This paper was prepared and delivered at several of our universities as introductory to a course of five lectures which insisted on the value of literature in common life—some hearers thought with an exaggerated emphasis—and attempted to maintain the thesis that all genuine, enduring literature is the outcome of the time that produces it, is responsive to the general sentiment of its time; that this close relation to human life insures its welcome ever after as a true representation of human nature; and that consequently the most remunerative method of studying a literature is to study the people for whom it was produced. Illustrations of this were drawn from the Greek, the French, and the English literatures. This study always throws a flood of light upon the meaning of the text of an old author, the same light that the reader unconsciously has upon contemporary pages dealing with the life with which he is familiar. The reader can test this by taking up his Shakespeare after a thorough investigation of the customs, manners, and popular life of the Elizabethan period. Of course the converse is true that good literature is an open door into the life and mode of thought of the time and place where it originated.
I hade a vision once—you may all have had a like one—of the stream of time flowing through a limitless land. Along its banks sprang up in succession the generations of man. They did not move with the stream-they lived their lives and sank away; and always below them new generations appeared, to play their brief parts in what is called history—the sequence of human actions. The stream flowed on, opening for itself forever a way through the land. I saw that these successive dwellers on the stream were busy in constructing and setting afloat vessels of various size and form and rig—arks, galleys, galleons, sloops, brigs, boats propelled by oars, by sails, by steam. I saw the anxiety with which each builder launched his venture, and watched its performance and progress. The anxiety was to invent and launch something that should float on to the generations to come, and carry the name of the builder and the fame of his generation. It was almost pathetic, these puny efforts, because faith always sprang afresh in the success of each new venture. Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be launched at all; they sank like lead, close to the shore. Others floated out for a time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and disappeared. Some, not well put together, broke into fragments in the bufleting of the waves. Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on their sails, and went away with good promise of a long voyage. But only a few floated for any length of time, and still fewer were ever seen by the generation succeeding that which launched them. The shores of the stream were strewn with wrecks; there lay bleaching in the sand the ribs of many a once gallant craft.
Innumerable were the devices of the builders to keep their inventions afloat. Some paid great attention to the form of the hull, others to the kind of cargo and the loading of it, while others—and these seemed the majority—trusted more to some new sort of sail, or new fashion of rudder, or new application of propelling power. And it was wonderful to see what these new ingenuities did for a time, and how each generation was deceived into the belief that its products would sail on forever. But one fate practically came to the most of them. They were too heavy, they were too light, they were built of old material, and they went to the bottom, they went ashore, they broke up and floated in fragments. And especially did the crafts built in imitation of something that had floated down from a previous generation come to quick disaster. I saw only here and there a vessel, beaten by weather and blackened by time —so old, perhaps, that the name of the maker was no longer legible; or some fragments of antique wood that had evidently come from far up the stream. When such a vessel appeared there was sure to arise great dispute about it, and from time to time expeditions were organized to ascend the river and discover the place and circumstances of its origin. Along the banks, at intervals, whole fleets of boats and fragments had gone ashore, and were piled up in bays, like the driftwood of a subsided freshet. Efforts were made to dislodge these from time to time and set them afloat again, newly christened, with fresh paint and sails, as if they stood a better chance of the voyage than any new ones. Indeed, I saw that a large part of the commerce of this river was, in fact, the old hulks and stranded wrecks that each generation had set afloat again. As I saw it in this foolish vision, how pathetic this labor was from generation to generation; so many vessels launched; so few making a voyage even for a lifetime; so many builders confident of immortality; so many lives outlasting this coveted reputation! And still the generations, each with touching hopefulness, busied themselves with this child's play on the banks of the stream; and still the river flowed on, whelming and wrecking the most of that so confidently committed to it, and bearing only here and there, on its swift, wide tide, a ship, a boat, a shingle.
These hosts of men whom I saw thus occupied since history began were authors; these vessels were books; these heaps of refuse in the bays were great libraries. The allegory admits of any amount of ingenious parallelism. It is nevertheless misleading; it is the illusion of an idle fancy. I have introduced it because it expresses, with some whimsical exaggeration—not much more than that of "The Vision of Mirza"—the popular notion about literature and its relation to human life. In the popular conception, literature is as much a thing apart from life as these boats on the stream of time were from the existence, the struggle, the decay of the generations along the shore. I say in the popular conception, for literature is wholly different from this, not only in its effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of lives upon this earth; it is not only an integral part of all of them, but, with its sister arts, it is the one unceasing continuity in history. Literature and art are not only the records and monuments made by the successive races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and emotion, but they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on, enduring, amid the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling the fleeting generations. Without this continuity of thought and emotion, history would present us only a succession of meaningless experiments. The experiments fail, the experiments succeed—at any rate, they end—and what remains for transmission, for the sustenance of succeeding peoples? Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and expressed. It is true that every era, each generation, seems to have its peculiar work to do; it is to subdue the intractable earth, to repel or to civilize the barbarians, to settle society in order, to build cities, to amass wealth in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices such as were never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance of each other—lucky if they have anything to say when that is accomplished—to extend the information of the few among the many, or to multiply the means of easy and luxurious living. Age after age the world labors for these things with the busy absorption of a colony of ants in its castle of sand. And we must confess that the process, such, for instance, as that now going on here—this onset of many peoples, which is transforming the continent of America—is a spectacle to excite the imagination in the highest degree. If there were any poet capable of putting into an epic the spirit of this achievement, what an epic would be his! Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our destination sooner—getting there quickly being a supreme object. It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal from the bowels of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift-running carriages, to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships. This gigantic achievement strikes the imagination.
