Chapter II (3)

He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. This world of ours, though usually steady enough in its movements, is at times decidedly eccentric. Not that I mean to impute to our old and exceedingly respectable planet any occasional aberrations of intellect, or still less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and Venus); the word is here to be accepted strictly in its scientific or Pickwickian sense as implying merely an irregularity of movement, a slight wobbling out of the established path, a deviation from exact circularity. Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion (I am not going to explain them here; the names alone will be quite sufficient for most people; they will take the rest on trust)—owing to the combination of these profoundly interesting causes, I say, there occur certain periods in the world’s life when for a very long time together (10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer than the southern, or _vice versa_. Now Dr. Croll has calculated that about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it was that produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on till about 80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the climate of Britain and the neighboring continent with its existing inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are good reasons for believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that

He lived in the long long agoes;
’Twas the manner of primitive man.

The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with the hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits with the lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and most remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was in all probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding. Our Zoo can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of Seine. But our old master saw the last of some at least among those gigantic quadrupeds; it was his hand or that of one among his fellows that scratched the famous mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and carved the figure of the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse. Probably, therefore, he lived in the period immediately preceding the Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells with which the long secular winter of the northern hemisphere was then from time to time agreeably diversified.

And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but on several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massénat, where a very early pre-Glacial man is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting a flint-tipped javelin. In this as in all other pictures of the same epoch I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in the costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master’s studies, in fact, are all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently unacquainted as yet with the use of clothing, though primitive woman, while still unclad, had already learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple addition of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though dresses were still wholly unknown, rouge was even then extremely fashionable among French ladies, and lumps of the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of the cave where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To return to our hunter, however, who for aught we know to the contrary may be our old master himself in person, he is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with an arched back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head, long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry and awkward figure.

Was he black? That we don’t certainly know, but all analogy would lead one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the whole, to be a very recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern. At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old original hairy covering. The few skulls and other fragments of skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our old master and his contemporaries much resembled in shape and build the Australian black fellows, though their foreheads were lower and more receding, while their front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling the immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart from any theoretical considerations as to our probable descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin’s hypothetical “hairy arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,” whose existence may or may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the actual historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as evidently approaching in several important respects the higher monkeys.

It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old monkey-like progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly delineated for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has admirably reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with a little creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes to each hind foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages show us an Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short by far to reach the ground. In our own horse these lateral toes have become reduced to what are known by veterinaries as splint bones, combined with the canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the pre-Glacial horses the splint bones still generally remained quite distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier period when they existed as two separate and independent side toes in the ancestral quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however, the splints are found united with the canons in a single piece, while conversely horses are sometimes, though very rarely, born at the present day with three-toed feet, exactly resembling those of their half-forgotten ancestor the Pliocene hipparion.

The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave period is, I am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of the period ate them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France; it was practised by pre-Glacial man in the caves of Périgord, and revived with immense enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards after the siege of Paris and the hunger of the Commune. The cave men hunted and killed the wild horse of their own times, and one of the best of their remaining works of art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses, while a huge snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his heel. In this rough prehistoric sketch one seems to catch some faint antique foreshadowing of the rude humor of the “Petit Journal pour Rire.” Some archæologists even believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave men as a source of food, and argue that the familiarity with its form shown in the drawings could only have been acquired by people who knew the animal in its domesticated state; they declare that the cave man was obviously horsey. But all the indications seem to me to show that tame animals were quite unknown in the age of the cave men. The mammoth certainly was never domesticated; yet there is a famous sketch of the huge beast upon a piece of his own ivory, discovered in the cave of La Madelaine by Messrs. Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works on archæology, which forms one of the finest existing relics of pre-Glacial art. In another sketch, less well known, but not unworthy of admiration, the early artist has given us with a few rapid but admirable strokes his own reminiscence of the effect produced upon him by the sudden onslaught of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide open, a perfect glimpse of elephantine fury. It forms a capital example of early impressionism, respectfully recommended to the favorable attention of Mr. J. M. Whistler.

The reindeer, however, formed the favorite food and favorite model of the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these early prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palæolithic art is undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, in which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a Chinese artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing of two reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and unearthed in one of the caves of Périgord, though far inferior to the Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit. The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for the head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of another. Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures. Probably all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote Mr. Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, “he lived in a cave by the seas; he lived upon oysters and foes.” The oysters are quite undoubted and the foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.

