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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ancien Regime, by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+
+
+
+Title: The Ancien Regime
+
+
+Author: Charles Kingsley
+
+Release Date: May 13, 2005  [eBook #1335]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ANCIEN REGIME***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1902 "Historical Lectures and Essays" Macmillan and
+Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ANCIEN REGIME
+by Charles Kingsley
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+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, were accordingly not
+spoken at the Royal Institution.
+
+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 as--what it actually is--a safe and harmless concession to
+the wishes--and, as I hold, to the just rights--of large portion of the
+British nation.
+
+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 hand-labour.  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, that--as Arthur Young told the French mob
+which stopped his carriage--the rich pay many taxes (over and above the
+poor-rates, 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 self-government, nor the
+toil of self-support.
+
+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 be--when 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 anti-revolutionary.  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
+Free-trade 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 for moderation in the use of the thing demanded.
+
+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 them--sometimes in a very
+tragical and pathetic fashion--somewhat 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
+governed--as England has not been--by a caste.
+
+The civilisation, not of mere book-learning, but of the heart; all that
+was once meant by "manners"--good breeding, high feeling, respect for
+self and respect for others--are just as common (as far as I have seen)
+among the hand-workers 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 age--in 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 others; and that those children will,
+inevitably, win in the struggle of life.
+
+Meanwhile, in this fact is to be found the most weighty, if not the only
+argument against manhood suffrage, which would admit many--but 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, but--what is infinitely more
+important--the difference between the pretender and the honest man.
+
+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 non-noble freeman) was
+crushed out in this island by the two Norman conquests--that of the Anglo-
+Saxon nobility by Sweyn and Canute; and that of the Anglo-Danish 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 low-born 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 the
+ballad sets forth) the squire's son might be a "'prentice good," and
+marry
+
+   "The bailiff's daughter dear
+   That dwelt at Islington,"
+
+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 intermarry whom nature
+and fact pronounce to be fit mates before God and man.
+
+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 such-like,
+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 political philosophy, M. de
+Tocqueville.
+
+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
+themselves--that 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 everywhere else retained." . . .
+
+"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 in the best sense of that word.
+
+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 hand-labour.  Whether
+the division between those two classes is increasing or not, is a very
+serious question.  Continued legislation in favour of the hand-labourer,
+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 hand-loom 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 co-operative
+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 meanwhile--ere 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 likewise--till 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
+men--and if he thinks it worth his while, of votes--by 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
+fear--perhaps, 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 friends--often 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 forces--I had almost said, above
+them all--stands 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 this--that 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
+immediately--whatever 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 nation, and prepares men for gradual,
+and therefore for harmless, change.
+
+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 common-sense
+of its members; and in the present default of genius, which is un-common
+sense, common-sense seems to be the only, if not the best, safeguard for
+poor humanity.
+
+1867
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE I--CASTE
+
+
+[Delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.]
+
+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
+discourse, there never was any Ancien Regime in England.
+
+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
+society went on as before.
+
+On the contrary, England was the mother of every movement which
+undermined, and at last destroyed, the Ancien Regime.
+
+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
+world--of 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
+seventeenth.
+
+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 founders of our Royal Society.
+
+In England, too, arose the great religious movements of the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries--and especially that of a body which I can never
+mention without most deep respect--the 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 civilisation.
+
+From England, finally, about the middle of the eighteenth century, went
+forth--promulgated by English noblemen--that 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
+slowly-awakening 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 commencement--as
+far as that of anything so vague, unsystematic, indeed anarchic, can be
+defined--from 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, half-unbelief 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 thereof--as was to be expected--had fled out through the gaping
+wounds.  Life, mere existence, was the most pressing need.  If men
+could--in the old prophet's words--find 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 battle-fields, 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 past--revered
+relics of more intelligible and better-ordered 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
+London--empty iron astride of wooden steeds, and armed with lances which
+every ploughboy could wrest out of their hands, and use in his own
+behalf.
+
+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 well--what 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 tales--however legendary--of
+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, caught up and surpassed in the race of progress by the classes
+below them.
+
+But, even when at its best, their system of government had in it--like
+all human invention--original 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 fellow-citizens.
+Thus would arise a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really most
+worthy--the most highly organised in body and in mind--perpetually
+recruited from below: from which, or from any other ideal, we are yet a
+few thousand years distant.
