The Ancien Régime

Transcribed from the 1902 "Historical Lectures and Essays" Macmillan and

Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

THE ANCIEN REGIME

by Charles Kingsley

PREFACE

The rules of the Royal Institution forbid (and wisely) religious or

political controversy. It was therefore impossible for me in these

Lectures, to say much which had to be said, in drawing a just and

complete picture of the Ancien Regime in France. The passages inserted

between brackets, which bear on religious matters, were accordingly not

spoken at the Royal Institution.

But more. It was impossible for me in these Lectures, to bring forward

as fully as I could have wished, the contrast between the continental

nations and England, whether now, or during the eighteenth century. But

that contrast cannot be too carefully studied at the present moment. In

proportion as it is seen and understood, will the fear of revolution (if

such exists) die out among the wealthier classes; and the wish for it (if

such exists) among the poorer; and a large extension of the suffrage will

be looked on as--what it actually is--a safe and harmless concession to

the wishes--and, as I hold, to the just rights--of large portion of the

British nation.

There exists in Britain now, as far as I can see, no one of those evils

which brought about the French Revolution. There is no widespread

misery, and therefore no widespread discontent, among the classes who

live by hand-labour. The legislation of the last generation has been

steadily in favour of the poor, as against the rich; and it is even more

true now than it was in 1789, that--as Arthur Young told the French mob

which stopped his carriage--the rich pay many taxes (over and above the

poor-rates, a direct tax on the capitalist in favour of the labourer)

more than are paid by the poor. "In England" (says M. de Tocqueville of

even the eighteenth century) "the poor man enjoyed the privilege of

exemption from taxation; in France, the rich." Equality before the law

is as well-nigh complete as it can be, where some are rich and others

poor; and the only privileged class, it sometimes seems to me, is the

pauper, who has neither the responsibility of self-government, nor the

toil of self-support.

A minority of malcontents, some justly, some unjustly, angry with the

present state of things, will always exist in this world. But a majority

of malcontents we shall never have, as long as the workmen are allowed to

keep untouched and unthreatened their rights of free speech, free public

meeting, free combination for all purposes which do not provoke a breach

of the peace. There may be (and probably are) to be found in London and

the large towns, some of those revolutionary propagandists who have

terrified and tormented continental statesmen since the year 1815. But

they are far fewer in number than in 1848; far fewer still (I believe)

than in 1831; and their habits, notions, temper, whole mental

organisation, is so utterly alien to that of the average Englishman, that

it is only the sense of wrong which can make him take counsel with them,

or make common cause with them. Meanwhile, every man who is admitted to

a vote, is one more person withdrawn from the temptation to disloyalty,

and enlisted in maintaining the powers that be--when they are in the

wrong, as well as when they are in the right. For every Englishman is by

his nature conservative; slow to form an opinion; cautious in putting it

into effect; patient under evils which seem irremediable; persevering in

abolishing such as seem remediable; and then only too ready to acquiesce

in the earliest practical result; to "rest and be thankful." His faults,

as well as his virtues, make him anti-revolutionary. He is generally too

dull to take in a great idea; and if he does take it in, often too

selfish to apply it to any interest save his own. But now and then, when

the sense of actual injury forces upon him a great idea, like that of

Free-trade or of Parliamentary Reform, he is indomitable, however slow

and patient, in translating his thought into fact: and they will not be

wise statesmen who resist his dogged determination. If at this moment he

demands an extension of the suffrage eagerly and even violently, the wise

statesman will give at once, gracefully and generously, what the

Englishman will certainly obtain one day, if he has set his mind upon it.

If, on the other hand, he asks for it calmly, then the wise statesman

(instead of mistaking English reticence for apathy) will listen to his

wishes all the more readily; seeing in the moderation of the demand, the

best possible guarantee for moderation in the use of the thing demanded.

And, be it always remembered, that in introducing these men into the

"balance of the Constitution," we introduce no unknown quantity.

Statesmen ought to know them, if they know themselves; to judge what the

working man would do by what they do themselves. He who imputes virtues

to his own class imputes them also to the labouring class. He who

imputes vices to the labouring class, imputes them to his own class. For

both are not only of the same flesh and blood, but, what is infinitely

more important, of the same spirit; of the same race; in innumerable

cases, of the same ancestors. For centuries past the most able of these

men have been working upwards into the middle class, and through it,

often, to the highest dignities, and the highest family connections; and

the whole nation knows how they have comported themselves therein. And,

by a reverse process (of which the physiognomist and genealogist can give

abundant proof), the weaker members of that class which was dominant

during the Middle Age have been sinking downward, often to the rank of

mere day-labourers, and carrying downward with them--sometimes in a very

tragical and pathetic fashion--somewhat of the dignity and the refinement

which they had learnt from their ancestors.

Thus has the English nation (and as far as I can see, the Scotch

likewise) become more homogeneous than any nation of the Continent, if we

except France since the extermination of the Frankish nobility. And for

that very reason, as it seems to me, it is more fitted than any other

European nation for the exercise of equal political rights; and not to be

debarred of them by arguments drawn from countries which have been

governed--as England has not been--by a caste.

The civilisation, not of mere book-learning, but of the heart; all that

was once meant by "manners"--good breeding, high feeling, respect for

self and respect for others--are just as common (as far as I have seen)

among the hand-workers of England and Scotland, as among any other class;

the only difference is, that these qualities develop more early in the

richer classes, owing to that severe discipline of our public schools,

which makes mere lads often fit to govern, because they have learnt to

obey: while they develop later--generally not till middle age--in the

classes who have not gone through in their youth that Spartan training,

and who indeed (from a mistaken conception of liberty) would not endure

it for a day. This and other social drawbacks which are but too patent,

retard the manhood of the working classes. That it should be so, is a

wrong. For if a citizen have one right above all others to demand

anything of his country, it is that he should be educated; that whatever

capabilities he may have in him, however small, should have their fair

and full chance of development. But the cause of the wrong is not the

existence of a caste, or a privileged class, or of anything save the

plain fact, that some men will be always able to pay more for their

children's education than others; and that those children will,

inevitably, win in the struggle of life.

Meanwhile, in this fact is to be found the most weighty, if not the only

argument against manhood suffrage, which would admit many--but too many,

alas!--who are still mere boys in mind. To a reasonable household

suffrage it cannot apply. The man who (being almost certainly married,

and having children) can afford to rent a 5 pound tenement in a town, or

in the country either, has seen quite enough of life, and learnt quite

enough of it, to form a very fair judgment of the man who offers to

represent him in Parliament; because he has learnt, not merely something

of his own interest, or that of his class, but--what is infinitely more

important--the difference between the pretender and the honest man.

The causes of this state of society, which is peculiar to Britain, must

be sought far back in the ages. It would seem that the distinction

between "earl and churl" (the noble and the non-noble freeman) was

crushed out in this island by the two Norman conquests--that of the Anglo-

Saxon nobility by Sweyn and Canute; and that of the Anglo-Danish nobility

by William and his Frenchmen. Those two terrible calamities, following

each other in the short space of fifty years, seem to have welded

together, by a community of suffering, all ranks and races, at least

south of the Tweed; and when the English rose after the storm, they rose

as one homogeneous people, never to be governed again by an originally

alien race. The English nobility were, from the time of Magna Charta,

rather an official nobility, than, as in most continental countries, a

separate caste; and whatever caste tendencies had developed themselves

before the Wars of the Roses (as such are certain to do during centuries

of continued wealth and power), were crushed out by the great

revolutionary events of the next hundred years. Especially did the

discovery of the New World, the maritime struggle with Spain, the

outburst of commerce and colonisation during the reigns of Elizabeth and

James, help toward this good result. It was in vain for the Lord Oxford

of the day, sneering at Raleigh's sudden elevation, to complain that as

on the virginals, so in the State, "Jacks went up, and heads went down."

The proudest noblemen were not ashamed to have their ventures on the high

seas, and to send their younger sons trading, or buccaneering, under the

conduct of low-born men like Drake, who "would like to see the gentleman

that would not set his hand to a rope, and hale and draw with the

mariners." Thus sprang up that respect for, even fondness for, severe

bodily labour, which the educated class of no nation save our own has

ever felt; and which has stood them in such good stead, whether at home

or abroad. Thus, too, sprang up the system of society by which (as the

ballad sets forth) the squire's son might be a "'prentice good," and

marry

"The bailiff's daughter dear

That dwelt at Islington,"

without tarnishing, as he would have done on the Continent, the scutcheon

of his ancestors. That which has saved England from a central despotism,

such as crushed, during the eighteenth century, every nation on the

Continent, is the very same peculiarity which makes the advent of the

masses to a share in political power safe and harmless; namely, the

absence of caste, or rather (for there is sure to be a moral fact

underlying and causing every political fact) the absence of that wicked

pride which perpetuates caste; forbidding those to intermarry whom nature

and fact pronounce to be fit mates before God and man.

These views are not mine only. They have been already set forth so much

more forcibly by M. de Tocqueville, that I should have thought it

unnecessary to talk about them, were not the rhetorical phrases, "Caste,"

"Privileged Classes," "Aristocratic Exclusiveness," and such-like,

bandied about again just now, as if they represented facts. If there

remain in this kingdom any facts which correspond to those words, let

them be abolished as speedily as possible: but that such do remain was

not the opinion of the master of modern political philosophy, M. de

Tocqueville.

He expresses his surprise "that the fact which distinguishes England from

all other modern nations, and which alone can throw light on her

peculiarities, . . . has not attracted more attention, . . . and that

habit has rendered it, as it were, imperceptible to the English

themselves--that England was the only country in which the system of

caste had been not only modified, but effectually destroyed. The

nobility and the middle classes followed the same business, embraced the

same professions, and, what is far more significant, intermarried with

each other. The daughter of the greatest nobleman" (and this, if true of

the eighteenth century, has become far more true of the nineteenth)

"could already, without disgrace, marry a man of yesterday." . . .

"It has often been remarked that the English nobility has been more

prudent, more able, and less exclusive than any other. It would have

been much nearer the truth to say, that in England, for a very long time

past, no nobility, properly so called, have existed, if we take the word

in the ancient and limited sense it has everywhere else retained." . . .

"For several centuries the word 'gentleman'" (he might have added,

"burgess") "has altogether changed its meaning in England; and the word

'roturier' has ceased to exist. In each succeeding century it is applied

to persons placed somewhat lower in the social scale" (as the "bagman" of

Pickwick has become, and has deserved to become, the "commercial

gentleman" of our day). "At length it travelled with the English to

America, where it is used to designate every citizen indiscriminately.

Its history is that of democracy itself." . . .

"If the middle classes of England, instead of making war upon the

aristocracy, have remained so intimately connected with it, it is not

especially because the aristocracy is open to all, but rather, because

its outline was indistinct, and its limit unknown: not so much because

any man might be admitted into it, as because it was impossible to say

with certainty when he took rank there: so that all who approached it

might look on themselves as belonging to it; might take part in its rule,

and derive either lustre or profit from its influence."

Just so; and therefore the middle classes of Britain, of whatever their

special political party, are conservative in the best sense of that word.

For there are not three, but only two, classes in England; namely, rich

and poor: those who live by capital (from the wealthiest landlord to the

smallest village shopkeeper); and those who live by hand-labour. Whether

the division between those two classes is increasing or not, is a very

serious question. Continued legislation in favour of the hand-labourer,

and a beneficence towards him, when in need, such as no other nation on

earth has ever shown, have done much to abolish the moral division. But

the social division has surely been increased during the last half

century, by the inevitable tendency, both in commerce and agriculture, to

employ one large capital, where several small ones would have been

employed a century ago. The large manufactory, the large shop, the large

estate, the large farm, swallows up the small ones. The yeoman, the

thrifty squatter who could work at two or three trades as well as till

his patch of moor, the hand-loom weaver, the skilled village craftsman,

have all but disappeared. The handworker, finding it more and more

difficult to invest his savings, has been more and more tempted to

squander them. To rise to the dignity of a capitalist, however small,

was growing impossible to him, till the rise of that co-operative

movement, which will do more than any social or political impulse in our

day for the safety of English society, and the loyalty of the English

working classes. And meanwhile--ere that movement shall have spread

throughout the length and breadth of the land, and have been applied, as

it surely will be some day, not only to distribution, not only to

manufacture, but to agriculture likewise--till then, the best judges of

the working men's worth must be their employers; and especially the

employers of the northern manufacturing population. What their judgment

is, is sufficiently notorious. Those who depend most on the working men,

who have the best opportunities of knowing them, trust them most

thoroughly. As long as great manufacturers stand forward as the

political sponsors of their own workmen, it behoves those who cannot have

had their experience, to consider their opinion as conclusive. As for

that "influence of the higher classes" which is said to be endangered

just now; it will exist, just as much as it deserves to exist. Any man

who is superior to the many, whether in talents, education, refinement,

wealth, or anything else, will always be able to influence a number of

men--and if he thinks it worth his while, of votes--by just and lawful

means. And as for unjust and unlawful means, let those who prefer them

keep up heart. The world will go on much as it did before; and be always

quite bad enough to allow bribery and corruption, jobbery and nepotism,

quackery and arrogance, their full influence over our home and foreign

policy. An extension of the suffrage, however wide, will not bring about

the millennium. It will merely make a large number of Englishmen

contented and loyal, instead of discontented and disloyal. It may make,

too, the educated and wealthy classes wiser by awakening a wholesome

fear--perhaps, it may be, by awakening a chivalrous emulation. It may

put the younger men of the present aristocracy upon their mettle, and

stir them up to prove that they are not in the same effete condition as

was the French noblesse in 1789. It may lead them to take the warnings

which have been addressed to them, for the last thirty years, by their

truest friends--often by kinsmen of their own. It may lead them to ask

themselves why, in a world which is governed by a just God, such great

power as is palpably theirs at present is entrusted to them, save that

they may do more work, and not less, than other men, under the penalties

pronounced against those to whom much is given, and of whom much is

required. It may lead them to discover that they are in a world where it

is not safe to sit under the tree, and let the ripe fruit drop into your

mouth; where the "competition of species" works with ruthless energy

among all ranks of being, from kings upon their thrones to the weeds upon

the waste; where "he that is not hammer, is sure to be anvil;" and he who

will not work, neither shall he eat. It may lead them to devote that

energy (in which they surpass so far the continental aristocracies) to

something better than outdoor amusements or indoor dilettantisms. There

are those among them who, like one section of the old French noblesse,

content themselves with mere complaints of "the revolutionary tendencies

of the age." Let them beware in time; for when the many are on the

march, the few who stand still are certain to be walked over. There are

those among them who, like another section of the French noblesse, are

ready, more generously than wisely, to throw away their own social and

political advantages, and play (for it will never be really more than

playing) at democracy. Let them, too, beware. The penknife and the axe

should respect each other; for they were wrought from the same steel: but

the penknife will not be wise in trying to fell trees. Let them accept

their own position, not in conceit and arrogance, but in fear and

trembling; and see if they cannot play the man therein, and save their

own class; and with it, much which it has needed many centuries to

accumulate and to organise, and without which no nation has yet existed

for a single century. They are no more like the old French noblesse,

than are the commercial class like the old French bourgeoisie, or the

labouring like the old French peasantry. Let them prove that fact by

their deeds during the next generation; or sink into the condition of

mere rich men, exciting, by their luxury and laziness, nothing but envy

and contempt.

Meanwhile, behind all classes and social forces--I had almost said, above

them all--stands a fourth estate, which will, ultimately, decide the form

which English society is to take: a Press as different from the literary

class of the Ancien Regime as is everything else English; and different

in this--that it is free.

The French Revolution, like every revolution (it seems to me) which has

convulsed the nations of Europe for the last eighty years, was caused

immediately--whatever may have been its more remote causes--by the

suppression of thought; or, at least, by a sense of wrong among those who

thought. A country where every man, be he fool or wise, is free to speak

that which is in him, can never suffer a revolution. The folly blows

itself off like steam, in harmless noise; the wisdom becomes part of the

general intellectual stock of the nation, and prepares men for gradual,

and therefore for harmless, change.

