The Ancien Regime.............................................................................................................................................1

Charles Kingsley ......................................................................................................................................1

PREFACE ...............................................................................................................................................1

LECTURE ICASTE ...........................................................................................................................5

LECTURE IICENTRALISATION ..................................................................................................14

LECTURE IIITHE EXPLOSIVE FORCES ....................................................................................25

The rules of the Royal Institution forbid (and wisely) religious or political controversy. It was therefore

impossible for me in these Lectures, to say much which had to be said, in drawing a just and complete picture

of the Ancien Regime in France. The passages inserted between brackets, which bear on religious matters,

But more. It was impossible for me in these Lectures, to bring forward as fully as I could have wished, the

contrast between the continental nations and England, whether now, or during the eighteenth century. But

that contrast cannot be too carefully studied at the present moment. In proportion as it is seen and understood,

will the fear of revolution (if such exists) die out among the wealthier classes; and the wish for it (if such

exists) among the poorer; and a large extension of the suffrage will be looked on aswhat it actually isa

safe and harmless concession to the wishesand, as I hold, to the just rightsof large portion of the British

There exists in Britain now, as far as I can see, no one of those evils which brought about the French

Revolution. There is no widespread misery, and therefore no widespread discontent, among the classes who

live by handlabour. The legislation of the last generation has been steadily in favour of the poor, as against

the rich; and it is even more true now than it was in 1789, thatas Arthur Young told the French mob which

stopped his carriagethe rich pay many taxes (over and above the poorrates, a direct tax on the capitalist in

favour of the labourer) more than are paid by the poor. "In England" (says M. de Tocqueville of even the

eighteenth century) "the poor man enjoyed the privilege of exemption from taxation; in France, the rich."

Equality before the law is as well nigh complete as it can be, where some are rich and others poor; and the

only privileged class, it sometimes seems to me, is the pauper, who has neither the responsibility of

A minority of malcontents, some justly, some unjustly, angry with the present state of things, will always

exist in this world. But a majority of malcontents we shall never have, as long as the workmen are allowed to

keep untouched and unthreatened their rights of free speech, free public meeting, free combination for all

purposes which do not provoke a breach of the peace. There may be (and probably are) to be found in

London and the large towns, some of those revolutionary propagandists who have terrified and tormented

continental statesmen since the year 1815. But they are far fewer in number than in 1848; far fewer still (I

believe) than in 1831; and their habits, notions, temper, whole mental organisation, is so utterly alien to that

of the average Englishman, that it is only the sense of wrong which can make him take counsel with them, or

make common cause with them. Meanwhile, every man who is admitted to a vote, is one more person

withdrawn from the temptation to disloyalty, and enlisted in maintaining the powers that bewhen they are

in the wrong, as well as when they are in the right. For every Englishman is by his nature conservative; slow

to form an opinion; cautious in putting it into effect; patient under evils which seem irremediable; persevering

in abolishing such as seem remediable; and then only too ready to acquiesce in the earliest practical result; to

"rest and be thankful." His faults, as well as his virtues, make him antirevolutionary. He is generally too dull

to take in a great idea; and if he does take it in, often too selfish to apply it to any interest save his own. But

now and then, when the sense of actual injury forces upon him a great idea, like that of Freetrade or of

Parliamentary Reform, he is indomitable, however slow and patient, in translating his thought into fact: and

they will not be wise statesmen who resist his dogged determination. If at this moment he demands an

extension of the suffrage eagerly and even violently, the wise statesman will give at once, gracefully and

generously, what the Englishman will certainly obtain one day, if he has set his mind upon it. If, on the other

hand, he asks for it calmly, then the wise statesman (instead of mistaking English reticence for apathy) will

listen to his wishes all the more readily; seeing in the moderation of the demand, the best possible guarantee

And, be it always remembered, that in introducing these men into the "balance of the Constitution," we

introduce no unknown quantity. Statesmen ought to know them, if they know themselves; to judge what the

working man would do by what they do themselves. He who imputes virtues to his own class imputes them

also to the labouring class. He who imputes vices to the labouring class, imputes them to his own class. For

both are not only of the same flesh and blood, but, what is infinitely more important, of the same spirit; of the

same race; in innumerable cases, of the same ancestors. For centuries past the most able of these men have

been working upwards into the middle class, and through it, often, to the highest dignities, and the highest

family connections; and the whole nation knows how they have comported themselves therein. And, by a

reverse process (of which the physiognomist and genealogist can give abundant proof), the weaker members

of that class which was dominant during the Middle Age have been sinking downward, often to the rank of

mere day labourers, and carrying downward with themsometimes in a very tragical and pathetic

fashionsomewhat of the dignity and the refinement which they had learnt from their ancestors.

Thus has the English nation (and as far as I can see, the Scotch likewise) become more homogeneous than

any nation of the Continent, if we except France since the extermination of the Frankish nobility. And for that

very reason, as it seems to me, it is more fitted than any other European nation for the exercise of equal

political rights; and not to be debarred of them by arguments drawn from countries which have been

The civilisation, not of mere booklearning, but of the heart; all that was once meant by "manners"good

breeding, high feeling, respect for self and respect for othersare just as common (as far as I have seen)

among the handworkers of England and Scotland, as among any other class; the only difference is, that

these qualities develop more early in the richer classes, owing to that severe discipline of our public schools,

which makes mere lads often fit to govern, because they have learnt to obey: while they develop later

generally not till middle agein the classes who have not gone through in their youth that Spartan training,

and who indeed (from a mistaken conception of liberty) would not endure it for a day. This and other social

drawbacks which are but too patent, retard the manhood of the working classes. That it should be so, is a

wrong. For if a citizen have one right above all others to demand anything of his country, it is that he should

be educated; that whatever capabilities he may have in him, however small, should have their fair and full

chance of development. But the cause of the wrong is not the existence of a caste, or a privileged class, or of

anything save the plain fact, that some men will be always able to pay more for their children's education than

Meanwhile, in this fact is to be found the most weighty, if not the only argument against manhood suffrage,

which would admit manybut too many, alas!who are still mere boys in mind. To a reasonable household

suffrage it cannot apply. The man who (being almost certainly married, and having children) can afford to

rent a 5 pound tenement in a town, or in the country either, has seen quite enough of life, and learnt quite

enough of it, to form a very fair judgment of the man who offers to represent him in Parliament; because he

has learnt, not merely something of his own interest, or that of his class, butwhat is infinitely more

The causes of this state of society, which is peculiar to Britain, must be sought far back in the ages. It would

seem that the distinction between "earl and churl" (the noble and the nonnoble freeman) was crushed out in

this island by the two Norman conquests that of the AngloSaxon nobility by Sweyn and Canute; and that

of the AngloDanish nobility by William and his Frenchmen. Those two terrible calamities, following each

other in the short space of fifty years, seem to have welded together, by a community of suffering, all ranks

and races, at least south of the Tweed; and when the English rose after the storm, they rose as one

homogeneous people, never to be governed again by an originally alien race. The English nobility were, from

the time of Magna Charta, rather an official nobility, than, as in most continental countries, a separate caste;

and whatever caste tendencies had developed themselves before the Wars of the Roses (as such are certain to

do during centuries of continued wealth and power), were crushed out by the great revolutionary events of the

next hundred years. Especially did the discovery of the New World, the maritime struggle with Spain, the

outburst of commerce and colonisation during the reigns of Elizabeth and James, help toward this good

result. It was in vain for the Lord Oxford of the day, sneering at Raleigh's sudden elevation, to complain that

as on the virginals, so in the State, "Jacks went up, and heads went down." The proudest noblemen were not

ashamed to have their ventures on the high seas, and to send their younger sons trading, or buccaneering,

under the conduct of lowborn men like Drake, who "would like to see the gentleman that would not set his

hand to a rope, and hale and draw with the mariners." Thus sprang up that respect for, even fondness for,

severe bodily labour, which the educated class of no nation save our own has ever felt; and which has stood

them in such good stead, whether at home or abroad. Thus, too, sprang up the system of society by which (as

without tarnishing, as he would have done on the Continent, the scutcheon of his ancestors. That which has

saved England from a central despotism, such as crushed, during the eighteenth century, every nation on the

Continent, is the very same peculiarity which makes the advent of the masses to a share in political power

safe and harmless; namely, the absence of caste, or rather (for there is sure to be a moral fact underlying and

causing every political fact) the absence of that wicked pride which perpetuates caste; forbidding those to

These views are not mine only. They have been already set forth so much more forcibly by M. de

Tocqueville, that I should have thought it unnecessary to talk about them, were not the rhetorical phrases,

"Caste," "Privileged Classes," "Aristocratic Exclusiveness," and suchlike, bandied about again just now, as

if they represented facts. If there remain in this kingdom any facts which correspond to those words, let them

be abolished as speedily as possible: but that such do remain was not the opinion of the master of modern

He expresses his surprise "that the fact which distinguishes England from all other modern nations, and

which alone can throw light on her peculiarities, . . . has not attracted more attention, . . . and that habit has

rendered it, as it were, imperceptible to the English themselvesthat England was the only country in which

the system of caste had been not only modified, but effectually destroyed. The nobility and the middle classes

followed the same business, embraced the same professions, and, what is far more significant, intermarried

with each other. The daughter of the greatest nobleman" (and this, if true of the eighteenth century, has

become far more true of the nineteenth) "could already, without disgrace, marry a man of yesterday." . . .

"It has often been remarked that the English nobility has been more prudent, more able, and less exclusive

than any other. It would have been much nearer the truth to say, that in England, for a very long time past, no

nobility, properly so called, have existed, if we take the word in the ancient and limited sense it has

"For several centuries the word 'gentleman'" (he might have added, "burgess") "has altogether changed its

meaning in England; and the word 'roturier' has ceased to exist. In each succeeding century it is applied to

persons placed somewhat lower in the social scale" (as the "bagman" of Pickwick has become, and has

deserved to become, the "commercial gentleman" of our day). "At length it travelled with the English to

America, where it is used to designate every citizen indiscriminately. Its history is that of democracy itself." .

"If the middle classes of England, instead of making war upon the aristocracy, have remained so intimately

connected with it, it is not especially because the aristocracy is open to all, but rather, because its outline was

indistinct, and its limit unknown: not so much because any man might be admitted into it, as because it was

impossible to say with certainty when he took rank there: so that all who approached it might look on

themselves as belonging to it; might take part in its rule, and derive either lustre or profit from its influence."

Just so; and therefore the middle classes of Britain, of whatever their special political party, are conservative

For there are not three, but only two, classes in England; namely, rich and poor: those who live by capital

(from the wealthiest landlord to the smallest village shopkeeper); and those who live by handlabour.

Whether the division between those two classes is increasing or not, is a very serious question. Continued

legislation in favour of the handlabourer, and a beneficence towards him, when in need, such as no other

nation on earth has ever shown, have done much to abolish the moral division. But the social division has

surely been increased during the last half century, by the inevitable tendency, both in commerce and

agriculture, to employ one large capital, where several small ones would have been employed a century ago.

The large manufactory, the large shop, the large estate, the large farm, swallows up the small ones. The

yeoman, the thrifty squatter who could work at two or three trades as well as till his patch of moor, the

handloom weaver, the skilled village craftsman, have all but disappeared. The handworker, finding it more

and more difficult to invest his savings, has been more and more tempted to squander them. To rise to the

dignity of a capitalist, however small, was growing impossible to him, till the rise of that cooperative

movement, which will do more than any social or political impulse in our day for the safety of English

society, and the loyalty of the English working classes. And meanwhileere that movement shall have

spread throughout the length and breadth of the land, and have been applied, as it surely will be some day, not

only to distribution, not only to manufacture, but to agriculture likewisetill then, the best judges of the

working men's worth must be their employers; and especially the employers of the northern manufacturing

population. What their judgment is, is sufficiently notorious. Those who depend most on the working men,

who have the best opportunities of knowing them, trust them most thoroughly. As long as great

manufacturers stand forward as the political sponsors of their own workmen, it behoves those who cannot

have had their experience, to consider their opinion as conclusive. As for that "influence of the higher

classes" which is said to be endangered just now; it will exist, just as much as it deserves to exist. Any man

who is superior to the many, whether in talents, education, refinement, wealth, or anything else, will always

be able to influence a number of menand if he thinks it worth his while, of votesby just and lawful

means. And as for unjust and unlawful means, let those who prefer them keep up heart. The world will go on

much as it did before; and be always quite bad enough to allow bribery and corruption, jobbery and nepotism,

quackery and arrogance, their full influence over our home and foreign policy. An extension of the suffrage,

however wide, will not bring about the millennium. It will merely make a large number of Englishmen

contented and loyal, instead of discontented and disloyal. It may make, too, the educated and wealthy classes

wiser by awakening a wholesome fearperhaps, it may be, by awakening a chivalrous emulation. It may put

the younger men of the present aristocracy upon their mettle, and stir them up to prove that they are not in the

same effete condition as was the French noblesse in 1789. It may lead them to take the warnings which have

been addressed to them, for the last thirty years, by their truest friendsoften by kinsmen of their own. It

may lead them to ask themselves why, in a world which is governed by a just God, such great power as is

palpably theirs at present is entrusted to them, save that they may do more work, and not less, than other men,

under the penalties pronounced against those to whom much is given, and of whom much is required. It may

lead them to discover that they are in a world where it is not safe to sit under the tree, and let the ripe fruit

drop into your mouth; where the "competition of species" works with ruthless energy among all ranks of

being, from kings upon their thrones to the weeds upon the waste; where "he that is not hammer, is sure to be

anvil;" and he who will not work, neither shall he eat. It may lead them to devote that energy (in which they

surpass so far the continental aristocracies) to something better than outdoor amusements or indoor

dilettantisms. There are those among them who, like one section of the old French noblesse, content

themselves with mere complaints of "the revolutionary tendencies of the age." Let them beware in time; for

when the many are on the march, the few who stand still are certain to be walked over. There are those

among them who, like another section of the French noblesse, are ready, more generously than wisely, to

throw away their own social and political advantages, and play (for it will never be really more than playing)

at democracy. Let them, too, beware. The penknife and the axe should respect each other; for they were

wrought from the same steel: but the penknife will not be wise in trying to fell trees. Let them accept their

own position, not in conceit and arrogance, but in fear and trembling; and see if they cannot play the man

therein, and save their own class; and with it, much which it has needed many centuries to accumulate and to

organise, and without which no nation has yet existed for a single century. They are no more like the old

French noblesse, than are the commercial class like the old French bourgeoisie, or the labouring like the old

French peasantry. Let them prove that fact by their deeds during the next generation; or sink into the

condition of mere rich men, exciting, by their luxury and laziness, nothing but envy and contempt.

Meanwhile, behind all classes and social forcesI had almost said, above them allstands a fourth estate,

which will, ultimately, decide the form which English society is to take: a Press as different from the literary

class of the Ancien Regime as is everything else English; and different in thisthat it is free.

