Chapter LXVI: Part 66

It is common to say that, if the world makes progress at all, it is by its great men, and when anything important for the race is to be done, a great man is raised up to do it. Yet another way to look at it is, that the doing of something at the appointed time makes the man who does it great, or at least celebrated. The man often appears to be only a favored instrument of communication. As we glance back we recognize the truth that, at this and that period, the time had come for certain discoveries. Intelligence seemed pressing in from the invisible. Many minds were on the alert to apprehend it. We believe, for instance, that if Gutenberg had not invented movable types, somebody else would have given them to the world about that time. Ideas, at certain times, throng for admission into the world; and we are all familiar with the fact that the same important idea (never before revealed in all the ages) occurs to separate and widely distinct minds at about the same time. The invention of the electric telegraph seemed to burst upon the world simultaneously from many quarters--not perfect, perhaps, but the time for the idea had come--and happy was it for the man who entertained it. We have agreed to call Columbus the discoverer of America, but I suppose there is no doubt that America had been visited by European, and probably Asiatic, people ages before Columbus; that four or five centuries before him people from northern Europe had settlements here; he was fortunate, however, in "discovering" it in the fullness of time, when the world, in its progress, was ready for it. If the Greeks had had gunpowder, electro-magnetism, the printing press, history would need to be rewritten. Why the inquisitive Greek mind did not find out these things is a mystery upon any other theory than the one we are considering.

And it is as mysterious that China, having gunpowder and the art of printing, is not today like Germany.

There seems to me to be a progress, or an intention of progress, in the world, independent of individual men. Things get on by all sorts of instruments, and sometimes by very poor ones. There are times when new thoughts or applications of known principles seem to throng from the invisible for expression through human media, and there is hardly ever an important invention set free in the world that men do not appear to be ready cordially to receive it. Often we should be justified in saying that there was a widespread expectation of it. Almost all the great inventions and the ingenious application of principles have many claimants for the honor of priority.

On any other theory than this, that there is present in the world an intention of progress which outlasts individuals, and even races, I cannot account for the fact that, while civilizations decay and pass away, and human systems go to pieces, ideas remain and accumulate. We, the latest age, are the inheritors of all the foregoing ages. I do not believe that anything of importance has been lost to the world. The Jewish civilization was torn up root and branch, but whatever was valuable in the Jewish polity is ours now. We may say the same of the civilizations of Athens and of Rome; though the entire organization of the ancient world, to use Mr. Froude's figure, collapsed into a heap of incoherent sand, the ideas remained, and Greek art and Roman law are part of the world's solid possessions.

Even those who question the value to the individual of what we call progress, admit, I suppose, the increase of knowledge in the world from age to age, and not only its increase, but its diffusion. The intelligent schoolboy today knows more than the ancient sages knew--more about the visible heavens, more of the secrets of the earth, more of the human body. The rudiments of his education, the common experiences of his everyday life, were, at the best, the guesses and speculations of a remote age. There is certainly an accumulation of facts, ideas, knowledge. Whether this makes men better, wiser, happier, is indeed disputed.

In order to maintain the notion of a general and intended progress, it is not necessary to show that no preceding age has excelled ours in some special, development. Phidias has had no rival in sculpture, we may admit. It is possible that glass was once made as flexible as leather, and that copper could be hardened like steel. But I do not take much stock in the "lost arts," the wondering theme of the lyceums. The knowledge of the natural world, and of materials, was never, I believe, so extensive and exact as it is today. It is possible that there are tricks of chemistry, ingenious processes, secrets of color, of which we are ignorant; but I do not believe there was ever an ancient alchemist who could not be taught something in a modern laboratory. The vast engineering works of the ancient Egyptians, the remains of their temples and pyramids, excite our wonder; but I have no doubt that President Grant, if he becomes the tyrant they say he is becoming, and commands the labor of forty millions of slaves--a large proportion of them office --holders--could build a Karnak, or erect a string of pyramids across New Jersey.

Mr. Froude runs lightly over a list of subjects upon which the believer in progress relies for his belief, and then says of them that the world calls this progress--he calls it only change. I suppose he means by this two things: that these great movements of our modern life are not any evidence of a permanent advance, and that our whole structure may tumble into a heap of incoherent sand, as systems of society have done before; and, again, that it is questionable if, in what we call a stride in civilization, the individual citizen is becoming any purer or more just, or if his intelligence is directed towards learning and doing what is right, or only to the means of more extended pleasures.

