or a private adventurer
might.
Under the influence of these ideas the
of these ideas the growth
of national debts has been very rapid. Russia,
France, Italy, Spain,
Spain, and such South American
States as have enjoyed credit of any kind, have
been the most flagrant instances of free-borrowing,
while England, Holland, and the United States are
the only countries that show an inclination to re-
duce their funded debts. It is customary to assume
that the wealth of a prosperous country increases
almost as rapidly as its indebtedness. For in-
stance, if it be shown that France owed £911,000,000
172
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
in 1882 against £140,000,000 in 1820, it is re-
torted that the wealth of France has increased from
£1,520,000,000 to £9,070,000,000 between 1815 and
1882.¹ Again, in the case of an undeveloped country,
like one of the Australian colonies, where the money
borrowed has not been squandered, as in the Argen-
tine Confederation, but spent in reproductive works,
it is usual to point to the railways and State lands
as valuable assets. Then, again, the competition of
money-seeking investment is so great that a large
number of States can borrow at 3, 3, 4, or, at most,
4 per cent, where they anciently borrowed at 5 or 6.
In this way the charges of old debts have been very
sensibly reduced in several countries. Indeed, taking
the money-market as a test, it may be said that Russia,
Turkey, certain South American States, and Portugal
are the only countries where national credit has been
seriously impaired by borrowing, and even among
these the decline is sometimes due to the fact that
the country has drawn too largely in quite recent
times upon its credit. The debt of Russia, if it could
be kept stationary, or nearly so, for a few years,
is not excessive for its growing population and im-
mense natural resources. What financiers fear is, that
the money lent is employed in preparations for war
that mean waste if peace is maintained, and that may
mean incalculable loss if war is resorted to. Generally,
the feeling seems to be, that every country has possi-
bilities of great industrial development; that the
necessity of maintaining national credit is understood
2
1 "National Wealth of France compared with other Countries," by
Fournier de Flaix, Statistical Journal, xlix. pp. 186-200.
2 It is roughly about £5 a head, of which a fourth is nominally
covered by debts from railways and municipalities. In the Netherlands
the debt is £20 a head, and in New Zealand nearly £60.
III
173
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
by all but barbarous communities, and as a corollary, that
there is no particular reason to be alarmed at the great
increase of national indebtedness throughout the world.
There are, perhaps, some considerations on the other
side. An increase of indebtedness is of its nature per-
manent; an increase of prosperity is not only not
certain to last, but is practically certain to be reduced
now and again by bad years. It means that money has
been laid by and invested in remunerative enterprises,
such as factories, ships, railways, houses, or the re-
clamation of land. Obviously, if population increases
slowly, or is stationary, the development of wealth at
constantly increasing rates cannot continue. A point
may be reached when further production becomes in-
creasingly difficult, and when families spend their
surplus incomes more and more in articles of osten-
tation and comfort, because investments are less and
less remunerative. Six or eight years of great de-
pression, attended with the closing of factories, the
throwing of land out of tillage, and the working of
half the railways at a loss, would tell very seriously
upon the capacity of even a prosperous country to
meet its engagements. As for the supposed guarantees
of a debt, they are all more or less visionary. In a
time of great depression the State must resume its
customs' duties or its mines, if it has pledged them,
and its lands and its railways may be unsaleable at any
depreciation. The only real guarantee of a debt is
national character. The financial world requires to
feel assured that under any possible form of govern-
ment the importance of maintaining the national credit
will be regarded as paramount to every other con-
sideration. It is among the solid advances of practical
morality that this is so much better understood than
174
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
was once the case. Countries like Spain and Greece
and the Argentine Confederation, that made no effort
to pay their debts fifty years ago, have begun to learn
by experience, though still in a halting and imperfect
manner, that repudiation is far too costly a luxury to
be indulged in.
Nevertheless, there seem to be two possibilities in
the future that may reasonably inspire a little anxiety.
One is, that States over-confident in the future may en-
cumber themselves with obligations which it will scarcely
be possible to discharge by any sacrifice. Let us sup-
pose, for instance, that England tries an experiment in
State Socialism, and buys up the land in Great Britain
to distribute it again to small tenants by issuing a 23
per cent stock. We may assume, further, that the
operation is carried out skilfully; that the landowner
gets a sufficient, but not a fancy value for his land;
and that the State may reasonably expect, if existing
values are maintained, to lose nothing by the transaction,
and even to gain ultimately, if farming by small occu-
piers proves a success, as great authorities have contended
that it is bound to do. All of course depends upon this
latter consideration. Now, it is at least conceivable that
even though the small farmer gets more out of the land
than the great landowner did, the farmer may yet fail
to pay expenses, because the foreign market may be
shut against his produce, and the home market may
have diminished. For instance, the English coal-
measures may have begun to fall off, or countries like
1
1 The probability of this has constantly been prophesied, notably by
the late Mr. Jevons; but the alarm seems to have subsided, because the
measures are more extensive than was at first supposed, and can be worked
profitably at greater depths than was thought possible. Still, they are
not inexhaustible, and their value might be depreciated before they were
worked out by the opening up of mines elsewhere.
III
175
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
China and the United States may produce so cheaply
as to drive English goods out of the market. In that
case the English taxpayer, who has paid £1,600,000,000,
let us say, for the land, and has created the money
by charging himself with interest to the amount of
£44,000,000, may find himself every year losing
£10,000,000 or £12,000,000 upon his purchase. It
will not be easy to make up this deficit by increased
taxation. A property-tax would fall largely upon the
very class who are by hypothesis unable to pay rent.
An income-tax, if it were severe, would drive the large
class of Englishmen who have invested their savings in
foreign countries to make their homes abroad. Confis-
cation of Church lands, large as the estates of the Church
are on paper, would bring in very little, till the com-
pensation due to actual incumbents had been paid off,
and would be very unpopular in the country if money,
heretofore spent in the parishes, was diverted to the
Treasury for the benefit of non-resident fund-holders.
Put it how we may, it is difficult to suppose that the
pressure upon the taxpayer in such a case as has been
assumed might not be very severe and long-continued.
Now, in such a crisis, it is difficult to believe-
and this is the second danger-that the taxpayer
might not be sorely tempted to draw a distinction
between debts due to a foreign creditor and obligations
incurred to fellow-countrymen. Forty years ago, a
very able student of political economy proposed to
declare the National Debt a 3 per cent annuity ter-
minable at the end of a hundred years.¹ A great part
of the National Debt had been contracted for what the
writer regarded as immoral purposes; a great part had
been raised in the most wasteful way; and the difference
.
1 Professor F. Newman.
176
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
in price between 3 per cent stock and an annuity, only
determined at the end of a century, was so small as
scarcely to deserve consideration when the great relief
the nation would sustain was taken into account. The
fact that this proposal, though it came at a time of great
national depression, was received with indifference or
indignation, may be taken as evidence that the com-
mercial instinct and sense of national honour were
perfectly sound in the England of that day. It may
seem unreasonable to assume that the world will ever
have a lower standard of good faith in the matter of
indebtedness than it had forty years ago. Still, it is
well to remember that even good moral purpose may
break down under an impossible burden. The American
States, which Sydney Smith lashed so wholesomely for
repudiation, had more to say for themselves than their
English creditor was disposed to see. Pennsylvania
was threatened with an exodus of taxpayers if it raised
money enough to provide the interest it owed. An
English Government, in the hypothetical case put,
might have to face the same possibility. It would
probably argue that it was better for the English fund-
holder to lose a part of his interest than to be paid in
whole for a time by loans that would soon culminate in
general bankruptcy; that if the State has a right to
impose a five shillings in the pound income-tax, it may
reasonably reduce incomes by five shillings in the pound;
and, finally, perhaps that the fund-holder had been over-
paid in the first settlement, and would receive his
substantial dues on a smaller dividend. It is unneces-
sary to point out what is sophistical in these arguments.
They cannot be called inconceivable, for every country
that has repudiated has used some of them by turns,
and the only question is, whether an English-speaking
III
177
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
people would ever come to adopt them. What is to be
feared is, that if national debts continue to increase
on the assumption that general prosperity is bound to
advance in the future as it has done in the past, a great
many communities are bound to have recourse to re-
pudiation when bad times come, though the form of
bankruptcy may be artfully disguised. A sweeping
succession duty would be an insidious and very prac-
ticable form of relieving the State from unpleasant
obligations.
Englishmen are perhaps apt to rely too much on the
precedent of integrity which has been maintained in
England for two centuries. Over-indebtedness, leading
to bankruptcy and to ruin or heavy temporary com-
plications, has been a common feature of state-life
throughout history. The decline of the Roman Empire
was undoubtedly hastened by the heavy indebtedness
of the cities,—an indebtedness which was often occa-
sioned by their engaging in great public works. The
Mississippi scheme of Law, which plunged France in
bankruptcy, was an attempt to apply the most daring
principles of modern finance under the administration
of a thoroughly corrupt court. France was bankrupt
again at the time of the Revolution, and the resource
of confiscating the Church lands and many private
estates was perfectly valueless. The American colonies
were mostly impecunious or worse under English rule.
Spain has a long record of insolvencies. Even England
has never paid her full bill for the glory of the French
wars under Edward III., and has witnessed the spectacle
of a Lord Chancellor suspending payment of debts,
because the Crown was insolvent, not much more than
two centuries ago.¹ Nay, there are still men living who
1 In 1672, under Charles II.—Lingard, vol. xii. pp. 18, 19.
N
178
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
11
can remember the time when the Bank of England was
relieved by law from the obligation to give gold for its
notes. When a State undertakes enterprises beyond
its strength, it always does it at the risk of bankruptcy,
whatever its good intentions may be. The question is,
whether the tendency to State Socialism may not be a
tendency also to the running up of large debts.
Two consequences seem to follow inevitably upon
repudiation of any kind. The one is that the private
as well as the public standard of honour will be lowered.
Individuals do not as a rule profess to be more moral
than the Government and the law, especially in countries
where the State is highly organised. The other is, that
the class ruined by repudiation is likely to be that class
which is essentially conservative of tradition, of refine-
ment, of all the passive elements of character. In such
a case as has been assumed, the aristocracy, deprived of
power and prestige by the forcible purchase of their
landed property, would be reduced to insignificance by
the resumption of a large part of the compensation first
awarded them.
The general purport of the argument has been in
agreement with Mr. Ticknor's predictions, though it
is rather more optimistic than Mr. Ticknor would
perhaps have agreed to. That standing armies are
likely to increase seems probable. What we have to
say, on the other hand, is, that wars need not neces-
sarily increase in proportion, and that the training of
a soldier may prove a valuable adjunct to the primary
school. That cities will increase more and more upon
country districts seems inevitable; and it has to be
admitted that the life of the poor in an overgrown
town is stunted and etiolated: neither physically sound
nor morally complete. On the other hand, science and
III
179
DANGERS OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT
་
State Socialism may gradually improve the condition of
the dweller in towns, and the reaction against town
life may lead to changes that will make existence in the
country more tolerable. That nations will plunge deeper
and deeper into indebtedness as the State becomes more
and more industrial seems not unlikely. The worst to
be apprehended from this will be its effect upon national
character. Whether we are changing in the direction
of a higher or of a lower morality is, therefore, the point
that is most really at issue.
ܪ܂
CHAPTER IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF AN ENHANCED NATIONAL
FEELING
The future of society depends very much on the perpetuity of national
feeling.—Patriotism is generally regarded as an accidental and not
very high altruism.—In antiquity it was largely alloyed with self-
interest and the municipal feeling.-Patriotism is now the filial
feeling to a mother country; the acknowledgment that we owe
duties to our fellowmen, and cannot adequately perform them
to the human race.-A nation from its richer memories and larger
life ought to command more devoted allegiance than a city.-The
rival feeling of personal loyalty is now disappearing, and need
not be regretted. The Church has incidentally done good work
for society in vindicating the limits within which thought and
morals ought to be independent of the State. On the other hand,
the attempt of the State to force morality upon the immoral will
was never more than partially successful, and ended by provoking
general revolt.-The State, which restrains immorality only when
it becomes dangerous to society, has practically done more than the
Church to enforce the moral law.-Sacrilege has ceased since it has
been treated only as a secular offence.-The substitution of restraint
by moderate laws and public opinion for ecclesiastical censures
and punishments has not been visibly unfavourable to sexual
purity. The hypocritical formalism of modern society is not so
dangerous to individuality as pressure by a Church inquisition.
Moreover, under the Church rich offenders escaped, and these are
now the most severely restrained. The Church relieved poverty
in a casual and ineffective way, and from a wrong motive, the idea
that the alms-giver would be benefited. The State relieves it in
a way better calculated to preserve self-respect in the poor, and
from the higher motive, that every member of the community
who will work is entitled to live. Both systems have been only
partially effective; but the Church system was a complete failure,
while the State system, under all disadvantages, has reduced pauperism
till it is a comparatively small feature of society. Though the
CH. IV SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 181
Church has in some respects and in some times and places miti-
gated slavery, slave emancipation has been a triumph of secular
statesmanship. The Medieval Church has been overpraised for its
services to learning. Its real object always was to save the soul,
not to inform the mind.-The great extension of primary educa-
tion in modern times is an achievement of secular statesmanship,
and has been repeatedly and violently opposed by the Churches.
-The State has superseded the Church in its hold on popular
imagination by the great benefits it assures its members. In some
instances the morality of the State is higher than that of the
Churches; for instance, in the treatment of women and children
and dumb animals.-The feeling of the industrial classes for in-
dustrial organisations is not likely to supersede national feeling,
and industry is likely to be restricted within national limits.-The
nation is bound to remain the unit of political society, because the
interests and feelings of different races and countries are too dis-
cordant to be harmonised under a central Government.-The modern
State does incomparably more for men and women than ancient
forms of society attempted, and ought to inspire deeper reverence
and love. In return for its services it is entitled to demand a more
complete surrender of selfish personal interests.
THE argument thus far has attempted to show that
what we now call the higher races will not only not
spread over the world, but are likely to be restricted
to a portion only of the countries lying in the Tem-
perate Zone; that under the pressure which will be
increasingly felt as outlets to trade and energy are
closed, State Socialism will be resorted to as the most
effective means of securing labour from want; that
great armies will need to be maintained; that the
population of cities will grow in number year by year;
and that in proportion as the State's sphere of activity
is increased will the indebtedness of the State increase
also in every civilised country. Whether this condition
of things will be good, tolerable, or bad, must depend
very much on the spirit in which the community takes
it. If we compare the description in Thucydides of
the state of Athens during the Peloponnesian war and
that in Synesius of a Roman provincial city, surrounded
182
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
and sometimes blockaded by barbarians, we shall see
that the great difference lies in the temper of the men
rather than in the circumstances of the time.¹ If the
people of Athens had not been quickened with the
inspiration of empire, if they had stooped to count
heads or ships, they would have acquiesced in the
secondary place which was all their leading families
were disposed to claim for them. As it was, they
staked their existence upon a splendid adventure, and
though they eventually failed, crowded centuries of
glorious life into the achievements of two generations.
Had the people of Ptolemais been led and inspired as
the Athenians were, they might have made their city
a stronghold of civilisation; and what is true of
Ptolemais is true, of course, in a much higher degree
of the Roman Empire. It fell to pieces, not because
its administrators were always inefficient, or its armies
weak, or its finances and mechanical resources inferior
to those of the nations which overpowered it, but
because there was really no sense of national life in
the community. Unless the general feeling in a people
is to regard individual existence and fortunes as of no
practical account in comparison with the existence and
self-respect of the body politic, the disintegrating forces
of time will always be stronger in the long run than
any given organisation.
Now patriotism, or the readiness to make sacrifices
for fatherland, is a very peculiar virtue. It is generally
treated as a mere phase of altruism, and is more praised
1 Synesius, Epistolae, civ. It may be admitted that Ptolemais was
never as populous as Athens in its best days, though Procopius speaks
of the African town as having been anciently prosperous and well-
peopled (De Aedif. vi. 2); but if Athens was the more powerful, it was
assailed by more formidable enemies. The great difference is the
measureless inferiority of the Roman governor of Ptolemais, Phryx
Johannes, to Pericles.
IV SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
183
by poets and orators than taken into account by
moralists. For instance, Kant strikes at the root of
patriotism by denying that the country has any original
and natural right to claim obedience from its citizens,"
and theologians and writers on ethics commonly hold
that patriotism is dangerously apt to be a misleading
force, diverting men from their obedience to a higher
law, such as the recognition of Papal authority, or of
the supreme dictates of morality. Mr. Lowell—surely
a patriot of very rare and high type-has laid it down
that our true country is that ideal realm which we
represent to ourselves under the names of religion,
duty, and the like. Mr. Lowell adds: "That it is an
abuse of language to call a certain portion of land,
much more certain personages, elevated for the time
being to high station, our country."2 Now it is obvious.
that a view of this kind may be reconciled with con-
duct which appears to the world to be dictated by
national sentiment. For instance, when America was
rent in twain by the War of Liberation, Mr. Lowell lent
1 Kant no doubt conditions this principle by saying that the in-
dependence of other men, which is inalienable to humanity, must not
be exercised so as to encroach on the independence of others (Rechts-
Lehre, Band iii. SS. 38, 39). At the same time he recognises the right
of the citizen to emigrate "Der Unterthan (auch als Bürger betrachtet)
hat das Recht der Auswanderung," Band iii. S. 174. Mr. Sidgwick
observes, "the duties of patriotism are difficult to formulate," and goes
on to remark, that "whether a citizen is at any time morally bound to
more than certain legally or constitutionally determined duties does not
now seem to be clear; nor, again, whether he can rightfully abrogate these
altogether by voluntary expatriation" (The Methods of Ethics, pp. 223,
224). The question is certainly not a simple one; but if thousands of
citizens, who have supported a policy of lavish expenditure, leave the
country when the burden of taxation becomes unpleasant, the very
existence of the State may be threatened. No moralist will defend this
extreme case; but is there no duty upon the sons of men who ran into
debt for the general good, as they not unreasonably conceived it, to take
the consequences of their fathers' mistakes upon themselves?
2 Biglow Papers, note to No. III.
1
184
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
*
I
-
It
his powerful assistance to the cause of nationality, and
though all that he did might have been justified on
cosmopolitan grounds-such as abhorrence of slavery,
or the desire to see the experiment of free institu-
tions worked out fairly upon a great continent-the
fact remains, that the transcendentalist was fighting
in the ranks with men who cared chiefly for the
national flag, and that, except for the momentum of
numbers and energy which these men gave, the cause
of general civilisation could not have triumphed.
is, of course, theoretically conceivable, though it is
surely very improbable, that the human race may
gradually be educated into the cosmopolitan conception
of duty. Capital, we are often told, has no sentiment.
It is determined in its choice of a home by no other
considerations than those of gain and security. Accord-
ingly, manufactures are freely transplanted from England
to Belgium, or America, or India, without regard to the
interests of the English people, the merchant navy of
a State entering upon a war is transferred without delay
to a neutral flag, and it constantly happens that a
belligerent power is supplied with arms or food or
money from its enemy. It may be asked, whether the
average citizen will not at some future date be careless
1
1 Two remarkable instances of this may be quoted from the history
of the great war with France when feeling on both sides was strained to
the uttermost. Rothschild having to transmit £800,000 to the Duke of
Wellington, sent it through France (Life of Buxton, p. 289). Bourri-
enne, being ordered to provide 16,000 military cloaks, 37,000 jackets,
and 200,000 pairs of shoes for the French army before the campaign
of Eylau, procured them from England through a Hamburg house
(Mémoires de Bourrienne, tome vii. chap. xx). In the first case, French-
men smuggled eight tons of gold through France to supply the needs of
an army fighting against their own countrymen. In the second instance,
whole factories in England must have been employed upon what—in the
case of the jackets and cloaks, at least-every one knew to be military
equipments for the use of the enemy.
IV
185
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
of local and temporary interests. The man who emi-
grates undoubtedly shows, by the act of renouncing his
native country, that he thinks himself entitled to carry
his labour to the market where it is best paid without
regard to any claims that England or Germany may
have on him. Practically, he is often justified in con-
tending that he will be more useful to his countrymen
in his new dwelling-place than at home. A day may
come, however, when a man who leaves an old and in-
debted State will be like the partner who peremptorily
withdraws from an embarrassed firm. In other words,
if it is right for States to assume large obligations, it
can only be so because they have a reasonable certainty
that successive generations of citizens will accept the
responsibility of that indebtedness. Therefore, unless
we regard the State as merely the casual aggregation
of persons who find it to their advantage to live in
a certain part of the earth, we must assume that there
is, or ought to be, a virtue of patriotism, which will
bind the Englishman to England, and the Frenchman
to France in some special and not easily dissoluble
way.
The difficulty is to separate patriotism, as we know
it, from infinite base alloys of interest, personal feeling,
or vanity, and to define its exact place in the moral
code. The patriotism of Greek statesmen and heroes
seems to have been a very mixed quantity. It was
undoubtedly leavened—and very largely so-by self-
interest. It was not as easy then as it has been in
modern times to transfer nationality. The circle of
possible friends was smaller even for a man of patrician
birth; the isolation of exile was intolerable; the trust
placed by his new protectors in the deserter more sus-
picious and exacting. Demaratos, Pausanias, Themi-
}
186
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
í
stocles, Aristeides, Alcibiades are conspicuous instances
of the false position in which a man disowned by his
fellow-citizens found himself; while Englishmen like
the Dukes of Berwick and Ormond, or Lord Bolingbroke;
Frenchmen like Dumouriez, Moreau, and Pozzo di Borgo,
enjoyed consideration, at least, in their new homes, and
the full confidence of the Courts that protected them.
Mr. Symonds has explained at length an element of
Greek patriotism, so-called, that has often been mis-
conceived-the personal attachment that bound together
the companies in the Sacred Band of Thebes.¹ When
it became possible for Greeks to prosper in Alexandria
and Antioch and Rome, and when the peculiar feeling
of the Sacred Band came to be out of date, the Greek
ceased to be a patriot. So it was with Rome also, and
we may say naturally and excusably. The old feeling
for Rome as a sacred city, which sustained its people
during the Punic Wars, seems to have passed away by
the time of Sylla; and national feeling in the days of
Cicero, Augustus, and Trajan, was little more than the
desire of an aristocracy for caste ascendency, the con-
tempt of Italians for conquered races, and a feeling in
the higher circles of society that life was only desirable
in Rome. We can scarcely give the name of patriotism
to the devotion of a tribe to its chief, or to the bitter
hatred of one race for another; and these feelings come
out predominantly in the history of the Middle Ages.
The gentlemen of Aquitaine, who so largely contributed
to win the battle of Poitiers, were fighting against what
we should now consider France, and were certainly not
fighting for England, but for an English king, who had
1 Contemporary Review, September 1890, pp. 415-417. Sir George
Cox has demurred by anticipation to Mr. Symonds's view, but practically
admits the fact.—General History of Greece, p. 574.
IV
187
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
claims upon their allegiance, and whom they renounced
when his yoke proved burdensome. Nevertheless, it is
probable that the terrible French and English wars did
actually lead to a great development of the spirit of
nationality as we understand it, and so to a larger
conception of patriotism. Still, both in England and
in France, centuries passed before the duty to the laws
or to Fatherland was recognised as more important than
loyalty to the sovereign.
It may be admitted that a great many various
motives contribute to form even a modern patriot.
Still, it is not very difficult to express a popular idea
of the limitations of the modern feeling. Patriotism is
now the feeling that binds together people who are of
the same race, or who at least inhabit the same country,
so that they shall try to preserve the body politic as it
exists, and recover for it what it has lost, or acquire
what seems naturally to belong to it. It seeks within
the country to procure the establishment of the best
possible order. It enjoins the sacrifice of property,
liberty, or life for the attainment of these objects. It
favours the existence of whatever is peculiar and local ;
of a distinctive literature, manners, dress, and character.
When it conceives the common country to be weak, it
tries to discard every foreign element as dangerous; and
when it is conscious of its strength, it tries to assimilate
what is best from abroad. The fierce pride of the English-
men in Algiers, who went back into captivity sooner than
acknowledge that they owed their. liberty to the King of
France, is now out of date;¹ but the general rule, that
no man can receive distinctions except from the head of
his country, is expressed in law and approved by opinion.
Stated in this way, patriotism seems to be based on the
1 Siècle de Louis XIV. chap. 14.
1
188
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
reasonable acknowledgment of two facts in our nature:
that we owe a duty to our fellowmen, and that we
cannot adequately perform it to the race at large. In
the American War of Liberation, to which reference has
been made, there was a Southern general of high moral
character (Stonewall Jackson), who, though he was a
believer in State rights, was not a believer in slavery.
He found it impossible to dissever the two causes, and
he elected, as most will think, pardonably, to fight for
the good of the State, which he clearly apprehended,
against the abstract and transcendental rights of human-
ity. Such problems are constantly occurring; and no
community can allow its citizens to take part against
itself on the ground that they belong to an ideal realm
of religion, duty, and the like. If a body of English
officers, for instance, feeling strongly that our interven-
tion in Egypt was immoral, had fought at Tel-el-Kebir
against their countrymen, they would have been shot
by martial law if they were taken, and no public
opinion, however hostile to England, would have con-
demned the execution. Practically, it would seem,
therefore, as far as our imperfect moral sense can see,
there is an obligation upon every citizen not actively to
injure the State he belongs to, which no man is allowed
to disregard. If he finds the State attacking what he
thinks a true religion, or violating the rights of labour,
or waging an iniquitous war, he is bound to oppose its
action by civic means; and if he fails in this, he is
by modern practice allowed to renounce his citizenship.
If, however, he does not take this extreme step, he
commits himself to supporting the policy of the State,
though he disapproves of it, and is not blamed for
assisting to carry it to a successful issue.
In some important particulars, a lofty feeling of
IV SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 189
patriotism has become more possible now than it ever
was in past centuries. The physical law, that the
greater mass attracts more powerfully than the smaller,
holds good in the moral world, and attachment to a
great country is bound, other things being equal, to
be more dignified and generous than attachment to a
city, though the city may have been Athens or Rome.
No doubt there were certain great periods in the life of
antiquity when the Athenian was merged in the Hellene,
fighting for the whole west against eastern barbarians,
and when the cause of Rome against Carthage was
practically the cause of Italy. These, accordingly, were
the ideal times, when men rose above their natural level.
A modern nation, however, if it has a past of any kind
worth remembering, is likely to have survived greater
struggles than any Greek city, to have ampler records
of heroism, and an incomparably more varied life. A
great country, of which it can be said that
One half her soil has walked the rest,
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages,
is one in which the religion of the soil can scarcely be
dissevered from national life. Of course it is essential
to the perpetuity of this sentiment that the nation should
be homogeneous. The Turks have not inherited the fame
of Justinian and his generals by over-running their
empire; and if by some industrial migration Germans,
Polish Jews, and other even more alien races were to
supersede the English labourer to any great extent, the
new England would be weaker than the old by all the
links of tradition. Practically, however, the case of the
Turks, who have camped in Europe without absorbing
or being absorbed, is exceptional; and a nation, as a
rule, is too large to be swamped by an industrial immi-
190
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER.
gration, as cities have now and again been. We may
therefore reckon the substitution of the nation for the
city in political organisation as one circumstance that
is favourable to the growth of an enlightened patriot-
ism. For intensity, nothing probably surpasses the
municipal feeling, as it has existed in cities that were
just powerful and dignified enough to appeal to senti-
ment.
The substitution of attachment to the State, the
country, the fatherland, for the feeling of personal
loyalty must also be regarded as a distinct moral gain.
Such a sentiment as that which led Jacobites and
non-Jurors to fight for a line of sovereigns whose
triumph in their own estimation was bound to be
dangerous to Church and law, or at least to abstain
from recognising a better order, and to estrange them-
selves from all interest in their country's struggles, all
wish to see that country triumph, must be regarded as
among the most lamentable of delusions. It was pos-
sible for the sovereign in times when this feeling pre-
vailed to be sincerely patriotic. A king, like Charles
II., who cared first for his pleasures, and next for power
as a means for promoting these, and who valued neither
the well-being nor the honour of his country, has been
the rare exception in England. Perhaps Louis XV.-
as selfish, as immoral, and less able—is his only counter-
part in France. But loyalists like Strafford, who would
have employed half-savage Irish troops against his own
countrymen; like the Scotch Jacobites, who invited a
French invasion; like the French émigrés, who were
willing to serve indifferently in English, Austrian, or
Prussian ranks, provided they fought against the cause
approved by their countrymen-are unhappily only typi-
cal instances of what the loyalist must logically become.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 191
In a few cases the want of nobler feeling has been
redeemed by an unselfish devotion, which asked for no
private gain, and shrunk at no sacrifices. Habitually,
the loyalist in exile has either calculated that he was
on the side which would win ultimately, or has been so
completely demoralised by life outside of his country-
men, as to have lost every trace of disinterested public
feeling when he returned in triumph. Of the Cavaliers
who lived to see the Restoration, and of the émigrés
who returned to France, it may be said pretty generally
that they acted as if they had not intended to serve the
lost cause for nothing. The Cavaliers, indeed, though
they asked for a great deal, got comparatively little,
because many of their estates had been sold in the open
market, and because the Presbyterians enjoyed the
credit of having brought the King back.¹ The French
émigrés, whose offence against their country had been
more serious, came back to find their debts and en-
cumbrances sponged out,2 to get a compensation of
£40,000,000, and to have something like a monopoly
of office and promotion for fifteen years. It can scarcely
be matter of regret that a feeling which so constantly
1 Autobiography of Sir John Bramston, p. 117. Clarendon gives an
instance where Lord Lovelace, having sold an estate below its value to
Bulstrode Whitelocke, refused to complete the title unless he was paid
an additional sum; but even in this strong case, Lord Lovelace seems to
have prevailed only through legal technicalities (Clarendon's Life, s. 281).
Mrs. Hutchinson says that her husband saved the estates of many gentle-
men of his county by getting himself appointed sequestrator.—Memoirs of
Colonel Hutchinson, pp. 326, 327.
2 "The emigration and the laws of 1793 by depriving them" (the
grand seigneurs) "of their estates, set them free from their creditors"
(Madame de Rémusat's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 414). "The whole mass of
confiscated land, not now in possession of the families to whom it belonged
in 1793, or of those to whom those families have sold it, would not
amount to the value of property lost by confiscation in Ireland by the
single family of Fitzgerald."-Lord Holland's Foreign Reminiscences, p.
281, published in 1850.
192
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
passed into the merest self-seeking is disappearing from
the domain of public life.
Even those who most feel what a gain it has been
that religious considerations should be ceasing to balance
secular in the estimation of citizens, will regard the old
fanaticism for Churches very differently from the irra-
tional sentiment of loyalty in its more extravagant
forms. It may be presumptuous for a man to believe
that the Church he was born in, or has passed over to,
represents the final results of thought on the most
difficult matters of speculation, and that God will
punish to all eternity those who, through perversity, or it
may be for want of spiritual light, refuse to accept the
truth when it is put before them. Still, most men will
admit that there must be one way of conceiving the
relations of God to man which is truer than any other
at any given time, and that to apprehend this rightly
ought to be of supreme importance. Even if we assume
blank materialism to be the gospel of the future, it must
be useful to apprehend it distinctly, that we may clear
our minds of dreams and human inventions. Still more,
if we believe in any form of religion that teaches a
higher law than the State prescribes, and is able to
enforce it by a sanction that is not of this world, must
the benefit of Church authority appear incontestable. It
is well to remember that secular society has revolted
not only against obsolete faiths,-for many forms of
Christianity appear to men in general as rational as
unbelief; not only against a corrupt clergy, for the
clergy have not always been corrupt, and, to take a
single instance, were both learned and zealous in England
when the great Rebellion descended upon them;¹ but
1 "All confess there never was a more learned clergy," said Selden
of the Caroline divines.-Selden's Table-Talk, p. 134.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 193
against the persistent efforts of religious organisations
to enforce common morality at the expense of individual
liberty. Let it be borne in mind, also, that the Church
in western Europe has perpetually represented a dualism
that was of the highest value for freedom of thought.
Sir Thomas More died on the scaffold, not because he
disputed the right of Parliament to make Anne Boleyn
Queen, or to settle the crown upon her children, but
because he denied that the ultimate power to determine
religious controversy could be vested in the head of the
State.¹ It is probable that he misinterpreted the inten-
tions of his contemporaries; but it is certain that after
the lapse of three centuries and a half, when the secular
power is far stronger than it was, it claims nothing in
any civilised State that Sir Thomas More would have
denied it. Except for the protest of men like Sir
Thomas More, Henry VIII. might have made the State
supreme in England, as it actually is in Russia. Take
again modern times. That marriage should be treated
by the State as a civil contract, and that primary
education should be given on secular lines, are principles
now very generally accepted. They seem to many men
worth fighting for, worth dying for. Nevertheless,
although their acceptance has been delayed by the
opposition of the Churches, it may surely be contended
1 More declared openly that he believed Parliament could make a
private person king, and told his friends in confidence that he had freely
remonstrated with the King about relaxing the Statute of Præmunire.
Roper's Life of More, pp. 66, 80, 81. The Act of Uniformity, as Mr.
Child has pointed out, drew up "all manner of spiritual authority" into
the Crown, and practically gave the King the power of defining doctrine.
-Child's Church and State under the Tudors, pp. 66, 67. Still, it is prob-
ably to be assumed that Henry never contemplated using these extreme
powers to their logical extent. He and his successors always acted with
the advice of the bishops, who presented the same mixture of pliancy
and independence in Church matters that the Parliaments displayed in
matters temporal.
194
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
that the gain resulting from a marriage-law controversy
or a Kultur-Kampf infinitely outweighs its inconveni-
ences to an administration. Few, indeed, are the
journalists and thinkers on the Continent who can speak
and write against a government measure with the
freedom which is tolerated in the meanest priest.
Lacordaire was silenced for calling Louis Napoleon a
tyrant, but he submitted only because his Church was
subservient to the usurper, and where he was simply
ordered to change the form of his work, a lay journalist
would have been imprisoned or sent to Cayenne. A
few years later, the French clergy were freely comparing
the head of the State to Pontius Pilate, and suffered no
annoyance.
It is one thing, however, to feel that the Churches
have been useful in past time as a counterpoise to
autocracy, and quite another to wish that their authority
should be maintained. As a rule, the Churches are in
their very essence opposed to liberty of thought and
conduct; while the State is gradually tending to become
more and more tolerant of each. It has been noticed
above that the law of life which the Churches seek to im-
pose has been found intolerable. Two familiar instances
will show what is meant. Every thoughtful student of
history is aware that the Protestant Reformation was
attended with a general dissolution of morals in those
countries which did not provide adequately for the
maintenance of ecclesiastical law.¹ The old Church
discipline was relaxed or swept away; and while even
1
1 “Of the following general facts I hold superfluous proof (1) that
after the religious revolution in Protestant Germany, there began and
long prevailed a fearful dissolution of morals; (2) that of this moral
corruption there were two principal foci-Wittenberg and Hesse."
Discussions on Philosophy, by Sir W. Hamilton, pp, 497-499, note. Com-
pare Ranke, Gesch. der Deutschen Reformation, Band v. SS. 435-437.
↑.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 195
1
the best men, such as Luther, found themselves at sea
on such a question as polygamy, the illiterate and lax
plunged into every kind of vicious extravagance. We
see Luther perpetually grappling with the problem, why
sin was bolder and prayer less earnest since the Gospel
had come into the world.¹ Yet it does not appear
difficult to understand that when the drunkard, the
fornicator, or the adulterer was no longer liable to be
summoned into the Dean's Court, and was not punishable
at common law, there was bound to be an interval of
decline before a sound public opinion had time to form
and make itself felt. The great success of Calvinism in
the latter half of the century is probably due very much
to the fact that Calvin's rigorous discipline kept his
Church free from scandal. The Calvinistic model was
accordingly adopted in England, and the English dio-
cesan courts combined the old Catholic rigour against
ecclesiastical offences with the Calvinistic zeal against
moral frailty. After a fair trial, lasting for about two
generations, the whole nation rose up in arms against
the inquisition domiciled in every archdeaconry.2 The
revolt, however, had two sides. It was supported by
1 "As the cold is greater and quicker in winter when the days get
longer and the sun comes nearer to us,—so also is the wickedness of man
greater, that is, more apparent, and breaks strongly forth when the
Gospel is preached." The lady doctor says to him, "Doctor, how is it,
that in Popery we prayed so fervently, earnestly, and often; but now is
our prayer quite cold; nay, we do not often pray?" The doctor answers
thereto, and said: "The devil is always urging on his servants, who are
untiring and laborious in service of their god; but the Holy Ghost
teaches and advises us how to pray rightly; yet we are so icy cold and
slack in prayer that it will not come out."-Luther's Tisch-Reden, Band i.
