FOOTNOTES:[1]We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest appearance, by an article that appeared in theRevue des Deux Mondesof the 19th October, 1873, under the title, “A New Phase of Spiritualism.” We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new school.[2]Hamilton’s “Discussions: Cousin, Schelling.”[3]Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” First Part p. 18.
[1]We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest appearance, by an article that appeared in theRevue des Deux Mondesof the 19th October, 1873, under the title, “A New Phase of Spiritualism.” We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new school.
[1]We already endeavoured to make this philosophy known at its earliest appearance, by an article that appeared in theRevue des Deux Mondesof the 19th October, 1873, under the title, “A New Phase of Spiritualism.” We are now dealing with the most recent form of this new school.
[2]Hamilton’s “Discussions: Cousin, Schelling.”
[2]Hamilton’s “Discussions: Cousin, Schelling.”
[3]Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” First Part p. 18.
[3]Herbert Spencer’s “First Principles,” First Part p. 18.
When a Professor ofPolitical Economywas first established in the University of Oxford, a controversy presently arose in the academical common rooms concerning the just meaning of the phrase. Among elder and conservative men, the most active-minded insisted that it ought to receive the full width of meaning attached to it by Aristotle in his Treatise on Economy, which, with him, was essentially the economy of the State—that is, in pure Greek,politicaleconomy, although this epithet is not annexed to his title. By this interpretation, the science naturally and necessarily became implicated with moral considerations, which never can be excluded from the statesman’s view. But the actual students and professors of the new science—eminently Mr. Nassau Senior and Dr. Whately, shortly afterwards Archbishop of Dublin—naturally feared that by such an interpretation political economy would become confounded with politics; would, indeed, cease to be a science; and by so great an enlargement of its area, would fail to receive that special and definite cultivation which Adam Smith had bestowed on it, as the theory of national wealth. Whately indeed, to avoid this inconvenient extension of the sense, proposed to call the topic, not political economy, butCatallactics—that is, the science of exchanges. Excellent in many respects as the last title was, it might have seemed to exclude the whole doctrine of taxation, and still more decisively all discussion of Malthus’s theory of population, which belongs to politics or to morals, not at all to the doctrine of exchange. In the end, the economists ruled that their science does not at all teach whatoughtto be, but simply whatis, whatgoes on, andwill go on, as an inevitable result of individuals holding exchangeable right in definite articles. Thus they seemed to have driven moral considerations out of their science, as much as out of gardening or medicine. To call theirpolitical economy, on that account,heartless(as so many have done) may seem ridiculous; but this form of attack on it arose from a perception or belief that its professors were claiming for it animperativeforce, while disclaiming morality, and were assuming that it was a sufficient and supreme rule for political action.
Of late it has been maintained on a special ground that moral considerations cannot wholly be excluded from political economy. Dr. W. B. Hodgson, first holder of a new chair in Edinburgh as Professor ofMercantileEconomy, has urged that, in so far as morality or immorality in individuals affects wealth and the markets, we do not exhaust the discussion on exchanges while we neglect this consideration. Perhaps indeed no one, in discussing taxation, has omitted to consider what taxes lead to fraudulent evasion or to smuggling; but economists hitherto, with great unanimity, have resolved that, in their character of economists, they will not notice moral evils from an opium trade, or from sale of deadly weapons and ammunition, or from traffic in intoxicants; nor can one in general discover from their writings that they know vice to be wasteful, or national expenditure on needless and foolish objects undesirable. They have a right to select what topics they will treat, and what they will not treat. They have a right to say: “Such and such considerations belong to morals, not toourpolitical economy.” But, on the one hand, if they are resolved that their science shall be as unmoral as engineering or navigation, they must not claim for it any decisive weight in State-politics; on the other hand, the topics which they neglect need, so much the more urgently, to be treated by others, especially since we have no professors of practical morals, and (for more reasons than one) questions of the market are not thought suitable to the pulpit.
That an exchange of one thing for another does, on the whole,pleaseboth parties to the exchange, is evidently testified by the fact that each acts voluntarily; hence, the inference is too lightly made that each isbenefitedby the transaction. Not only so, but from an increasing magnitude of exchanges increase of wealth is inferred, without any reference to the nature of the things exchanged. In a rough estimate, this reasoning has, no doubt, aprimâ facieweight, for we may not dictate to the tastes of others, nor assume that tastes which are not ours are therefore silly. Yet, evidently things which perish in the using quickly cease to be wealth, and things which are not likely to be approved continuously cannot long command the same high price. No article could fetch a price at all if it were not intended to be enjoyed, used, or consumed; the final purchase is called expenditure, and all expenditure is liable to moral judgment, approving or censuring. When we censure expenditure, not merely because it is excessive, but because it is essentially foolish or evil, we necessarily deplore and deprecate the traffic which feeds it—the traffic which it encourages; hence, some vicious trades are even forbidden by law. Short of this,there is necessarily a large margin of trades which law does not, and perhaps cannot successfully, forbid, which nevertheless may be justly regretted, censured, and, as far as may be, discountenanced. Economists are not here blamed if they (disowning moral considerations) do nothing of the kind; but they must not be allowed to blind us to the fact that some trades, not forbidden by law, are so far from promoting wealth and weal as to be gravely pernicious. To rejoice in their magnitude, to announce it triumphantly as a proof of national prosperity, is something worse than a mistake.
