American Revolution—French Revolution—Individual Rights— Individual Will—Schemes of Universal Society—Education —Power of the State
I have had occasion to speak of the theological temper of the United States of North America, as illustrating one stage in the history of Protestantism, and as indicating a desire for something that Protestantism does not supply. But the political change which took place in these states, when they revolted from the mother country, is, in the same point of view, even more important.
Among the leading characteristics of the Reformation, I noticed an anxiety to assert the rights of national Sovereigns, and, as involved in them, the distinct position of each nation. This feeling, I said, was closely intertwined with that feeling of personal distinctness in each man which is the main spring of Protestantism. But when the Protestant systems had developed themselves, these inseparable twins began to manifest great impatience of each other’s company. The monarchs of the reformed States found that the belief in each individual’s right to act and think for himself trenched very inconveniently upon their authority, and tended in no degree to the consistency and unity of the nations which they governed. They observed that whenever the religious feeling was strong, it treated all things as subordinate to itself; therefore, unless it could be made to conspire with the objects of their government, it must thwart them. There seemed to be but two expedients; to force the religious feeling into this agreement, or as much as possible to weaken it. The first policy was tried, and failed; afterwards the latter was adopted for a time with better success. The dispositions on the other side of course corresponded to these. The religious bodies became more and more jealous of the sovereign’s interference with them; in times of strong excitement they resisted it; but as such times made their terms of communion more strict, these bodies became less and less identical with the nation; therefore it was not difficult to believe, when peace returned, that they had nothing to do with national affairs, that it was their business to be wholly religious, and the business of the monarchs to be wholly secular. This opinion, however, was very slowly adopted by any class of Reformers. The Lutherans thought, and still think, a State tyranny less intolerable than the abandonment of the Reformation principles. The Calvinists, in their palmy days, resolved, that if the State could not be religious with a sovereign, it should be religious without one. The Scotch Covenant affirmed the State to be essentially theocratic; the whole effort of our civil wars was to establish the same principle, and in one strange interlude between the acts of that tragedy, the Scotch tried to create a Presbyterian theocracy in the person of Charles the Second. It was only upon the disappointment of these schemes, that the modern doctrine under its different modifications began to prevail. And in the meantime an experiment was to be made whether religious men, if they could not exercise an influence over the old societies of Europe, might not frame societies for themselves in another world.
The legislation and government of the Puritan colonies bore every mark of their origin. They were, in fact, if the solecism may be pardoned, sect-commonwealths, connected by their religious peculiarities more than by the bonds of a common language, of a common origin, or of subjection to a distant sovereign. Before the time arrived when the last-mentioned of these ties was to be snapped asunder, the colonies had acquired an important position as trading communities. The religious feeling of the early settlers had lost much of its strength, but had left behind it industrious habits, clearness of understanding in common matters, indifference to refinements either physical or intellectual, and a useful pertinacity of character. Of such elements the heroes of the revolution were composed, men who, being exceedingly like the Puritans in these qualities, differed from them in this, that their notions of government and society were unconnected with a spiritual principle, and referred wholly to the condition and circumstances of this world. This change was evident from the Declaration of Independence—a document in which the old Protestant feeling, that each man is a distinct being possessing distinct privileges and rights, is curiously blended with a vague notion of a general fellowship which was beginning to gain currency in Europe, and which was rather a reaction against Protestantism than the natural result of it. And of this declaration the ultimate consequence was that union of the different independent states, respecting which future history will determine whether it have taken effect by a process of natural fusion, or merely by the decrees and contrivances of legislators.
These events were undoubtedly indications that a strife of principles was at hand, though the scene of it was not to be laid in the land of Franklin and Washington. It was in a country of the old world, a country in which the Protestant doctrine had been stifled two centuries before, a country in which society had been everything and human beings almost nothing, that the most vehement declaration of men’s individual rights was to be made, and that the death-struggle between those impulses which lead each person to maintain such rights, and those which lead him to seek communion with his fellows, was to begin.
It has been truly and profoundly observed that the French Revolution could not have been brought about merely by the scepticism of the philosophers, merely by the sins of the civil and ecclesiastical rulers, merely by the starvation of the people, nor by all these combined, if there had not been a certain element of faith to mix with and contradict the scepticism—to create a kind of moral indignation against the sin and to convert the sense of hunger from a dead anguish into a living passion.