S. 226; Band ii. S. 233.
2 See vols. xxi. and xxxiv. of the Surtees Society Publications, con-
taining the Acts of the High Commission Court within the Diocese of
Durham, 1560-1591, and 1626-1639. We find the offences varying
from adultery, blasphemy, and insults to the clergy, to clandestine
marriages and nonconformity. Fines, sometimes as high as £3000,
penance, and imprisonment were the penalties.
1
196
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
worldly men who wished not to be meddled with, and
by Puritans, who approved highly of the principle of
interference, but desired to keep it in their own hands,
and to use it against social gaiety as well as against
faulty living. The result was that at the Restoration
there was a general and strong reaction against the
exercise of Church authority in any shape. It was not
extinguished suddenly; but it had to content itself
more and more with obscure offenders, till it became an
anomaly and ridiculous. Like most abuses in England,
it has remained on the Statute Book long after it had
died out in practice. Less than fifty years ago an
Englishman could be punished for not attending church
or a registered chapel on Sunday;¹ and later still the
Ecclesiastical Court retained the theoretical right to
punish him for incest and incontinence. Indeed,
these were in England the only courts taking cognisance
of such offences, except as private injuries; yet even
this has not tended to the preservation of their use or
influence. The modern State habitually prefers to
legislate on secular principles for such offences against
morality-incest, unnatural vice, seduction, and the like
as it finds it desirable not to tolerate.
Now the practical effect of this change is, that where
the Church has always aimed at substituting a perfect
rule of thought and life for liberty of opinion and moral
conduct, the State has never attempted to do more than
to protect its own existence against the excesses of liberty.
1 Homersham Cox, Institutions of English Society, p. 463, note. The
penalties incurred for non-attendance at church under 1 Eliz. c. 2,
§ 14, and 3 Jac. I. § 14, were repealed by the 9th and 10th Victoria,
c. 59, § 1. I believe they were last put in force against men suspected
of poaching. The law of sacrilege was abolished by 24 and 25 Victoria,
c. 96, § 50. Breaking into a church, however, is more heavily punished
than breaking into other buildings.-Stephen's Blackstone, vol. iv. pp.
203, 204.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 197
The Church and the State may each punish the publica-
tion of blasphemy, but the Church does it because it is
an offence against God, and because the individual ought
not to blaspheme; while the State only considers that
licentious attacks upon convictions which are sacred to
some of its subjects are an offence to good feeling, and
an incentive to disorder, or a cause of undesirable acri-
mony. The Church punishes sexual immorality as
dishonouring to the libertine, and the State, as a rule,
only meddles with it when advantage is taken of the
young and weak, or when there is likely to be a public
scandal. The Church denounces Sunday traffic as a
breach of the fourth commandment, and the State only
proscribes it as an encroachment on necessary rest. The
Church almost invariably regards the marriage-tie as
indissoluble, or nearly so; and the State, where it is
not influenced by the Church, habitually allows divorce
in a great number of cases. It would seem, in all these
particular instances, as if the State was deliberately
substituting a lower law for a higher. Practically,
however, secular society will bear comparison, even
on these points where it is least exacting, with any
State that was governed by the Church in old days,
taking even the times that were best for Church dis-
cipline. In the first place, it has never been possible
to maintain the religious ideal. Now and again history
records with admiration how some saintly prelate or
confessor has reproved a monarch for flagrant immoral-
ity. The Bishop of Soissons, for instance, compelled
Louis XV. to dismiss Mdme. de Château-Roux and her
sister for a few days, as the price of receiving the sacra-
Unhappily, this brilliant instance of a great
duty bravely discharged, and the fact that thirty years
later the Abbé of Beauvais denounced the same king
ments.
198
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
•
to his face, are very insufficient offsets to the general
toleration which the Church extended to the vilest
debauchee in Christendom. There is no occasion to
suppose that the Popes or the rulers of the French
hierarchy were indifferent to the scandals of Versailles
and of the Eil-de-Bœuf. What influenced them in
remaining apathetic-in not excommunicating the king
and his mistresses-was the fear lest the Church should
lose the support of royal authority; and this or a
meaner motive has been equally operative with the
Anglican clergy, who ought to have admonished George
IV., and with the French clergy under the Second
Empire. It may be said that the case taken of a
sovereign and his court is exceptional. It is excep-
tional only in the fact that the infamy is conspicuous.
How many English clergymen in the last three centuries
have dared to denounce a large landowner for drunken
or immoral habits? If they have done so, it has been
at the risk of a civil suit for defamation of character,
with a fair chance that their bishop would disapprove
their zeal, and with the certainty that their parochial
work would be heavily hindered, that opposition to
them would be fomented, and that the alms of the richest
contributor would be withdrawn. Even during the short
rule of the Puritans, which was strict enough to provoke
a reaction of unbridled licentiousness, there is evidence
that powerful offenders-a Martyn or a Wentworth-
were never meddled with. In the struggle to repress
irrepressible human nature, the Churches have always
been worsted, and their defeats have necessarily been
disgraceful.
1
1 Clarendon goes so far as to say that Cromwell was well pleased to
see Cavaliers and Presbyterians notorious for "scandalous lives," "luxury
and voluptuousness."-Clarendon's Life, c. 37.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 199
Even, however, if the Church ideal could be main-
tained, it would be at the cost of something better than
the formal abstinence from evil,—of human liberty. If
we can conceive a generation that abstained from saying
what it thought for fear of Church censures; that was
sober, moral, and cleanly-mouthed, not because it re-
garded vice as evil, but because it feared fine, imprison-
ment, or disgrace; that talked with the tongue of
By-ends, while within was all uncleanness, we should
have the picture of a society more hopelessly corrupt
than the world has ever yet seen. The sons of such
men would be born, suckled, and bred in lies; would
inherit the lust of the flesh, the craven spirit, and the
tortuous intellect. In vindicating for every man the
right to think mistakenly, to speak foolishly, and to
live within limits riotously, the State has vindicated
also the right to believe on conviction, to denounce
error fearlessly, and to lead sweet and wholesome lives,
untainted by Pharisaism, and not degraded by the re-
proach of a profitable conformity. When we measure
the actual results of liberty, we find surely that they
are good, even in the domain where liberty is accounted
most dangerous. The offence of sacrilege is so peculiar
by its nature, that what appears revolting profanity to
the Conservative may seem nothing more than a splendid
iconoclasm to the Reformer. In ages when there has
been a religion established by law, the policy of those
who assailed it has invariably been to show their con-
tempt for it and lessen it in popular estimation by acts
of public indignity. Not to mention the early Christians,
who, it may be said, could not compromise with such
flagrant errors as those of Paganism, we find that Pro-
testantism, even in England, which has been conspic-
uously temperate, carried on its war against the
:
CHAP.
200
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
!
}
Established Church by acts that must have been pro-
foundly offensive to every pious person who retained
his ancestral faith. Thus, for instance, we find as early
as the days of Wycliffe that a gentleman of Wiltshire,
who had received the sacramental bread from his parish
priest, took it home and lunched upon it with wine,
oysters, and onions.¹ Under Henry VIII. and Queen
Mary, acts which we can only designate as deliberate
outrages upon the Church of the majority, were ex-
tremely common. Sometimes it was a crucifix-the
symbol to ordinary men of their Lord's death and
suffering—that was carried off and burned or broken
up; sometimes a cat in priest's robes was hanged, or
the priest parodied behind his back while he was offi-
ciating in the sacred mysteries; very constantly the
consecrated bread of the Eucharist was ostentatiously
seized and trampled under foot, or given for food to
a dog.² In short, the more hotheaded of the English
Reformers were guilty of deliberate acts which it is
possible a Hell-fire Club would have shrunk from two
centuries later; and though the intemperance of the
Reformers was palliated by the sincerity of their con-
victions, and their readiness to seal them with their
blood, it is certain that much which they did would
be punished in any civilised State as sacrilege. No
Walsingham's Historia Anglicana, vol. i. pp. 450, 451.
1
3
2 See Maitland's chapters on the Ribalds of the Reformation, and
specially pp. 242, 252, 254, and 291, 293.—Maitland's Reformation in
England.
(C
3 The worst acts imputed to the monks of Medmenham-who may
appropriately be termed a Hell-fire Club-are, I believe, the invocation
of the devil by Lord Sandwich, the giving the sacrament to a dog by the
same worthy, and a picture in which a naked Venus was represented as
mater sanctorum," excesses which were meant to be private, and acts, how-
ever scandalous, which were probably much less offensive to the apathetic
religion of those times than the acts of the reforming ribalds to the more
pious among their countrymen.-Rae's Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox, pp.
13, 134; Dilke's Papers of a Critic, vol. ii. p. 233.
IV SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 201
administration, however, finds it necessary in these
days to protect the convictions of its citizens from
deliberate insult, except in the rare cases where the
Church is practically stronger than the State, and where
the war of faiths is carried on under something like the
old conditions. To all appearance the liberty granted
might with safety be greater than it is. The line of
demarcation between the late Dr. Matthew Arnold
comparing the Trinity to three Lord Shaftesburys,¹
and the late Mr. Bradlaugh editing a comparison of it to
a monkey with three tails,² is rather one of literary style
than of reverence; and it is difficult to see why the two
offenders were so differently punished. Meanwhile, it
is instructive to notice that these two sallies of irrever-
ence, and a few lines by Mr. Swinburne, are all that
represent the sacrilegious spirit in Englishmen who
have taken any noticeable place among their country-
men during the last fifty years, though the temper of
the times is believed to be sceptical, and even aggres-
sively irreligious.
It would be easy to give plausible grounds for sup-
posing that the absence of Church control, though it
always led to excesses when it first ceased, has in the
long run been attended with advantage to sexual purity.
There are certain patent facts which give colour to this
supposition. England has not seen for two centuries
such a Court as that which Hamilton described in the
Memoirs of Grammont, and whose tone was reflected in
Wycherley's comedies. The days when the wits of the
Rolliad made it their inexhaustible joke against Pitt
that he led a cleanly life, seem as far off as the days of
Charles II., and it is popularly assumed now that public
1 Literature and Dogma, pp. 306, 307.
2 In my first edition I mistakenly charged Mr. Bradlaugh with the
authorship of a comparison which he only gave publicity to.
202
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
opinion demands absolute decorum from a leading man.
Nelson, who intrigued with his friend's wife; Welling-
ton, who was certainly not irreproachable; and Warren
Hastings, who purchased a divorced wife from a needy
foreigner, would scarcely be permitted now to save the
Empire. A similar change, though not quite so strongly
accentuated, may be noticed everywhere. The French
nation has always been taxed with a disposition to re-
gard immorality as inevitable and venial, and so long
as it is not carried to excess, nothing more than one of
"such wild tricks as gentlemen will have."¹ Readers
of Rabelais, of Brantôme, of Bussy Rabutin, of Duclos,
of Voltaire, and of Champfort, find it difficult to believe
that there was a moral French society between Francis I.
and Louis XVI. The best observers tell us that, at
present, provincial life in France is as pure as it is any-
where, and that Paris would not be perceptibly worse
than any other great city if it was not the favourite
resort of profligate and wealthy Bohemians from every
part. It is probably true to say that the rich men,
who give a tone to society, are everywhere more liable
to suffer from a social scandal, and consequently more
anxious to avoid it, than they have been in any previous
part of the world's history. It is also true that girls
and young women are better protected by law than
they have ever been, and that the disposition to pro-
tect them is only kept from going further than it does
by practical difficulties. The old Poor-Law of England,
for instance, which threw the whole cost of an illegiti-
2
1 "The French, even when practically chaste in their own lives,
regard adultery in the male sex, at least, with a sort of amusement,
not unmingled with admiration."-Hamerton's French and English, p.
232.
2 Hamerton's French and English, pp. 206-232, and Hamerton's
Round my House, pp. 178-181.
IV
203
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
mate birth upon the father, has been discarded, because
it was found to deprive women of a desirable reason for
self-restraint.¹ Therefore, it is perhaps correct to say
that the substitution of secular for clerical influence, of
moderate laws and the restraint of public opinion for
ecclesiastical censures and punishments, has not been
visibly unfavourable to correctness of life in the sexes.
More than this it might be hazardous to affirm at
present. The great sin of great cities does not seem to
be on the decrease; and temporary, or it may be per-
manent but irregular unions, in which the women and
the children are not safeguarded as in marriage, seem to
have increased of late years in undesirable proportions,
especially in Catholic countries. Above all, we have
to remember that what Goethe said of humanity—that
"it is always advancing, but in spiral lines"-is emi-
nently true of the ascetic principle in morals. The
times of Charles I. and of the Commonwealth appeared
to establish a tradition of austerity, and scarcely any
one could have anticipated the deluge of depravity that
overwhelmed England after the Restoration. It is cer-
tain that the literature, the art, and the tone of wealthy
society in France were demoralised by the libertinage ·
in high places of the Second Empire.
2
It may be asked whether the mechanical pressure
exerted by public opinion in modern society is not
just as destructive of vigorous individuality as Church
authority could have been. Under the old system, a
sceptic bowed to the consecrated wafer, though he did
not believe in the Real Presence, and abstained from
sacrilegious words and acts, because he was afraid of
1 This was the emphatic opinion of the Poor-Law Commissioners,
pp. 346, 347.
2 France and the South and Central American Republics are the
countries specially alluded to.-See Nelson's Central America, p. 51.
J
204
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
being imprisoned or burned. In the nineteenth century
he attends church, repeats a creed which he believes to
be outworn, and lets his children be taught from a book
which he regards as a collection of old wife's fables,
because he knows that violently to repudiate the faith
of the majority will injure him in society and in his
profession. Under the old system, a libertine abstained
from seducing his neighbour's wife for fear of being fined
in the Dean's Court, and made to do public penance;
at present, he is afraid of an action at law, of some
social disrepute, and of political ruin. Are not the con-
formity and the morality no better than an organised
hypocrisy? And where is the gain in having discarded
the ecclesiastical system? The gain, it may be admitted,
is not complete or unalloyed. Nevertheless, in matters
of religion, it may surely be said that the tolerance of
secular society is distinctly greater than that of Church
courts influenced by professional feeling as well as by
conviction. Probably, even now, there is essential truth
in the description of English society which a German
cynic gave thirty years ago. "A man in England
may be an atheist, but he must belong to the Church
of the atheists." What is dreaded is not so much the
reproach of wrong belief, or of unbelief, as the awkward-
ness-the indecency, so to speak of isolation. Even
So, have the prophets of unpopular doctrines-a Colenso,
a Herbert Spencer, or a Renan-suffered anything com-
parable to the treatment of a Latimer or a Du Bourg, a
Servetus or a Giordano Bruno? Is it not the case, too,
that where the penalty exacted is small, and almost
fanciful, a man does not feel degraded by submitting
to it as he does by an imperious demand upon his
allegiance? Many a man is a formalist because he will
not fritter away his life in the worry of a fight for
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 205
his small and half-formulated doubts, who would show
something of the old spirit if he were called upon to
turn Protestant, being Catholic; or, being Protestant,
to worship the Host. In the case of morality, another
difference between ancient and modern times has to be
remembered. Anciently it was the rich offender for
whom the laws were spiders' webs, which he could
break through at pleasure. At present, it is the prince,
the statesman, or the man in society, who is marked
down for a flagrant offence against morals, while the
mechanic escapes unobserved. We may surely say that
a condition of society which exacts a severer rule of
life from the rich than from the poor, is to that extent
healthy and full of promise, and better than the old
practice of the Churches.
While it is apparent that society has lost nothing
by transferring the correctional functions of the old
Churches in certain matters of religious and moral
obligation to the secular law-giver, it is demonstrable
that it has gained very much since the State has vindi-
cated its supreme right to deal with such matters as
pauperism, the rights of labour, and popular education.
All these are issues in which the Church has failed from
having a low ideal, as well as from inherent ineffective-
ness. Take, for instance, pauperism. It is probable
that no Church has ever possessed the wealth requisite
for coping with national indigence after discharging the
other duties that were justly demanded of it. From
the very nature of Church endowments, it is habitually
the wealthy parts of a country that are best supplied,
and national interests and needs are inevitably sacrificed
to local and family considerations. Thus we find in
England of the Middle Ages that, in all Cumberland
and Lancashire, with an area of more than 2,000,000
206
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
acres, there were only seventeen religious houses; and
in East Hampshire, in a district that measured fifty
miles by twenty, there was not a single foundation from
which the poor could be relieved. On the other hand,
wealthy counties, like Norfolk and Lincolnshire, were
studded with rich houses at easy distances from one
another.¹ To them that had was given. But this in-
herent defect in the Church system, that it has always
been local and parochial, rather than national, is very
far from being its worse fault. Charity in the Churches
is inculcated as a religious duty profitable to the per-
son who practices it. It occasionally blesses him that
gives, and it habitually demoralises and degrades him
who takes. The condition of receiving Church doles
has always been to need them at the moment; and the
question of deserving them is most frequently treated
as of very minor importance. Nothing like an attempt
to give work, or even to test by work on any large scale,
has ever been attempted, as a rule, by religious bene-
factors. Now it may freely be admitted that secular
methods of dealing with pauperism have often been
foolish and bad. The English Poor-Law system, as
competent observers found it in 1834, was so adminis-
tered as to promote inefficiency in men and immorality
in women. Still the spirit of all English legislation on
this subject is in its intentions sound and liberal. What
lies at the bottom of every Poor-Law Act is the feeling
that every man born into the body politic is bound to
work, and must have work found for him if he cannot
find it for himself, on the ground that every man is
responsible for the support of his family-parents or
children. Whether the State is to organise public
works, and provide an insurance fund against sickness
1 Pearson's Historical Maps, pp. 61, 62.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 207
or old age, or whether it is best to leave these matters
as much as possible to private initiative, are questions
that need not be discussed here. What is important to
notice is, that the promiscuous alms-giving which the
Churches have habitually encouraged is discontinued,
or even punished, in the most civilised communities;
that secular legislation compels wealth to contribute to
the support of industry; and that we seem slowly but
surely to be approaching a time when no man shall
need bread, except by his own fault, and when no
woman shall have to purchase her children's bread by
her own shame.
It must be borne in mind that it does not neces-
sarily follow because a bad system is abolished that
a better is immediately substituted. The dissolution
of the English monasteries was followed by a great
debasement of the English coinage, by the confiscation
of the Guild lands, which were the English artisan's
benefit funds, and by arbitrary legislation which proposed
to fix the labourer's wages below his needs. Therefore
it is no wonder if the transition to the secular system
of relief was not generally welcomed. The change from
the old order had been complicated in an unnecessary
and mischievous manner. So again, the enclosure of
common lands in a later century, and the one-sided
legislation in matters of trade-the sweeping away of
all safeguards for workmen were aggravations of the
poverty that is bound to exist. Every country has
passed through a phase when the nobles succeeding to
the Church have been even less regardful of the in-
dustrial class. None the less is it on the whole true,
that pauperism has declined over the greater part of
the world since the Church ceased to dispense charity,
and that the right of the labourer to work has come
+
208
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
to receive universal recognition.
1
Moreover, it is at
least noticeable that in the Middle Ages the leaders
of a Jacquerie were as hostile to the Church as to the
State.¹ The Primate of England was beheaded by
Tyler's followers, and the Convent of St. Albans ter-
rorised by sympathisers with Tyler; the Bishop of
Salisbury was beheaded by sympathisers with Cade,
and in either movement Church officials were obliged
to hide for their lives. It can scarcely be supposed,
therefore, that the poor were conscious of profiting
to any great extent by Church alms. As a fact, we
know that lawless vagabondage and extreme destitution
in great cities were features of every period of the
Middle Ages. The tendency of the representatives of
labour in modern times is to give increased power to
the State, and to attain their ends by influencing its
councils. It may prove that the expectation of obtain-
ing relief through the State has been a fallacious one.
Meanwhile, that the vagrant poverty of our large com-
munities has been considerably reduced can hardly be
doubted. The English poor-rate in Charles II.'s time
amounted to little less than half the entire revenue of
the Crown,2 and the paupers and beggars in 1696 were
estimated at more than one-fifth of the population.
They are now one-thirtieth. Two years later (1698)
Fletcher of Saltoun declared that in Scotland, which
had then a population of about a million, there were
200,000 persons begging from door to door, and that
"in all times there have been about 100,000 of those
1 The confession of Jack Straw says: "We would have destroyed all
the beneficed clergy, bishops, monks, canons, and the rectors of churches
off the face of the earth.”—Walsingham, vol. ii. p. 10. Even if we take
this confession to be a forgery, it must be assumed to represent in an
exaggerated form the views held by the insurgents.
2 Macaulay's History of England, vol. i. pp. 437, 438.
IV SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 209
vagabonds, who have lived without any regard or sub-
jection either to the laws of the land, or even those
of God and nature."¹ Scotland has now about 100,000
paupers to a population of 4,000,000. It seems on the
whole fair to say, that the Church system of relieving
poverty was neither effective nor popular, and entailed
great demoralisation; and, on the other hand, that
though the State blundered for centuries in its methods,
it has already achieved an appreciable measure of suc-
cess, and has raised the character of the working-man,
while it has mitigated distress. It is the more remark-
able that this should be the case as the action of the
State in every country was for a long time trammelled
or misdirected by the prejudices or interests of a
wealthy class.
Next in importance to the recognition of the right
of the labourer to be assured employment, is the right
of the labourer to sell his work at the best possible
price. In early times it was a more imperative neces-
sity for the State to see that labour was not withheld
than to secure its proper recognition. Leaving out
of account, therefore, those remote ages in which whole
populations were sold in the slave market, till the
slave superseded the free labourer in many parts of
the civilised world, we find two forms of personal bond-
age existing in modern or comparatively modern times
-serfdom and slavery. The serf, owing duty to an
estate rather than to a lord, could not be separated
from wife and children, and practically has always been
able to work for himself. His position, though far from
perfect, has not necessarily, except at times, been so
bad as to demand the interposition of the Churches,
which are not charged primarily with the care of
1 Fletcher's Second Discourse on the Affairs of Scotland, pp. 100, 101.
P
-
1
.
210
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Cachives
心
​01)
н
man's material needs. This, however, cannot be said
of slavery. It has habitually been so cruel that the
weaker races, like Caribs and other American Indians,
have died out or declined under it, and even so strong
a race as the negro could not maintain itself in the
West Indian Islands under British rule.¹ Again, slavery
has been the fertile cause of sexual immorality, the
master practically doing as he pleased with his female
slaves, even to the extent of taking married women
from their husbands. Lastly, the slave system was
inherently regardless of family ties, so that even in
the Southern States Virginia was a mere breeding-place,
out of which the members of one household were sold
into every part of the country. Now it is true that
an exceptional churchman, like Las Casas, has now and
again denounced slavery in unsparing terms, or has even
devoted his life to a crusade against it. It may also
be claimed for some particular Churches that they have
in their corporate capacity done a good deal to improve
the position of the slave. The Roman Catholic Church,
for instance, has habitually treated black and white as
equals before the altar, and the Independent Smith, the
Wesleyan Shrewsbury, and the Baptist Underhill did
good work in exposing the cruelties of the Demerara,
Jamaica, and Barbadoes planters. Habitually, however,
in countries where slavery was established, the Churches
have acquiesced in it as the natural order of things,
have perhaps vindicated its divine original, have thrown
in their weight against its abolition, and have not even
protested solemnly that the marriage-tie was sacred, or
1 Between 1817-1822 and 1827-1832, in an average term of twelve
years, the slaves registered in the West India Islands diminished in a
population of 558,194 by 60,219 wear and tear, and exclusive of manu-
missions." Parliamentary Papers," quoted in Appendix to Memoirs of
Buxton. Compare M. Lewis's Journal, pp. 50, 140, 141.
103
Cave
i hell
IV
211
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
that religious instruction ought to be imparted. In the
latter days of North American slavery, an opinion that
religious negroes were more tricky and idle than others
became prevalent, and led to the withdrawal of religious
teaching on many estates-the Churches making no
protest.¹ Now it may be granted that the Churches
were not called upon to denounce the unrighteousness
of the sin of slavery while it was tolerated by the State.
Bishops and pastors have to take the world as they find
it in many matters, and the great majority in a slave
State are likely to have been honestly in favour of an
institution with which they were familiar from child-
hood. Still, even moderate men have always accounted
it a blot on the great Christian sects, that in their
desire not to lose their influence over the propertied
classes they have habitually refrained from inculcating
humanity, purity, and regard for family ties, except in a
very general and abstract way. At any rate, the credit
of abolishing the slave-trade, of freeing the slave by
war in the United States, and by legal reforms in other
countries, has been left essentially to secular politicians.
The negro race is not that which has profited most by
the abolition of slavery. The white labourer is even
a greater gainer by the fact that he is no longer forced
to compete with the products of unremunerated toil,
and a disgrace that was reflected on all manual labour
has been removed. The industrial classes have to thank
the State everywhere for this reform, and, to say the
least, owe no gratitude to the Churches.
In this matter of slavery, and in the cognate ques-
tion of the right of workmen to unite in Trades-Unions
that they may raise the rate of wages, what we have to
1 See Olmisted's Journeys in the Cotton Kingdom, vol. ii. pp. 212-229,
and Kemble's Journal of Residence on a Georgian Plantation, pp. 342, 346.
I
212
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
notice is the fact that the State is everywhere doing
work which the Churches will not or cannot do, and
where it has the same object as the Churches, habitually
employs a more reasonable method. Another emphatic
instance of this difference is seen in the treatment of
education by the two great organisations. The medieval
Church, often unwarrantably abused for defects which
belonged to the age, has as often been extravagantly over-
praised for its supposed services to learning. The broad
fact is, that its services were to a large extent accidental,
and that when it was best performing its own functions,
it was hostile to letters. Accidentally it was the interest
of men who had a taste for study to take the tonsure,
and so secure themselves a maintenance, protection,
and, if they were in a monastery, the command of a few
books. The true purpose of the Church, however, as
conceived by the best of its own sons, was not to inform
the mind but to save the soul; and to take a single
conspicuous instance, the Franciscan revival of religion
in the thirteenth century was aimed at the pride of
intellect as much as at the lust of the flesh. "The
habit and one little book," satisfied the founder of the
order;¹ and his disciples improved upon his teaching.
There is not a more pathetic history in the records of
literature than that of Roger Bacon, who, having as he
believed the secret of all knowledge, was constrained to
sacrifice the labours of forty years, his superiors strictly
forbidding him to write or communicate his thoughts.2
Now in this particular instance a Pope interposed to
procure for Bacon the liberty of bequeathing his results
1 Milman's History of Latin Christianity, vol. iv. p. 265, note.
despised and prohibited human learning," p. 275.
"He
2 Bacon's superiors threatened to confiscate his book and impose a
severe fast on him if he communicated anything that he wrote to the
outside world.—Opus Tertium, cap. ii.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 213
to posterity; and we have to remember that the secular
clergy as a body had no tradition of opposition to learn-
ing, and that the Benedictines in particular have a
splendid record-chiefly it is true for later times-of
devotion to studies bearing upon ecclesiastical matters.
Still, the broad fact remains, that the Church of the
Middle Ages did not of set purpose promote learning of
a secular kind beyond what was necessary for the vulgar
needs of life; and that when there was a revival of
learning, the scholars and the clergy were soon at feud.
Bishop Pecock, for instance, was disgraced for teaching
that faith rested upon reason; Reuchlin was fiercely
attacked for studying Hebrew; and Ramus silenced for
attacking the old logic. It fared no better with the
precursors of scientific anatomy and the founders of
astronomical science. Looking back, it is easy for us to
say
that the Church was unwise in its policy of attacking
the new learning, which was certain to establish itself;
yet this view is not indisputable. If the Church could
have silenced a handful of scholars and scientific men,
it would probably be the Universal Church at this day.
If its rulers believed that the life of men beyond the
grave was more important to them than their present
enlightenment, they were justified in putting free inquiry
down by the axe and by the stake.
After three centuries the opposition of all the Chris-
tian Churches to education not directed by themselves
is as marked as it ever was. It is not now a question
of the liberty to publish treatises that will only be read
in the first instance by a highly educated minority, but
of opening the gates of knowledge to every child. To
the politician of western Europe, of America, or Australia,
the question presents itself as a very simple one. The
educated workman can use his powers more efficiently
214
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
than the uneducated; the educated soldier is more than
a match for the drilled barbarian, other things being
equal; and there is, as a rule, less crime in an educated
community.¹ Sound schools of every kind are therefore
not a mere luxury or convenience but a condition of
national existence. Practically, the statesman in every
country would gladly enlist the clergy on the side of
education if he could do it by concessions that were not
destructive of his purpose. Practically, the clergy in
every country demand the control of the schools; and
while they are willing to teach the elements of know-
ledge, desire above all to send out the scholars entrusted
to them saturated with a superficial and gross theology.
The battle, of course, varies in different countries. In
parts of South America the clergy have succeeded in
keeping the schools in their own hands, and these are
among the most backward States on that continent; in
Belgium they would compound for the liberty to drive
out a teacher they dislike, and to interfere as they
choose in school hours; in England they are united in
dislike of Board or quasi-secular schools, and aspire to
prohibit any improvements that may make these danger-
ously attractive. In Holland they have actually suc-
ceeded in securing a return to pure denominationalism.
In Ontario the Church of Rome, in the first instance,
procured an exceptional right for those of its members
who were not within a certain distance of a Catholic
school to remain uneducated; and the Protest-
2
1 My impression is that the great causes of crime are want and
congenital predisposition. Education has a tendency to reduce want
and to inspire a keener fear of consequences. More perhaps cannot be
claimed for it.
2 Catholics in Ontario cannot be compelled to attend any school,
unless they reside in a separate school section, i.e. in a section in which
there is a school of their own denomination.-School Act of 1871,
§ 3.
•
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 215
!
ants later on have retaliated by introducing an
expurgated Bible, compiled by order of the Minister
of Education, into the mixed schools. In Victoria,
Catholics and Protestant ministers agreeing to oppose
secular teaching, are divided among themselves what is
to be substituted. On the whole, however, it is prob-
ably correct to say, that the Churches everywhere
distrust and oppose any educational system which they
do not themselves administer or cannot meddle in
freely; and that the State everywhere finds it impossible
to leave the schools to the Churches. That experiment
has in fact been tried in every country and has failed
in all. In England it was so absolute a mockery that
in 1838 an impostor or lunatic succeeded in passing
himself off as the Messiah, almost under the shadow of
Canterbury Cathedral, and in a county where Church
influence ought to have been predominant.
A year
later the Archbishop of Canterbury carried an address
to the Queen, protesting against grants in aid to any
but Church schools. In Victoria, after twenty years of
subsidies to the denominational system, it was found
that thirty per cent of the children had no school
teaching provided for them,¹ and that about forty per
cent of the schools established had no religious instruc-
tion given in them at all. In France the favour shown
to the Church under the Second Empire led to a com-
plete paralysis of school-teaching, and in the day of trial
France with one-third of its population illiterate was no
2
.
1 Within a year after the passing of the Victorian Education Act,
1872, the school-attendance had increased from 68,436 children to
99,536.
2 In the evidence taken before Mr. Higinbotham's Commission (1866)
the Inspector-General testified, that in 39 out of 100 schools visited no
religious instruction at all was given, while in three schools only was
religious instruction given by the clergyman. Almost every witness
spoke more or less to the same effect.
216
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
match for Germany with her soldiers, one and all,
educated up to the highest point compatible with their
station in life. No doubt, secular education has also
been advocated in France on moral grounds; and M.
Paul Bert unquestionably showed good reason for be-
lieving that the doctrines taught in Catholic seminaries
are still very much those which Pascal dissected in the
Provincial Letters.¹ The great reason, however, why
secular education has been adopted generally in France,
and specially in Paris, has been because the Church
showed itself apathetic and unsuccessful as a disseminator
of any knowledge that did not bear upon religion and
obedience to the Church.
It may freely be admitted that the Church has not
always been to blame for its deficiencies. It has been
impossible to entrust it with that compulsory power,
without which a school system can never be universally
successful. It has never disposed-in modern times-
of such enormous funds as the State can raise by a
local rate or a tax. Its worst sins of omission belong
to periods when statesmen also were careless how the
children of the poor grew up. There is some truth in
what the advocates of the clerical party say, when they
contend that education without moral training is only
putting weapons into the hands of criminals, and that
to enlarge the mental horizon of many thousands, who
can never struggle out of their actual low level, is only
to increase misery and unrest. Even those who believe
with De Maistre, that the moral man can only be formed
upon his mother's knee; even those who are convinced
2
1 Paul Bert. Speech of July 5, 1879, and La Morale des Jésuites.
2 "Ce qu'on appelle l'homme, c'est à dire, l'homme moral, est peut-
être formé à dix ans ; et s'il ne l'a pas été sur les genoux de sa mère,
ce sera toujours un grand malheur.”—Soirées de St. Pétersbourg, Troisième
Entretien.
IV
217
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
+
by the teaching of history, that the character cannot
suffer because the mind is cleared, may admit that no
great experiment is so absolutely successful at once as
to make cavil impossible. Still, when all abatements
have been made, the success achieved by the secular
system is enormous. It is now the State everywhere
which is fascinating every family by proffering the
bâton de maréchal to its children, as it forces upon
them an education that will fit them to rise to wealth
and dignity. More and more the State is endeavouring
to do this work costlessly, or at the smallest possible
cost to the parent. Can we wonder if all the world
over it is superseding the Church in its hold on popular
imagination. It is still true that the peasant's son may
rise to be Bishop, Cardinal, or Pope; but it is no longer
true- -even proximately that the secular lottery offers
only blanks to the poor man's son. In the United
States, where primary education was well developed
before the higher education had struck roots, every
avenue of success is not only theoretically but prac-
tically open to the son of the poorest labourer;
he may be head of department, general, judge, or
president. Every State in the civilised world is ap-
proximating to this model. Every Church is propor-
tionately weaker in the capacity to stir the democratic
fibre.
It would be easy, if we pursued the comparison of
State and Church ideals, to show that the State has
taken the larger, more liberal, and more tender view of
the relations of the weak to the strong. The Church
undoubtedly forbade infanticide, but it has habitually
left children under the parental control, even when this
was capricious or intolerably severe. It is the State
that has interposed to prevent the child's strength from
218
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
In one
being overtaxed, and to insist that it shall receive
proper education. The Churches from all time have
treated the wife as the handmaid of the husband:
bound to submit to ill-treatment, to spoliation, and to
unfaithfulness at his hands, with none or with the
slightest possible redress. The State has insensibly
remodelled its customs till a woman in every civilised
country can own property, can live apart from her
husband, and in certain cases can retain the guardian-
ship of her children. In these instances the State has
done little more than many excellent though not typical
churchmen have always desired to see done.
remarkable particular, secular politicians deserve the
credit of having discerned and successfully applied a
new principle in morality-the duty of tenderness to
the brute creation. No doubt it has always been
natural for good men to feel compassion for everything
that is capable of suffering; but even men like St.
Anselm and St. Francis, who felt this instinctively,
never raised it to the rank of a religious obligation. In
one remarkable instance the opposition to vivisection
for scientific purposes-the reformers have proceeded on
the transcendental ground that humanity at large has
no right to purchase relief from its own suffering by
torturing the helpless. The question is not whether all
these changes are maturely thought out and adminis-
tered with the wisest possible limitations. The broad
fact can hardly be disputed that secular civilisation,
"the wisdom and the wit of this world," is informed
with a moral purpose, and is steadily working out
what we may call the Christian law of life, though it
1
2
1 Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, lib. ii. cap. iii. §§ 27, 28; Milman's
Latin Christianity, vol. iv. p. 269.
2 Sermons by Dean Church, p. 120.
IV
219
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
respects human liberty so profoundly that it shivers
and shrinks back repeatedly before it ventures to step
within the sphere of spiritual activity. The advocates
of Church authority and of individual lawlessness unite
to denounce as violations of freedom every fresh act of
that impassive, ever-dilating power which rends asunder
the unrighteous contract between employer and servant,
between landlord and tenant, which protects the
child from degradation and rescues the woman from
misuse; but the trust of citizens in the justice of human
society grows stronger as the powers of the State are
enlarged. The love of an Englishman for his country
in old days might be little more than love for the land
in which men of his own tongue governed themselves and
kept their homes from the foreign enemy. He might be
at the mercy of corrupt officials, governed by harsh laws,
weighted by oppressive taxation, and without the possi-
bility of rising in any service but that of the Church.
The love of any man speaking the English tongue for
his country is now for a land that can give him ampler
protection than his fathers ever dreamed of, that invests
him with the prestige of a dominant race, that adjusts
his public burdens so as to be least onerous, that gives
him the right to assist in making the laws, that pro-
tects him against his own weakness, and offers him the
means to start on equal terms in the race for honour
or wealth. Merely the dream of what a country might
be has transformed ignorant men, serving forcibly in
the hostile ranks, into heroes who fell where they stood
sooner than drive back the army of liberation; and has
transfigured prosaic women into heroines, who gave son
after son to the national cause. Is it wonderful if the
prodigies of Hungarian and Italian heroism have been
more than matched in America, where there was a country
220
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
of noble memories with a settled government and wise
liberties to maintain ?
