Progress

by P.B.

Originally published in Saint Pauls (Virtue & Co.) vol.1 #6 (Mar 1868).

"Progress—Bah! Now for a discourse on things in general,—much fuss and little way, like the old lady's journey round the lawn all night." Thus, I can well imagine, half sneers, half snarls, the judicious reader, as his eye falls on the title of this article.
        I appreciate his shrewdness. Vast, vague, difficult, intangible, the subject is; and I am modestly conscious of my inability to do it justice. But stronger than this consciousness is my feeling that something to the purpose requires to be said on progress. Is it not precisely on this matter that we are all in a state of uneasy indecision?—all, except perhaps the London tradesman, whose bosom swells with proud satisfaction beneath his red waistcoat, as he imbibes from the inspired columns of Jupiter Junior the persuasion,—deticately, almost insensibly suggested, rather than put in so many words,—that he, representing as he does the infallible "public," is the ultimate judge in all controversies, and stands upon the very apex of civilisation. The question is not by any means so simple as our friend in the red waistcoat is "given to understand." Several of the cleverest and most remarkable men in England take a different view of it from that derived. by him from his oracle. They allege that, instead of going forward, or even standing still, we are falling backward. And so the question will recur in a teasing, tantalising form. It is the year of grace 1868; whether we choose or not, we are "in the foremost files of time," and have the advantage of all that has been done in the past; the roar of our machinery, the din of our revolutions, echoes through the solar system; can we not, then, make up our minds whether our progress is a reality and a gain, or a delusion and a mistake? "Never mind," you reply. ‘Have a slice of sirloin from Mr. M^cCombie's ox, pledge me in this superlative sherry, and know that, while Cadiz stretches out her hand to Aberdeen over England's social board, things cannot be in a bad way." Pleasant,—and perhaps wise; but, sooth to say, it is not so easy to be a Gallio in this case. Voracious and bibacious the healthy Englishman is; but it is necessary to his comfort that he retain a fair opinion of himself; and the chances are that, if he tries in society any of those optimist sallies.,he will be contemptuously gloomed upon by the smartest people present as a bit of a fool. Will he, nill he, therefore, it is necessary to his peace that he have some precise, intelligent, plain, and tenable notions on the subject of progress. I shall hardly profess to furnish him with these on the present occasion; but the question has been a good deal in my thoughts, and it may be of some use to him to accompany me in a cursory but not altogether careless survey of the ground.
        To begin with, let us have an idea, as distinct as may be, of the dark side of our affairs, and the indictment brought against us by those who mourn and moralise over the decadence of the time. They are indisputably entitled to a hearing. There are not at this moment in Europe two men whose genius is more frankly admitted than that of Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin. That they are both characterised, more or less, by extravagance and eccentricity, we shall grant; but they have produced works remarkable not more for splendour of diction than for vigour of thought, acuteness of observation, fineness of moral sensibility, and force of moral judgment. They tell us, with constantly deepening emphasis as they increase in years, that the whole system of our affairs,—political, social, moral, intellectual, material,—is in a state of wreck and ruin. More than thirty years ago Mr. Carlyle, abandoning that serene hopefulness and earnest gaiety which lent so rare a charm to his earlier essays, began to talk of "a distracted society, vacant, prurient,"—an age "which slumbers and somnambulates, which cannot speak, but only screech and gibber." For thirty years the river of his indignation and scorn has rolled on in swelling volume; and if those waters of Marah were collected into a single reservoir, it would be larger than could contain all the bitterest wailings and denunciations of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel put together. Mr. Carlyle sees around him "a world all rocking and plunging, like that old Roman one when the measure of its iniquities was full; the abysses, and subterranean and supernal deluges, plainly broken loose; in the wild, dim-lighted chaos all stars of heaven gone out." In Mr. Carlyle's latest deliverance on the condition-of-England question, his far-famed "Shooting of Niagara and After," he reiterates his forebodings, drapes all his shadows in deeper black, and sums up with the announcement that it must, ere long, come to street-fighting, the big English "slave-nation" being taken by the beard by Mr. Carlyle and a company of brave men.
        Mr. Ruskin, whose earlier works were in like manner canopied with an atmosphere of calm gladness and steadfast hope, felt at a certain point in his career his spirit so stirred within him by the sins and sorrows he beheld, that he turned from the placid fields of art, rushed into the wilderness of political economy, and, re-appearing in a garment of camel's hair, and with a leathern girdle about his loins, commenced shouting "Woe, woe," into the ears of a generation which had liked him much better in his previous capacity. England, as he now sees her, is a withered and semi-fatuous beldam, "with her right hand casting away the souls of men, and with her left the gifts of God." Few things are more saddening than to read Mr. Ruskin's latest books; for not only is the melancholy which pervades them profound, but you perpetually feel that it is a brave and radiant soul which has been darkened, and that the murk of night has returned upon the dewdrops of morning. Mr. Carlyle's main cry against us is that we want strength; Mr. Ruskin's, that we want virtue. Mr. Carlyle says we have become a nation of sentimental dreamers, and whining, dawdling incompetents; Mr. Ruskin, that all the motives of our life have been swallowed up in cruel, vulturous, insatiable greed.
        Were we to take the suffrage of the poets on this question, they would not yield us a reassuring verdict. Mr. Tennyson has, on the whole, been a cheerful though a deeply thoughtful and earnest poet. In one of his poems, however, the much-canvassed "Maud," he takes formal diagnosis of the time, and never did physician speak less hopefully of a case. "Wretchedest age since time began,"—such is the sum of his opinion. And the younger minstrels,—the Arnolds, Swinburnes, and others, who are seated on the steps of Tennyson's throne,—testify, by the tone of unrest and uneasiness, or even of weariness and disappointment, which can be heard throughout their poems, that, bright and sportive as is their melody at times, they are dimly conscious that the spirit of the age is funereal rather than festive.