The Parisian philosophy of the eighteenth century was little more than the expression by men cleverer and bolder than their contemporaries, of that feeling which pervaded the whole of society. All the teachers did was to make their disciples conscious of the unbelief which already had possession of them; their wit was irresistible, because it brought to light contradictions which existed in the persons they were addressing. So long as such contradictions are painful, so long as the conscience is at all awake to say, “This which you are not you are meant to be”—wit of this kind is most torturing. The mind may feel a kind of awful delight in it, as in a just penance which it deserves to undergo, but no grave admonition is half so bitter. But when the conscience is not awake at all, or is only so far awake as to perceive that hypocrisy is an evil and dishonourable thing, this wit will be very differently received. The mere time-killer—the lounger of the upper classes—who is convinced that everything must go on as it has always gone on, that words can do no harm, and that his position in society gives him a title to see further than a clown or a shopkeeper, listens gladly, and entertains a doctrine which both is so consistent with his practice, and which enables him to cast away as absurd any lingering sense of responsibility. The active, intelligent, aspiring member of the middle class, who thinks that he is unfairly depressed, who sees that the habits of society are false, who knows that it derives a support from certain feelings of reverence and awe which are connected with the acknowledgment of invisible principles, eagerly welcomes the discovery that no such principles exist; for then a system which, at least in all its outward appearances, is hollow and deceitful, and which certainly is a hindrance to his ambition, may gradually fall to pieces. But though this philosophy had, for these opposite reasons, a hold both upon the soirées of Paris, and upon the enterprising lawyer of the provincial town, there was nothing in it which could possibly appeal to the sympathies of poor men—of those who were actually suffering. It is true that many of the philosophers were economists, and could descant upon the circumstances which made bread dear, and might make industry more profitable; but hungry men, hating all abstractions, hate those most which refer to their hunger, and do not relieve it. Again, in many districts, the doctrines which the wise men derided, even if we may not believe that they commended themselves as realities to those who had no home or portion on earth, were at least connected with the friendly faces of curés who had sympathised and suffered with their flocks, and with actual gifts of bread at the convent doors.
Doubtless such relics of religious association and sympathy must have been much more thinly scattered among the mechanics of the capital: the habits of the classes above them will have descended upon them, and the quicker wit of the citizen will have more quickly detected the falsehood and hypocrisy—being much more glaring—which he saw among his instructors. Still, even to this class, what was there in the teaching of such a man as Helvetius, for instance, which could have given the least pleasure? Sir James Mackintosh speaks of the Helvetian philosophy as the philosophy of the pot-house. But the frequenter of the pot-house would scarcely have cared to be told that a man, apart from the influences of society, deprived of the help which he receives from legislators, soirées, and tailors, is good for nothing, even though it were added, that legislators, soirées, and tailors, through the influence of priestly imposture, had managed their affairs badly, that they needed to be reformed by philosophy, and that when so reformed many persons now proscribed might be brought within the charmed circle of civilisation. The poor man must have felt that, whatever good chance might befal him hereafter, he was, at all event for the present, not within the horizon of the philosopher’s telescope.
But how different was the case when a voice was heard from Switzerland, proclaiming that each man has in himself, apart from all social institutions and social civilisation, rights and power; that he may claim those rights, and put this power forth; that he must do so if he would break the bonds which legislators, tailors, and soirées have been fastening around him, and if he would form a society in accordance with nature and truth. This was an appeal which went straight to the hearts of those who had nothing that they could call their own except their human limbs and countenance, and whatever there was, known or unknown, which gave motion to their limbs and life to their countenance. It appealed to the sense of strength, of wrong, of suffering, which is extinct in none; it called that forth into energy and action which the philosophical systematisers, for the most part, either denied the existence of, or would have been willing should not exist; it mixed itself with all those notions about the frauds and tyrannies of priests and lawyers which the unsentimental school had propagated; it turned to its own use all the materialist notions of the age respecting the origin of governments in compacts and conventions: finally, it compelled the sages to acknowledge that the government of reason must begin in outbreaks of popular fury, and to join with the people in laying the foundation of society in a declaration of individual rights.
The allies soon became enemies: it was found that the philosophers could do nothing with their theories; then the poorer men tried what they could do with other weapons. The lookers-on were terrified; they began to ask themselves whether the notions which they had adopted, as the highest discoveries of the enlightened intellect, must not have been falsely deduced. Could law and government have had their birth in the way that the teachers of the eighteenth century supposed? Must not they have had some higher source? Was it not necessary to believe that some mysterious power upheld them? These thoughts stirred in the minds of men, especially in the Protestant nations, and prepared them to listen to Burke when he told them, as one who knew, that law rests upon deep invisible principles, not upon philosophical maxims or generalisations; that it is to be feared and reverenced as something above us, not to be dealt with as our creature and servant; that if its existence and awful derivation be trifled with or denied, it will prove its power and have its revenge. This teaching, so unlike any to which the last age had been accustomed, was received by many wondering nobles and ecclesiastics as if it were the revelation of a new truth, especially given for the defence of their houses and lands; by others it was welcomed with a more genial and thankful feeling, as the application to new circumstances of a doctrine which had been familiar to all great thinkers, and which had been delivered with peculiar power and solemnity by the noblest writers of the English nation. How much Burke, an adventurer, an Irishman, a philosopher, was the instrument of restoring the tone of English feeling, both amongst the men of action and of meditation, both in the upper and middling class, many are now ready to confess. Nor was his influence confined to this country. The deep historical researches of Niebuhr and the jurisprudential wisdom of Savigny, if they were not called forth by his writings, at least received their direction, in a great measure, from him; they would not have found readers to understand or appreciate them, if the soil had not been at first prepared by our statesman and orator.