Only two causes seem likely to interfere with the
growth of national feeling. On the one hand, the great
body of the citizens may be more interested in industrial
organisations stretching over the whole earth; and on
the other hand, the dream of a few thinkers, that we
shall rise beyond the nation as we have risen beyond
the family, the tribe, and the province, may come to be
realised. The first is the more immediate danger. It is
> possible to suppose the great body of artisans, for
instance, taking a supreme interest in the claims of the
various trades, and attaching only a secondary import-
ance to the different countries in which individual
members happen to live. Something of this kind is
discernible at present. If we can assume that it will
extend, it might conceivably happen that a whole
labouring population would decide to repudiate burdens
of purely national concern, and would migrate freely
from the State, if they were outvoted, sooner than
submit to any inconvenient pressure. That a man
should be first a Trades-Unionist, and only in the
second place an Englishman or Australian, would not
be in itself more remarkable than the spectacle, which
has often been witnessed, of men who were first Catholics
and only Englishmen or Frenchmen when the claims of
the Church were satisfied. It is difficult to conceive,
however, that men will ever attach themselves as
devotedly to a Trades-Union, wise and dignified though
it may be, as they did in times past to the Church,
which gave them a great deal in this world, and
promised them everything in the next. It must be
borne in mind, too, that while the State professes to
reconcile or adjust conflicting interests, no trades
IV SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 221
•
It
organisation has ever been able to make itself more
than sectional. The claims of one body of workers are.
habitually opposed to the needs of others, so that they
can only unite, now and again, on some very general
ground, like the limitation of the hours of work.
may be added that there is a great and not unreason-
able jealousy among the workmen of every country lest
they should be swamped by the immigration of com-
petitors. This feeling is likely to become stronger as
times go on, as America and Australia fill up, and as it
becomes increasingly clear that there is no great field
for the employment of whites in the Tropical Zone. It
may, indeed, be hoped by optimists that in the far
future the comity of nations will be so far extended as
to make it increasingly easy for individuals to change
their country; but it can hardly be expected that the
United States, to take the most important instance, will
continue to find land and labour for several hundred
thousand emigrants yearly. It is needless to say, how-
ever, that if population in England and Germany
continues to increase at its present rate, an emigration
of a million will mean no more thirty years hence than
half a million meant thirty years ago. Practically,
then, the Trades-Unions of the future are likely to
become not more international in their character, but
more exclusively national. Each will try to secure the
best possible terms for itself in its own country; each
will protect itself against competition from outside; and
as a consequence the mass of men will have to abide in
the land where they are born, and to make the best of it.
These considerations apply partly to the cosmo-
politan theory. It will have to contend with the
narrower feeling that is bound to prevail, when men
no longer look upon the world as full of possible homes
222
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
?
for them. There are, of course, some who dream that
the whole human race will be united into one grand
federation. Visions of this sort, if they are ever realised,
can only be so in so distant a future that it is scarcely
worth while to discuss them. It may be observed,
however, that there seem to be certain limits to national
growth which no policy however imperial can trans-
cend. It is fashionable to lament the infatuation of the
British counsels that severed the connection of the
American colonies with Great Britain; and no one at
this day would care to defend George III., or Grenville,
or Lord North. None the less it may be doubted
whether the colonies could have borne the strain of the
French war in which England engaged a few years
later; and more generally, whether England has not
done better for herself in India, Africa, and Australia,
from having an absolutely free hand. At this moment
Australia and England are united in a manner that
gratifies sentiment and interest, and entails no particular
obligation on either party to the union. The Australian
colonies are protected to some extent by the prestige of
imperial power, and attract English capital rather more
freely than they would do if they were independent.
England gets the repute of Empire, and the advantage
that trade follows the flag, and the certainty that, in
the case of another Indian Mutiny, she could call up
thousands to her standard from an adjoining continent,
whereas, if the colonies were independent, the Irish
element would be actively sympathising with whatever
was hostile to Great Britain. If, however, the dream
of some English theorists were accomplished, so that
Australia exchanged a very satisfactory form of self-
government for representation in an imperial senate,
the loss to the great dependency would be incalculable.
IV
SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING 223
!
譬
​The best men would be taken away to a distant country,
would lose touch of their own proper countrymen, and
even if they clearly saw what was good for Australia,
would be perpetually compelled to compromise and
accept what was best for the Empire. The result would
be an angry separation in a very short term of years.
Nevertheless, the interests of Australia and Great
Britain would be incomparably more easy to reconcile
in a British Parliament than the interests of the whole
world in a general council. Putting aside the union of
the human race as chimerical, is it possible to conceive
even the Germanic race-including Germany, Scandi-
navia, and Holland, with the British Empire and the
United States-combining for such simple purposes as
the preservation of the world's peace, or to procure
Free Trade, or a common system of Protection? Yet
these people have a common origin, cognate tongues, to
a great extent a common religion, and might conceiv-
ably arrange their commercial interests so as not to
clash violently. The difficulty is that each would feel
it was surrendering more than it gave. The citizen of
California would object to being taxed that a Russian
attack on Herat might be repulsed; and the Australian
would not care to guarantee Alsace and Lorraine. The
chances are as great that some powers which are now un-
wieldy will be broken up, as that others will increase their
boundaries; and that any but a compact dominion will
be kept together under a centralised form of government
seems difficult to believe. The best we can hope is, that
the federal principle will be developed, and that interna-
tional arbitration will become more and more practicable.
Dr. Matthew Arnold circulated a story that a cate-
chism used in French schools, after enumerating the
various benefits of civic society, asks the question, "Who
224
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
7
gives you all this?" and makes answer, "the State."
Mr. Hamerton has shown that this story is substantially
incorrect, and that all that can be said is, that in a
single manual, which teachers are allowed but not
obliged to use, something of this sort may perhaps be
found with the words "the country" in place of "the
State."1
It is surely permissible to inquire whether
teaching of this sort, instead of being ridiculed as
superficial, denounced as irreligious, or condemned for
placing the Commonwealth in a place of honour that
belongs to the parents, ought not to be enforced in
every school. A child, whose parents do their duty by
it in a spirit of tenderness, is never likely to be insen-
sible in after-life of what it has owed them. It is useful,
no doubt, to inculcate filial reverence at schools, but it
is really taught in homes. On the other hand, the
more general teaching, that all good things come from
God, ought not to exclude the obvious fact that God
works upon human society through the agency of men
and women, that is, through parents, and through the
civil power. Whatever may have been the case in old
days, a child's obligations to the State are now infinite.
The State watches over the infant life from birth; pro-
vides that the growing child is not stunted by excessive
toil, is properly clothed and fed, and is so educated as
to have a fair start in life; it assures the adult against
starvation, protects him from foreign enemies, from
tyrannical employers, and from the criminal classes that
prey upon property; it secures him liberty of thought
and faith, and it offers him the means of safe and easy
insurance against illness or death.2 It is constantly
1 Hamerton's French and English, pp. 194-196.
2 Of course, no one State does all this; but the exceptions are so
trifling that it has seemed not misleading to speak generally.
IV SOME ADVANTAGES OF NATIONAL FEELING
225
endeavouring to extend the sphere of its beneficent
energies. It is no doubt true that though all this is
attempted, there are many inadequacies in the political
scheme, and that myriads of human beings lead lives of
unbroken toil or horrible destitution. Still the broad
fact remains that human co-operation for political ends
is yearly becoming more fruitful of good purpose, more
sympathetic, and more successful in its attempts to
relieve want; and that every child growing up towards
citizenship ought to understand the incalculable debt
which it owes to the brotherhood of man. Neither is it
merely material benefits with which a great country
endows its citizens. The countrymen of Chatham and
Wellington, of Washington and Lincoln, of Joan of Arc
and Gambetta,-in short, the citizens of every historic
State,—are richer by great deeds that have formed the
national character, by winged words that have passed
into current speech, by the example of lives and labours
consecrated to the service of the Commonwealth. The
religion of the State is surely as worthy of reverence as
any creed of the Churches, and ought to grow in
intensity year by year.
It is the note of every true religion, however, that if
it promises great good, it demands proportionate sacri-
fices. In days when to be an Englishman meant little
more than to be safe from Spain and the Inquisition,
and to be allowed to live in the land where a man's
fathers had made their homes, even these benefits
appeared so transcendently important by the side of
what was possible in France and the Low Countries,
that Englishmen of every degree seemed to quicken to
an electric spark of heroism. The sailors and explorers
achieved impossible adventures; the poets and thinkers
were of more than mortal stature. The new England
Q
226
CHAP. IV
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
=
which does incomparably more for its people than the
Elizabethan England did, commands less and indeed
scarcely any gratitude, because the Englishman has a
choice of fatherlands in which he may preserve the
English nationality. He transfers himself without a
pang to America or Australia. If, however, the world
is filling up, as seems probable; if great migrations of
toilers are bound to become impossible at no very
distant date, the mass of men will have to regard the
country they are born in as their home for life, and will
be attached to it by interest as well as by sentiment.
It seems not quite visionary to suppose that a day will
come when service of some sort will be exacted from
every man under pain of social discredit, or legal liabili-
ties, as military service is now exacted from every able-
bodied man on the Continent; when the immigration
of aliens will be restrained within reasonable limits,
when wealthy men will be forced by public opinion to
give money for national endowments as freely as they
did in the Middle Ages; and when the doctrine that
men can divest themselves of obligations to their country
by leaving it will seem extravagant. In that case, the
spirit of uncalculating devotion to the common cause,
which even in our own days has changed the face of
half Europe and rescued society from dissolution in
North America, will become a steady principle of action,
deserving to be accounted a faith, and lifting all who
feel it into a higher life.
CHAPTER V
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
The religion of the family will gradually die out as the religion of the
State becomes more and more absorbing. The power of the head of
the family was anciently autocratic over the lives, property, and
self-respect of the members.-The right of private war or of the
blood-feud has been abolished. The rights of fathers and husbands
over the lives of children and wives have been abolished, or nearly
so.—The ancient rule of secular legislation, which the Churches have
copied, was that marriage was indissoluble.-The State has done its
best to maintain this principle down to quite recent times.-Christian-
ity, however, has made this important change, that it does not
tolerate the libertinage which was the old compensation for the
restrictions of marriage.--The old marriage of suitability was not
more mercenary in its essence than the marriage of inclination.
The essential difference between the two is, that the one makes
family considerations the matter of vital importance, and the other
only desires to satisfy individual caprice.-Nevertheless, changes in
modern society have made the indissoluble marriage bear so heavily
upon women that it is impossible to maintain it.—That the tie
between husband and wife should come to be easily variable, instead
of permanent, is bound to make the tie between parents and children
weaker.-Moreover, the right of parents to use their children's labour
has been found to work so badly, that the State is interposing every-
where to limit work and make education compulsory.-As parents
are losing their rights over children, children are losing the sense
of duty and obligation to their parents.-These changes in the
conjugal and parental relations are working in the direction of
individualism, and may be for good as well as for evil.-The family,
however, is the natural provision for the conservation of character,
and the consequences may be undesirable if we destroy pride in the
past, responsibility for the present, and care for the future.-The
changed relations of master and servant are also taking away a small
and occasional but efficient safeguard of family feeling.—The tradition
of a fixed family home has been destroyed.
It has been argued that the religion of the country is
likely to become a deeper and more serious feeling as
i
228
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
the sphere of State action increases, as the State shows
itself more beneficent in its aims than a good king,
more effectively moral than the Churches, and more
comprehensive and human than King or Church, aris-
tocratic caste or guild of associated workmen. On the
other hand, it seems possible that not only loyalty and
faith and class or clan feeling will be merged in the
new power, but that what we may call the religion of
the family will gradually die out. In a certain sense,
of course, the family must always remain the unit of
the State. The union of men and women, even if we
leave children out of the question, is so important in
its effects upon character, that on its influence for good
or evil must the condition of society very largely depend.
When, however, we bear in mind that for many centuries
the head of the family has exercised more or less auto-
cratic powers under his own roof, and that infinitely
various forms of virtue and vice, strength and foible,
have been developed in consequence, the importance of
any great changes that tend to exalt the State and
emancipate the individual at the expense of the family
will become apparent. What is perhaps most curious
is, that the State has always been tender of family
rights; and that in all its encroachments upon parental
or conjugal authority, or upon family feeling, it has
simply obeyed an irresistible necessity.
The powers of the family or its members have, of
course, varied enormously in different ages. The right
of the parents to deal as they would with the newly-born
babe has been recognised more or less in all but Christian
and Mahommedan communities.¹ Children were as freely
exposed in the old Greek and Roman world and among
1 Muir's Life of Mahomet, vol. i. p. cclxi. note, and iv. 228, 221;
The Koran, Sura xvii. 31; vi. 137, 141. Compare 81, 8.
V
229
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
2
the Norsemen as they are in modern China.¹ There was
no limitation to this right, which belonged absolutely
to the head of the family. In the case of the wife, or
of children who had been acknowledged, the father had
the rights of the magistrate; that is, he could not legi-
timately put to death, except for a grave and appropriate
cause; but there was no recognised tribunal to which an
appeal from his sentence would lie. These excessive
powers over life imply an absolute authority over the
person and property. The husband could lend his wife
to a friend, or choose a husband for his daughter and
a wife for his son. He could make his children labour
as he chose, and might neglect their education as he
would. Neither wife nor children could possess pro-
perty. He could adopt a stranger to share his children's
inheritance. This, of course, is the extreme type of the
family as it existed in the laws of Athens and Rome.3
Extreme as it is, it has coloured all but the most modern
legislation, except in the parts relating to life and death.
So completely are we at variance with ancient morality
on that score, that Rousseau is considered infamous for
having allowed the State to care for his children; and
Philip II. and Peter the Great are generally reprobated
1 Coulanges, Cité Antique, p. 101. Compare Grimm, "Das erste und
aelteste Recht des Vaters aeussert sich gleich bei der Geburt des Kindes ;
er kann es aufnehmen oder aussetzen."-Deutsche Rechts- Alterthümer,
S. 455.
2 See the remarkable story in Plutarch, that Quintus Hortensius
applied to Cato the Younger for the loan of his daughter, who was
already married to Bibulus, and was finally gratified with the loan of
Cato's wife, Martia, her father having been consulted. The loan, how-
ever, took the form of a gift for life, Martia being formally married
to Hortensius, though, being left a widow, she married Cato again.
Hortensius, it is said, had no object but to be connected with Cato's
family.
3 See generally on this subject the chapter on "L'Autorité dans la
famille," in the Cité Antique, by Coulanges, and Hearn's Aryan Household,
chap. iv. § 3.
230
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
2
1
for having, as is supposed, ordered the death of sons
whom they not unreasonably regarded as a menace to
the highest good of the country. On the other hand,
as late as the thirteenth century the Church Courts in
England ruled that a husband could transfer his wife to
another man for a period determinable at the recipient's
pleasure. The right of selling a ward's marriage was
among the most profitable incidents of feudal tenure;
and the ward was so far better off than the natural
child, that a guardian was bound to choose the husband
in her own rank. In England it is probably correct to
say that the consent of the parties has always been the
first thing considered, and the consent of the parents
nothing more than a necessary formality, without which
the marriage of minors could not be valid. As, how-
ever, a girl of seven might be betrothed in medieval
England, and as down to a later time the marriages of
mere children were still common, the parental authority
was practically absolute; and to marry without the con-
sent of the parents was regarded as an outrage upon
3
1 Motley seems to incline to the belief that Philip contrived his son's
death (Rise of Dutch Republic, p. 403). Ranke and Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell
describe the death as natural, but mention the charges against Philip
(Spanish Empire, p. 34, and Life of Don John, i. pp. 74, 75). The
essential point is, that Philip has generally been believed guilty. As
regards Peter the Great, Coxe decides against Peter (Northern Tour, vol.
ii. pp. 308-315). Kelly takes it as proved (History of Russia, chap. xxvii.)
Oustrialoff, of course, accepts the official story, that the Tsarevitch died of
apoplexy (Hist. of Russia, ii. p. 84); and Schuyler apparently thinks
that he died of the consequences of torture, while it was still doubtful if
Peter would carry the sentence of death into execution (Peter the Great,
vol. ii. pp. 431-433).
2 See John Comoy's grant of his wife: "Noveritis me tradidisse et
dimisisse spontaneâ voluntate meâ domino Gul. Paynell militi Margaretam
uxorem meam . . et concedo quod praedicta Margareta sit et maneat
cum praedicto Gulielmo pro voluntate ipsius Gulielmi.”—Rot. Parl. vol. i.
p. 146.
3 "All persons who had completed their seventh year were held
competent to contract espousals.”—Reeve's History of English Law, vol.
iv. p. 53.
V
231
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
decency. In France, the consent of the parents was
anciently regarded as the most necessary point, and the
consent of the parties rather as a desirable accessory. It
is still impossible for a Frenchman to marry without the
permission of his father, or, if his father be dead, of his
mother, unless he resorts to the extremity of the legal
process known as "a respectful summons.'
a respectful summons." The French
father may apply to have his child imprisoned for a term
not exceeding six months; but this power, which is sub-
ject to revision of the Court, is practically no more than
the right of the English father to ask that his child may
be sent to a reformatory. In either case, the right of
imprisonment which the father could formerly exercise
has been transformed into a right to move the civil power
without the intervention of the public prosecutor. As
for the right of the parent to transfer his child to strangers
who will adopt it, to leave it uneducated, or to put it to
sordid or excessive toil during the years of growth, the
first of these still exists everywhere, and the second and
third have only been encroached upon in quite recent
times. In France, however, a child parted with by its
parents to a stranger appears to retain a claim upon the
parental inheritance which cannot be set aside by a will.¹
In France, therefore, and in countries with French law,
the power of the head of the family to distribute the
property he has inherited or acquired has been set aside
for political considerations.
The effect of this primitive legislation, though it
aimed only at giving the family a religious chief and
the State a person responsible for the acts of children or
kinsmen, was naturally to invest relationship with very
1 This applies even to a child who has been adopted into another
family: "L'adopté restera dans sa famille naturelle, et conservera tous
ses droits."-Code Civile, livre i. tit. viii. s. 348.
Uor M
232
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
!
!
7
solemn obligations. The family that was a little church
and a little jurisdiction within itself, that had at one
time a worship of its ancestors, and that was always
more closely bound to its members than to the city or
the State, came naturally in many cases to be a law to
itself. The blood-feud is a striking instance of the
obligations which the family feeling might involve. In
days when a man owed his existence in the first instance
to himself, and only in a very secondary manner to the
State, it was very important not only that his sons.
should be able to speak with the enemy in the gate, but
that they should be resolute to leave no wrong done
unavenged. The result, however, was of questionable
value. The old Greek adage that "a man is a fool if
he kills the father and leaves the children alive,"
expresses what was bound actually to happen. Families
were not kept from quarrels by the knowledge that a
feud would be one of extermination; but whichever
was the weaker or was surprised was wiped out.¹
Accordingly the first great step in constructing political
society has always been to substitute the arbitration of
the State for the blood-feud. Cursory observers are
often struck by the apparent barbarism of a tariff which
assesses the exact value of injuries to the person; but
such legislation really shows that the family is being
merged in the nation. It was proof of considerable
civilisation that Horatius was tried for killing his sister.
Anciently, the offence would only have been against his
father; and as it was, Horatius was acquitted when his
father accepted the responsibility of the act.² It is
perhaps true that the blood-feud to some extent softened
1 Thus Flosi, who reluctantly took up the blood-feud against Njal's
family, was careful not to leave a survivor, old enough to bear arms, out
of thirty people.-Dasent's Story of Burnt Njal, pp. 124, 171.
2 Livy, i. 27.
V
233
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
the spirit of revenge by systematising it. Modern senti-
ment, in spite of the influences of Christianity, recoils a
little from Jimena marrying the Cid, whose hands are
red with her father's blood. Corneille justifies the
action by duty to the King and a secret passion for
Rodrigo. The old story, however, is entirely consistent
with the spirit of primitive times. Rodrigo shows that
Jimena has no cause for complaint, as he killed her
father in fair fight and to satisfy the blood-feud, and
because he is willing to make the injury done good.
"I killed a man, and I give you a man."¹ As, however,
such compositions were not often possible, the State
found it desirable to interpose habitually, and has
gradually adopted the rule that vengeance belongs only
to the State; that the individual must never use force
except in strict self-defence; and that he may not even
omit his revenge-that is, accept atonement or com-
position-in any but trifling cases, as every offence is
committed primarily against the body politic.
The right of the father over the lives of his children,
and the right of the husband over the life of his wife,
are now practically obsolete. The first is so repugnant
to modern feeling that even a novelist scarcely dares to
conceive a situation in which it occurs. In Serge
Panin a mother-in-law kills the son-in-law who has
made her daughter miserable, brought dishonour upon
his name, and is too cowardly to die by his own hand;
but it may be doubted if modern sentiment would have
tolerated this lawless justice upon a nearer relative.
The case of the wife is a little different. There is a
survival of old custom, atrophied or nearly so by disuse,
in the doctrine of our law-books, which justifies the
•
•
1 "Maté á tu padre, Jimena Para vengar cierto agravio. Maté
hombre, y hombre doy.”—Romancero del Cid, xi. p. 7.
•
234
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
1
slaying of an adulteress taken en flagrant délit, so far
as to hold the avenging husband free of the highest
guilt, and only liable for manslaughter. This relic of
custom has been so far modified by judicial interpreta-
tions that a man is only allowed the benefit of it when
he acts literally in the moment of wrath, and it is
becoming less safe for him, year by year, to punish
faithlessness by death. The modern explanation of this
toleration of violence is that the provocation has been
intolerable, but it seems more reasonable to regard it as
a survival of that old feeling which Calderon has
expressed in one of the most powerful of his plays,
where "the physician of his own honour," a man who
has murdered his wife, knowing her to be innocent,
for no reason but that she is the object of a dishonour-
able love, is publicly praised by the King, and rewarded
with marriage to another noble lady, who takes his
hand, knowing it, as she herself admits, to be "bathed
in blood."2 Calderon exhibits the feeling that the wife's
chastity was due to her husband rather than herself in
its most extravagant form; while modern English
practice has very nearly reached the point when adultery
is only punishable as the breach of a very solemn
contract, by which the man has suffered loss as
husband and father. It will be noted that the husband's
rights were given to him to safeguard the family; and
as the worship of ancestors, the family name, and the
succession to property have never been regarded as
liable to suffer by the husband's adultery, he has never
been punishable; though his wife has been allowed the
relief of a judicial separation or of divorce, the redress
1 Blackstone, book iv. chap. 14.
2 Gutierre da la mano á Lenora. "Mas mira que va bañada En ·
sangre, Leonor."--Lenora. "Cura con ella Mi vida, en estando mala.”
Jornada III.
-El Medico de su Honra.
V
235
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
So
permitted to her varying in different countries.
again, the life of the male head of the family has been
regarded as peculiarly sacred. It is scarcely more than
a hundred years since the penalty in England for a wife
who murdered her husband was to be drawn and
burned;¹ but the husband who murdered his wife was
only hanged. The ancient jurisprudence of France was
equally severe for crimes against the head of the family,
though it was usual to exchange the extreme penalty of
burning alive for beheading in the case of well-born
women.
Both those who attack and those who defend the
indissolubility of the marriage-tie are apt to think that
the engagement which man and woman take to remain
united "till death us do part" expresses an obligation
created by Christianity. This view is the very reverse
of fact. The highest civilisations of the old Pagan
world had derived or instinctively adopted the theory
that marriage was for all time. This was especially true
of Rome, where an extravagant tradition said that there
was no divorce for five centuries; 2 and of Germany,
where Tacitus tells us that a woman had one husband
as she had one body and one life. The very exceptions
to the rule show that the law aimed at maintaining a
general principle with the smallest possible concession
to human weakness. Christian Churches evade the
recognition of divorce by declaring that there has been
no marriage if the man is incapable of founding a family.
Athenian law permitted the woman in this case to have
1 It was changed to drawing and hanging in 1790.-30 George III.
cap. 48.
2 Ramsay's Roman Antiquities, p. 252.
3
3 Taciti Germania, cap. 19. Grimm, however, modifies this by
showing that divorce was allowed for sterility, adultery, pronounced
incompatibility, and persistent desertion. Rechts-Alterthümer, SS.
453, 454.
236
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
a lover in the family she had married into, but shrunk
from declaring the marriage ceremony to be void.¹ On
the other hand, if the woman was sterile, Roman law
allowed her to be repudiated, that the family might not
be extinguished, and worship to the family gods cease.2
It has been a difficulty of all times that men may some-
times be unavoidably kept away from their families
by being captives in a strange land, though of late this
inconvenience is scarcely felt. In Roman law marriage
was dissolved by captivity, because the assumption was
that the loss of freedom would be permanent, and the
captive accordingly ceased to belong to his proper State.
If, however, the wife did not take advantage of her
liberty to marry again, the husband who was ransomed
or escaped might resume her when he resumed his
citizenship. It is remarkable that English customary
law has recognised this exception to the indissolubility
of marriage, so that a wife whose husband has been
absent for seven years and cannot be heard of is not
punished if she contracts a second marriage, though
she is still liable to be resumed by the first husband,
which the Roman matron was not;-a liability which
seems degrading to self-respect. Human nature has
always shown itself impatient of conjugal restraints,
and whatever laws the State may enact are always
certain to be evaded by a large class. Roman legisla-
tion, however, was on the whole less easily foiled than
that of the Latin Church. The substitute for divorce in
the later and laxer times of Rome was not a dissolution
of the religious marriage, but a form of concubinage
under contract regulated by law and approved by
1 Plutarch's Solon.
3
2 This is said to have been the reason of the first divorce in Rome,
that of Carvilius Ruga.-Val. Max. lib. ii. cap. i.
3 This right is recognised and confirmed by 1 Jac. I. cap. ii.
V
237
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
fashion. The substitute in the Middle Ages was to
discover that the marriage was invalid, as having been
contracted within the prohibited degrees of affinity, and
without a proper dispensation.' The Roman custom
which forbade the union of all direct ascendants or
descendants, whether by blood, adoption, or marriage,2
did not allow of these demoralising evasions, and must
be regarded as the outcome of higher sanitary science
and stricter ethical practice.
On the whole, it is probably correct to say that
every healthy society has endeavoured, in its best times
at least, to treat marriage as indissoluble, and that
when breaches of this practice have occurred, it has been
through the irregular passions of powerful and wealthy
men seeking to mould the law to their own wishes, or
through the growth of a Bohemian and vagabond class.
Christianity came into the world at a time when the
old religious marriage was beginning to be found
burdensome, and adopted the view which the most
religiously-minded men of the time would instinctively
take. The scandals of the Ecclesiastical Courts are only
proof that the Church put itself into a thoroughly false
position when it claimed the perilous office of deter-
mining under what circumstances the marriage-tie might
be dissolved. It is noticeable that in England the
change to secular society effected at the Reformation
was attended with an infinitely greater rigour in matters
affecting marriage. The early Reformers would no
doubt have legalised divorce under conditions of abso-
lute equality for both sexes; but under Elizabeth a
1 This immoral practice was swept away at the Reformation by 32
Hen. VIII. cap. 38.
2 This was done by the Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea, A.D. 9.-Ramsay's
Roman Antiquities, p. 249.
3 The "Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum," drawn up by Cranmer,
238
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
theory came in that divorce was never to be permitted,
and the only relaxation was when divorce by Act of
Parliament was allowed. This, however, was only
granted for a single cause, and was so costly as to
be practically very rare. It is noticeable that in France
also, after the liberty of divorce had been introduced
at the Revolution, regulated by Napoleon, and practised
for five and twenty years, it was abrogated without
much difficulty by a reactionary but still secular govern-
ment, and has only lately been restored. Summing up,
it seems probable that from the earliest times of civil-
isation the indissolubility of marriage has appeared to
be desirable, and has been promoted by the State for
civil reasons, quite as strongly as it has been enjoined
by traditional religions for reasons of faith that are in
some instances outgrown, so as to be now scarcely in-
telligible except to scholars.
While, however, the difference between ancient and
comparatively modern times as to the institution of
marriage may seem small, there has been one enormous
difference introduced by Christianity-the idea of
purity. Of course, no powerful society has ever existed
without a moral code of some kind. In Rome it was
unchaste for a woman to commit adultery, because if
a bastard were born into the family he could not con-
tinue the family worship; it was unchaste for a man
to marry a barbarian,' or to intrigue with a matron, and
Haddon, and Cheke, proposed to give divorce if the marriage had been
brought about by force or fear, if either partner was unfaithful, and if
there was irreconcilable enmity between them.- Reeve's History of
English Law, vol. iv. pp. 546-548.
1 ((
Sequiturque nefas, Ægyptia conjux " (Aeneid viii. 688). So,
too, Horace speaks of the soldier of Crassus as dishonoured by a bar-
barian wife (Odes, III. v.) Forbiger remarks that the expression in
Virgil, "crime against heaven," is not at all too strong for the marriage
with a foreigner, "which Roman law forbade," or perhaps rather stig-
matised as improper (injustum).
ม
V
239
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
2
1
it was unchaste to commit acts that are now heavily
punished in every Christian country. On the other
hand, there is no reason to suppose that a man who
intrigued with public women or with slaves was con-
sidered unchaste unless he did it in a scandalous way,
or was held to have given his wife some special cause
of complaint. That the Germanic standard was higher
than the Roman is probable; but unless we assume
that the Germans and Norsemen were very soon cor-
rupted we know that their practice was not very
different. To put it briefly, the ancient marriage was
based on suitability of family connections and fortunes
rather than on inclination, and as love had not been
in the contract the husband was easily pardoned if he
allowed himself some license outside the house, pro-
vided he rendered his wife all proper respect under
the common roof. This mariage de convenance has
lasted down to our own days on parts of the Continent,
and the liberty enjoyed by the Roman husband has
been more or less freely claimed by husbands every-
where; but the tolerance of old custom is becoming
a thing of the past. It no doubt lingers in our laws.
As a rule, the husband can divorce the wife for a single
act of misconduct, while the husband must either be
guilty of systematic misconduct, as in Victoria, or of
some additional offence, such as protracted desertion,
1 To take two familiar instances, Plutarch appears to blame Cato the
Censor for making a slave his mistress in the house where his daughter-in-
law was living; but Pompey's attachment to the courtezan Flora is spoken
of as rather creditable to him than otherwise. Valerius Maximus pretty
well indicates the boundary line of Roman continence when he praises
"frugalitas "as "ab immoderato Veneris usu aversa."- Lib. ii. c. 5.
(C
2 M. Henri Martin says, for instance, of the Frank Princes
(c. 500-550): "Jetés par la conquête au milieu d'une civilisation
corrompue, ils ne faisaient guère avec elle qu'un échange de vices,
prenant ses raffinements sensuels, et lui communiquant leur brutalité."-
Hist. de France, tome ii. p. 12.
240
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
as in Scotland, or of cruelty, as in England, if the wife
is to be absolutely released. The husband in England
can claim damages from the man who has ruined his
family life, but the woman can claim none from the
rival who has supplanted her. The law, therefore,
having the threads of obsolete theory woven into its
woof, has been various and uncertain in the changes
that it has admitted. Still, it can hardly be doubted
that as the conception of their eternal tutelage has been
dispersed, and women have come to be regarded as
more or less the equals of men-at least as deserving
equality before the law-men are held more strictly to
account in matters of conjugal morality. In other
words, the primitive marriage of suitability, the marri-
age which aimed first at constituting the conditions for
a new family, and which only regarded inclination in
the second place, is being superseded everywhere by
marriages that are supposed to be based upon love,
and only not disallowed by the judgment. It stands
to reason that conjugal fidelity enters into the contract
far more than it anciently did on the man's side.
It cannot be supposed that a system which has
endured and been approved through so many centuries
as the mariage de convenance has witnessed is immoral
in its essence, and the gravity of the change which is
now overthrowing it cannot easily be over-estimated.
Englishmen are apt to think of it as a system under
which girls of fifteen, just fresh from the convent, are
married to worn-out debauchees of sixty, and it is of
course a system under which this abuse is possible, just
as under the English system of liberty a girl in her
teens may run away with her father's groom, and a
young man of one and twenty tie himself for life to a
courtezan. We must look at typical instances of the
V
241
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
French system to understand what it has really been,
and how many of the noblest and best women in a
country distinguished for its women have entered upon
congenial lives in this manner. In its practical render-
ing by the best people the mariage de convenance has
always meant the marriage in which the conditions.
of family happiness were based upon high character,
suitability of circumstances, and, if possible, old family
friendships. St. Simon tells us that when he first
thought of marrying he fixed upon the daughter of
an old friend, though he had never so much as seen
the lady, because his veneration for the father's char-
acter led him to believe that he could not go wrong
in choosing from such a stock.¹ Mdme. de Sévigné's
daughter, Mdme. de Grignan, tells us of a betrothal
which was arranged after this fashion: "The fathers
at the fireside were talking over the perfections of
their children (a son and daughter respectively),
when M. de St. Aignan said, 'We ought to bring
together two persons so worthy of one another.' "T
am willing,' said Sanguin; 'shake hands on it.'"2
These no doubt are instances from the old régime
and from the aristocratic class; but if we take the
bourgeoisie at the time just preceding the Revolution,
we shall find very much the same course of procedure,
though the parental authority is perhaps a little less
marked. Mdme. Roland tells us that most of her
suitors proposed for her to her parents, before they
I
1 St. Simon adds, that when he found the eldest daughter other-
wise arranged for, he proposed to wait till a younger sister should be
of age to marry.—Mémoires de St. Simon, tome i. c. viii. Lord Burleigh
in the Precepts addressed to his son goes on the same lines as St.
Simon. In choosing a wife, he directs Robert Cecil to "enquire
diligently of her disposition, and how her parents have been inclined
in their youth."
2 Lettres de Mdme. de Sévigné, December 22, 1677.
R
242
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
1
had even been admitted to the house. In her case,
as her father had forfeited the right to control her
actions, the decision was practically left in her own
hands, and she decided to marry a man twice her
age, whose character she could sincerely respect. She
considered marriage, as she tells us, "an austere union,
a partnership in which the wife, as a rule, takes upon
herself to provide for the happiness of both." Know-
ing that her attachment for M. Roland was based upon
esteem rather than love, she guarded herself against
possible heartaches by sharing her husband's labours
and pleasures, so as to leave herself no time for ir-
regular fancies. Mr. Hamerton tells us that even now
there are many persons in France who deliberately
prefer the marriage based upon suitability of position
and character to the marriage of mere inclination.
"I remember," he says, "being much amused by the
indignation of a very beautiful young French lady
about a rumour that she had been wedded for love.
She reiterated her assurance that it was a baseless
fabrication, that her husband had only seen her once
before her betrothal, and then quite formally in the
presence of other people, and that their marriage had
been entirely one of convenance. In short, she re-
pelled the idea of love as if it had been a disgraceful
and unmerited imputation." 2 Mr. Hamerton, however,
goes on to explain that dowerless girls constantly re-
ceive good offers in France. Everywhere, of course,
rational people will not entangle themselves in the
obligation to support a family till they can see a fair
prospect of being able to do it. Therefore, even where
the assumption is that all marriages are of inclination,
1 Mémoires de Mdme. Roland, pp. 129, 192-194.
2 Hamerton's French and English, p. 357.
V
243
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
some are sure to have been partly determined by
money considerations, while some will be purely mer-
cenary. Where the marriage, supposed to be of
inclination, has really been made for the sake of
settlements, the fact that a young man or a young
girl has acted from mere calculation in such a matter
is perhaps rather more repulsive to sentiment than
if the marriage had been treated of by the heads
of the families from first to last as essentially a matter
of business; and, on the other hand, where a marriage
of suitability becomes almost instantly a marriage of
affection, as is said to be very often the case, there
seems no reason why such an alliance should be rated
as in any way lower than the love marriage.
However, it is idle to argue with the master of many
legions, or to say anything against a change that has
been the almost inevitable result of circumstances, and
that expresses the settled impulse of the Germanic race.
The marriage of inclination is now the only avowed one
in the greater part of the civilised world, and is rapidly
supplanting the marriage of suitability in France.
Writers like George Sand and Ibsen are only apologists
for a revolution already made. In proportion as women
are emancipated, do they claim a freedom which is
desired rather as a relief to ennui than as an offset to
masculine libertinage. Some changes have made the
marriage yoke more difficult to bear than it was. One
is, that desertion is increasingly common since emigra-
tion has become a habit with the working-classes.
