Chapter IV: Part 4

The worst of it is that, if Sir Henry Maine is right, we have no more to hope from other classes than from roughs and clowns. He can discern no blue sky in any quarter. "In politics," he says, "the most powerful of all causes is the timidity, the listlessness, and the superficiality of the generality of minds" (p. 73). This is carrying criticism of democracy into an indictment against human nature. What is to become of us, thus placed between the devil of mob ignorance and corruption, and the deep sea of genteel listlessness and superficiality? After all, Sir Henry Maine is only repeating in more sober tones the querulous remonstrances with which we are so familiar on the lips of Ultramontanes and Legitimists. A less timid observer of contemporary events, certainly in the land that all of us know best and love best, would judge that, when it comes to a pinch, Liberals are still passably prudent, and Conservatives quite sufficiently wide-awake.

Another of the passages in Sir Henry Maine's book, that savours rather of the party caricaturist than of the "dispassionate student of politics," is the following:--

"There is some resemblance between the period of political reform
in the nineteenth century and the period of religious reformation
in the sixteenth. Now as then the multitude of followers must be
distinguished from the smaller group of leaders. Now as then
there are a certain number of zealots who desire that truth shall
prevail.... But behind these, now as then, there is a crowd which
has imbibed a delight in change for its own sake, who would reform
the Suffrage, or the House of Lords, or the Land Laws, or the
Union with Ireland, in precisely the same spirit in which the mob
behind the reformers of religion broke the nose of a saint in
stone, made a bonfire of copes and surplices, or shouted for the
government of the Church by presbyteries" (p. 130).

We should wish to look at this remarkable picture a little more closely. That there exist Anabaptists in the varied hosts of the English reformers is true. The feats of the Social Democrats, however, at the recent election hardly convince us that they have very formidable multitudes behind them. Nor is it they who concern themselves with such innovations as those which Sir Henry Maine specifies. The Social Democrats, even of the least red shade, go a long way beyond and below such trifles as Suffrage or the Upper House. To say of the crowd who do concern themselves with reform of the Suffrage, or the Land Laws, or the House of Lords, or the Union with Ireland, that they are animated by a delight in change for its own sake, apart from the respectable desire to apply a practical remedy to a practical inconvenience, is to show a rather highflying disregard of easily ascertainable facts. The Crowd listen with interest to talk about altering the Land Laws, because they suspect the English land system to have something to do with the unprosperous condition of the landlord, the farmer, and the labourer; with the depopulation of the country and the congestion in the towns; with the bad housing of the poor, and with various other evils which they suppose themselves to see staring them daily in the face. They may be entirely mistaken alike In their estimate of mischief and their hope of mitigation. But they are not moved by delight in change for its own sake. When the Crowd sympathises with disapproval of the House of Lords, it is because the legislative performances of that body are believed to have impeded useful reforms in the past, to be impeding them now, and to be likely to impede them in the future. This may be a sad misreading of the history of the last fifty years, and a painfully prejudiced anticipation of the next fifty. At any rate, it is in intention a solid and practical appeal to experience and results, and has no affinity to a restless love of change for the sake of change. No doubt, in the progress of the controversy, the assailants of the House of Lords attack the principle of birth. But the principle of birth is not attacked from the _a priori_ point of view. The whole force of the attack lies in what is taken to be the attested fact that the principle of a hereditary chamber supervising an elective chamber has worked, is working, and will go on working, inconveniently, stupidly, and dangerously. Finally, there is the question of the Irish Union. Is it the English or Scottish Crowd that is charged with a wanton desire to recast the Union? Nobody knows much about the matter who is not perfectly aware that the English statesman, whoever he may be, who undertakes the inevitable task of dealing with the demand for Home Rule, will have to make his case very plain indeed in order to make the cause popular here. Then is it the Irish Crowd? Sir Henry Maine, of all men, is not likely to believe that a sentiment which the wisest people of all parties in Ireland for a hundred years have known to lie in the depths of the mind of the great bulk of the Irish population, to whom we have now for the first time given the chance of declaring their wishes, is no more than a gratuitous and superficial passion for change for its own sake. The sentiment of Irish nationality may or may not be able to justify itself in the eye of prudential reason, and English statesmen may or may not have been wise in inviting it to explode. Those are different questions. But Sir Henry Maine himself admits in another connection (p. 83) that "vague and shadowy as are the recommendations of what is called a Nationality, a State founded on this principle has generally one real practical advantage, through its obliteration of small tyrannies and local oppressions." It is not to be denied that it is exactly the expectation of this very practical advantage that has given its new vitality to the Irish National movement which seems now once more, for good or for evil, to have come to a head. When it is looked into, then, the case against the multitudes who are as senselessly eager to change institutions as other multitudes once were to break off the noses of saints in stone, falls to pieces at every point.