It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the first of these points--the permanence of our advance, if it is an advance. But we may be encouraged by one thing that distinguishes this period--say from the middle of the eighteenth century--from any that has preceded it. I mean the introduction of machinery, applied to the multiplication of man's power in a hundred directions--to manufacturing, to locomotion, to the diffusion of thought and of knowledge. I need not dwell upon this familiar topic. Since this period began there has been, so far as I know, no retrograde movement anywhere, but, besides the material, an intellectual and spiritual kindling the world over, for which history has no sort of parallel. Truth is always the same, and will make its way, but this subject might be illustrated by a study of the relation of Christianity and of the brotherhood of men to machinery. The theme would demand an essay by itself. I leave it with the one remark, that this great change now being wrought in the world by the multiplicity of machinery is not more a material than it is an intellectual one, and that we have no instance in history of a catastrophe widespread enough and adequate to sweep away its results. That is to say, none of the catastrophes, not even the corruptions, which brought to ruin the ancient civilizations, would work anything like the same disaster in an age which has the use of machinery that this age has.

For instance: Gibbon selects the period between the accession of Trajan and the death of Marcus Aurelius as the time in which the human race enjoyed more general happiness than they had ever known before, or had since known. Yet, says Mr. Froude, in the midst of this prosperity the heart of the empire was dying out of it; luxury and selfishness were eating away the principle that held society together, and the ancient world was on the point of collapsing into a heap of incoherent sand. Now, it is impossible to conceive that the catastrophe which did happen to that civilization could have happened if the world had then possessed the steam-engine, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph. The Roman power might have gone down, and the face of the world been recast; but such universal chaos and such a relapse for the individual people would seem impossible.

If we turn from these general considerations to the evidences that this is an "era of progress" in the condition of individual men, we are met by more specific denials. Granted, it is said, all your facilities for travel and communication, for cheap and easy manufacture, for the distribution of cheap literature and news, your cheap education, better homes, and all the comforts and luxuries of your machine civilization, is the average man, the agriculturist, the machinist, the laborer any better for it all? Are there more purity, more honest, fair dealing, genuine work, fear and honor of God? Are the proceeds of labor more evenly distributed? These, it is said, are the criteria of progress; all else is misleading.

Now, it is true that the ultimate end of any system of government or civilization should be the improvement of the individual man. And yet this truth, as Mr. Froude puts it, is only a half-truth, so that this single test of any system may not do for a given time and a limited area. Other and wider considerations come in. Disturbances, which for a while unsettle society and do not bring good results to individuals, may, nevertheless, be necessary, and may be a sign of progress. Take the favorite illustration of Mr. Froude and Mr. Ruskin--the condition of the agricultural laborer of England. If I understand them, the civilization of the last century has not helped his position as a man. If I understand them, he was a better man, in a better condition of earthly happiness, and with a better chance of heaven, fifty years ago than now, before the "era of progress" found him out. (It ought to be noticed here, that the report of the Parliamentary Commission on the condition of the English agricultural laborer does not sustain Mr. Froude's assumptions. On the contrary, the report shows that his condition is in almost all respects vastly better than it was fifty years ago.) Mr. Ruskin would remove the steam-engine and all its devilish works from his vicinity; he would abolish factories, speedy travel by rail, new-fangled instruments of agriculture, our patent education, and remit him to his ancient condition--tied for life to a bit of ground, which should supply all his simple wants; his wife should weave the clothes for the family; his children should learn nothing but the catechism and to speak the truth; he should take his religion without question from the hearty, fox-hunting parson, and live and die undisturbed by ideas. Now, it seems to me that if Mr. Ruskin could realize in some isolated nation this idea of a pastoral, simple existence, under a paternal government, he would have in time an ignorant, stupid, brutal community in a great deal worse case than the agricultural laborers of England are at present. Three-fourths of the crime in the kingdom of Bavaria is committed in the Ultramontane region of the Tyrol, where the conditions of popular education are about those that Mr. Ruskin seems to regret as swept away by the present movement in England--a stagnant state of things, in which any wind of heaven would be a blessing, even if it were a tornado. Education of the modern sort unsettles the peasant, renders him unfit for labor, and gives us a half-educated idler in place of a conscientious workman. The disuse of the apprentice system is not made good by the present system of education, because no one learns a trade well, and the consequence is poor work, and a sham civilization generally. There is some truth in these complaints. But the way out is not backward, but forward. The fault is not with education, though it may be with the kind of education. The education must go forward; the man must not be half but wholly educated. It is only half-knowledge like half-training in a trade that is dangerous.

But what I wish to say is, that notwithstanding certain unfavorable things in the condition of the English laborer and mechanic, his chance is better in the main than it was fifty years ago. The world is a better world for him. He has the opportunity to be more of a man. His world is wider, and it is all open to him to go where he will. Mr. Ruskin may not so easily find his ideal, contented peasant, but the man himself begins to apprehend that this is a world of ideas as well as of food and clothes, and I think, if he were consulted, he would have no desire to return to the condition of his ancestors. In fact, the most hopeful symptom in the condition of the English peasant is his discontent. For, as skepticism is in one sense the handmaid of truth, discontent is the mother of progress. The man is comparatively of little use in the world who is contented.