The French Revolution, like every revolution (it seems to me) which has convulsed the nations of Europe for

the last eighty years, was caused immediatelywhatever may have been its more remote causes by the

suppression of thought; or, at least, by a sense of wrong among those who thought. A country where every

man, be he fool or wise, is free to speak that which is in him, can never suffer a revolution. The folly blows

itself off like steam, in harmless noise; the wisdom becomes part of the general intellectual stock of the

As long as the press is free, a nation is guaranteed against sudden and capricious folly, either from above or

from below. As long as the press is free, a nation is guaranteed against the worse evil of persistent and

obstinate folly, cloaking itself under the venerable shapes of tradition and authority. For under a free press, a

nation must ultimately be guided not by a caste, not by a class, not by mere wealth, not by the passions of a

mob: but by mind; by the net result of all the commonsense of its members; and in the present default of

genius, which is uncommon sense, commonsense seems to be the only, if not the best, safeguard for poor

These Lectures are meant to be comments on the state of France before the French Revolution. To English

society, past or present, I do not refer. For reasons which I have set forth at length in an introductory

Therefore, when the Stuarts tried to establish in England a system which might have led to a political

condition like that of the Continent, all classes combined and exterminated them; while the course of English

On the contrary, England was the mother of every movement which undermined, and at last destroyed, the

From England went forth those political theories which, transmitted from America to France, became the

principles of the French Revolution. From England went forth the philosophy of Locke, with all its immense

results. It is noteworthy, that when Voltaire tries to persuade people, in a certain famous passage, that

philosophers do not care to trouble the worldof the ten names to whom he does honour, seven names are

English. "It is," he says, "neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Boyle, nor Spinoza, nor Hobbes, nor Lord

Shaftesbury, nor Mr. Collins, nor Mr. Toland, nor Fludd, nor Baker, who have carried the torch of discord

into their countries." It is worth notice, that not only are the majority of these names English, but that they

belong not to the latter but to the former half of the eighteenth century; and indeed, to the latter half of the

So it was with that Inductive Physical Science, which helped more than all to break up the superstitions of the

Ancien Regime, and to set man face to face with the facts of the universe. From England, towards the end of

the seventeenth century, it was promulgated by such men as Newton, Boyle, Sydenham, Ray, and the first

In England, too, arose the great religious movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesand

especially that of a body which I can never mention without most deep respectthe Society of Friends. At a

time when the greater part of the Continent was sunk in spiritual sleep, these men were reasserting doctrines

concerning man, and his relation to his Creator, which, whether or not all believe them (as I believe them) to

be founded on eternal fact, all must confess to have been of incalculable benefit to the cause of humanity and

From England, finally, about the middle of the eighteenth century, went forthpromulgated by English

noblementhat freemasonry which seems to have been the true parent of all the secret societies of Europe.

Of this curious question, more hereafter. But enough has been said to show that England, instead of falling, at

any period, into the stagnation of the Ancien Regime, was, from the middle of the seventeenth century, in a

state of intellectual growth and ferment which communicated itself finally to the continental nations. This is

the special honour of England; universally confessed at the time. It was to England that the

slowlyawakening nations looked, as the source of all which was noble, true, and free, in the dawning future.

It will be seen, from what I have said, that I consider the Ancien Regime to begin in the seventeenth century.

I should date its commencementas far as that of anything so vague, unsystematic, indeed anarchic, can be

definedfrom the end of the Thirty Years' War, and the peace of Westphalia in 1648.

For by that time the mighty spiritual struggles and fierce religious animosities of the preceding century had

worn themselves out. And, as always happens, to a period of earnest excitement had succeeded one of

weariness, disgust, halfunbelief in the many questions for which so much blood had been shed. No man had

come out of the battle with altogether clean hands; some not without changing sides more than once. The war

had ended as one, not of nations, not even of zealots, but of mercenaries. The body of Europe had been pulled

in pieces between them all; and the poor soul thereofas was to be expectedhad fled out through the

gaping wounds. Life, mere existence, was the most pressing need. If men couldin the old prophet's

wordsfind the life of their hand, they were content. High and low only asked to be let live. The poor asked

it slaughtered on a hundred battlefields, burnt out of house and home: vast tracts of the centre of Europe

were lying desert; the population was diminished for several generations. The trading classes, ruined by the

long war, only asked to be let live, and make a little money. The nobility, too, only asked to be let live. They

had lost, in the long struggle, not only often lands and power, but their ablest and bravest men; and a weaker

and meaner generation was left behind, to do the governing of the world. Let them live, and keep what they

had. If signs of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were feverish, factitious,

temporary soon, as the event proved, to droop into the general exhaustion. If wars were still to be waged

they were to be wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for the mightiest

invisible interests of man. The exhaustion was general; and to it we must attribute alike the changes and the

conservatism of the Ancien Regime. To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism, and of arbitrary

regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has set forth in a book which I shall have occasion often to quote. To it

is owing, too, that longing, which seems to us childish, after ancient forms, etiquettes, dignities, court

costumes, formalities diplomatic, legal, ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to keepsakes of the

pastrevered relics of more intelligible and betterordered times. If the spirit had been beaten out of them in

a century of battle, that was all the more reason for keeping up the letter. They had had a meaning once, a life

once; perhaps there was a little life left in them still; perhaps the dry bones would clothe themselves with

flesh once more, and stand upon their feet. At least it was useful that the common people should so believe.

There was good hope that the simple masses, seeing the old dignities and formalities still parading the streets,

should suppose that they still contained men, and were not mere wooden figures, dressed artistically in

official costume. And, on the whole, that hope was not deceived. More than a century of bitter experience

was needed ere the masses discovered that their ancient rulers were like the suits of armour in the Tower of

Londonempty iron astride of wooden steeds, and armed with lances which every ploughboy could wrest

The mistake of the masses was pardonable. For those suits of armour had once held living men; strong, brave,

wise; men of an admirable temper; doing their work according to their light, not altogether wellwhat man

does that on earth?but well enough to make themselves necessary to, and loyally followed by, the masses

whom they ruled. No one can read fairly the "Gesta Dei per Francos in Oriente," or the deeds of the French

Nobility in their wars with England, or those taleshowever legendaryof the mediaeval knights, which

form so noble an element in German literature, without seeing, that however black were these men's

occasional crimes, they were a truly noble race, the old Nobility of the Continent; a race which ruled simply

because, without them, there would have been naught but anarchy and barbarism. To their chivalrous ideal

they were too often, perhaps for the most part, untrue: but, partial and defective as it is, it is an ideal such as

never entered into the mind of Celt or Gaul, Hun or Sclav; one which seems continuous with the spread of the

Teutonic conquerors. They ruled because they did practically raise the ideal of humanity in the countries

which they conquered, a whole stage higher. They ceased to rule when they were, through their own sins,

But, even when at its best, their system of government had in it like all human inventionoriginal sin; an

unnatural and unrighteous element, which was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and ruin. The old

Nobility of Europe was not a mere aristocracy. It was a caste: a race not intermarrying with the races below

it. It was not a mere aristocracy. For that, for the supremacy of the best men, all societies strive, or profess to

strive. And such a true aristocracy may exist independent of caste, or the hereditary principle at all. We may

conceive an Utopia, governed by an aristocracy which should be really democratic; which should use, under

developed forms, that method which made the mediaeval priesthood the one great democratic institution of

old Christendom; bringing to the surface and utilising the talents and virtues of all classes, even to the lowest.

We may conceive an aristocracy choosing out, and gladly receiving into its own ranks as equals, every youth,

every maiden, who was distinguished by intellect, virtue, valour, beauty, without respect to rank or birth; and

rejecting in turn, from its own ranks, each of its own children who fell below some lofty standard, and

showed by weakliness, dulness, or baseness, incapacity for the post of guiding and elevating their

fellowcitizens. Thus would arise a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really most worthythe most

highly organised in body and in mindperpetually recruited from below: from which, or from any other

But the old Ancien Regime would have shuddered, did shudder, at such a notion. The supreme class was to

keep itself pure, and avoid all taint of darker blood, shutting its eyes to the fact that some of its most famous

heroes had been born of such lefthanded marriages as that of Robert of Normandy with the tanner's daughter

of Falaise. "Some are so curious in this behalf," says quaint old Burton, writing about 1650, "as these old

Romans, our modern Venetians, Dutch, and French, that if two parties dearly love, the one noble, the other

ignoble, they may not, by their laws, match, though equal otherwise in years, fortunes, education, and all

good affection. In Germany, except they can prove their gentility by three descents, they scorn to match with

them. A nobleman must marry a noblewoman; a baron, a baron's daughter; a knight, a knight's. As slaters sort

And doubtless this theorylike all which have held their ground for many centuriesat first represented a

fact. These castes were, at first, actually superior to the peoples over whom they ruled. I cannot, as long as

my eyes are open, yield to the modern theory of the equalityindeed of the nonexistenceof races.

Holding, as I do, the primaeval unity of the human race, I see in that race the same inclination to sport into

fresh varieties, the same competition of species between those varieties, which Mr. Darwin has pointed out

among plants and mere animals. A distinguished man arises; from him a distinguished family; from it a

distinguished tribe, stronger, cunninger than those around. It asserts its supremacy over its neighbours at first

exactly as a plant or animal would do, by destroying, and, where possible, eating them; next, having grown

more prudent, by enslaving them; next, having gained a little morality in addition to its prudence, by

civilising them, raising them more or less toward its own standard. And thus, in every land, civilisation and

national life has arisen out of the patriarchal state; and the Eastern scheik, with his wives, free and slave, and

his hundreds of fighting men born in his house, is the type of all primaeval rulers. He is the best man of his

hordein every sense of the word best; and whether he have a right to rule them or not, they consider that he

Whether this ought to have been the history of primaeval civilisation, is a question not to be determined here.

That it is the history thereof, is surely patent to anyone who will imagine to himself what must have been. In

the first place, the strongest and cunningest savage must have had the chance of producing children more

strong and cunning than the average; he would havethe strongest savage has stillthe power of obtaining

a wife, or wives, superior in beauty and in household skill, which involves superiority of intellect; and

therefore his children wouldsome of them at leastbe superior to the average, both from the father's and

the mother's capacities. They again would marry select wives; and their children again would do the same;

till, in a very few generations, a family would have established itself, considerably superior to the rest of the

Again, if one of that race invented a new weapon, a new mode of tillage, or aught else which gave him

power, that would add to the superiority of his whole family. For the invention would be jealously kept

among them as a mystery, a hereditary secret. To this simple cause, surely, is to be referred the system of

hereditary caste occupations, whether in Egypt or Hindoostan. To this, too, the fact that alike in Greek and in

Teutonic legend the chief so often appears, not merely as the best warrior and best minstrel, but as the best

smith, armourer, and handicraftsman of his tribe. If, however, the inventor happened to be a lowborn genius,

its advantages would still accrue to the ruling race. For nothing could be more natural or more easyas more

than one legend intimatesthan that the king should extort the new secret from his subject, and then put him

Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the past, both of whom must have

become in their time great chiefs, founders of mighty aristocraciesit may be, worshipped after their death

The first, who seems to have existed after the age in which the black race colonised Australia, must have been

surely a man worthy to hold rank with our Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons. For he invented (and mind,

one man must have invented the thing first, and by the very nature of it, invented it all at once) an instrument

so singular, unexpected, unlike anything to be seen in nature, that I wonder it has not been called, like the

plough, the olive, or the vine, a gift of the immortal gods: and yet an instrument so simple, so easy, and so

perfect, that it spread over all races in Europe and America, and no substitute could be found for it till the

latter part of the fifteenth century. Yes, a great genius was he, and the consequent founder of a great

aristocracy and conquering race, who first invented for himself and his children after him abow and arrow.

The nextwhether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak of him in second placewas the man

who was the potential ancestor of the whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe; the man

who first, finding a foal upon the steppe, deserted by its dam, brought it home, and reared it; and then

bethought him of the happy notion of making it drawpresumably by its taila fashion which endured long

in Ireland, and had to be forbidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth century. A great aristocrat must that

man have become. A greater still he who first substituted the bit for the halter. A greater still he who first

thought of wheels. A greater still he who conceived the yoke and pole for bearing up his chariot; for that

same yoke, and pole, and chariot, became the peculiar instrument of conquerors like him who mightily

oppressed the children of Israel, for he had nine hundred chariots of iron. Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians,

Greeks, Romansnone of them improved on the form of the conquering biga, till it was given up by a race

who preferred a pair of shafts to their carts, and who had learnt to ride instead of drive. A great aristocrat,

again, must he have been among those latter races who first conceived the notion of getting on his horse's

back, accommodating his motions to the beast's, and becoming a centaur, halfman, halfhorse. That

invention must have tended, in the first instance, as surely toward democracy as did the invention of firearms.

A tribe of riders must have been always, more or less, equal and free. Equal because a man on a horse would

feel himself a man indeed; because the art of riding called out an independence, a selfhelp, a skill, a

consciousness of power, a personal pride and vanity, which would defy slavery. Free, because a tribe of riders

might be defeated, exterminated, but never enchained. They could never become gleboe adscripti, bound to

the soil, as long as they could take horse and saddle, and away. History gives us more than one glimpse of

such tribesthe scourge and terror of the nonriding races with whom they came in contact. Some,

doubtless, remember how in the wars between Alfred and the Danes, "the army" (the Scandinavian invaders)

again and again horse themselves, steal away by night from the Saxon infantry, and ride over the land

(whether in England or in France), "doing unspeakable evil." To that special instinct of horsemanship, which

still distinguishes their descendants, we may attribute mainly the Scandinavian settlement of the north and

east of England. Some, too, may recollect the sketch of the primeval Hun, as he first appeared to the

astonished and disgusted old Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus; the visages "more like cakes than

faces;" the "figures like those which are hewn out with an axe on the poles at bridge ends;" the ratskin

coats, which they wore till they rotted off their limbs; their steaks of meat cooked between the saddle and the

thigh; the little horses on which "they eat and drink, buy and sell, and sleep lying forward along his narrow

neck, and indulging in every variety of dream." And over and above, and more important politically, the

common councils "held on horseback, under the authority of no king, but content with the irregular

government of nobles, under whose leading they force their way through all obstacles." A racelike those

Cossacks who are probably their lineal descendantsto be feared, to be hired, to be petted, but not to be

Instances nearer home of free equestrian races we have in our own English borderers, among whom (as Mr.

Froude says) the farmers and their farmservants had but to snatch their arms and spring into their saddles

and they became at once the Northern Horse, famed as the finest light cavalry in the world. And equal to

themsuperior even, if we recollect that they preserved their country's freedom for centuries against the

superior force of Englandwere those troops of Scots who, century after century, swept across the border on

their little garrons, their bag of oatmeal hanging by the saddle, with the iron griddle whereon to bake it;

careless of weather and of danger; men too swift to be exterminated, too independent to be enslaved.