If the world in which you live happens to be the world of books, if your pursuit is to know what has been done and said in the world, to the end that your own conception of the value of life may be enlarged, and that better things may be done and said hereafter, this world and this pursuit assume supreme importance in your mind. But you can in a moment place yourself in relations—you have not to go far, perhaps only to speak to your next neighbor—where the very existence of your world is scarcely recognized. All that has seemed to you of supreme importance is ignored. You have entered a world that is called practical, where the things that we have been speaking of are done; you have interest in it and sympathy with it, because your scheme of life embraces the development of ideas into actions; but these men of realities have only the smallest conception of the world that seems to you of the highest importance; and, further, they have no idea that they owe anything to it, that it has ever influenced their lives or can add anything to them. And it may chance that you have, for the moment, a sense of insignificance in the small part you are playing in the drama going forward. Go out of your library, out of the small circle of people who talk of books, who are engaged in research, whose liveliest interest is in the progress of ideas, in the expression of thought and emotion that is in literature; go out of this atmosphere into a region where it does not exist, it may be into a place given up to commerce and exchange, or to manufacturing, or to the development of certain other industries, such as mining, or the pursuit of office—which is sometimes called politics. You will speedily be aware how completely apart from human life literature is held to be, how few people regard it seriously as a necessary element in life, as anything more than an amusement or a vexation. I have in mind a mountain district, stripped, scarred, and blackened by the ruthless lumbermen, ravished of its forest wealth; divested of its beauty, which has recently become the field of vast coal-mining operations. Remote from communication, it was yesterday an exhausted, wounded, deserted country. Today audacious railways are entering it, crawling up its mountain slopes, rounding its dizzy precipices, spanning its valleys on iron cobwebs, piercing its hills with tunnels. Drifts are opened in its coal seams, to which iron tracks shoot away from the main line; in the woods is seen the gleam of the engineer's level, is heard the rattle of heavily-laden wagons on the newly-made roads; tents are pitched, uncouth shanties have sprung up, great stables, boarding-houses, stores, workshops; the miner, the blacksmith, the mason, the carpenter have arrived; households have been set up in temporary barracks, children are already there who need a school, women who must have a church and society; the stagnation has given place to excitement, money has flowed in, and everywhere are the hum of industry and the swish of the goad of American life. On this hillside, which in June was covered with oaks, is already in October a town; the stately trees have been felled; streets are laid out and graded and named; there are a hundred dwellings, there are a store, a post-office, an inn; the telegraph has reached it, and the telephone and the electric light; in a few weeks more it will be in size a city, with thousands of people—a town made out of hand by drawing men and women from other towns, civilized men and women, who have voluntarily put themselves in a position where they must be civilized over again.
This is a marvelous exhibition of what energy and capital can do. You acknowledge as much to the creators of it. You remember that not far back in history such a transformation as this could not have been wrought in a hundred years. This is really life, this is doing something in the world, and in the presence of it you can see why the creators of it regard your world, which seemed to you so important, the world whose business is the evolution and expression of thought and emotion, as insignificant. Here is a material addition to the business and wealth of the race, here employment for men who need it, here is industry replacing stagnation, here is the pleasure of overcoming difficulties and conquering obstacles. Why encounter these difficulties? In order that more coal may be procured to operate more railway trains at higher speed, to supply more factories, to add to the industrial stir of modern life. The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an executive ability that would maintain and manoeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, however, consciously philanthropists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving employment to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before. They enjoy no doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of leadership and the consequence derived from its recognition; but they embark in this enterprise in order that they may have the position and the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material advantages—sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which are the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy equipages and troops of servants; the object being that their wives shall dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the ground; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and—a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our world—that they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk.
This life—for this enterprise and its objects are types of a considerable portion of life—is not without its ideal, its hero, its highest expression, its consummate flower. It is expressed in a word which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the word Barnum—for our crude young nation has the distinction of adding a verb to the French language, the verb to barnum—it is expressed in the well-known name Croesus. This is a standard—impossible to be reached perhaps, but a standard. If one may say so, the country is sown with seeds of Croesus, and the crop is forward and promising. The interest to us now in the observation of this phase of modern life is not in the least for purposes of satire or of reform. We are inquiring how wholly this conception of life is divorced from the desire to learn what has been done and said to the end that better things may be done and said hereafter, in order that we may understand the popular conception of the insignificant value of literature in human affairs. But it is not aside from our subject, rather right in its path, to take heed of what the philosophers say of the effect in other respects of the pursuit of wealth.
One cause of the decay of the power of defense in a state, says the Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws—one cause is the love of wealth, which wholly absorbs men and never for a moment allows them to think of anything but their private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain; mankind are ready to learn any branch of knowledge and to follow any pursuit which tends to this end, and they laugh at any other; that is the reason why a city will not be in earnest about war or any other good and honorable pursuit.
The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says Socrates, in the Republic, is the ruin of democracy. They invent illegal modes of expenditure; and what do they or their wives care about the law?
"And then one, seeing another's display, proposes to rival him, and thus the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character.
"After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a fortune, the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.
"And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state, virtue and the virtuous are dishonored.
"And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is neglected.
"And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and money, and they honor and reverence the rich man and make a ruler of him, and dishonor the poor man.
"They do so."
The object of a reasonable statesman (it is Plato who is really speaking in the Laws) is not that the state should be as great and rich as possible, should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by sea and land.
The citizen must, indeed, be happy and good, and the legislator will seek to make him so; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot be; not at least in the sense in which many speak of riches. For they describe by the term "rich" the few who have the most valuable possessions, though the owner of them be a rogue. And if this is true, I can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be happy: he must be good as well as rich. And good in a high degree and rich in a high degree at the same time he cannot be. Some one will ask, Why not? And we shall answer, Because acquisitions which come from sources which are just and unjust indifferently are more than double those which come from just sources only; and the sums which are expended neither honorably nor disgracefully are only half as great as those which are expended honorably and on honorable purposes. Thus if one acquires double and spends half, the other, who is in the opposite case and is a good man, cannot possibly be wealthier than he. The first (I am speaking of the saver, and not of the spender) is not always bad; he may indeed in some cases be utterly bad, but as I was saying, a good man he never is. For he who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither justly nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty. On the other hand, the utterly bad man is generally profligate, and therefore poor; while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just means only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be very poor. The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very rich are not good, and if they are not good they are not happy.
And the conclusion of Plato is that we ought not to pursue any occupation to the neglect of that for which riches exist—"I mean," he says, "soul and body, which without gymnastics and without education will never be worth anything; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times, the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts."
Men cannot be happy unless they are good, and they cannot be good unless the care of the soul occupies the first place in their thoughts. That is the first interest of man; the interest in the body is midway; and last of all, when rightly regarded, is the interest about money.
