PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE 
 
PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE 
 
 HISTORIC PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM MORTON FULLERTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF "IN CAIRO 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS 
 1893 
 
Copyright, 1898, 
 BY ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
 
 : 
 
 JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 
 
o mp father, 
 
 On whose library-shelves the sight of Plato touching shoulders 
 with John Howe the Puritan preacher, and of the poet Shelley 
 enduring with unwonted tranquillity his two odd companions on 
 either hand, Balzac and the author of the "Divine Legation of 
 Moses" while just beyond stood Lucretius, the "Thousand and 
 One Nights" and Adam Smith, suggested to me, the hoy, the 
 value of the social virtue of tolerance, and, although it impressed 
 at first the special charm of literature, suggested without much 
 ado the larger interest of life. 
 
NOTICE. 
 
 Two of the following essays appeared origin- 
 ally in the Fortnightly Review. They have since 
 been revised, and are now published together 
 under the title " English and 'Americans.' " The 
 other attempts at appreciation of the Time have 
 not before been printed. The dates affixed to 
 the two former are those of publication. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM AT THE 
 PRESENT TIME 13 
 
 ENGLISH ANff~AOTHHttAJJ|" 59 
 
 DEMOORACT;~WITH" EETERmraB-r^-A., .RECENT BOOK. 117 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM 
 AT THE PRESENT TIME. 
 
PATEIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 
 ON A CEETAIN DANGEE IN PATEIOTISM 
 AT THE PEESENT TIME. 
 
 THE word is by way of being pedantic, but how 
 little can one help wishing at times for a whole planet 
 of " philosophers ; " for although " philosophy can 
 bake no bread," and although there may be much 
 doubt whether it can "give us God, Freedom, and 
 Immortality," yet unquestionably, without that im- 
 pulse to comparing one thing with another which 
 results in a kind of liking for the condition of detach- 
 ment from each special fact known to us, a state 
 usually reached by a widely awakened man in the 
 world, and one which deserves to be known as philoso- 
 phic, there is the risk that we all, rendered clan- 
 nish by our confinement within particular geographical 
 barriers, or limited, perchance, by kinship of race, 
 may lose positive insights of value in regard to other 
 respectable, even interesting, sections of our human 
 fellows, not to speak of the loss of those superior 
 
 
14 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 pleasures that attend this " philosophic " detached con- 
 dition, the somewhat general, the so-called cosmopoli- 
 tan, or even the cosmical, way of looking at things. 
 
 Thus, for instance, a number of those especially 
 English 'qualities, so mixed of unlike elements as 
 almost to demand a suicidal phrase in description of 
 them, such a phrase, perhaps, as odious merits, all 
 those qualities, I mean, which have been frequently 
 so very obtrusive in the contact of the English people 
 with others in the recent eight hundred years, over 
 seas as well as in the English island, become, by reason 
 of the coagulating clannish drift in human nature, un- 
 fortunately contrasted with what, in the same general 
 way, I may be allowed to call the amiable defects of 
 the French; for by qualities permitting such euphe- 
 mistic description the French have usually been known 
 to the great practical, unimaginative " Saxon " world. 
 
 The result of the contrast between the amiable de- 
 fects and the odious merits has been a long story 
 of mutual misunderstanding. To disinterested critics 
 of the two peoples this misunderstanding is almost 
 pathetic, and to the gods of whom, surely, a spirit 
 of poetic justice still demands our pious recognition 
 it must be ironic. An approximately disinterested 
 observer, for this is all that any one of us can hope 
 to be, seeking to avoid, with equal caution, unscien- 
 tific laudation and unscientific depreciation of both 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 17 
 
 planet, and even become so chronic that there will 
 seem to be positively no cure. 
 
 I chanced not long ago upon an article in the Con- 
 temporary Review, 1 by a Mr. Edward Wakefield, on so 
 enticing a theme that I promptly bought the number 
 and read the article, " The Brand of Cain in the 
 Great Eepublic ; " and I read it, if not with pleasure, 
 at least with entertainment. It came to me, at the 
 time, as so happy an instance of the sort of thing 
 which may be called internationally unfortunate, the 
 fact that not all men can claim pretensions in a way 
 to being " philosophers, " wisdom-loving, to liking, I 
 mean, to find out the truth for its own sake, irrespec- 
 tive of the consequences, in an honest, scientific 
 fashion. For this article was one of those plausible 
 but unsatisfactory things which we all of us are sure to 
 produce if we have not the leaven of criticism to tem- 
 per the utterances made by us in that needlessly aver- 
 age state of ignorance of others that so surely results 
 in uncompromising patriotism. But patriotism is so 
 little laudable in itself that it appears to me to be posi- 
 tively vulgarizing and repressing if it be treasured at 
 the expense of the critical wider view, or, as M. le 
 Vicomte de Vogue says, the " passion for the planet," 
 a passion which reveals many relatively admirable 
 things everywhere about us, even among other peoples 
 1 November, 1891. 
 2 
 
 
18 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 than our own, and shows us that the humanized temper 
 named cosmopolitism I wish there were an exacter 
 word brings its reward as well as the Anglo-Hebraic 
 thing called patriotism. So that when this Mr. Wake- 
 field, in the not unnatural way of the English of the 
 island, although he wrote entertainingly and admira- 
 bly to the point, as a lawyer preparing a brief, recorded 
 in quick succession instance after instance of Ameri- 
 can love for the "smell of blood" (he found this 
 phrase in a poem of the late Mr. Lowell, and made 
 effective use of it), I, although I listened, could not 
 help immediately putting him down on the list of 
 those admirable patriotic writers who clearly deserve 
 pensions and button-hole ribbons from their states, 
 but who cannot be classed among the critics of the 
 finer breed, whose country's boundaries, not for practi- 
 cal social purposes, but for the responsible exactions 
 of authorship, is somewhat wider than that, at least, 
 of their native state. For here is what Mr. Wakefield 
 wrote : 
 
 " The Americans take a most curious view of this kind 
 of killing. [He refers to homicides.] They consider [sic] 
 that any man may rightly shoot another from whom he 
 thinks himself in danger of a blow or any hurt, or even 
 from whom he has had bad words." 
 
 Then again : 
 
 " In all ranks of society, even in New York and Phila- 
 delphia, men are to be met with who have taken life, who 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER TN PATRIOTISM. 19 
 
 are not ashamed of themselves for it, and whose friends are 
 not ashamed of them either." 
 
 And once more : 
 
 " Boys, and even women, quite commonly take the life of 
 a fellow-creature in the United States, and if 'provoca- 
 tion ' or any strong emotion can be shown, it is thought 
 rather creditable to them than otherwise." 
 
 Quite commonly, and rather creditable to them 
 than otherwise ! And Mr. Wakefield uses the word 
 " Americans, " which is inclusive. But still one more 
 quotation : 
 
 " It will doubtless shock and surprise worthy people in 
 England, who do not know much about America, to hear 
 that burning alive is practised in that free and enlightened 
 country a century after it has been abandoned in Spain 
 and Italy." 
 
 Really, in the face of so terrible an indictment, and 
 if the " Americans " be so hopelessly, reekingly red- 
 handed as all this, what can we all be but pessimists 
 in regard to democracy, pessimists of the darkest 
 shade? Where is there for us any hope? And if 
 what Mr. Wakefield says be true, the title of his 
 article, so successfully reproducing the inimitable char- 
 acteristics of the headlines of the journals of this detes- 
 table United States of North America, deserves for its 
 achievements in what is frequently known as " local 
 colour," considerable praise. But, seriously, imagine 
 
20 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 the late Walter Bagehot, or M. Boutmy to-day in 
 France, writing like this! Imagine these gentlemen 
 pointing out a number of lamentable facts in regard to 
 life in the United States of North America, and then 
 making of such facts so little critical use as to set down 
 in responsible but corrupting black type on virginal 
 white paper the unqualified assertions about " boys, and 
 even women, " who " quite commonly " indulge in the 
 extremely unsociable acts named, and about the " prac- 
 tice " of " burning alive " rivalling in its painful fea- 
 tures the supposed customs of Spain and Italy a cen- 
 tury ago. Imagine them collecting these instances, 
 and not arranging such instances in their proper 
 places, in that correct perspective so dear to the scien- 
 tist ; not, for example, to name but one kind of ob- 
 vious reservation, assuring their readers that while 
 every one of the odious events recorded could often 
 be paralleled in this land of individual assertion, the 
 sort of thing, says Mr. Wakefield, that the Americans 
 like in women, and dub an " excitable temperament, " 
 the only possible light in which his discussion can be 
 seen to be of any value is had when a comparison 
 is drawn between, on the one side, the habits of these 
 .enormously-diffused and red-handed people of the 
 United States of North America, and, on the other, the 
 conduct of the peoples of the United Kingdom (and 
 it is unfortunate for him that this name includes the 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 21 
 
 Ireland of the last ten years), of the whole of Europe, 
 and even of a part of Asia as well. For the commu- 
 nity of the United States of North America is a very 
 varied one; it is scattered over what the majority of 
 its members are always apt to assert loudly is the 
 greatest country in the world, and it is moreover a 
 collection of almost autonomous states, somewhat simi- 
 lar, in this respect of decentralization, to the political 
 relations of the people of Greek cantoris in their brief 
 periods of confederation, a fact of which, however, I 
 would not do Mr. Wakefield the injustice to deny that 
 he is aware. But in failing to point out this much of 
 the whole and real bearing of his unimpeachable facts, 
 and therefore of others like them, Mr. Wakefield's 
 entertaining article became comparatively valueless, 
 without useful point. I have paid to it almost unfair 
 attention. I cite these passages only as an illustration 
 of the unsatisfactory results we are all apt to produce 
 if we write as patriots rather than as critics, and of 
 the loss of positive insights that we suffer if we come 
 at relative things like ourselves and our neighbours in 
 so uncritical a mood. 
 
 So again, indeed, may the same thing be seen in 
 the relations of us Scotch and English, wherever we 
 may have been born, with the not very colonizing 
 French. The English, with their one great idea, their 
 love for institutions, a love however which is no 
 
 
22 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 passion, but with their dogged grip of this, and with 
 their practical honesty, and their extraordinary energy, 
 cannot be expected in general to see great virtue in a 
 people who, like the French, really think spontane- 
 ously, and who think so much that their thinking 
 would seem to have tended to stunt the race physi- 
 cally, the energy being devoted to the elaboration of 
 the folded gray matter in the brain rather than to the 
 rounding of muscles and the reddening of cheeks ; and 
 when these French people not only think, but often 
 put their thinking violently, indecorously into action, 
 how can the English be blamed for having their peculiar 
 opinion in regard to French lack of self-control, and 
 French childishness and caprice ? Blamed for inevi- 
 table opinions? Human nature, at the hands of the 
 critic, at least, never need suffer this injustice. But 
 when it is remembered that what is censured thus in 
 the opinion of Englishmen are the frequently intolerable 
 results arising from the possession by Frenchmen of 
 certain things of which Englishmen have so little, but 
 without which undoubtedly, however, one must ad- 
 mit that they have got on extremely well, the censure, 
 while intelligible, may be appreciated at its worth. 
 The censure receives its proper interpretation as a 
 failure to understand, whereas corresponding censure 
 of Englishmen by Frenchmen has almost always 
 tended to be more critical. It has usually been this 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 23 
 
 English failure to understand which has created the 
 antipathy that England has felt with reference to 
 France. But ignorant sneer on the one side has been 
 met on the other by supercilious disdain. It is con- 
 ceivable that some one might argue that the antipathy 
 is rather an international hostility of peoples that 
 have often met perforce of geographical accidents on 
 the field of battle; that the English, for instance, 
 never can forget that once upon a time their Edward 
 III. was repulsed before the clock-towers of Chartres 
 in the green meadows of the Beauce, and the French 
 that the beau pays was cut and desolated by the 
 horse-hoofs of the English Plantagenets ; France that 
 she lost an empire in America and in India, and that 
 to-day the valley of the Kile, whose unspeakable charm 
 French men, more than any other men, have rendered 
 intelligible and seductive throughout the world, is 
 becoming only one more play-ground for a mastering 
 race who love, better than the tombs of Ti, the fine 
 game of polo, and who dress in scarlet uniforms with- 
 in sight of the abashed eyelids of the Sphinx. All 
 this has its force undoubtedly. But even these not- 
 able achievements of English energy are not the things 
 that have done the most to cleave the gulf : the Eng- 
 lish recall them only as one more evidence of their 
 divine right as the chosen people, and of the clear 
 proof of French inferiority; the French remember 
 
 
24 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 them as proof that in all the assumption of comparison 
 in regard to physical prowess and the great tenacious 
 virtues perhaps the English are right; but they half 
 learn the lesson and this is a great merit that their 
 own distinction, which is of quite another order, 
 should not be lightly esteemed. The antipathy that 
 exists is, I repeat, the duel of uncomprehending sneer 
 and of supercilious disdain. And what the French 
 in their more analysing, critical way lay up against the 
 English, and find infinite difficulty in forgetting, are 
 incidents of a very different sort. 
 
 Now, all this crude, uncritical feeling is surely a 
 great mistake. It certainly stands full in the way of 
 one of the things for which we all ought to strive, a 
 completer knowledge of what other men have done 
 everywhere in the world, without distinction of blood 
 or home; and the cultivating of a loud-mouthed pa- 
 triotism, for its own sake as an end, would seem to 
 retard the comity between the nations which certainly 
 might bring us now other incalculable advantages 
 perhaps quite as good as those that, as we are told, 
 patriotism alone can offer us. 
 
 I have said " might bring us. " But I should very 
 much regret giving an impression that I am unaware 
 of what a great virtue patriotism has been in the 
 world, and still is. When one thinks of Greece, when 
 one thinks of Eome, when one thinks of Israel, when 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 25 
 
 one thinks of New England, what first comes to the 
 mind of us all, no, what first comes to the mind even 
 especially of the average among us who are not 
 scholars, and do not know these places in all the in- 
 complete detail of their history, if it is not the com- 
 pactness of these peoples, their aggressiveness, their 
 unity, their national consciousness, their common 
 pride, and their devotion to the often narrow but 
 always definite and tangible ideals of their own na- 
 tional temperament, in a word, their patriotism ? And 
 in contrast to all this, what I will not ask is the 
 common opinion held of men who have betrayed their 
 countries, but what do the professional historians in- 
 sist on telling us about these very same peoples when 
 these writers enter curiously into an analysis of the 
 causes of their disintegration or their fall, if at the 
 most all that they say may not be summed up in the 
 assertion that when matters became so shockingly bad 
 it was because the old feeling of patriotism no longer 
 stirred men's minds as in the periods of " glorious 
 unity " and livelier self-consciousness 1 But while 
 patriotism seems to have been hitherto a name for the 
 great unifying impulse that made peoples, although not 
 necessarily amiable, yet strong; and although the ab- 
 sence of it may now and then be a positive social crime, 
 like treason, or regicide, or what you will of the same 
 sort, it is conceivable that at other times and in quite 
 
26 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 other conditions its virtue may not appear so obvious, 
 but may even positively evaporate. For patriotism has 
 up to our century served its place in history not, 
 surely everybody will admit, as a necessarily demon- 
 strable good in itself, but as a good only because it 
 served other ends which for men, at each time when 
 it has been so rife, were clearly demonstrable goods, 
 if they themselves were to live at all in any sort of 
 ordered way. But suppose that a time arrive in 
 which the end sought to be obtained by the cultiva- 
 tion of the mood and the duty of patriotism is no 
 longer so important as before ; when not merely it is 
 no longer necessary that men should be kept asunder 
 for their own collective or individual good, but also 
 indeed very important that they should, on the other 
 hand, be brought quickly closer and closer together, 
 in order that they may not be slow in accepting and 
 appreciating the multitudinous hints and suggestions 
 of a great fresh mechanical century like our own, 
 with railroads and telegraphs and all that, then surely 
 something of the glory that hangs about the word 
 patriotism would begin to fade. Can one not imagine 
 even the possibility of "cosmopolitism" exciting in 
 these circumstances an equally virtuous passion? Is 
 it even positively irreligious to conceive an era of in- 
 ternational comity when the epitaph, " He died for his 
 country," may arouse in the mind of the spectator 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 27 
 
 rather a thought of pity for the poor fellow permitted 
 thus by his rather barbaric, rather uncritical neigh- 
 bours to be a victim of such an absurd necessity, than 
 of unmixed admiration for any inimitable heroism 
 enshrined in the phrase? 
 
 Well, it appears to me that into such a time as this 
 men are now entering, though we ourselves are pretty 
 certain not to see it ; but at all events patriotism is not 
 at all the thing it was. And while for a good, or bad , 
 time longer some of men's highest devotions will still 
 cling to this ideal, there is the sign of the change. 
 Yet the lack of prejudice and the unwillingness to 
 censure such hitherto odious proverbs as Ubi bene, ibi 
 patria, and the utter disappearance of those sec- 
 tional and national prejudices that made Beranger 
 once so absorbing, and Jacob's Ode on Privilege so 
 magnificent, so picturesque, and makes to-day some 
 of our patriotic verse so unpoetical, like the loud 
 cracking in the wind of a stiffly starched national 
 flag, while these various dreams, I say, remain still 
 unfulfilled, and as they are sure to remain unfulfilled 
 so long, there can be no danger even of a little exag- 
 geration in one's utterance as to the merits of even 
 other peoples than one's own. Proper criticism can 
 thereby only be helped, and we shall certainly be sure 
 of not in any way retarding the stream of tendency. 
 
 It is the more needful, moreover, that this or that 
 
28 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 one of us who finds himself at liberty to speak should 
 not resist the interpretation of the time, that the very 
 things which are making such inroads on patriotism, 
 namely, all those forces which are magically reducing 
 the earth's circumference, will undoubtedly, still for 
 some time longer, have locally quite the opposite effect, 
 and will make men think more about the things 
 within their own most limited horizon even than they 
 did before. For it is these very forces which are now 
 drawing together the inquisitive world, and which will 
 eventually draw together the whole world, that are 
 waking up men, and suggesting to them new problems, 
 and worrying them terribly to-day with apparently all 
 but insoluble questions. This is why, whether we 
 like it or dislike it, or whether we ought to like it or 
 dislike it, patriotism will still have its ample field, 
 and may reap its legitimate glorious rewards. 
 
 Take such an event as happened the other day 
 in France in connection with the question always so 
 important there of the relations between church and 
 state, when an archbishop, a certain Monseigneur 
 Gouthe-Soulard, refused to accept loyally the repub- 
 lican regime, and in very irresponsible ways lent the 
 force of his great parochial authority to strengthening 
 the various local elements of resistance and obstruc- 
 tion, one might almost say of sedition, against the 
 whole idea of the present republican government. 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 29 
 
 The incident was really so interesting that I think it 
 
 m 
 important to refer to it at some length ; it happened in 
 
 this fashion. 
 
 Every one knows how the power of the Pope in x v 
 temporal things has been, for the moment, curtailed 
 throughout the world; how in Home, the city of the 
 Holy Father, if it be remembered how glorious that 
 condition once was, his condition may really, after all, 
 be said to be to-day what the faithful are always as- 
 serting it to be, almost that of a prisoner in a palace; 
 and every one can understand how the loyal host of the 
 clergy, " vicars of Christ, " often chafe against this 
 state of things, and regard it as something to be 
 changed at any cost. So it is not incomprehensible 
 that much activity should be expended in recovering 
 the former majesty and dominance, and, to those who 
 know France, that special energy of this kind should 
 emanate from there. For just as in China at the 
 present moment all Chinese gentlemen of good birth 
 are unable to conceive how they can be at once China- 
 men and Christians, missionaries and all that being 
 to them only the advance guard of the European 
 civilization which undermines their own, so that it 
 appears to them complete disloyalty, absolute anti- 
 patriotism in a purely political sense, to accept the 
 strenuous notions of the foreigner, so in France, now 
 for many years, to be a republican, to accept the 
 
 
30 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 republican regime, has been to many really like an 
 abjuration before men of Christianity itself; has been 
 almost, indeed, to proclaim oneself an atheist. And 
 it was the monarchy, and only the monarchy, which, 
 it has been widely imagined, cared for religion, and 
 in particular cared for the Koman Catholic Church. 
 It is not necessary now to consider why such a 
 notion arose, or whether it was well or ill founded. 
 I need point out only that it was very rife, and still 
 is very rife, 1 notwithstanding in many respects its 
 manifest injustice and inaccuracy, and the significant 
 efforts of men like Cardinal Lavigerie, the Bishop of 
 Annecy, and indeed even the great head of the Church 
 himself, in his general attitude of disapproval of war- 
 like rebellious methods, to stem the torrent. So with 
 so widespread a feeling in the country it is not sur- 
 prising that Roman Catholic Christians, a little hot- 
 
 1 Since these lines were written, indeed only within the last 
 few weeks, there has been a great change. The Pope, Leo 
 XIII., has spoken in clear, irritating accents ; he has recognized 
 the Republic ; the Comte de Mun, former leader in the Chamber 
 of the " Royalist right," has abandoned his old position ; and 
 all along the line there is hesitation and dismay. For France 
 1892 is the most memorable year since the war. It has seen 
 the alliance of Russia with that country, and the Pope's irre- 
 vocable decision to accept the present regime as established. 
 France, notwithstanding the scandal of Panama, holds in the 
 world a position of dignity to-day more admirable than at any 
 other time in its history. 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 31 
 
 headed, and owing allegiance first to their faith, should 
 conceive such a scheme as was conceived in France. 
 Pilgrimages, called pilgrimages of French workmen, 
 were arranged, and some twenty thousand of these 
 " workmen " were despatched to Eome with the 
 avowed object of offering to the Holy Father a solid 
 proof of the undiminished loyalty of France to the 
 Holy See. Wise men, thinking of the strained rela- 
 tions of France and Italy in these days of the renewed 
 Triple Alliance; thinking of the friction between 
 Italy and the Vatican ; and thinking of the multitude 
 of latent possibilities of something, of many things, 
 going wrong, when twenty thousand foreigners were 
 suddenly precipitated in such circumstances into a 
 foreign capital, were greatly troubled at the prospect. 
 But the Government, though it had the chance of 
 wise action, and was as alive as possible to the danger, 
 in reality said nothing, did nothing. It overlooked, 
 with a leniency that testified to its real dread in the 
 whole matter, rather than to a firm tactfulness, several 
 violations of the Concordat of Napoleon, such, for 
 instance, as M. Gouthe-Soulard's going at all to Rome 
 without seeking the permission of the Minister of 
 Public Worship, and it awaited the issue. 
 