But if horsemanship had, in these cases, a levelling tendency it would have the very opposite when a riding

tribe conquered a non riding one. The conquerors would, as much as possible, keep the art and mystery of

horsemanship hereditary among themselves, and become a Ritterschaft or chivalrous caste. And they would

be able to do so: because the conquered race would not care or dare to learn the new and dangerous art. There

are persons, even in England, who can never learn to ride. There are whole populations in Europe, even now,

when races have become almost indistinguishably mixed, who seem unable to learn. And this must have been

still more the case when the races were more strongly separated in blood and habits. So the Teutonic chief,

with his gesitha, comites, or select band of knights, who had received from him, as Tacitus has it, the

warhorse and the lance, established himself as the natural rulerand oppressorof the nonriding

populations; first over the aborigines of Germany proper, tribes who seem to have been enslaved, and their

names lost, before the time of Tacitus; and then over the nonriding Romans and Gauls to the South and

West, and the Wendish and Sclavonic tribes to the East. Very few in numbers, but mighty in their unequalled

capacity of body and mind, and in their terrible horsemanship, the Teutonic Ritterschaft literally rode

roughshod over the old world; never checked, but when they came in contact with the freeriding hordes of

the Eastern steppes; and so established an equestrian caste, of which the [Greek text] of Athens and the

Of that equestrian caste the symbol was the horse. The favourite, and therefore the chosen sacrifice of Odin,

their ancestor and God, the horse's flesh was eaten at the sacrificial meal; the horse's head, hung on the ash in

Odin's wood, gave forth oracular responses. As Christianity came in, and the eating of horseflesh was

forbidden as impiety by the Church, while his oracles dwindled down to such as that which Falada's dead

head gives to the goosegirl in the German tale, the magic power of the horse figured only in ballads and

The art of riding became an hereditary and exclusive scienceat last a pedantry, hampered by absurd

etiquettes, and worse than useless traditions; but the power and right to ride remained on the whole the mark

of the dominant caste. Terribly did they often abuse that special power. The faculty of making a horse carry

him no more makes a man a good man, than the faculties of making money, making speeches, making books,

or making a noise about public abuses. And of all ruffians, the worst, if history is to be trusted, is the ruffian

on a horse; to whose brutality of mind is superadded the brute power of his beast. A ruffian on a horsewhat

is there that he will not ride over, and ride on, careless and proud of his own shame? When the ancient

chivalry of France descended to that level, or rather delegated their functions to mercenaries of that level

when the knightly hosts who fought before Jerusalem allowed themselves to be superseded by the dragoons

and dragonnades of Louis XIV.then the end of the French chivalry was at hand, and came. But centuries

before that shameful fall there had come in with Christianity the new thought, that domination meant

responsibility; that responsibility demanded virtue. The words which denoted rank, came to denote likewise

high moral excellencies. The nobilis, or man who was known, and therefore subject to public opinion, was

bound to behave nobly. The gentlemangentilemanwho respected his own gens, or family and pedigree,

was bound to be gentle. The courtier, who had picked up at court some touch of Roman civilisation from

Roman ecclesiastics, was bound to be courteous. He who held an "honour" or "edel" of land was bound to be

honourable; and he who held a "weorthig," or worthy, thereof, was bound himself to be worthy. In like wise,

he who had the right to ride a horse, was expected to be chivalrous in all matters befitting the hereditary ruler,

who owed a sacred debt to a long line of forefathers, as well as to the state in which he dwelt; all dignity,

courtesy, purity, selfrestraint, devotionsuch as they were understood in those rough dayscentred

themselves round the idea of the rider as the attributes of the man whose supposed duty, as well as his

supposed right, was to govern his fellowmen, by example, as well as by law and force;attributes which

gathered themselves up into that one wordChivalry: an idea, which, perfect or imperfect, God forbid that

mankind should ever forget, till it has become the possessionas it is the Godgiven rightof the poorest

slave that ever trudged on foot; and every collierlad shall have becomeas some of those Barnsley men

Very unfaithful was chivalry to its idealas all men are to all ideals. But bear in mind, that if the horse was

the symbol of the ruling caste, it was not at first its only strength. Unless that caste had had at first spiritual,

as well as physical force on its side, it would have been soon destroyednay, it would have destroyed

itselfby internecine civil war. And we must believe that those Franks, Goths, Lombards, and Burgunds,

who in the early Middle Age leaped on the backs (to use Mr. Carlyle's expression) of the Roman nations,

were actually, in all senses of the word, better men than those whom they conquered. We must believe it from

reason; for if not, how could they, numerically few, have held for a year, much more for centuries, against

millions, their dangerous elevation? We must believe it, unless we take Tacitus's "Germania," which I

absolutely refuse to do, for a romance. We must believe that they were better than the Romanised nations

whom they conquered, because the writers of those nations, Augustine, Salvian, and Sidonius Apollinaris, for

example, say that they were such, and give proof thereof. Not good men according to our higher standard

far from it; though Sidonius's picture of Theodoric, the East Goth, in his palace of Narbonne, is the picture of

an eminently good and wise ruler. But not good, I say, as a rulethe Franks, alas! often very bad men: but

still better, wiser, abler, than those whom they ruled. We must believe too, that they were better, in every

sense of the word, than those tribes on their eastern frontier, whom they conquered in after centuries, unless

we discredit (which we have no reason to do) the accounts which the Roman and Greek writers give of the

So it was in later centuries. One cannot read fairly the history of the Middle Ages without seeing that the

robber knight of Germany or of France, who figures so much in modern novels, must have been the

exception, and not the rule: that an aristocracy which lived by the saddle would have as little chance of

perpetuating itself, as a priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the mediaeval Nobility has

been as much slandered as the mediaeval Church; and the exceptions takenas more salient and

excitingfor the average: that side by side with ruffians like Gaston de Foix hundreds of honest gentlemen

were trying to do their duty to the best of their light, and were raising, and not depressing, the masses below

themone very important item in that duty being, the doing the whole fighting of the country at their own

expense, instead of leaving it to a standing army of mercenaries, at the beck and call of a despot; and that, as

M. de Tocqueville says: "In feudal times, the Nobility were regarded pretty much as the government is

regarded in our own; the burdens they imposed were endured in consequence of the security they afforded.

The nobles had many irksome privileges; they possessed many onerous rights: but they maintained public

order, they administered justice, they caused the law to be executed, they came to the relief of the weak, they

conducted the business of the community. In proportion as they ceased to do these things, the burden of their

privileges appeared more oppressive, and their existence became an anomaly in proportion as they ceased to

do these things." And the Ancien Regime may be defined as the period in which they ceased to do these

thingsin which they began to play the idlers, and expected to take their old wages without doing their old

But in any case, government by a ruling caste, whether of the patriarchal or of the feudal kind, is no ideal or

permanent state of society. So far from it, it is but the first or second step out of primeval savagery. For the

more a ruling race becomes conscious of its own duty, and not merely of its own powerthe more it learns

to regard its peculiar gifts as entrusted to it for the good of menso much the more earnestly will it labour to

raise the masses below to its own level, by imparting to them its own light; and so will it continually tend to

abolish itself, by producing a general equality, moral and intellectual; and fulfil that law of selfsacrifice

A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble as themselvesthat is at least a

fair ideal, tending toward, though it has not reached, the highest ideal of all.

But suppose that the very opposite tendencyinherent in the heart of every child of manshould conquer.

Suppose the ruling caste no longer the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their equals.

Suppose themshameful, but not without example actually sunk to be their inferiors. And that such a fall

did come nay, that it must have comeis matter of history. And its cause, like all social causes, was not a

political nor a physical, but a moral cause. The profligacy of the French and Italian aristocracies, in the

sixteenth century, avenged itself on them by a curse (derived from the newlydiscovered America) from

which they never recovered. The Spanish aristocracy suffered, I doubt not very severely. The English and

German, owing to the superior homeliness and purity of ruling their lives, hardly at all. But the continental

caste, instead of recruiting their tainted blood by healthy blood from below, did all, under pretence of keeping

it pure, to keep it tainted by continual intermarriage; and paid, in increasing weakness of body and mind, the

penalty of their exclusive pride. It is impossible for anyone who reads the French memoirs of the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the aristocracy therein depicted was ripe for

ruinyea, already ruinedunder any form of government whatsoever, independent of all political changes.

Indeed, many of the political changes were not the causes but the effects of the demoralisation of the

noblesse. Historians will tell you how, as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV.

complained that the nobles were quitting their country districts; how succeeding kings and statesmen, notably

Richelieu and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up to Paris, that they might become mere courtiers, instead

of powerful country gentlemen; how those who remained behind were only the poor hobereaux, little

hobbyhawks among the gentry, who considered it degradation to help in governing the parish, as their

forefathers had governed it, and lived shabbily in their chateaux, grinding the last farthing out of their tenants,

that they might spend it in town during the winter. No wonder that with such an aristocracy, who had

renounced that very duty of governing the country, for which alone they and their forefathers had existed,

there arose government by intendants and subdelegates, and all the other evils of administrative

centralisation, which M. de Tocqueville anatomises and deplores. But what was the cause of the curse? Their

moral degradation. What drew them up to Paris save vanity and profligacy? What kept them from

intermarrying with the middle class save pride? What made them give up the office of governors save

idleness? And if vanity, profligacy, pride, and idleness be not injustices and moral vices, what are?

The race of heroic knights and nobles who fought under the walls of Jerusalemwho wrestled, and not in

vain, for centuries with the equally heroic English, in defence of their native soilwho had set to all Europe

the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this; their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says,

Every Intendant, chosen by the ComptrollerGeneral out of the lower born members of the Council of

State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his

greed, ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man abler, more energetic, and often, to judge from

the pages of De Tocqueville, with far more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantrythan was the

count or marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and let him nevertheless

Understand meI am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the Ancien Regime, but against its

The hereditary principle is good, because it is founded on fact and nature. If men's minds come into the world

blank sheets of paper which I much doubtevery other part and faculty of them comes in stamped with

hereditary tendencies and peculiarities. There are such things as transmitted capabilities for good and for evil;

and as surely as the offspring of a good horse or dog is likely to be good, so is the offspring of a good man,

and still more of a good woman. If the parents have any special ability, their children will probably inherit it,

at least in part; and over and above, will have it developed in them by an education worthy of their parents

and themselves. If man werewhat he is nota healthy and normal species, a permanent hereditary caste

might go on intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself. But the same moral reason which would make such a

caste dangerousindeed, fatal to the liberty and development of mankind, makes it happily impossible.

Crimes and follies are certain, after a few generations, to weaken the powers of any human caste; and unless

it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with the common stock of humanity, it must sink under

that weakness, as the ancient noblesse sank by its own vice. Of course there were exceptions. The French

Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and like every day of judgment, divided between

the good and the evil. But it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few Richelieus,

Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayettes were but the storks among the cranes involved in the

Profligacy, pride, idlenessthese are the vices which we have to lay to the charge of the Teutonic Nobility

of the Ancien Regime in France especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole continent of

Europe. But below them, and perhaps the cause of them all, lay another and deeper

I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief. I mean want of belief in duty, in responsibility.

Want of belief that there was a living God governing the universe, who had set them their work, and would

judge them according to their work. And therefore, want of belief, yea, utter unconsciousness, that they were

set in their places to make the masses below them better men; to impart to them their own civilisation, to

raise them to their own level. They would have shrunk from that which I just now defined as the true duty of

an aristocracy, just because it would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves. But the process of

abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from within. So it must always be, in such

a case. If a ruling class will not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to drag them

down to theirs. That sense of justice which allowed privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges

as the salary of a judge, or the immunity of a member of the House of Commons; when they were earned, as

in the Middle Age, by severe education, earnest labour, and life and death responsibility in peace and war,

will demand the abolition of those privileges, when no work is done in return for them, with a voice which

But with that righteous voice will mingle another, most wicked, and yet, alas! most flattering to poor

humanitythe voice of envy, simple and undisguised; of envy, which moralists hold to be one of the basest

of human passions; which can never be justified, however hateful or unworthy be the envied man. And when

a whole people, or even a majority thereof, shall be possessed by that, what is there that they will not do?

Some are surprised and puzzled when they find, in the French Revolution of 1793, the noblest and the foulest

characters labouring in concert, and side by sideoften, too, paradoxical as it may seem, united in the same

personage. The explanation is simple. Justice inspired the one; the other was the child of simple envy. But

this passion of envy, if it becomes permanent and popular, may avenge itself, like all other sins. A nation may

say to itself, "Provided we have no superiors to fall our pride, we are content. Liberty is a slight matter,

provided we have equality. Let us be slaves, provided we are all slaves alike." It may destroy every standard

of humanity above its own mean average; it may forget that the old ruling class, in spite of all its defects and

crimes, did at least pretend to represent something higher than man's necessary wants, plus the greed of

amassing money; never meeting (at least in the country districts) any one wiser or more refined than an

official or a priest drawn from the peasant class, it may lose the belief that any standard higher than that is

needed; and, all but forgetting the very existence of civilisation, sink contented into a dead level of

intellectual mediocrity and moral barbarism, crying, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."

A nation in such a temper will surely be taken at its word. Where the carcase is, there the eagles will be

gathered together; and there will not be wanting to such nationsas there were not wanting in old Greece

and Romedespots who will give them all they want, and more, and say to them: "Yes, you shall eat and

drink; and yet you shall not die. For I, while I take care of your mortal bodies, will see that care is taken of

For there are those who have discovered, with the kings of the Holy Alliance, that infidelity and scepticism

are political mistakes, not so much because they promote vice, as because they promote (or are supposed to

promote) free thought; who see that religion (no matter of what quality) is a most valuable assistant to the

duties of a minister of police. They will quote in their own behalf Montesquieu's opinion that religion is a

column necessary to sustain the social edifice; they will quote, too, that sound and true saying of De

Tocqueville's: {1} "If the first American who might be met, either in his own country, or abroad, were to be

stopped and asked whether he considered religion useful to the stability of the laws and the good order of

society, he would answer, without hesitation, that no civilised society, but more especially none in a state of

freedom, can exist without religion. Respect for religion is, in his eyes, the greatest guarantee of the stability

of the State, and of the safety of the community. Those who are ignorant of the science of government, know

M. de Tocqueville, when he wrote these words, was lamenting that in France, "freedom was forsaken;" "a

thing for which it is said that no one any longer cares in France." He did not, it seems to me, perceive that, as

in America the best guarantee of freedom is the reverence for a religion or religions, which are free

themselves, and which teach men to be free; so in other countries the best guarantee of slavery is, reverence

But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there are others who will see; who will say: "If religion be the pillar

of political and social order, there is an order which is best supported by a religion which is adverse to free

thought, free speech, free conscience, free communion between man and God. The more enervating the

superstition, the more exacting and tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, if we help it to do

its own. If it permit us to enslave the body, we will permit it to enslave the soul."

And so may be inaugurated a period of that organised anarchy of which the poet says:

The degradation of the European nobility caused, of course, the increase of the kingly power, and opened the

way to central despotisms. The bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class, whatever were its virtues, its value,

its real courage, were never able to stand alone against the kings. Their capital, being invested in trade, was

necessarily subject to such sudden dangers from war, political change, bad seasons, and so forth, that its

holders, however individually brave, were timid as a class. They could never hold out on strike against the

governments, and had to submit to the powers that were, whatever they were, under penalty of ruin.

But on the Continent, and especially in France and Germany, unable to strengthen itself by intermarriage with

the noblesse, they retained that timidity which is the fruit of the insecurity of trade; and had to submit to a

more and more centralised despotism, and grow up as they could, in the face of exasperating hindrances to

wealth, to education, to the possession, in many parts of France, of large landed estates; leaving the noblesse

to decay in isolated uselessness and weakness, and in many cases debt and poverty.

The systemor rather anarchyaccording to which France was governed during this transitional period,

may be read in that work of M. de Tocqueville's which I have already quoted, and which is accessible to all

classes, through Mr. H. Reeve's excellent translation. Every student of history is, of course, well acquainted

with that book. But as there is reason to fear, from language which is becoming once more too common, both

in speech and writing, that the general public either do not know it, or have not understood it, I shall take the

liberty of quoting from it somewhat largely. I am justified in so doing by the fact that M. de Tocqueville's

book is founded on researches into the French Archives, which have been made (as far as I am aware) only

by him; and contains innumerable significant facts, which are to be found (as far as I am aware) in no other

The French peoplesays M. de Tocquevillemade, in 1789, the greatest effort which was ever made by

any nation to cut, so to speak, their destiny in halves, and to separate by an abyss that which they had

heretofore been, from that which they sought to become hereafter. But he had long thought that they had

succeeded in this singular attempt much less than was supposed abroad; and less than they had at first

supposed themselves. He was convinced that they had unconsciously retained, from the former state of

society, most of the sentiments, the habits, and even the opinions, by means of which they had effected the

destruction of that state of things; and that, without intending it, they had used its remains to rebuild the

edifice of modern society. This is his thesis, and this he proves, it seems to me, incontestably by documentary

evidence. Not only does he find habits which we supposeor supposed till latelyto have died with the

eighteenth century, still living and working, at least in France, in the nineteenth, but the new opinions which

we look on usually as the special children of the nineteenth century, he shows to have been born in the

eighteenth. France, he considers, is still at heart what the Ancien Regime made her.