The majority of mankind reverses this order of interests, and therefore it sets literature to one side as of no practical account in human life. More than this, it not only drops it out of mind, but it has no conception of its influence and power in the very affairs from which it seems to be excluded. It is my purpose to show not only the close relation of literature to ordinary life, but its eminent position in life, and its saving power in lives which do not suspect its influence or value. Just as it is virtue that saves the state, if it be saved, although the majority do not recognize it and attribute the salvation of the state to energy, and to obedience to the laws of political economy, and to discoveries in science, and to financial contrivances; so it is that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence for a civilization that is worth anything, a civilization that does not by its own nature work its decay, is that which I call literature. It is time to define what we mean by literature. We may arrive at the meaning by the definition of exclusion. We do not mean all books, but some books; not all that is written and published, but only a small part of it. We do not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science, of medicine, and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or biography, or fiction even. These may all be ephemeral in their nature. The term belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow. In books of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel, adventure, biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that possess, or the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes within our meaning of literature. It must have in it something of the enduring and the universal. When we use the term art, we do not mean the arts; we are indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts. In art and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal to the universal in the race. It is, for example, impossible for a Christian today to understand what the religious system of the Egyptians of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to grasp the idea conveyed to a Chinaman's thought in the phrase, "the worship of the principle of heaven"; but the Christian of today comprehends perfectly the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of Thotmes III., who described the comical miseries of his campaign with as clear an appeal to universal human nature as Horace used in his 'Iter Brundusium;' and the maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the bitter-sweetness of Thomas a Kempis. De Quincey distinguishes between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. The definition is not exact; but we may say that the one is a statement of what is known, the other is an emanation from the man himself; or that one may add to the sum of human knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a higher want in human nature than the want of knowledge. We select and set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we call genius. As I have said, the subject of a production does not always determine the desired quality which makes it literature. A biography may contain all the facts in regard to a man and his character, arranged in an orderly and comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it may be so written, like Plutarch's Lives or Defoe's account of Robinson Crusoe, that it is literature, and of imperishable value as a picture of human life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is higher than the want of knowledge. And this contribution, which I desire to be understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the thing of most value in the lives of the majority of men, whether they are aware of it or not. It may be weighty and profound; it may be light, as light as the fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore; it may be the thought of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a perfect state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute beauty, goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the soul; or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman: but it has this one quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for facts, for knowledge, for wealth.
In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized, in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back by equally emphasized contempt. The apostles of light regard the rest of mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions of life easier. It is natural that every man should magnify the circle of the world in which he is active and imagine that all outside of it is comparatively unimportant. Everybody who is not a drone has his sufficient world. To the lawyer it is his cases and the body of law, it is the legal relation of men that is of supreme importance; to the merchant and manufacturer all the world consists in buying and selling, in the production and exchange of products; to the physician all the world is diseased and in need of remedies; to the clergyman speculation and the discussion of dogmas and historical theology assume immense importance; the politician has his world, the artist his also, and the man of books and letters a realm still apart from all others. And to each of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary importance; he is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing. To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a litigant; to the grocer the world is that which eats, and pays—with more or less regularity; to the scholar the world is in books and ideas. One realizes how possessed he is with his own little world only when by chance he changes his profession or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or journalism, and sees in its true proportion what it was that once absorbed him and seemed to him so large. When Socrates discusses with Gorgias the value of rhetoric, the use of which, the latter asserts, relates to the greatest and best of human things, Socrates says: I dare say you have heard men singing—at feasts the old drinking-song, in which the singers enumerate the goods of life-first, health; beauty next; thirdly, wealth honestly acquired. The producers of these things—the physician, the trainer, the money-maker—each in turn contends that his art produces the greatest good. Surely, says the physician, health is the greatest good; there is more good in my art, says the trainer, for my business is to make men beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says the money-maker, whether any one can produce a greater good than wealth. But, insists Gorgias, the greatest good of men, of which I am the creator, is that which gives men freedom in their persons, and the power of ruling over others in their several states—that is, the word which persuades the judge in the court, or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly: if you have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and the moneymaker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for those who are able to speak and persuade the multitude.
What we call life is divided into occupations and interest, and the horizons of mankind are bounded by them. It happens naturally enough, therefore, that there should be a want of sympathy in regard to these pursuits among men, the politician despising the scholar, and the scholar looking down upon the politician, and the man of affairs, the man of industries, not caring to conceal his contempt for both the others. And still more reasonable does the division appear between all the world which is devoted to material life, and the few who live in and for the expression of thought and emotion. It is a pity that this should be so, for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the facts and feelings of men.
If the poet lives in a world apart from the vulgar, the most lenient apprehension of him is that his is a sort of fool's paradise. One of the most curious features in the relation of literature to life is this, that while poetry, the production of the poet, is as necessary to universal man as the atmosphere, and as acceptable, the poet is regarded with that mingling of compassion and undervaluation, and perhaps awe, which once attached to the weak-minded and insane, and which is sometimes expressed by the term "inspired idiot." However the poet may have been petted and crowned, however his name may have been diffused among peoples, I doubt not that the popular estimate of him has always been substantially what it is today. And we all know that it is true, true in our individual consciousness, that if a man be known as a poet and nothing else, if his character is sustained by no other achievement than the production of poetry, he suffers in our opinion a loss of respect. And this is only recovered for him after he is dead, and his poetry is left alone to speak for his name. However fond my lord and lady were of the ballad, the place of the minstrel was at the lower end of the hall. If we are pushed to say why this is, why this happens to the poet and not to the producers of anything else that excites the admiration of mankind, we are forced to admit that there is something in the poet to sustain the popular judgment of his in utility. In all the occupations and professions of life there is a sign put up, invisible—but none the less real, and expressing an almost universal feeling—"No poet need apply." And this is not because there are so many poor poets; for there are poor lawyers, poor soldiers, poor statesmen, incompetent business men; but none of the personal disparagement attaches to them that is affixed to the poet. This popular estimate of the poet extends also, possibly in less degree, to all the producers of the literature that does not concern itself with knowledge. It is not our care to inquire further why this is so, but to repeat that it is strange that it should be so when poetry is, and has been at all times, the universal solace of all peoples who have emerged out of barbarism, the one thing not supernatural and yet akin to the supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid conditions, tolerable to the race. For poetry is not merely the comfort of the refined and the delight of the educated; it is the alleviator of poverty, the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary pilgrimage. We cannot conceive the abject animal condition of our race were poetry abstracted; and we do not wonder that this should be so when we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as the body. The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the office or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical conditions in which the majority exist. There are races, which we may call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly exemplified. It would be difficult to find poverty more complete, physical wants less gratified, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the steppes of Siberia. But there are perhaps none among the more favored races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and romance. Watch the throng seated about an Arab or Indian or Persian story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry, almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment that all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples. Measure, if you can, what poetry is to them, what their lives would be without it. To the millions and millions of men who are in this condition, the bard, the story-teller, the creator of what we are considering as literature, comes with the one thing that can lift them out of poverty, suffering—all the woe of which nature is so heedless.