No reader, it is believed, will complain that the last sentence is mysterious or obscure. Our manufacturers of cotton and woollen have of late loudly deplored the falling off of their home trade, while the consumption of intoxicating drink continues to increase. They believe that if the labouring classes spent less on the brewer and distiller, they would spend more on the clothier. The most fanatical devotee of alcohol cannot deny that too much of it is drunk, in face of the long-continued avowal of the judges that drink is by far the greatest cause of crime—drink, short of evident and provable drunkenness. Indeed, it is not from those who are outright drunk, but from those who have been drinking, that the worst and most numerous outrages come, while the foot and the eye are steady, though the brain and the passions are perverted. To boast and rejoice in the magnitude of the drink traffic, legal as it undoubtedly is, has no moral defence. The topic is here adduced, not in order to push that argument further, but in order to insist that the mere increase of a trade does notin itselfdenote an increase of wealth; is notin itselfnecessarily a thing to be applauded either by the economist or by the moralist. In each case we must look into detail, and consider whether this or that prosperous trade, like a huge weed in a garden, dwarfs or kills other growths, which, but for it, might thrive.
An avowed ardent disciple of Mr. Cobden—a gentleman in some eminence of place and rank—has recently dissuaded taxes on wine and tobacco for the sake of revenue,noton the ground which one might expect—viz., that a Government ought not to base a revenue on what may chance to be public vice,buton the ground that “the grower of wine in France and of tobacco in America” can reasonably refuse to trade with us, if “we will not accept payment inthe only coinwhich he has to offer—namely, in his wine or his tobacco.”[4]As if we were not competent to reply: “Of wine and tobacco we quickly get more than enough. Preserve your grapes in sawdust, or make them into raisins, and you will not find our people averse to enjoy them, nor will you encounter any unreasonable duty from our Custom-houses. As to tobacco, surely the rich land which alone can raise it, can raise no end of other products which we are certain to value.” This well-informed writer, in his whole argument, seems to account wine the onlyfood-product which we receive from France (to silks and elegant articles he once slightly alludes); but he cannot be ignorant that the solid food which France sends us in eggs, cheese, butter, vegetables, chickens, and dry fruit is enormous; she would in ordinary years send us wheat, did not America, Russia, and Australia make it needless. To speak of wine asthe only coinof France is a wonderful straining of argument. But the reason for quoting it here is to illustrate how completely the School of Cobden wishes the State to ignore moral considerations in trade. Yet the State deserves no reverence, if it be not moral. Laws and enactments, framed by minds reckless of morality, are apt to be, on the one side unjust and oppressive, on the other eminently corrupting. A State which gains revenue from a vicious trade, such as gambling and debauchery, demoralizes its people so effectually as to deserve reprobation rather than reverence. According to the ancients, the lawgiver begins to civilize society and to earn veneration by establishing marriage and sanctifying the family. Are we to say, “We have changed all that now; let the Church care for morality: it is no concern of the State?” Who first taught such sentiment as wise policy, it is not easy to say; but it certainly has, in practice, if not in theory, attained a deadly currency. It never was the doctrine of Adam Smith. It is obviously a sure road to ruin, if its development be unopposed.
A legislator, of course, ought not to guide his enactments by the morality of any one school. If, in Greek fashion, we were to set up an Epimenides, a Solon, a Lycurgus, as plenipotentiary to start us in a new course, there might be some little danger of one-sided and conceited morals; yet not much, even so; for a very one-sided or very stupid man would hardly be elected: every lawgiver wishes his new institutions to be permanent, and is sure to have some regard to the friction which they would encounter in working. But where the legislation must have sanction, not from one man, but from a thousand men, of whom six hundred are elected from different circles of mixed ranks, from diverse localities, where forms and schools of religion, based on variety of thought, prevail, it is evidently impossible that in the laws collectively approved any moral ideas should dominate, except those which are common to all who are morally cultivated. To dread moral considerations in the debates of an English Parliament, lest the morality prevailing in its laws become one-sided and arbitrary, pedantic and ascetic, is so baseless, so wanting in good sense, as scarcely to seem sincere. When people tell us, “We shall be liable to have laws against dancing and cardplaying, or laws compelling us to go to church, if we insist that legislation ought to study for the public virtue,” they not only make themselves ridiculous, they even force us to suspect that they fear lest vice be repressed in ways inconvenient to the vicious. So much is premised, lest it be imagined or pretended that in pointing at moral limits to beneficial commerce any morality is desired less broad thanthat which all noble and well-reputed schools accept—the morals of mankind. At the same time, what is here advanced is intended to bear less immediately on law than on the general tenor of public opinion and practical writing.
