THE
CONTEMPORARY
REVIEW

VOLUME XXXVI. NOVEMBER, 1879

CONTENTS.

[Pg 369]

ON FREEDOM.[1]

Not more than twenty years have passed since John Stuart Mill sent
forth his plea for Liberty.[2]

If there is one among the leaders of thought in England who, by the
elevation of his character and the calm composure of his mind, deserved
the so often misplaced title of Serene Highness, it was, I think,
John Stuart Mill.

But in his Essay “On Liberty,” Mill for once becomes passionate. In
presenting his Bill of Rights, in stepping forward as the champion of
individual liberty, a new spirit seems to have taken possession of him. He
speaks like a martyr, or the defender of martyrs. The individual human
soul, with its unfathomable endowments, and its capacity of growing to
something undreamt of in our philosophy, becomes in his eyes a sacred
thing, and every encroachment on its world-wide domain is treated as
sacrilege. Society, the arch-enemy of the rights of individuality, is
represented like an evil spirit, whom it behoves every true man to resist
with might and main, and whose demands, as they cannot be altogether
ignored, must be reduced at all hazards to the lowest level.

[Pg 370]
I doubt whether any of the principles for which Mill pleaded so
warmly and strenuously in his Essay “On Liberty” would at the present
day be challenged or resisted, even by the most illiberal of philosophers,
or the most conservative of politicians. Mill’s demands sound very
humble to our ears. They amount to no more than this, “that the individual
is not accountable to society for his actions so far as they
concern the interests of no person but himself, and that he may be subjected
to social or legal punishments for such actions only as are prejudicial
to the interests of others.”

Is there any one here present who doubts the justice of that principle, or
who would wish to reduce the freedom of the individual to a smaller
measure? Whatever social tyranny may have existed twenty years ago,
when it wrung that fiery protest from the lips of John Stuart Mill, can
we imagine a state of society, not totally Utopian, in which the individual
man need be less ashamed of his social fetters, in which he could
more freely utter all his honest convictions, more boldly propound all his
theories, more fearlessly agitate for their speedy realization; in which,
in fact, each man can be so entirely himself as the society of England,
such as it now is, such as generations of hard-thinking and hard-working
Englishmen have made it, and left it as the most sacred inheritance to
their sons and daughters?

Look through the whole of history, not excepting the brightest days of
republican freedom at Athens and Rome, and I know you will not find one
single period in which the measure of Liberty accorded to each individual
was larger than it is at present, at least in England. And if you wish to
realize the full blessings of the time in which we live, compare Mill’s
plea for Liberty with another written not much more than two hundred
years ago, and by a thinker not inferior either in power or boldness to
Mill himself. According to Hobbes, the only freedom which an individual
in his ideal state has a right to claim is what he calls “freedom of
thought,” and that freedom of thought consists in our being able to
think what we like—so long as we keep it to ourselves. Surely, such
freedom of thought existed even in the days of the Inquisition, and we
should never call thought free, if it had to be kept a prisoner in solitary
and silent confinement. By freedom of thought we mean freedom of
speech, freedom of the press, freedom of action, whether individual or
associated, and of that freedom the present generation, as compared
with all former generations, the English nation, as compared with all
other nations, enjoys, there can be no doubt, a good measure, pressed
down, and shaken together, and sometimes running over.

It may be said that some dogmas still remain in politics, in religion,
and in morality; but those who defend them claim no longer any
infallibility, and those who attack them, however small their minority,
need fear no violence, nay, may reckon on an impartial and even
sympathetic hearing, as soon as people discover in their pleadings the
true ring of honest conviction and the warmth inspired by an unselfish
[Pg 371]
love of truth.

It has seemed strange therefore to many readers of Mill, particularly
on the Continent, that this cry for Liberty, this demand for freedom for
every individual to be what he is, and to develop all the germs of his
nature, should have come from what is known as the freest of all
countries, England. We might well understand such a cry of indignation
if it had reached us from Russia; but why should English
philosophers, of all others, have to protest against the tyranny of
society? It is true, nevertheless, that in countries governed despotically,
the individual, unless he is obnoxious to the Government, enjoys far
greater freedom, or rather licence, than in a country like England, which
governs itself. Russian society, for instance, is extremely indulgent.
It tolerates in its rulers and statesmen a haughty defiance of the
simplest rules of social propriety, and it seems amused rather than
astonished or indignant at the vagaries, the frenzies, and outrages, of those
who in brilliant drawing-rooms or lecture-rooms preach the doctrines of what is called Nihilism or
Individualism,[3]—viz.,
“that society must be regenerated by a struggle for existence and the survival of the strongest,
processes which Nature has sanctioned, and which have proved successful
among wild animals.” If there is danger in these doctrines the Government
is expected to see to it. It may place watchmen at the doors of
every house and at the corner of every street, but it must not count on
the better classes coming forward to enrol themselves as special constables,
or even on the co-operation of public opinion which in England would
annihilate that kind of Nihilism with one glance of scorn and pity.

In a self-governed country like England, the resistance which society,
if it likes, can oppose to the individual in the assertion of his rights, is
far more compact and powerful than in Russia, or even in Germany.
Even where it does not employ the arm of the law, society knows how
to use that softer, but more crushing pressure, that calm, but Gorgon-like
look which only the bravest and stoutest hearts know how to
resist.

It is rather against that indirect repression which a well-organized
society exercises, both through its male and female representatives, that
Mill’s demand for Liberty seems directed. He does not stand up for
unlimited licence; on the contrary, he would have been the most
strenuous defender of that balance of power between the weak and the
strong on which all social life depends. But he resents those smaller
penalties which society will always inflict on those who disturb its
dignified peace and comfort:—avoidance, exclusion, a cold look, a
stinging remark. Had Mill any right to complain of these social
penalties? Would it not rather amount to an interference with
individual liberty to wish to deprive any individual or any number of
individuals of those weapons of self-defence? Those who themselves
[Pg 372]
think and speak freely, have hardly a right to complain, if others claim
the same privilege. Mill himself called the Conservative party the
stupid party par excellence, and he took great pains to explain that it
was so, not by accident, but by necessity. Need he wonder if those
whom he whipped and scourged used their own whips and scourges
against so merciless a critic?

Freethinkers, and I use that name as a title of honour for all who, like
Mill, claim for every individual the fullest freedom in thought, word, or
deed, compatible with the freedom of others, are apt to make one mistake.
Conscious of their own honest intentions, they cannot bear to be mistrusted
or slighted. They expect society to submit to their often very
painful operations as a patient submits to the knife of the surgeon.
That is not in human nature. The enemy of abuses is always abused
by his enemies. Society will never yield one inch without resistance, and
few reformers live long enough to receive the thanks of those whom they
have reformed. Mill’s unsolicited election to Parliament was a triumph
not often shared by social reformers; it was as exceptional as Bright’s
admission to a seat in the Cabinet, or Stanley’s appointment as Dean of
Westminster. Such anomalies will happen in a country fortunately so
full of anomalies as England; but, as a rule, a political reformer must
not be angry if he passes through life without the title of Right Honourable;
nor should a man, if he will always speak the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth, be disappointed if he dies a martyr rather
than a Bishop.

But granting even that in Mill’s time there existed some traces of
social tyranny, where are they now? Look at the newspapers and the
journals. Is there any theory too wild, any reform too violent, to be
openly defended? Look at the drawing-rooms or the meetings of learned
societies. Are not the most eccentric talkers the spoiled children of the
fashionable world? When young lords begin to discuss the propriety
of limiting the rights of inheritance, and young tutors are not afraid to
propose curtailing the long vacation, surely we need not complain of
the intolerance of English society.

Whenever I state these facts to my German and French and Italian
friends, who from reading Mill’s Essay “On Liberty” have derived the
impression that, however large an amount of political liberty England
may enjoy, it enjoys but little of intellectual freedom, they are generally
willing to be converted so far as London, or other great cities, are
concerned. But look at your Universities, they say, the nurseries of
English thought! Can you compare their mediæval spirit, their
monastic institutions, their scholastic philosophy, with the freshness and
freedom of the Continental Universities? Strong as these prejudices
about Oxford and Cambridge have always been, they have become still
more intense since Professor Helmholtz, in an inaugural address which
he delivered at his installation as Rector of the University of Berlin, lent
the authority of his great name to these misconceptions. “The tutors,” he
[Pg 373]
says,[4]
“in the English Universities cannot deviate by a hair’s-breadth from
the dogmatic system of the English Church, without exposing themselves
to the censure of their Archbishops and losing their pupils.” In
German Universities, on the contrary, we are told that the extreme
conclusions of materialistic metaphysics, the boldest speculations within
the sphere of Darwin’s theory of evolution, may be propounded without
let or hindrance, quite as much as the highest apotheosis of Papal
infallibility.

Here the facts on which Professor Helmholtz relies are entirely
wrong, and the writings of some of our most eminent tutors supply a
more than sufficient refutation of his statements. Archbishops have no
official position whatsoever in English Universities, and their censure of
an Oxford tutor would be resented as impertinent by the whole
University. Nor does the University, as such, exercise any very strict
control over the tutors, even when they lecture not to their own
College only. Each Master of Arts at Oxford claims now the right
to lecture (venia docendi), and I doubt whether they would ever submit
to those restrictions which, in Germany, the Faculty imposes on every
Privat-docent. Privat-docents in German Universities have been rejected
by the Faculty for incompetence, and silenced for insubordination.
I know of no such cases at Oxford during my residence of
more than thirty years, nor can I think it likely that they should ever
occur.

As to the extreme conclusions of materialistic metaphysics, there are
Oxford tutors who have grappled with the systems of such giants as
Hobbes, Locke, or Hume, and who are not likely to be frightened by
Büchner and Vogt.

I know comparisons are odious, and I am the last man who would
wish to draw comparisons between English and German Universities
unfavourable to the latter. But with regard to freedom of thought,
of speech, and action, Professor Helmholtz, if he would spend but a few
weeks at Oxford, would find that we enjoy a fuller measure of freedom
here than the Professors and Privat-docents in any Continental
University. The publications of some of our professors and tutors
ought at least to have convinced him that if there is less of brave
words and turbulent talk in their writings, they display throughout a
determination to speak the truth, which may be matched, but could not
easily be excelled, by the leaders of thought in France, Germany, or
Italy.

The real difference between English and Continental Universities is
that the former govern themselves, the latter are governed. Self-government
entails responsibilities, sometimes restraints and reticences.
I may here be allowed to quote the words of another eminent Professor
[Pg 374]
of the University of Berlin, Du Bois Reymond, who, in addressing his colleagues, ventured to tell
them,[5]
“We have still to learn from the English how the greatest independence of the individual is compatible
with willing submission to salutary, though irksome, statutes.” That is
particularly true when the statutes are self-imposed. In Germany, as
Professor Helmholtz tells us himself, the last decision in almost all the
more important affairs of the Universities rests with the Government,
and he does not deny that in times of political and ecclesiastical tension,
a most inconsiderate use has been made of that power. There are,
besides, the less important matters, such as raising of salaries, leave of
absence, scientific missions, even titles and decorations, all of which
enable a clever Minister of Instruction to assert his personal influence
among the less independent members of the University. In Oxford the
University does not know the Ministry, nor the Ministry the University.
The acts of the Government, be it Liberal or Conservative, are freely
discussed, and often powerfully resisted by the academic constituencies, and
the personal dislike of a Minister or Ministerial Councillor could as little
injure a professor or tutor as his favour could add one penny to his salary.

But these are minor matters. What gives their own peculiar
character to the English Universities is a sense of power and responsibility:
power, because they are the most respected among the
numerous corporations in the country; responsibility, because the
higher education of the whole country has been committed to their
charge. Their only master is public opinion as represented in Parliament,
their only incentive their own sense of duty. There is no country
in Europe where Universities hold so exalted a position, and where those
who have the honour to belong to them may say with greater truth,
Noblesse oblige.

I know the dangers of self-government, particularly where higher and
more ideal interests are concerned, and there are probably few who wish
for a real reform in schools and Universities who have not occasionally
yielded to the desire for a Dictator, of a Bismarck or a Falk. But such a
desire springs only from a momentary weakness and despondency; and
no one who knows the difference between being governed and governing
oneself, would ever wish to descend from that higher though
dangerous position to a lower one, however safe and comfortable it
might seem. No one who has tasted freedom would ever wish to
exchange it for anything else. Public opinion is sometimes a hard task-master,
and majorities can be great tyrants to those who want to be
honest to their own convictions. But in the struggle of all against all,
each individual feels that he has his rightful place, and that he may
exercise his rightful influence. If he is beaten, he is beaten in
[Pg 375]
fair fight; if he conquers, he has no one else to thank. No
doubt despotic Governments have often exercised the most beneficial
patronage in encouraging and rewarding poets, artists, and men of
science. But men of genius who have conquered the love and admiration
of a whole nation are greater than those who have gained the
favour of the most brilliant Courts; and we know how some of the
fairest reputations have been wrecked on the patronage which they had
to accept at the hands of powerful Ministers or ambitious Sovereigns.

But to return to Mill and his plea for Liberty. Though I can hardly
believe that, were he still among us, he would claim a larger measure of
freedom for the individual than is now accorded to every one of us in
the society in which we move, yet the chief cause on which he founded
his plea for Liberty, the chief evil which he thought could be remedied
only if society would allow more elbow-room to individual genius,
exists in the same degree as in his time—aye, even in a higher degree.
The principle of Individuality has suffered more at present than perhaps
at any former period of history. The world is becoming more and more
gregarious, and what the French call our nature moutonnière, “our mutton-like
nature,” our tendency to leap where any bell-wether has leapt before,
becomes more and more prevalent in politics, in religion, in art, and
even in science. M. de Tocqueville expressed his surprise how much
more Frenchmen of the present day resemble one another than did
those of the last generation. The same remark, adds John Stuart
Mill, might be made of England in a greater degree. “The modern
régime of public opinion,” he writes, “is in an unorganized form
what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized;
and unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against
this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its noble antecedents and its professed
Christianity, will tend to become another China.”

I fully agree with Mill in recognizing the dangers of uniformity, but
I doubt whether what he calls the régime of public opinion is alone, or
even chiefly, answerable for it. No doubt there are some people in
whose eyes uniformity seems an advantage rather than a disadvantage.
If all were equally strong, equally educated, equally honest, equally rich,
equally tall, or equally small, society would seem to them to have
reached the highest ideal. The same people admire an old French
garden, with its clipped yew-trees, forming artificial walls and towers
and pyramids, far more than the giant yews which, like large serpents, clasp
the soil with their coiling roots, and overshadow with their dark green
branches the white chalk cliffs of the Thames. But those French gardens,
unless they are constantly clipped and prevented from growing, soon
fall into decay. As in nature, so in society, uniformity means but too
often stagnation, while variety is the surest sign of health and vigour.
The deepest secret of nature is its love of continued novelty. Its
tendency, if unrestrained, is towards constantly creating new varieties,
which, if they fulfil their purpose, become fixed for a time, or, it may
[Pg 376]
be, for ever; while others, after they have fulfilled their purpose, vanish
to make room for new and stronger types.

The same is the secret of human society. It consists and lives in
individuals, each being meant to be different from all the others, and to
contribute his own peculiar share to the common wealth. As no tree is
like any other tree, and no leaf on the same tree like any other leaf, no
human being is exactly like any other human being, nor is it meant to
be. It is in this endless, and to us inconceivable, variety of human
souls that the deepest purpose of human life is to be realized; and the
more society fulfils that purpose, the more it allows free scope for the
development of every individual germ, the richer will be the harvest in
no distant future. Such is the mystery of individuality that I do not
wonder if even those philosophers who, like Mill, reduce the meaning of
the word sacred to the very smallest compass, see in each individual
soul something sacred, something to be revered, even where we cannot
understand it, something to be protected against all vulgar violence.

Where I differ from Mill and his school is on the question as to the
quarter from whence the epidemic of uniformity springs which threatens
the free development of modern society. Mill points to the society in
which we move; to those who are in front of us, to our contemporaries.
I feel convinced that our real enemies are at our back, and that the
heaviest chains which are fastened on us are those made, not by the present,
but by past generations—by our ancestors, not by our contemporaries.

It is on this point, on the trammels of individual freedom with which
we may almost be said to be born into the world, and on the means by
which we may shake off these old chains, or at all events carry them
more lightly and gracefully, that I wish to speak to you this evening.

You need not be afraid that I am going to enter upon the much discussed
subject of heredity, whether in its physiological or psychological
aspects. It is a favourite subject just now, and the most curious facts
have been brought together of late to illustrate the working of what is
called heredity. But the more we know of these facts, the less we seem
able to comprehend the underlying principle. Inheritance is one of
those numerous words which by their very simplicity and clearness are
so apt to darken our counsel. If a father has blue eyes and the son
has blue eyes, what can be clearer than that he inherited them? If the
father stammers and the son stammers, who can doubt but that it came
by inheritance? If the father is a musician and the son a musician, we
say very glibly that the talent was inherited. But what does inherited
mean? In no case does it mean what inherited usually means—something
external, like money, collected by a father, and, after his death,
secured by law to his son. Whatever else inherited may mean, it does
not mean that. But unfortunately the word is there, it seems almost
pedantic to challenge its meaning, and people are always grateful if an
easy word saves them the trouble of hard thought.

Another apparent advantage of the theory of heredity is that it never
[Pg 377]
fails. If the son has blue, and the father black, eyes, all is right
again, for either the mother, or the grandmother, or some historic or
prehistoric ancestor, may have had blue eyes, and atavism, we know, will
assert itself after hundreds and thousands of years.

Do not suppose that I deny the broad facts of what is called by the
name of heredity. What I deny is that the name of heredity offers any
scientific solution of a most difficult problem. It is a name, a metaphor,
quite as bad as the old metaphor of innate ideas; for there is hardly a
single point of similarity between the process by which a son may share
the black eyes, the stammering, or the musical talent of his father, and
that by which, after his father’s death, the law secures to the son the possession
of the pounds, shillings, and pence which his father held in the Funds.

But whatever the true meaning of heredity may be, certain it is
that every individual comes into the world heavy-laden. Nowhere
has the consciousness of the burden which rests on each generation as it
enters on its journey through life found stronger expression than among
the Buddhists. What other people call by various names, “fate or providence,”
“tradition or inheritance,” “circumstances or environment,”
they call Karman, deed—what has been done, whether by ourselves or by
others, the accumulated work of all who have come before us, the consequences
of which we have to bear, both for good and for evil. Originally
this Karman seems to have been conceived as personal, as the work
which we ourselves have done in former existences. But, as personally
we are not conscious of having done such work in former ages, that
kind of Karman, too, might be said to be impersonal. To the question
how Karman began, the accumulation of what forms the condition of all
that exists at present, Buddhism has no answer to give, any more than
any other system of religion or philosophy. The Buddhists say it began
with avidyâ, and avidyâ means
ignorance.[6] They are much more deeply
interested in the question how Karman may be annihilated, how each
man may free himself from the influence of Karman, and Nirvâna, the
highest object of all their dreams, is often defined by Buddhist philosophers
as “freedom from Karman.”[7]

What the Buddhists call by the general name of Karman, comprehends
all influences which the past exercises on the present, both physically
and mentally.[8]
It is not my object to examine or even to name all
these influences, though I confess nothing is more interesting than to
look upon the surface of our modern life as we look on a geological
map, and to see the most ancient formations cropping out everywhere
under our feet. Difficult as it is to colour a geological map of England,
it would be still more difficult to find a sufficient variety of colours to
mark the different ingredients of the intellectual surface of this island.

[Pg 378]
That all of us, whether we speak English or German, or French or
Russian, are really speaking an ancient Oriental tongue, incredible as
it would have sounded a hundred years ago, is now admitted by everybody.
Though the various dialects now spoken in Europe have been
separated many thousands of years from the Sanskrit, the ancient
classical language of India, yet so unbroken is the bond that holds the
West and East together that in many cases an intelligent Englishman
might still guess the meaning of a Sanskrit word. How little difference
is there between Sanskrit sûnu and English son, between Sanskrit
duhitar and English daughter, between Sanskrit vid, to know, and
English to wit, between Sanskrit vaksh, to grow, and English to wax!
Think how we value a Saxon urn, or a Roman coin, or a Celtic weapon!
how we dig for them, clean them, label them, and carefully deposit them
in our museums! Yet what is their antiquity compared with the
antiquity of such words as son or daughter, father and mother? There
are no monuments older than those collected in the handy volumes
which we call Dictionaries, and those who know how to interpret those
English antiquities—as you may see them interpreted, for instance, in
Grimm’s Dictionary of the German, in Littré’s Dictionary of the French,
or in Professor Skeats’ Etymological Dictionary of the English Language—will
learn more of the real growth of the human mind than by studying
many volumes on logic and psychology.

And as by our language we belong to the Aryan stratum, we belong
through our letters to the Hamitic. We still write English in hieroglyphics;
and in spite of all the vicissitudes through which the ancient
hieroglyphics have passed in their journey from Egypt to Phœnicia,
from Phœnicia to Greece, from Greece to Italy, and from Italy to
England, when we write a capital F
,
when we draw the top line
and the smaller line through the middle of the letter, we really draw
the two horns of the cerastes, the horned serpent which the ancient
Egyptians used for representing the sound of f. They write the
name of the king whom the Greeks called Cheops, and they themselves
Chu-fu, like this:[9]

Here the first sign, the sieve, is to be pronounced
chu; the second, the horned serpent, fu, and the
little bird, again, u. In the more cursive or Hieratic writing
the horned serpent appears as
; in the later Demotic as

and
.
The Phœnicians, who borrowed their letters from the Hieratic
Egyptian, wrote
and . The Greeks, who took their letters from
the Phœnicians, wrote .
When the Greeks, instead of writing like
the Phœnicians from right to left, began to write from left to right,
they turned each letter, and as
became K, our k, so , vau, became
F, the Greek so-called Digamma, the Latin F.

The first letter in Chu-fu, too, still exists in our alphabet, and in the
transverse line of our H we must recognize the last remnant of the
lines which divide the sieve. The sieve appears in Hieratic as
, in
[Pg 379]
Phœnician as ,
in ancient Greek as , which occurs on an inscription
found at Mycenæ and elsewhere as the sign of the spiritus asper,
while in Latin it is known to us as the letter
H.[10] In the same
manner the undulating line of our capital
still recalls very strikingly
the bent back of the crouching lion, which in the later hieroglyphic
inscriptions represents the sound of L.

If thus in our language we are Aryan, in our letters Egyptian, we
have only to look at our watches to see that we are Babylonian.
Why is our hour divided into sixty minutes, our minutes into sixty
seconds? Would not a division of the hour into ten, or fifty, or a
hundred minutes have been more natural? We have sixty divisions on
the dials of our watches simply because the Greek astronomer Hipparchus,
who lived in the second century B.C., accepted the Babylonian system
of reckoning time, that system being sexagesimal. The Babylonians knew
the decimal system, but for practical purposes they counted by sossi
and sari, the sossos representing 60, the saros 60 × 60, or 3600. From
Hipparchus that system found its way into the works of Ptolemy, about
150 A.D., and thence it was carried down the stream of civilization,
finding its last resting-place on the dial-plates of our clocks.

And why are there twenty shillings to our sovereign? Again the
real reason lies in Babylon. The Greeks learnt from the Babylonians
the art of dividing gold and silver for the purpose of trade. It has
been proved that the current gold piece of Western Asia was exactly
the sixtieth part of a Babylonian mnâ, or mina. It was nearly equal
to our sovereign. The difficult problem of the relative value of gold
and silver in a bi-monetary currency had been solved to a certain extent
in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom, the proportion between gold and
silver being fixed at 1 to 13⅓. The silver shekel current in Babylon
was heavier than the gold shekel in the proportion of 13⅓ to 10, and
had therefore the value of one-tenth of a gold shekel; and the half
silver shekel, called by the Greeks a drachma, was worth one-twentieth
of a gold shekel. The drachma, or half silver shekel, may therefore be
looked upon as the most ancient type of our own silver shilling in its
relation of one-twentieth of our gold
sovereign.[11]

I shall mention only one more of the most essential tools of our
mental life—namely, our figures, which we call Arabic, because we
received them from the Arabs, but which the Arabs called Indian,
because they received them from the Indians—in order to show you how
this nineteenth century of ours is under the sway of centuries long
past and forgotten; how we are what we are, not by ourselves, but by
those who came before us, and how the intellectual ground on which
we stand is made up of the detritus of thoughts which were first thought,
not on these isles nor in Europe, but on the shores of the Oxus, the
Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus.

[Pg 380]
Now you may well ask Quorsum hæc omnia?—What has all this to
do with freedom and with the free development of individuality?
Because a man is born the heir of all the ages, can it be said that
he is not free to grow and to expand, and to develop all the faculties
of his mind? Are those who came before him, and who left him this
goodly inheritance, to be called his enemies? Is that chain of tradition
which connects him with the past really a galling fetter, and not rather
the leading-strings without which he would never learn to walk
straight?

Let us look at the matter more closely. No one would venture to
say that every individual should begin life as a young savage, and be
left to form his own language, and invent his own letters, numerals,
and coins. On the contrary, if we comprehend all this and a great deal
more, such as religion, morality, and secular knowledge, under the
general name of education, even the most advanced defenders of individualism
would hold that no child should enter society without submitting,
or rather without being submitted, to education. Most of us would
even go further, and make it criminal for parents or even for communities
to allow children to grow up uneducated. The excuse of worthless
parents that they are at liberty to do with their children as they like,
has at last been blown to the winds. I still remember the time when
pseudo-Liberals were not ashamed to say that, whatever other nations,
such as the Germans, might do, England would never submit to compulsory
education. That wicked sophistry, too, has at last been silenced,
and among the principal advocates of compulsory education, and of the
necessity of curtailing the freedom of savage parents of savage children,
have been Mill and his friends, the apostles of liberty and
individualism.[12]
A new era may be said to date in the history of every nation from the
day on which “compulsory education” becomes part of their statute-book;
and I may congratulate the most Liberal town in England on having
proved itself the most inexorable tyrant in carrying out the principle of
compulsory education.

But do not let us imagine that compulsory education is without its
dangers. Like a powerful engine, it must be carefully watched, if it is
not to produce, what all compulsion will produce, a slavish receptivity,
and, what all machines do produce, monotonous uniformity.

We know that all education must in the beginning be purely dogmatic.
Children are taught language, religion, morality, patriotism, and
afterwards at school, history, literature, mathematics, and all the rest,
long before they are able to question, to judge, or choose for themselves,
and there is hardly anything that a child will not believe if it
comes from those in whom the child believes.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic, no doubt, must be taught dogmatically,
and they take up an enormous amount of time, particularly in
[Pg 381]
English schools. English spelling is a national misfortune, and in the
keen international race between all the countries of Europe, it handicaps
the English child to a degree that seems incredible till we look at
statistics. I know the difficulties of a Spelling Reform, I know what
people mean when they call it impossible; but I also know that
personal and national virtue consists in doing so-called impossible things,
and that no nation has done, and has still to do, so many impossible
things as the English.

But, granted that reading, writing, and arithmetic occupy nearly the
whole school-time and absorb the best powers of the pupils, cannot something
be done in play-hours? Is there not some work that can be turned
into play, and some play that can be turned into work? Cannot the
powers of observation be called out in a child while collecting flowers,
or stones, or butterflies? Cannot his judgment be strengthened either
in gymnastic exercises, or in measuring the area of a field or the height
of a tower? Might not all this be done without a view to examinations
or payment by results, simply for the sake of filling the little dull minds
with one sunbeam of joy, such sunbeams being more likely hereafter to
call hidden precious germs into life than the deadening weight of such
lessons as, for instance, that th-ough is though, thr-ough is through,
en-ough is enough. A child who believes that will hereafter believe
anything. Those who wish to see Natural Science introduced into
elementary schools frighten schoolmasters by the very name of Natural
Science. But surely every schoolmaster who is worth his salt should
be able to teach children a love of Nature, a wondering at Nature, a
curiosity to pry into the secrets of Nature, an acquisitiveness for some of
the treasures of Nature, and all this acquired in the fresh air of the
field and the forest, where, better than in frouzy lecture-rooms, the edge
of the senses can be sharpened, the chest be widened, and that freedom
of thought fostered which made England what it was even before the
days of compulsory education.

But in addressing you here to-night it was my intention to speak of
the higher rather than of elementary education.

All education, as it now exists in most countries of Europe, may be
divided into three stages—elementary, scholastic, and academical; or
call it primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Elementary education has at last been made compulsory in most
civilized countries. Unfortunately, however, it seems impossible to
include under compulsory education anything beyond the very elements
of knowledge—at least for the present; though, with proper management,
I know from experience that a well-conducted elementary school
can afford to provide instruction in extra subjects—such as natural
science, modern languages, and political economy—and yet, with the
present system of Government grants, be
self-supporting.[13]

The next stage above the elementary is scholastic education, as it is
supplied in grammar schools, whether public or private. According as
[Pg 382]
the pupils are intended either to go on to a university, or to enter at
once on leaving school on the practical work of life, these schools are
divided into two classes. In the one class, which in Germany are
called Real-schulen, less Latin is taught, and no Greek, but more of
mathematics, modern languages, and physical science; in the other,
called Gymnasia on the Continent, classics form the chief staple of
instruction.

It is during this stage that education, whether at private or public
schools, exercises its strongest levelling influence. Little attention can
be paid at large schools to individual tastes or talents. In Germany,
even more perhaps than in England, it is the chief object of a good
and conscientious master to have his class as uniform as possible at the
end of the year; and he receives far more credit from the official
examiner if his whole class marches well and keeps pace together, than
if he can parade a few brilliant and forward boys, followed by a number
of straggling laggards.

And as to the character of the teaching at school, how can it be
otherwise than authoritative or dogmatic? The Socratic method is very
good if we can find the viri Socratici and leisure for discussion. But
at school, which now may seem to be called almost in mockery
σχολή,
or leisure, the true method is, after all, that patronized by the great
educators of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Boys at school
must turn their mind into a row of pigeon-holes, filling as many as
they can with useful notes, and never forgetting how many are empty.
There is an immense amount of positive knowledge to be acquired
between the ages of ten and eighteen—rules of grammar, strings of
vocables, dates, names of towns, rivers, and mountains, mathematical
formulas, &c. All depends here on the receptive and retentive powers
of the mind. The memory has to be strengthened, without being
overtaxed, till it acts almost mechanically. Learning by heart, I
believe, cannot be too strongly recommended during the years spent at
school. There may have been too much of it when, as the Rev. H. C.
Adams informs us in his “Wykehamica” (p. 357), boys used to say by
heart 13,000 and 14,000 lines, when one repeated the whole of Virgil,
nay, when another was able to say the whole of the English Bible by
rote:—”Put him on where you would, he would go fluently on, as
long as any one would listen.”

No intellectual investment, I feel certain, bears such ample and such
regular interest as gems of English, Latin, or Greek literature deposited
in our memory during our childhood and youth, and taken up from time
to time in the happy hours of our solitude.

One fault I have to find with most schools, both in England and on
the Continent. Boys do not read enough of the Greek and Roman
classics. The majority of our masters are scholars by profession, and
they are apt to lay undue stress on what they call accurate and minute
scholarship, and to neglect wide and cursory reading. I know the
[Pg 383]
arguments for minute accuracy, but I also know the mischief that is
done by an exclusive devotion to critical scholarship before we have
acquired a real familiarity with the principal works of classical literature.
The time spent in our schools in learning the rules of grammar
and syntax, writing exercises, and composing verses, is too large. Look
only at our Greek and Latin grammars, with all their rules and exceptions,
and exceptions on exceptions! It is too heavy a weight for any boy
to carry; and no wonder that when one of the thousand small rules
which they have learnt by heart is really wanted, it is seldom forthcoming.
The end of classical teaching at school should be to make our boys
acquainted not only with the language, but with the literature and
history, the ancient thought of the ancient world. Rules of grammar,
syntax, or metre, are but means towards that end; they must never be
mistaken for the end itself. A young man of eighteen, who has
probably spent on an average ten years in learning Greek and Latin,
ought to be able to read any of the ordinary Greek or Latin classics
without much difficulty; nay, with a certain amount of pleasure. He
might have to consult his dictionary now and then, or guess the
meaning of certain words; he might also feel doubtful sometimes
whether certain forms came from
ἵημι, I send, or
εἶμι, I go, or
εἰμί,
I am, particularly if preceded by prepositions. In these matters
the best scholars are least inclined to be pharisaical; and whenever I
meet in the controversies of classical scholars the favourite phrase,
“Every schoolboy knows, or ought to know, this,” I generally say to
myself, “No, he ought not.” Anyhow, those who wish to see the
study of Greek and Latin retained in our public schools ought to feel
convinced that it will certainly not be retained much longer, if it can
be said with any truth that young men who leave school at eighteen
are in many cases unable to read or to enjoy a classical text, unless
they have seen it before.

Classical teaching, and all purely scholastic teaching, ought to be
finished at school. When a young man goes to University, unless he
means to make scholarship his profession, he ought to be free to
enter upon a new career. If he has not learnt by that time so
much of Greek and Latin as is absolutely necessary in after-life
for a lawyer, or a student of physical science, or even a clergyman,
either he or his school is to blame. I do not mean to say that
it would not be most desirable for every one during his University
career to attend some lectures on classical literature, on ancient
history, philosophy, or art. What is to be deprecated is, that the
University should have to do the work which belongs properly to the
school.

The best colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have shown by their
matriculation examinations what the standard of classical knowledge
ought to be at eighteen or nineteen. That standard can be reached by
boys while still at school, as has been proved both by the so-called local
[Pg 384]
examinations, and by the examinations of schools held under the
Delegates appointed by the Universities. If, therefore, the University
would reassert her old right, and make the first examination, called at
Oxford Responsions, a general matriculation examination for admission
to the University, not only would the public schools be stimulated to
greater efforts, but the teaching of the University might assume, from
the very beginning, that academic character which ought to distinguish
it from mere schoolboy work.

Academic teaching ought to be not merely a continuation, but in one
sense a correction of scholastic teaching. While at school instruction
must be chiefly dogmatic, at University it is to be Socratic, for I find
no better name for that method which is to set a man free from the
burden of purely traditional knowledge; to make him feel that the
words which he uses are often empty, that the concepts he employs are,
for the most part, mere bundles picked up at random; that even where
he knows facts, he does not know their evidence; and where he
expresses opinions, they are mostly mere dogmas, adopted by him without
examination.

But for the Universities, I should indeed fear that Mill’s prophecies
might come true, and that the intellect of Europe might drift into
dreary monotony. The Universities always have been, and, unless
they are diverted from their original purpose, always will be, the
guardians of the freedom of thought, the protectors of individual
spontaneity; and it was owing, I believe, to Mill’s ignorance of true
academic teaching that he took so desponding a view of the generation
growing up under his eyes.

When we leave school, our heads are naturally brimful of dogma,
that is, of knowledge and opinions at second-hand. Such dead knowledge
is extremely dangerous, unless it is sooner or later revived by the
spirit of free inquiry. It does not matter whether our scholastic
dogmas be true or false. The danger is the same. And why? Because
to place either truth or error above the reach of argument is certain to
weaken truth and to strengthen error. Secondly, because to hold as
true on the authority of others anything which concerns us deeply,
and which we could prove ourselves, produces feebleness, if not dishonesty.
And, thirdly, because to feel unwilling or unable to meet
objections by argument is generally the first step towards violence and
persecution.

I do not think of religious dogmas only. They are generally the
first to rouse inquiry, even during our schoolboy days, and they are by
no means the most difficult to deal with. Dogma often rages where we
least expect it. Among scientific men the theory of evolution is at
present becoming, or has become, a dogma. What is the result? No
objections are listened to, no difficulties recognized, and a man like Virchow,
himself the strongest supporter of evolution, who has the moral courage
to say that the descent of man from any ape whatsoever is, as yet,
[Pg 385]
before the tribunal of scientific zoology, “not proven,” is howled down in
Germany in a manner worthy of Ephesians and Galatians. But at present I
am thinking not so much of any special dogmas, but rather of that dogmatic
state of mind which is the almost inevitable result of the teaching at school.
I think of the whole intellect, what has been called the intellectus sibi
permissus, and I maintain that it is the object of academic teaching to
rouse that intellect out of its slumber by questions not less startling than
when Galileo asked the world whether the sun was really moving and the
earth stood still; or when Kant asked whether time and space were objects,
or necessary forms of our sensuous intuition. Till our opinions have thus
been tested and stood the test, we can hardly call them our own.

How true this is with regard to religion has been boldly expressed by
Bishop Beveridge.

This is bold and manly language from a Bishop nearly two hundred
years ago, and I certainly think that the time has come when some of
the divinity lecturers at Oxford and Cambridge might well be employed
in placing a knowledge of the sacred books of other religions
within the reach of undergraduates. Many of the difficulties—most of
them of our own making—with regard to the origin, the handing
down, the later corruptions and misinterpretations of sacred texts,
would find their natural solution, if it was shown how exactly the
same difficulties arose and had to be dealt with by theologians of other
creeds. If some—ay, if many—of the doctrines of Christianity were
met with in other religions also, surely that would not affect their
value, or diminish their truth; while nothing, I feel certain, would more
effectually secure to the pure and simple teaching of Christ its true place in
the historical development of the human mind than to place it side by side
with the other religions of the world. In the series of translations of
the “Sacred Books of the East,” of which the first three volumes have
just appeared,[14]
I wished myself to include a new translation of the Old
and New Testaments; and when that series is finished it will, I believe,
be admitted that nowhere would these two books have had a grander
setting, or have shone with a brighter light, than surrounded by the Veda,
the Zendavesta, the Buddhist Tripitaka, and the Qur’än.

But as I said before, I was not thinking of religious dogmas only,
or even chiefly, when I maintained that the character of academic
[Pg 386]
teaching must be Socratic, not dogmatic. The evil of dogmatic teaching
lies much deeper, and spreads much further.

Think only of language, the work of other people, not of ourselves,
which we pick up at random in our race through life. Does not every
word we use require careful examination and revision? It is not
enough to say that language assists our thoughts or colours them, or
possibly obscures them. No, we know now that language and thought
are indivisible. It was not from poverty of expression that the Greek
called reason and language by the same word,
λόγος. It was because
they knew that, though we may distinguish between thought and speech,
as we distinguish between body and soul, it is as impossible to tear the
one by violence away from the other as it is to separate the concave
side of a lens from its convex side. This is something to learn and to
understand, for, if properly understood, it will supply the key to most
of our intellectual puzzles, and serve as the safest thread through the
whole labyrinth of philosophy.

“It is evident,” as Hobbes
remarks,[15]
“that truth and falsity have no place but amongst such living creatures as use speech. For though
some brute creatures, looking upon the image of a man in a glass, may
be affected with it, as if it were the man himself, and for this reason
fear it or fawn upon it in vain; yet they do not apprehend it as true or
false, but only as like; and in this they are not deceived. Wherefore,
as men owe all their true ratiocination to the right understanding of
speech, so also they owe their errors to the misunderstanding of the
same; and as all the ornaments of philosophy proceed only from man,
so from man also is derived the ugly absurdity of false opinion. For
speech has something in it like to a spider’s web (as it was said of old
of Solon’s laws), for by contexture of words tender and delicate wits are
ensnared or stopped, but strong wits break easily through them.”

Let me illustrate my meaning by at least one instance.