It is not alone of the poetical nations of the East that this is true, nor is this desire for the higher enjoyment always wanting in the savage tribes of the West. When the Jesuit Fathers in 1768 landed upon the almost untouched and unexplored southern Pacific coast, they found in the San Gabriel Valley in Lower California that the Indians had games and feasts at which they decked themselves in flower garlands that reached to their feet, and that at these games there were song contests which sometimes lasted for three days. This contest of the poets was an old custom with them. And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it down from father to son. We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power which literature gives them to live outside it. Through our sacred Scriptures, through the ancient storytellers, through the tradition which in literature made, as I said, the chief continuity in the stream of time, we all live a considerable, perhaps the better, portion of our lives in the Orient. But I am not sure that the Scotch peasant, the crofter in his Highland cabin, the operative in his squalid tenement-house, in the hopelessness of poverty, in the grime of a life made twice as hard as that of the Arab by an inimical climate, does not owe more to literature than the man of culture, whose material surroundings are heaven in the imagination of the poor. Think what his wretched life would be, in its naked deformity, without the popular ballads, without the romances of Scott, which have invested his land for him, as for us, with enduring charm; and especially without the songs of Burns, which keep alive in him the feeling that he is a man, which impart to his blunted sensibility the delicious throb of spring-songs that enable him to hear the birds, to see the bits of blue sky-songs that make him tender of the wee bit daisy at his feet—songs that hearten him when his heart is fit to break with misery. Perhaps the English peasant, the English operative, is less susceptible to such influences than the Scotch or the Irish; but over him, sordid as his conditions are, close kin as he is to the clod, the light of poetry is diffused; there filters into his life, also, something of that divine stream of which we have spoken, a dialect poem that touches him, the leaf of a psalm, some bit of imagination, some tale of pathos, set afloat by a poor writer so long ago that it has become the common stock of human tradition-maybe from Palestine, maybe from the Ganges, perhaps from Athens—some expression of real emotion, some creation, we say, that makes for him a world, vague and dimly apprehended, that is not at all the actual world in which he sins and suffers. The poor woman, in a hut with an earth floor, a reeking roof, a smoky chimney, barren of comfort, so indecent that a gentleman would not stable his horse in it, sits and sews upon a coarse garment, while she rocks the cradle of an infant about whom she cherishes no illusions that his lot will be other than that of his father before him. As she sits forlorn, it is not the wretched hovel that she sees, nor other hovels like it—rows of tenements of hopeless poverty, the ale-house, the gin-shop, the coal-pit, and the choking factory—but:
"Sweet fields beyond the swelling floodStand dressed in living green"
for her, thanks to the poet. But, alas for the poet there is not a peasant nor a wretched operative of them all who will not shake his head and tap his forehead with his forefinger when the poor poet chap passes by. The peasant has the same opinion of him that the physician, the trainer, and the money-lender had of the rhetorician.
The hard conditions of the lonely New England life, with its religious theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as difficult to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have been unendurable if they had not been touched with the ideal created by the poet. There was in creed and purpose the virility that creates a state, and, as Menander says, the country which is cultivated with difficulty produces brave men; but we leave out an important element in the lives of the Pilgrims if we overlook the means they had of living above their barren circumstances. I do not speak only of the culture which many of them brought from the universities, of the Greek and Roman classics, and what unworldly literature they could glean from the productive age of Elizabeth and James, but of another source, more universally resorted to, and more powerful in exciting imagination and emotion, and filling the want in human nature of which we have spoken. They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of life, or a guide to heaven. It supplied the place to them of the Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab. It opened to them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination.
What is the Bible? It might have sufficed, accepted as a book of revelation, for all the purposes of moral guidance, spiritual consolation, and systematized authority, if it had been a collection of precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury of promises. We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training their intellectual faculties in the knottiest problems of human responsibility and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling with dogmas and the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew out of the Bible: what else it was to them in a degree it has been to few peoples many age. For the Bible is the unequaled record of thought and emotion, the reservoir of poetry, traditions, stories, parables, exaltations, consolations, great imaginative adventure, for which the spirit of man is always longing. It might have been, in warning examples and commands, all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on earth and reach a better country; but it would have been a very different book to mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it lacked its wonderful literary quality. It might have enabled men to reach a better country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in that better country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of actual life. For, apart from its religious intention and sacred character, the book is so written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophecies, promises, stories, that clear literary quality that supplies, as certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is higher than the want of facts or knowledge.
The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points. And this is the test of any piece of literature—its universal appeal to human nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh laws—only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and Virginia—the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them. It was an open door into a world where emotion is expressed, where imagination can range, where love and longing find a language, where imagery is given to every noble and suppressed passion of the soul, where every aspiration finds wings. It was history, or, as Thucydides said, philosophy teaching by example; it was the romance of real life; it was entertainment unfailing; the wonder-book of childhood, the volume of sweet sentiment to the shy maiden, the sword to the soldier, the inciter of the youth to heroic enduring of hardness, it was the refuge of the aged in failing activity. Perhaps we can nowhere find a better illustration of the true relation of literature to life than in this example.
Let us consider the comparative value of literature to mankind. By comparative value I mean its worth to men in comparison with other things of acknowledged importance, such as the creation of industries, the government of States, the manipulation of the politics of an age, the achievements in war and discovery, and the lives of admirable men. It needs a certain perspective to judge of this aright, for the near and the immediate always assume importance. The work that an age has on hand, whether it be discovery, conquest, the wars that determine boundaries or are fought for policies, the industries that develop a country or affect the character of a people, the wielding of power, the accumulation of fortunes, the various activities of any given civilization or period, assume such enormous proportions to those engaged in them that such a modest thing as the literary product seems insignificant in comparison; and hence it is that the man of action always holds in slight esteem the man of thought, and especially the expresser of feeling and emotion, the poet and the humorist. It is only when we look back over the ages, when civilizations have passed or changed, over the rivalries of States, the ambitions and enmities of men, the shining deeds and the base deeds that make up history, that we are enabled to see what remains, what is permanent. Perhaps the chief result left to the world out of a period of heroic exertion, of passion and struggle and accumulation, is a sheaf of poems, or the record by a man of letters of some admirable character. Spain filled a large place in the world in the sixteenth century, and its influence upon history is by no means spent yet; but we have inherited out of that period nothing, I dare say, that is of more value than the romance of Don Quixote. It is true that the best heritage of generation from generation is the character of great men; but we always owe its transmission to the poet and the writer. Without Plato there would be no Socrates. There is no influence comparable in human life to the personality of a powerful man, so long as he is present to his generation, or lives in the memory of those who felt his influence. But after time has passed, will the world, will human life, that is essentially the same in all changing conditions, be more affected by what Bismarck did or by what Goethe said?