The French revolution, then, has led many thoughtful persons, and many who are not thoughtful, to the conviction, that the doctrine upon which the declaration of rights rests is essentially false; that a man choosing to stand upon his independence—choosing to be an individual—choosing the state of nature—can have no claims on his neighbour; that to build up a fellowship upon this principle of independence is a monstrous contradiction, which proves itself to be so the moment it is brought to a practical experiment; finally, that law, being the appointed corrector of and judge of man, must be derived from, and rest upon, sanctions which men regard as superhuman. But, on the other hand, there are not a few who, without directly opposing these doctrines, nay, perhaps assenting to them in so far forth as they are answers to Rousseau, are inclined to draw inferences from the same facts which are most unlike these—one might fancy almost incompatible with them. ‘Whatever may be talked about the majesty and transcendant character of law,’ say these persons, ‘it is manifest that men did set themselves above law during the Revolution, and did shew that they could defy it. The popular will proved that all the terrors of law, affirmed and made more fearful by religion, were not sufficient to bind it; and when at last it succumbed, it was not to this power, but to the will of a man, who shewed that there was that in him which all the units of the nation together could not resist. Afterwards, it is true, the political machine seemed to run into its old ruts; tradition and custom apparently resumed their sway. But again the same truth was established; all such influences have been found ineffectual; a will, a despotical will, is wanted somewhere; to this alone will men really bow down. Whether there be a right in individual men or not, there is—(I borrow the favourite phrase of a writer who has exhibited this position with the greatest clearness, and who has converted the whole history of the Revolution from an abstraction into a living reality)—“a might,” and this might will make itself felt, either in a whole nation, or in some single person who compels the whole nation to acknowledge that he is meant to govern it.’
One might fancy, when the opinion is put into this form, that Hobbes was again speaking in the nineteenth century. But whatever resemblance there may be in the words, the feeling which finds utterance in them is the most opposite possible to that of the hard materialist; it is a feeling of reverence for spiritual force. The triumphant despot is not the man to whom men submit, because they find it more convenient to abstain from fighting, or because they find the government of one less perplexing than that of many; no, he is the man to whom they do homage, because he has the highest title, the most perfect ordination, because he was in truth created to be their king. And therefore this is only another, and I fancy a more advanced and reasonable, form of that reverence for Will, as superior to the forms of government and society, which has led many to look upon the notions of rule and subjection as hateful inventions of priests and monarchs. The writer of “Prometheus Unbound,” and the “Revolt of Islam,” preached the freedom of man from all outward forms and restraints: those who say that subjection is a necessity of man’s being, that he longs to be governed, are yet equally certain that he can only submit to the dominion of a man; that he can never bow to the authority of an outward rule. And both alike differ from the sentimental teachers of the last age, who exhorted men to follow their natures—to give their good feelings and impulses fair play, &c. Both acknowledge that a man must not yield to inclination, that he must win a victory over his nature that otherwise he can neither be free himself, nor obtain lordship over his fellows.
Meantime these notions, which in this form might be passed by as the dreams of idle men, are forcing themselves in another form upon the reflection of all practical politicians. Not only in quiet chambers, but by fierce mobs, is the doctrine proclaimed that Will is superior to Law—that it ought to be superior—that to it belongs the power of unmaking and re-making that which pretends to hold it down. Anyone who attends carefully to the phrases which are current among us now, will perceive, I think, that they are very far more tremendous than those which were heard at the beginning of the French Revolution. “We have a right,” is a phrase which betokens the acknowledgment of some antecedent principle; but in our day this language, if we chance to hear it, translates itself immediately into “We will.” This is the ground of the right; it aspires to be the ground of all things.
“And why has it not yet attained its aspiration, and what can hinder it from doing so?” asks the terrified statesman. He finds that when such a question is started, politics must have become an awful science; a science which can scarcely be pursued successfully by one who determines that he will confine himself to official rules or precedents, and that he will admit nothing as concerning him which involves transcendent considerations. However he may be inclined to laugh at metaphysics and scorn theology, he finds that he must discuss a subject which touches upon all the deepest principles of both; that he must ascertain by what means the existence of law may be reconciled with the existence of the human will. The debate between the disciple of Rousseau and the disciple of Burke brought out the old controversy—“Is the nature of man a good thing, a thing to be trusted, as Rousseau affirms that it is? Or is it an evil thing, as the Reformers said it was, which is to be kept down, and which every good man is to triumph over?” And this controversy, after the experiment of the French Revolution, was decided by politicians in favour of the ancient opinion, and against the new one. But here is another old scholastic controversy brought to the like practical issue, and submitted to the same adjudication: “Is Man, as the successors of the Reformers have affirmed, to be identified with that nature which is attached to him; or is he, when he sinks under the dominion of that nature, to be considered as abandoning his proper state, as subjecting himself to that over which he was meant to rule?” If this controversy be decided in favour of the first notion, the notion of modern Calvinism, the politician must invent what charms he can to lull that will to sleep, “which hath oftentimes been bound with fetters and chains, and the chains have been plucked asunder by wit, and the fetters broken in pieces, neither hath any man tamed it. But in the mountains and the tombs has it been continually—crying and cutting itself with stones.” If on the other hand he admit the existence of a will or spirit in man, and that this will is only safe and free when it has found some other will to govern it, and that in the vain effort for independence it constantly becomes the slave of its own natural inclinations, it can be no contradiction on the one hand to suppose that law is meant to overawe these inclinations; on the other hand, that there is some spiritual government, in which the man himself has a claim of citizenship, and in which he may find his rightful king.