Among other vices ascribed to democracy, we are told that it is against science, and that "even in our day vaccination is in the utmost danger" (p. 98). The instance is for various reasons not a happy one. It is not even precisely stated. I have never understood that vaccination is in much danger. Compulsory vaccination is perhaps in danger. But compulsion, as a matter of fact, was strengthened as the franchise went lower. It is a comparative novelty in English legislation (1853), and as a piece of effectively enforced administration it is more novel still (1871). I admit, however, that it is not endured in the United States; and only two or three years ago it was rejected by an overwhelming majority on an appeal to the popular vote in the Swiss Confederation. Obligatory vaccination may therefore one day disappear from our statute book, if democracy has anything to do with it. But then the obligation to practise a medical rite may be inexpedient, in spite of the virtues of the rite itself. That is not all. Sir Henry Maine will admit that Mr. Herbert Spencer is not against science, and he expresses in the present volume his admiration for Mr. Spencer's work on _Man and the State_. Mr. Spencer is the resolute opponent of compulsory vaccination, and a resolute denier, moreover, of the pretension that the evidence for the advantages of vaccination takes such account of the ulterior effects in the system as to amount to a scientific demonstration. Therefore, if science demands compulsory vaccination, democracy in rejecting the demand, and even if it went further, is at least kept in countenance by some of those who are of the very household of science. The illustration is hardly impressive enough for the proposition that it supports.

Another and a far more momentous illustration occurs on another page (37). A very little consideration is enough to show that it will by no means bear Sir Henry Maine's construction. "There is, in fact," he says, "just enough evidence to show that even now there is a marked antagonism between democratic opinion and scientific truth as applied to human societies. The central seat in all Political Economy was from the first occupied by the theory of Population. This theory ... has become the central truth of biological science. Yet it is evidently disliked by the multitude and those whom the multitude permits to lead it."

Sir Henry Maine goes on to say that it has long been intensely unpopular in France, and this, I confess, is a surprise to me. It has usually been supposed that a prudential limitation of families is rooted in the minds and habits of nearly, though not quite, all classes of the French nation. An excellent work on France, written by a sound English observer seven or eight years ago, chances to be lying before me at the moment, and here is a passage taken almost at random. "The opinions of thoughtful men seem to tend towards the wish to introduce into France some of that improvidence which allows English people to bring large families into the world without first securing the means of keeping them, and which has peopled the continent of North America and the Australian colonies with an English-speaking race" (Richardson's _Corn and Cattle Producing Districts of France_, p. 47, etc.). Surely this is a well-established fact. It is possible that denunciations of Malthus may occasionally be found both in Clerical and Socialistic prints, but then there are reasons for that. It can hardly be made much of a charge against French democracy that it tolerates unscientific opinion, so long as it cultivates scientific practice.

As for our own country, and those whom the multitude permits to lead it, we cannot forget that by far the most popular and powerful man _in faece Romuli_--as Sir Henry Maine insists on our putting it in that polite way--was tried and condemned not many years ago for publishing a certain pamphlet which made a limitation of population the very starting-point of social reform. It is not necessary to pronounce an opinion on the particular counsels of the pamphlet, but the motives which prompted its circulation (motives admitted to be respectable by the Chief-Justice who tried the case), and the extraordinary reception of the pamphlet by the serious portion of the workmen of the towns, would make a careful writer think twice before feeling sure that popular bodies will never listen to the truth about population. No doubt, as Sir Henry Maine says in the same place, certain classes now resist schemes for relieving distress by emigration. But there is a pretty obvious reason for that. That reason is not mere aversion to face the common sense of the relations between population and subsistence, but a growing suspicion--as to the reasonableness of which, again, I give no opinion--that emigration is made into an easy and slovenly substitute for a scientific reform in our system of holding and using land. In the case of Ireland, other political considerations must be added.

Democracy will be against science, we admit, in one contingency: if it loses the battle with the Ultramontane Church. The worst enemy of science is also the bitterest enemy of democracy, _c'est le cléricalisme_. The interests of science and the interests of democracy are one. Let us take a case. Suppose that popular Government in France were to succumb, a military or any other more popular Government would be forced to lean on Ultramontanes. Ultramontanes would gather the spoils of democratic defeat. Sir Henry Maine is much too well informed to think that a clerical triumph would be good for science, whatever else it might be good for. Then are not propositions about democracy being against science very idle and a little untrue? "Modern politics," said a wise man (Pattison, _Sermons_, p. 191) "resolve themselves into the struggle between knowledge and tradition." Democracy is hardly on the side of tradition.