Another is, that the felon, who was formerly hanged
without mercy, is now released periodically, and can
resume full marital rights over his wife's person and
property, where the law has not been altered to meet
his case. A third probably is, that the duty to
244
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
children is less felt since the State has charged itself
with the care of seeing that they are not positively
starved or allowed to run wild. A fourth is, that partly
from experience, and partly through the influence of
modern notions of heredity, a wife knows that her
husband's license is a wrong inflicted upon her own
children.¹ They only receive divided tenderness, and
succeed to a diminished estate; they inherit depravity,
if they do not inherit disease. A fifth is, that the
legislator has found it convenient everywhere to relieve
the married woman from tutelage in certain important
particulars; to make her responsible for her acts, capable
of bearing witness against her husband, and able to own
property in her own right. A sixth is, that the reli-
gious sanctions of marriage are less regarded since society
has become increasingly secular. A seventh is, that as
the whole conditions of industry have changed, a wife's
work is less important to her husband, and the unpro-
tected woman is more easily able to earn a living for
herself. To stay at home and spin wool, or sew, would
often be very unthrifty conduct in a modern wife, who
can make more out of doors as a laundress, a char-
woman, a factory operative, or an employee in a shop.
To all these causes of change we may add, that the law
for very shame is relaxing the old harshness which was
part of a logical theory. The woman who separates
from her husband can now keep her children, so far as
is consistent with their own good; and cannot be tor-
tured, as was once possible, by having to renounce the
privileges she bought with maternity if she will not live
with a depraved and uncongenial husband. Last of all,
the barbarous suit for restitution of conjugal rights,
1 M. de Pressensé put this argument very powerfully in the debates
that led to giving the liberty of divorce in France.
V
245
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
that practical reduction of marriage to what George
Sand has cynically called it, "the right at Common
Law to outrage a woman," has been nullified even in
conservative England.
So overwhelmingly strong are these reasons, that
many even of those who regard divorce with horror and
alarm are constrained to support it as a requirement of
justice. They feel, too, that it is idle to talk about the
sanctity of home-life being impaired where the home
has had no sanctity; and that to keep men and women,
who are in a false position, miserable and in a condition
that inclines to immorality, is a heavy price to pay for
the peace of mind of those who, having no discomfort
themselves, take a pleasure in thinking that the marriage-
bond is indissoluble. On the other hand, even those
who regard divorce as desirable and right in itself
without regard to cases of extreme hardship, must
admit that the transformation of an union for life,
determined by many reasons besides inclination into a
partnership during good conduct,-very widely inter-
preted,—or it may be even during pleasure, is a change
that cannot fail to be fraught with eventful conse-
quences. Those who have advocated the marriage of
inclination have found a strong argument for it in the
fact that, even if the dream of compatibility has proved
delusive and short, the mere fact that husband and wife
came together of their own accord deprives them of
the right to murmur, and interests their pride in the
maintenance of the marriage-bond. Perhaps this argu-
ment tells more forcibly in countries where the two
systems are in operation. The experience of those
American States in which divorce is extremely easy
appears to show that wherever unions are dissoluble a
certain percentage of people will dissolve them. On the
246
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
other hand, it seems certain that as the thought of family
duties disappears more and more from marriage, as it
comes more and more to be legalised concubinage, in
which legal formalities are employed only to guarantee
the wife's self-respect and assure her social position, the
whole condition of home-life will be changed. It is not
improbable that in many cases husband and wife, who
are not very sure of themselves, will refrain from com-
plicating their relations by having children. They will
thus be always ready to quit one another, and the mere
fact that they so hold themselves in readiness, will in
many cases bring about a separation. Even where they
have a family, the feeling is apt to be less tender to the
children, who were not the first thought in marriage,
but only an inevitable incident, so to speak, than is the
case in countries where the perpetuation of a family,
the constitution of a home, have been the first thought.
Foreign observers of England have constantly commented
on the disposition of those who can afford to send their
children away from home to school;¹ and on the settled
principle that married couples are not to live with either
father-in-law. The good effects of these customs are
seen in the readiness with which the Englishman becomes
a citizen of the world, making his home wherever he
goes. Yet something may be said for that French
intimacy of parental tenderness, which makes a mother
2
1 "The want of natural affection in the English displays itself
specially in their conduct towards their children, for having kept them
at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years at the utmost,
every one, however rich he may be, puts away his children into the
houses of others."—Italian Relation of England, c. 1500. Compare M.
Taine in the nineteenth century: "Il n'y a pas en Angleterre de sépara-
tion profonde entre la vie de l'enfant, et celle de l'homme fait," and " un
père, une mère, est bien moins que chez nous au courant des sentiments
de sa fille, des affaires ou des plaisirs de son fils."—Notes sur l'Angleterre,
pp. 122, 123, 141.
2 Ibid.
tr
V
247
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
the confidante of her mature son in all his follies and his
plans, which so consecrates filial piety that it is the one
virtue which it is not permitted to smile at, and which
so glorifies the family surroundings that the emigrant,
however prosperous, always wanders back at last to the
village in which his race is settled. It will be very
marvellous if the present cordial relations of parents
and children in France survive marriages of inclination,
and their correlative, the law making marriage dissoluble.
Till very lately the law was careful not to interfere
between parents and children. It was held that the
parents, so long as they cared for the lives of their
offspring, had an absolute right to decide how they
should be brought up. The single exception in England
to this rule has been in the case of heirs to property
whose future social condition might be impaired if
they were left in the hands of an immoral or atheistic
parent.¹ It was under the operation of this principle
that Shelley was deprived of his children, and there
seems no reason for supposing that the law was not
administered with perfect fairness in that particular
case. Indeed, there has been a more complete instance
of its application in later times, when daughters were
taken from a mother's guardianship and transferred to
their father's care, because the odium attaching to their
mother's opinions might affect their prospects in mar-
riage. The anomaly which the English law embodied
was too monstrous to endure. On the one hand, any
child not entitled to property was left absolutely in the
2
1 In the case of Wellesley v. The Duke of Beaufort it was stated, how-
ever, that in reality the jurisdiction of the Court was over all the children
in the realm, and was only not exercised in all cases because it was not
all children who possessed an estate which required the protection of the
Court.
2 The case of Besant v. Besant.
248
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
hands of a parent who might be brutal and immoral,
who was often careless and lax. A girl-to take the
strongest and most probable case of wrong-might be
brought up ignorant of the most rudimentary knowledge,
a Pagan in faith, without sufficient food or clothing,
without the common decencies of life in her home, and
might be forced to drudge in the fields, or at a loom
from her tenderest years. As she grew older, the law
did not safeguard her in any efficient way from being
forced to earn money by prostitution, though it never
of course actually sanctioned this.
That the great
nations of the world are as good as they are, shows that
parents have for the most part treasured the honour of
the family in a rude but sufficient fashion. On the
other hand, that every country has been scourged with
a criminal class that defied punishment and Church
restraints is conclusive proof that in many families the
parents have been untrustworthy guardians of their
children's characters. It has, however, been the healths
and the minds of children that have suffered most under
the enormous powers delegated to the family. Most of
the labour to which the young can be put is either
brutalising or unhealthy. Work in isolation, such as
tending sheep or scaring birds, is apt to make the brain
torpid; the work in gangs, while it endured, was
actually demoralising; and for children, who need fresh
air and exercise, work over a loom or in a stifling room
can only be carried on at the cost of vitality. Never-
theless, the necessity for the parent to make money by
his children's earnings has habitually been so great that
he has used his authority simply to compel labour. The
State has interposed in the last resort, and not without
many misgivings, because the interests of its future men
and women-their health and mental equipment-were
V
249
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
bound to be more important to it than the maintenance
of parental authority. The State is limiting the hours
of work for children in every country, and it is com-
pelling their attendance at school.
There have been many lamentations from those who
think that the father is best left alone, and that a State
system cannot be adapted to various capacities, as wise
parents would adapt their training; and from those
who think that schools cannot teach morality in
that religious form which they believe to be the best.
Without examining these arguments at length, it may
be observed that the State has never attempted the
costly and litigious work of national education in
wantonness or from a light heart, but invariably
because it conceived that it had no alternative.
Neither has it wrested education out of the hands of
individuals, for private and endowed schools have never
been the majority; but out of the hands of the
Churches, which have generally been strong enough to
exclude competition, and not rich or enlightened enough
to use their monopoly well. However, the purpose of
this argument is not to defend the change to State
education, but to point out that, wherever it is
introduced, it necessarily transforms the position of the
children. For certain hours of the day they are working
under the civil law, and very possibly against the wish
of their parents. They grow up better educated than
father or mother, and know that they are not indebted to
them for their schooling. As they become adults, they
understand more and more that the State has only
exacted from them a labour profitable to themselves,
while their parents are taking advantage of their tender
years to confiscate the proceeds of their industry. The
child in an old society knew that his father had not
250
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE and charactER
cast him into the streets as a foundling, had not sold
him as a slave or given him away, and had provided
him with food, clothing, and education out of parental
tenderness. The child in a modern society knows that
the parent has done little more for him than the law
and public opinion exact, and draws the conclusion, very
often not unreasonably, that he has no great cause to
be grateful. Our modern practice is so far from being
an anomalous growth of new theories that it has been
exceeded in some respects by old statutory provisions.
The law at one time directed the parish overseers of the
poor to apprentice children, whose parents could not
support them, to such among the richer parishioners as
seemed capable of the burden, and these had to bear it
till the apprentices were of age. Neither could the
parishioner so burdened refuse to receive the child
assigned to him, though he might appeal to a higher
court if he was taxed beyond his means or out of his
turn.¹ It will be seen that the old law was pretty
exactly one of parochial socialism. The peculiar feature
about it is not that it provided for the children of needy
parents-for some such provision is unavoidable-
but that it took the child from the control of its natural
parents and practically transferred it to an artificial
family. To this day the State holds-and holds, we
may say, unavoidably-that pauperism suspends family
ties. Husband and wife are separated from their
children and from one another in the workhouse. In
the boarding-out system, which is now generally
adopted, and with the best results, it is a rule not to
assign the child to its natural parent. Unless we are
prepared to maintain that the State is bound to care for
the physical well-being of the young, but may let their
¹ Stat. 5. Eliz. c iv. ; 8 and 9 Will, & Mary c. 90.
V
251
THE DECLINE of the FAMILY
minds lie fallow, we must surely admit that the case for
compulsory education is as strong as for poor-relief to
orphans and the children of destitute or vicious parents.
In one respect it is, of course, incomparably stronger, for
the percentage of parents who will allow a child to
starve is undoubtedly much smaller than that of parents
who will allow it to grow up wild or absorbed in
mechanical drudgery.
It may be noticed in passing that where the State
limits conjugal rights or parental authority, it gives as
much to individualism as it takes from the head of the
family. In fact, most changes in the law affecting the
family system have come from the need felt by states-
men to modify a power that interfered with State
necessities, and from the readiness of citizens to abandon
a burdensome obligation. The English husband can no
longer compel his wife to return to him, or squander her
estate, or deprive her of her children, or inflict on her
the moderate correction Dr. Marmaduke Coghill approved
of, or the restraint of her liberty which Blackstone
expressly allows. On the other hand, he can more or
less easily divest himself of all responsibility for her
debts or misconduct, and in great part of the civilised
world finds it reasonably easy to obtain a divorce. The
result, good or bad, is to give man and woman
immensely increased freedom of action, the power to
draw back from a contract that was once irrevocable,
and that was one of the most noticeable conservative
forces, and the right to make a fresh start in life. Only
1
2
1 Dr. Marmaduke Coghill, Judge of the Prerogative Court in Ireland,
ruled, c. 1700, that a husband might give his wife moderate correction
with a little cane or switch. Swift alludes to his being jilted in
consequence.—Letters to Stella, July 1, 1711.
2 "The Courts of Law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife
of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour."-Blackstone's Com-
mentaries, book i. chap. xv.
252
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
a man of exceptional energy can change his profession
or trade once fairly entered upon in an old society,
but in a new society a man goes on experimenting till
he finds the career in which he works best, and this
facility of change has a great effect in promoting
individualism. Something like this will be the condition
of the married couple who feel that they are not
absolutely committed by one unfortunate mistake.
Whether the losses may not more than overbalance the
gains-whether the frequent changes of object that
make the intellect subtle and versatile may not make
the affections callous and insincere, whether the
Germans were not partly right in saying that there
should be only one marriage for one life-may be
matter for serious consideration; but the one point
seems evident that individualism is bound to gain as
family obligations are weakened. So again with the
duty to children. It is conceivable, and perhaps
probable, that in many countries the parents will retain
and deserve by increased tenderness a great deal of that
authority over their children which was anciently given
them by law. The instinct of parental love is so
intimately associated with our nature that we cannot
imagine it will ever die out; and Plato's conception of
a commonwealth, in which the children are to be taken
at birth from the mother and brought up by the State,
is inconceivable, for the twofold reason that the State
has never assumed duties which were not forced upon it,
and that parents generally would be opposed to any
such surrender. Still it is conceivable that, as parents
lose their proprietary and administrative rights over
children, an increasing number will be inclined to shift
all responsibility upon the State. We may imagine the
State crèche, and the State doctor, and the State school,
V
253
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
supplemented, it may be, by State meals, and the child,
already drilled by the State, passing out from school
into the State workshop. To whatever extent all this
takes place, it will increase the parent's freedom, will
relieve the mother from the incessant watchfulness
which a household now entails, and will set the father
free to work less or to choose more congenial work.
Here again it is easy to see that there may be good and
evil in the change. Mrs. Grote has hinted at a common
opinion, most often left unexpressed, that a man of
genius is wise to take a mistress rather than a wife,
in order that he may live for his art and not for his
family;¹ and Mr.
and Mr. Hamerton in a more temperate
argument has pointed out that "the married man never
goes, or hardly ever goes, on the same intellectual lines
which he would have followed if he had remained a
bachelor." 2 Now, some of the cases Mr. Hamerton
puts—where a man having married a rich wife, sacrifices
his career to her wishes, or where, having married an
extravagant wife, he toils for her luxury-are cases that
only concern a few persons.
But the need of providing
for children is a constant source of excessive toil and
impoverishment. If fathers generally come to feel this
obligation less and less, it will certainly leave them
freer to consider their own pleasures, or, it may be,
their own capacity for good work. They will lose
what is sometimes a wholesome discipline; they will
be relieved from what is often a burden heavy to
bear.
Now, when we have discarded all that was temporary
in the old system of family relations-the need of
defence against enemies, the obligation of a common
1 Grote's Life of Ary Scheffer, p. 49. Cf. p. 91.
2 Hamerton, The Intellectual Life. Part vii. letter v.
254
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
family worship, and the pledges for good behaviour
exacted by the State-there remains something
indescribably holy and serious in the conception of the
household. It might be better for society in one way
that a father should never feel bound to pay his adult
son's debts, or the son his father's, but the moral gain
of such examples, which are still fortunately very
frequent, is incalculable. It is certain that pride of
family has often been unreasonable, even where the
ancestors were men who had served their country with
distinction; and where the boast is to descend from a
king's harlot, or through a long line of close-fisted fox-
hunters, it can only be regarded as a very sad example
of human weakness. On the other hand, if there be
any truth in scientific doctrines of heredity, the
descendants of ancestors who have an honourable
record of integrity, of labour, it may be even of splendid
public service, are surely entitled to pride themselves
on their pedigree. The possibilities of atavism may
determine a man to follow the line in which an ancestor
distinguished himself. Neither is it easily possible to
overrate the influence exercised by family traditions-
however vague and unintelligent-upon a sympathetic
character. Other things being equal, the member of
one of those families, in which all the men have been
brave and the women pure, starts with a better chance
of blameless life than the child whose best hope is that
its family record may not be remembered against it.
No one will assume that the impairment of the old
family system, the growth of the democratic feeling
against titles, or the increasing disposition to treat
wealth as the only title to consideration, will ever
altogether extinguish the pride of descent. The
instance of America shows how deeply rooted the
V
255
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
feeling is, even in a new and democratic society. The
real value of family feeling is not, however, so much
based upon recognition of the past as upon forethought
for the future. Whatever else science teaches us, it
teaches that the family with its inherited taints of
greed or lust, its quick impulses or cautious movements,
its sublimated or impaired brain power, its noble or
sordid proclivities, is the one indestructible factor in
human society. We may destroy its vantage-ground of
privilege and consideration, but, however debilitated, it
will remain. No change affecting it can be other than
far-reaching. The man who has not shrunk from dis-
honouring his ancestors has often recoiled from the
prospect of bringing infamy upon his children. In
proportion as the family bonds are weakened, as the tie
uniting husband and wife is more and more capricious,
as the relations of the children to the parent become
more and more temporary, will the religion of household
life gradually disappear. Certain imperishable instincts
will maintain the semblance of the old relations, and
it need not be apprehended that any large portion
of society will either decline upon concubinage, or
abandon children generally to the care of the State.
What we have rather to look forward to is a state of
things in which marriages will be contracted without
reflection, and broken up without scruple, in which
children will be cared for when they are young with, it
may be, even more tenderness than of old, but with
incomparably less anxiety to fit them for the moral
obligations of life, and in which the claim of parents to
be obeyed will cease with the children's need of support.
Family life will be a gracious and decorative incident in
the system of such a society; but the family, as a
constituent part of the State, as the matrix in which
256
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
character is moulded, will lose its importance as the
clan and the city have done.
CC
The relations of master and servant, of master and
apprentice, of employer and employed, have in past
time presented what we may call bastard forms of family
life, and which have been recognised as such by custom
and law. One of them, the relation of master and
apprentice, has long ago been shorn of its old
significance. The others are being unavoidably changed.
As large establishments are superseding small in every
department of industry, the personal relation between
employer and man tends to become weaker; and the
hand," as a rule, looks more to his Trades-Union for
support and help than to his nominal paymaster. In
domestic service it has become a principle with servants
unions in large cities that no one is to remain in the
same place for more than a limited time. It may be
safely said of these changes that they have not been
without cause, and have mostly been either good or
unavoidable. With all allowance for the habits of a
ruder time, it is difficult for a student of our old
literature to believe that servants were ever really
better treated than they have been in the present
century; except where they corresponded to the class of
what are now called "lady-helps," like the Mercer
whom Samuel Pepys played music with and took to
parties, and whom his wife did not scruple to thrash
when she thought punishment deserved.¹ Swift's
notices of servants represent the Irish servants as
distinctly worse than they are now, and the English
servants as decidedly less to be trusted. It would be
1 Pepys's Diary, vol. ii. p. 450; vol. iii. p. 26.
2
2 See Swift's Sermon on the Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland,
and his Rules that Concern all Servants.
V
257
THE DECLINE OF THE FAMILY
easy to quote evidence from novelists like Fielding to
the same effect. Nevertheless it may be freely admitted
that there was a reasonable percentage of cases till very
lately in which servants remained in the same family all
their lives, identified themselves with its fortunes, and
shared its affections and hopes. Thousands of persons
still living can remember how the family servant—often,
it may be, exercising a self-assertion that was almost
tyrannical—was yet an important part of the surround-
ings that made home lovable. Such servants are now
bound to disappear, and are said to be disappearing
even in France; and the compensation for their
extinction has in a broad sense been more than
adequate. The whole class is, as a rule, better housed
and better fed, and gets better wages. All that need
be here noted is that the class which goes out to service
is apt to lose its own family ties, without, as was
formerly the case to some extent at least, acquiring new
ones; and that the family which employs servants is
now contracting only for so much labour, and not only
does not expect the attachment which it may conceiv-
ably deserve, but knows that it cannot retain its
employees except at the cost to them of professional
ostracism. The change is one that will be very
differently felt in different households. There have
always been many in which the servant was never
naturalised. For those, however, in which the relations
of high and low were gracious and cordial, the transition
to a state in which the house is little more than an inn,
owned and worked by the occupants, cannot fail to be
an impairment of the completeness of family life.
Neither can it be doubted that, as the habit of emi-
gration to colonies has weakened national feeling for a
time, England being regarded as only one out of many
S
•
Â
258
CHAP. V
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
t
countries belonging to the Englishman, so the abandon-
ment of their country homes by many families that were
identified with them for centuries has weakened one of
the mainsprings of family feeling. Squireens and
yeomanry have been bought out, or have left, because
they found themselves overshadowed by rich neighbours.
with whom it was impossible to compete, and whom it
was not pleasant to defer to. Associations have been
destroyed that can never be renewed. Even, however,
if all the representatives of the old families could be
replaced, England and half a dozen modern countries
are getting so crowded that their populations are forced
to live for the most part in towns. Some of the dis-
advantages of this change have already been considered.
It need only be noticed here that it is bound to destroy
the religion of the homestead; and though that may
only be a gross form of human weakness which induces
men to linger where the cradle of the race was laid,
where generation after generation has been committed
to consecrated dust, where the very meadows and woods
are instinct with memories of ancestral life, we are so
constituted that our very weakness will sometimes lend
intensity to our loves. May it be that as husband and
wife, parent and children, master and servant, family
and home lose more and more of their ancient and
intense significance, the old imperfect feelings will be
transmuted into love for fatherland.
CHAPTER VI
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
The question postulated is whether the changes that increase the in-
fluence of the State may not diminish the sphere of individual
energy.—The inquiry is complicated by the consideration that a
strong motive—such as the love of power or fame-may stimu-
late energy, even where circumstances are most unfavourable, as
in ancient Athens. Moreover, the Church and Army develop
individuality in some ways, though they crush it in others.
Religious influence has been stronger than ethical in past times.
What then will be the result if the State takes the place of
the Church in organising society, and if science supersedes it in
criticism of the past and in divination of the future? — A
tendency to disbelieve in the miraculous may leave unaffected
the faith that there is a moral government and foreordering of
the world. It need not therefore destroy a temperate belief in
the efficacy of prayer.-The belief in a future state is likely to
be less positively held.—These changes, though they may leave
religion in society as an appreciable element, are bound to im-
pair its influence over the masses, which was once great and good.—
The austere tradition of Puritan family life, with its strength and
its shortcomings, has gone for ever, and is replaced by a sensuous,
genial, and fibreless society. Women are bound to be profoundly
influenced by the changes that are making them more and more
like men, as they are exempted from tutelage, encouraged to stand
alone, and induced to occupy themselves with pursuits hitherto
esteemed masculine.-State education and State military service are
bound to render the intellect more mechanical and to sap the
energy that is developed by competition. The right of public
meeting is likely to be limited in the future, and this will interfere
with the power to give instantaneous body and form to new thoughts
by the contagion of popular feeling.—The immigration of aliens in
large numbers is likely to be restricted everywhere, as also the
right of individuals to practise their professions or trades in a
foreign country. This will add enormously to the power an ad-
260
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
ministration now has over those who criticise or oppose it. Exile will
mean ruin.—It is anticipated by some that the future has in reserve
for us great scientific discoveries which will at least elevate the mind,
and which may perhaps reconcile reason and faith. This is to
assume that doctrines which aim at spiritualising the character can
be reduced to the condition of problems that satisfy the intellect.
They would lose all that is distinctive in the process. The most
that can be said is, that religion will gain when its teaching does
not outrage possibility, and science by learning that it is not all-
sufficient. Beyond this there is reason to suppose that science has
done her greatest and most suggestive work. There is nothing now
left for her but to fill in details. Certain forms of literature, such
as the epic, the drama, the pastoral, and the satire appear to be
already exhausted. The real genius of the age takes a lyrical form,
and is feeble and incongruous when it attempts any other.-More-
over, life has been toned down, so that there is much less wealth
of strong incident and effective situation than was the case anciently.
-Again, when work has been perfectly done the artist does not
care to attempt it again, and the world will not tolerate repro-
ductions. Topics are being exhausted. This, however, will tell
after a time even more against lyrical poetry, because the single
mood or situation is less capable of variety than the human char-
acter. The novel is not likely to replace poetry for work of the
highest kind. History, however, which is perpetually accumulating
fresh material, may furnish practically inexhaustible material to
minds of the highest order.-Criticism has only recently begun to
exist. It is likely to exercise a growing influence over all matters
of science as observation and thought are accumulated.—While,
however, there is a comparative certainty about the judgments of
science, the criticism of taste is apt to be very variable, as if fixed
canons could not be applied with precision to living men.— Criticism
generally errs by being too eulogistic, or, at least, disproportionately
eulogistic.-As, however, it is likely that the classical and best
models will be discarded as contemporary literature grows upon us,
criticism will suffer, because its standards will be impaired.-
Although the results of science admit of being communicated in
good style, science is passing so much into the hands of experts
that its familiar interpretation will cease to be needed.-Oratory
is likely to be reduced more and more to debating and to the skilful
enhancement of commonplace. It seems probable that as the
special correspondent is superseding the traveller, so journalism
will absorb more and more of the world's practical intellect; even
the abstract thinker finding it advantageous to communicate his
ideas through a newspaper with large circulation. But the
journalist writes for the day, and his best work is only of
ephemeral value. It is conceivable that the duration of life will
be prolonged, and that the chances of health will be enormously
increased by scientific improvements. It would seem as if this
ought to increase self-confidence and energy.
A world pre-
-
VI
261
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
dominantly of old people will be a world of more stable political
order and greater efficiency of exact thought.-On the other hand,
it will be a world with less adventure and energy, less brightness
and hope. Neither will ambition be so powerful a motive of
action as when a single man -Caesar or Chatham-could initiate
and carry out a policy of his own.-Again, it is possible that the
most important and sensational changes have already been effected.
-Fame is perhaps a little less capricious than of old; but it is
less valuable from being more widely distributed. This will be
especially true of literary fame, as some kinds of literature are
dying out, and the competition in those that survive will elicit
many candidates for distinction.—The limitations imposed by State
Socialism on private enterprise are never likely to be so far-reaching
as to preclude money-making and destroy the passion for wealth.---
Wealth, however, will be valued as the source of power and osten-
tation, not as the means of founding a family.-We are realising
our highest dreams, and they mean a more stable and equable order,
less aspiration, and less energy.—The decay of vital power in the
race does not mean that it will become extinct; but that it will
gradually lose interest in all but the day's needs.-It is inspiriting
to remember that the world has passed through stormy times before,
and has been depressed, and yet the results have been better than
expectation. As we can trace advance hitherto, why should it not
be continued in the future?-The faith in progress is based upon
an assumption as to the Divine purpose in creation, which is not
only gratuitous, but opposed to facts.-All that can be said is, that
if we are passing into the old age of humanity we may at least bear
the burden laid upon us with dignity.
So far an attempt has been made to show that the races
of the world are approaching a stationary condition as
regards territorial limits between Aryan and others,
what we call the higher being confined for practical
purposes to a part of the Temperate Zone; that demo-
cracy is likely to find its consummation in State
Socialism; and that certain notable influences, such
as attachment to a Church, municipal feeling, and even
family feeling, are likely to become less and less im-
portant as factors in the constitution of society. The
great possible motors of action, if these changes actually
take place, will be the sense of duty to the State, and
the self-reliance of individual character. The patriotic
feeling is likely to be enhanced by a sense of the great
*
262
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
services which the State will render in the new order;
by the habit of military discipline which universal
service in the ranks will create; and by the mere fact
that as the feelings lose a sufficient object in Church,
city, or family, they will tend to concentrate themselves
upon the fatherland.
the fatherland. It remains to consider what effect
the new importance of the State may have upon per-
sonal energy and independence of thought. The strength
of the State can hardly be more than the sum of strength
in its individual members; and it is at least conceivable
that we may get political organisations which are more
complete than have ever yet been—that is, which attempt
more and do more—but which are yet deficient in the
spiritual reserve which an older and more imperfect
society possessed in the initiative and resource of its
members. To take examples from history, let us
assume-merely as a hypothesis-that modern society
is tending more and more to the form of society that
prevailed under the Incas, and that such men as Drake
and Frobisher, Clive and Warren Hastings, are likely
to become rare and disappear.
The initial perplexity of such an inquiry is, that it
is extremely difficult to avoid the conclusion that energy
of character may assert itself in certain epochs with ap-
parent disregard of political institutions. Athens in its
best time was a country in which the limitations of ori-
ginality in thought or action were enormous. To be
suspected of entertaining new views about religion was
dangerous, and impiety was charged against statesmen
like Pericles and Alcibiades, philosophers like Anaxa-
goras and Socrates, as effectively as if they had been
statesmen of the seventeenth century in Europe. To
be wealthy was to be suspected of peculation, and to
be powerful was to invite ostracism. The general
VI
263
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
5
1
charged with the command of an expedition might
find his plans disconcerted by omens that disheartened
the forces, and was almost certain to be recalled on the
smallest check. Scarcely any man was more popular
than Nicias, who was religious and liberal, and whom
all instinctively felt to be "a safe man"; yet Nicias,
having a nervous temperament, is said to have lived in
such constant disquietude, that he walked the streets
day by day with a hang-dog look. Fortunately, Nicias
was the rare exception, and the typical Athenian of those
days, as we know him, was a man of reckless political
and moral courage, setting his fortunes at stake fearlessly
in the incessant contest for political power, going to any
extreme against his opponents, and speaking his mind
about government or religion without regard to the
probability that he might be prosecuted. In fact, to
take modern parallels, the freedom of thought resembled
that of Paris during the last half-century of the monarchy,
and the energy of initiative that of the English statesmen
who created the Indian Empire. The most simple ex-
planation is, that the Athenian of those days saw
magnificent possibilities of fame and power before him.
It was possible, even probable, that Athens might be-
come the queen city of the western world, whose
commands would be obeyed from Sicily to the shores
of the Euxine. In that case the men who had made
Athens would have a harvest of immortal glory, and if
they lived to see their work done, would be the most
enviable of men, rewarded by praise, wealth, and power.
The vision quickened those who beheld it to immortal
action.
1 Plutarch's Life of Nicias. Plutarch quotes from Phrynichus: “A
good citizen; one who does not walk the streets with a hang-dog look
like Nicias."
264
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
.
It would seem, accordingly, that we must start upon
any examination into the causes that modify character
with the postulate that several and perhaps even many
races are inherently energetic; and though they may
be depressed for a time by foreign conquest, or by
poverty, or by bad government, as the modern Italians
were for centuries, it is never safe to predict that they
have lost the power to rise again. Another important
consideration is, that some institutions which seem to
crush originality in one direction, may be found to
favour the formation of a strong character in another.
The influence of every Church, Christian or otherwise,
is to discourage examination of those truths which it.
teaches as fundamental. It allows the intellect of its
followers to be apologetic, explanatory, and, it may be,
even complementary, but forbids it at all hazards to be
critical. Beyond this, every Church is tempted to com-
promise with human frailty so long as its own supremacy
is recognised. It often, almost habitually, prefers the
immoral man, who gives it no trouble, to the moral
man, who is always fingering his conscience and doubt-
ing how far the Church system is adequate.
To a
considerable extent, accordingly, the Churches proscribe
independence of speculation, and weaken the springs of
character by relaxing the moral fibre. On the other
hand, every Church has a rule of life which is more
ascetic and severe than men in general would naturally
adopt, and its demands in this way are commonly in
proportion with its shortcomings in other directions.
The Catholic Church, for instance, which puts Dante
and Darwin into the Index Expurgatorius, and which
is very gentle to sins of the flesh when it speaks through
Jesuit fathers in the confessional, does yet exact severe
sacrifices from its members: forbids them to attend the
VI
265
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
!
1
theatre or the racecourse, orders them to fast, regulates
the relations of husband and wife, and constrains, where
it is obeyed, to a great deal of ceremonial observance.
A man who complies with the rules of the Church is
tolerably certain to be narrow-minded and deficient in
his apprehension of independent morality; but he ought
to have acquired habits of self-denial, which will partly
make up
for what he has lost ethically, and which will
even fit him to think better, within certain limitations,
if he can be trained to think at all. The Army, again,
is and is intended to be a great school for extinguishing
self-assertion. The ideal soldier is one who obeys orders
mechanically without considering whether they are wise
or right. Nevertheless, military discipline is generally
regarded as elevating to moral character; the man who
will suffer privation and face death at the call of duty
gaining, as a rule, more by this than he loses by sacri-
ficing the habit to do only what his conscience approves ;
and this is more markedly the case than ever since the
laws of war have been made comparatively moral and
regardful of human rights. On the other hand, the
soldier is generally found wanting in flexibility when
he turns his attention to the business of common life.
Taking now the great principles or motives that
have influenced conduct in past times, we may surely
assign the highest place to the obligations of morality
and religion, which it is not always easy to distinguish
from one another. Both agree in telling us to do what
we recognise as our duty, because right is right; but
the moralist does not care to go beyond the fact that
we get our reward in this life in the spiritual elevation
which transforms humanity into something higher and
better; while the religious teacher, as a rule, tells us that
we shall be additionally rewarded or punished by carry-
266
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
1
}
ing our purified or degraded natures into a new state of
existence. The teaching which promises most has
undoubtedly had the largest influence in bygone cen-
turies; partly because its propagators were more zealous,
and partly because men and women were more fascinated
by the vision of a new life without weakness or sorrow,
and with the fruition of all knowledge, than by the
noble commonplaces of morality. Therefore, if the
Churches lose their hold upon society, as they seem to
be doing in certain directions, because the State has
appropriated many of their functions and is discharging
them better, the change will be very momentous, though
it may be balanced by gains which will be more than
proportionate to the losses. We may conceive, for
instance, that a population which has had its intellect
quickened in State schools, which has been subjected to
discipline in the State army, and which the State has
compelled to work, and has tried to keep from excess in
drink, may furnish more promising subjects for Christian
teaching than the dwellers in great cities, mostly ignor-
ant, often idle and vicious, have contributed hitherto.
This, however, is not the anticipation entertained by the
Churches in general, and as corporations guided by
clever experts are commonly alive to their own interests,
the view of religious leaders has to be considered. It is
probably correct to say, that thoughtful churchmen
conceive the Churches to be losers by all the State
improvements which tend to take the relief of poverty
into secular hands. Beyond this, they regard with
alarm the disinclination of the Civil Government to be
bound by religious precedent in such matters as the laws
of marriage, the observance of the Lord's day, or the
repression of sexual immorality. But what is most
dreaded is the growth of an independent and purely
VI
267
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
secular school of thought,—especially in science and
history, whose conclusions may come to influence school
teaching, and to permeate society. No religious man
doubts that the highest scientific teaching is compatible
with ardent religious faith. The names of Herschel,
Brewster, Faraday, the Hamiltons, Secchi, St. George
Mivart, and in History, of De Tocqueville, Guizot,
Palgrave, and Stubbs,—a few names out of a host—are
sufficient evidence that a faith as intelligent and as sub-
missive as Pascal's is still possible. None the less, it is
instinctively felt that the great mass of men who possess
the scientific temperament and training are apt to dis-
card the supernatural element from religion; and that
this may lead, not only to a rejection of modern
miracles, but to a setting aside of the Incarnation and
Ascension of Christ, of that perpetual miracle of the
Real Presence, in which Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans,
and the Greek Church believe, and of that other per-
petual miracle of the communication of the Holy Ghost
in certain solemn moments, or in certain sacerdotal
functions, which no Christian Church-except the
Unitarian body-has renounced or explained away.
may be, of course, that these fears will be dissipated
hereafter, but they certainly exist at present, and seem
not unwarranted. There is a story that an Ultra-
montane speaker in an Austrian Parliament addressed
the House with the interrogation: "I suppose we all
believe in the Church?" and was met with a shout from
the left, "We believe in Darwin."
What is appre-
hended is that the whole world may come to be divided
in the same way, and that the disciples of Darwin-or
of Darwin's successor-will be the more numerous.
It
A world without the belief in miracle, and without
the belief in a life after death, for which life on earth is
268
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
a preparation! Such a state of society has never been
known yet, though the belief in a future life was not
held with unwavering certainty in Hellenic and Roman
times. It is not easy to realise all that a complete
renunciation of these faiths would imply. It is custom-
ary to assume that belief in miracles is already held
very guardedly by the great mass of educated Protest-
ants. Almost all these suppose miracles in the ordinary
acceptation of the term to have ceased with the Apostolic
age. Nevertheless, almost every devout Protestant
believes firmly that his own life has been so ordered
beforehand for good, that every incident may subserve
a moral end. Thomas a Kempis tells us in considering
the difficult question of temptations to sin, that "divine
wisdom and equity weigh the condition and merits of
men, and pre-ordain everything so as to fit in with the
salvation of the elect."1 Luther went even further than
this, and declared that temptations were the spiritual
discipline of the soul; quoting Archbishop Albert of
Mainz for the thought commonly ascribed to himself,
that the human heart is like millstones, which grind on
themselves if they are not supplied with grist, as an
instance that the soul needs struggle to take it out
of isolation and keep it from feeding upon itself.2
Sometimes this doctrine has been so applied as to
become trivial, and often so as to become extravagant.