As long as the press is free, a nation is guaranteed against sudden and

capricious folly, either from above or from below. As long as the press

is free, a nation is guaranteed against the worse evil of persistent and

obstinate folly, cloaking itself under the venerable shapes of tradition

and authority. For under a free press, a nation must ultimately be

guided not by a caste, not by a class, not by mere wealth, not by the

passions of a mob: but by mind; by the net result of all the common-sense

of its members; and in the present default of genius, which is un-common

sense, common-sense seems to be the only, if not the best, safeguard for

poor humanity.

1867

LECTURE I--CASTE

[Delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.]

These Lectures are meant to be comments on the state of France before the

French Revolution. To English society, past or present, I do not refer.

For reasons which I have set forth at length in an introductory

discourse, there never was any Ancien Regime in England.

Therefore, when the Stuarts tried to establish in England a system which

might have led to a political condition like that of the Continent, all

classes combined and exterminated them; while the course of English

society went on as before.

On the contrary, England was the mother of every movement which

undermined, and at last destroyed, the Ancien Regime.

From England went forth those political theories which, transmitted from

America to France, became the principles of the French Revolution. From

England went forth the philosophy of Locke, with all its immense results.

It is noteworthy, that when Voltaire tries to persuade people, in a

certain famous passage, that philosophers do not care to trouble the

world--of the ten names to whom he does honour, seven names are English.

"It is," he says, "neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Boyle, nor Spinoza,

nor Hobbes, nor Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr. Collins, nor Mr. Toland, nor

Fludd, nor Baker, who have carried the torch of discord into their

countries." It is worth notice, that not only are the majority of these

names English, but that they belong not to the latter but to the former

half of the eighteenth century; and indeed, to the latter half of the

seventeenth.

So it was with that Inductive Physical Science, which helped more than

all to break up the superstitions of the Ancien Regime, and to set man

face to face with the facts of the universe. From England, towards the

end of the seventeenth century, it was promulgated by such men as Newton,

Boyle, Sydenham, Ray, and the first founders of our Royal Society.

In England, too, arose the great religious movements of the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries--and especially that of a body which I can never

mention without most deep respect--the Society of Friends. At a time

when the greater part of the Continent was sunk in spiritual sleep, these

men were reasserting doctrines concerning man, and his relation to his

Creator, which, whether or not all believe them (as I believe them) to be

founded on eternal fact, all must confess to have been of incalculable

benefit to the cause of humanity and civilisation.

From England, finally, about the middle of the eighteenth century, went

forth--promulgated by English noblemen--that freemasonry which seems to

have been the true parent of all the secret societies of Europe. Of this

curious question, more hereafter. But enough has been said to show that

England, instead of falling, at any period, into the stagnation of the

Ancien Regime, was, from the middle of the seventeenth century, in a

state of intellectual growth and ferment which communicated itself

finally to the continental nations. This is the special honour of

England; universally confessed at the time. It was to England that the

slowly-awakening nations looked, as the source of all which was noble,

true, and free, in the dawning future.

It will be seen, from what I have said, that I consider the Ancien Regime

to begin in the seventeenth century. I should date its commencement--as

far as that of anything so vague, unsystematic, indeed anarchic, can be

defined--from the end of the Thirty Years' War, and the peace of

Westphalia in 1648.

For by that time the mighty spiritual struggles and fierce religious

animosities of the preceding century had worn themselves out. And, as

always happens, to a period of earnest excitement had succeeded one of

weariness, disgust, half-unbelief in the many questions for which so much

blood had been shed. No man had come out of the battle with altogether

clean hands; some not without changing sides more than once. The war had

ended as one, not of nations, not even of zealots, but of mercenaries.

The body of Europe had been pulled in pieces between them all; and the

poor soul thereof--as was to be expected--had fled out through the gaping

wounds. Life, mere existence, was the most pressing need. If men

could--in the old prophet's words--find the life of their hand, they were

content. High and low only asked to be let live. The poor asked

it--slaughtered on a hundred battle-fields, burnt out of house and home:

vast tracts of the centre of Europe were lying desert; the population was

diminished for several generations. The trading classes, ruined by the

long war, only asked to be let live, and make a little money. The

nobility, too, only asked to be let live. They had lost, in the long

struggle, not only often lands and power, but their ablest and bravest

men; and a weaker and meaner generation was left behind, to do the

governing of the world. Let them live, and keep what they had. If signs

of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were

feverish, factitious, temporary--soon, as the event proved, to droop into

the general exhaustion. If wars were still to be waged they were to be

wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for

the mightiest invisible interests of man. The exhaustion was general;

and to it we must attribute alike the changes and the conservatism of the

Ancien Regime. To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism,

and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has set forth in a

book which I shall have occasion often to quote. To it is owing, too,

that longing, which seems to us childish, after ancient forms,

etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities diplomatic, legal,

ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to keepsakes of the past--revered

relics of more intelligible and better-ordered times. If the spirit had

been beaten out of them in a century of battle, that was all the more

reason for keeping up the letter. They had had a meaning once, a life

once; perhaps there was a little life left in them still; perhaps the dry

bones would clothe themselves with flesh once more, and stand upon their

feet. At least it was useful that the common people should so believe.

There was good hope that the simple masses, seeing the old dignities and

formalities still parading the streets, should suppose that they still

contained men, and were not mere wooden figures, dressed artistically in

official costume. And, on the whole, that hope was not deceived. More

than a century of bitter experience was needed ere the masses discovered

that their ancient rulers were like the suits of armour in the Tower of

London--empty iron astride of wooden steeds, and armed with lances which

every ploughboy could wrest out of their hands, and use in his own

behalf.

The mistake of the masses was pardonable. For those suits of armour had

once held living men; strong, brave, wise; men of an admirable temper;

doing their work according to their light, not altogether well--what man

does that on earth?--but well enough to make themselves necessary to, and

loyally followed by, the masses whom they ruled. No one can read fairly

the "Gesta Dei per Francos in Oriente," or the deeds of the French

Nobility in their wars with England, or those tales--however legendary--of

the mediaeval knights, which form so noble an element in German

literature, without seeing, that however black were these men's

occasional crimes, they were a truly noble race, the old Nobility of the

Continent; a race which ruled simply because, without them, there would

have been naught but anarchy and barbarism. To their chivalrous ideal

they were too often, perhaps for the most part, untrue: but, partial and

defective as it is, it is an ideal such as never entered into the mind of

Celt or Gaul, Hun or Sclav; one which seems continuous with the spread of

the Teutonic conquerors. They ruled because they did practically raise

the ideal of humanity in the countries which they conquered, a whole

stage higher. They ceased to rule when they were, through their own

sins, caught up and surpassed in the race of progress by the classes

below them.

But, even when at its best, their system of government had in it--like

all human invention--original sin; an unnatural and unrighteous element,

which was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and ruin. The old

Nobility of Europe was not a mere aristocracy. It was a caste: a race

not intermarrying with the races below it. It was not a mere

aristocracy. For that, for the supremacy of the best men, all societies

strive, or profess to strive. And such a true aristocracy may exist

independent of caste, or the hereditary principle at all. We may

conceive an Utopia, governed by an aristocracy which should be really

democratic; which should use, under developed forms, that method which

made the mediaeval priesthood the one great democratic institution of old

Christendom; bringing to the surface and utilising the talents and

virtues of all classes, even to the lowest. We may conceive an

aristocracy choosing out, and gladly receiving into its own ranks as

equals, every youth, every maiden, who was distinguished by intellect,

virtue, valour, beauty, without respect to rank or birth; and rejecting

in turn, from its own ranks, each of its own children who fell below some

lofty standard, and showed by weakliness, dulness, or baseness,

incapacity for the post of guiding and elevating their fellow-citizens.

Thus would arise a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really most

worthy--the most highly organised in body and in mind--perpetually

recruited from below: from which, or from any other ideal, we are yet a

few thousand years distant.

But the old Ancien Regime would have shuddered, did shudder, at such a

notion. The supreme class was to keep itself pure, and avoid all taint

of darker blood, shutting its eyes to the fact that some of its most

famous heroes had been born of such left-handed marriages as that of

Robert of Normandy with the tanner's daughter of Falaise. "Some are so

curious in this behalf," says quaint old Burton, writing about 1650, "as

these old Romans, our modern Venetians, Dutch, and French, that if two

parties dearly love, the one noble, the other ignoble, they may not, by

their laws, match, though equal otherwise in years, fortunes, education,

and all good affection. In Germany, except they can prove their

gentility by three descents, they scorn to match with them. A nobleman

must marry a noblewoman; a baron, a baron's daughter; a knight, a

knight's. As slaters sort their slates, do they degrees and families."

And doubtless this theory--like all which have held their ground for many

centuries--at first represented a fact. These castes were, at first,

actually superior to the peoples over whom they ruled. I cannot, as long

as my eyes are open, yield to the modern theory of the equality--indeed

of the non-existence--of races. Holding, as I do, the primaeval unity of

the human race, I see in that race the same inclination to sport into

fresh varieties, the same competition of species between those varieties,

which Mr. Darwin has pointed out among plants and mere animals. A

distinguished man arises; from him a distinguished family; from it a

distinguished tribe, stronger, cunninger than those around. It asserts

its supremacy over its neighbours at first exactly as a plant or animal

would do, by destroying, and, where possible, eating them; next, having

grown more prudent, by enslaving them; next, having gained a little

morality in addition to its prudence, by civilising them, raising them

more or less toward its own standard. And thus, in every land,

civilisation and national life has arisen out of the patriarchal state;

and the Eastern scheik, with his wives, free and slave, and his hundreds

of fighting men born in his house, is the type of all primaeval rulers.

He is the best man of his horde--in every sense of the word best; and

whether he have a right to rule them or not, they consider that he has,

and are the better men for his guidance.

Whether this ought to have been the history of primaeval civilisation, is

a question not to be determined here. That it is the history thereof, is

surely patent to anyone who will imagine to himself what must have been.

In the first place, the strongest and cunningest savage must have had the

chance of producing children more strong and cunning than the average; he

would have--the strongest savage has still--the power of obtaining a

wife, or wives, superior in beauty and in household skill, which involves

superiority of intellect; and therefore his children would--some of them

at least--be superior to the average, both from the father's and the

mother's capacities. They again would marry select wives; and their

children again would do the same; till, in a very few generations, a

family would have established itself, considerably superior to the rest

of the tribe in body and mind, and become assuredly its ruling race.

Again, if one of that race invented a new weapon, a new mode of tillage,

or aught else which gave him power, that would add to the superiority of

his whole family. For the invention would be jealously kept among them

as a mystery, a hereditary secret. To this simple cause, surely, is to

be referred the system of hereditary caste occupations, whether in Egypt

or Hindoostan. To this, too, the fact that alike in Greek and in

Teutonic legend the chief so often appears, not merely as the best

warrior and best minstrel, but as the best smith, armourer, and

handicraftsman of his tribe. If, however, the inventor happened to be a

low-born genius, its advantages would still accrue to the ruling race.

For nothing could be more natural or more easy--as more than one legend

intimates--than that the king should extort the new secret from his

subject, and then put him to death to prevent any further publicity.

Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the

past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders

of mighty aristocracies--it may be, worshipped after their death as gods.

The first, who seems to have existed after the age in which the black

race colonised Australia, must have been surely a man worthy to hold rank

with our Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons. For he invented (and mind,

one man must have invented the thing first, and by the very nature of it,

invented it all at once) an instrument so singular, unexpected, unlike

anything to be seen in nature, that I wonder it has not been called, like

the plough, the olive, or the vine, a gift of the immortal gods: and yet

an instrument so simple, so easy, and so perfect, that it spread over all

races in Europe and America, and no substitute could be found for it till

the latter part of the fifteenth century. Yes, a great genius was he,

and the consequent founder of a great aristocracy and conquering race,

who first invented for himself and his children after him a--bow and

arrow.

The next--whether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak

of him in second place--was the man who was the potential ancestor of the

whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe; the man who

first, finding a foal upon the steppe, deserted by its dam, brought it

home, and reared it; and then bethought him of the happy notion of making

it draw--presumably by its tail--a fashion which endured long in Ireland,

and had to be forbidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth century.

A great aristocrat must that man have become. A greater still he who

first substituted the bit for the halter. A greater still he who first

thought of wheels. A greater still he who conceived the yoke and pole

for bearing up his chariot; for that same yoke, and pole, and chariot,

became the peculiar instrument of conquerors like him who mightily

oppressed the children of Israel, for he had nine hundred chariots of

iron. Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans--none of them

improved on the form of the conquering biga, till it was given up by a

race who preferred a pair of shafts to their carts, and who had learnt to

ride instead of drive. A great aristocrat, again, must he have been

among those latter races who first conceived the notion of getting on his

horse's back, accommodating his motions to the beast's, and becoming a

centaur, half-man, half-horse. That invention must have tended, in the

first instance, as surely toward democracy as did the invention of

firearms. A tribe of riders must have been always, more or less, equal

and free. Equal because a man on a horse would feel himself a man

indeed; because the art of riding called out an independence, a

self-help, a skill, a consciousness of power, a personal pride and

vanity, which would defy slavery. Free, because a tribe of riders might

be defeated, exterminated, but never enchained. They could never become

_gleboe adscripti_, bound to the soil, as long as they could take horse

and saddle, and away. History gives us more than one glimpse of such

tribes--the scourge and terror of the non-riding races with whom they

came in contact. Some, doubtless, remember how in the wars between

Alfred and the Danes, "the army" (the Scandinavian invaders) again and

again horse themselves, steal away by night from the Saxon infantry, and

ride over the land (whether in England or in France), "doing unspeakable

evil." To that special instinct of horsemanship, which still

distinguishes their descendants, we may attribute mainly the Scandinavian

settlement of the north and east of England. Some, too, may recollect

the sketch of the primeval Hun, as he first appeared to the astonished

and disgusted old Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus; the visages "more

like cakes than faces;" the "figures like those which are hewn out with

an axe on the poles at bridge-ends;" the rat-skin coats, which they wore

till they rotted off their limbs; their steaks of meat cooked between the

saddle and the thigh; the little horses on which "they eat and drink, buy

and sell, and sleep lying forward along his narrow neck, and indulging in

every variety of dream." And over and above, and more important

politically, the common councils "held on horseback, under the authority

of no king, but content with the irregular government of nobles, under

whose leading they force their way through all obstacles." A race--like

those Cossacks who are probably their lineal descendants--to be feared,

to be hired, to be petted, but not to be conquered.

Instances nearer home of free equestrian races we have in our own English

borderers, among whom (as Mr. Froude says) the farmers and their farm-

servants had but to snatch their arms and spring into their saddles and

they became at once the Northern Horse, famed as the finest light cavalry

in the world. And equal to them--superior even, if we recollect that

they preserved their country's freedom for centuries against the superior

force of England--were those troops of Scots who, century after century,

swept across the border on their little garrons, their bag of oatmeal

hanging by the saddle, with the iron griddle whereon to bake it; careless

of weather and of danger; men too swift to be exterminated, too

independent to be enslaved.

But if horsemanship had, in these cases, a levelling tendency it would

have the very opposite when a riding tribe conquered a non-riding one.

The conquerors would, as much as possible, keep the art and mystery of

horsemanship hereditary among themselves, and become a Ritterschaft or

chivalrous caste. And they would be able to do so: because the conquered

race would not care or dare to learn the new and dangerous art. There

are persons, even in England, who can never learn to ride. There are

whole populations in Europe, even now, when races have become almost

indistinguishably mixed, who seem unable to learn. And this must have

been still more the case when the races were more strongly separated in

blood and habits. So the Teutonic chief, with his gesitha, comites, or

select band of knights, who had received from him, as Tacitus has it, the

war-horse and the lance, established himself as the natural ruler--and

oppressor--of the non-riding populations; first over the aborigines of

Germany proper, tribes who seem to have been enslaved, and their names

lost, before the time of Tacitus; and then over the non-riding Romans and

Gauls to the South and West, and the Wendish and Sclavonic tribes to the

East. Very few in numbers, but mighty in their unequalled capacity of

body and mind, and in their terrible horsemanship, the Teutonic

Ritterschaft literally rode roughshod over the old world; never checked,

but when they came in contact with the free-riding hordes of the Eastern

steppes; and so established an equestrian caste, of which the [Greek

text] of Athens and the Equites of Rome had been only hints ending in

failure and absorption.