 The issue came, not as big with complications, for- 
 tunately, as might have been the case, but yet serious. 
 This is what happened. A large number of pilgrims 
 
32 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 went one day to the Pantheon, and one of them wrote 
 in what may be called the visitors' book, next to the 
 tomb of Victor Emmanuel, Vive le Pape Roi. The 
 news of this indiscretion, soon undistinguishable from 
 an insult, transpired among the Roman populace as 
 flames move among things combustible, and a tumult 
 arose, and some hard hitting occurred, and some 
 unfriendly phrases were tossed about. At the head 
 of the procession had been carried the tricolour of 
 "France, and it was little wonder that, the explosion 
 once fired, the detonations went rolling up and down 
 through Italy, and that even the Italian Government 
 was forced to take notice, and to ask if France had 
 not been very indiscreet, and what she meant by such 
 indiscretion. So French diplomacy stepped in, and 
 there were apologies, which some of the Catholics of 
 France asserted were a staining and a humiliation of 
 the flag, and what might have become a very serious 
 affair indeed was smoothed over. However, lest 
 there should be something further of the same sort, 
 the Minister of Public Worship, though late in his 
 intervention, wrote the following very proper letter to 
 the bishops and archbishops of France : 
 
 " You know the incidents so to be regretted which have 
 just occurred at Rome during the pilgrimages known as 
 pilgrimages of ' French workmen.' You are too alive to the 
 best interests of the nation not to think, with me, that all 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 33 
 
 the authorities of the country ought to avoid becoming 
 compromised in demonstrations which may easily lose their 
 religious character. I therefore have the honour to invite 
 you to abstain for the moment from all participation in 
 these pilgrimages." 
 
 Could anything have been more admirably proper 1 
 And this was the language of the secular superior of 
 all the ecclesiastical functionaries of France, a man 
 who certainly had the right to command compliance 
 in all the interests of patriotism. In this spirit, it is 
 gratifying to record, it was received everywhere. But 
 this Monseigneur Gouthe-Soulard chose to take it 
 quite otherwise, and wrote a letter in reply which, 
 considering all the circumstances, such things, that 
 is, as the difficulty the republican government, which 
 is undoubtedly now the only form suitable to the 
 modern France, has always found in inspiring respect 
 among monarchists of an impossible loyalty, and the 
 way the Church has been always unnecessarily mixed 
 up in this dissension; such things as that he himself 
 owed his place to the present administration; such 
 things as that by putting spokes in the wheels of the 
 government in thus breaking its laws, he retarded 
 greatly, by reason of his high influence, the desirable 
 end of pacification, and the impression of dignity and 
 solidity so important for France to give to the world 
 if it would regain its political eminence among the 
 
 3 
 
34 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 Great Powers, considering all this sort of thing, I 
 say, Monseigneur Gouthe-Soulard's letter, rehearsing 
 false histories of republican persecution, and denying 
 much too vivaciously the authority of the government, 
 and thus by implication the duty of all men to keep 
 the laws of the land, was one of the most unpatriotic 
 documents ever produced. I would wish to print this 
 letter intact, and the record of subsequent events, in- 
 cluding the archbishop's defence at his trial, and the 
 able review of the case made by M. Beaurepaire, the 
 Procureur-General, for the entire incident is of in- 
 terest; but it is not necessary to devote more space 
 to what is, after all, for me now only an illustration. 
 The archbishop's whole conception of his duty was 
 very inadequate, and he and those who went with 
 him in his defence were wanting in a proper sense of 
 patriotism; and this illustrates why the need of a right 
 sense as to this thing should still be pressing. And so 
 it must continue, it must be perennial, so long as such 
 questions as this one in France exist, the duty there of 
 loyalty, of harmony, of unity, even at a good deal of 
 personal cost ; or so long as the United States in North 
 America persists in not opening its eyes quite widely 
 to great questions like that of immigration, or the re- 
 form of the civil service ; or so long as such a thing 
 may happen as that a distinguished scholar like M. 
 Clermont-Ganneau shall be prevented from obtaining 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 35 
 
 his legitimate recognition as the real discoverer of 
 the remarkable historic frauds associated with the 
 name of the distinguished Shapira, prevented because 
 of the singular notion that it really matters more to 
 what country a wise man belongs than whether he 
 be wise ; so long, for instance, as people of Irish blood 
 in America confound the word " nationality " with the 
 word " nation ; " or so long as the English conscience 
 does not in some way summon to its aid (against all the 
 ideals of the liberty of the press and the equality of 
 all before the law) some ingenious scheme to alter its 
 present modes of procedure in the divorce court, re- 
 sulting in such unpleasant and unnecessary revelations 
 as we all nowadays are being let read as the result 
 of the most approved and modern systems of cross- 
 examination. 
 
 So let patriotism have its due as a great thing in 
 the world still, both as incentive and as duty. There 
 will always be a kind of moral persuasion upon most 
 people, a force emanating directly from the community 
 in which they are born, which will keep them in those 
 moods which are known as loyal or patriotic, even if 
 it does not lead them to exaggerate the power of these 
 fine ideas; and although, as I have been showing, 
 people often make mistakes and get false ideas about 
 patriotism and loyalty, so that in reality they may not 
 be half patriotic enough, the common sense of the 
 
36 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 community may sometimes be left to correct such 
 errors and lessen the dangers of the exaggerated or 
 false patriotism. So this danger may be put out of 
 account in appreciating the value of patriotism, and 
 the necessity of it in a certain sense may be granted 
 without more ado. But what I said at first about the 
 change in the force and extent of its persuasiveness in 
 the world to-day is the main point upon which I 
 would insist. There is no doubt about that : patriot- 
 ism is no longer the thing it was. 
 
 A real service is done to others always in expressing 
 freshly their common but unspoken conviction upon 
 any serious matter. A writer who does this runs a 
 chance of being read, and indeed risks almost all of 
 the other dangerous honours upon the long Appian 
 Way of the classics, so constantly overrun by the 
 Goths and Vandals of letters. I lay no claim to the 
 possession of a heart eager for encounters with any of 
 these breezy Northmen. But the chief corroboration 
 of my way of thinking on these matters of patriotism 
 and cosmopolitism as contrasted ideals for the moment 
 (although they overlap again and again in reality) is, 
 after all, the fact that I chance, without originality, 
 to be expressing only the common and increasing, 
 but as yet unconfessed, conviction of most widely 
 awakened men in all countries, a conviction which 
 has been forced upon them by the very growth and 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 37 
 
 expansion of the time. Every moment makes a com- 
 pacter Earth, and makes the thought and act of each 
 of the most indifferent of us more responsible and 
 quickly efficient things than ever they have been be- 
 fore. And the first great effect of this world-contrac- 
 tion is just this growing suspicion as to the absolute 
 value of international barriers, and this opening of 
 individual minds, which have made patriotism not 
 at all the thing it was. But " common sense " in a 
 community a thing which is a very justly vaunted 
 mark of English-speaking communities cannot uni- 
 formly as yet be trusted to be really sane in any large 
 sort of way. There is unfortunately no assurance, as 
 all these random illustrations with which we have 
 been dealing indicate, that " common sense " as yet 
 even in this rapidly contracting world can unfail- 
 ingly detect the true patriotism from the false. 
 " Common sense " is very short-sighted. " Common 
 sense " has not even the privilege of clairvoyance. 
 " Common sense " is a very dogged, persistent foe of 
 the ideal, and it rarely generalises rapidly enough for 
 events. 
 
 This is what English history is always betraying, 
 and never more painfully than at the present time. 
 The English a people who pass for being logical, but 
 who stumble on their course more heavily weighted 
 than any other people in a kind of ponderous sabot of 
 
 
38 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 " common sense " of a certain sort are, unfortunately 
 for themselves, not really logical after all. Happily 
 the clog-gait, however, and oddly enough, is a positive 
 gain for humanity. 
 
 Consider for a moment the English record. The 
 Romans may have been as successful as the English 
 have been in the reorganisation of conquered provinces, 
 in the civilising of the outer world less complicated 
 than that just beyond the walls of Rome and beyond 
 Italy ; but no modern peoples have shown anything like 
 English ability in reconstructing in a special mould 
 various and utterly alien races, for no modern peoples 
 have had just the English tangible ideal, their practi- 
 cal genius for institutions. With this thought in the 
 mind one looks about one's planet with astonishment. 
 Undeviating energy, such as went to the making of 
 New England and then leapt to the westward over the 
 Alleghanies ; such as crystallised, legalised, let me say 
 institutionised, the vast and varied nationalities of 
 India ; such as is now disporting itself in its final field 
 of activity, the great new world of Africa of the South, 
 is both admirable, and Unrivalled. And Egypt needs 
 not be omitted from this list. Yet this energy, arising 
 from the need of healthy activity, and a very narrow, 
 unphilosophic, but practical passion for personal ag- 
 grandisement, has always (I cannot think of an ex- 
 ception on any large scale) been an extremely selfish 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 39 
 
 impulse. Breadth of vision, ideality, the sense of 
 humanity (except and not always then 1 when 
 interpreted to this people in ideas of justice or in- 
 justice), have not been English marks ; and yet without 
 these native characteristics, even any intimate sense 
 of common kinship, when portions of the same nation 
 are separated by wide, estranging seas, inevitably tends 
 to disappear. The individual problems, the individ- 
 ual interests, are usually all-important to the English, 
 and the general drift has always been the same in this 
 race wherever a cleavage has occurred. Australia and 
 Canada to-day are loyal chiefly from inertia and from 
 gallantry ; the centre of gravity of their patriotism has 
 shifted, and is no longer at Greenwich. It is not 
 needful to prove so obvious a remark. An exceptional 
 and perhaps laudable astuteness in political conduct 
 could even have withstood for a little this very omnipo- 
 
 1 Civis Romanus sum was a grand cry. Of its best intent 
 we have an inkling in the " idea " of the Emperor Marcus 
 Aurelius, the idea " of a polity in which there is the same law 
 for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and 
 equal freedom of a people, and the idea of a kingly govern- 
 ment which respects most of all the freedom of the governed." 
 But, as Mr. Gladstone, in the famous debate in the English 
 Parliament in 1850, on the claims of Don Pacifico, declared, 
 the phrase has a certain " inapplicability to the condition and 
 claims of an English citizen." English blood, however, usually 
 finds much difficulty in throbbing in consonance with this 
 opinion. 
 
 
40 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 tence in the onrush of the time. Colonial loyalty and 
 patriotism could have heen directed yet a while still to 
 the same island centre, and we should not even now 
 be hearing Sir Richard Cartwright and Mr. Cecil 
 Ehodes delivering speeches which in an "unconstitu- 
 tional " monarchy would be thought high treason, 
 and even but three hundred years ago in England 
 had been punished as such. Such astuteness, how- 
 ever, is not in the English blood. Fortunately for 
 the interests of humanity, English patriotism, while 
 not really of the large stamp, being so maladroitly 
 fanned, is having, however, the best of results; and 
 this digression shows, I believe, what I meant in say- 
 ing that the clog-gait is sweet music in His Holiness 
 the Zeitgeist's ears ; for this august personage is work- 
 ing avowedly in the interests of humanity, rather than 
 in those of any particular, even the most amiable or 
 worthy, section of it. 
 
 But let the illustration of English colonisation be 
 pursued, indeed, with even more analysis still. Take 
 such an article as I read the other day in the Times 
 on the largest and most interesting of modern English 
 institutions, the British South Africa Company. 
 The article to which I refer appeared just on the day 
 before the first regular meeting of this immense or- 
 ganization was to be held in London, and it was con- 
 ceived in a really uncommon spirit of frankness. It 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 41 
 
 was written, moreover, not only with candour, but, 
 on the whole, with literary probity. But scattered 
 throughout this article were a number of sentence* - 
 like this: 
 
 "Germany fortunately was not then ripe for colonia 
 
 enterprise." 
 
 Then, speaking of a proposed German expedition 
 into Matabele Land from Walfish Bay, in 1885, this 
 article said : 
 
 " Fortunately, by an accidental circumstance the expedi- 
 tion was postponed, and our government had time to realise 
 the seriousness of the situation." 
 
 Now, such passages as these are inspired, naively 
 inspired, with the very breath of the old admirable 
 patriotism, the patriotism which, after love of God 
 and love of father and mother, all conventionally 
 brought up young people in most Christian countries 
 have learned to be binding. And although it would 
 be a simple thing instantly to add many a passage 
 more efficient for my purpose, none needs be better. 
 For how self -revealed, in all its fine boyish inade- 
 quateness, such a patriotism is. Like a rosy baby in 
 a bath, Patriotism stands here naked and unashamed. 
 As it happens, indeed, the Times is positively right. 
 It is a fortunate thing, if somebody's conscience is to 
 be saddled with the weighty responsibility of setting 
 
42 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 a-rolling across Africa over native bodies the great 
 bespangled Juggernaut car of civilisation, that that 
 conscience should be English; for when Englishmen 
 are confronted before Rhadamanthus with the debit 
 account against them of the long list of murders and 
 of selfish plunderings which always mark the path of 
 the Christian peoples in new lands, and especially 
 of this one, as the long tragedy of the American 
 Indians illustrates, they may be able to commute the 
 death-sentence to a paltry twenty years' penal servi- 
 tude, perhaps, owing merely to the proofs afforded on 
 the credit page of the same ledger of the speed with 
 which bridges and roads, and post-offices and telegraph 
 lines, and schools and churches and courts, have 
 sprung up, more numerous in South Africa in five 
 years than would have been the case in twenty under 
 any other bandits. But this, I fancy, was not the 
 line of thought of the writer of these sentences; and 
 the content of his words, what he himself sought to 
 express, and did express even more completely than 
 he imagined at the time, was simply his own patriot- 
 ism, the intense loyalty of the English marrow. The 
 facts throughout his article are given, I imagine, with 
 fairness. In one place the writer even speaks in 
 hostile criticism of some of the methods of the Com- 
 pany in question, in such terms as follow : " Just 
 such blunders as these have been committed by Eng- 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 43 
 
 lishmen with respect to similar enterprises in Africa 
 and elsewhere during the past four hundred years." 
 And of no man speaking with reference to his coun- 
 trymen shall we ever expect more than this in the 
 way of criticism ; such frankness is positively touching. 
 But this unwitting, most natural, interpretation of the 
 facts is an interesting thing. The spirit of it is so 
 uncritical; so uncritical, although, after all, what is 
 said, is so true. It reminds one directly of the still 
 more patriotic way that the Hebrew writers had, of 
 the style, for instance, of the Homeric hook of Judges. 
 One passage in particular returns to me in the force 
 of all its unpremeditated charm. It was in the time 
 of the wars with Ammon, when Jephthah, a " mighty 
 man of valour, " indeed the most notorious foot-pad of 
 the time, deigned to parley with the outrageous inso- 
 lence of the Ammonites in their desire to recover land 
 formerly taken from them hy the Israelites when they 
 issued from Egypt. Jephthah sent messengers to the 
 Ammonites, and in fact did so more than once, mes- 
 sengers whom he instructed to deny absolutely the 
 legal right of that people to the land in dispute ; and 
 he asserted his position with a strenuous, persistent, 
 but naive eloquence which on every other rule of in- 
 ternational law than that associated with the name of 
 Rob Hoy, who was surely among the most conspicu- 
 ous to apply the principle of the survival of the fittest 
 
44 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 to these questions, was really sophistical. The gist 
 of his position was briefly, in his own language, 
 this: 
 
 " So now the Lord, the God of Israel, hath dispossessed 
 the Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldest 
 thou possess them ? Wilt not thou possess that which 
 Chemosh they god giveth thee to possess '? So whomsoever 
 the Lord our God hath dispossessed from before us, them will 
 we possess." 
 
 There is no gainsaying this, it is so admirably 
 direct, it is so strenuously patriotic. But between 
 these words and those of the writer in the Times, 
 "fortunately, by an accidental circumstance the 
 expedition was postponed, and our government had 
 time to realise the seriousness of the situation, " how 
 little difference there is! The formulas are altered. 
 The writer in the Times speaks of " accidental 
 circumstances " where his predecessor talks about 
 " the Lord God of Israel. " But the spirit of the two 
 writers is quite the same, so much so, indeed, that 
 it would almost seem quite in the face of all that 
 I have been saying that patriotism is as much as 
 ever patriotism, and that I have been hopelessly 
 wrong. 
 
 But there is a difference, nevertheless, and the 
 change in the formulas is a great thing. All this talk 
 about England's splendid gift for dominance, her prac- 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 45 
 
 tical genius for colonisation, and the parallel between 
 the style of the writer in the Times and that of the 
 author of Judges, are useful in gradually bringing us 
 nearer to a more critical sense of what patriotism 
 really is, and what patriotism should be, and even 
 when it should not exist at all. And as I said, a use- 
 ful thing for us all is to know how to detect the true 
 patriotism from the false, lest ever, in being quite 
 patriotic according to the " common sense " of the 
 community into which our parents precipitated us, 
 we likewise succeed all unwittingly in being really 
 ridiculous, and in losing the advantages of a certain 
 larger air. But the inquiry, though always one which, 
 inevitably, we shall be pursuing individually forever, 
 can never cease to be anything but complex, indeed 
 must become rapidly more and more complex for all of 
 us. It was a comparatively simple thing for Jephthah 
 to make up his patriotic mind as to his proper line of 
 conduct at a time when the great duty of a leader was 
 to create the feeling of unity and nationality, and to 
 secure, at any cost, compactness of national fibre ; and 
 it is not much more complicated a question for Lord 
 Salisbury to-day to see that English imperial safety, 
 English patriotism, demands an understanding with 
 the Sultan regarding Egypt, and the giving of every 
 facility in South Africa to the great companies there 
 which, incidentally in search of territory and of gold, 
 
46 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 are seeking only to abolish slavery in those regions. 1 
 But the problem is not so simple for Englishmen in 
 Canada, in Newfoundland, in Ireland, in Australia; 
 was not the other day for citizens of the North American 
 United States in respect to Chili, or now in Behring 
 Sea, or the Isthmus of Panama, or when they have 
 to legislate on immigration and naturalisation ; for the 
 Tsar in respect to Finland ; for the Emperor Erancis 
 Joseph, with Count Apponyi and the young Tzechs 
 and the Croats on his hands at once, or when he 
 remembers that he is a good Catholic, and at the same 
 time the second great factor of the Triple Alliance; 
 for the Emperor of China, with the officiousness of 
 England and America, anxious about their missiona- 
 ries, to cope with ; above all, for the German Emperor, 
 inoculated with the imperial blood of the hierarchic 
 Hohenzollerns, the incarnation of one of the two great 
 principles surviving from the times of superstition which 
 science and criticism have now almost sent to the 
 limbo of useless human inventions, divine right and 
 
 1 Though this sound like sarcasm, I hasten to wash my 
 hands of flippancy like this. " This railway," said Mr. Cham- 
 berlain the other day at a " Liberal Union " dinner in London 
 of the Mombasa railway, "which we are told, and which we 
 believe, would lead to the practical suppression of slavery over 
 a great part of the African continent, would also incidentally 
 extend British influence and promote British commerce." No 
 laughter is reported by the stenographer of the Times. 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 47 
 
 papal infallibility above all, I say, for this German 
 Emperor when he thinks on his pillow of the provinces 
 of Alsace and of Lorraine. 
 