+
+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 left-handed 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 their slates, do they degrees and families."
+
+And doubtless this theory--like all which have held their ground for many
+centuries--at 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 equality--indeed
+of the non-existence--of 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 horde--in every sense of the word best; and
+whether he have a right to rule them or not, they consider that he has,
+and are the better men for his guidance.
+
+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 have--the strongest savage has still--the power of obtaining a
+wife, or wives, superior in beauty and in household skill, which involves
+superiority of intellect; and therefore his children would--some of them
+at least--be 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 tribe in body and mind, and become assuredly its ruling race.
+
+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
+low-born genius, its advantages would still accrue to the ruling race.
+For nothing could be more natural or more easy--as more than one legend
+intimates--than that the king should extort the new secret from his
+subject, and then put him to death to prevent any further publicity.
+
+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 aristocracies--it may be, worshipped after their death as gods.
+
+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 a--bow and
+arrow.
+
+The next--whether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak
+of him in second place--was 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 draw--presumably by its tail--a 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, Romans--none 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, half-man, half-horse.  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
+self-help, 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
+tribes--the scourge and terror of the non-riding 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 rat-skin 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 race--like
+those Cossacks who are probably their lineal descendants--to be feared,
+to be hired, to be petted, but not to be conquered.
+
+Instances nearer home of free equestrian races we have in our own English
+borderers, among whom (as Mr. Froude says) the farmers and their farm-
+servants 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 them--superior even, if we recollect that
+they preserved their country's freedom for centuries against the superior
+force of England--were 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
+war-horse and the lance, established himself as the natural ruler--and
+oppressor--of the non-riding 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 non-riding 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 free-riding hordes of the Eastern
+steppes; and so established an equestrian caste, of which the [Greek
+text] of Athens and the Equites of Rome had been only hints ending in
+failure and absorption.
+
+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 horse-flesh was forbidden as
+impiety by the Church, while his oracles dwindled down to such as that
+which Falada's dead head gives to the goose-girl in the German tale, the
+magic power of the horse figured only in ballads and legends: but his
+real power remained.
+
+The art of riding became an hereditary and exclusive science--at 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 horse--what 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 gentleman--gentile-man--who 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, self-restraint, devotion--such as they were
+understood in those rough days--centred 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 fellow-men, by example, as well as by
+law and force;--attributes which gathered themselves up into that one
+word--Chivalry: an idea, which, perfect or imperfect, God forbid that
+mankind should ever forget, till it has become the possession--as it is
+the God-given right--of the poorest slave that ever trudged on foot; and
+every collier-lad shall have become--as some of those Barnsley men proved
+but the other day they had become already:
+
+   A very gentle perfect knight.
+
+Very unfaithful was chivalry to its ideal--as 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 destroyed--nay, it would have destroyed itself--by 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 rule--the 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 horrible savagery of those tribes.
+
+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 taken--as more salient and exciting--for 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 them--one 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 things--in which they began to play the
+idlers, and expected to take their old wages without doing their old
+work.
+
+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 power--the more it learns to regard its peculiar gifts as
+entrusted to it for the good of men--so 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 self-sacrifice which is the beginning and the end of all virtue.
+
+A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble
+as themselves--that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward, though it
+has not reached, the highest ideal of all.
+
+But suppose that the very opposite tendency--inherent in the heart of
+every child of man--should conquer.  Suppose the ruling caste no longer
+the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their
+equals.  Suppose them--shameful, but not without example--actually sunk
+to be their inferiors.  And that such a fall did come--nay, that it must
+have come--is 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 newly-discovered 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 ruin--yea, already ruined--under 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 hobby-hawks 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 sub-
+delegates, 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
+Jerusalem--who wrestled, and not in vain, for centuries with the equally
+heroic English, in defence of their native soil--who had set to all
+Europe the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this;
+their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, being--a perfect readiness
+to fight duels.
+
+Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller-General 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 peasantry--than was the count or
+marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and
+let him nevertheless become first his deputy, and then his master.
+
+Understand me--I am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the
+Ancien Regime, but against its caste principle--two widely different
+elements, continually confounded nowadays.
+
+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 doubt--every 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 were--what he
+is not--a 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 dangerous--indeed, 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 wholesale doom due not to each
+individual, but to a system and a class.
+
+Profligacy, pride, idleness--these 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 vice--godlessness--atheism.