Of that equestrian caste the symbol was the horse. The favourite, and

therefore the chosen sacrifice of Odin, their ancestor and God, the

horse's flesh was eaten at the sacrificial meal; the horse's head, hung

on the ash in Odin's wood, gave forth oracular responses. As

Christianity came in, and the eating of horse-flesh was forbidden as

impiety by the Church, while his oracles dwindled down to such as that

which Falada's dead head gives to the goose-girl in the German tale, the

magic power of the horse figured only in ballads and legends: but his

real power remained.

The art of riding became an hereditary and exclusive science--at last a

pedantry, hampered by absurd etiquettes, and worse than useless

traditions; but the power and right to ride remained on the whole the

mark of the dominant caste. Terribly did they often abuse that special

power. The faculty of making a horse carry him no more makes a man a

good man, than the faculties of making money, making speeches, making

books, or making a noise about public abuses. And of all ruffians, the

worst, if history is to be trusted, is the ruffian on a horse; to whose

brutality of mind is superadded the brute power of his beast. A ruffian

on a horse--what is there that he will not ride over, and ride on,

careless and proud of his own shame? When the ancient chivalry of France

descended to that level, or rather delegated their functions to

mercenaries of that level--when the knightly hosts who fought before

Jerusalem allowed themselves to be superseded by the dragoons and

dragonnades of Louis XIV.--then the end of the French chivalry was at

hand, and came. But centuries before that shameful fall there had come

in with Christianity the new thought, that domination meant

responsibility; that responsibility demanded virtue. The words which

denoted rank, came to denote likewise high moral excellencies. The

nobilis, or man who was known, and therefore subject to public opinion,

was bound to behave nobly. The gentleman--gentile-man--who respected his

own gens, or family and pedigree, was bound to be gentle. The courtier,

who had picked up at court some touch of Roman civilisation from Roman

ecclesiastics, was bound to be courteous. He who held an "honour" or

"edel" of land was bound to be honourable; and he who held a "weorthig,"

or worthy, thereof, was bound himself to be worthy. In like wise, he who

had the right to ride a horse, was expected to be chivalrous in all

matters befitting the hereditary ruler, who owed a sacred debt to a long

line of forefathers, as well as to the state in which he dwelt; all

dignity, courtesy, purity, self-restraint, devotion--such as they were

understood in those rough days--centred themselves round the idea of the

rider as the attributes of the man whose supposed duty, as well as his

supposed right, was to govern his fellow-men, by example, as well as by

law and force;--attributes which gathered themselves up into that one

word--Chivalry: an idea, which, perfect or imperfect, God forbid that

mankind should ever forget, till it has become the possession--as it is

the God-given right--of the poorest slave that ever trudged on foot; and

every collier-lad shall have become--as some of those Barnsley men proved

but the other day they had become already:

A very gentle perfect knight.

Very unfaithful was chivalry to its ideal--as all men are to all ideals.

But bear in mind, that if the horse was the symbol of the ruling caste,

it was not at first its only strength. Unless that caste had had at

first spiritual, as well as physical force on its side, it would have

been soon destroyed--nay, it would have destroyed itself--by internecine

civil war. And we must believe that those Franks, Goths, Lombards, and

Burgunds, who in the early Middle Age leaped on the backs (to use Mr.

Carlyle's expression) of the Roman nations, were actually, in all senses

of the word, better men than those whom they conquered. We must believe

it from reason; for if not, how could they, numerically few, have held

for a year, much more for centuries, against millions, their dangerous

elevation? We must believe it, unless we take Tacitus's "Germania,"

which I absolutely refuse to do, for a romance. We must believe that

they were better than the Romanised nations whom they conquered, because

the writers of those nations, Augustine, Salvian, and Sidonius

Apollinaris, for example, say that they were such, and give proof

thereof. Not good men according to our higher standard--far from it;

though Sidonius's picture of Theodoric, the East Goth, in his palace of

Narbonne, is the picture of an eminently good and wise ruler. But not

good, I say, as a rule--the Franks, alas! often very bad men: but still

better, wiser, abler, than those whom they ruled. We must believe too,

that they were better, in every sense of the word, than those tribes on

their eastern frontier, whom they conquered in after centuries, unless we

discredit (which we have no reason to do) the accounts which the Roman

and Greek writers give of the horrible savagery of those tribes.

So it was in later centuries. One cannot read fairly the history of the

Middle Ages without seeing that the robber knight of Germany or of

France, who figures so much in modern novels, must have been the

exception, and not the rule: that an aristocracy which lived by the

saddle would have as little chance of perpetuating itself, as a

priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the mediaeval

Nobility has been as much slandered as the mediaeval Church; and the

exceptions taken--as more salient and exciting--for the average: that

side by side with ruffians like Gaston de Foix hundreds of honest

gentlemen were trying to do their duty to the best of their light, and

were raising, and not depressing, the masses below them--one very

important item in that duty being, the doing the whole fighting of the

country at their own expense, instead of leaving it to a standing army of

mercenaries, at the beck and call of a despot; and that, as M. de

Tocqueville says: "In feudal times, the Nobility were regarded pretty

much as the government is regarded in our own; the burdens they imposed

were endured in consequence of the security they afforded. The nobles

had many irksome privileges; they possessed many onerous rights: but they

maintained public order, they administered justice, they caused the law

to be executed, they came to the relief of the weak, they conducted the

business of the community. In proportion as they ceased to do these

things, the burden of their privileges appeared more oppressive, and

their existence became an anomaly in proportion as they ceased to do

these things." And the Ancien Regime may be defined as the period in

which they ceased to do these things--in which they began to play the

idlers, and expected to take their old wages without doing their old

work.

But in any case, government by a ruling caste, whether of the patriarchal

or of the feudal kind, is no ideal or permanent state of society. So far

from it, it is but the first or second step out of primeval savagery. For

the more a ruling race becomes conscious of its own duty, and not merely

of its own power--the more it learns to regard its peculiar gifts as

entrusted to it for the good of men--so much the more earnestly will it

labour to raise the masses below to its own level, by imparting to them

its own light; and so will it continually tend to abolish itself, by

producing a general equality, moral and intellectual; and fulfil that law

of self-sacrifice which is the beginning and the end of all virtue.

A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble

as themselves--that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward, though it

has not reached, the highest ideal of all.

But suppose that the very opposite tendency--inherent in the heart of

every child of man--should conquer. Suppose the ruling caste no longer

the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their

equals. Suppose them--shameful, but not without example--actually sunk

to be their inferiors. And that such a fall did come--nay, that it must

have come--is matter of history. And its cause, like all social causes,

was not a political nor a physical, but a moral cause. The profligacy of

the French and Italian aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged

itself on them by a curse (derived from the newly-discovered America)

from which they never recovered. The Spanish aristocracy suffered, I

doubt not very severely. The English and German, owing to the superior

homeliness and purity of ruling their lives, hardly at all. But the

continental caste, instead of recruiting their tainted blood by healthy

blood from below, did all, under pretence of keeping it pure, to keep it

tainted by continual intermarriage; and paid, in increasing weakness of

body and mind, the penalty of their exclusive pride. It is impossible

for anyone who reads the French memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the aristocracy therein

depicted was ripe for ruin--yea, already ruined--under any form of

government whatsoever, independent of all political changes. Indeed,

many of the political changes were not the causes but the effects of the

demoralisation of the noblesse. Historians will tell you how, as early

as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV. complained that

the nobles were quitting their country districts; how succeeding kings

and statesmen, notably Richelieu and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up

to Paris, that they might become mere courtiers, instead of powerful

country gentlemen; how those who remained behind were only the poor

_hobereaux_, little hobby-hawks among the gentry, who considered it

degradation to help in governing the parish, as their forefathers had

governed it, and lived shabbily in their chateaux, grinding the last

farthing out of their tenants, that they might spend it in town during

the winter. No wonder that with such an aristocracy, who had renounced

that very duty of governing the country, for which alone they and their

forefathers had existed, there arose government by intendants and sub-

delegates, and all the other evils of administrative centralisation,

which M. de Tocqueville anatomises and deplores. But what was the cause

of the curse? Their moral degradation. What drew them up to Paris save

vanity and profligacy? What kept them from intermarrying with the middle

class save pride? What made them give up the office of governors save

idleness? And if vanity, profligacy, pride, and idleness be not

injustices and moral vices, what are?

The race of heroic knights and nobles who fought under the walls of

Jerusalem--who wrestled, and not in vain, for centuries with the equally

heroic English, in defence of their native soil--who had set to all

Europe the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this;

their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, being--a perfect readiness

to fight duels.

Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller-General out of the lower-born

members of the Council of State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune

to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his greed,

ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man--abler, more

energetic, and often, to judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far

more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry--than was the count or

marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and

let him nevertheless become first his deputy, and then his master.

Understand me--I am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the

Ancien Regime, but against its caste principle--two widely different

elements, continually confounded nowadays.

The hereditary principle is good, because it is founded on fact and

nature. If men's minds come into the world blank sheets of paper--which

I much doubt--every other part and faculty of them comes in stamped with

hereditary tendencies and peculiarities. There are such things as

transmitted capabilities for good and for evil; and as surely as the

offspring of a good horse or dog is likely to be good, so is the

offspring of a good man, and still more of a good woman. If the parents

have any special ability, their children will probably inherit it, at

least in part; and over and above, will have it developed in them by an

education worthy of their parents and themselves. If man were--what he

is not--a healthy and normal species, a permanent hereditary caste might

go on intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself. But the same moral reason

which would make such a caste dangerous--indeed, fatal to the liberty and

development of mankind, makes it happily impossible. Crimes and follies

are certain, after a few generations, to weaken the powers of any human

caste; and unless it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with

the common stock of humanity, it must sink under that weakness, as the

ancient noblesse sank by its own vice. Of course there were exceptions.

The French Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and

like every day of judgment, divided between the good and the evil. But

it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few

Richelieus, Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayettes were but the

storks among the cranes involved in the wholesale doom due not to each

individual, but to a system and a class.

Profligacy, pride, idleness--these are the vices which we have to lay to

the charge of the Teutonic Nobility of the Ancien Regime in France

especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole

continent of Europe. But below them, and perhaps the cause of them all,

lay another and deeper vice--godlessness--atheism.

I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief. I mean want

of belief in duty, in responsibility. Want of belief that there was a

living God governing the universe, who had set them their work, and would

judge them according to their work. And therefore, want of belief, yea,

utter unconsciousness, that they were set in their places to make the

masses below them better men; to impart to them their own civilisation,

to raise them to their own level. They would have shrunk from that which

I just now defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because it

would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves. But the process

of abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from

within. So it must always be, in such a case. If a ruling class will

not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to

drag them down to theirs. That sense of justice which allowed

privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges as the salary

of a judge, or the immunity of a member of the House of Commons; when

they were earned, as in the Middle Age, by severe education, earnest

labour, and life and death responsibility in peace and war, will demand

the abolition of those privileges, when no work is done in return for

them, with a voice which must be heard, for it is the voice of truth and

justice.

But with that righteous voice will mingle another, most wicked, and yet,

alas! most flattering to poor humanity--the voice of envy, simple and

undisguised; of envy, which moralists hold to be one of the basest of

human passions; which can never be justified, however hateful or unworthy

be the envied man. And when a whole people, or even a majority thereof,

shall be possessed by that, what is there that they will not do?

Some are surprised and puzzled when they find, in the French Revolution

of 1793, the noblest and the foulest characters labouring in concert, and

side by side--often, too, paradoxical as it may seem, united in the same

personage. The explanation is simple. Justice inspired the one; the

other was the child of simple envy. But this passion of envy, if it

becomes permanent and popular, may avenge itself, like all other sins. A

nation may say to itself, "Provided we have no superiors to fall our

pride, we are content. Liberty is a slight matter, provided we have

equality. Let us be slaves, provided we are all slaves alike." It may

destroy every standard of humanity above its own mean average; it may

forget that the old ruling class, in spite of all its defects and crimes,

did at least pretend to represent something higher than man's necessary

wants, plus the greed of amassing money; never meeting (at least in the

country districts) any one wiser or more refined than an official or a

priest drawn from the peasant class, it may lose the belief that any

standard higher than that is needed; and, all but forgetting the very

existence of civilisation, sink contented into a dead level of

intellectual mediocrity and moral barbarism, crying, "Let us eat and

drink, for to-morrow we die."

A nation in such a temper will surely be taken at its word. Where the

carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered together; and there will

not be wanting to such nations--as there were not wanting in old Greece

and Rome--despots who will give them all they want, and more, and say to

them: "Yes, you shall eat and drink; and yet you shall not die. For I,

while I take care of your mortal bodies, will see that care is taken of

your immortal souls."

For there are those who have discovered, with the kings of the Holy

Alliance, that infidelity and scepticism are political mistakes, not so

much because they promote vice, as because they promote (or are supposed

to promote) free thought; who see that religion (no matter of what

quality) is a most valuable assistant to the duties of a minister of

police. They will quote in their own behalf Montesquieu's opinion that

religion is a column necessary to sustain the social edifice; they will

quote, too, that sound and true saying of De Tocqueville's: {1} "If the

first American who might be met, either in his own country, or abroad,

were to be stopped and asked whether he considered religion useful to the

stability of the laws and the good order of society, he would answer,

without hesitation, that no civilised society, but more especially none

in a state of freedom, can exist without religion. Respect for religion

is, in his eyes, the greatest guarantee of the stability of the State,

and of the safety of the community. Those who are ignorant of the

science of government, know that fact at least."

M. de Tocqueville, when he wrote these words, was lamenting that in

France, "freedom was forsaken;" "a thing for which it is said that no one

any longer cares in France." He did not, it seems to me, perceive that,

as in America the best guarantee of freedom is the reverence for a

religion or religions, which are free themselves, and which teach men to

be free; so in other countries the best guarantee of slavery is,

reverence for religions which are not free, and which teach men to be

slaves.

But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there are others who will see;

who will say: "If religion be the pillar of political and social order,

there is an order which is best supported by a religion which is adverse

to free thought, free speech, free conscience, free communion between man

and God. The more enervating the superstition, the more exacting and

tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, if we help it to

do its own. If it permit us to enslave the body, we will permit it to

enslave the soul."

And so may be inaugurated a period of that organised anarchy of which the

poet says:

It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs.

LECTURE II--CENTRALISATION

The degradation of the European nobility caused, of course, the increase

of the kingly power, and opened the way to central despotisms. The

bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class, whatever were its virtues, its

value, its real courage, were never able to stand alone against the

kings. Their capital, being invested in trade, was necessarily subject

to such sudden dangers from war, political change, bad seasons, and so

forth, that its holders, however individually brave, were timid as a

class. They could never hold out on strike against the governments, and

had to submit to the powers that were, whatever they were, under penalty

of ruin.

But on the Continent, and especially in France and Germany, unable to

strengthen itself by intermarriage with the noblesse, they retained that

timidity which is the fruit of the insecurity of trade; and had to submit

to a more and more centralised despotism, and grow up as they could, in

the face of exasperating hindrances to wealth, to education, to the

possession, in many parts of France, of large landed estates; leaving the

noblesse to decay in isolated uselessness and weakness, and in many cases

debt and poverty.