 So that no one of us can now go flippantly by such 
 considerations as these with any light sense of our 
 individual responsibility to settle at least for our own 
 satisfaction the sense that these old words and formu- 
 las are to have for us to-day. And if any one tells me 
 that there is something rather remote, something too 
 transcendental and not very pressing in these matters, 
 so that I had much better be doing something else 
 than to call attention to them, the burden of proof 
 may be on my side, but I shall not protest with him 
 over much. I desire only quietly to imagine that I 
 am right, and that he is flippantly wrong. I recall 
 M. Renan : Ce qui me semble un monstre dans Vhu- 
 manite, c'est V indifference et la legerete. 
 
 Yes, the matter is really serious, and has large bear- 
 ings; for it is nothing more or less than the great 
 question whether or not any closely-knit community 
 nowadays is consciously to retard the streams of tenden- 
 cies that are making for human uplifting. When Spar- 
 tans were shut within their beautiful valley under the 
 snow-ridge of Taygetos, isolated, almost inaccessible, 
 the laws of their compact state, taking their natural 
 growth, became individual, peculiar, but picturesquely 
 suitable to the people, the moment, and the place. 
 
48 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 We have happened on other times ; and yet when we 
 do not use the formulas of the Greeks and Latins, we 
 build with the Gothic debris of the Middle Age. 
 " When Paris is right or wrong, " says M. Arsene 
 Houssaye, "it is the fault of Athens or of Borne." 
 This, depend upon it, is not as it should be; for 
 while the planet, to the naked eye, is ever almost the 
 same, the nations that laugh and cry upon its surface 
 are vastly, determinably, irrecoverably changed. 
 
 Any demand made upon us, therefore, in restriction 
 of our individual liberty to think freely as citizens 
 of the planet first, with our thoughts and vision on 
 larger notions than those of nation, or even of race, 
 must, hi general, be resisted. It is unwarrantable 
 repression. My charge against patriotism is mainly 
 this, that it has usually been a sanctioned obligation 
 thrust upon us all at the expense of the dignity of hu- 
 man nature ; and in substituting for it a less repressive 
 passion, I have but one regret, namely, that I did not 
 invent the phrase, " the passion for the planet. " Such 
 a passion certainly points the way to what is clearly a 
 more desirable end at this time for us all. 
 
 But I recognize a danger in writing in this fashion. 
 I am afraid that the more we know of the human 
 temper, the less its present dignity is apt to impress 
 us; the less indeed we shall have to say about its 
 dignity at all, with any such meaning as both Chris- 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 49 
 
 tianity and Science have up to this century usually 
 put into that word. 1 Mankind has believed ever in 
 a chosen people , and then it got the notion of a chosen 
 race; and even Science clung for a long time to the 
 inspiriting conception of a chosen planet, and even the 
 broadest humanity has, quite without a suspicion of 
 narrowness, almost always ruled out every creature 
 save the human, save man, who, drunk with his 
 own imaginings, and without criticism, declared him- 
 self made in the image of a god whose form and fea- 
 tures he himself had unwittingly invented. The great 
 poets, to be sure, saw with a more discerning intuition. 
 The Egyptians of the early, unpedantic faith, a Saint 
 Francis of Assisi, a Wordsworth, are sufficiently iso- 
 lated and dissimilar instances to indicate that complete 
 Nature the Nature, I mean, that the scientific im- 
 pulse gives us has always and everywhere had a few 
 sympathetic adorers. But for the most part the 
 nations up to just the other day had gone on in roads 
 worn each century more deeply, and affording ever 
 less and less outlook across their hedges. The gods 
 
 1 Compare " Hopkinsianism," however, and " Edwardsism," 
 with their formulas about the " principle of divine sovereignty," 
 with the relegation of the prerogatives of " absolute monarchy " 
 to God, a scheme in which man's conformity to the " means of 
 grace " and his almost superhuman struggle to find the way to 
 the " foot of the throne," were a kind of man-baiting practised by 
 an Almighty Chief of the Sports. 
 
 4 
 
50 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 would seem to have been, for some five thousand 
 years, drinking or hunting on Olympus. Apparently 
 an intolerable boredom, at some time about the middle 
 of the last century, filled all the corridors and lobbies 
 of the Olympian palace. Hermes himself would ap- 
 pear to have fallen asleep, in some long afternoon 
 siesta. Then, Zeus, waking from his lethargy and 
 casting about for a decorous diversion, conceived a 
 secret plan and despatched Hermes with sealed orders. 
 These, opened on the journey, read as follows: 
 "Away to Solar System No. 8,369,868,3221+, Planet 
 No. 3, European Division. Section France! Elec- 
 trify all heads. The race of Earth moves too slowly. 
 Afterwards go with Hephaistos to England and to 
 New England, American Division, and let us see what 
 you can do." And everybody knows what happened. 
 But although there are incidents of just the other 
 day like the French and American Eevolutions, and 
 although there are books and lives and achievements 
 which one does well to remember, and which do make 
 us think so much better of the capacity of mankind on 
 "Planet No. 3, Solar System No. 8,369,868,322+," 
 that we really may be amiable to our commiserating 
 friends the optimists and the Comtists and what not, 
 and tolerate a certain amount of after-dinner talk about 
 our present dignity as men, yet I wish distinctly my- 
 self to avoid laying any stress on the word; for our 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 51 
 
 slight civilisation really cannot as yet, to any critical 
 sense, warrant so fine an epithet. We have done too 
 little; before us lies too vast a future. 1 
 
 Yet the trouble with patriotism in distinction from 
 cosmopolitism is and now I may return to my re- 
 mark without danger of misconception the trouble 
 with patriotism is mainly this, that, being always one 
 of the class of popular obligations with a " moral " 
 sanction, it has ordinarily exercised a compulsion which 
 has limited our interests and our freer growth to a 
 degree seriously injurious, not merely to individual 
 
 1 In that vast future, however, what problems will be solved, 
 what ameliorations secured, what insights revealed ! I often 
 think of the words of Buffon : " Loin de se decourager, le 
 philosophe doit applaudir a la nature, lors me me qu'elle lui 
 parait avare ou trop mysterieuse, et se feliciter de ce qu'a 
 mesure qu'il leve une partie de son voile, elle lui laisse entrevoir 
 une immensite d'autres objets, tous dignes de ses recherches. 
 Car ce que nous connaissons deja doit nous faire juger de 
 ce que nous pouvons connaitre ; 1'esprit humain n'a point de 
 bornes, il s'e'tend a mesure que 1'univers se deploie ; 1'homme peut 
 done et doit tout tenter ; il ne lui faut que du temps pour tout 
 s.ivoir. II pourrait meme, en multipliant ses observations, voir 
 et prevoir tous les phenomenes, tous les evenements de la na- 
 ture, avec autant de verite et de certitude que s'il les deduisait 
 immediatement des causes ; et quel enthousiasme plus pardon- 
 nable et meme plus noble que celui de croire l'homme capable 
 de reconnaitre toutes les puissances, et decouvrir par ses travaux 
 tous les secrets de la nature ! "- It is a dream of a new heaven 
 and a new earth, but henceforward only science can fly so 
 straight against the sun on poetic wings. 
 
52 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 expansion, but to the whole " dignity of humanity. " 
 And it is just this larger end, this dignity of humanity, 
 that is perforce the goal, I suppose, of all of us. Pa- 
 triotism has tended always to be one of the most ex- 
 acting of those ideals that stifle our naturalness and 
 free play ; and yet it is only by sincerity, by complete 
 confidence in oneself, by quiet, open-eyed persistence 
 in one's own faith, whatever others niay think or say, 
 that we can ever hope to merit the recording of any 
 single achievement of ours, however slight, on the 
 pages of Time's note-book of the best. That kind of 
 patriotism, then, is discernibly useless which imprisons 
 any large impulses or retards mankind on this high 
 course. As a political or social being man is bound 
 always to be an opportunist. Opportunism is the 
 only moral, because it is the only possible, method of 
 man's going. And this implies a myriad of compro- 
 mises, a myriad of acts that in any absolute view are 
 follies and vulgarities, but are relatively not merely 
 important, not merely " good, " but inevitable. The 
 play of destiny as we are, we must all make up our 
 minds to restriction. We live in a prison; and al- 
 though we never see the Warder, His iron bars and 
 chains must chafe us forever, and some of us to death. 
 But there is some solace it is at all events the only 
 one that we have that we may look about us at 
 what lies just near at hand, and get a pretty clear 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 53 
 
 notion of what it is that is chafing us, and best of all 
 study (for without such study we shall never know 
 anything worth knowing) ourselves. With the one 
 divining-rod, Curiosity, we may conjure so much of 
 Truth as to know that we are at least not any longer 
 being deceived. Nor is this so unsatisfying an assur- 
 ance after all. For this one thing, at least, we may 
 know, that we necessarily make some progress. But 
 because much that is called patriotism, in repressing 
 something of our freedom and sincerity, and in making 
 the worse appear the better reason, can only retard 
 us, can only veil the vision of the spectacle of the 
 various and richly humanising planet- view, it is very 
 questionable whether we can afford to cultivate it at 
 the expense of this other ideal, this hope of getting at 
 last a wider scope. 
 
 To those of us who chance to deal with the instru- 
 ment of the English tongue, the facts which are for us 
 personally insistent must always belong to a peculiar 
 series, must appeal always with a special force. We 
 cannot evade nationality, even were wisdom in that 
 way. And the critic has his own passionate attach- 
 ments, which it is no part of his obligation to reveal. 
 There is the English oak and the holly, and the high 
 gloss of the green on the box-leaves at the season of 
 the English Christmas, symbols all round the planet, 
 
54 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 for those who came out of the rich, specialised, in- 
 dividual English land, of warm, wholesome life and 
 hearty, unthinking optimism. And to all those en- 
 deared traditions for which these symbols stand many 
 of us would always cling more tenaciously than to any 
 marked by so unintelligible a sign as, for instance, 
 the orchid, detached recipient of all that is borne on 
 every wind; or as the banyan, spreading and variously 
 striking root, although without loss of identity, over 
 wide stretches of after all common ground; or as the 
 elm, that throws its shadow in New English highways 
 across delightful memorable gables. 
 
 But of such individual loves and such special at- 
 tachments I have deliberately here said nothing. Not 
 even at this moment did it seem worth while to insist 
 that the great, new, yet now ageing world of the United 
 States of North America, with its temper so perennially 
 fresh, and yet with origins so venerable, appears to me 
 individually the land where all the interesting solu- 
 tions of the problems that haunt men's minds to-day 
 are to be first written in intelligible letters for the 
 very race itself. And if this is to be in time the large 
 privilege of this land, its sons may now and then be 
 suffered to set up their own particular ancestral gods 
 even in the open, and to felicitate themselves even in 
 uncritical terms upon their fair lot at being under so 
 
ON A CERTAIN DANGER IN PATRIOTISM. 55 
 
 apparently responsible, so fortunate a destiny. But 
 even for such devotees as these there will be no harm 
 in remembering Chemosh and the Ammonites ; for it is 
 in the spirit of such double recollection that wisdom 
 may most readily be found. 
 

 ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS. 3 
 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMEKICANS." 
 
 I speak with the freedom of 
 history, and I hope without 
 offence BURKE, 
 
 I. 
 
 THERE is often a restful charm in generalisation. 
 This word stands at times for possibilities of intelli- 
 gent pleasure to be indulged in without any of the 
 irritation sure to be aroused in well-ordered minds by 
 crackling paradox. A child busies itself by the hour 
 with iron-filings and a magnet; and grown-up babies 
 find a similar but keener pleasure in tempering pet 
 magnets of their own, and then in proudly proving 
 their attracting and co-ordinating power throughout 
 the apparent chaos of the world's facts. But unsuc- 
 cessful generalisation worries rather than comforts, 
 even though it suggest. So that when an English 
 friend of mind the other day thought to mark for me 
 the present drift of society in the North American 
 United States by saying that in that country, in its 
 supposed aping of English manners, the rest of the 
 civilised world was enjoying the amusing spectacle of 
 an entire nation playing the part of the prodigal son, 
 
60 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 of a nation that had sought after strange gods in 
 other lands, and was now returning in repentance to 
 the ancestral mansion and the lordly park, I too, 
 in my turn, ventured to be amused, and made the 
 generalisation of my own that there is everything 
 in the point of view. On the text of this remark I 
 began with him a monologue, contrasting English and 
 American life. Now and then I trod upon my friend's 
 insular toes. But I am bound to say that he was 
 too well-bred, and not quite insular enough, having 
 read much and travelled widely, at the time to wince. 
 However, he promised to answer me at our next 
 meeting. Meanwhile I have looked over the matter 
 anew, and put down some preliminary notes, English 
 and New English, to guide him in his reply. I 
 warn him that every word I utter is either quite 
 meaningless or altogether false apart from its entire 
 context. 
 
 The vitality of England is shown in her power of 
 successful colonisation; and there is an English super- 
 stition that her safety lies, and that it has always lain, 
 in being beloved by Poseidon. To argue this point 
 completely would require a quiet discussion of what 
 kind of safety is worth having for a nation ; and on 
 this point there are many notions. But England, at 
 all events, has not been very vague as regards her 
 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 61 
 
 own notion, and of this great sea-god she has been an 
 easy-going and unquestioning lover, with an almost 
 unnatural measure of tact. Her great rival beyond 
 the Channel, against whose sea-lights her own send 
 challenging gleams nightly, has commonly been char- 
 acterised by a certain habit of impulse, and by an 
 impetuous sincerity in the realisation of her Gallic 
 convictions, which the typical Englishman has never 
 understood. Whenever he has found himself begin- 
 ning to admire this greater spontaneity of thought, 
 and consequently of action, in France, he has thought 
 it loyalty to his sovereign to harden his heart and dull 
 his sensibilities, in Pharaonic fashion, against that 
 modicum of approval which would be betrayed by 
 even the early stages of favourable appreciation. 
 This is true even to-day, and in general always has 
 been true, notwithstanding the Continental affecta- 
 tions of the small-toed court of William II., the 
 mental attitudes of a third Earl of Shaftesbury, or of 
 a finer than he, the Matthew Arnold of our own time, 
 a Wordsworth sonneteering eloquently in praise of 
 liberty, or of the present mild-eyed Oxford School of 
 devotees of M. Paul Bourget; for the moment I 
 am engaged in a determination of the broad lines 
 of national characteristics, now fast disappearing as 
 England becomes rapidly more cosmopolitan, not of 
 some conflicting and troublesome exceptions proving 
 
62 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 the presence in this misty island of important varie- 
 ties of blood not distinctively English. 
 
 Individually, to the penetrating student of history 
 and human nature, average England has .not been 
 admirable, but it has rarely failed to be really inter- 
 esting; for in the constantly varied Philistinism 
 of our English race there has always been no end 
 of ironical delight to be got from our picturesqueness, 
 our absurd incompleteness, our unclassical note of 
 provinciality. Yet at home, save in those surface 
 eccentricities of aspect so easily caricatured by keen 
 observers, Englishmen, speaking generally, have not 
 shown great individuality. This can easily be main- 
 tained , in the face of Dickens and Hogarth and Cruik- 
 shank, who are to be conveniently taken out to prove 
 my point : exceptiones prolant regulas. 
 
 The types of largest human interest have tended 
 always to break away from England. Like the planet 
 Saturn, if indeed not like the primeval god him- 
 self, whom, as he imagined, times and seasons served, 
 and who was so enamoured of his own creations that 
 he devoured his own children, who naturally, there- 
 fore, did not care to live at home, England has 
 sloughed her fancied useless members in far-reaching 
 rings of colonisation. The English island is not so 
 small as it appears on the map; but it has never^ 
 been large enough to hold men who thought too 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 63 
 
 much ahead of them. Thinking behind has been 
 tolerated, and indeed cultivated, and in such thinking 
 no people has equalled the English; thinking unde 
 authority and from sanctioned prejudices has pi 
 Englishmen, has pleased Oxford and Cambridge, 
 has been dry-nursed into a national habit of mind by 
 large and generous endowments. But any obvious 
 breaking away from the conventional has so far taken 
 a line of immoral eccentricity as to be too often 
 damned as inconvenient in the good old-fashioned 
 sense of the word, and practically proved so by being 
 ejected. Such ejection masquerades to the English 
 sense as the preservation of law and order. But is 
 it not really keeping the cover down upon any un- 
 pleasant surprise that might start up from too sudden 
 a view of the ugly-headed Jack-in-the-box Truth? 
 For every new idea, to men so well established as 
 England's gentlemen have been and are, in Church 
 and State and country seats, is almost ugly and in- 
 convenient. The mere mechanical devices and scien- 
 tific discoveries of the latter half of the nineteenth 
 century, which have forced into a juxtaposition 
 before undreamed of every quarter of the globe, have 
 tempered isolated insolence, wherever found, to a 
 certain appearance of urbanity and affectation of 
 comity. But some peoples have needed tempering 
 more than others, and our England of Spartan reti- 
 
64 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 cence and self-sufficiency is essentially Doric England 
 still. 
 
 England, I said just now, has never been large 
 enough to hold men who thought too much ahead of 
 them. The sentence certainly needs illumination, 
 but perhaps it becomes a more plausible assertion if 
 I add that people in England who let their minds 
 play freely are often forced to live lives of convention 
 and compromise utterly inconsistent with their actual 
 intellectual attitudes and their deepest convictions. 
 English liberty is liberty of thought and expression, 
 but not of action; and yet how energetic the Eng- 
 lish are! The English mind, while less imaginative 
 than most, is, in all forms of logical activity, surer 
 of its results than any other, and the steadiest in the 
 world. Yet to be steady is not always to be sane, 
 intelligent; and the want of imagination has been so 
 essential a lack ! With an all but unrivalled capacity 
 for pure thinking when he chooses to exercise his 
 mind, there are discernible quite unmistakable proofs 
 that in practical realisation of his intellectual beliefs 
 even the liberty-loving Englishman does not like to 
 stand alone. He is constantly, moreover, postponing 
 the donning of his thinking-cap ; but in this he mani- 
 fests perhaps merely the temporary indifference of 
 conscious strength. The pleasant exhaustion conse- 
 quent upon his manly activity in the hunting or 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 65 
 
 football field, or in the lazy delights of the ineffable 
 punt, is not directly conducive to thinking upon any 
 subject more remote than how to have a bath before 
 dinner. Like the healthy Spartan that he is, the 
 Englishman in this mood regards with wholesome 
 disgust the merest flavour of Attic salt. Attic salt 
 partially paralyses his papillce, scarcely keeping their 
 virtue unimpaired for the detection of the proper 
 bouquet of lusty port. With no necessity, therefore, 
 of thinking, in the shadow of a Church and State 
 that thinks for you, a Church whose bells, on each 
 periodic Sunday, multitudinously applaud the achieve- 
 ments of dignified and self-sufficient England, and 
 while there are so many legitimate and obviously 
 superior interests in the open air, wooing river, paw- 
 ing horses, eager hounds, England proudly rests 
 content and who can wonder? in the strength 
 and dignity she has secured for herself by her own 
 unaided efforts. With little capability of detecting 
 the drift in society and hi events, the streams of 
 social tendency with the rise of the people, she is 
 quite unharassed by the worry of these questions 
 until they press and cry indecorously for attention. 
 When at last actually this time has come, England 
 grips all such problems one by one as they advance, 
 and considers them with an extraordinary steadiness 
 
 of intent vision, and an admirable and painstaking 
 
 5 
 
66 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 caution. But the word " cautious " as applied to the 
 English is surely the ethical name merely for a cer- 
 tain wise inertia. Yet the quality is one of many 
 indications of England's practical sense and worldly 
 wisdom. All history is compromise. But English 
 history is marked by compromise more particularly 
 than any other, although few histories can boast of 
 being less " compromising. " 
 
 Pre-eminently, England's instinct is to be fair. 
 Her history has been a long struggle towards equity. 
 But the English character, while sworn in the long 
 run to justice, partakes also of nay, I may say glories 
 in a more general and not less admirable quality 
 of human nature, selfishness. The combination and 
 co-operation of these two ideals, to be selfish, 
 which we have always cultivated beyond the mere 
 needs of self-preservation, wherever we English have 
 lived in the world, and the peculiar English sense of 
 justice and fair-play, which seems to suffer deterioration 
 away from the island, explain the distinctive charac- 
 ter of English history. That portion of English society 
 which is the heir of the feudal lord has always been 
 aware that sooner or later the old order supporting it 
 would change. But the problem, born of a natural 
 conservative desire, has been how most slowly to ac- 
 complish this change ; how long it is feasible and pos- 
 sible to postpone the inevitable. An Englishman 
 
67 
 
 ordinarily finds the old ways sufficient for his purpose. 
 English country roads, bordered by hedgerows of 
 honeysuckle, blackberry, and May, are grooves deep- 
 worn. The changes from feudalism to the divine 
 right of kings; from the absolute monarchy of the 
 Stuarts to the constitutional government of the suc- 
 cession ; the social and political revolutions marked by 
 the Reform Bills, the Corn Laws, the Municipal Cor- 
 poration and the Education Acts, of all these 
 changes or measures none was undertaken till the 
 conditions of each time became so literally intolerable 
 as to force the questions to serious and final issue. 
 Then the Englishman of convention listened to the 
 dictates of the Englishman of sanity and worldly wis- 
 dom, and recognized the soundness of the latter's 
 advice to play for a time his long-unaccustomed, but 
 not unnatural, role of Sir Giles Eairplay, the English- 
 man of justice. The political sagacity of Englishmen 
 may be summed up in their firm conviction that a 
 stitch just in time saves nine; and whatever political 
 chagrin they have suffered has arisen from a neglect of 
 this principle, which they know the value of really 
 better than any other people in the world. 
 