Many economists write, as assuming that it is a step forward in civilization when a barbarous people learns artificial wants. If a New Zealander, instead of being satisfied with a mat for his back, which, made by himself, will last him for years, betakes himself to an English coat, which he must buy with a price,—which indeed less effectually shields him from wet, and sooner wears out,—he does that which is convenient to the English trader, but to him is a very doubtful gain: perhaps rather he brings on himself colds, cough, and consumption. If a thousand Maoris did the same, the commerce might figure in a Maori budget, and a Maori economist might point to the new trade as a step forward in national prosperity. The Zulus, as described by Englishmen who have travelled in Zululand or lived in the midst of them in Natal, are an upright, generous, faithful, honest race; and strange to say, Englishmen, who have such experience of them, are found to corroborate the utterance of Cetewayo, “A Zulu trained by a missionary is a Zulu spoiled”—that is, when trained in our habits they lose their national virtues. How can this be? why should it be? Apparently, because from us they learn artificial wants. While an apron suffices a Zulu for clothing, and a very simple hut for shelter, he can in many ways afford to be hospitable and generous. A man with very few wants has all the feelings of superfluity and wealth while surrounded by possessions so slender that we count him very poor: and when with an amount of toil which to his hardihood is not at all severe, he can always calculate on providing for himself and family all that their simple habits need, he is not deterred from present generosity by studying for his own future. But if he learn to covet and count necessary a number of articles which require from him threefold labour, he feels himself no longer rich, but poor; then, instead of giving small favours gratuitously, he claims to be paid for everything; instead of being princely, he becomes mercenary and stingy. If he imitate the dress, he is liable to envy the wealth of the Englishman, and in schemes of laying up for the future he easily becomes avaricious, perhaps fraudulent. Such are the steps by which one may justly calculate that some or many barbarians degenerate from the normal goodness of their fellows. The artificial wants which they learn when housed with our missionaries, or imbibe from the crafty allurements of traders, are not (primâ facie) a benefit at all, do not conduce to independence, to the sense of wealth, nor to the practice of virtue. They are simply a convenience to the European trader. If a Maori or Zulu chief frown upon such trade, which judgment does he deserve—to be scolded as barbarous, or to be praised as sagacious? With them, perhaps also with us, to account but few things necessary is a foundation for many virtues. Our economists often reverse the picture.
No stress is here laid on the fact that the historical saints of Christendom thought it an excellence to be satisfied with a minimum of external appliances for the comfort of the body. So much of arbitrary opinion may be imputed reasonably to them, and so much of fancy and credulity to their biographers, that it does not occur to the present writer to account their practices or principles any support to his argument. But the case of Socrates, and many other Greek philosophers, is different, and much to the point. With them, high thought, cheap feeding, and mean circumstantials frequently went together; and perhaps even those philosophers, who were somewhat mercenary and rich, would vehemently have renounced the idea that it is a good thing to acquire habits and tastes which make necessary to us things previously needless. But there is danger of drawing the reader’s thoughts into a new channel by this allusion to Greek philosophers when an argument of national economy is chiefly intended, not of personal virtues. As it is better for an individual to be satisfied with supplies that are sufficient, close at hand, and easy of attainment, than to have fastidious tastes which cannot be supplied without considerable effort and labour, so it is better for a nation to have a taste for its native products, so far as our lower wants are concerned. If we can get all that the health and strength of the body needs from our own soil, and with small expenditure, this is better for us than to be enslaved to artificial tastes, which multiply labours for mere bodily supply. To fix ideas, let me illustrate the principle here contained by discussing those popular beverages, tea and coffee.
Tea undoubtedly, as superseding beer, cider, and wine, has wrought much benefit to England, even if it have been (when heavily taxed) dearer than our native intoxicants. When taken with little food, in strong and frequent cups, it may often have weakened the nerves; but it does not, like alcohol, pervert the brain and inflame the mind, thus leading to folly, vice, and crime. The present writer is, and always has been, a tea drinker; nor have the many assaults on this beverage which have been sent to him shaken his belief that, taken in moderation, it has no evil comparable to its good. The present argument does not aim to prove that tea is in itself bad, only that the too-exclusive addiction to it has hurtfully excluded the trial of native beverages, which are perhaps better, certainly cheaper, and far more accessible.