We may without impropriety take for an illustration of the comparative value of literature to human needs the career of a man now living. In the opinion of many, Mr. Gladstone is the greatest Englishman of this age. What would be the position of the British empire, what would be the tendency of English politics and society without him, is a matter for speculation. He has not played such a role for England and its neighbors as Bismarck has played for Germany and the Continent, but he has been one of the most powerful influences in molding English action. He is the foremost teacher. Rarely in history has a nation depended more upon a single man, at times, than the English upon Gladstone, upon his will, his ability, and especially his character. In certain recent crises the thought of losing him produced something like a panic in the English mind, justifying in regard to him, the hyperbole of Choate upon the death of Webster, that the sailor on the distant sea would feel less safe—as if a protecting providence had been withdrawn from the world. His mastery of finance and of economic problems, his skill in debate, his marvelous achievements in oratory, have extorted the admiration of his enemies. There is scarcely a province in government, letters, art, or research in which the mind can win triumphs that he has not invaded and displayed his power in; scarcely a question in politics, reform, letters, religion, archaeology, sociology, which he has not discussed with ability. He is a scholar, critic, parliamentarian, orator, voluminous writer. He seems equally at home in every field of human activity—a man of prodigious capacity and enormous acquirements. He can take up, with a turn of the hand, and always with vigor, the cause of the Greeks, Papal power, education, theology, the influence of Egypt on Homer, the effect of English legislation on King O'Brien, contributing something noteworthy to all the discussions of the day. But I am not aware that he has ever produced a single page of literature. Whatever space he has filled in his own country, whatever and however enduring the impression he has made upon English life and society, does it seem likely that the sum total of his immense activity in so many fields, after the passage of so many years, will be worth to the world as much as the simple story of Rab and his Friends? Already in America I doubt if it is. The illustration might have more weight with some minds if I contrasted the work of this great man—as to its answering to a deep want in human nature—with a novel like 'Henry Esmond' or a poem like 'In Memoriam'; but I think it is sufficient to rest it upon so slight a performance as the sketch by Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh. For the truth is that a little page of literature, nothing more than a sheet of paper with a poem written on it, may have that vitality, that enduring quality, that adaptation to life, that make it of more consequence to all who inherit it than every material achievement of the age that produced it. It was nothing but a sheet of paper with a poem on it, carried to the door of his London patron, for which the poet received a guinea, and perhaps a seat at the foot of my lord's table. What was that scrap compared to my lord's business, his great establishment, his equipages in the Park, his position in society, his weight in the House of Lords, his influence in Europe? And yet that scrap of paper has gone the world over; it has been sung in the camp, wept over in the lonely cottage; it has gone with the marching regiments, with the explorers—with mankind, in short, on its way down the ages, brightening, consoling, elevating life; and my lord, who regarded as scarcely above a menial the poet to whom he tossed the guinea—my lord, with all his pageantry and power, has utterly gone and left no witness.
By Charles Dudley Warner
In accordance with the advice of Diogenes of Apollonia in the beginning of his treatise on Natural Philosophy—"It appears to me to be well for every one who commences any sort of philosophical treatise to lay down some undeniable principle to start with"—we offer this:
All men are created unequal.
It would be a most interesting study to trace the growth in the world of the doctrine of "equality." That is not the purpose of this essay, any further than is necessary for definition. We use the term in its popular sense, in the meaning, somewhat vague, it is true, which it has had since the middle of the eighteenth century. In the popular apprehension it is apt to be confounded with uniformity; and this not without reason, since in many applications of the theory the tendency is to produce likeness or uniformity. Nature, with equal laws, tends always to diversity; and doubtless the just notion of equality in human affairs consists with unlikeness. Our purpose is to note some of the tendencies of the dogma as it is at present understood by a considerable portion of mankind.
We regard the formulated doctrine as modern. It would be too much to say that some notion of the "equality of men" did not underlie the socialistic and communistic ideas which prevailed from time to time in the ancient world, and broke out with volcanic violence in the Grecian and Roman communities. But those popular movements seem to us rather blind struggles against physical evils, and to be distinguished from those more intelligent actions based upon the theory which began to stir Europe prior to the Reformation.
It is sufficient for our purpose to take the well-defined theory of modern times. Whether the ideal republic of Plato was merely a convenient form for philosophical speculation, or whether, as the greatest authority on political economy in Germany, Dr. William Roscher, thinks, it "was no mere fancy"; whether Plato's notion of the identity of man and the State is compatible with the theory of equality, or whether it is, as many communists say, indispensable to it, we need not here discuss. It is true that in his Republic almost all the social theories which have been deduced from the modern proclamation of equality are elaborated. There was to be a community of property, and also a community of wives and children. The equality of the sexes was insisted on to the extent of living in common, identical education and pursuits, equal share in all labors, in occupations, and in government. Between the sexes there was allowed only one ultimate difference. The Greeks, as Professor Jowett says, had noble conceptions of womanhood; but Plato's ideal for the sexes had no counterpart in their actual life, nor could they have understood the sort of equality upon which he insisted. The same is true of the Romans throughout their history.
More than any other Oriental peoples the Egyptians of the Ancient Empire entertained the idea of the equality of the sexes; but the equality of man was not conceived by them. Still less did any notion of it exist in the Jewish state. It was the fashion with the socialists of 1793, as it has been with the international assemblages at Geneva in our own day, to trace the genesis of their notions back to the first Christian age. The far-reaching influence of the new gospel in the liberation of the human mind and in promoting just and divinely-ordered relations among men is admitted; its origination of the social and political dogma we are considering is denied. We do not find that Christ himself anywhere expressed it or acted on it. He associated with the lowly, the vile, the outcast; he taught that all men, irrespective of rank or possessions, are sinners, and in equal need of help. But he attempted no change in the conditions of society. The "communism" of the early Christians was the temporary relation of a persecuted and isolated sect, drawn together by common necessities and dangers, and by the new enthusiasm of self-surrender. ["The community of goods of the first Christians at Jerusalem, so frequently cited and extolled, was only a community of use, not of ownership (Acts iv. 32), and throughout a voluntary act of love, not a duty (v. 4); least of all, a right which the poorer might assert. Spite of all this, that community of goods produced a chronic state of poverty in the church of Jerusalem." (Principles of Political Economy. By William Roscher. Note to Section LXXXI. English translation. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1878.)]—Paul announced the universal brotherhood of man, but he as clearly recognized the subordination of society, in the duties of ruler and subject, master and slave, and in all the domestic relations; and although his gospel may be interpreted to contain the elements of revolution, it is not probable that he undertook to inculcate, by the proclamation of "universal brotherhood," anything more than the duty of universal sympathy between all peoples and classes as society then existed.