I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, however, the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves to show how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive. You can’t speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals; nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilized being who is now calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own study. Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the hypothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have intervened innumerable generations of gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master, when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and necklet of bear’s teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human being, with a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had invented the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle. Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements with artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with the figures of animals. I have no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to distil; and he was probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures. Such a personage cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has rightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.

No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must go much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years, with which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier fire-split flints which the Abbé Bourgeois—undaunted mortal!—ventured to discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire de Beauce_. Those flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial, one distinguished archæologist will not admit they can be in any way human; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the great European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whether you call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough and fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it. When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may be sure that man, noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties—cannibal or otherwise—is lurking somewhere very close just round the corner. The more we examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the conviction force itself upon us that he was very far indeed from being primitive—that we must push back the early history of our race not for 250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years into the dim past of Tertiary ages.

But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race by a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he is separated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space, the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows still cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice sheet drove away palæolithic man—the man of the caves and the unwrought flint axes—from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armed only with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant of taming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing of the use of metals—_aurum irrepertum spernere fortior_—and he had not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to a finished edge. He couldn’t make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery, and if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great anthropological truth, justly remarks, “man, being reasonable, _must_ get drunk”) he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from the capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human being who alone inhabited France and England during the later pre-Glacial period.

A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play bills put it), and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile, loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared away he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man, physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulations of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the age of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity—the age of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake dwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow small ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flax and wear decent clothing; in a word, they had passed from the savage hunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists. That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we must conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn’t to be measured by mere calculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand years. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; what looked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere in the dim distance. Like our palæolithic artists, we fail to get the reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.

On the table where I write there lie two paper weights, preserving from the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this article is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet, produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows, and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now serves me in the office of a paper weight, is far ruder, simpler, and more ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use among the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forests two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angry cave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybody knows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a bastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I have very little doubt in my own mind that with it some æsthetic ancestor has brained and cut up for use his next-door neighbor in the nearest cavern, and then carved upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketch of the entire performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact, habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal remains of the mammoth or the man whom they wished to caricature in deathless bone-cuts. The other paper weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk, belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels of civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trained barbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of a rude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in the midst of this “so-called nineteenth century,” which perpetually proclaims itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to believe themselves inferior to their original ancestors, instead of being superior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base, degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men that ever were our fathers.—_Cornhill Magazine._

THE ORGANIZATION OF DEMOCRACY.

BY GOLDWIN SMITH.

In the Colonies, at least in Canada, there are a good many of us who believe, not in the expansion of England, but in the multiplication of Englands, and to whom Imperial Federation, or any scheme for the political re-absorption of an adult and distant Colony into its Mother Country, appears totally impracticable. Yet we regard the Mother Country not only as the object of our filial affection and pride, but as the centre of our civilization, feel a practical as well as a sentimental interest in everything that touches her, and tremble at her danger as at our own.

We look on from a distance, it is true; and though the cable transmits to us the news, it does not, nor do even the newspapers and the correspondents, transmit to us the mind of England. In this respect our judgment may be at fault. On the other hand, we are out of the fray; we stand clear of English parties; we care for nothing but the country; we see, while those immediately engaged do not see, the heady current of faction, ambition, chimerical aspiration, political fatalism, and disunionist conspiracy hurrying the nation towards a bourne which all the speakers and writers on the Franchise Bill and the Redistribution Bill, by the vagueness of their speculations on the practical results, proclaim to be unknown.