He shows that the hatred of the ruling caste, the intense determination to gain and keep equality, even at the

expense of liberty, had been long growing up, under those influences of which I spoke in my first lecture.

He shows, moreover, that the acquiescence in a centralised administration; the expectation that the

government should do everything for the people, and nothing for themselves; the consequent loss of local

liberties, local peculiarities; the helplessness of the towns and the parishes: and all which issued in making

Paris France, and subjecting the whole of a vast country to the arbitrary dictates of a knot of despots in the

capital, was not the fruit of the Revolution, but of the Ancien Regime which preceded it; and that Robespierre

and his "Comite de Salut Public," and commissioners sent forth to the four winds of heaven in bonnet rouge

and carmagnole complete, to build up and pull down, according to their wicked will, were only handling,

somewhat more roughly, the same wires which had been handled for several generations by the

"Do you know," said Law to the Marquis d'Argenson, "that this kingdom of France is governed by thirty

intendants? You have neither parliament, nor estates, nor governors. It is upon thirty masters of request,

despatched into the provinces, that their evil or their good, their fertility or their sterility, entirely depend."

To do everything for the people, and let them do nothing for themselvesthis was the Ancien Regime. To be

more wise and more loving than Almighty God, who certainly does not do everything for the sons of men,

but forces them to labour for themselves by bitter need, and after a most Spartan mode of education; who

allows them to burn their hands as often as they are foolish enough to put them into the fire; and to be filled

with the fruits of their own folly, even though the folly be one of necessary ignorance; treating them with that

seeming neglect which is after all the most provident care, because by it alone can men be trained to

experience, self help, science, true humanity; and so become not tolerably harmless dolls, but men and

The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill; The perfect spirit, nobly

Such seems to be the education and government appointed for man by the voluntatem Dei in rebus revelatum,

and the education, therefore, which the man of science will accept and carry out. But the men of the Ancien

Regimein as far as it was a Regime at alltried to be wiser than the Almighty. Why not? They were not

the first, nor will be the last, by many who have made the same attempt. So this Council of State settled

arbitrarily, not only taxes, and militia, and roads, but anything and everything. Its members meddled, with

their whole hearts and minds. They tried to teach agriculture by schools and pamphlets and prizes; they sent

out plans for every public work. A town could not establish an octroi, levy a rate, mortgage, sell, sue, farm, or

administer their property, without an order in council. The Government ordered public rejoicings, saw to the

firing of salutes, and illuminating of housesin one case mentioned by M. de Tocqueville, they fined a

member of the burgher guard for absenting himself from a Te Deum. All selfgovernment was gone. A

country parish was, says Turgot, nothing but "an assemblage of cabins, and of inhabitants as passive as the

cabins they dwelt in." Without an order of council, the parish could not mend the steeple after a storm, or

repair the parsonage gable. If they grumbled at the intendant, he threw some of the chief persons into prison,

and made the parish pay the expenses of the horse patrol, which formed the arbitrary police of France.

Everywhere was meddling. There were reports on statisticscircumstantial, inaccurate, and uselessas

statistics are too often wont to be. Sometimes, when the people were starving, the Government sent down

charitable donations to certain parishes, on condition that the inhabitants should raise a sum on their part.

When the sum offered was sufficient, the ComptrollerGeneral wrote on the margin, when he returned the

report to the intendant, "Goodexpress satisfaction." If it was more than sufficient, he wrote,

"Goodexpress satisfaction and sensibility." There is nothing new under the sun. In 1761, the Government,

jealous enough of newspapers, determined to start one for itself, and for that purpose took under its tutelage

the Gazette de France. So the public newsmongers were of course to be the provincial intendants, and their

But alas! the poor subdelegates seem to have found either very little news, or very little which it was politic

to publish. One reports that a smuggler of salt has been hung, and has displayed great courage; another that a

woman in his district has had three girls at a birth; another that a dreadful storm has happened, but has

done no mischief; a fourthliving in some specially favoured Utopiadeclares that in spite of all his efforts

he has found nothing worth recording, but that he himself will subscribe to so useful a journal, and will

exhort all respectable persons to follow his example: in spite of which loyal endeavours, the journal seems to

have proved a failure, to the great disgust of the king and his minister, who had of course expected to secure

fine weather by nailing, like the schoolboy before a holiday, the hand of the weatherglass.

Well had it been, if the intermeddling of this bureaucracy had stopped there. But, by a process of evocation

(as it was called), more and more causes, criminal as well as civil, were withdrawn from the regular tribunals,

to those of the intendants and the Council. Before the intendant all the lower order of people were generally

sent for trial. Breadriots were a common cause of such trials, and M. de Tocqueville asserts that he has

found sentences, delivered by the intendant, and a local council chosen by himself, by which men were

condemned to the galleys, and even to death. Under such a system, under which an intendant must have felt it

his interest to pretend at all risks, that all was going right, and to regard any disturbance as a dangerous

exposure of himself and his chiefsone can understand easily enough that scene which Mr. Carlyle has

dramatised from Lacretelle, concerning the canaille, the masses, as we used to call them a generation since:

"A dumb generationtheir voice only an inarticulate cry. Spokesman, in the king's council, in the world's

forum, they have none that finds credence. At rare intervals (as now, in 1775) they will fling down their hoes,

and hammers; and, to the astonishment of mankind, flock hither and thither, dangerous, aimless, get the

length even of Versailles. Turgot is altering the corn trade, abrogating the absurdest corn laws; there is dearth,

real, or were it even factitious, an indubitable scarcity of broad. And so, on the 2nd day of May, 1775, these

waste multitudes do here, at Versailles chateau, in widespread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged

raggedness, present as in legible hieroglyphic writing their petition of grievances. The chateaugates must be

shut; but the king will appear on the balcony and speak to them. They have seen the king's face; their petition

of grievances has been, if not read, looked at. In answer, two of them are hanged, on a new gallows forty feet

Of course. What more exasperating and inexpiable insult to the ruling powers was possible than this? To

persist in being needy and wretched, when a whole bureaucracy is toiling day and night to make them

prosperous and happy? An insult only to be avenged in blood. Remark meanwhile, that this centralised

bureaucracy was a failure; that after all the trouble taken to govern these masses, they were not governed, in

the sense of being made better, and not worse. The truth is, that no centralised bureaucracy, or socalled

"paternal government," yet invented on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything else:

because it is founded on an error; because it regards and treats men as that which they are not, as things; and

not as that which they are, as persons. If the bureaucracy were a mere Briareus giant, with a hundred hands,

helping the weak throughout the length and breadth of the empire, the system might be at least tolerable. But

what if the Government were not a Briareus with a hundred hands, but a Hydra with a hundred heads and

mouths, each far more intent on helping itself than on helping the people? What if subdelegates and other

officials, holding office at the will of the intendant, had to live, and even provide against a rainy day? What if

intendants, holding office at the will of the ComptrollerGeneral, had to do more than live, and found it

prudent to realise as large a fortune as possible, not only against disgrace, but against success, and the dignity

fit for a new member of the Noblesse de la Robe? Would not the system, then, soon become intolerable?

Would there not be evil times for the masses, till they became something more than masses?

It is an ugly name, that of "The Masses," for the great majority of human beings in a nation. He who uses it

speaks of them not as human beings, but as things; and as things not bound together in one living body, but

lying in a fortuitous heap. A swarm of ants is not a mass. It has a polity and a unity. Not the ants but the fir

The term, I believe, was invented during the Ancien Regime. Whether it was or not, it expresses very

accurately the life of the many in those days. No one would speak, if he wished to speak exactly, of the

masses of the United States; for there every man is, or is presumed to be, a personage; with his own

independence, his own activities, his own rights and duties. No one, I believe, would have talked of the

masses in the old feudal times; for then each individual was someone's man, bound to his master by ties of

mutual service, just or unjust, honourable or base, but still giving him a personality of duties and rights, and

Dividing, I say. The poor of the Middle Age had little sense of a common humanity. Those who owned

allegiance to the lord in the next valley were not their brothers; and at their own lord's bidding, they buckled

on sword and slew the next lord's men, with joyful heart and good conscience. Only now and then misery

compressed them into masses; and they ran together, as sheep run together to face a dog. Some wholesale

wrong made them aware that they were brothers, at least in the power of starving; and they joined in the cry

which was heard, I believe, in Mecklenburg as late as 1790: "Den Edelman wille wi dodschlagen." Then, in

Wat Tyler's insurrections, in Munster Anabaptisms, in Jacqueries, they proved themselves to be masses, if

nothing better, striking for awhile, by the mere weight of numbers, blows terrible, though aimlesssoon to

be dispersed and slain in their turn by a disciplined and compact aristocracy. Yet not always dispersed, if they

could find a leader; as the Polish nobles discovered to their cost in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Then Bogdan the Cossack, a wild warrior, not without his sins, but having deserved well of James Sobieski

and the Poles, found that the neighbouring noble's steward had taken a fancy to his windmill and his farm

upon the Dnieper. He was thrown into prison on a frivolous charge, and escaped to the Tatars, leaving his

wife dishonoured, his house burnt, his infant lost in the flames, his eldest son scourged for protesting against

the wrong. And he returned, at the head of an army of Tatars, Socinians, Greeks, or what not, to set free the

serfs, and exterminate Jesuits, Jews, and nobles, throughout Podolia, Volhynia, Red Russia; to desecrate the

altars of God, and slay his servants; to destroy the nobles by lingering tortures; to strip noble ladies and

maidens, and hunt them to death with the whips of his Cossacks; and after defeating the nobles in battle after

battle, to inaugurate an era of misery and anarchy from which Poland never recovered.

Thus did the masses of Southern Poland discover, for one generation at least, that they were not many things,

but one thing; a class, capable of brotherhood and unity, though, alas! only of such as belongs to a pack of

wolves. But such outbursts as this were rare exceptions. In general, feudalism kept the people divided, and

therefore helpless. And as feudalism died out, and with it the personal selfrespect and loyalty which were

engendered by the old relations of master and servant, the division still remained; and the people, in France

especially, became merely masses, a swarm of incoherent and disorganised things intent on the necessaries of

Out of this mass were struggling upwards perpetually, all who had a little ambition, a little scholarship, or a

little money, endeavouring to become members of the middle class by obtaining a Government appointment.

"A man," says M. de Tocqueville, "endowed with some education and small means, thought it not decorous

to die without having been a Government officer." "Every man, according to his condition," says a

It was not merely the "natural vanity" of which M. de Tocqueville accuses his countrymen, which stirred up

in them this eagerness after place; for we see the same eagerness in other nations of the Continent, who

cannot be accused (as wholes) of that weakness. The fact is, a Government place, or a Government

decoration, cross, ribbon, or what not, is, in a country where selfgovernment is unknown or dead, the only

method, save literary fame, which is left to men in order to assert themselves either to themselves or their

A British or American shopkeeper or farmer asks nothing of his Government. He can, if he chooses, be

elected to some local office (generally unsalaried) by the votes of his fellowcitizens. But that is his right,

and adds nothing to his respectability. The test of that latter, in a country where all honest callings are equally

honourable, is the amount of money he can make; and a very sound practical test that is, in a country where

intellect and capital are free. Beyond that, he is what he is, and wishes to be no more, save what he can make

himself. He has his rights, guaranteed by law and public opinion; and as long as he stands within them, and

(as he well phrases it) behaves like a gentleman, he considers himself as good as any man; and so he is. But

under the bureaucratic Regime of the Continent, if a man had not "something by command of the king," he

was nothing; and something he naturally wished to be, even by means of a Government which he disliked and

despised. So in France, where innumerable petty posts were regular articles of sale, anyone, it seems, who

had saved a little money, found it most profitable to invest it in a beadledom of some kindto the great

detriment of the country, for he thus withdrew his capital from trade; but to his own clear gain, for he thereby

purchased some immunity from public burdens, and, as it were, compounded once and for all for his taxes.

The petty German princes, it seems, followed the example of France, and sold their little beadledoms

likewise; but even where offices were not sold, they must be obtained by any and every means, by everyone

who desired not to be as other men were, and to become Notables, as they were called in France; so he

migrated from the country into the nearest town, and became a member of some small bodyguild, town

council, or what not, bodies which were infinite in number. In one small town M. de Tocqueville discovers

thirtysix such bodies, "separated from each other by diminutive privileges, the least honourable of which

was still a mark of honour." Quarrelling perpetually with each other for precedence, despising and oppressing

the very menu peuple from whom they had for the most part sprung, these innumerable small bodies, instead

of uniting their class, only served to split it up more and more; and when the Revolution broke them up, once

and for all, with all other privileges whatsoever, no bond of union was left; and each man stood alone, proud

of his "individuality"his complete social isolation; till he discovered that, in ridding himself of superiors,

he had rid himself also of fellows; fulfilling, every man in his own person, the old fable of the bundle of

sticks; and had to submit, under the Consulate and the Empire, to a tyranny to which the Ancien Regime was

For, in France at least, the Ancien Regime was no tyranny. The middle and upper classes had individual

libertyit may be, only too much; the liberty of disobeying a Government which they did not respect.

"However submissive the French may have been before the Revolution to the will of the king, one sort of

obedience was altogether unknown to them. They knew not what it was to bow before an illegitimate and

contested powera power but little honoured, frequently despised, but willingly endured because it may be

serviceable, or because it may hurt. To that degrading form of servitude they were ever strangers. The king

inspired them with feelings . . . which have become incomprehensible to this generation . . . They loved him

with the affection due to a father; they revered him with the respect due to God. In submitting to the most

arbitrary of his commands, they yielded less to compulsion than to loyalty; and thus they frequently

preserved great freedom of mind, even in the most complete dependence. This liberty, irregular, intermittent,"

says M. de Tocqueville, "helped to form those vigorous characters, those proud and daring spirits, which

were to make the French Revolution at once the object of the admiration and the terror of succeeding

This libertytoo much akin to anarchy, in which indeed it issued for awhileseems to have asserted itself

in continual petty resistance to officials whom they did not respect, and who, in their turn, were more than a

The French Governmentone may say, every Government on the Continent in those dayshad the special

weakness of all bureaucracies; namely, that want of moral force which compels them to fall back at last on

physical force, and transforms the ruler into a bully, and the soldier into a policeman and a gaoler. A

Government of parvenus, uncertain of its own position, will be continually trying to assert itself to itself, by

vexatious intermeddling and intruding pretensions; and then, when it meets with the resistance of free and

rational spirits, will either recoil in awkward cowardice, or fly into a passion, and appeal to the halter and the

sword. Such a Government can never take itself for granted, because it knows that it is not taken for granted

by the people. It never can possess the quiet assurance, the courteous dignity, without swagger, yet without

hesitation, which belongs to hereditary legislators; by which term is to be understood, not merely kings, not

merely noblemen, but every citizen of a free nation, however democratic, who has received from his

Such was the political and social state of the Ancien Regime, not only in France, but if we are to trust (as we

must trust) M. de Tocqueville, in almost every nation in Europe, except Britain.