The system--or rather anarchy--according to which France was governed

during this transitional period, may be read in that work of M. de

Tocqueville's which I have already quoted, and which is accessible to all

classes, through Mr. H. Reeve's excellent translation. Every student of

history is, of course, well acquainted with that book. But as there is

reason to fear, from language which is becoming once more too common,

both in speech and writing, that the general public either do not know

it, or have not understood it, I shall take the liberty of quoting from

it somewhat largely. I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de

Tocqueville's book is founded on researches into the French Archives,

which have been made (as far as I am aware) only by him; and contains

innumerable significant facts, which are to be found (as far as I am

aware) in no other accessible work.

The French people--says M. de Tocqueville--made, in 1789, the greatest

effort which was ever made by any nation to cut, so to speak, their

destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had

heretofore been, from that which they sought to become hereafter. But he

had long thought that they had succeeded in this singular attempt much

less than was supposed abroad; and less than they had at first supposed

themselves. He was convinced that they had unconsciously retained, from

the former state of society, most of the sentiments, the habits, and even

the opinions, by means of which they had effected the destruction of that

state of things; and that, without intending it, they had used its

remains to rebuild the edifice of modern society. This is his thesis,

and this he proves, it seems to me, incontestably by documentary

evidence. Not only does he find habits which we suppose--or supposed

till lately--to have died with the eighteenth century, still living and

working, at least in France, in the nineteenth, but the new opinions

which we look on usually as the special children of the nineteenth

century, he shows to have been born in the eighteenth. France, he

considers, is still at heart what the Ancien Regime made her.

He shows that the hatred of the ruling caste, the intense determination

to gain and keep equality, even at the expense of liberty, had been long

growing up, under those influences of which I spoke in my first lecture.

He shows, moreover, that the acquiescence in a centralised

administration; the expectation that the government should do everything

for the people, and nothing for themselves; the consequent loss of local

liberties, local peculiarities; the helplessness of the towns and the

parishes: and all which issued in making Paris France, and subjecting the

whole of a vast country to the arbitrary dictates of a knot of despots in

the capital, was not the fruit of the Revolution, but of the Ancien

Regime which preceded it; and that Robespierre and his "Comite de Salut

Public," and commissioners sent forth to the four winds of heaven in

bonnet rouge and carmagnole complete, to build up and pull down,

according to their wicked will, were only handling, somewhat more

roughly, the same wires which had been handled for several generations by

the Comptroller-General and Council of State, with their provincial

intendants.

"Do you know," said Law to the Marquis d'Argenson, "that this kingdom of

France is governed by thirty intendants? You have neither parliament,

nor estates, nor governors. It is upon thirty masters of request,

despatched into the provinces, that their evil or their good, their

fertility or their sterility, entirely depend."

To do everything for the people, and let them do nothing for

themselves--this was the Ancien Regime. To be more wise and more loving

than Almighty God, who certainly does not do everything for the sons of

men, but forces them to labour for themselves by bitter need, and after a

most Spartan mode of education; who allows them to burn their hands as

often as they are foolish enough to put them into the fire; and to be

filled with the fruits of their own folly, even though the folly be one

of necessary ignorance; treating them with that seeming neglect which is

after all the most provident care, because by it alone can men be trained

to experience, self-help, science, true humanity; and so become not

tolerably harmless dolls, but men and women worthy of the name; with

The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;

The perfect spirit, nobly planned

To cheer, to counsel, and command.

Such seems to be the education and government appointed for man by the

voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatum, and the education, therefore, which

the man of science will accept and carry out. But the men of the Ancien

Regime--in as far as it was a Regime at all--tried to be wiser than the

Almighty. Why not? They were not the first, nor will be the last, by

many who have made the same attempt. So this Council of State settled

arbitrarily, not only taxes, and militia, and roads, but anything and

everything. Its members meddled, with their whole hearts and minds. They

tried to teach agriculture by schools and pamphlets and prizes; they sent

out plans for every public work. A town could not establish an octroi,

levy a rate, mortgage, sell, sue, farm, or administer their property,

without an order in council. The Government ordered public rejoicings,

saw to the firing of salutes, and illuminating of houses--in one case

mentioned by M. de Tocqueville, they fined a member of the burgher guard

for absenting himself from a Te Deum. All self-government was gone. A

country parish was, says Turgot, nothing but "an assemblage of cabins,

and of inhabitants as passive as the cabins they dwelt in." Without an

order of council, the parish could not mend the steeple after a storm, or

repair the parsonage gable. If they grumbled at the intendant, he threw

some of the chief persons into prison, and made the parish pay the

expenses of the horse patrol, which formed the arbitrary police of

France. Everywhere was meddling. There were reports on

statistics--circumstantial, inaccurate, and useless--as statistics are

too often wont to be. Sometimes, when the people were starving, the

Government sent down charitable donations to certain parishes, on

condition that the inhabitants should raise a sum on their part. When

the sum offered was sufficient, the Comptroller-General wrote on the

margin, when he returned the report to the intendant, "Good--express

satisfaction." If it was more than sufficient, he wrote, "Good--express

satisfaction and sensibility." There is nothing new under the sun. In

1761, the Government, jealous enough of newspapers, determined to start

one for itself, and for that purpose took under its tutelage the _Gazette

de France_. So the public newsmongers were of course to be the

provincial intendants, and their sub-newsmongers, of course, the

sub-delegates.

But alas! the poor sub-delegates seem to have found either very little

news, or very little which it was politic to publish. One reports that a

smuggler of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; another

that a woman in his district has had three girls at a birth; another that

a dreadful storm has happened, but--has done no mischief; a fourth--living

in some specially favoured Utopia--declares that in spite of all his

efforts he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will

subscribe to so useful a journal, and will exhort all respectable persons

to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal

seems to have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his

minister, who had of course expected to secure fine weather by nailing,

like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weather-glass.

Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped

there. But, by a process of evocation (as it was called), more and more

causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular

tribunals, to those of the intendants and the Council. Before the

intendant all the lower order of people were generally sent for trial.

Bread-riots were a common cause of such trials, and M. de Tocqueville

asserts that he has found sentences, delivered by the intendant, and a

local council chosen by himself, by which men were condemned to the

galleys, and even to death. Under such a system, under which an

intendant must have felt it his interest to pretend at all risks, that

all was going right, and to regard any disturbance as a dangerous

exposure of himself and his chiefs--one can understand easily enough that

scene which Mr. Carlyle has dramatised from Lacretelle, concerning the

canaille, the masses, as we used to call them a generation since:

"A dumb generation--their voice only an inarticulate cry. Spokesman, in

the king's council, in the world's forum, they have none that finds

credence. At rare intervals (as now, in 1775) they will fling down their

hoes, and hammers; and, to the astonishment of mankind, flock hither and

thither, dangerous, aimless, get the length even of Versailles. Turgot

is altering the corn trade, abrogating the absurdest corn laws; there is

dearth, real, or were it even factitious, an indubitable scarcity of

broad. And so, on the 2nd day of May, 1775, these waste multitudes do

here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces,

squalor, winged raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing

their petition of grievances. The chateau-gates must be shut; but the

king will appear on the balcony and speak to them. They have seen the

king's face; their petition of grievances has been, if not read, looked

at. In answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows forty feet high,

and the rest driven back to their dens for a time."

Of course. What more exasperating and inexpiable insult to the ruling

powers was possible than this? To persist in being needy and wretched,

when a whole bureaucracy is toiling day and night to make them prosperous

and happy? An insult only to be avenged in blood. Remark meanwhile,

that this centralised bureaucracy was a failure; that after all the

trouble taken to govern these masses, they were not governed, in the

sense of being made better, and not worse. The truth is, that no

centralised bureaucracy, or so-called "paternal government," yet invented

on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything

else: because it is founded on an error; because it regards and treats

men as that which they are not, as things; and not as that which they

are, as persons. If the bureaucracy were a mere Briareus giant, with a

hundred hands, helping the weak throughout the length and breadth of the

empire, the system might be at least tolerable. But what if the

Government were not a Briareus with a hundred hands, but a Hydra with a

hundred heads and mouths, each far more intent on helping itself than on

helping the people? What if sub-delegates and other officials, holding

office at the will of the intendant, had to live, and even provide

against a rainy day? What if intendants, holding office at the will of

the Comptroller-General, had to do more than live, and found it prudent

to realise as large a fortune as possible, not only against disgrace, but

against success, and the dignity fit for a new member of the Noblesse de

la Robe? Would not the system, then, soon become intolerable? Would

there not be evil times for the masses, till they became something more

than masses?

It is an ugly name, that of "The Masses," for the great majority of human

beings in a nation. He who uses it speaks of them not as human beings,

but as things; and as things not bound together in one living body, but

lying in a fortuitous heap. A swarm of ants is not a mass. It has a

polity and a unity. Not the ants but the fir-needles and sticks, of

which the ants have piled their nest, are a mass.

The term, I believe, was invented during the Ancien Regime. Whether it

was or not, it expresses very accurately the life of the many in those

days. No one would speak, if he wished to speak exactly, of the masses

of the United States; for there every man is, or is presumed to be, a

personage; with his own independence, his own activities, his own rights

and duties. No one, I believe, would have talked of the masses in the

old feudal times; for then each individual was someone's man, bound to

his master by ties of mutual service, just or unjust, honourable or base,

but still giving him a personality of duties and rights, and dividing him

from his class.

Dividing, I say. The poor of the Middle Age had little sense of a common

humanity. Those who owned allegiance to the lord in the next valley were

not their brothers; and at their own lord's bidding, they buckled on

sword and slew the next lord's men, with joyful heart and good

conscience. Only now and then misery compressed them into masses; and

they ran together, as sheep run together to face a dog. Some wholesale

wrong made them aware that they were brothers, at least in the power of

starving; and they joined in the cry which was heard, I believe, in

Mecklenburg as late as 1790: "Den Edelman wille wi dodschlagen." Then,

in Wat Tyler's insurrections, in Munster Anabaptisms, in Jacqueries, they

proved themselves to be masses, if nothing better, striking for awhile,

by the mere weight of numbers, blows terrible, though aimless--soon to be

dispersed and slain in their turn by a disciplined and compact

aristocracy. Yet not always dispersed, if they could find a leader; as

the Polish nobles discovered to their cost in the middle of the

seventeenth century. Then Bogdan the Cossack, a wild warrior, not

without his sins, but having deserved well of James Sobieski and the

Poles, found that the neighbouring noble's steward had taken a fancy to

his windmill and his farm upon the Dnieper. He was thrown into prison on

a frivolous charge, and escaped to the Tatars, leaving his wife

dishonoured, his house burnt, his infant lost in the flames, his eldest

son scourged for protesting against the wrong. And he returned, at the

head of an army of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or what not, to set free

the serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and nobles, throughout Podolia,

Volhynia, Red Russia; to desecrate the altars of God, and slay his

servants; to destroy the nobles by lingering tortures; to strip noble

ladies and maidens, and hunt them to death with the whips of his

Cossacks; and after defeating the nobles in battle after battle, to

inaugurate an era of misery and anarchy from which Poland never

recovered.

Thus did the masses of Southern Poland discover, for one generation at

least, that they were not many things, but one thing; a class, capable of

brotherhood and unity, though, alas! only of such as belongs to a pack of

wolves. But such outbursts as this were rare exceptions. In general,

feudalism kept the people divided, and therefore helpless. And as

feudalism died out, and with it the personal self-respect and loyalty

which were engendered by the old relations of master and servant, the

division still remained; and the people, in France especially, became

merely masses, a swarm of incoherent and disorganised things intent on

the necessaries of daily bread, like mites crawling over each other in a

cheese.

Out of this mass were struggling upwards perpetually, all who had a

little ambition, a little scholarship, or a little money, endeavouring to

become members of the middle class by obtaining a Government appointment.

"A man," says M. de Tocqueville, "endowed with some education and small

means, thought it not decorous to die without having been a Government

officer." "Every man, according to his condition," says a contemporary

writer, "wants to be something by command of the king."

It was not merely the "natural vanity" of which M. de Tocqueville accuses

his countrymen, which stirred up in them this eagerness after place; for

we see the same eagerness in other nations of the Continent, who cannot

be accused (as wholes) of that weakness. The fact is, a Government

place, or a Government decoration, cross, ribbon, or what not, is, in a

country where self-government is unknown or dead, the only method, save

literary fame, which is left to men in order to assert themselves either

to themselves or their fellow-men.

A British or American shopkeeper or farmer asks nothing of his

Government. He can, if he chooses, be elected to some local office

(generally unsalaried) by the votes of his fellow-citizens. But that is

his right, and adds nothing to his respectability. The test of that

latter, in a country where all honest callings are equally honourable, is

the amount of money he can make; and a very sound practical test that is,

in a country where intellect and capital are free. Beyond that, he is

what he is, and wishes to be no more, save what he can make himself. He

has his rights, guaranteed by law and public opinion; and as long as he

stands within them, and (as he well phrases it) behaves like a gentleman,

he considers himself as good as any man; and so he is. But under the

bureaucratic Regime of the Continent, if a man had not "something by

command of the king," he was nothing; and something he naturally wished

to be, even by means of a Government which he disliked and despised. So

in France, where innumerable petty posts were regular articles of sale,

anyone, it seems, who had saved a little money, found it most profitable

to invest it in a beadledom of some kind--to the great detriment of the

country, for he thus withdrew his capital from trade; but to his own

clear gain, for he thereby purchased some immunity from public burdens,

and, as it were, compounded once and for all for his taxes. The petty

German princes, it seems, followed the example of France, and sold their

little beadledoms likewise; but even where offices were not sold, they

must be obtained by any and every means, by everyone who desired not to

be as other men were, and to become Notables, as they were called in

France; so he migrated from the country into the nearest town, and became

a member of some small body-guild, town council, or what not, bodies

which were infinite in number. In one small town M. de Tocqueville

discovers thirty-six such bodies, "separated from each other by

diminutive privileges, the least honourable of which was still a mark of

honour." Quarrelling perpetually with each other for precedence,

despising and oppressing the very _menu peuple_ from whom they had for

the most part sprung, these innumerable small bodies, instead of uniting

their class, only served to split it up more and more; and when the

Revolution broke them up, once and for all, with all other privileges

whatsoever, no bond of union was left; and each man stood alone, proud of

his "individuality"--his complete social isolation; till he discovered

that, in ridding himself of superiors, he had rid himself also of

fellows; fulfilling, every man in his own person, the old fable of the

bundle of sticks; and had to submit, under the Consulate and the Empire,

to a tyranny to which the Ancien Regime was freedom itself.

For, in France at least, the Ancien Regime was no tyranny. The middle

and upper classes had individual liberty--it may be, only too much; the

liberty of disobeying a Government which they did not respect. "However

submissive the French may have been before the Revolution to the will of

the king, one sort of obedience was altogether unknown to them. They

knew not what it was to bow before an illegitimate and contested power--a

power but little honoured, frequently despised, but willingly endured

because it may be serviceable, or because it may hurt. To that degrading

form of servitude they were ever strangers. The king inspired them with

feelings . . . which have become incomprehensible to this generation . . .They loved him with the affection due to a father; they revered him

with the respect due to God. In submitting to the most arbitrary of his

commands, they yielded less to compulsion than to loyalty; and thus they

frequently preserved great freedom of mind, even in the most complete

dependence. This liberty, irregular, intermittent," says M. de

Tocqueville, "helped to form those vigorous characters, those proud and

daring spirits, which were to make the French Revolution at once the

object of the admiration and the terror of succeeding generations."

This liberty--too much akin to anarchy, in which indeed it issued for

awhile--seems to have asserted itself in continual petty resistance to

officials whom they did not respect, and who, in their turn, were more

than a little afraid of the very men out of whose ranks they had sprung.