+
+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 must be heard, for it is the voice of truth and
+justice.
+
+But with that righteous voice will mingle another, most wicked, and yet,
+alas! most flattering to poor humanity--the 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 side--often, 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 to-morrow 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 nations--as there were not wanting in old Greece
+and Rome--despots 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
+your immortal souls."
+
+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 that fact at least."
+
+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 for religions which are not free, and which teach men to be
+slaves.
+
+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:
+
+   It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs.
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE II--CENTRALISATION
+
+
+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 system--or rather anarchy--according 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 accessible work.
+
+The French people--says M. de Tocqueville--made, 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 suppose--or supposed
+till lately--to 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 Comptroller-General and Council of State, with their provincial
+intendants.
+
+"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
+themselves--this 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 women worthy of the name; with
+
+   The reason firm, the temperate will,
+   Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
+   The perfect spirit, nobly planned
+   To cheer, to counsel, and command.
+
+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
+Regime--in as far as it was a Regime at all--tried 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 houses--in one case
+mentioned by M. de Tocqueville, they fined a member of the burgher guard
+for absenting himself from a Te Deum.  All self-government 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
+statistics--circumstantial, inaccurate, and useless--as 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 Comptroller-General wrote on the
+margin, when he returned the report to the intendant, "Good--express
+satisfaction."  If it was more than sufficient, he wrote, "Good--express
+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 sub-newsmongers, of course, the
+sub-delegates.
+
+But alas! the poor sub-delegates 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 fourth--living
+in some specially favoured Utopia--declares 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 weather-glass.
+
+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.
+Bread-riots 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 chiefs--one 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 generation--their 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 chateau-gates 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 high,
+and the rest driven back to their dens for a time."
+
+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 so-called "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 sub-delegates 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 Comptroller-General, 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-needles and sticks, of
+which the ants have piled their nest, are a mass.
+
+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 him
+from his class.
+
+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 aimless--soon 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 self-respect 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 daily bread, like mites crawling over each other in a
+cheese.
+
+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 contemporary
+writer, "wants to be something by command of the king."
+
+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 self-government 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 fellow-men.
+
+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 fellow-citizens.  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 kind--to 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 body-guild, town council, or what not, bodies
+which were infinite in number.  In one small town M. de Tocqueville
+discovers thirty-six 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 freedom itself.
+
+For, in France at least, the Ancien Regime was no tyranny.  The middle
+and upper classes had individual liberty--it 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 power--a
+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 generations."
+
+This liberty--too much akin to anarchy, in which indeed it issued for
+awhile--seems to have asserted itself in continual petty resistance to
+officials whom they did not respect, and who, in their turn, were more
+than a little afraid of the very men out of whose ranks they had sprung.
+
+The French Government--one may say, every Government on the Continent in
+those days--had 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 forefathers the right, the duty, and the example of
+self-government.
+
+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 that--if we have need,
+which happily all have not--in its lighter literature.
+
+I shall not trouble you with criticisms on French memoirs--of 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's--as 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 be--and doubtless with reason--a 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 best--that 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 literature--the 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 long-suffering 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 ferrets--with 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 pathological museum.
+
+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" appeared.
+
+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 ideal--imperfect, 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 generation--free 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 pagans--Inachus, Cecrops,
+Erichthon, Triptolemus, and Sesostris--rewarded 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 by an ascetic creed.
+
+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 Blas."
+
+But there are solid defects in "Telemaque"--indicating corresponding
+defects in the author's mind--which 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 self-government,
+and education of human beings into free manhood by the exercise of self-
+government, free will, free thought--of 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 unjustly--as the slavish and
+childish dream of a past age, into the schoolroom, where it still
+remains.
+
+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 lay-figure, 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 men--is, in "Telemaque,"
+whenever she thinks or acts, the temptress, the enchantress; the victim
+(according to a very ancient calumny) of passions more violent, often
+more lawless, than man's.
+
+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 answer--that 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-government--that 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 spring up from underneath.
+
+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 Naples--for 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 any--is 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 self-sacrifices--in a word, their unbelief in God, and
+themselves, and mankind--all 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 children; in
+a word, to arise and become men once more.
+
+And, what is more, men had to punish--to avenge.  Those are fearful
+words.  But there is, in this God-guided 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 believe--as long as I believe in any God at all--that 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
+Revolution.