Among the words which have proved spider’s webs, ensnaring even
the greatest intellects of the world from Aristotle down to Leibniz, the
terms genus, species, and individual occupy a very prominent place.
The opposition of Aristotle to Plato, of the Nominalists to the Realists,
of Leibniz to Locke, of Herbart to Hegel, turns on the true meaning of
these words. At school, of course, all we can do is to teach the received
meaning of genus and species; and if a boy can trace these terms back
to Aristotle’s
γένος and
εἶδος, and show in what sense that philosopher
used them, every examiner would be satisfied.

But the time comes when we have to act as our own examiners, and
when we have to give an account to ourselves of such words as genus
and species. Some people write, indeed, as if they had seen a species and
a genus walking about in broad daylight; but a little consideration
will show us that these words express subjective concepts, and that, if
the whole world were silent, there would never have been a thought of
[Pg 387]
a genus or a species. There are languages in which we look in vain for
corresponding words; and if we had been born in such a language,
these terms and thoughts would not exist for us. They came to us,
directly or indirectly, from Aristotle. But Aristotle did not invent
them, he only defined them in his own way, so that, for instance,
according to him, all living beings would constitute a genus, men a
species, and Socrates an individual.

No one would say that Aristotle had not a perfect right to define
these terms, if those who use them in his sense would only always
remember that they are thinking the thoughts of Aristotle, and not
their own. The true way to shake off the fetters of old words, and to
learn to think our own thoughts, is to follow them up from century to century,
to watch their development, and in the end to bring ourselves face
to face with those who first found and framed both words and thoughts.
If we do this with genus and species, we shall find that the words which
Aristotle defined—viz.,
γένος and
εἶδος—had originally a very different
and far more useful application than that which he gave to them.
Γένος,
genus, meant generation, and comprehended such living beings only
as were known to have a common origin, however they might differ in
outward appearance, as, for instance, the spaniel and the bloodhound,
or, according to Darwin, the ape and the man.
Εἶδος or species, on
the contrary, meant appearance, and comprehended all such things as
had the same form or appearance, whether they had a common origin or
not, as if we were to speak of a species of four-footed, two-footed,
horned, winged, or blue animals.

That two such concepts, as we have here explained, had a natural justification
we may best learn from the fact that exactly the same thoughts
found expression in Sanskrit. There, too, we find gâti, generation, used
in the sense of genus, and opposed to âkriti, appearance, used in the
sense of species.

So long as these two words or thoughts were used independently
(much as we now speak of a genealogical as independent of a morphological
classification) no harm could accrue. A family, for instance,
might be called a
γένος, the gens or clan was a
γένος, the nation
(gnatio) was a
γένος, the whole human kith and kin was a
γένος; in
fact, all that was descended from common ancestors was a true
γένος.
There is no obscurity of thought in this.

On the other side, taking
εἶδος or species in its original sense, one
man might be said to be like another in his
εἶδος or appearance. An
ape, too, might quite truly be said to have the same
εἶδος or species or
appearance as a man, without any prejudice as to their common origin.
People might also speak of different
εἴδη or forms or classes of things,
such as different kinds of metals, or tools, or armour, without committing
themselves in the least to any opinion as to their common descent.

Often it would happen that things belonging to the same
γένος, such
as the white man and the negro, differed in their
εἶδος or appearance;
[Pg 388]
often also that things belonging to the same
εἶδος, such as eatables,
differed in their
γένος, as, for instance, meat and vegetables.

All this is clear and simple. The confusion began when these two
terms, instead of being co-ordinate, were subordinated to each other
by the philosophers of Greece, so that what from one point of view was
called a genus, might from another be called a species, and vice versâ.
Human beings, for instance, were now called a species, all living
beings a genus, which may be true in logic, but is utterly false in what
is older than logic—viz., language, thought, or fact. According to language,
according to reason, and according to Nature, all human beings
constitute a
γένος, or generation, so long as they are supposed to have
common ancestors; but with regard to all living beings we can
only say that they form an
εἶδος—that is, agree in certain appearances,
until it has been proved that even Mr. Darwin was too modest
in admitting at least four or five different ancestors for the whole animal
world.[16]

In tracing the history of these two words,
γένος and
εἶδος, you may
see passing before your eyes almost the whole panorama of philosophy,
from Plato’s ideas down to Hegel’s Idee. The question of genera, their
origin and subdivision, occupied chiefly the attention of natural philosophers,
who, after long controversies about the origin and classification of
genera and species, seem at last, thanks to the clear sight of Darwin, to
have arrived at the old truth which was prefigured in language—namely,
that Nature knows nothing but genera, or generations, to be traced
back to a limited number of ancestors, and that the so-called species are
only genera, whose genealogical descent is as yet more or less obscure.

But the question as to the nature of the
εἶδος became a vital question
in every system of philosophy. Granting, for instance, that women in
every clime and country formed one species, it was soon asked what
constituted a species? If all women shared a common form, what was
that form? Where was it? So long as it was supposed that all women
descended from Eve, the difficulty might be slurred over by the name
of heredity. But the more thoughtful would ask even then how it
was that, while all individual women came and went and vanished, the
form in which they were cast remained the same?

Here you see how philosophical mythology springs up. The very
question what
εἶδος or species or form was, and where these things
were kept, changed those words from predicates into subjects.
Εἶδος was
conceived as something independent and substantial, something within or
above the individuals participating in it, something unchangeable and
eternal. Soon there arose as many
εἴδη or forms or types as there
were general concepts. They were considered the only true realities of
which the phenomenal world is only as a shadow that soon passeth
away. Here we have, in fact, the origin of Plato’s ideas, and of the
various systems of idealism which followed his lead, while the opposite
[Pg 389]
opinions that ideas have no independent existence, and that the one is
nowhere found except in the many
(τὸ ἕν παρὰ τὰ πολλά),
was strenuously defended by Aristotle and his
followers.[17]

The same red thread runs through the whole philosophy of the
Middle Ages. Men were cited before councils and condemned as
heretics because they declared that animal, man, or woman were mere
names, and that they could not bring themselves to believe in an ideal
animal, an ideal man, an ideal woman as the invisible, supernatural, or
metaphysical types of the ordinary animal, the individual man, the single
woman. Those philosophers, called Nominalists, in opposition to the
Realists, declared that all general terms were names only, and that
nothing could claim reality but the individual.

We cannot follow this controversy further, as it turns up again
between Locke and Leibniz, between Herbart and Hegel. Suffice it to
say that the knot, as it was tied by language, can be untied by
the science of language alone, which teaches us that there is and
can be no such thing as “a name only.” That phrase ought to be
banished from all works on philosophy. A name is and always has been
the subjective side of our knowledge, but that subjective side is as impossible
without an objective side as a key is without a lock. It is
useless to ask which of the two is the more real, for they are real only
by being, not two, but one. Realism is as one-sided as Nominalism.
But there is a higher Nominalism, which might better be called the
Science of Language, and which teaches us that, apart from sensuous
perception, all human knowledge is by names and by names only, and
that the object of names is always the general.

This is but one out of hundreds and thousands of cases to show how
names and concepts which come to us by tradition must be submitted
to very careful snuffing before they will yield a pure light. What
I mean by academic teaching and academic study is exactly this
process of snuffing, this changing of traditional words into living words,
this tracing of modern thought back to ancient primitive thought,
this living, as it were, once more, so far as it concerns us, the whole
history of human thought ourselves, till we are as little afraid to differ
from Plato or Aristotle as from Comte or Darwin.

Plato and Aristotle are, no doubt, great names; every schoolboy is
awed by them, even though he may have read very little of their
writings. This, too, is a kind of dogmatism that requires correction.
Now, at University, a young student might hear the following,
by no means respectful, remarks about Aristotle, which I copy from
one of the greatest English scholars and philosophers:—”There is
nothing so absurd that the old philosophers, as Cicero saith, who
was one of them, have not some of them maintained; and I believe
that scarce anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy
than that which now is called Aristotle’s Metaphysics; or
[Pg 390]
more repugnant to government than much of that he hath said in his
Politics; nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics.” I am
far from approving this judgment, but I think that the shock
which a young scholar receives on seeing his idols so mercilessly
broken is salutary. It throws him back on his own resources; it
makes him honest to himself. If he thinks the criticism thus passed
on Aristotle unfair, he will begin to read his works with new eyes.
He will not only construe his words, but try to reconstruct in his
own mind the thoughts so carefully elaborated by that ancient
philosopher. He will judge of their truth without being swayed by
the authority of a great name, and probably in the end value what is
valuable in Aristotle, or Plato, or any other great philosopher far more
highly and honestly than if he had never seen them trodden under foot.

But do not suppose that I look upon the Universities as purely
iconoclastic, as chiefly intended to teach us how to break the idols of
the schools. Far from it! But I do look upon them as meant
to freshen the atmosphere which we breathe at school, and to shake
our mind to its very roots, as a storm shakes the young oaks, not to
throw them down, but to make them grasp all the more firmly the
hard soil of fact and truth! “Stand upright on thy feet” ought to be
written over the gate of every college, if the epidemic of uniformity
and sequacity which Mill saw approaching from China, and which since
his time has made such rapid progress Westward, is ever to be stayed.

Academic freedom is not without its dangers; but there are dangers
which it is safer to face than to avoid. In Germany—so far as my
own experience goes—students are often left too much to themselves,
and it is only the cleverest among them, or those who are personally
recommended, who receive from the professors that personal guidance
and encouragement which should and could be easily extended to all.

There is too much time given in the German Universities to mere
lecturing, and often in simply retailing to a class what each student
might read in books often in a far more perfect form. Lectures are
useful if they teach us how to teach ourselves; if they stimulate; if
they excite sympathy and curiosity; if they give advice that springs
from personal experience; if they warn against wrong roads; if, in fact,
they have less the character of a show-window than of a workshop. Half
an hour’s conversation with a tutor or a professor often does more than
a whole course of lectures in giving the right direction and the right
spirit to a young man’s studies. Here I may quote the words of Professor
Helmholtz, in full agreement with him. “When I recall the
memory of my own University life,” he writes, “and the impression
which a man like Johannes Müller, the professor of physiology, made
on us, I must set the highest value on the personal intercourse with
teachers from whom one learns how thought works on independent
heads. Whoever has come in contact but once with one or several
first-class men will find his intellectual standard changed for life.”

[Pg 391]
In English Universities, on the contrary, there is too little of academic
freedom. There is not only guidance, but far too much of constant
personal control. It is often thought that English undergraduates
could not be trusted with that amount of academic freedom which is
granted to German students, and that most of them, if left to choose
their own work, their own time, their own books, and their own
teachers, would simply do nothing. This seems to me unfair and
untrue. Most horses, if you take them to the water, will drink; and
the best way to make them drink is to leave them alone. I have lived
long enough in English and in German Universities to know that the
intellectual fibre is as strong and sound in the English as in the German
youth. But if you supply a man, who wishes to learn swimming, with
bladders—nay, if you insist on his using them—he will use them, but he
will probably never learn to swim. Take them away, on the contrary,
and depend on it, after a few aimless strokes and a few painful gulps,
he will use his arms and his legs, and he will swim. If young men do
not learn to use their arms, their legs, their muscles, their senses, their
brain, and their heart too, during the bright years of their University
life, when are they to learn it? True, there are thousands who never
learn it, and who float happily on through life buoyed up on mere
bladders. The worst that can happen to them is that some day the
bladders may burst, and they may be left stranded or drowned. But
these are not the men whom England wants to fight her battles. It
has often been pointed out of late that many of those who, during this
century, have borne the brunt of the battle in the intellectual warfare
in England, have not been trained at our Universities, while others who
have been at Oxford and Cambridge, and have distinguished themselves
in after-life, have openly declared that they attended hardly any
lectures in college, or that they derived no benefit from them. What
can be the ground of that? Not that there is less work done at
Oxford than at Leipzig, but that the work is done in a different spirit.
It is free in Germany; it has now become almost compulsory in
England. Though an old professor myself, I like to attend, when
I can, some of the professorial lectures in Germany; for it is a real
pleasure to see hundreds of young faces listening to a teacher on the
history of art, on modern history, on the science of language, or on
philosophy, without any view to examinations, simply from love of the
subject or of the teacher. No one who knows what the real joy of
learning is, how it lightens all drudgery and draws away the mind from
mean pursuits, can see without indignation that what ought to be the
freest and happiest years in a man’s life should often be spent between
cramming and examinations.

And here I have at last mentioned the word, which to many friends
of academic freedom, to many who dread the baneful increase of uniformity,
may seem the cause of all mischief, the most powerful engine
for intellectual levelling—Examination.

[Pg 392]
There is a strong feeling springing up everywhere against the tyranny
of examinations, against the cramping and withering influence which
they are supposed to exercise on the youth of England. I cannot join
in that outcry. I well remember that the first letters which I ventured
to address to the Times, in very imperfect English, were in favour of
examinations. They were signed La Carrière ouverte, and were written
long before the days of the Civil Service Commission! I well remember,
too, that the first time I ventured to speak, or rather to stammer, in public,
was in favour of examinations. That was in 1857, at Exeter, when the
first experiment was made, under the auspices of Sir T. Acland, in establishing
the Oxford and Cambridge Local Examinations. I have been an
examiner myself for many years, I have watched the growth of that system
in England from year to year, and in spite of all that has been said and
written of late against examinations, I confess I do not see how it would
be possible to abolish them, and return to the old system of appointment
by patronage.

But though I have not lost my faith in examinations, I cannot conceal
the fact that I am frightened by the manner in which they are
conducted, and by the results which they produce. As you are interested
yourselves at this Midland Institute, in the successful working of
examinations, you will perhaps allow me in conclusion to add a few
remarks on the safeguards necessary for the efficient working of examinations.

All examinations are a means to ascertain how pupils have been
taught; they ought never to be allowed to become the end for which
pupils are taught.

Teaching with a view to examinations lowers the teacher in the
eyes of his pupils; learning with a view to examinations is apt to
produce shallowness and dishonesty.

Whatever attractions learning possesses in itself, and whatever efforts
were formerly made by boys at school from a sense of duty, all this is
lost if they once imagine that the highest object of all learning is gaining
marks in examinations.

In order to maintain the proper relation between teacher and pupil,
all pupils should be made to look to their teachers as their natural examiners
and fairest judges, and therefore in every examination the
report of the teacher ought to carry the greatest weight. This is the
principle followed abroad in all examinations of candidates at public
schools; and even in their examination on leaving school, which gives them
the right to enter the University, they know that their success depends
far more on the work which they have done during the years at school,
than on the work done on the few days of their examination. There are
outside examiners appointed by Government to check the work done at
schools and during the examinations; but the cases in which they have
to modify or reverse the award of the master are extremely rare, and
they are felt to reflect seriously on the competency or impartiality of the
school authorities.

[Pg 393]
To leave examinations entirely to strangers reduces them to the level
of lotteries, and fosters a cleverness in teachers and taught often akin to
dishonesty. An examiner may find out what a candidate knows not,
he can hardly ever find out all he knows; and even if he succeeds in
finding out how much a candidate knows, he can never find out how he
knows it. On these points the opinion of the masters who have
watched their pupils for years is indispensable for the sake of the
examiner, for the sake of the pupils, and for the sake of their
teachers.

I know I shall be told that it would be impossible to trust the masters,
and to be guided by their opinion, because they are interested parties.
Now, first of all, there are far more honest men in the world than dishonest,
and it does not answer to legislate as if all schoolmasters were
rogues. It is enough that they should know that their reports would
be scrutinized, to keep even the most reprobate of teachers from bearing
false witness in favour of their pupils.

Secondly, I believe that unnecessary temptation is now being placed
before all parties concerned in examinations. The proper reward for a
good examination should be honour, not pounds, shillings, and pence.
The mischief done by pecuniary rewards offered in the shape of scholarships
and exhibitions at school and University, begins to be recognized
very widely. To train a boy of twelve for a race against all England is
generally to overstrain his faculties, and often to impair his usefulness
in later life; but to make him feel that by his failure he will entail on
his father the loss of a hundred a year, and on his teacher the loss of
pupils, is simply cruel at that early age.

It is always said that these scholarships and exhibitions enable the
sons of poor parents to enjoy the privilege of the best education in
England, from which they would otherwise be debarred by the excessive
costliness of our public schools. But even this argument, strong as it
seems, can hardly stand, for I believe it could be shown that the majority
of those who are successful in obtaining scholarships and exhibitions at
school or at University are boys whose parents have been able to pay the
highest price for their children’s previous education. If all these prizes were
abolished, and the funds thus set free used to lessen the price of education
at school and in college, I believe that the sons of poor parents
would be far more benefited than by the present system. It might also
be desirable to lower the school-fees in the case of the sons of poor
parents, who were doing well at school from year to year; and, in order
to guard against favouritism, an examination, particularly vivâ voce,
before all the masters of a school, possibly even with some outside examiner,
might be useful. But the present system bids fair to degenerate
into mere horse-racing, and I shall not wonder if, sooner or later, the
two-year olds entered for the race have to be watched by their trainer
that they may not be overfed or drugged against the day of the race. It
has come to this, that schools are bidding for clever boys in order to run
them in the races, and in France, I read, that parents actually extort
[Pg 394]
money from schools by threatening to take away the young racers that
are likely to win the
Derby.[18]

If we turn from the schools to the Universities we find here, too, the
same complaints against over-examination. Now it seems to me that
every University, in order to maintain its position, has a perfect right
to demand two examinations, but no more: one for admission, the other
for a degree. Various attempts have been made in Germany, in Russia,
in France, and in England to change and improve the old academic
tradition, but in the end the original, and, as it would seem, the natural
system, has generally proved its wisdom and reasserted its right.

If a University surrenders the right of examining those who wish to
be admitted, the tutors will often have to do the work of schoolmasters,
and the professors can never know how high or how low they should aim
in their public lectures. Besides this, it is almost inevitable, if the
Universities surrender the right of a matriculation-examination, that
they should lower, not only their own standard, but likewise the
standard of public schools. Some Universities, on the contrary, like
over-anxious mothers, have multiplied examinations so as to make quite
sure, at the end of each term or each year that the pupils confided to
them have done at least some work. This kind of forced labour may
do some good to the incorrigibly idle, but it does the greatest harm to all
the rest. If there is an examination at the end of each year, there can
be no freedom left for any independent work. Both teachers and
taught will be guided by the same pole-star—examinations; no deviation
from the beaten track will be considered safe, and all the pleasure
derived from work done for its own sake, and all the just pride and joy,
which those only know who have ever ventured out by themselves on
the open sea of knowledge, must be lost.

We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the brilliant show of
examination papers.

It is certainly marvellous what an amount of knowledge candidates
will produce before their examiners; but those who have been both
examined and examiners know best how fleeting that knowledge is,
and how different from that other knowledge which has been acquired
slowly and quietly, for its own sake, for our own sake, without a
thought as to whether it would ever pay at examinations or not. A
candidate, after giving most glibly the dates and the titles of the
principal works of Cobbett, Gibbon, Burke, Adam Smith, and David
Hume, was asked whether he had ever seen any of their writings, and
he had to answer, No. Another, who was asked which of the works of
Pheidias he had seen, replied that he had only read the first two books.
That is the kind of dishonest knowledge which is fostered by too
frequent examinations. There are two kinds of knowledge, the one
that enters into our very blood, the other which we carry about in our
pockets. Those who read for examinations have generally their pockets
[Pg 395]
cram full; those who work on quietly and have their whole heart in
their work are often discouraged at the small amount of their knowledge,
at the little life-blood they have made. But what they have
learnt has really become their own, has invigorated their whole frame,
and in the end they have often proved the strongest and happiest men
in the battle of life.

Omniscience is at present the bane of all our knowledge. From the
day he leaves school and enters the University a man ought to make up
his mind that in many things he must remain either altogether ignorant,
or be satisfied with knowledge at second-hand. Thus only can he
clear the deck for action. And the sooner he finds out what his own
work is to be, the more useful and delightful will be his life at University
and later. There are few men who have a passion for all knowledge,
there is hardly one who has not a hobby of his own. Those so-called
hobbies ought to be utilized, and not, as they are now, discouraged, if
we wish our Universities to produce more men like Faraday, Carlyle,
Grote, or Darwin. I do not say that in an examination for a University
degree a minimum of what is now called general culture should not be
insisted on; but in addition to that, far more freedom ought to be given
to the examiner to let each candidate produce his own individual work.
This is done to a far greater extent in Continental than in English
Universities, and the examinations are therefore mostly confided to the
members of the Senatus Academicus, consisting of the most experienced
teachers, and the most eminent representatives of the different branches
of knowledge in the University. Their object is not to find out how
many marks each candidate may gain by answering a larger or smaller
number of questions, and then to place them in order before the world
like so many organ pipes. They want to find out whether a man, by
the work he has done during his three or four years at University,
has acquired that vigour of thought, that maturity of judgment, and
that special knowledge, which fairly entitle him to an academic status,
to a degree, with or without special honours. Such a degree confers no
material advantages;[19]
it does not entitle its holder to any employment
in Church or State; it does not vouch even for his being a fit person to
be made an Archbishop or Prime Minister. All this is left to the later
struggle for life; and in that struggle it seems as if those who, after
having surveyed the vast field of human knowledge, have settled on a
few acres of their own and cultivated them as they were never cultivated
before, who have worked hard and have tasted the true joy and happiness
of hard work, who have gladly listened to others, but always
depended on themselves, were, after all, the men whom great nations
delighted to follow as their royal leaders in their onward march towards
greater enlightenment, greater happiness, and greater freedom.

To sum up. No one can read Mill’s Essay “On Liberty” at the present
moment without feeling that even during the short period of the last
[Pg 396]
twenty years the cause which he advocated so strongly and passionately,
the cause of individual freedom, has made rapid progress, aye,
has carried the day. In no country may a man be so entirely himself,
so true to himself and yet loyal to society, as in England.

But, although the enemy whose encroachments Mill feared most and
resented most has been driven back and forced to keep within his own
bounds,—though such names as Dissent and Nonconformity, which were
formerly used in society as fatal darts, seem to have lost all the poison
which they once contained,—Mill’s principal fears have nevertheless not
been belied, and the blight of uniformity which he saw approaching
with its attendant evils of feebleness, indifference, and sequacity, has
been spreading more widely than ever in his days.

It has even been maintained that the very freedom which every
individual now enjoys has been detrimental to the growth of individuality;
that you must have an Inquisition if you want to see martyrs;
that you must have despotism and tyranny to call forth heroes. The
very measures which Mill and his friends advocated so warmly, compulsory
education and competitive examinations, are pointed out as
having chiefly contributed to produce that large array of pass-men, that
dead level of uninteresting excellence, which is the beau idéal of a
Chinese Mandarin, while it frightened and disheartened such men as
Humboldt, Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill.

There may be some truth in all this, but it is certainly not the
whole truth. Education, as it has to be carried on, whether in
elementary or in public schools, is no doubt a heavy weight which
might well press down the most independent spirit; it is, in fact,
neither more nor less than placing, in a systematized form, on the
shoulders of every generation the ever-increasing mass of knowledge,
experience, custom, and tradition that has been accumulated by former
generations. We need not wonder, therefore, if in some schools all
spring, all vigour, all joyousness of work is crushed out under that load
of names and dates, of anomalous verbs and syntactic rules, of mathematical
formulas and geometrical axioms, which boys are expected to
bring up for competitive examinations.

But a remedy has been provided, and we are ourselves to blame if
we do not avail ourselves of it to the fullest extent. Europe erected
its Universities, and called them the homes of the Liberal Arts, and
determined that between the slavery of the school and the routine of
practical life every man should have at least three years of freedom.
What Socrates and his great pupil Plato had done for the youth of
Greece,[20]
these new academies were to do for the youth of Italy,
France, England, Spain, and Germany; and, though with varying
success, they have done it. The mediæval and modern Universities
have been from century to century the homes of free thought. Here
the most eminent men have spent their lives, not merely in retailing
[Pg 397]
traditional knowledge, as at school, but in extending the frontiers of
science in all directions. Here, in close intercourse with their teachers,
or under their immediate guidance, generation after generation of
boys, fresh from school, have grown up into men during the three
years of their academic life. Here, for the first time, each man has
been encouraged to dare to be himself, to follow his own tastes, to
depend on his own judgment, to try the wings of his mind, and, lo,
like young eagles thrown out of their nest, they could fly. Here the
old knowledge accumulated at school was tested, and new knowledge
acquired straight from the fountain-head. Here knowledge ceased to
be a mere burden, and became a power invigorating the whole mind,
like snow which during winter lies cold and heavy on the meadows,
but when it is touched by the sun of spring melts away, and fructifies
the ground for a rich harvest.

That was the original purpose of the Universities; and the more they
continue to fulfil that purpose the more will they secure to us that
real freedom from tradition, from custom, from mere opinion and
superstition, which can be gained by independent study only; the more
will they foster that “human development in its richest diversity”
which Mill, like Humboldt, considered as the highest object of all
society.

Such academic teaching need not be confined to the old Universities.
There is many a great University that sprang from smaller beginnings
than your Midland Institute. Nor is it necessary, in order to secure
the real benefits of academic teaching, to have all the paraphernalia of
a University, its colleges and fellowships, its caps and gowns. What is
really wanted are men who have done good work in their life, and who
are willing to teach others how to work for themselves, how to think
for themselves, how to judge for themselves. That is the true academic
stage in every man’s life, when he learns to work, not to please others,
be they schoolmasters or examiners, but to please himself, when he
works from sheer love of work, and for the highest of all purposes, the
conquest of truth. Those only who have passed through that stage
know the real blessings of work. To the world at large they may
seem mere drudges—but the world does not know the triumphant joy
with which the true mountaineer, high above clouds and mountain
walls that once seemed unsurpassable, drinks in the fresh air of the High
Alps, and away from the fumes, the dust, and the noises of the city,
revels alone, in freedom of thought, in freedom of feeling, and in the
freedom of the highest faith.

F. Max Müller.

[Pg 398]

MR. GLADSTONE.

TWO STUDIES SUGGESTED BY HIS “GLEANINGS OF PAST YEARS.”

I.

Lord Beaconsfield and his party are still holding on. All the
over-praised Disraelian craft has dwindled somehow to this merely
muscular operation. An attempt is, indeed, made to disguise the attitude
by keeping strict silence, and arranging the facial expression of the
Cabinet, if not of the Party, in a way not agreeing with the strain;
but the country is fast finding out that the real posture of the
Conservatives at this moment is that of clutching at office, and
nothing more. However, no amount of not talking about the elections
will put them off finally. In his most efficient days Lord Beaconsfield
was hardly clever enough to operate upon the almanack, and a certain
terrible date is approaching upon him with increasing swiftness. It
will be rather humiliating at last for a Premier to be brought up by
the day of the month, and to be reminded by the great officials of
Parliament what year of Our Lord it is. But these latter personages are
partly paid for watching the efflux of time, and no doubt they will do
their duty. It may be unpleasant for them to have to tell Lord Beaconsfield
that dates make it impossible for him to go on any longer, but
they must get what consolation they can from the remembrance that it is
the first time they ever had to say this to a Minister. Several Parliaments
in our history have been nicknamed rather uglily, but it is likely that the
Beaconsfield House of Commons will be known under a description more
humiliating than any, because so inescapeably accurate. It will literally
be the run-to-the-last-dregs Parliament, and when, on there not being
another moment left, the dissolution has necessarily to be ordered, the
not-any-longer-to-be-put-off elections will take place.

When that unpostponeable day comes, it is very well known beforehand
whose will be the most towering figure on the hustings, whose the form
towards which all eyes must turn. It will be that of him whose name is
[Pg 399]
written at the head of this paper—Mr. Gladstone. Most Englishmen
will at first feel a crick in the neck in having to look behind them so far
north as Midlothian. But Liberals and Conservatives alike understand that
wherever Mr. Gladstone chooses to take up his position that becomes the
centre of the fight. If he stood for the Orkneys, he would still be too
near for his opponents; and, as for his friends, they remember that with
Ulysses’ bow it did not greatly signify whether the hero was a few yards
further off or nearer. The bolts will reach. It is, indeed, not unlikely
that Mr. Gladstone may force on the conflict, and, after the speech at
Chester, the other side cannot say that they were left without warning.
The Conservative leaders have, in fact, a nearer date to calculate than the
final one of the Parliamentary calendar—that, namely, of Mr. Gladstone’s
appearance in Midlothian. It may be supposed that they are already
anxiously counting the days of the dwindling interval. Whenever he
gives instructions for his hustings to be put up, the Conservatives will
have to send for their own carpenters, and order planks.

The present moment, while he is temporarily absent, and just before
he again necessarily reappears in the very front of the public stage, may
not be an ill time for taking a hasty review of him and his career. It is,
in fact, a favourable chance. Mr. Gladstone, by stress of glorious hard
work and sheer public efficiency, has so unceasingly filled the passing
hour, always being fully occupied himself in dealing with a special
matter, and enforcing the attention of the nation to it, that he has
left people very little at leisure to take in a retrospect of him. The
result is, that there is great inadequacy in the public appreciation
of the dimensions of his career; it stretches back further, expands
wider, rises higher than most of us commonly keep in our minds.
Lately, it is true, Mr. Gladstone has taken great pains to remind
the country of his years; he has rather ostentatiously postured as
an old man. But without meaning to impugn his veracity, or to dispute
the register, we may say that he has scarcely got anybody to
believe it. He has gone on felling trees, writing letters and articles, and
publishing volumes, with utterances of more and better speeches between
than anybody else can make, in a way which has led not a few to
congratulate themselves that he was not any younger. In particular, his
opponents, so soon as they found out that his announcement of retirement
into ease meant that he was going to take the truest rest of all, to work
a little harder in another kind of way, positively made an outcry as if he
had pledged himself to gratify them by doing nothing. They seem rather
to complain that he has retired into greater publicity; but there is something
to be said about that matter. The implied bargain on Mr.
Gladstone’s side at the time obviously was that the Conservatives were
themselves not to do anything in particular. It was to be a time of
stagnation, and they have not kept to that understanding; no sooner had
he turned his back than they began to swagger up and down the world as
Imperialists. They have risked the highest interests of the empire and
[Pg 400]
have made England figure on the wrong side, arrayed against the oppressed
and blustering for war. Mr. Gladstone could only keep quiet by
foregoing all patriotism. It was too much to ask from an old-fashioned
English statesman, who had always himself stood on the side of freedom
and peace, and had grown accustomed to seeing his country ranged there
too. However, we will speak again a little later on this point of his
announced retirement.

It is nearly superfluous to remind any one that there is no statesman
now before the public with an official record which can in any way be
set beside Mr. Gladstone’s even in the mere matters of length of
time and diversity of parts. There are a number of men in the House
of Commons older than Mr. Gladstone; there are some, though not
many, who have had a seat in it longer than he has; but there is no
one whose Ministerial life goes back nearly so far. He held office
forty-five years ago. Nearly a score of years had to pass after his first
appointment to a post before Mr. Disraeli joined a Ministry, and then
he stepped into the place which had been refused by Mr. Gladstone.
The latter’s range of official experience excels others in breadth even more
than in length. Before he became Prime Minister he had been Under-Secretary
for the Colonies, Vice-President of the Board of Trade and
Master of the Mint, President of the Board of Trade, full Secretary
for the Colonies, and Chancellor of the Exchequer more than once.
There is no other journeyman politician with a stroke of work left in
him who has anything like this list of credentials of apprenticeship to
show. Mr. Gladstone learnt his craft under Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston,
Russell; and then himself became the selecter and instructor of a
group of younger men for whom renewed office is only biding a not
very distant date. It is an honour alike to name the men he served
under and those whom he commanded; including in the association
with him some whom he attracted, and to whom the latter phrase might
scarcely fully apply; for Mr. Cobden worked with him without an office,
and Mr. Bright in one. These latter were achievements of personal
influence which may fairly rank a trifle higher than merely taking
precedence of a Duke in a Cabinet. If we go on to consider what has
happened in his time in the way of legislation and social reform, and
his connection with it, it may be said, speaking generally, that he has
witnessed the political and economical remoulding of this kingdom; and,
taking all things together, has helped it forward in more ways than
anybody else who still survives. If while Mr. Bright lives his name must
always have the honour of first mention when the Repeal of the Corn Laws
is spoken of, it was Mr. Gladstone who wrought out all the details of
Peel’s fiscal reforms. He too it was who, much later, gave effect to
Cobden’s negotiation of the French Commercial Treaty; and also,
again, made the best bargain that could be made when that first
international arrangement lapsed. Every amelioration bearing on
taxation and trade in our time has been naturally fated in some
[Pg 401]
way to touch the hands of Mr. Gladstone. So, too, it was his conversion,
or rather his progress, on the question of the Franchise—proved by
his bringing in of the Russell measure—which made the immediate
granting of the vote certain, and challenged the Tory trick of the last
Reform Bill. The Ballot Act, without which the vote was but a sinister
gift, came from his Ministry. But let us turn from England to the sister
country. If Ireland is ever pacified, it will be then seen that it was Mr.
Gladstone who, by the Disestablishment of the Irish Church and by his
Land Act, laid the foundations of the peace. If the Roman Catholics get a
University now, they will only get what he offered them years ago. The
prosperity of Ireland is, indeed, sure some day to give to Mr. Gladstone’s
memory a splendid revenge for the ingratitude she showed to the man
who brought legislating for Ireland into vogue. If we shift our regard to
diplomacy, the future is still clearly with him in several of the chiefest
international arrangements this generation has witnessed. When the
Berlin Treaty is cobwebbed, and forgotten by everybody but historians and
bookworms, the Treaty of Washington will be a living, ruling precedent
between the mighty English-speaking nations on both sides of the Atlantic;
and on the day that the Turks are thrust out of Europe, and the peoples
of those regions are settling the Eastern Question finally for themselves,
the then British Government, in begging somebody to take Cyprus off
our hands, will hear a larger Greece gratefully couple Mr. Gladstone’s
name with the cession of the Ionian Islands.

In every one of these matters Mr. Gladstone gets his good fortune
with posterity, as we believe, from having acted on Liberal principles.
It is the merit of those principles that, to borrow a phrase of his own,
they put Time on a man’s side. He has trusted himself to the popular
impulses, which are the breezes blowing towards the future, giving
auspicious omens by the very working out of the world’s events. But
if, apart from Liberalism, he would have had not much more significance
for the coming generations than Lord Beaconsfield will have when his
foreign policy has once been undone and set aside, Mr. Gladstone must
not be defrauded of a tittle of his due credit. He who has done all
this was once a Conservative, and, to make it still more wonderful, a
Peelite. Of that pale group of a Parliamentary section, which never
could be a party, he is the only one who escaped from the vain middle
region of ineffectiveness. For a man who was once a Peelite and has
never ceased to be a High Churchman to have gained supreme power in
this country is a political miracle. It was worked by sheer mental
force. Mr. Gladstone’s greatest feat, making all the rest possible, was
the slowly but ever-ripeningly turning himself into a good, sound,
robust Liberal; but he not only had the wit to appreciate the inevitableness
of popular progress, he made himself a shaper and a helper
of it in ways which showed a willing adoption of its cause. For we may
scrutinize his career more closely than in the above rapid sketch, may look
down lower than these great pictorial incidents we have been recapitulating;
[Pg 402]
and, if we do so, we shall see a set of administrative reforms,
less showy, but very hard to carry, and which exhibit genuine Liberalism
in the grain of every one of them. It was under his auspices that the
Civil Service was thrown open to unlimited competition; he, in spite of
the Lords, with Earl Derby at their head, took the duty off paper, giving
us cheap newspapers; he consolidated the Law Courts, doing away a
whole web of legal artificialities; it was as his colleague that Mr.
Forster gave to the country its first national educational scheme;
but for him Mr. Cardwell would never have succeeded in altering
the principle of our military organization from long-period enlistments
to the short-term service; while Mr. Gladstone’s opponents are willing
to thrust upon him the whole honour of abolishing purchase in the
army, because they think the issue of the Royal Warrant which, thanks
to their resistance of the reform, was the only means of effecting it,
lends itself to a taunt. Add to this list, the fact that although he, at
first, for easily seen reasons of mere habit of mind, going back to the
earlier days when he was Conservative, did not favour University
Reform, yet he finally lent himself fully to it, and it is not difficult to
understand the successive outcries raised against him in the higher
social quarters. He gave all the “interests” splendidly sufficient
reasons for their dislike, since wherever there was an abuse Mr. Gladstone
was as certain in the end to confront it as he is to appear, axe on
his shoulder, before any tree in Hawarden woods which has lived past
its time.

But there is another way, more compendious still, of summing up
his political chronicle. His opponents at times exult over the fact of
his having often changed his constituencies. It is true, but it was
always for his growing Liberalism. Certainly, there are those who
once ensconced in a shire—say, in Buckinghamshire—remain there as
long as they need a seat. They never offend any one by progress of
view. Mr. Gladstone has not acted by that rule; he has got himself
turned out of constituency after constituency; but, we repeat, it was
always for the same reason—he became too big for them. Among his
highest distinctions are these,—he is the resigner of Newark, the
rejected of Oxford, the loser of South Lancashire. The thing has
occurred too often to admit of a casual explanation. It was not for
Liberalism, as it is now understood, that he, when still in his youth,
offended the mighty Duke of Newcastle and had to give up Newark,
but it was for reasoned-out consistency which gave hope of Liberalism.
He would not stultify his intellect by voting for Peel’s proposed increase
of the Maynooth Grant in contradiction of his own book on Church and
State. But all the world knows that it was for Liberalism somewhat
developed that he quitted Oxford; and the cause of his defeat in Lancashire
was that he had for years been too busy in pushing forward
reforms on all hands. It was a noble vanquishment for him, whatever
it was for his party, for Lancashire, or for the country. Test his career
[Pg 403]
how we will, the result still comes out to his honour. He, for
conscience’ sake, offended the great patron on whom his whole prospects
then depended, remaining out of Parliament for a time; later, he went
over with Peel, knowing that it meant an ineffective hanging between
two parties for an indefinite time, sharing the hopes and chances of
neither; when Lord Derby came into power, he refused office on its
being offered. In a word, he has evidenced his sincerity and proved
his patriotism in every way for which it is allowed to other men to
claim honour. When a man has risked personal prospects, refused
place, held office in all its kinds, left one lagging constituency after
another behind him, and finally, by sheer insisting on rapid progress,
temporarily wearied the weak and lazy of his countrymen throughout
the whole nation, as the last general election showed that he had, what
more is there left for him to do for his country? Only one thing
remained: the sacrificing his retirement after the formal announcement
of the close of his career, and, afresh taking up his old post in the
front of the battle as if he were still young and had place and public
life to secure, striving his hardest a last time for the sake of his principles
and his party. It is this final possibility of sacrificing ease and
renewing labour which Mr. Gladstone undertakes in the Midlothian
campaign now so very soon to be opened by him.

The above is the merest bird’s-eye glance at his career, but it seemed
to us a retrospect which all Liberals should have in their minds more
completely than is common when he again draws to him the national
gaze, as he of necessity will do.