The French Government--one may say, every Government on the Continent in

those days--had the special weakness of all bureaucracies; namely, that

want of moral force which compels them to fall back at last on physical

force, and transforms the ruler into a bully, and the soldier into a

policeman and a gaoler. A Government of parvenus, uncertain of its own

position, will be continually trying to assert itself to itself, by

vexatious intermeddling and intruding pretensions; and then, when it

meets with the resistance of free and rational spirits, will either

recoil in awkward cowardice, or fly into a passion, and appeal to the

halter and the sword. Such a Government can never take itself for

granted, because it knows that it is not taken for granted by the people.

It never can possess the quiet assurance, the courteous dignity, without

swagger, yet without hesitation, which belongs to hereditary legislators;

by which term is to be understood, not merely kings, not merely noblemen,

but every citizen of a free nation, however democratic, who has received

from his forefathers the right, the duty, and the example of

self-government.

Such was the political and social state of the Ancien Regime, not only in

France, but if we are to trust (as we must trust) M. de Tocqueville, in

almost every nation in Europe, except Britain.

And as for its moral state. We must look for that--if we have need,

which happily all have not--in its lighter literature.

I shall not trouble you with criticisms on French memoirs--of which those

of Madame de Sevigne are on the whole, the most painful (as witness her

comments on the Marquise de Brinvilliers's execution), because written by

a woman better and more human than ordinary. Nor with "Menagiana," or

other 'ana's--as vain and artificial as they are often foul; nor with

novels and poems, long since deservedly forgotten. On the first perusal

of this lighter literature, you will be charmed with the ease, grace,

lightness with which everything is said. On the second, you will be

somewhat cured of your admiration, as you perceive how little there is to

say. The head proves to be nothing but a cunning mask, with no brains

inside. Especially is this true of a book, which I must beg those who

have read it already, to recollect. To read it I recommend no human

being. We may consider it, as it was considered in its time, the typical

novel of the Ancien Regime. A picture of Spanish society, written by a

Frenchman, it was held to be--and doubtless with reason--a picture of the

whole European world. Its French editor (of 1836) calls it a _grande

epopee_; "one of the most prodigious efforts of intelligence, exhausting

all forms of humanity"--in fact, a second Shakespeare, according to the

lights of the year 1715. I mean, of course, "Gil Blas." So picturesque

is the book, that it has furnished inexhaustible motifs to the

draughtsman. So excellent is its workmanship, that the enthusiastic

editor of 1836 tells us--and doubtless he knows best--that it is the

classic model of the French tongue; and that, as Le Sage "had embraced

all that belonged to man in his composition, he dared to prescribe to

himself to embrace the whole French language in his work." It has been

the parent of a whole school of literature--the Bible of tens of

thousands, with admiring commentators in plenty; on whose souls may God

have mercy!

And no wonder. The book has a solid value, and will always have, not

merely from its perfect art (according to its own measure and intention),

but from its perfect truthfulness. It is the Ancien Regime itself. It

set forth to the men thereof, themselves, without veil or cowardly

reticence of any kind; and inasmuch as every man loves himself, the

Ancien Regime loved "Gil Blas," and said, "The problem of humanity is

solved at last." But, ye long-suffering powers of heaven, what a

solution! It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly, immoral,

base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of course it is; for so is the world

of which it is a picture." No; the most notable thing about the book is

its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance

of the human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the

actors in it are not men and women, but ferrets--with here and there, of

course, a stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman

mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human heart can find no

more interest than in a pathological museum.

That last, indeed, "Gil Blas" is; a collection of diseased specimens. No

man or woman in the book, lay or clerical, gentle or simple, as far as I

can remember, do their duty in any wise, even if they recollect that they

have any duty to do. Greed, chicane, hypocrisy, uselessness are the

ruling laws of human society. A new book of Ecclesiastes, crying,

"Vanity of vanity, all is vanity;" the "conclusion of the whole matter"

being left out, and the new Ecclesiastes rendered thereby diabolic,

instead of like that old one, divine. For, instead of "Fear God and keep

his commandments, for that is the whole duty of main," Le Sage sends

forth the new conclusion, "Take care of thyself, and feed on thy

neighbours, for that is the whole duty of man." And very faithfully was

his advice (easy enough to obey at all times) obeyed for nearly a century

after "Gil Blas" appeared.

About the same time there appeared, by a remarkable coincidence, another

work, like it the child of the Ancien Regime, and yet as opposite to it

as light to darkness. If Le Sage drew men as they were, Fenelon tried at

least to draw them as they might have been and still might be, were they

governed by sages and by saints, according to the laws of God.

"Telemaque" is an ideal--imperfect, doubtless, as all ideals must be in a

world in which God's ways and thoughts are for ever higher than man's;

but an ideal nevertheless. If its construction is less complete than

that of "Gil Blas," it is because its aim is infinitely higher; because

the form has to be subordinated, here and there, to the matter. If its

political economy be imperfect, often chimerical, it is because the mind

of one man must needs have been too weak to bring into shape and order

the chaos, social and economic, which he saw around him. M. de

Lamartine, in his brilliant little life of Fenelon, does not hesitate to

trace to the influence of "Telemaque," the Utopias which produced the

revolutions of 1793 and 1848. "The saintly poet was," he says, "without

knowing it, the first Radical and the first communist of his century."

But it is something to have preached to princes doctrines till then

unknown, or at least forgotten for many a generation--free trade, peace,

international arbitration, and the "carriere ouverte aux talents" for all

ranks. It is something to have warned his generation of the dangerous

overgrowth of the metropolis; to have prophesied, as an old Hebrew might

have done, that the despotism which he saw around him would end in a

violent revolution. It is something to have combined the highest

Christian morality with a hearty appreciation of old Greek life; of its

reverence for bodily health and prowess; its joyous and simple country

society; its sacrificial feasts, dances, games; its respect for the gods;

its belief that they helped, guided, inspired the sons of men. It is

something to have himself believed in God; in a living God, who, both in

this life and in all lives to come, rewarded the good and punished the

evil by inevitable laws. It is something to have warned a young prince,

in an age of doctrinal bigotry and practical atheism, that a living God

still existed, and that his laws were still in force; to have shown him

Tartarus crowded with the souls of wicked monarchs, while a few of kingly

race rested in Elysium, and among them old pagans--Inachus, Cecrops,

Erichthon, Triptolemus, and Sesostris--rewarded for ever for having done

their duty, each according to his light, to the flocks which the gods had

committed to their care. It is something to have spoken to a prince, in

such an age, without servility, and without etiquette, of the frailties

and the dangers which beset arbitrary rulers; to have told him that

royalty, "when assumed to content oneself, is a monstrous tyranny; when

assumed to fulfil its duties, and to conduct an innumerable people as a

father conducts his children, a crushing slavery, which demands an heroic

courage and patience."

Let us honour the courtier who dared speak such truths; and still more

the saintly celibate who had sufficient catholicity of mind to envelop

them in old Grecian dress, and, without playing false for a moment to his

own Christianity, seek in the writings of heathen sages a wider and a

healthier view of humanity than was afforded by an ascetic creed.

No wonder that the appearance of "Telemaque," published in Holland

without the permission of Fenelon, delighted throughout Europe that

public which is always delighted with new truths, as long as it is not

required to practise them. To read "Telemaque" was the right and the

enjoyment of everyone. To obey it, the duty only of princes. No wonder

that, on the other hand, this "Vengeance de peuples, lecon des rois," as

M. de Lamartine calls it, was taken for the bitterest satire by Louis

XIV., and completed the disgrace of one who had dared to teach the future

king of France that he must show himself, in all things, the opposite of

his grandfather. No wonder if Madame de Maintenon and the court looked

on its portraits of wicked ministers and courtiers as caricatures of

themselves; portraits too, which, "composed thus in the palace of

Versailles, under the auspices of that confidence which the king had

placed in the preceptor of his heir, seemed a domestic treason." No

wonder, also, if the foolish and envious world outside was of the same

opinion; and after enjoying for awhile this exposure of the great ones of

the earth, left "Telemaque" as an Utopia with which private folks had no

concern; and betook themselves to the easier and more practical model of

"Gil Blas."

But there are solid defects in "Telemaque"--indicating corresponding

defects in the author's mind--which would have, in any case, prevented

its doing the good work which Fenelon desired; defects which are natural,

as it seems to me, to his position as a Roman Catholic priest, however

saintly and pure, however humane and liberal. The king, with him, is to

be always the father of his people; which is tantamount to saying, that

the people are to be always children, and in a condition of tutelage;

voluntary, if possible: if not, of tutelage still. Of self-government,

and education of human beings into free manhood by the exercise of self-

government, free will, free thought--of this Fenelon had surely not a

glimpse. A generation or two passed by, and then the peoples of Europe

began to suspect that they were no longer children, but come to manhood;

and determined (after the example of Britain and America) to assume the

rights and duties of manhood, at whatever risk of excesses or mistakes:

and then "Telemaque" was relegated--half unjustly--as the slavish and

childish dream of a past age, into the schoolroom, where it still

remains.

But there is a defect in "Telemaque" which is perhaps deeper still. No

woman in it exercises influence over man, except for evil. Minerva, the

guiding and inspiring spirit, assumes of course, as Mentor, a male form;

but her speech and thought is essentially masculine, and not feminine.

Antiope is a mere lay-figure, introduced at the end of the book because

Telemachus must needs be allowed to have hope of marrying someone or

other. Venus plays but the same part as she does in the Tannenhauser

legends of the Middle Age. Her hatred against Telemachus is an integral

element of the plot. She, with the other women or nymphs of the romance,

in spite of all Fenelon's mercy and courtesy towards human frailties,

really rise no higher than the witches of the Malleus Maleficanum.

Woman--as the old monk held who derived femina from fe, faith, and minus,

less, because women have less faith than men--is, in "Telemaque,"

whenever she thinks or acts, the temptress, the enchantress; the victim

(according to a very ancient calumny) of passions more violent, often

more lawless, than man's.

Such a conception of women must make "Telemaque," to the end of time,

useless as a wholesome book of education. It must have crippled its

influence, especially in France, in its own time. For there, for good

and for evil, woman was asserting more and more her power, and her right

to power, over the mind and heart of man. Rising from the long

degradation of the Middle Ages, which had really respected her only when

unsexed and celibate, the French woman had assumed, often lawlessly,

always triumphantly, her just freedom; her true place as the equal, the

coadjutor, the counsellor of man. Of all problems connected with the

education of a young prince, that of the influence of woman was, in the

France of the Ancien Regime, the most important. And it was just that

which Fenelon did not, perhaps dared not, try to touch; and which he most

certainly could not have solved. Meanwhile, not only Madame de

Maintenon, but women whose names it were a shame to couple with hers,

must have smiled at, while they hated, the saint who attempted to

dispense not only with them, but with the ideal queen who should have

been the helpmeet of the ideal king.

To those who believe that the world is governed by a living God, it may

seem strange, at first sight, that this moral anarchy was allowed to

endure; that the avenging, and yet most purifying storm of the French

Revolution, inevitable from Louis XIV.'s latter years, was not allowed to

burst two generations sooner than it did. Is not the answer--that the

question always is not of destroying the world, but of amending it? And

that amendment must always come from within, and not from without? That

men must be taught to become men, and mend their world themselves? To

educate men into self-government--that is the purpose of the government

of God; and some of the men of the eighteenth century did not learn that

lesson. As the century rolled on, the human mind arose out of the slough

in which Le Sage found it, into manifold and beautiful activity,

increasing hatred of shams and lies, increasing hunger after truth and

usefulness. With mistakes and confusions innumerable they worked: but

still they worked; planting good seed; and when the fire of the French

Revolution swept over the land, it burned up the rotten and the withered,

only to let the fresh herbage spring up from underneath.

But that purifying fire was needed. If we inquire why the many attempts

to reform the Ancien Regime, which the eighteenth century witnessed, were

failures one and all; why Pombal failed in Portugal, Aranda in Spain,

Joseph II. in Austria, Ferdinand and Caroline in Naples--for these last,

be it always remembered, began as humane and enlightened sovereigns,

patronising liberal opinions, and labouring to ameliorate the condition

of the poor, till they were driven by the murder of Marie Antoinette into

a paroxysm of rage and terror--why, above all, Louis XVI., who attempted

deeper and wiser reforms than any other sovereign, failed more

disastrously than any--is not the answer this, that all these reforms

would but have cleansed the outside of the cup and the platter, while

they left the inside full of extortion and excess? It was not merely

institutions which required to be reformed, but men and women. The

spirit of "Gil Blas" had to be cast out. The deadness, selfishness,

isolation of men's souls; their unbelief in great duties, great common

causes, great self-sacrifices--in a word, their unbelief in God, and

themselves, and mankind--all that had to be reformed; and till that was

done all outward reform would but have left them, at best, in brute ease

and peace, to that soulless degradation, which (as in the Byzantine

empire of old, and seeming in the Chinese empire of to-day) hides the

reality of barbarism under a varnish of civilisation. Men had to be

awakened; to be taught to think for themselves, act for themselves, to

dare and suffer side by side for their country and for their children; in

a word, to arise and become men once more.

And, what is more, men had to punish--to avenge. Those are fearful

words. But there is, in this God-guided universe, a law of retribution,

which will find men out, whether men choose to find it out or not; a law

of retribution; of vengeance inflicted justly, though not necessarily by

just men. The public executioner was seldom a very estimable personage,

at least under the old Regime; and those who have been the scourges of

God have been, in general, mere scourges, and nothing better; smiting

blindly, rashly, confusedly; confounding too often the innocent with the

guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and replace

old sins by new. But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle

be, I must believe--as long as I believe in any God at all--that such men

as Robespierre were His instruments, even in their crimes.

In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the wickedness of certain

of its leaders was part of the retribution itself. For the noblesse

existed surely to make men better. It did, by certain classes, the very

opposite. Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, whom it itself had

made wicked. For over and above all political, economic, social wrongs,

there were wrongs personal, human, dramatic; which stirred not merely the

springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just demand for the freedom

of labour and enterprise: but the very deepest springs of rage, contempt,

and hate; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors of the

Revolution.

It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those

horrors were of the artist class--by which I signify not merely painters

and sculptors--as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to

signify, at least in England--but what the French meant by

_artistes_--producers of luxuries and amusements, play-actors, musicians,

and suchlike, down to that "distracted peruke-maker with two fiery

torches," who, at the storm of the Bastile, "was for burning the

saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run screaming; had not a

patriot, with some tincture of natural philosophy, instantly struck the

wind out of him, with butt of musket on pit of stomach, overturned the

barrels, and stayed the devouring element." The distracted peruke-maker

may have had his wrongs--perhaps such a one as that of poor Triboulet the

fool, in "Le Roi s'amuse"--and his own sound reasons for blowing down the

Bastile, and the system which kept it up.

For these very ministers of luxury--then miscalled art--from the periwig-

maker to the play-actor--who like them had seen the frivolity, the

baseness, the profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered,

whom they despised while they adored! Figaro himself may have looked up

to his master the Marquis as a superior being as long as the law enabled

the Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet Figaro

may have known and seen enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were

abolished, for handing the Marquis over to a Comite de Salut Public.

Disappointed play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like

Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious. Why not?

Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men

and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it

may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than

had our own Pitt and Burke. They had played the valet: and no man was a

hero to them. They had seen the nobleman expose himself before his own

helots: they would try if the helot was not as good as the nobleman. The

nobleman had played the mountebank: why should not the mountebank, for

once, play the nobleman? The nobleman's God had been his five senses,

with (to use Mr. Carlyle's phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should

not the mountebank worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see

what grace and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?

But why so cruel? Because, with many of these men, I more than suspect,

there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth

sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a great portion of the

respectable middle class, and much of the lower class: but wrongs to

which they and their families, being most in contact with the noblesse,

would be especially exposed; namely, wrongs to women.

Everyone who knows the literature of that time, must know what I mean:

what had gone on for more than a century, it may be more than two, in

France, in Italy, and--I am sorry to have to say it--Germany likewise.