Rigid enemies of alcoholic drink often assure us, in poetical and ecstatic language, that water is the only reasonable and right drink for man, as for other animals; but the water which they recommend and describe as gushing and sparkling in mountain rills does not come to the hearth and home of every mountain dweller, much less is it attainable by the inhabitants of cities or boggy plains. The hardy beasts of the field, if they can get the water pure, manage to endure its coldness in all seasons; so perhaps might we, if we could recover robustness of the stomach without losing any advantage of a developedbrain. That such recovery is impossible is not here asserted, but simply that, under the existing circumstances, the water (through its impurities or its coldness) often needs to be cooked, to be warmed, to have then some taste superadded which shall overcome mawkishness. When this is conceded, the question arises, will no native botany suffice? Are we of necessity driven to import tea from China or Assam? Such are the wonderful and deep harmonies of Nature that in each long-inhabited country the constitution of animals becomes adapted to its plants as well as to its climate, and finds among them not only its food, but its remedies for disease. Native herbs are often found more health-restoring than pretentious foreign drugs; nor is it extravagant to imagine that native leaves and berries might adapt themselves as well to the palate of Englishmen as tea and coffee, and better to their stomachs, if, instead of buying from the foreigner, we had duly studied our home resources. In the case of coffee, it curiously happens that there are persons among us who prefer what is called dandelion coffee to the coffee of Arabia; and that the preference is sincere seems proved by the accident that the dandelion thus prepared is dearer than the best Mocha. Nor does this dearness weigh against our argument. Twenty years ago brown bread was charged by bakers as fancy bread; ten years ago lentils were double their present price; in each case because the demand was so uncertain. The price of dandelion would quickly come down if it were in large and daily request. As substitutes for tea many leaves may be named which will not be called simply medicinal, prominently those of the sweet bay, the peach, and the black currant. If we were by any cause cut off from tropical markets, some combination would soon be discovered which carried off public preference; and when a national taste in it had once been established, every good purpose would have been attained without the foreign article. Should we not in that case moralize with wonder over the vast apparatus of great ships, which had been built, and manned, and stored, and sent to sea, with loss of sailors’ lives, entailing widowhood and orphanhood, for no better reason than to bring back leaves, for which adequate substitutes abound at home? This argument undertakes not to prove, but to illustrate. It is not specially confined to the case of tea or coffee. It does not make positive assertion that we can now change the English taste, nor does it urge a transition which would be violent, if at all sudden. It merely points to reasonable probabilities, as showing that a vast trade with a distant country to gratify an artificial want, if it prove how much we can afford to spend without being ruined, yet does not at all prove that we enrich ourselves by the exchange. At the same time, so great is the facility for making drinks, that we might assume higher ground and press our argument farther. The deliciousness of Oriental sherbet is no matter of doubt or controversy. Its basis is simply barley-water; to flavour it, the foreigner, of course, uses some of his own fruits, but we have plenty of substitutes at hand, at least while sugar abounds to us. It may be warmed, if necessary: so littleneed we depend on the Chinese. Besides, some among us are satisfied with, and warmly applaud, the drink prepared from simple oatmeal. If we all had this taste, we should nationally be richer.
It may be retorted, “Did you not nameSugar? Do you advocate making sugar of beetroot?” But no general renunciation of foreign commerce is for a moment here suggested as expedient. While we can bring sugar made from cane, and save our lands for other uses than beetroot, we presume this commerce to conduce to wealth. Not but that we may suspect the cheapness of sugar to conspire with other causes in slackening our zeal forHoney. Bees do not occupy and use up arable land. An abundance of cottage gardens and little rockeries satisfy them. Their depredations do not lessen the sweetness of flowers, nor the savour of herbs. They add to our wealth, at very small expense. They greatly add to the fertilization of plants. By all means let us get from the foreigner what we need; only let us not therefore neglect and forget our native resources.