But on reading back, how inadequate does the above record seem
for Mr. Gladstone! It is simply the background of the picture; a
field of industry and achievements, on which the portraiture of the
man himself needs yet making to stand out. We have been speaking
of the ex-Premier, for instance, just as we might talk of any
politician, and Mr. Gladstone, though our chiefest politician, has
throughout been so much more than that. It is perfectly true
that there is no public man among us who has projected less
of a special atmosphere of personality than he has through which
his doings are to be beheld. He has been too busy with his work to
think of any attitudinizing or trick in doing it. Mr. Gladstone’s only
mannerism has been that of superior excellence of thinking, speaking,
and doing. Anybody else might have done and said what he has
uttered and effected, if only they had had the same ability and industry.
His one comprehensive distinction, summing up all the others, lies in
his having developed more of these two simple, old-fashioned things than
his best contemporaries. He has invented no mysteries, traded in no
artificialities, given us no pyrotechnics; only a plain common air lies
along his track, in which, if we perhaps except two or three points
where a little mist hangs, everything can be clearly seen in white light,
without exaggeration or distortion. His whole style has been the old
[Pg 404]
traditionary English one, accentuated only by Scotch earnestness
and seriousness of religious feeling. If Mr. Gladstone, however, has
not made any eccentric or theatrical impression on the public mind, he
has done something larger and better. He has kept all the three
kingdoms continuously aware of him as an element in our general
thinking, as well as being a power in our practical affairs. If we put
aside Mr. Carlyle, Mr. Mill, and Mr. Ruskin, scarcely any one has had
so much to do with the general mental activity of the last two generations
as Mr. Gladstone. The result is what we have just pointed out,—that
if we sketch him as a statesman only, everybody sees that the
canvas is not big enough. It is a sufficiently full description of most
men who have been politicians to ascribe to them statesmanship; but
in Mr. Gladstone’s case we want a yet larger phrase; his business has
not been politics merely, it has been patriotism; and he has made
time, nobody quite knows how, to do nearly as much work outside
Parliament as within it. We may cut a scholar able to adorn a
university out of Mr. Gladstone, and then carve from him a fine
student and reverencer of Art; next mark off a reviewer and general
littérateur whom professed authors will respectfully make room for in
their ranks; and not only is there still left, solid and firm, the great
Parliamentary Minister, but of the scattered fragments a couple of
Bishops might easily be made, with, if nothing at all is to be wasted,
several preachers for the denominations. The latter would be derived
from a morsel or two of material which Mr. Gladstone himself is not
fully aware of as being in his composition. It is not very easy to give
a complete impression offhand of such a multiform personage as this.
We must take him a little simpler. The general effect of it all has been,
as we said above, that the mental activity of the community in all
matters relating to politics and practical affairs has had to take its rate
and much of its scale largely from him, and he has been thinking with
the speed, not of the old jog-trot political life, but with the rapidity of
ethical and religious cogitation, and has insisted on giving thought to
everything. In fact, the ultimate impression which Mr. Gladstone
has made upon the community has been that of an intellect weaponed
with a perfectly fluent tongue, and a hand holding the quickest of
pens, occupying the very highest national posts, ceaselessly going on
reasoning, insisting upon doing it, whether the reasoning might
occasionally go wrong or not, just as if thinking, speaking, and writing
were man’s right employment. His chief opponents would, perhaps,
hesitate in flatly saying that they were not; but, at any rate, they
have continually been wanting him to stop. Nearly all the complaint
that was ever made of Mr. Gladstone resolves itself into a charge that
he has thought and spoken and written too much. The accusation is
one which it would task a great many men to lay themselves open to;
it is never thought of in the case of the bulk of us. Above all, he has
kept on thinking; he would use his mind. Possibly the other side might
[Pg 405]
have forgiven it, if only he had not done it so well; if only this promptest,
quickest ratiocination on the part of a practical politician in our times
had not, as it progressed, brought him ever nearer to the conclusions
of Liberalism. He has, we are, however, rather ashamed to admit,
had to suffer from his own party for this unusualness of mental
activity. Our practical politics for generations past had been carried
on upon such shallow reasoning, on such a hand-to-mouth principle
of mere party expediency, that even some Liberals were surprised
when he brought a little subtlety of intellect into public life. It
was enough to make a smaller man despair of his countrymen’s
sanity when he found that for years many of them could not
distinguish between an Anglican High Churchman and an admirer
of Rome.

To speak plainly, there was never such a humiliating spectacle
of public stolidity as that which for so long a time was witnessed in the
popular mystification as to Mr. Gladstone’s religious position. It went
for nothing that his first critical Parliamentary step was to give up his
seat rather than vote more money to Maynooth; nobody seemed to bear
in mind that as far back as 1852 he both predicted and publicly hoped for
the downfall of the temporal power of the Papacy, and that ten years
later Sir George Bowyer openly attacked him on that very point in
Parliament; it did not avail that he it was who paved the way for the
unification of Italy by dragging into the light before all Europe the
prison secrets of Neapolitan tyranny. Because he had the good sense
to oppose the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, and the loyalty to remain on
terms of friendship with the companions of his youth after they became
Puseyites, and avowed that he held the same views as to Church doctrine
which some of the greatest Church of England divines taught, he was
called on to explain, every month or so, that he was not a Jesuit. Not
until he published his pamphlet on the Vatican Decrees, and by so
doing threw all the Roman Catholics in England and elsewhere into
a white heat of rage, was the silliness quite exploded. It is true that
the dull public might plead that a real profession of religiousness on
the part of a leading politician was such a novelty that it might be
excused being a little puzzled, and believing the worst in its perplexity.
Worst or best, Mr. Gladstone has gone on speaking and writing about
his religion just as if a man’s ethics and faith ought to have some
connection with his politics, and, as time has passed, people appear to
think it less strange. This non-reticence on the score of religion has
made more serious the impression Mr. Gladstone has produced upon
the public mind; but in reality it is no specialty in his mode of
public thinking, but only a necessary part of it. He tracks his commonest
politics to their fundamental principles, and makes of them a
system. He has always in his reasoning to go back to history, and
this has delayed his advance in comparison with men who dispense
with that; but there never yet was a public man who explained so
[Pg 406]
fully as Mr. Gladstone the reasons of his changes. All the progress
of his mind is to be traced in speeches, articles, pamphlets, volumes.
He has given too much explanation, not too little, for his mind has an
insatiability for reasons. Most people are content when they get hold
of a good one; but he wants three or four—in fact, all that can be got
by searching for; and if it be true, as it certainly is, that he likes the
last to have a little subtlety about it, long-sustained thinking cannot
take people too deep in politics, whatever it may do now and then in
religion. For instance, on the question of Reform Mr. Gladstone has
certainly exhausted the process, having at last got at the final ideal
argument. It turns out, as he stated it to Mr. Lowe, to be this,—that,
apart from, or rather in addition to, all the hard reasons of justice and
safety that Mr. Bright can urge for extending the franchise, the vote
ought to be given because it has an educative power, and will make
our humbler fellow-countrymen better citizens. It is open to any one,
who is stupid enough, to call that argument subtle, but no one can deny
that it is truly Liberal. There is not a man among us to-day who keeps
the main Liberal issues so broad and clear as Mr. Gladstone does, and
this simply because he will get to a principle. He adds a tremendous
multiplicity of ideas in the way of side issues, but, as we above put it,
they are all reasons in addition. There is a very simple test of it,—he
has never recanted a single article of his Liberal progress, never gone
back a single step. This hardly can be said of either Mr. Lowe or a
few others who might be named. It could not even be said of so
thorough a Liberal as Earl Russell. Mr. Gladstone’s alleged over-refining
has ended in placing and keeping him in the practical lead of his party, at a
time of life when many born in the faith grow faint-hearted. Even the
one bit of mysticism which his political feeling has developed—namely,
the belief that the popular judgment is truest of all in very large matters—is
only the full flowering of the popular trust which every Liberal
professes to have. The bulk of the nation will forgive him that excess of
political belief, if it be an excess, for it is the last compliment a statesman
can pay them, and they have but to merit it, and it then turns to Mr.
Gladstone’s praise as well as theirs. But, at any rate, it will not do for
Liberals to set out to argue the point with Mr. Gladstone, or they will
quickly find themselves tripped up by a principle; for it is no sentimentality
in him which underlies the view, but completed logic and
wide recollection of historical instances.

Indeed, although it was necessary in trying to reproduce the general
impression Mr. Gladstone has made upon his contemporaries to speak
of this alleged over-refining, what is meant by it has been after all a
kind of superfluity of mental operation. His intricacy of thinking has
never hindered his activity; least of all living men has Mr. Gladstone
been a dreamer. He stands in history as a reviser of fiscal policies; an
introducer of new administrative modes; a widener of the boundaries of
political rights; a ceaseless overthrower of public abuses. From first to
[Pg 407]
last he has been, as the hatred of his opponents has too well witnessed,
a man of practice. You may add to this that he reasons too minutely,
if you like; but it was not by a transcendental casuistry of politics that
he wearied the country: it was by his enormous energy in ceaselessly
proposing wide sweeping measures. The casuistry was all in addition.
The over-refining of Mr. Gladstone has, in fact, been of a wholly different
kind from what is common among men; it has consisted in finding
justifications afterwards for very prompt vigorous doing. Examine, if
any one thinks it worth while at this time of day, the Ewelme Rectory
case, or the issue of the Royal Warrant on Purchase, or the Collier
appointment, and it will appear that it was for bold decision in
taking a practical step that he was arraigned as much as for subsequently
finding too many reasons for it. For ourselves, as we have
not set out to apologize for Mr. Gladstone (men of his dimensions
must be taken as they are), but simply to put down hints recalling
more fully than is usual the great features of his career, there is
no need for our not saying that we wish he had in some cases dispensed
with these arguments in excess of the conclusion. In some
instances it is as wise after all, though not so clever, to be satisfied
with urging one good reason, and not to confuse ordinary people
by adding five or six more not so good, the risk being that there
will be a bad one among them. But the fact remains that Mr. Gladstone
has not busied himself in tying mental knots for the purpose of
entanglement; he has indulged in no such waste of time. The mental
puzzle has always referred to some practical doing. Owing to this, his
opponents have had to admit his mental sincerity, while accusing him
of over-subtlety. It nearly all turned, in fact, into the psychological
question of whether Mr. Gladstone’s mind had not at one part of its
machinery a twist, and in the meantime while this point was being discussed
he went on carrying his measures. If there were Liberals who
did not quite follow him in his defence of the issue of the Royal
Warrant, when he drew distinctions between prerogative and statutory
power, they had not the least doubt that in abolishing purchase he had
effected a capital Liberal reform, and they might hope that his reasoning
as well as his practice was right. Is Mr. Gladstone to be the only
one to whose idiosyncrasy nothing is to be allowed? The hullabaloo
which was raised when somebody could say that he had broken through
a technicality seemed very like, after all, as though from this one politician
perfection was expected, which was not an ill compliment at bottom;
and any admirers who may admit that perfection was not always got,
do not, in granting that, depreciate him much as this world goes, and may
still think him the most upright of our public men. His mental
machinery is complicated, whilst there is no apparatus like it for
rapidity, and once set going he himself cannot always stop it; his
mind, as we have said, riots in ratiocination, and will multiply arguments
to the last shred of the material which any case in hand affords.
[Pg 408]
But, to return to the main point,—it never leaves go of the real business.
Even what has seemed to some persons his off-work, his voluminous
writing, has, with the one exception of his classical studies, been no
mere leisurely literature, but persistent advocacy of special objects.
These productions have been meant to frame public opinion, and to
give him openings for legislation, if that became possible. He has
used the press because it had become the hugest instrument of the time
he lived in; but it was not for the purpose of multiplying books that
Mr. Gladstone wrote, but with a view to practically influencing men.

This relentless subordination of everything to practical ends—this
iron determination to keep doing, even while ready frankly to depend
upon his power of speaking and writing to produce conviction and
popular persuasion as the means for effecting his objects, gives as
the final imprint of Mr. Gladstone on one’s mind that he was
always meant for a Liberal. A man of this kind might be born
a Conservative; it might take him time to break fully with old
ties; but for him to stay finally in the ranks where thought was
allowed to remain muddled, where abuses were looked on with toleration,
and ease was enjoyed at the cost of others, was an impossibility.
Mr. Gladstone, if only from the fact that he was a born
financier and an inveterate thinker, and a man with a passion for
publicly talking, belonged to the Liberals from the first. His
whole life, too, has consistently lent itself to that style. If it has
had in it a touch of austerity, that excellently befitted the social
condition of the masses of our people. His gaze has been fixed too
much upon them to be attracted by the glitter of the narrow upper
circle, which so foolishly persists, amidst its gaudy splendour, in believing
itself the nation. That silliness was not for Mr. Gladstone. He has
been subjected to some tests. If his family was not highly placed, his
father was a baronet, and he himself was educated at Eton and Oxford.
Nobles have been among his friends at all periods of his life, as well as
his official subordinates more than once in it. But he has passed
the whole of his long career without a sparkle of the glitter of
adventitious display: that proudest title of all, which it is not in the
power of the Crown to bestow but only to take away—”the Great
Commoner”—has descended upon him, and is still his. Then he has
fenced himself off with no stiffness of manner; the only dignity he has
assumed has been the natural seriousness of ardent sincerity, warning off
triflers only. To everybody else he has been accessible; any person
could impose on him the trouble of a written reply. His post-cards
were known to be public property. But putting aside that joke,
which is now worn bare, scarcely has any one so fully and ungrudgingly
accepted the responsibilities of his position. He has been the public’s
faithful, ready servant in every particular. Nor has it been mere complaisance,
or a drudging of mechanical industry; he has exhibited a real
faculty of interesting himself in all that anybody has been doing actively
[Pg 409]
and well. To say that he is the only statesman who, while clinging to
the Church of England, has commanded the sympathies of the Dissenters,
might provoke an enemy, embittered by the fact, to reply that he had
tactical reasons for trying to do that; but it could have been nothing
else than real width of mind and a robust versatility which enabled this
High Churchman largely to divide impartial admiration between the
Evangelical party and the Romanists, pointing out fully and exactly
what is to be praised in each. Any one who wishes it can find the
estimates set out in detail in the third and seventh volumes of “The
Gleanings.” This wide range of intellectual appreciation is really as
much a characteristic of Mr. Gladstone as has been his unyielding
tenacity and doctrinal hold within the limits of his personal confession
of belief. He, a firm acceptor of the tenets of sacramental efficacy, apostolical
succession, and the authority of the Church in her own sphere, could
take up the semi-rationalistic book “Ecce Homo,” and turn it round-and-round
admiringly as a most curious and valuable mental production.
Nothing in which thought was really shown has escaped his notice, or
failed to arouse his interest. He has bent his look on Secularism, as
a scientific inquirer might scrutinize a new species, and he has stooped
to quote Mr. Bradlaugh. In one place you will find him, very likely
on the page after giving a passage from Isaiah or the Psalms, citing the
old poet Dunbar, or speaking of Rowe or Swift, or alluding to Rousseau;
while long before it became a fashion he had words of sympathizing
praise for Shelley, selecting, of all other places, The Quarterly Review to
print them in. But, perhaps, the clearest proof of all, alike of his
power to bear testimony in spite of personal disliking, and his standing
hard and fast upon a principle when he has reached it, is that he, whom
Macaulay nearly half a century ago described as “a young man of unblemished
character,” and whom his Lordship, if he were now alive,
would speak of as “the old man with personal fame unspotted,” could
step aside in one of his articles to recognize the public debt due to Jack
Wilkes as a helper forward of our freedom. Wherever a national
service has been done, Mr. Gladstone’s eulogy always has been ready.

Down to this point we have not spared so much as a hint to his magnificent
oratory, his unsurpassed debating skill, his not infrequent successes
in literary style. These were not the things that anybody
needed reminding of, and that necessity was the prescribed limit of our
self-imposed task. Who has forgotten when the expounding of the
Budget was the greatest intellectual treat of the Session, when sugar
and railway duties and tea became natural themes for eloquence, and
the unfolding of the surplus was breathlessly waited for like the dénouement
of a novelist’s plot? Those scenes are long past, it is true, but
the echoes of them can still be heard, for each year since has brought a
disappointing reminder to awaken them. But the matchless vigour and
splendour of his debating fence has never slackened, never weakened;
the only privilege of the older generation in respect of it, is that they
[Pg 410]
can boast to have witnessed more of it, not to have seen better displays.
As to his writings, there least of all is any reminder wanted, for
he presents the public with an improving specimen each month. If any
one laid themselves out to find fault with Mr. Gladstone’s literature, the
very worst thing they could discover to say of it, would be that it still
was oratory, only written down.

This is the man who, after a few weeks of leisure, reappears next
month in Midlothian; first in the field, as if that appearance was his by
right of custom. How well he compares with the rest of our older
party leaders! Mr. Bright, grown a little pursy, though also stricken
by domestic misfortune, rests rather inertly on his laurels, which certainly
are plentiful enough to invite repose; Mr. Forster has never succeeded
in quite finding his way out of the clauses of his own Education
Act, where he sees himself confronted with the Church of England at
the end of so many vistas, that he is lost in admiration of its architecture;
Mr. Goschen, by some strange weakness (which, let us hope, is
only temporary) has got a scare from meeting the County Franchise
wearing Joseph Arch’s coat and hat; while Mr. Lowe is riding hobbies,
bicycle-wise, in and out before the very select constituency of the London
University, with readers of The Fortnightly Review for outside spectators,
just by way of showing off his little feats of mental gymnastic. In the
meanwhile, Mr. Gladstone, the veteran of them all, is putting on his
harness for a fresh contest, a riper, better Liberal to-day than on any
previous day of fight. It is for the younger men to rally round him.

But, before taking our leave of Mr. Gladstone, we have finally to enlarge
our view of him. Early in these remarks it seemed well to give a very
hasty summary of his whole career; but there remains to be attempted
an exact sketch of his actual position in respect of opinions and practical
relations at the moment when he ceased to be Minister. Let us, first
of all, at this moment when a Brummagem Imperialism is only yet half-faded,
recall what was Mr. Gladstone’s opinion of the historic position
and natural function of England among the nations; for it has been
craftily made to appear that he was willing, and indeed anxious, for this
country to efface itself. In 1870, when he was still at the height of
power, he published in The Edinburgh Review his article on “Germany,
France, and England,” and the following was the view he then put
forward of the international obligations and duties of his country, in spite
of the sea dividing us from other lands:—

“Yet we are not isolated…. With vast multitudes of persons in
each of the Continental countries we have constant relations, both of
personal and commercial intercourse, which grow from year to year;
and as, happily, we have no conflict of interests, real or supposed, nor
scope for evil passions afforded by our peaceful rivalry, there is nothing
to hinder the self-acting growth of concord…. So far from this
implying either a condition or a policy of isolation, it marks out England
as the appropriate object of the general confidence…. All that is
[Pg 411]
wanted is that she should discharge the functions, which are likely more
and more to accrue to her, modestly, kindly, impartially…. But
in order that she may act fully up to a part of such high distinction,
the kingdom of Queen Victoria must be in all things worthy of it. The
world-wide cares and responsibilities with which the British people have
charged themselves are really beyond the ordinary measure of human
strength; and until a recent period it seemed the opinion of our rulers
that we could not do better than extend them yet further, wherever an
opening could easily, or even decently, be found. With this avidity
for material extension was joined a preternatural and morbid sensibility.
Russia at the Amoor, America at the Fee-jee or the Sandwich Islands,
France in New Caledonia or Cochin China—all these, and the like, were
held to be good reasons for a feverish excitement lest other nations
should do for themselves but the fiftieth part of what we have done for
ourselves…. The secret of strength lies in keeping some proportion
between the burden and the back.”

Is it necessary to ask whether this is a policy combining dignified
patriotism and prudently-restrained common sense? Compare it for a
moment with the gewgaw skimble-skamble diplomatic sensationalism
with which we have been presented since. But let us go a little more
into detail as to Mr. Gladstone’s standing with reference to international
relations. This present Government has perhaps forgotten that there is
such a nation in the world as the United States of America; but Mr.
Gladstone kept it well in mind, and we suppose every one will admit
that he, of all statesmen, stands well with that people of our own blood,
who very shortly will be the most powerful community upon the earth,
and the one with whom we shall, for all time, have most to do. However,
we will keep within the bounds of Europe. It is the fashion now
to give precedence to Germany. Well, Mr. Gladstone was among the
first to predict the success of Prussia, and she is not likely to forget
who it was who preserved neutrality at a moment most critical to her.
Is it France that he is not on good relations with? Why this Minister, who
invited her wine trade, and strove unceasingly to increase commerce to and
fro across the Channel, and who is for giving further and further political
rights to his countrymen, is the only English statesman whom the bulk
of Frenchmen can understand. To them our Tories must be as antiquated
as their own Royalists. Italy is a growing Power in the European
comity, and who is there among our statesmen who can in her fair cities
arouse half the enthusiasm he can? He is, literally, the only English
politician they familiarly know. With Austria, it is true, he during
the recent war lost patience for a moment, but her conduct since has
told that her rulers must at the time have known that he had good
reasons for it; and no one has more fully appreciated the difficulties of
Austria’s position than he has done, or was more early in giving her, years
ago, the very counsel which she has since proved was the wisest for her.
There remains one other great Power to be named—Russia; the State
[Pg 412]
with whom we shall have directly of necessity to stand face to face in the
far East, and with whom terms will in the end have somehow to be made.
It is urged against Mr. Gladstone that he has not rendered himself
obnoxious enough to this remaining Power—that is, that he did not
incapacitate himself for negotiating with her, and, having postponed
defiance of her, might make some peaceful arrangement. Can any
friend of peace think this a very grievous accusation? Mr. Gladstone
has gained this position of goodwill all round at what cost?—that of
having fallen into disfavour with the Turks. That is his one terrible
disqualification for affairs; or, if you wish to be precisely exhaustive,
and at the same time to elicit the absurdity fully, you may add to it
that he has irritated the Bourbons. It is quite true, and we, indeed,
wish to put it clearly forward, that he was for abating a little of our
national swagger, and was prepared to see, and to welcome, advancement
in other nations. But every well-grounded Liberal knows that it
is only on those two conditions that England can permanently pursue
her own paths of industrial development, and the world make progress.
Mr. Gladstone’s single sin in reference to our external relations was his
readiness to favour those two results.

But how does he show when a last view is taken of him from within
our politics? Here, again, first look to the circumference. In dealing
with the colonies, he was for all being put in possession of a free autonomy,
and then urging them to self-reliance—in those ways welding them into
the integrity of the empire; and as to India, he insisted that we should
strive more and more to realize what he termed the generous conception
of a moral trusteeship, to be administered for the benefit of those over
whom we rule. Here, once more, we get the true ring of a sound
Liberalism, for those are the only principles, we venture to affirm, on
which such an empire as this of ours can ever be made permanent. Treating
the colonies as babies and biting the thumb at Russia, even from the
most scientific frontier India can furnish, though you shout “Empress”
from it as loudly as you will, has nothing truly English about it.
Empire is not kept in such a mawkish, artificial manner.

But now narrow the gaze within our own home limits. The chief
domestic questions for the British public are these,—extension of the
County Franchise, the Redistribution of Seats, the Disestablishment of
the Church, and Retrenchment of Expenditure. The Land Question
will yet have to grow, and may not ripen in his time. But on three of
the above pending matters Mr. Gladstone stands at the very front. He
is for making our field cultivators citizens no less than our artizans; he
is for re-allotting members in a manner which will give us a Parliament
truly representative; and it is hardly necessary to speak of economical
benefits in connection with the Minister who used the nation to
reduction of taxation and surpluses arriving together, and whose last
promise under that head was the total abolition of the Income Tax.
On the other of these great domestic matters, that which stands third
[Pg 413]
in the above list, the Disestablishment of the Church, it has seemed to
advanced Liberals that Mr. Gladstone has lagged. But the lively fear
of his opponents on this very matter is full of hope. Since he last
dissented from Mr. Miall’s motion, he has written a very significant
phrase in an article in this Review. In treating of “The Courses of
Religious Thought,” when reviewing the churches of the United States
and of the British Colonies he spoke of their vigorous growth, “far from
the possibly chilling shadow of National Establishments of Religion.” In
that phrase, for a man so practical as is Mr. Gladstone, Disestablishment
seems to cast its shadow before, and not a few persons on the other side
of the question shivered from the chilliness it made. But these topics
of the first class do not depend upon any one statesman; the biggest of
men have these capital problems thrust upon them; all that you
can do is to take note how a leader stands in reference to them.
And the above is Mr. Gladstone’s standing. But there was another
class of legislative reforms which he was the man to have gone in search
of. In one of his most recent articles he has given us a hint of a dream
of this kind which was in his mind. He stated it thus:—”Our
currency, our local government, our liquor laws, portions even of our
taxation, remain in a state either positively disgraceful, or at the least
inviting and demanding improvement.” That programme of the further
benefits which we should have owed to Mr. Gladstone was put aside by the
giddiness of twenty-five or thirty constituencies at the last elections, but it
will fittingly serve to give the finishing touch to our presentation of
him in this paper. Liberals have, in fact, to thank him for offering more
of reform and of benefit than the country would let him give it. Splendid
as his achievements have been, he really had others in reserve.

Is it too late? is the question that naturally arises. Certainly there
is no hope of having the five years of administration by him which
we have lost since 1874. That is irretrievable; and if Mr. Gladstone
felt then his growing years, and had a wish to finish other tasks apart
from politics, he is no younger now; while the aims of his purposed
leisure must have been greatly interfered with by his partial recall
to affairs owing to the dangers to which freedom in Bulgaria and our
own national credit were exposed. It is wholly a matter for Mr.
Gladstone to decide. If the next elections go in favour of the
Liberals, all the world knows that office is there for him to take or
to leave. Earl Granville, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Hartington would,
we need not say, be among the first even to urge it as far as it was right
to do so, and the whole party would welcome him back to power with a
shout of joy. Who knows? Mr. Gladstone’s patriotism is great, and our
financial muddle will, also, be very great about that time. Between the
two he might be tempted; he may yet do us the final service of putting the
national finances right again. It is, we repeat, wholly for him to say.
Earlier in this paper a further word was promised on the subject of
his retirement; but, upon second thoughts, it scarcely seems necessary.
[Pg 414]
Mr. Gladstone was too experienced in Parliamentary doings
not to know that the Conservatives would take care to keep enough
of their majority until time itself forced them back to the unwished-for
hustings. He did his party not an atom of practical injury by
retiring; rather, it was a good opportunity for giving a younger leader
practice. It would be quite idle, on the other hand, to argue with
his opponents for complaining that he did not retire enough. He has
made speeches, they say; he has written articles in every organ there
is; he has even republished previous writings. As we before said, they
have themselves to blame for it in great measure: if they wanted Mr.
Gladstone to stay in retirement, they should have carefully kept quiet.
Instead of that they made a noise before his door, disturbing him in his
studies. What more natural than that he should come out? He did so,
and found that, disguised like harlequins in the flimsy bedizenment which
they call Imperialism, they were playing high jinks with Britain’s
reputation and the chances of freedom for the oppressed in the East. It
was too much for him; but if they complain of the number of the weapons
he attacked them with, we know that it would have been impossible for
him to please them there. They never have been satisfied on that
score. What they really find fault with are the blows they got.

And there are more to come. Directly we shall have them complaining
that he has chosen a constituency so far away as Scotland;
the real fact being that they wish he had gone much farther still.
They never are sincere with Mr. Gladstone; he cannot please them.
We leave them anxiously listening for his approach again unto these
shores, knowing very well that to their thinking they will hear his
voice all too soon.

A Liberal.

II.

Description is said to be only possible by comparing, and when one
is asked to sketch Mr. Gladstone, how is it to be set about? His
admirers will have it that he has been a very great Minister, so that
if we adopt the comparative method, we ought to look high for
standards. Shall we match him alongside Bismarck or Cavour? The
latter, to give him precedence, stands renowned for building up his
country in evil days, when every omen was against her. But Mr.
Gladstone, succeeding to power when England was in the full tide of
prosperity and at the height of fame, gave up her prospects, and would
have acquiesced in her decadence. There is no likeness whatever
between him and Cavour. Then take Bismarck. The great German
Chancellor shares with the Italian Minister the glory of having widened
[Pg 415]
the bounds and raised the position of his land, and he stands now head
and shoulders above all in the midst of the diplomatic world a very
Colossus. But Mr. Gladstone is and has always been outside that world
altogether. Prince Bismarck has his hand on all the springs of action, and
will let pass no chance of exalting his country. Mr. Gladstone, we repeat,
never made the slightest impression in the regions of diplomacy;
Courts did not know him, foreign statesmen left him out of their
reckoning of the men that had to be dealt with. The great international
achievements for which he has alone been talked of have been
the surrender of British territory and the paying down of English
money lavishly to another State for preposterous claims. But it
will be said that it is not fair to Mr. Gladstone to compare him to
Prince Bismarck and Count Cavour, for they were men who found their
country in unusual circumstances. Look, then, to names in our own
history. Pitt must not be spoken of for the reasons just allowed in the
other cases; but there are Canning and Palmerston. How does
Mr. Gladstone look alongside them? He has himself more than
once alluded to Canning, as if not unwilling to be thought to have
received his mantle. It was, however, always only in connection with
Greece that he spoke of Canning; but that Minister looked much
farther than the Mediterranean. One would have thought that so fine
a rhetorician as Mr. Gladstone would not have forgotten the famous
phrase in which Canning claimed to have called the New World into
existence to redress the balance of the Old. Lord Palmerston was
without any such fine phrases, but in foreign affairs he acted boldly,
though he had to fall back on a musty Latin quotation to describe it.
Every Englishman, however, understood Latin when their Minister said,
Civis Romanus sum. Yet neither of these Ministers at any part of their
career lived in times more stirring than Mr. Gladstone has done, nor
when the interests of England were more endangered. He has still later
had magnificent opportunities, but he did worse than lose them.

From all this, it would seem that, whether we look abroad or at home,
there is no possibility of describing Mr. Gladstone by hints of comparison
with these historical personages. What is said in that way
appears, in fact, to turn into contrast; which is, also, itself a mode of
delineation, though not usually of the kind the chief object of it
wishes. We can find no Minister to couple along with him as having
deliberately despaired of his country. However, Mr. Gladstone is
certainly great in some way, for although other nations while we were
under his sway were gradually losing sight of England herself as well as
of him, he was making plenty of noise all the time at home. If it should
turn out, as we go on, that he was not a great Minister but a great
orator, that would seem to account for both the things. If Bismarck
and Cavour have made affairs, Mr. Gladstone has made speeches,
beating them as much in that as they did him in the other respect.
But it is not exactly the same thing to the countries the men represent.

[Pg 416]
It is, therefore, under a humbler, more domestic aspect than that
of this high supreme style of Minister which we have first tried that
we must begin Mr. Gladstone’s portraiture. The task may be divided
into two portions. There is the opinion which we Conservatives hold
of the general influence and effect he has had upon our national interests,
in which we may be credited with at least trying to estimate his acts and
measures on their merits; and, besides that, there is a judgment of
him from a narrower party view, arising out of his historic relation to
ourselves. We will take the latter first.

To hear Liberals talk, one might suppose that Conservatives had
always cherished a special hatred against Mr. Gladstone simply for
ceasing to be a Tory and becoming a Radical. That the Conservatives
rather late in his career came to show much irritation against Mr. Gladstone
is perfectly correct; but it was, as I hope to show as I go on, for
very different reasons than simply because he had made one Conservative
less and one Liberal more. A great political party has no such
immortal animosities as that supposes: party feeling is not based
on merely sentimental grounds. Both sides are used to losing men.
It is the common fate of Parliamentary warfare. Now and then,
some rather idle person who has time to waste in going back a long
way in his recollections bethinks himself that Lord Beaconsfield was
not always a Conservative; but we never yet heard of any one among
the party challenging sympathy for him on the score that he had
been hunted by the Liberals through half a century or so for having
deserted them. Yet it will be admitted that Lord Beaconsfield has
injured the Liberals more than ever Mr. Gladstone has done the
Conservatives. What is the reason, then, of this difference of alleged
treatment in the two cases? The answer may be given in half a
sentence,—Lord Beaconsfield, alike when he was Mr. Disraeli and
since, has always fought fair. That is enough in politics to make
your opponents acquiesce in your being such; but Mr. Gladstone
as his career developed surprised and puzzled everybody, his own friends
included; and those who blame the Conservatives for, in the end,
losing temper and showing exasperation, should bear in mind that
he finally produced the very same effect upon the country at large.

It is worth while following this point a little further, for it would not
be of much use attempting to sketch Mr. Gladstone if we are supposed
to dislike him from some mere party instinct. Will anybody be good
enough to tell us when this inscrutable emotion of hatred of Mr. Gladstone
arose? Liberals are not supposed to be strong in history, but they
have very short memories indeed if they have forgotten both their own
career and his. Why, in 1852—that is, in the twentieth year of
Mr. Gladstone’s Parliamentary life—the Conservatives were offering
him office, which was not refused by him with over-much promptness.
For nearly fourteen years after that he was retained as the representative
of the University of Oxford. It is, in fact, not yet very
[Pg 417]
much more than a dozen years since this victim of political persecution,
and present champion of the Radicals, was quietly ensconced
in a seat for what is sometimes spoken of as the head-quarters of
Toryism. He has roved a good deal among the constituencies since,
but he was then willing to have gone on remaining at Oxford, if
his constituents had also been willing to have been made laughing-stocks
by letting him remain. Surely a man who represented Tory electors until
he was getting fast on for sixty could scarcely up to that point have been
much hunted and worried for Liberal principles. To speak plainly,
there never was so late a conversion made of so much histrionic use as
this of Mr. Gladstone’s. But though it has suited both his and his
present party’s ends, it rather puzzles plain people who have kept their
recollections a little trim to think that if he lives on into senatorial
decrepitude, he will never have sat for Radical constituencies anything
like so long a time as he did for Conservative ones. For between
thirty and forty years this Liberal ex-Premier was a Tory member.

In fact, a glance at the right honourable gentleman’s wonderfully
prosperous career will show that in the list of our public men he has
of all others made the fewest, the briefest, the least sacrifices either for
principle or party. There are very simple ways of testing it; Mr.
Gladstone has not been out of office long enough for a man who was
innocent of business prudence in his career. He has, in fact, reaped
the official spoils of two parties, if not of three. The dates and appointments
are on record for anybody to trace out. On the very face of it,
a man who has served under Peel, Aberdeen, Palmerston, and Russell,
and then come out as a full-blown Liberal Prime Minister himself,
must of necessity be said to offer rather a miscellaneous career.
His warmest admirer must admit that he has been either the most fortunate
or else the most prudent of men; and, as we do not wish to be
stingy in our recognition of his skill, we prefer to compliment him
by attributing his great prosperity throughout so many years and
under so many different chiefs to his prudence.

If this very hasty review of Mr. Gladstone’s chronicle does not agree
with the impression of him which is the prevailing one on the Liberal
side, it is the one which the bare facts of his career would produce on
every side if they could be seen without the misleading effect of his
very fine words and exceedingly solemn attitudes. Very fortunately
for him it is only the Conservatives who have a full and accurate recollection
of Mr. Gladstone. They have necessarily observed him continuously
from their own unshifting party position, and so have been able
to perceive in a way that hardly was practicable to the Liberals, who
were always shifting and struggling among themselves, how invariably
and consistently his announcements of change of view have hit with the
opportunities for improvement of his Parliamentary position. On every
occasion, to the very moment, so soon as a Liberal question had fully ripened,
Mr. Gladstone presented himself to pluck it. It was so with Reform, it
[Pg 418]
was so with Church Rates, it was so with University Reform, it was so
with the Ballot, it was so with the spoliation of the Irish Church and the
unsettling of the Irish landowners, and it is so with the County Franchise,
and it will be so once more, if the Liberals ever get into power again,
with the English Church and the English Land Laws. Mr. Bright, Mr.
Miall, and all the Radicals have drudged for many a year for Mr. Gladstone,
who, when all the outdoor work has been done, has always
allowed himself to be persuaded to bring in the Measure just in the nick
of time, and, by expounding it in a very fine speech, has robbed its
actual originators of two-thirds of the credit of making it possible.

Luckily for the Conservatives, though he never had the courage to
attack a question of the very first class himself in the way of initiative, he
had an insatiable ambition for meddling with smaller ones, and by making
vents in these ways for his restlessness and his ambition, he finally
ruined all that his skilful prudence in the larger affairs had gained him,
disgusting the country till it determined to get him off its hands at any
price. Still, that is not just now the point in question.

Mr. Gladstone’s so slowly passing through all the stages from Conservatism
to Radicalism has had this effect,—that while all other public
men of his standing have grown more or less antiquated in steady loyal
service to their party, and by presenting a fixed if monotonous aspect to
the public, this one Parliamentary personage kept a perennial freshness,
simply by skilfully dividing his prolonged career into distinct periods and
going on changing. Some political section has been always welcoming
Mr. Gladstone newly into its ranks and to its spoils, for, as we have said,
the two things unfailingly went together; and the shouts with which he
was received were always strengthened by fainter murmurs of applause
from other sections more advanced along the line, who hoped to receive
him themselves later on. They did so. Really to each one of them he was
a recruit from the last party. To the Palmerstonians he ought at the
most to have been only a Peelite; to the Liberals at worst only a
Palmerstonian. But by a surprising adroitness, it was always made to
appear that in all his migrations from party to party, he joined each
successive group as a new retreater from the Tories. It certainly was
true in one sense; he was always going further away from them. But
for all party purposes and reckoning, he had as much left them when
he joined Palmerston as when he shook hands with Mr. Bright and
took his place in front of the Radicals.

These are only a first handful of specimens of a certain unfairness in
Mr. Gladstone’s position and career from first to last, from which he
has largely profited, and which very naturally irked his opponents, who
have had to suffer its inconveniences. He has posed as a sort of political
orphan left lonely in the Parliamentary world at the death of Peel, who
has been persecuted by wicked Tories from one Chancellorship of the
Exchequer to another, until they finally drove him into the Premiership,
but all this time he was successfully seceding from them, though they
[Pg 419]
continued in pursuit. It must have been Mr. Gladstone’s portentous
earnestness of demeanour which has covered up from the general public
a joke so huge and prolonged as this, preventing everybody from seeing
that such a tale did not agree with his unprecedented prosperity. But
if in these ways he has kept himself interesting to the country, and fresh
and surprising for every group he has in rotation joined, both he and
his changes have long been stale to the Conservatives. They are able
to look along his whole track, and seeing him from behind, know him as
a Peelite, a follower of Aberdeen, a Palmerstonian, a Russellite, and a
Radical. They are debarred from applying his own name to the last
stage, and calling him a Gladstonian. Strangely enough, and indeed
very significantly, that term has never taken root in our politics.
There really have never been any Gladstonians: no one ever was
or ever will be called by that title. Mr. Gladstone will end his
days and depart without founding any school; he will stand recorded
only as the acceptor of office from those who did so, and the passer
of other people’s measures. But in political life a man who attains
the first rank of conspicuousness without founding a line may fairly
be suspected. It will be found that he has been too busy in a narrower
way,—looking after not questions but himself. To that very
small party, numerically reckoned, consisting of only one member,
Mr. Gladstone has been consistently and untiringly faithful. He
has challenged for it sympathy in all the ways to which his very fine
oratory has lent itself, and he has not neglected the humbler art of perpetual
advertisement, keeping it by means of the press and the platform
ever before the public eye. But when he finally leaves us it is certain
to vanish entirely.