 For men, therefore, who have thought too enthu- 
 siastically ahead of them or before their time, England 
 may justly be said to be as small as it looks. The 
 case seems, then to afford a pretty paradox, in which 
 
68 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 I see again a Spartan parallel. The existing liberty 
 of action seems in no way commensurate with the 
 liberty allowed in thought. Here is the result of a 
 philosophy giving the direct lie to the Socratic prin- 
 ciple that virtue is knowledge. England has defended 
 this position with a certain wilfulness and may I 
 add? pretence. There is no god but Convention, 
 and Compromise is his prophet : so runs the English 
 Koran. Progress must come, but let its advance be 
 decorous. Righteousness, English righteousness, has 
 been obedience to the strict, straight lines of Church 
 and State. There is something pre-Christian, theo- 
 cratic, early Jewish, about this. Righteousness and 
 religion have been separated in the English from 
 personal convictions; thus separated, they become a 
 thing apart, and, by an optical illusion, a good in them- 
 selves, a sacred thing, without vital human relation- 
 ship. We thus get the anomaly of the inhabitants of 
 an entire island affirming their belief and trust in a 
 host of traditions, superstitions, or old-time rules, po- 
 litical, religious, social, quite beyond which nine-tenths 
 of the individual members composing the community 
 have carried their thought, and which in their own in- 
 dividual thinking they do not for one moment take into 
 account. This is a sublime and ornamental hypocrisy, 
 which England shares with the old Israel and the Eome 
 of the earlier Caesars. Were it not at present so 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 69 
 
 general as to be thoroughly well understood, it might 
 be morally injurious. But, as it is, its existence is 
 always silently and mutually taken for granted; and 
 thus, there being really no deception, it has rarely 
 brought down the destructive wrath of the avenging 
 gods. Among the Northern States of America such 
 hypocrisy is not a national sin. But this is because 
 his clothes, for the most part, still fit the Englishman 
 there. The England of the island clings fondly to the 
 old bottles, while New England had in most cases to 
 make new ones, and is without the former's temptations 
 to vamp the old. In England hypocrisy is innocuous 
 because pervasive and an element in all men's cal- 
 culations. It is the tax respectability lays upon her 
 children for being the sons of their mother, thus tak- 
 ing advantage of their loyalty ; and it is a tax appar- 
 ently very easy to be borne. New England and the 
 Western States of the United States which sprang from 
 her loins have scarcely developed hypocrisy, because, 
 in the first place, these people could more easily man- 
 age, whenever they have wakened to the necessity, to 
 throw off the incubus of their many odious theoretical 
 rules of life, since the rules are not so heavily weighted 
 by authority in America as in England; moreover, 
 their quality has not been tried as yet, and, for the 
 most part, what conventions, social or religious, they 
 did take with them, they still, in the sweet innocence 
 
70 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 of their hearts, believe in, not having thought so far 
 afield as the Englishman of the island. When they 
 do begin to think, frequently they express themselves 
 in the worst possible form. Colonel Ingersoll, as a 
 writer on religion, would be heard as little of in Eng- 
 land as Mr. Bradlaugh; but in North America, both 
 to the honour and the dishonour of the people, he 
 created once a Satanic uproar. This simply meant 
 that to large bodies of people there his ideas were an 
 appreciable and novel attraction, and that such follow- 
 ers had not the habit of criticism and culture to see 
 the whole bearing of his contentions. His impatience, 
 his lack of perspective, his style of hue and cry, ex- 
 actly suited them. The little knowledge of the host 
 of readers in North America eager for wisdom speaks 
 out with a blatant sincerity which drives hypocrisy 
 crouching to a corner of the wall. Few of them could 
 understand how in a certain state hypocrisy has be- 
 come a virtue, or at least a tolerated and even culti- 
 vated habit of mind, and that that state is the admir- 
 able England of Doric reticence and compromise. 
 
 Some of the more agreeable features among the is- 
 land social customs most appreciated by foreigners, 
 especially by the New English, arise from this national 
 characteristic of self-sufficiency, this Doric reticence 
 and insular provincialism. An illustration in point 
 is the average treatment of the guest in a country 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 71 
 
 house. To put guests at their ease should, I imagine, 
 be the great aim of entertainment; and how charm- 
 ingly is this end accomplished in England! This 
 ability has an air of being inborn; but it frequently 
 arises, not from a sense of fitness and true politeness, 
 as when seen in New Englishmen, but really from the 
 isolating racial selfishness by virtue of which an indi- 
 vidual member of society, insisting upon being let alone 
 himself, readily allows others, by the mere device of neg- 
 lect, the same pleasure. The plan works well, it works 
 naturally. And the opposite ideal of social entertain- 
 ment seen in New England, and equally inalienable 
 from the blood as there developing, works only with 
 friction, the tactless struggle, I mean, to render 
 oneself agreeable, the nervous anxiety a guest is al- 
 most sure to encounter in a host who fears that he 
 may suffer from ennui if every moment be not filled 
 for him. This is almost capable of becoming exas- 
 perating ; it renders the average relation in New Eng- 
 lish society almost intolerable to one who has tasted 
 the delightful independence of the unencumbered 
 hours in an English country house. But whatever 
 the results may be, are not the causes such as given ? 
 The Englishman, with a state all terraced with so- 
 cieties of philanthropy, is at heart as little of the Good 
 Samaritan as the New English Voltaire, Franklin. 
 Englishmen appear to fill the mountain road, healing 
 
72 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 volcanoes of sores on thousands of beggars. All the 
 time, Arnold Toynbee and the rest aside, all the 
 time, at heart and as a nation, not from ill-will, but 
 from mere inertia, they are eager to pass by on the 
 other side. On the contrary, the American is more 
 genuinely generous and flexible. The generosity of 
 his brother of the island is still Puritan, and largely 
 takes the form of a sop to a growling conscience, which 
 may be ignored during the process of digestion. But 
 I would not presume to judge whether or not it is 
 better to toss the sop to conscience than to convention. 
 In considering so curiously this English characteris- 
 tic marked by the agreeable custom I have cited, I 
 willingly plead guilty to all manner of frankness in 
 indulging in praise more bitter-sweet than sweet. 
 But if this seem quite scientifically outspoken, much 
 more, I fear, will be the wider illustration it occurs to 
 me now to give. My friend who compared the Ex- 
 odus of the people of the United States to England 
 with the classical Eeturn of the Prodigal Son probably 
 was not aware of the full significance of the fact ex- 
 pressed so epigrainmatically in the remark from which 
 he drew his insular conclusion ; but of the fact there 
 can be no doubt. The banished English race, if it 
 really get to know England, likes it. And English- 
 men " take to Americans, " as the phrase goes. This 
 is a highly entertaining fact, and not unsignificant. 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 73 
 
 I hear " Americans " in London constantly asserting 
 that they like to be there. They regard it as the 
 most " livable " city in the world, and England, of 
 which London is the eye, the most " livable " of 
 countries. An Englishman, listening to this praise, 
 is intensely gratified; and more than ever does he 
 regard England as the centre of the solar system. 
 Laudari a viro laudato, to be praised by the praised, 
 Cicero says somewhere, quoting from another, is a 
 keen, a very keen, satisfaction. And it is an agreeable 
 titillation for the English paterfamilias to know that 
 the children enjoy, when they return to it, the warmth 
 and the big logs and the enticing settle of the old fire- 
 side. He expects it is a comforting compliment (for 
 this is the very word, I am sorry to say, that he uses, 
 believing himself to be speaking correctly the undefiled 
 tongue of his fathers), but he did not dare to be un- 
 prepared for disappointment. However unlikely he 
 would be to confess it, he is really proud of his errant 
 child of energy. The " American " compliments him 
 simply by being American. The American accent 
 i and intonation are intolerable to him ; but the fund of 
 life the American carries with him is exhilarating in 
 England. He is like a boy coming back to the aged 
 father and mother and brushing up the wits of the old 
 people. The father believes that he forgets more 
 nightly than the boy has ever known; but the 
 
74 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 freshness of the boy's points of view, the depth and 
 speed of his intuition, the engaging power of quaint 
 suggestion, the inevitable alertness of mind, the 
 buoyancy and enthusiasm of his average mood, all 
 these characteristics and qualities are so unexpected, 
 so fresh and helpful, that the father cannot but ad- 
 mire, although he may be a good deal shocked. The 
 Doric Englishman has become in America both Ionic 
 and Corinthian; and there is no evidence that Sparta 
 ever failed secretly to admire Athens or Corinth, how- 
 ever much she thought it her duty to disapprove of 
 their gods. 
 
 Wherever we finally turn to account for the fact, 
 to the atmosphere or the amalgamation of varied races, 
 or, in general, to the total change in the environment, 
 the fact itself will go unquestioned. The American 
 of New England and the West, for New England, 
 roughly speaking, is a more distinctive and original 
 English colony than the Virginias, starting as an 
 Englishman, has become in two centuries and a half 
 a variant species, a new being. He seems making, at 
 his best, towards an ideal type midway between the 
 Frenchman and his own English forefathers. And 
 now he comes back into the parent nest something of , 
 a cuckoo, except that he creates amusement rather 
 than menacing annoyance. The Englishman liked 
 him a " little bit, " and he is devoted to the English-j 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 75 
 
 man. What it all means I shall certainly not under- 
 take to tell, 
 
 To an Englishman the world beyond the boundaries 
 of his isle and America and the Colonies are 
 more truly so than other parts of the planet is in- 
 habited by barbarians, just as Dacia or Italy or Persia 
 was to the Greek. In Athens it is easy to please the 
 Athenians. Aspasia proved it in an eloquent bit of 
 satirical rhetoric in Plato's Menexenus, and I have 
 heard it proved in New England to New Englishmen 
 ad nauseam in too many a Fourth of July oration. 
 England's Parliament proves it nightly to the satisfac- 
 tion of the readers of the Times. But the national 
 pride of the United States, which has grown with the 
 sense of achievement in the difficult process of work- 
 ing out its own salvation, differs widely in its char- 
 acter from the national pride of England, although 
 both thrive on the glorious memories of portions of 
 their past history. All the world, and especially the 
 American and Colonial world, I have said, the Eng- 
 lishman thinks barbarian. Yet, after all, America is 
 not quite barbarian to him, for it is only boyish, 
 immature. The Englishman of North America might 
 not be blamed for preferring the dubious company of 
 the barbarians to the acceptance of the conventional 
 distinction of the other classification. His sole com- 
 fort I do not for one moment deny or assert that 
 
76 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 this is enough is in knowing that very likely he is 
 an Englishman scaled of a good many prejudices and 
 longer-sighted. But the natural language of the Eng- 
 lish national pride is, " Leave England, and you leave 
 civilisation behind you." This is a tune played in 
 England with variations. Whatever urbanity of man- 
 ner England enjoys has been taken on only because it 
 was found necessary, for any sort of success in the 
 carrying out of her own policy, to veil her two chief 
 characteristics, brutal energy and honest directness, 
 in an ingratiating air of manners. This is the whole- 
 some result of England's contact with the great world. 
 The Shaftesbury who was the author of the Charac- 
 teristics, one of the most urbane and un-English of 
 English gentlemen, and the best critic of his time, 
 has said : " All politeness is owing to liberty. We 
 polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough 
 sides by this amiable collision. " Yet the manners of 
 England, which are the social conventions of her own 
 political organism, are admirably adapted to the island 
 itself. That outside of England they serve little pur- 
 pose, so that beyond the limits of his own shores the 
 Englishman is always at sea, is not perhaps so serious 
 a fault. But then outside it is that the self-suffi- 
 ciency, brutal energy, and honest directness come ob- 
 trusively to the fore. But in directness and all the 
 useful qualities of honesty and energy and courage and 
 
77 
 
 pluck and singleness of purpose and simplicity that 
 flow from it or are akin to it, where is there a man 
 that can vie with him? In becoming cosmopolitan, 
 he has managed somehow to get a show of manners, 
 learned a craft not quite natural to him, and lost some- 
 thing of his directness and honesty. But though the 
 changes of the last half-century have been so great, he 
 is still a Dorian, still he scorns deceit and meanness. 
 He hates guilelessness, but equally detests the wily. 
 Evasion and circumlocution are not his habit. There- 
 fore he is not prepared for the often Jesuitical quality 
 of French subtlety, or the as frequent New English 
 characteristic of chicane. If there is one thing he dis- 
 likes more than another, it is the uncanny canniness 
 of people who are too clever. Facts and plodding are 
 his province, and no one manipulates facts so well. 
 I see wide- fields in the domain of English ethical 
 philosophy and its alien metaphysics opening up if I 
 could but enter on them. So that it takes more facts 
 to convince the island English than any other nation, 
 and the defect of this temperament is the failure to 
 recognize that facts can ever lie. A Frenchman 
 knows this, and always counts upon it. For French 
 finesse the English have no weapons so delicate. And 
 for those New English characteristics, by reason of 
 which Proteus should have altars erected to him in 
 the New English market-places, the alertness, adapt- 
 
78 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 ability, buoyancy, or, in their exaggerated forms, 
 bumptiousness and shrewdness and smartness, they 
 have an envious appreciation although they look at 
 times so primly askance, an appreciation that passes 
 into a positive craving for more matter equally amus- 
 ing. So " Americans " they have cultivated and flat- 
 tered and entertained royally, if often in the manner 
 patronising, But not being critics, they have made 
 little distinction between " Americans ; " they have 
 not been careful respecters of persons. They ran after 
 the late Mr. Lowell and " Buffalo Bill " with equal 
 energy ; and the latter, I am sure, with the greater in- 
 terest. Both were flattered, and came again. And 
 yet this is so admirably different from the way the 
 Athenians mobbed a philosopher of Megara, who was 
 keenly interested in the great innovator, Socrates, and 
 journeyed once all the way across the Thriasian Plain, 
 and up over the hills through the olive-groves of At- 
 tica, to violet-crowned Athens, just to visit him and 
 learn from him. But that was at a time when Megara 
 had no commercial market, and wished in vain for 
 free-trade. It is the immense ennui of their routine 
 lives that troubles the English, and makes them re- 
 joice at the freshness of Americans. Americans to 
 the English are a new sensation. 
 
 But it is this very habit of convention, and this un- 
 deviating routine against which at heart the island Eng- 
 

 ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 79 
 
 lish chafe, and by reason of which they are so willing 
 to welcome any manifestation of freedom in others, any 
 evidence of absence of conventional restraint, when 
 they are not asked to be pert nonconformists too, that 
 makes England so fascinating and restful a country to 
 the New Englishman or the Englishman of the Col- 
 onies. The Englishman of the New Worlds is like a 
 cat in possessing nine lives and a clever habit of alight- 
 ing in every fall upon his feet. The Englishman, not 
 because he is too nice and delicate, but because he is 
 not so easily adaptable, being used to one authoritative 
 way of life prescribed by Church, Society, and State, 
 is like glass or flowers, which, when moved, must 
 always be moved "right side up, with care." But 
 American versatility and vivacity are contagious; and 
 every one in the United States is a chameleon. The 
 pitch of American life is at fever heat. Busied in 
 the struggle to live, it becomes a second nature to the 
 American to live fast; and under the strain of the 
 nervous tension he breaks utterly down in health be- 
 fore any of his European neighbours. His aim is not, 
 as often in England, to get money enough to live in 
 such a way as to live well. He does not recognise 
 that the only good of money is to buy leisure to be 
 wise, but, with eye fast fixed upon the coin itself, 
 the dazed vision magnifies it into a good for its own 
 sake. In America, on the whole, money is at present 
 
80 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 the chief condition of power. By money man is 
 enabled there to crane himself above the dead level 
 of uniformity. Hence, in general, America has not 
 reached the point that England long ago attained, in 
 which it can afford to cultivate other gods than Mam. 
 mon. This is, I show farther on, not without its 
 fortunate results; but the unpleasant fact is that 
 with such an ideal and such a cult arise too often 
 sordidness of likings in the worshippers, and medioc- 
 rity, if not actual vulgarity, of aspiration, too often, 
 that is, apart from the narrow-minded university cen- 
 tres of culture and from the sections dominated by piety 
 and the churches. But the piety of the churches, 
 while sincere, is of course quite lacking in culture; 
 whereas in England hypocrisy has often sesthetic or 
 patriotic sanction, and is attended with inviting allure- 
 ments. New Englishmen thank God that they have 
 " a Church without a bishop, and a State without a 
 king ; " so that certain temptations not to think which 
 are natural to England do not there entice. The 
 United States pretends to fewer social shackles and 
 fewer superstitions than any country in the world ; but 
 what it has are more galling and oppressive than any hi 
 England. " We hold these truths to be self-evident, " 
 says its Declaration of Independence, " that all men 
 are created equal." This assertion, as profoundly 
 false as it is profoundly true, pervades all her institu- 
 

 ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 81 
 
 tions, and is dangerously caviare to the general. For 
 not all Americans have by any means as yet recog- 
 nised that only men who are equal are equal; that 
 there are degrees of worth, and thus degrees of legiti- 
 mate superiority, and consequently of desert and social 
 rank, but a rank of which taste ought to be the gauge. 
 The truth in this utterance which they do appreciate is 
 its insistence upon the inalienable right of every man 
 to be himself, and to work out his own salvation, and 
 its rejection of anything like the English notion that 
 the individual must content himself with smiling 
 labour, however arduous, in the lot to which he is 
 called and in which he is born. 
 