In other and greater matters a like topic recurs. When the controversy against the Corn Laws was at its height, the advocates of repeal were taunted with wishing to explode native wheat. They replied, “Wheat is now largely sown in England where the climate or soil is unfavourable; in such fields only, the culture will be discouraged; where it can be produced and ripened with greater certainty it will still be grown, and the price will no longer be forced up; the lands less suited to wheat may well yield, either some other grain in rotation, or other needful crop.” Valid as this reply seemed, grand and glorious as are the results of opening our ports to foreign corn, the retrospect of thirty years nevertheless suggests new lines of thought. Want of food in Ireland when the potato crop failed was the argument which converted Sir Robert Peel; but the desire of selling cotton and woollen fabrics, or hardware, to those whose “chief coin” was wheat, gave an earlier impetus to the Anti-Corn Law League. Cobden and his associates were in the right, and performed well the task of the day; but the existing state of our agriculture is now discerned to be highly unsatisfactory. Every year widens and deepens the conviction that our laws of Land Tenure are fundamentally wrong; indeed, they are diverse from those of all the world; if they are not signally better than those of all other nations, they are gravely and lamentably worse; and the idea now presents itself, that the temporary relief given to us by the free importation of wheat has proved a buttress to an evil system of land laws, and has blinded us to the essential evils contingent on a perpetual increasing ratio of the population in great towns to that of the rustic districts. Much wealthier, no doubt, we are, and our poorer classes are less hard-worked. To dwell on the drawbacks through higher expectations, artificial wants, higher prices of coal, bricks, and houses—not to mention worse matters—might lead into too long digression. But, to bring out the idea here pointed at, we may speculate as to the results which must have followed, if no foreign markets had beenable to give us permanent supplies of necessary food. Suppose that barely we had been able in 1847 to save from starvation as many poor Irishmen as we did save, but that in succeeding years the United Kingdom had been cast on its own resources for grain and cattle; will any one maintain that by a proper use of the land we could not have fed our own population?
If any one is of that opinion, let him consider the phenomena of French agriculture. A century ago France seemed unable to feed her inhabitants. Thousands of the population died of starvation, even the king’s own servants. Misery among the peasants and the poorer classes in towns was universal. No one imagined that the country could afford to export food, or had any idea of its vast capacity of production. Her climate is not now superior to what it was; her area is somewhat enlarged by the sagacious plantings on dunes of sand; the soil is improved by a century’s tillage; the produce is more valuable, because the peasants have been taught many secrets of fruit culture. Most important of all, millions of peasants are owners of small freeholds. The “magic of property” has made them industrious, saving and ever vigilant to increase and improve the crops. We in England censure and deplore the compulsion on a French parent to divide his petty freehold and his gains equally among his children. If this be a grave evil, yet so much the more remarkable are the marvellous results of the union in one man of landlord, farmer, and labourer: for we see that by the universal and untiring industry which this fact elicits, not only were the great extravagances of the Second Empire and its wars sustained, but, in spite of the scarcely calculable losses of the Franco-German war, the fine of two hundred and fifty millions sterling, which France had to pay, was paid within four or five years, while a larger army than ever was raised and maintained. No one can dispute that the unexampled buoyancy of French finance is due mainly to the sound conditions of French landed tenure. Ireland, Scotland, and England all await a similar development, and never can be satisfied without it: but we have postponed the day of necessary reform by buying our food of almost every kind, in dangerous amount, from foreign countries, while our own arable land goes back into grass and pasture.
And what reply does the Right Hon. John Bright make, when addressed with a claim of reformed landed tenure? His name is here adduced for honour, as an eminent type of the Cobden School; but the habitual reply is, “Good! we are in favour of Free Trade in land:” as though Free Trade were in itself a charm which can scare away all evils; as though the existing freedom to accumulate land to any extent by purchase were not one of our greatest mischiefs. Men cannot live in the air. Land for a dwelling is as essential as air and water. Land is very limited in quantity, especially land conveniently situated, with favourable conditions. Land primitively belongs to a nation, and no man naturally has any right to more of it than he can himself cultivate and use. Large landed estates are a vast power, social and political.Their possession was originally in England an official trust, coupled with political duties and customary dues in payment: but without right of ejectment while those dues were paid. The commercial idea of land is a perversion and abuse. Those who fancy that the abolition of entails and primogeniture and whatever makes conveyances expensive, will bring about the desirable reform, boast that their remedy will hoist up the market price of land; in other words, it would make an effective purchase by the State more and more difficult, more and more burdensome to the community. Nay, it might even delay the necessary reform, until the patience of a nation under a landlord Parliament broke down, and such a revolution followed as that of France under Louis XVI. As there is a moral limit to the magnitude of beneficial commerce with the foreigner, much more is there a moral limit to the beneficial magnitude of landed estates. Happily some despots are philanthropic; yet we are not in love with despotism. Some great landowners are philanthropic: higher honour be to them! but we must calculate that very many will covet power over all who reside on the estate, and will use the power not always kindly; or will employ it as a political engine to win state-offices and salaries for their families; others, more directly and unblushingly mercenary, will think chiefly how to raise rent, and will forbid both crops and inhabitants, if wealthy lovers of occasional sport outbid ordinary farmers. If from mere pride and love of the romantic a landlord make his estate a wilderness, the nation still suffers the damage. Its population is cooped into towns or driven into exile, its markets are starved, its military force is lowered. While the Cobden School pertinaciously connives at these great evils, and juggles with the phrase “Free Trade” as if land were an article which ought to be on the same footing as moveables, they are playing into the hands of their nominal adversaries.