        In brief, a number of the most gifted and influential men of the day hold that the time is desperately out of joint. In the tumult of what we call our progress they discern the cracking and rending of the timbers in a falling house; our boasted force, they say, is but the heat of fever or the paroxysm of delirium. The blackness of darkness is eclipsing at noon the sun of our national glory, and blight and mildew have struck our standing corn and blooming flowers. Our material prosperity is hollow, precarious, and, such as it is, purchased with an amount of horror, ugliness, choking foulness, which literally blackens the face of nature in our manufacturing districts, and extinguishes at once the colours of the world, and all that is bright and brave and beautiful in man's soul. Our social life is a masked ball of simpering artificialities, skipping, smirking graciosities, of corpses that grin a mere pretence of life and mirth. Our literature is a jargon of histrionic excitements, or a universal crackling of fool's laughter. Our science and our philosophy are mechanical, materialistic. Our religion is a cant, a fanaticism, an imbecility, or a doubt. Our government is a pitiful see-saw of party against party, the work of the country left undone and inefficiency revelling in all departments, while the everlasting problem, whether the sublime Greek or the sublime Trojan,—Arcades ambo, humbugs both,—shall mount the throne of office, gets itself solved.
        Enough;—such is the "doleful song" chanted by these eminent persons. A great relief it would be to sniff it aside as "a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong." But are there no facts which, contemplated not through the fiery lenses of genius but with the unimpassioned eyes of common-sense, convey the impression that there is a painful significance in the strain? What imagination, haunted with terror or gangrened by hatred, had dreamed such dreams as were shown by the Trades' Union Commission to be facts? The public stood aghast at the revelation of rattening; it was as if one of the monsters of a former epoch, suddenly uprearing itself from its slime, had appeared in our streets. Was there ever anything in this world more astonishingly and malignantly bad than Fenianism? Put together the incoherence of its aims, the senseless atrocity of its methods, the brainless, heartless fierceness which always characterises it, and you will search history in vain for a ghastlier portent. Poor England, knowing with absolute certainty that to hand over Ireland to the Fenians, with a view to the establishment of a Fenian republic, would be to constitute a hell upon earth, and commit the most stupendous crime in history, has been brought to her wits' end in dealing with these men. If the Fenian leaders had been capable of a relenting emotion,—if one touch of fine or high-toned sentiment could have penetrated the obduracy of their hearts,—they would have been softened by the forbearance and conciliation which reached a climax of thoughtful tenderness in the reprieve of the Irish rebel, Burke. At no other period of the world,—in no other country in our own day, except, perhaps, the United States of America,—would Burke have escaped the gallows. Had the feeling of England towards Ireland been any other save earnest compassion and invincible good-will,—anxiously, resolutely tender, as the spirit of a mother when she hangs over her sick, fractious, wailing, frenzy-stricken child,—that gentleman would have died. With instinct brutish and forlorn, the Fenians could see in mercy only a sign of weakness, and went from worse to worse.
        Look, for a moment, at the monetary and commercial world. Convulsions, periodically recurring, shake the great cities of Europe and America,—and, most of all, the metropolis of Great Britain,—as if by the roll of an earthquake. On those occasions the spectacles presented in the "City" suggest to the mind the aspect of a town at whose gates thunder the cannon of a besieging army. Pale and haggard men hurry about in an agony of apprehension. The millionaire of yesterday is the pauper of to-day. The tide of calamity sends its long billows into remote country nooks, licking up the substance of widow and orphan, and hurrying persons brought up to a far different fate into the workhouse or the lunatic asylum. The laws which govern these convulsions are most imperfectly known; but it is universally acknowledged that they are connected with dishonest trading, with over-stimulated competition, with maniacal intensity of desire to become rich. And is it not widely felt that not only commercial soundness, but manufacturing and mechanical efficiency in all provinces, has suffered from this base wish to make money? The right and noble ambition to produce a good article and have it appreciated has, it is said, yielded to the mean and abnormal ambition to be well paid; and George Eliot's Adam Bede has become an ideal of the past in England. Certainly, when we look at the wretched agglomerations of brick, mud, and wood which are now run up by building speculators on all sides of London, and recall the workmanship of the days when companies of brother masons reared our Gothic cathedrals, whose glory will live for ever, and whose very framework is as adamant, we cannot help entertaining misgivings as to the continuance of the true kingly pride in the breasts of England's workmen.
        Shall we break, then, into a shriek of execration and contempt, and declare that the only true prophets are the prophets of despair? Not yet. The source of all error is incomplete induction. There are some facts not touched upon in the preceding paragraphs which a resolutely candid mind will take along with it before pretending to arrive at a conclusion upon the general question.
        The first phenomenon of a re-inspiring kind which may strike us as surprising after the panorama of death at which we have been looking, but which is happily indubitable, is the existence of clear, joyous, and successful activity in the department of physical science. Never since the gates of the tomb were shut upon "deep-browed Verulam" did that bark which, to the eye of his imagination, sailed periodically from the New Atlantis on its voyage in quest of light, return so richly freighted with nature's gold and jewels, nature's rifled secrets and hidden powers, as it has returned many times in our day. It is not enough to say that the sciences have grown,—they have shot suddenly from dwarfish into gigantic dimensions. If you glance over that, most interesting sketch of the history of geology given by Sir Charles Lyell in his great work, you will be amazed at the childish absurdity of the views touching the structure and modelling of the world and the facts of animal and vegetable life entertained by men of high ability not a hundred years ago. Little more than a quarter of a century has gone by since Lord Macaulay, who, to the last, continued on the side of those who dare to be proud of their country, and hopeful of her future, summed up, in one of his well-packed but freely-moving sentences, the fruits of the Baconian philosophy:—"It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendour of the day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all despatch of business; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind." The enumeration had, at the time it was made, that best literary force which comes of moderation and veracity. In its main points it still continues exact and impressive. But how far does it fall short of a just description of what physical science has now achieved! We have seen it revolutionise the whole art and practice of war, military and naval. We have seen it, by subtle dealing with the mysteries of colour and of light, analyse the sun. We have seen it track the tempest on the deep, and commence a series of meteorological inductions which may ultimately rob the storm of its terrors. We have seen it solve the ancient problems of the source of the Nile and the North-West passage. We have seen it not only convey the lightning innocuously into the earth, but lay it beneath the ocean to bear man's messages.