 But however strong may be the belief throughout 
 the United States of North America in man's inalien- 
 able right of liberty, the belief does not appear to 
 have that general vitality we should have expected. 
 The religious and social restrictions that exist there, 
 though infinitely fewer than those in England in the 
 written statute books of the island and in the un- 
 written laws of the national goddess Kespectability 
 and her prophet, are not, like English restrictions, 
 which are for the most part paper conventions, easily 
 ignored in practice, and thus prolific of hypocrisy, 
 but arbitrarily tyrannical formulas of the strictest 
 sort, most unfavourable to the development of indivi- 
 duality, and rendering a special, independent life all 
 
82 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 but impossible. This tyranny is not felt so much 
 in the expression of one's political convictions, but 
 it is shamefully exacting in social and religious life. 
 In the rank and file of the churches in New England 
 intolerance is still grievously rife, so that the average 
 Methodist, for instance, or Baptist, could never, even 
 in the covert silence of his own rash musings, logically 
 wish a hateful Unitarian or Universalist in "hell," 
 because his profound belief is quite at one with his 
 professed creed that they are already doomed, and his 
 interest in the matter would be utterly superfluous. 
 In England, where, if Englishmen practised in all 
 sincerity what the Prayer-book preaches, intolerance 
 should be far more general and savage, as a matter 
 of fact it is far less frequent. Indeed, religious 
 intolerance pure and simple may be said scarcely to 
 exist at all, whatever distrust there is of the Non- 
 conformist being distinctly a political affair. But 
 the Prayer-book offers a most convenient code to fall 
 back upon as a means for the inclusive instruction 
 of children and the lower classes. In England, for 
 the most part, servants are born servants, and must 
 die servants, and need not complain, for they are a 
 different race, happy helots in the Spartan realm. 
 In a land where no man is born a servant, or, if he 
 has been, runs the risk some day of being President of 
 his country, it is obvious, and to the English traveller 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 83 
 
 it will often be painfully, obnoxiously obvious, that 
 there must frequently be a vast deal of prevalent 
 vulgarity in self-assertion, and annoying friction, and 
 loud-mouthed jarring of dissonant advisers. Such is 
 indeed the case in the North America of to-day. 
 But the fact is of the highest significance. In the 
 United States of North America to-day there are 
 more human beings with a growing sense of their 
 own worth as men, more individual human beings 
 with sense of " self,." than have ever before been con- 
 gregated in history. Almost all the deficiencies and 
 disadvantages of these people seem capable of being 
 interpreted as necessary evils; so that at present 
 the undoubted " lack of distinction " which was re- 
 corded by the late Matthew Arnold is really a great 
 distinction. The ideal aim of civilisation, it is argu- 
 able, is the fullest general development of individuality 
 in all the members of the nation. But the process 
 is painful in a high degree; and a nation in the 
 stress and strain of such development is not a pleas- 
 ant place for people of delicate organism or too nice 
 nerves to live in. But the critic who, noting the 
 application of this truth to America, stops at the fact 
 without explaining it or determining the prophecy in 
 it, is too lazy to think. It should be pointed out 
 that the unrest, the absence of taste, the reaching 
 after new ideas, the self-assertion, the youthful con- 
 
84 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 fidence and bounce, are all inevitable characteristics 
 most likely to be outgrown, unless some cataclysm 
 engulf the entire proud Korah's troop of these States, 
 and swallow them on their far Atlantis, away into 
 oblivion, where Destiny can no longer experiment 
 with them. These States to-day certainly mark a 
 farther general advance in civilisation, however, than 
 has yet been attained. There is a more pervasive 
 individual life there, a greater general power of the 
 imagination, and a higher average individual devel- 
 opment, than in any country in the world. But if 
 this be true of the average, the highest quality is 
 much rarer than in England. I hasten to record, 
 however, that the comparison of English and New 
 English history in these respects, recalling as they 
 do the Athens of refinement made possible by slavery, 
 and quite another fact in human development so 
 distinct, so astoundingly distinct, as that of the 
 French Revolution, leaves open the whole problem 
 of the destiny of our civilisation, and not merely 
 what we shall come to be as a race, but what we 
 ought to wish to be, an even more curious and 
 pressing inquiry still. Off against the wonderful 
 ideal truth that the Revolution of France wrote in 
 blood on the pages of history, stands the other truth 
 taught in the record of the English island, that, in 
 the words of Joubert, subordination is a better 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 85 
 
 tiling than independence. "Liberty, liberty," he 
 cries, " in all things let us have justice, and we shall 
 have enough liberty. " And this has been England. 
 So that with these great contrasts in our minds, 
 how much there is for us to think about, over how 
 much have we to ponder! We almost find the ques- 
 tion of the ultimate hope, the ultimate aim, far too 
 involved, too remote, for speculation even; and we 
 return to surer ground in such assertions, for in- 
 stance, as that in the United States the small rem- 
 nant is what we should have expected. With more 
 ideas as a nation than the English of the island, if 
 less than the French, the Englishman of America is 
 fortunate in having more self-control than the latter, 
 and more repose. He is more sympathetic and more 
 appreciative than the island Englishman. But, of 
 course, a people waking to a knowledge of itself is 
 not a tractable monster. Its millions of heads mean 
 each a thinking brain liable to entangle its Briarean 
 arms. Here is horror and anarchy in germ. His 
 Holiness the Zeit-Geist seems very foolhardy, it must 
 be owned, to try so uncertain and strange a game. 
 
 England, therefore, to a New Englishman is a 
 fair land flowing with milk and honey, where he 
 may rest his tired eyes and weary brain. Here, 
 after all the uproar of his home, is dignity and 
 strength and charm. All the relics of feudalism 
 
86 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 exercise upon the foreigner of English blood their 
 spell. All over the land he hears the whispering 
 of immemorial elms. He walks in Druid groves or 
 on the earthworks of Danish camps. It is not the 
 Church alone that is established. Every English in- 
 stitution seems to stand upon a pyramid base that 
 cannot be shaken. All the land is fair, as it rolls, 
 and well tilled to the horizon. Not only is it like a 
 gentleman's park, it is really such, the playground 
 of grand feudal lords in the pay of Poseidon, who 
 boast in their addresses to their retainers of Eng. 
 land's dominion of the sea, and of the glories of her 
 world-encircling commerce, but neglect to mention 
 that, in compensation for these splendid distinctions, 
 England's fruit-trees run a danger of being left to 
 wither, and her fields of going unproductive. Fruit 
 may be had from the Channel Islands, grain from 
 the United States, eggs, chickens, vegetables, from 
 the Continent. The individual English farmer seems 
 doomed. If gentlemen have money to buy products 
 from abroad, their own fields they may polish into 
 parks. Hare and deer, and grouse and pheasant, 
 and wood-pigeon and partridges were all created for 
 the glory of England. Adam, bless him, gave them 
 English names. The foreigner of English blood, 
 however, who is a long time learning this, would be 
 a fool to quarrel with this paradise in which he finds 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 87 
 
 himself so comfortably at home, and so well treated 
 when he arrives. For England is the prettiest coun- 
 try in the world. The misty air which hovers over 
 it, and on the slightest provocation touches it with 
 softening blue, seems charged with opiates. England, 
 summer England, is a Circe's garden, where the 
 passing traveller never gets even a single revealing 
 whiff from the stagnant pools of slime in the pig- 
 sties so carefully hidden. The wind never blows 
 from that quarter, for the air above the heads of 
 imperial England is never troubled; nor is there 
 much circulation or current from below, the cool, 
 conventional, calm atmosphere of upper England 
 seeming eternally satisfying, nothing heated or mephi- 
 tic ever rising to insult the too nice nerves of those 
 who dwell above, or send sickening warning of any 
 rottenness beneath. The towers of Westminster grow 
 daily, as one gazes, more and more beautiful. The 
 cabs continue to glide easily and cheaply over noise- 
 less pavements. Your tailor calls you " sir, " and 
 never asks for money, and the school-children curtsey 
 as they pass. The moonlight lies with beauty rare 
 upon the grand sweep of the Thames at Richmond, 
 and sleeps upon the meadows by the stream. Wind- 
 sor, serene, majestic, dominates her park with dignity 
 of far-seen towers. The lanes of Devon wind and 
 wind between their high hedges tangled with dog- 
 
88 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 rose in curves of sweetest and most suggestive charm. 
 Still over Bolton Abbey climbs the ivy, while the 
 river, wandering through the peaceful dale, murmurs 
 memories of Wordsworth. Cathedral spires soar, 
 and nightingales sing, and the gardens of Oxford 
 bloom in sweet seclusion, and the live oak grows at 
 Clovelly quite unto the iridescent sea. And who 
 shall say that England is not fair 1 Against such let 
 her church-bells chime anathema ! But occasionally 
 there are hateful murmurs, as of rumbling earth- 
 quakes, of dock labourers on strike, and occasionally 
 one is forced to listen to an anxious discussion upon 
 Royal Grants; and occasionally one hears the theatre 
 shake with the applause of the people, the English 
 people, sanctioning vociferously the motive of a play 
 teaching, as did the Middleman, the truth so rarely 
 true for England, that the labourer is worthy of his 
 hire. Then England takes another hue; and the 
 critic has new light on Isaiah's fulminations and th( 
 stern Thucydidean story of the Sicilian expedition. 
 
 But meanwhile, till the air begins to circulate muc 
 more than at present, they who can afford the 
 far niente life will continue to bask in the Englisl 
 fields, and let inconvenient suggestions alone. Think- 
 ing is so troublesome and stupid! But the Englisl 
 of the United States, seeing the stress of the growii 
 problem of England, namely, how, in the acceptai 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 89 
 
 and assimilation of the democratic principle, she shall 
 hasten, without total collapse or serious and chronic 
 disorder, the natural process of transformation, so 
 to accomplish in one year what should take, the ptfy^. ^ 
 siologists tell us, seven, need not so speedily congratu- 
 late themselves upon their greater good-fortune. The 
 problem there, which is even of higher interest, is 
 no whit less difficult. The responsibility of vindi-f 
 eating democracy will be upon the next half-century 1 
 of these American men. They think their raison\ 
 d'etre is proved. Vain beating of the eagle wings! 
 The second historical era of the world, which began 
 with the discovery of America, is passing into its 
 crisis. And to the responsibility of it in America, 
 as well as in England, but most of all in America, 
 there will be men enough to rise, only so long as they 
 continue clasping their hands below the purse-fold of 
 their gowns, and always looking about to spy whence 
 they may get them gold ! As it is, thank fortune, 
 though I am uttering a paradox that in another place 
 I have explained, this age in America does not so 
 much differ from the Alexandrian, of which Theocritus 
 wrote that the very rust of the money was too pre- 
 cious to be rubbed off for a gift. 
 
 England despises France, and dislikes it because 
 she thinks it given over to bawds and feminine bau- 
 bles. The healthy Englishman loathes baubles, and, 
 
90 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 if he allows himself to traffic with the former, makes 
 a bestial business of it, and not a pretty pleasure all 
 redolent of musk. Englishmen judge the French 
 from their knowledge of Paris, and Paris from a. 
 legendary cancan. To a Frenchman's pre-eminent 
 accessibility to ideas, his curiosity, his distinction of 
 taste, England turns the deafest of insular ears. Be- 
 cause France nutters and is versatile, even a larger 
 than even the Philistine England damns it as unstable, 
 undignified, and fickle. The generalising tendency 
 of the French, the lightness of their spirit and their 
 sympathy, become to England indications of super- 
 ficiality. Thus, because she has not an atom ofr 
 respect for, and so little knowledge of, France, 
 French institutions, so lacking in the English steadi- 
 ness and dignity, her democratic tendencies so vari- 
 able, so uncertain, her republicanism so idealistic, so 
 unpractical, do not appreciably menace England. 
 And this is an important point, that while spiritually 
 France has her power, politically she has been nil. 
 But in contrast with the political inefficiency of 
 France is the strong influence of the vast colonial 
 English world. New England, America, Australia, 
 have never ceased to react most powerfully upon the 
 Mother Island. From the beginning, down through 
 Franklin and Emerson and Sir Henry Parkes to the 
 present moment, while America seems to loom over 
 
91 
 
 the top of the sea, silently but resolutely and cer- 
 tainly as Fate, even as a python insinuates itself 
 into the jungle and enfolds its prey, American and 
 colonial ideals have slowly permeated English life; 
 how slowly indeed in this society so impatient of 
 ideas, and yet after all really and surely! I am not 
 sure if the history of New England be not almost 
 the greatest glory of England. It should surely be 
 a pride of New England that its history is the most 
 characteristic and significant in English history. New 
 England will grow to be content, nay, to rejoice, 
 that, besides to the Lares of its own hearthstone, it 
 is drawn more strongly still to this island beyond the 
 Atlantic sacred as the home of the race, a sacred 
 isle, more sacred than Delos or Delphi or Pisa to the 
 Greek, a holy ground of relics and symbols and signs 
 and superstitions, touched with the melancholy and 
 charm of the evening light through the western win- 
 dows of its grand cathedrals; the ri^cvo^ the 0X1-15, 
 the sacred enclosure, of the inheritors of the tongue of 
 Shakespeare, of Milton, and of Keats, wherever they 
 breathe under the sun. 
 
 February, 1890. 
 
92 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 II. 
 
 A PROPHET of the United States is not without 
 honour save in his own country; but it is entertain- 
 ing, and, I may add x instructive, to note how much his 
 countrymen's real estimate of him depends upon for- 
 eign appreciation, especially that of Englishmen; and 
 therefore how rare is his opportunity for self -congrat- 
 ulation, considering that England has so slight a re- 
 gard for the foremost men, the poets and prophets, 
 beyond the Atlantic, because so little real knowledge of 
 them. 1 Until to-day, it might almost have been said of 
 North American writers, painters, sculptors, that they 
 required the stamp of European approval in order to 
 attain a recognised place of esteem in North American 
 opinion. This entire region even as yet is not sure 
 of its judgments. But woe to the Englishman who 
 commits the tactless indiscretion of saying that this is 
 so. New Englishmen, however, and their brothers of 
 the West see no reason for humbly impressing their 
 deficiency upon others. While the island English- 
 man prefers to live in a paradise of imperial pride , 
 " fool's paradise " though it may be, it is still a para- 
 dise, the American Englishman, with the assurance 
 
 1 " La France a souvent averti les Anglais du merite de leurs 
 grands hommes," wrote De Fontanes in 1785 to Joubert. 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 93 
 
 of inexperience, assumes a certainty and omniscience 
 which he is aware is not very well founded, and 
 which can deceive nobody acquainted with a little 
 history and human nature. He may admit, within 
 the privacy of his own geographical boundaries and 
 to other American Englishmen, unsatisfying things 
 about himself and his fellows; but, like the island 
 English in their assertion of their own gift for domi- 
 nance, he is not possessed of sufficient magnanimity 
 to own the truth to many others who are not of his 
 own kith and kin. 
 
 It is amusing to come upon a characteristic such as 
 this, reminiscent of the boyish inflation of the public 
 school, in the attitude and bearing of States when they 
 are forced to throw their shoulders back and toe the 
 line of dignity. "Nescis, mi fili, quam parva cum 
 sapientia regitur mundus : " " You have no idea, my 
 boy, with how little wisdom the world is governed, " 
 said Count Oxenstiern, the Chancellor of Sweden, to 
 his son. Behind the conventional and magniloquent 
 phrases of diplomatic correspondence I sometimes 
 think there is a void of intellectual inanity that 
 imposes upon statesmen themselves. A score of 
 adequate illustrations crowd to the point of any 
 unclogged pen in this connection. But the most 
 conspicuous illustration of all it occurs to me to give 
 at the moment, because it will serve also, by the way, 
 
94 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 as an all-sufficient proof of the prominence and per- 
 vasiveness of the English characteristic of selfishness, 
 in illustration of which I have noted in the preceding 
 portion of these remarks a more trivial instance, that 
 was much questioned when it first appeared. 
 
 Never has England's selfishness, her constant prac- 
 tical belief in the truth of the principle of Natural 
 Selection, and her confidence that the working of this 
 theory may he facilitated by jealous attention to one's 
 own resources, God helping those who help them- 
 selves, been more effectively demonstrable than in 
 the whole history of her relations with her colonies. 
 She has believed that the race is indeed to the swift- 
 est, and the battle to the strongest, and bread to the 
 worldly-wise ; and she has seen that the best way to 
 prove this is to win by being universally competent 
 herself. But in statecraft, as in the selling of eggs, 
 there may be a wisdom of the penny and the foolish- 
 ness of the pound. In this one conspicuous particular 
 such fiscal demoralisation and folly have almost al- 
 ways marked the policy of the usually so honest and 
 fair-minded England. What her ministers ought al- 
 ways to have done in regard to colonial affairs, that 
 is, in regard to foreign affairs that were really home 
 affairs, was to bend all their energies to hoodwink- 
 ing the people. She should have made her children 
 useful to her, and at the same time concealed from 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 95 
 
 them their subjection. What actually she has 
 usually succeeded in doing is either to apply the 
 chastising rod, or else to show in regard to her off- 
 spring an unnatural indifference. Hence the culti- 
 vation of that spirit of alienation in the colonies 
 which a century ago wrested from England the 
 United States in North America, and which seems 
 liable to disintegrate her larger empire of this nine- 
 teenth century. Ordinarily any proper working theory 
 of diplomacy depends upon a practical application to 
 human nature of the eternal principal of the Conserva- 
 tion of Energy ; action, that is, without speech, faire 
 sans dire. But what shall we say of a people who, 
 in the first place, have from sheer indifference neg- 
 lected their duty for so long a time that the policy of 
 faire sans dire is on many problems now impracti- 
 cable, and who now fail to take the only course left 
 open to them, that of a generous interest and sym- 
 pathy, which shall uproot all falsity of pride? By 
 such careless indifference to-day England runs the risk 
 of losing a splendid empire. 1 
 
 The revolution of the English colonies in America 
 would seem to have taught England nothing. The 
 enormity of English stupidity in matters of this sort 
 is a crime against sanity which will almost tolerate 
 
 1 Cf . the whole series of Burke's studies on the American 
 Revolution, especially the "Address to the King." 
 
96 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 extravagant figures to describe it. What pathos in 
 her frantic endeavours to bite off her own nose ! She 
 betrays dangerous symptoms of growing cataract, im- 
 pairing clearness of vision. Her statesmen need a 
 course in moral geometry and ethical conic sections, 
 to learn how to plot outward, into regions that just as 
 intimately concern them beyond their shores, the pro- 
 jection of certain admirably straight lines and princi- 
 ples which they readily enough apply to themselves 
 and to the people for whom they legislate in their 
 own island. As long ago as the time of Edward I. 
 the decree De tallagio non concedendo settled that 
 no tax or impost should be levied without the joint 
 consent of the Lords and Commons. In England it- 
 self this has been a much-admired principle for cen- 
 turies, and out of it grew the principle of no taxation 
 without representation. But violation of the spirit 
 of this decree lost to the mother country the American 
 colonies. England did not see at the time, and she 
 does not now wholly see, that her sons are her sons 
 though seas divide them. How fond the island Eng- 
 lishmen are of facts, and how well they manipulate 
 them, I have elsewhere stated. " The English now and 
 then produce a learned creature like a thistle, prickly 
 with all facts, and incapable of all fruit. " But appar- 
 ently England is the Doubting Thomas of the nations, 
 who believes in no facts but those which can literally 
 
ENGLISH AND " AMERICANS." 97 
 
 be handled, such, for instance, as produce the clan- 
 nish barbaric warfare that often exists for generations 
 between families, over merely a disputed ell of real 
 estate, or else facts that can be seen in closest per- 
 spective. If this were not true, she would be more 
 alive to the stress of the present time. 
 
 The North American Revolution was as truly a 
 civil war as the War of Secession in the United 
 States of America or the great Cromwellian outbreak 
 of that name in England. George III. thought it 
 the revolt of a dependency. It is a fallacy, however, 
 that has been too long held to imagine that the 
 American colonies proved their right to a separate 
 existence by virtue of their success. The legitimacy 
 of the struggle lay in its character as a fight for 
 equity of rights. New Englishmen happened to 
 have a temper more English than that of their domi- 
 neering elder brothers on the soil of the old home, 
 and they were more keenly alive to any derogation 
 from their rights. Like the Plaza-Toro family in 
 Mr. Gilbert's Gondoliers, they did not " demand " 
 until they had first " sought " and " desired " equality 
 of recognition at court with the other portions of the 
 state. When that freedom and equality were denied 
 them by an ignorant and indifferent government, 
 then was born their right to fight to the bitter end. 
 But, of course, the issue of individual existence, be- 
 
98 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 yond that of local self-government, was by no means 
 " constitutional, " or anything but revolutionary. As 
 self-respecting Englishmen, their only course was a 
 protracted obstinacy. But the spirit of final compro- 
 mise which usually stands Englishmen in such good 
 stead just at the last moment, forsook at this crisis 
 those who lived at home, and the wrongheadedness of 
 Lord North's government dropped the insolent iron 
 hand of coercion upon a people very much more Eng- 
 lish than the Englishmen who were then in the majority 
 in Parliament. Had it not been for an estranging 
 sea, too wide to be traversed by the unsympathetic, 
 selfish gaze of England, Englishmen would have seen 
 that they were putting their feet upon the necks of 
 brothers, and that it was time to change the character 
 they were playing to that of Sir Giles Fairplay, which 
 suits them so much better. Here was an object-lesson 
 that would have been large enough for all but English 
 eyes. But it was not learned by the English of 
 America any more than, as we see ample proofs to- 
 day, it has been learned in England. As a civil war, 
 the North American Revolution was inevitable; as 
 a war of independence, it was at the time a geogra- 
 phical necessity. The Civil War in the United States 
 of North America discussed, with the argument of bul- 
 lets, practically the same question; namely, the rights 
 enjoyed by people possessed of local self-government, 
 
ENGLISH AND " AMERICANS." 99 
 
 and the duties incumbent upon them, The right of 
 the Southern States to secession was certainly much 
 more plausible than that of the original New English 
 colonies to secede; for the national integrity de- 
 pended originally upon a voluntary compact. The 
 exact nature of State-rights and the Union was far 
 less quickly and certainly determinable, and the in- 
 dividual independence of the several States was really, 
 as some of the Border States i clearly saw, an arguable 
 question; whereas that of the colonies was not, until 
 a stupid policy drew a line wider than the ocean 
 between the home island and that part of England 
 in America. As society is constituted, the error of 
 the South in the Union of the North American States 
 was in not adopting constitutional methods, and in 
 precipitating the war before all other means had been 
 tried. The North scarcely realised how divergent its 
 own political development and that of the slave 
 States had rapidly come to be, Many of the natural 
 political English tendencies, in particular those mak- 
 ing towards the democratic principle, were arrested 
 and all but destroyed by atrophy throughout the 
 entire South of the slaves, and the community became 
 less and less intelligible to the more consistent members 
 of the Puritan or Quaker North who had maintained 
 
 1 Kentucky, for instance, at first, in its attitude of neutrality, 
 in which President Lincoln acquiesced. 
 
100 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 and cultivated the old English tradition. Fortunately 
 for both the North and the South in America, there 
 were no natural barriers of mountain or dim stretches 
 of vague sea to solve with hopeless disruption, as 
 with the irony of a fate that puts to scorn all human 
 intervention, a question in which the anxious dis- 
 cussions of men were vain, and their actual warfare 
 impotently sublime and pathetic folly. Marriages of 
 States, obviously, save on the shores of the Adriatic, 
 are made in heaven ; at all events not always by the 
 orthodox appointed ministers on earth. 
 