The electorate, that is to say, the government—at least the body by which the government is appointed and its policy is determined—is undergoing reconstruction on the largest scale. Yet we look in vain, even in the speeches of the great statesman who is the author of these measures, for any forecast of their practical effect, of the influence which they will have on the character of government, or of the sort of policy which they will produce. Able and impressive as the speeches may be, there is little in them but philanthropy and arithmetic, neither of which is politics. The effect of the Redistribution Bill especially is evidently a matter of the merest conjecture. Lord Salisbury thinks that it will act in one way, and Mr. Chamberlain that it will act in another. The first considers it favorable to aristocratic reaction, the second considers it favorable to authoritative democracy. The Bill is a leap in the dark. In any case less important than that of a reconstruction of the national institutions, safe experiments would probably precede sweeping change. A new mode of paving would be tried first in one or two streets; a new mode of cultivation would be tried first in one or two fields. But if you proposed to try the Redistribution Bill in one or two specimen districts, a chorus of scornful reprobation would arise from all parties, sects, and ambitions. Nor would any voices be louder than those of some who are foremost in hailing the advent of political science, and preaching the necessity of a scientific method in all things. This is not a deliberation on the amendment of national institutions; it is a battle of parties. Each party is seeking not so much to improve the government as to make it the instrument of particular theories or passions. But this surely is what a government, an executive government at least, ought not to be. A government ought to be the impartial guardian for the whole nation of law, order, property, personal rights, and the public safety; while opinion is left to shape itself by discussion, reach maturity, and at length impress itself on legislation. This whole movement is pre-eminently the work of party, and inspired by its passions. Reform in 1832 was really national; the nation earnestly desired liberation from a corrupt oligarchy. But the subsequent suffrage agitations have been mainly set on foot by the politicians for the purposes of their party war.

Democracy has come. By all reflecting men its advent seems to be acknowledged, by most it is welcomed as bringing, so far as we can see or so far as experience, though chequered, informs us, an increase of happiness to the masses of mankind, and therefore, in the highest sense, to all. But it requires to be organized and regulated; otherwise the end will be anarchy and, as the inevitable consequence of anarchy, a relapse into a government of force. Republics, as we have more than once seen, are capable of suicide. The people is no more divine than kings, though its divinity was proclaimed by the Maratists; it is capable of governing itself as wrongly as any king can govern it. The ignorance, the passions, the self-interest, not only of particular classes, but of all of us alike, need to be controlled, as far as institutions can control them, and eliminated from the Councils of the State. The Americans, as was said before, have tried to organize and regulate democracy. The framers of the American Constitution—no veil of illusion being spread before their eyes by the surviving forms and names of an old monarchy—saw the problem which destiny had set before them. It was not such a problem as would be presented to them by the America of the present day, with its New York and its Chicago, its flood of foreign immigrants, and its enfranchised negroes; far less is it such a problem as Great Britain, with the populace of its great cities, its host of Radical and Secularist artisans, its uninstructed millions of farm laborers, and its disaffected Irishry presents to the British statesman. They had to deal only with the Puritan freeholders of New England and the planters of the South. Still they saw the necessity of providing a solution, and a solution they produced—one not in all respects correct, even in its day (for the mode adopted of electing the President was a fatal error), yet effective as well as deliberate, and such as has sufficed, notwithstanding the great increase of the strain upon the machinery, to shelter civilization and avert anarchy. They instituted an executive government invested with actual power and existing independently of parties in Congress, a real though suspensive veto, a Senate elected on a Conservative principle, a written constitution in the keeping of a Supreme Court, by which all powers and jurisdictions are strictly defined and limited, and which can be amended only with the deliberate consent of the nation at large. Besides, as was said before, the Federal system itself, by localizing questions and breaking the sweep of agitation, has a highly Conservative effect. These safeguards, with the political qualities of the Anglo-Americans and the Germans, prevent a catastrophe which without them would certainly come. But England has nothing like them. She has nothing but an “ancient throne,” now stripped of the last vestige of political power, and an aristocracy which is evidently doomed, and, by its struggles to retain its obsolete privilege, stimulates revolution. The only Conservative institution which is really effective is the non-payment of Members of Parliament; and this Democracy has already marked for abolition.

One could wish for a blast of the Fontarabian horn to awaken British statesmen, in this decisive hour, to the fact that England, though she has the consecrated form, has no longer the substance of monarchical government. Her only government is the House of Commons, or a committee of leaders of the dominant party, holding their offices during the pleasure of that House. In the electorate is the supreme power; this is now not only the fact but a recognized fact. Twice the Ministry, after submitting its policy to the judgment of the constituencies by a dissolution of Parliament, has resigned in deference to the verdict. Yet these same statesmen go on dealing with the electorate as though they were not dealing with the government or with the sovereign power, but only with a representation of the people convened for the purpose of assenting to taxation. They seem to fancy that flood the electorate as they will with ignorance, passion, and all the elements of violence and anarchy, the government will still be carried on calmly and wisely by the occupant and the Ministers of the “ancient throne.” Is it possible that the mere phrase “servants of the Crown” can cast such a spell over practical minds?