Very likely some ardent Radical, whose mind is so full of having got Mr.
Gladstone at last that he forgets, or perhaps never knew, how many grades
and shades of politicians have in succession enjoyed him before, will say
that in all this we are only railing at Mr. Gladstone’s success. His success!
In order to describe Mr. Gladstone, we had first to write retrospectively,
take in his earlier phases, and to look generally at his whole history.
In that retrospect, down to a late point in it, he was exceedingly
prosperous; but we never meant to say that he had been very successful
since the beginning of 1874. There is not the slightest need
for any Conservative to feel bitter against Mr. Gladstone now on any
grounds of personal envy. He has done them the greatest service of any
public man for three generations; and at any time he might have individually
prospered as much as he liked for them, if it had been possible
for him to do it without injuring his country. It is to this more
serious examination of his career that we now go.

Not that we propose to entangle ourselves in the minute details of it,
for that is in no way necessary. We have already in part explained
why we may, in such a sketch as this, drop out many years of his political
life. For a great length of time Mr. Gladstone was only a Budget-maker.
[Pg 420]
It is true he made them for Governments that were not
Conservative, but he still was considered nearly a Conservative outside
his financial handicraft. And here, again, part of the explanation
we earlier gave applies. There is not the slightest reason why any
Conservative should pause long to consider Mr. Gladstone as the
passer of the Ballot, or even as the disestablisher of the Irish
Church and the interferer with the rights of landed property in Ireland.
The only thing special to be said about him in connection with these
things as distinguishing him from the ruck of Liberals would be, that he
was a very late ex-Tory, and at the time a professed High Churchman. He
somehow got the Liberals to let him write his name across every one
of those measures so soon as it was seen that they would pass, and he
has made the legislation in that way seem to be his; but the Conservatives
know with whom they had really to deal in the inception and
the pushing forward of those movements, and it was not Mr. Gladstone.
The real men were Mr. Bright, Mr. Dillwyn, Mr. Miall, and those who
for many a year worked with them while Mr. Gladstone was never heard
of, never thought of, in connection with the matters they had always
matured before he had anything to do with them.

Nor was it on account of these affairs that Mr. Gladstone’s fall
occurred when it came, which is another reason why it would be waste
of time to discuss them in connection with him. Who is proposing to
alter these things now that they have been fought out between the great
parties of the State and decided? As a supplement to his Irish Land
Bill, we now have the Irish peasants refusing to pay any rent at all:
but in these days when a thing is done in our Parliament it is done.
The Conservatives, in spite of the majority at their back, have never put
forward a finger to touch those settlements, nor do they mean to do so;
and yet not only our own country, but all Europe, and indeed realms
farther away still, have been keenly aware that the Beaconsfield
Ministry has been very busy for years undoing something that Mr.
Gladstone had done.

What was this gigantic task, which was not the repealing of
legislation, or the passing of statutes of any kind, but which required
courage and effort more arduous than those things? There must
have been some cause for the bursts of applause which have again
and again echoed on our shores from all parts of the civilized globe
at something that was going on. It was, we hasten to answer, the
rehabilitation of England in the eyes of the world,—the restoration
of her ancient power as a factor in the enforcement and administration
of public right among the nations. Somehow, coincidently with
Mr. Gladstone’s prosperity as a Minister, England, his country, had
sunk, and in exactly answering ratio, and was sinking lower and
lower still daily. He was very famous, or at least very notorious, at
home, but the renown of Britain abroad was clouding; and our people
never will bear that, as history had shown before. This man, who at heart
[Pg 421]
was but a financier, and who ought in the fitness of things never to
have risen higher in office than a Chancellor of the Exchequer, whose
function it should have been to find funds for some one else as a Prime
Minister capable of a policy in the higher international politics befitting
an Empire, was conducting our foreign affairs in the spirit of a commercial
traveller; willing to effect a little saving by giving up a group of
islands in one part or a bit of territory in another, and to effect an
economy at another time by backing out of a treaty. Though, at the
same time, if anybody insisted, and there loomed, however distantly, a
possibility of war, he would pay the money down in a hurry by millions,
as he did in the Alabama case. We should have had all the world insisting
very soon, making peace more costly than war itself, besides the shame of
unjustifiable surrender.

But we were spared all this; though the undoing of the humiliation, as
far as it had gone, has fully occupied Mr. Gladstone’s successors ever since.

This is the great accusation which the Conservatives have to bring
against Mr. Gladstone—that of having degraded the position of his
country; and an arraignment more fatal than this cannot be made in the
case of a chief Minister. It is not alone the Conservatives who make
it. Did not Earl Russell, Liberal though he was, find enough English
blood in his aged veins when writing his last book, to say that Mr.
Gladstone had dragged the name of England through the mire? But
it would not be quite accurate to put this forward as the full
explanation of Mr. Gladstone’s sudden tumble from office; for it was
not until after that occurred that the bulk of people quite knew the
whole extent of the injury he had worked in this respect. The Conservative
leaders guessed it, but they knew more about foreign affairs
than the rank and file of the nation. Everybody, of course, high and
low, was aware that he had unasked given up the Ionian Islands because
of some literary reasons which he had come upon in writing books about
Homer, that he had surrendered territory in the San Juan Boundary
Question, and that he had quietly gone to Geneva and paid America,
not indeed all she asked,—for even with Britain’s wealth the whole
of the first modest request would only have been found with difficulty,—but
he had counted down a sum that made Brother Jonathan’s
shrewd eyes twinkle with joy. The country, from these events
following one another, had come to have a very uneasy feeling that
somehow under his auspices everything was going against us abroad.
Still it was only later that it was made fully apparent how completely
England was effaced; not until the three Emperors had begun to
settle the rearrangement of Eastern Europe, without so much as saying
to Great Britain, “By your leave.” There is difficulty when looking back
now to prevent oneself from suffering some illusion in this respect;
but it is a fact, and we may be glad of it, that Englishmen did not until
it was roughly forced upon them suppose beforehand that their position
had dwindled to quite so low an ebb.

[Pg 422]
At the elections of 1874, there was no distinct foreign policy before
the public, for though there were many on the Conservative side who
sympathized with France in her adversity, and saw clearly that Germany’s
mutilation of her territory meant trouble in time to come, not a
voice was raised in deprecation of our neutrality. But, for the
matter of that, it may be just as correctly said that there was no
matured domestic question before the country, for it will not be
supposed that there was a single Tory any more than a Liberal who
wished the Income Tax to be retained on his shoulders. It was hardly
for proposing to do away with that impost that everybody voted so unanimously
against Mr. Gladstone; they only did so at the polling-booths in
spite of his proposing it, which somehow seems rather mysterious. If his
opponents were not proposing to recall any of the recent legislation, and
if there was no special question of foreign affairs pending, and if nobody
had any desire not to be lightened of taxation, how was it, pray, that Mr.
Gladstone was so ignominiously hurled from power? In reality, there
is not the slightest difficulty about it—Mr. Gladstone was decisively
rejected by his countrymen, not on any question of policy, either home
or foreign, but because of the personal impression he had slowly but
surely imprinted on their minds. The real issue before the country was
whether it would have any more of Mr. Gladstone, and it said No.

It is a common artifice on the part of his apologisers to insinuate
that he had wearied the nation by offering it too many things
for its good. But neither individuals nor communities are much in
the habit of refusing gifts; it is the one thing, and nearly the only
thing, in this world for which there is an excellent reason whenever
so strange a proceeding happens. There is another way of
representing the matter, one much less complimentary but far more
true—the country was sick of Mr. Gladstone. Even the sight of
Mr. Lowe standing at his side with four millions of surplus in
his hands was not enough to tempt them. The promise to abolish the
Income Tax was the most tremendous bribe ever offered to the constituencies,
but, to their credit, it did not corrupt them. They would
not accept Mr. Gladstone any longer at any price whatever. The
believers in democracy, and Mr. Gladstone in particular, according to
some of his very latest reasonings, ought to have accepted this universal
disgust as being a popular inspiration. However, they have done
nothing of the kind, but avow that it was a public delusion, which they
at first hinted would be temporary; but if the public is liable to
delusions, and to fits of them which continue for seven or eight years
at a stretch, for that is now the duration of this one, what becomes of
these very radical gentlemen’s democracy? For it is not really open to
them to plead, though they will go on doing it, that the people’s eyes
were dazzled by a glitter of diplomatic success, and their blood infuriated
by a skilfully aroused anti-Russian feeling. It is not open to
them for a simple reason, but a very conclusive one: the elections came
[Pg 423]
before anything of this could have happened; and the elections themselves
arrived with the suddenness they did owing to something which had
preceded them—namely, a steady run of Ministerial defeats in the
by-contests, wherever a vacancy occurred in a constituency. Mr.
Gladstone avowed all this in the address with which he startled the
Greenwich electors and the whole country, though he and his friends
have never mentioned the fact since. It was for the purpose of
putting all things right that the elections which put them all more
wrong still were so unexpectedly ordered. It was not because of being
intoxicated by the diplomatic triumph of Lord Beaconsfield and Lord
Salisbury at Berlin—which did not occur till years after—that the
constituencies rejected Mr. Gladstone. We have no wish to be unnecessarily
impolite, but the true reason for it was that which we have
named already—they had come not to like Mr. Gladstone. If we
trace that fact backwards in a natural way, we shall find that one cause
of it was that they felt the honour and the interest of England were
not safe in his hands; but this was only one among other causes. It
swelled afterwards into the biggest reason of all, and now practically
includes all the others; but, at the moment, it was not actually known
that the safety of England was about to be imperilled.

The voters were affected by other reasons. What were those other
reasons? The public must have known them pretty clearly at the
time, since it acted so promptly and decidedly upon them, and it,
therefore, ought not to need very much recalling of them now, for the
time, after all, is not so very long ago. But it may be as well to go
into them a little, since it was through the incidents furnishing them
that the general public was led to form the very same estimate
of Mr. Gladstone which the Conservatives had held for about a
score of years before. At last the popular judgment coincided with
that of his Parliamentary opponents, and he fell from power. But
any one who will give a moment’s consideration to the cases of the
Collier appointment, the Ewelme Rectory affair, and the issue of the
Royal Warrant on purchase in the army, will see that we are right in
affirming that Mr. Gladstone’s ignominious expulsion from office was
owing to moral rather than political causes. It stands recorded that this
Minister, who had put religious professions in the front of his politics
in a way novel to public life, had to defend his conduct over and over
again in the House of Commons by quoting the mere letter of the law.
Parliament became not unlike the Old Bailey when a legal wrangle is
going on over the technicalities of an indictment; and the unwonted
spectacle of Lord Chief Justices accusing a theological Premier of
having somehow evaded a statute was not made any less unedifying
by Mr. Gladstone showing great skill in being his own attorney.
Everybody must admit that he certainly did that.

It is possible to recall each of the cases in very few words. An Act
of Parliament had been passed with a view to strengthening the Judicial
[Pg 424]
Committee of the Privy Council, and, as this Court was one of Appeal,
it stood to reason that those appointed to it to revise other Judges’
decisions should have had judicial experience themselves. It was expressly
provided in the Act that those to be raised to this Court should
be already Judges. To the surprise of the whole country, Sir Robert
Collier, well known as Mr. Gladstone’s Attorney-General, and, therefore,
conspicuously only a waiter for a judgeship, not a judge already,
was announced as the filler of one of these vacancies, before half the
readers of the newspapers knew that he had ceased to be Attorney-General.
It turned out, however, that he was in reality a judge at the
moment, and that he had been one for some few moments previously,
having, in fact, sat on the bench of the Common Pleas for just two
days. There is not space to follow Mr. Gladstone’s wonderful reasoning,
but it chiefly turned on a point so fine as this, that what the Act meant
to stipulate was not experience, but status. In other words, that a
man should be made a judge of one kind for five minutes, in order to be
turned into one of another kind, just for the say of the thing.
Amazed members of the Legislature which had passed the enactment protested
that they were not so foolishly subtle as this, and that they had
never, before Mr. Gladstone mentioned it, thought of any such distinction
as that between status and experience.

But this was not the only instance in which he has told people
what they had intended better than they knew, and all differently.
In the Ewelme Rectory business he would have it that when a statute
said Oxford it meant Cambridge, or at least that its specifying Oxford
did not signify, or that it included Cambridge, or, in fact, might be
construed to prescribe anything else which it did not say and which
was contrary to what everybody had thought of it before. However,
here, again, as the lawyers would otherwise have been troublesome, the
technicality was found to have been formally complied with. The
words of the enactment did really require that the man who was to be
made rector of Ewelme parish should be a member of Oxford Convocation,
and Mr. Harvey, Mr. Gladstone’s friend, who had been educated
at Cambridge, and who, until that living became vacant, had never
dreamed of connection with Oxford, was made a member of the Convocation,
in order to receive the living. Of course, Mr. Gladstone argued
that Mr. Harvey’s being a Master of Arts was enough, though the
statute said nothing of that, and everybody else had thought it expressly
stated a certain University where the Master of Arts was to come
from.

But let us go on to the third case, that of the issue of the Royal
Warrant abolishing purchase. Not a few of the Liberals who exulted at
the success of the party measure had a misgiving at the way in which
it was secured. It was felt to be a victory which could not be repeated,
and one of a style which, if they who snatched it had been Conservatives,
would have thrown the country into a convulsion. The most violent
[Pg 425]
act in the name of the Crown which the oldest man living in England has
witnessed, was counselled by Mr. Gladstone. Because the Lords, in
the exercise of the power which the Constitution gives them,
were not willing instantly to pass his Bill for giving an entirely new
social aspect to the army, he caused the Queen to do nothing short of
superseding them entirely, and practically reduced the Constitution at a
stroke to the Commons and the Crown. It is just now part of the
tactics of the Liberals to protest against some imagined wish to bring
in “personal rule.” If any such preposterous design existed, it would
be Mr. Gladstone’s own act which would be fallen back upon for the
precedent. The feeling which has best enabled the most thoughtful
among Englishmen to understand the kind of shock which foreigners
experience on the occurrence of one of the political earthquakes which
they call on the Continent by the name coup d’état, was that which ran
through the country when Mr. Gladstone announced that there was
nothing for the Lords to discuss, that he had advised the Queen to issue
a Royal Warrant. We had lost all recollection of the particular sensation,
but he brought back just a twinge of it. Mr. Gladstone, however,
can do Radical acts and then explain them historically. Once more we
found ourselves all inextricably entangled in his casuistry. He now
argued that the Royal Warrant had not been issued by exercise of prerogative,
but in strict pursuance of statutory power, there being some
Act of the Georges to that effect, which ordinary people had forgotten.
It is not necessary to follow the thing further. In the end, Mr.
Gladstone became too clever for the country. Even the dullest began
to perceive that Mr. Gladstone could conscientiously do whatever he
liked. The more subtly he argued, the more plain John Bull got
puzzled.

It may, at first sight, seem tasking the public memory too much to
ask people if they remember the tension there was in the political
atmosphere towards the end of Mr. Gladstone’s career. But a very
great many will not have forgotten it. The political weather is so far
like the other sort that it is only borne in mind for its badness; that,
however, was a terrible season. At the last, Mr. Gladstone seemed to
have got into the air, and he did not improve the climate. He may urge,
certainly, that Mr. Lowe had made himself very obnoxious, that Mr.
Ayrton had been found to be intolerable, and that the great trade of the
publicans, with all its supporters, was in arms against Mr. Bruce.
That is all true; the country disliked each one of these his chief colleagues.
But neither Mr. Lowe’s hard cynicism, nor Mr. Ayrton’s dogmatic
inæstheticism, nor Mr. Bruce’s stolid mechanical interference, stirred
the large keen dissatisfaction which Mr. Gladstone’s own incomprehensibility
in the end did. He gave men’s consciences a shock, and none
of the others affected to feel so deeply as that: it was only he who
had stood forward as a political moralist, and then set everybody by the
ears discussing his conduct. It was the same outside Parliament and
[Pg 426]
within it. Everybody was arguing Mr. Gladstone; nobody could make
him out, nobody felt safe, or could imagine what was coming next. If
the atmosphere had but been charged a little more with him, England
would not have been worth living in. Luckily the elections came, and
the air was cleared.

But if in the more exaggerated instances we have above spoken of, the
general public became aware of a certain obliquity, an unreliability, a
dissatisfied restlessness, an imperiousness in Mr. Gladstone, the Conservatives
had been more or less continuously aware of those qualities
for many years. They, as we said earlier, have had to observe the
right hon. gentleman closer, more continuously, and it would be easy
for any one of them who is of middle age to give from his own memory
a string of instances, just the same in kind as those above, though not
so broadly striking, beginning much earlier in his career, and coming
down much later. Very recently, Lord Salisbury at Manchester
recalled Mr. Gladstone’s dealings with his Oxford constituents in
reference to the disestablishment of the Irish Church. But his lordship
courteously spared his opponent the details. Has the world forgotten
the famous letter to Dr. Hannah, bearing the date of June,
1865, written, as Mr. Gladstone himself with unlooked-for naïveté
admits in his “Chapter of Autobiography,” for the appeasing of doubts?
He in it asserted, first of all, that the question was “remote and
apparently out of all bearing on the practical politics of the day;”
second, he avowed that he was probably going “to be silent” on the
topic; third, he said that “he scarcely expected ever to be called on to
share in such a measure;” and, as his finishing words, spoke of it as “a
question lying at a distance he could not measure.” These were far too
many causes for not doing a thing, and the Conservatives accordingly
began to look out. In 1869, Mr. Gladstone disestablished the Irish
Church. The “remoteness” and the “distance which was not
measurable” somehow came to be packed within these two dates,—1865-9.
What had so hurried matters? Well, one can only recall
what had happened in the interim, and among the events there had
been these two occurrences—he had been expelled from Oxford and
rejected by South Lancashire. The like suddenness attended his conversion
on the subject of the Ballot. After half a lifetime of opposition,
he one fine morning announced that it must pass, hardly a hint of
warning having been given beforehand.

But his whole career has shown this suddenness of advance,
at distinct periods, which, as we have said, always coincided with
the brightening of the prospects of the respective agitations. It
is true, as is earlier pointed out, that he took something like
a quarter of a century to travel the ground between the Conservative
starting-point and the Radical position, but the length of
time was not owing to his creeping between the bounds; he has
[Pg 427]
traversed it at successive leaps, standing still between, and, at
the places where he remained stationary, there was always the
warm shelter of office. This style of progress has characterized him
down to the present moment. As late as 1874 he told a deputation
that he did not consider the question of the County Franchise
ripe. There has been a good deal of very indifferent weather
since then; but whether or not the field crops have matured, it
seems now that the agricultural labourer has been growing fast.
Mr. Joseph Arch has been the sun that has shone upon him, and Mr.
Gladstone, as usual, is quite ready to reap the harvest. Examples
might be multiplied manifold. Take the boasted case of the Liberal
surplus, of which we have never ceased to hear—just as if Mr. Lowe
and Mr. Gladstone had between them coined the money. Its history,
stated in three words, was this: Mr. Lowe had mulcted the public in
an unnecessary twopence of Income Tax, and, instead of shamefully
confessing the incompetency it showed in a Chancellor of the
Exchequer, presented himself before the constituencies, on the eve of
the elections, with his hands full of gold, and with the air of presenting
it to them.

Mr. Gladstone, great financier as he is, was not above profiting by
his subordinate’s miscalculation. Instead of administering a rebuke,
as a good journeyman might have been expected to do to a bad
apprentice, he patted Mr. Lowe on the back. Indeed, in the Greenwich
address, when he so magniloquently spoke of the money being
given back in the shape of abolishing the Income Tax, he seemed to
take some credit to himself.

It will be beginning, perforce, to dawn upon the reader that this was
a Minister very difficult to be dealt with by an Opposition. If we had
space in this paper, a part of the task of sketching Mr. Gladstone
would be to point out how injuriously he has confused the demarcation
of parties; how unscrupulous he has been in seeking allies which on
no principle of fair classification belonged to him. It may be nothing
that he can half apologize for Irish Obstructionists—the Liberals have
always exploited Irish members. But this very high Churchman, who
clings to a tenet so ridiculous in the eyes of Dissenters as apostolical
succession, can figure in Dr. Joseph Parker’s chapel, and
betray a close and not uncomplimentary knowledge of the trust-deed
of the Rev. Newman Hall’s congregation. This austere gentleman,
who, when inquiring into the “Theses of Erastus” (see his article),
finds out that moral offences are at the root and source of all heresy,
has a kindly word for such free-thinkers as happen to be also political
leaders of the working men—Mr. Bradlaugh, for example. This
objector to divorce, on such stupendously elevated grounds as that we
are all members of a mystical body, and who cannot bring himself to
allow more than a civil marriage to a deceased wife’s sister, mingles in
[Pg 428]
the ruck of Radicals. But if he has what they must think ecclesiastical
crotchets, he always manages them with most skilful prudence. If he
has to satisfy his most private feelings by bringing in no fewer than six
resolutions in more or less opposition to the Public Worship Bill, he
can withdraw them again. But was this the gentleman to champion
Radicals and Dissenters? An Opposition which had to keep its own
consistent lines, and which was closely restricted as to its allies, was at
a perpetual disadvantage with one whose own opinions, subtle and
complicated as they might be, cut him off from nobody who could be
of aid.

Fortunately the country itself, at a certain rather tardy point,
rallied its patriotism in that spontaneous way which always practically
reinforces the Conservative party. The “Alabama” claims gave those
who did not meddle much in politics their first shock, while for more
thoughtful persons it brought back a reminiscence of the surrender of
the Ionian Islands; and when, later, the public saw him stand tamely
by while Russia tore up the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris,
every student of our history knew that Mr. Gladstone’s fate was sealed.
The nation, stirred by arousings of the deeper instincts of the English
character, at last reckoned with him on general grounds—dislike of
his personal demeanour, and dread of what he was bringing on the
country. It refused to be won either by the finest oratory or the
prospect of reduced taxation.

The Conservatives came into power on the highest tide of popular
feeling which living Englishmen have witnessed. But the change was
too late to prevent mischief; Russia, encouraged by England’s effacement
during Mr. Gladstone’s sway, had matured her further plans, and
had already put her secret intrigues into motion. The Treaty of San
Stefano showed plainly what her plan was, and just as clearly does
everybody not blinded by party feeling now know that to Russia’s
amazement, and amidst the surprised and grateful admiration of the whole
civilized globe, the present Ministry have thwarted that plan and made
England again safe and famous. It would be a waste of time to retrace
the details: a summary of them is to be found in Lord Salisbury’s
Manchester speech. What alone further concerns us here is the manner
in which Mr. Gladstone has borne himself in Opposition. We have
already seen how he did so as a Minister. It was understood, indeed,
that he had retired, with something which was meant to pass for dignity,
though to the eyes of the nation there was never anything which was
not sulk which had so much the look of it. However, on the plea that
something had happened in the world, he was quickly back again in
front, elbowing Lord Hartington aside. Speeches, in Parliament and
out, articles in every magazine, republication in pamphlet and volume,
letters to everybody, which, practically, meant to all the newspapers:
there never was such an active resuscitation of one who had so publicly
[Pg 429]
become politically defunct. It is, however, not for coming to life
again that we find fault with Mr. Gladstone, for, in truth, we always
expected it.

Our complaint is simply this, that if such a style of opposition as he
has resorted to became habitual, the government of the country would be
made impossible. No means were left untried to make Russia hope,
and other nations fear, that Lord Beaconsfield had not the nation at his
back, and, when owing to this encouragement, Russia showed obstinacy,
and it was necessary to risk something by exhibiting boldness, that very
necessity was sought to be turned into a reproach. Mr. Gladstone’s
own tactics made it imperative that in the matter of Cyprus, and some
other negotiations, secrecy should be observed, and the Government
was charged with acting unconstitutionally, as if constitutional
usage imposed no limits on the Opposition, or as if those limits
had not been transgressed. Just so, again, in the Afghan war. If Lord
Northbrook had acted with spirit years before, that war would never
have been necessary; but that trifling fact Mr. Gladstone overlooked,
he and the Duke of Argyll making it appear that Lord Lytton had
been at great pains to get himself and his Government into a difficulty.
Why Mr. Gladstone has had so little to say about the Cape war is a
mystery, which may be explained some day; all that can now be said of
it is that it shows a striking inconsistency. Luckily his efforts, though
his industry was gigantic, have failed, and even he must be now aware
that his renewal of them, though we suppose it must go on, having
been arranged so long and announced so pompously, is a trifle late,
with the Cape war ended, our troops in Cabul, those of Austria at Novi
Bazar, and checkmated, scolding Russia gnashing her teeth at Germany.
However, no doubt we shall have some very fine speeches, proving that
nothing of this ought to have happened, or that it won’t last long, or
that the Beaconsfield Administration did not bring it about, or any
thing else, just as reasonable, for fine words can be arranged in many
different ways by a practised orator.

What, then, we may finally ask, was the secret of Mr. Gladstone’s
success so long as he was prosperous, and what was the explanation of
his fall when it so suddenly arrived? The thrifty skill of calculation
in estimating the growth of questions which his whole career so irresistibly
points to was spoken of early in this sketch; but a man, no
matter how judicious in the management of his own approaches to a
party, cannot impose himself upon it. The Liberals, on the successive
occasions, welcomed Mr. Gladstone, and did so gladly, never making
his very late conversions a reproach. Its leaders were more vociferous
in hailing him at each renewed arrival one stage farther on than were the
rank and file, though some of them, as the thing was repeated, must have
been struck with the unfailing punctuality of his approach. Not that
we are professing to sympathize with these gentlemen. If it satisfied
them that whenever they had upset a Government, be it that of Aberdeen
[Pg 430]
or of Palmerston, the inevitable Mr. Gladstone always emerged out of
the wreck, just a little more Liberal than the day before, ready to take
the first pick of places in the new Cabinet, all well and good. But the
fact was that his arrival always was a convenience, for, no matter how
the sections differed among themselves, the rallying round Mr. Gladstone
as a further seceder from Toryism was a proceeding in which
they could all join, and it gave them, again and again, an appearance of
unanimity and cohesion. This was, in fact, his great function, and in it
he has been very valuable to the party. Besides, though so late and
seemingly slow in politics, he had from the first been great, and at the
outset even precocious, in finance; and, further, he was a wonderful
orator, even quicker in debating than Mr. Bright. Such a personage,
so largely prudent and so highly gifted, was sure to succeed,
and to do so for a long time; but he was also certain to fail in the end,
and that completely.

His temperament made that nearly certain. He was always too
busy making speeches, or writing for the press, or answering letters,
to be any power in social life. A strange kind of semi-recluse,
but combining with bookworm habits a passion for speechifying
and for using the penny post, was not likely to conciliate London,
and he never did. By-and-by he was railing at the Clubs,
because they did not agree with him; and then he had next to appeal
from the metropolitan journals to the superior politicians and brighter
wits who preside over the provincial newspapers. All this prognosticated
failure. Even his special gifts and the kind of successes which
fell to him turned into the means of helping it. His turn for figures
not unnaturally made immediate economy his great object, forgetful of
the larger connection in such a land as ours between an imperial position
in the world and the preservation of our commerce, and overlooking
also the costliness of reasserting our position when a crisis came;
while his ready eloquence, having no longer open to it the old patriotic
themes, had to expend itself in the adornment of British abnegation,
and the excited applause given to his rhetoric was mistaken by him for
assent to his views, till he was amazed to find himself suddenly quite
out of accord with the nation, and falling, he knew not why, headlong
from power.

Even to this hour he seems never to have had the least misgiving
that the man who could speak with such complacency
of the trading supremacy of the world passing to America (see his
article on “Kin Beyond the Sea”), and who could urge as a reason
for our not caring to interfere in Egypt that it would be the egg of a
North African empire (see his article on “Aggression on Egypt and
Freedom in the East”), was not the man to be England’s Minister. But
the country had found it out even before he wrote those articles; his
threatening his countrymen with the calamity of finding another
empire on their hands, in the only part of the world yet remaining
[Pg 431]
to be explored and civilized, has only proved that they were right, and
will not terrify Englishmen.

But a fluent orator has always left to him a kind of gambler’s hope of
retrieving everything by talking. Mr. Gladstone is going to alter everything
by making a dozen or two of speeches in Scotland. Are these
Midlothian harangues to be longer than that made at Greenwich, or
more numerous than those uttered in Lancashire? They may be as
fine as they will for anything it signifies to Conservatives, if the result
is only again the same as on the other occasions, and it is hardly likely
that he will persuade Englishmen now amidst their returning renown to
despair of the future of England.

A Conservative.

[Pg 432]

THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

When De Tocqueville,in his celebrated work upon the Ancien Régime
and the Revolution, had described the downfall of the Bourbon
monarchy, he ended with these words:—”I have now reached the
threshold of the great Revolution; on this occasion I shall not cross it,
but perhaps I may soon be in a position to do so, and then I shall no
longer consider its causes, but its nature, and shall finally venture to
pass judgment on the society that has proceeded from it.”

Death prevented this admirable inquirer from accomplishing his
purpose, a loss to the historical literature of Europe for ever to be
regretted, and certainly not least by the author who has now undertaken
to fill up the blank, and complete De Tocqueville’s projected
task—the description, namely, of modern France as the outcome
of the immense transformation which the Revolution brought upon
the Old French State. The fundamental principles which appear so
clearly and sharply in Tocqueville’s development are prominent in
Taine’s; the activity of the earlier author prepared the ground for
the later to build on. But we must admit that Taine’s work is pre-eminently
independent, and his descriptions more striking, broad, and
richly coloured than those of his precursor, while the material contents
of his work are often different. But what, in spite of this, constitutes
the resemblance between the two men is, their having for basis a
common conception both of the State and what it presupposes, and of
the historian and his task. It is the very opposite of the manner of
thinking entertained in the eighteenth century which, without any heed
to the peculiar character of the necessities of a given people, was bent
on constructing, according to simple rules of reason and natural
law, the best State for all time. Taine, in a very striking manner,
declares himself free from such an error. “In 1849,” he observes,
[Pg 433]
“I was an elector, and had to take part in the naming of a large
number of Deputies. Therefore it was necessary not only to decide as
to persons, but as to theories as well; I was required to be Royalist
or Republican, Democrat or Conservative, Socialist or Bonapartist,
and I was nothing of the kind—nay, I was nothing at all, and envied
those who had the luck to be something. These worthy men built a
constitution as they would a house, on the most ornamental, most new,
or most simple plan; a row of models stood ready for choice, a baronial
castle, a burgher’s house, a workshop, a barrack, a phalanstery, a
cottage, and each said of his favourite model: ‘That is the only
proper dwelling, the only one a rational man would inhabit.’ To me
this seemed an utter mistake. A people, as I thought, may indeed
be able to say what house they admire, but some experience is needed
to teach them what house they need, whether it be commodious and
lasting, stands the weather well, and harmonizes with the customs,
occupations, and fancy of its occupant. We here in France have
never been content with our political erections; in the course of eighty
years we have pulled them down and rebuilt them thirteen times. Other
nations have acted differently, and found their advantage in so doing.
They have preserved an old, substantial building, enlarged, built around,
and beautified it according to their needs, but never attempted to build
an ideal house at one stroke, according to the rules of pure reason. It
would therefore appear that the sudden invention of an entirely new,
and at the same time suitable and durable constitution is an undertaking
that transcends human capacity. The political and social form
which a people permanently assumes is no matter of choice, but fixed
by its character and its past. It must be suited to its idiosyncrasy,
even in the minutest points, or it will crack and fall. Therefore we
must know ourselves before we can discover what the proper constitution
for us is. We must invert the accustomed method, and first form to
ourselves a picture of the nation before we sketch a constitution. At
the same time this is a far harder and wider task than the one hitherto
in favour. What inquiries into past and present, what labour in all
domains of thought and action, are needed to understand with precision
and completeness the nature and growth of a great people through
centuries! But it is the only way to avoid putting out first empty
discussions and then incoherent constructions; and, as regards myself,
I shall not think of a political opinion until I have learnt to know
France.”

From this rejection of the rationalistic State theory, it follows, of
course, that the author declines the style of historical writing that
corresponds with it. We all know how parties who contended in the
course of the Revolution have gone on attempting to justify their
historical representation of it—Emigrants and Feuillans, Girondists and
Montagnards, Bonapartists and Communists. They all knew exactly at
the beginning of their historical labours what the conclusions arrived at
[Pg 434]
would be. Their own party had the ideal of the only healthy State cut
and dry, and hence the sentence upon companions, allies, and enemies was
pronounced beforehand. The desirable aspects of the Revolution were
owing to the activity of that party, the undesirable to the worthlessness
of its adversaries. The study of isolated facts only awoke real interest
in so far as it sharpened the perception of the main point—our party is
right, all others are wrong. To this disposition of mind more than to
any other hindrances we may attribute the small advance made, up to
the middle of our century, in the knowledge of facts, in the history of
the Revolution; this is what explains the else inexplicable phenomenon
that, spite of the large interest felt in the period, no history of
Louis XVI. drawn from authentic documents has as yet been written.
For that even the books of De Tocqueville and Taine, spite of the
strength of their authors’ intellect and the wealth of their material,
have not afforded us this, we shall soon convincingly see.

Both these works, however, are invaluable preparations for the
writing of such a history. With firm and decided political principles
of their own, both authors have determined to serve no party, but knowledge
only. Both desire to know men and circumstances before they judge
of the political experiments made. Both are full of the spirit of the old
saying: “Human affairs are neither to be wept over nor laughed at, but
to be understood.” It is only when we know the soil and the seed
from which the Revolution sprang that we can understand its nature and
working, and only from the understanding of the whole can we pronounce
upon the details with which factions have hitherto concerned themselves
in endless and unprofitable debate. We will illustrate our meaning by
a contrary procedure. I have not unfrequently heard the question:
“How can Taine, whose first volume reveals more fully than any previous
work the utter corruption of the Ancien Régime, place the Revolution in
his second in an equally unfavourable light? If the old state were
so completely good for nothing, the French were perfectly right in
utterly destroying it.” Accordingly, there has been no want of critics
who, after the appearance of the first volume, declared the author to be
a thorough Liberal, and, after the second, in deep disappointment, proclaimed
him a thoroughly reactionary politician. There are, indeed,
certain passages that might lead to such a conclusion, certain inconsistencies
do appear, but on the whole it is self-evident, from an historical
standpoint, that out of so evil a condition as the first volume paints
the dark pictures of the second must needs grow. Rather should we
have had cause to wonder if from a diseased root there had sprung a
healthy tree. The men of the Revolution had grown up on no other
soil and in no other atmosphere than that of the Ancien Régime; it
was under it that their notions had arisen, their passions been fostered,
and their ideal formed; it was there that their nature had received its
stamp and their strivings their direction; and if all relations were dislocated,
political feeling perverted, all portions of the people filled with
[Pg 435]
bitter hatred against the State and each other, how should pupils in
such a school amidst the final shock of catastrophes show themselves
men of ripe experience, practical wisdom, and determined energy? He
who has once taken in this simple truth will be much inclined to a mild
judgment of individual men and parties; at all events, he will not be
able abruptly to take sides either for or against the Ancien Régime or
the Revolution. For one thing will have grown clear to him, that the
Revolution was not the destroyer alone, but the undeniable offspring, of
the old condition of things.

That a work of Henri Taine’s displays literary ability of the first
order there is no need to say. His representation of events is grounded
on most industrious study; unpublished documents of all kinds are
cited, as well as printed works, and among the latter we have not only
French, but foreign authorities—English more especially—while
German are hardly so much as noticed. At all events, the mass of
thoroughly explored material is enormous, and our historical knowledge
is frequently extended, rectified, and cleared thereby. We shall attempt
to follow the general line of thought running through the book, and
now and then to controvert it on certain points.

It will be remembered to what pregnant results Tocqueville’s
inquiries led. The centralized government of France is by no means a
creation of our century, but a production of the Ancien Régime. Since
the days of Richelieu, ministers of finance and their intendants and
delegates had taken the exclusive charge of police of every kind, public
works and plans, the economic and spiritual welfare of the people.
The elementary principles of political liberty and parliamentary constitution,
of independent local administration and commercial freedom,
were destroyed thereby. Spiritual and temporal magnates had been almost
sovereigns in the districts in which they fulfilled the duties of government,
preserved internal and external peace, protected local interests,
and consequently imposed taxes and corvées upon their dependents,
while often successfully resisting royal aggression—all these magnates
were now as unconditionally as the mass of the people subjected to the
royal bureaucracy and forced out of all political activity—thenceforth, as
hated parasites, they had to live at the cost of the working people. The
King, therefore, assembled them at his Court, where, in compensation
for their loss of liberty and honour, pensions and presents—always at
the cost of the people—were heaped upon them. Thus the popular
hatred went on intensifying with every generation, and was at length
the source and essential element of the great Revolution.

It is on this thesis that Taine bases his representation of the subject.
Privileges were once the reward of political service done by the heads
and leaders of the people in their own territories. Then, the landlord
lived in the midst of his dependents—his own interest was identical
with their welfare, he was linked with them by natural and traditional
ties, and appeared as their powerful advocate whenever the State
[Pg 436]
attempted any arbitrary and oppressive measure. Now bureaucratic
government divided the landowners from the people, and by the unjustified
continuance of their privileges set the two henceforth in opposition.
For because the nobleman paid no taxes, the burgher and farmer
had to make up the deficit. Because he retained the right of chase,
his game had to be fed on the crops of his tenants. If a not inconsiderable
number of the higher middle classes gained the special
privileges of nobility, the burthens of the rest of the people were
only increased thereby. The author has rendered us praiseworthy
service by exposing the extent of privileges and feudal rights on one
hand, and of the increase of taxes and duties on the other, more fully
and precisely than any other writer has done. Thorough investigation
has brought out a still more appalling condition than had been
imagined. After the State, the Church, and the landlord had received
their rates, the share of the farmer in the proceeds of his land never
amounted to more than a half, and often his taxes rose to eighty per
cent. of his income. On the other hand, the privileged classes paid
at least a fifth less than the just proportion, and knew how to obtain on
a yearly average at least a hundred millions in the shape of presents,
pensions, &c. With increasingly few exceptions, there was no more thought
of any care to be taken of the lower classes by the higher. Prelates and
magnates streamed towards Versailles; all that the peasants knew of
them was from their unmerciful agents coming for rent and taxes. Thus
France fell asunder into two worlds without, unfortunately, any reciprocal
knowledge or common interest, divided by contempt and hatred—worlds
that lived on side by side, the smaller in wealth, enjoyment, elegance,
and luxury, and, above all, brilliant idleness; the larger in poverty,
wretchedness, ignorance, savagery, and, above all, in ever-growing and
devouring bitterness of heart—a condition such as no other nation of
Christian Europe had ever before come to.

Now all this is perfectly correct, and Taine proves it by a mass of
authentic testimony: nevertheless it may be observed that it is only a
part of the truth, and by this one-sidedness the author has been led
into error.