The first measure which we need is not one which shall facilitate the purchase of new and new estates by the over-wealthy, who, if they are not gamblers or otherwise vicious, often know not what to do with their vast incomes; but much rather a measure which shall set a maximum area for estates. The mildest thing to do is, not in the first instance to pass any newAct, but only a resolution orVoteof the Commons, declaring that it is against the public interest for any individual to possess more than a thousand acres of rustic land, or more than five acres of town land; and that whoever bequeaths to one person more than the above-named, ought to be subjected to a heavy and special land tax. In the same direction we need other special votes of the House, to the effect—that by legislation, by purchase, and by taxation the recovery of the national soil for the nation from year to year ought to be systematically pursued, wherever now held in large masses by bodies of men or by individuals; and that in order to give to cultivators the full results of their own industry, it is expedient that the State, out of its own present or future domains, carve out numerous small farms to be held under it as by copyright tenure, not subject to rise of rent.Space does not permit further detail, or reply to objections; but the idea intended is to work in the direction ofvirtualfreeholds, ever increasing in number, which cannot be bought out of the hands of the cultivators by tempting prices from the rich, because they are legally State property, and destined to remain as areas of small culture. By buying up from time to time the lands possessed by large charities, by legacy taxes directed to discourage bequests of land in great mass, and by direct purchases of land or rather by taking the legacy tax in land itself, the State would beneficently in the course of many generations undo the injustices and frauds of the past.
Land is so far from being a desirable object of unlimited commerce (called by the Cobden School Free Trade), that, especially under the modern interpretation which makes the lord (or chief man)ownerof the land, the most jealous limitations ought to be imposed on it by the State. So long, indeed, as a man holds no more of it than one family can cultivate, jealousy is needless; for the holder (especially if he pay a quit-rent for it) is sure to cultivate it, and cannot offend by excluding population. Town land ought, as soon as possible, to become town property; and, meanwhile, as early as possible, all town building to be subjected to a public veto for sanitary reasons. To make away into mercenary hands, as an article of trade, the whole solid area on which a nation lives, is astonishing as an idea of statesmanship. There is another matter connected with land as to which the State may justly feel great jealousy—namely, as to the consumption and exportation of material which cannot be reproduced. It is said that Sicily, under the Romans first, was largely deteriorated by the perpetual exportation of corn, exhausting even very fertile soil. Ireland in the past may have suffered by the constant sending out of cattle and pigs, with no back-current of commerce to restore all that their bones and flesh took out of the earth. Virginia and other States of the American Union largely ruined their soil by unceasing exportation of tobacco and other products. But to come closer home, no crops of coal can be grown in England and Wales. We reap where we have not sown, where we cannot sow. We export in enormous mass what we cannot reproduce. We allow individuals to become, out and out, proprietors of the national coal, and then sanction their unlimited exportation of it, with the high probability that this may cripple industry in the near future of England. This surely is a commerce, the benefit of which is very doubtful even in a cosmopolitan view. It may seem better to stimulate other nations to search for coal on their own soil than to use up what we cannot replace. And as for some other articles of immense commerce, as tobacco, it may seem doubtful which nation loses more by it—the importers or the exporters. Surely in all these cases the quality of the things bought and sold must be considered carefully, before we regard the magnitude of any trade a national benefit or a source of national wealth.
F. W. Newman.
FOOTNOTES:[4]“Reciprocity,” by Sir Louis Mallet, C.B., 1879: Printed for the Cobden Club.
[4]“Reciprocity,” by Sir Louis Mallet, C.B., 1879: Printed for the Cobden Club.
[4]“Reciprocity,” by Sir Louis Mallet, C.B., 1879: Printed for the Cobden Club.
At the present time, when theologians and those who have most aptitude for such discussions are arguing “in thoughts more elevate” of the soul’s future life, and its rewards and punishments therein, the pre-historic student is tempted to lethisthoughts wander backwards over a different aspect of the same subject, in an effort to link again the chain of belief concerning heaven and hell, which joins this present with a long-forgotten past. The difficulty which we feel in uniting ourselves in thought with past ages, arises surely more often from the imperfection of our sympathies than from the deficiency of our positive knowledge. So many questions which were once new have long been settled, so many experiments have been tried, such experiences have been lived through since then; it is so impossible that the earlier conditions of life and society should return; and we cannot bring ourselves to make the effort of imagination necessary to place us in harmony with bygone times. But there are some few questions which seem as far from settlement now as they ever were; one of these is the question concerning the destiny of man after death, the character of his journey into that undiscovered country, and the sort of life he will lead when there.