        This prosperous and conquering activity of science is a most important fact. It might, not without plausibility, be maintained that it is in itself adequate to the refutation of the school of despair. Intensely earnest as is the activity in question, it is not a fitful or feverish activity. It is calm in its might, like nature's power in early summer, that turns the landscape green. Here, then, is at least one great force which remains sound. Can the body be incurably diseased if one limb is vividly and healthily alive? And can any one say that the powers of this force for good are necessarily incompetent to grapple with our social ills, whatever they may be?
        We must tread cautiously here, as in every instance where we have to deal with complex and difficult questions. The scientific activity of the age demonstrates that we are not suffering from the worst of national maladies,—failure of stamina. We are not dying of atrophy. The common statement made with great force and brilliancy by Mr. Matthew Arnold in one of his recent poems, that the civilised world is at this moment in a position analogous to that of the Roman empire in the wane of ancient civilisation, is incorrect. The Roman, "with haggard eyes," gloated over the agonies of gladiators, the combats of wild beasts. The English officer in India takes note of geological formations in his visits to the hills, and gazes with passionate rapture on a new flower. Our children delight in botany and conchology; and our Brewsters, Lyells, Murchisons, testify, by the keen sparkling interest in their eyes when any accession is made to their store of scientific fact, that the freshness of nature is not exhausted by enjoying it for fourscore years.
        On the other hand, it would be rash to conclude that great scientific activity is a pledge that a period of crisis or calamity is not approaching. Science has never been in a more vivacious state than in France before the revolution of 1793. If ever nation passed through a crisis of agony, the French nation passed through such a crisis. in the days of the Terror, and words and ideas must change their significance before we can characterise that period as anything but disastrous. The strength of the French people, however, was not exhausted, and the spasm of national anguish was the prelude to a new and higher development of the national life. In our own time and country we have scientific activity in a superlative degree, without that fierce and embittered antagonism of class to class which was the fatal system in France before the revolution. We may regard it, therefore, as a thing of good omen.
        Rattening, and the various exhibitions of proletarian injustice, turbulence, and insubordination which associate themselves in the public mind with rattening, are in themselves as bad as they could well be; but if we steadily consider them in their exact magnitude, and in relation to the circumstances under which they have taken place, they will not strike us into despair. In judging of them, one or two points ought to be distinctly borne in mind. The practice, though sympathised with by working men to an extent which is sad and alarming, was repudiated by the great body of Trades' Unionists in England. The taint is deadly, but local; and the plague-spot admits of being cut out.
        The position of working men, in the second place, in relation to their employers, to each other, and to the public in general, is, in our time, peculiar. It has not yet, so to speak, attained to stable equilibrium. The feudal organisation of labour, of which so warmly coloured and taking a picture has been painted by Mr. Froude in the first volume of his history, was long since broken up. To unite and to organise to the limit of his natural capacity, which will also be the limit of his natural right, is practically a necessity for man. The break-up of the trade organisation of the middle ages was not the obliteration of a principle of human nature, but the abandonment of one form in which that principle had been embodied. Government. however, neither furnished working men with a substitute for the feudal organisation of labour, nor permitted them, for a century or two, to provide by combination a substitute for themselves. Only a few years, comparatively speaking, have elapsed since the right of union was conceded them. It was not likely that they would acquire, in a day or in a year, the capacity to use, beneficially to themselves and to the community, the new and important power which was put into their hands. The self-organisation of labour might well occupy the half, or even the whole, of a century. Errors were sure to be committed by the workmen in the process; and one error clearly inevitable was the exaggeration of the right of the class to lord it over the individual, This error, in its milder but yet pernicious phase, led to the prohibition of piece-work and the prescription of uniform wages for work of varying quality. This error, in its extreme and atrocious development, was rattening. No energy of repression could be too great in grappling with an error which had brought forth so ghastly a progeny of crime; but there is no reason to doubt that the self-organisation of labour in England will gradually be accomplished in accordance with the laws of justice and expediency.
        The population of England, in the third place, has within the last half-century increased in a ratio unprecedented in our history. Gaining new powers by which to draw from the earth its products and utilise them for the benefit of man; we have been able-to feed and clothe about three times as many persons as dwelt in England in the earlier part of the century. This was a direct effect, and must therefore constitute an infallible proof, of material prosperity; but the larger a class is, the less ought we to be surprised at the occurrence within it of exceptional instances of insubordination. There has been nothing in the recent proceedings of any portion of the working class so alarming, from the national point of view, as in those of the Rebeccaites and the physical-force Chartists, whose mischievous absurdities have left no dint on England's helm.