We have dwelt on these secondary matters, because they show that the author hardly brings to the study of modern democracy the ripe preparation of detail which he gave to ancient law. In the larger field of his speculation, the value of his thought is seriously impaired by the absence of anything like a philosophy of society as a whole. Nobody who has studied Burke, or Comte, or Mill--I am not sure whether we should not add even De Maistre--can imagine any of them as setting to work on a general political speculation without reference to particular social conditions. They would have conducted the inquiry in strict relation to the stage at which a community happened to be, in matters lying outside of the direct scope of political government. So, before all other living thinkers, should we have expected Sir Henry Maine to do. It is obvious that systems of government, called by the same name, bearing the same superficial marks, founded and maintained on the same nominal principles, framed in the same verbal forms, may yet work with infinite diversity of operation, according to the variety of social circumstances around them. Yet it is here inferred that democracy in England must be fragile, difficult, and sundry other evil things, because out of fourteen Presidents of the Bolivian Republic thirteen have died assassinated or in exile. If England and Bolivia were at all akin in history, religion, race, industry, the fate of Bolivian Presidents would be more instructive to English Premiers.

One of the propositions which Sir Henry Maine is most anxious to bring home to his readers is that Democracy, in the extreme form to which it tends, is of all kinds of government by far the most difficult. He even goes so far as to say (p. 87) that, while not denying to Democracies some portion of the advantage which Bentham claimed for them, and "putting this advantage at the highest, it is _more than compensated_ by one great disadvantage," namely, its difficulty. This generalisation is repeated with an emphasis that surprises us, for two reasons. In the first place, if the proposition could be proved to be true, we fail to see that it would be particularly effective in its practical bearings. Everybody whose opinions are worth consideration, and everybody who has ever come near the machinery of democratic government, is only too well aware that whether it be far the most difficult form of government or not, it is certainly difficult enough to tax the powers of statesmanship to the very uttermost. Is not that enough? Is anything gained by pressing us further than that? "Better be a poor fisherman," said Danton as he walked in the last hours of his life on the banks of the Aube, "better be a poor fisherman, than meddle with the governing of men." We wonder whether there has been a single democratic leader either in France or England who has not incessantly felt the full force of Danton's ejaculation. There may, indeed, be simpletons in the political world who dream that if only the system of government were made still more popular, all would be plain sailing. But then Sir Henry Maine is not the man to write for simpletons.

The first reason, then, for surprise at the immense stress laid by the author on the proposition about the difficulty of popular government is that it would not be of the first order of importance if it were true. Our second reason is that it cannot be shown to be true. You cannot measure the relative difficulty of diverse systems of government. Governments are things of far too great complexity for precise quantification of this sort. Will anybody, for example, read through the second volume of the excellent work of M. Leroy-Beaulieu on the Empire of the Czars (1882), and then be prepared to maintain that democracy is more difficult than autocracy? It would be interesting, too, to know whether the Prince on whose shoulders will one day be laid the burden of the German Empire will read the dissertation on the unparalleled difficulties of democracy with acquiescence. There are many questions, of which the terms are no sooner stated than we at once see that a certain and definite answer to them is impossible. The controversy as to the relative fragility, or the relative difficulty, of popular government and other forms of government, appears to be a controversy of this kind. We cannot decide it until we have weighed, measured, sifted, and tested a great mass of heterogeneous facts; and then, supposing the process to have been ever so skilfully and laboriously performed, no proposition could be established as the outcome, that would be an adequate reward for the pains of the operation.

This, we venture to think, must be pronounced a grave drawback to the value of the author's present speculation. He attaches an altogether excessive and unscientific importance to form. It would be unreasonable to deny to a writer on democracy as a form of government the right of isolating his phenomenon. But it is much more unreasonable to predicate fragility, difficulty, or anything else of a particular form of government, without reference to other conditions which happen to go along with it in a given society at a given time. None of the properties of popular government are independent of surrounding circumstances, social, economic, religious, and historic. All the conditions are bound up together in a closely interdependent connection, and are not secondary to, or derivative from, the mere form of government. It is, if not impossible, at least highly unsafe to draw inferences about forms of government in universals.

No writer seems to us to approach Machiavelli in the acuteness with which he pushes behind mere political names, and passes on to the real differences that may exist in movements and institutions that are covered by the same designation. Nothing in its own way can be more admirable, for instance, than his reflections on the differences between democracy at Florence and democracy in old Rome--how the first began in great inequality of conditions, and ended in great equality, while the process was reversed in the second; how at Rome the people and the nobles shared power and office, while at Florence the victors crushed and ruined their adversaries; how at Rome the people, by common service with the nobles, acquired some of their virtues, while at Florence the nobles were forced down to seem, as well as to be, like the common people (_Istorie Fiorentine_, bk. iii).

This is only an example of the distinctions and qualifications which it is necessary to introduce before we can prudently affirm or deny anything about political institutions in general terms. Who would deny that both the stability and the degree of difficulty of popular government are closely connected in the United States with the abundance of accessible land? Who would deny that in Great Britain they are closely connected with the greater or less prosperity of our commerce and manufactures? To take another kind of illustration from Mr. Dicey's brilliant and instructive volume on the Law of the Constitution. The governments of England and of France are both of them popular in form; but does not a fundamental difference in their whole spirit and working result from the existence in one country of the _droit administratif_, and the absolute predominance in the other of regular law, applied by the ordinary courts, and extending equally over all classes of citizens? Distinctions and differences of this order go for nothing in the pages before us; yet they are vital to the discussion.