There is another thought pertinent here. It is this: that no man, however humble, can live a full life if he lives to himself alone. He is more of a man, he lives in a higher plane of thought and of enjoyment, the more his communications are extended with his fellows and the wider his sympathies are. I count it a great thing for the English peasant, a solid addition to his life, that he is every day being put into more intimate relations with every other man on the globe.

I know it is said that these are only vague and sentimental notions of progress--notions of a "salvation by machinery." Let us pass to something that may be less vague, even if it be more sentimental. For a hundred years we have reckoned it progress, that the people were taking part in government. We have had a good deal of faith in the proposition put forth at Philadelphia a century ago, that men are, in effect, equal in political rights. Out of this simple proposition springs logically the extension of suffrage, and a universal education, in order that this important function of a government by the people may be exercised intelligently.

Now we are told by the most accomplished English essayists that this is a mistake, that it is change, but no progress. Indeed, there are philosophers in America who think so. At least I infer so from the fact that Mr. Froude fathers one of his definitions of our condition upon an American. When a block of printer's type is by accident broken up and disintegrated, it falls into what is called "pi." The "pi," a mere chaos, is afterwards sorted and distributed, preparatory to being built up into fresh combinations. "A distinguished American friend," says Mr. Froude, "describes Democracy as making pi." It is so witty a sarcasm that I almost think Mr. Froude manufactured it himself. Well, we have been making this "pi" for a hundred years; it seems to be a national dish in considerable favor with the rest of the world--even such ancient nations as China and Japan want a piece of it.

Now, of course, no form of human government is perfect, or anything like it, but I should be willing to submit the question to an English traveler even, whether, on the whole, the people of the United States do not have as fair a chance in life and feel as little the oppression of government as any other in the world; whether anywhere the burdens are more lifted off men's shoulders.

This infidelity to popular government and unbelief in any good results to come from it are not, unfortunately, confined to the English essayists. I am not sure but the notion is growing in what is called the intellectual class, that it is a mistake to intrust the government to the ignorant many, and that it can only be lodged safely in the hands of the wise few. We hear the corruptions of the times attributed to universal suffrage. Yet these corruptions certainly are not peculiar to the United States: It is also said here, as it is in England, that our diffused and somewhat superficial education is merely unfitting the mass of men, who must be laborers, for any useful occupation.

This argument, reduced to plain terms, is simply this: that the mass of mankind are unfit to decide properly their own political and social condition; and that for the mass of mankind any but a very limited mental development is to be deprecated. It would be enough to say of this, that class government and popular ignorance have been tried for so many ages, and always with disaster and failure in the end, that I should think philanthropical historians would be tired of recommending them. But there is more to be said.

I feel that as a resident on earth, part owner of it for a time, unavoidably a member of society, I have a right to a voice in determining what my condition and what my chance in life shall be. I may be ignorant, I should be a very poor ruler of other people, but I am better capable of deciding some things that touch me nearly than another is. By what logic can I say that I should have a part in the conduct of this world and that my neighbor should not? Who is to decide what degree of intelligence shall fit a man for a share in the government? How are we to select the few capable men that are to rule all the rest? As a matter of fact, men have been rulers who had neither the average intelligence nor virtue of the people they governed. And, as a matter of historical experience, a class in power has always sought its own benefit rather than that of the whole people. Lunacy, extraordinary stupidity, and crime aside, a man is the best guardian of his own liberty and rights.

The English critics, who say we have taken the government from the capable few and given it to the people, speak of universal suffrage as a quack panacea of this "era of progress." But it is not the manufactured panacea of any theorist or philosopher whatever. It is the natural result of a diffused knowledge of human rights and of increasing intelligence. It is nothing against it that Napoleon III. used a mockery of it to govern France. It is not a device of the closet, but a method of government, which has naturally suggested itself to men as they have grown into a feeling of self-reliance and a consciousness that they have some right in the decision of their own destiny in the world. It is true that suffrage peculiarly fits a people virtuous and intelligent. But there has not yet been invented any government in which a people would thrive who were ignorant and vicious.

Our foreign critics seem to regard our "American system," by the way, as a sort of invention or patent right, upon which we are experimenting; forgetting that it is as legitimate a growth out of our circumstances as the English system is out of its antecedents. Our system is not the product of theorists or closet philosophers; but it was ordained in substance and inevitable from the day the first "town meeting" assembled in New England, and it was not in the power of Hamilton or any one else to make it otherwise.