        The increase of population is, I have said, a token of material prosperity. With more strict scientific accuracy I should call it a sign that food and clothing of one kind or another have been abundant. But it is possible that an increase in mere numbers has been accompanied with, or even occasioned by, a descent on the part of the people in respect to the worthier attributes of humanity, and an accommodation of themselves to lower conditions of existence. Of this kind was doubtless the numerical increase of the Irish during many years preceding the occurrence of the potato blight. Heedless of the future so long as his rudest animal wants were supplied, the Irish peasant thought only of planting and reaping his potato crop; and when the crop failed, his resources were at an end. It is beyond question that the manufacturing and mechanical population of England, among which the increase in numbers has principally, if not exclusively, taken place, have not learned to content themselves with a lower standard of living, but, on the contrary, have steadily raised their conceptions of the comfort, and even the luxury, they ought to enjoy. In some agricultural districts the life of the peasantry, even when all the compensations of their lot are taken into account, is hard. But there are no English counties in our day, as there were in the days of Harrison, where the poor are forced, in times of high prices, to put up with bread made of rye, barley, or a mixture of peas, beans, and oats, "and some acorns among." The experience of the cotton dearth in Lancashire proved that starvation does not tread close upon the heels of scarcity in the England of our time; and a number of phenomena, among which, probably, the most important is the success of Co-operative Societies, demonstrate that in mental power, self-command, and other qualities which raise a man out of that lowest stratum of humanity on which the demagogue acts most successfully, the workmen of England have made a great advance.
        Our spinning-jennies, steam-engines, and blast-furnaces having given us an immense population, it is well for us to recollect that the augmented numbers must be fed. In this connection, the wisdom of our commercial legislation during the last twenty years is conspicuous. Great Britain has been placed in a position of greatest possible advantage relatively to other countries. England is the mart of the world. In our free-trade legislation is embodied a larger and nobler policy than that which Bacon dared to embody in the fundamental statutes on which was reared the legislation of the New Atlantis. Liberal to the measure of romance and extravagance, if tried by the standards of that age, as the administration of Bacon's ideal commonwealth may have been, the principle of exclusion lay deep in its constitution. The legislators of the New Atlantis were desirous to learn from all the world; they were willing also to communicate of their own knowledge to all the world; but they did not venture to hold intercourse with all the world. England has no fund set apart, as the men of the New Atlantis had, for the entertainment of strangers; but she shares with strangers all she has; and her merchants are Greek, Hebrew, German, American. When the harvest of England falls short, every wheat-grower from Suez to Chicago prepares to ship for the English market ;we consequently know not the sudden and fierce extremes of famine and of plenty which were familiar to our fathers; and the native stock of the population is recruited by new blood from the most brilliant-witted, patient-thoughted. and tenaciously vital races of the planet.
        But if we ought to take the light with the shadow, it is never safe or permissible to forget that shadow goes with the light. Certain of the conditions under which labour is carried on in our manufacturing and mining districts are incompatible with health of body or of soul. All things in this strangely complicated, mysteriously influenced life of ours hold together. Man and his world are adapted to each other; and those beautiful old legends about Æolian harps and sphere melodies were adumbrations of the scientific truth, that man is mysteriously influenced by nature. There is a connection, an actual, literal connection, spiritual and corporeal, between blue sky and cheerfulness of heart, between crimson clouds and generous feelings, between dewy flowers and gracious kindness, between exercise of limb and lung on green or heathy knolls and manly frankness and courage; and between the absence of all these things and sunken degradation of soul. On more than one occasion within the last few years has the general mind of England been struck with horror and amazement at the exhibition, in the mining districts, of a deadness of feeling, a cowardly self-love, a stolid cruel apathy, as of the idiot or the brute, such as had from of old been deemed impossible in Englishmen. The people of a village,—not one or two, but scores or hundreds of them,—are aware for hours that a man is beating his wife to death, but no one interferes, and the woman is killed. Again, two men pass along the highway while a man is murdering a woman. She shrieks to them for help. They hear her; but they do not stop; and after being fiendishly beaten, she is thrown into a deep hole with water in it, and drowned. In these instances there is a Cainish sordidness and callousness of soul,—"are we our sister's keeper?" "it's not our business," "we should get into trouble if we interfered,"—which one would hope to be beneath the common level of humanity. Those bestial men lived in a sunless atmosphere; from morning to night their feet were upon earth chequered by the play of no sunbeams, freshened by no tender gleam of grass or flowers; when the foot of day touched the mountain-tops, they slunk into the pit, and only when the shadow of the night was creeping over the world did they, like evil things, emerge. Living in the darkness, they became children of darkness; the colours of humanity were blanched out of their souls; and the horrible, corpse-like whiteness of moral death-in-life remained.
        Such things there are in our sunny England; but the horror and indignation they excite in the breasts of Englishmen,—the importunate, passionate desire they awaken within us to have them eternally put behind us and improved from the face of the world,—are equally characteristic of our civilisation. The cry of mining and manufacturing England for more light and air has not gone up in vain. The men who, through the industry of the people, have become princes in the land, have responded to it with princely munificence, and our Crossleys, Baxters, and a company of like-minded men with them, have "built themselves an everlasting name" by those splendid donations of parks in the neighbourhood of great cities, in which the worker may brace his weary limbs, inhale pure air, and glad his eyes with the light of flowers.
        There is a reserve of force amongst us capable of bearing upon our social ills, of which our despairing censors fail to take due account. So fixedly do they gaze into the black pool of our miseries and crimes, that they mark not the silent, pauseless, mighty enginery by which the sun above their heads is slowly but surely drawing it up. Our woe and wickedness we share with other ages; that spirit of kindness which is so potent in these days we may call our own. The Parliament of England passing a special act by which a man who had committed a heinous and dangerous crime was boiled alive; Cranmer lightly stating in the corner of a letter, as a little bit of news which might as well be mentioned, that he had left a man to go to the fire for heresy; these at least are phenomena which have become impossible in England. We cannot even conceive the hardness and cruelty of the olden time; and there are tens of thousands in all quarters with whom it is a necessity of existence, a necessity without the satisfaction of which the pain of living would be intolerable, to do what they can to mitigate the evils which surround them.