If Christianity has been and is the force in promoting and shaping civilization that we regard it, we may be sure that it is not as a political agent, or an annuller of the inequalities of life, that we are to expect aid from it. Its office, or rather one of its chief offices on earth, is to diffuse through the world, regardless of condition or possessions or talent or opportunity, sympathy and a recognition of the value of manhood underlying every lot and every diversity—a value not measured by earthly accidents, but by heavenly standards. This we understand to be "Christian equality." Of course it consists with inequalities of condition, with subordination, discipline, obedience; to obey and serve is as honorable as to command and to be served.
If the religion of Christ should ever be acclimated on earth, the result would not be the removal of hardships and suffering, or of the necessity of self-sacrifice; but the bitterness and discontent at unequal conditions would measurably disappear. At the bar of Christianity the poor man is the equal of the rich, and the learned of the unlearned, since intellectual acquisition is no guarantee of moral worth. The content that Christianity would bring to our perturbed society would come from the practical recognition of the truth that all conditions may be equally honorable. The assertion of the dignity of man and of labor is, we imagine, the sum and substance of the equality and communism of the New Testament. But we are to remember that this is not merely a "gospel for the poor."
Whatever the theories of the ancient world were, the development of democratic ideas is sufficiently marked in the fifteenth century, and even in the fourteenth, to rob the eighteenth of the credit of originating the doctrine of equality. To mention only one of the early writers,—[For copious references to authorities on the spread of communistic and socialistic ideas and libertine community of goods and women in four periods of the world's history—namely, at the time of the decline of Greece, in the degeneration of the Roman republic, among the moderns in the age of the Reformation, and again in our own day—see Roscher's Political Economy, notes to Section LXXIX., et seq.] —Marsilio, a physician of Padua, in 1324, said that the laws ought to be made by all the citizens; and he based this sovereignty of the people upon the greater likelihood of laws being better obeyed, and also being good laws, when they were made by the whole body of the persons affected.
In 1750 and 1753, J. J. Rousseau published his two discourses on questions proposed by the Academy of Dijon: "Has the Restoration of Sciences Contributed to Purify or to Corrupt Manners?" and "What is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and is it Authorized by Natural Law?" These questions show the direction and the advance of thinking on social topics in the middle of the eighteenth century. Rousseau's Contrat-Social and the novel Emile were published in 1761.
But almost three-quarters of a century before, in 1690, John Locke published his two treatises on government. Rousseau was familiar with them. Mr. John Morley, in his admirable study of Rousseau, [Rousseau. By John Morley. London: Chapman & Hall. 1873—I have used it freely in the glance at this period.]—fully discusses the latter's obligation to Locke; and the exposition leaves Rousseau little credit for originality, but considerable for illogical misconception. He was, in fact, the most illogical of great men, and the most inconsistent even of geniuses. The Contrat-Social is a reaction in many things from the discourses, and Emile is almost an entire reaction, especially in the theory of education, from both.
His central doctrine of popular sovereignty was taken from Locke. The English philosopher said, in his second treatise, "To understand political power aright and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in; and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their persons and possessions as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man—a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the advantages of nature and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should by any manifest declaration of His will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty." But a state of liberty is not a state of license. We cannot exceed our own rights without assailing the rights of others. There is no such subordination as authorizes us to destroy one another. As every one is bound to preserve himself, so he is bound to preserve the rest of mankind, and except to do justice upon an offender we may not impair the life, liberty, health, or goods of another. Here Locke deduces the power that one man may have over another; community could not exist if transgressors were not punished. Every wrongdoer places himself in "a state of war." Here is the difference between the state of nature and the state of war, which men, says Locke, have confounded—alluding probably to Hobbes's notion of the lawlessness of human society in the original condition.
The portion of Locke's treatise which was not accepted by the French theorists was that relating to property. Property in lands or goods is due wholly and only to the labor man has put into it. By labor he has removed it from the common state in which nature has placed it, and annexed something to it that excludes the common rights of other men.
Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes as well as from Locke in his conception of popular sovereignty; but this was not his only lack of originality. His discourse on primitive society, his unscientific and unhistoric notions about the original condition of man, were those common in the middle of the eighteenth century. All the thinkers and philosophers and fine ladies and gentlemen assumed a certain state of nature, and built upon it, out of words and phrases, an airy and easy reconstruction of society, without a thought of investigating the past, or inquiring into the development of mankind. Every one talked of "the state of nature" as if he knew all about it. "The conditions of primitive man," says Mr. Morley, "were discussed by very incompetent ladies and gentlemen at convivial supper-parties, and settled with complete assurance." That was the age when solitary Frenchmen plunged into the wilderness of North America, confidently expecting to recover the golden age under the shelter of a wigwam and in the society of a squaw.
The state of nature of Rousseau was a state in which inequality did not exist, and with a fervid rhetoric he tried to persuade his readers that it was the happier state. He recognized inequality, it is true, as a word of two different meanings: first, physical inequality, difference of age, strength, health, and of intelligence and character; second, moral and political inequality, difference of privileges which some enjoy to the detriment of others-such as riches, honor, power. The first difference is established by nature, the second by man. So long, however, as the state of nature endures, no disadvantages flow from the natural inequalities.
In Rousseau's account of the means by which equality was lost, the incoming of the ideas of property is prominent. From property arose civil society. With property came in inequality. His exposition of inequality is confused, and it is not possible always to tell whether he means inequality of possessions or of political rights. His contemporary, Morelly, who published the Basileade in 1753, was troubled by no such ambiguity. He accepts the doctrine that men are formed by laws, but holds that they are by nature good, and that laws, by establishing a division of the products of nature, broke up the sociability of men, and that all political and moral evils are the result of private property. Political inequality is an accident of inequality of possessions, and the renovation of the latter lies in the abolition of the former.