An old writer tells the story of a Puritan, who having
declared that he should perish eternally as certainly as
a glass he threw down was shattered, derived great
comfort from observing that the glass lay unbroken on
the ground. Mr. Keble suggests in very beautiful
1 De Imitatione Christi, lib. i. c. 13, § 6.
3
2 Luther's Tisch-Reden, iii. c. 26, § 44.
3 Compare Rousseau, by training a Calvinist, and at the time "demi-
Janséniste," throwing a stone at a tree, and deciding, that if it hit, it
VI
269
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
1
verse that the counsels of statesmen may be changed,
and the march of armies suspended in order to facilitate
the conversion of a single soul. It is probably correct
to say that a sane Christianity still contents itself with
the limits indicated by Thomas a Kempis. It does not
conceive a world in which there are perpetual inter-
positions, but rather one which has been so exquisitely
foreordered, that every event has its moral use and its
appropriateness to the special life. There is no depar-
ture from the order of nature in the recovery from
illness, or the escape from danger, that has often been
the cause of a conversion; yet the religious mind, look-
ing at the result, concludes not unnaturally, that Loyola's
transformation on a sick bed was as divinely ordered as
St. Paul's vision. Accordingly, as long as this belief in
the moral government of the world as its supreme pur-
pose is maintained, we may surely say that the belief in
miracle survives, though the belief in violations of fixed
natural laws may have become obsolete.
So again with the belief in prayer. We are so far
from the times when Elisha saw the angels and chariots
of fire compassing the city in which he lived to protect
it, that such a faith would now appear a hallucination or
an imposture. The belief in prayers against drought or
rain or against pestilence, and the recourse to days of
national humiliation, are dying out. Those who repeat
prayers against war, if they do it as more than a mere
formality, probably explain it to themselves as a solemn
recalling by the nation of its duties to other communi-
ties. There is perhaps more real fervour in the prayers
offered up for individuals that the life of a sovereign,
would be a sign of his salvation. It hit; and "depuis lors, je n'ai plus
douté de mon salut."-Confessions, Part I. livre vi.
1 Christian Year, Hymn for All Saints' Day.
"
270
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
.
a great statesman, or, much more, of a near relation,
may be preserved. The reason of the difference,
however, lies only in our acuter perception of the
uniformity of natural laws in certain cases. We under-
stand that a prayer for rain means a reversal of
climatic laws all over the world, and we see how
irrational it is to ask that the order of the Universe
shall be changed for the sake of a Scotch county, or of
a pastoral district in Australia.
As well might a
Neapolitan Lazzarone pray that his face should be washed
for him by the ministration of angels. The inhabitants
of every country can modify the climate and enrich the
soil if they will only use the intelligence given them at
birth, and the Neapolitan may wash himself if he is
inclined. On the other hand, the laws of disease are so
little understood, and constitutions rally in such
remarkable ways, that there seems less impropriety in
supposing that Divine sympathy may now and again
interpose in cases of this sort in answer to earnest
prayer. It may be observed, however, that many of
the most profoundly religious persons shrink from
petitions of this kind as irreverent and unwise attempts
to secure from God what He has already ordered better
in another way. Sir Thomas More, who himself prayed
earnestly for his daughter's recovery, is said to have
regarded the birth of a half-witted son as the answer of an
angry Heaven to his wife, who had longed ungovernably
for a boy. "Thou hast wearied God with prayers for a
man-child, and He has given thee one, who will be always
a child."¹ In this case we get a curious combination
of the religious and reasoning faculties; a belief that
effectual fervent prayer was potent, and could change
the purpose of God, and the conviction that such a
1 Roper's Life of More, ed. Singer, p. 169, note 19.
VI
271
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
weapon ought not to be employed in a reckless and
inconsiderate manner. In proportion as this temperate
view has met with acceptance, prayer has ceased to
formulate desires, and has come rather to be the
expression of the soul's unreserve towards Him who is
the last comfort of the comfortless; or it is the
inarticulate cry of doubt or pain, "the retreat of the
solitary upon the eternal solitude.”1 I have heard Mr.
Emerson speak in a lecture of a good man he had
known who said that it seemed to him impossible not to
be constantly praying, by which probably nothing more
was meant than that a sense of being near to the
Invisible Presence tempered every wish and animated
every thought. Men of this stamp must always be
rare, but there seems no reason why they should die out
of society. The scientific habit of thought may reject
belief in a sympathetic God as unproven and of no
demonstrable utility, but cannot affect to regard it as
mischievous or provably extravagant.
The belief in a future life, which seems almost
instinctive, is yet one of those essential parts of
Christianity which it is most difficult to establish with
precision, or even to put forward convincingly. It was
recommended in the first centuries of our era by the
abject misery in which men and women lived. The
cities and provinces burdened with debt; the nobles
suspected at court, and tracked by informers; the
peasantry mostly slaves at the mercy of their lord and
of every government official; barbarians rushing in to
destroy, or pestilence ravaging; it seemed as if the very
perfection of mechanism in the central government
1 Plotini Enneades, lib. ix. c. 10. “ καὶ οὕτω θεῶν καὶ ἀνθρώπων
θείων καὶ εὐδαιμόνων βίος, ἀπαλλαγὴ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν τῇδε, βίος ἀνή-
δονος τῶν τῇδε, φυγὴ μόνου προς μόνον.”
L
272
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
made it all the more an inexorable fatality, crushing out
hope and self-respect. Men so wretchedly circum-
stanced, might well deem that there must be a future
life to compensate for what was endured below, if they
did not regard the whole drama of existence as some
wild devil's extravaganza. To this feeling later on was
added the perception that such an ultimate triumph of
right in this life as Job and David believed in was in no
wise to be demonstrated, and that if we looked forward
to an exact apportionment for every one according to
his deserts, we must believe in some final tribunal where
"God at the end compensates, punishes." Circum-
stances have so completely changed that these
arguments have lost much of their weight. Society is
better ordered, and men are now happy or miserable in
this life very much through their own character and
conduct. Again, the enormous difficulties of realising a
future state have come to be understood. The argu-
ment of Leibnitz that eternal life means the eternal
development of character, good or evil,¹ so that the good
will always be growing better, the bad always declining
upon lower depths, is so appalling to modern sensibility
that to many it seems preferable to believe that we
have our heaven and hell upon earth. Then again,
science counting up the untold myriads of men and women
who have passed away noiselessly, and considering how
few even now lead a life very much higher than that of
brutes, conceives it irrational to suppose that all will be
raised again into a higher sphere of existence. There
is also a revolt of morality from the doctrine of punish-
ments and rewards. St. Teresa's fine sentiment that
she did not fear hell, or hope for heaven, but loved
1 "Il (Sextus) porte toujours avec lui ce qu'il sera.
Leibnitz, Opera, vol. vi. pp. 359-363.
"_Théodicée.
VI
273
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
God for himself alone,¹ is the expression of a thought
that has always existed vaguely among men, and that
is coming to be more and more recognised as the true
motive of action. Nevertheless, those who hold this
belief, and who are perhaps purifying religion by
holding it, are withdrawing a future life from its place
in the moral government of the world. Their gaze, as
it were, fixes itself upon the divine life and passion as
they were on earth, and refuses to see the heavens
opening above.
Now, it can hardly be doubted that these tendencies
in modern thought-the tendency to reduce miracle to
the recognition of a moral order in the world, the
tendency to limit prayer to spiritual aspiration, and
the tendency to regard a future life as nothing more
than a fanciful and unimportant possibility-are all
bound to lessen the influence of religion upon the
masses. The traveller who goes into countries where
the old faith still lingers in unabated vitality-into
parts of the Tyrol, or still more into Russia-is conscious
that he has passed into a different moral world. Its
ethics, in the acceptation of modern thinkers, are
probably worse than those of the civilised west, but
it is pervaded with a sense, which the west has lost, of
living partly in an unseen world, and with almost entire
reference to a life beyond the grave. It can scarcely be
doubted that civilisation is at present the winning force,
and that while its admirable police will impose a stricter
morality everywhere, the scientific spirit which it fosters
will dissipate the larger part of traditional religion. It
is perhaps correct to say that the religious tone of mind
has always been seen at its highest advantage in
countries which the secular spirit was already invading
1 Soneto á Cristo crucificado.-Obras de Santa Teresa, p. 537.
T
274
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
and conquering.
The Catholicism of the French
Jansenists, the Protestantism of Puritan times, furnish
the most admirable instances of unalloyed Christianity
that the world has seen, and their influence elevated
the men who were neither Jansenists nor Puritans.
Those who judge the religion of England at its best in
the seventeenth century by the life of Nicholas Ferrar
or of John Bunyan, and who turn to the records of Blaise
and Jacqueline Pascal to appreciate the Jansenist, will
find that the religious tone of Anglican, Nonconformist,
and Catholic was practically indistinguishable. Those
who wish to trace what was vulgar and dishonest
in the professors of those days will find inimitable
portraitures in the Tartufe of Molière, which was
probably aimed at a mystic or a Jansenist,¹ and in
Hudibras, which was written by a man who had lived
in a Puritan household. It is well to know that there
was a bad side, and to remember that the worst men
were habitually those who traded upon the success of
religion; for the good is so admirable as to induce a
1 There is a tradition that Tartufe was drawn from Roquette, Bishop
of Autun, a very ordinary type of the intriguing priest (Biographie
Universelle, art. "Molière "). Michelet appears to identify Tartufe with
Desmarets, an illuminé, and quotes the line:
"Priez Dieu que toujours le ciel vous illumine."
66 On
Henri Martin describes him as "l'athée travesti en Jésuite." The only
point that Tartufe has in common with the Jesuits is casuistry.
trouve avec le ciel des accommodements." On the other hand, Louis XIV.
would hardly have tolerated an attack on the Jesuits, and Tartufe's
ostentation of austerity is incomparably more a Jansenist than a Jesuit
trait. The great hatred the clergy generally had for the play appears
due to the fact that in the first sketch Tartufe was a clerical confessor
(Martin, Hist. de France, tome xiii. p. 678). It seems safest, how-
ever, to hold that Tartufe was hypocrisy incarnate rather than any
particular hypocrite; and we know from Mdme. de Sévigné (Lettres,
Dec. 1, 1664) that the Chancellor Séguier was described as "la
métamorphose de Pierrot en Tartufe.”
VI
275
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
regret that it was in the very nature of things ephemeral,
and carrying in it the seeds of death.
The Puritan household which many of this genera-
tion can recall in its latter-day adumbration, was an
institution that has a title to be commemorated. The
men and women who grew up in a faith that was
something more than enthusiasm or passive conviction
were penetrated by a sense of the reality of divine law
in a way that perhaps is never likely to be reproduced.
Habitually abstemious in food, reserved in speech,
methodical in act, and possessed with an awful sense
of the obligation of physical purity, they carried a certain
ungainly erectness into everyday life, and fell readily
into line in any great crisis. To him who feels that he
is "for ever in the Great Taskmaster's eye" nothing
can be trivial, and so it came about that the Puritan
approached his small duties with a seriousness that
seemed to want grace and proportion; but that earnest-
ness was the secret of a concentration of power, which,
when it has been diverted into business, has made
Puritans the most successful of speculators and organ-
isers. When the Hebrew faith took possession of a soul
that had the Hellenic sense of beauty, it gave the world
Milton; when it informed a statesman and soldier of
Roman unscrupulousness and ambition, it made Crom-
well; and when it tempered the highest speculative
originality, it produced a Pascal. The prevailing note
in each of these great minds is austerity; and their
intellectual counterparts in the modern world are apt to
be discriminative and subtle and sympathetic and fibre-
less. Puritanism is no longer a force in art or letters
or statesmanship; and the Puritan tradition of family
life is dead, and cannot be revived. The results of that
iron drill were obtained at a cost which none who
276
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
passed through it can forget, or would submit to again,
or could endure to see inflicted upon their children.
The mother who almost doubted if it was not sin to
love the babe that smiled up in her face; the children
who spoke with bated breath and were trained to
orderly composure on Sundays; the belief of
young and
old that they lived in a world whose amusements and
thoughts were irreverent and grotesque by the side of
life with its awful duties, even as laughter above a
deathbed would be; the conception of marriage as
indissoluble; the recoil from libertinage of thought or
of moral tone as from shame and death, are all parts of
a system that could only be maintained while the New
Testament was believed in as something more than the
best possible moral code,-as the actual word of God.
Instead of this we have got a new family life, which is
infinitely genial, and charming, and natural, which gives
free vent to the feelings, and cares liberally for culture
and advancement in life. Only the sense of obligation,
of duty to God, of living forward into eternity has
disappeared. When all is said, the man who orders his
life as if it were to end with the grave, or as if his
thoughts and works here would not follow him beyond
the grave, can scarcely fail to live more in the present
than the future. He may have wider perceptions and
sympathies and enjoyments than the Puritan, but he
will have less self-restraint and will. He will clutch
with a fierce avidity at power or wealth, or at the
pleasures which are purchased by the possession of
power and wealth.
It is likely that this change will affect women even
more than men. Hitherto in all countries, but in the
Germanic above all, woman has been the moral element
in households the personification of duty and purity
VI
277
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
in family life. Probably, even now, there are very few
men of over fifty who have not grown up believing in
the women among whom they lived as devoutly as they
believed in God. There might be vice in the highest
or the lowest circles, but for men at large it was a
presence outside of their homes. It may be the facts
of society are still very much the same, but there is a
change of tone. The reforms that are removing woman
from the perpetual tutelage of husbands and parents are
unavoidably constraining her to stand alone in many
respects. She is more at liberty to choose her own
husband, more free to refuse to marry, more able to
shape out an independent career, and has come to
possess nearly equal rights over property and over her
children. At the same time the old idea that the
woman's real function is to be wife and mother exists
almost in full force; and the women who wish to com-
pete with men in politics, in the professions, in trade,
and to some extent in serious literature, still find that
they are kept back by public opinion, though they are
no longer restrained by legal difficulties. The result
seems to be a conflict of old and new desires. On the
one hand are the natural instinct to use beauty and
attractiveness in their congenial sphere of conquest, and
the practical feeling that in this one domain the woman
can draw greater prizes in the lottery of life than the
man. In most cases the man who has risen to wealth
or eminence can look back upon laborious years, and on
times in which he despaired of achieving anything.
But a girl of eighteen may become the wife of a duke,
a millionaire, or the greatest statesman of the day, by
the mere accident of meeting him at a ball, or sitting
next him at dinner. Chances of this kind, though
known and moderately frequent in all ages, were not
278
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
numerous enough to demoralise the imaginations of any
large number; they are now a perceptible cause of
ambition and unrest. On the other hand, the various
causes that are driving women to make homes for them-
selves while they have freed society from the worst
feature of conventual life, and from the unattractive
celibacy of women, who having failed to marry were
supposed to have failed in their careers, are assimilating
the thoughts and habits of women to the masculine
type. The inquiry now often made why there should be
a different law of morality for the two sexes could
scarcely have been formulated as lately as a century
ago; and it may be questioned if women are not likely
to lose something rare and inappreciable if it comes to
be recognised that there is no special ideal for wives
and daughters. Human nature may probably be trusted
to keep its own boundary lines; and the old trick of
thought that regards fearlessness in word and act as the
true virtue of the man, and sexual purity as that of the
woman, will not easily be unlearned. Meanwhile, for
the present at least, it seems as if there were an unsettle-
ment of ideas that may lead for a generation or more to
much ferment of thought and irregularity of aim and
instability of character. The license of some notoriously
depraved courts is never likely to be exceeded, or even
reached. It is even probable, perhaps, that as women
are more and more occupied with serious interests they
will be less and less tempted to be frail. What it seems
most reasonable to apprehend is, that the old instinc-
tive virtue will be replaced by a calculating common
sense, which may easily become a calculating com-
pliance; and that while family life in general will be as
inviolable as heretofore, it will lose the sense of reli-
gious sanction, and continue to exist only because it is
VI
279
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
felt to be warranted by a sane estimate of loss and
gain.
If these changes ever come to pass, we shall get a
world that is mostly secular in its tone, though with a
minority who hold a spiritualised faith, and the family,
as it loses its influence, will cease to transmit the tradi-
tion of a consecrated household life. It remains to be
seen whether the new forces that are supplanting the
Churches and the family can so elevate individual
character as to give it a new reserve of strength in
place of what it is losing. What the State does, and
does admirably in its way, tends almost entirely to
make its citizens more perfect parts of the political
machine. Its school-training is bound to be more or
less automatic or mechanical; the service in the ranks
which it enforces will subdue the will even more than
it develops the faculties; and if it organises labour, it
is likely to do it on conditions of democratic equality
that will maintain as far as possible a dead level among
employees. The most that can be said is, that if aristo-
cratic privilege is abolished, and the influence of wealth
reduced to a minimum, society will attain to that ideal
of the " career open to talents" which has been realised
in some critical periods-as under Cromwell and the
First Napoleon-with very brilliant results. The best
observers of democratic society are, however, apt to
accuse it of a jealousy that seems to belong to its very
essence—the jealousy lest it should end in constituting
an official aristocracy with excessive incomes and powers.
It accordingly guards against this by, as far as may be,
equalising salaries, distributing powers, and giving pro-
motion by seniority, or by some rude form of rotation ;
such as the wholesale displacements that occur in America
after every triumph of an Opposition. We know by the
280
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
instances of England and Austria that the opposite prin-
ciple of selection by fitness-meaning practically selection
by favour-may work very badly. That statesmen of
ardent, patriotism and personal incorruptibility like Pitt
and Lord Castlereagh should have allowed two such
incompetent commanders as the Duke of York and
Lord Chatham to direct great British armies, would
be inexplicable if we assumed the consideration of fit-
ness to have entered very much into their combinations.
Abercromby, Cornwallis, and Sir John Moore were avail-
able when the Royal Duke was taken; Wellesley, Baird,
and Hope when Lord Chatham was employed. The
Ministers must have known that they were running a
fearful risk; but they undoubtedly thought it impossible
to pass over officers of high rank till they had been tried
and had failed.¹ Therefore it is not very wonderful if
the great democracy of the United States acquiesces in
a system that puts good and bad on a level in ordinary
times, and if it trusts to itself to use extraordinary
remedies in the day of danger. It is easier, however,
to understand this deplorable system-bad even when
the principle of summary changes is abolished—than
to justify it as reasonably practical, or to regard
it as anything but a danger to administration and to
character. In the countries where promotion by merit
is now practically unknown, respectable mediocrity
and a tame discharge of routine duties have come to
be the almost invariable notes of the junior men in
the Civil Service. If, therefore, as seems probable, the
State is continually extending its control over industry,
1 It may be added that as late as 1808 the Portland Administration
intended to put the Duke of York in command of the British army in
Spain, passing over Wellington. Fortunately, the newspapers learned
what was in the air, and attacked it so violently as to make it impossible.
-Greville's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 64.
VI
281
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
and is taking men more and more into its pay, not only
will the stimulus of competition, which has often per-
haps been excessive, be removed throughout the services,
but the standard of work in all departments is likely to
be kept at so low a level that a great school of training
for character will be lost. Neither will the State be
quickened into emulation of its neighbours if, as seems
probable, protective tariffs defend native industry against
competition, and reduce interchange within the smallest
possible limits.
There are two other ways in which it seems probable
that the increased powers which are of necessity claimed
by bodies politic will interfere with the free develop-
ment, or at least with the free expression of religious
and political thought. The right of free meeting has
commonly been regarded by Englishmen as something
like an inherent attribute of citizenship. Even in Eng-
land, however, it has repeatedly been found necessary
to restrain it. In 1795 and 1820 this was done by
stringent and unpopular Acts of Parliament, against
which public opinion pronounced decisively, and which
were, in fact, intended for the moment's need. In 1843
a British Government of scrupulous moderation was
compelled to forbid a monster meeting of Irishmen at
the Hill of Tara. In 1848 London was filled with
troops and special constables, because a monster meeting
of Chartists was convened on Kennington Common.
Since then there have been repeated occasions when
the West End of London has been visited with panic
or with riot, because crowds were being addressed in
Hyde Park. Therefore, even in England, the right to
1 E.g. in 1866, when Mr. Beales headed the Reform demonstration ;
and in 1884, when 80,000 men met in Hyde Park; and in February
1886, when there were riots.
•
282
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
hold large political meetings is beginning to be questioned
or limited, and the right to organise religious processions
has been severely abated. On the Continent large meet-
ings in the open air have never had the indulgence of
English practice accorded to them,¹ and meetings in
rooms are habitually watched by the police. The tempt-
ation for any strong party in the State to make a
demonstration by showing that it is backed by imposing
numbers must always be very great; and, at the same
time, demonstrations of this kind may easily be the
prelude of civil war. Moreover, politics and religion
are intermixed. A large body of Catholic pilgrims
may express its convictions in a way that is dangerous
to civil order; a procession of Orangemen may provoke
a faction fight; and a parade of the Salvation Army is
often the occasion of riot. It seems, therefore, to be
highly probable that civil society everywhere will adopt
a uniform practice, and will forbid large assemblages in the
streets or in open spaces, except on occasions of general
interest and specified by law. Now it can hardly be
said that such a regulation would be any great restraint
upon liberty; and yet it is impossible not to feel that it
would diminish the influence of the emotional element in
human nature. Processions and mass meetings have been
instinctively adopted in every country and every age,
because they worked upon the imaginations and strength-
ened convictions or communicated ideas by the contagion
of sympathy. The impulse of great change has constantly
been derived from demonstrations of this kind. Forbid
them, and what administrations will gain in stability will
be lost to all the causes that are in an actual minority.
1 The "loi contre les attroupements" of April 10, 1831, forbids open-
air meetings, under penalties going up to two years' imprisonment, and
three years' loss of electoral rights.
VI
283
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
Incomparably more important than even the right
of holding public meetings has been the permission
habitually accorded to refugees from one country to
become naturalised in another. The right of asylum
is perhaps more likely to be extended than withheld.
The enthusiasts who make changes are, however, as a
rule, not wealthy, and in the rare cases where a rich
man is a reformer it is commonly difficult for him to
transport his property, unless he has been making pro-
vision for the worst with almost unexampled caution.
If we take some of the great emigrations, for con-
science' sake, during the last three centuries, it is
obvious that the Flemings, the French Huguenots, and
the Palatines could not have settled in England and
Ireland if they had not been allowed to work at the
industries they were acquainted with. Similarly, if the
Irish Catholics, who swarmed into France and Spain
during part of the eighteenth century, had been denied
everything but the right to be food for powder, the
influx could never have assumed the vast propor-
tions it did. Now there are many signs at present
that the employment of aliens is getting to be
regarded with disfavour all the world over by profes-
sional men and by artisans. Habitually, in the case
of the learned professions, the State, influenced by
native protectionists, professes to be alarmed lest un-
qualified persons should trade upon the credulity
of the public, and declines to recognise, or only par-
tially recognises, those who have not the hall-marks
of its own degrees. The excuse is sometimes ex-
ceedingly plausible. Thus, for instance, the Medical
Board in Victoria has refused to register a Chinese
doctor with a diploma from a medical school in
China on the ground that he had not studied ana-
284
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
tomy,' and the result is that, though the thousands
of Chinamen in Victoria are not absolutely debarred the
professional aid they naturally believe to be best, the
Chinese practitioner cannot legally call himself a doctor,
or recover fees. In France there has been a movement
against allowing foreign artists to exhibit, and a strike
against the employment of foreign models. More
reasonably, the enlistment of aliens in the army or
navy is getting everywhere to be more and more un-
usual The teaching profession has been the constant
asylum of exiles. In proportion as the State assumes
the direction of this does it confine the service to those
who have passed its own special tests, and at this
moment an English teacher with the highest certificates
cannot obtain the lowest classified post in Victoria
unless he submits to a fresh examination, nor con-
versely can a Victorian in England. Louis Philippe
at one period supported himself by teaching mathe-
matics in a Swiss school.2 Scarcely any public insti-
tution would now receive an alien, especially one who,
like the Duc de Chartres, was not possessed of a
University degree, however competent he might be.
Naturally the feeling which asserts itself so strongly
among professional men is operative also among hand-
workers. When labourers are imported, or emigrate
out of one country into another, it is generally because
they have a lower standard of comfort than the natives
whom they will come in competition with, and are
1 In the case of Yee Quock Ping. The Victorian courts upheld this
decision of the Medical Board.
2 He did this in the College of Reichenau, near Coire, in the Grisons,
rising every morning at four to do his work, and remaining in the
occupation for fifteen months under the name of Corby. He owed his
appointment to the patronage of General de Montesquieu.-Stephens,
French Revolution, vol. ii. p. 509; Memoirs of Mdme. de Genlis, vol. iv.
p. 180, note by editor.
VI
285
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
prepared to work for lower wages. It is urged against
them with a good deal of justice, that they displace
men who are better citizens and on a higher grade of
civilisation than themselves, and also in many cases
that they work cheaper because they do slop work.
Accordingly the feeling against allowing foreigners to
come over in any large numbers is getting to be strong
in the Old World, is noticeable in Australia, and is
perceptible as a tendency even in the United States.
At the same time several States that once encouraged
the immigration of foreigners for economical reasons,
are now reversing their policy on the ground that only
a homogeneous nationality can be safely administered.
France is less a home than it was for Germans;
Germany is driving out the Poles or forcing them to
renounce their language; and Russia is taking very
strong steps not only against the Jews, but even
against the German colonists in the South, who were
anciently invited over by Government agents, and
favoured with grants of land.
Now, that nations themselves may lose largely under
a system which forbids the infusion of foreign blood
is more than probable. Russia could scarcely have
emerged from barbarism or become a great power
without the aid of men of the most various nation-
alities;¹ and in England, even if we exclude the de-
scendants of aliens, there is a noticeable list that
includes men like the statesman Bentinck, the soldiers
Schomburg and Ruvigny, the engineer Brunel, the
philologist Max Müller, and the painter Alma Tadema.
The greater loss, however, is likely to be on the side
of individual liberty. Till lately the restless and
1 Gordon, Le Fort, Schein, Patkul, Münnich, Villebois, Greig, Elphin-
stone, Benningsen, Wittgenstein, and Pozzo di Borgo.
286
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
energetic man who dissented from the faith or dis-
approved the government of his country has known
that if he is driven into exile he may begin life again
in a new country, not indeed without some loss, but
without let or hindrance from law. Napoleon himself
advised Auguste de Staël to take service in England
when he refused, from filial piety, to accept an appoint-
ment in France.¹ One of the Roman triumvirs of 1849
earned an honourable living by teaching Italian in
Oxford, and no less a man than Garibaldi was glad
to take work for a time in a soap-boiling factory in
New York. A future Saffi may find that the right
to teach at Oxford is confined to Oxford graduates,
and a future Garibaldi that he will have to take out
his citizenship before he is allowed to do manual labour
of any kind in a strange country; it may be even that
to take out his citizenship will be as difficult in a
good many parts of the world as it is in Switzerland.
The inevitable result of all this must be to impose
silence upon the men who are inclined to take up
arms against abuses in politics or in the social system.
The Liberal reformer under a despotism will know that
if he escapes being shot or imprisoned he will be
starved for want of employment when he is in exile.
The man who finds himself ostracised by society, as
Godwin and Shelley were, will have to change his
name like Godwin, if he has not, like Shelley, private
means to fall back upon, and the chance that an un-
popular man can disguise himself under an alias in his
own country is becoming appreciably less as the right
to investigate every man's private surroundings is more
2
1 Memoirs of Mdme. de Rémusat, vol. ii. p. 414.
2 Godwin had to disguise himself under the alias of Baldwin when
he went into business as a bookseller.
VI
287
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
and more conceded to the press. It is quite conceivable
that while the laws of every civilised state become in-
creasingly tolerant, the difficulty of changing a father-
land may compel all but the most reckless to refrain
from criticising the government, the faith, or the social
habits approved by their fellow-citizens. Nor, indeed,
is it easy to see why England should accord the old
privileges to aliens simply that the expression of
thought in France and Germany may be free. Yet
that fearlessness of speculation and speech is bound
to die out when frank, even unguarded words are
more or less certain to involve ruin to a man, and to
those he holds dearest, is tolerably certain. Even
reserve, even the reputation of thinking have been
dangerous under some despotisms.
The time may
come when all who wish to be safe will render lip-
service to the powers that be, and will school their
very features into acquiescence, and when that arrives
the capacity of feeling strongly will die out.
Happily, the secret force which has acted as a
solvent of the old society is to a great extent in-
dependent of political combinations. The spirit of
scientific inquiry is indeed likely to profit very much
by many incidents of the new order. As education
is diffused and becomes increasingly secular in its
tone, the public that welcomes and can appreciate the
results of science is likely to be enlarged. Even on
the extreme assumption that State Socialism should
discourage practical invention as unfavourable in its
immediate results to the labourer, or should starve
out inventors by virtually confiscating the proceeds
of discovery, there would still be the great domain
of abstract science, which is what the minds that
chiefly influence progress are most interested about.
288
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
་
When we consider how careless of gain the greatest
men of the past have been-from Roger Bacon and
Newton to Faraday and Brunel or, in another de-
partment of thought, from Leibnitz and Pascal to
Herbert Spencer and Littré, it seems that we need
hardly apprehend that philosophy will cease to labour,
even though the State, like the old French terrorists,
should conceive that it has no need of chemists. On
the other hand, there seem to be some strong reasons
for expecting that science will do more for us in the
future than she has attempted in the past. The first
steps, that were the most difficult, have been made,
and it looks as if nothing were now needed but to
enter in and possess the promised land.
In every
department of thought there appears to be promise of
infinite possibilities. The physiologist dreams of pene-
trating the mystery of life; the chemist of forming all
possible natural combinations in his laboratory from
the diamond to sugar; the engineer of extending his
triumphs over space. Beyond and above all these
there is the vague hope that science may succeed better
than religion, either in lifting the veil of the unseen
world, or in demonstrating that we need nothing but the
seen.
Let it be conceded that the fairyland in which
our fathers lived has become impossible, and that con-
stituted as we are we find it difficult to believe in
anything where we cannot trace the sequence of cause
and effect. Even so, a clearer insight into some fragment
of the Divine order-something to assure us of eternal
sympathy behind eternal power-may mean the bring-
ing back of a faith which was once salutary, and which
the world seems poorer for needing.
Unhappily, those who anticipate that science and
faith may be reconciled, or that science will give us a
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
new and better religion, seem a little to have under-
rated the difficulties that have to be overcome before
either dream can be realised. It is possible, no doubt,
to find theologians who think they can substitute belief
in the benevolence of Divine law for belief in a
sympathetic and personal God, and who are prepared to
discard all that has constituted religion hitherto-belief
in miracles, belief in a life beyond the grave, belief in a
God who cares for man so that He has put on humanity.
It is possible also to find scientific men who assume that
religion may be reduced to belief in a great First Cause
and the practice of a few ethical principles recommended
by long experience. It is doubtful whether even these
views, though they converge, could ever meet. Science,
with its God in the shape of a plausible hypothesis, and
with its shifting lines of morality, could only signal
across an impassable gulf to the faith that would regard
its purified intuition as the one reality in the world.
Outwardly the quietist, who will not pray or wish lest
he should be asking of God something that has been
better ordered already,¹ is on the same plane as the
scientific man, who believes that our acts and thoughts
are the exact expression of our antecedents, and cannot
be changed. Practically the one man is penetrated with
a sense of Divine sympathy, and the other with belief
in an order of abstract laws in which sympathy would
be irrational and misplaced. Whatever befall the
quietist, his obligation to support the burden of life
cannot be affected, and his sense of absolute trust in
God may even be deepened and purified as he is
detached from earth. To the scientific man death by
1"Wir beten es gescheh', mein Herr und Gott, dein Wille."
“Und sieh, er hat kein Will', er bleibt ein' ewige Stille."
Deutsche Liebe, S. 74.
U
290
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
his own hands seems to be the natural relief from
trouble, if he can once assure himself that the balance
of probabilities is against his receiving what he deems
desirable from life. It is needless to trace the infinite
divagations into which even the morality sanctioned
by science would stray from religious practice. We
must either admit that two theories of religion are
equally possible, and to appearance equally good, or we
must be content to allow that the Stoic conception of a
sublimated humanity, which is the counterfeit of
religion that science would naturally adopt, is not to be
called religion, though it is very beautiful and grand.
Nevertheless it is probable that either system of thought
gains in proportion as its teachers succeed in under-
standing one another. For Christianity it is a great
gain to be gradually discarding fables that reduced it to
the level of an ordinary mythology. For science the
lesson that it does not satisfy every want, cannot teach
everything, may be inappreciable.
Of the infinite possibilities of science it becomes those
who are not within the sacred portals to speak diffidently.
Though the dreams of an Erasmus Darwin or a
Tschernischevski¹ may still be far from accomplishment,
what has actually been done is so great, and has now
and then been so far beyond calculation, that it seems
difficult to raise our hopes of practical discoveries too
high. It is, however, in the loftiest results of science,
its insight into law, that the mind has to look for its
noblest satisfaction; and it is by showing itself to be
1 Dr. Erasmus Darwin proposed to temper the climate of tropical
zones by rigging icebergs up with sails and letting them drift south-
ward. Tschernischevski, in his What is to be Done? anticipates the
time when the ploughman will go out from his home in a splendid club to
set machines going which will relieve him of all work, while he is sheltered
by an awning from sun and rain (p. 338).
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
inexhaustible that science must retain its ascendency.
Now, it is surely not unreasonable to surmise that there
are limitations in the nature of the universe which must
circumscribe the achievements of speculative research.
Every astronomer knows that there was only one
secret of the universe to be discovered, and that when
Newton told it to the world the supreme triumph of
astronomy was achieved. Whether Darwin or some one
else shall have disclosed the other great mystery of the
generation of life, it is none the less certain that all
future triumphs will be insignificant by the side of the
first luminous hypothesis. Chemistry rests, when all
abatements have been made, on the atomic theory, and
even if future investigation enables us to forecast with
absolute precision what the result of combinations.
hitherto unattempted will be, so that we can calculate
in the study what is now worked out gropingly in the
laboratory, that discovery would hardly eclipse the
merit of Dalton's contribution to science.¹ So it is
in every department of research. Even the greatest
men are little more than sagacious interpreters of
thought and toil which others have expended obscurely.
The discovery of a new metal, a new star, or a new
species is now nothing to thrill us with wonder and
awe. We know that it has been worked up to by
former experiments or is the result of improved
instruments, and is no more matter of wonder than
that this year's best steamship should make a knot
an hour more than was possible five years ago. Then
again, not only is science ceasing to be a prophet, but
in virtue of her very triumphs, precisely because her
thoughts are passing into the life-blood of the world, is
1 The late Professor H. J. S. Smith was inclined to think this
possible and worth working for.
292
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
she losing visible influence as a liberal education. It is
coming to be matter of history that she has taught us
to substitute law for caprice in our conceptions of the
Divine will; that she has relegated the belief in
secondary causes and the belief in arbitrary inter-
positions of the First Cause to the lumber-room of
fable; that she has given us a broader and intenser
view of nature, while she has left us the fairyland
of the world's childhood for an appreciable treasure.
Other harvests have now been gathered in. The
prophet and leader is rapidly becoming a handmaid.
Her possibilities can be pretty accurately summed up
or forecast in a cyclopædia; and having delivered
herself of her one imperishable protest against popular
theology, she has no other great moral truth to declare.
If, however, science fails us, we shall be impoverished
in that very region of intellectual toil from which alone
we have a right to expect exceptional results. Science
for many years past has appeared to press the higher
imagination into her service, or at least fancy and
imagination have seemed to be less rich than they were
in their own special department-that of poetry.
Nature, as the old logicians used to say, does nothing
at a bound; and there has accordingly been a
noticeable revival of poetry during the early period
of the present century, such as might tempt an optimist
to believe that the world had been endowed with a
second youth. Goethe, Schiller, and Heine in Germany;
Victor Hugo and De Musset in France; Leopardi in
Italy; Lermontoff and Puschkin in Russia; and Tegner
in Sweden, had for contemporaries in England a
marvellous phalanx beginning with Wordsworth,
Byron, and Shelley, and ending with Browning and
Tennyson. Even if there were a silent fifty years after
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293
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
the last of these great men had produced really great
work, it would be rash to infer that the creative faculty
had said its last word. Nevertheless, looking back
upon the past and counting up what we have lost, it is
impossible to feel very sanguine as to the future.
Certain kinds of poetry have become impossible;
certain others are rapidly being exhausted.
Can any
one conceive that an epic poem could be written in
this age?
The epic turned upon the fortunes of
society-the dramatic incidents of war or travel-in
days when the individual could really incline the
balance of a battle or an adventure by his own prowess.