 This entire significant episode in history is largely 
 explained by the fact that the characteristic blinding 
 English selfishness, which sometimes looks so hopeless, 
 got the upper hand of the English habit of final com- 
 promise, which is almost as characteristic. As has 
 been said before, from the dominance of this prin- 
 ciple, which destroyed her insight and injured her 
 sense of perspective, she has suffered much chagrin. 
 That even thus the whole injury she does herself is 
 not told, but that in general this selfishness even dis- 
 torts her judgment, I lately noted entertainingly 
 illustrated by a mural tablet placed between two 
 nondescript Indians in Westminster Abbey, who hold 
 upon their heads a piece of sculpture erected to the 
 memory of an Hon. Lieut. -Colonel Roger Townshend, 
 killed by a cannon-ball on the 25th of July, 1759, 
 
ENGLISH AND ''AMERICANS." 101 
 
 he was reconnoitring the French lines at Ticonderoga. 
 This slab enrolls the Hon. Lieut. -Colonel Roger 
 Townshend " with the names of those immortal states- 
 men and commanders whose wisdom and intrepidity 
 in the cause of this comprehensive and successful war 
 have extended the commerce, enlarged the dominions, 
 and upheld the majesty of these kingdoms beyond 
 the idea of any former age. " Oh, shades of Alexander 
 and Napoleon, what can one say more? Really, we 
 English do need an Academy, after all. For notwith- 
 standing the internal evidence of the style, there is 
 surely no reason to suppose that the Hon. Lieut. - 
 Colonel Roger Townshend, one of the immortals of 
 this war which upheld the majesty of this British 
 empire beyond the idea of any former age, is a mythi- 
 cal creature or a demigod. For Fort Ticonderoga 
 still stands, the most imposing military ruin in 
 America, I speak under correction here, and across 
 its western barracks the sun sets full upon its brown 
 and crumbling stone, adorned when once I saw it 
 with a truly nineteenth- century legend in the staring 
 white letters of somebody's " Stove Polish. " This 
 legend attests at all events a certain reality to the 
 cycle of stories clustering about the ruin. But Ticon- 
 deroga is not only a monument to American vulgarity. 
 It is also a warning to Englishmen, almost as significant 
 as their painful memories of Manipur, of the fatality 
 
102 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 lurking in their short-sighted selfishness and in the 
 practical lack of perspective I have mentioned. 
 They should see to it that amid " the long wash of 
 Australasian seas " there arise not another Ticonde- 
 roga as significant. For they still have it in their 
 power, at this period of rapidly extending intercommu- 
 nication, when seas no longer divide as they once did 
 in the earlier time when Englishmen in America laid 
 the foundations of their new American state, to seize 
 the event, and, securing for themselves and their 
 posterity a harmonious and federated empire, to seal 
 for some time the issue of the future. 
 
 Is it not a pity that the inflation and boastfulness 
 of which mention has been made, arising partly from 
 a sense of their own deficiencies, should be so rife 
 among Englishmen all over the world, and especially 
 among Englishmen in America ? For it is unnecessary. 
 A talent of appreciation is much more natural to the 
 people of the United States than to the island Eng- 
 lish. But criticism, of course, however much it 
 fulfils its function by being simply a faithful recording 
 of impressions or as a sympathetic interpretation, is 
 at least the ability to know a good thing when one 
 sees it. Yet the feeling of the courage of one's con- 
 victions, while always a moral characteristic in a 
 person of artistic genius or special abilities, unfortu- 
 nately may exist quite apart from critical insight or 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 103 
 
 intellectual cleverness. Much of th'e unadulterated 
 strain of English "blood in America, and certain other 
 sections of charming and appreciative people not 
 English, still possess this steadiness and poise which 
 I have elsewhere called moral inertia, and are quite 
 free from the vulgar " "bounce " and boastfulness. 
 But these are clearly no longer the dominant classes 
 in American life. Democratic institutions have tended 
 to their disfranchisement. The remnant, possessing 
 a refined tradition of manners and of ideas, and en- 
 dowed hereditarily with the love of whatsoever things 
 are noble and of good report, people certainly hav- 
 ing in their composition a positive basis for looking 
 at things critically as they are, comparatively speak- 
 ing, is very small. Not unlike the vanishing class of 
 the Faubourg St. Germain in Paris, with which, how- 
 ever, it has nothing else in common, it lives in as un- 
 obtrusive an alienation as possible in the midst of a 
 vast number of good-natured and commonplace vul- 
 garians who are the heirs of the future. Its function 
 is the tending of the vestal fires. It is a dethroned 
 aristocracy, beyond any question more exclusive than 
 the aristocracy of England. Levites of the arcana 
 of the best in American life, their own self-preserva- 
 tion almost demands their isolation. Their condition 
 is pathetic, were it not so enviable, in the distinction 
 attaching to their sacred obligation of preserving the 
 
104 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 national records and keeping the fires alight. At 
 times they half believe they prefer the " stinking 
 breath " and the " sweaty nightcap " of the rampant 
 democracy fast developing in England, to the exas- 
 perating habit of gaucherie manifested in every 
 gesture by people given only to pennies, psalms, or 
 platitudes. For though the gap between the higher 
 and the lower in England is yearly narrowing, still 
 there is a pleasant deference and that habit of respect 
 which leads to ease of living there. In the States of 
 North America and, I am told, in the English colonies 
 as well, the presumptuous familiarity of manner, born 
 usually of the very kindest and most unselfish feelings, 
 is extremely irritating, and none the less so for the 
 merit of its origin. American bonhomie seems to be 
 an endeavour to be one thing to all men. This is not 
 at all the same thing as being all things to all men. 
 The Pauline diplomacy is an ideal that neither Eng- 
 land nor America has reached. The self-centred in- 
 difference of island Englishmen is as unfavourable to 
 this ideal as the hearty abandon of indiscriminate 
 intimacy that marks the American type of English- 
 man. The Christian conception of the fellowship of 
 mankind and love of one's neighbour has become far 
 riper in America than in England, and it is usually 
 more genuine when it exists. But there is very little 
 of the early spirit of this much-prized Christianity in 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 105 
 
 either country. By both countries Jesus is the most 
 discussed, but the least understood, person in history. 
 In the United States people are . often wooed tfc 
 churches where they are told nine times what Paulv 
 said to once what Jesus said, and their attendance is 
 won by theatrical devices which in England are 
 thought very bad taste indeed. But listeners once 
 won are undoubtedly for the most part more intel- 
 lectually entertained and rationally stirred by the ser- 
 mon than church-goers in England. Except in the 
 Episcopal Church, so called, which is in America 
 only a sect among others more significant, the same 
 interest does not attach to the rest of the service other 
 than the sermon. But the average ability of New 
 English or even all the North American clergy is in 
 advance of the average ability of the same class in 
 England. In comparison with the stern, highly elab- 
 orated tutelage of the New English clergy, the train- 
 ing and circumstances of the clergy in England under 
 the Establishment have been lax and demoralising. 
 The result has been in New England a stronger moral 
 fibre, but a learning adapted to less humane ends, and 
 in general a deeper but less broad intellectual achieve- 
 ment. " The religion most prevalent in our northern 
 colonies," said Burke, in his speech on Conciliation 
 with America, " is a refinement on the principle of 
 resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the 
 
106 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 protestantism of the Protestant religion." The elet 
 ment of life transplanted in the first two centuries 
 beyond the Atlantic was an invigorating principle 
 from the marrow of the English backbone. This pro- 
 testantism of the Protestant religion gave integrity 
 and vitality of latent energy which assured continuous 
 and, on the whole, healthy development to a people 
 caring less for artistic grace than the grace of God. 
 It was a Puritanism radically the same that was 
 accountable for the historical life of the Israelites 
 and of early Rome. Concerted action and a unani- 
 mous and patriotic pride in their own national life, 
 based on sublimity of conceit in their own special god, 
 have characterized all great peoples before the urbanity 
 of their decadence. But the special English strength 
 of the early New Englishman has largely disappeared. 
 Yet in the advance towards disillusionment, to which 
 every people tends, the North Americans, placed, geo- 
 graphically speaking, eccentrically off the focal centre 
 of European influence, have got only to the precipitous 
 edge of the gulf of despair ; but that they are even in 
 its neighbourhood they are utterly unconscious. What 
 facts and elements may come to retard this result, nay, 
 what already exist, I am not for the moment concerned 
 to consider ; but there they are now at least, for better 
 or worse. The modern New Englishmen and the 
 Englishmen of the Western States keep the intellectual 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 107 
 
 expression of their ancestors' faith, and of most of their 
 points of view, but they are not inspired with the old 
 indomitable confidence in a vital reality behind the 
 expressions. England has undergone and is now under- 
 going a disillusionment as revolutionary as that of 
 France, but, as its habit is, it takes the change more 
 decorously. An Englishman never tells all he knows, 
 and much less frequently all he feels. But his sanity 
 and reticence in matters of religion should not be al- 
 lowed to hide the fact of this tremendous and pervasive 
 subterranean change. The cloak of his hypocrisy may 
 in time not far distant cover America. But there it 
 can never so effectually hide the gestures underneath 
 as in England. Perhaps it is because the mantle is 
 so ample and always has been ample, thus affording 
 opportunities of quieter consideration of what will be 
 the best way, when changes threaten, to adapt oneself 
 to the new order of the time, that England's history 
 has been so continuously expansive along the line of 
 liberty, and that only in rare instances have events 
 come to birth prematurely, or found the larger part of 
 the state unprepared for them. Of this truth the first 
 two centuries of New English history almost the 
 most characteristic, as I have elsewhere said, in Eng- 
 lish history offer conspicuous proof. But neither 
 the New England of to-day, nor any body of men in 
 America, can be cited to this end. New England has 
 
108 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 almost outlived the name. Its boundaries are now 
 holding many another race. As democracy advances 
 in England, and other nations more and more rub 
 shoulders against the Englishman on the sacred soil 
 of the paradise of his own patrimony, Englishmen will 
 gradually take the American hue. Still insular, how 
 fast is the Englishman becoming cosmopolitan and 
 democratic; and how odd that he should not realize 
 that his way has before been trodden by the New 
 Englishman. 
 
 The form which England's worldly wisdom has 
 taken is a perfectly natural result of her geographical 
 position. Eor some centuries she has sat in the seat 
 of customs. Stormed by the battering of these north- 
 ern seas, England's rock has risen in the very high- 
 way of the waves of largest international influence. 
 Her reticence, her selfishness, were needed for her 
 self-preservation. Everything, she knew, would come 
 to her in time. Hence her dignity and patience in 
 the best type of her sons, and in her worst the narrow 
 horizon of her mind, her brutal self-sufficiency and 
 coarse, pugnacious energy, born of an ignorance always 
 eager to die in order to save its prejudices. No 
 brutality, no coarseness, is so odious as English 
 coarseness. Little of this was transplanted to Amer- 
 ica, however, to the home now of mediocrity and the 
 common. Always through the centuries the best type 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 109 
 
 of Englishman, both in England and New England, 
 has had in quite unaccountable haphazard fashion 
 visions of the flammantia mcenia mundi. The calm, 
 slow, conservative Englishman, given to sleeping in 
 Authority and dreaming of the past, is not the only, 
 though he is the average and the passing, type. There 
 have always been a saving few given to the cultivation 
 of variations from the original stock, and the courage- 
 ous pursuit of deviating and eccentric humours. In 
 the open play of discussion which has been possible in 
 England, how often have flashes of seminal and il- 
 luminating thought been struck out in the interests 
 of Truth, and how rarely elsewhere has the light 
 been brighter! But the flaming boundaries of the 
 worlds have scarcely been kenned more resolutely in 
 this island than by single-eyed observers on New 
 English hilltops, through many a calm long night of 
 the first two centuries of their history. All this is 
 a fact unknown in the insular mother island. Now 
 things are not quite the same. Englishmen, educated 
 
 1 wisely for generations in liberty and self-reliance, and 
 amidst that collection of rights called free institutions, 
 
 - were able in America to work out their own salvation 
 without even the amount of fear and trembling that 
 is prescribed and that one might have thought neces- 
 sary. Suddenly, however, representatives of races 
 without the habits of self-reliance, and unpractised 
 
110 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 in the technique of practical government, invade the 
 country, and the first scientific result is a swamping 
 tidal-wave. 
 
 It is a commonplace to say that it makes a vast 
 difference whether democracy grows up naturally from 
 within, or is imported from without as an idea to be 
 engrafted. But the commonplaces are so often fois; 
 gotten. It makes a large part of the difference, indeed, 
 between France and England, between England and 
 the modem United States, between the first two cen. 
 turies of American national life and the last half 
 century of that life. America of the last thirty or 
 forty years bears scarcely any resemblance to the; 
 original English New England. She has taken a 
 step from which now there is no going back. She is 
 selling her original birthright for a conglomerate mess 
 of pottage, hi which " Irish stew, " mulligatawny soup, 
 corn-bread, " sauer-kraut, " and " lager beer " are staple 
 ingredients. The modern America of the States is 
 entering upon certain social problems absolutely new: 
 to it. These problems must be settled by methods 
 for which she will not be able to find any precedent 
 in her English traditions. For her earlier history, 
 indeed almost for the first two centuries of her history, 
 the phenomena with which she had to deal were dis- 
 tinct, definite, what the scientists call isolated, and 
 therefore comparatively simple. The complicated 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." Ill 
 
 tangle of those that now exist is so very perplexing 
 that she may well tremble at the problem of unravel- 
 ling them. At the start she was forced, for her very 
 life, to eject elements of hostility which threatened her 
 existence. Among such the Quakers have a plain 
 tale of intolerance manifested towards them, for in- 
 stance, to cite in proof. But for the most part during 
 this period in America nothing impeded her growth; 
 and with such blood in her veins, no wonder she suc- 
 ceeded. Liberty, planted in a soil that was unchoked 
 by any weeds of an older time the feudal growth 
 that in England was so deep-rooted grew to quick 
 maturity. But just for this reason the establishment 
 of national unity and republican government was not 
 quite so remarkable an achievement at the time as 
 to-day they seem. The difficulties of Frenchmen in 
 the solution of their problem, which only to a super- 
 ficial view can possibly appear the same as the 
 American, and was and is in reality radically differ- 
 ent, are worth noting in comparison. Two genera- 
 tions passed between the protective and feudal age of 
 Louis XIV. and the astounding Revolution, and 
 meanwhile almost every eminent Frenchman, formerly 
 having thought England barbarian, came to this island 
 of liberty of thought. Voltaire introduced to France 
 Locke, Newton, and Shakespeare. " Until Voltaire 
 had got to know England by his travels and friend- 
 
 i 
 
112 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 ship," says Cousin, "he was not Voltaire." The 
 effect of these leaders of light was that of an awaken- 
 ing spark. We know the story ; but in the flame and 
 the fire many traditions were untouched and many 
 affections went un scorched. They had only disap- 
 peared for a time from view in the smoke of the con- 
 flagration. In some the love of the old regime, and 
 in others the force of a cowering habit, were here and 
 there asbestos in the fire. " I 'd rather be a Stuart 
 bastard than a legitimate Guelph, " a friend once said 
 to me. It was a kind of sentiment like this that per- 
 vaded France and still is not unknown there. More- 
 over, a people is always impressed by mystery, and 
 cares for what it does not or cannot possess, as well as 
 to recall what the fathers enjoyed in " the good old 
 times." And it is against this host of prejudices, 
 affections, predispositions, that liberty has had to make 
 its way in France. A people denied the experience 
 of self-government is almost sure to go mad if inflamed 
 with an abstract idea of liberty, equality, fraternity, 
 for which it is not ripe. Constitutional government 
 in England has been self-government in leading-strings. 
 The early colonists in America were largely Eng- 
 lishmen, with all the English training, who believed 
 that under favourable conditions the leading-strings 
 could be snapped. They were perfectly right. But 
 they who have builded the house no longer sit at the 
 
ENGLISH AND "AMERICANS." 113 
 
 head of the table, and all about the board is a motley 
 throng. What is to be the nature of the remaining 
 courses of the banquet or the quality of the after-din- 
 ner wine and speeches, he must be either a clever 
 schoolboy or a wise prophet to suggest. 1 
 
 1 Perhaps the deadlock of business recently in the American 
 House of Representatives, nominally over the question of a 
 quorum, may indicate to some extent the lines along which 
 data may be collected for the prophetic generalisation. The 
 episode was not a pleasant one. It tested nothing, but it re- 
 vealed weaknesses. It showed, among other things, how bitter 
 still is sectional prejudice, and how keen still the sense of so- 
 vereignty among the Southern States. Moreover, it illustrated 
 on a large scale an important point that Mr. Bagehot was 
 always making, the greater working efficiency of the parlia- 
 mentary form of government over the presidential in its union 
 of the executive and legislative functions. Is it to be hoped 
 that this American episode is the rapid retrogression that it 
 seems away from the idea of centralisation of power, and the 
 delegation of authority to the lower House ? A crisis such as 
 this, however, if overcome quietly and calmly settled, must tend 
 to the establishment of government on a more solid basis. 
 The English cabinet, which is simply a governing committee 
 of presumably the most wisely chosen representatives of the 
 dominant party, has made the actual business of government 
 and the legislative will of the party in power almost identical. 
 This is an ideal yet to be attained in the less simple system of 
 the government of the United States. Whether this is a de- 
 sirable ideal, however, is an important and interesting matter 
 for discussion. No one has written more ably upon this subject 
 than Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, in his " Essays on Government/' 
 Boston, 1889. 
 
114 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 But it is unfortunate, I admit, to be reminded again, 
 and just at this moment, of the remark of Count 
 Oxenstiern, " You have no idea, my boy, with how 
 little wisdom the world is governed. " 
 
 MAT, 1890. 
 
DEMOCRACY, WITH REFERENCE TO A 
 RECENT BOOK. 
 
DEMOCKACY, WITH REFERENCE TO A 
 RECENT BOOK. 
 
 WHAT is the greatest name in the world? What 
 word responds to the most inclusive thought of the 
 time 1 ? 
 
 Surely it is this : Democracy. The word " Catholi- 
 cism " has a renowned echo in the world. No observer 
 of the moment will refuse to Pope Leo XIII. the 
 distinction that is his. The Holy See is still perhaps 
 as well able to take care of itself as ever. Once all 
 eyes turned to Rome with superstitious adoration; for 
 centuries the Pope nearly hypnotised the world. To- 
 day in Catholicism there is not quite the same power 
 of attraction, the same glory, the same prestige. But 
 the Catholic Church, the Church which is after all, 
 historically, The Church, driven for mere self-preser- 
 vation to a new opportunism, a fresh political wisdom, 
 is recovering again, for a time at least, its ground. 
 It is bending on its oars with an unexpected vigour. 
 So men pull with a winning or a losing ! stake in 
 sight. And although one sees in the near future 
 perhaps a future so near as the end of the twentieth 
 century the rock of St. Peter, cracked, though not 
 
118 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 shattered, yet more venerable always and picturesque 
 than any of the foundations on which the post-Reforma- 
 tion religious sects have raised the symbols and temples 
 of their faith, while in the unsightly clefts the lichens 
 begin to encroach, as long ago they did on the Doric 
 flutings of dead Apollo's shrine at Bassae, stillf to-day 
 there is no obvious sign of the change, to-day, at least, 
 the Church is holding its own and more ! 
 
 Why is this renewed vitality, this undiminished 
 and lusty life 1 Because, simply because, it has burned 
 the old standards, and raised another of a bunting 
 woven in nineteenth-century looms. It has lifted the 
 standard of Democracy. Pope Leo XIII. has himself 
 given the cue in memorable words. 1 It is not seemly 
 the application was to France and the Royalists 
 that the Church should direct its loyalty to more than 
 one corpse. 
 