So you must have education, now you have the ballot, say the critics of this era of progress; and this is another of your cheap inventions. Not that we undervalue book knowledge. Oh, no! but it really seems to us that a good trade, with the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments back of it, would be the best thing for most of you. You must work for a living anyway; and why, now, should you unsettle your minds?

This is such an astounding view of human life and destiny that I do not know what to say to it. Did it occur to Mr. Froude to ask the man whether he would be contented with a good trade and the Ten Commandments? Perhaps the man would like eleven commandments? And, if he gets hold of the eleventh, he may want to know something more about his fellow-men, a little geography maybe, and some of Mr. Froude's history, and thus he may be led off into literature, and the Lord knows where.

The inference is that education--book fashion--will unfit the man for useful work. Mr. Froude here again stops at a half-truth. As a general thing, intelligence is useful in any position a man occupies. But it is true that there is a superficial and misdirected sort of education, so called, which makes the man who receives it despise labor; and it is also true that in the present educational revival there has been a neglect of training in the direction of skilled labor, and we all suffer more or less from cheap and dishonest work. But the way out of this, again, is forward, and not backward. It is a good sign, and not a stigma upon this era of progress, that people desire education. But this education must be of the whole man; he must be taught to work as well as to read, and he is, indeed, poorly educated if he is not fitted to do his work in the world. We certainly shall not have better workmen by having ignorant workmen. I need not say that the real education is that which will best fit a man for performing well his duties in life. If Mr. Froude, instead of his plaint over the scarcity of good mechanics, and of the Ten Commandments in England, had recommended the establishment of industrial schools, he would have spoken more to the purpose.

I should say that the fashionable skepticism of today, here and in England, is in regard to universal suffrage and the capacity of the people to govern themselves. The whole system is the sharp invention of Thomas Jefferson and others, by which crafty demagogues can rule. Instead of being, as we have patriotically supposed, a real progress in human development, it is only a fetich, which is becoming rapidly a failure. Now, there is a great deal of truth in the assertion that, whatever the form of government, the ablest men, or the strongest, or the most cunning in the nation, will rule. And yet it is true that in a popular government, like this, the humblest citizen, if he is wronged or oppressed, has in his hands a readier instrument of redress than he has ever had in any form of government. And it must not be forgotten that the ballot in the hands of all is perhaps the only safeguard against the tyranny of wealth in the hands of the few. It is true that bad men can band together and be destructive; but so they can in any government. Revolution by ballot is much safer than revolution by violence; and, granting that human nature is selfish, when the whole people are the government selfishness is on the side of the government. Can you mention any class in this country whose interest it is to overturn the government? And, then, as to the wisdom of the popular decisions by the ballot in this country. Look carefully at all the Presidential elections from Washington's down, and say, in the light of history, if the popular decision has not, every time, been the best for the country. It may not have seemed so to some of us at the time, but I think it is true, and a very significant fact.

Of course, in this affirmation of belief that one hundred years of popular government in this country is a real progress for humanity, and not merely a change from the rule of the fit to the rule of the cunning, we cannot forget that men are pretty much everywhere the same, and that we have abundant reason for national humility. We are pretty well aware that ours is not an ideal state of society, and should be so, even if the English who pass by did not revile us, wagging their heads. We might differ with them about the causes of our disorders. Doubtless, extended suffrage has produced certain results. It seems, strangely enough, to have escaped the observation of our English friends that to suffrage was due the late horse disease. No one can discover any other cause for it. But there is a cause for the various phenomena of this period of shoddy, of inflated speculation, of disturbance of all values, social, moral, political, and material, quite sufficient in the light of history to account for them. It is not suffrage; it is an irredeemable paper currency. It has borne its usual fruit with us, and neither foreign nor home critics can shift the responsibility of it upon our system of government. Yes, it is true, we have contrived to fill the world with our scandals of late. I might refer to a loose commercial and political morality; to betrayals of popular trust in politics; to corruptions in legislatures and in corporations; to an abuse of power in the public press, which has hardly yet got itself adjusted to its sudden accession of enormous influence. We complain of its injustice to individuals sometimes. We might imagine that something like this would occur.

A newspaper one day says: "We are exceedingly pained to hear that the Hon. Mr. Blank, who is running for Congress in the First District, has permitted his aged grandmother to go to the town poorhouse. What renders this conduct inexplicable is the fact that Mr. Blank is a man of large fortune."

The next day the newspaper says: "The Hon. Mr. Blank has not seen fit to deny the damaging accusation in regard to the treatment of his grandmother."

The next day the newspaper says: "Mr. Blank is still silent. He is probably aware that he cannot afford to rest under this grave charge."

The next day the newspaper asks: "Where's Blank? Has he fled?"

At last, goaded by these remarks, and most unfortunately for himself, Mr. Blank writes to the newspaper and most indignantly denies the charge; he never sent his grandmother to the poorhouse.