Modern war is a series of scientific problems, in which
masses are manoeuvred and the individual hardly
emerges; modern travel, though it may lead us now
and again into a wonderland of man-apes or of Herodo-
tean dwarfs, or of deserted cities and Titanic ruins, tells
its tale best in prose, and is bound to tell much that
cannot be given in a few picturesque strokes. The
pastoral is doomed. So far as it had any reality, it
was based on contrasts that have ceased to be sharp
and interesting, or on a feeling for country life that
is now more naturally expressed in a subjective form,
such as Wordsworth has employed. The satire as Horace
and Juvenal, Dryden, Boileau, and Pope fashioned it
has fallen into comparative disuse, and the temper of
modern times would scarcely endure the religious
vehemence of Juvenal or the vitriolic epigrams of
Dryden and Pope. The poetical drama, except in
France, has given us nothing for two centuries but
pieces for the closet, and in France only Victor Hugo
has produced anything for the stage that deserves to be
read for its intrinsic worth. Putting aside Shakespeare,
whose powers were so godlike and exceptional that it
1
294
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
There are, in
which modern
One of these is
seems unreasonable to draw any argument from them,
we may surely say that there are at least six poets
of the Elizabethan era, the meanest of whom showed more
workmanlike conception of what was needed for dramatic
representation of effective plot and situations than is to
be found in Shelley, Byron, Browning, and Swinburne,
though the least of these is superior in poetic feeling
and taste to Beaumont, Webster, and Ford, and to
Marlowe in all but two or three passages.
fact, only two classes of poetry in
craftsmen have vindicated themselves.
the epic of society of which Don Juan is the best
instance for light sarcastic workmanship, and Childe
Harold the most perfect for serious style. In each of
these great poems, however, though social subjects are
more or less touched upon, the treatment is more
purely subjective-more concerned with individual
characteristics and feelings-than as they would have
been rendered by an old artist handling them. In this
particular the story of society, as distinguished from the
story of national life, is true to the spirit of its age.
Where modern poetry has really discovered a new
world, and is unapproachable, has been in its lyrical
reproduction of moods and passions. The first part of
Faust, perhaps altogether the most consummate poem.
of the last hundred years, derives its singular perfection
from the blending of three distinct forms of art in a
very exquisite form. There is an epical thought in the
background of the piece. The idealist destroying his
own past that he may build it up anew reflects the
genius of the times when the French Revolution was in
the air. Only it was not natural to the poet to
conceive an epical movement in an epical form. Then
again, there is a dramatic action in the scene where
VI
295
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER,
Faust-a free agent but caught in the devil's meshes-is
bringing the Furies into a quiet home. Still, the most
effective parts of the so-called drama are the passages of
self-questioning monologue or declamation and the
purely lyrical pieces. Of course, dramatic and lyrical
poetry both deal with the expression of human feeling,
and the boundary line between them is often invisible.
Still, it is probably correct to say that the drama takes
for its principle of organic structure the action of men
and women upon one another, while the lyrical poem
expresses the feelings of men and women in themselves.
Unavoidably, therefore, the dramatist is more popular
in his treatment and the lyrical poet more subtle.
Othello, thinking out his causes and motives of jealousy
as Browning would have depicted him, would have
expressed himself in very different words from those
which Iago's incisive prompting draws from him.
Now the lyrical work of the present century would
seem to be distinctly in advance of any work of that
exact kind done heretofore. In the ode, the battle-song,
the love-song, and the drinking-song, the poets of the past
cannot easily be beaten. These all are lighted up by the
glint of social life. On the other hand, if we take the
form of poem that hints rather than develops a thought,
but hints what it means with precision, and suggests
what it would be tedious to express-that form in which
Goethe would have been unrivalled if Heine had not
come after him,-we find that the passion, the national
feeling, the religious doubt, the social cynicism of the
present age have been expressed in infinite variety with
marvellous wealth of feeling. Discriminate the substance
from the form, and we shall see that Milton's L'Allegro
and Пl Penseroso-professedly the expression of indi-
vidual temperament-are yet thronged with pictures of
296
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
it
life and its works; while dramas like Manfred, Luria,
or Erechtheus are little more than splendid collections of
passages reflecting the subjective moods of the poet.
That great poets who were essentially lyrical should
constantly have preferred to tell a story in narrative or
dramatic form may be ascribed partly to the influence
of old association, and partly to the greater variety
which is offered by modes of verse that are not in their
essence limited to a few stanzas. Even here, however,
may be remarked, that no one, as a rule, tells an old
story again without changing its model for the worse
if he deviates from the original. The writers of the
Morte d'Arthur were not craftsmen of the highest
order, though they understood how to diversify the
rather monotonous tale of chivalrous adventure, and
were sometimes capable of fine touches. They pos-
sessed, however, an instinct of congruity which kept
them from anachronisms of manner and anomalies of
ethical feeling. They recoiled from the naked story
of Geraint and Enid as inappropriate to knightly times;
they conceived Vivien as an overfond woman, not as
a fin-de-siècle lorette craving for notoriety; and
they never dreamed of bringing Arthur to preach
morality to the penitent woman who lay before him
in tears.
There is perhaps another reason besides a growing
failure in the capacity to conceive or work out dramatic
situations why the drama in its old form has ceased to
be possible, except as a trick or sleight of the imagination.
If a change in social relations has made the epic impos-
sible by dwarfing the immediate agency of the individual,
a change in manners has robbed the drama of a great
deal of its effect. The carnage in Othello, though awful
and pitiful even to men of that day, was not improbable.
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
The husband had the notorious right to kill his wife if
she were taken in flagrant guilt, and a Southern husband
might be assumed to do a little more. Single combat
was so frequent and serious that, of authors contem-
porary with Shakespeare, Ben Jonson had killed two
men, and Marlowe was himself killed in a brawl.
Jealousy may be as strong a passion now as then; it
is said to have transformed the whole nature of one of
the noblest writers in France;¹ but it would not in the
socially-elevated class lead to prompt and undisguised
murder. Take, again, the drama of filial ingratitude.
A great French author has treated again the subject of
Lear in the most powerful of his works; 2 and the
modern Lear is nothing more than a man whom his
daughters are ashamed of, having themselves married
into a different sphere, and who delights in making
unselfish sacrifices for their pleasure. Neither would
the tone of modern manners allow the father, who had
divested himself of estates and who was repaid with
ingratitude, to complain as vociferously as Lear does.
The world everywhere is more orderly and reticent than
it was, and less suited to theatrical effects. No doubt
it is still possible to contrive picturesque situations by
choosing topics from ancient history, or from political
conspiracies in half-civilised countries, or by descending
to life among the criminal classes, or on their fringe.
In all these cases, however, the mind of the reader
is generally unfamiliar with the order of thought that
makes such transgressions of law possible, and in the
scenes from actual but low life is apt to be more dis-
gusted by the vulgarity of the surroundings than
1 See the account of P. L. Courier's later life in the Souvenirs de
Soixante Annees, by Delécluze, pp. 248-252.
2 Balzac in Le Père Goriot.
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CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
moved to pity or terror by the tragical circumstances
of the tale told.
Less cer-
There is, however, another reason, which is perhaps
tending to make the drama less possible than it was,
and the reason is one which tells, in a less degree,
against all poetry. Human nature, various as it is,
is only capable after all of a certain number of emotions
and acts, and these as the topics of an incessant litera-
ture are bound after a time to be exhausted.
We may
say with absolute certainty that certain subjects are
never to be taken again. The tale of Troy, the
wanderings of Odysseus, the vision of Heaven and
Hell, as Dante saw it, the theme of Paradise Lost, and
the story of Faust are familiar instances.
tainly, we may say that wherever a great dramatist,
like Shakespeare or Molière, has left a masterpiece of
successful delineation of character, artists will be slow
to hazard rivalry and the world to tolerate it. Take,
for instance, Othello. Such a subject as jealousy can-
not, of course, be renounced simply because Shake-
speare has treated it, and Webster in Love's Sacrifice
has given us an innocent wife, a perfidious accuser, and
a husband stirred to deadly revenge; but Webster,
though it probably did not occur to him that there
might be some irreverence in counterfeiting Othello,
was yet careful, from the different bent of his genius
or to avoid the charge of plagiarism, that his conception
should be essentially diverse. His husband is no Moor
with a sense of incongruity about his marriage; his
wife has broken no filial vow, and though she is chaste
in body has strayed in thought; and the artificer of
ruin is not a man with a grudge against the husband,
but a courtier wishing to gain influence. Take again
the religious hypocrite as limned in Tartufe. Our old
VI
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
literature abounds in caustic satire of the canting
Puritan - from Jonson's Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy to
Howard's Committee-Men.¹ Nowhere, however, is the
sketch so full and particular, and for the world at
large—even the English world-it may safely be said
that Tartufe is a living original, whom it would be
difficult to displace. Now it is in the nature of things
that the strongest types and the best adapted for
stage purposes should gradually be used up. Effective
adaptations of an old subject may still be possible;
but it is not writers of the highest capacity who will
attempt them, and the reading world, which remembers
what has been done before, will never accord more
than a secondary recognition to the adaptation. It is
not the least merit of Sheridan that he thoroughly
understood this, and made his Joseph Surface an ori-
ginal by endowing him with the platitudes of social
morality, and suppressing all reference to the religion
that Tartufe desecrates. Precisely, however, because
these types have been so inimitably sketched is the
man who would tread in the same path uncomfortably
circumscribed.2
Now if there are limits to the conception of human
characters, into the making up of which so many elements
and motives enter, much more must there be a limit to
the expression of feeling and emotion. In Hamlet or
Beatrice or Macbeth we pass from one phase of thought
1 Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair; Sir R. Howard's The Committee.
Compare Scrapeall in Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia.
2 Perhaps as strong an instance as any of the way in which later
writers are circumscribed by the existence of a recognised type is to be
found in the influence exerted by Molière's Misanthrope. The character
of Alceste has been imitated by Wycherley in the Plain Dealer, and
by Marivaux in Les Sincères. Wycherley in the effort to be original
has made his honest man boisterous and brutal, while Marivaux has
refined him away into a very ordinary gentleman, who is a little wanting
in tact.
300
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
to another, and filial sentiment or noble indignation is
played off against speculative philosophy, or the woman
is shown in sunshine or in storm, or the irresolute man
capable of guilt is contrasted with the criminal seared by
the enjoyment of power. But the single mood of thought,
expressed even in its most various inflections, does not
admit of very wide treatment. Browning is not easily
surpassed for analysis of motive in thoughtful men;
but Browning wrote more at length when he developed
a character in dramatic form-in A Blot in the
'Scutcheon or A Soul's Tragedy-than when he made
his subject soliloquise, as in Andrea del Sarto and
Cleon and Bishop Blougram's Apology, and it is
noticeable that even in these he conceives an imagin-
ary opponent, in order to bring out his thought with
greater amplitude. If we turn to Heine, who was
more supremely artistic than Browning, we find that
he can commonly put the suggestion of sentiment or
the touch of observation he desires to express into a
dozen or twenty lines. Perhaps it may be added that
concision in thought-the power to give the greatest
effect with the fewest strokes-is the surest passport
to immortality. At any rate, when we consider that
the drinking-song and the Cotyttian lyric are
becoming obsolete, that there is presumably less strong
passion in the world, and that what there is, is more
reticent, that the greatest problems of thought have
been hackneyed and made commonplace by discussion,
and that a certain trick of workmanlike style is much
more generally diffused than it was, it seems difficult
to predict that the future of the modern lyric will be
as bright as its past. It appears possible to imagine
a not very distant time when the student will recoil
from every new variation in worse verse of the old
VI
301
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
themes, as a lover of music closes his ear against
familiar melodies ground out on a barrel-organ, and
when men gifted with the power to feel and write will
be paralysed if they attempt earnest work with the
recollection that almost this exact thing has been
done before, and has passed into household words or
speech.
To some it may seem that the novel, which has been
a very potent instrument in supplanting the drama, is
never likely to die out, and may in a satisfactory
measure take the place of poetry. No one can question
that a great amount of very high ability has been spent
Scott and
upon the novel during the present century.
George Eliot, Dickens and Thackeray, Hawthorne and
Manzoni, Balzac and Charles de Bernard are only a few
in a host of distinguished names. Tried by a rough and
popular but fairly good test, these writers have all
created types that the world has agreed to accept as
very masterly. Scott, though there are signs that he
is being forgotten, popularised a conception of Scotch
character in its chivalrous capabilities and homely work
for which his countrymen owe him a deep debt of
gratitude. No other writer has done so much to invest
the life of a small community with imperishable interest.
Of the other writers mentioned, one-George Eliot-has
been almost Shakespearean in the power of putting life
into every touch; while Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac,
and Manzoni, working more elaborately and at length,
have made characters such as Pecksniff and Becky
Sharp, Le Père Goriot and Don Abbondio, appreciable
additions to the world's repertory of dramatic memories.
Of Hawthorne it may safely be said that his idealism
was poetical in a very high degree, and yet that one
can hardly imagine it expressed intelligibly in verse.
1
302
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Nevertheless, when all is said it is difficult to conceive the
novel taking the place for a new society which poetry
has filled for the elder world. If we take the most
perfect prose ever written and contrast, let us say, the
last chapters of the Agricola with the death of Marcellus,
Burke's lament on the loss of his son with Milton's
sonnet upon his blindness, or Burke's description
of the ravage of the Carnatic with Milton's sonnet on
the Vaudois, or if we compare De Quincey and Ruskin
at their best with Shelley and Keats, we shall surely
find that the great poem haunts the memory more
certainly than the majestic prose. Neither is this
merely for the reason which first suggested verse, because
metre and rhythm and alliteration and rhyme are
aids to remembrance, but because the limitations poetry
exacts are apt to give it concision and simplicity of
outline, while its very nature allows it to run riot in
ideas and imagery. Now, these reasons will always
make the poetical form where it is appropriate more
durable and less easy to recast than prose, and it seems
more likely that Scott should be superseded than that
Homer or Dante should be rewritten. In one way this is
to the advantage of the world, which may count upon
a perennial supply of novels; but in proportion as it
is appreciated will it dishearten the best novel-writers
with their work, or induce them to essay other fields of
literary enterprise.
While it seems unavoidable that science should
come to appear less and less a revelation from God, and
that poetry should degenerate into mere literary bric-à-
brac, such as the composition of rondels and triolets now
is, there are two departments of thought in which it
would seem that the human mind may look for
compensation-history and criticism.
That history
VI
303
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
will ever be brought to such perfection that we shall
be able to forecast the future in more than a very
general way is perhaps only a dream. That it may
reconstruct the past in a manner that was not even
hoped for a century ago seems indisputable. We are
getting to understand the constitution of primitive
societies by studying primitive man as we still have
him in savage communities; we are beginning to
comprehend the genesis of agrarian laws, and of laws
regulating property of all kinds, as each country
develops a school of scientific jurists. When we
consider what Gibbon did without the aid of critical
editions, with some sources of knowledge sealed
to him, and before comparative philology existed, for
times of which our records are lamentably imperfect, it
seems difficult to set limits to what another Gibbon
might achieve under more favourable conditions. Even
for English history the work of preparation has only
been begun. Were the whole of our public records
printed, indexed, and digested, as a small portion has
been, the whole history of families, of property, and of
administration in England might be given with very
few gaps for something like seven hundred years. A
book like De Tocqueville's Ancien Régime, which forced
highly educated men absolutely to recast their notions
of a period of history only distant by two generations, is
probably still possible for every country in every
century of its existence. Now, it may be admitted of
Gibbon and of De Tocqueville that, with the instinct
of genius, they took two of the greatest subjects avail-
able, and, like Newton and Darwin, discovered
worlds which are now mapped out and familiar. The
Englishman was the first to reconstruct the Roman
Empire in a way that men with ordinary political
304
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
insight might apprehend-the first and perhaps the
only one in England to write the true history of the
Christian Church.¹ De Tocqueville's work, less colossal
in scope but scarcely less astonishing, was to show that
what men regarded as an outburst of unexpected forces
was only a violent acceleration of orderly change. Still,
it may be fairly said that both Gibbon and De Tocque-
ville have rather opened up new regions to the
exploration of others than done anything so absolutely
that it cannot be attempted again. Gibbon, to take a
single familiar instance, made the first part of Finlay's
Greece, if not possible, at least better than it could
otherwise have been. From Lavergne to Taine and
Stephens every succeeding writer on the French
Revolution has begun very much where De Tocqueville
left off, and has started from the points he has given
to make new and fruitful investigations. Considering
the vast fields in the past that remained unattempted,
that fresh domains are being added in every generation,
that the subject-matter is as wide as human nature
in all time, and that nothing is so small as to be
despised, nothing so great as to be left unessayed by
the historian, it may surely be anticipated that history
is bound to occupy more and more thought, and to
be more clearly and fully understood as time goes on.
The critical faculty, so far as it applies to reasoning,
is almost certain to be stronger in an advanced than in
a young society, the only apparent exception being
when the young society is one of singular acuteness and
the old society stagnant for the time. It seems idle to
discuss the importance of scientific criticism. It is the
1 Cardinal Newman has expressed this opinion: "It is melancholy to
say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim
to be considered an ecclesiastical historian is Gibbon.”—On the Development
of Christian Doctrine, p. 5.
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305
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
orderly faculty that is gradually evolving a new world
out of chaos; comparative philology in the place of
happy or unhappy guesses by good or bad linguists;
history in the place of chronicles; and the basis of a
positive belief in the place of old cosmogonies or
traditions of miracle. Probably few of this generation
can appreciate the incalculable debt which even men of
this generation have owed to the critic. Professor
Agassiz, whom many still living can remember with
affection and reverence, was brought up under teachers
who held that God had scattered fossils about the world
as a test of faith;¹ and an Oxford teacher of the highest
local repute at least thirty years later published his
belief that the typical vertebra—a column with lateral
processes—was multiplied all over the world as a proof
of the Crucifixion.2 A little later an Oxford divine, the
accredited head of a great party in the Church, was
consulting with an Oxford anatomist to know if it was
not possible to point to a whale that might have
swallowed Jonah. Now, it is of course demonstrable
that a great deal which is false may be believed
without substantial injury to the reasoning powers or
faith. Machiavel based a work of acute political
philosophy on ten books of Livy, which are a repertory
of fable, and Sir Matthew Hale combined very sound
judgment as a lawyer, and Sir Thomas Browne a rather
rational religion with belief in witchcraft. What we
have to consider, however, is first whether men like
Machiavel would not have been incomparably more
useful to society if they had started from the stand-
point of Niebuhr and Maine, and next whether for the
mass of men such a belief as that in witchcraft, which
¹ Professor Agassiz told me this himself.
2 Christian Ethics, by the Rev. W. Sewell.
X
306
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
was harmful even to Hale, is not inexpressibly degrading
and fruitful of bad practice. It must be borne in mind
also that scientific criticism is very often much more
than a mere negation. It is sometimes from the
necessity of the case reconstructive, and it is commonly
strongest when it supplies something in place of what it
takes away.
Darwin might have contented himself
with showing the difficulties that beset all existing
theories of the origin of species, and in that case his
work, however valuable, would have been purely
negative. As a fact, the mere process of detecting
difficulties led him to what he thought an easier solu-
tion of the life of the universe, and his theory, true
or false, has served to stimulate inquiry, and has at
least, we may perhaps say, given a convenient halting-
place for speculation. On the whole, whether we
regard its positive results or the masculine tone of
thought which it stimulates, the spirit of critical
analysis in the domain of positive science seems to
be that from which we have most to hope in coming
centuries.
The criticism of taste is another matter. That
there is an absolute canon of beauty seems hardly
questionable when we consider that at a distance of
more than two thousand years we are still recognising
the transcendent excellence of the best Greek artists in
style and marble. On the other hand, that any age
can consider itself possessed of a true judgment seems a
little doubtful when we bear in mind how constantly
opinions have varied upon subjects where there ought
to be very little difference. There was probably no
man of his day better qualified to write sound criticism
on the drama as he knew it than Dryden. Dryden
tells us that he loved Shakespeare, and he says a great
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
4
1
deal about Shakespeare that shows an appreciation un-
usual for those times, but he confesses that he admired
Ben Jonson more, and thought Beaumont and Fletcher
superior for the construction of plots, for natural
dialogue, for pathos, and for gaiety. Even this might
pass, but before he died Dryden declared Congreve to
be the equal of Shakespeare.2 A century later we find
Dr. Johnson praising Shakespeare by comparing him
with Rowe, and remarking that he had not perhaps
produced "one play which if it were now exhibited as
the work of a contemporary writer would be heard to
the conclusion." 3 Rowe's best piece is an adaptation of
Massinger, and if it were true that the audiences which
thronged the London theatres to see Shakespeare's
plays cared more for Garrick's acting than for the poet,
it is certainly proof, as we should esteem it, that
the standard of criticism may decline at times. The
simple fact seems to be that Shakespeare, though always
popular after a fashion, was above the level of his own
times; that he survived on the stage because he was
less dependent on tricks of style and modes of society
than his contemporaries; that Voltaire by his various
notices and Garrick by his acting are responsible for a
good deal of the dramatist's popularity in the eighteenth
century; and that Coleridge and Hazlitt are the first
English critics who did him real justice. It is fortunate
for the world that Athenian taste was more discrimina-
tive of its great poets.
In spite, however, of Lord Beaconsfield's aphorism
1 Essay on Dramatic Poetry.
2 "Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more."
3 Preface to Shakespeare.
-Epistle to my dear friend Mr. Congreve.
4 The Fair Penitent is taken wholesale from the Fatal Dowry —See
Cunningham's Life of Massinger, p. 18.
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CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
"1
that "critics are writers who have failed," the fact
probably is that literary criticism more often errs by
indiscriminate praise than by imperfect recognition.
Dryden's panegyric on Congreve is an instance in point,
and though we may assume that it was a little coloured
by personal friendship, praise so deliberately given in
his noblest style by a critic with a reputation to support
must be regarded as on the whole a genuine opinion.
No one now doubts either that Congreve was very clever
or that he is not one of the immortals. Dr. Johnson's
Lives of the Poets represent an extremely high
average of the work done in England during the
eighteenth century. Macaulay's limitation that the
critic "was undoubtedly an excellent judge of composi-
tions fashioned on his own principles," must be qualified
by the recollection that Johnson's principles were
substantially those of the age. Now, that Johnson
would have put Cowley on a level with Shakespeare
or Milton if he had been asked the question, may fairly
be doubted, but his praise of the small man is as liberal
as what he awards the great, and more appreciative,
and he quotes approvingly a sentiment ascribed to
Milton, that Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley were the
three greatest English poets. His praise of Pope's
Iliad as "the noblest version of poetry which the world
has ever seen," will appear strong to those who
remember Spenser's Ruins of Rome, Fairfax's Tasso,
and Dryden's Vergil and Juvenal, but is reasonable
by the side of the eulogy on Savage, a deservedly
forgotten poetaster, who is praised so that a foreigner
reading the two lives would rank him above Gray. It
may be admitted that Dr. Johnson was a man of strong
prejudices. What, however, are we to say to Dr.
1 Lothair, vol. ii. chap. xxxv.
י
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
Matthew Arnold, a modern critic of feeling, of
knowledge, and it may even be said of genius, who
has extolled Joubert and De Sénancour, men infinitely
below his own standard, as if they were great writers?
Must we not assume that personal feeling and peculi-
arities of temperament enter into the criticism of taste
to such an extent that no single judgment can be
accepted except as the argument of an advocate? May
we not also say that though it is always possible to
distinguish excellence, it is not always easy to define
proportions while a work is yet new? Of two books
that deservedly achieved an immediate and great success
-Buckle's History of Civilisation and Maine's Ancient
Law-Buckle's was the greatest triumph at the moment
and Maine's has been incomparably the more enduring.
Again, the critic of style is perhaps peculiarly liable to
be overawed by a great reputation. Where the
scientific controversialist can advance observation and
experiment in proof of his censure, the critic of taste
can do little more than assert a damnatory opinion.
At this distance of time few would dispute that George
Eliot's works after Middlemarch exhibit distinct and
lamentable falling off in power, but Daniel Deronda
at least was as vociferously praised as the author's best
work had been.¹ Probably only two or three writers in
a generation attain such an eminence that criticism
is suspended in presence of their works, but these two
or three are the very ones who have most influence in
moulding a generation, and in whose regard the verdict
of a sane judgment is most desirable.
1 "There have been the strongest expressions of interest," says George
Eliot in her Diary; some persons adhering to the opinion, started
during the early numbers, that the book is my best."-George Eliot's Life,
vol. iii. p. 298. Even M. Schérer hesitated to express, what he evidently
felt, that the book was a comparative failure.-Essays, p. 60.
310
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
*
On the whole, it seems difficult to suppose that the
criticism of taste will be more discriminative, more
independent of contemporary fashion, or more original
and suggestive than the criticism of the last century has
been. Moreover, if, as this argument has attempted to
prove, there is likely to be a general decline in the
poetic faculty, criticism will have to occupy itself with
worse material, for contemporary writers are after all
those with whom the age is bound to be most
conversant. Whether men of scholarly taste are even
likely to hold their ground as society becomes more
distinctly industrial in its tone, and if means are taken
to prevent the transmission of easy fortunes, may be
fairly doubted; but already the men who are conversant
with our old literature are comparatively rare, and the
scholars who can appreciate an old classic-Sophocles,
Catullus, or Dante-are too few to make any impres-
sion on thought. As classical studies are gradually
eliminated from all but a few schools, they will become
rarer still. In the English colonies I have known, the
tendency is to tolerate University training as a necessity
for professional men, but to regard primary school educa-
tion, or something only a little above it, as sufficient for
all the needs of practical men and men of the world.
Indeed, high schools in Australia seem to be maintained
chiefly because some people like their children to have
the distinction of a rather costly training, because a few
others intend to send their sons and daughters into
professions, and because a good many find it convenient
to keep their children of a certain age away from home
during the day. Now, the primary school Reader of
commerce and of educational use has been brought to
very great perfection by different editors, and contains
a fair sample of what children of thirteen or fourteen
VI
311
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
will be likely to appreciate or ought to understand. It
is giving scores of thousands who would have learned
nothing under the old régime a knowledge of some good
prose and verse, and is educating many whose mental
food would otherwise have been Watts and Tupper and
Robert Montgomery to an understanding of Campbell
and Macaulay and Longfellow. For its special purpose
the best work of this kind can hardly be improved
upon. Still, there can be little doubt that selections of
this kind are coming to be thought all-sufficient, and
are displacing the higher English classics, from
Shakespeare to Wordsworth, so that these are less
and less studied. The probabilities are that two
generations hence it will be rare in any civilised
country to find an adult who cannot read or write,
or who has not a tincture of letters derived from school
manuals and completed by newspapers; but that it will
be rarer still to find even a wealthy man who knows
the classics as Fox knew them, or who is as conversant
with the literature of his own land as Canning and Peel
were.
It may be argued with some plausibility, that
although works of the higher imagination will perhaps
cease to be produced, as the field is exhausted, and as
the faculty of subtle criticism dies out among the
learned and the multitude, the mind will be able to
recover in prose even more than it has lost in poetry.
It has been assumed that history will take a wider
range than ever; it may be supposed that oratory will
become more and more an art, as States governed by
Parliaments give more and more advantage to fluent
speech. Beyond this the example of Mill has shown
how much even political economy may be recommended
by a faultless setting; and it may be safely said, that
312
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
no subject however abstruse-in metaphysics or in
natural science-is incapable of being enhanced by
style. Plato has embalmed discussions of great subtlety
and of difficult argument in prose, which the world will
not consent to forget; and Buffon produced a volumin-
ous work on natural history, which made the tour of
the world, and was known by repute or by fragments
in the salon and in the cottage. Probably the instan-
taneous success of Mr. Darwin's Origin of Species was
due very much to the admirable simplicity and sustained
interest of the narrative, which even the general public
could follow sufficiently to understand. In connection
with this it must be remembered that style after all can
only be dignified or effective if it expresses dignified
or effective thought. The decay of poetry has been
assumed to be due to the fact that topics are being
exhausted, and that the less varied and emotional life
we are approaching will not lend itself to energy and
colour in description. Unhappily, very much the same
may be said of science. Even if the epoch of great
discoveries is not exhausted, the new results are almost
certain to be less simple, less sensational, more painfully
approached by long processes of inquiry, less easy of
comprehension to the outside world than the first
revelations of astronomy and geology have been. Goethe
has remarked that the beginnings of a science are always
its most attractive part. The luminous conception, the
broad outlines, the strong contrasts of colouring can be
indicated from the first; but as inquiry and research
proceed, abatements and modifications of the central
theory have to be considered, and the attention is
wearied with detail. The man of encyclopædic know-
ledge is being supplanted by the specialist, and the
specialist is constantly finding that he cannot narrow
VI
313
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
his work too much. Darwin from his wonderful powers
was capable of both kinds of work; but we may safely
say that his monograph on earthworms, though part of
a broad theory, would never have stimulated thought
as the Origin of Species did. It seems probable, at
least, that the Buffon and Darwin of the past will be
replaced by a cohort of skilful investigators, each taking
for the work of his life an exhaustive inquiry into a
single species of Scarabæus or Bakterion. What hap-
pens in physical science will have its counterpart in
scientific history. The successors of Gibbon, Mr. Finlay,
and Mr. Bury, are inevitably less capable of giving
pictorial effect to their narrative, because it is more
circumstantial and minute. The mere hesitations of a
man balancing evidence are against effect in style; and
as the scientific spirit takes nothing on trust, it would
not allow even a Gibbon in the present day to present
his conclusions more or less positively in a flowing
narrative.
The experience of free assemblies during the present
century does not seem to sanction the hope that there
is a great future for oratory. The very marked tendency
has been to substitute what is known as debating for
the classical form of speech. In other words, appeals to
the feelings are very little valued, and statements of
fact and the clear exposition of argument very much.
It is difficult to say whether much has really been lost
by this transformation. The reports of speeches from
the best times of the British House of Commons appear
to show that Lord Chatham ranted in very overflown
language,¹ that Sheridan was chiefly regarded as an
1 Lord Chesterfield, a very favourable judge of Lord Chatham, put
him below Bolingbroke and Mansfield for "undeviating eloquence," but
above them for "the strength of thunder and the splendour of lightning.”
In one place he says that his matter is generally flimsy, and his argu-
.
314
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
exhibition of fireworks, and Burke hardly listened to at
all; and that Fox and Pitt were very much speakers of
the modern school. On the other hand, there is some
reason to suppose that Sheridan's most remarkable
effort the Begum speech-has been so mutilated in the
printed version as to be unrecognisable;¹ and the
chances are that this applies in great measure to Lord
Chatham. Taking the modern oratory in its best form
-a clear business-like argument, relieved by pathetic
touches or appeals to generous feeling-it may be
admitted to be a measurable force. It has been said
that no speech ever changed a vote; but even if this be
true of Parliament, there remains the fact that some
speeches have powerfully influenced national feeling,
and that a party is always the weaker for being without
orators. Still there are two strong reasons why we may
expect a gradual and growing change towards a lower
level of eloquence. One is that the art of public
speaking is much more generally practised than it was,
and that it is difficult for any one with the limitations
imposed by the modern preference for debating to tower
head and shoulders above the mob of gentlemen who
spout with ease. The other is that the great common-
places of oratory are even more easily exhausted than
those of poetry. Patrick Henry carried a House of
Assembly with him by asking if they who had cowed
ments often weak."—Letters, Feb. 2, 1751. On the other hand, he
allowed him the praise of great versatility; "he excelled in the argu-
mentative, as well as the declamatory way.” Character of Lord
Chatham. Lord Brougham says that he was charged with often passing
from the sublime to the ludicrous.-Statesmen of the time of George III.
And Lord Macaulay says, that “his merit was almost entirely rhetorical,"
and that "his style was not always in the purest taste."-Essay on
Chatham, Lord Lytton sums him up: "Others take force from judg-
ment, fancy, thought; Chatham from passion."—St. Stephen's, Part I.
1 Rae's Wilkes, Sheridan, and Fox, pp. 218-233.
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
the British lion were to be afraid of its whelps.¹ So
hackneyed an allusion as to the British lion would now
only provoke ridicule. We can hardly doubt that
allusions to Marathon and Salamis, though still com-
mon, were becoming a joke in the time of Aristophanes.
That Demosthenes was able to thrill a judicial assembly
with them again 2 testifies to his genius, but does not
prove that smaller men could have succeeded by playing
upon the same thought.
2
On the whole, it seems probable, that the best work
of men able to write good prose will go even more than
it already does into the form of general literature-
reviews and newspaper articles. Given a much larger
reading public than at present-and State schools are
bound to provide this,-and a much lower general level
of acquirement and taste than the educated classes of
the world have possessed for the last century, it seems
inevitable that hand-to-mouth work should meet the
essential needs of the generation. No one who con-
siders the admirable results achieved by modern leader-
writers and correspondents can doubt that a great deal
of supremely good literary power is actually used up in
this manner. A hundred years ago an Englishman
wanting to be informed about the state of the
Continent would have found much better material in
Clarke's Travels in Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia;
in Moore's Travels in France and Germany; in Beck-
ford's Letters from Spain; and in Brydone's Letters
from Sicily, than the Times or the Courier would have
given him. At present the current statistics of any
Continental country are best learned from a gazetteer
1 "Shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, now
be afraid of his whelps ?"-Tyler's Life of Patrick Henry, p. 260.
2 Demosthenes, de Corona, p. 297.
316
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
or a handbook, and its ephemeral politics or excite-
ment from the special correspondent of any great
paper. The old-fashioned traveller has to explore
some provincial district, like the Carpathians or Bosnia,
or to give information not easily obtained about some
interesting stratum of society, if he would attract
readers. Books of travel are still numerous; but the
traveller only makes a reputation when he opens up a
field which the correspondent has not attempted; when
he is a Burton, a Vambéry, or a Stanley. It may
be a century or more before the world at large is
Europeanised, and before all its countries are brought
under pretty much the same conditions, so that local
dialects, costumes, and customs will have disappeared ;
but every change in this direction is increasing the
capacity of the daily press to deal adequately with
what the public cares to know. This is perhaps the
least noticed instance of the way in which the press
supplies a want anciently catered for in a less ephemeral
manner; but of course it has supplanted governments
for the ascertainment and propagation of authentic
news; and its statistical summaries are practically what
the commercial world goes by. All this is so com-
pletely within the domain of a newspaper that it
seems impossible to regret it, or even cavil at it. That
significant or interesting facts should be put freshly
before the notice of all is bound to be an important
factor in progress. It must be remembered, however,
that it is not only new facts which are best dis-
seminated through the newspaper or the magazine.
Journalism is the most efficient, if not the only real
medium through which new thoughts pass into circula-
tion. So popular a measure as Free Trade might
perhaps have been carried anyhow, but was carried
VI
317
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
ten years sooner than it would have been, because the
press gave opportunities for discussing it freely. So
abstruse an idea as Hare's, of the representation of
minorities, would probably be as forgotten by this time
as Harrington's theories, if the press had not from time
to time revived it for controversy or advocacy. A
thinker, like Hobbes or Harrington, would have gained
little in immediate notoriety by writing for the
Mercury of the day; and would have lost everything
in permanent consideration. At present, there is no
man contemplating any immediate reform, who may
not reasonably balance in his own mind whether he
will not exert more influence through a newspaper
with a large or an influential circulation than through
a book. If he is important enough to be assured that
the press will discuss his book adequately, or if his
subject is too complicated and vast for newspaper
articles, he will naturally prefer the less ephemeral
form. Cases of another kind are, however, the more
numerous, and to a man who feels that his volume,
that has cost years of preparation, may probably only
get a success of esteem-half a dozen favourable
notices and three months of circulating library exist-
ence the temptation to write in the form that is
certain to count readers by thousands, and likely to
provoke discussion, is very great, even if his motives
are purely disinterested. If, like many authors, he lives
to some extent by his pen, the attraction of journalism
is incomparably stronger. A list of really successful
books that have paid nothing or very little to their
authors would include some names of distinction,
and many
many of men who might have done reasonably
well if they had put their thoughts into an ephemeral
form.
318
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Now, that the press, being as it is bound to be a
great power in modern society, should be perpetually
recruited from the best thinking ability of the day is
in itself highly desirable. What we are bound, how-
ever, to regard as an offset to the manifest advantages
of the free promulgation and discussion of public
matters, is the fact that the journalist's work, calculated
as it is for the day's needs, is rarely sufficient for any-
thing beyond. In some cases a man employed for a
time on the press has also done permanent work, and
the reverence attaching to his name has caused the
ephemerides to be collected and preserved. Will any
one say that the political articles of Coleridge and
Heine, even the literary articles of Goethe, were in any
way worthy of their genius? To take more modern
instances, is Sir Henry Maine likely to be remembered
by his articles in the Saturday Review? or Mr. R. H.