“A riddle which one shrinksTo challenge from the scornful sphinx.”
Some would dissuade us from the continuance of these (so they say) unfruitful speculations; but it is very certain that man must change his nature before they will lose their fascination for him; and until he does so, he cannot read without sympathy the guesses which past generations of men have made towards the solution of the same problems. For them, indeed, these solutions have lost their interest, as ours will soon do for us. Whatever lot that new condition may hold in store, eternalpleasure or eternal pain, they have tried it now; whatever scene the dark curtain hides, they have passed behind it. This is very certain: as that we soon must. But so long as we remain here upon this upper earth, we must be something above or below humanity if we refuse ever to let our thoughts wander toward the changes and chances of another life.
Not, indeed, that questions of this sort have ever had for the majority of men in one age, or for the collective mass of human kind, an all-absorbing interest. If we choose to look closely into the matter, and to test men’s opinion as it is displayed in their actions (the only real opinion), we shall at first perhaps be struck by the slight belief which they possess in a future state. For it is slight compared to their “notional assent,” that which they think they believe concerning it. With the majority, faith upon this point is at best but shadowy, of an otiose character suitable for soothing the lots of others, and sometimes, alas! called into requisition to relieve us from the stings of conscience on account of the pain which our own misconduct or neglect has introduced therein. And as it is with us, so, save under exceptional conditions, it has always been with men in the full vigour and enjoyment of life. There have been times when one aspect of the future—its terror—has been realized with an intensity, and has exercised an influence upon life and conduct, such as is unknown in our days. But these times have not been ordinary ones, and we are apt, I think, even to over-estimate the force of faith during the Middle Ages. That term, “dark ages,” overrides our fancy; “we can never hear mention of them without an accompanying feeling as though a palpable obscure had dimmed the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to and fro groping.”[5]But, then, neither have the most light-hearted and sceptical of people been able to shut their eyes utterly to the warnings of death. We are wont to think of the Greeks as of just such a light-hearted, and in a fashion sceptical, temperament, and to contrast the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of mediæval Europe. Scarcely any thought of death, or of judgment after death, disturbs the serenity of Greek art, such as it has come down to us. Thanatos is not to be found;[6]even the tombs are adorned with representations of war and of the chase, or with figures of the dancing Hours. And yet Greek art was not without its darker side. It had, like mediæval poetry, its Dante—Polygnotus, namely—who adorned the pilgrims’ house at Delphi with frescoes representing the judgment and the tortures of the damned,—a Greek Campo Santo. He would have given us a different impression of the Greek mind in presence of the fact of mortality, and shown us how easily we are led to exaggerate the divergence in thought between different nations and different times.
So we find as far back as we can test the belief of men, certain theories touching the fate of the soul after death, which represent, inthe germ at least, the prevalent opinions of our own day; and out of some of which these opinions have sprung. First among these, probably in point of time, stands the purely sceptical theory which takes its rise from the earliest efforts of language to give expression to the unseen. Casting about for a name for the essential part of man, the life or soul of him, language finds at first that it has no suitable word, and then supplies its want by using the breath—theψυχη,spiritus—in this sense. Like the vital spark itself, the breath is seen to depart when the man dies. Whither has it gone? The purely negative, the purely sceptical answer would be, “It has disappeared.” The answer actually given in most religious creeds is, “It has gone to the unseenplace,” or the concealedplace; as the Greeks said, to Hades (Ἀ-ίδης); or, as our Northern ancestors said, to Hel.[7]Thus, out of pure negation we have the beginning of a myth: thespiritbecomes something definite, and the place it has gone to is partly realized. The unseen place is underground, gained by a dark valley which stretches there from the upper earth. Enough of the old belief remains to keep this home of the dead itself dark and shadowy and lifeless. “The senseless dead, the simulacra of mortals,” as Homer says. And we remember how even a hero like Achilles “would rather be on earth and serve for hire to a man of mean estate, than rule a king among the dead.”
The same thought is expressed by the Hebrew poet,[8]
“Sheol shall not praise thee, Jehovah,The dead shall not celebrate thee;They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth;The living, the living, shall praise thee, as I do this day.”
No people have held up thisdestructiveside of death, this negative theory of a future, with sharper outline than the Greeks and Hebrews. What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is that line, “They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth!” Other people have found themselves unable to rest at this point; they have endowed their place with a personality, but, still strongly impressed with its horrors, this personality is grim and fearful. Even with the Greeks, Hades is a person, not a place; with the Teutons, Hel has gone through the same transformation: and a thousand other images of horror to be met with in different creeds, devouring dragons, dogs who, like Cerberus, threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom, can be shown by their names to have sprung from merely negative images of death, the unseen, the coverer, the concealer, the cave of night.