The opening sentence of the Contrat-Social is, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is a slave," a statement which it is difficult to reconcile with the fact that every human being is born helpless, dependent, and into conditions of subjection, conditions that we have no reason to suppose were ever absent from the race. But Rousseau never said, "All men are born equal." He recognized, as we have seen, natural inequality. What he held was that the artificial differences springing from the social union were disproportionate to the capacities springing from the original constitution; and that society, as now organized, tends to make the gulf wider between those who have privileges and those who have none.
The well-known theory upon which Rousseau's superstructure rests is that society is the result of a compact, a partnership between men. They have not made an agreement to submit their individual sovereignty to some superior power, but they have made a covenant of brotherhood. It is a contract of association. Men were, and ought to be, equal cooperators, not only in politics, but in industries and all the affairs of life. All the citizens are participants in the sovereign authority. Their sovereignty is inalienable; power may be transmitted, but not will; if the people promise to obey, it dissolves itself by the very act—if there is a master, there is no longer a people. Sovereignty is also indivisible; it cannot be split up into legislative, judiciary, and executive power.
Society being the result of a compact made by men, it followed that the partners could at any time remake it, their sovereignty being inalienable. And this the French socialists, misled by a priori notions, attempted to do, on the theory of the Contrat-Social, as if they had a tabula rasa, without regarding the existing constituents of society, or traditions, or historical growths.
Equality, as a phrase, having done duty as a dissolvent, was pressed into service as a constructor. As this is not so much an essay on the nature of equality is an attempt to indicate some of the modern tendencies to carry out what is illusory in the dogma, perhaps enough has been said of this period. Mr. Morley very well remarks that the doctrine of equality as a demand for a fair chance in the world is unanswerable; but that it is false when it puts him who uses his chance well on the same level with him who uses it ill. There is no doubt that when Condorcet said, "Not only equality of right, but equality of fact, is the goal of the social art," he uttered the sentiments of the socialists of the Revolution.
The next authoritative announcement of equality, to which it is necessary to refer, is in the American Declaration of Independence, in these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed." And the Declaration goes on, in temperate and guarded language, to assert the right of a people to change their form of government when it becomes destructive of the ends named.
Although the genesis of these sentiments seems to be French rather than English, and equality is not defined, and critics have differed as to whether the equality clause is independent or qualified by what follows, it is not necessary to suppose that Thomas Jefferson meant anything inconsistent with the admitted facts of nature and of history. It is important to bear in mind that the statesmen of our Revolution were inaugurating a political and not a social revolution, and that the gravamen of their protest was against the authority of a distant crown. Nevertheless, these dogmas, independent of the circumstances in which they were uttered, have exercised and do exercise a very powerful influence upon the thinking of mankind on social and political topics, and are being applied without limitations, and without recognition of the fact that if they are true, in the sense meant by their originators, they are not the whole truth. It is to be noticed that rights are mentioned, but not duties, and that if political rights only are meant, political duties are not inculcated as of equal moment. It is not announced that political power is a function to be discharged for the good of the whole body, and not a mere right to be enjoyed for the advantage of the possessor; and it is to be noted also that this idea did not enter into the conception of Rousseau.
The dogma that "government derives its just power from the consent of the governed" is entirely consonant with the book theories of the eighteenth century, and needs to be confronted, and practically is confronted, with the equally good dogma that "governments derive their just power from conformity with the principles of justice." We are not to imagine, for instance, that the framers of the Declaration really contemplated the exclusion from political organization of all higher law than that in the "consent of the governed," or the application of the theory, let us say, to a colony composed for the most part of outcasts, murderers, thieves, and prostitutes, or to such states as today exist in the Orient. The Declaration was framed for a highly intelligent and virtuous society.
Many writers, and some of them English, have expressed curiosity, if not wonder, at the different fortunes which attended the doctrine of equality in America and in France. The explanation is on the surface, and need not be sought in the fact of a difference of social and political level in the two countries at the start, nor even in the further fact that the colonies were already accustomed to self-government.
The simple truth is that the dogmas of the Declaration were not put into the fundamental law. The Constitution is the most practical state document ever made. It announces no dogmas, proclaims no theories. It accepted society as it was, with its habits and traditions; raising no abstract questions whether men are born free or equal, or how society ought to be organized. It is simply a working compact, made by "the people," to promote union, establish justice, and secure the blessings of liberty; and the equality is in the assumption of the right of "the people of the United States" to do this. And yet, in a recent number of Blackwood's Magazine, a writer makes the amusing statement, "I have never met an American who could deny that, while firmly maintaining that the theory was sound which, in the beautiful language of the Constitution, proclaims that all men were born equal, he was," etc.
An enlightening commentary on the meaning of the Declaration, in the minds of the American statesmen of the period, is furnished by the opinions which some of them expressed upon the French Revolution while it was in progress. Gouverneur Morris, minister to France in 1789, was a conservative republican; Thomas Jefferson was a radical democrat. Both of them had a warm sympathy with the French "people" in the Revolution; both hoped for a republic; both recognized, we may reasonably infer, the sufficient cause of the Revolution in the long-continued corruption of court and nobility, and the intolerable sufferings of the lower orders; and both, we have equal reason to believe, thought that a fair accommodation, short of a dissolution of society, was defeated by the imbecility of the king and the treachery and malignity of a considerable portion of the nobility. The Revolution was not caused by theories, however much it may have been excited or guided by them. But both Morris and Jefferson saw the futility of the application of the abstract dogma of equality and the theories of the Social Contract to the reconstruction of government and the reorganization of society in France.
If the aristocracy were malignant—though numbers of them were far from being so—there was also a malignant prejudice aroused against them, and M. Taine is not far wrong when he says of this prejudice, "Its hard, dry kernel consists of the abstract idea of equality."—[The French Revolution. By H. A. Taine. Vol. i., bk. ii., chap. ii., sec. iii. Translation. New York: Henry Holt & Co.]—Taine's French Revolution is cynical, and, with all its accumulation of material, omits some facts necessary to a philosophical history; but a passage following that quoted is worth reproducing in this connection: "The treatment of the nobles of the Assembly is the same as the treatment of the Protestants by Louis XIV. . . . One hundred thousand Frenchmen driven out at the end of the seventeenth century, and one hundred thousand driven out at the end of the eighteenth! Mark how an intolerant democracy completes the work of an intolerant monarchy! The moral aristocracy was mowed down in the name of uniformity; the social aristocracy is mowed down in the name of equality. For the second time an abstract principle, and with the same effect, buries its blade in the heart of a living society."