And as for its moral state. We must look for thatif we have need, which happily all have notin its lighter

I shall not trouble you with criticisms on French memoirsof which those of Madame de Sevigne are on the

whole, the most painful (as witness her comments on the Marquise de Brinvilliers's execution), because

written by a woman better and more human than ordinary. Nor with "Menagiana," or other 'ana'sas vain

and artificial as they are often foul; nor with novels and poems, long since deservedly forgotten. On the first

perusal of this lighter literature, you will be charmed with the ease, grace, lightness with which everything is

said. On the second, you will be somewhat cured of your admiration, as you perceive how little there is to

say. The head proves to be nothing but a cunning mask, with no brains inside. Especially is this true of a

book, which I must beg those who have read it already, to recollect. To read it I recommend no human being.

We may consider it, as it was considered in its time, the typical novel of the Ancien Regime. A picture of

Spanish society, written by a Frenchman, it was held to beand doubtless with reasona picture of the

whole European world. Its French editor (of 1836) calls it a grande epopee; "one of the most prodigious

efforts of intelligence, exhausting all forms of humanity"in fact, a second Shakespeare, according to the

lights of the year 1715. I mean, of course, "Gil Blas." So picturesque is the book, that it has furnished

inexhaustible motifs to the draughtsman. So excellent is its workmanship, that the enthusiastic editor of 1836

tells us and doubtless he knows bestthat it is the classic model of the French tongue; and that, as Le

Sage "had embraced all that belonged to man in his composition, he dared to prescribe to himself to embrace

the whole French language in his work." It has been the parent of a whole school of literaturethe Bible of

tens of thousands, with admiring commentators in plenty; on whose souls may God have mercy!

And no wonder. The book has a solid value, and will always have, not merely from its perfect art (according

to its own measure and intention), but from its perfect truthfulness. It is the Ancien Regime itself. It set forth

to the men thereof, themselves, without veil or cowardly reticence of any kind; and inasmuch as every man

loves himself, the Ancien Regime loved "Gil Blas," and said, "The problem of humanity is solved at last."

But, ye longsuffering powers of heaven, what a solution! It is beside the matter to call the book ungodly,

immoral, base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture."

No; the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its dreariness, barrenness, shallowness,

ignorance of the human heart, want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the actors in it are not men and

women, but ferretswith here and there, of course, a stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the

inhuman mirror of an inhuman age, in which the healthy human heart can find no more interest than in a

That last, indeed, "Gil Blas" is; a collection of diseased specimens. No man or woman in the book, lay or

clerical, gentle or simple, as far as I can remember, do their duty in any wise, even if they recollect that they

have any duty to do. Greed, chicane, hypocrisy, uselessness are the ruling laws of human society. A new

book of Ecclesiastes, crying, "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity;" the "conclusion of the whole matter" being left

out, and the new Ecclesiastes rendered thereby diabolic, instead of like that old one, divine. For, instead of

"Fear God and keep his commandments, for that is the whole duty of main," Le Sage sends forth the new

conclusion, "Take care of thyself, and feed on thy neighbours, for that is the whole duty of man." And very

faithfully was his advice (easy enough to obey at all times) obeyed for nearly a century after "Gil Blas"

About the same time there appeared, by a remarkable coincidence, another work, like it the child of the

Ancien Regime, and yet as opposite to it as light to darkness. If Le Sage drew men as they were, Fenelon

tried at least to draw them as they might have been and still might be, were they governed by sages and by

saints, according to the laws of God. "Telemaque" is an idealimperfect, doubtless, as all ideals must be in a

world in which God's ways and thoughts are for ever higher than man's; but an ideal nevertheless. If its

construction is less complete than that of "Gil Blas," it is because its aim is infinitely higher; because the

form has to be subordinated, here and there, to the matter. If its political economy be imperfect, often

chimerical, it is because the mind of one man must needs have been too weak to bring into shape and order

the chaos, social and economic, which he saw around him. M. de Lamartine, in his brilliant little life of

Fenelon, does not hesitate to trace to the influence of "Telemaque," the Utopias which produced the

revolutions of 1793 and 1848. "The saintly poet was," he says, "without knowing it, the first Radical and the

first communist of his century." But it is something to have preached to princes doctrines till then unknown,

or at least forgotten for many a generationfree trade, peace, international arbitration, and the "carriere

ouverte aux talents" for all ranks. It is something to have warned his generation of the dangerous overgrowth

of the metropolis; to have prophesied, as an old Hebrew might have done, that the despotism which he saw

around him would end in a violent revolution. It is something to have combined the highest Christian

morality with a hearty appreciation of old Greek life; of its reverence for bodily health and prowess; its

joyous and simple country society; its sacrificial feasts, dances, games; its respect for the gods; its belief that

they helped, guided, inspired the sons of men. It is something to have himself believed in God; in a living

God, who, both in this life and in all lives to come, rewarded the good and punished the evil by inevitable

laws. It is something to have warned a young prince, in an age of doctrinal bigotry and practical atheism, that

a living God still existed, and that his laws were still in force; to have shown him Tartarus crowded with the

souls of wicked monarchs, while a few of kingly race rested in Elysium, and among them old

pagansInachus, Cecrops, Erichthon, Triptolemus, and Sesostrisrewarded for ever for having done their

duty, each according to his light, to the flocks which the gods had committed to their care. It is something to

have spoken to a prince, in such an age, without servility, and without etiquette, of the frailties and the

dangers which beset arbitrary rulers; to have told him that royalty, "when assumed to content oneself, is a

monstrous tyranny; when assumed to fulfil its duties, and to conduct an innumerable people as a father

conducts his children, a crushing slavery, which demands an heroic courage and patience."

Let us honour the courtier who dared speak such truths; and still more the saintly celibate who had sufficient

catholicity of mind to envelop them in old Grecian dress, and, without playing false for a moment to his own

Christianity, seek in the writings of heathen sages a wider and a healthier view of humanity than was afforded

No wonder that the appearance of "Telemaque," published in Holland without the permission of Fenelon,

delighted throughout Europe that public which is always delighted with new truths, as long as it is not

required to practise them. To read "Telemaque" was the right and the enjoyment of everyone. To obey it, the

duty only of princes. No wonder that, on the other hand, this "Vengeance de peuples, lecon des rois," as M.

de Lamartine calls it, was taken for the bitterest satire by Louis XIV., and completed the disgrace of one who

had dared to teach the future king of France that he must show himself, in all things, the opposite of his

grandfather. No wonder if Madame de Maintenon and the court looked on its portraits of wicked ministers

and courtiers as caricatures of themselves; portraits too, which, "composed thus in the palace of Versailles,

under the auspices of that confidence which the king had placed in the preceptor of his heir, seemed a

domestic treason." No wonder, also, if the foolish and envious world outside was of the same opinion; and

after enjoying for awhile this exposure of the great ones of the earth, left "Telemaque" as an Utopia with

which private folks had no concern; and betook themselves to the easier and more practical model of "Gil

But there are solid defects in "Telemaque"indicating corresponding defects in the author's mindwhich

would have, in any case, prevented its doing the good work which Fenelon desired; defects which are natural,

as it seems to me, to his position as a Roman Catholic priest, however saintly and pure, however humane and

liberal. The king, with him, is to be always the father of his people; which is tantamount to saying, that the

people are to be always children, and in a condition of tutelage; voluntary, if possible: if not, of tutelage still.

Of selfgovernment, and education of human beings into free manhood by the exercise of self government,

free will, free thoughtof this Fenelon had surely not a glimpse. A generation or two passed by, and then the

peoples of Europe began to suspect that they were no longer children, but come to manhood; and determined

(after the example of Britain and America) to assume the rights and duties of manhood, at whatever risk of

excesses or mistakes: and then "Telemaque" was relegated half unjustlyas the slavish and childish

But there is a defect in "Telemaque" which is perhaps deeper still. No woman in it exercises influence over

man, except for evil. Minerva, the guiding and inspiring spirit, assumes of course, as Mentor, a male form;

but her speech and thought is essentially masculine, and not feminine. Antiope is a mere layfigure,

introduced at the end of the book because Telemachus must needs be allowed to have hope of marrying

someone or other. Venus plays but the same part as she does in the Tannenhauser legends of the Middle Age.

Her hatred against Telemachus is an integral element of the plot. She, with the other women or nymphs of the

romance, in spite of all Fenelon's mercy and courtesy towards human frailties, really rise no higher than the

witches of the Malleus Maleficanum. Woman as the old monk held who derived femina from fe, faith, and

minus, less, because women have less faith than menis, in "Telemaque," whenever she thinks or acts, the

temptress, the enchantress; the victim (according to a very ancient calumny) of passions more violent, often

Such a conception of women must make "Telemaque," to the end of time, useless as a wholesome book of

education. It must have crippled its influence, especially in France, in its own time. For there, for good and

for evil, woman was asserting more and more her power, and her right to power, over the mind and heart of

man. Rising from the long degradation of the Middle Ages, which had really respected her only when

unsexed and celibate, the French woman had assumed, often lawlessly, always triumphantly, her just

freedom; her true place as the equal, the coadjutor, the counsellor of man. Of all problems connected with the

education of a young prince, that of the influence of woman was, in the France of the Ancien Regime, the

most important. And it was just that which Fenelon did not, perhaps dared not, try to touch; and which he

most certainly could not have solved. Meanwhile, not only Madame de Maintenon, but women whose names

it were a shame to couple with hers, must have smiled at, while they hated, the saint who attempted to

dispense not only with them, but with the ideal queen who should have been the helpmeet of the ideal king.

To those who believe that the world is governed by a living God, it may seem strange, at first sight, that this

moral anarchy was allowed to endure; that the avenging, and yet most purifying storm of the French

Revolution, inevitable from Louis XIV.'s latter years, was not allowed to burst two generations sooner than it

did. Is not the answerthat the question always is not of destroying the world, but of amending it? And that

amendment must always come from within, and not from without? That men must be taught to become men,

and mend their world themselves? To educate men into self governmentthat is the purpose of the

government of God; and some of the men of the eighteenth century did not learn that lesson. As the century

rolled on, the human mind arose out of the slough in which Le Sage found it, into manifold and beautiful

activity, increasing hatred of shams and lies, increasing hunger after truth and usefulness. With mistakes and

confusions innumerable they worked: but still they worked; planting good seed; and when the fire of the

French Revolution swept over the land, it burned up the rotten and the withered, only to let the fresh herbage

But that purifying fire was needed. If we inquire why the many attempts to reform the Ancien Regime, which

the eighteenth century witnessed, were failures one and all; why Pombal failed in Portugal, Aranda in Spain,

Joseph II. in Austria, Ferdinand and Caroline in Naplesfor these last, be it always remembered, began as

humane and enlightened sovereigns, patronising liberal opinions, and labouring to ameliorate the condition of

the poor, till they were driven by the murder of Marie Antoinette into a paroxysm of rage and terror why,

above all, Louis XVI., who attempted deeper and wiser reforms than any other sovereign, failed more

disastrously than anyis not the answer this, that all these reforms would but have cleansed the outside of

the cup and the platter, while they left the inside full of extortion and excess? It was not merely institutions

which required to be reformed, but men and women. The spirit of "Gil Blas" had to be cast out. The

deadness, selfishness, isolation of men's souls; their unbelief in great duties, great common causes, great

selfsacrificesin a word, their unbelief in God, and themselves, and mankindall that had to be reformed;

and till that was done all outward reform would but have left them, at best, in brute ease and peace, to that

soulless degradation, which (as in the Byzantine empire of old, and seeming in the Chinese empire of to

day) hides the reality of barbarism under a varnish of civilisation. Men had to be awakened; to be taught to

think for themselves, act for themselves, to dare and suffer side by side for their country and for their

And, what is more, men had to punishto avenge. Those are fearful words. But there is, in this Godguided

universe, a law of retribution, which will find men out, whether men choose to find it out or not; a law of

retribution; of vengeance inflicted justly, though not necessarily by just men. The public executioner was

seldom a very estimable personage, at least under the old Regime; and those who have been the scourges of

God have been, in general, mere scourges, and nothing better; smiting blindly, rashly, confusedly;

confounding too often the innocent with the guilty, till they have seemed only to punish crime by crime, and

replace old sins by new. But, however insoluble, however saddening that puzzle be, I must believeas long

as I believe in any God at allthat such men as Robespierre were His instruments, even in their crimes.

In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the wickedness of certain of its leaders was part of the

retribution itself. For the noblesse existed surely to make men better. It did, by certain classes, the very

opposite. Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, whom it itself had made wicked. For over and above all

political, economic, social wrongs, there were wrongs personal, human, dramatic; which stirred not merely

the springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just demand for the freedom of labour and enterprise: but

the very deepest springs of rage, contempt, and hate; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors of the

It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those horrors were of the artist classby

which I signify not merely painters and sculptorsas the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to

signify, at least in Englandbut what the French meant by ARTISTESproducers of luxuries and

amusements, play actors, musicians, and suchlike, down to that "distracted peruke maker with two fiery

torches," who, at the storm of the Bastile, "was for burning the saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run

screaming; had not a patriot, with some tincture of natural philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him,

with butt of musket on pit of stomach, overturned the barrels, and stayed the devouring element." The

distracted perukemaker may have had his wrongsperhaps such a one as that of poor Triboulet the fool, in

"Le Roi s'amuse"and his own sound reasons for blowing down the Bastile, and the system which kept it

For these very ministers of luxurythen miscalled artfrom the periwigmaker to the playactorwho

like them had seen the frivolity, the baseness, the profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered,

whom they despised while they adored! Figaro himself may have looked up to his master the Marquis as a

superior being as long as the law enabled the Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet

Figaro may have known and seen enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were abolished, for handing

the Marquis over to a Comite de Salut Public. Disappointed playactors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed

poets, like Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious. Why not? Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as

lapdogs and singingbirds by men and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it

may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than had our own Pitt and Burke. They had

played the valet: and no man was a hero to them. They had seen the nobleman expose himself before his own

helots: they would try if the helot was not as good as the nobleman. The nobleman had played the

mountebank: why should not the mountebank, for once, play the nobleman? The nobleman's God had been

his five senses, with (to use Mr. Carlyle's phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should not the mountebank

worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see what grace and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?

But why so cruel? Because, with many of these men, I more than suspect, there were wrongs to be avenged

deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a great portion of

the respectable middle class, and much of the lower class: but wrongs to which they and their families, being

most in contact with the noblesse, would be especially exposed; namely, wrongs to women.

Everyone who knows the literature of that time, must know what I mean: what had gone on for more than a

century, it may be more than two, in France, in Italy, andI am sorry to have to say itGermany likewise.

All historians know what I mean, and how enormous was the evil. I only wonder that they have so much

overlooked that item in the causes of the Revolution. It seems to me to have been more patent and potent in

the sight of men, as it surely was in the sight of Almighty God, than all the political and economic wrongs put

together. They might have issued in a change of dynasty or of laws. That, issued in the blood of the offenders.

Not a girl was enticed into Louis XV.'s Petit Trianon, or other den of aristocratic iniquity, but left behind her,

parents nursing shame and sullen indignation, even while they fingered the illgotten price of their daughter's

honour; and left behind also, perhaps, some unhappy boy of her own class, in whom disappointment and

jealousy were transformedand who will blame him?into righteous indignation, and a very sword of

God; all the more indignant, and all the more righteous, if education helped him to see, that the maiden's

acquiescence, her pride in her own shame, was the ugliest feature in the whole crime, and the most potent

reason for putting an end, however fearful, to a state of things in which such a fate was thought an honour and

a gain, and not a disgrace and a ruin; in which the most gifted daughters of the lower classes had learnt to

think it more noble to becomethat which they becamethan the wives of honest men.