 The fittest survives on this planet. But the fittest 
 survives only in obedience to the laws of this planet, 
 of this whole mysterious system in the network of the 
 complications of which we find ourselves prisoners 
 with the sweet illusion that we are free. To ignore 
 the arrangement of things is the courageous privilege 
 of an idealist, of a Ravachol, but not of a discreet, 
 
 1 The exact words of Leo XIII. as spoken to Monsieur do 
 Blowitz were : L'figlise du Christ ne s'attache qu'a un seul ca- 
 davre, a celui qui est lui-meme attache sur la croix. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 119 
 
 time-serving man, not of the opportunist. And The 
 Church, in its alliance with Democracy, is showing 
 itself more in and of the world than ever. So, that 
 it will survive yet for a fruitful while one may be 
 sure: it has based its hope upon the greatest of all 
 names ; it is making the cause of the people its own. 
 
 Yes, Democracy is the greatest name in the world; 
 and the entertainment which the advance of the ideas 
 for which it stands offers to the critic is so exhilarat- 
 ing as almost to imperil his steadiness of vision. To 
 be fully abreast of one's time, an achievement which 
 Goethe thought enough to make a man a genius, is 
 to-day beyond the opportunity of even so fortunately 
 placed an observer as a pope. Not even can Leo 
 XIII., who, for the pleasure of criticism, is the most 
 privileged prisoner on the planet, hope to sum up the 
 entire moment; not even he can venture to plot the 
 curve of the developing Democracy. But the great 
 thing is that he has seen the nature of the problem, 
 and where lies the safety of the venerable interests 
 dear to him. Could there be any doubt, indeed, that 
 the word " Democracy " covers vaguely a host of facts 
 belonging to the most interesting series now at the 
 critical disposal of an observing man, the right-about- 
 face of Catholicism just the other day in Prance would 
 be conclusive evidence : so much confidence has The 
 Church taught us to have in her worldly wisdom! 
 
120 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 It is of the latest serious attempt to interpret to us 
 the meaning of this word so often on our lips to-day, 
 Laveleye's Le Gouvernement dans la Democratic, 1 
 that I am now going to speak. We have not the book 
 as yet in English. But in Europe, as of all that 
 Laveleye did, one hears about it a great deal. Per- 
 haps readers care about him there too much. But it 
 is worth while, I believe, as often as possible to inter- 
 est ourselves in what other people are saying on those 
 matters of which we too are thinking. The process is 
 invigorating and widening; it is a good thing for our 
 prejudices. 
 
 A new book by Laveleye was always a pleasure, but 
 never a surprise. Few writers devoting themselves 
 to large, yet after all special and limited, themes have 
 adopted at once so many of the good, and some of the at- 
 tractive but unfortunate, intellectual methods of our age. 
 There have been times, one likes to think, when men 
 have had no thought for the morrow ; when they have 
 cared only to satisfy their own sense of perfection, let- 
 ting all other ends take care of themselves; when they 
 have been willing to risk being forestalled, so only 
 they might be left sincerely to follow their own bent 
 in their own leisurely way. At our exciting moment of 
 to-day the temptation to be immediately heard leads so 
 
 1 Le Gouvernement dans la Democratic, par mile de Lave- 
 leye. Vols. 2. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1891. pp. 664. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 121 
 
 many of us, on the contrary, into the strenuous com- 
 pany of those who speak long and overloudly, "because 
 it seems a kind of duty to anticipate our neighbours. 
 And Laveleye often yielded to this temptation; he 
 rarely failed to let us all feel that he did not intend to 
 be left out in the cold. His work, naturally, suffered 
 from these conditions; it almost always showed signs 
 of impatience. His thousands of pages were often put 
 forth unedited, so often even unindexed, when the 
 index would have given really so very little trouble. 
 Yet certainly it is at the loss of a number of very 
 superior merits in our work that we make up our 
 minds to be in a hurry. Moreover, if a writer is con- 
 vinced that at any cost he must be encyclopaedic, lest 
 somebody should catch him napping, is it not the 
 choosing of some inferior pleasures for others that are 
 really higher ? How can the fact of the possession of 
 a large horizon in intellectual matters ever, of itself, 
 make up for constantly obtruding evidences of a cer- 
 tain indifference to the presence of spaces of untilled 
 ground here and there within its magnificent sweep 1 
 Yet, although Laveleye's work is lacking in unity, 
 in force, in convincingness, it can never fail to be 
 delightfully suggestive for readers open-eyed; for, 
 as I said, he reflects most of the good, and some 
 of the bad, of this particular moment. Suggestive, 
 delightfully suggestive, the moment is, but its great- 
 
122 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 est admirers will scarcely deny that it is wanting in 
 unity and in force. Of all this, Laveleye's last book 
 must henceforward bring continuous pathetic proof. 
 And yet to love to generalise, to possess, as a part of 
 one's temperament, that kind of gift of imagination 
 that makes generalisation possible and a pleasure, and 
 to subordinate facts to this gift, this habit, while still 
 liking them in themselves, is not common; and it is 
 common, least of all, in the English temper. So that 
 this suggestiveness of Laveleye is in itself, at this 
 time, really a distinguished merit, and of value for 
 English writers for instruction. And while his worl 
 has so much of so distinguished a quality, if it had not 
 also the unworthy impatience it would appeal to 
 as more compact, more philosophical, more enduring. 
 It was this impatience that allowed him to be self -con- 
 tradictory with surprising frequency; because of tl 
 he often raised foot-notes to the dignity of chapters: 
 because of this, too, he went on repeating himself, 
 and too often only compiling without sorting, just 
 the farmer of the New Testament parable garnei 
 crops of excellent grain merely for storage into bai 
 Yet criticism such as this undoubtedly has a slightly 
 troubled conscience ; for Laveleye had read so mu( 
 and really had knowledge of so many things, and aftei 
 all did in some, indeed in many, respects his owi 
 particular task so surprisingly well, when one thinl 
 
DEMOCRACY. 123 
 
 of the complexity of the subjects, and he was 
 usually so helpful, letting his thought play freely and 
 very widely, that it would he a pity not to say enough 
 positively in praise to keep all the lines of perspective 
 true. But criticism, surely, must always hold up the 
 ideal perfection ; and to secure an audience, moreover, 
 Laveleye's work does not need any man's approval. 
 It is already popularly thought to be too important a 
 fact. He long ago secured his large and judicious 
 circle of readers, who will still listen to him in any 
 circumstances, whatever any one of us may say, 
 whether in censure or in praise. 
 
 Laveleye's too impressive lack of method, however, 
 and his very modern lack of force and unity have not 
 detracted from the fine superior characteristic in him 
 of suggestiveness, and therefore from what might be 
 called, in so difficult a theme as was his latest, the 
 almost stirring interest of his book on Democracy. 
 When it is admitted once and for all that a book like 
 this would have been in many respects an ideal in its 
 kind for the official head of the old Alexandrian 
 Library, certainly the author's dearest friends cannot 
 expect of the class of his more detached readers keener 
 appreciation of his value. These other merits indi- 
 viduality, originality, force are not necessary merits 
 of encyclopaedic works, and why should they be looked 
 for ? If Laveleye were ever dull, he really might be 
 
124 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 called the Pausanias of constitutional achievements. 
 As he is, he is very entertaining and usually luminous, 
 with a great talent for appreciating sanely things that 
 exist, and he always seems surprisingly complete, im- 
 partial. Perhaps we should be greedy to demand 
 more ; to ask, for instance, for the clairvoyant things 
 that please us in De Tocqueville, or the clear method, 
 the science, or the really critical sense of a Bagehot. 
 
 So this last work of Laveleye will always be a use- 
 ful book. He set himself there to say all that was 
 to be said on what is undoubtedly the timeliest of 
 themes, and a writer wedded as he was to history 
 could scarcely have said more than he said. To facts 
 he clung very nearly always. He was aware of ap- 
 proximately all that has been written wisely on these 
 interesting matters. He was quite wonderfully up to 
 date. In Prance, save M. Boutmy, who is there that 
 has kept careful pace with all the political facts of the 
 time? In England, before Bagehot, who was there 
 that knew at once really accurately and comprehen- 
 sively much about the immense cluster of political 
 facts in the United States of North America, for in- 
 stance, in their unexplored suggestiveness for students 
 of Democracy 1 Then came Mr. Bryce and compiled 
 his thesaurus, his encyclopaedia, revealing to a host of 
 inattentive scientists the absorbing significance of this 
 class of American facts. But of this undiscovered 
 
DEMOCRACY. 125 
 
 country, so valuable for research, from which, how- 
 ever, sooner or later all travellers return, Laveleye 
 knew more, apparently, than any other European. 
 He did not, I think, know enough, nor did he know 
 much more than the rest of us do about Australia. 
 But in all other countries he appreciated the demo- 
 cratic movement from the point of view of history as 
 no one had done hitherto. Yet the breaks in his 
 vision were serious, and they limit the value of his 
 last book too definitely in essential things to pass un- 
 noticed. He is very discreet, not daring to prophesy 
 what will happen some day and soon. Yet more ven- 
 turesome attempts to form a " political science " would 
 have been tolerable. For, structural conditions con- 
 ditions, I mean, of this very moment he exactly 
 defines. But there is a whole rather interminable 
 network of significant psychologic facts, spiritual facts, 
 mechanical facts, even now existing, although new with 
 our age, which have begun to modify all the conclusions 
 to be drawn from the somewhat stale teachings of his- 
 tory of which students have always been so fond, and 
 which, if carefully disentangled and scanned, would give 
 such students a positive enthusiasm for scientific pro- 
 phecy, a prophecy in which, without cynicism, we 
 should be willing enough to watch them indulge. Yet 
 upon none of these did Laveleye insist, and few of them 
 has he recorded. This class of facts, everywhere visible 
 
126 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 to-day, is, it is true, everywhere save in the Americas, 
 in South Africa, and in Australia, rather intangible, 
 indeed all but hopelessly complicated, so that it is not 
 easily determinable. But in Australia and at the 
 Cape and in the United States of North America, for 
 instance, many of them, after all, are so clear and 
 obvious that they may be said almost to advertise 
 themselves, so that even he who runs may read; and 
 it is just these facts which at our time a writer on 
 " Democracy " ought to try to press into his service 
 and to question. Even at the risk of being thought 
 unscientific, Utopian, there was here an enviable op- 
 portunity, to be had only for the searching. Hence- 
 forth few of the deductions of history will much help 
 us in plotting the curves of the developing Democracy. 
 Such deductions will still for some time have a great 
 bearing on the problem as it may be studied in Eng- 
 land, and on the continent of Europe a closer bearing 
 still; but in comparison none whatever, I repeat, 
 though with some exaggeration, in the United States 
 of North America, for there is the entire overwhelm- 
 ing series of new facts and new conditions which are 
 positively modifying the individual man. To say that 
 this train of thought was unknown to Laveleye would 
 be untrue. He gave many intimations that he was 
 partially aware of this change which is so radical : this 
 was shown in his way of talking about the South 
 
DEMOCRACY. 127 
 
 American States in comparison with the spirit of the 
 things he said about the great Republic in North 
 America ; but these remarks were, after all, only inti- 
 mations, and perhaps he magnanimously, rather sadly 
 withal, rejected his chance, preferring always to be 
 strictly historical. However this may be, he neglected 
 an opportunity, and his main deductions, his most 
 original suggestions, were usually in regard to the 
 modern France, which is, of course, after the two 
 great countries already named, the chief centre of 
 amusement just now to students of political science, 
 and a country which undoubtedly, it may be said, he 
 knew much better than others more remote. 
 
 About modern France, indeed, how excellent in this 
 last book he often is ! Take this which is so much at 
 one with all he has to say about the value of Puritan- 
 ism in England, and Laveleye loved Puritanism, 
 about that Puritanism which has been the great leaven 
 of independency in religion : 
 
 " If France had not persecuted, massacred, and exiled 
 those of her children who became converts to Protestantism, 
 she would have developed those germs of liberty and of 
 self-government which had been preserved in the provincial 
 
 States." 
 
 This is not a new idea, although would it were 
 even older, and better known, but Laveleye was 
 always putting this idea opposite a new light and 
 
128 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 insisting upon it; and to us Englishmen, or New Eng- 
 lishmen, who are so apt to suppose that it is among us, 
 alone of modern peoples, that the germs of liberty 
 have existed, on account of some radical superiority 
 which in a way gives us a kind of divine right to domi- 
 nation, it is a real service to have this fact so constantly 
 recalled. But Laveleye went on : 
 
 " France suffers still frightful results from St. Bartholo- 
 mew and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, those 
 two great blows at liberty of conscience. The thing 
 most wanting in France is men who, without breaking 
 with tradition, shall nevertheless accept the new ideas. 
 The republicans are usually hostile or indifferent to every 
 religious idea, and, like their ancestors the revolutionists of 
 the last century, they lack a basis on which to build a solid 
 structure. Those who defend religious ideas wish to revive 
 the ancien regime, and are obstacles in the way of reform." 
 
 Or take this in specific reference to two or three 
 of the political forms in which the amiable defects of 
 the French people find expression, this people so 
 given to not looking before they leap, so much do they 
 love partial glimpses of ideas-in-themselves, and so 
 lacking are they in a pertinacious science : 
 
 " The misfortune of France is that, pursuing liberty 
 with passion, she has never desired to take the road that 
 leads thither. She has destroyed independent bodies, anni- 
 hilated local autonomies, centralised all functions, accorded 
 all power to irresponsible agents, rendered impossible all 
 
DEMOCRACY. 129 
 
 legal resistance, and raised thus a colossus who absorbs all 
 the national life, and who, drunk with his omnipotence, has 
 too often brought the country to its destruction. France 
 does not hesitate to overthrow dynasties, she does not dare 
 to make up her mind to restrain the exorbitant preroga- 
 tives of power which provoke these incessant revolutions; 
 on the contrary, after each crisis she increases them, thinking 
 thus better to assure the stability of political institutions. 
 It is time to return from this mistake j the sphere of action 
 of the sovereign power must be restrained in every way, by 
 cutting up the administration into independent services 
 which shall not be hierarchical, by re-establishing political 
 institutions, and by powerfully arming citizens against the 
 arbitrary encroachment of functionaries. Then only will 
 the name of the Kepublic become synonymous with that 
 of liberty." 
 
 A solution, a brave solution! But this solution, 
 however logical, and plausible as it is, must not be taken 
 immediately as ultimate. So we might take it, and 
 with assurance, were it not that we are living in the 
 " nineteenth century " and at its close ; that this means 
 the whole vague series of new facts psychologic, spir- 
 itual, mechanical of which I have been speaking as 
 now beginning their work in renovation of the modern 
 man, and in the negativing of the old historical teach- 
 ings of analogy; and were it not that in general all 
 these fresh moments of time are to be studied by 
 political scientists " on their own merits, as the ex- 
 pression is, and within their own conditions. And 
 
130 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 thus it is reasonable to suggest that perhaps this solu- 
 tion, so suitable apparently at the moment, needs not 
 after all be applied in France, because there may be 
 reasons why in that country the nation, in its progress 
 ahead of the new causes and amid the fresh conditions 
 named, may outstrip the necessity for it, discovering 
 thus new and unexpected safeguards against the 
 threatened dangers, and securing safety even while 
 preserving, and indeed increasing, the impulse which is 
 more natural to Frenchmen towards unity and centrali- 
 sation. And furthermore it is equally reasonable to 
 suggest that perhaps to the United Kingdom of Great 
 Britain and Ireland, for reasons quite different, the 
 entire nations of these islands not being as yet so im- 
 pressible by these new causes and fresh conditions, 
 this solution of a particular kind has a more pressing 
 plausibility. Yet, after all, the passage quoted is ex- 
 cellent, though the reservations are important, and hint 
 that politics is very difficult if treated as a science. 
 They are at least too important for Laveleye to have 
 asserted so categorically in another place that under all 
 conditions " the autonomy of provinces is the citadel 
 of liberty," and then, backed by this generalisation, 
 to have said, as he did elsewhere : 
 
 " Closing their eyes to the clearest teachings of history, 
 French republicans do not wish at any price for provincial 
 autonomies ; and yet without them the Republic is only a 
 
DEMOCRACY. 131 
 
 vain word, and it will with difficulty succeed in maintain- 
 ing itself." 
 
 Laveleye is to my mind much more critical, and less 
 in need of being fenced about by reservation, when he 
 writes as follows about the slower social evolution of 
 England certain things which history may legitimately 
 be left to teach him, for he is referring to changes 
 which, whether they will or not take place in the way 
 he names, in any case must occur (saving only the hope 
 that always resides in " intervention by the state ") 
 before the new political facts to which I am always 
 alluding as liable to vitiate the best-conceived panaceas 
 derived from history, can seriously complicate the 
 problem. 
 
 " In England," he says, " where property is centred in the 
 hands of a small number of families, where labourers in the 
 field are shut out from the possession of the soil they culti- 
 vate, where the innumerable masses of industrial labourers 
 have declared war on their masters, where finally the fact 
 of inequality is becoming patent to all eyes, the danger 
 [of social explosion, taking some such practical direction as 
 seizure of the land and a fresh division of it] is greater. 
 The rural labourer is not as yet aroused by aspirations for 
 equality, workmen in the towns are not accustomed to 
 arms, nor have they the revolutionary tradition, and the 
 average middle-class citizen,* strengthened by party strug- 
 gle and by self-government, will know better than else- 
 where how to defend himself. But these conditions will 
 1 La bourgeoisie. 
 
132 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 not last. Suppose that in some years, when ideas of social 
 re-organisation shall have invaded the whole working class, 
 a great war breaks out, stopping commerce and closing the 
 workshops; the consequences might be frightful, for the 
 social revolution would not be limited to the capital, as in 
 France, it would extend like a fire to the manufacturing 
 towns and the fields, and would have but one end to pur- 
 sue, namely, to place property in the hands of all." 
 
 This " frightful " prospect is fortunately chimerical 
 to any but the anarchist soul, and things will very 
 likely not take this course ; but Laveleye was stating 
 here a supposition, and his conclusions from such 
 premises were logical enough, and the whole passage 
 is suggestive. A certain light falls upon it from the 
 remark on the fact of the absence in England of a 
 written constitution. 
 
 "This regime," he says, "which certainly has some ad- 
 vantages, is perhaps attended with no serious inconveniences 
 so long as there reigns a respect for traditions and ancien 
 laws. I think it perilous, however, in democratic epochs 
 where rules a taste for novelty, with the love of what i 
 called progress.'* 
 
 Well, all these passages are interesting, althoug] 
 clearly they need to be less unreservedly expressed 
 But they represent Laveleye, I believe, in his mos 
 daring moods, at his critical strongest. He clearly 
 felt that there is a certain insecurity, and I should be 
 the last to affirm that he was wrong, inherent in 
 
DEMOCRACY. 133 
 
 workable hypotheses. Consider for a little his chief 
 attempt pointedly to formulate a really inclusive poli- 
 tical induction true for all conditions, save probably in 
 space of four dimensions, where the novelty of the 
 surroundings could not in the least make up for the 
 fresh harassing complications. His attempt results in 
 this: 
 
 Equality of political rights and inequality in 
 social conditions is the great peril of the modern 
 democracies. f 
 
 This is so true an utterance that it deserves all ifce ^V"J 
 illustration that Laveleye gave it in his two large . _ ^. 
 umes. But, full of virtue as it is, it is almost his 
 
 ly divining-rod, and it is powerless to conjure the 
 'uture. It is scarcely conceivable that any one could 
 3e more complete than he in the process of proving 
 ;his admirable generalisation, on which undoubtedly 
 langs much of the law and the prophecy of " political 
 science." Laveleye illuminates this idea; develops 
 it; tentatively explodes it; giving every fact and 
 critic hostile to him their turn, as is the true breeding 
 of the really urbane writer of the Republic of Letters ; 
 demonstrates it with a cumulative force of argument 
 ;hat is convincing. Yet, among conclusions of great 
 value this one is not so really important after all, for 
 there is still that entire interesting series of other 
 questions which, after this generalisation is accepted, 
 
134 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 come crying to us all for an answer, but in which 
 Laveleye will not try in the least to help us. 
 