All historians know what I mean, and how enormous was the evil. I only

wonder that they have so much overlooked that item in the causes of the

Revolution. It seems to me to have been more patent and potent in the

sight of men, as it surely was in the sight of Almighty God, than all the

political and economic wrongs put together. They might have issued in a

change of dynasty or of laws. That, issued in the blood of the

offenders. Not a girl was enticed into Louis XV.'s Petit Trianon, or

other den of aristocratic iniquity, but left behind her, parents nursing

shame and sullen indignation, even while they fingered the ill-gotten

price of their daughter's honour; and left behind also, perhaps, some

unhappy boy of her own class, in whom disappointment and jealousy were

transformed--and who will blame him?--into righteous indignation, and a

very sword of God; all the more indignant, and all the more righteous, if

education helped him to see, that the maiden's acquiescence, her pride in

her own shame, was the ugliest feature in the whole crime, and the most

potent reason for putting an end, however fearful, to a state of things

in which such a fate was thought an honour and a gain, and not a disgrace

and a ruin; in which the most gifted daughters of the lower classes had

learnt to think it more noble to become--that which they became--than the

wives of honest men.

If you will read fairly the literature of the Ancien Regime, whether in

France or elsewhere, you will see that my facts are true. If you have

human hearts in you, you will see in them, it seems to me, an explanation

of many a guillotinade and fusillade, as yet explained only on the ground

of madness--an hypothesis which (as we do not yet in the least understand

what madness is) is no explanation at all.

An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding upon

worm-eaten furniture, and mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien

Regime. And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one of its own

landscapes. A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain, swarming with

the prince's game; a picturesque old robber schloss above, now in ruins;

and below, perhaps, the picturesque new schloss, with its French

fountains and gardens, French nymphs of marble, and of flesh and blood

likewise, which the prince has partially paid for, by selling a few

hundred young men to the English to fight the Yankees. The river, too,

is picturesque, for the old bridge has not been repaired since it was

blown up in the Seven Years' War; and there is but a single lazy barge

floating down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs of his Serene

Highness; the village is picturesque, for the flower of the young men are

at the wars, and the place is tumbling down; and the two old peasants in

the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper of vine-twigs, are

very picturesque likewise, for they are all in rags.

How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, and the quiet artistic

beauty of the scene destroyed;--to have steamers puffing up and down the

river, and a railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the Old

World, in exchange for the wealth of the New--or hurrying, it may be,

whole regiments of free and educated citizen-soldiers, who fight, they

know for what. How sad to see the alto schloss desecrated by tourists,

and the neue schloss converted into a cold-water cure. How sad to see

the village, church and all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to

the very steeple-top;--a new school at the town-end--a new crucifix by

the wayside. How sad to see the old folk well clothed in the fabrics of

England or Belgium, doing an easy trade in milk and fruit, because the

land they till has become their own, and not the prince's; while their

sons are thriving farmers on the prairies of the far West. Very

unpicturesque, no doubt, is wealth and progress, peace and safety,

cleanliness and comfort. But they possess advantages unknown to the

Ancien Regime, which was, if nothing else, picturesque. Men could paint

amusing and often pretty pictures of its people and its places.

Consider that word, "picturesque." It, and the notion of art which it

expresses, are the children of the Ancien Regime--of the era of decay.

The healthy, vigorous, earnest, progressive Middle Age never dreamed of

admiring, much less of painting, for their own sake, rags and ruins; the

fashion sprang up at the end of the seventeenth century; it lingered on

during the first quarter of our century, kept alive by the reaction from

1815-25. It is all but dead now, before the return of vigorous and

progressive thought. An admirer of the Middle Ages now does not build a

sham ruin in his grounds; he restores a church, blazing with colour, like

a medieval illumination. He has learnt to look on that which went by the

name of picturesque in his great-grandfather's time, as an old Greek or a

Middle Age monk would have done--as something squalid, ugly, a sign of

neglect, disease, death; and therefore to be hated and abolished, if it

cannot be restored. At Carcassone, now, M. Viollet-le-Duc, under the

auspices of the Emperor of the French, is spending his vast learning, and

much money, simply in abolishing the picturesque; in restoring stone for

stone, each member of that wonderful museum of Middle Age architecture:

Roman, Visigothic, Moslem, Romaine, Early English, later French, all is

being reproduced exactly as it must have existed centuries since. No

doubt that is not the highest function of art: but it is a preparation

for the highest, a step toward some future creative school. As the early

Italian artists, by careful imitation, absorbed into their minds the

beauty and meaning of old Greek and Roman art; so must the artists of our

days by the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance. They must learn

to copy, before they can learn to surpass; and, meanwhile, they must

learn--indeed they have learnt--that decay is ugliness, and the imitation

of decay, a making money out of the public shame.

The picturesque sprang up, as far as I can discover, suddenly, during the

time of exhaustion and recklessness which followed the great struggles of

the sixteenth century. Salvator Rosa and Callot, two of the earliest

professors of picturesque art, have never been since surpassed. For

indeed, they drew from life. The rags and the ruins, material, and alas!

spiritual, were all around them; the lands and the creeds alike lay

waste. There was ruffianism and misery among the masses of Europe;

unbelief and artificiality among the upper classes; churches and

monasteries defiled, cities sacked, farmsteads plundered and ruinate, and

all the wretchedness which Callot has immortalised--for a warning to evil

rulers--in his Miseres de la Guerre. The world was all gone wrong: but

as for setting it right again--who could do that? And so men fell into a

sentimental regret for the past, and its beauties, all exaggerated by the

foreshortening of time; while they wanted strength or faith to reproduce

it. At last they became so accustomed to the rags and ruins, that they

looked on them as the normal condition of humanity, as the normal field

for painters.

Only now and then, and especially toward the latter half of the

eighteenth century, when thought began to revive, and men dreamed of

putting the world to rights once more, there rose before them glimpses of

an Arcadian ideal. Country life--the primaeval calling of men--how

graceful and pure it might be! How graceful--if not pure--it once had

been! The boors of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo might be true to

present fact; but there was a fairer ideal, which once had been fact, in

the Eclogues of Theocritus, and the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. And so

men took to dreaming of shepherds and shepherdesses, and painting them on

canvas, and modelling them in china, according to their cockney notions

of what they had been once, and always ought to be. We smile now at

Sevres and Dresden shepherdesses; but the wise man will surely see in

them a certain pathos. They indicated a craving after something better

than boorishness; and the many men and women may have become the gentler

and purer by looking even at them, and have said sadly to themselves:

"Such might have been the peasantry of half Europe, had it not been for

devastations of the Palatinate, wars of succession, and the wicked wills

of emperors and kings."

LECTURE III--THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES

In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed

more to the eighteenth century than to any century since the Christian

era. It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the century

which followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider that the

eighteenth century was but the child, or rather grandchild, thereof. But

I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with

my description of the very same era as one of decay and death. For side

by side with the death, there was manifold fresh birth; side by side with

the decay there was active growth;--side by side with them, fostered by

them, though generally in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or

unconscious. We must beware, however, of trying to find between that

decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is really

none. The general decay may have determined the course of many men's

thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I have heard said)

the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new Regime--a loose metaphor,

which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for

a philosophic truth. That would be to confess man--what I shall never

confess him to be--the creature of circumstances; it would be to fall

into the same fallacy of spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when

they believed that bees were bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the

first place, the bees were no bees, but flies--unless when some true

swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs,

as Samson's bees did in that of the lion. But bees or flies, each sprang

from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of its own: it

was fostered by the carcass it fed on during development; but bred from

it it was not, any more than Marat was bred from the decay of the Ancien

Regime. There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become poisonous

themselves, as did Marat: but even they owe their vitality and

organisation to something higher than that on which they feed; and each

of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of God."

All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any

man be the creature of circumstances, it is because he has become so,

like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk downward

toward the brute.

Accordingly we shall find, throughout the 18th century, a stirring of

thought, an originality, a resistance to circumstances, an indignant

defiance of circumstances, which would have been impossible, had

circumstances been the true lords and shapers of mankind. Had that

latter been the case, the downward progress of the Ancien Regime would

have been irremediable. Each generation, conformed more and more to the

element in which it lived, would have sunk deeper in dull acquiescence to

evil, in ignorance of all cravings save those of the senses; and if at

any time intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it would have

issued, not in the proclamation of new and vast ideas, but in an anarchic

struggle for revenge and bread.

There are races, alas! which seem, for the present at least, mastered by

circumstances. Some, like the Chinese, have sunk back into that state;

some, like the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged from it; but

in Europe, during the eighteenth century, were working not merely new

forces and vitalities (abstractions which mislead rather than explain),

but living persons in plenty, men and women, with independent and

original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite of all circumstances, with

power which we shall most wisely ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord

and Giver of Life.

Such persons seemed--I only say seemed--most numerous in England and in

Germany. But there were enough of them in France to change the destiny

of that great nation for awhile--perhaps for ever.

M. de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very remarkable one, which

appears at first sight to militate against my belief--a chapter "showing

that France was the country in which men had become most alike."

"The men," he says, "of that time, especially those belonging to the

upper and middle ranks of society, who alone were at all conspicuous,

were all exactly alike."

And it must be allowed, that if this were true of the upper and middle

classes, it must have been still more true of the mass of the lowest

population, who, being most animal, are always most moulded--or rather

crushed--by their own circumstances, by public opinion, and by the wants

of five senses, common to all alike.

But when M. de Tocqueville attributes this curious fact to the

circumstances of their political state--to that "government of one man

which in the end has the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike,

and all mutually indifferent to their common fate"--we must differ, even

from him: for facts prove the impotence of that, or of any other

circumstance, in altering the hearts and souls of men, in producing in

them anything but a mere superficial and temporary resemblance.

For all the while there was, among these very French, here and there a

variety of character and purpose, sufficient to burst through that very

despotism, and to develop the nation into manifold, new, and quite

original shapes. Thus it was proved that the uniformity had been only in

their outside crust and shell. What tore the nation to pieces during the

Reign of Terror, but the boundless variety and originality of the

characters which found themselves suddenly in free rivalry? What else

gave to the undisciplined levies, the bankrupt governments, the parvenu

heroes of the Republic, a manifold force, a self-dependent audacity,

which made them the conquerors, and the teachers (for good and evil) of

the civilised world? If there was one doctrine which the French

Revolution specially proclaimed--which it caricatured till it brought it

into temporary disrepute--it was this: that no man is like another; that

in each is a God-given "individuality," an independent soul, which no

government or man has a right to crush, or can crush in the long run: but

which ought to have, and must have, a "carriere ouverte aux talents,"

freely to do the best for itself in the battle of life. The French

Revolution, more than any event since twelve poor men set forth to

convert the world some eighteen hundred years ago, proves that man ought

not to be, and need not be, the creature of circumstances, the puppet of

institutions; but, if he will, their conqueror and their lord.

Of these original spirits who helped to bring life out of death, and the

modern world out of the decay of the mediaeval world, the French

_philosophes_ and encyclopaedists are, of course, the most notorious.

They confessed, for the most part, that their original inspiration had

come from England. They were, or considered themselves, the disciples of

Locke; whose philosophy, it seems to me, their own acts disproved.

And first, a few words on these same _philosophes_. One may be

thoroughly aware of their deficiencies, of their sins, moral as well as

intellectual; and yet one may demand that everyone should judge them

fairly--which can only be done by putting himself in their place; and any

fair judgment of them will, I think, lead to the conclusion that they

were not mere destroyers, inflamed with hate of everything which mankind

had as yet held sacred. Whatever sacred things they despised, one sacred

thing they reverenced, which men had forgotten more and more since the

seventeenth century--common justice and common humanity. It was this, I

believe, which gave them their moral force. It was this which drew

towards them the hearts, not merely of educated bourgeois and nobles (on

the _menu peuple_ they had no influence, and did not care to have any),

but of every continental sovereign who felt in himself higher aspirations

than those of a mere selfish tyrant--Frederick the Great, Christina of

Sweden, Joseph of Austria, and even that fallen Juno, Catharine of

Russia, with all her sins. To take the most extreme instance--Voltaire.

We may question his being a philosopher at all. We may deny that he had

even a tincture of formal philosophy. We may doubt much whether he had

any of that human and humorous common sense, which is often a good

substitute for the philosophy of the schools. We may feel against him a

just and honest indignation when we remember that he dared to travestie

into a foul satire the tale of his country's purest and noblest heroine;

but we must recollect, at the same time, that he did a public service to

the morality of his own country, and of all Europe, by his

indignation--quite as just and honest as any which we may feel--at the

legal murder of Calas. We must recollect that, if he exposes baseness

and foulness with too cynical a license of speech (in which, indeed, he

sinned no more than had the average of French writers since the days of

Montaigne), he at least never advocates them, as did Le Sage. We must

recollect that, scattered throughout his writings, are words in favour of

that which is just, merciful, magnanimous, and even, at times, in favour

of that which is pure; which proves that in Voltaire, as in most men,

there was a double self--the one sickened to cynicism by the iniquity and

folly which he saw around him--the other, hungering after a nobler life,

and possibly exciting that hunger in one and another, here and there, who

admired him for other reasons than the educated mob, which cried after

him "Vive la Pucelle."

Rousseau, too. Easy it is to feel disgust, contempt, for the

"Confessions" and the "Nouvelle Heloise"--for much, too much, in the

man's own life and character. One would think the worse of the young

Englishman who did not so feel, and express his feelings roundly and

roughly. But all young Englishmen should recollect, that to Rousseau's

"Emile" they owe their deliverance from the useless pedantries, the

degrading brutalities, of the medieval system of school education; that

"Emile" awakened throughout civilised Europe a conception of education

just, humane, rational, truly scientific, because founded upon facts;

that if it had not been written by one writhing under the bitter

consequences of mis-education, and feeling their sting and their brand

day by day on his own spirit, Miss Edgeworth might never have reformed

our nurseries, or Dr. Arnold our public schools.

And so with the rest of the _philosophes_. That there were charlatans

among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish,

self-seeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts? Among what class of men

were there not such in those evil days? In what class of men are there

not such now, in spite of all social and moral improvement? But nothing

but the conviction, among the average, that they were in the right--that

they were fighting a battle for which it was worth while to dare, and if

need be to suffer, could have enabled them to defy what was then public

opinion, backed by overwhelming physical force.

Their intellectual defects are patent. No one can deny that their

inductions were hasty and partial: but then they were inductions as

opposed to the dull pedantry of the schools, which rested on tradition

only half believed, or pretended to be believed. No one can deny that

their theories were too general and abstract; but then they were theories

as opposed to the no-theory of the Ancien Regime, which was, "Let us eat

and drink, for to-morrow we die."

Theories--principles--by them if men do not live, by them men are, at

least, stirred into life, at the sight of something more noble than

themselves. Only by great ideas, right or wrong, could such a world as

that which Le Sage painted, be roused out of its slough of foul

self-satisfaction, and equally foul self-discontent.

For mankind is ruled and guided, in the long run, not by practical

considerations, not by self-interest, not by compromises; but by theories

and principles, and those of the most abstruse, delicate, supernatural,

and literally unspeakable kind; which, whether they be according to

reason or not, are so little according to logic--that is, to speakable

reason--that they cannot be put into speech. Men act, whether singly or

in masses, by impulses and instincts for which they give reasons quite

incompetent, often quite irrelevant; but which they have caught from each

other, as they catch fever or small-pox; as unconsciously, and yet as

practically and potently; just as the nineteenth century has caught from

the philosophers of the eighteenth most practical rules of conduct,

without even (in most cases) having read a word of their works.

And what has this century caught from these philosophers? One rule it

has learnt, and that a most practical one--to appeal in all cases, as

much as possible, to "Reason and the Laws of Nature." That, at least,

the philosophers tried to do. Often they failed. Their conceptions of

reason and of the laws of nature being often incorrect, they appealed to

unreason and to laws which were not those of nature. "The fixed idea of

them all was," says M. de Tocqueville, "to substitute simple and

elementary rules, deduced from reason and natural law, for the

complicated traditional customs which governed the society of their

time." They were often rash, hasty, in the application of their method.