I am now alluding to the first part of this exposition, that which
treats of the centralization of the government in the hands of royal
officials as the deepest root of all this mischief. The worst side of this
centralization had been incontrovertibly exposed by De Tocqueville,
but none the less his representation was unfair and unjust, because it
made no mention of the brighter side. No one can contest that the
political inactivity of men of all positions in a system that referred the
general interests of France to a bureaucracy, demoralized the higher classes
and left the lower ignorant and inexperienced. Still the historian should
not forget the actual achievements of this great bureaucracy. Under
Colbert’s guidance it created the civic order and economical beginnings
of modern France. It, for the first time in France, rendered throughout
[Pg 437]
a century a burghers’ war an impossible thing, and it stimulated internal
traffic by roads and canals, which gave rise to countless industrial
and commercial undertakings. Later, under Turgot and Necker, it
waged, on behalf of the people, war against the pressure of privileges,
thought primarily of reform and progress, and saw with bitter regret the
defeat of its popular efforts by the opposition of the nobles. Tocqueville
himself tells how the Liberal parties before the Revolution thought
more of reforms than liberties—that is to say, they expected the improvement
of their condition from a further strengthening of the Monarchy.
It came to a Revolution first, however. The Monarchy, wielded by the
feeble hand of Louis XVI., was unequal to the task; then privileges
fell for ever, but after ten years monarchical centralization arose anew
in order a second time to satisfy the needs and inclinations of the
French people throughout three generations. It seems therefore a
mistake to paint this institution so out and out black. We may
lament that it has not merely done nothing to educate the French in
political liberty, but has as much as possible stifled liberty and the very
sense of it among them. But how without it, under the circumstances
that succeeded to the religious wars and the Fronde, anything like a positive
constitution ever could have arisen in France, De Tocqueville does
not say. We are indeed amazed when Taine, in his enumeration of the
privileged classes as those luxurious idlers, those once political servants
who had now renounced all political influence, numbers, as third with the
clergy and nobility, the King—the head of that Government, which was
only too zealous in working, and thereby drew all the power of the State
to itself and excluded all others from care for the common weal. Here
there is an evident contradiction, nor is it any way cleared up by
the circumstance that personally Louis XV. vied in indolence and
debauchery with the worst of his courtiers, or that his unfortunate
successor spent much of his time and energy in Court etiquette
and the chase. For the reign of Louis XVI. was from first to last
spent in efforts, by the setting aside of feudal privileges, alike to
strengthen the Crown and promote the good of the people, and in no
case can it be more incorrect to look upon the Crown as a devouring
parasitical growth upon the body of the State. This brings me back to
my former remark: had Taine instead of or by the side of his picture
of society under the Ancien Régime written the history of its last
monarch, most assuredly he would have avoided this misconception.

But he admirably describes how the brilliant and empty position of
the higher class led step by step to ruin. These distinguished
personages had no earnest and strenuous activity; to be civil officials
appeared to the majority of them below their dignity. They adopted
the army as a mere sphere of chivalrous adventure, for even there,
there was no question for them of rigid discipline; they left the drilling
and care of their troops to subalterns and sergeants. Bishops and
abbots drew immense revenues, and gallantly offered their devotion to
[Pg 438]
fair dames, but as to divine services and cure of souls, they were the
affair of needy priests and hungry vicars. The only field for their
ambition and interest was the Court, the salon, good society. To
shine there was the object of their distinguished lives. And as the French
people have ever been largely endowed with grace and esprit, these efforts
resulted in a perfection of personal appearance, a virtuoso-ship of social
intercourse, a fixed and yet highly elastic code of bon ton, such as the world
never saw before or since. Until then the first class of a great nation
had never been known to make the formation of an exquisite society
its highest, nay, its only life-purpose, to subordinate and sacrifice
mental activity, moral strength, and individuality of character to the
promotion and claims of this cultus. Here the final end of existence
was enjoyment in all imaginable degrees, and thought and action were
rigidly directed to it. That the greatest part of life should be spent
in society was the most pressing requirement of politeness, the
reciprocal recognition without which all society becomes unendurable.
The conventional forms in which this recognition clothed itself became
the law of this great world, and the consequences were felt on all sides.
Any appearance of individual peculiarity or opinion came to be held
unfitting; to be other or better than the rest was an offence against
manners. Equally forbidden was the manifestation of any strong
passion, a thing by its very nature opposed to the sway of conventionality.
Vice therefore was excused if it presented itself gracefully,
and almost honoured if it brought a startling and exciting variety into
the monotony of daily life. Mental enjoyments were as welcome as
sensual, provided they could be had without trouble or labour, for the
aim was not to be informed, but amused, and so any kind of knowledge
was good, with the exception of the tedious. Hence it followed that all
mental acquirement was estimated not by the worth of its content but
the excellence of its form: abstract intelligence in the service of enjoyment,
such was the motto of this society. Genial originality, unconscious
creative power, native vigour, were thoroughly antipathetic
there, or only tolerated in so far as they made themselves subservient
to the ruling mood.

A further consideration of how essentially these characteristics
of good society tended to strengthen and sharpen the revolutionary
theories of its deadly foes, here becomes instructive. The development
of this process may indeed be looked upon as the salient point in Taine’s
work, for often as the French literature and philosophy of the eighteenth
century have been treated of, I know of no earlier author who with such
extensive material and penetrating insight has clearly brought out
the continuous reciprocal action of circumstances and theories, and thus
gained an unalterable scale for the measurement of both by history.
Taine begins, as is just, with the mighty impetus given to natural science
since the middle of the seventeenth century throughout Europe, by which a
way was opened for an utterly new view of the world and of men, in opposition
to the speculative and theological conceptions of the Middle Ages.

[Pg 439]
Next comes under consideration the prevalence of the inductive
method, the rejection of all dogmatic assumption, the repugnance to
all intuitive ideas, the proclamation of observation and experiment
as the only sources of verifiable knowledge. These principles having
been at once unconditionally acknowledged in the sphere of natural
science, the next step was to apply the tone of thought they had
engendered to the phenomena of spiritual and social life, and here also
to demand thorough investigation by the one true authority—criticism.
Whatever the consequence of this investigation might in particular cases
be, the very fact that it had been demanded, that the right of the existing,
as such, was denied, that the authority of tradition was subjected
to that of critical reason—this betokened a new epoch in the world’s
history, and opened out possibilities of hitherto undreamed-of progress
in politics and religion, State and Church, material and spiritual
culture. It is now plain that if the inductive method can lead to such
positive results, its application should be thorough and universal. No
naturalist delivers a general law as to the life of an organism before he
has considered its origin, existence, and decay in all their stages, compared
it with its like, separated it from its unlike; for it is just through
the discovery and recognition of the eminently special that analysis leads
him to the comprehension of universal truth. And according to this
same rule, in order to arrive at a just and practicable idea of reform for
any State, a great mass of special observations by technically practised
and prepared eyes would have been required; legal, economical, and
historical inquiries made; the peculiarities of individuals and peoples, of
the epoch and stage of culture, must have been known; the not merely
personal but collective functions of human nature in their bases and
action investigated: for only when all this had been accomplished could it
be asserted that the organism of the State and its laws had been dealt
with after the manner of a genuine naturalist, and that we were now
in a condition to judge of single actualities according to these laws.

How came it that in the France of the eighteenth century the
very opposite occurred—that politicians, stimulated by young natural
science, should from the very first turn their backs upon the inductive
method, and evolve the future State rationalistically, according to a
few abstract principles?

Taine convincingly shows the reason of this: it was chiefly the influence
of fashionable society upon literature which led to this fatal
tendency.

The highest circles in Paris and Versailles, in their brilliant but
idle existence, were, as we have seen, as intent upon mental as sensual
excitement, and therefore prepared to open their doors to every littérateur
who could satisfy this demand. Now, owing to the actual structure
of society in France, the writer who did not choose merely to devote
himself to a few professional subjects had no other public than this distinguished
class. They and they alone were in a position to secure him
praise, honours, and a certain income, therefore it was most natural
[Pg 440]
that the writer should conform to requirements upon the satisfaction of
which his literary career was so absolutely dependent. We have now
to inquire what were the characteristics of the prevalent tone of thought
among the highest class. First a horror of all thoroughness, all enduring
and laborious perseverance, all deep earnestness and spiritual
recollection. For all this was the very opposite of enjoyment and diversion,
it was a falling into the deadly sin of tediousness. It was desirable,
indeed, to have much and varied knowledge, but rapidly and lightly, by
vivid and pungent discussion, to reach the quintessence of the most
interesting points and conclusions. Consequently the author’s productions
became restless, many-sided, and superficial. The mass of
information in every department of knowledge which Voltaire, for
instance, had at his disposal was immense; but the working out and
application of it were strongly hasty, aphoristic, and frivolous. To this
was added the dislike the public of the time had to any individual
peculiarity, its tendency to force all personalities into one conventional
form—an effort equally fatal to poetic creation and to the historical sense.
For such men as these the world was comprehended in what they called the
great world; they had lost the power of imagining that there was
or ever had been an existence outside of it and absolutely unlike it; or if
in any particular case the astounding fact could not be entirely concealed,
it was understood that among cultivated persons it could never
be given any importance. Even on the stage it was no longer considered
becoming that peasants or labourers, a Peruvian or Iroquois, should speak
in their own natural manner; they were all alike rendered polite,
sententious, and fluent as their distinguished audience. Each local and
individual tone was rubbed away, every person of the drama was but a
mouthpiece for the eighteenth-century eloquence of the author. As
with the drama, so with other literature. Taine correctly observes
that if we read an English romance of the period, we have before our
eyes a section of the English people; but a French one, though widely
varying in garb, contains invariably a picture of a French salon, and that
only. In presence of so universal a mood as this, how could any one
come to the study of the State by means of difficult and distant
researches on historical ground? Montesquieu did it, but he remained
solitary among his contemporaries, won much celebrity, but exercised
very little influence. The other reformers used quickly to turn
over the pages of histories in order to find piquant quotations for some
ready-made theory; as, for instance, the ambition of priests, the
falsehood of diplomatists, the insatiability of princely greed. As to
the complicated task of judging any individual State and its constitution
according to its climatic and geographic conditions and its
historical antecedents, with the exception of Montesquieu, no man
dreamt of that. The public, with whom the decision lay, did not require
anything of the kind, nay, would have repaid the severe toil with disapproval.
It placed, as we have before said, far more stress on a
[Pg 441]
pleasant form than an instructive purpose, cared but little for any
subject in itself, but only as affording material for the most intelligent,
yet at the same time most comprehensible and exciting conversation.
In debate no trace of previous knowledge won by personal effort was
pre-supposed; all that was needed was never to be commonplace, and in
every case to bring forward new and amazing truths. Accordingly
speech and style strove neither for fulness nor depth, but so much the
more for clearness and conclusiveness. In exposition, the progress was
regular from syllogism to syllogism, great care being taken never to skip
over a middle term. In order to be impressive the speaker became
rhetorical, in order to convince he endeavoured to reduce every subject
to one universal and easily inculcated proposition. Good society was
delighted to be thus agreeably put in possession of the most advanced
views of the world; but literature thus allowed itself to deviate from
real knowledge into the way of empty abstraction.

That the literature thus fostered and guided should from the beginning
of the eighteenth century have been in opposition, that since the middle
of it it should have undermined with savage impetuosity all the foundations
of existing conditions, this gave not the least shock to distinguished
society. Disgust at their own impotence and the omnipotence of royal
officials, dislike to an intolerant orthodoxy, vexation at some personal
neglect at Court,—altogether there was cause enough for malicious satisfaction
when philosophers, by biting criticisms, made clear the standpoint
of burdensome potentates. And when an ever-growing and strengthening
Materialism taught the doctrine of physical enjoyment and judicious
selfishness as the guiding principle of human conduct, it only spoke
out what had half-unconsciously been the sum of all the motives and
activities of high society. But above all, theories were but theories,
merely conversation, excitement, pastime. The nobles declaimed against
obsolete abuses, but naturally each meant to keep his own rightful
possessions, and among these were privileges and feudal rights. They
felt conscious of a fresh superiority to the ignorant masses, because they
professed humanitarianism and liberalism, and spoke against superstition
and subordination. That these much-admired theories might by-and-by
become common to the whole community, and then bring
about horrible explosions—of this they had not the remotest suspicion.
Any one who had in 1780 prophesied such a thing to the ladies of
Versailles, would have been looked upon as we should look upon a
prophet nowadays, who told us that in the next century cats and dogs,
instead of men, were to be lords of creation.

This, then, was the public in whose atmosphere and with whose
co-operation the philosophy of revolutionary enlightenment sprung up.
It was here that it learned its rapid and superficial mode of study, its
rejection of an historical spirit in favour of multitudinous present
actualities, its taste for rhetorically adorned formulæ and commonplaces.
When the construction of the best State was to be set about, common
[Pg 442]
characteristics were collected from the natural history of mankind, such
as the dislike to pain, the impulse towards pleasure, the capacity of
forming, from sensations, representations and conclusions. These
characteristics were merely put together as the concept man,
and from this abstract man were deduced, as in a mathematical
formula, the laws of politics, morals, and rights. Since all men had
the same natural impulse towards happiness, the State must render it
possible for them all to reach that aim. Since all had a natural
capacity to form concepts and conclusions, they would be sure to employ
the right means to that end so soon as their hands were left free, or
in case of a momentary mistake these right means logically pointed out
to them. That passion is, in point of fact, in the great majority of
men, stronger than reason, and desire more impetuous than thought,
was disregarded by these admirers of abstract reason; the fact that
each man had the faculty of drawing a logical conclusion appeared to
them to insure his conforming his conduct to the requirements of that
conclusion. If a logically formulated proof of the excellence of one
of the Constitutions they had sketched could be arrived at, they fancied
that the security and durability of its construction was perfectly
guaranteed. On the other hand, that the preservation of constitutional
order required other forces besides logical discussions, this was altogether
outside their range of thought.

But logic knows no limits beyond the evolution of its own conceptions.
The existing condition of things lent itself to being ground to
powder. Before the critical assault of the new teaching no defence of
the hoary unrighteousness of the Old Régime could make a stand; the
pity was that, according to its own principles, the former found it impossible
to attain to a firm and enduring constitution of any sort or colour.

But, if possible, the theories afloat set in against the existing
ecclesiastical system even more strongly than against the political
constitution. The natural science of the day afforded far more material
for battle on that ground than the other. Astronomy, physiology, and
anthropology joined with the efforts of philosophy to demonstrate that
miracle was a delusion, revelation unthinkable, and an extra-mundane
God unverifiable. Soon numerous voices exalted negation into the
positive statement that every idea of God should be rejected, and that
the so-called soul in man was only the highest function of organized
matter. True, Voltaire remained through life a Deist, and Rousseau
declared his faith in God and in the immortality of the soul; but the
one all the more resolutely contended against the divine institution of
the Church, and the other against the fundamental Christian doctrines
of Sin and Justification. However different each may have been from
the other, they waged in common a war for life and death against the
Church, the war of utterly opposed principles. Tocqueville was wrong
in saying that the Revolution was only inimical to the Church as a
feudal and aristocratic institution; that after it had lost its wealth and
[Pg 443]
privileges, democratic society recognized how strong a democratic
momentum the Church itself contained, and accordingly gave itself up
with increased warmth to religious feelings. Here there is no doubt
Taine’s record is the more correct one. The Revolution knew well
that it desired not the wealth only, but the fall of the Church; and
not the partisans of the Revolution, but its adversaries, whose numbers
were largely swelled by the cruelties of the Terror, have brought about
the elevation of the Church in our own century.

If we now contemplate somewhat more narrowly the Constitutional
theory of the illumination, we shall discern two characteristic and
prominent features, which, on the one hand, show its descent from the
innermost core of the Ancien Régime, and, on the other, very energetically
determined the whole course of the Revolution. The ideal state deduced
from the universal characteristics of mankind was as cosmopolitan as
levelling. Just as on the stage of the period, Frenchman and savage,
ancient Greek and modern Parisian, spoke the same language,—that of
the salons of Versailles,—so political theories recognized neither
Frenchman nor Englishman, Catholic nor Protestant, educated nor uneducated,
only Man in general. They never considered what institutions
would be adequate, in France, to the needs and capacities of the
educated ranks and uneducated masses, or how far the habits and
opinions of their nation would render the adoption of a foreign institution
practicable or injurious; rather they formulated the rights of
men, of abstract instead of actually existing men, and were convinced
that a constitution based thereupon was for all men, and consequently
for all peoples, the only good, and therefore the only lawful one. And
just as clear as the equality of nations under the new political law,
appeared the equality of all men in the new State, by which was meant
not merely a claim to equal protection by law, or equal facility in
obtaining one’s rights, but a demand for the realization of an inborn
and material equality of rights. This, as is well known, was the point
on which Rousseau took his stand, and gave the last and decisive
direction to the impending democratic revolution. Taine justly
observes how frequently, in spite of their common principles, Rousseau’s
character and way of life led him to take different views
from those of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. The deepest and most
unqualified indignation of these last was inspired by what they called
superstition, stupidity, and priestcraft, the transformation of the old
State being with them more an affair of the intellect than the feelings,
a conclusion drawn from their universal theory and an ideal requirement
of philanthropy. It was generosity that led them to appear as the
advocates of the poor and their woes, while they themselves were high
in the approval and favour of the best society. Rousseau, on the other
hand, had himself led the life of the proletaire; in the nervous excitability
and measureless vanity which made him almost prouder of his
weaknesses and vices than of the greatness and strength of his talents
[Pg 444]
he—poor, often hungry, not seldom degraded and reviled—had filled
himself with burning wrath against the favoured of earthly fortune,
the noble and the rich, the revellers in idleness and luxury. This
growing hatred he transferred to the State and the laws which had
produced so unrighteous a contrast between man and man. Men, he
maintained, were in their original condition good, because equal. It was
the State, culture, society, that first introduced inequality, and vice and
crime thereby. The existing order was not merely incompetent, as the
Encyclopædists asserted, but hurtful, poisonous, deadly. And, in contrast
to it, he sketches a picture of the true human State.

Equal and good men assemble in their natural condition to think on
the basis of their future State. Each endows the new community
with all liberty and property, in order to receive back an equal share of
the management and the possessions of the whole. But this whole is
omnipotent. No laws bind its will, for its will is the source of all law.
No king, no official, no superior rules over it; each individual is only
empowered to act, so far and so long as he upholds the plenipotence of
the sovereign mass. It is not the upper classes who command the
people, but the people which require obedience from its officers and
throws them away when they no longer please it. For individual
liberty there is here no place; but owing to the equality of all, the free
will of the masses joyously and harmoniously prevails.

For a season these doctrines only served to afford a welcome mental
stimulant to the minds, if not of the nobility, of the cultivated and
property-possessing classes. The higher, and soon the lower, bourgeoisie
inflated themselves with these views. At this period they shared
certain of the privileges of the nobles, filled numerous and prominent
offices in the State, gave to the nation its largest number of famous
thinkers and poets, promoted industry and commerce, and daily increased
in wealth, while the nobles, by their extravagance, ruined themselves
financially. The former were, therefore, full of the consciousness
of their own dignity, and found the continued precedence claimed by
the nobles to be unendurable. They believed with inward satisfaction
in this doctrine of the equality of all men and the sovereignty of the
whole. For, instead of the privileged, it seemed to them self-evident
that owing to their culture they, the hitherto unprivileged, ought to stand
out prominently among the people as leaders of that governing
whole. Thus the state of freedom and equality would be the state of
pure reason as well, and, therefore, the leading position could not fail
to fall to them, the masters of reasonable discussion. Meanwhile the
mass of the poor, wholly cut off from the sources of culture and the
mental movements of their country, for long years knew nothing of this
absolute governing power which, according to the new discoveries, inalienably
belonged to it, and was so surprisingly soon to fall into its
lap. The only change in their condition, and thus the only preparation
for their future sovereignty, was an increase of outward distress and of
[Pg 445]
inward confusion and embitterment; and then came the time when the
small circle to which education and enjoyment were limited, and the State
power they wielded, fell into internal demoralization, strife of factions, and
financial embarrassments, till the very Crown itself was obliged to summon
popular forces to war against the privileged. All the springs of State
machinery refused to work, coffers were empty, authorities and classes at
bitter internecine strife, the army unreliable and undisciplined. It was
under circumstances like these that the mass of the people in towns and
villages heard from their candidates, advocates, and demagogues, what
in truth their rights were. In their ignorance and want, their rudeness
and embitterment, they suddenly learnt that for them—as sovereign—limits,
obligations, authority no longer existed, that the old corruption
and slavish condition was to be thoroughly got rid of, and that then
everything would belong to them. They listened with greedy ears, and
rushed forward to trample under foot whatever sought to contest these
rights of theirs.

The highest and noblest aims lured the century on, and animated the
hearts of countless worthy men: liberty, well-being, and culture for
all, no difference between man and man but that of talent and virtue,
fraternity among all citizens in the State and all nations on the earth;
these were the ideals that 1780 proclaimed to the world and the future,
and therefore the French still love to speak of the deathless principles
and fair days of this first epoch of the Revolution. All this,
Thiers tells us, would have been admirably realized had not evil-hearted
emigrants and foreign Powers by their malignant attacks, driven the
most humane of all Revolutions into desperation, a fight for existence,
and bloodshed. All would have gone well, says Louis Blanc, had not the
wicked Thermidorians, on the occasion of Robespierre’s fall, brought in a
policy of vice and self-seeking instead of one of virtue and brotherly love.
Probably, on the other side the Vosges, eighty men out of every hundred
adopt one or other of these views, and so it is easily intelligible that
the merciless facts by which Taine shatters these fair pictures should be
received with repugnance and surprise by his countrymen. The contrast
between such a reality and such an ideal is indeed enormous; fair days,
or so much even as one fair day in the course of the Revolution, can
no longer be spoken of; in the very hour when absolute monarchy
collapsed, a wild, rude, and cruel anarchy covered the land, filling
France with violence and crime of every kind for a decade, and lastly
causing an unparalleled despotism to appear to the French people
salvation and deliverance. The conclusion is unavoidable, either the
ideal was good for nothing, and the Coblentz emigrants had right on
their side against the nation, or the French people had set about their
high task in a quite impracticable way, and their historical fame has
this time to be limited to the motto, In magnis voluisse sat est. Neither
of these alternatives will have a pleasing sound in the ears of a Liberal
Frenchman.

[Pg 446]
But, pleasing or not, the facts are indisputable, and up to the present
time each new investigation of authentic documents has only served to
give them a wider range and a more assured basis. We have seen the
end of the Ancien Régime. The nobles of the former State were
unnerved by idleness, debilitated by enjoyment, degraded by immorality;
never had the aristocracy of a great nation fallen and been brushed
away from the soil of their country, making so feeble a resistance.
The leaders of the movement followed a political teaching based on a most
one-sided and therefore radically false conception of human nature, and
had no idea of the real nature of their fellow-citizens, or of the principles
and needs of genuine political life. Finally the masses were unmoved
by any political thought whatever, but were darkly conscious of their
own wretched state up to the present time, and their hatred of those who
had, or were supposed to have, occasioned it, were credulous and impressionable,
and penetrated with the rightfulness of their wildest passions
and desires. With such materials as these it is possible indeed to
blow up an old and half-useless house, but not to construct on its ruins
a well-planned and lasting new one.

Thus Taine shows by details from documents contemporaneous with
the events, how, even before the opening of the National Assembly,
the condition of things was out of joint at a hundred points. Tumults
and plunder, disobedience to authorities, and maltreatment of obnoxious
persons, were the order of the day; public officials were spiritless, and
dared not command the already murmuring troops to restore order.
The first weeks of the Assembly brought hot discussions as to the
union of the three orders, attempts at reactionary State measures, and
the taking of the Bastille. Excitement grew from day to day; the suspense
throughout the country was tremendous. With the Parisian catastrophes
the whole Ancien Régime rocked and gave way from side to side;
and not merely privileges and feudal rights, but all State authorities
vanished at one blow, or at the first threat from an armed mob resigned
their functions. The French nation had positively no government, no
laws, no police, no taxation. In place of these they had journals, clubs,
societies, popular songs, and Lynch law; security for person and property
no longer existed; every one did according to his heart’s desire till a
stronger than he preferred the opposite and knocked him down. This
state of anarchy actually went on thus till the culmination of the
Reign of Terror; every now and then it quieted down here or there, to
burst out the following day at some other point with redoubled fury.
In the midst of the omnipresent turmoil and confusion, the King, a
powerless prisoner, sat in the Tuileries. The only quarter which
afforded a possibility of the restoration of the State was the National
Assembly, which was sufficiently respected and popular both with the
people and the National Guard, to have enforced obedience had it set
about it the right way. But there were two reasons which forbade the
adoption of that way. One was that the Assembly was deprived of
[Pg 447]
free action by the ruling theory of the Rights of Man, Liberty and
Equality. This included the rights of resistance against oppression,
and accordingly every citizen might at any moment consider himself
oppressed and authorized in resisting. It had been borne in upon
these sovereign citizens that the will of the sovereign people stood
higher than that of its representatives, and that the people was at any
time capable of re-entering upon the direct exercise of its sovereignty.
It is plain that under the influence of theories such as these any
control over street-riots and local deeds of violence was a difficult, if
not hopeless task. And, on the same ground, it was impracticable to
attempt any control or regulation of press or clubs, which looked upon
their boundless activity as the highest expression and most precious
jewel of revolutionary liberty. As, according to theory, State officials
were to be, not the lords, but the servants of the sovereign people, it
became expedient that they should not be named by the Central
Government, but chosen, and that only for a short time, by the citizens.
In the same spirit the affairs of Government were entrusted not to
individual officials, but to deliberating colleagues; while, as to the
passing of laws, the principle of equality rendered impossible the
formation of an Upper House, or any finally decisive action on the part
of the King. Thus the Government remained powerless, legislation
was hasty and uncertain, the lower classes unmanageable, and on very
many occasions it was plain that club orators and journalists who knew
how to flatter the demands of the masses bent both Government and
National Assembly beneath their sway. More than once there arose
indignation in the Assembly at so unworthy and dangerous a condition;
but at each attempt to grapple with and remove it, the fear
of a monarchical or aristocratic reaction fell upon it and paralyzed
its action.

In order to control the anarchical wilfulness of demagogues and
proletaires there was but one thing to be done, to strengthen the authority
of the executive. This meant restoration of discipline in the army, and
energetic organization of Government, extensive powers conferred on the
police officials, sharp punishments, and swift justice. But how then? If
power were thus conferred upon the Government to restrain proletaires
and rioters, who could guarantee liberty and the National Assembly
against the head of the reinforced Government, against the King, who
had hitherto been by these chronic riots kept in defenceless subjection?
This dilemma led to the revolutionary spirit invariably triumphing at the
National Assembly. The present fear of the violence of the crowd
attendant at the sittings combined with the apprehension of a future
monarchical reaction. When, some years later, at the organization of the
Republican Government, the weakness of authority was again felt, more
than one orator freely declared the existing arrangements to be undoubtedly
bad throughout, and to be amended as soon as possible; owned that
this had, indeed, been perfectly known at the time of their creation in
[Pg 448]
1790, but that they were intentionally framed thus, in the interests of
liberty, to prevent the King from exercising any power. Enough—the
Constitutional Assembly did nothing to surround personal safety and
political order with any inviolable defence; on the contrary, they did
much to open the door wide to the passionate and arbitrary action of the
masses. We may say that they thoughtlessly sowed the seeds of all the
horrors of the Terror, and had the sad beginnings of that development
before their eyes, without even an attempt to avert them. This is true, most
especially in the economical department: the colossal transformation
of the laws of property in France, which brought half the soil into new
hands, and irresistibly threw the population at large into communistic
paths, was out and out the work of the Constituent Assembly.

For more than twenty years I have, in my “History of the Revolution
Period,” established these circumstances from authentic documents, and
thus given repeated offence to the French public. I may therefore be
permitted to feel all the greater satisfaction at such a distinguished
investigator as Taine, after drawing forth numberless documents from
Parisian archives, coming to absolutely the same conclusion. All I
have heard in the way of objection to his statements is utterly
unimportant. As it is not possible to drive the facts he has proved
from original documents out of existence, the observation is made that
though his information may be true, it is one-sided; that while he
never wearies of describing revolts and misdeeds, he does not sufficiently
point out in how many places the Civil Guard bravely and loyally
upheld civil order. Taine would be the last to dispute this fact; had
it not been so there would have been no longer any France left in the
nineteenth century. But he would venture to inquire whether praise
be deserved by an Assembly which, as ruler of a great State, surrendered
without resistance now the third of it, now the half, during three years, to
a bloody anarchy; whether we can speak of “fair days” or “humane
Revolution,” when in this short period six horrible Jacqueries laid the
land waste, when countless political murders remained unpunished, and
military émeutes and ecclesiastical brawls thrust the weapons of civil
war into the hands of the masses. We are told of a pure and ideal
inspiration then filling millions of liberty-loving and patriotic spirits;
and well may we call that a fair time in which noble aims and infinite
hopes set all pulses beating higher, and stimulate a whole people to
youthful efforts, and fill it with fresh and energetic life. Yes, there
were moments of golden dreams and illusions like these. Only they
should have lasted longer. It is not through their feelings, speeches,
wishes, but their deeds, that nations assume their historical position
and receive their historical sentence. Taine writes the last, indeed,
with an incisive pen, and often with glaring colours, but essentially he
gives nothing but what follows by indissoluble sequence from the
facts of the Revolution.

On certain points, indeed, one may notice a few omissions in his
[Pg 449]
work, or raise a few objections, though they do not affect it as a
whole. Space does not permit me to dwell on all particular instances;
I must be satisfied with pointing out a few. While during the first
months of the Revolution the agitation of the lower classes was
identical in town and country, and the lawless violence of artisans and
peasants pursued the same ends by the same means, one of the most
prominent features of the later phase, the Terror, was the gradual
introduction of a war of interest between the people of the capital and
the villages. The more the power of the Mountain and the Parisian
Commune increased, the more absolutely the booty of the Revolution
fell to the share of the town proletaires, at the cost not only of the
great landed proprietors, but the small farmers as well. Our first
impression at the aspect of this rivalry is the selfishness and greed of
the Parisian demagogues; but we may easily convince ourselves that
these could never have attained to so extended an activity if existing
circumstances had not offered the possibility of a class war. But for
any disquisition on this subject, or allusion to the causes that, in the
first years of the Revolution, prepared its way, we look through
Taine’s pages in vain. Again, in the representation of the Ancien
Régime, his attention is pre-eminently turned to social relations connected
with the land. Had he with an equally comprehensive and
minute care studied the different strata, the interests and wants of the
town population, the problem alluded to would have solved itself.

It is with admirable insight and incontrovertible reasoning that
Taine shows the logical untenableness and practical mischief of
the theory of equality, both in the writings of Rousseau and the
action of the Constituent Assembly. He proves the contradiction
between this equality and the very nature of man, and how, consequently,
pure democracy rendered the development of political liberty
unattainable. In perfect agreement with Tocqueville, he points to the
absolute necessity, under the circumstances of the time, of aristocratic
institutions, for the creation and preservation of a free State, and explains
how deeply seated these are in the needs and claims of human nature.
This portion of his work is indeed masterly; and the more widely extended
the equalitarian superstition among the Liberal parties of our day,
the more one could desire Taine’s views to exercise a strong and wide-spread
influence. But, on the other hand, it appears to me that by this
very conception of political institutions, our author has been led to
show himself something more than just in the sentence he passes on the
representatives of this period, the nobles and prelates of 1789. This is
one of the few incongruities already alluded to between the first and
second volume. After reading of the luxury, artificiality, and idleness
of aristocratic society in the former, and coming with the author to the
conviction that terrible consequences must attend such a condition, one
is surprised to find in the latter that these privileged ones were the best,
the most discerning and patriotic portion of the nation, whose
[Pg 450]
annihilation or exile brought about the same injurious results that the
expulsion of the Huguenots had done. This contradiction is not cleared
up by the fact that in the years immediately preceding the Revolution,
and chiefly through the influence of Rousseau, a sentimental humanity
had prevailed in high circles, that here, too, it was the fashion to speak
of a return to an idyllic life of nature, of universal brotherly love, and
of the relief of every form of distress. For these transformations
remained, in point of fact, only fanciful phrases of the salons. When
Louis XVI., Turgot, and Calonne, really desired to set about such philanthropic
reforms in good earnest, it was, as we have already seen, these
sentimental nobles themselves who hindered their effort, and by nullifying
reform brought about the Revolution. When the catastrophe
came, many of them had sufficient insight into the new position of
affairs to make haste and repudiate those privileges which throughout
the land had been already trampled under foot by an unchained people.
The horrible persecution to which they were subjected, in utter disregard
of all existing rights and all human feeling, with bloodthirsty cruelty
and shameless greed, must ever insure for the victims the compassion
and sympathy of every right-minded observer; and in order fully to
justify revolutionary laws against emigrants, one would be driven to
advance sophisms only, not arguments. But all this does not affect the
question, whether, as Taine assumes, these persecuted ones did hold a
distinguished place in the nation for political virtue, intellectual culture,
and capacity for action. Neighbouring nations, so far as I know,
without exception took at the time an entirely different view. Doubtless,
there were among the emigrants many who won respect and regard in
the regions whither their flight had led them. But the great majority,
by their thoughtless arrogance, mutual bickerings, and shameless
frivolity, left behind them a bad reputation; whereas a hundred years
before the exiled Huguenots, by their unity, earnestness, and industry,
won, wherever they went, the respect and gratitude of their new
countrymen.

Heinrich von Sybel.

[Pg 451]

WHAT IS THE ACTUAL CONDITION OF IRELAND?

Returning to settle in Ireland after an absence that began more
than twenty years ago, I found two things strongly claiming my
attention. One, was the very great advance in material well-being
which my country appeared to have made. The other, was the fact
that both Englishmen and Irishmen appeared resolutely to ignore this
progress. Nearly all who write and speak about Ireland, either dwell
upon her grievances or assume poverty as her normal condition. I
know not of any who have attempted to record her returning prosperity.
Yet there are few facts in modern history better worthy of notice than
the advance in material wealth which has taken place in Ireland during
the thirty years between 1846 and 1876.

The year 1879 marks the close of just one-third of a century from
the great famine. The first thirty years of this period, 1846-76, were
years of continual advance in well-being. From 1877 and down to the
present year a reaction has been going on, which is largely connected
with a general depression of trade all over the world. For reasons
which will appear hereafter, I do not hold that this reaction is likely to be
permanent.

It is true that at the beginning of that period the country was in the
very lowest depths of poverty and depression. The starting-point
therefore was a very backward one: and the wonder is that so much
advance should have been made, considering not only the backwardness
of the starting-point but the difficulties of the road.

I shall not attempt to depict the state of things which prevailed at
the close of the great potato famine. The condition of the country is
well known; the facts are in the recollection of many persons now
living; and the evidence is within the reach of all inquirers. I may
safely assume that Ireland then was among the very poorest of all the
countries in Europe. What is her position now?

[Pg 452]
In discussing the social condition of any country, the population
question naturally comes to the front. Is the population pressing
unduly on the means of subsistence? then there is something wrong,
and until this is set right progress is impossible. On the other hand, if
the population is so sparse as to leave the resources of the country undeveloped,
there is also something wrong, though in this case the evil
is far less. The population, such as it is, may be prosperous and
advancing, though it is not producing all it might.

The former was notoriously the state of things in Ireland before
1847.[21]
In 1845 (the year immediately preceding the famine) the population
was at the highest point it attained during the present century, and
probably the highest it ever reached. It was estimated at 8,295,061.
In 1847, the year when the famine was at its height, the numbers are
given as 8,025,274. In 1875, just thirty years after the maximum, the
numbers had fallen to 5,309,494. In 1877 they were estimated at
5,338,906, showing an increase over 1875 of 29,412.

It is a familiar fact that the population of 1845 and 1847 was excessive.
Whether the present population may not be defective in regard
of productive power is a question not without importance, but not
immediately relevant. What we are now dealing with is the material
welfare of the existing population; and it is clear that five millions can
live where eight cannot. But are the five millions better off in some
proportion to the price the country has paid for the decrease in population?
And is there a real advance in the condition of the people,
not a mere rise out of beggary and starvation?

In attempting an answer to a question of this nature, one looks
naturally to the rate of wages first. But this test is an imperfect one:
partly because local variations are still considerable; partly because
money payments in many places and among large classes are more or
less supplemented by subsistence drawn directly from the land.
Besides, a mere increase in money wages may mean little or nothing,
unless the increased wages possess increased purchasing power, and there
be at the same time an upward tendency in the standard of living.
Putting aside the wages question accordingly (to be discussed hereafter),
let us try to find other indications of the extent and nature of the
changes in the people’s condition since the famine. A test of some
value, though not absolutely conclusive by itself, will be afforded by
changes in the area of farms. It is notorious that one of the causes
which most contributed to bring about the famine and its miseries was
[Pg 453]
the small size of holdings. Now the census returns show that from
1851, very shortly after the famine, there has been a steady decrease in
the number of farms under fifteen acres, and a steady increase in the
number of farms between fifteen and thirty acres, as well as in farms
exceeding thirty acres in area. Up to 1861 the number of holdings
not exceeding fifteen acres had declined fifty-five per cent., while those
above fifteen acres had increased 133 per cent. The number of farms
between fifteen and thirty acres was in 1861 double what it had been in
1841, and the farms above thirty acres amounted in 1861 to 157,833,
against 48,625, which had been their number twenty years before.
Between 1861 and 1871 farms under fifteen acres decreased by 12,548,
and farms above thirty acres increased by 1470. According to the
latest returns (1875) the farms not exceeding one acre in area were
51,459; those of one to five acres were 69,098; those of five to fifteen
acres, 166,959; fifteen to thirty acres, 137,669; the total above thirty
acres being 160,298 holdings.

This distribution of the land seems to indicate a considerable improvement
compared with the state of things prevailing before the
famine. Unfortunately the increase in the size of holdings has not
been attended by a corresponding decrease in the number held on an
insecure tenure. Tenancy at will continues to be the rule, and permanency
the exception, in our land tenure. I have made an attempt
to estimate roughly the classes of landholders. The “Domesday” list
of proprietors of land gives the number of owners of one acre and
under ten as 6892, holding 28,968 acres, or an average of a little over
four acres each: between ten acres and fifty there are 7746 owners,
holding 195,525 acres, or an average a little over twenty-six acres:
between fifty acres and a hundred there are 3479 owners, holding
250,147 acres, or an average of just under seventy-two acres. These
make up a body of small proprietors, owning from one to a hundred
acres, numbering 18,117. Eason’s Almanac for 1879, which has been
published while I write, estimates the number of “proprietors in fee”
of agricultural holdings at 20,217. The same authority gives the
number of leaseholders in perpetuity as 10,298; for terms of years
exceeding thirty-one as 13,712; for thirty-one years and under, 47,623
(many of which may be short leases); and of leases for lives, or lives
and years alternative, as 63,759. The number of tenancies at will is
526,628, or 77.2 per cent, of the whole number of holdings. These
statistics were collected in 1870, and they have doubtless been in some
degree modified by the working of the Church Act and the Land Act.
I have omitted from my extracts from the Domesday list the proprietors
of under one acre. These are given in Thom’s Directory as 36,144,
holding 9065 acres; but their holdings do not affect the present
question, as they are mostly non-agricultural. The estimate in Eason’s
Almanac purports to relate wholly to agricultural holdings. Domesday
includes all classes.

[Pg 454]
Another index of the condition of a people may be found in the way
they are housed. Mean and comfortless dwellings imply not only a low
standard of comfort, but often a low morality. Let us see how this
matter has stood in Ireland. The Census Commissioners of 1841
divided the dwellings of the people into four classes. The fourth, or
lowest, comprised all mud cabins having only one room. Of this class
there were in all Ireland, according to the 1841 census, 491,278. In
the last census, 1871, the number had fallen to 155,675. The third-class
dwellings were also built of mud, but contained three or four
rooms, with windows; the latter convenience being by no means
universally present in the one-roomed cabin of the fourth class. Of
the third class the census of 1841 enumerated 533,297; by 1871 this
number had fallen to 357,126. The second class are described as good
farmhouses, and in towns, houses having from five to nine rooms. Of this
class in 1841 there were 264,184; and in 1871 the number had increased
to 387,660. The first class of houses increased during the same period
from 40,080 to 60,919. Let us see now in what way the population
has been distributed in the different classes of houses. In 1841 the
number of families occupying first-class houses was 31,333. In 1871
the number had risen to 49,693. During the same period the number
of families in second-class houses rose from 241,664 to 357,752. On
the other hand, the families in third-class houses decreased from
574,386 to 432,774; and those in the fourth-class, or one-roomed
cabins, from 625,356 to 227,379. By a curious coincidence, the proportion
of families to houses was the same in 1841 and in 1871—one
hundred and eleven families to one hundred houses. In this way the
very great shifting in the classes is all the more clearly proved to indicate
a real rise in the condition of the people.