Thereupon the newspaper says: "Of course a rich man who would put his own grandmother in the poorhouse would deny it. Our informant was a gentleman of character. Mr. Blank rests the matter on his unsupported word. It is a question of veracity."

Or, perhaps, Mr. Blank, more unfortunately for himself, begins by making an affidavit, wherein he swears that he never sent his grandmother to the poorhouse, and that, in point of fact, he has not any grandmother whatever.

The newspaper then, in language that is now classical, "goes for" Mr. Blank. It says: "Mr. Blank resorts to the common device of the rogue --the affidavit. If he had been conscious of rectitude, would he not have relied upon his simple denial?"

Now, if an extreme case like this could occur, it would be bad enough. But, in our free society, the remedy would be at hand. The constituents of Mr. Blank would elect him in triumph. The newspaper would lose public confidence and support and learn to use its position more justly. What I mean to indicate by such an extreme instance as this is, that in our very license of individual freedom there is finally a correcting power.

We might pursue this general subject of progress by a comparison of the society of this country now with that of fifty years ago. I have no doubt that in every essential this is better than that, in manners, in morality, in charity and toleration, in education and religion. I know the standard of morality is higher. I know the churches are purer. Not fifty years ago, in a New England town, a distinguished doctor of divinity, the pastor of a leading church, was part owner in a distillery. He was a great light in his denomination, but he was an extravagant liver, and, being unable to pay his debts, he was arrested and put into jail, with the liberty of the "limits." In order not to interrupt his ministerial work, the jail limits were made to include his house and his church, so that he could still go in and out before his people. I do not think that could occur anywhere in the United States today.

I will close these fragmentary suggestions by saying that I, for one, should like to see this country a century from now. Those who live then will doubtless say of this period that it was crude, and rather disorderly, and fermenting with a great many new projects; but I have great faith that they will also say that the present extending notion, that the best government is for the people, by the people, was in the line of sound progress. I should expect to find faith in humanity greater and not less than it is now, and I should not expect to find that Mr. Froude's mournful expectation had been realized, and that the belief in a life beyond the grave had been withdrawn.

ENGLAND

By Charles Dudley Warner

England has played a part in modern history altogether out of proportion to its size. The whole of Great Britain, including Ireland, has only eleven thousand more square miles than Italy; and England and Wales alone are not half so large as Italy. England alone is about the size of North Carolina. It is, as Franklin, in 1763, wrote to Mary Stevenson in London, "that petty island which, compared to America, is but a stepping-stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry."

A considerable portion of it is under water, or water-soaked a good part of the year, and I suppose it has more acres for breeding frogs than any other northern land, except Holland. Old Harrison says that the North Britons when overcome by hunger used to creep into the marshes till the water was up to their chins and there remain a long time, "onlie to qualifie the heats of their stomachs by violence, which otherwise would have wrought and beene readie to oppresse them for hunger and want of sustinance." It lies so far north--the latitude of Labrador--that the winters are long and the climate inhospitable. It would be severely cold if the Gulf Stream did not make it always damp and curtain it with clouds. In some parts the soil is heavy with water, in others it is only a thin stratum above the chalk; in fact, agricultural production could scarcely be said to exist there until fortunes made in India and in other foreign adventure enabled the owners of the land to pile it knee-deep with fertilizers from Peru and elsewhere. Thanks to accumulated wealth and the Gulf Stream, its turf is green and soft; figs, which will not mature with us north of the capes of Virginia, ripen in sheltered nooks in Oxford, and the large and unfrequent strawberry sometimes appears upon the dinner-table in such profusion that the guests can indulge in one apiece.

Yet this small, originally infertile island has been for two centuries, and is today, the most vital influence on the globe. Cast your eye over the world upon her possessions, insular and continental, into any one of which, almost, England might be dropped, with slight disturbance, as you would transfer a hanging garden. For any parallel to her power and possessions you must go back to ancient Rome. Egypt under Thotmes and Seti overran the then known world and took tribute of it; but it was a temporary wave of conquest and not an assimilation. Rome sent her laws and her roads to the end of the earth, and made an empire of it; but it was an empire of barbarians largely, of dynasties rather than of peoples. The dynasties fought, the dynasties submitted, and the dynasties paid the tribute. The modern "people" did not exist. One battle decided the fate of half the world--it might be lost or won for a woman's eyes; the flight of a chieftain might settle the fate of a province; a campaign might determine the allegiance of half Asia. There was but one compact, disciplined, law-ordered nation, and that had its seat on the Tiber.