2. But this hint leads us to another aspect of the French Revolution, that which may be called its properly political aspect. It began with a declaration of individual rights, but upon that declaration it professed to build a society; and this society was to be universal. It is true that the character of the revolutionary proceedings, from first to last, was eminently French. It is true that a strong burst of French patriotism was called forth by the invasion of the Allies, and that a desire of French predominance may be traced in the different counsels of the nation, from the commencement of the war to the abdication of Napoleon. But the principle of the Revolution—I mean not its nominal principles, as they were expressed in parchment documents or in pompous phrases, but the real principle which governed the minds of those who acted in it, and which alone rescued their documents and phrases from the charge of utter unmeaningness—was the substitution of a universal polity for national polities. Every monstrous absurdity which marked the speakers, writers, and actors who figured in it savoured of this feeling, and proved its existence; all its achievements, both when it was acting as a republic and when it was concentrated in one man, tended to this result. Even the constitutions which were propounded one after another for France itself had no more reference to France than to Kamschatka; they were all constructed upon universal principles, all meant for mankind.
These illustrations of the worth and preciousness of particular governments, when they are framed in conformity with general maxims, awakened the thoughtful men of Europe to a study of national history, and of that internal life in nations whereby they have been able to preserve their identity for generations amidst all changes of external circumstances. And these profound investigations received light and strength from the national feelings which the propagandism of France and the tyranny of the universal empire called forth. A spirit was roused which made it impossible that men should look upon the histories of Voltaire, of Hume, and of Robertson, as representing the feelings and mind of past generations; a spirit which led the children to feel that there was a bond between them and their fathers, that they were inheritors of the same soil, and that names, and memorials, and institutions, more permanent than the oaks which grew upon it, had been bequeathed to them to keep.
But this patriotic temper did not much survive the war in Germany and the Peninsula; and though the historical inquiries to which it had given life and interest were not neglected, nay, though they began to be more valued as the wisdom and learning which had been exhibited in them were better known, yet they no further influenced the popular mind than as they supplied the armour for resisting some of its most prevalent tendencies. In spite of the deep and solemn warnings which those who engaged in them have supplied, schemes of universal society, which pass over as insignificant all peculiarities of race, and of language, ridicule custom and the reverence of ancestors and annul the old constitutions in which these are embodied, have been most rife amongst us. It may be well to notice two or three of them.
Considering the change which has been gradually taking place in the philosophy of Europe—a change which only of late years has been distinctly perceptible, but which has been in progress at least from the commencement of the present century—it may seem a matter of some surprise that Mr. Bentham, a philosopher emphatically of the last generation, who was formed in the school of Locke and Hobbes, and who aspired to reduce their maxims to practice, should have exercised so considerable an influence over the minds of persons who live in this day. The fact would undoubtedly be difficult of explanation, if Mr. Bentham’s influence had continued, and had overcome those which were opposed to it. To understand why it should have been for a time felt both in his own country and abroad is not, I think, impossible. He came into notice when the great Rousseau experiment had been made, and had led to the consequences of which we have spoken. It was impossible for anyone to deny that Burke and the Constitutionalists had gained much for their argument by that experiment. To all appearance they were right, and the defenders of popular governments wrong. Still there was a restless feeling that the trial might have been conducted differently, and that then it would have answered to the wishes of those who commenced it. And besides this, the several countries of Europe, and presently, also, the Spanish colonies of America, were in that naked revolutionised condition which seemed to make a new constitution of some kind necessary for them. These feelings Mr. Bentham met. He told men that the Rousseau scheme was false in its very conception; that anterior to the existence of society we have no rights; that except in combination we are good for nothing; that the end of any combination is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of the units who enter into it; that the combination is preserved by the mutual suspicion of its members, and by such contrivances as dispose the governing body not to violate the interest of those whose affairs they administer. Having these few and comprehensible rules to guide him, the writer applied a very acute and painstaking intellect, first, to the construction of a scheme of government and legislation which should accord with his theory; secondly, to a detailed exposure of the various contradictions and absurdities which are to be found in the practice of different nations, and especially of his own. To young men who were ashamed of being reckoned sentimental, and who yet panted for the glorious commonwealth which the sentimental school had promised, the sight of a new society built