+
+It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those
+horrors were of the artist class--by which I signify not merely painters
+and sculptors--as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to
+signify, at least in England--but what the French meant by
+_artistes_--producers 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 peruke-maker
+may have had his wrongs--perhaps 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 up.
+
+For these very ministers of luxury--then miscalled art--from the periwig-
+maker to the play-actor--who 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 play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like
+Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious.  Why not?
+Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds 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, and--I am sorry to have to say it--Germany 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 ill-gotten
+price of their daughter's honour; and left behind also, perhaps, some
+unhappy boy of her own class, in whom disappointment and jealousy were
+transformed--and 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 become--that which they became--than 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 madness--an 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
+worm-eaten 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 picturesque likewise, for they are all in rags.
+
+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 New--or 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 cold-water cure.  How sad to see
+the village, church and all, built up again brand-new, and whitewashed to
+the very steeple-top;--a new school at the town-end--a 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 its places.
+
+Consider that word, "picturesque."  It, and the notion of art which it
+expresses, are the children of the Ancien Regime--of 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
+1815-25.  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 great-grandfather's time, as an old Greek or a
+Middle Age monk would have done--as 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. Viollet-le-Duc, 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
+learn--indeed they have learnt--that 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 immortalised--for a warning to evil
+rulers--in his Miseres de la Guerre.  The world was all gone wrong: but
+as for setting it right again--who 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 normal condition of humanity, as the normal field
+for painters.
+
+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 life--the primaeval calling of men--how
+graceful and pure it might be!  How graceful--if not pure--it 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 Palatinate, wars of succession, and the wicked wills
+of emperors and kings."
+
+
+
+
+LECTURE III--THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES
+
+
+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 Regime--a loose metaphor,
+which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for
+a philosophic truth.  That would be to confess man--what I shall never
+confess him to be--the 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 flies--unless 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 downward
+toward the brute.
+
+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 ascribe directly to Him who is the Lord
+and Giver of Life.
+
+Such persons seemed--I only say seemed--most numerous in England and in
+Germany.  But there were enough of them in France to change the destiny
+of that great nation for awhile--perhaps for ever.
+
+M. de Tocqueville has a whole chapter, and a very remarkable one, which
+appears at first sight to militate against my belief--a 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 alone were at all conspicuous,
+were all exactly alike."
+
+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
+crushed--by their own circumstances, by public opinion, and by the wants
+of five senses, common to all alike.
+
+But when M. de Tocqueville attributes this curious fact to the
+circumstances of their political state--to 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 mere superficial and temporary resemblance.
+
+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 self-dependent 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 proclaimed--which it caricatured till it brought it
+into temporary disrepute--it was this: that no man is like another; that
+in each is a God-given "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, the puppet of
+institutions; but, if he will, their conqueror and their lord.
+
+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
+fairly--which 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 century--common 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 tyrant--Frederick 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
+indignation--quite as just and honest as any which we may feel--at 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 self--the one sickened to cynicism by the iniquity and
+folly which he saw around him--the 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 cried after
+him "Vive la Pucelle."
+
+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 schools.
+
+And so with the rest of the _philosophes_.  That there were charlatans
+among them, vain men, pretentious men, profligate men, selfish,
+self-seeking, 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 right--that
+they were fighting a battle for which it was worth while to dare, and if
+need be to suffer, could have enabled them to defy what was then public
+opinion, backed by overwhelming physical force.
+
+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 no-theory of the Ancien Regime, which was, "Let us eat
+and drink, for to-morrow we die."
+
+Theories--principles--by 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
+self-satisfaction, and equally foul self-discontent.
+
+For mankind is ruled and guided, in the long run, not by practical
+considerations, not by self-interest, 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 logic--that is, to speakable
+reason--that 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 small-pox; 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 one--to 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 understood him.
+
+But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and
+to reason for the power of discerning that same good--if 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 at least the heralds and the
+coadjutors of science.
+
+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
+the case?  Till we know the facts, argument is worse than useless.
+
+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 cruellest of monsters.
+
+From "Fama;" from rumours, hearsays, exaggerations, scandals,
+superstitions, public opinions--whether 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 death--from 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 nature--What are
+the facts of the case?
+
+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
+boldly--What 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.
+
+[But these philosophers (it will be said) hated all religion.