In connection with this part of my subject, I may now proceed to
discuss the wages question and the condition of the labouring population.
Of the actual number of this class I can find no accurate return.
But we have already seen that the number of families inhabiting the
lowest class of houses (and these may be assumed all to belong to the
lowest class of labourers) was about 227,400. As the census of 1871
gave the average number of a family as 5.07, or 507 persons to 100
families, we may estimate the number of this class at 2274 multiplied
by 507, or 1,152,918. Those who inhabit a better class of house may
be safely assumed on the whole to be better off in other respects. Now
the money wages of the ordinary agricultural labourer are 1s. 6d. a day
in the most remote and backward places. This is the minimum, and in
harvest time the labourers earn 2s. 6d. a day. A great many labourers
have small holdings; but as these are not rent-free they do not count
directly as an element in wages. The way in which they do count is
that the people are not so overworked but that the labourer and his
family can attend to the holding, grow their own potatoes, feed the pig,
&c.—thereby eking out the actual money payment.

[Pg 455]
The diet of these labourers (I am still referring to the most backward
and remote parts of Ireland) is tea and bread for breakfast,
potatoes and a little bacon for dinner, and oatmeal porridge for supper.
The people have quite risen out of the “potatoes and point” stage of
feeding. Of course, on Fridays and other fast-days, Roman Catholics
abstain from flesh meat; but there are few places so remote from the
sea that fresh herrings are not to be had, and at any rate salt ones are
always available. On the other hand, on Sundays and holidays many
of the labouring families contrive to have butcher’s meat; and I am
told that in certain districts there is one day in the year when every
family among the peasantry makes an invariable rule to eat a dinner of
fresh meat, some animal (often a fowl) being killed on purpose to furnish
this meal. This is probably some relic of a sacrificial observance.

The condition of the people being such as I have described, one
would naturally expect not to find pauperism very prevalent. As a
matter of fact it is not. The average daily number of paupers in the
workhouses throughout 1876 was 43,235, and of recipients of out-door
relief 31,600: bringing up the total to 74,835. The average of persons
in receipt of relief was 140.6 in 10,000 of population. This daily
average represents the current subsisting mass of pauperism, and is in a
considerable measure made up of the old, infirm, and sick. Of able-bodied
paupers, the males were only 1697 in the daily average of
workhouse inmates, and the females were 4130. There were 10,134
healthy children under fifteen in the workhouses, and the other inmates
were either sick in hospital or permanently unable to work. These
figures seem to be the very reverse of alarming. Permanent pauperism
is not a very virulent social disorder when only two able-bodied persons
to every five hundred of the population are in receipt of in-door relief,
and when the whole permanent pauper population barely exceeds fourteen
in a thousand. But though permanent pauperism may be well in hand,
casual pauperism may be at a high pitch. Let us see how this matter
has stood. I shall first take the statistics of 1876, and then try to
modify my conclusions by such later figures as may be available. In
1876 the population of England and Wales stood at 24,244,000, and
the total of paupers in receipt of relief, in-door and out-door, on the
1st of January of that year, was 752,887; Scotland, with a population
of 3,527,000, had a total pauper population on the 1st of January,
1876, of 66,733. In Ireland, on the same date, the total population
being 5,321,600, the paupers amounted to 77,913. In other words, at
a rough estimate, on the 1st of January, 1876, about one person in
every thirty-three in England and Wales was in receipt of relief as a
pauper; in Scotland, about one in every fifty-three; while in Ireland
the proportion was only one in sixty-eight. A similar proportion
appears in the incidence of the poor-rate. In 1876 England and Wales
paid at the rate of 6s. 0¾d. per head of population; Scotland 5s. 0½d.;
Ireland only 3s. 4d.

[Pg 456]
Of course these figures must undergo modification in view of the
altered circumstances of the present time. The statistics of 1876 are
not an accurate guide to the facts of 1879. During the last three
years there has been considerable depression of trade; and it may very
well be that the returns of this year will indicate an ebb in the tide of
prosperity. But, unless I am very much mistaken, after making all
allowances, it will probably be found that Ireland is the part of the
United Kingdom least affected by the present prolonged commercial
crisis.[22]

The figures and facts recorded above will probably astonish the considerable
class of persons to whom the word “Irish” has an air of
wanting something, unless it is followed by “pauper.” A smaller but
perhaps not less intelligent class—that of English travellers in Ireland—will
promptly jump to the conclusion that the figures are cooked; they
will argue, “We have travelled in Ireland, and have been beset with
beggars; how, then, can the country be so free from pauperism? Surely
the true state of the case is that the people keep out of the workhouses
merely in order to live on public charity in another form?” It cannot, I
regret to say, be denied that mendicancy is very common in Ireland; so
common as to be little less than a national scandal. There is, however,
something to be said in mitigation of judgment, though perhaps not in
defence. It is a matter in which figures are of little use; for no one
could, by any possibility, estimate how many persons live wholly by
begging. That there are in every community some persons who do may
be taken as certain. That their number is larger in proportion to the
bulk of the population in a Roman Catholic than in a Protestant community,
is antecedently probable. The theory of the Roman Catholic
religion positively encourages mendicancy. It is held to be no sin to
live on alms, and to be a positive merit to give alms. Never turn
away thy face from any poor man, is a text acted on by devout
Romanists in its most literal acceptation. The result is not difficult to
foresee. It must, however, be recorded to the credit of the Irish
Catholic clergy, that they are beginning to see the folly of indiscriminate
almsgiving; and though they are hampered in no small degree by
the traditions of their Church, they have made many successful efforts
in the direction of the organization of charity. Another influence,
which largely contributes to the existence of the mendicancy that scandalizes
the traveller, is the tradition of recent poverty. The habits of
centuries are not effaced in a generation. Not much more than twenty
years ago, begging was a recognized necessity in the life of the Irish
[Pg 457]
poor. But now, when times are moderately prosperous, begging is
limited almost wholly to old people who hang about the doors of
Catholic chapels, and about places frequented by tourists. On the
roads leading to such “show places,” also, the tourist will be often
beset by little knots of children clamouring for half-pence; but these
are no more professional beggars than a gentleman who amuses himself
with pheasant shooting is a professional dealer in game. It is a form of
excitement with them; not a very high one to be sure, but not meaner
or more vicious than baccarat or rouge-et-noir.

Still, when all is said, there is more mendicancy in Ireland than would
exist if things were in a healthier state; and where mendicancy is common,
pauperism must fluctuate largely. In more prosperous times, a
larger number of mendicants can find support from a more copious
supply of alms. When evil times curtail the fund whence alms are
supplied, the mendicant must fall back on legal relief. From this point
of view the small increase of six in ten thousand, already referred
to,[23]
seems to show that the commercial depression of 1877 has not largely
touched the revenues of the Irish mendicant!

An account of the condition of the Irish people would be incomplete
without some reference to the statistics of drunkenness and crime.
Here we shall find some results of a rather surprising kind. Thus, in
England and Wales in 1876, the population being 24,244,000, the
number of drunkards brought before magistrates was 205,567; being, at
an approximate estimate, one in every 118 of the population. In
Scotland, the population being 3,527,800, the drunkards arrested
numbered 26,209, or about one in 134. In Ireland, the population
being 5,321,600, the drunkards brought before magistrates were 112,253;
showing the enormous proportion of one in every 47 of the people.
Of course these figures in all three kingdoms include very many cases of
repeated conviction, so that it would not be fair to say that one man in
every 118 in England, still less in every 47 in Ireland, is actually a drunkard.
All the same, this comparison is sufficiently alarming as well as perplexing.
It is rather paradoxical to find Scotland showing a smaller proportion
of apparent drunkards than either of the other kingdoms; and
some people might be ill-natured enough to hint that this result depended
mainly on greater skill in keeping out of the hands of the police.
On the other hand, a patriotic Irishman might, without any very
flagrant paradox, argue that the fact of so many Irish being arrested for
being drunk proves that they are actually a more sober people. It takes
less to make an Irishman drunk, partly because he is more excitable in
temperament, and partly because he drinks but seldom. The habitually
temperate man, when he does casually exceed, shows his condition very
promptly; the habitual toper can dissemble it far longer. Another
reason that may be given for the state of things here indicated, is that
the police force is more numerous in Ireland in proportion to the population
[Pg 458]
than in England or Scotland;[24]
and as, for reasons which will be
hereafter seen, the police have actually less to do, they are able to
expend a quantity of surplus energy in arresting drunkards whom the
busier constables of England and Scotland would allow to stagger quietly
home. That some or all these causes are in operation to bring about
the startling excess of apparent drunkenness in Ireland, is manifest when
we come to discuss the statistics of crime. The connection of crime
with drink is a commonplace of moralists; but, like most other commonplaces,
it requires to be seriously tested by the light of facts.

The crimes with which drink is most closely connected are naturally
those which come under the class of offences against the person. Drink
may, indeed, prompt offences against property; but chiefly in an indirect
fashion. A drunkard is very likely to be in want of things which he
may seek to obtain by theft; but drink is not the sole cause of poverty,
and professional thieves are not habitual drunkards. Referring then
to the class of offences against the person, we find that in 1876 only four
persons were sentenced to death in all Ireland. The number sentenced
in England was 32. Here is already a considerable discrepancy; for
the population of England is to that of Ireland in the proportion of only
about four and two-fifths to one, and the death sentences in England
were eight times as numerous as in
Ireland.[25] But this is not all.
Nearly all the murders in Ireland are agrarian, and with these drink is
only casually if at all connected. On the other hand, nearly every
murder in England is committed more or less under the influence of
intoxication. Turning to the secondary punishments, we find twelve
sentences of penal servitude for life in England, while there were none
in Ireland. Ten of these twelve ought perhaps to be discounted, as
representing ten commutations of capital punishment, for of the thirty-two
persons sentenced to death in England only twenty-two were
executed. But the most remarkable discrepancy is seen when we come
to sentences of penal servitude for terms of years. Of these there were
only fifty in Ireland against 280 in England. In the absence of
returns of crime actually committed (including undetected offences), it
is not easy to pronounce an opinion of much value; but from the
statistics of conviction it would appear that violent crimes against the
person are much less prevalent in proportion to the population in Ireland
than in England. These results are by no means contrary to reasonable
expectation, when we consider the vast congestion of population in
London and other cities in England, to which there is no parallel anywhere
[Pg 459]
in Ireland. But, such as they are, they seem to show that the
apparent addiction of Irishmen to strong drink is not attended by a
proportionate addiction to the more serious forms of crime. On the
other hand (and this must be recorded for whatever it may be worth),
we have 1078 sentences of imprisonment and other minor penalties
inflicted in Ireland, against only 1533 similar sentences in England.

Turning now to the class of offences against property with violence,
we find two sentences of penal servitude for life in England, against
none in Ireland; 271 sentences for terms of years in England, against
26 in Ireland; 898 sentences of minor terms of imprisonment against
only 69 in Ireland. In cases of this nature one might naturally expect
drink to be a considerable predisposing cause. On the other hand, there
is no assignable connection between drink and crime unaccompanied by
violence, except in so far as poverty is an effect of drink and a cause for
crime. Even here, however, the proportion fails; for the convictions for
minor offences against property in Ireland were only 798, against
10,674 in England: and of these only 104 suffered penal servitude for
terms of years, against 1063 in England.

All this, it may be said, simply shows that there must be a great deal
of undetected crime in Ireland. To a certain extent, no doubt, this is
true; but the remark applies chiefly to some of the more serious crimes,
especially agrarian murder. There is not the same motive for concealing
minor forms of crime, nor perhaps would even the Ribbon organization
make such concealment practicable. To be sure it may be urged that,
though minor crime is not purposely concealed, the police are too busy
keeping the peace and looking after Fenians and Ribbonmen to have
time for detecting ordinary thefts. This fact may, indeed, have something
to do with the apparent scarcity of petty crime in Ireland; but
this is certainly not the aspect of the case usually dwelt upon, by Judges
of Assizes, for instance, when a Grand Jury sends up a pair of white
gloves instead of a sheaf of criminal indictments. However this may
be, I merely record the facts as I find them; leaving readers, for the
most part, to draw what inferences the facts seem to suggest. One inference
they suggest to me is, that Irishmen are not such very drunken
animals after all; or else that they are somehow or other an exception
to the rule which connects drink and crime. The undeniable blot on
the Irish character—agrarian outrage—is not to be accounted for by
drink. The true explanation is familiar to all who really know the
country. The Irish peasant is very largely dependent on the soil for his
support, and believes himself to be wholly so. He also believes himself
to have a moral and a historical right to the possession of the soil; a
belief which contains a considerable admixture of truth, provided it be
stated with the proper limitations. Unluckily, the Irish peasant holds it
without any limitation at all; and herein lies the secret of his hostility to
the law. The peasant ejected, or in fear of ejectment, looks on himself
as a ruined man (which he need not be), and as a wronged man (which
[Pg 460]
he is only very partially). Men ruined and wronged have always been
raw material for brigands; and the Ribbonman is simply a brigand in a
frieze coat.

I have no desire to compose an Essay on the Land Question; but it
is absolutely impracticable to discuss Irish social economy without finding
the Land Question in one’s way. It is the question which most
closely concerns the industrial classes; for the land is the mainstay of
Irish industry. It is the pivot upon which all Irish politics turn; for
although priestly influence counts for a great deal, that influence itself
depends in great measure on the land hunger of the peasantry. I feel
that I should be leaving Hamlet out of the play if I did not say a few
words on the matter. As I have already hinted, the Irish peasant has
three reasons for his desire to be “rooted in the soil.” One is a traditional
reason. He thinks that his forefathers were unjustly ousted by
foreign conquerors. His belief rests on an utterly distorted view of
history. It is true that eight hundred years ago a few of the ancestors
of a few of the existing peasantry might in a sort of sense have been
called landowners. But so far as the Gaelic race survives, it would be
equally true to say that the ancestors of the existing peasantry had been
the serfs or the slaves of barbarous chieftains. The old Gaelic tribal
ownership, if left to itself, might or might not have ripened into a
peasant proprietary; but the only real grievance which the existing
Gaelic peasantry can allege, is that the English conquest forcibly interrupted
the natural process of evolution. Moreover, a large number of
the existing peasants are no true Gael at all, but the descendants of
Danes, Normans, and the various waves of Saxon settlers from Elizabeth
to William of Orange. In parts of Ireland there are even to be found
the descendants of French Huguenots, of Scotch fugitives involved in the
Stuart insurrections, and of refugees of 1793. That such a colluvies
gentium should claim to be the heirs of Septs which occupied the land

is simply a proof of profound ignorance of history. Such, however, is
the vague traditional belief; and it is complicated with a moral sentiment,
that he who tills the land has a right to live by the land. The
sentiment is open to no objection, provided it be understood that the
land is an instrument of production in which the whole community is
interested. The cultivator has the same right to live by the land as
the artisan to live by his handicraft, and no more—that is, both peasant
and artisan have a right to expect that the social system shall be so
adjusted that neither shall be unjustly deprived of the fruit of his
labour. But neither peasant nor artisan can claim that any instrument
of production shall be used for the sole sake of the producer.
Hence, even if peasant proprietorship were undeniably the best thing
for the peasant, it does not follow that he has a moral right to it, unless
it be good for the whole community as well. This consideration is too
[Pg 461]
often neglected by the thorough-going advocates of peasant proprietorship.
They assume that the interests of the peasants are the only
interests to be considered. In Ireland, indeed, they are not far wrong;
for the peasantry are very nearly the whole community. This, however,
only raises the previous question, whether peasant proprietorship
would be a success in Ireland—of which hereafter. The last and most
practical of the agrarian arguments is that a tenant evicted is a man
ruined. Even this is only partially true, and at most is only an argument
against capricious eviction. It is conclusive as against the system
of tenancy at will, or any of those short tenures which are, in fact, a
standing notice to quit. It holds good in favour of peasant proprietorship
to this extent—that the ruin of a peasant proprietor can only
occur through his own fault or misfortune, and not through the caprice
of a landlord. In short, the discontent of the Irish peasantry proves
that the Anglo-Irish system of tenure is about the worst of all possible
systems; but it proves little or nothing in favour of peasant ownership.

My own opinion (valeat quantum) is that the soil and climate of
Ireland render the country utterly unfit to maintain a considerable
body of peasant proprietors; but that, nevertheless, it would be wise
and politic to establish peasant properties as widely as may be practicable.
The climate is notoriously damp, and variable in the extreme.
Grain crops are inferior and precarious—root crops are not much better—even
meadows are untrustworthy, because of the difficulty of haymaking—but
Irish pasture is perhaps the best in the world. Natural
conditions mark out Ireland as a pastoral and cattle-breeding country;
and such a country is the destined home of latifundia. It is not
merely that cattle require large spaces of pasture; but the trade in
cattle requires capital, and requires the power of staying through seasons
of adversity. An attempt to breed or deal in cattle by a class of
peasant proprietors, acting singly, could only end in ruin; a ruin even
more complete than bad seasons would bring upon unsuccessful cultivators
of grain. Another product for which Ireland is eminently fitted
is timber.[26]
This also obviously requires spaces of land, and intervals
of idle capital, utterly incompatible with any system of small holdings.
Nature would seem to have marked out Ireland as a country to be
thinly populated; historical accident once made her one of the most
populous of countries, and we all know what came of it. The people
were dependent on a single kind of food; it failed, and misery ensued
such as modern Europe had never beheld. The scenes of 1847 we may
devoutly hope will never be witnessed again; but such a season as
1878-79 would be a trial that few peasant proprietors could stand.
Why then do I say that a peasant proprietary ought to be created?
[Pg 462]
Because I believe that in the experiment is to be found the sole method
of convincing the Irish peasants that their true interest lies in quite
another direction. The peasant now believes that all he wants in
order to be prosperous is to be “rooted in the soil.” It is of no use to
appeal to abstract reasoning. He knows that he has to pay rent, and
that he is liable to eviction for non-payment. Carefully as recent legislation
has guarded him against capricious eviction, he knows that if his
landlord chooses to pay for turning him out, out he must go. The few
of his neighbours who do acquire freeholds, he perceives to be comparatively
prosperous. He does not take into account that the
prosperity of the freeholder is maintained by precisely the same
exceptional energy and thrift which in the first instance enabled him to
secure the freehold. Besides, it is undeniable that cæteris paribus a
man who holds rent-free is likely to be better off than one who pays
rent; and so long as rent is the rule and freehold the exception, the
few freeholders will seem at least to possess an advantage over the
many rentpayers. In short, the peasant farmer will never cease to
believe ownership a panacea for all his ills, until he shall have tried
it, and failed. Of course it does not absolutely follow that the
experiment of creating a peasant proprietary must needs fail. It may
succeed; and then the Irish land problem is solved. For the reasons
given above, however, I think it would fail. If all the holdings of fifteen acres and under (there are
285,000[27]
of them, or nearly half the whole number of farms in Ireland) were turned into peasant properties tomorrow,
I believe they would in thirty, or at most in fifty, years be
recast into large cattle farms, owned probably for the most part by
joint-stock companies. The process of consolidation would be partly
the buying out of ruined peasants after some such seasons as we are
now undergoing; partly a voluntary union of the residue, who would
find association desirable in order to secure a sufficiency of land and
capital. But those who might be compelled to part with their lands
could no longer ascribe their ruin to the tenure by which they held. It
would be made clear to them and to all concerned that it is the laws of
Nature and not the laws of England which hinder Ireland from maintaining
a dense agricultural population.

It may be urged against what I have here said, that it is hardly
worth while engaging in a social revolution merely in order that the
last state of things may turn out on the whole very similar to the first.
I cannot deny the force of this remark; though I may suggest, in my
turn, that perhaps it is worth while to make some sacrifice for the sake
of attaining stable equilibrium in the social system. I am persuaded
that the one great difficulty in Irish affairs is to convince the peasant
that the law is a power not hostile but friendly to him. This is no
easy task. It is not so very long since the law actually was the hard
[Pg 463]
master it is still supposed to be. Nor is the peasant’s own attitude of
mind a very easy one to deal with. He clamours loudly to be “rooted
in the soil,” or, in other words, to be made absolute owner of his farm;
but he clamours not less loudly against the absenteeship of his landlord.
He utterly fails to perceive the inconsistency of his position.
He cannot eat his cake and have his cake. He cannot be at
one and the same time tenant to a resident lord of the manor, and
owner in fee-simple of his own holding. Absolute peasant ownership
is primâ facie incompatible with the very existence of a landed aristocracy;
and it may be some perception of this that induces certain of
the land agitators to propose fixity of tenure at a quit-rent rather than
absolute peasant proprietorship. But it is clear that this is a mere
evasion of the difficulty. A landlord, who is merely a rent-charger,
has no more motive to reside on his estate than if he sold it and lived
on the interest of the purchase-money. There is no doubt a sense
in which the two things are not absolutely incompatible. Peasant
properties might be intermixed with large estates owned by resident
landlords. And this would certainly constitute a state of things by no
means undesirable; in fact, it is what might possibly emerge from the
experiment I have mentioned above. I think it more than probable
that a great deal of the land, after such an experiment, would fall into
the hands of joint-stock companies; but a considerable portion might
also be bought up by individuals, who might choose to become resident
landlords. It must, however, be remembered that there are many
things besides agrarian agitation which tempt Irish landlords to become
absentees. Residence in Ireland is attended with many drawbacks and
discomforts, even when a landlord is on the best of terms with his
tenantry. Absenteeism is no new complaint; Adam Smith discussed
proposals for an absentee-tax. Its prevalence is not uncommonly
ascribed to the Union, but it might as well be ascribed to the
Deluge. The most potent causes of absenteeism in the latter
half of the nineteenth century are the City of Dublin Steam
Navigation Company, and the London and North-Western Railway.
These, and kindred institutions, are also the channels which conduct a
vast deal of wealth into Ireland; and if absenteeism constitutes a
perennial drain on her resources, the facilities of locomotion cause the
drain to return ten-fold.[28]
If these facilities did not exist, it does not
follow that the landlords who remained at home would necessarily be of
much use to the community. The squires and squireens in Lever’s
and Maxwell’s novels are very amusing to read about; but they are a
race that nobody at the present day would seriously wish to revive.
[Pg 464]
However this may be, there is little inducement for the existing landlords
to remain resident in a country where they are continually
threatened, and occasionally shot. I cannot help thinking that in the
tendency to absenteeism, courageous statesmanship might find the
means of solving the Land problem. There should be little difficulty,
one would imagine, in persuading a number of existing Irish landlords
to part with their estates for a reasonable
compensation.[29] The Church
Surplus is at hand to provide the purchase-money. After deducting
the sums to be paid to the Intermediate Education Board, and to the
National School Teachers’ Pension Fund, there will remain nearly four
millions in the hands of the Temporalities Commission. This money
judiciously advanced to tenant farmers would enable a considerable
number of them to acquire the freehold of their farms, and thus the
foundations of a peasant proprietary might be laid without any confiscation
or disturbance of vested rights. The Royal Commission on
Agriculture would perhaps be a good medium for acquiring information on
this subject. They might include in the scope of their inquiry the best
method of carrying out some such scheme as has been here indicated.

Having set out with no intention beyond that of offering a general
view of a few leading facts and figures relating to Irish affairs, I find
myself insensibly gliding into a political discussion. So far as I have
any excuse for this, it must be found in the irrepressible character of
the Land problem; which, as I before remarked, can by no possibility
be evaded by any one who writes on Irish social economy. Yet this
problem itself is in one aspect simply a phase of the struggle going on
all over the world between, labour and capital. Side by side with this
there is yet another struggle going on, which is also a phase of a
world-wide conflict. It is the old story of Priesthood against Free
Thought; but in Ireland, like nearly all things Irish, it bears a peculiar
aspect of its own. Many a man here would be amazed to be told that he is
fighting on the side of the priests; yet the Irish Orange Tory, and to
some extent even the Irish Evangelical clergyman, is really and truly
(though of course unconsciously) helping the policy of the Roman
Church. But it would extend my essay beyond all reasonable limits to
discuss this matter; and besides, I set out to write on statistics, and not
on politics.[30]

Edward Stanley Robertson.

[Pg 465]

THE DELUGE:

ITS TRADITIONS IN ANCIENT NATIONS.

Of all traditions relating to the history of primitive humanity, by
far the most universal is that of the Deluge. Our present purpose
is to pass under review the principal versions of it extant among the
leading races of men. The concordance of these with the Biblical
narrative will bring out their primary unity, and we shall thus be
able to recognize the fact of this tradition being one of those which
date before the dispersion of peoples, go back to the very dawn of the
civilized world, and can only refer to a real and definite event.

But we have previously to get rid of certain legendary recollections
erroneously associated with the Biblical Deluge, their essential features
forbidding sound criticism to assimilate them therewith. We allude to
such as refer to local phenomena, and are of historic and comparatively
recent date. Doubtless the tradition of the great primitive cataclysm
may have been confused with these, and thus have led to an exaggeration
of their importance; but the characteristic points of the narrative
admitted into the Book of Genesis are wanting, and even under the
legendary form it has assumed these events retain a decidedly special
and restricted character. To group recollections of this nature with
those that really relate to the Deluge would be to invalidate, rather
than confirm, the consequences we are entitled to draw from the latter.

Take, for instance, the great inundation placed by the historic books
of China in the reign of Yao. This has no real relation, or even
resemblance, to the Biblical Deluge; it is a purely local event, the
date of which, spite of the uncertainty of Chinese chronology previous
to the eighth century B.C., we may yet determine as long subsequent
to the fully historic periods of Egypt and
Babylon.[31]
Chinese authors
[Pg 466]
describe Yu, minister and engineer of the day, as restoring the course
of rivers, raising dykes, digging canals, and regulating the taxation of
every province throughout China. A learned Sinologist, Edouard Biot,
has proved, in a treatise on the changes of the lower course of the
Hoang-ho, that it was to one of its frequent inundations the above
catastrophe was due, and that the early Chinese settlements on its
banks had had much to suffer from this cause. These works of Yu were
but the beginning of embankments necessary to contain its waters,
carried on further in following ages. A celebrated inscription graven
on the rocky face of one of the mountain peaks of Ho-nan passes for
contemporaneous with these works, and is consequently the most
ancient specimen of Chinese epigraphy extant. This inscription appears
to present an intrinsically authentic character, sufficient to dispel the
doubts suggested by Mr. Legge, although there is this rather suspicious
fact connected with it, that we are only acquainted with it through
ancient copies, and that for many centuries past the minutest research
has failed to re-discover the original.

Nor is the character of a mere local event less conspicuous in the
legend of Botchica, such as we have it reported by the Muyscas, the
ancient inhabitants of the province of Cundinamarca, in South America,
although here mythological fable is mingled much more largely with
the fundamental historic element.

Huythaca, the wife of a divine man, or rather a god, called Botchica,
having practised abominable witchcraft in order to make the river
Funzha leave its bed, the whole plain of Bogota is devastated by its
waters; men and beasts perish in the inundation, and only a few
escape by flight to the loftiest mountains. The tradition adds that
Botchica broke asunder the rocks inclosing the valley of Canoas and
Tequendama, in order to facilitate the escape of the waters, next
reassembled the dispersed remnant of the Muyscas, taught them Sun-worship,
and went up to heaven, after having lived 500 years in
Cundinamarca.

I.

Chaldean and Biblical Narratives.—Of the traditions relating to the
great cataclysm the most curious, no doubt, is that of the Chaldeans.
Its influence has stamped itself in an unmistakable manner on the
tradition of India; and, of all the accounts of the Deluge, it comes
nearest to that in Genesis. To whoever compares the two it becomes
evident that they must have been one and the same up to the time
when Terah and his family left Ur of the Chaldees to go into
Palestine.

We have two versions of the Chaldean story—unequally developed
indeed, but exhibiting a remarkable agreement. The one most anciently
known, and also the shorter, is that which Berosus took from the
sacred books of Babylon and introduced into the history that he wrote
[Pg 467]
for the use of the Greeks.[32]
After speaking of the last nine antediluvian
kings, the Chaldean priest continues thus:—

By the side of this version, which, interesting though it be, is, after
all, second hand, we are now able to place an original Chaldeo-Babylonian
edition, which the lamented George Smith was the first to decipher on
the cuneiform tablets exhumed at Nineveh and now in the British
Museum. Here the narrative of the Deluge appears as an episode in
the eleventh tablet, or eleventh chaunt of the great epic of the town of
Uruk. The hero of this poem, a kind of Hercules, whose name has not as
[Pg 468]
yet been made out with
certainty,[34]
being attacked by disease (a kind of leprosy), goes, with a view to its cure, to consult the patriarch saved
from the Deluge, Khasisatra, in the distant land to which the gods
have transported him, there to enjoy eternal felicity. He asks Khasisatra
to reveal the secret of the events which led to his obtaining the
privilege of immortality, and thus the patriarch is induced to relate the
cataclysm.

By a comparison of the three copies of the poem that the library of
the palace of Nineveh contained, it has been possible to restore the narrative with hardly any
breaks.[35]
These three copies were, by order of the King of Assyria, Asshurbanabal,
made in the eighth century B.C.,
from a very ancient specimen in the sacerdotal library of the town of
Uruk, founded by the monarchs of the first Chaldean empire. It is
difficult precisely to fix the date of the original, copied by Assyrian
scribes, but it certainly goes back to the ancient empire, seventeen
centuries, at least, before our era, and even probably beyond; it was
therefore much anterior to Moses, and nearly contemporaneous with
Abraham. The variations presented by the three existing copies prove
that the original was in the primitive mode of writing called the
hieratic, a character which must have already become difficult
to decipher in the eighth century B.C., as the copyists have differed as
to the interpretation to be given to certain signs, and in other cases have
simply reproduced exactly the forms of such as they did not understand.
Finally, it results from a comparison of these variations, that the
original, transcribed by order of Asshurbanabal, must itself have been a
copy of some still more ancient manuscript, in which the original text
had already received interlinear comments. Some of the copyists
have introduced these into their text, others have omitted them. With
these preliminary observations I proceed to give integrally the narrative
ascribed in the poem to Khasisatra:—

This narrative follows with great exactness the same course as that,
or rather as those of Genesis, and the analogies are on both sides
striking. It is well known, and has long been critically demonstrated,
that chapters vi., vii., viii. and ix. of Genesis contain two different
narratives of the Deluge, the one taken from the Elohist document, the
other from the Jehovist, both being skilfully combined by the final editor.
Reverencing their text, which he evidently considered sacred, he omitted
no fact given by either, so that we have the whole story twice narrated in
different terms; and, in spite of the way the verses are mixed up, it is
easy so to disentangle the two versions as that each should form a continuous
and unbroken narrative. Some critics have recently pretended
that, with regard to the stories of the Creation and Deluge, both cuneiform
documents disproved the distinction between the two sources of
Genesis, and proved the primitive unity of its composition; that the same
repetitions, in effect, were to be found there. This was a premature
conclusion, drawn from translations very imperfect as yet, and requiring
thorough revision; and, indeed, confining ourselves to the story of the
Deluge, such revision, carried on according to strict philological principles,
does away with the arguments that had been based on the
version of George Smith. None of the repetitions of the final text of
Genesis are observable in the Chaldean poem; which, on the contrary,
decisively confirms the distinction made between the two narratives,
the Elohist and Jehovist, interwoven by the last compiler of the Pentateuch.
It is with each of these separately—when disentangled and
compared—that the Chaldean narrative coincides in its order—it is not
with the result of their combination. And nothing could be easier
than to demonstrate this by a synoptic table, in which the three narratives
were collated.

Such a table would at once show their agreement and their difference,
[Pg 472]
what the three records have in common, and what each has added of its
own to the primitive outline. They are certainly three versions
of the same traditional history, and with the Chaldeo-Babylonians on
the one hand, and the Hebrews on the other, we have two parallel
streams proceeding from one source. Nevertheless, we must note on
both sides divergences of certain importance which prove the bifurcation
of the two traditions to have taken place at a very remote era,
and the one of which the Bible affords us the expression to be not
merely an edition of that preserved by the Chaldean priesthood, expurgated
from a severely monotheistic point of view.

The Biblical narrative bears the impress of an inland people, ignorant
of navigation. In Genesis, the name of the ark, têbâh, signifies “coffer,”
and not “vessel.” Nothing is said about the launching of the ark;
there is no mention made of the sea, or of navigation; there is no pilot.
In the Epic of Uruk, on the contrary, everything shows it to have been
composed amidst a maritime population; every circumstance bears a
reflex of the manners and customs of people living on the shore of the
Persian Gulf. Khasisatra enters a vessel, properly so called; it is
launched, undergoes a trial trip, all its seams are caulked with bitumen,
it is entrusted to a pilot.

The Chaldeo-Babylonian narrative represents Khasisatra as a king,
who goes up into the ship surrounded by a whole population of servants
and companions; in the Bible, we have only Noah and his family who
are saved; the new human race has no other source than the patriarch’s
three sons. Nor is there any trace in the Chaldean poem of the distinction
(in the Bible peculiar indeed only to the Jehovist) between
clean and unclean beasts, and of each kind of the former being numbered
by sevens, although in Babylonia the number seven had a specially
sacramental character.

As to the dimensions of the ark, we find a disagreement not only
between the Bible and the tablet copied by order of Asshurbanabal,
but between the latter and Berosus. Both Genesis and the cuneiform
documents measure the ark’s dimensions by cubits, Berosus
by stadia. Genesis states its length and breadth to have been in the
proportion of 6 to 1, Berosus of 5 to 2, the tablet in the British Museum
of 10 to 1. On the other hand, the fragments of Berosus do not treat
of the relative dimensions of height and breadth, and the tablet gives
them as equal, while the Bible speaks of thirty cubits of height and fifty
of breadth. But these differences as to figures have but a secondary
importance; nothing so liable to alterations and variations in different
editions of the same narrative. We may observe, however, that in
Genesis it is only the Elohist—always much addicted to figures—who
gives the dimensions of the ark. And, on the other hand, it is the
Jehovist alone who tells of the sending forth of the birds, which occupies
a considerable place in the Chaldean tradition. As to the variations
here between the Biblical story and that in the poem of Uruk, the latter
[Pg 473]
adding the swallow to the dove and the raven, and not attributing to
the dove the part of a messenger of good tidings, I do not think they
go for much. The agreement as to the main point is, in my eyes, of
far more importance.

But what is, on the contrary, of very decided importance, is the
absolute disagreement as to the duration of the Deluge between the
Elohist and Jehovist, as well as between the two and the Chaldeo-Babylonian
narrator. Here we have a manifest trace of different
systems applying to the ancient tradition calendrical conceptions, dissimilar
in each record, and yet all seeming to have proceeded from
Chaldea.

By the Elohist the periods of the Deluge are indicated by the
ordinal numbers of the months, but these ordinal numbers relate to a
lunar year, beginning on the 1st of Tishri (September-October),
at the autumnal equinox. This is admitted by Josephus, and by the
Author of the Targum of the pseudo-Jonathan, as well as by Rashi
and Kimchi, among the Jewish commentators of the Middle Ages; and
proved, as I conceive, by Michaelis among the moderns. The rain
begins to fall, and Noah enters into the ark the 17th day of the
second month—i.e., Marcheshvan. The great force of the waters lasts
150 days, and the 17th of the seventh month—i.e., Nisan
(March-April)—the ark grounds on Mount Ararat. The 1st day of the tenth
month, or Tammuz (June-July), about the summer solstice, the
mountains are laid bare. The 1st day of the first month of the following
year—that is, of Tishri, at the autumnal equinox—the waters
have completely retired, and Noah leaves the ark on the 27th of the
second month. Thus the Deluge lasted a whole lunar year, plus
eleven days—that is to say, as Ewald well remarks, a solar year of 365
days. Now, under the climatic conditions of Babylonia and Assyria,
the rains of late autumn begin towards the end of November, and at
once the level of the Euphrates and Tigris rises. The periodic overflow
of the two rivers occurs in the middle of March, and culminates at
the end of May, from which time the waters go down. At the end of
June they have left the plains, and from August to November are at
their lowest level. Now the dates of the Deluge, given by the Elohist,
and re-stated as we have been doing according to Michaelis and Knobel,
accord perfectly with these phases of the rising and falling of the two
Mesopotamian rivers. They accord even better in the primitive system
which served for starting-point to that of the Elohist, and which has
been so ingeniously restored by
M. Schræder,[45]
a system attributing to the Deluge 300 days in all, or a ten months’ duration: 150 days for its
greatest height and 150 for its decrease. According to this system,
the leaving of the ark must have taken place on the first day of the
601st year of Noah’s life—that is to say, on the 1st of Tishri, at the
autumnal equinox. Thus the deliverance of the father of the new
[Pg 474]
humanity, as well as the Covenant made by God with him and his
race, were fixed on the very day to which an ancient opinion which
has maintained itself among the Jews assigned the creation of the
world. As to the beginning of the Deluge, it occurred, according to
the same system, on the 1st day of the third month—that is to say,
at the commencement of the lunation whose end coincided with
the Sun’s entry into Capricorn, when the conjunction of planets
brought about periodic deluges according to an astrological conception
of Chaldean origin, which does not indeed appear a very ancient one;
but must have been based on data adopted by some of the sacerdotal
schools of Babylonia as to the epoch of the cataclysm.

It is also with the winter rains, and not with the swelling of the
Euphrates and Tigris in spring, that the calendrical construction, according
to which the antediluvian kings or patriarchs have been placed in
relation with solar mansions (a construction followed in Uruk’s Epic
poem), causes the commencement of the Deluge to coincide. It connects,
in point of fact, the tradition of the cataclysm with the month of
Shabut (January-February), and with the sign of Aquarius. Accordingly,
I find great difficulty in admitting the exactness of the date, 15th of
Daisios, given in the extract of Alexander Polybister, as that assigned
by Berosus to the Deluge, for this would make the event occur in the
middle of the Assyrian month Sivan, at the beginning of July, in a
season of complete drought, when the rivers have reached their lowest
level. I hold this to be an evident error, due not to the author of the
Chaldean History himself, but to his transcriber. Berosus must have
written
μηνὸς ὀγδόυ· πέμπτῃ καὶ δεκάτῃ
the 15th of the eighth month, translating into Greek the Assyrian name of the Arakh-Shanina.
And by a readily explicable error Cornelius Alexander must have turned
it into Daisios, which was the eighth month of the Syro-Macedonian
Calendar, forgetting the difference between the initial point of its year
and that of the Chaldeo-Assyrian. In reality, then, the date given by
Berosus only differed by two days from that adopted by the Elohist
compiler of Genesis. Besides, as Knobel rightly insists, in placing the
commencement of the Deluge at the 15th or 17th of a month, we
place it always at the full moon, for it is also with this phase of the
light that lights the night that popular belief in Egypt and Mesopotamia
links the periodic rise of Nile or Tigris.