upon logic was most consolatory; their elders could more easily appreciate, even if they were not disposed to acknowledge, the justice of Mr. Bentham’s practical charge that while in their ordinary acts and discourses they admitted no other principle than that to which he referred all things, they were yet maintaining various institutions, which upon that principle could not be justified; that they were consequently carrying out the doctrine of self-interest so far as it furthered their own ends, and repudiating it just when it might inconveniently interfere with them. These were facts which could not be gainsaid; and if Mr. Bentham could have contrived that his system should seem to meddle with nothing but law and government, he would for a considerable time have retained the disciples which he had made, and even have obtained frequent accessions to their numbers. After the shock of the French revolution and of the French war had subsided, men whose tendency was to occupy themselves with the workings of their own minds, began to lose all interest in politics, and even to decry them as belonging to a merely outward region; they could, therefore, easily consent that almost any system upon that subject should gain currency. But they soon found that a compact organized political scheme must involve the questions which they looked upon as alone sacred. The impossibility of distinguishing social Utilitarianism from individual Utilitarianism, of reconciling the acknowledgment of a certain ultimate end in one region of thought with the positive denial of it in another, became apparent to those whose minds were most real, most impatient of mere artificial boundaries, as well as to those who were strictly and formally logical. Poets found that if their art could be defended at all, it must be merely as a kind of amusement, upon the same grounds as cards or horse-racing; religious men, however reluctant they might be to acknowledge any relation between such topics, were driven to ask themselves whether the doctrine of Paley and Bentham could be reconciled with that of the Sermon on the Mount, and if not, which was to be abandoned? This school, therefore, found itself unexpectedly assailed by all those new and strange thoughts respecting literature, metaphysics, and the spiritual universe, which had been gradually working themselves out in the minds of men in different parts of Europe, while Mr. Bentham had been occupied in his study with the rationale of evidence, and having nothing to oppose to them, it could only sound a retreat, and endeavour, at whatever risk of theoretical or practical inconsistency, to defend the existence of its philosophy by circumscribing the application of it within very narrow limits. But even within these limits it has no safe dwelling-place. For while the desire of man for a universal polity has grown every day more strong, this desire has connected itself more and more with deep feelings and passions, has had less and less to do with the mere calculating understanding. But to this calculating understanding the Benthamites make their sole appeal; by this they would fashion the whole scheme of human life, and of the universe. The right thing is that the will of the majority should be omnipotent. But what calculus have they discovered for measuring the strength which lies in that word—will—or for ascertaining what is to become of all theories and axioms of legislation when it has obtained supremacy?
Far more profound in its conception, and I think, also, more interesting in its details, than the system of which I have been speaking, was that which was proclaimed in France about twelve years ago, under the name of St. Simonianism. In their project of society the Benthamites discarded, or treated as mere accidents, all national distinctness. But there was one circumstance in the condition of man which could not be wholly accidental, or entirely the fruit of bad legislation. Men do exist in families; it would seem that in the most fortunate societies the principle of family life has been most recognized, its limits most accurately defined. Without taking any cognizance of this fact, the Benthamites created a society upon the hypothesis that mankind is an aggregate of individual atoms. The St. Simonians felt at once that such a scheme was a practical delusion: so long as the notions of mankind continue what they are, so long as the morality which maintains these notions, and is maintained by them, subsists, men will be continually acting, speaking, voting, per stirpes, and not per capita. Thus the aristocratical idea intrudes itself; the existence of a perfect democratical fellowship is impossible. Now while I reverence the feeling, to whatever cause it may be traced, which hindered the English Utilitarian school from boldly looking down into the gulf which this thought opens—while I rejoice that they dared not sacrifice their moral impulses to their logical consistency, and though I can easily understand how they may have persuaded themselves that they were logically consistent, because it was not for the greatest happiness of the greatest number that all family ties should be sacrificed—I must yet maintain that if a universal society is to be constructed, either upon the Utilitarian maxim, or upon the chacun selon sa capacité maxim of the St. Simonians, it is an indispensable preliminary that domestic feelings, associations, sympathies, all the laws by which they are upheld, all acknowledgment of relationship as a significant fact, should be extinguished. The deepest mind that ever dwelt in a mere mortal when searching, and that with the noblest and purest aims, for the foundation of universal society, could find no escape from this conclusion; and every new project for the actual establishment of it has supplied fresh evidence that, if such a society is to be built by human hands, these must be the conditions of it.