They ignored whole classes of facts, which, though spiritual and not

physical, are just as much facts, and facts for science, as those which

concern a stone or a fungus. They mistook for merely complicated

traditional customs, many most sacred institutions which were just as

much founded on reason and natural law, as any theories of their own. But

who shall say that their method was not correct? That it was not the

only method? They appealed to reason. Would you have had them appeal to

unreason? They appealed to natural law. Would you have had them appeal

to unnatural law?--law according to which God did not make this world?

Alas! that had been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in his

time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end. Rabelais

saw it done in his time; and wrote his chapters on the "Children of

Physis and the Children of Antiphysis." But, born in an evil generation,

which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the revolution of 1789, he

was sensual and, I fear, cowardly enough to hide his light, not under a

bushel, but under a dunghill; till men took him for a jester of jests;

and his great wisdom was lost to the worse and more foolish generations

which followed him, and thought they understood him.

But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and

to reason for the power of discerning that same good--if man cannot find

truth by that method, by what method shall he find it?

And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and encyclopaedists

were not men of science, they were at least the heralds and the

coadjutors of science.

We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, fanatics. But we must

recollect that one thing they meant to do, and did. They recalled men to

facts; they bid them ask of everything they saw--What are the facts of

the case? Till we know the facts, argument is worse than useless.

Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case must deliver men more

or less from that evil spirit which the old Romans called "Fama;" from

her whom Virgil described in the AEneid as the ugliest, the falsest, and

the cruellest of monsters.

From "Fama;" from rumours, hearsays, exaggerations, scandals,

superstitions, public opinions--whether from the ancient public opinion

that the sun went round the earth, or the equally public opinion, that

those who dared to differ from public opinion were hateful to the deity,

and therefore worthy of death--from all these blasts of Fame's lying

trumpet they helped to deliver men; and they therefore helped to insure

something like peace and personal security for those quiet, modest, and

generally virtuous men, who, as students of physical science, devoted

their lives, during the eighteenth century, to asking of nature--What are

the facts of the case?

It was no coincidence, but a connection of cause and effect, that during

the century of _philosopher_ sound physical science throve, as she had

never thriven before; that in zoology and botany, chemistry and medicine,

geology and astronomy, man after man, both of the middle and the noble

classes, laid down on more and more sound, because more and more extended

foundations, that physical science which will endure as an everlasting

heritage to mankind; endure, even though a second Byzantine period should

reduce it to a timid and traditional pedantry, or a second irruption of

barbarians sweep it away for awhile, to revive again (as classic

philosophy revived in the fifteenth century) among new and more energetic

races; when the kingdom of God shall have been taken away from us, and

given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.

An eternal heritage, I say, for the human race; which once gained, can

never be lost; which stands, and will stand; marches, and will march,

proving its growth, its health, its progressive force, its certainty of

final victory, by those very changes, disputes, mistakes, which the

ignorant and the bigoted hold up to scorn, as proofs of its uncertainty

and its rottenness; because they never have dared or cared to ask

boldly--What are the facts of the case?--and have never discovered either

the acuteness, the patience, the calm justice, necessary for ascertaining

the facts, or their awful and divine certainty when once ascertained.

[But these philosophers (it will be said) hated all religion.

Before that question can be fairly discussed, it is surely right to

consider what form of religion that was which they found working round

them in France, and on the greater part of the Continent. The quality

thereof may have surely had something to do (as they themselves asserted)

with that "sort of rage" with which (to use M. de Tocqueville's words)

"the Christian religion was attacked in France."

M. de Tocqueville is of opinion (and his opinion is likely to be just)

that "the Church was not more open to attack in France than elsewhere;

that the corruptions and abuses which had been allowed to creep into it

were less, on the contrary, there than in most Catholic countries. The

Church of France was infinitely more tolerant than it ever had been

previously, and than it still was among other nations. Consequently, the

peculiar causes of this phenomenon" (the hatred which it aroused) "must

be looked for less in the condition of religion than in that of society."

"We no longer," he says, shortly after, "ask in what the Church of that

day erred as a religious institution, but how far it stood opposed to the

political revolution which was at hand." And he goes on to show how the

principles of her ecclesiastical government, and her political position,

were such that the _philosophes_ must needs have been her enemies. But

he mentions another fact which seems to me to belong neither to the

category of religion nor to that of politics; a fact which, if he had

done us the honour to enlarge upon it, might have led him and his readers

to a more true understanding of the disrepute into which Christianity had

fallen in France.

"The ecclesiastical authority had been specially employed in keeping

watch over the progress of thought; and the censorship of books was a

daily annoyance to the _philosophes_. By defending the common liberties

of the human mind against the Church, they were combating in their own

cause: and they began by breaking the shackles which pressed most closely

on themselves."

Just so. And they are not to be blamed if they pressed first and most

earnestly reforms which they knew by painful experience to be necessary.

All reformers are wont thus to begin at home. It is to their honour if,

not content with shaking off their own fetters, they begin to see that

others are fettered likewise; and, reasoning from the particular to the

universal, to learn that their own cause is the cause of mankind.

There is, therefore, no reason to doubt that these men were honest, when

they said that they were combating, not in their own cause merely, but in

that of humanity; and that the Church was combating in her own cause, and

that of her power and privilege. The Church replied that she, too, was

combating for humanity; for its moral and eternal well-being. But that

is just what the _philosophes_ denied. They said (and it is but fair to

take a statement which appears on the face of all their writings; which

is the one key-note on which they ring perpetual changes), that the cause

of the Church in France was not that of humanity, but of inhumanity; not

that of nature, but of unnature; not even that of grace, but of disgrace.

Truely or falsely, they complained that the French clergy had not only

identified themselves with the repression of free thought, and of

physical science, especially that of the Newtonian astronomy, but that

they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for centuries past, to exercise

any censorship whatsoever over the thoughts of men: that they had

identified themselves with the cause of darkness, not of light; with

persecution and torture, with the dragonnades of Louis XIV., with the

murder of Calas and of Urban Grandier; with celibacy, hysteria,

demonology, witchcraft, and the shameful public scandals, like those of

Gauffredi, Grandier, and Pere Giraud, which had arisen out of mental

disease; with forms of worship which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly)

idolatry, and miracles which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly)

impostures; that the clergy interfered perpetually with the sanctity of

family life, as well as with the welfare of the state; that their evil

counsels, and specially those of the Jesuits, had been patent and potent

causes of much of the misrule and misery of Louis XIV.'s and XV.'s

reigns; and that with all these heavy counts against them, their morality

was not such as to make other men more moral; and was not--at least among

the hierarchy--improving, or likely to improve. To a Mazarin, a De Retz,

a Richelieu (questionable men enough) had succeeded a Dubois, a Rohan, a

Lomenie de Brienne, a Maury, a Talleyrand; and at the revolution of 1789

thoughtful Frenchmen asked, once and for all, what was to be done with a

Church of which these were the hierophants?

Whether these complaints affected the French Church as a "religious"

institution, must depend entirely on the meaning which is attached to the

word "religion": that they affected her on scientific, rational, and

moral grounds, independent of any merely political one, is as patent as

that the attack based on them was one-sided, virulent, and often somewhat

hypocritical, considering the private morals of many of the assailants.

We know--or ought to know--that within that religion which seemed to the

_philosophes_ (so distorted and defaced had it become) a nightmare dream,

crushing the life out of mankind, there lie elements divine, eternal;

necessary for man in this life and the life to come. But we are bound to

ask--Had they a fair chance of knowing what we know? Have we proof that

their hatred was against all religion, or only against that which they

saw around them? Have we proof that they would have equally hated, had

they been in permanent contact with them, creeds more free from certain

faults which seemed to them, in the case of the French Church,

ineradicable and inexpiable? Till then we must have charity--which is

justice--even for the _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century.

This view of the case had been surely overlooked by M. de Tocqueville,

when he tried to explain by the fear of revolutions, the fact that both

in America and in England, "while the boldest political doctrines of the

eighteenth-century philosophers have been adopted, their anti-religious

doctrines have made no way."

He confesses that, "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had

been preached, even before the greater part of the French philosophers

were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the

eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions in England. Able

writers and profound thinkers espoused that cause, but they were never

able to render it triumphant as in France." Of these facts there can be

no doubt: but the cause which he gives for the failure of infidelity will

surely sound new and strange to those who know the English literature and

history of that century. It was, he says, "inasmuch as all those who had

anything to fear from revolutions, eagerly came to the rescue of the

established faith." Surely there was no talk of revolutions; no wish,

expressed or concealed, to overthrow either government or society, in the

aristocratic clique to whom English infidelity was confined. Such was,

at least, the opinion of Voltaire, who boasted that "All the works of the

modern philosophers together would never make as much noise in the world

as was made in former days by the disputes of the Cordeliers about the

shape of their sleeves and hoods." If (as M. de Tocqueville says)

Bolingbroke set up Voltaire, neither master nor pupil had any more

leaning than Hobbes had toward a democracy which was not dreaded in those

days because it had never been heard of. And if (as M. de Tocqueville

heartily allows) the English apologists of Christianity triumphed, at

least for the time being, the cause of their triumph must be sought in

the plain fact that such men as Berkeley, Butler, and Paley, each

according to his light, fought the battle fairly, on the common ground of

reason and philosophy, instead of on that of tradition and authority; and

that the forms of Christianity current in England--whether Quaker,

Puritan, or Anglican--offended, less than that current in France, the

common-sense and the human instincts of the many, or of the sceptics

themselves.]

But the eighteenth century saw another movement, all the more powerful,

perhaps, because it was continually changing its shape, even its purpose;

and gaining fresh life and fresh adherents with every change. Propagated

at first by men of the school of Locke, it became at last a protest

against the materialism of that school, on behalf of all that is, or

calls itself, supernatural and mysterious. Abjuring, and honestly, all

politics, it found itself sucked into the political whirlpool in spite of

itself, as all human interests which have any life in them must be at

last. It became an active promoter of the Revolution; then it helped to

destroy the Revolution, when that had, under Napoleon, become a levelling

despotism; then it helped, as actively, to keep revolutionary principles

alive, after the reaction of 1815:--a Protean institution, whose power we

in England are as apt to undervalue as the governments of the Continent

were apt, during the eighteenth century, to exaggerate it. I mean, of

course, Freemasonry, and the secret societies which, honestly and

honourably disowned by Freemasonry, yet have either copied it, or

actually sprung out of it. In England, Freemasonry never was, it seems,

more than a liberal and respectable benefit-club; for secret societies

are needless for any further purposes, amid free institutions and a free

press. But on the Continent during the eighteenth century, Freemasonry

excited profound suspicion and fear on the part of statesmen who knew

perfectly well their friends from their foes; and whose precautions were,

from their point of view, justified by the results.

I shall not enter into the deep question of the origin of Freemasonry.

One uninitiate, as I am, has no right to give an opinion on the great

questions of the mediaeval lodge of Kilwinning and its Scotch degrees; on

the seven Templars, who, after poor Jacques Molay was burnt at Paris,

took refuge on the Isle of Mull, in Scotland, found there another Templar

and brother Mason, ominously named Harris; took to the trowel in earnest,

and revived the Order;--on the Masons who built Magdeburg Cathedral in

876; on the English Masons assembled in Pagan times by "St. Albone, that

worthy knight;" on the revival of English Masonry by Edwin, son of

Athelstan; on Magnus Grecus, who had been at the building of Solomon's

Temple, and taught Masonry to Charles Martel; on the pillars Jachin and

Boaz; on the masonry of Hiram of Tyre, and indeed of Adam himself, of

whose first fig-leaf the masonic apron may be a type--on all these

matters I dare no more decide than on the making of the Trojan Horse, the

birth of Romulus and Remus, or the incarnation of Vishnoo.

All I dare say is, that Freemasonry emerges in its present form into

history and fact, seemingly about the beginning of George I.'s reign,

among Englishmen and noblemen, notably in four lodges in the city of

London: (1) at The Goose and Gridiron alehouse in St. Paul's Churchyard;

(2) at The Crown alehouse near Drury Lane; (3) at The Apple Tree tavern

near Covent Garden; (4) at The Rummer and Grapes tavern, in Charnel Row,

Westminster. That its principles were brotherly love and good

fellowship, which included in those days port, sherry, claret, and punch;

that it was founded on the ground of mere humanity, in every sense of the

word; being (as was to be expected from the temper of the times) both

aristocratic and liberal, admitting to its ranks virtuous gentlemen

"obliged," says an old charge, "only to that religion wherein all men

agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves: that is, to be

good men and true, or men of honour and honesty, by whatever

denominations or persuasions they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry

becomes the centre of union and means of conciliating true friendship

among persons that otherwise must have remained at a distance."

Little did the honest gentlemen who established or re-established their

society on these grounds, and fenced it with quaint ceremonies, old or

new, conceive the importance of their own act; we, looking at it from a

distance, may see all that such a society involved, which was quite new

to the world just then; and see, that it was the very child of the Ancien

Regime--of a time when men were growing weary of the violent factions,

political and spiritual, which had torn Europe in pieces for more than a

century, and longed to say: "After all, we are all alike in one thing--for

we are at least men."

Its spread through England and Scotland, and the seceding bodies which

arose from it, as well as the supposed Jacobite tendency of certain

Scotch lodges, do not concern us here. The point interesting to us just

now is, that Freemasonry was imported to the Continent exclusively by

English and Scotch gentlemen and noblemen. Lord Derwentwater is said by

some to have founded the "Loge Anglaise" in Paris in 1725; the Duke of

Richmond one in his own castle of Aubigny shortly after. It was through

Hanoverian influence that the movement seems to have spread into Germany.

In 1733, for instance, the English Grand Master, Lord Strathmore,

permitted eleven German gentlemen and good brethren to form a lodge in

Hamburg. Into this English Society was Frederick the Great, when Crown

Prince, initiated, in spite of strict old Frederick William's objections,

who had heard of it as an English invention of irreligious tendency.

Francis I. of Austria was made a Freemason at the Hague, Lord

Chesterfield being in the chair, and then became a Master in London under

the name of "Brother Lothringen," to the discontent of Maria Theresa,

whose woman's wit saw farther than her husband. Englishmen and Scotchmen

introduced the new society into Russia and into Geneva. Sweden and

Poland seem to have received it from France; while, in the South, it

seems to have been exclusively an English plant. Sackville, Duke of

Middlesex, is said to have founded the first lodge at Florence in 1733,

Lord Coleraine at Gibraltar and Madrid, one Gordon in Portugal; and

everywhere, at the commencement of the movement, we find either London or

Scotland the mother-lodges, introducing on the Continent those liberal

and humane ideas of which England was then considered, to her glory, as

the only home left on earth.

But, alas! the seed sown grew up into strange shapes, according to the

soil in which it rooted. False doctrine, heresy, and schism, according

to Herr Findel, the learned and rational historian whom I have chiefly

followed, defiled the new Church from its infancy. "In France," so he

bemoans himself, "first of all there shot up that baneful seed of lies

and frauds, of vanity and presumption, of hatred and discord, the

mischievous high degrees; the misstatement that our order was allied to

the Templars, and existed at the time of the Crusades; the removal of old

charges, the bringing in surreptitiously of a multitude of symbols and

forms which awoke the love of secrecy; knighthood; and, in fact, all

which tended to poison Freemasonry." Herr Findel seems to attribute

these evils principally to the "high degrees." It would have been more

simple to have attributed them to the morals of the French noblesse in

the days of Louis Quinze. What could a corrupt tree bring forth, but

corrupt fruit? If some of the early lodges, like those of "La Felicite"

and "L'Ancre," to which women were admitted, resembled not a little the

Bacchic mysteries of old Rome, and like them called for the interference

of the police, still no great reform was to be expected, when those

Sovereign Masonic Princes, the "Emperors of the East and West,"

quarrelled--knights of the East against knights of the West--till they

were absorbed or crushed by the Lodge "Grand Orient," with Philippe

Egalite, Duc de Chartres, as their grand master, and as his

representative, the hero of the diamond necklace, and disciple of Count

Cagliostro--Louis, Prince de Rohan.