If you will read fairly the literature of the Ancien Regime, whether in France or elsewhere, you will see that

my facts are true. If you have human hearts in you, you will see in them, it seems to me, an explanation of

many a guillotinade and fusillade, as yet explained only on the ground of madnessan hypothesis which (as

we do not yet in the least understand what madness is) is no explanation at all.

An age of decay, incoherence, and makeshift, varnish and gilding upon wormeaten furniture, and

mouldering wainscot, was that same Ancien Regime. And for that very reason a picturesque age; like one of

its own landscapes. A picturesque bit of uncultivated mountain, swarming with the prince's game; a

picturesque old robber schloss above, now in ruins; and below, perhaps, the picturesque new schloss, with its

French fountains and gardens, French nymphs of marble, and of flesh and blood likewise, which the prince

has partially paid for, by selling a few hundred young men to the English to fight the Yankees. The river, too,

is picturesque, for the old bridge has not been repaired since it was blown up in the Seven Years' War; and

there is but a single lazy barge floating down the stream, owing to the tolls and tariffs of his Serene Highness;

the village is picturesque, for the flower of the young men are at the wars, and the place is tumbling down;

and the two old peasants in the foreground, with the single goat and the hamper of vine twigs, are very

How sad to see the picturesque element eliminated, and the quiet artistic beauty of the scene destroyed;to

have steamers puffing up and down the river, and a railroad hurrying along its banks the wealth of the Old

World, in exchange for the wealth of the Newor hurrying, it may be, whole regiments of free and educated

citizen soldiers, who fight, they know for what. How sad to see the alto schloss desecrated by tourists, and

the neue schloss converted into a coldwater cure. How sad to see the village, church and all, built up again

brandnew, and whitewashed to the very steepletop; a new school at the townenda new crucifix by

the wayside. How sad to see the old folk well clothed in the fabrics of England or Belgium, doing an easy

trade in milk and fruit, because the land they till has become their own, and not the prince's; while their sons

are thriving farmers on the prairies of the far West. Very unpicturesque, no doubt, is wealth and progress,

peace and safety, cleanliness and comfort. But they possess advantages unknown to the Ancien Regime,

which was, if nothing else, picturesque. Men could paint amusing and often pretty pictures of its people and

Consider that word, "picturesque." It, and the notion of art which it expresses, are the children of the Ancien

Regimeof the era of decay. The healthy, vigorous, earnest, progressive Middle Age never dreamed of

admiring, much less of painting, for their own sake, rags and ruins; the fashion sprang up at the end of the

seventeenth century; it lingered on during the first quarter of our century, kept alive by the reaction from

181525. It is all but dead now, before the return of vigorous and progressive thought. An admirer of the

Middle Ages now does not build a sham ruin in his grounds; he restores a church, blazing with colour, like a

medieval illumination. He has learnt to look on that which went by the name of picturesque in his

greatgrandfather's time, as an old Greek or a Middle Age monk would have doneas something squalid,

ugly, a sign of neglect, disease, death; and therefore to be hated and abolished, if it cannot be restored. At

Carcassone, now, M. ViolletleDuc, under the auspices of the Emperor of the French, is spending his vast

learning, and much money, simply in abolishing the picturesque; in restoring stone for stone, each member of

that wonderful museum of Middle Age architecture: Roman, Visigothic, Moslem, Romaine, Early English,

later French, all is being reproduced exactly as it must have existed centuries since. No doubt that is not the

highest function of art: but it is a preparation for the highest, a step toward some future creative school. As

the early Italian artists, by careful imitation, absorbed into their minds the beauty and meaning of old Greek

and Roman art; so must the artists of our days by the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance. They must

learn to copy, before they can learn to surpass; and, meanwhile, they must learnindeed they have

learntthat decay is ugliness, and the imitation of decay, a making money out of the public shame.

The picturesque sprang up, as far as I can discover, suddenly, during the time of exhaustion and recklessness

which followed the great struggles of the sixteenth century. Salvator Rosa and Callot, two of the earliest

professors of picturesque art, have never been since surpassed. For indeed, they drew from life. The rags and

the ruins, material, and alas! spiritual, were all around them; the lands and the creeds alike lay waste. There

was ruffianism and misery among the masses of Europe; unbelief and artificiality among the upper classes;

churches and monasteries defiled, cities sacked, farmsteads plundered and ruinate, and all the wretchedness

which Callot has immortalisedfor a warning to evil rulersin his Miseres de la Guerre. The world was all

gone wrong: but as for setting it right againwho could do that? And so men fell into a sentimental regret

for the past, and its beauties, all exaggerated by the foreshortening of time; while they wanted strength or

faith to reproduce it. At last they became so accustomed to the rags and ruins, that they looked on them as the

Only now and then, and especially toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, when thought began to

revive, and men dreamed of putting the world to rights once more, there rose before them glimpses of an

Arcadian ideal. Country lifethe primaeval calling of menhow graceful and pure it might be! How

gracefulif not pureit once had been! The boors of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo might be true to

present fact; but there was a fairer ideal, which once had been fact, in the Eclogues of Theocritus, and the

Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. And so men took to dreaming of shepherds and shepherdesses, and painting

them on canvas, and modelling them in china, according to their cockney notions of what they had been once,

and always ought to be. We smile now at Sevres and Dresden shepherdesses; but the wise man will surely see

in them a certain pathos. They indicated a craving after something better than boorishness; and the many men

and women may have become the gentler and purer by looking even at them, and have said sadly to

themselves: "Such might have been the peasantry of half Europe, had it not been for devastations of the

In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed more to the eighteenth century than to

any century since the Christian era. It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the century which

followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider that the eighteenth century was but the child, or rather

grandchild, thereof. But I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with my

description of the very same era as one of decay and death. For side by side with the death, there was

manifold fresh birth; side by side with the decay there was active growth;side by side with them, fostered

by them, though generally in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or unconscious. We must beware,

however, of trying to find between that decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is really

none. The general decay may have determined the course of many men's thoughts; but it no more set them

thinking than (as I have heard said) the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new Regimea loose

metaphor, which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for a philosophic truth. That

would be to confess manwhat I shall never confess him to bethe creature of circumstances; it would be

to fall into the same fallacy of spontaneous generation as did the ancients, when they believed that bees were

bred from the carcass of a dead ox. In the first place, the bees were no bees, but fliesunless when some true

swarm of honey bees may have taken up their abode within the empty ribs, as Samson's bees did in that of the

lion. But bees or flies, each sprang from an egg, independent of the carcass, having a vitality of its own: it

was fostered by the carcass it fed on during development; but bred from it it was not, any more than Marat

was bred from the decay of the Ancien Regime. There are flies which, by feeding on putridity, become

poisonous themselves, as did Marat: but even they owe their vitality and organisation to something higher

than that on which they feed; and each of them, however, defaced and debased, was at first a "thought of

God." All true manhood consists in the defiance of circumstances; and if any man be the creature of

circumstances, it is because he has become so, like the drunkard; because he has ceased to be a man, and sunk

Accordingly we shall find, throughout the 18th century, a stirring of thought, an originality, a resistance to

circumstances, an indignant defiance of circumstances, which would have been impossible, had

circumstances been the true lords and shapers of mankind. Had that latter been the case, the downward

progress of the Ancien Regime would have been irremediable. Each generation, conformed more and more to

the element in which it lived, would have sunk deeper in dull acquiescence to evil, in ignorance of all

cravings save those of the senses; and if at any time intolerable wrong or want had driven it to revolt, it would

have issued, not in the proclamation of new and vast ideas, but in an anarchic struggle for revenge and bread.

There are races, alas! which seem, for the present at least, mastered by circumstances. Some, like the

Chinese, have sunk back into that state; some, like the negro in Africa, seem not yet to have emerged from it;

but in Europe, during the eighteenth century, were working not merely new forces and vitalities (abstractions

which mislead rather than explain), but living persons in plenty, men and women, with independent and

original hearts and brains, instinct, in spite of all circumstances, with power which we shall most wisely

Such persons seemedI only say seemedmost numerous in England and in Germany. But there were

enough of them in France to change the destiny of that great nation for awhileperhaps for ever.

M. de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very remarkable one, which appears at first sight to militate

against my beliefa chapter "showing that France was the country in which men had become most alike."

"The men," he says, "of that time, especially those belonging to the upper and middle ranks of society, who

And it must be allowed, that if this were true of the upper and middle classes, it must have been still more

true of the mass of the lowest population, who, being most animal, are always most moulded or rather

crushedby their own circumstances, by public opinion, and by the wants of five senses, common to all

But when M. de Tocqueville attributes this curious fact to the circumstances of their political stateto that

"government of one man which in the end has the inevitable effect of rendering all men alike, and all

mutually indifferent to their common fate"we must differ, even from him: for facts prove the impotence of

that, or of any other circumstance, in altering the hearts and souls of men, in producing in them anything but a

For all the while there was, among these very French, here and there a variety of character and purpose,

sufficient to burst through that very despotism, and to develop the nation into manifold, new, and quite

original shapes. Thus it was proved that the uniformity had been only in their outside crust and shell. What

tore the nation to pieces during the Reign of Terror, but the boundless variety and originality of the characters

which found themselves suddenly in free rivalry? What else gave to the undisciplined levies, the bankrupt

governments, the parvenu heroes of the Republic, a manifold force, a selfdependent audacity, which made

them the conquerors, and the teachers (for good and evil) of the civilised world? If there was one doctrine

which the French Revolution specially proclaimedwhich it caricatured till it brought it into temporary

disreputeit was this: that no man is like another; that in each is a Godgiven "individuality," an

independent soul, which no government or man has a right to crush, or can crush in the long run: but which

ought to have, and must have, a "carriere ouverte aux talents," freely to do the best for itself in the battle of

life. The French Revolution, more than any event since twelve poor men set forth to convert the world some

eighteen hundred years ago, proves that man ought not to be, and need not be, the creature of circumstances,

Of these original spirits who helped to bring life out of death, and the modern world out of the decay of the

mediaeval world, the French PHILOSOPHES and encyclopaedists are, of course, the most notorious. They

confessed, for the most part, that their original inspiration had come from England. They were, or considered

themselves, the disciples of Locke; whose philosophy, it seems to me, their own acts disproved.

And first, a few words on these same philosophes. One may be thoroughly aware of their deficiencies, of

their sins, moral as well as intellectual; and yet one may demand that everyone should judge them

fairlywhich can only be done by putting himself in their place; and any fair judgment of them will, I think,

lead to the conclusion that they were not mere destroyers, inflamed with hate of everything which mankind

had as yet held sacred. Whatever sacred things they despised, one sacred thing they reverenced, which men

had forgotten more and more since the seventeenth centurycommon justice and common humanity. It was

this, I believe, which gave them their moral force. It was this which drew towards them the hearts, not merely

of educated bourgeois and nobles (on the menu peuple they had no influence, and did not care to have any),

but of every continental sovereign who felt in himself higher aspirations than those of a mere selfish

tyrantFrederick the Great, Christina of Sweden, Joseph of Austria, and even that fallen Juno, Catharine of

Russia, with all her sins. To take the most extreme instance Voltaire. We may question his being a

philosopher at all. We may deny that he had even a tincture of formal philosophy. We may doubt much

whether he had any of that human and humorous common sense, which is often a good substitute for the

philosophy of the schools. We may feel against him a just and honest indignation when we remember that he

dared to travestie into a foul satire the tale of his country's purest and noblest heroine; but we must recollect,

at the same time, that he did a public service to the morality of his own country, and of all Europe, by his

indignationquite as just and honest as any which we may feelat the legal murder of Calas. We must

recollect that, if he exposes baseness and foulness with too cynical a license of speech (in which, indeed, he

sinned no more than had the average of French writers since the days of Montaigne), he at least never

advocates them, as did Le Sage. We must recollect that, scattered throughout his writings, are words in favour

of that which is just, merciful, magnanimous, and even, at times, in favour of that which is pure; which

proves that in Voltaire, as in most men, there was a double selfthe one sickened to cynicism by the iniquity

and folly which he saw around himthe other, hungering after a nobler life, and possibly exciting that

hunger in one and another, here and there, who admired him for other reasons than the educated mob, which

Rousseau, too. Easy it is to feel disgust, contempt, for the "Confessions" and the "Nouvelle Heloise"for

much, too much, in the man's own life and character. One would think the worse of the young Englishman

who did not so feel, and express his feelings roundly and roughly. But all young Englishmen should recollect,

that to Rousseau's "Emile" they owe their deliverance from the useless pedantries, the degrading brutalities,

of the medieval system of school education; that "Emile" awakened throughout civilised Europe a conception

of education just, humane, rational, truly scientific, because founded upon facts; that if it had not been written

by one writhing under the bitter consequences of mis education, and feeling their sting and their brand day

by day on his own spirit, Miss Edgeworth might never have reformed our nurseries, or Dr. Arnold our public

And so with the rest of the philosophes. That there were charlatans among them, vain men, pretentious men,

profligate men, selfish, selfseeking, and hypocritical men, who doubts? Among what class of men were

there not such in those evil days? In what class of men are there not such now, in spite of all social and moral

improvement? But nothing but the conviction, among the average, that they were in the rightthat they were

fighting a battle for which it was worth while to dare, and if need be to suffer, could have enabled them to

Their intellectual defects are patent. No one can deny that their inductions were hasty and partial: but then

they were inductions as opposed to the dull pedantry of the schools, which rested on tradition only half

believed, or pretended to be believed. No one can deny that their theories were too general and abstract; but

then they were theories as opposed to the notheory of the Ancien Regime, which was, "Let us eat and drink,

Theoriesprinciplesby them if men do not live, by them men are, at least, stirred into life, at the sight of

something more noble than themselves. Only by great ideas, right or wrong, could such a world as that which

Le Sage painted, be roused out of its slough of foul selfsatisfaction, and equally foul selfdiscontent.

For mankind is ruled and guided, in the long run, not by practical considerations, not by selfinterest, not by

compromises; but by theories and principles, and those of the most abstruse, delicate, supernatural, and

literally unspeakable kind; which, whether they be according to reason or not, are so little according to

logicthat is, to speakable reasonthat they cannot be put into speech. Men act, whether singly or in

masses, by impulses and instincts for which they give reasons quite incompetent, often quite irrelevant; but

which they have caught from each other, as they catch fever or smallpox; as unconsciously, and yet as

practically and potently; just as the nineteenth century has caught from the philosophers of the eighteenth

most practical rules of conduct, without even (in most cases) having read a word of their works.

And what has this century caught from these philosophers? One rule it has learnt, and that a most practical

oneto appeal in all cases, as much as possible, to "Reason and the Laws of Nature." That, at least, the

philosophers tried to do. Often they failed. Their conceptions of reason and of the laws of nature being often

incorrect, they appealed to unreason and to laws which were not those of nature. "The fixed idea of them all

was," says M. de Tocqueville, "to substitute simple and elementary rules, deduced from reason and natural

law, for the complicated traditional customs which governed the society of their time." They were often rash,

hasty, in the application of their method. They ignored whole classes of facts, which, though spiritual and not

physical, are just as much facts, and facts for science, as those which concern a stone or a fungus. They

mistook for merely complicated traditional customs, many most sacred institutions which were just as much

founded on reason and natural law, as any theories of their own. But who shall say that their method was not

correct? That it was not the only method? They appealed to reason. Would you have had them appeal to

unreason? They appealed to natural law. Would you have had them appeal to unnatural law?law according

to which God did not make this world? Alas! that had been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in

his time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end. Rabelais saw it done in his time; and wrote

his chapters on the "Children of Physis and the Children of Antiphysis." But, born in an evil generation,

which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the revolution of 1789, he was sensual and, I fear, cowardly

enough to hide his light, not under a bushel, but under a dunghill; till men took him for a jester of jests; and

his great wisdom was lost to the worse and more foolish generations which followed him, and thought they

But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and to reason for the power of discerning

that same goodif man cannot find truth by that method, by what method shall he find it?