Down to this time the political history of England has been a long revolution, of which the Whig or Liberal party in its successive phases has been the organ, and by which, after many oscillations and vicissitudes, supreme power has been drawn from the Crown and the aristocracy to the Commons. The destructive part of the process is now all but complete, only a small remnant of precarious power being retained by the House of Lords. The constructive part remains to be performed. The task of British statesmen at the present day is, in effect, to found a Democratic Government. The ground has been cleared for the new edifice, but the edifice has yet to be built. Its foundations have hardly yet been laid.

Without giving way to reactionary panic, it may surely be said that the times are critical. They are not evil; they are full, on the contrary, of the unripe promise of good; but they are critical. Statesmen cannot afford to act blindfold. Democracy comes, as it was likely that it would come, not by itself, but as part of a general revolution, political, social, and religious. Nihilism marks, by its all-embracing lust of destruction, the connection between the different revolutionary forces, while it exhibits them in their delirious excess. The English reform movement in the early part of the century was almost exclusively political; other agitations were called into being by the general disturbance, but they were secondary and subsided; the main object sought was the removal of abuses in government; the leaders were strict economists, and, far from seeking a social revolution, would have recoiled from the idea. But a momentous change has taken place since that time. The fermentation is now not only political but general. Political power is sought by the masses and their leaders, not merely for the sake of purifying the administration and reducing its cost, but in the hope that it may be used to effect a great social change. Secularism has become an important factor in the situation. Rate religious influence, and that of faith in a future state as low as you will, it can hardly be denied that the patience of the masses under the inequalities of the social system has hitherto been largely sustained by the belief that the system was a providential ordinance, and that those who did their duty in it, even if they suffered here, would be in some way made happy in the sum of things.

Nor has the doctrine of spiritual equality been without its effect in consoling the lowly for their inferiority of rank. Hereafter scientific conviction, derived from the study of the social organism, may supply the place of religious impressions as a motive for acquiescence in things as they are. At present it is the destructive process of science that has almost exclusively taken place in the mind of the Radical proletarian. Believing now that this world is all, he naturally desires to grasp his full share of its good things without delay. His sensibility having been quickened with his intelligence, he feels inferiority as well as privation, and is impelled by social envy as well as by desire. His education has advanced just far enough to enable him to imbibe theories which coincide with his wishes. If he cannot understand the fine reasonings of Mr. George, he can understand the confiscation, and he thinks that so much fine reasoning must make the confiscation moral. Communism and semi-communism are rife; there is a tendency to them even at the Universities, and in other high places. Perhaps the loss of faith in the Church leads some to see an indemnity for it in a communistic polity. If there is not in England, as there is in Germany, a strong Socialistic party, there appears to be a growing disposition to make a Socialistic use of the suffrage. There is certainly in many quarters an exaggerated idea of the powers and duties of the fictitious being styled the State. One conspicuous candidate for the succession to the leadership, at all events, is evidently holding out hopes of a Socialistic system of high taxation for the benefit of those who produce least, and he appears inclined to head a crusade against the property of all landowners, and of all owners of houses in towns. Nor is he without rivals in this quest of popularity on the Tory side. The ball of agrarianism which has been set rolling by recent legislation in Ireland, rolls on, and its course is not likely to stop in Skye. All this may be working for good. The writer of this paper, at all events, has no inclination to take the despondent view. But surely there is enough to warn statesmen that they must exercise forecast, that they must try, while they can, to secure to the nation a stable and rational government; that they must not hastily divorce power from intelligence and responsibility; that they must not plunge the country headlong into unorganized and unregulated democracy. If this Parliament comes to an end without having created any conservative safeguards, while it has instituted a suffrage destined evidently soon to be universal, the reins will have been thrown on the necks of the horses, and the last leverage of Conservatism will be gone. M. Taine has just shown us whither horses with the reins upon their necks may run, and what wreck they may make of their own hopes. It is true that great resignation, and even apathy, has been sometimes shown by the masses in times of suffering from dearth. No doubt the masses move slowly; but you incite them to move when you thrust into their hand the vote and send among them people to teach them that by a violent use of it they can raise themselves to the level of the rich. Able and powerful men of the ruling class itself are now, either from philanthropy or from party motives, doing their utmost to pave the way for a Socialistic revolution.