But if Freemasonry, among the frivolous and sensual French noblesse,

became utterly frivolous and sensual itself, it took a deeper, though a

questionably fantastic form, among the more serious and earnest German

nobility. Forgetful as they too often were of their duty to their

peoples--tyrannical, extravagant, debauched by French opinions, French

fashions, French luxuries, till they had begun to despise their native

speech, their native literature, almost their native land, and to hide

their native homeliness under a clumsy varnish of French outside

civilisation, which the years 1807-13 rubbed off them again with a brush

of iron--they were yet Germans at heart; and that German instinct for the

unseen--call it enthusiasm, mysticism, what you will, you cannot make it

anything but a human fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most

blessed fact--that instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar

value to German philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and above all to

German family life, and which is just the complement needed to prevent

our English common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockism from degenerating into

materialism--that was only lying hidden, but not dead, in the German

spirit.

With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more

earnest shape. Dropping, very soon, that Lockite and _Philosophe_ tone

which had perhaps recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it

became mediaevalist and mystic. It craved after a resuscitation of old

chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of the knightly ideal, and the old

German _biederkeit und tapferkeit_, which were all defiled and overlaid

by French fopperies. And not in vain; as no struggle after a noble aim,

however confused or fantastic, is ever in vain. Freemasonry was the

direct parent of the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which freed

Germany from Napoleon. Whatever follies young members of them may have

committed; whatever Jahn and his Turnerei; whatever the iron youths, with

their iron decorations and iron boot-heels; whatever, in a word, may have

been said or done amiss, in that childishness which (as their own wisest

writers often lament) so often defaces the noble childlikeness of the

German spirit, let it be always remembered that under the impulse first

given by Freemasonry, as much as that given by such heroes as Stein and

Scharnhorst, Germany shook off the chains which had fallen on her in her

sleep; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it but for a moment, a free

people alike in body and in soul.

Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic

influences, one shrinks from saying much of the extravagances in which

its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution. Yet they are so

characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature,

that they must be hinted at, though not detailed.

It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the

aristocracy, or at least to the most educated classes; and clear, too,

that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism

into which the popular creeds had then been frozen--unsatisfied with

their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo-philosophy--unsatisfied with

want of all duty, purpose, noble thought, or noble work. With such a

temper of mind it fell in: but that very temper was open (as it always

is) to those dreams of a royal road to wisdom and to virtue, which have

haunted, in all ages, the luxurious and the idle.

Those who will, may read enough, and too much, of the wonderful secrets

in nature and science and theosophy, which men expected to find and did

not find in the higher degrees of Masonry, till old Voss--the translator

of Homer--had to confess, that after "trying for eleven years to attain a

perfect knowledge of the inmost penetralia, where the secret is said to

be, and of its invisible guardians," all he knew was that "the documents

which he had to make known to the initiated were nothing more than a well

got-up farce."

But the mania was general. The high-born and the virtuous expected to

discover some panacea for their own consciences in what Voss calls, "A

multitude of symbols, which are ever increasing the farther you

penetrate, and are made to have a moral application through some

arbitrary twisting of their meaning, as if I were to attempt expounding

the chaos on my writing-desk."

A rich harvest-field was an aristocracy in such a humour, for quacks of

every kind; richer even than that of France, in that the Germans were at

once more honest and more earnest, and therefore to be robbed more

easily. The carcass was there: and the birds of prey were gathered

together.

Of Rosa, with his lodge of the Three Hammers, and his Potsdam

gold-making;--of Johnson, alias Leuchte, who passed himself off as a

Grand Prior sent from Scotland to resuscitate the order of Knights

Templars; who informed his disciples that the Grand Master Von Hund

commanded 26,000 men; that round the convent (what convent, does not

appear) a high wall was erected, which was guarded day and night; that

the English navy was in the hands of the Order; that they had MSS.

written by Hugo de Paganis (a mythic hero who often figures in these

fables); that their treasure was in only three places in the world, in

Ballenstadt, in the icy mountains of Savoy, and in China; that whosoever

drew on himself the displeasure of the Order, perished both body and

soul; who degraded his rival Rosa to the sound of military music, and

after having had, like every dog, his day, died in prison in the

Wartburg;--of the Rosicrucians, who were accused of wanting to support

and advance the Catholic religion--one would think the accusation was

very unnecessary, seeing that their actual dealings were with the

philosopher's stone, and the exorcism of spirits: and that the first

apostle of the new golden Rosicrucian order, one Schropfer, getting into

debt, and fearing exposure, finished his life in an altogether

un-catholic manner at Leipsic in 1774, by shooting himself;--of Keller

and his Urim and Thummim;--of Wollner (who caught the Crown Prince

Frederick William) with his three names of Chrysophiron, Heliconus, and

Ophiron, and his fourth name of Ormesus Magnus, under which all the

brethren were to offer up for him solemn prayers and intercessions;--of

Baron Heinrich von Ekker and Eckenhofen, gentleman of the bed-chamber and

counsellor of the Duke of Coburg Saalfeld, and his Jewish colleague

Hirschmann, with their Asiatic brethren and order named Ben Bicca,

Cabalistic and Talmudic; of the Illuminati, and poor Adam Weisshaupt,

Professor of Canon and National Law at Ingoldstadt in Bavaria, who set up

what he considered an Anti-Jesuitical order on a Jesuit model, with some

vague hope, according to his own showing, of "perfecting the reasoning

powers interesting to mankind, spreading the knowledge of sentiments both

humane and social, checking wicked inclinations, standing up for

oppressed and suffering virtue against all wrong, promoting the

advancement of men of merit, and in every way facilitating the

acquirement of knowledge and science;"--of this honest silly man, and his

attempts to carry out all his fine projects by calling himself Spartacus,

Bavaria Achaia, Austria Egypt, Vienna Rome, and so forth;--of Knigge, who

picked his honest brains, quarrelled with him, and then made money and

fame out of his plans, for as long as they lasted;--of Bode, the knight

of the lilies of the valley, who, having caught Duke Ernest of Saxe

Gotha, was himself caught by Knigge, and his eight, nine, or more

ascending orders of unwisdom;--and finally of the Jesuits who, really

with considerable excuses for their severity, fell upon these poor

foolish Illuminati in 1784 throughout Bavaria, and had them exiled or

imprisoned;--of all this you may read in the pages of Dr. Findel, and in

many another book. For, forgotten as they are now, they made noise

enough in their time.

And so it befell, that this eighteenth century, which is usually held to

be the most "materialistic" of epochs, was, in fact, a most

"spiritualistic" one; in which ghosts, demons, quacks, philosophers'

stones, enchanters' wands, mysteries and mummeries, were as

fashionable--as they will probably be again some day.

You have all heard of Cagliostro--"pupil of the sage Althotas, foster-

child of the Scheriff of Mecca, probable son of the last king of

Trebizond; named also Acharat, and 'Unfortunate child of Nature;' by

profession healer of diseases, abolisher of wrinkles, friend of the poor

and impotent; grand-master of the Egyptian Mason-lodge of High Science,

spirit-summoner, gold-cook, Grand-Cophta, prophet, priest, Thaumaturgic

moralist, and swindler"--born Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo;--of him, and

of his lovely Countess Seraphina--nee Lorenza Feliciani? You have read

what Goethe--and still more important, what Mr. Carlyle has written on

him, as on one of the most significant personages of the age? Remember,

then, that Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; that his success--nay,

his having even conceived the possibility of success in the brain that

lay within that "brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped" head--was made

possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro lived in our time, public

opinion would have pointed out to him other roads to honour--on which he

would doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly dace try to be

caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish pike who cannot gorge them.

But the method most easy for a pike-nature like Cagliostro's, was in the

eighteenth century, as it may be in the latter half of the nineteenth, to

trade, in a materialist age, on the unsatisfied spiritual cravings of

mankind. For what do all these phantasms betoken, but a generation

ashamed of its own materialism, sensuality, insincerity, ignorance, and

striving to escape therefrom by any and every mad superstition which

seemed likely to give an answer to the awful questions--What are we, and

where? and to lay to rest those instincts of the unseen and infinite

around it, which tormented it like ghosts by day and night: a sight

ludicrous or pathetic, according as it is looked on by a cynical or a

human spirit.

It is easy to call such a phenomenon absurd, improbable. It is rather

rational, probable, say certain to happen. Rational, I say; for the

reason of man tells him, and has always told him, that he is a

supernatural being, if by nature is meant that which is cognisable by his

five senses: that his coming into this world, his relation to it, his

exit from it--which are the three most important facts about him--are

supernatural, not to be explained by any deductions from the impressions

of his senses. And I make bold to say, that the recent discoveries of

physical science--notably those of embryology--go only to justify that

old and general belief of man. If man be told that the microscope and

scalpel show no difference, in the first stage of visible existence,

between him and the lower mammals, then he has a right to answer--as he

will answer--So much the worse for the microscope and scalpel: so much

the better for my old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life,

death, a substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, invisible,

unknowable by any physical science whatsoever. If you cannot render me a

reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will

render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory

of life, it will demand satisfaction from some magical theory; as did the

mind of the eighteenth century when, revolting from materialism, it fled

to magic, to explain the ever-astounding miracle of life.

The old Regime. Will our age, in its turn, ever be spoken of as an old

Regime? Will it ever be spoken of as a Regime at all; as an organised,

orderly system of society and polity; and not merely as a chaos, an

anarchy, a transitory struggle, of which the money-lender has been the

real guide and lord?

But at least it will be spoken of as an age of progress, of rapid

developments, of astonishing discoveries.

Are you so sure of that? There was an age of progress once. But what is

our age--what is all which has befallen since 1815--save after-swells of

that great storm, which are weakening and lulling into heavy calm? Are

we on the eve of stagnation? Of a long check to the human intellect? Of

a new Byzantine era, in which little men will discuss, and ape, the deeds

which great men did in their forefathers' days?

What progress--it is a question which some will receive with almost angry

surprise--what progress has the human mind made since 1815?

If the thought be startling, do me the great honour of taking it home,

and verifying for yourselves its truth or its falsehood. I do not say

that it is altogether true. No proposition concerning human things,

stated so broadly, can be. But see for yourselves, whether it is not at

least more true than false; whether the ideas, the discoveries, of which

we boast most in the nineteenth century, are not really due to the end of

the eighteenth. Whether other men did not labour, and we have only

entered into their labours. Whether our positivist spirit, our content

with the collecting of facts, our dread of vast theories, is not a

symptom--wholesome, prudent, modest, but still a symptom--of our

consciousness that we are not as our grandfathers were; that we can no

longer conceive great ideas, which illumine, for good or evil, the whole

mind and heart of man, and drive him on to dare and suffer desperately.

Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but

they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress. No

outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it

merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is

inward, of the soul. And, therefore, improved constitutions, and

improved book instruction--now miscalled education--are not progress:

they are at best only fruits and signs thereof. For they are outward,

material; and progress, I say, is inward. The self-help and

self-determination of the independent soul--that is the root of progress;

and the more human beings who have that, the more progress there is in

the world. Give me a man who, though he can neither read nor write, yet

dares think for himself, and do the thing he believes: that man will help

forward the human race more than any thousand men who have read, or

written either, a thousand books apiece, but have not dared to think for

themselves. And better for his race, and better, I believe, in the sight

of God, the confusions and mistakes of that one sincere brave man, than

the second-hand and cowardly correctness of all the thousand.

As for the "triumphs of science," let us honour, with astonishment and

awe, the genius of those who invented them; but let us remember that the

things themselves are as a gun or a sword, with which we can kill our

enemy, but with which also our enemy can kill us. Like all outward and

material things, they are equally fit for good and for evil. In England

here--they have been as yet, as far as I can see, nothing but blessings:

but I have my very serious doubts whether they are likely to be blessings

to the whole human race, for many an age to come. I can conceive

them--may God avert the omen!--the instruments of a more crushing

executive centralisation, of a more utter oppression of the bodies and

souls of men, than the world has yet seen. I can conceive--may God avert

the omen!--centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the

junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires--a world-

spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web; and smiting from thence

everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a

swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II.

were but clumsy and impotent.

All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or evil, exactly as far

as they are in the hands of good men or of bad.

Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads and telegraphs, instead

of inaugurating an era of progress, may possibly only retard it. "Rester

sur un grand succes," which was Rossini's advice to a young singer who

had achieved a triumph, is a maxim which the world often follows, not

only from prudence, but from necessity. They have done so much that it

seems neither prudent nor possible to do more. They will rest and be

thankful.

Thus, gunpowder and printing made rapid changes enough; but those changes

had no farther development. The new art of war, the new art of

literature, remained stationary, or rather receded and degenerated, till

the end of the eighteenth century.

And so it may be with our means of locomotion and intercommunion, and

what depends on them. The vast and unprecedented amount of capital, of

social interest, of actual human intellect invested--I may say locked

up--in these railroads, and telegraphs, and other triumphs of industry

and science, will not enter into competition against themselves. They

will not set themselves free to seek new discoveries in directions which

are often actually opposed to their own, always foreign to it. If the

money of thousands are locked up in these great works, the brains of

hundreds of thousands, and of the very shrewdest too, are equally locked

up therein likewise; and are to be subtracted from the gross material of

social development, and added (without personal fault of their owners,

who may be very good men) to the dead weight of vested selfishness,

ignorance, and dislike of change.

Yes. A Byzantine and stationary age is possible yet. Perhaps we are now

entering upon it; an age in which mankind shall be satisfied with the

"triumphs of science," and shall look merely to the greatest comfort

(call it not happiness) of the greatest number; and like the debased Jews

of old, "having found the life of their hand, be therewith content," no

matter in what mud-hole of slavery and superstition.

But one hope there is, and more than a hope--one certainty, that however

satisfied enlightened public opinion may become with the results of

science, and the progress of the human race, there will be always a more

enlightened private opinion or opinions, which will not be satisfied

therewith at all; a few men of genius, a few children of light, it may be

a few persecuted, and a few martyrs for new truths, who will wish the

world not to rest and be thankful, but to be discontented with itself,

ashamed of itself, striving and toiling upward, without present hope of

gain, till it has reached that unknown goal which Bacon saw afar off, and

like all other heroes, died in faith, not having received the promises,

but seeking still a polity which has foundations, whose builder and maker

is God.

These will be the men of science, whether physical or spiritual. Not

merely the men who utilise and apply that which is known (useful as they

plainly are), but the men who themselves discover that which was unknown,

and are generally deemed useless, if not hurtful, to their race. They

will keep the sacred lamp burning unobserved in quiet studies, while all

the world is gazing only at the gaslights flaring in the street. They

will pass that lamp on from hand to hand, modestly, almost stealthily,

till the day comes round again, when the obscure student shall be

discovered once more to be, as he has always been, the strongest man on

earth. For they follow a mistress whose footsteps may often slip, yet

never fall; for she walks forward on the eternal facts of Nature, which

are the acted will of God. A giantess she is; young indeed, but humble

as yet: cautious and modest beyond her years. She is accused of trying

to scale Olympus, by some who fancy that they have already scaled it

themselves, and will, of course, brook no rival in their fancied monopoly

of wisdom.

The accusation, I believe, is unjust. And yet science may scale Olympus

after all. Without intending it, almost without knowing it, she may find

herself hereafter upon a summit of which she never dreamed; surveying the

universe of God in the light of Him who made it and her, and remakes them

both for ever and ever. On that summit she may stand hereafter, if only

she goes on, as she goes now, in humility and in patience; doing the duty

which lies nearest her; lured along the upward road, not by ambition,

vanity, or greed, but by reverent curiosity for every new pebble, and

flower, and child, and savage, around her feet.

FOOTNOTES

{1} Mr. H. Reeve's translation of De Tocqueville's "France before the

Revolution of 1789." p. 280.