The system of the Jehovist is quite a different one. According to
him, Jahveh announces the Deluge to Noah only seven days beforehand.
The waters are at their height for forty days, and decrease
during forty more. After these eighty days Noah sends out the three
birds at intervals of seven days, and thus it is on the 21st day after he
has opened the window of the ark for the first time that he, too, goes
out of the ark and offers his sacrifice to the Lord. Here the phases of
the cataclysm are evidently calculated on those of the annual spring
outflow of the Euphrates and Tigris, so that we need not hesitate to
[Pg 475]
assign the origin of the very form of the tradition received by the
Jehovist writer, to the cradle of the race of the Terahites in Chaldea.
The overflow of the two rivers of Mesopotamia lasts, in fact, for an average
of seventy-five days from the middle of March to the end of May; and
twenty-six days later—that is, at the end of the 101 in all (80 + 21 =
75 + 26 = 101), when the Jehovist makes Noah leave the ark—the lands
which have been inundated become once more practicable.

What, moreover, in the Jehovist narrative bears a very marked
impress of Chaldean origin is the part played in it by septennial
periods; seven days intervening between the announcement and the
beginning of the Deluge, seven between each sending forth of the
birds. That religious and mystic importance attached to the heptade
which gave rise to the conception of the seven days of creation, and to
the invention of the week, is an essentially Chaldean idea. It is among
the Chaldeo-Babylonians that we discover its origin and find its most
numerous applications. The story of Khasisatra, in the poem of Uruk,
invariably proceeds hebdomadally. The violence of the Deluge lasts
seven days, and so does the stay of the vessel on Mount Nizir
when the waters begin to go down. It is true, indeed, that the building
of the vessel occupies eight instead of seven days; but we must add
the time necessary for the embarkation of provisions, animals, passengers,
and this will enable us to calculate the whole duration of Khasisatra’s
preparations between the vision sent him by Êa and the moment when
he closes the vessel at the approach of the rain, as consisting of fourteen
days or two hebdomades. This being granted, if the poem does not
state precisely the intervals at which the three birds were sent forth,
we are justified in applying here the figures used by the Jehovist in
Genesis, and counting seven days between the first and second sending
forth, seven between the second and third, and seven, lastly, between
the departure of the bird which does not return, and the leaving the
vessel. The whole interval, then, between the warning of Êa and the
sacrifice of Khasisatra, amounts to seven hebdomades—plainly a number
intentionally assigned. And the whole duration of the Deluge is
doubled by the sacred writer, who was the author of the Jehovist
document, 7 × 2 × 7, instead of 7 × 7; that is, fourteen weeks with just
three days over, owing to the writer having employed the round
numbers 40 + 40 = 80 days, instead of the precise number seventy-seven
days or eleven hebdomades (7 + 4 × 7), to indicate the interval
between the beginning of the diluvian rain and the sending forth of
the first bird. And now, if we keep count of the time between the
announcing of the cataclysm by Jahveh and its commencement, the
figures of the Jehovist are in all 7 × 2 × 7 + 7 days, and those of the
system of the Chaldean poem 7 × 7. But they are on both sides combinations
of seven.

Where the Chaldeo-Babylonian narrative and that of the Bible
absolutely diverge, is in their statement of what, after the Deluge,
[Pg 476]
befell the righteous man saved from it. According to the figures of the
Elohist, Noah lives on among his descendants for 350 years, and dies
at the age of 950. Khasisatra receives the privilege of immortality;
is carried away “to live like the gods,” and transported into “a distant
place,” where the hero of Uruk goes to visit him in order to
learn the secrets of life and death. But in the Bible we have something
of the same kind told us of Noah’s great-grandfather Enoch, who
“walked with God, and was not, because God took him.” We see,
then, that the Babylonian tradition united in the person of Khasisatra
facts which the Bible distributes between Enoch and Noah, the two
whom Holy Scripture equally characterizes as having “walked with
God.”

The author of the treatise “On the Syrian Goddess,” erroneously
attributed to Lucian, acquaints us with the diluvian tradition of the
Arameans, directly derived from that of Chaldea, as it was narrated in
the celebrated Sanctuary of Hierapolis or Bambyce.

It appears to me difficult not to recognize an echo of fables popular
[Pg 477]
in all Semitic countries about this chasm of Hierapolis, and the part it
played in the Deluge,—in the enigmatic expressions of the Koran
respecting the oven tannur which began to bubble and disgorge water
all around at the commencement of the Deluge. We know that this
tannur has been the occasion of most grotesque imaginings of Mussulman
commentators, who had lost the tradition of the story to which
Mahomet made allusion. And, moreover, the Koran formally states that
the waters of the Deluge were absorbed in the bosom of the earth.

II.

Indian Traditions.—India, in its turn, affords us an account of the
Deluge, which by its poverty strikingly contrasts with that of the Bible
and the Chaldeans. Its most simple and ancient form is found in the
Çatapatha Brâhmana of the Rig-Veda. It has been translated for the
first time by M. Max Müller.

Next in order of date and complication, which always goes on loading
the narrative more and more with fantastic and parasitical details, comes
the version in the enormous epic of Mahâbhârata. That of the poem
called Bhâgavata-Purâna is still more recent and fabulous. Finally, the
same tradition forms the subject of an entire poem of very low date, the
Matsya-Purâna, of which an analysis has been given by the great Indian
scholar, Wilson.

In the preface to the third volume of his edition of Bhâgavata-Purâna,
Eugene Burnouf has carefully compared the three narratives known at
the time he wrote (that of the Çatapatha Brâhmana has been since
discovered), with a view to clearing up the origin of the Indian tradition
of the Deluge. He points out in a discussion that deserves to remain a
[Pg 478]
model of erudition and subtle criticism, that it is absolutely wanting in
the Vedic hymns, where we only find distant allusions to it that
seem to belong to a different kind of legend altogether, and also
that this tradition was primitively foreign to the essentially Indian
system of Manvantaras, or periodic destructions of the world. He
thence concludes that it must have been imported into India
subsequently to the adoption of this system, which is, however, very
ancient, being common to Brahmanism and Buddhism, and therefore
inclines to look upon it as a Semitic importation that took place in
historic times, not, indeed, of Genesis, but more probably of the Babylonian
tradition.

The discovery of an original edition of the latter confirms the theory
of the French savant. The leading feature which distinguishes the
Indian narrative is the part assigned to a god who puts on the form of
a fish, in order to warn Manu, to guide his vessel and save him from the
flood. The nature of the metamorphosis is the only fundamental and
primitive point, for different versions vary as to the personality of the
god who assumes this form—the Brâhmana leaves it uncertain, the Mahâbhârata
fixes on Brahma, and the compilers of the Purânas on Vishnu.
This is the more remarkable that this metamorphosis into a fish
Matsyavatara remains isolated in Indian mythology, is foreign to its
habitual symbolism, and gives rise to no ulterior developments: no trace
being found in India of that fish-worship which was so important and
widespread among other ancient people. Burnouf rightly saw in this
a sign of importation from without, and especially of its Babylonian
origin, for classic testimony, recently confirmed by native monuments,
shows us that in the religion of Babylon the conception of ichthyomorphic
gods held a more prominent place than elsewhere. The part played
by the divine fish with regard to Manu in the Indian legend, is attributed
both by the Epic of Uruk and by Berosus to the god Êa, who is
also designated Schalman, “the Saviour.” Now this god, whose type
of representation we now know certainly from Assyrian and Babylonian
monuments, is essentially the ichthyomorphic god, and his image almost
invariably combines the forms of fish and man. In astronomical tables
frequent mention is made of the catasterism of the “fish of Êa,” which
is indubitably our sign Pisces, since it presides over the month Adar.
It is to a connection of ideas based on the diluvian record, that we must
attribute the placing of Pisces—primarily of the “fish of Êa”—next
to Aquarius, whose relation to the history of the Deluge we have already
pointed out. Here we have an evident allusion to the part of Saviour
attributed by the people who invented the Zodiac, to the god Êa in the
flood, and to the idea of an ichthyomorphic nature especially belonging
to this aspect of his personality. Êa is, moreover, the Oannès, lawgiver
of the fragments of Berosus, half-man, half-fish, whose form, answering
to the description given by the Chaldean history, has been discovered
[Pg 479]
in the sculptures of Assyrian palaces and on cylinders, the Euahanès
of Hygin, and the Oès of
Helladios.[46]

Whenever we find among two different peoples one same legend, with
as special a circumstance which does not spring naturally and necessarily
from the fundamental facts of the narrative, and when, moreover, this
circumstance is closely connected with the whole religious conceptions of
one of these peoples, and remains isolated and alien from the customary
symbolism of the other, criticism lays it down as an absolute rule that
we must conclude the legend to have been transmitted from the one to the
other in an already fixed form, to be a foreign importation, superimposed,
not fused with the national, and as it were genial, traditions of
the people, who have received, without having created it.

We must also remark that in the Purânas it is no longer Manu
Vaivasata that the divine fish saves from the Deluge, but a different
personage, the King of the Dâsas—i.e., fishers, Satyravata, “the man
who loves justice and truth,” strikingly corresponding to the Chaldean
Khasisatra. Nor is the Puranic version of the Legend of the Deluge
to be despised, though it be of recent date and full of fantastic and
often puerile details. In certain aspects it is less Aryanized than that of
Brâhmana or than the Mahâbhârata, and above all it gives some circumstances
omitted in these earlier versions, which must yet have belonged
to the original foundation, since they appear in the Babylonian legend;
a circumstance preserved no doubt by the oral tradition—popular and
not Brahmanic—with which the Purânas are so deeply imbued. This
has been already observed by Pictet, who lays due stress on the following
passage of the Bhâgavata-Purâna: “In seven days,” said Vishnu
to Satyravata, “the three worlds shall be submerged.” There is
nothing like this in the Brâhmana nor the Mahâbhârata, but in Genesis
the Lord says to Noah, “Yet seven days and I will cause it to rain
upon the earth;” and a little further we read, “After seven days the
waters of the flood were upon the earth.” And we have just pointed
out the parts played by hebdomades as successive periods in that system
of the duration of the flood, adopted by the author of the Jehovist
documents inserted in Genesis, as well as by the compiler of the
Chaldean Epic of Uruk. Nor must we pay less attention to what the
Bhâgavata-Purâna says of the directions given by the fish-god to
Satyravata for the placing of the sacred Scriptures in a safe place in
order to preserve them from Hayagrîva, a marine horse dwelling in
the abyss, and of the conflict of the god with this Hayagrîva, who had
stolen the Vedas and thus produced the cataclysm by disturbing the
order of the world. This circumstance too is wanting in the more
ancient compositions, even in the Mahâbhârata, but it is a most important
one, and cannot be looked on as a spontaneous product of
[Pg 480]
Indian soil, for we recognize in it under an Indian garb the very tradition
of the interment of the sacred writings at Sippara by Khasisatra,
such as we have it in the fragments of Berosus.

It is the Chaldean form, then, of the tradition that the Indians have
adopted owing to communications which the commercial relations
between the countries render historically natural, and they afterwards
amplified it with the exuberance peculiar to their imagination. But
they must have adopted it all the more readily because it agreed with a
tradition, which under a somewhat different form had been brought by
their ancestors from the primitive cradle of the Aryan race. That the
recollection of the flood did indeed form part of the original groundwork
of the legends as to the origin of the world held by this great
race, is beyond all doubt. For if Indians have accepted the Chaldean
form of the story, so nearly allied to that of Genesis, all other nations
of Aryan descent show themselves possessed of entirely original versions
of the cataclysm which cannot be held to have been borrowed either
from Babylonian or Hebrew sources.

III.

Traditions of other Aryan Peoples.—Among the Iranians, in the
sacred books containing the fundamental Zoroastrian doctrines, and
dating very far back, we meet with a tradition which must assuredly be
looked upon as a variety of that of the Deluge, though possessing a
special character, and diverging in some essential particulars from those
we have been examining. It relates how Yima, who in the original and
primitive conception was the father of the human race, was warned
by Ahuramazda, the good deity, of the earth being about to be devastated
by a flood. The god ordered Yima to construct a refuge, a square
garden, vara, protected by an enclosure, and to cause the germs of men,
beasts, and plants to enter it, in order to escape annihilation. Accordingly,
when the inundation occurred, the garden of Yima with all that
it contained was alone spared, and the message of safety was brought
thither by the bird Karshipta, the envoy of
Ahuramazda.[47]

A comparison has also been made, but erroneously as I think, between
the Biblical and Chaldean Deluge and a story only found complete
in the Bundahesh-pahlavi;[48]
though, as a few of the older books contain allusions to some of its
circumstances;[49]
it must date further back than this edition of it, which is recent. Ahuramazda determines to
destroy the Khafçtras—i.e., the maleficent spirits created by Angrômainyus,
the spirit of evil: Tistrya, the genius of the star Sirius, descends at his
command to earth, and, assuming the form of a man, causes it to rain
for ten days. The waters cover the earth, and all maleficent beings are
drowned. A violent wind dries the earth, but some germs of the evil
[Pg 481]
spirit’s creation remain, and may reappear, therefore Tistrya descends
again under the form of a white horse, and produces a second Deluge
by another rainfall of ten days. To prevent him accomplishing his
task, the demon Apusha assumes the appearance of a black horse, and
engages in combat; but he is struck with lightning by Ahuramazda, as
well as the demon Çpendjaghra, who had come to his aid. Finally, to
bring about the complete destruction of evil, Tistrya descends the third
time under the form of a bull, and produces a third Deluge by a third
rainfall of ten days, after which the waters divide to form the four
great and the twenty-four small seas. Now all this relates to a cosmogonic
fact, anterior to the creation of man. The Khafçtras, from
which Tistrya undertakes to purge the earth, are the hurtful and
venomous beasts created by Angrômainyus which fervent Mazedans
make it a duty to destroy in our actual world—such as scorpions,
lizards, toads, serpents, rats, &c. There is no allusion here to humanity,
or the punishment of its sins. If we were bent on finding in our Bible
any parallel to this first rain falling on the surface of the earth—which
both destroys the hurtful creatures by which it was infested and renders
it productive of a fertile vegetation—we should turn, not to the account
of the Deluge, but to what is said in Gen. ii. 5, 6.

The Greeks had two principal legends as to the cataclysm by which
primitive humanity was destroyed. The first was connected with the
name of Ogyges, the most ancient of the kings of Bœotia or Attica;
a quite mythical personage, lost in the night of ages, his very name
seemingly derived from one signifying deluge in Aryan idioms, in
Sanscrit Ângha. It is said that in his time the whole land was covered
by a flood, whose waters reached the sky, and from which he, together
with some companions, escaped in a vessel.

The second tradition is the Thessalian legend of Deucalion. Zeus
having worked to destroy the men of the age of bronze, with whose
crimes he was wroth, Deucalion, by the advice of Prometheus, his
father, constructed a coffer, in which he took refuge with his wife,
Pyrrha. The Deluge came, the chest or coffer floated at the mercy of
the waves for nine days and nine nights, and was finally stranded on
Mount Parnassus. Deucalion and Pyrrha leave it, offer sacrifice, and
according to the command of Zeus re-people the world by throwing
behind them “the bones of the earth”—namely, stones, which change
into men. This Deluge of Deucalion is in Grecian tradition what most
resembles a universal Deluge. Many authors affirm that it extended to
the whole earth, and that the whole human race perished. At Athens, in
memory of the event, and to appease the manes of its victims, a ceremony
called Hydrophoria was observed, having so close a resemblance to that
in use at Hierapolis in Syria, that we can hardly fail to look upon it as
a Syro-Phœnician importation, and the result of an assimilation established
in remote antiquity between the Deluge of Deucalion and that of
Khasisatra, as described by the author of the treatise “On the Syrian
[Pg 482]
Goddess.”[50]
Close to the temple of the Olympian Zeus a fissure in the
soil was shown, in length but one cubit, through which it was said the
waters of the Deluge had been swallowed up. Thus, every year, on the
third day of the festival of the Anthestéria, a day of mourning consecrated
to the dead,—that is, on the thirteenth of the month of Anthestérion,
towards the beginning of March—it was customary, as at Bambyce, to
pour water into the fissure, together with flour mixed with honey,
poured also into the trench dug to the west of the tomb, in the funereal
sacrifices of the Athenians.

Others, on the contrary, limit Deucalion’s flood to Greece, even declare
that it only destroyed the larger portion of the community, a great many
men saving themselves on the highest mountains. Thus the Delphian
legend told how the inhabitants of that town, following the wolves in
their flight, had taken refuge in a cave on the summit of Parnassus,
where they built the town of Lycorea, whose foundation is, on the other
hand, attributed by the Chronicle of Paros to Deucalion, after the reproduction
by him of a new human race. Later mythographers
necessarily adopted this idea of several points of simultaneous escape
from a desire to reconcile the local legends of several places in Greece,
which named some other than Deucalion as the hero saved from the
flood. For instance, at Megara it was the eponym of the city Megaros,
son of Zeus and of one of the nymphs Sithnides, who, warned by the
cry of cranes of the imminence of the danger, took refuge on Mount
Geranien. Again, there was the Thessalian Cerambos, who was said to
have escaped the flood by rising into the air on wings given him by the
nymphs, and it was Perirrhoos, son of Eolus, that Zeus Naios had
preserved at Dodona. For the inhabitants of the Isle of Cos the hero
of the Deluge was Merops, son of Hyas, who there assembled under
his rule the remnant of humanity preserved with him. The traditions
of Rhodes only supposed the Telchines, those of Crete Jasion, to have
escaped the cataclysm. In Samothracia the same character was attributed
to Saon, said to be the son of Zeus or of Hermes; he seems only
to have been a heroic form of the Hermès Saos or Sôcos, the object
of special worship in the island, a divinity in whom M. Philippe
Berges recognizes with good reason a Phœnician importation, the
Sakan of Canaan identified elsewhere with Hermes Dardanos, supposed
to have arrived in Samothracia immediately after these events,
being driven by the Deluge from Arcadia.

In all these flood stories of Greece we cannot doubt that the
tradition of a cataclysm fatal to the whole of humanity—a tradition
common to all Aryan peoples—was mixed up, as Knobel rightly
observes, more or less precisely with local catastrophes produced by
extraordinary overflows of lakes or rivers, or the rupture of their natural
[Pg 483]
embankments, the sinking of some portions of the sea-coast, or tidal
waves consequent upon earthquakes or sudden upheavals of the ocean bed.
Such events were frequent in Greece, in the district between Egypt and
Palestine, near Pelusium and Mount Casius, as well as in the Cimbric
Chersonese. The Greeks used to relate how often their country had in
primitive ages been the theatre of such catastrophes. Istros numbered
four of these, one of which had opened the Straits of the Bosphorus
and Hellespont, when the waters of the Euxine, rushing into the
Ægean, submerged the islands and neighbouring coasts. This is
evidently the Deluge of Samothracia; where the inhabitants who
succeeded in saving themselves did so only by gaining the highest
peak of the mountain that rises there; then, in gratitude for their
preservation, consecrated the whole island by surrounding its shores
with a belt of altars dedicated to the gods. In like manner the tradition
of the Deluge of Ogyges seems connected with the recollection of
an extraordinary rise of the Lake Capaïs, inundating the whole of the
great Bœotian Valley, a recollection amplified later—as is ever the case
with legends—by applying to the local disaster all the details popularly told
of the primitive Deluge which had taken place before the separation of
the ancestors of the two races, Semitic and Aryan. It is also probable
that some event that had occurred in Thessaly, or rather in the region
of Parnassus, determined the localization of the legend of Deucalion.
Nevertheless, it always retained, as we have seen, a more general
character than the others, whether the Deluge be extended to the
whole earth or limited to the whole of Greece.

Be that as it may, the different narratives were reconciled by
admitting three successive Deluges, those of Ogyges, Deucalion, and
Dardanos. The general opinion pronounced the former the most
ancient, placing it 600 or 250 years before that of Deucalion. But
this chronology is far from being universally accepted; and the inhabitants
of Samothracia maintain their Deluge to have been the earliest.
Christian chronographers of the third and fourth century, as, for
instance, Julius Africanus and Eusebius, adopted the Hellenic dates of
the Deluges of Ogyges and Deucalion, and inscribed them in their
records as different events from the Mosaic Deluge, which, for their part,
they fixed at 1000 years before that of Ogyges.

In Phrygia the diluvian tradition was as natural as in Greece. The
town of Apamea derived thence its surname Kibotos, or ark, and
claimed to be the place where the Ark had stopped. Iconium had the
like pretensions. In the same way the people of Milyas, in Armenia,
showed the fragments of the Ark on the top of the mountain called
Baris; and these were also exhibited in early Christian times to pilgrims
on Ararat, as Berosus tells us that in his day the remnants of the
vessel of Khasisatra were visited on the Gordyan range.

In the second and third centuries of our era, by means of the
syncretic infiltration of Jewish and Christian traditions even into minds
[Pg 484]
still attached to Paganism, the sacerdotal authorities of Apamea and
Phrygia had coins struck bearing an open ark, in which the patriarch
and his wife were seen receiving back the dove with the olive branch,
and side by side were the two same personages, having left the Ark to
retake possession of the earth. On the Ark is inscribed the name
ΝΩΕ, the very form the name assumes in the Septuagint. Thus, at
this time the Pagan priesthood of the Phrygian city had, we see,
adopted the Biblical narrative, even down to its names, and had grafted
it on the old native tradition. They related that a short while before
the Deluge there reigned a holy man called Annacos, who had predicted
it, and occupied the throne more than 300 years, an evident reproduction
of the Enoch of the Bible, who walked with God for 365 years.

As to the branch of the Celts—in the bardic poems of Wales, we have
a tradition of the Deluge, which, although recent under the concise
form of the Triads, is still deserving of attention. As usual, the legend
is localized in the country, and the Deluge counts among three terrible
catastrophes of the island of Prydain, or Britain, the other two consisting
of devastation by fire and by drought.

Pictet here observes—

We also find a vestige of the same tradition in the Scandinavian
Ealda.[53]
But here the story is combined with a cosmogonic myth.
The three sons of Borr, Othin, Wili, and We, grandsons of Buri, the
first man, slay Ymir, the father of the Hrimthursar or Ice giants, and
his body serves them for the construction of the world. Blood flows
from his wounds in such abundance that all the race of giants is drowned
in it, except Bergelmir, who saves himself, with his wife, in a boat, and
reproduces the race. “Thus,” Pictet again observes, “the myth only
[Pg 485]
belongs to the general tradition through these last features, by which,
however, we trace it up to a common source.”

Of all European peoples the Lithuanians were the last to embrace
Christianity, and their language remains nearest to the original Aryan.
They have a legend of the Deluge, the groundwork of which appears
very ancient, although it has assumed the simple character of a popular
tale, and some of its details may have been borrowed from Genesis at the
time of the first Christian missions. According to
it[54] the god Pramzimras,
seeing the whole earth to be full of iniquity, sends two giants, Wandu
and Wêjas (fire and wind), to lay it waste. These overthrew everything
in their fury, and only a few men saved themselves on a mountain.
Pramzimras, who was engaged in eating celestial walnuts, dropped a shell
near the mountain, and in it the men took refuge, the giants respecting
it. Having escaped from the calamity, they afterwards disperse, and
only one very aged couple remain in the country, greatly bewailing their
childless condition. Pramzimras, to console them, sends his rainbow
and bids them jump “on the bones of the earth,” which curiously recalls
the oracle to Deucalion. The two old people jump nine times, and nine
pairs are the result, who became the ancestors of the nine Lithuanian
tribes.

IV.

Egyptian Traditions.—While the tradition of the Deluge holds so
considerable a place in the legendary memories of all branches of the
Aryan race, the monuments and original texts of Egypt, with their many
cosmogonic speculations, have not afforded one, even distant, allusion to
this cataclysm. When the Greeks told the Egyptian priests of the
Deluge of Deucalion, their reply was that they had been preserved from
it as well as from the conflagration produced by Phaëton; they even
added that the Hellenes were childish in attaching so much importance to
that event, as there had been several other local catastrophes resembling
it. According to a passage in Manetho, much suspected, however, of
being an interpolation, Thoth or Hermes Trismegistus had himself,
before the cataclysm, inscribed on stelæ in hieroglyphical and sacred
language the principles of all knowledge. After it the second Thoth
translated into the vulgar tongue the contents of these stelæ. This
would be the only Egyptian mention of the Deluge, the same Manetho
not speaking of it in what remains to us of his “Dynasties,” his only
complete authentic work. The silence of all other myths of the
Pharaonic religion on this head render it very likely that the above is
merely a foreign tradition, recently introduced, and no doubt of Asiatic
and Chaldean origin. “Thus,” says M. Maury, “the Seriadic land,
where the passage in question places these hieroglyphic columns, might
very well be no other than Chaldea. This tradition, though not in the
Bible, existed as a popular legend among the Jews at the beginning
[Pg 486]
of our era, which confirms our supposition; as the Hebrews might
have learnt it during the Babylonian captivity. Josephus tells us that
the patriarch Seth, in order that wisdom and astronomical knowledge
should not perish, erected, in prevision of the double destruction by fire
and water predicted by Adam, two columns, the one in brick, the other
in stone, on which this knowledge was engraved, and which subsisted in
the Seriadic country.” This history is evidently only a variety of the
Chaldean legend of the terra-cotta tables bearing the divine revelations,
and the principles of all sciences which Êa ordered Khasisatra to bury
before the Deluge, “in the city of the Sun at Sippara,” as we have had
it above in the extracts from Berosus.

Nevertheless, the Egyptians did admit a destruction by the gods of
primal men on account of their rebellion and their sins. This event
was related in a chapter of the sacred books of Thoth, those famous
Hermetic books of the Egyptian priesthood which are graven on the
sides of one of the inmost chambers of the funereal hypogeum of Seti
the First at Thebes. The text has been published and translated by
M. Edouard Naville.[55]

The scene is laid at the close of the reign of the god Râ, the earliest
terrestrial reign, according to the system of the priests of Thebes, the
second, according to that of the priests of Memphis, which is the one
followed by Manetho, who placed at the very origin of things the reign
of Phtah, previous to that of Râ. Irritated by the impiety and crimes
of the men he has made, the god assembles the other gods to hold
counsel with them in profound secrecy, “so that men should not see it,
nor their heart be afraid.”

A goddess, whose name has unfortunately disappeared, but who seems
to have been Tefnut, identified with Hathor and Sekhet, is then sent
to accomplish the sentence of destruction.

But the massacre ended, the anger of Râ was appeased; he began to
repent of what he had done. A great expiatory sacrifice succeeded in
finally calming him. Fruits were gathered throughout Egypt, bruised,
and their juice mingled with human blood, 7000 pitchers being filled with
it and presented to the god.

Nevertheless, some men have escaped the destruction commanded by
Râ, and renewed the population of the earth. As for the solar god
who reigns over the world, he feels himself old, sick and weary; he has
had enough of living among men, whom he regrets not to have
completely annihilated, but has sworn henceforth to spare.

The god Râ decides, however, to accept the help of the men of the
new human race who offer themselves to him to combat his enemies,
and a great battle takes place, out of which they come victorious. But
in spite of this success the god, disgusted with earthly life, resolves to quit
it for ever, and has himself carried into heaven by the goddess Nut, who
takes the form of a cow. Then he creates a region of delight, the
fields of Aalu, the Elysium of Egyptian mythology, which he peoples
with stars. Entering into rest, he assigns to different gods the government
of different parts of the world. Shu, who is to succeed him as
king, is to administer celestial matters with Nut; Seb and Nun receive
the charge of the things of earth and water. Finally, Râ, a sovereign
who has voluntarily abdicated, goes to dwell with Thoth, his favourite
son, on whom he has bestowed the superintendence of the under-world.

[Pg 488]
Such is this strange narrative, “in which,” as M. Naville has well
said, “in the midst of fantastic and often puerile inventions, we do nevertheless
find the two terms of existence as understood by the ancient
Egyptians. Râ begins with earth, and passing through heaven stops in
the region of profundity, Ament, in which he apparently wishes to
sojourn. This then is a symbolic and religious representation of life,
which for every Egyptian—and especially for a royal conqueror—had to
begin and end like the sun. This explains the chapter being inscribed
in a tomb.”

Hence it was the last portion of the narrative—which we can analyse
but very briefly—the abdication of Râ and his retreat, first, in heaven,
next in the Ament, a symbol of death which is to be followed by resurrection
as the setting of the sun by its rising—it is this which constituted
its interest in the conception of the doctrine of a future life,
illustrated in the decoration of the interior of the tomb of Seti I.
For our present purpose, on the contrary, it is the beginning of the
story which constitutes its importance, it is that destruction of primal
humanity by the gods of which no mention has been hitherto found
elsewhere. Although the means of destruction employed by Râ are
quite dissimilar, although he does not proceed by submersion but by
a massacre in which the lion-headed goddess Tefnut or Sekhet, the
dreadful form of Hathor, is the agent, the other sides of the story bear
a sufficiently striking analogy to that of the Mosaic or Chaldean
Deluge to show that it is the special and very individual form assumed
in Egypt by that tradition. In both we have human corruption exciting
divine wrath, and punished by a divinely ordained annihilation of the
race, from which there escapes but a very small number destined to
give birth to a new humanity. Finally, after the event an expiatory
sacrifice appeases the celestial anger, and a solemn covenant is made
between men and the deity, who swears never so to destroy them again.
To me, the agreement of these principal features outweighs the divergence
in detail. And we have also to observe how singularly akin is the part
ascribed by the Egyptian priest to Râ with that assigned in the epic
poem of Uruk to the god Bel, in the deluge of Khasisatra. The
Egyptians believed, as did other nations, in the destruction of mankind;
but as inundation meant for them prosperity and life, they changed the
primitive tradition; the human race, instead of perishing by water, was
otherwise exterminated; and the inundation—that crowning benefit to
the valley of the Nile—became in their eyes the sign that the wrath of
Râ was appeased.

V.

American Stories of the Flood.

I have particular pleasure in quoting these words by a man of
immense erudition, because he does not belong to orthodox writers,
and will not therefore be thought biassed by a preconceived opinion.
Others also, no less rationalistic than he, have pointed out this likeness
between American traditions of the Deluge and those of the Bible
and the Chaldeans.

The most important among the former are the Mexican, for they
appear to have been definitively fixed by symbolic and mnemonic
paintings before any contact with Europeans. According to these
documents, the Noah of the Mexican cataclysm was Coxcox, called
by certain peoples Teocipactli or Tezpi. He had saved himself, together
with his wife Xochiquetzal, in a bark, or, according to other traditions,
on a raft, made of cypress wood (Cupressus disticha). Paintings retracing
the deluge of Coxcox have been discovered among the Aztecs, Miztecs,
Zapotecs, Tlascaltecs, and Mechoacaneses. The tradition of the latter
is still more strikingly in conformity with the story as we have it in
Genesis and in Chaldean sources. It tells how Tezpi embarked in a
spacious vessel with his wife, his children, and several animals, and grain,
whose preservation was essential to the subsistence of the human race.
When the great god Tezcatlipoca decreed that the waters should
retire, Tezpi sent a vulture from the bark. The bird, feeding on the
carcases with which the earth was laden, did not return. Tezpi sent
out other birds, of which the humming-bird only came back with a
leafy branch in its beak. Then Tezpi, seeing that the country began
to vegetate, left his bark on the mountain of Colhuacan.

The document, however, that gives the most valuable information as
to the cosmogony of the Mexicans is one known as “Codex Vaticanus,”
from the library where it is preserved. It consists of four symbolic
pictures, representing the four ages of the world preceding the actual
[Pg 490]
one. They were copied at Chobula from a manuscript anterior to the
conquest, and accompanied by the explanatory commentary of Pedro de
los Rios, a Dominican monk, who in 1566, less than fifty years after
the arrival of Cortez, devoted himself to the research of indigenous
traditions as being necessary to his missionary work.

The first age is marked with the cipher 13×400+6, or 5206, which
Alexander von Humboldt understands as giving the number of years of
the period, and Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg as the date of its commencement,
from a proleptic era going back from the period of the execution
of the manuscript. This age is called Tlatonatiuh, “Sun of Earth.”
It is that of the giants, or Quinames, the earliest inhabitants of Anahuac,
whose end was destruction by famine.

The number of the second age is 12×400+4, or 4804, and it is
called Tlatonatiuh, “Sun of Fire.” It closes with the descent on
Earth of Xiuhteuchli, the god of fire. Mankind are all transformed
into birds, and only thus escape the conflagration. Nevertheless, one
human pair find refuge in a cave, and repeople the world.

As to the third age, Ehécatonatiuh, “Sun of Wind,” its number is
10×400+10, or 4010. Its final catastrophe is a terrible hurricane
raised by Quetzalcoatl, the “god of the air.” With few exceptions, men
are metamorphosed into monkeys.

Then comes the fourth age, Atonatiuh, “Sun of Water,” whose
number is 10×400+8, or 4008. It ends by a great inundation, a
veritable deluge. All mankind are changed into fish, with the exception
of one man and his wife, who save themselves in a bark made of the
trunk of a cypress-tree. The picture represents Matlalcueye, goddess
of waters, and consort of Tlaloc, god of rain, as darting down towards
earth. Coxcox and Xochiquetzal, the two human beings preserved, are
seen seated on a tree-trunk and floating in the midst of the waters.
This flood is represented as the last cataclysm that devastates the earth.

All this is most important, as a mind of the order of Humboldt’s did
not hesitate to acknowledge. However, M. Girard de Realle wrote
quite recently:

I much fear that the tendency here is not on the side of writers
who are looked on as ground to powder by the epithet Christian;
which, indeed, be it said in passing, might well surprise a few
among them. And this tendency, when resolved at any cost to
attack the Bible, is as anti-scientific as when grasping at any uncritical
argument in its defence. No doubt the identical character of
Xochiquetzal or Maciulxochiquetzal, as goddess of the fertilizing rain
and of vegetation, with that of Chalchihuitlicué or Mallalcuéyé, is a
well-known fact, more certain even than the character of fish-god of
Coxcox or Teocipactli. But the transformation of gods into heroes is a
very common fact in all polytheisms, and most common in the kind of
unconscious euhemerism from which infant peoples never free themselves.
There is therefore nothing here to contradict the fact that these two
divine personages, contemplated as heroes, may be taken as the two
survivors of the Flood, and the ancestors of the new humanity. As to
the theory of Don José Ramirez, about the symbolic pictures that have
been interpreted as expressing the diluvian tradition, it is very ingenious
and scientifically presented, but not so absolutely proved as M.
Girard de Realle considers. But even granting its incontestability, it
only removes part of the evidence which may have been unintentionally
forced by those naturally disposed to see in it a parallel to Genesis; as
for instance, with regard to the sending out the birds by Tezpi. Still
the existence of the tradition among Mexican peoples would not be
shaken, for it rests upon a whole of indubitable testimony, confirming
in a striking manner the interpretation hitherto given of the “Codex
Vaticanus.”

The valuable work in the Aztec language, and in Latin letters, compiled
by a native, subsequently to the Spanish conquest, called Codex
Chimalpopoca by Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg, who gives an analysis
and partial translation of it in the first volume of his “Histoire des
Nations Civilisees du Mexique,” contains in its third portion a history of
the suns, or successive ages of the world. Each takes its name from the
way in which humanity is destroyed at its close. The first is the age of
jaguars, who devour the primordial
giants;[61]
the second, the age of wind;
at its close men lost themselves, and were carried off by the hurricane,
and transformed themselves into monkeys. Houses, woods, everything
was swept away by the wind. Then comes the age of fire, whose
sun is called Tlalocan-Teuctli, “Lord of the lower regions,” the usual
appellation of Mictlanteuctli, the Mexican Pluto, which seems to point
to the idea of an age of special volcanic activity. At its close, mankind
is destroyed by a rain of fire, and such as do not perish escape under
[Pg 492]
the form of birds. Finally, the fourth age is that of water, which immediately
precedes our present epoch, and closes with the Deluge.

Here is the narrative according to Abbé Brasseur’s version, held
correct by Americanists:—

This last touch is a satire on the Chichimecs, or “barbarians of the
North,” founders of the kingdom of Tezcuco. It proves the decidedly
indigenous character of the story, and removes any such suspicion of a
Biblical imitation, as the date might have led to.

The manuscript, written in Spanish by Motolina, who belonged to
the generation of the “conquistadores,” has hitherto only been known by
extracts given from it by Abbé Brasseur in his “Recherches sur les
Ruines de Palenque,” a work containing many useful documents, though
already pervaded by the delusions which towards the end of his career so
strangely misled this learned pioneer of Mexican antiquarianism. Here,
too, we find the theory of the four suns, or four ages, given in the same
order as by the author of the “Codex Chimalpopoca.”

The first is called “age of Tezcatlipoca,” because that god had then
added on a half to the sun, which was only half luminous, or had “made
himself sun in its place.” This was the age of the Quinames, or giants,
who were almost all exterminated by famine. After this, Quetzlcoatl,
the god of the air, having armed himself with a great stick, struck Tezcatlipoca
with it, threw him into the water, and “and made himself sun
in his place.” The fallen god, transforming himself into a jaguar,
[Pg 493]
devoured such of the Quinames as had escaped from the famine. The
statements of the “Codex Vaticanus” and the “Codex Chimalpopoca”
as to the final catastrophe of the world’s first age, are thus reconciled
by this last narrative.

Motolina calls the two next ages those of wind and fire; they are
closed in the way we have seen.

The fourth is the age of the “Sun of Water,” placed under the
patronage of the goddess Chalchihuitlicué. The Deluge terminates it,
and after this last cataclysm, we enter upon our present era.

We come next to the “History of the Chichimecs,” by Don Fernando
d’Alva Ixtlilxochitl, descendant of the old pagan kings of Tezcuco, whose
pretended silence on the subject we have seen appealed to as disproving
the authenticity of these Mexican diluvian traditions. In the first
chapter of his first book, Ixtlilxochitl relates the story of the cosmic
ages according to the traditions of his native city. He only gives four
in all, including the actual period. The first is the Atonatiuh, or “Sun
of Waters,” which begins with the creation, and ends with a universal
deluge. Then comes the Thlachitonatiuh, or “Sun of Earth,” when the
giants called Quinametziu-Tzocuilhioxime lived, descendants of the survivors
of the first epoch. A frightful earthquake, overthrowing the
mountains, and destroying the greater part of the dwellers on earth, closes
this age. It is in the third age, Ehecatonatiuh, “Sun of Wind,” that
Olmecs and Xicalanques came from the east to settle in the south of
Mexico. At first they were conquered by the remnant of the Quinames,
but ended by massacring these. Quetzalcoatl next appears as a religious
reformer, but is not listened to by men, whose indocility is punished
by the appalling hurricane during which such as escaped became monkeys.
Then begins the present age, Tlatonatiuh, or “Sun of Fire,” thus
called because it is to end by a rain of fire. We see, therefore, that
Ixtlilxochitl was perfectly acquainted with the diluvian tradition, and if
he does not enter into its details, he assigns it an important place in his
series of ages.