+
+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. de Tocqueville's words)
+"the Christian religion was attacked in France."
+
+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 that of society."
+
+"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 in France.
+
+"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 shackles which pressed most closely
+on themselves."
+
+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 well-being.  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 key-note 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 not--at least among
+the hierarchy--improving, 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 be done with a
+Church of which these were the hierophants?
+
+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 one-sided, virulent, and often somewhat
+hypocritical, considering the private morals of many of the assailants.
+We know--or ought to know--that 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
+ask--Had 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 charity--which is
+justice--even for the _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century.
+
+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
+eighteenth-century philosophers have been adopted, their anti-religious
+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 England--whether Quaker,
+Puritan, or Anglican--offended, less than that current in France, the
+common-sense 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 benefit-club; 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 fig-leaf the masonic apron may be a type--on 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 Vishnoo.
+
+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 remained at a distance."
+
+Little did the honest gentlemen who established or re-established 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
+Regime--of 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, we are all alike in one thing--for
+we are at least men."
+
+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 mother-lodges, introducing on the Continent those liberal
+and humane ideas of which England was then considered, to her glory, as
+the only home left on earth.
+
+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,"
+quarrelled--knights of the East against knights of the West--till 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 Count
+Cagliostro--Louis, Prince de Rohan.
+
+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
+peoples--tyrannical, 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 1807-13 rubbed off them again with a brush
+of iron--they were yet Germans at heart; and that German instinct for the
+unseen--call 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 fact--that 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 common-sense, matter-of-fact Lockism from degenerating into
+materialism--that was only lying hidden, but not dead, in the German
+spirit.
+
+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 boot-heels; 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 alike in body and in soul.
+
+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 not detailed.
+
+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-philosophy--unsatisfied 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 to virtue, which have
+haunted, in all ages, the luxurious and the idle.
+
+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 Voss--the translator
+of Homer--had 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
+got-up farce."
+
+But the mania was general.  The high-born 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 attempt expounding
+the chaos on my writing-desk."
+
+A rich harvest-field 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
+easily.  The carcass was there: and the birds of prey were gathered
+together.
+
+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 religion--one 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
+un-catholic 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 bed-chamber 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 Anti-Jesuitical 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 noise
+enough in their time.
+
+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
+fashionable--as they will probably be again some day.
+
+You have all heard of Cagliostro--"pupil of the sage Althotas, foster-
+child 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; grand-master of the Egyptian Mason-lodge of High Science,
+spirit-summoner, gold-cook, Grand-Cophta, prophet, priest, Thaumaturgic
+moralist, and swindler"--born Giuseppe Balsamo of Palermo;--of him, and
+of his lovely Countess Seraphina--nee Lorenza Feliciani?  You have read
+what Goethe--and 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 success--nay,
+his having even conceived the possibility of success in the brain that
+lay within that "brass-faced, bull-necked, thick-lipped" head--was 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 pike-nature 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 questions--What 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 a cynical or a
+human spirit.
+
+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 it--which are the three most important facts about him--are
+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 science--notably those of embryology--go 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 answer--as he
+will answer--So 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
+to magic, to explain the ever-astounding miracle of life.
+
+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 transitory struggle, of which the money-lender has been the
+real guide and lord?
+
+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 age--what is all which has befallen since 1815--save after-swells 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 progress--it is a question which some will receive with almost angry
+surprise--what progress has the human mind made since 1815?
+
+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
+symptom--wholesome, prudent, modest, but still a symptom--of 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 on to dare and suffer desperately.
+
+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 instruction--now miscalled education--are not progress:
+they are at best only fruits and signs thereof.  For they are outward,
+material; and progress, I say, is inward.  The self-help and
+self-determination of the independent soul--that 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 second-hand 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
+here--they 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
+them--may 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 conceive--may God avert
+the omen!--centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the
+junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires--a world-
+spider in the omphalos of his world-wide 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 bad.
+
+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 be
+thankful.
+
+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 end of the eighteenth century.
+
+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 invested--I may say locked
+up--in 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 dislike of change.
+
+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 mud-hole of slavery and superstition.
+
+But one hope there is, and more than a hope--one 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 foundations, whose builder and maker
+is God.
+
+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 wisdom.
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{1}  Mr. H. Reeve's translation of De Tocqueville's "France before the
+Revolution of 1789."  p. 280.
+
+
+
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