And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and encyclopaedists were not men of science, they were

We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, fanatics. But we must recollect that one thing they meant

to do, and did. They recalled men to facts; they bid them ask of everything they saw What are the facts of

Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case must deliver men more or less from that evil spirit which the

old Romans called "Fama;" from her whom Virgil described in the AEneid as the ugliest, the falsest, and the

From "Fama;" from rumours, hearsays, exaggerations, scandals, superstitions, public opinionswhether

from the ancient public opinion that the sun went round the earth, or the equally public opinion, that those

who dared to differ from public opinion were hateful to the deity, and therefore worthy of deathfrom all

these blasts of Fame's lying trumpet they helped to deliver men; and they therefore helped to insure

something like peace and personal security for those quiet, modest, and generally virtuous men, who, as

students of physical science, devoted their lives, during the eighteenth century, to asking of natureWhat are

It was no coincidence, but a connection of cause and effect, that during the century of philosopher sound

physical science throve, as she had never thriven before; that in zoology and botany, chemistry and medicine,

geology and astronomy, man after man, both of the middle and the noble classes, laid down on more and

more sound, because more and more extended foundations, that physical science which will endure as an

everlasting heritage to mankind; endure, even though a second Byzantine period should reduce it to a timid

and traditional pedantry, or a second irruption of barbarians sweep it away for awhile, to revive again (as

classic philosophy revived in the fifteenth century) among new and more energetic races; when the kingdom

of God shall have been taken away from us, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.

An eternal heritage, I say, for the human race; which once gained, can never be lost; which stands, and will

stand; marches, and will march, proving its growth, its health, its progressive force, its certainty of final

victory, by those very changes, disputes, mistakes, which the ignorant and the bigoted hold up to scorn, as

proofs of its uncertainty and its rottenness; because they never have dared or cared to ask boldlyWhat are

the facts of the case? and have never discovered either the acuteness, the patience, the calm justice,

necessary for ascertaining the facts, or their awful and divine certainty when once ascertained.

Before that question can be fairly discussed, it is surely right to consider what form of religion that was which

they found working round them in France, and on the greater part of the Continent. The quality thereof may

have surely had something to do (as they themselves asserted) with that "sort of rage" with which (to use M.

M. de Tocqueville is of opinion (and his opinion is likely to be just) that "the Church was not more open to

attack in France than elsewhere; that the corruptions and abuses which had been allowed to creep into it were

less, on the contrary, there than in most Catholic countries. The Church of France was infinitely more tolerant

than it ever had been previously, and than it still was among other nations. Consequently, the peculiar causes

of this phenomenon" (the hatred which it aroused) "must be looked for less in the condition of religion than in

"We no longer," he says, shortly after, "ask in what the Church of that day erred as a religious institution, but

how far it stood opposed to the political revolution which was at hand." And he goes on to show how the

principles of her ecclesiastical government, and her political position, were such that the philosophes must

needs have been her enemies. But he mentions another fact which seems to me to belong neither to the

category of religion nor to that of politics; a fact which, if he had done us the honour to enlarge upon it, might

have led him and his readers to a more true understanding of the disrepute into which Christianity had fallen

"The ecclesiastical authority had been specially employed in keeping watch over the progress of thought; and

the censorship of books was a daily annoyance to the philosophes. By defending the common liberties of the

human mind against the Church, they were combating in their own cause: and they began by breaking the

Just so. And they are not to be blamed if they pressed first and most earnestly reforms which they knew by

painful experience to be necessary. All reformers are wont thus to begin at home. It is to their honour if, not

content with shaking off their own fetters, they begin to see that others are fettered likewise; and, reasoning

from the particular to the universal, to learn that their own cause is the cause of mankind.

There is, therefore, no reason to doubt that these men were honest, when they said that they were combating,

not in their own cause merely, but in that of humanity; and that the Church was combating in her own cause,

and that of her power and privilege. The Church replied that she, too, was combating for humanity; for its

moral and eternal wellbeing. But that is just what the philosophes denied. They said (and it is but fair to take

a statement which appears on the face of all their writings; which is the one keynote on which they ring

perpetual changes), that the cause of the Church in France was not that of humanity, but of inhumanity; not

that of nature, but of unnature; not even that of grace, but of disgrace. Truely or falsely, they complained that

the French clergy had not only identified themselves with the repression of free thought, and of physical

science, especially that of the Newtonian astronomy, but that they had proved themselves utterly unfit, for

centuries past, to exercise any censorship whatsoever over the thoughts of men: that they had identified

themselves with the cause of darkness, not of light; with persecution and torture, with the dragonnades of

Louis XIV., with the murder of Calas and of Urban Grandier; with celibacy, hysteria, demonology,

witchcraft, and the shameful public scandals, like those of Gauffredi, Grandier, and Pere Giraud, which had

arisen out of mental disease; with forms of worship which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly) idolatry, and

miracles which seemed to them (rightly or wrongly) impostures; that the clergy interfered perpetually with

the sanctity of family life, as well as with the welfare of the state; that their evil counsels, and specially those

of the Jesuits, had been patent and potent causes of much of the misrule and misery of Louis XIV.'s and XV.'s

reigns; and that with all these heavy counts against them, their morality was not such as to make other men

more moral; and was notat least among the hierarchyimproving, or likely to improve. To a Mazarin, a

De Retz, a Richelieu (questionable men enough) had succeeded a Dubois, a Rohan, a Lomenie de Brienne, a

Maury, a Talleyrand; and at the revolution of 1789 thoughtful Frenchmen asked, once and for all, what was to

Whether these complaints affected the French Church as a "religious" institution, must depend entirely on the

meaning which is attached to the word "religion": that they affected her on scientific, rational, and moral

grounds, independent of any merely political one, is as patent as that the attack based on them was onesided,

virulent, and often somewhat hypocritical, considering the private morals of many of the assailants. We

knowor ought to knowthat within that religion which seemed to the philosophes (so distorted and

defaced had it become) a nightmare dream, crushing the life out of mankind, there lie elements divine,

eternal; necessary for man in this life and the life to come. But we are bound to askHad they a fair chance

of knowing what we know? Have we proof that their hatred was against all religion, or only against that

which they saw around them? Have we proof that they would have equally hated, had they been in permanent

contact with them, creeds more free from certain faults which seemed to them, in the case of the French

Church, ineradicable and inexpiable? Till then we must have charitywhich is justiceeven for the

This view of the case had been surely overlooked by M. de Tocqueville, when he tried to explain by the fear

of revolutions, the fact that both in America and in England, "while the boldest political doctrines of the

eighteenthcentury philosophers have been adopted, their antireligious doctrines have made no way."

He confesses that, "Among the English, French irreligious philosophy had been preached, even before the

greater part of the French philosophers were born. It was Bolingbroke who set up Voltaire. Throughout the

eighteenth century infidelity had celebrated champions in England. Able writers and profound thinkers

espoused that cause, but they were never able to render it triumphant as in France." Of these facts there can

be no doubt: but the cause which he gives for the failure of infidelity will surely sound new and strange to

those who know the English literature and history of that century. It was, he says, "inasmuch as all those who

had anything to fear from revolutions, eagerly came to the rescue of the established faith." Surely there was

no talk of revolutions; no wish, expressed or concealed, to overthrow either government or society, in the

aristocratic clique to whom English infidelity was confined. Such was, at least, the opinion of Voltaire, who

boasted that "All the works of the modern philosophers together would never make as much noise in the

world as was made in former days by the disputes of the Cordeliers about the shape of their sleeves and

hoods." If (as M. de Tocqueville says) Bolingbroke set up Voltaire, neither master nor pupil had any more

leaning than Hobbes had toward a democracy which was not dreaded in those days because it had never been

heard of. And if (as M. de Tocqueville heartily allows) the English apologists of Christianity triumphed, at

least for the time being, the cause of their triumph must be sought in the plain fact that such men as Berkeley,

Butler, and Paley, each according to his light, fought the battle fairly, on the common ground of reason and

philosophy, instead of on that of tradition and authority; and that the forms of Christianity current in

Englandwhether Quaker, Puritan, or Anglicanoffended, less than that current in France, the

commonsense and the human instincts of the many, or of the sceptics themselves.]

But the eighteenth century saw another movement, all the more powerful, perhaps, because it was continually

changing its shape, even its purpose; and gaining fresh life and fresh adherents with every change.

Propagated at first by men of the school of Locke, it became at last a protest against the materialism of that

school, on behalf of all that is, or calls itself, supernatural and mysterious. Abjuring, and honestly, all politics,

it found itself sucked into the political whirlpool in spite of itself, as all human interests which have any life

in them must be at last. It became an active promoter of the Revolution; then it helped to destroy the

Revolution, when that had, under Napoleon, become a levelling despotism; then it helped, as actively, to keep

revolutionary principles alive, after the reaction of 1815:a Protean institution, whose power we in England

are as apt to undervalue as the governments of the Continent were apt, during the eighteenth century, to

exaggerate it. I mean, of course, Freemasonry, and the secret societies which, honestly and honourably

disowned by Freemasonry, yet have either copied it, or actually sprung out of it. In England, Freemasonry

never was, it seems, more than a liberal and respectable benefitclub; for secret societies are needless for any

further purposes, amid free institutions and a free press. But on the Continent during the eighteenth century,

Freemasonry excited profound suspicion and fear on the part of statesmen who knew perfectly well their

friends from their foes; and whose precautions were, from their point of view, justified by the results.

I shall not enter into the deep question of the origin of Freemasonry. One uninitiate, as I am, has no right to

give an opinion on the great questions of the mediaeval lodge of Kilwinning and its Scotch degrees; on the

seven Templars, who, after poor Jacques Molay was burnt at Paris, took refuge on the Isle of Mull, in

Scotland, found there another Templar and brother Mason, ominously named Harris; took to the trowel in

earnest, and revived the Order;on the Masons who built Magdeburg Cathedral in 876; on the English

Masons assembled in Pagan times by "St. Albone, that worthy knight;" on the revival of English Masonry by

Edwin, son of Athelstan; on Magnus Grecus, who had been at the building of Solomon's Temple, and taught

Masonry to Charles Martel; on the pillars Jachin and Boaz; on the masonry of Hiram of Tyre, and indeed of

Adam himself, of whose first figleaf the masonic apron may be a typeon all these matters I dare no more

decide than on the making of the Trojan Horse, the birth of Romulus and Remus, or the incarnation of

All I dare say is, that Freemasonry emerges in its present form into history and fact, seemingly about the

beginning of George I.'s reign, among Englishmen and noblemen, notably in four lodges in the city of

London: (1) at The Goose and Gridiron alehouse in St. Paul's Churchyard; (2) at The Crown alehouse near

Drury Lane; (3) at The Apple Tree tavern near Covent Garden; (4) at The Rummer and Grapes tavern, in

Charnel Row, Westminster. That its principles were brotherly love and good fellowship, which included in

those days port, sherry, claret, and punch; that it was founded on the ground of mere humanity, in every sense

of the word; being (as was to be expected from the temper of the times) both aristocratic and liberal,

admitting to its ranks virtuous gentlemen "obliged," says an old charge, "only to that religion wherein all men

agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves: that is, to be good men and true, or men of honour and

honesty, by whatever denominations or persuasions they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry becomes

the centre of union and means of conciliating true friendship among persons that otherwise must have

Little did the honest gentlemen who established or reestablished their society on these grounds, and fenced

it with quaint ceremonies, old or new, conceive the importance of their own act; we, looking at it from a

distance, may see all that such a society involved, which was quite new to the world just then; and see, that it

was the very child of the Ancien Regimeof a time when men were growing weary of the violent factions,

political and spiritual, which had torn Europe in pieces for more than a century, and longed to say: "After all,

Its spread through England and Scotland, and the seceding bodies which arose from it, as well as the

supposed Jacobite tendency of certain Scotch lodges, do not concern us here. The point interesting to us just

now is, that Freemasonry was imported to the Continent exclusively by English and Scotch gentlemen and

noblemen. Lord Derwentwater is said by some to have founded the "Loge Anglaise" in Paris in 1725; the

Duke of Richmond one in his own castle of Aubigny shortly after. It was through Hanoverian influence that

the movement seems to have spread into Germany. In 1733, for instance, the English Grand Master, Lord

Strathmore, permitted eleven German gentlemen and good brethren to form a lodge in Hamburg. Into this

English Society was Frederick the Great, when Crown Prince, initiated, in spite of strict old Frederick

William's objections, who had heard of it as an English invention of irreligious tendency. Francis I. of Austria

was made a Freemason at the Hague, Lord Chesterfield being in the chair, and then became a Master in

London under the name of "Brother Lothringen," to the discontent of Maria Theresa, whose woman's wit saw

farther than her husband. Englishmen and Scotchmen introduced the new society into Russia and into

Geneva. Sweden and Poland seem to have received it from France; while, in the South, it seems to have been

exclusively an English plant. Sackville, Duke of Middlesex, is said to have founded the first lodge at Florence

in 1733, Lord Coleraine at Gibraltar and Madrid, one Gordon in Portugal; and everywhere, at the

commencement of the movement, we find either London or Scotland the motherlodges, introducing on the

Continent those liberal and humane ideas of which England was then considered, to her glory, as the only

But, alas! the seed sown grew up into strange shapes, according to the soil in which it rooted. False doctrine,

heresy, and schism, according to Herr Findel, the learned and rational historian whom I have chiefly

followed, defiled the new Church from its infancy. "In France," so he bemoans himself, "first of all there shot

up that baneful seed of lies and frauds, of vanity and presumption, of hatred and discord, the mischievous

high degrees; the misstatement that our order was allied to the Templars, and existed at the time of the

Crusades; the removal of old charges, the bringing in surreptitiously of a multitude of symbols and forms

which awoke the love of secrecy; knighthood; and, in fact, all which tended to poison Freemasonry." Herr

Findel seems to attribute these evils principally to the "high degrees." It would have been more simple to

have attributed them to the morals of the French noblesse in the days of Louis Quinze. What could a corrupt

tree bring forth, but corrupt fruit? If some of the early lodges, like those of "La Felicite" and "L'Ancre," to

which women were admitted, resembled not a little the Bacchic mysteries of old Rome, and like them called

for the interference of the police, still no great reform was to be expected, when those Sovereign Masonic

Princes, the "Emperors of the East and West," quarrelledknights of the East against knights of the

Westtill they were absorbed or crushed by the Lodge "Grand Orient," with Philippe Egalite, Duc de

Chartres, as their grand master, and as his representative, the hero of the diamond necklace, and disciple of

But if Freemasonry, among the frivolous and sensual French noblesse, became utterly frivolous and sensual

itself, it took a deeper, though a questionably fantastic form, among the more serious and earnest German

nobility. Forgetful as they too often were of their duty to their peoplestyrannical, extravagant, debauched

by French opinions, French fashions, French luxuries, till they had begun to despise their native speech, their

native literature, almost their native land, and to hide their native homeliness under a clumsy varnish of

French outside civilisation, which the years 180713 rubbed off them again with a brush of ironthey were

yet Germans at heart; and that German instinct for the unseencall it enthusiasm, mysticism, what you will,

you cannot make it anything but a human fact, and a most powerful, and (as I hold) most blessed factthat

instinct for the unseen, I say, which gives peculiar value to German philosophy, poetry, art, religion, and

above all to German family life, and which is just the complement needed to prevent our English

commonsense, matteroffact Lockism from degenerating into materialismthat was only lying hidden,

With the Germans, therefore, Freemasonry assumed a nobler and more earnest shape. Dropping, very soon,

that Lockite and Philosophe tone which had perhaps recommended it to Frederick the Great in his youth, it

became mediaevalist and mystic. It craved after a resuscitation of old chivalrous spirit, and the virtues of the

knightly ideal, and the old German biederkeit und tapferkeit, which were all defiled and overlaid by French

fopperies. And not in vain; as no struggle after a noble aim, however confused or fantastic, is ever in vain.