Notwithstanding the world-wide advertisement of the French experiment, it has taken almost a century for the dogma of equality, at least outside of France, to filter down from the speculative thinkers into a general popular acceptance, as an active principle to be used in the shaping of affairs, and to become more potent in the popular mind than tradition or habit. The attempt is made to apply it to society with a brutal logic; and we might despair as to the result, if we did not know that the world is not ruled by logic. Nothing is so fascinating in the hands of the half-informed as a neat dogma; it seems the perfect key to all difficulties. The formula is applied in contempt and ignorance of the past, as if building up were as easy as pulling down, and as if society were a machine to be moved by mechanical appliances, and not a living organism composed of distinct and sensitive beings. Along with the spread of a belief in the uniformity of natural law has unfortunately gone a suggestion of parallelism of the moral law to it, and a notion that if we can discover the right formula, human society and government can be organized with a mathematical justice to all the parts. By many the dogma of equality is held to be that formula, and relief from the greater evils of the social state is expected from its logical extension.
Let us now consider some of the present movements and tendencies that are related, more or less, to this belief:
I. Absolute equality is seen to depend upon absolute supremacy of the state. Professor Henry Fawcett says, "Excessive dependence on the state is the most prominent characteristic of modern socialism." "These proposals to prohibit inheritance, to abolish private property, and to make the state the owner of all the capital and the administrator of the entire industry of the country are put forward as representing socialism in its ultimate and highest development."—["Socialism in Germany and the United States," Fortnightly Review, November, 1878.]
Society and government should be recast till they conform to the theory, or, let us say, to its exaggerations. Men can unmake what they have made. There is no higher authority anywhere than the will of the majority, no matter what the majority is in intellect and morals. Fifty-one ignorant men have a natural right to legislate for the one hundred, as against forty-nine intelligent men.
All men being equal, one man is as fit to legislate and execute as another. A recently elected Congressman from Maine vehemently repudiated in a public address, as a slander, the accusation that he was educated. The theory was that, uneducated, he was the proper representative of the average ignorance of his district, and that ignorance ought to be represented in the legislature in kind. The ignorant know better what they want than the educated know for them. "Their education [that of college men] destroys natural perception and judgment; so that cultivated people are one-sided, and their judgment is often inferior to that of the working people." "Cultured people have made up their minds, and are hard to move." "No lawyer should be elected to a place in any legislative body."—[Opinions of working-men, reported in "The Nationals, their Origin and their Aims," The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1878.]
Experience is of no account, neither is history, nor tradition, nor the accumulated wisdom of ages. On all questions of political economy, finance, morals, the ignorant man stands on a par with the best informed as a legislator. We might cite any number of the results of these illusions. A member of a recent House of Representatives declared that we "can repair the losses of the war by the issue of a sufficient amount of paper money." An intelligent mechanic of our acquaintance, a leader among the Nationals, urging the theory of his party, that banks should be destroyed, and that the government should issue to the people as much "paper money" as they need, denied the right of banks or of any individuals to charge interest on money. Yet he would take rent for the house he owns.
Laws must be the direct expression of the will of the majority, and be altered solely on its will. It would be well, therefore, to have a continuous election, so that, any day, the electors can change their representative for a new man. "If my caprice be the source of law, then my enjoyment may be the source of the division of the nation's resources."—[Stahl's Rechtsphilosophie, quoted by Roscher.]
Property is the creator of inequality, and this factor in our artificial state can be eliminated only by absorption. It is the duty of the government to provide for all the people, and the sovereign people will see to it that it does. The election franchise is a natural right—a man's weapon to protect himself. It may be asked, If it is just this, and not a sacred trust accorded to be exercised for the benefit of society, why may not a man sell it, if it is for his interest to do so?
What is there illogical in these positions from the premise given? "Communism," says Roscher, [Political Economy, bk. i., ch. v., 78.]—is the logically not inconsistent exaggeration of the principle of equality. Men who hear themselves designated as the sovereign people, and their welfare as the supreme law of the state, are more apt than others to feel more keenly the distance which separates their own misery from the superabundance of others. And, indeed, to what an extent our physical wants are determined by our intellectual mold!"
The tendency of the exaggeration of man's will as the foundation of government is distinctly materialistic; it is a self-sufficiency that shuts out God and the higher law.—["And, indeed, if the will of man is all-powerful, if states are to be distinguished from one another only by their boundaries, if everything may be changed like the scenery in a play by a flourish of the magic wand of a system, if man may arbitrarily make the right, if nations can be put through evolutions like regiments of troops, what a field would the world present for attempts at the realizations of the wildest dreams, and what a temptation would be offered to take possession, by main force, of the government of human affairs, to destroy the rights of property and the rights of capital, to gratify ardent longings without trouble, and to provide the much-coveted means of enjoyment! The Titans have tried to scale the heavens, and have fallen into the most degrading materialism. Purely speculative dogmatism sinks into materialism." (M. Wolowski's Essay on the Historical Method, prefixed to his translation of Roscher's Political Economy.)]—We need to remember that the Creator of man, and not man himself, formed society and instituted government; that God is always behind human society and sustains it; that marriage and the family and all social relations are divinely established; that man's duty, coinciding with his right, is, by the light of history, by experience, by observation of men, and by the aid of revelation, to find out and make operative, as well as he can, the divine law in human affairs. And it may be added that the sovereignty of the people, as a divine trust, may be as logically deduced from the divine institution of government as the old divine right of kings. Government, by whatever name it is called, is a matter of experience and expediency. If we submit to the will of the majority, it is because it is more convenient to do so; and if the republic or the democracy vindicate itself, it is because it works best, on the whole, for a particular people. But it needs no prophet to say that it will not work long if God is shut out from it, and man, in a full-blown socialism, is considered the ultimate authority.
II. Equality of education. In our American system there is, not only theoretically but practically, an equality of opportunity in the public schools, which are free to all children, and rise by gradations from the primaries to the high-schools, in which the curriculum in most respects equals, and in variety exceeds, that of many third-class "colleges." In these schools nearly the whole round of learning, in languages, science, and art, is touched. The system has seemed to be the best that could be devised for a free society, where all take part in the government, and where so much depends upon the intelligence of the electors. Certain objections, however, have been made to it. As this essay is intended only to be tentative, we shall state some of them, without indulging in lengthy comments.