Of all the calamities that ever befell the human race, the greatest was the French Revolution. Wide, happily, is the difference between the France of a century ago and the England of the present day. In the case of England there is no Versailles, no deficit, no gulf between the aristocracy and the middle classes; while there is diffused intelligence instead of a night of political ignorance in which all sorts of spectres stalked, general habits of self-government in place of a paralyzing centralization, and a political character, as we may flatter ourselves, stronger and sounder than was that of the French. Still there are some points of similarity, especially the dangerous conjunction of social or agrarian with political revolution. In England, as in the France of the eighteenth century, scepticism has gained the minds of the ruling class; with their convictions their nerve is shaken, and it is difficult to see who would stop the avalanche if once it should begin to slide. Nor is there wanting a sybaritic Jacobinism which ominously reminds us of the Palais Royal. Pleasure-hunting and frivolity, athletic and of other kinds, appear to have reached a great height, and to public questions a sort of careless fatalism seems to prevail. No doubt there is still plenty of force and of seriousness in the country; but something like a convulsion may be needed to bring them to the front. The masses in France, though galled by the burdens of feudal lordship were not, properly speaking, Socialistic. Socialism proper can hardly be said to have shown its head before the conspiracy of Babœuf; and the nation was still at the core monarchical and Catholic, as was proved by the ease with which both monarchy and Church were restored by Napoleon. Should the manufacturing and maritime supremacy of England be still more severely challenged and continue to decline, an amount of suffering might be produced among her people hardly less than was, in reality, that of the people in France. If Socialistic legislation commences in earnest, and, as the inevitable consequence, property begins to shrink from circulation and investment, stoppage of industry and dearth of bread cannot fail to ensue, and we know what the effects of these would be in the middle of a Socialistic revolution. Much ought to be risked, if there were real hope of equalizing, by any political action, the human lot. But who seriously believes this to be possible? Who does not know that the things which we deplore and are slowly mending will only be made worse by convulsions?

Surely, if this work were in the hands of patriotic and comprehensive statesmanship, not in those of party, there would be, instead of a mere extension of the Franchise, a revision of the Constitution. Before, by the admission of a large popular element, the strain upon the conservative and regulative parts of the machine was increased, those parts would be looked over and put in order; this question of the Second Chamber would be settled, and if the result was a determination to reform the House of Lords, that determination would be carried into effect, and the institution would be placed in a condition to do its work, before the next general election.