But the St. Simonians felt that a universal society, even of the kind which they had imagined—even a universal bank—could not be established by mere human hands. Here was another indication of the deeper wisdom which was at work amidst their extravagancies and contradictions. They must have asked themselves as they repeated the words, “chacun selon sa capacité”—But where shall we find the judge of capacities? Where dwells that seeing eye which shall perceive in each, that mighty power which shall assign to each, his rightful vocation? The question carried them into a mysterious region. There must be some supernatural foundation for this commonwealth, some supernatural superintendence over it. It was inconceivable upon any other hypothesis. Once convinced of that fact, it became a duty, or what seemed to them the same thing, a logical necessity, to invent a supernatural machinery, and assume the airs of inspired men. Upon this fraud of course followed every species of absurdity and falsehood—under the weight of these the system sank rapidly. French philosophers were not yet prepared for an Apollonius in the nineteenth century; they had not yet learnt to feel as Porphyry felt, that there was a kingdom in the world which, without the help of some mythical hero, could not be opposed. Possibly, if the vision of such a kingdom should become more clear and threatening, some will be driven to that resource, and then St. Simonianism will reappear, under another name and form, to try whether it can satisfy the inextinguishable longing in human hearts for a human fellowship.
The socialism of Mr. Owen is wholly unlike the St. Simonian doctrine in all its more striking and philosophical features, but for that very reason it may obtain for a time a wider popularity. A benevolent person established a factory in a certain district of Scotland upon a principle which made it a blessing, not a curse, to its inmates and the neighbourhood. One who had taken part in this experiment, though he did not originate it, adopted the very plausible notion that a similar arrangement might be applicable in all our manufacturing districts. The problem how to deal with the population concentrated there, is the most awful one which presents itself to the modern politician; anyone who could offer but a suggestion on the subject, especially if it were the result of experience, was entitled to a patient hearing. When Mr. Owen shewed that men, brought by certain contrivances under a laborious, kindly, self-denying superintendence, would be more happily situated than those who were merely treated as animals capable of producing a certain quantity of cotton twist, the demonstration was not the less valuable because the result of it might have been anticipated. But by a process (alas! most natural) he went on to the conviction that the whole secret lay in the particular machinery which he recommended: then, by another step, to the further conclusion that such a machinery was in itself capable of producing every desirable moral result. That Rubicon once passed, it needed only a mind somewhat more generalising, daring, and self-conceited than that which is found in the majority of men, one withheld by no historical knowledge and few intellectual impediments from experiments for the disorganisation of society, to produce a preacher of the doctrine that men are mere creatures of circumstances, and that by a readjustment of circumstances their condition may be completely reformed. The necessary corollaries from these propositions worked themselves out by degrees, without the help of any intellectual subtlety, as the obstructions to the new scheme made themselves manifest:—whatever principles, practices, institutions existing among men were connected with the idea of a will or spirit in us which might be superior to circumstances, must be abandoned. That all forms of religious faith should be included among these was inevitable; but it is a discovery of the highest practical value which the Owenites have been permitted to enforce, though they certainly were not the first to make it, that Marriage is in the same category, that its meaning or validity cannot be maintained, either logically or practically, when the existence of a spiritual principle and of spiritual obligations is denied.
Owenism may be described as an attempt, upon a larger scale than Benthamism, to apply to society universally the maxims which have been already adopted by certain of the classes which compose it. The worship of circumstances is the habit of feeling into which the easy and comfortable part of mankind naturally fall; their inward thought is that their houses shall continue for ever, and that thought makes them at once indisposed to change, and sceptical about the existence of any invisible govern—When the poor men say, “We, too, will acknowledge circumstances to be all in all, we will cast away any belief in that which is invisible, this world shall be the only home in which we will dwell,” the language may well appal all who hear. To one who sympathizes with the poor it is fearful, because of that which it shews they are ready to abandon. To one who has no sympathy with the poor it is fearful, because of that which it shews they are ready to take away from him. Nevertheless, be it observed, the force of these assertions lies in that very point in which they are anti-socialist—it is the “we will” that gives them all their meaning—it is that which imparts to the dry chips of Mr. Owen’s theory the semblance of vitality. He protests against the existence of that to which he owes his own pertinacity, and all the effects which it has been ever able to produce.
Combination, therefore, in its simpler forms, combination for the purpose of assisting the will of the majority, and enforcing its right to be heard and to rule; combination in the form of trades’ unions, and chartist unions (I use language derived from our English experience, but, I fear, by no means unintelligible to the members of other nations, at least not to Frenchmen); combination—not divested of religious sympathies, but with a piteous fury striving to seize and to appropriate them to its own purpose;—this, it seems to me, is much more really the characteristic of our times, is much more really fearful because it carries with it so many more elements of real power, than all the schemes and systems for the reconstruction of the universe. No doubt every one of these schemes embodies some truth which cannot be lost. The greatest happiness of the greatest number, though it may be the most idle and insignificant of all formulas till each one of its substantives and adjectives has been translated, must yet contain a meaning which will somehow or other be realised. The phrase, chacun selon sa capacité, indicates a persuasion of gifts appropriated to peculiar vocations and offices which we cannot afford to part with; the idea of co-operation, on which Owen dwells, is one of wonderful depth and importance. But each of these is chiefly remarkable as the shrine of a feeling which it cannot satisfy, and of a conviction which it labours to stifle—the feeling, I mean, that a universal society is needful to man; the conviction that if there be such a society, the treatment of man as a voluntary or a spiritual being must be the characteristic distinction of it.