        Consider how much there is in that one word, sympathy, viewed as descriptive of a characteristic of our time in contrast with other ages. Is not sympathy almost entirely a child of these last days, and is there any quality, any influence, short of the special inspiration of the Divine Spirit, more blessed than sympathy? "O sympathy!" one could almost exclaim with a living writer, "thou of the gentle tread, and the tender hand, and the kind, thought-lighted brow, methinks, if I could envy the poet his lyre, it would be to chant thy praises! Thou art the angel of mercy, that openest the eyes, and tunest the tongue, and, with thy silent, delicate ministry, healest the heart. Thou revealest secrets, and makest the face of a brother the mirror in which a man may see his own. Thou art the central chord around which the music of humanity ranges itself. All discords thou reducest to harmony. The stone falls from the hand, the dark, knitted brow smooths down, as the Saviour's appeal,—'He that is without sin among you?'—is conducted by thee to the heart. Thou touchest the face of the bigot, and its hard, harsh lines melt and glow in the light of merciful intelligence. There is not a woe thou canst not alleviate; not a joy thou canst not augment; not a perception thou canst not clear; not a faculty thou canst not invigorate; not a good quality thou canst not temper and ennoble: thou fillest the well-springs of life. Loosed by thy delicate finger, the bandage falls from the eye of Justice, and though that eye may glisten with a tear, she sees by it how to hold the balances and to adjust the scales infinitely better than when she was blind. Thou art the woman in the household of the soul, helpmate to the intellect, ally and guardian of all that is good." This is perhaps rather high-flown and prose-poetical, but at bottom it is not inconsistent with fact; and I do not think it would be easy to exaggerate the advantage which the present possesses over bygone ages in respect of sympathy. Stern and cold us the typical character of the English is understood to be, there must be in it a vein of the finest sympathetic tenderness, homely yet delicate, simple, beautiful, and true. England has produced no Raphael or Titian; but what European artist has painted a child like Reynolds, or a lady like Gainsborough? It is difficult to imagine that the gentleness which has increased in all civilised countries in recent times, and conspicuously increased in England, is not a real advance upon the hardness of our ancestors. That enthusiasm of humanity, that passion for well-doing, that modern chivalry, with the ministering hand for the levelled spear and the dew of sympathy for the lightnings of defiance, which now carries on a universal crusade against suffering and wrong, may be trusted to do somewhat to better the lot of mankind.
        One thing clearly indisputable is, that we occupy a position of unprecedented advantage in respect of machinery accumulated and knowledge obtained. With our mechanical, chemical, agricultural science, we can make more of this "neat little farm, the earth," than was practicable for any former generation. We have surveyed the patrimonial acres, and know what they will bear. From Erebus to Hecla, nothing has escaped us. Aided by our Cuviers, our Humboldts, our Lyells, we can fix with something like precision the number of men that can be maintained upon the planet. A reasonable computation is that, if the habitable earth were utilised to the extent to which modern science renders it utilisable, it could support twelve times its present number of human tenants. The army of mankind has but begun, for example, to take possession of its domain in the western hemisphere, north and south. Millions on millions of wheat-bearing, beef-bearing, wool-bearing acres in North and South America have to be rescued from the bison and the jaguar, the ape, the puma, and the snake. Escaped from the camp of the human host, announcing its approach, myriads of wild horses, wild cattle, wild dogs, roam the prairie and the pampa, to be shut in, one day, by the mountain and the ocean, and brought back into subjection. If the human being is becoming superfluous in Europe, in other lands he is still at a premium; and by bold enterprise and wise organisation, it is surely possible that he may be brought where he is wanted. If you consider man well, you will find that what is of all things most conducive to his health and prosperity is action; and it is too soon to speak hopelessly of human progress while the planet presents fields for exertion practically illimitable.
        All ages are ages of transition; for man is essentially the child of progress, and from the days of flint hatchets to those of electric telegraphs has been going on; but of the present time we may say, with special emphasis, that it is characterised by transition. A recluse here and there, who, contriving to anchor his boat in some quiet creek apart from the main current of tendency, has dozed while the mighty stream was hurrying on; a man of action, absorbed in practical enterprises, and unable to realise the velocity of the tide which has swept himself and all else along with it; these may dream that it is with us as it was, say, three centuries ago, when society took its modern form after the great religious revolution which broke up feudalism in the west of Europe. But surely this is a mistake. Except in the very roots of his moral and intellectual being, man is changed. His,—the civilised, the educated man's,—conception of the universe around him is so entirely different from that which was formerly entertained, that a modification of the whole structure and framework of his thought has become inevitable. His little dwelling, with its day-lamp, the sun, and its night-lamp, the moon, and its star-openings in the pavement of heaven, has expanded into the infinite blue of immensity. His few thousand years of human life and terrestrial geography have deepened back into the dateless ages of geology. Mainly through the influence, direct or indirect, of scientific pursuits, inquiry in all departments,—historical, critical, philosophic,—has become at once more searching and more definite than heretofore. The whole intellectual atmosphere has been clearing up. Vague wonder, vague fear, vague expectation, have been passing away, and while the grandeur and mystery of nature have been heightened and deepened, the fantastic splendours and superstitious terrors with which she was formerly invested have been vanishing away. Huge cataclysms, worlds seething between fierce heat of internal fire and canopy of steaming vapour, have given place to a calmer idea of the process of creation, and the present is seen stretching, in variety of phenomena, but sublime unity of law, into the vistas of the past. Imagination is sternly denied the legendary and fanciful materials out of which she used to delight to rear her dream-fabrics, but in exchange for the fleeting illusions of intellectual childhood she receives the fadeless magnificence of truth. Astrology, with its pompous jargon, is no more, but in its stead we have the unveiling of heaven, in vision after vision of ineffable glory, by astronomy; no alchemist or magician now arranges his retorts or gathers his simples with a view to converting lead into gold, or discovering the elixir of life; but the chemist tells us of the secret powers and properties of nature, and the geologist points us to the rocks of the earth in which lie veins of gold. Even spirit-rapping apes the language of science, and claims, not in vain, for imbecility and imposture, that candid investigation which, in good time, snuffs them out.