In a reform of the House of Lords it is difficult to feel any confidence. The hereditary principle seems to be thoroughly dead. In the Middle Ages it had a root in the faith and in the ignorance of mankind; it had its temporary uses, and at the same time it had its correctives. A mediæval lord was obliged to exert himself that his lordship might not be taken by another. A mediæval king was obliged to exert himself if he wished to keep his crown upon his head. Now, except in the rare cases of men moulded of Nature’s finest clay, with whom nobility acts really as an obligation, hereditary rank and wealth kill duty in the cradle. It is found impossible to get a decent attendance in the House of Lords. In answer to Lord Rosebery’s appeal, a Peer says that he will be happy to attend if the nation will re-enact the Corn Laws, so as to enable him to keep a house in town. To indulge a mere whim, the hereditary wearers of the crown refuse to visit Ireland, and thus fling away the affections of the Irish people. The historical cause has been tried during this controversy and the issue is not doubtful. We have seen how the House of Lords, since it assumed its present character, which it did under the second Tudor, has worked. That it has acted as a court of mature wisdom, revising on grounds of impartial statesmanship the rash decisions of the popular House, is as complete a fable as its Norman pedigree. It has simply opposed the selfish resistance of a privileged order to change of every kind. Could it have its way, not only Rotten Boroughs and Sinecurism, but the old Criminal Code, Religious Intolerance, Arbitrary Imprisonment, the Censorship of the Press, the Paper Duty, even Slavery and the Slave Trade, would still be cumbering the earth; or, rather, long ago, the nation would have been compelled to choose between political death and revolution. To fear, on questions which caused national excitement, the House of Lords has at last given way; but not to reason and justice. A multitude of minor reforms it has strangled, by its obstructiveness, altogether. The only great measure of change which this organ of mature wisdom ever readily passed was the Franchise Bill of 1867, which was described by its own author as a leap in the dark, and had been devised with the view of swamping progressive intelligence in a flood of ignorance and beer. Nor has obstruction been the only sin of that order of which the House of Lords is the organ; it has given to the general policy of England a class bias; it stimulated the crusade against the French Revolution, and unlike the crusading Barons of the Middle Ages, it stayed at home revelling in high rents and in a mass of sinecures, of which it sacrificed not one penny, while the people bled and starved in a cause which was not theirs. It has fostered militarism generally as a diversion from domestic reform. On economic questions the legislation of the Lords has been mere landlordism. As mere landlords they have acted, from the day on which they sold the national religion to the Pope for a quiet title to the Church lands, to the day on which they passed the Arrears Bill, after showing their sense of its character, in order that they might recover some of their back rents. If twice in the course of their long history they have been for a moment on the side of freedom, fear for their Church lands, combined with jealousy of ecclesiastical favorites, was the cause. The period of their most complete ascendency, in the last century, was the epoch of political corruption; and the conduct of the House at the time of the railway mania, when it formed a Ring in the landlord interest, was, to say the least, not a proof that hereditary wealth lifts its possessor above commercial motives. Many histories are darker than that of the House of Lords; few are less heroic; and the facts are now deeply imprinted on the minds of the people. Faith in the “noble blood” of the scapegrace son of a law lord, once dissipated, is not likely to return. The hereditary wealth itself, which is the real basis of aristocratic influence, and without which the Peerage would be a thing of shreds and patches, is reduced by agricultural depression, and will be greatly broken up by the abolition of primogeniture and entail,—a change which is sure to come, for it will be found that the only antidote to agrarian communism is the free acquisition of land. The hereditary principle is dead, and can serve England or civilized humanity no more. Introduced into, or retained in, any Senate, it will carry with it the seeds of death. As soon as it obeys, as obey it certainly will, its obstructive instinct, the cry against it will be renewed. It will not become less odious by becoming weaker. If the life element which it is proposed to introduce remains antagonistic to the hereditary element, the tribunal of mature wisdom will be divided against itself and fresh conflicts will ensue. If it is assimilated, you will have the House of Lords over again, and more odious than ever, since the life element will be regarded as having apostatized and betrayed its trust.

Yet the whole theory of a Second Chamber as a necessary part of Parliamentary institutions appears to have no other origin nor any sounder basis than a mistaken view of the nature of the House of Lords, which all the world has supposed to be a Senate, when in fact it was an estate of the feudal realm, representing not a higher grade of deliberative wisdom but simply the special interest of the great landowners. The only valid argument in favor of the retention of the House of Lords is, in fact, the difficulty which the Bicamerists find in devising anything to be put in its place. Nomination is a total failure; the nominated Senate of Canada is a legislative cypher, the debates of which are not even reported, and the places in it are a mere addition to the bribery fund of the party leader. If both Chambers are elective, as in Victoria, the result is a collision and a deadlock, out of which, in the case of sovereign assemblies, there would be no colonial officer or governor to point a way. Co-option in any form, or election by an order, would give us the oligarchy over again, perhaps in a worse shape than ever, since the members would have to cultivate the good graces of a privileged and reactionary electorate. Not only as to the mode in which their Senate is to be elected are the Bicamerists at fault; they are equally at fault as to the special materials of which it is to be composed. If age or wealth is to be the qualification, impotence or odium will be the result. If the wisest are to have their seats in the Senate, the popular House will be deprived of its best leaders. Supreme power must centre somewhere; it will centre in that body which most directly represents the national will. Let the assembly, then, which is the seat of supreme power, be the seat of collective wisdom. Concentrate in it, as far as possible, all the best available elements, those of a conservative character as well as the rest. Frankly recognize its authority, and invest it at the same time with a full measure of responsibility. Notoriously the existence of a Senate diminishes the sense of responsibility in the popular chamber, and diminishes it out of proportion to the control really exercised; for a Senate soon gets tired of incurring the unpopularity of rejection. This surely is a more rational and hopeful plan than that of abandoning the seat of supreme power to popular impulse, and affixing by way of safeguard an artificial regulator to its side. Checks and balances belong to mechanics, not to politics; in mechanics you can apportion force, in politics force cannot be apportioned, though nominal authority may. That there are good and useful elements in the House of Lords, especially among the new creations, nobody doubts. Let them be transferred, with any social influence which in these democratic times may adhere to them, to a sphere where they can act with effect. At present they are ostracized by seclusion, as is clearly perceived by some Radicals, who on that ground deprecate a reform of the House of Lords. Let Lord Salisbury go to the Commons and Lord Hartington stay there. The Lords are warned by their partisans against imitating the foolish abdication of the French aristocracy in the famous holocaust of feudal titles. To that it may come, if they do not take care. But this is an earlier stage of the revolution, and the day of grace has not yet expired. Let the Lords do that which the French aristocracy ought to have done, and by doing which they might have averted the catastrophe. Let them at once go over frankly to the _Tiers Etat_, and strengthen by their accession the conservative forces in the national assembly. Convulsive efforts to retain an obnoxious privilege only inflame the revolutionary spirit, and at the same time make it still more desperately difficult for rational statesmanship to deal with the situation. Tory democracy is apparently a plea for founding aristocracy on demagogism, and for stemming Socialism by heading it and combining it with a foreign policy of violence. Can the House of Lords be so blind as not to see in what such a course must end? What has been the end of other attempts of privilege to save itself by an alliance with extreme Radicalism against moderate reform?