Among the notions which Rousseau scattered about the world, some of the most striking and startling, as everyone knows, had reference to education. The commonwealth of Plato, said the author of “Emile,” is neither more nor less than a scheme of education; and when the true commonwealth which answers to that dream shall rise out of the ruins of the old form of society, the question, how education is to be conducted, will be the one which will absorb all others into itself. Men who started from the most opposite point to Rousseau, and took the most different directions from him and from each other, adopted this opinion. It began to be believed that education would be a substitute for prisons, penitentiaries, and hangmen, and that consequently, statesmen were, above all other men, bound to interest themselves in it. These feelings received a shock from the events of the French Revolution. As the awfulness and dignity of Law began again to be acknowledged, the notion of substituting more benignant influences for its punishments and terrors was scouted; the educational doctrine was regarded as part of the sentimental creed respecting the goodness of human nature; that creed having been proved to be absurd—it having been seen how little man, left to himself, either can do, or wishes to do, without prisons or guillotines—the different inferences from it must also be abandoned. To some such feelings as this language indicates—feelings which seldom shaped themselves into definite thoughts or arguments, but which exercised a powerful influence, nevertheless—we may attribute the dislike to popular education which was manifested, especially in England, by the supporters of existing institutions.
But both parties in the controversy had forgotten one important point—Education must henceforth, said the disciple of the new school, be the grand agent and influence in the world. Nonsense, replied the English country gentleman, we will stand in the old ways, we will do as our forefathers did before us. Well! but what are the old ways? what did our forefathers before us? History shews that they attached as much importance to education as Rousseau himself could do—that they believed it to be that without which prisons and penitentiaries were perfectly ineffectual, which had powers that were never intrusted to them. It is evident that they had no thought of confining education to any class, for they were continually making provision for the training of youths whose main qualification was their poverty. The discovery of this fact was fatal to the argument against the philosophers. For a time it decided the practical question in their favour. The old institutions for education had been abused in England by carelessness or selfishness, had been destroyed upon the continent by revolutionary violence; and in the one and the other were multitudes growing up with all the new notions about popular power and will, with all the new indisposition to bow down before authorities merely because they were established. Jails could not be provided for all, or if they could, it might in time be a question who would be the jailers. Therefore the statesmen began to say, we must have fresh schools; the old have served indifferently well to train those who have a national position; they are not meant for those masses which have none; they may train those who desire instruction, and will make sacrifices to obtain it; they can be of no service to those who look upon it scarcely as a blessing, who scarcely know what it means.
It is evident, I think, that these thoughts have worked a great change in the minds of all men upon these subjects. I say of all men, for the change is as remarkable in those who have declared education to be the panacea, as in those who have but lately been awakened to a sense of its necessity. The former used to urge the great advantage it would be to the poor to have the means of intellectual cultivation placed within their reach: how many new pleasures they would be able to command, how many temptations they might avoid. The latter were able to rebut such arguments by plausible appeals to fact. Did the boys of the schools acquire these new tastes? Were they the better for their knowledge? Was the population more refined or more moral? I know not where such controversies could end, or what violent twisting of statistics there might have been on each side in order to make out the theorem which was to be demonstrated. But the advocates of education now say, Look at these masses of human beings; it is not a question what you should do to amuse or benefit them, but what you must do in order to govern them, in order to prevent them from destroying the land and themselves. You have found the ordinary resources of government fail; you have proved how inadequate religion is when it only assumes the character of a support to law; you must resort to some other means. You may laugh at the notion of a silent moral influence, such as education pretends to possess, being sufficient; but does not history, do not these living masses, laugh at the notion of your physical appliances being efficient? Surely this is different language altogether. The answer to it is not easy. There is no answer to it but the sleepy determination not to think about the matter till we are compelled to think of it by a revolution.