Hutton by his contributions to the Spectator? In all
these cases the work bears the impress of the master's
genius, but the form is of transitory interest. No
doubt, Pascal's most celebrated work was thrown into
the form of fugitive letters; and Swift was practically
a journalist; and Junius is reputed a classic; and
Courier's Letters to the Censeur are not easily dis-
tinguishable from his other works. Each case has to
be examined separately. Pascal put the argument for
secular society against churchmen in general, for the
inflexible law against moral casuistry, into a form that
made it intelligible to the fashionable and popular
reader. Whether modern journalism could tolerate so
much abstruse controversy is questionable; but at any
rate Pascal's genius was exceptional, and much of the
Letters preserves its vitality from being still applicable
to Continental Catholicism. Of Junius, I confess to
VI
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THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
1
thinking that he has been extravagantly overrated.
He had the good fortune to come at a time when the
art of trenchant writing had suffered temporary eclipse,
and to espouse popular views against the Court; but
Macaulay's casual remark that he was "a most unequal
writer," ¹ and De Rémusat's verdict, that he had "more
cleverness than inspiration," pretty well reduce him to
his proper
level.2 On the whole Swift and Courier seem
to be the best instances of transcendent journalism.
Now Swift, who is undoubtedly the greatest name in
English literature between Milton and Burke, did much
more bad work than good when he wrote for the
moment. Out of thirty-two articles which he con-
tributed to the Examiner, the one comparing Marl-
borough to Crassus is the only one that lives and is
most remembered. No one but a scholar now reads
the pamphlet on the Conduct of the Allies, or that on
the Barrier Treaty. The really successful work
Swift did as a journalist in the modern sense was in
his Drapier's Letters; and even these, and some of the
pamphlets on Irish matters, owe their real importance
to the fact that the author, almost unconsciously,
transcended his own purpose, and advocated the more
permanent interests of his country, self-government,
and an administration that should be regardful of the
poor. Even so Swift owes his place among the im-
mortals to the Tale of a Tub and to Gulliver's Travels,
rather than to his attacks on the policy of his own day.
We may say equally of Courier-in spite of his own
admirable defence of the pamphlet that he is always
best when he handles an adequate theme; and that his
Letters to the Censeur would not have been preserved
1 Essay on Warren Hastings.
2 De Rémusat, L'Angleterre au Dix-huitième Siècle, tome ii. p. 191.
320
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
L
if he had not written the Pamphlet des Pamphlets and
the Réponse aux Lettres Anonymes. Now Courier was
a very remarkable and very rare combination. Delé-
cluze tells us that his real passion was to turn a phrase
in the happiest possible style; and that he was not so
much a fanatical politican as a Rabelaisian critic of
whatever seemed extravagant and grotesque in admin-
istration. Courier therefore is an exceptional instance
of the best conceivable man for newspaper work; a
man who is not so much concerned with the thought
itself as with the way of putting it before the world.
It is surely not unreasonable to think that, as a rule,
men who write with the sense that they will not be
remembered, and that only the immediate impression
is of importance, will differ from those who "speak to
time and to eternity," as the moulder in wax differs
from the artist in marble or in bronze.¹
The influence of deep religious feeling and the
influence of exalted intellectual energy have been of
such incomparable importance in moulding individual
character hitherto, that if we assume them to be power-
fully reduced it is difficult to see what can take their
place. The love of country or reverence for the State
which seems likely to supersede both Church organisation
and the tradition of family life, is hardly a principle
that will strengthen initiative or self-reliance.
and again, no doubt, in some great time of crisis the
State may have to appeal to the self-devotion and
fertility of resource of its citizens, but that great times
of crisis-wars and social convulsions—will become less
and less frequent, more and more temporary in their
Now
1 M. Cousin has developed this idea very forcibly in the preface to
Jacqueline Pascal (pp. 5-7), “Un homme sérieux n'écrit que par
nécessité, et parcequ'autrement il ne peut atteindre son but.”
VI
321
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
duration, and increasingly mild in the changes they
cause, seems a consummation as probable as it is
desirable. There remains, however, the question, just
worth notice, whether a change in the physical conditions
of human life may not affect character for the better.
Science has done a great deal, and is constantly holding
out the hope of more. Let us assume its anticipations
realised-preventible sickness, which includes every
form of epidemic, eliminated; the science of healing
enormously improved; the average of life prolonged by
ten or twenty years; and all this consolidated by the
State Socialism which insists upon healthy homes and
provides adequate wages. It is no great stretch of
imagination to look forward to the day when there
shall be a reasonable expectation of life for every child
born, when the sorrow of premature bereavement shall
be rarely felt, and when even the population of large
towns, from which we cannot expect an exuberant
vitality, may have such an average of wiry strength and
capacity to work and enjoy as will at least render life
tolerable. Should these anticipations be realised, it
would seem that society ought to gain as it has gained
in past years by the political improvements that have
made life and property secure, or by the inventions and
engineering works that have reduced the frequency of
famines. To take exceptional instances, times like the
breaking up of the Roman Empire in Europe, the rise of
Mahratta power in India, or the Tae-Ping revolt
in China, were times that demoralised the imagination
and paralysed industry. Even the ploughman and the
shepherd very often renounced toil which seemed
profitless and turned themselves to plunder or
vagabondage, but much more was the higher commerce
extinguished and the educated professions died out. At
Y
ฟ
322
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
present war is the only great source of ruin that seems
likely to be permanent, and even wars are less frequent
and shorter and more humane, and lead to less violent
change where conquest is absolute. Of political
convulsions like the French Revolution we may
probably say that they also are likely to be mitigated
by the ghastly recollection of the ruin they cause, and
by the remedy for social unrest which the spread of
liberal institutions offers. The worst effects of floods
and droughts are now obviated by the great facilities
for international traffic. Therefore, if we can conceive
cholera, typhus, and all such diseases extirpated by
sanitary science, the diseases that scourge immorality
disappearing before a rigid police, and cures, such as are
even now anticipated, actually discovered for consump-
tion and cancer, perhaps even for diseases of the liver
and kidneys, it will not be too much to say that the
present expectation of life under healthy conditions
would be more than doubled. Tennyson has alluded
to the great stimulus hope would derive if we were
In lieu of many mortal flies, a race
Of giants, living each a thousand years.
It does not seem possible that we should ever attain to
the thousand years, but there is perhaps nothing palpably
unreasonable in assuming that ninety may be for some
coming generation what seventy is in our own days;
that the death-rate of children, which is one-third in
Victoria for the very young of what it is for Austria,
Italy, and Spain,¹ may be reduced very far below the
healthiest average at present; and that for the ordinary
1 For children under five in Victoria it is 38.6; for the same age in
Spain, 106.2; in Italy, 110; and in Austria, 111.7.-Hayter's Victorian
Year-Book for 1889-90, § 630, and Mulhall's Dictionary of Statistics,
p. 127.
VI
323
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
adult illnesses may come to be so manageable as to
be hardly taken into account in the scheme of life. In
this case it would seem that the generation would be
far more able than now to "see its own work out," and
that self-confidence, which is an efficient spring of
energy, would be proportionately increased. To take a
single instance from literature, Gibbon was only fifty-
one when he completed the great work which is an
epoch in historical literature. It had taken him twenty-
seven years to perfect, and his expectation of life, as he
himself tells us, allowed him only about fifteen years
more.¹ He seems to have decided that, after taking the
rest which was his just due, it would be too late for him
to attempt any new task. Yet had his expectation
of life been of thirty years instead of fifteen, his decision
might have been different, and the world, had his
life actually been prolonged, might have been the
richer by a work showing Gibbon's ripest learning and
maturest thought.
Against this consideration we must perhaps set the
fact that a world in which the term of life is sensibly
prolonged will be predominantly a world of old people.
Unless we can assume, what is most unlikely, that the
struggle for existence will become less and less severe as
numbers multiply and the earth fills up, we must
suppose that countries in the Temperate Zone at least
will gradually approximate more and more to the
stationary state. Society will accommodate itself to this
by late marriages or by conjugal agreements to limit
the number of children; and while the proportion of
men and women over fifty is now, let us say, one in
eight, it may easily come to be one in six. At this
still allow about fifteen years."-
Memoirs of my Life and Writings, by Gibbon, p. 127.
1 "The laws of probability
324
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
moment the proportion of persons over sixty-five in
France, the capital instance of a civilised country that
is stationary, is nearly double what it is England and
more than double the proportion in America or
Australia, not because the average of life is higher, for
it is rather lower, but because the proportion of children
born is so incomparably smaller.' Now, it may be
admitted that none of the evils which Swift depicted as
incident to the condition of the Struldbrugs would be
likely to arise where the duration of life was still
limited, and where physical strength was continued as
now till within a short time of decay and death. What
we have to suppose is that men with the admirable
vitality of Newman, Gladstone, Radetsky, Moltke,
Bismarck, Littré, Chevreuil, and Lesseps will become
increasingly common, and that, as, in cases where the
exact reason is more required than quick insight and
promptitude of action or alacrity of eye and ear, the
best work is very often done by the old, we may get an
increasing average of the best work. We may even
conjecture that the predominance of experienced and
reflective men in a population-for those between forty-
five and ninety might easily come to be more numerous
than those between twenty and forty-five-would be
an important conservative force balancing the democratic
tendency to impulsive change. Increased stability of
political order, increased efficiency of exact thought, are
possible advantages that cannot be disregarded.
Yet in some respects they would perhaps be dearly
purchased. A restriction of the birth-rate means a
diminution of family life with its consecrating cares and
1 810 in the 10,000 in France against 458 in England and Wales,
350 in the United States, and from 119 to 254 in Australia.—Hayter's
Year-Book, 1889-90, § 140.
VI
325
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
pleasures. The protraction of life means that a woman
shall outgrow motherhood by forty or fifty instead of by
twenty years, and that she and her husband shall
relapse practically into the conditions of single life
without its liberty or its hopes. The general retard-
ing of marriages will mean the blotting-out of a page of
romance which, if often foolish, was almost always bright
and animate. That children should be comparatively an
infrequent presence will rob life of its most appreciable
consolation. But the most visible effect to the world
will probably be the decay of energy. If youth is the
season of unrest, when change is welcomed for its own
sake and when orderly growth is despised, it is also the
brooding-time of speculation, the maturing-time of
adventure. Old men are probably best fitted for
carrying on the mechanical and routine work of the
world, but the artists, the poets, the explorers, the
propagators of new ideas are habitually to be found
among the young. Of two great changes that have
powerfully influenced modern society, it may probably
be said that both the Reformation and the Revolution
owed their impetus to the generation under forty.
Wherever war has depended more upon promptitude
and insight than upon scientific combinations-that is
to say, where it was not imperative to handle great
masses and arrange for long distances-the army
commanded by a young general—a Condé, a Hoche, or
a Napoleon-is apt to triumph over age and military
lore. Therefore, if we assume men of middle and of
mature age to add the influence of numbers to that
which they already get from seniority, it is difficult to
suppose that the history of the world will not be a
great deal tamer in the future than it has been in the
past.
That life should be essentially sadder and grayer
326
СНАР.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
th
than it has been may mean very little; that it should
be less capable of energy and reform, more prone to
entrench itself in an established order, will undoubtedly
mean that it is passing into its old age, and that those
whom the present does not satisfy will have nothing to
hope from what is to come.
It has seemed desirable to dwell minutely upon
these conditions of character and action, because if
religious conviction is replaced by sentimental morality,
if imagination and fancy are circumscribed, finding no
worlds to occupy, and if the prolongation of physical
existence tends to make society as a whole less ener-
getic and confident of its own powers, it is difficult to
suppose that any external motives can take the place
of faith, intellect, and hope. Nevertheless, it is easy
to see that such external motives as the love of power,
the love of money, and the love of fame are likely
to become less and less powerful as the world becomes
more settled and larger. It will always be an object
of ambition to be the first man or among the first men
in the community. In the past, however, the great
man, whether he were the successful soldier, a Caesar
or a Napoleon, or the organising statesman, an Augustus
Caesar, a Richelieu, or a Chatham, was a man who had
a policy of his own, which he was prepared to carry
out single-handed. Such men were necessities of an
imperfect civilisation. It needed two men of such
different, yet sympathetic genius, as Julius and Augustus
Caesar to rescue Roman administration and the fortunes
of the whole civilised world from the violence and
rapacity of the patrician order. Only a dictator could
have crushed the nobles, established French unity, and
inaugurated a new and national policy as Richelieu
did. Only Chatham's will and insight could have given
VI
327
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
England an empire; and only a soldier, wielding the
whole military force of the country, could have rescued
France from anarchy. To take the example most easily
comprehended, can any one imagine a Pitt in these
later times dominating a subservient senate, staking
the whole fortunes of England upon wars of only half-
comprehended importance, and, in order to conciliate
the king, maintaining a vast army in Germany, though
if the nation had one settled conviction it was to avoid
Hanoverian entanglements. When Lord Palmerston,
one of the most powerful and popular ministers of his
time, meditated an intervention in favour of Denmark,
he was met with a private remonstrance from a strong
section of his supporters, and found that to carry out
his policy he would have to rely upon the votes of his
opponents. No doubt what is true of England and
America is not yet true, to the same extent, of any
Continental State. The most that even a hopeful
observer can say is that religious wars are less likely
to break out than they were, that States are approxi-
mating more and more to their natural limits, and that
there is a growing disposition to form alliances that
may prevent war from taking place, and that may
restrict the acquisitions a conqueror makes. Beyond
this, however, we may perhaps hope, without being
oversanguine, that as the influence of the masses in-
creases, and those masses are educated, they will
throw their weight more and more into the scale of
peace. Universal conscription has at least had this
advantage, that it forces every household in a nation
to realise the inconveniences of military service, and
to dread the horrors of war. Every improvement
that makes civic life more tolerable will tend to the
same result. It is probably safe to say that a Cromwell
328
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
i
is already impossible in England or the United States,
and that a Napoleon is becoming impossible in France.
The statesmen of this generation are not the origin-
ators of a policy, but the adaptors of innovations
endorsed by public opinion. That the change tends
incomparably to the advantage of society is probable,
but it undoubtedly dwarfs the individual. Of the
various attributes which Gray ascribed to power, the
statesman in a civilised country retains only one in
its completeness. He can command" "the applause
of listening senates"; but he is only the exponent
of his party if he "scatters plenty," and happily he
is no longer permitted to "shut the gates of mercy
on mankind.'
""
It is conceivable that the statesman's importance
may be circumscribed in another and most desirable
way.
That change will ever cease to be needful
cannot be anticipated. Rather as the sphere of State
action is enlarged, the obligation ceaselessly to adjust
an enlarged legislation to new wants will come to
be more sensitively felt. Still it seems possible to
suppose that the most momentous changes are already
accomplished. The subordination of Church to State,
the abolition of forced labour, the suppression of
privilege, the right to express opinions with perfect
fearlessness, the humanising of the penal code, have
been reforms of such transcendent significance that
we can hardly conceive any changes in the future
that will renew society to the same extent. If women
were to receive the suffrage in any great country,
the experiment would excite a good deal of noisy
feeling on both sides; but it is difficult to suppose
that it could have the importance which the first
Reform Bill had for its own generation in England.
VI
329
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
A measure to buy back the lands of a country from
their owners, such as has been contemplated in New
Zealand, would be as important as the seizure of
Church lands in England, or as the confiscations of
the French Revolution; but it would in all likelihood
be carried out more temperately and equitably, and
it would not involve the same tremendous conse-
quences a change of faith or a sudden transformation
of the whole social structure. Moreover, something
depends on the more or less sensational manner in
which a change is effected. Negro emancipation still
impresses the imagination as a very memorable fact.
In one sense its importance can hardly be exaggerated,
for, by recognising the obligation to free even a half-
brutal race, England practically accepted an enhanced
duty towards the higher forms of labour. Neverthe-
less, looking back on it, one can see that the actual
expectations entertained of lifting a degraded race to
a higher level have been absolutely futile. On the
other hand, the reforms of the criminal law, which
have abolished pressing to death, burning, torture,
and promiscuous hangings for almost every kind of
fraud and larceny, have been so gradual that they
have passed almost unobserved. It is only if we look
back and sum them up that we can estimate their full
importance, and we mostly forget the names of the
men who carried them. It is probable that change
in the future will generally be of the same tentative
and orderly kind, giving no great popularity or power
to the statesman who has the good fortune to associate
himself with some of the details.
Swift, in a characteristic passage, declares that the
names of those who have rendered the greatest services
to their country are to be found upon no record, except
330
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
a few of them whom history has represented as the
vilest rogues and traitors.¹ As even Swift passionately
admired half a dozen great men of antiquity, we must
allow for some exaggeration in his trenchant aphorism.
It is probably truer to say that the public estimate of
notable men has always been capricious, and determined
by such conditions as personal magnetism or the popu-
larity of the causes they were connected with. To take
one conspicuous instance, no one would seriously doubt
at the present day that Sir Robert Peel was an incom-
parably greater man than Canning or Lord Althorp
or Palmerston; but it is certain that he was more
steadily reviled and depreciated than any of these, or
than all three together. Fonblanque wrote of him as
the Joseph Surface or Tartufe of politics;2 Disraeli
taunted him before an applauding house with "sublime
mediocrity." The facts are, that with every private
virtue he was a cold ungenial man in mixed society,
and his singular fortune impelled him to carry out
two distasteful reforms-Catholic Emancipation and
Free Trade-which he had for years tried to avert.
Still, even in a case of this kind we can see that the
circumstances of modern society are incomparably more
just to a reputation than those of the ancient world
were. Peel as a Roman of the Empire would have
come down to us in the pages of a Suetonius or a
Tacitus, as the aristocratic clique loved to speak of
him; his greatness would have been toned down by
epigrammatic sentences, such as we now know to be
unjust, and in all likelihood his memory would have
been charged with some scandals of which he was
1 Voyage to Laputa, chap. viii.
"3
2 Fonblanque's England under Seven Administrations, vol. iii. pp.
182, 183.
3 M'Carthy's History of our own Times, vol. ii. p. 214.
VI
331
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
wholly innocent. As it is, the worst that has happened
has been that Peel never enjoyed during his lifetime
the harvest of reputation that was his due, and that
the honour we now pay him is as cold and unmeaning
as an epitaph. Still the votary of fame, "that last
infirmity of noble minds," must lay his account for
forfeiting immediate recognition if he wishes to do the
purest work in any capacity. Shelley never lived to
see his works read,¹ and Wordsworth and Browning
were only honoured when they were old. Peel frankly
admitted that to Cobden rather than himself should
have belonged the honour of passing Free Trade into
law; and Cobden was impossible. There is therefore
a chance in these matters which is never likely to be
eliminated. Beyond this, while the great names of
the past are luminous from being few, the prominent
men of modern times are jostled in an almost indis-
tinguishable crowd. One of the few of this generation
in England, whose reputation in the higher mathematics
was more than insular, used to speak regretfully of
the chances by which real distinction of intellect was
enabled to forge to the front in days when the whole
civilised world was scarcely more populous than Scotland
and London together are now."
Napoleon is said to have inquired what the lifetime
of a great picture was, and being told that in the nature
of things it could only last some centuries, to have ejacu-
lated contemptuously, "Quelle belle immortalité!" It
is more than conceivable that, as new nations spring into
prominence, as the record of past time is extended, as
the occupations in which men take interest multiply,
¹ With the single exception of the Cenci, which went through two
editions in his lifetime.
2 The late Professor Henry J. S. Smith.
332
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
fame will become less and less durable, though celebrity
will be more and more cheaply purchased. An educated
man in Shakespeare's time needed only to burden his
memory with a few names, and of those mentioned
casually in Montaigne's Essays the larger number are
now obscure except to professed scholars. It is
probably not too much to say that every great epoch to
some extent obliterates one that has gone before it. If
Wellington's victories had not been won, Marlborough
would still be treasured with pride and familiarly known
to Englishmen, and it is noticeable that the
noticeable that the memory of
the War of Independence has become fainter in the
United States since the War of Liberation was fought
with results equally momentous and with battles upon
an incomparably grander scale. War, however, from its
tragical circumstances and far-reaching effects, is the
surest passport to immortality. Homer is comparatively
forgotten, but Alexander is still a name of glory over
great part of the world. Courier, indeed, has argued
that some one else would have gained the battle of
Rocroi if Condé had not been present, but that no one
except Molière could have written the Misanthrope; and
draws the inference that literary fame is of more intrinsic
worth than military.' Against this, however, we have
to set the fact that literary fame is circumscribed by the
duration of the phase of the language to which it belongs.
To a Frenchman of the present day Molière is only a little
archaic, and for civilised men generally French is still
one of the languages of society which no one dares
disregard; but it cannot be fanciful to anticipate a
time when Molière will only be read with a sense of
strangeness by Frenchmen and as a classic, and when
some new literature, such as Russian, will be dividing
1 Conversations chez la Comtesse d'Albany.
VI
333
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
the attention of highly-educated men. Nevertheless,
the old dramatists are always likely to retain the
advantage of being unsurpassable in a style that
modern times will not care seriously to imitate. What,
however, are we to say of lyrical poets, of essayists, of
the vast multitude who will compete for distinction in
such new forms as the coming age will tolerate, and
who will be like the sand of the sea for number? It is
surely impossible to suppose that the fame of many
thousand men contesting recognition on fairly even
terms, and producing fairly even work, will be so
individual and distinct as to be a measurable incentive
to action. Now, the argument that is good of literature
will apply to every field of human activity. As
chemists, engineers, physicians, lawyers, politicians,
and soldiers multiply, it will be difficult, in the
language of an old proverb, to see the trees for the
wood.
The love of money is perhaps more likely to survive
the changes of modern society than either the lust of
power or the passion for fame. Even if we assume
the State to encroach more and more upon the
domain of private industry, and to undermine large
properties with taxes and succession-duties, human
nature will still remain with its inextinguishable
cravings for whatever gold can purchase, and with a
fertility of resource for acquiring wealth that will defy
legislation. The experience of the United States,
though there has been no modifying cause there like
State Socialism, is very instructive up to a certain
point. Gold in the United States does not purchase
political power, and to some extent disqualifies for it.
For a long time it did not even give social distinction,
and the class that possessed it was unable to enjoy field-
334
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
sports or costly pictures, and was limited in its private
life by the trouble attending large households in a new
country. Nevertheless, men went on speculating and
accumulating with far more avidity than in Europe, and
were very often content to find their reward in the lace
and jewels which their wives wore. There was the
desire to achieve success against competitors, and there
was perhaps a feeling that if wealth was acquired the
science of enjoying wealth would gradually be learned.
With a few there was the honourable wish to connect
their names with great public benefits-to found a
Girard College or a Cornell University. It is conceiv-
able that State Socialism, while it reduces the chances
of money-making, will even increase its desirability.
If we assume industry and property to pass more and
more under the control of the State, we are almost
bound to assume a large body of State functionaries,
none of whom the democratic temper will permit to be
very highly paid. A system that turned physicians
into public officers salaried by the State, as vaccinators
now are in some countries, would almost certainly
make no important distinction between the highest and
the lowest talent. Unless, therefore, private practice
were forbidden, the ablest men would entrench them-
selves in this, and would probably make larger incomes
than they at present do, as they would refer all pauper
patients to the State medical men. Again, though it is
possible to conceive the State monopolising all the land
and all the mines, it is difficult to think that it could
set itself to monopolise production and distribution.
It may conceivably limit the occupation of land so as to
1 Mrs. Kemble (Butler) gives some instructive instances of this in a
note beginning, "I have nowhere seen extravagance to compare with that
of American women."-Further Records, vol. ii. p. 48.
VI
335
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
prevent the building up of large leaseholds, but it can
hardly forbid the purchase of corn and cotton on the
most extensive scale. Neither can it prevent a par-
ticular mine from turning out fabulously rich and
giving enormous dividends to its lessees. Even the
expedient of taxes designed to break up large pro-
perties can only be cautiously applied, as it is certain
to be met by evasions and corruption of State
officials. Therefore, in the most extreme and hypo-
thetical case that seems at present possible, when the
State has taken to itself all land, railways, steamers,
canals, tramways, waterworks, gasworks, telegraphs,
and telephones, has salaried the professions, and has
even invaded finance with a State bank, there will
still remain infinite possibilities for speculation and
for the amassing of great fortunes. The distance
between wealth and competence will indeed be more
sharply accentuated than it is at present, for large
professional incomes and inherited fortunes will be
comparatively rare, and these it is which at present fill
up the interval between the small ordinary stipends of
clerical work and the great gains of the speculator.
That the passion for wealth will be a little changed
in one respect is perhaps conceivable. Hitherto it has
generally been associated with the desire to found a
family. If, however, we conceive the family ties
weakened, and it has been argued that many changes
are conspiring to this result, and an active interposition
of the State to prevent the transmission of property in
great sums, wealth will come to be valued especially
with a view to present consideration and enjoyment.
The type of the old-fashioned miser is already obsolete
except among the uneducated, and if these changes in
social structure come to pass it will rapidly be discarded
•
336
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
everywhere. The ideal of men with the money-grasping
intelligence will be to realise the capacities of a Monte
Cristo, not of course for a steady purpose of revenge,
but for opportunities of magnificent ostentation.
Summing up, then, we seem to find that we are slowly
but demonstrably approaching what we may regard as
the age of reason or of a sublimated humanity; and
that this will give us a great deal that we are expecting
from it-well-ordered polities, security to labour,
education, freedom from gross superstitions, improved
health and longer life, the destruction of privilege in
society and of caprice in family life, better guarantees
for the peace of the world, and enhanced regard for
life and property when war unfortunately breaks out.
It is possible to conceive the administration of the most
advanced states so equitable and efficient that no one
will even desire seriously to disturb it. On the other
hand, it seems reasonable to assume that religion will
gradually pass into a recognition of ethical precepts
and a graceful habit of morality; that the mind will
occupy itself less and less with works of genius, and
more and more with trivial results and ephemeral
discussions; that husband and wife, parents and children,
will come to mean less to one another; and that
romantic feeling will die out in consequence; that the
old will increase upon the young; that two great incen-
tives to effort, the desire to use power for noble ends,
and the desire to be highly esteemed, will come to
promise less to capable men as the field of human
energy is crowded; and generally that the world will
be left without deep convictions or enthusiasm, without
the regenerating influence of the ardour for political
reform, and the fervour of pious faith which have
quickened men for centuries past as nothing else has
VI
337
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
quickened them, with a passion purifying the soul. It
would clearly be unreasonable to murmur at changes
that express the realisation by the world of its highest
thought, whether the issue be good or bad. The etio-
lated religion which it seems likely we shall subside
upon; the complicated but on the whole satisfactory
State mechanism, that will prescribe education, limit
industry, and direct enjoyment, will become, when they
are once arrived at, natural and satisfactory. The
decline of the higher classes as an influence in society,
the organisation of the inferior races in menacing forms
throughout the Tropical Zone, are the natural result of
principles that we cannot disown if we would. It
would be impossible for a conservatively - minded
monarch to reconstruct the nobility of the eighteenth
century in the twentieth; and even now no practical
statesman could dream of arresting Chinese power or
Hindoo or negro expansion by wholesale massacres.
The world is becoming too fibreless, too weak, and
too good to contemplate or to carry out great
changes which imply lamentable suffering. It trusts
more and more to experience; less and less to insight
and will.
-
The Medea of Corneille, face to face with supreme
misfortune, was able to say that there at least remained
to her herself.¹ But that which is the saving hope of a
strong character is the denial of hope to a generation of
weak men. What is a society that has no purpose beyond
supplying the day's needs, and amusing the day's
vacuity, to do with the terrible burden of personality?
It is doomed to live on into the ages, with all that the
best ordered polity can secure it, with all inherited
1 "Dans un si grand revers que vous reste-t-il ?” "Moi. Moi, dis-j',
et c'est assez." Médée, Acte ii. Scène 5.
Ꮓ
338
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
treasures of beauty, with a faith in science that is per-
petually mocked by weaker and weaker results, and with
no spiritual sense to understand what surrounds it, with
the mind's vision growing dim, with the apprehension
of art dwarfed to taking comfort in bric-à-brac, with no
hope or suggestion of sight beyond the grave. In the
old age of the plant the roots continue to thicken out
and deepen down, when there is neither blossom nor
fruit. The spectacle of an old man with his intellect
keen, with his experience bitter, with his appetites
unsatiated, with the memory of past enjoyment stinging
him, and deprived of the physical power to enjoy, is so
familiar that we accept it as one of the commonplaces
of life. Scarcely any one remembers that he will in
turn live on into such an old age, if he does not sacrifice
daily to the invisible powers; and even less does any of
us assume that the world may easily put on this form of
decrepitude:
The consummation coming past escape,
When we shall live most, and yet least enjoy.
Our morality will then be the emasculate tenderness of
those who shrink from violence, not because it is a
transgression of order, but because it is noisy and
coarse; and having outlived strong passions, and the
energy by which will translates itself into act, we shall
plume ourselves on having abolished vice. Our in-
tellectual discipline will be derived from the year-book
and the review, and our intellectual pleasure from the
French novel. Yet there seems no reason why men of
this kind should not perpetuate the race, increasing and
multiplying, till every rood of earth maintains its man,
and the savour of vacant lives will go up to God from
every home.
VI
339
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
1
As an offset to these forebodings, it is undoubtedly
well to remember that the world has passed through
evil times before and has outlived them. It may even
be admitted that wherever men have reflected enough
to occupy themselves with forecasts of the future, their
presentiments have been apt to take colour from their
surroundings, and have sometimes been needlessly
sombre. History tells us that the days upon which
Gibbon afterwards looked back as the happiest humanity
had known were days in which Christians and Jews
were expecting the crash of the world, and in which the
wisest of Roman Emperors gave it as a counsel of
perfection, that the man who felt God within him
should be ready for death as for a trumpet's call.¹
At a later time, which we now look back to as the
golden season of romance and chivalry, England was
covered with religious foundations created avowedly, as
the charter of one of them states, because all things
were tending visibly to extinction.2 In the first of
these cases the depression of thoughtful men was
greater than the actual state of the world warranted; in
the second, than facts later on justified; and yet if
Marcus Aurelius could have seen the state of the world
in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, or if the
pessimists of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
had lived on into the fifteenth, when Pecock was able
to say that "ever more the world decreaseth in people,"
they might have found abundant warrant for their
despondency. On the other hand, history reminds us
193
1 “περιμένων τὸ ἀνακλητικὸν ἐκ τοῦ βίου εὔλυτος.”Marc. Aurel.
Antonin. lib. iii. p. 38.
2 "Quia omnia tendunt visibiliter ad non esse.”—Statutes of Oriel
College.
3 Pecock's Repressor of overmuch blaming of the Clergy, part iii.
chap. v.
340
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
also that there have been two ages in which the world
was hopeful and sanguinely self-confident. The first
was the period when printing had conquered back a lost
territory for the mind, and when the discovery of
America offered a new world to Christendom in
exchange for the lost East. These dreams of enlighten-
ment and prosperity were the prelude to bloody
religious wars extending over more than a century.
The second time, of which those who shared its
delirium have said, as one great contemporary said of
the first, that merely to live in it was a joy, was the
period that preceded the French Revolution—a time
when men were dreaming that all which philosophy
recommended could be inaugurated without bloodshed
by decrees and mutual embraces and the planting of
trees of liberty. There was some disenchantment from
those dreams also. On the whole, neither our despond-
ency nor our cheerful expectation can be assumed to
correspond with any real forecast of the future.
man to argue that he will recover from senile decay
because he has outlived fever and a fall from his horse,
would clearly be irrational. Neither do we, in fact,
attach much importance to arguments of this sort.
They are stimulating for a man or a nation in
difficulties, but they lack the proportion necessary for
comparison when we come to deal with the system of
the Universe. What we mostly trust to, perhaps, is
the sentiment expressed by Tennyson, that "somehow
good will be the final goal of ill," and we either
assume that we shall go on to all time vindicating the
Creator's purpose by the mellowing perfection of our
lives, or at least that we shall be allowed some
centuries during which we may mature and sweeten in
a world where incalculable terms of life seem already to
For a
VI
341
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
have been allotted to the lower types. This man argues
that we shall last as long as the coal-measures, and this
other that there is no reason why the race should die
out till the earth itself shall have begun to cool down
into a skeleton of rock without atmosphere or central
heat. Assume this protracted existence, and it seems
natural to suppose that we are at present only in
the infancy of man, and to anticipate that our remote
descendants may be as far superior to ourselves in
polity and intelligence as we are to the tribes of the
lake period.
It is natural and perhaps good to indulge in these
dreams, which encourage us to continued effort; but it
is impossible not to remember that they derive no
warrant from the analogies of nature, so far as we can
be said to understand the natural world. If the recent
surmises of geologists are correct, man has already been
an inhabitant of the earth for some very long period,
whether we measure it by tens of thousands or hundreds
of thousands of years, and has only had a history worth
recording for some forty centuries at most.
Even during
historical times, so-called, the world has mostly been
peopled by races, either like the negro very little raised
above the level of brutes, or at best, like the lower-
caste Hindoo and the Chinaman, of such secondary
intelligence as to have added nothing permanent to
our stock of ideas. At this moment, though the
civilised and progressive races have till quite recently
been increasing upon the inferior types, and though
the lowest forms of all are being exterminated, there
seems, as we have seen, good warrant for assuming that
the advantage has already passed to the lower forms
of humanity, and indeed it appears to be a well-ascer-
tained law that the races which care little for comfort
342
CHAP.
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
and decency are bound to tide over bad times better
than their superiors, and that the classes which reach the
highest standard are proportionally short-lived. Nay,
so profusely is life given in excess of what we can
account the efficient use made of it, so many purpose-
less generations seem to pass away before humanity
is in travail of a prophet or a thinker, that some in-
quirers have actually defined the method of creation
as a law of waste. "To work in vain," said the author
of The Plurality of Worlds, "is so far from being
contrary to the usual proceedings of nature that it is
an operation which is constantly going on in every
part of nature." Of the weeds we trample down every
one represents a wealth of wasted germs; of the fish
that people the deep not one but is the fortunate
survivor where, it may be, a million possible existences
have perished before birth, and these again, if we go
further back, represent other and often higher types
that were animate and are extinct. Above us the
infinite distances of space are studded with orbs, of
almost all of which we can say more or less certainly
that if they admit life at all it is not our life. Have
we any warrant for assuming that man, the creature of
a moment in time, the inhabitant of a speck in space,
is really the heir of all the ages, or anything more
than a sublimated form of terrestrial life, which will
have its youth, its maturity, and its decay like every-
thing else hitherto created. Science, with its record
of glacial epochs and its forecast of vanishing heat;
religion, with its warning that "the earth and the
works that are therein shall be burned up," do not
speak of life, but of death.
Happily, what the distant future of the world may
be is a matter that does not much concern us, and about
VI
343
THE DECAY OF CHARACTER
which we may rejoice to know nothing.
It is quite
possible that if the noblest Greeks and Romans had
foreseen how short-lived the supremacy of Athens was
to be, or at what cost of national character the empire
of the world was to be achieved by Rome, they would
have folded their arms, or have set sail, as Sertorius
thought of doing, in quest of the Fortunate Isles,¹ where
life was nothing more than lotos-eating. We are able
to see that though the aspirations of patriotism have
been defeated, the greater world of humanity has been
the richer for what these men ventured and thought.
Should it so be that something like what the Norsemen
conceived as "the twilight of the gods" is coming upon
the earth, and that there will be a temporary eclipse
of the higher powers, we may at least prepare for it
in the spirit of the Norsemen, who, as the Ynglinga
Saga tells us, deemed that whether God gave them
victory or called them home to himself either award
was good. We are so accustomed to the fierce rapture
of struggle and victory, to that rough training of
necessity by which the weak are destroyed, to revolu-
tions of the political order, transferences of power and
wealth, and discoveries in science, that we can hardly
conceive a quiet old age of humanity, in which it may
care only for sunshine and food and quiet, and expect
nothing great from the toil of hand or thought. Know-
ing something of the limitations and very little of the
capabilities of our moral nature, it is perhaps natural we
should shrink from the prospect that the classes which
have been the depository of refinement and breeding will
be submerged below the level of democracy, that dis-
2
1 "Sertorius
•
conceived a strong desire to fix himself in those
islands, where he might live in perfect tranquillity at a distance from the
evils of tyranny and war.”—Plutarch's Life of Sertorius.
2 Ynglinga Saga, chap. x.
344
CHAP. VI
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
tinctions of rank and fortune, of character and intellect,
will become unimportant, that the family with its con-
secrated memories and duties will be transformed into
a genial partnership of independent wills, that fancy
and imagination will find no expression in literature,
and that the faiths for which men have lived and died
in times past will only survive as topics of meditation
or as the discipline of ethical practice. When the gods
of Greece passed away with the great Pan, nature lost
its divinity, but society was overshadowed by a holier
presence.