The same fallacious limitation, the same exclusion of the many various causes that cooperate in the production of political results, is to be discerned in nearly every argument. The author justly calls attention to the extraordinary good luck which has befallen us as a nation. He proceeds to warn us that if the desire for legislative innovation be allowed to grow upon us at its present pace--pace assumed to be very headlong indeed--the chances are that our luck will not last. We shall have a disaster like Sedan, or the loss of Alsace Lorraine (p. 151). This is a curiously narrow reading of contemporary history. Did Austria lose Sadowa, or was the French Empire ruined at Sedan, in consequence of the passion of either of those Governments for legislative innovations; or must we not rather, in order to explain these striking events, look to a large array of military, geographical, financial, diplomatic, and dynastic considerations and conditions? If so, what becomes of the moral? England is, no doubt, the one great civilised power that has escaped an organic or structural change within the last five-and-twenty years. Within that period, the American Union, after a tremendous war, has revolutionised the social institutions of the South, and reconstructed the constitution. The French Empire has foundered, and a French Republic once more bears the fortunes of a great State over troubled waters. Germany has undergone a complete transformation; so has the Italian peninsula. The internal and the external relations alike of the Austrian Power are utterly different to-day from what they were twenty years ago. Spain has passed from monarchy to republic, and back to monarchy again, and gone from dynasty to dynasty. But what share had legislative innovation in producing these great changes? No share at all in any one case. What is the logic, then, of the warning that if we persist in our taste for legislative innovation, we shall lose our immunity from the violent changes that have overtaken other States--changes with which legislative innovation had nothing to do?

In short, modern societies, whether autocratic or democratic, are passing through a great transformation, social, religious, and political. The process is full of embarrassments, difficulties, and perils. These are the dominant marks of our era. To set them all down to popular government is as narrow, as confused, and as unintelligent as the imputation in a papal Encyclical of all modern ills to Liberalism. You cannot isolate government, and judge it apart from the other and deeper forces of the time. Western civilisation is slowly entering on a new stage. Form of government is the smallest part of it. It has been well said that those nations have the best chance of escaping a catastrophe in the obscure and uncertain march before us, who find a way of opening the most liberal career to the aspirations of the present, without too rudely breaking with all the traditions of the past. This is what popular government, wisely guided, is best able to do.

But will wise guidance be endured? Sir Henry Maine seems to think that it will not. Mill thought that it would. In a singularly luminous passage in an essay which for some reason or another he never republished, Mill says--

"We are the last persons to undervalue the power of moral
convictions. But the convictions of the mass of mankind run hand
in hand with their interests or their class feelings. _We have a
strong faith, stronger than either politicians or philosophers
generally have, in the influence of reason and virtue over men's
minds_; but it is in that of the reason and virtue of their own
side of the question. We expect few conversions by the mere force
of reason from one creed to the other. Men's intellects and hearts
have a large share in determining what _sort_ of Conservatives or
Liberals they will be; but it is their position (saving individual
exceptions) which makes them Conservatives or Liberals."

This double truth points to the good grounds that exist why we should think hopefully of popular government, and why we should be slow to believe that it has no better foundation to build upon than the unreal assumptions of some bad philosophers, French or others.

A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS.[1]

[Footnote 1: March 1888.]

Nunquamne reponam,
Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri?

Historians are only too fond of insisting on the effect of the French Revolution in checking English reform. One of the latest of them dwells on the fatal influence of this great event in our own country, in checking, blighting, and distorting the natural progress of things. But for that influence, he says, the closing years of the century would probably have seen the abolition of the English Slave Trade, the reform of Parliament, and the repeal of the Test Act.[1] The question of the precise degree of vitality in sectarian pride, and of tenacity in a great material interest, a hundred years ago or at any time, is not very easy to settle. It is quite possible that the Slave Trade and the Test Act might have died nearly as hard, if there had been no French Revolution. In any case, it is a curious implication that underlies all writing in this familiar vein, that France ought to have gone on with a bad government, in order to secure to England the advantages of a good one.

[Footnote 1: Lecky, vi. 297.]

As to one disservice, however, there can be no doubt. The French Revolution has furnished the enemies of each successive proposal of reform with a boundless supply of prejudicial analogies, appalling parallels, and ugly nicknames, which are all just as conclusive with the unwise as if they were the aptest arguments. Sydney Smith might well put "the awful example of a neighbouring nation" among the standing topics of the Noodle's Oration. The abolition of rotten boroughs brought down a thousand ominous references to noyades, fusillades, and guillotines. When Sir Robert Peel took the duty off corn, Croker warned him with great solemnity that he was breaking up the old interests, dividing the great families, and beginning exactly such a castastrophe as did the Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789. Cobden and Bright were promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette, and Anacharsis Clootz. Baboeuf, it is true, was for dividing up all property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were mere _nuances_, not material to the purposes of obloquy. Robespierre, Danton, Marat have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors of worthies so obviously and exactly like them as Mr. Beales and Mr. Odger; while an innocent caucus for the registration of voters recalls to some well-known writers lurid visions of the Cordeliers and the Jacobin Club.