In this change of language, however, some other changes are involved which may not be obvious. There may be a hundred differences about the instruction which ought to be communicated, and the persons who should communicate it, but those who defend education upon these grounds are agreed so far as this—Whatever be the right agency or instruments for getting a dominion over the will of these masses, it is the attainment of this dominion which is our object. It signifies not much in what phrases this object is expressed. I can easily conceive that earnest and able defenders of education may be loth to adopt the conviction into which I remarked that many political students had been led by comparing the theories and the events of the last fifty years—very loth to speak of man as a mysterious being, whose natural inclinations, if they be followed, make him a transgressor of law and order, and an enemy of his fellows, but who may be raised above those inclinations, may attain a true freedom which sets him above the penalty of laws because he has no wish to break them: such expressions may appear to them strange and fantastical, and most unlike those of the school in which they have been trained. Nevertheless they may mean very nearly what the persons who indulge in such odd mystical talk mean; they may confess by a number of words and acts that they do look upon education as a wondrous power which is to act upon men in a very wondrous manner; yet not in the way of a charm, not in a way inconsistent with their constitution: a power which is by some means to reach a faculty or principle, call it what you like, that swords and clubs cannot reach. There is, I think, a very general consent indeed about this point, however diverse the elements may be which make up that consent. For instance, those who say that it is hopeless to communicate religious instruction to all the members of a nation, and that, therefore, (what they call) secular instruction must be communicated to them first, defend the proposition upon these two grounds, one that the perils of leaving the people untaught are infinite, there being everywhere threatenings of popular outrage which the legislature cannot put down; the other, that there must be something common to all men, something which all men may receive, and that this cannot be the same with those sect-notions and opinions which manifestly do not belong to all. Such is the line of their argument. Taken simply as it stands, it does, I submit, lead us into reflections quite unlike any that would be naturally suggested by the ablest treatises on education in the last century. It sets us upon thinking what manner of power that must be which can address itself to a whole body of human creatures, and can call forth that in each of them which will give him the rights of Man, and make him a fellow-worker with his brethren. Sad experience has convinced thoughtful persons that the secret does not lie in the mechanical contrivances for bringing a number of children together in a school, which were produced as the perfect cure for the nation’s evils a few years ago. These contrivances organize and discipline masses into a certain stupid material consistency, or they call out now and then into dangerous self-exalting activity the powers of one or two clever pupils; they do not infuse into the whole body a quiet life, which may circulate regularly and continually through each of its distinct members. Again, the different Protestant systems and sects, as I have said already, are found inadequate for the purpose; they scarcely recognize the existence of that in the pupil which can be spoken to and called forth; they divide instead of harmonising. Still it would seem that there must be such a power somewhere—who shall tell us where?
The method which has been used for cutting this knot explains the last remarkable peculiarity in our modern political views. All those bodies which profess a voluntary character having been found unequal to the task of conducting education, the conclusion has appeared inevitable that the government of each nation should undertake the formation and superintendence of it. Anyone who has soberly set himself to consider in what way it is possible to provide for this dire necessity, will not be surprised that this should offer itself to hundreds as the only refuge from positive despair. However many cherished notions of personal and domestic liberty they may be obliged to abandon, however painful the thought may be that we in the nineteenth century have no better resource than that which we have learnt to consider unsatisfactory and dangerous in the old republics of Greece, still a wise lover of his species will not be hindered by such thoughts from adopting that which he is sure is the only practical means for its relief. But there are some perplexing reflections which will intrude themselves, before he attains to that perfect certainty. Is it not somewhat strange that we should be asserting this marvellous power for the state, just at the time when there is most reluctance to acknowledge even those powers which evidently do belong to it? Is not the Will of the multitude asserting its independence of the civil power, and are we not devising a remedy for this very exigency? Have not the governments in most European countries been for some time past rather hastily undressing themselves of the spiritual properties and functions to which they had in earlier times laid claim? Are not those called illiberal which hesitate to perform these acts of renunciation? and is it not a little inconsistent that these governments should at the selfsame moment be assuming that which, by their own confession, is in the very strictest and most remarkable sense an authority over the spirits of men? I say, by their own confession, for do we escape at all from the difficulty, by saying that the state shall only have the charge of secular education, other portions of it being left to more peculiar and individual interests? Is not this what we propose to ourselves by our education—the attainment of a certain influence over those human hearts which are cherishing such fearful dreams of independence and defiance? Is not this the very plea—the only plea for the state’s interference—that its existence is endangered by ignorance and self-will? And must not, therefore, the education of which the state undertakes the superintendence, most especially aim—by such means as seem the likeliest to answer—(it matters not what epithet you give them) at the accomplishment of this design?
This is a contradiction by which I fancy the practical statesman will be haunted continually; which will perplex him far more in action than even in meditation. To satisfy the cry for a power which shall not be merely legal, not merely punitive, but which shall act directly upon the human spirit, that the legal and punitive sanctions may make their appeal to the consciences of men, not to the fears of brutes—you inspire a body with this power, or at least you force it into acts implying this power, which is saying continually, that it can deal with nothing internal—can take cognizance only of overt acts. To satisfy the cry for a universal body, in which men shall be regarded as human beings and not merely as the members of a local society, you insist that the government of a local society shall assume to itself a universal human character, when all the new schemes for the management of the world are bearing witness that it never has had and never can have such a character; that its only security consists in its distinctions and limitations. Still the difficulty remains: if there be no spiritual universal society—and all attempts to create one in this nineteenth century have been very abortive—the state must, at any hazard of inconsistency, in despite of every danger to individual liberty, notwithstanding the strong and increasing feeling of its incompetency, assume the appearance and perform the duties of one.