Under what different circumstances did England win her position! Before she came to the front, Venice controlled, and almost monopolized, the trade of the Orient. When she entered upon her career Spain was almost omnipotent in Europe, and was in possession of more than half the Western world; and besides Spain, England had, wherever she went, to contend for a foothold with Portugal, skilled in trade and adventure; and with Holland, rich, and powerful on the sea. That is to say, she met everywhere civilizations old and technically her superior. Of the ruling powers, she was the least in arts and arms. If you will take time to fill out this picture, you will have some conception of the marvelous achievements of England, say since the abdication of the Emperor Charles V.

This little island is today the centre of the wealth, of the solid civilization, of the world. I will not say of art, of music, of the lighter social graces that make life agreeable; but I will say of the moral forces that make progress possible and worth while. Of this island the centre is London; of London the heart is "the City," and in the City you can put your finger on one spot where the pulse of the world is distinctly felt to beat. The Moslem regards the Kaaba at Mecca as the centre of the universe; but that is only a theological phrase. The centre of the world is the Bank of England in Leadenhall Street. There is not an occurrence, not a conquest or a defeat, a revolution, a panic, a famine, an abundance, not a change in value of money or material, no depression or stoppage in trade, no recovery, no political, and scarcely any great religious movement--say the civil deposition of the Pope or the Wahhabee revival in Arabia and India--that does not report itself instantly at this sensitive spot. Other capitals feel a local influence; this feels all the local influences. Put your ear at the door of the Bank or the Stock Exchange near by, and you hear the roar of the world.

But this is not all, nor the most striking thing, nor the greatest contrast to the empires of Rome and of Spain. The civilization that has gone forth from England is a self-sustaining one, vital to grow where it is planted, in vast communities, in an order that does not depend, as that of the Roman world did, upon edicts and legions from the capital. And it must be remembered that if the land empire of England is not so vast as that of Rome, England has for two centuries been mistress of the seas, with all the consequences of that opportunity--consequences to trade beyond computation. And we must add to all this that an intellectual and moral power has been put forth from England clear round the globe, and felt beyond the limits of the English tongue.

How is it that England has attained this supremacy--a supremacy in vain disputed on land and on sea by France, but now threatened by an equipped and disciplined Germany, by an unformed Colossus--a Slav and Tartar conglomerate; and perhaps by one of her own children, the United States? I will mention some of the things that have determined England's extraordinary career; and they will help us to consider her prospects. I name:

I. The Race. It is a mixed race, but with certain dominant qualities, which we call, loosely, Teutonic; certainly the most aggressive, tough, and vigorous people the world has seen. It does not shrink from any climate, from any exposure, from any geographic condition; yet its choice of migration and of residence has mainly been on the grass belt of the globe, where soil and moisture produce good turf, where a changing and unequal climate, with extremes of heat and cold, calls out the physical resources, stimulates invention, and requires an aggressive and defensive attitude of mind and body. The early history of this people is marked by two things:

( 1 ) Town and village organizations, nurseries of law, order, and self-dependence, nuclei of power, capable of indefinite expansion, leading directly to a free and a strong government, the breeders of civil liberty.

( 2 ) Individualism in religion, Protestantism in the widest sense: I mean by this, cultivation of the individual conscience as against authority. This trait was as marked in this sturdy people in Catholic England as it is in Protestant England. It is in the blood. England never did submit to Rome, not even as France did, though the Gallic Church held out well. Take the struggle of Henry II. and the hierarchy. Read the fight with prerogative all along. The English Church never could submit. It is a shallow reading of history to attribute the final break with Rome to the unbridled passion of Henry VIII.; that was an occasion only: if it had not been that, it would have been something else.

Here we have the two necessary traits in the character of a great people: the love and the habit of civil liberty and religious conviction and independence. Allied to these is another trait--truthfulness. To speak the truth in word and action, to the verge of bluntness and offense--and with more relish sometimes because it is individually obnoxious and unlovely--is an English trait, clearly to be traced in the character of this people, notwithstanding the equivocations of Elizabethan diplomacy, the proverbial lying of English shopkeepers, and the fraudulent adulteration of English manufactures. Not to lie is perhaps as much a matter of insular pride as of morals; to lie is unbecoming an Englishman. When Captain Burnaby was on his way to Khiva he would tolerate no Oriental exaggeration of his army rank, although a higher title would have smoothed his way and added to his consideration. An English official who was a captive at Bokhara (or Khiva) was offered his life by the Khan if he would abjure the Christian faith and say he was a Moslem; but he preferred death rather than the advantage of a temporary equivocation. I do not suppose that he was a specially pious man at home or that he was a martyr to religious principle, but for the moment Christianity stood for England and English honor and civilization. I can believe that a rough English sailor, who had not used a sacred name, except in vain, since he said his prayer at his mother's knee, accepted death under like circumstances rather than say he was not a Christian.