Not in a Second Chamber, patched up or newly created, but in a well-regulated franchise and a rational mode of election, are effectual securities for the permanent ascendancy of national reason over passion in the legislature to be found. The electorate has been dealt with by successive reformers in the belief that its functions, and therefore the necessary qualifications for it, have remained unchanged. But its functions have been greatly changed, and have become infinitely more important and difficult than they originally were. Instead of merely choosing delegates to give his assent to taxation, the elector is now called upon to choose a ruler, and, at the same time, virtually to decide upon the general policy of the country. This is beyond the capacity of any ordinary voter. Everybody knows what happens, and until an immense progress shall have been made in popular education, must happen—how the intelligent elector, even supposing him to escape bribery and all other corrupt influences, votes at best for the Blue or Yellow ticket, and too often votes not even for the Blue or Yellow ticket, but with reference to some merely local or personal question, some fancy or antipathy, leaving the broad interests of the country and the qualifications essential to a legislator altogether out of sight. The author of “Round My House” tells us how opinion among the French peasantry in certain districts was swept by an angry fancy about a reduction in the value of a coin. What chance would Chatham or Peel, representing a great national policy, have stood against the lowest demagogue if he had been on the unpopular side of the question about the Cider Tax or Wood’s halfpence? An ordinary citizen, occupied in trade or manual labor, has not the leisure, if he had the knowledge and capacity, to study the complex questions put before him. Yet there are reformers who desire to set Hodge to choose not only out of the worthies of his own neighborhood, but out of all the notabilities of the country, among whom the largest vote would probably be polled by the Tichborne Claimant. From selfishness the poor are at least as free as the rich; they would vote at least as well if they knew how; but the knowledge is to them unattainable. In no sphere but that of politics does anybody propose to thrust upon people power of which it is manifestly impossible that they should make an intelligent use. Not only is it manifestly impossible that the people should make an intelligent use of the power of direct election to the governing assembly and of determining its policy: it is morally impossible that they should really make use of it at all. They are unorganized, and, though they live in the same district, unconnected as a rule with each other: they have no means of taking counsel together for the selection of a member. The selection must therefore be made for them by some self-constituted agency. That agency is the Caucus, into the hands of whose managers and masters the representation, styled popular, really falls.

Both the party organizations in England are now adopting the system, and thus confiscating the suffrage which they profess by legislation to bestow. One of them at least already has the Boss, and both of them will soon have the complete machine, with a host of professional politicians, recruited from the class which prefers place-hunting to honest trades. Government, in a word, will fall into the hands of irresponsible intriguers, and will be dominated in ever-increasing measure by Knavery and corruption. Nor is there any assignable remedy for the evil; the wire-pullers and professional politicians alone can give their time to the elections, and therefore it is hardly possible to organize the means of casting off their yoke. Attending “primaries” is often preached as the duty of the patriotic citizen; but the patriotic citizen who does attend the primary finds everything arranged by the wire-pullers beforehand and himself impotent and a laughing-stock. This will not appear in the first flush of a revolutionary movement, while the present leaders retain their ascendancy, but it will appear as soon as the revolution settles down. Public education, it is true, has been introduced in England; but it has always existed in the United States, and it has not saved that country from the Boss. To save the country from the Boss is now the highest aim of the best citizens; but they will hardly succeed without a constitutional change.