A recent addition has been made to the stock of nicknames drawn from the terrible melodrama of the last century. The Chancellor of the Exchequer at Dublin described the present very humble writer as "the Saint-Just of our Revolution." The description was received with lively applause. It would be indelicate to wonder how many in a hundred, even in that audience of the elect, had ever heard of Saint-Just, how many in five hundred could have spelt his name, and how many in a thousand could have told any three facts in his career. But let us muse for a moment upon the portrait. I take down the first picture of Saint-Just that comes to my hand, M. Taine is the artist:--

"Among these energetic nullities we see gradually rising _a young
monster_--with face handsome and tranquil--Saint-Just! A sort of
precocious Sulla, who at five-and-twenty suddenly springs from
the ranks, and _by force of atrocity wins his place!_ Six years
before, he began life by an act of domestic robbery: while on a
visit at his mother's, he ran away in the night with her plate and
jewels; for that he was locked up for six months. On his release,
he employed his leisure in the composition of an odious poem. Then
he flung himself head foremost into the revolution. Blood calcined
by study, a colossal pride, a conscience completely unhinged,
an imagination haunted by the bloody recollections of Rome and
Sparta, an intelligence falsified and twisted until it found
itself most at its ease in the practice of enormous paradox,
barefaced sophism, and murderous lying--all these perilous
ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated ambition, boiled
and fermented long and silently in his breast."

It is, no doubt, hard to know ourselves. One may entertain demons unawares, and have calcined blood without being a bit the wiser. Still, I do not find the likeness striking. It would have done just as well to call me Nero, Torquemada, Iago, or Bluebeard.

Whether the present writer does or does not deserve all the compliments that history has paid to Saint-Just, is a very slight and trivial question, with which the public will naturally not much concern itself. But as some use is from time to time made of the writer's imputed delinquencies to prejudice an important cause, it is perhaps worth while to try in a page or two to give a better account of things. It is true that he has written on revolutionists like Robespierre, and destructive thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire. It is true that he believes the two latter to have been on the whole, when all deductions are made, on the side of human progress. But what sort of foundation in this for the inference that he "finds his models in the heroes of the French Revolution," and "looks for his methods in the Reign of Terror"? It would be equally logical to infer that because I have written, not without sympathy and appreciation, of Joseph de Maistre, I therefore find my model in a hero of the Catholic Reaction, and look for my methods in the revived supremacy of the Holy See over all secular and temporal authorities. It would be just as fair to say that because I pointed out, as it was the critic's business to do, the many admirable merits, and the important moral influences on the society of that time, of the _New Heloïsa_, therefore I am bound to think Saint Preux a very fine fellow, particularly fit to be a model and a hero for young Ireland. Only on the principle that who drives fat oxen must himself be fat, can it be held that who writes on Danton must be himself in all circumstances a Dantonist.

The most insignificant of literary contributions have a history and an origin; and the history of these contributions is short and simple enough. Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius had impressed upon his generation an essentially one-sided view both of the eighteenth century as a whole, and of the French thinkers of that century in particular. His essay on Diderot, his lecture on Rousseau, his chapters on Voltaire, with all their brilliance, penetration, and incomparable satire, were the high-water mark in this country of the literary reaction against the French school of Revolution. Everybody knows the famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century and all its men and all its works. Voltaire's furies, Diderot's indigestions, Rousseau's nauseous amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the whole of them and their company, offered ready material for the boisterous horseplay of the transcendental humourist. Then the tide began to turn. Mr. Buckle's book on the history of civilisation had something to do with it. But it was the historical chapters in Comte's Positive Philosophy that first opened the minds of many of us, who, five-and-twenty years ago, were young men, to a very different judgment of the true place of those schools in the literary and social history of Western Europe. We learnt to perceive that though much in the thought and the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolution laid them fairly open to Carlyle's banter, yet banter was not all, and even grave condemnation was not all. In essays, like mine, written from this point of view, and with the object of trying to trim the balance rather more correctly, it may well have been that the better side of the thinkers concerned was sometimes unduly dwelt upon, and their worse side unduly left in the background. It may well have been that an impression of personal adhesion was conveyed which only very partially existed, or even where it did not exist at all: that is a risk of misinterpretation which it is always hard for the historical critic to escape. There may have been a too eager tone; but to be eager is not a very bad vice at any age under the critical forty. There were some needlessly aggressive passages, and some sallies which ought to have been avoided, because they gave pain to good people. There was perhaps too much of the particular excitement of the time. It was the date when _Essays and Reviews_ was still thought a terrible explosive; when Bishop Colenso's arithmetical tests as to the flocks and herds of the children of Israel were believed to be sapping not only the inspiration of the Pentateuch but the foundations of the Faith and the Church; and when Darwin's scientific speculations were shaking the civilised world. Some excitement was to be pardoned in days like those, and I am quite sure that one side needed pardon at least as much as the other. For the substantial soundness of the general views winch I took of the French revolutionary thinkers at that time, I feel no apprehension; nor--some possible occasional phrases or sentences excepted and apart--do I see the smallest reason to shrink or to depart from any one of them. So far as one particular reference may serve to illustrate the tenour of the whole body of criticism, the following lines, which close my chapter on the "Encyclopaedia," will answer the purpose as well as any others, and I shall perhaps be excused for transcribing them:--