        Change of this kind, pervading every province of intellectual exertion, is no mere restless vacillation. Let the cynic say that we are being made like a wheel;—it is a wheel which is not merely revolving on its pivot, but going forward. That there is in the present time much of that "raw haste" which is "half-sister" to delay," may be true, but there is hardly more than enough to balance that ill-starved union of torpor and timidity which calls itself wisdom and conservatism, and is the dry-rot of civilisation.
        Of our political position and prospects, also, shall I venture to speak a hopeful word? Fenianism, mob-procossioning, sacrifice, or apparent sacrifice, of political consistency, if not for the sake of office, at least for the sake of getting over a difficulty, are ugly phenomena. But is it not possible that Fenianism, as it is the worst and most absurd of the political agitations which have desolated Ireland, may prove one of the last? Its rabid excesses during the last eighteen months have clearly been connected with the conclusion of the American war, and the consequent disengagement, to the annoyance and detriment of the British nation, of a number of the most reckless scoundrels and most vehement blockheads of the species. Except as part of that venomous disaffection, that blind and furious exasperation, which in all European countries constitutes a fire-stratum, happily very thin, but requiring to be constantly watched, beneath the surface of our civilisation, Fenianism has probably all but played itself out.
        As for the political morality of a Tory Government passing a Reform Bill founded on household rating suffrage, we are too near the event, with its startling vicissitude and its passionate strife, to hold the balance straight in weighing the motives of the actors. The mere fact, however, that the vindication of the Government, if practicable, must depend upon complicated and difficult reasonings, with nice consideration of times and circumstances, and ample allowance for human frailty and the requirements of expediency, is to be regretted. If the history of a political party can pledge it to anything whatever, the Conservative party in England was pledged to resist, if proposed by others, and still more to decline bringing forward on its own account, a Reform Bill embracing a large extension of the suffrage. It has a sophisticating effect upon the public mind, an effect alien to the simplicity and decision which ought to rule the moral impulses of a nation, when the conduct of statesmen requires to be elaborately vindicated. It is an unquestionable fact, weep over it or smile over it as we may, that the temper of Parliament is not favourable to a high sense of honour and a keen and sensitive conscientiousness. It was remarked that when Macaulay, always conscious of making history, talked of elevated sentiments and the loftiest political virtue, his fellow-members used to have a faint, underhand suspicion, owing to the depravity of their hearts, that there was in him a trace of the pedant and the prig; and the jesting, gyrating, easy-minded Palmerston, or the rollicking Disraeli, is far more readily obeyed in St. Stephen's than the scrupulous, proud, and irascible Gladstone. More consoling is it to recollect that in Mr. Lowe, Lord Cranborne, and one or two others, the country beheld, during the Reform session, and appreciated, an unswerving and intrepid consistency. It will, I think, be admitted also by any one who has been a careful observer during the last twenty years, that the character of parliamentary eloquence has, on the whole, changed for the better. The flashy, rhetorical ingredients have been more and more .thrown out. Dishonest commonplaces about the patriotism and intelligence of working men became rarer in proportion as a just regard to their claims, and an unaffected desire to give them a voice in the national affairs, were exhibited. Not only in the great speeches of Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Lowe, but in careful efforts by much younger politicians,—Mr. Grant Duff, for example, and Lord Cranborne,—you have a selectness of language, a compact vigour of thought, a comprehensiveness and accuracy of information, such as politicians used to reserve for the articles they contributed to Reviews, and which are new in the parliamentary eloquence of the century.
        Better still, in the way of political augury, is the rise, both within and without the walls of St. Stephen's, of a spirit of earnest practical endeavour, disposed to attach comparatively slight importance to party cries and party names, and to concentrate attention and effort upon administrative efficiency. It is still in general admitted, though one or two bold thinkers have ventured, on grounds which appear to me satisfactory, to dispute the proposition, that party government is inseparable from the working of parliamentary institutions; but it is felt by sensible men that the question whether a politician calls himself Whig, Tory, or Radical, is of less importance, as bearing upon his fitness or unfitness to occupy a place in the Government, than the question whether he is specially qualified to do some part of the nation's work, to govern India, to conduct our foreign relations, to offer a definite and judicious suggestion respecting Ireland. No doubt the ideas which prevail as to what Parliament is able to perform, and ought to perform, are vague in the extreme; but I am much mistaken if there has not been gradually deepening and intensifying in the mind of the nation a feeling that the time has come for Parliament to enter upon an industrial era. The essentially important but long and wearisome problem of rendering Parliament indisputably the voice of the nation,—the tongue whereby the British people signifies its will,—has been solved. Adjustments, more or less important, remain to be made, in connection with the general constituency; and if the national honesty, earnestness, and common-sense were all that could be wished, our legislators would think it worth while to put an end, by one strenuous effort, to electoral corruption. But, in the most debateable and laborious part of it, reform of the parliamentary machine has been got done with, and the wiser portion of the nation lifts up its head to see what work the said machine is capable of turning out. It is shrewdly suspected,—shrewdly, and I think rather sternly too,—that our colonies lack governing, and that the relation in which they stand to the mother country is preposterous; that our railways, put by Parliament in possession of stupendous powers, are not under adequate parliamentary supervision; that jobbery and the attorney interest run riot in parliamentary committees, and require bridling a good deal. Not one of those superfluous railway lines which plough up the soil of England like lashes on the back of a slave, interfering with agriculture and entailing endless distress upon shareholders, but was sanctioned by a parliamentary committee, and helped to round the paunch of many a parliamentary lawyer. If you will reflect upon the numbers of our home population, and cast a glance over the territories on the map of the world which, with their teeming millions, own the sway of Britain, you will see that Providence has appointed for this nation not a little to do. Parliament, the elixir of the national talent and the national worth, ought to be the model and the fountain-head of all our activities, simplifying, abbreviating, and, when indispensable, supplementing our code of laws, searching out capable governors for our dependencies, superintending the execution of works of national importance which require the interposition of the national will and the national force, reducing taxation to the lowest point consistent with efficient administration and public security, disencumbering itself of all work not its own,—that is to say, of all work which naturally and normally belongs either to the individual or to associated individuals,—vigilantly repressing injustice exercised by one class upon another, and impartially securing the benefits of the constitution for all classes. Such would be the Parliament of England in its industrial era; and the spirit which animates our younger politicians is of a kind which renders the expectation of its being realised not altogether visionary.