When Christianity itself began to appear
grotesque and incredible, men reconciled themselves
to the change by belief in an age of reason, of enlight-
ment, of progress. It is now more than probable that
our science, our civilisation, our great and real advance
in the practice of government are only bringing us
nearer to the day when the lower races will predomi-
nate in the world, when the higher races will lose their
noblest elements, when we shall ask nothing from the
day but to live, nor from the future but that we may
not deteriorate. Even so, there will still remain to
us ourselves. Simply to do our work in life, and to
abide the issue, if we stand erect before the eternal
calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal
unrest, may be nobler training for our souls than the
faith in progress.
APPENDIX A
PROPORTIONS OF RACES IN TROPICAL AMERICA
Country.
Whites.
Indians.
Mixed.
Negroes.
a

Mexico (1882)
•
1,909,000
3,765,044
Guatemala (1889)
Honduras (1889)
Salvador (1886)
Nicaragua
Costa Rica
•
British Honduras
184,000?
876,000
4,785,940
400,000 ?
:
...
82,000 ?
350,000
...
10,000
654,000
50,000 ?
330,000
40,000 ?
3,500
160,000
15,000?
26,000
Colombia (1881)
•
450,000
1,800,000
1,500,000
Venezuela (1888)
120,000
•
480,000
326,000
1,200,000
50,000
Peru
474,390
1,832,000
650,000
50,000 Chinese
Ecuador
100,000
890,000
300,000
...
Bolivia
500,000
1,100,000
600,000
Brazil.
3,787,289
386,955 3,801,787
1,954,452
Paraguay
66,000
130,000
264,000
8,187,679
11,696,999 13,661,727
2,174,452
1,334,000 pure and mixed.
Of these numbers, taken merely from the Statesman's Year-Book,
it may be observed—
1. That the number of pure whites allotted to Brazil seems
extravagantly large. It probably includes all half-castes, except
mulattoes.
2. In Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and British
Honduras, the number of whites is given conjecturally, or by
collection, from all estimates. The estimate of whites for Colombia
is taken from Lanier's Amérique du Sud, p. 372.
3. The last census of Venezuela shows a decisive increase of
half-castes and diminution of pure Indians. Former censuses give
the numbers as follows:
346
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Whites.
Indians.
Half-castes.
Slaves.
1800.
1810 (Alison)
1839 (Wayle).
200,000
120,000
406,000
62,000
•
212,000
120,000
341,000
62,000
260,000
222,000
414,000
50,000
We must take into account in considering Venezuela-(1) that
in 1881 there were 34,916 foreign residents of white extraction ;
(2) that a great many wild Indians have been civilised after a
fashion during the last half-century; and (3) that half-castes are
bound to increase disproportionately, other things being equal.
4. If the numbers given above are approximately correct, the
coloured races, pure and mixed, are as 28,000,000 or 29,000,000
to 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 of whites, or practically white. If, how-
ever, the whites are over-calculated for Brazil, as seems certain, the
proportion of the coloured to the white races in these regions is
probably as four to one. What are the chances that the white
races will be reinforced by immigration so as to preserve its pre-
sent ratio? and, if it is not so reinforced, must it not gradually be
absorbed? Putting the Indians out of the question, the negroes
alone, though now inferior in numbers to the whites, would easily
increase in a century so as to swamp them if the two races multiply
in the same proportions as the whites and coloured people of the
Black Belt in the United States. It is not at present likely that
the negroes will absorb Colombia, Venezuela, or Peru.
It seems
at least very possible that they will make Brazil practically a negro
state with an influential white minority.
5. In the preceding calculation the negroes of the Black Belt in
the United States have not been taken into account. It is obvious,
however, that from 8,000,000 to 9,000,000 blacks, increasing at a
rapid rate, and settling by preference in the warmer climates, are
likely at no very distant time to reinforce the coloured population
of Central and Southern America. They may contribute a yearly
tide of immigrants by sea, simply because they want more space, or
the legislation of the United States may be so framed as to dispose
them to settle elsewhere. Central America at present would appear
to offer them more inducements than Africa.¹
¹ Bryce says of Mexico: "The population was in 1884, 10,460,703, of whom
20 per cent are stated to be pure whites, 43 per cent of mixed races, and the
remaining 37 per cent Indians."-American Commonwealth, vol. iii. p. 260, note.
APPENDIX B
COMPARATIVE GROWTHS OF WHITE AND BLACK POPULATION
IN THE UNITED STATES
White Population.
1890.
1880.
1870.
1860.
Alabama
•
830,796
662,185
521,384
526,271
North Carolina
1,049,191
867,242
678,470
629,942
South Carolina
458,454
391,105
289,667
291,300
Florida.
224,461
142,605
96,057
77,746
Georgia.
973,462
816,906
638,926
591,550
Louisiana
554,712
454,954
362,065
357,456
Mississippi.
539,703
479,398
382,896
353,899
4,630,779
3,814,395
2,969,465
2,828,164
Black Population.

1890.
1880.
1870.
1860.
Alabama
681,431
600,103
475,510
437,770
North Carolina
567,170
531,277
391,650
361,522
South Carolina
692,503
604,332
415,814
412,320
Florida.
166,678
126,690
91,689
62,677
Georgia.
863,716
725,133
545,142
465,698
Louisiana
562,893
483,655
364,210
350,373
Mississippi.
747,720
650,291
444,201
437,404
4,282,111
3,721,481 2,728,216 2,527,764
Of these statistics it may be remarked--
1. That the census of 1870 is regarded as inaccurate, and as
erring on the side of imperfect enumeration.
348
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
NATI
2. The census authorities of the United States say that the
increase of the white race in the South since 1830 has not been
effected by the aid of immigration, except in Kansas and Missouri.
As, however, the whites in the South have increased at the rate of
17 per cent, while the average rate, independent of immigration,
has been 14 per cent, it seems as if immigration cannot be dis-
regarded.
3. The great increase of railways in the Southern States since
the war of 1862-66 has been accompanied by an increase of towns
as distributing centres, and has therefore been favourable to the
growth of the white population.
4. Taking the Union all round, the increase for the last ten
years-exclusive of immigration-has been 13.90 for the blacks
against 14 for the whites. It is claimed that the blacks increased
faster only when they were recruited by the slave-trade; and that
white immigration has completely turned the balance since then.
On the other hand, the diminution of increase among the blacks
from 34.82 in 1870-80 to 13.90 in 1880-90 is so vast, even if we
allow the preceding census to have been incomplete, as to suggest a
doubt whether the negro population has been completely numbered
at the last census.
5. Assuming the facts of the last census to be unimpeachable,
it seems to result that whites and blacks increase in nearly the
same ratio, but that there is in the United States “ a perceptible
tendency southward of the coloured people." In this case the
result will still be to make a belt of States predominantly negro.
6. If we reduce the increase of the whites in the Black Belt by
3 per cent so as to bring it to the normal American rate, their gain
upon the
negroes during the last ten years will appear to be very
trifling.
INDEX
AFGHANISTAN not all mountains, 51
Africa, Central, colonisation of, by whites
impossible, 38-41
Agassiz, early training of, 305
Ainos, 49
Albert, Archbishop, on the human
heart, 208
Alcibiades charged with impiety, 262
Alexander's successors, effects of wars
by, 90
Algeria, 44, 63, note; influence of,
upon French society, 124
Almaden, mines of, 107
Amazon, Indians of, 52; whites of, 53
America, Central and Southern, not
fitted for white men, 53
America, Southern, clergy control
schools, 214
America, tropical, proportions of races
in, Appendix A
America, U.S., white population in, 64;
emigration to, 96; European heroism
more than matched in, 218-220;
experience of, about divorce, 245;
displacement of office-bearers in,
279; not quite unreasonable, 280
American militia not very successful in
War of Independence, and beaten in
1812, 115, 116
Anaxagoras charged with impiety, 262
Angola, 35
Anselm revives philosophy, 90; com-
passionate to animals, 218
Apaches untameable, 34
Araucanians untameable, 34
Argentine Republic, its circumstances
exceptional, 58
Arminius, 89
Arnold, Matthew, failed as a lecturer,
164; jests on the Trinity, 201;
responsible for a story about French
schools, 223, 224; overpraises small
men, 309
Asia, Central, capabilities of, 43, 44
Athens an instance of highly-developed
city life, 148; under the best condi-
tions, 156; in the Peloponnesian
war, 181, 182; energy of its people,
263
Atrato, mouths of, pestilential, 57
Attila, 90
Australia the best inheritance of the
higher races, 16; an instructive
instance of new tendencies, 17, 18;
peculiarly fitted for settlement, 42;
emigration to, 96; urban population
in, 142, 143; well-being of its
people, 163; splendid chances in,
169; high schools in, 310
Australia, South, and progressive land-
tax, 19
Austria gained by Solferino, 141
Austrian Parliament and Darwin, 267
Aztecs, 56; docile, 59
BACON, Roger, 13; pathetic fate of, 212
Balzac paints the French peasant, 169;
and filial ingratitude, 297
Bankruptcy, national, examples of, 177,
178; consequences of, 178
Barrios, a half-caste, 56
Baylen, capitulation of, its character,
120
Beaconsfield, Lord, on critics, 307
Belgium, education in, 214
Bell, Graham, invents telephone, 102,
note 1
Bell, Patrick, invents reaping-machine,
102, note 1
Beluchistan not all desert, 51, and note
Bert, Paul, revives Pascal's charges, 216
Bichat essentially a thinker, 151
Birkenhead, heroism of men of the, 139
Black Belt, States of the, 60, 62
Blucher's soldiers comparatively bar-
barous, 140
Boers, 36; occupy Natal, 36; defeat
English at Majuba Hill, 114, 121, 122
350
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
Bolivia, Indians of, 52; a tropical
Switzerland, 58
Booth's analysis of London population,
154
Borde on Englishmen, 99, note
Borneo, Chinese in, 47
Boudeuse, La, captain of, kills prisoners,
139, note
Bourrienne clothes French troops in
England, 184, note
Boyle's estimate of Indian population, 54
Bradlaugh edits jest on the Trinity, 201
Brazil unfitted for Europeans, 53;
largely negro, 59, 60
British North Borneo Company is
stimulating immigration, 49
British rule, its tendencies in India, 51
Browne, Sir T., uncritical, 305
Browning, on the stage, 165; reflective,
167; only honoured when old, 331
Brunswick, Duke of, his invasion of
France, 116-118
Bryce on laws restraining immigration,
15, note 2; on town population in
America, 143, note 2; on the popula-
tion of Mexico, 346, note
Buckle's success, 309
Buffon, fascinating style of, 312
Bukhara, 43, note
Bunyan, John, 274
Burke, predictions by, 2, 3; describes
ravage of the Carnatic, 82; a worthy
expression of English genius, 151
Burleigh's (Lord) view of marriage, 241,
note 1
Bury as historian, 313
Bushmen worthless as slaves, 35; ex-
terminated, 36.
CADE, sympathisers with, behead a
bishop, 208
Caesar's (Julius) massacres in Gaul, 81:
he saves Rome from the patricians, 326
Caesar, Augustus, 326
Calderon gives the primitive view of
marriage, 234
California, chances in, 169
Calvin's rigorous discipline, 195
Cambodia, fine ruins in, 91, 92
Canada, consequences of its conquest, 5;
mentioned, 44
Canning, prediction by, 3; knew
English literature, 311
Canterbury, Archbishop of, opposes un-
denominational education, 215
Cape Colony, 35, 36
Carera, an Indian, 56
Carlyle approves Frederick II.'s political
economy, 107; restricts his social
intercourse, 157; only moderately
successful as lecturer, 164
Carnatic ravaged, 82
Carnot organises the French army, 118
Cashmere not adapted for colonisation,
35
Castilla, 56
Catholicism parodied, 24
Cato the Younger lends his wife, 229,
note 2
Cato the Censor blamed by Plutarch,
239, note 1
Cavaliers not disinterested, 191
Charles II. a rare exception, 190
Chateaubriand, 151
Chatham as orator, 313, 314; gave
England an Empire, 326, 327
Chatham, Lord, an incapable general,
280
Chesterfield, Lord,
predicts French
Revolution, 5; his opinion of
Chatham as orator, 313, 314, and note
Child on the Act of Uniformity, 193,
note
China has little to dread from civilised
nations, 34; her facilities for colon-
ising Turkestan, 43, 44; certain to
grow, 45-51; could' support a larger
population, 64-67; form its develop-
ment will take, 95, 96; forced into
civilisation, 111, 112
Chinamen, 31, 33; mortality of, in Nica-
ragua, 57; numbers of, in Siam, 66;
have supplanted a higher race in
Cambodia, 92; probable influence of
their example upon Europeans, 123-
126; supplant white labour, 125;
have added nothing to thought, 341
Choiseul predicts loss of America to
England, 5
Cholera, its effects in 1831-32, 153
Christianity copied Paganism, 24
Church has been very useful in the past,
192-194; its authority became intoler-
able, 194-196; inefficient against blas-
phemy and immorality, 196-198; could
only succeed at the cost of liberty, 199-
201; was less capable than the State
is of enforcing purity, 201-203; was
less capable of tolerance than the State
is, 203-205; was inefficient in its
dealing with pauperism, 205-209;
and with slavery, 209-211; and has
everywhere opposed a thorough system
of national education, 211-216; has
lost its hold on popular imagination,
216, 217; has a lower humanity than
the State, 217-220; has evaded the
recognition of divorce, 235; dis-
courages critical examination, 264;
distrusts the growing power of the
State, 266
Cicero loathes life out of Rome, 148
INDEX
351
Cid, story of, consistent with the times,
233
Clive a typical Englishman, 100; of a
type disappearing, 263
Cobden the real author of Free Trade,
331
Cochin China, fine ruins in, 91
Coghill, Dr. M., approved corporal cor-
rection for a wife, 251
Coleridge, moderately successful as
lecturer, 164; on Shakespeare, 307;
as journalist, 318
Colley, Sir G., character of his defeat,
121, 122
Commin of Denwick invents reaping-
machine, 102, note 1
Comoy, John, demises his wife, 230,
note 2
Congo, anticipations about the region of
the, 31
Corneille modernises the story of the
Cid, 233; his Medea quoted, 337
Cortez, 33, 34
Courier, 151; transformed by jealousy,
297; a transcendent journalist, 319,
320; on literary reputation, 332
Cousin on the source of inspiration in
writers, 320
Cowley overrated by Johnson, 308
Criticism invaluable and fairly certain
in science, 304-306; influenced by
fashion and feeling in taste, 306, 307;
apt to be too favourable, 307-309;
likely to decline still further as the
highest standards are disused, 310, 311
Cromwell, Puritan and Roman elements
in, 275; adopts promotion by merit,
279; impossible in modern England or
the United States, 327, 328
DALTON's discovery unsurpassable, 291
Dante perhaps a gainer by exile, 149;
and by city life, 150; proscribed by
Rome, 264
Darwin, Erasmus, dreams of, 290, and
note
Darwin not a liver in cities, 157; pro-
scribed by Rome, 264; belief in,
267; value of his discovery, 291,
303; admirable style of, 312; varied
work by, 313
Davis, President, eulogised by Gladstone,
4
Death, Black, effects of, 153
Debts, national, often rightly incurred,
170, 171; or on plausible grounds,
171-173; may be dangerous, 173,
174; because (1) the State undertakes
too much, 174, 175; and (2) then
national integrity breaks down under
the burden, 175-177
Decrès on the term of service, 119
Democracy, real meaning of, 109, 261
Demosthenes, 315
Diaz, Porfirio, of mixed descent, 55
Dickens as lecturer, 164
Diocesan courts, 195, and note
Directory, French, issues orders denying
quarter to Englishmen, 139
Disraeli on Peel, 330
Drake, 262
Dramatic poetry is dying out because
passions are weaker, 296-298; and
because topics have been exhausted,
298, 299
Dryden as a critic, 306, 307
Duff, Grant, on Indian reforms, 83; on
effects of Thirty Years' War, 90,
note
Dumas the younger, 167
Dutch at the Cape, 35, 36; in Natal,
36, 37; in Java, 42
ECCLESIASTICAL court, powers of, 196
Ecuador, Indians in, 52; whites in, 54;
a tropical Switzerland, 58
Education, State, a necessity, 11
Edward III., debts not yet paid, 177
Eliot, George, restricts her social inter-
course, 157; was praised for inferior
work, 309
Emancipation, slave, a sound bargain,
171
Emigration weakens national feeling,
257, 258
Emigrés, French, disloyal to their
country, 190; well compensated, 191
England, treatment of children in, 246,
and note; is indebted to alien immi-
grants, 285
English debt being reduced, 171
English race, tendency of, to State
Socialism, 96-98
FAME always capriciously given, 329-
331; and likely to be more evenly dis-
tributed hereafter than now, 331-333
Family, unit of State, 228; powers of
the paterfamilias anciently very great,
228-231; the blood-feud, 231-233;
rights over life in, 233-235
Family feeling, advantages of, 253-256
Ferrar, Nicholas, 274
Finlay as historian, 313
Flemings, settlement of, in England,
283
Fletcher of Saltoun on Scotch pauperism,
208
Fleury a peace-loving minister, 137
Fonblanque on Peel, 330
Fortescue quoted, 96
Foy, General, on insurrectionary soldiers,
352
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
116; on reforms in French organisa-
tion, 117
Fox, predictions by, 3; knew the
classics, 311
France, Reign of Terror in, 25, 26; in-
crease of population in, 68, 74, 75;
outstrips England in ironclads, 103;
adaptable to the stationary state,
105; gained by defeat at Sedan, 141;
education in, 215, 216; law and
practice of marriage in, 231, 240-243
Francis, St., condemns intellect, 212;
compassionates animals, 218
Frederick II., 46; his economical policy,
107; his ambition, 137
French army, size of, in 1740, 95,
note 2
French princes, profligacy of, 198
French society broken up by the Second
Empire, 158
Frobisher, 262
Froeschwiller, French cuirassiers at, 139
Future life, belief in, impaired, 271, 273
GALDOS paints Spanish villager, 169
Garibaldi worked as a soap-boiler, 286
Garrick made Shakespeare popular, 307
George IV. not reproved by the Church,
198
Germanic standard of chastity high,
239
Germany is driving out the Poles, 285
Gibbon, estimate by, of Roman subjects,
67; criticised by Maurice, 89, note;
his excellent work, 303, 304; the
best Church historian, 304, and note;
his concision, 313; his expectation
of life, 323; his estimate of the time
of the Antonines, 339
Gilbert, admirable work of, 166
Gladstone, eulogy of President Davis
by, 4
Gobelins, tapestry of, 107
Goethe on English inventiveness, 102,
note 2; on progress, 203; on the
beginnings of a science, 313; his liter-
ary articles, 318
Goldsmith predicts changes in France,
Germany, Holland, and Sweden, 5, 6
Gray's view of the attributes of power,
328
Great men careless of gain, 288; their
importance circumscribed in modern
society, 326, 328
Greeks comparatively exterminated, 69;
appreciated city life, 147
Grey Town pestilential, 57
Grote, Mrs., disapproves marriage for
men of genius, 253
Guaranis, 56; docile, 59
Guardia, a half-caste, 56
Guatemala, few whites in, 33, 54
Guerillas of no real utility, 121
HALE, Sir M., uncritical, 305
Hamerton on French society, 202,
notes; vindicates French schools,
224; on the effects of marriage,
253
Hamilton, predictions by, 6
Hare's theory popularised by newspaper
discussion, 317
Hastings, Warren, not moral, by modern
standards, 202; his type disappearing,
262
Hawthorne criticises Englishmen, 100
Heine predicts defeat of France by
Germany, 7; criticises Englishmen,
100; his political articles, 318
Henry VIII., his aims 193, and note
Henry's (Patrick) oratory, 314, 315
Herschel on earthquakes, 141
Hindoos, 33, 34; increase of, 76; have
added nothing to thought, 341
Holberg's estimate of Englishmen, 99-101
Holland, education denominational in,
214
Homer perhaps influenced by town life,
150; comparatively forgotten, 332
Honduras impossible for Europeans,
57
Horace on barbarian wives, 238, note 1
Hottentots, few, at Cape in 1795, 36
Howe improves sewing-machine, 102,
note 1
Hugo, Victor, appreciates John Brown,
6, 7; his greatness as a dramatist,
: 167
Huguenots at the Cape, 35; in England,
283
Humaita, 33
Hutton's (R. H.) work as a journalist,
318
Hyder Ali ravages the Carnatic, 82
IBSEN partially appreciated, 167, 168
Ili, Chinese immigration into, 66;
massacres in, 82; Mahommedanism
stamped out in, 131
Immigration, alien rights of, every-
where restrained, 283-285; unfortun-
ate consequences of this restraint,
285-287
India, its people too numerous to be
exterminated, 34; character of re-
forms in, 83
Indians, 34; not dangerous in Argentine,
58; occupy fertile niches of Peru,
etc., 58
Inkerman, English infantry at, 139
Ireland, population in, 68
Irishmen, increase of, 69, 70, 75, 76
INDEX
353
Italy adaptable to the stationary state,
105; a gainer by war, 141
JAPANESE, 31, 32
Java, climate of, 42
Jemappes won by half-trained troops,
118
Jevons, Prof., on the coal-measures, 174,
note
Jews in Russia, 76-80; capable of
of agriculture, 77; causes of their
increase, 78, 79; appear a danger to
the Empire, 80
Johnson, Dr., a lover of town life, 147;
social sphere of, 157; his estimate of
Cowley and Shakespeare, 307; of
Savage and Gray, 308
Juarez, 33, 55
Junius, a journalist, 318; overrated,
319
Juvenal praises city life, with a reserva-
tion, 148, 149; too vehement for
modern times, 293
KAFFIRS take refuge under British rule,
36
Kanakas, some qualities of the, 32
Kant's estimate of Englishmen, 99; on
patriotism, 183
Keble on a moral order, 268, 269
Kempis on predestination, 268; his
view generally taken, 269
Kloster-Zeven, capitulation of, 122
Knowles, Sheridan, value of success of,
165
LABOUR, its regulation by law inevitable,
12
Lacordaire, why silenced, 194
Las Casas, 210
Laveleye on communal property, 106
Law, Mississippi scheme of, 177
Leibnitz, his doctrine of eternal life, 272
Lely on Englishmen, 99, note
Lesseps, M. de, vindicates climate of
Nicaragua, 57
Lewis, Cornewall, predictions by, 4-6
Life may be prolonged by science, 321,
322; and this will be a gain to
knowledge, 323; and to political
order, 323-324; but will rob life of
brightness and energy, 324-326
Local feeling dying out, 258
London, riotous meetings in, 281
Lords, House of, if abolished, 109
Louis XV., 190; censured by the Church,
197, 198
Lowell on patriotism, 183, 184
Loyola's conversion, 269
Luther's old name for the Turks, 133;
perplexed by the liberty of the
Reformation, 195; on temptations,
268
Lytton, Bulwer, success of, on the stage,
165
MACAULAY on Junius, 319
M'Cormick patents reaping-machine in
America, 102, note 1
Machiavel uses uncritical materials, 305
Magyars crowded out in Hungary, 69
Mahommedanism a possible force in
China, 131-133
Mahommedans of Yunnan, 34; of China,
132
Mahrattas, desolation caused by, 321
Maine's success, 309; work in journal-
ism, 318
Maistre, De, paradox by, 141; on teach-
ing religion, 216
Malaysia, capabilities of, 42, 43
Malthus, doctrines of, 142
Maories, 32
Marcus Aurelius, 89; his despondency,
339
Marlborough superseded by Wellington,
332
Marriage anciently indissoluble, 236-
238;
idea of purity imported into,
238-240; the marriage of suitability,
240-243; is being superseded by the
marriage of inclination, which implies
divorce, 243-245; and at least tends
to weaken the marriage bond, 245-
247;
diminished importance of,
favours individualism, 251-253
Mars-la-Tour, heroism of
infantry at, 139
Mashonaland, future of, 31
Matabeleland, future of, 31
Mauritius, decay of French in, 76
German
Meeting, public right of, everywhere
restrained, 281, 282
Meissen, porcelain of, 107
Mejia, 33, 55
Mendez, 56
Merv, 43, note, 44
Meteren's estimate of Englishmen, 99
Mexico, Indians of, not exterminated, 33;
whites can labour in, 33; population
of, how composed, 54, 55; ruling class
white, 56; use of guerillas revived in,
121
Michelet on French revolutionary levies,
116
Military education likely to be general-
ised, 136; in some respects advan-
tageous to character, 138-141, 265
Mill condemns State labour, 107, 108;
a master of style, 311, 312
Milton perhaps a gainer by solitude, 149
Milton a product of Puritan and Hellenic
4
2 A
354
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
influences, 273; his poetry compared
with Burke's prose, 300-302
Mirabeau approves Frederick II.'s politi-
cal economy, 107
Molière may become archaic, 332
Moltke's (Von) soldiers comparatively
humane, 141
Monasteries and pauperism, 205, 206
Money, love of, likely to be a permanent
force, 333-335; will be desired from
more selfish motives than now, 335, 336
Montaigne's allusions to well-known
names, 332
Morality not easily distinguished from
religion, 265
Morazan, 56
More, Sir Thomas, his principles of
action, 193; his doctrine of prayer,
170
Moreau, a civilian-made soldier, 118
Morocco, 44
Morris, his conception of a reformed
England, 27
Mozambique, 35
NAPOLEON I., forecasts by, 7, 8; esti-
mate of French revolutionary levies
by, 117-119; his wars reduced French
stature, 153; he regulates divorce,
238; adopts promotion by merit,
279; rescued France from anarchy,
326, 327; is becoming impossible in
France, 328; his view of fame, 331
Napoleon, Louis, believed in by English
society, 4; called a tyrant, 194; not
reproved by the clergy, 198
Nasmyth, 101; his hammer first used
in Creuzot, 102
Natal, example of, 36-38
Needle-gun tried and rejected by English
officers, 103
Negroes, American, dangerous increase
of, 10, 11, 59-63. Appendices A, B
Nelson would not be allowed to save the
Empire, 202
Newman, J. H., avoids London, 157
Newspapers are superseding the pamphlet,
the book of travel, and the philosophical
argument, 315-317
Newton discovered the one great secret,
291; made it familiar, 303
Nicander Nucius on Englishmen, 99, note
Nicaragua, few whites in, 33; impos-
sible for Europeans, 57; filibusters
meant to work in, with slaves, 58
Nicholas I., 9
Nicias, timidity of, 263
Noblemen, English, die out rapidly,
70-73
Novel, the, cannot take the place of
poetry, 301, 302
OGLE on the migration of population,
144, 155
Olmsted on comparative health of white
and negro, 62
Ontario, education law in, 214
Orissa, famine in, 84
Orton's (Professor) views about Indians,
52; about whites in the Amazon, 53;
finds an Indian governor, 56
Ovid loathes life out of Rome, 148
PAKENHAM beaten before New Orleans,
115
Palatines, settlement of, in England,
283
Palmerston controlled by his supporters,
327
Parents and children, legal relations of,
247-249; partly superseded by State
control, 249-251
Paris like Athens and Rome, 149, 263
Pascal a Jansenist, 274; a Puritan of
speculative genius, 275; a writer for
the day's need, 318
Patriotism will become increasingly im-
portant, 181, 182; a virtue of a
peculiar kind, 182-185; a very mixed
virtue, 185-187; is gradually taking
definite shape, 187, 188; and becoming
more possible in its best form, 188-190;
a higher feeling than loyalty, 190-192
Pauperism in England and Scotland,
208, 209
Pecock, Bishop, disgraced, 213; state-
ment of, about population, 339
Peel knew English literature, 311; was
steadily reviled, 330, 331
Pennsylvania, repudiation by, 176
Pepys, Samuel, 256
Pericles charged with impiety, 262
Persia, population of, 52; Shah of, 93
Peru, Indians of, not exterminated, 33;
a tropical Switzerland, 58; early civil-
isation of, 91
Peter the Great, 8, 46; his treatment of
his son, 229, 230
Peterborough a typical Englishman, 100
Philip II.'s treatment of his son, 229,
230
Philippe, Louis, a teacher, 284
Philoctetes, 148
Pitt attacked for purity of his life, 201
Pizarro, 33, 34
Plate, Lower, whites can labour in, 33
Plato's imperishable prose, 312
Pliny, social sphere of, 157
Poetry is dying out, except lyrical,
292-295; which is becoming richer
and more various, 295, 296; but
which may soon be exhausted, 300,
301, See Drama
INDEX
355
Police, how recruited in Loudon, 154,
note
Pompey, 239, note 1
Population, increase of, difficult to pre-
dict, 67, 68; methods to stint may
be adopted, 130
Prayer, belief in, modified, 269-271
Protection likely to be adopted by the
higher races, 128-130
Protestantism copied Catholicism, 24
Protestants, early outrages by, 200
Prussia a first-rate power, 110
Prussian army, size of, in 1740, 95,
note 1
Ptolemais as described by Synesius,
182
Puritans favour Church interference,
196; awake to repress incontinence,
198; Puritan superstition, 268; the
Puritan household, 275, 276
RAMUS silenced, 213
Reformation, the work of men under
forty, 325
Reichshoffen, French cuirassiers at, 139
Rémusat, De, on Junius, 319
Renaissance, the, excited great hopes,
340
Reuchlin attacked, 213
Revolution, French, the work of men
under forty, 325; excited great hopes,
340
Revolutions likely to be less violent,
322, 329
Richelieu a dictator, 326
Rochambeau powerfully assists the
Americans, 115
Rogers, Professor, on condition of work-
ing-class anciently, 127
Roland, Mdme., marriage of, 241, 242
Roman Empire under Trajan, 87, 88;
causes of its decline, 88, 90; de-
spondency attending its break-up,
321
Roman law of marriage, 236
Ross of Bladensburg beats American
militia, 115
Rothschild smuggles gold, 184, note
Rousseau predicts Revolution, 5; unlike
Voltaire, 150; his treatment of his
children reprobated, 229; super-
stitious experiment by, 268, note 3
Rowe, 307
Russia and Turkestan, 43, 44; effects
of conquest by, in Turkey in Asia,
63; capable of supporting a large
population, 105; strong for aggres-
sion, 110; has aims on Persia, 111;
gained by defeat in Crimea, 141; is
oppressing Jews and Germans, 285;
is largely indebted to foreigners, 285;
Russian army, size of, in 1740, 95
note 1
SAFFI taught in Oxford, 286
Saint invents sewing machine, 102
note 1
St. Aignan, 241.
St. Simon's view of marriage, 241, and
note 1
Salvation Army, 156
Sand's (G.) views on marriage, 243-245
Sanguin, 241
San Sebastian, surrender of, 139; atro-
cities at, 140, note
Saragossa, defences of, their character,
120, 121
Sardou, 167
Science not reconcilable with faith, 288-
290; is ceasing to impress the imag-
ination, 290-292
Scotland, increase of population in, 75
Scotchmen frugal, 169
Scott, Sir W., did admirable work, 301;
yet may be superseded, 302
Senegambia, 35
Sepoy outrages, 82
Sertorius thought of sailing for the For-
tunate Isles, 343
Servants, changed relations of, to ein-
ployers, 256, 257
Sèvres, porcelain of, 107
Sewell on the typical vertebra, 305
Shaftesbury, Lord, legislation by, 154
Shakespeare on the stage, 165; his songs,
168; his tragedy of Lear, 297
Shelburne, Lord, prediction by, 2
Shelley on the stage, 165; ostracised,
286, 302; not read in his lifetime, 331
Sheridan's oratory, 313, 314
Shirley on English pedigrees, 71
Shrewsbury, 210
Sidgwick (Prof. H.) on patriotism, 183
Smith, Adam, on mortality, 153, 154
Smith (H. J. S., Prof.) on constructive
chemistry, 291; on the crowding-out
of talent, 331
Smith, 210
Socialism, State, its essential aims in
land laws, 20; how it may be intro-
duced, 103-105; what influences will
modify it, 122, 123; it may tend to
promote health, 321
Socrates charged with impiety, 262
Spain, possessions of, under Philip II.,
92, 93; praised for policy, 93; cap-
able of supporting a large population,
105
Spaniards, greatness of, 93
Staël, Auguste de, advised by Napoleon,
286
Staël, Mdme. de, why she loved Paris, 149
356
NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER
:
State activity, increase of, 18-22; value
of, to the modern citizen, 224-226
Stationary state, its good and evil, 336-
338; arguments against it, 339-341;
invalid, 341, 342
Statistical Bureau of U.S., estimate by,
61
Strafford, a traitor, 190
Straits Settlement, Chinese in, 46, 47,
and note
Straw, Jack, confession of, 208, note
Sweden, increase of population in, 70
Swift's view of servants, 256; a trans-
cendent journalist, 319; on the ill-
fate of great men, 329, 330
Swinburne on the stage, 165; sometimes
irreverent, 201
Szechuen, fluctations of population in, 65
TACITUS praises the Germans, 89; social
sphere of, 157; on German marriages,
235; compared with Virgil, 302
Tae-Pings, character of their revolt, 34;
how put down, 83; its effect on
society, 34
Taine on English family life, 246, note 1
Talleyrand praises Hamilton, 6; his
sagacity, 8, and note
Tara, Hill of, meeting at, forbidden, 281
Tarragona, storm of, 140
Tartufe, a representative of the religious
man of his day, 274
Temper of European nations likely to
change, 130, 131
•
Tennyson on the stage, 165; has changed
the Arthurian legend for the worse,
296; his view of longevity, 322; his
optimism, 340
Texas, whites can labour in, 33; its
precedent, 59
Thackeray as lecturer, 164
Thirty Years' War, 81; its effect, 90
Thomas buys patent of sewing-machine,
102, note 1
Ticknor, M., prognostications by, 135,
170
Tocqueville, De, predictions by, 6, 8;
statement about French society by,
151; re-cast a portion of modern his-
tory, 303; not exhaustive, 304
Towns increasing upon the country, 142,
143; partly because of improved com-
munication, 143-145; partly because
education makes men social and
ambitious, 145-147; partly because
city life stimulates talent, 147-150;
though no fixed law can be laid down
as to this, 150-152. But city life is
unhealthy, 152-154; though much is
being done to improve it, 154, 155;
and the town population is only kept
vigorous by country immigrants, 155,
156. The old cities were open to
country influences, and with a manage-
able society, 156-158. The tendency
is for the individual to dwindle in
town-life, 158-160. Family feeling
withers up in town, 160-162; nor can
improved conditions of policy alto-
gether remedy this, 162, 163. On
the other hand, towns offer women
relief from ennui, 163, 164; though
the intellectual interests stimulated
are not the highest, 164-166; as the
drama is dying, 166-168; the music-
hall vulgar, 168. It seems accidental
that avarice is less a passion in towns
than in the country, 168, 169
Towton, battle of, 132
Transylvania, movement of population
in, 69
Trevisano, Andrea, on Englishmen, 99,
note
Trinidad, the marshes of, pestilential, 57
Tripoli, 44
Tunis, 44
Tschernischevski, dreams of, 290, and
note
Turkestan, Eastern, 43, note, 44
Turkestan, Western, Russia may colonise,
45
Turkish Empire, dissolution of, predicted,
8; inevitable, 45; greatness of, in
16th century, 93
Turks depress higher races, 68; moral
character of, 94, 95; how called by
Luther, 133
Tyler's followers behead an archbishop,
208
UNDERHILL, 210
United States filling up rapidly, 14, 15;
the better for the War of Independ-
ence, 141; urban population in, 142,
143
VALERIUS, Maximus, on continence, 239
Valmy, a victory by half-trained troops,
118
Venezuela, described by Eastwick, 59
Verbrugghe, M., defends climate of
Nicaragua, 57
Victoria and State landlordism, 19;
State employees in, 21, 22; effects of
Chinese labour in, 125; clergy of,
oppose State education, 215; having
failed to educate, 215; law of divorce
in, 239; Medical Board of, refused to
register a Chinese doctor, 283, 284;
its teaching service a close one, 284 ;
death-rate of children in, 322
Virginia, a mere breeding-place, 210
INDEX
357
Voltaire on earthquakes, 141; his in-
fluence, 150; on Shakespeare, 307
WALPOLE, a peace-loving Minister, 137
War never likely to be replaced by
arbitration, 136-138
Webster, 167
Wellington, predictions by, 3, 4; wrong
forecast of, by Napoleon, 8; forbids
English and
and French outposts to
mingle, 140, note; extenuates atro-
cities at San Sebastian, 141
Wieliczka, mine of, 107
Wiener's views about Indians in Peru,
52, 53; knows a half-caste priest, 56
Women, how affected by changes in
society, 276-279
Wurtemberg, depopulation of, in Thirty
Years' War, 81, 82
YNGLINGA SAGA, quoted, 343
York, Duke of, employed, though provedly
incapable, 280
Young's (Arthur) sound estimate of the
Revolution, 6
Yunnan, 34; massacres in, 82; Mahom-
medanism stamped out in, 131
ZAMBESI, anticipations about the region
of the, 33
Zealand, New, and progressive land-tax,
19, 329
Zulus, 36, 37
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