"An urgent social task lay before France and before Europe: it
could not be postponed until the thinkers had worked out a scheme
of philosophic completeness. The thinkers did not seriously make
any effort after this completeness. The Encyclopaedia was the most
serious attempt, and it did not wholly fail. As I replace in my
shelves this mountain of volumes, 'dusky and huge, enlarging on
the sight,' I have a presentiment that their pages will seldom
again be disturbed by me or by others. They served a great purpose
a hundred years ago. They are now a monumental ruin, clothed with
all the profuse associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of
Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of stone and sterile
memories we contemplate. We think rather of the grey and crumbling
walls of an ancient stronghold, reared by the endeavour of stout
hands and faithful, whence in its own day and generation a band
once went forth against barbarous hordes, to strike a blow for
humanity and truth."[1]

[Footnote 1: Diderot, i. 247.]

It is gratifying to find that the same view of the work of these famous men, and of its relation to the social necessities of the time, commends itself to Mr. Lecky, who has since gone diligently and with a candid mind over the same ground.[1] Then where is the literary Jacobin?

[Footnote 1: See his vol. vi. 305 _et seq_.]

Of course, it is easy enough to fish out a sentence or a short passage here and there which, if taken by itself, may wear a very sinister look, and carry the most alarming impressions. Not many days ago a writer addressed a letter to the _Times_ which furnishes a specimen of this kind of controversy. He gave himself the ambiguous designation of "Catholicus"; but his style bore traces of the equivocally Catholic climate of Munich. His aim was the lofty and magnanimous one of importing theological prejudice into the great political dispute of the day; in the interest, strange to say, of the Irish party who have been for ages the relentless oppressors of the Church to which he belongs, and who even now hate and despise it with all the virulence of a Parisian Red. This masked assailant conveys to the mind of the reader that I applaud and sympathise with the events of the winter of 1793, and more particularly with the odious procession of the Goddess of Reason at Notre Dame. He says, moreover, that I have "the effrontery to imply that the horrible massacres of the Revolution ... were 'a very mild story compared with the atrocities of the Jews or the crimes of Catholicism.'" No really honest and competent disputant would have hit on "effrontery" as the note of the passage referred to, if he had had its whole spirit and drift before him. The reader shall, if he pleases, judge for himself. After the words just quoted, I go on to say:--

"Historical recriminations, however, are not edifying. It is
perfectly fair, when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to
rejoin that the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men
and women on the first day of the Saint Bartholomew, than perished
in Paris through the Years I. and II. But the retort does us no
good beyond the region of dialectic. Some of the opinions of
Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. But it would be
far better to share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and
benignant priest, like the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Misérables_,
than to hold these good opinions of Chaumette, as he held them,
with a rancorous intolerance, a reckless disregard of the rights
and feelings of others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that
great and precious part of our nature that lies out of the domain
of the logical understanding.... In every family where a mother
sought to have her child baptised, or where sons and daughters
sought to have the dying spirit of the old consoled by the last
sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy to the government which
had closed the churches and proscribed the priests. How could a
society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the solemn
mysticism of the Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by
apostate priests ... as they filed before the Convention, led by
the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes bearing
piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold with which
they had once served their holy office."[1]

[Footnote 1: _Misc._ i 77-79.]

Where is the effrontery, the search for methods in the Reign of Terror, the applause for revolutionary models? Such inexcusable perversion of a writer's meaning for an evanescent political object--and a very shabby object too--is enough to make one think that George III. knew what he was talking about, when he once delivered himself of the saying that "Politics are a trade for a rascal, not for a gentleman."