Therefore we must needs acknowledge the diluvian tradition to be
really indigenous in Mexico and not an invention of missionaries.
We may doubt as to some particulars in some of the versions, though
this arises chiefly from a preconceived idea, because they too much
resemble the story in Genesis; but as to the fundamental tradition it
is unassailable, and intimately connected with a conception not drawn
from the Bible—and universally admitted to have existed—that, namely, of
the four ages of the world. Between this conception, and that of the
four ages or Yugas of India, and of the manvantaras where the destruction
of the world and the renewals of humanity alternate, there is an
analogy which appeared very significant to Humboldt, MacCulloch, and
M. Maury. It is one that justifies us in asking whether the Mexicans
devised it independently or borrowed it more or less directly from India.
The system of the four ages, inseparable in Mexico from that of the
[Pg 494]
diluvian tradition, confronts us with the problem—ever recurring with
regard to American civilization—of how far these are spontaneous and
how far derived from Asia through Buddhist or other missionaries. In
the present state of our knowledge we can as little solve this problem
negatively as affirmatively, and all attempts made to come to a positive
conclusion are premature and unproductive. Before discovering whence
American civilizations came, we must thoroughly know what they were,
nor attempt the arduous and obscure question of their origin till we
frame a real American archæology on the same scientific basis and by
the same methods as other archæologies. And in this respect Messrs.
T. G. Müller and Herbert Bancroft appear to me greatly in advance of
their precursors in this field of inquiry.

For the present, all that can be done is, as I have attempted with
Flood stories, to determine facts without pretending to draw inferences.
Hence I should no longer boldly write, as I did eight years ago: “The
Flood stories of Mexico positively prove the tradition of the Deluge to
be one of the oldest held by humanity—a tradition so primitive as
to be anterior to the dispersion of human families and the final developments
of material civilization; which the Red race peopling America
brought from the common cradle of our species into their new home, at
the same time that the Semites, Chaldeans, and Aryans respectively
carried it into theirs.”[64]
The fact is that among American peoples this
tradition may not be primitive. We may indeed affirm that it was not
borrowed from the Bible after the arrival of the Spaniards, but we cannot
be equally confident that it was not the result of some previous foreign
importation, the precise date of which we have no means of fixing.

Be that as it may, the doctrines of successive ages, and of the destruction
of the men of the first age by a Deluge, is also found in the curious book
of Popol-vuh that collection of the mythological traditions of Guatemala,
written after the conquest in the native tongue, by a secret adept of
the old religion; discovered, copied, and translated into Spanish in the
beginning of the last century by the Dominican Francisco Ximenez, curé
of St. Thomas of Chiula. His Spanish version has been published by
M. Schelzer, the original text with a French translation by Abbé
Brasseur. Here we read that the gods, seeing that animals were neither
capable of speaking nor of adoring them, determined to make men in
their own image. They fashioned them at first in clay. But those men
had no consistency, could not turn their heads; spoke, indeed, but
understood nothing. The gods then destroyed their imperfect work by
a Deluge. Setting about it for the second time, they made a man
of wood and a woman of resin. These creatures were far superior to
the former; they moved and lived, but only like other animals; they
spoke, but unintelligibly; and gave no thought to the gods. Then
Hurakan, “the heart of heaven,” the god of storm, caused a rain of
burning resin to fall, while the ground was shaken by a fearful earthquake.
[Pg 495]
All the descendants of the wood-and-resin pair perished, with
a few exceptions, who became monkeys of the forest. Finally, out of
white and yellow maize, the gods produced four perfect men: Balam-Quitze,
“the smiling jaguar;” Balam-agab, “the jaguar of the night;”
Mahuentah, “the distinguished name;” and Igi-Balam, “the jaguar of
the moon.” They were tall and strong; saw and knew everything, and
rendered thanks to the gods. But the latter were alarmed at this their
final success, and feared for their supremacy: accordingly, they threw a
light veil, like a mist, over the vision of the four men, which became
like that of the men of to-day. While they slept the gods created for
them four wives of great beauty, and from three of these pairs the
Quichés were born—Igi-Balam and his wife Cakixaha having no children.
This series of awkward attempts at creation is sufficiently removed
from the Biblical narrative to do away with any suspicion of Christian
missionary influence over this indigenous quadrennial legend, where, as
usual, we find the belief in the destruction of primal mankind by a
great flood.

We meet with it in Nicaragua as well. Oviedo relates that Pedsarias
Davila, governor of the province in 1538, charged F. Bobadilla, of the
Order of St. Dominic, to inquire into the spiritual condition of those
Indians whom his predecessors boasted of having converted in great
numbers to Catholicism, which he, Davila, with good reason, doubted.
The monk accordingly examined the natives, and Oviedo has transmitted
several dialogues which show us the creed of the Nicaraguans a few years
after the Spanish conquest. The following bears directly on our subject:—

The great god Tamagastad, of whom mention is made in this dialogue,
is evidently the same as Thomagata, the awful-visaged spirit of
fire, whose cultus was anterior among a portion of the Muyscas at
Tunga and Sogamosa to that of Botchica. This, therefore, brings us
back to the religious and cosmogonic traditions of the very advanced
civilization in the high table-land of Cundinamarca, and we are led to
recognize in the Flood-legend of Botchica a certain echo of the so
universally spread tradition of the Deluge of early ages, mingled with
the memory of a local event, from which the ancestors of the Muyscas
had suffered at the time of their first settlement. Neither must we
forget that Botchica and his wicked spouse, who brought about the
inundation of Cundinamarca, are no other than personifications of
the sun and moon, as were the pair Manco-Capac and Mama-Oello
in the empire of the Incas. “The moon of Peru is gentle and
beneficent,” well observes M. Girard de Realle, “she helps her brother
and husband in the work of civilization; on the plateau of Cundinamarca,
on the contrary, she is a witch, a veritable deity of night and
of evil, worthily represented by the lugubrious owl.”

Some have believed themselves to have discovered the Flood-tradition
among the Peruvians, but careful criticism disproves this. For it
only arises from an unintelligent interpretation of the myth of Viracocha
or Con, god of waters, or more precisely, the personification of
the element, as shown by the legend which represents him as having no
bones, and yet stretching himself out afar, lowering the mountains and
filling up the valleys in his course. He was the chief god of the
Aymaras, who, according to them, had created the earth; and who,
issuing from Lake Titicaca, to manifest himself on earth, had assembled
the earliest men at Tiahuanaco. Later, the official cosmogony of the
Incas led to his undergoing an euhemeristic transformation diminishing
his religious importance; and he is represented as one of the sons of the
Sun, come upon earth to dwell among and civilize mankind, a younger
brother of Manco-Capac. Now it is under the government of Viracocha
that the Deluge is placed by the writers of very recent date, who
mention this event, of which the native tradition was unknown to the
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, to Montesinos, Balboa, Gomara, F. Oliva,
and, in short, to all authorities of any weight in Peruvian matters.
MacCulloch does indeed quote Acosta and Herrera, but these authors
never speak of a Deluge involving all humanity; they only say that
[Pg 497]
Viracocha gave laws to the earliest men at the close of a primordial
period anterior to their creation, when the whole surface of the earth
had been under water.

Numerous legends of the great inundation of earliest times have
been found among the savage tribes of America. But by their very
nature these leave room for doubt. They have not been committed to
writing by the natives, we only know them by intermediaries who may,
in perfectly good faith, have altered them considerably in an unconscious
desire to assimilate them to the Bible story. Besides, they have
been only collected very lately, when the tribes had been for a long
time in contact with Europeans, and had often had living among them
more than one adventurer who might well have introduced new elements
into their traditions. They are therefore very inferior in importance
to those we have found existing in Mexico, Guatemala, and
Nicaragua, previous to the arrival of the Spanish conquerors.

The most remarkable of them, as excluding by its very form the idea
of European communication, is that of the Cherokees. It seems a
childish version of the Indian tradition, only that it is a dog instead
of a fish who plays the part of deliverer to the man who escapes the
catastrophe; but this brings us back to a myth special to America—that
of the transformation of fish into dogs, as we have seen in the
Flood-story of the “Codex Chimalpopoca.”

It is said that the Tamanakis, a Carib tribe on the banks of the
Orinoco, have a legend of the man and woman who escaped the flood
by reaching the summit of Mount Tapanacu. There they threw cocoa-nuts
behind them, from which sprung a new race of men and women.
If the report be true, which, however, we cannot affirm, this would be a
very singular agreement with one of the distinctive features of the
Greek story of Deucalion and Pyrrha.

Russian explorers have reported a childlike narrative of the flood in
the Aleutian Islands, forming the geographical link between Asia and
North America, and at the extremity of the north-east of America
among the Kolosks. Henry the traveller gives the following tradition
as current among the Indians of the Great Lakes:—

According to Father Charlevoix, the tribes of Canada and the valley
of the Mississippi relate in their rude legends that all mankind was destroyed
by a flood, and that the good spirit, to repeople the earth, had
changed animals into men. It is to J. S. Kohl we owe our acquaintance
with the version of the Chippeways—full of grotesque and perplexing
touches—in which the man saved from the deluge is called
Menaboshu.[65]
To know if the earth be drying he sends a bird, the diver, out of his
bark; then becomes the restorer of the human race and the founder of
existing society. Catlin relates a story, current among the Mandans,
of the earth being a great tortoise borne on the waters, and that when
one day, in digging the soil, a tribe of white men pierced the shell of
the tortoise, it sank, and the water covering it drowned all men, with
the exception of one, who saved himself in a boat; and when the earth
re-emerged, sent out a dove, who returned with a branch of willow in
its beak. Here we have Noah’s dove, as in the story of Tezpi and
Menaboshu we have other birds substituted for it. But the native
originality of this detail, as of the whole diluvian tradition among the
Mandans, may well be doubted when we remember that the physical
peculiarities of this curious tribe on the banks of the Missouri led Catlin
to consider it of mixed blood, and partly white origin.

In the songs of the inhabitants of New California allusion was made
to a very remote period when the sea left its bed and covered the earth.
The whole race of men and animals perished in this deluge, sent by the
supreme god Chinigchinig, with the exception of a few who had taken
refuge on a high mountain which the water failed to reach. The Commissioners
of the United States who explored New Mexico before its
annexation, tell of the existence of a similar tradition among the different
native tribes of that vast territory. Other travellers give us kindred
narratives, more or less strikingly resembling the Bible record. But
for the most part they are too vaguely reported to be entirely trusted.

VI.

Polynesian Traditions.—In Oceania even, and not among the Pelagian
negroes or Papoos,[66]
but the Polynesian, racenatives of the archipelago
of Australasia, the diluvian tradition has been traced, mingled with recollections
of sudden rises of the sea, which are one of the most frequent
scourges of those islands. The most noted is that of Tahiti, which
has been specially referred to the primeval tradition. Here it is as
[Pg 499]
given by M. Gaussin,[67]
who has published a translation of it, as well as
the Tahitian text, written by a native named Maré:—

This story, like all in this part of the world currently referred to
the memory of the Deluge, has assumed the childish character peculiar
to Polynesian legends, and moreover, as M. Maury justly observes, it
may be naturally explained by the recollection of one of those tidal
waves so common in Polynesia. The most essential feature of all
traditions properly called diluvian is wanting here. The island,
observes M. Maury, has no resemblance to the
Ark.[68] It is true that
one of the versions of the Tahitian legend states that the two fishermen
repaired to Toa-marama, not only with their families, but with a pig, a
dog, and a couple of fowls, which recalls the entry of the animals into
the Ark. On the other hand, some details of a similar story among
the Fijis, especially one in which, for many years after the event,
canoes were kept ready in case of its repetition, far better fit a local
phenomenon, a tidal wave, than a universal deluge.

However, if all these legends were exclusively related to local
catastrophes, it would be strange that they should appear and be
almost similar in a certain number of localities at a great distance
from each other, and only where the Polynesian race has taken root, or
left indubitable traces of its passage;—this race, indigenous in the
Malay Archipelago, not having migrated thence till about the fourth
century of the Christian era—i.e., at a time when, in consequence of the
communication between India and a portion of
Malaysia,[69] the Flood-tradition
under its Indian form might well have entered in. Without,
therefore, deciding the question one way or other, we do not think that
that opinion can absolutely be condemned which finds in these Polynesian
legends an echo of the tradition of the Deluge, much weakened,
[Pg 500]
much changed, and more inextricably confused than anywhere else with
local disasters of recent date.

The result, then, of this long review authorizes us to affirm the story of
the Deluge to be a universal tradition among all branches of the human
race, with the one exception, however, of the black. Now a recollection
thus precise and concordant cannot be a myth voluntarily invented. No
religious or cosmogonic myth presents this character of universality. It
must arise from the reminiscence of a real and terrible event, so powerfully
impressing the imagination of the first ancestors of our race, as
never to have been forgotten by their descendants. This cataclysm
must have occurred near the first cradle of mankind, and before the dispersion
of the families from which the principal races were to spring;
for it would be at once improbable and uncritical to admit that at as
many different points of the globe as we should have to assume in
order to explain the wide spread of these traditions—local phenomena so
exactly alike should have occurred, their memory having assumed an
identical form, and presenting circumstances that need not necessarily
have occurred to the mind in such cases.

Let us observe, however, that probably the diluvian tradition is not primitive
but imported in America; that it undoubtedly wears the aspect of
an importation among the rare populations of the yellow race where it
is found; and lastly, that it is doubtful among the Polynesians of Oceania.
There will still remain three great races to which it is undoubtedly peculiar,
who have not borrowed it from each other, but among whom the
tradition is primitive, and goes back to the most ancient times; and
these three races are precisely the only ones of which the Bible speaks
as being descended from Noah, those of which it gives the ethnic filiation
in the tenth chapter of Genesis. This observation, which I hold to
be undeniable, attaches a singularly historic and exact value to the tradition
as recorded by the Sacred Book, even if, on the other hand, it may lead
to giving it a more limited geographical and ethnological significance.
In another paper I propose to inquire whether, in the conception of the
inspired writers, the Deluge really was universal, in the sense customarily
supposed.

But as the case now stands, we do not hesitate to declare that, far
from being a myth, the Biblical Deluge is a real and historical fact,
having, to say the least, left its impress on the ancestors of three
races—Aryan or Indo-European, Semitic or Syro-Arabian, Chamitic or
Kushite—that is to say, on the three great civilized races of the ancient
world, those which constitute the higher humanity—before the ancestors
of those races had as yet separated, and in the part of Asia they together
inhabited.

François Lenormant.

[Pg 501]

SUSPENDED ANIMATION.

Some time since an article appeared in the Times, quoted from the
Brisbane Courier (an Australian paper of good credit), stating
that one Signor Rotura had devised a plan by which animals might be
congealed for weeks or months without being actually deprived of life,
so that they might be shipped from Australia for English ports as dead
meat, yet on their arrival here be restored to full life and activity.
Many regarded this account as intended to be received seriously, though
a few days later an article appeared, the opening words of which
implied that only persons from north of the Tweed should have taken
the article au grand sérieux. Of course it was a hoax; but it is
worthy of notice that the editor of the Brisbane Courier had really been
misled, as he admitted a few weeks later, with a candour which did him
credit.[70]

This wonderful discovery, however, besides being worth publishing as
a joke (though rather a mischievous one, as will presently be shown),
did good service also by eliciting from a distinguished physician certain
statements respecting the possibility of suspending animation, which
otherwise might have remained for some time unpublished. I propose
[Pg 502]
here to consider these statements, and the strange possibilities which some
of them seem to suggest. In the first place, however, it may be worth
while to recall the chief statements in the clever Australian story, as
some of Dr. Richardson’s statements refer specially to that narrative.
I shall take the opportunity of indicating certain curious features of
resemblance between the Australian story, which really had its origin in
America (I am assured that it was published a year earlier in a New
York paper), and an American hoax which acquired a wide celebrity
some forty years ago, the so-called Lunar Hoax. As it is certain that
the two stories came from different persons, the resemblance referred to
seems to suggest that the special mental qualities (defects, bien entendu)
which cause some to take delight in such inventions, are commonly
associated with a characteristic style of writing. If Buffon was right,
indeed, in saying, Le style c’est de l’homme même, we can readily
understand that clever hoaxers should thus have a style peculiar to
themselves.

It can hardly be considered essential to the right comprehension of
scientific experiments that a picturesque account should be given of
the place where the experiments were made. The history of the
wonderful Australian discovery opens nevertheless as follows:—”Many
of the readers of the Brisbane Courier who know Sydney Harbour will
remember the long inlet opposite the heads known as Middle Harbour,
which, in a succession of land-locked reaches, stretches away like a
chain of lakes for over twenty miles. On one of these reaches, made
more than ordinarily picturesque by the bold headlands that drop almost
sheer into the water, stand, on about an acre of grassy flat, fringed by
white beach on which the clear waters of the harbour lap, two low brick
buildings. Here, in perfect seclusion, and with a careful avoidance of
publicity, is being conducted an experiment, the success of which, now
established beyond any doubt, must have a wider effect upon the future
prosperity of Australia than any project ever contemplated.” It was
precisely in this tone that the author of the
“Lunar Hoax”[71] opened his
account of those “recent discoveries in astronomy which will build an
imperishable monument to the age in which we live, and confer upon
the present generation of the human race a proud distinction through
all future time.” “It has been poetically said,” he remarks—though
probably he would have found some difficulty in saying where or by
whom this had been said,—”that the stars of heaven are the hereditary
regalia of man, as the intellectual sovereign of the animal creation; he
may now fold the zodiac around him with a loftier consciousness of his
mental supremacy” (a sublime idea, irresistibly suggestive of the
description which an American humourist gave of a certain actor’s
representation of the death of Richard III., “he wrapped the star-spangled
banner round him, and died like the son of a hoss”).

[Pg 503]
It next becomes necessary to describe the persons engaged in pursuing
the experiments by which the art of freezing animals alive is to
be attained. “The gentlemen engaged in this enterprise are Signor
Rotura, whose researches into the botany and natural history of South
America have rendered his name eminent; and Mr. James Grant, a
pupil of the late Mr. Nicolle, so long associated with Mr. Thomas Mort
in his freezing process. Next to the late Mr. Nicolle, Mr. James Grant
can claim pre-eminence of knowledge in the science of generating cold,
and his freezing chamber at Woolhara has long been known as the
seat of valuable experiments originated in his, Mr. Nicolle’s, lifetime.”
Is it merely an accident, by the way, or is it due to the circumstance
that exceptional powers of invention in general matters are often found
in company with singular poverty of invention as to details, that two of
the names here mentioned closely resemble names connected with the
Lunar Hoax? It was Nicollet who in reality devised the Lunar Hoax,
though Richard Alton Locke, the reputed author, probably gave to
the story its final form; and, again, the story purported to come from
Dr. Grant, of Glasgow. In the earlier narrative, again, as in the later,
due care was taken to impress readers with the belief that those who
had made the discovery, or taken part in the work, were worthy of all
confidence. Sir W. Herschel was the inventor of the optical device by
which the inhabitants of the moon were to be rendered visible, a plan
which “evinced the most profound research in optical science, and the
most dexterous ingenuity in mechanical contrivance. But his son, Sir
John Herschel, nursed and cradled in the observatory, and a practical
astronomer from his boyhood, determined upon testing it at whatever
cost.” Among his companions he had “Dr. Andrew Grant, Lieutenant
Drummond of the Royal Engineers, and a large party of the best
English mechanics.”

The accounts of preliminary researches, doubts, and difficulties are in
both cases very similar in tone. “It appears that five months ago,”
says the narrator of the Australian hoax, “Signor Rotura called upon
Mr. Grant to invoke his assistance in a scheme for the transmission of
live stock to Europe. Signor Rotura averred that he had discovered a
South American vegetable poison, allied to the well-known woolara (sic)
that had the power of perfectly suspending animation, and that the
trance thus produced continued until the application of another vegetable
essence caused the blood to resume its circulation and the heart its functions.
So perfect, moreover, was this suspension of life that Signor
Rotura had found in a warm climate decomposition set in at the extremities
after a week of this living death, and he imagined that if the
body in this inert state were reduced to a temperature sufficiently low
to arrest decomposition, the trance might be kept up for months,
possibly for years. He frankly owned that he had never tried this preserving
of the tissues by cold, and could not confidently speak as to its
effect upon the after-restoration of the animal operated on. Before he
[Pg 504]
left Mr. Grant he had turned that gentleman’s doubts into wondering
curiosity by experimenting on his dog.” The account of this experiment
I defer for a moment till I have shown how closely in several respects
this portion of the Australian hoax resembles the corresponding part of
the American story. It will be observed that the great discovery is
presented as simply a very surprising development of a process which is
strictly within the limits, not only of what is possible, but of what is
known. So also in the case of the Lunar Hoax, the amazing magnifying
power by which living creatures in the moon were said to have been
rendered visible, was presented as simply a very remarkable development
of the familiar properties of the telescope. In both cases, the circumstances
which in reality limit the possible extension of the properties
in question were kept conveniently concealed from view. In
both cases, doubts and difficulties were urged with an apparent frankness
intended to disarm suspicion. In both cases, also, the inventor of the
new method by which difficulties were to be overcome is represented as
in conference with a man of nearly equal skill, who urges the doubts
naturally suggested by the wonderful nature of the promised achievements.
In the Lunar Hoax, Sir John Herschel and Sir David Brewster
are thus represented in conference. Herschel asks whether the difficulty
arising from deficient illumination may not be overcome by
effecting a transfusion of artificial light through the focal image.
Brewster, startled at the novel thought, as he well might be, hesitatingly
refers “to the refrangibility of rays and the angle of incidence,” which
is effective though glorious in its absurdity. (Yet it has been gravely
asserted that this nonsense deceived Arago.) “Sir John, grown more
confident, adduced the example of the Newtonian reflector, in which
the refrangibility was arrested by the second speculum and the angle of
incidence restored by the third” (a bewilderingly ridiculous statement).
“‘And,’ continued he, ‘why cannot the illuminated microscope, say the
hydro-oxygen, be applied to render distinct, and if necessary even to
magnify, the focal object?’ Sir David sprang from his chair in an
ecstasy of conviction, and leaping half-way to the ceiling” (from which
we may infer that he was somewhat more than tête montée), “exclaimed,
‘Thou art the man!'”

The method devised in each case being once accepted as sound, the
rest of course readily follows. In the case of the Lunar Hoax a number
of discoveries are made which need not here be
described[72] (though I
shall take occasion presently to quote some passages relating to them
which closely resemble in style certain passages in the Australian narrative).
In the later hoax, the illustrative experiments are forthwith
introduced. Signor Rotura, having so far persuaded Mr. Grant of the
validity of the plan as to induce him to allow a favourite dog to be experimented
[Pg 505]
upon, “injected two drops of his liquid, mixed with a little
glycerine, into a small puncture made in the dog’s ear. In three or four
minutes the animal was perfectly rigid, the four legs stretched backward,
eyes wide open, pupils very much dilated, and exhibiting symptoms
very similar to those caused by strychnine, except that there had been no
previous struggle or pain. Begging his owner to have no apprehension
for the life of his favourite animal, Signor Rotura lifted the dog carefully
and placed him on a shelf in a cupboard, where he begged he might be
left till the following day, when he promised to call at ten o’clock and
revive the apparently dead brute. Mr. Grant continually during that
day and night visited the cupboard, and so perfectly was life suspended
in his favourite—no motion of the pulse or heart giving any indication
of the possibility of revival—that he confesses he felt all the sharpest
reproaches of remorse at having sacrificed a faithful friend to a doubtful
and dangerous experiment. The temperature of the body, too, in the
first four hours gradually lowered to 25 degrees Fahrenheit below ordinary
blood temperature, which increased his fears as to the result; and by morning
the body was as cold as in natural death. At ten o’clock next morning,
according to promise, Signor Rotura presented himself, and laughing
at Mr. Grant’s fears, requested a tub of warm water to be brought.
He tested this with the thermometer at 32 degrees Fahrenheit” (which,
being the temperature of freezing water, can hardly be called warm),
“and in this laid the dog, head under.” In reply to Mr. Grant’s
objections Signor Rotura assured him that, as animation must remain
entirely suspended until the administration of the antidote, no water
could be drawn into the lungs, and that the immersion of the body was
simply to bring it again to a blood-heat. After about ten minutes of
this bath the body was taken out, and another liquid injected in a
puncture made in the neck. “Mr. Grant tells me,” proceeds the veracious
narrator, “that the revival of Turk was the most startling thing
he ever witnessed; and having since seen the experiment made upon a
sheep, I can fully confirm his statement. The dog first showed the return
of life in the eye” (winking, doubtless, at the joke), “and after five and a
half minutes he drew a long breath, and the rigidity left his limbs. In a
few minutes more he commenced gently wagging his tail, and then slowly
got up, stretched himself, and trotted off as though nothing had happened.”
From this moment Mr. Grant had full faith in Signor Rotura’s
discovery, and promised him all the assistance in his power. They next
determined to try freezing the body. But the first two experiments
were not encouraging. Mr. Grant fortunately did not allow his favourite
dog to be experimented upon further, so a strange dog was put into the
freezing room at Mr. Grant’s works for four days, after having in the first
place had his animation suspended by Signor Rotura. Although this
animal survived so far as to draw a long breath, the vital energies
appeared too exhausted for a complete rally, and the animal died. So
[Pg 506]
also did the next two animals experimented on, a cat and a dog. “In
the meantime, however, Dr. Barker had been taken into their counsels,
and at his suggestion respiration was encouraged, as in the case of persons
drowned, by artificial compression and expansion of the lungs. Dr.
Barker was of opinion that, as the heart in every case began to beat, it
was a want of vital force to set the lungs in proper motion that caused
death. The result showed his surmises to be entirely correct. A
number of animals whose lives had been sealed up in this artificial
death have been kept in the freezing chamber from one to five weeks,
and it is found that though the shock to the system from this freezing
is very great, it is not increased by duration of time.”

I need not follow the hoaxer’s account of the buildings erected for
the further prosecution of these researches. One point, however, may
be mentioned illustrating the resemblance to which I have already
referred as existing between this Australian narrative and the Lunar
Hoax. In describing the works erected at Middle Harbour, the
Australian account carefully notes that the necessary funds were
provided by Mr. Christopher Newton, of Pitt Street. In like manner,
in the Lunar Hoax we are told that the plate-glass required for the
optical arrangement devised by Sir J. Herschel was “obtained, by
consent be it observed, from the shop-window of M. Desanges, the
jeweller to his ex-majesty Charles X., in High Street.”

Now comes the culminating experiment, the circumstances of which
are the more worthy of being carefully noted, because it is distinctly
stated by Dr. Richardson that none of the experiments described in
this narrative, apocryphal though they may really be, can be regarded
as beyond the range of scientific possibilities:—”Arrived at the works
in Middle Harbour, I was taken into the building that contains Mr.
Grant’s apparatus for generating cold…. Attached to this is the
freezing chamber, a small, dark room, about eight feet by ten. Here
were fourteen sheep, four lambs, and three pigs, stacked on their sides
in a heap, alive, which Mr. Grant told me had been in their present
position for nineteen days, and were to remain there for another three
months. Selecting one of the lambs, Signor Rotura put it on his
shoulder, and carried it outside into the other building, where a number
of shallow cemented tanks were in the floor, having hot and cold water
taps to each tank, with a thermometer hanging alongside. One of
these tanks was quickly filled, and its temperature tested by the Signor,
I meantime examining with the greatest curiosity and wonder the
nineteen-days-dead lamb. The days of miracles truly seem to have come
back to us, and many of those stories discarded as absurdities seem to
me less improbable than this fact, witnessed by myself. There was the
lamb, to all appearance dead, and as hard almost as a stone, the only
difference perceptible to me between his condition and actual death
being the absence of dull glassiness about the eye, which still retained
its brilliant transparency. Indeed, this brilliancy of the eye, which is
[Pg 507]
heightened by the enlargement of the pupil, is very striking, and lends
a rather weird appearance to the bodies. The lamb was gently dropped
into the warm bath, and was allowed to remain in it about twenty-three
minutes, its head being raised above the water twice for the introduction
of the thermometer into its mouth, and then it was taken out and
placed on its side on the floor, Signor Rotura quickly dividing the wool
on its neck, and inserting the sharp point of a small silver syringe
under the skin and injecting the antidote. This was a pale green
liquid, and, as I believe, a decoction from the root of the Astracharlis,
found in South America. The lamb was then turned on its back,
Signor Rotura standing across it, gently compressing its ribs with his
knees and hands in such a manner as to imitate their natural depression
and expansion during breathing. In ten minutes the animal was
struggling to free itself, and when released skipped out through the
door and went gambolling and bleating over the little garden in front.
Nothing has ever impressed me so entirely with a sense of the
marvellous. One is almost tempted to ask, in the presence of such a
discovery, whether death itself may not ultimately be baffled by
scientific investigation.” In the Lunar Hoax there is a passage
resembling in tone the lively account of the lamb’s behaviour when
released. Herds of agile creatures like antelopes were seen in the
moon, “abounding in the acclivitous glades of the woods.” “This
beautiful creature afforded us,” says the narrator, “the most exquisite
amusement. The mimicry of its movements upon our white-painted
canvas was as faithful and luminous as that of animals within a few
yards of the camera obscura. Frequently, when attempting to put our
fingers upon its beard, it would suddenly bound away, as if conscious of
our earthly impertinence; but then others would appear, whom we
could not prevent nibbling the herbage, say or do to them what we
would.” And again, a little further on, “We fairly laughed at the
recognition of so familiar an acquaintance as a sheep in so distant a
land—a good large sheep, which would not have disgraced the farms of
Leicestershire or the shambles of Leadenhall Market; presently they
appeared in great numbers, and on reducing the lenses we found them
in flocks over a great part of the valley. I need not say how desirous
we were of finding shepherds to these flocks, and even a man with blue
apron and rolled-up sleeves would have been a welcome sight to us, if
not to the sheep; but they fed in peace, lords of their own pastures,
without either protector or destroyer in human shape.”

Not less amusing, though more gravely written, is the account of
the benefits likely to follow from the use of the wonderful process for
freezing animals alive. Cargoes of live sheep can be readily sent from
Australia to Europe. Any that cannot be restored to life will still be
good meat; while the rest can be turned to pasture or driven alive to
market. With bullocks the case would not be quite so simple, because
of their greater size and weight, which would render them more difficult
[Pg 508]
to handle with safety. The carcass being rendered brittle by freezing,
they are so much the more liable to injury. “It sounded odd to hear
Mr. Grant and Signor Rotura laying stress upon the danger of breakage
in a long voyage.” This one can readily imagine.

Some of the remoter consequences of the discovery are touched on
by the narrator, though but lightly, as if he saw the necessity of keeping
his wonders within reasonable limits. Signor Rotura, “though he had
never attempted his experiment on a human being,” which was considerate
on his part, “had no doubt at all as to its perfect safety.” He
had requested Sir Henry Parkes to allow him to operate on the next
felon under capital sentence. This, by the way, was a compromising
statement on our hoaxer’s part. It requires very little acquaintance
with our laws to know that no one could allow a felon condemned to
death to be experimented on in this or in any other manner. Such a
man is condemned to die, and to die without any preliminary tortures,
bodily or mental, other than those inseparable from the legally adopted
method of bringing death about. He can neither be allowed to remain
alive after an experiment, and necessarily free (because he has not been
condemned to other punishment than the death penalty), nor can he be
first experimented upon and then hanged. So that that single sentence
in the narrative should have shown every one that it was a hoax, even
if the inherent absurdity of many other parts of the story had not
shown this very clearly. As to whether a temporary suspension of the
vital faculties would affect the longevity of the patient, Signor Rotura
expressed himself somewhat doubtful; he believed, however, that the
duration of life might in this way be prolonged for years. “I was
anxious,” says the hoaxer, “to know if a period of, say, five years of
this inertness were submitted to, whether it would be so much cut out
of one’s life, or if it would be simply five years of unconscious existence
tacked on to one’s sentient life. Signor Rotura could give no positive
answer, but he believes, as no change takes place or can take place
while this frozen trance continues, no consumption, destruction, or
reparation of tissue being possible, it would be so many unvalued and
profitless years added to a lifetime.” Of some of the strange ideas
suggested by this conception I shall take occasion to speak further on;
I must for the present turn, however, from the consideration of this
ingenious hoax to discuss the scientific possibilities which underlie the
narrative, or at least some parts of the narrative.

In the first place, it must be noticed that in the phenomena of hibernation
we have what at a first view seems closely to resemble the results
of Signor Rotura’s apocryphal experiments. As was remarked in the
Times, the idea underlying the Australian story is that the hibernation of
animals can be artificially imitated and extended, so that as certain
animals lie in a state of torpor and insensibility throughout the winter
months, all animals also may perhaps be caused to lie in such a state for
an indefinite length of time, if only a suitable degree of cold is maintained,
[Pg 509]
and some special contrivance adopted to prevent insensibility from passing
into death. The phenomena of hibernation are indeed so surprising,
when rightly understood, that inexperienced persons might well believe
in almost any wonders resulting from the artificial production (which, be
it remembered, is altogether possible) of the hibernating condition, and
the artificial extension of this condition to other animals than those which
at present hibernate, and to long periods of time. It has been justly
said, that if hibernation had only been noticed among cold-blooded
animals, its possibility in the case of mammals would have seemed inconceivable.
The first news that the bat and hedgehog pass into the state of
complete hibernation, would probably have bean received as either a
daring hoax or a very gross blunder.

Let us consider what hibernation really is. When, as winter approaches
and their insect food disappears, the bat and the hedgehog
resign themselves to torpor, the processes which we are in the habit of
associating with vitality gradually diminish in activity. The breathing
becomes slower and slower, the heart beats more and more slowly, more
and more feebly. At last the breathing ceases altogether. The circulation
does not wholly cease, however. So far as is known, the life of
warm-blooded animals cannot continue after the circulation has entirely
ceased for more than a certain not very considerable length of
time.[73]
The chemical changes on which animal heat depends, and without which
there can be no active vitality, cease with the cessation of respiration.
But dormant vitality is still maintained in hibernation, because the
heart’s fibre, excited to contract by the carbonized blood, continues to
propel the blood through the torpid body. This slow circulation of
venous blood continues during the whole period of hibernation. It is
the only vital process which can be recognised; and it is not easy to
understand how the life of any warm-blooded animal can be maintained
in this way. The explanation usually offered is that the material conveyed
by the absorbents suffices to counterbalance the process of waste
occasioned by the slow circulation. But this does not in reality touch
the chief difficulty presented by the phenomena of hibernation.
So far as mere waste is concerned (as I have elsewhere pointed
out) the imagined Australian process is as effectual as hibernation; in
that process, of course the circulation would be as completely checked as
the respiration; thus there would be no waste, and the absorbents (which
would also be absolutely dormant) would not have to do even that slight
amount of work which they accomplish during hibernation. Science
can only say that the known cases of hibernation among warm-blooded
animals show that the vital forces may be reduced much lower without
destroying life, than but for them we should have deemed conceivable.

But next let us consider what science has to say as to the artificial
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suspension of vitality. In Dr. Richardson’s paper on this subject there is
much which seems almost as surprising as anything in the Australian
story. Indeed, he seems scarcely to have felt assured that that story
really was a hoax. “The statements,” he says, “which, under the head
of ‘A Wonderful Discovery,’ are copied from the Brisbane Courier, seem
greatly to have astonished the reading public. To what extent the
statements are true or untrue it is impossible to say. The whole may
be a cleverly-written fiction, and certain of the words and names used
seem, according to some readers, to suggest that view; but be this so
or not, I wish to indicate that some part at all events of what is stated
might be true, and is certainly within the range of possibility.” “The
discovery,” he proceeds, “which is described in the communication under
notice, is not in principle new; on the subject of suspension of animation
I have myself been making experimental inquiries for twenty-five
years at least, and have communicated to the scientific world many
essays, lectures, and demonstrations, relating to it. I have twice read
papers bearing on this inquiry to the Royal Society, once to the British
Association for the Advancement of Science, two or three times in my
lectures on Experimental and Practical Medicine, and published one in
Nature. In respect to the particular point of the preservation of animal
bodies for food, I dwelt on this topic in the lectures delivered before the
Society of Arts, in April and May of last year (1878), explaining very
definitely that the course of research in the direction of preservation
must ultimately lead to a process by which we should keep the structures
of animals in a form of suspended molecular life.” In other words, Dr.
Richardson had indicated the possibility of doing precisely that which
would have constituted the chief value of the Australian discovery, if
this had been real.

Let us next consider what is known respecting the possibility of
suspending a conscious and active life. This is first stated in general
terms by Dr. Richardson, as follows:—”If an animal perfectly free from
disease be subjected to the action of some chemical agents or physical
agencies which have the property of reducing to the extremest limit the
motor forces of the body, the muscular irritability, and the nervous
stimulus to muscular action, and if the suspension of the muscular
irritability and of the nervous excitation be made at once and equally,
the body even of a warm-blooded animal may be brought down to a
condition so closely resembling death, that the most careful examination
may fail to detect any signs of life.” This general statement
must be carefully studied if the reader desires thoroughly to understand
at once the power and the limits of the power of science in this direction.
The motor forces, the muscular irritability, and the nervous
stimulus to muscular action, can be reduced to a certain extent without
destroying life, but not absolutely without destroying life. The
reduction of the muscular irritability must be made at once and equally;
if the muscular irritability is reduced to its lowest limit while the
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nervous excitation remains unaltered, or is less reduced, death ensues; and
vice versâ, if the nervous excitation is reduced to its lowest limits while
the muscular irritability remains unaltered, or is little reduced, death
equally follows. Then it is to be noticed that though when the state of
seeming death is brought about, the most careful examination may fail to
detect any signs of life, it does not follow that science may not find
perfectly sure means of detecting cases where life still exists but is at
its very lowest. Of course all the ordinary tests, in which so many
place complete reliance—a mirror placed close to the mouth, a finger
on the pulse, hand, or ear applied to the
breast[74] over the heart, and so
forth—would be utterly inadequate, in such a case, to reveal any signs of
life. That doctors have been deceived by cases of suspended vitality
not artificially produced, but presenting similar phenomena, is well
known. A case in point may not be out of place here, as illustrating
well certain features of suspended animation, and showing the possibility
that in some cases consciousness may remain, even when the most careful
examination detects no traces of life. The case is described by Dr.
Alexander Crichton, in his “Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of
Mental Derangement.” “A young lady, who had seemed gradually to
sink until she died, had been placed in her coffin, careful scrutiny
revealing no signs of vitality. On the day appointed for her funeral,
several hymns were sung before her door. She was conscious of all
that happened around her, and heard her friends lamenting her death.
She felt them put on the dead-clothes, and lay her in the coffin, which
produced an indescribable mental anxiety. She tried to cry, but her
mind was without power, and could not act on the body. It was
equally impossible to her to stretch out her arms or to open her eyes
or to cry, although she continually endeavoured to do so. The internal
anguish of her mind was, however, at its utmost height when the funeral
hymns began to be sung and when the lid of the coffin was about to be
nailed on. The thought that she was to be buried alive was the first
one which gave activity to her mind, and caused it to operate on
her corporeal frame. Just as the people were about to nail on the lid, a
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kind of perspiration was observed to appear on the surface of the body.
It grew greater every moment, and at last a kind of convulsive motion
was observed in the hands and feet of the corpse. A few minutes after,
during which fresh signs of returning life appeared, she at once opened
her eyes, and uttered a most pitiable shriek.” In this case it was considered
that the state of trance had been brought about by the excessive
contractile action of the nervous centres. St. Augustine, by the way,
remarks in his “De Civitate Dei” on the case of a certain priest called
Restitutus (appropriately enough), who could when he wished withdraw
himself from life in such sort that he did not feel when twitched or
stung, but might even be burned without suffering pain except afterwards
from the wound so produced. Not only did he not struggle or
even move, but like a dead person he did not breathe, yet afterwards he
said that he could hear the voices of those around him (if they spoke
loudly) as if from a great distance (de longinquo).