        It would be easy to write a volume on the characteristics of English literature at this moment; it is difficult to speak a few words upon the subject which will be felt to be pertinent. At a first glance one might infer that our literature is fast running to seed. Beyond all question an enormous and alarming amount of trash is in these days put into black and white in England. The natural arrangement that a complete blockhead should be quiet and not write, which seems to have been understood by our ancestors, has been totally set aside, and every booby now sports his book. Nature, it is true, asserts herself by keeping those books unread. They probably give pleasure to their producers. Accurate observers in natural history are aware that the donkey brays his loudest, not for the purpose of communicating his ideas to other donkeys, but purely with a view to making proclamation of himself, and being conscious of raising a noise. His trumpet will resound through a whole parish when he has neither quadruped nor biped in sight ; and the discordant scream appears to indicate a sort of absurd crack-winded satisfaction. A similar instinct it perhaps is which instigates the corresponding human animal to proclaim himself in a book. As publishers are generally wise enough in their generation to take care that no one suffers pecuniarily for the blockhead's book except the sole man who enjoys it, there is little practical evil done, and waste paper is a useful commodity. A more dangerous symptom is the rapid decline in the quality of our wit and humour, with enormous increase in the quantity of what passes itself off as such. For my own part. I advisedly declare that nothing previously witnessed in the way of drivel seems to me to have quite come down to the level of the contributions made by the imitators of Artemus Ward to the funny papers. There have been traces, too, of a grossness of political slander which prove that we have still among us one or two satirists of that order which has been justly said to furnish a link of connection between man and the baboon. Not more disputable is it that a large proportion of the fictitious literature of the day is mere unwholesome garbage, ministering to an appetite for morbid excitement, conveying neither instruction nor information, deadening the interest of everyday life, inflaming and contaminating the imagination, and injuring every quality of character, every capacity of intellect.
        And yet I see no reason to despair of British literature. There is much jungle in the forest, but it does not kill the trees; there are many weeds in the garden, but they do not choke the flowers. A genuine vitality, an honest, unaffected force in many departments of our literature, speaks of growth, not of decadence. In historical investigation we push on with the ardour and the vigilance which all earnest minds have caught from the scientific tendency of the age. The judgments of former times have been revised; pretences and falsehoods have been exploded; we have learned the salutary, though startling, lesson that at least nine-tenths of what has passed with us for historical knowledge has been elaborate and pompous ignorance; and the way is being gradually but steadily cleared towards an approximately correct conception of the characters and the events of past times. From Hallam's "History of the British Constitution," on the one hand, taken as a model of temperate, exact, impartial writing, to Mr. Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution," on the other, viewed as an illustration of the power of genius, allied with intense and wide-ranging human sympathy, to call the men and women of the past to life around us, and show us the web of history as it is woven by their hands, how many admirable historical works and historical essays we have had within the last quarter of a century! In poetry there is not much that is extensively read, but the cause is rather that our great poets have taught us to be fastidious than that much excellent poetry is not produced. Our minor poets alone would have sufficed to make any epoch remarkable which did not possess Tennyson and the Brownings. No female poet has appeared in the world who is, on the whole, comparable with Mrs. Barrett Browning. In Tennyson's poetry we may take a legitimate pride; for it is the poetry of consummate culture, the most finished the world has seen, glorious in melody, and yet profoundly English. And if a large proportion of our fiction is rubbish, let it be said that the generation which saw for twenty years, contemporaries in fame and rivals in power, three such novelists as Thackeray, Dickens, and Lord Lytton, cannot have much to complain of in its fictitious literature. "The Newcomes" and ‘David Copperfield" will certainly be named among the finest examples of this species of composition in the English language, and the line of female novelists in England is carried on by a lady who, in "Adam Bede," in "Silas Marner," in "Romola," has shown herself, to say the least, a worthy successor of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. In general literature I shall name only Mr. Ruskin, confessedly the first Art critic in Europe, who, if he had written between Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, and his works had come down to us alongside of theirs, would, I think, be allowed to have surpassed both in the combination of grandeur with melodiousness, and to be, on the whole, the greatest master of English prose that has yet appeared. The age is probably richer than most ages in genius, and whatever genius there is can now make itself heard. That base and pernicious literature abounds is certain, but men of taste are apt to confound with what is actually bad what may be innocuous in itself, and, relatively to certain stages of culture, positively excellent. Because you can critically appreciate Beethoven's sonatas, you need not cast looks of scorn upon the circle of village children drinking in ecstasy from the tones of a barrel-organ.