The next determining cause in England's career is:

II. The insular position. Poor as the island was, this was the opportunity. See what came of it:

( 1 ) Maritime opportunity. The irregular coastlines, the bays and harbors, the near islands and mainlands invited to the sea. The nation became, per force, sailors--as the ancient Greeks were and the modern Greeks are: adventurers, discoverers--hardy, ambitious, seeking food from the sea and wealth from every side.

( 2 ) Their position protected them. What they got they could keep; wealth could accumulate. Invasion was difficult and practically impossible to their neighbors. And yet they were in the bustling world, close to the continent, commanding the most important of the navigable seas. The wealth of Holland was on the one hand, the wealth of France on the other. They held the keys.

( 3 ) The insular position and their free institutions invited refugees from all the Continent, artisans and skilled laborers of all kinds. Hence, the beginning of their great industries, which made England rich in proportion as her authority and chance of trade expanded over distant islands and continents. But this would not have been possible without the third advantage which I shall mention, and that is:

III. Coal. England's power and wealth rested upon her coal-beds. In this bounty nature was more liberal to the tight little island than to any other spot in Western Europe, and England took early advantage of it. To be sure, her coal-field is small compared with that of the United States--an area of only 11,900 square miles to our 192,000. But Germany has only 1,770; Belgium, 510; France, 2,086; and Russia only in her expansion of territory leads Europe in this respect, and has now 30,000 square miles of coal-beds. But see the use England makes of this material: in 1877, she took out of the ground 134,179,968 tons. The United States the same year took out 50,000,000 tons; Germany, 48,000,000; France, 16,000,000; Belgium, 14,000,000. This tells the story of the heavy industries.

We have considered as elements of national greatness the race itself, the favorable position, and the material to work with. I need not enlarge upon the might and the possessions of England, nor the general beneficence of her occupation wherever she has established fort, factory, or colony. With her flag go much injustice, domineering, and cruelty; but, on the whole, the best elements of civilization.

The intellectual domination of England has been as striking as the physical. It is stamped upon all her colonies; it has by no means disappeared in the United States. For more than fifty years after our independence we imported our intellectual food--with the exception of politics, and theology in certain forms--and largely our ethical guidance from England. We read English books, or imitations of the English way of looking at things; we even accepted the English caricatures of our own life as genuine--notably in the case of the so-called typical Yankee. It is only recently that our writers have begun to describe our own life as it is, and that readers begin to feel that our society may be as interesting in print as that English society which they have been all their lives accustomed to read about. The reading-books of children in schools were filled with English essays, stories, English views of life; it was the English heroines over whose woes the girls wept; it was of the English heroes that the boys declaimed. I do not know how much the imagination has to do in shaping the national character, but for half a century English writers, by poems and novels, controlled the imagination of this country. The principal reading then, as now--and perhaps more then than now--was fiction, and nearly all of this England supplied. We took in with it, it will be noticed, not only the romance and gilding of chivalry and legitimacy, such as Scott gives us, but constant instruction in a society of ranks and degrees, orders of nobility and commonalty, a fixed social status, a well-ordered, and often attractive, permanent social inequality, a state of life and relations based upon lingering feudal conditions and prejudices. The background of all English fiction is monarchical; however liberal it may be, it must be projected upon the existing order of things. We have not been examining these foreign social conditions with that simple curiosity which leads us to look into the social life of Russia as it is depicted in Russian novels; we have, on the contrary, absorbed them generation after generation as part of our intellectual development, so that the novels and the other English literature must have had a vast influence in molding our mental character, in shaping our thinking upon the political as well as the social constitution of states.

For a long time the one American counteraction, almost the only, to this English influence was the newspaper, which has always kept alive and diffused a distinctly American spirit--not always lovely or modest, but national. The establishment of periodicals which could afford to pay for fiction written about our society and from the American point of view has had a great effect on our literary emancipation. The wise men whom we elect to make our laws--and who represent us intellectually and morally a good deal better than we sometimes like to admit--have always gone upon the theory, with regard to the reading for the American people, that the chief requisite of it was cheapness, with no regard to its character so far as it is a shaper of notions about government and social life. What educating influence English fiction was having upon American life they have not inquired, so long as it was furnished cheap, and its authors were cheated out of any copyright on it.