Freemasonry was the direct parent of the Tugenbund, and of those secret societies which freed Germany from

Napoleon. Whatever follies young members of them may have committed; whatever Jahn and his Turnerei;

whatever the iron youths, with their iron decorations and iron bootheels; whatever, in a word, may have

been said or done amiss, in that childishness which (as their own wisest writers often lament) so often defaces

the noble childlikeness of the German spirit, let it be always remembered that under the impulse first given by

Freemasonry, as much as that given by such heroes as Stein and Scharnhorst, Germany shook off the chains

which had fallen on her in her sleep; and stood once more at Leipsic, were it but for a moment, a free people

Remembering this, and the solid benefits which Germany owed to Masonic influences, one shrinks from

saying much of the extravagances in which its Masonry indulged before the French Revolution. Yet they are

so characteristic of the age, so significant to the student of human nature, that they must be hinted at, though

It is clear that Masonry was at first a movement confined to the aristocracy, or at least to the most educated

classes; and clear, too, that it fell in with a temper of mind unsatisfied with the dry dogmatism into which the

popular creeds had then been frozen unsatisfied with their own Frenchified foppery and pseudo

philosophyunsatisfied with want of all duty, purpose, noble thought, or noble work. With such a temper of

mind it fell in: but that very temper was open (as it always is) to those dreams of a royal road to wisdom and

Those who will, may read enough, and too much, of the wonderful secrets in nature and science and

theosophy, which men expected to find and did not find in the higher degrees of Masonry, till old Vossthe

translator of Homerhad to confess, that after "trying for eleven years to attain a perfect knowledge of the

inmost penetralia, where the secret is said to be, and of its invisible guardians," all he knew was that "the

documents which he had to make known to the initiated were nothing more than a well gotup farce."

But the mania was general. The highborn and the virtuous expected to discover some panacea for their own

consciences in what Voss calls, "A multitude of symbols, which are ever increasing the farther you penetrate,

and are made to have a moral application through some arbitrary twisting of their meaning, as if I were to

A rich harvestfield was an aristocracy in such a humour, for quacks of every kind; richer even than that of

France, in that the Germans were at once more honest and more earnest, and therefore to be robbed more

Of Rosa, with his lodge of the Three Hammers, and his Potsdam gold making;of Johnson, alias Leuchte,

who passed himself off as a Grand Prior sent from Scotland to resuscitate the order of Knights Templars; who

informed his disciples that the Grand Master Von Hund commanded 26,000 men; that round the convent

(what convent, does not appear) a high wall was erected, which was guarded day and night; that the English

navy was in the hands of the Order; that they had MSS. written by Hugo de Paganis (a mythic hero who often

figures in these fables); that their treasure was in only three places in the world, in Ballenstadt, in the icy

mountains of Savoy, and in China; that whosoever drew on himself the displeasure of the Order, perished

both body and soul; who degraded his rival Rosa to the sound of military music, and after having had, like

every dog, his day, died in prison in the Wartburg;of the Rosicrucians, who were accused of wanting to

support and advance the Catholic religionone would think the accusation was very unnecessary, seeing

that their actual dealings were with the philosopher's stone, and the exorcism of spirits: and that the first

apostle of the new golden Rosicrucian order, one Schropfer, getting into debt, and fearing exposure, finished

his life in an altogether uncatholic manner at Leipsic in 1774, by shooting himself;of Keller and his Urim

and Thummim;of Wollner (who caught the Crown Prince Frederick William) with his three names of

Chrysophiron, Heliconus, and Ophiron, and his fourth name of Ormesus Magnus, under which all the

brethren were to offer up for him solemn prayers and intercessions;of Baron Heinrich von Ekker and

Eckenhofen, gentleman of the bedchamber and counsellor of the Duke of Coburg Saalfeld, and his Jewish

colleague Hirschmann, with their Asiatic brethren and order named Ben Bicca, Cabalistic and Talmudic; of

the Illuminati, and poor Adam Weisshaupt, Professor of Canon and National Law at Ingoldstadt in Bavaria,

who set up what he considered an AntiJesuitical order on a Jesuit model, with some vague hope, according

to his own showing, of "perfecting the reasoning powers interesting to mankind, spreading the knowledge of

sentiments both humane and social, checking wicked inclinations, standing up for oppressed and suffering

virtue against all wrong, promoting the advancement of men of merit, and in every way facilitating the

acquirement of knowledge and science;"of this honest silly man, and his attempts to carry out all his fine

projects by calling himself Spartacus, Bavaria Achaia, Austria Egypt, Vienna Rome, and so forth;of

Knigge, who picked his honest brains, quarrelled with him, and then made money and fame out of his plans,

for as long as they lasted;of Bode, the knight of the lilies of the valley, who, having caught Duke Ernest of

Saxe Gotha, was himself caught by Knigge, and his eight, nine, or more ascending orders of

unwisdom;and finally of the Jesuits who, really with considerable excuses for their severity, fell upon

these poor foolish Illuminati in 1784 throughout Bavaria, and had them exiled or imprisoned;of all this you

may read in the pages of Dr. Findel, and in many another book. For, forgotten as they are now, they made

And so it befell, that this eighteenth century, which is usually held to be the most "materialistic" of epochs,

was, in fact, a most "spiritualistic" one; in which ghosts, demons, quacks, philosophers' stones, enchanters'

wands, mysteries and mummeries, were as fashionableas they will probably be again some day.

You have all heard of Cagliostro"pupil of the sage Althotas, fosterchild of the Scheriff of Mecca,

probable son of the last king of Trebizond; named also Acharat, and 'Unfortunate child of Nature;' by

profession healer of diseases, abolisher of wrinkles, friend of the poor and impotent; grandmaster of the

Egyptian Masonlodge of High Science, spiritsummoner, goldcook, GrandCophta, prophet, priest,

Thaumaturgic moralist, and swindler"born Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo;of him, and of his lovely

Countess Seraphinanee Lorenza Feliciani? You have read what Goetheand still more important, what

Mr. Carlyle has written on him, as on one of the most significant personages of the age? Remember, then,

that Cagliostro was no isolated phenomenon; that his successnay, his having even conceived the possibility

of success in the brain that lay within that "brassfaced, bullnecked, thicklipped" headwas made

possible by public opinion. Had Cagliostro lived in our time, public opinion would have pointed out to him

other roads to honour on which he would doubtless have fared as well. For when the silly dace try to be

caught and hope to be caught, he is a foolish pike who cannot gorge them. But the method most easy for a

pikenature like Cagliostro's, was in the eighteenth century, as it may be in the latter half of the nineteenth, to

trade, in a materialist age, on the unsatisfied spiritual cravings of mankind. For what do all these phantasms

betoken, but a generation ashamed of its own materialism, sensuality, insincerity, ignorance, and striving to

escape therefrom by any and every mad superstition which seemed likely to give an answer to the awful

questionsWhat are we, and where? and to lay to rest those instincts of the unseen and infinite around it,

which tormented it like ghosts by day and night: a sight ludicrous or pathetic, according as it is looked on by

It is easy to call such a phenomenon absurd, improbable. It is rather rational, probable, say certain to happen.

Rational, I say; for the reason of man tells him, and has always told him, that he is a supernatural being, if by

nature is meant that which is cognisable by his five senses: that his coming into this world, his relation to it,

his exit from itwhich are the three most important facts about himare supernatural, not to be explained

by any deductions from the impressions of his senses. And I make bold to say, that the recent discoveries of

physical sciencenotably those of embryologygo only to justify that old and general belief of man. If

man be told that the microscope and scalpel show no difference, in the first stage of visible existence,

between him and the lower mammals, then he has a right to answeras he will answerSo much the worse

for the microscope and scalpel: so much the better for my old belief, that there is beneath my birth, life,

death, a substratum of supernatural causes, imponderable, invisible, unknowable by any physical science

whatsoever. If you cannot render me a reason how I came hither, and what I am, I must go to those who will

render me one. And if that craving be not satisfied by a rational theory of life, it will demand satisfaction

from some magical theory; as did the mind of the eighteenth century when, revolting from materialism, it fled

The old Regime. Will our age, in its turn, ever be spoken of as an old Regime? Will it ever be spoken of as a

Regime at all; as an organised, orderly system of society and polity; and not merely as a chaos, an anarchy, a

But at least it will be spoken of as an age of progress, of rapid developments, of astonishing discoveries.

Are you so sure of that? There was an age of progress once. But what is our agewhat is all which has

befallen since 1815save afterswells of that great storm, which are weakening and lulling into heavy

calm? Are we on the eve of stagnation? Of a long check to the human intellect? Of a new Byzantine era, in

which little men will discuss, and ape, the deeds which great men did in their forefathers' days?

What progressit is a question which some will receive with almost angry surprisewhat progress has the

If the thought be startling, do me the great honour of taking it home, and verifying for yourselves its truth or

its falsehood. I do not say that it is altogether true. No proposition concerning human things, stated so

broadly, can be. But see for yourselves, whether it is not at least more true than false; whether the ideas, the

discoveries, of which we boast most in the nineteenth century, are not really due to the end of the eighteenth.

Whether other men did not labour, and we have only entered into their labours. Whether our positivist spirit,

our content with the collecting of facts, our dread of vast theories, is not a symptomwholesome, prudent,

modest, but still a symptomof our consciousness that we are not as our grandfathers were; that we can no

longer conceive great ideas, which illumine, for good or evil, the whole mind and heart of man, and drive him

Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but they are not progress; they are only the

fruits of past progress. No outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it merely

spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is inward, of the soul. And, therefore, improved

constitutions, and improved book instructionnow miscalled educationare not progress: they are at best

only fruits and signs thereof. For they are outward, material; and progress, I say, is inward. The selfhelp and

selfdetermination of the independent soulthat is the root of progress; and the more human beings who

have that, the more progress there is in the world. Give me a man who, though he can neither read nor write,

yet dares think for himself, and do the thing he believes: that man will help forward the human race more

than any thousand men who have read, or written either, a thousand books apiece, but have not dared to think

for themselves. And better for his race, and better, I believe, in the sight of God, the confusions and mistakes

of that one sincere brave man, than the secondhand and cowardly correctness of all the thousand.

As for the "triumphs of science," let us honour, with astonishment and awe, the genius of those who invented

them; but let us remember that the things themselves are as a gun or a sword, with which we can kill our

enemy, but with which also our enemy can kill us. Like all outward and material things, they are equally fit

for good and for evil. In England herethey have been as yet, as far as I can see, nothing but blessings: but I

have my very serious doubts whether they are likely to be blessings to the whole human race, for many an

age to come. I can conceive themmay God avert the omen! the instruments of a more crushing

executive centralisation, of a more utter oppression of the bodies and souls of men, than the world has yet

seen. I can conceivemay God avert the omen!centuries hence, some future worldruler sitting at the

junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraphwiresa worldspider in the omphalos of his

worldwide web; and smiting from thence everything that dared to lift its head, or utter a cry of pain, with a

swiftness and surety to which the craft of a Justinian or a Philip II. were but clumsy and impotent.

All, all outward things, be sure of it, are good or evil, exactly as far as they are in the hands of good men or of

Moreover, paradoxical as it may seem, railroads and telegraphs, instead of inaugurating an era of progress,

may possibly only retard it. "Rester sur un grand succes," which was Rossini's advice to a young singer who

had achieved a triumph, is a maxim which the world often follows, not only from prudence, but from

necessity. They have done so much that it seems neither prudent nor possible to do more. They will rest and

Thus, gunpowder and printing made rapid changes enough; but those changes had no farther development.

The new art of war, the new art of literature, remained stationary, or rather receded and degenerated, till the

And so it may be with our means of locomotion and intercommunion, and what depends on them. The vast

and unprecedented amount of capital, of social interest, of actual human intellect investedI may say locked

upin these railroads, and telegraphs, and other triumphs of industry and science, will not enter into

competition against themselves. They will not set themselves free to seek new discoveries in directions which

are often actually opposed to their own, always foreign to it. If the money of thousands are locked up in these

great works, the brains of hundreds of thousands, and of the very shrewdest too, are equally locked up therein

likewise; and are to be subtracted from the gross material of social development, and added (without personal

fault of their owners, who may be very good men) to the dead weight of vested selfishness, ignorance, and

Yes. A Byzantine and stationary age is possible yet. Perhaps we are now entering upon it; an age in which

mankind shall be satisfied with the "triumphs of science," and shall look merely to the greatest comfort (call

it not happiness) of the greatest number; and like the debased Jews of old, "having found the life of their

hand, be therewith content," no matter in what mudhole of slavery and superstition.

But one hope there is, and more than a hopeone certainty, that however satisfied enlightened public

opinion may become with the results of science, and the progress of the human race, there will be always a

more enlightened private opinion or opinions, which will not be satisfied therewith at all; a few men of

genius, a few children of light, it may be a few persecuted, and a few martyrs for new truths, who will wish

the world not to rest and be thankful, but to be discontented with itself, ashamed of itself, striving and toiling

upward, without present hope of gain, till it has reached that unknown goal which Bacon saw afar off, and

like all other heroes, died in faith, not having received the promises, but seeking still a polity which has

These will be the men of science, whether physical or spiritual. Not merely the men who utilise and apply

that which is known (useful as they plainly are), but the men who themselves discover that which was

unknown, and are generally deemed useless, if not hurtful, to their race. They will keep the sacred lamp

burning unobserved in quiet studies, while all the world is gazing only at the gaslights flaring in the street.

They will pass that lamp on from hand to hand, modestly, almost stealthily, till the day comes round again,

when the obscure student shall be discovered once more to be, as he has always been, the strongest man on

earth. For they follow a mistress whose footsteps may often slip, yet never fall; for she walks forward on the

eternal facts of Nature, which are the acted will of God. A giantess she is; young indeed, but humble as yet:

cautious and modest beyond her years. She is accused of trying to scale Olympus, by some who fancy that

they have already scaled it themselves, and will, of course, brook no rival in their fancied monopoly of

The accusation, I believe, is unjust. And yet science may scale Olympus after all. Without intending it, almost

without knowing it, she may find herself hereafter upon a summit of which she never dreamed; surveying the

universe of God in the light of Him who made it and her, and remakes them both for ever and ever. On that

summit she may stand hereafter, if only she goes on, as she goes now, in humility and in patience; doing the

duty which lies nearest her; lured along the upward road, not by ambition, vanity, or greed, but by reverent

curiosity for every new pebble, and flower, and child, and savage, around her feet.

{1} Mr. H. Reeve's translation of De Tocqueville's "France before the Revolution of 1789." p. 280.