        One word more,—as gentlemen say on platforms,—and I have done. Fain would I make it a word worth uttering, for its subject is the most important upon which I have yet touched. Religion, which, along with the progressive reason, gives man his distinctive position among the creatures of this world, is the most momentous fact to be considered in judging of any state of society. The history of mankind furnishes no example of a healthful or prosperous society in which religion had fallen into abeyance. The assertion is loudly and extensively made that religion has either fallen, or is rapidly falling, into abeyance in England at this hour. Intelligent men, it is alleged, whether philosophers or artisans, smile at the claims of Christianity; in continental society the emancipation of all, save women and children, from sacerdotal thraldom is complete; and in England the separation between that part of the community which is under clerical influence and that which indignantly casts it off becomes unmistakable. A Saturday Reviewer has given expression, in the following remarkable statement, to his idea of the extent to which the separation in question has already been carried:—"There is a gulf between the clerical mind and the ordinary male mind which is deep, and daily deepening. On the one side it is a pity akin to contempt, too apathetic to form itself into words; on the other, there are pious hands uplifted in meek spitefulness." We have seen what Mr. Carlyle and others gay as to our religion being either a doubt, a cant, or an hypocrisy.
        Let us be calm. Within the circle of a coterie one is apt to misconceive what is being done or thought in the great world. When Archdeacon Denison and a few sympathising friends come together to express their sense of the horror and iniquity of the Conscience Clause, they find their unanimity so complete, their sentiment so harmonious, their unconsciousness of any fault or flaw in their formula so profound, that their senses are steeped in a sweet entrancing music of forgetfulness; the panorama of the present swims from before their eyes; and they fancy that they live in the merry ecclesiastical England of 1662, the ink hardly dry on the Act of Uniformity. That is a mistake; and when the zealous-archdeacon goes out into the world of present things, even so far as to a Church Congress, he hears what, to use his own words, "takes his breath away." But a corresponding mistake is just as often made in the scientific or philosophical coterie. The few who are gathered together, and who speak a dialect of their own, take it for granted,—there is a pleasant sensation in so doing which facilitates the operation,—that they represent the general body of their countrymen, and, in particular, that they are accepted as guides by the overwhelming majority of intelligent and educated men. This, however, may be a delusion, and I cannot help thinking that the Saturday Reviewer mistook the impression of a coterie for a sign of the times when he said that "the ordinary male mind" of England regards the clergy with contemptuous and apathetic pity. At all events, his words have no scientific value as a statement of fact. A vast proportion of the landowners, of the merchants, of the farmers, of the tradesmen, of the working men of England, look upon the clergy with respect. They do so not without cause, for the clergy deserve to be respected. I do not name one or ten, because if I named any it would be invidious not to name hundreds, among the clergy of all denominations in England, who, if honest adherence to conviction, blameless character, benevolent life, personal refinement, and a high standard of intellectual attainment, constitute a title to respect, deserve to be respected. Between the learned professions there is naturally some jealousy. The lawyer type of mind, on the whole far lower and ignobler, is more acute than that of the clergyman, more inclined to religious scepticism, more heartless, cold, and cynical. Young lawyers are apt enough to speak and feel with contempt regarding the clergy. Medical men, too, are not unfrequently glad of an occasion "to spite the parsons." The literary and the clerical classes compete in all modern countries for the direction of public opinion; rivalry produces in mean souls,—and even men of letters can be mean,—envy and hatred; and envy and hatred are most pleasantly expressed in contempt. Scientific men have reason for accusing at least a portion of the clergy of discountenancing science, and materialists and positivists see their natural enemies in a class which stands or falls with the subsistence of faith in a spiritual world and a living God. That it is possible, therefore, to move pretty widely in cultivated circles in the metropolis without passing beyond limits within which the clergy are despised, I admit; but it is simply an error to conclude that ordinary Englishmen regard the clergy, or the Christian religion which they teach, with contempt. Mr. Gladstone may be considered a favourable specimen of the ordinary, or even of the extraordinary "male mind" of England, and his critique on "Ecce Homo" is not the work of a man who turns in apathetic scorn from all that the clergy of England are and represent.
        The lay mind of the country, let enthusiastic sceptics say what they will, has not learned to look upon the historical facts with which the Christian religion is bound up, as Cicero and Cæsar looked upon the tattle of the augurs; but it is, I think, absolutely certain that the lay mind of England will accept those truths respecting the physical world upon which scientific authorities are agreed, and those conclusions respecting the documents in which the Christian religion is embodied on which scholars are unanimous. It is absolutely certain, also, that these scientific truths and philological conclusions differ in important points from the conceptions entertained regarding them by the divines and scholars who drew up the confessions of the various Protestant Churches. Englishmen feel themselves bound, not merely by their national character for integrity, frankness, and courage, but by their Protestantism itself, to face every statement which is true, and to face it with a welcoming smile. That clearing process which has been applied to all our knowledge must be applied to our religion. It must divest itself of every tag of superstition; and it will, we may pretty confidently infer, be in the future less ecclesiastical and less dogmatic than it has been in the past. But there is no reason to apprehend that we are passing into the Chinese phase of civilisation, or that the grandeur which envelopes human affairs when heaven's light falls upon them is to be no more seen in England. Christianity, the most spiritual of religions, presents no parallel to the religions of classic antiquity; it affords scope to all that is noble, great, beautiful in man; it is the religion of conscience and of the affections; its harmony with what is divine in humanity is so profound, that the circumstance has been taken advantage of to represent it as a mere elaboration of natural religion. The deliberate testimony of the wisest of the moderns, Goethe, was given to the effect that man cannot recede from the point to which he has attained in Christianity. That a religion which, in its body of spiritual truth, offers a comprehensive and benign response to all that is deepest in human nature, under what theory soever man is viewed, should be undermined by the discovery of new facts relating either to the formation of the world or man's place in the animal creation, is out of the question; and the historical evidence touching the fundamental facts of the Christian revelation stands at this moment on a basis which scholars taking rank with any in Europe hold to be impregnable.