Let me cite another more grotesque piece of irrelevancy with a similar drift. Some months ago the present writer chanced to express an opinion upon Welsh Disestablishment. Wales, at any rate, would seem to be far enough away from _Emile, Candide_, the Law of Prairial, and the Committee of Public Safety. The _Times_, however, instantly said[1] that it would be affectation to express any surprise, because my unfortunate "theories and principles, drawn from French sources and framed on French models, all tend to the disintegration of comprehensive political organisations and the encouragement of arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race or dialect." Was there ever in the world such prodigious nonsense? What French sources, what French models? If French models point in any one direction rather than another, it is away from disintegration and straight towards centralisation. Everybody knows that this is one of the most notorious facts of French history from the days of Lewis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu down to Napoleon Bonaparte. So far from French models encouraging "arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of race and dialect," France is the first great example in modern history, for good or for evil, of a persevering process of national unification, and the firm suppression of all provincial particularismus. This is not only true of French political leaders in general: it is particularly true of the Jacobin leaders. Rousseau himself, I admit, did in one place point in the direction of confederation; but only in the sense that for freedom on the one hand, and just administration on the other, the unit should not be too large to admit of the participation of the persons concerned in the management of their own public affairs. If the Jacobins had not been overwhelmed by the necessity of keeping out the invaders, they might have developed the germ of truth in Rousseau's loose way of stating the expediency of decentralisation. As it was, above all other French schools, the Jacobins dealt most sternly with particularist pretensions. Of all men, these supposed masters, teachers, and models of mine are least to be called Separatists. To them more than to any other of the revolutionary parties the great heresy of Federalism was most odious; and if I were a faithful follower of the Jacobin model, I should have least patience with nationalist sentiment whether in Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, and should most rigorously insist on that cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in the case of Ireland I believe to be equally hopeless and undesirable. This explanation, therefore, of my favour for Welsh Disestablishment is as absurdly ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrelevant.

[Footnote 1: Nov. 3, 1886.]

The logical process is worth an instant's examination. The position is no less than this,--that to attempt truly to appreciate the place and the value in the history of thought and social movements of men who have been a hundred years in their graves, and to sympathise with certain sides and certain effects of their activity under the peculiar circumstances in which French society then found itself, is the same thing as binding yourself to apply their theories and to imitate their activity, under an entirely heterogeneous set of circumstances, in a different country, and in a society with wholly dissimilar requirements. That is the argument if we straighten it out. The childishness of any such contention is so obvious, that I should be ashamed of reproducing it, were it not that this very contention has made its appearance at my expense several times a month for the last two years in all sorts of important and respectable prints.

For instance, it appears that I once said somewhere that Danton looked on at the doings of his bloodier associates with "sombre acquiescence." _Argal_, it was promptly pointed out--and I espy the dark phrase constantly adorning leading articles to this day--the man who said that Danton sombrely acquiesced in the doings of Billaud, Collet, and the rest, must of necessity, being of a firm and logical mind, himself sombrely acquiesce in moonlighting and cattle-houghing in Ireland. Apart from the curious compulsion of the reasoning, what is the actual state of the case? Acquiescence is hardly a good description of the mood of a politician who scorns delights and lives laborious days in actively fighting for a vigorous policy and an effective plan which, as he believes, would found order in Ireland on a new and more hopeful base. He may be wrong, but where is the acquiescence, whether sombre or serene?

The equally misplaced name of Fatalism is sometimes substituted for acquiescence, in criticisms of this stamp. In any such sense anybody is a fatalist who believes in a relation between cause and effect. If it is fatalism to assume that, given a certain chain of social or political antecedents, they will inevitably be followed by a certain chain of consequences, then every sensible observer of any series of events is a fatalist. Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, and secret ballot, have within the last sixty years completely shifted the balance of political power in Ireland. Land legislation has revolutionised the conditions of ownership. These vast and vital changes in Ireland have been accompanied by the transfer of decisive power from aristocracy to numbers in Great Britain, and Great Britain is arbiter. Is it fatalism, or is it common sense, to perceive that one new effect of new causes so potent must be the necessity of changing the system of Irish government? To dream that you could destroy the power of the old masters without finding new, and that having invited the nation to speak you could continue to ignore the national sentiment was and is the very height of political folly, and the longer the dream is persisted in the ruder will be the awakening. Surely the stupidest fatalism is far more truly to be ascribed to those who insist that Ireland was eternally predestined to turmoil, confusion, and torment; that there alone the event defies calculation; and that, however wisely, carefully and providently you modify or extinguish causes, in Ireland, though nowhere else, effects will still survive with shape unaltered and force unabated.