In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a latergrowth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul’s future finds expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a complete history of the dead man’s journey across the Nile and through the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.
This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven, disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one, mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason, though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their myth of the soul’s journey, drawing all its distinctive features from the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.
The most probable conjecture has fixed the cradle of our race in that corner of land which lies westward the steep range of the Beloot Tagh mountains, an off-shoot of the Himalayas, and northward from the high barren land of Cabul. This country, the ancient Bactriana, is the most habitable district to be found anywhere in Central Asia. There the hills stretch out in gentle slopes towards the west, and enclose fertile valleys, whose innumerable streams, fed by the mountains east and south, all go to swell the waters of the Oxus, now called the Jihon. Farther north lies another fruitful country, watered by the Jaxartes, separated from the first by a range of hills much inferior to those which divide both lands from Yarkand and Cashgar on the east, and from Cabul on the south. Both the great rivers empty themselvesinto the Sea of Aral, between which and the Caspian, sharply cutting off the fertile country from that sea, stretches the Khiva desert, a barren land affording a scanty nourishment to the herds of wandering Turkic tribes. There is good reason to believe, however, that this desert did not always exist, but that in times not extraordinarily remote the Caspian Sea, joined to the Sea of Aral, extended over a much larger area than it at present covers: it is known even now to be sinking steadily within its banks. With such a contraction of the great sea the desert would grow by a double process, by the laying bare its sandy bed and by the withdrawal of a neighbouring supply of moisture from the dry land. So it may well have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward—to people, at last, all the countries of Europe. The root which is common to the European languages for the names of the sea, means, in the Indian and Iranian languages, a desert: how can we account for this fact better than by supposing that after the European nations had left their early home, their brethren, who remained behind and who long afterwards separated into the people of India and Persia, came to know as a desert the district which their fathers had once known as the sea?
Thus, these ancient Aryans stood with their backs toward the mountains and their faces toward the sea. All their prospect, all their future, seemed to be that way; when their migrations began they were undertaken in that direction—towards the west. Most important of all in the formation of a creed, their sun-god, or sun-hero,[9]was seen by many of them quenching his beams in the waters; the home of the sun is always likewise the home of souls. What more natural, nay, what so necessary, as that the Aryan paradise should lie westward beyond the sea? It has been said just now that the Indian word for desert corresponds etymologically with the European word for sea: that word must have been, in the old Aryan, something likemara, from which we get the Persianmĕru, desert, the Latinmare, the Teutonic (German and English)meer. But from identically the same root we likewise get the Sanksrit and the Zend (old Persian)mara, death, the Latinmors, the old Norsemordh, the Germanmord, ourmurder, all signifying originally the same thing.[10]What, then, does this imply? The word which the old Aryans used for sea they used likewise for death. How would this be possible, unless this, their first sea, were likewise the sea of death, the necessary stage upon the road to paradise?
It might have been expected that such a connection of ideas would have endowed the sea with an entirely terrible character, precluding anyattempt to explore its solitudes, or the lands which lay beyond. It has been already said that as a matter of experience we find that theearthlyparadise often comes to be realized so vividly that men lose the fear which should attach to any attempt at finding it. They were not religious, heavenward-looking men who, in Mr. Morris’s poem, set out in quest of the happy land; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a true instinct, and that of all those mediæval mariners who were lost in their search after St. Brandon’s isle, none knew that they had found what they were seeking—Death. The Greeks eagerly cherished delusions of the same kind; and long before they had summoned up courage sufficient to navigate the Mediterranean they had invented the myths of their western islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired Rhadamanthus was taken when expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, or of those gardens kept by the daughters of the west,[11]where decay and death could not enter. It is likely enough that for the Aryanstheirwestern sea did long retain its more fearful meaning,a death; but that they at last gained courage to look upon it only asthe road[12]to the land of which they had long been dreaming.
How much more weighty a position the sea takes in men’s thoughts than is warranted by their real familiarity with it! Into the mass of sedentary lives—the vast majority—it enters but seldom as an experience, provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of all countries which possess a sea-board, how full is the literature of reference to this one phenomenon of physical nature! The sun and the moon, and all the heavenly bodies, the familiar sights and sounds of land, are the property of all; and yet allusions to these are not more common in literature than allusions to the sea: one might fancy that man was amphibious, with a power of actually livingupon, and not onlyby, the water. Charles Lamb acutely penetrates the cause of a certain disappointment we all feel at the sight of the sea for the first time. We go with the expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from true voyages, and what we cherish as credulously from romances and poetry, come crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. Thus we are imbued with thoughts of the sea before we have had any sight of it ourselves, merely by the sea’s great influence acting through the total experience of humanity. “We think of the great deep and of those who go down unto it: of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells and the mariner—