At the North, thanks to a free press and periodicals, to a dozen reform agitations, and to the intellectual stir generally accompanying industries and commerce, we have been developing an immense intellectual activity, a portion of which has found expression in fiction, in poetry, in essays, that are instinct with American life and aspiration; so that now for over thirty years, in the field of literature, we have had a vigorous offset to the English intellectual domination of which I spoke. How far this has in the past molded American thought and sentiment, in what degree it should be held responsible for the infidelity in regard to our "American experiment," I will not undertake to say. The South furnishes a very interesting illustration in this connection. When the civil war broke down the barriers of intellectual non-intercourse behind which the South had ensconced itself, it was found to be in a colonial condition. Its libraries were English libraries, mostly composed of old English literature. Its literary growth stopped with the reign of George III. Its latest news was the Spectator and the Tatler. The social order it covered was that of monarchical England, undisturbed by the fiery philippics of Byron or Shelley or the radicalism of a manufacturing age. Its chivalry was an imitation of the antiquated age of lords and ladies, and tournaments, and buckram courtesies, when men were as touchy to fight, at the lift of an eyelid or the drop of the glove, as Brian de Bois-Guilbert, and as ready for a drinking-bout as Christopher North. The intellectual stir of the North, with its disorganizing radicalism, was rigorously excluded, and with it all the new life pouring out of its presses. The South was tied to a republic, but it was not republican, either in its politics or its social order. It was, in its mental constitution, in its prejudices, in its tastes, exactly what you would expect a people to be, excluded from the circulation of free ideas by its system of slavery, and fed on the English literature of a century ago. I dare say that a majority of its reading public, at any time, would have preferred a monarchical system and a hierarchy of rank.

To return to England. I have said that English domination usually carries the best elements of civilization. Yet it must be owned that England has pursued her magnificent career in a policy often insolent and brutal, and generally selfish. Scarcely any considerations have stood in the way of her trade and profit. I will not dwell upon her opium culture in India, which is a proximate cause of famine in district after district, nor upon her forcing the drug upon China--a policy disgraceful to a Christian queen and people. We have only just got rid of slavery, sustained so long by Biblical and official sanction, and may not yet set up as critics. But I will refer to a case with which all are familiar--England's treatment of her American colonies. In 1760 and onward, when Franklin, the agent of the colonies of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, was cooling his heels in lords' waiting-rooms in London, America was treated exactly as Ireland was--that is, discriminated against in every way; not allowed to manufacture; not permitted to trade with other nations, except under the most vexatious restrictions; and the effort was continued to make her a mere agricultural producer and a dependent. All that England cared for us was that we should be a market for her manufactures. This same selfishness has been the keynote of her policy down to the present day, except as the force of circumstances has modified it. Steadily pursued, it has contributed largely to make England the monetary and industrial master of the world.

With this outline I pass to her present condition and outlook. The dictatorial and selfish policy has been forced to give way somewhat in regard to the colonies. The spirit of the age and the strength of the colonies forbid its exercise; they cannot be held by the old policy. Australia boldly adopts a protective tariff, and her parliament is only nominally controlled by the crown. Canada exacts duties on English goods, and England cannot help herself. Even with these concessions, can England keep her great colonies? They are still loyal in word. They still affect English manners and English speech, and draw their intellectual supplies from England. On the prospect of a war with Russia they nearly all offered volunteers. But everybody knows that allegiance is on the condition of local autonomy. If united Canada asks to go, she will go. So with Australia. It may be safely predicted that England will never fight again to hold the sovereignty of her new-world possessions against their present occupants. And, in the judgment of many good observers, a dissolution of the empire, so far as the Western colonies are concerned, is inevitable, unless Great Britain, adopting the plan urged by Franklin, becomes an imperial federation, with parliaments distinct and independent, the crown the only bond of union--the crown, and not the English parliament, being the titular and actual sovereign. Sovereign power over America in the parliament Franklin never would admit. His idea was that all the inhabitants of the empire must be citizens, not some of them subjects ruled by the home citizens. The two great political parties of England are really formed on lines constructed after the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. The Tories had been long in power. They had made many changes and popular concessions, but they resisted parliamentary reform. The great Whig lords, who had tried to govern England without the people and in opposition to the crown in the days of George III., had learned to seek popular support. The Reform Bill, which was ultimately forced through by popular pressure and threat of civil war, abolished the rotten boroughs, gave representation to the large manufacturing towns and increased representation to the counties, and the suffrage to all men who had 'paid ten pounds a year rent in boroughs, or in the counties owned land worth ten pounds a year or paid fifty pounds rent. The immediate result of this was to put power into the hands of the middle classes and to give the lower classes high hopes, so that, in 1839, the Chartist movement began, one demand of which was universal suffrage. The old party names of Whig and Tory had been dropped and the two parties had assumed their present appellations of Conservatives and Liberals. Both parties had, however, learned that there was no rest for any ruling party except a popular basis, and the Conservative party had the good sense to strengthen itself in 1867 by carrying through Mr. Disraeli's bill, which gave the franchise in boroughs to all householders paying rates, and in counties to all occupiers of property rated at fifteen pounds a year. This broadening of the suffrage places the power irrevocably in the hands of the people, against whose judgment neither crown nor ministry can venture on any important step.