No author has a right to assume that anybody has read all his books or any of them, but he may reasonably claim that he shall not be publicly classified, labelled, catalogued, and placed In the shelves, on the strength of half of his work, and that half arbitrarily selected. If it be permitted to me without excess of egotism to name the masters to whom I went to school in the days of early manhood, so far from being revolutionists and terrorists, they belonged entirely to the opposite camp. Austin's _Jurisprudence_ and Mill's _Logic_ and _Utilitarianism_ were everything, and Rousseau's _Social Contract_ was nothing. To the best of my knowledge and belief, I never said a word about "Natural Rights" in any piece of practical public business in all my life; and when that famous phrase again made its naked appearance on the platform three or four years ago, it gave me as much surprise and dismay as if I were this afternoon to meet a Deinotherium shambling down Parliament Street. Mill was the chief influence for me, as he was for most of my contemporaries in those days. Experience of life and independent use of one's mind--which he would have been the most ready of men to applaud--have since, as is natural, led to many important corrections and deductions in Mill's political and philosophical teaching. But then we were disciples, and not critics; and nobody will suppose that the admirer of Wordsworth, the author of the Essay on Coleridge, and of the treatise on Representative Government, the administrator in the most bureaucratic and authoritative of public services, was a terrorist or an unbridled democrat, or anything else but the most careful and rationalistic of political theorisers. It was Mill who first held up for my admiration the illustrious man whom Austin enthusiastically called the "godlike Turgot," and it was he who encouraged me to write a study on that great and inspiring character. I remember the suspicion and the murmurings with which Louis Blanc, then living in brave and honourable exile in London, and the good friend of so many of us, and who was really a literary Jacobin to the tips of his fingers, remonstrated against that piece of what he thought grievously misplaced glorification. Turgot was, indeed, a very singular hero with whom to open the career of literary Jacobin. So was Burke,--the author of those wise sentences that still ring in our ears: "_The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. Nobody shall persuade me, where a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation._" Burke, Austin, Mill, Turgot, Comte--what strange sponsors for the "theories and principles of the Terror"!

What these opinions came to, roughly speaking, was something to this effect: That the power alike of statesmen and of publicists over the course of affairs is strictly limited; that institutions and movements are not capable of immediate or indefinite modification by any amount of mere will; that political truths are always relative, and never absolute; that the test of practical, political, and social proposals is not their conformity to abstract ideals, but to convenience, utility, expediency, and occasion; that for the reformer, considerations of time and place may be paramount; and finally, as Mill himself has put it, that government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and that what this power is, and shall be, depends less on institutions than institutions depend upon it. If I were pressed for an illustration of these principles at work, inspiring the minds and guiding the practice of responsible statesmen in great transactions of our own day and generation, I should point to the sage, the patient, the triumphant action of Abraham Lincoln in the emancipation of the negro slaves. However that may be, contrast a creed of this kind with the abstract, absolute, geometric, unhistoric, peremptory notions and reasonings that formed the stock in trade of most, though not quite all, of the French revolutionists, alike in action and in thought. It is plain that they are the direct opposite and contradictory of one another.

To clench the matter by chapter and verse, I should like to recall what, I have said of these theories and principles in their most perfect and most important literary version. How have I described Rousseau's _Social Contract_? It placed, I said, the centre of social activity elsewhere than in careful and rational examination of social conditions, and careful and rational effort to modify them. It substituted a retrograde aspiration for direction, and emotion for the discovery of law. It overlooked the crucial difficulty--namely, how to summon new force, without destroying the sound parts of a structure which it has taken many generations to erect. Its method was geometric instead of being historic, and hence its "desperate absurdity." Its whole theory was constructed with an imperfect consideration of the qualities of human nature, and with too narrow a view of society. It ignored the great fact that government is the art of wisely dealing with huge groups of conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. It "gives us not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government."

Such language as all this is hardly that of a disciple to a master, in respect of theories and principles which he is making his own for the use of a lifetime. "There has been no attempt" [in these pages], I said in winding up, "to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the _Social Contract_. But there is another side to its influence. We should be false to our critical principle, if we do not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless." Any writer would have stamped himself as both unfit for the task that I had undertaken, and entirely below the level of the highest critical standard of the day, if he had for a moment dreamed of taking any other point of view.

As for historical hero-worship, after Carlyle's fashion, whether with Jacobin idols or any other, it is a mood of mind that must be uncongenial to anybody who had ever been at all under the influence of Mill. Without being so foolish as to disparage the part played by great men in great crises, we could have no sympathy with the barbaric and cynical school, who make greatness identical with violence, force, and mere iron will. Cromwell said, in vindication of himself, that England had need of a constable, and it was true. The constable, the soldier, the daring counsellor at the helm, are often necessities of the time. It is often a necessity of the time that the energy of a nation or of a movement should gather itself up in a resolute band or a resolute chief; as the revolutionary energy of France gathered itself up in the greater Jacobins, or that of England in Oliver Cromwell. Goethe says that nature bids us "_Take all, but pay_." Revolutions and heroes may give us all, but not without price. This is at the best, and the best is the exception. The grandiose types mostly fail. In our own day, people talk, for example, with admiration of Cromwell's government in Ireland,--as if it were a success, instead of being one of the worst chapters in the whole history of Irish failure. It was force carried to its utmost. Hundreds were put to the sword, thousands were banished to be slaves of the planters in the West Indies, and the remnant were driven miserably off into the desolate wilds of Connaught. But all this only prepared the way for further convulsions and deadlier discontent.