 Granted the discovery of this rather beautiful but 
 unsatisfying axiom, as vague in its suggestion as to 
 the future as that other much admired one of Bishop 
 Butler's about the present, that things will be as they 
 will be, what nevertheless can it do for us ? For this 
 future, as I said, is immediately to be in many re- 
 spects radically different from the past, immediately, 
 and that is the point. Take, for instance, the United 
 States of North America, which has already begun to 
 record its really exacting problems. Two centuries 
 and a half in New England solved nothing. They 
 demonstrated only what English piety and religion 
 and the English sense of justice can accomplish when 
 left to approximately uninterrupted development, 
 without weeds of tradition or convention to choke 
 them. But then the century began to change its 
 character. Steam and electricity and the newspaper 
 displayed an absolutely transforming activity. There 
 especially, but in general and everywhere, it is be- 
 coming evident that between the man of the immediate 
 future and the man of the corresponding quarter of 
 even the latest century there is to be a much greater 
 and more radical difference than between the man of 
 the late last century and the man of, for instance, 
 one may really say this safely, without having been an 
 
DEMOCRACY. 135 
 
 ancient, old Rome or Carthage or Alexandria. l New 
 emotions, new relations, new possibilities, new affec- 
 tions, new conditions in general, are arriving with 
 such astounding rapidity that the world is even now 
 almost a fresh one, and the past facts of history are 
 becoming less and less applicable. " Political science, " 
 now nothing but a name, already demands the seer. 
 And it is in the great recent nations, lying apart from 
 the European and Asiatic network, that the new con- 
 ditions can be best studied. But if all this is true, 
 what remarkable force can there be in the axiom that 
 " equality of political rights and inequality in social 
 
 [ conditions is the great peril of modern democracies " ? 
 Yes, equality of political rights and inequality in 
 social conditions is the great peril of modern demo- 
 cracies. But one thing that is certain is that equality 
 of political rights is largely all but assured now 
 
 1 throughout the world. To be the son of the even 
 
 1 There is this difference between the present moment and 
 
 | that equally romantic awakening of the Renascence, namely, 
 
 I that the changes which human nature is now undergoing are, 
 
 I while perhaps not so obvious and striking in degree as then, 
 
 | yet so subtle and so fresh as to be almost radical. To-day it is 
 
 human nature as a whole, men as mutually responsible members 
 
 of a community, that is being altered ; not merely this or that 
 
 privileged mind thrilled with the new cry, " Back to Homer and 
 
 the Gods and the Beautiful Christ Himself." See an important 
 
 study on Sebastien Castellion, sa Vie et son (Euvre (1516-1563), 
 
 by M. Ferdinand Buisson. Paris : Hachette. 
 
136 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 immediate future is to be the heir of these equal poli- 
 tical rights much of the world over. That this is not 
 undoubtedly the drift there is left to us no chance of 
 suspicion, and especially since the book of Laveleye. 
 But out of this comes the important matter : Will this 
 democratic future give birth to the distinctly distress- 
 ing peril with which it seems big ? Is there nothing 
 to keep from the eyes of the high gods the monster 
 that one can imagine will be produced by the union 
 of the chaste Minerva of political rights and the hairy 
 brutal Briareus of unequal social conditions? Are 
 these two irreconcilable things, existing together, 
 positively to produce so unexampled horror, whatever 
 we may do, or whatever may be done ? Are there no 
 discernible causes tending to the ultimate extinction 
 of, or else the taming of the savagery in, inequality of 
 conditions? And if there are such causes, what are 
 they, and when may we welcome them ? Where lies 
 the hope for the Democracy ? We would like to know 
 all about the new facts. It is possible, it seems to 
 me, to discuss them much more bravely than Laveleye 
 has done, and yet not lose one's head. Indeed, at this 
 moment of time is it possible, without discussing 
 them, to be scientific? 
 
 These, then, are some matters of pre-eminent import- 
 ance in this vague field, in comparison to which all 
 others are clearly of less interest. And to try to look 
 
DEMOCRACY. 137 
 
 at such matters closely, at all events to answer such 
 questions plausibly, though tentatively, would give a 
 certain endurance to a piece of writing on these sub- 
 jects. Laveleye, however, has not seriously touched 
 them. Yet, although his scheme disappointingly does 
 not admit of anxiety in such inquiry, how difficult it 
 would be to make much of a list of other things which 
 it does not contain. On " right, " " justice ," " liberty ; " 
 the forms of states and their development ; the virtues 
 and vices and tendencies inherent in each form ; the 
 " relation of state and church; " the question of " educa- 
 tion ; " of democracy seen through both ends of a 
 telescope, and of all that can give it dignity or render it 
 unstable ; of combinations among classes ; of the whole 
 " electoral regime " and of parliaments, what field or 
 corner has he not traversed or ransacked, and always 
 with plausibility when he tells us the result of his 
 observations! At the start, especially in definition of 
 ;he word " state, " his analysis is very clear ; and so 
 much depends on nice analysis, on clear definition! 
 But then in the midst of it all, when he says a thing like 
 this, " However, progress in civilisation has been 
 possible only by action on the part of the state, " one 
 wishes such analysis had stopped just short of it. 
 Yet more fully and with more reserve he says, " To- 
 day the mission of the state is no longer to force the 
 citizen to submit to its ends, but to make laws which 
 
138 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 allow the individual man to arrive, by his own efforts, 
 at the whole joy of the fruit of his labour and the 
 complete development of his faculties." 
 
 That Laveleye contradicts both of these utterances, 
 in themselves to a large extent mutually contradictory, 
 often throughout his discussion, arguing now for " indi- 
 vidualism," and yet again being dead against it, simply 
 because he is impatient and is rather eclectic than 
 original, is not so much worth pointing out, however, 
 as that in themselves the remarks just quoted are 
 indefensible. It really is not true that " progress in 
 civilisation has been possible only by action on the 
 part of the state. " Much depends, as I said, on clear 
 definition. But here there can be no doubt whatever of 
 the meaning of the word " state, " namely, " the govern- 
 ment, " " the public powers. " And how untrue, there- 
 fore, the sentence is ! The " progress of civilisation " 
 has gone on with the help of the occasionally happy 
 and harmonious working of at least many other 
 forces than those directed by governments or public 
 powers, by all the great forces of art and invention 
 and commerce and discovery, and by an interminable list 
 besides. This is a commonplace, and of course it 
 was all clear enough to Laveleye ; and yet he left such 
 sentences as these in his manuscript. He would have 
 condemned as quickly as a New Englishman the spirit 
 of those great institutions which , established theoreti- 
 
DEMOCRACY. 139 
 
 cally in the interests of " civilisation " (as a matter of 
 fact how rarely they are !), do all they can to retard 
 it, by insisting that they have engaged the entire time 
 of their servants, as well as their ideas, their inventions, 
 their brains. This, a widespread system in England 
 and in France and in many another country, does not 
 Mr. Eudyard Kipling tell us how it exists in India ? 
 is of course directly opposed to the " spirit of progress, " 
 but it is citable here because it illustrates the simple 
 fact that advance in civilisation is possible even without 
 action 011 the part of the state, and because it was not 
 scientific in Laveleye thus to let it slip off his pen. 
 
 Indeed, there are good reasons why " state interven- 
 tion " can never be a supreme ideal, vigorously as we all 
 appear to be pushing to that ideal. For the state, as 
 the word is used in that phrase, is, for the most part, 
 only the active will of so much of the nation as ex- 
 ercises its powers, having attained various individual 
 expression. Perhaps it ought to be the active will 
 of only the best in the nation. If for any length of 
 time the state fails to do the will of the active nation, 
 it becomes to the nation odious, and things then tend 
 towards tyranny ; for the state may be said to be no 
 longer " constitutional. " Of course, therefore, tyranny 
 can develop in a democracy almost as well as in a 
 monarchy. The supremely ideal state, however, im- 
 plies the supremely ideal nation ; and in the supremely 
 
140 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 ideal nation individual enlightenment and capacity 
 would be so pervasive that any such activity on the part 
 of the state as is denned by the common notion of the 
 word " intervention " namely, a kind of paternal and 
 maternal assumption of responsibility, a dry-nursing 
 of the community would be unnecessary. In fact, 
 the phrase would then mean nothing, inasmuch as the 
 state, as a separate entity, being non-existent, being 
 nothing but a name, the word " state " would be syno- 
 nymous with the word " nation, " and the government 
 would exist simply as a frictionless machine absolutely 
 competent to translate into action the entire thought 
 of the community, and the whole community would 
 be in an-archy, in heaven; dull and harpless, yet in 
 heaven. But as the ideal condition does not now exist, 
 any practical politics as well as " political science " is 
 forced to deal with the real, the obvious state in the 
 circumstances of its stunted development, and in the 
 winter of its discontent; and as an historical fact of 
 the past and the present, its great end, speaking gener- 
 ally, has been, and is, and really it appears to me should 
 be, to maintain all the results of past achievements 
 in general rights and privileges, by conservative insis- 
 tence on the universally binding force of statute and 
 constitutional law. This, its domestic, is ideally its 
 chief, function. Of course in external relations it is 
 like a ship's figure-head, it is the nation's ambassador. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 141 
 
 But for the present, and at all events for the future, 
 in the enlightened nation the chief moral character- 
 istics, if one may speak thus figuratively, should be 
 obedience and inertia. For the progress towards poli- 
 tical right, towards complete abolition of exclusive 
 privileges, towards art and towards science, towards 
 all that makes up our slight civilisation, is not depen- 
 dent and should not be dependent on the state, how- 
 ever much the state has it in its power to contribute 
 to progress. It is the separate members of the nation 
 who will, as human nature exists, care for this, and the 
 state will go fast enough, in all conscience, if it simply 
 reflect this advance, and recognise it only with the 
 utmost caution. In a word, if there really be some 
 place for everything, the state is the place for procras- 
 tination, conservatism, and irritating " red tape. " 
 
 But undoubtedly now at this moment of awakening 
 knowledge, when pretty nearly all men are becoming 
 alert to needs of which they had not thought before, 
 they will press more and more loudly in supplication 
 to the state to relieve them quickly in their difficulties 
 and to legislate in their behalf. If the demands are 
 intelligent and widespread, and clearly in the interests 
 of justice, the state may be said figuratively to have 
 a duty to legislate in response. But is it not clear 
 that this is not, properly speaking, " state intervention " 
 at all 1 It is only the liking for the fair, the just, the 
 
142 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 equal, with the hatred of privilege (which mark the 
 advance of civilisation), being historically recorded; 
 their attaining incarnation, as it were, in tangible forms. 
 And it is not " state intervention " at all, save by a 
 confusion of terms, or in the same way that a man 
 may be said to intervene in the conduct of his own 
 life when, having lived for a long time in one particu- 
 lar fashion, he decides, for this or that reason, to live in 
 another and different way. So that while, as the years 
 go on, henceforth the cry for this wonderful panacea 
 will become louder and louder, yet, bustle henceforth 
 as the state may and as it will, let no one be deceived. 
 The state is not really " intervening, " after all, but 
 it is only reflecting, in most cases very incautiously, 
 very bunglingly, very absurdly, the growingly expand- 
 ing, complicated, life of communities, and showing 
 thus very little knowledge of where its real virtue lies, 
 namely, in obedience and inertia. 
 
 Now, Laveleye sees, with Dupont- White, how 
 rapidly, all about the planet, " intervention " is grow- 
 ing to be an alluring idea, one thinks of the cigarettes 
 of Rhode Island, and one sees that this is so ; how Eng- 
 lish and American legislation in particular have shown 
 what, from the point of view of the Saxon traditions 
 as to the almost divine right of the individual man, 
 is regarded in many minds as really an astounding 
 change. But as to why all this is taking place he is 
 
 
DEMOCRACY. 143 
 
 not very clear, and the real nature of the change he 
 makes no attempt to define. 
 
 But it is a pleasure after these evidences of impa- 
 tience, of lack of compactness, to remember how safe 
 and satisfying Laveleye was capable of being. In the 
 chapters on the parliamentary regime and its vices in 
 this latest book, he is not only quite at his best, but he 
 is at a very good point of value indeed. He is not 
 only clear, he was always that, but he is critical 
 and he is informing. Here his immensely impressive 
 acquaintance with the large class of books and docu- 
 ments containing the indispensable mass of political 
 facts that are American, sources very little known in 
 England, on the Continent scarcely known at all, stood 
 him in good stead. Enamoured particularly of the 
 constitutional monarchy when it works at its most 
 frictionless best, as he thought under the Leopolds of 
 Belgium, though all that appears to me the happiest 
 of accidents, he still depicts with a lucidity and a 
 completeness that show his admiration for quite an- 
 other governmental form, many advantages attending 
 the working of the constitution of the United States 
 in North America; and in general he compares the 
 North American system with the English with real 
 penetration and knowledge. But here again at the 
 threshold of the interesting problems he laid down his 
 pen. There are many things here that seem to have 
 
144 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 escaped him. He says there are to be dangers in the 
 future, more even than exist at present. That, how- 
 ever, he told us in his formula about " equal rights " 
 and " unequal social conditions, " so that the warning 
 is not very impressive. Yet there are also two lumi- 
 nous passages like these : 
 
 "The natural limits of a democratic republic were in the 
 old days the walls of a city. To-day the book, the news- 
 paper, the telegraph, bring to all, at the same moment, the 
 same impression, and extend the circle of the agora to the 
 frontiers of a language and the limits of a continent. 
 Thus one of the great obstacles to the establishment of 
 republics is done away with by the mere progress in technical 
 inventions. 1 , . . For more than two hundred years we have 
 been seeing in New England societies freely governing 
 themselves, by electing all authorities without exception, 
 political, administrative, judiciary, ecclesiastical, without 
 having any necessity of a king's intervention in their 
 streets, or of a pope's in their consciences. ... In order 
 that the same regime should be established and maintained 
 in Europe, it would be enough for the European peoples in 
 all classes of society to acquire illumination as sane, a 
 good sense as solid, a religion as reasonable, as the inhabi- 
 tants of New England. We are, alas! far from that con- 
 dition, and no one can tell when we shall reach it, for we 
 do not suspect even the- distance, that separates us ; but 
 who would dare say that the goal will never be reached ? " 
 
 Ah, here were the timely cues! Why were they 
 not followed? Yet Laveleye was a wise man, and 
 
 1 The italics are mine. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 145 
 
 perhaps here his silence was wisdom. The way is 
 so very difficult that it is only for the surest-footed. 
 Who of us has the courage to enter upon it 1 Who 
 thinks himself strong enough to venture the saying of 
 the enduring thing upon so vast a theme ? 
 
 Yet there are reasons why it is worth while to 
 have notions on this question, vast and all hut pre- 
 sumptuous as it is. I may say frankly that I see but 
 two solutions, and that one of them, while popular 
 and possible in scholastic argument, seems to me 
 highly improbable as the one likely to be evolved by 
 events. This solution is a return to the ages of faith. 
 
 Upon what painful moments have we happened! 
 The assurances, the attachments, which made life 
 tolerable for the classes at the bottom of the social 
 organism; the consolations and illusions of religious 
 devotion making natural for members of these classes 
 the spirit of martyrdom ; the quiet moods leading to 
 endurance of privation and of suffering, and sought 
 for even by the devout poor in the hope of the far-off 
 joys of " heaven, " when the time should come for 
 " the last to be first, " and for the great " reversal of 
 human judgments " to be an accomplished fact, all 
 these causes of peace and conservatism are vanishing 
 from the earth ; and louder and louder, echoing about 
 the planet, rise the cries of the people who suffer; the 
 
 indignant bursts of men too long repressed, and now 
 
 10 
 
146 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 with their opening thought demanding, fist in air, a 
 share in the fruits of the common activity. So long 
 as men believe in a God of compensation; so long as 
 no one can say them nay when they affirm that they 
 catch his whispers in their ear, bidding them bide 
 their time; so long as men believe that in their 
 " Father's house are many mansions, " and that one 
 day a freehold will be theirs, with milk and cheese 
 and gardens for their children, and the sky of summer 
 over them for ever; so long as mothers know in their 
 heart of hearts that sorrow is God's will, and that in 
 the end, after the trials of this " Vale of Tears, " they 
 shall " see Him face to face, " and hear His voice 
 bidding them enter, " good and faithful servants, into 
 the joy of their Lord, " so long will they work their 
 fingers to the bone, wearing always on their face the 
 beatific smile ; so long will the " Song of the Shirt " 
 be really a paean of rejoicing; so long will the factory 
 bell, tolling in the grey of the early morning, an- 
 nounce for them the dawning of a day bringing them, 
 whatever its miseries, nearer to the Gates of Pearl; 
 and so long will there be a quiet earth. 
 
 But what a moment for them, what a moment for 
 us, when these dreams are gone ! What then ? Tra- 
 gedy of tragedies for us all. Woe to their fellows when 
 men wake to the truth that they have been dupes! 
 For they will no longer suffer and be still. Then let 
 
DEMOCRACY. 147 
 
 society look to its libraries and museums, and the cour- 
 tesan of the great cities to her lap-dog and her violet 
 
 powder. 
 
 " Un certain ressort cache, 
 
 Tout h, coup etant lache, 
 
 Fait tomber, ber ber, 
 
 Fait sauter, ter ter, 
 
 Fait tomber, 
 
 Fait sauter, 
 
 Fait voler la tSte. 
 
 C'est vraiment honnete ! " 
 
 And it is to this sort of awakening that we have all 
 but come again to-day. In my ears while I write are 
 the pi?ig, ping of the pistols, and the louder explosion 
 of the guns, on the river bank at Homestead in the 
 State founded by the man of the peaceful name of 
 Penn. So that one is all but inclined to say, with M. 
 Kenan : " I cannot conceive how, without the old 
 dreams, ever can be rebuilt the foundations of a noble 
 and a happy life. " 
 
 Yes, depend upon it, this pessimistic view of civili- 
 sation, but for one thing, is exact. The particular 
 " noble and the happy life " of the past, of the disin- 
 tegrating present even, it is clear enough, will not 
 return. For the " old dreams, " as truly as have gone 
 the soaring harmonies of the Pindaric song, are vanish- 
 ing from the world. And instead is the sound in 
 every country of this planet of the army of Democracy, 
 
148 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 each soldier beating time before the triumphant march 
 with fresh flags and symbols at his head. The Huns 
 and Vandals of the Middle Age are only the rudest 
 symbol of such an army. By systems of barbaric 
 " protection " the states think for the moment to 
 erect their dikes against the international tide. But 
 down before this tide state and Chinese wall of tariff 
 must inevitably go, and after them all else be swept 
 away, but for one thing, in the common destruc- 
 tion. But what is this check, this solution, of our 
 crisis? It seems to me to inhere in the activity of 
 forces, the dignity of which it is the mode to-day to 
 question ; in the good, side by side with the dangerous, 
 in that great laic movement of the growing time 
 known vaguely as the " modern spirit. " 
 
 Laic? But the word is French rather than Eng- 
 lish ; and as yet, in communities of people who speak 
 English, the term has no force, because no vogue. On 
 the continent of Europe, however, laic has for a long 
 time now been growing in familiarity as a name for 
 all the impulses that mark the temper of persons re- 
 sentful of authority ; it is less exact to say, but briefer 
 and more intelligible, a name for all the impulses of 
 the " people. " Science has not to approve or condemn 
 the thing thus named. Its sole business is to draw 
 attention to the fact. And while, therefore, I do not 
 venture to record a personal opinion as to the value of 
 
DEMOCRACY. 149 
 
 this spirit, I may nevertheless recall its existence. 
 For of that there is no question. A fresh spirit is 
 growing on our planet, growing in those portions of it 
 known as England and the United States in North 
 America, and is already widely extended among the 
 older " Latin nations, " a spirit which, having at first 
 its origin in a feeling of reaction against ecclesiastical 
 authority alone, is rapidly broadening so as to include 
 in it the entire series of feelings of suspicion of all 
 authority whatsoever, of dislike of whatsoever institu- 
 tions and compact monopolizing organisms; and it is 
 this feeling, binding together the " people " in every 
 country east and west, which deserves a name, and 
 which, in want of a better, I have called laic. It is 
 the laic spirit which is transforming society, to which 
 Authority is now throwing its bribes, which is de- 
 manding to-day socialistic solutions for the ills which 
 it suffers, and with which pre-eminently the scientist 
 and the philosopher in these fields have now to deal. 
 And the practical question is, what, if the contented 
 and the happy life is not to be secured by a revival of 
 the old faiths, what will preserve to us the ancient 
 tranquillity, and the progress of a quiet evolution ; for 
 without the action of this unknown cause we shall be 
 exposed to a dreadful revolution, which the quickly 
 expanding laic spirit indubitably threatens. 
 
 A paragraph in M. de Cassagnac's newspaper, 
 L'Autorite, recently caught my eye : " On mounting 
 
150 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 the scaffold, Kavachol's last cry was, Vive la Repiib- 
 llque. It was a cry from the heart. The Republic 
 having produced Eavachol, he, in dying, salutes his 
 mother. This good-by of his proves that Eavachol 
 was still better than his mother." I do not call 
 special attention to the miserable helplessness of 
 mood, like that of a chained dog who snarls, betrayed 
 in unpatriotic utterance like this, which implies that 
 the present regime in France is responsible for the 
 anarchist ideal ; as well might a citizen of the United 
 States of North America accuse Thomas Jefferson or 
 Alexander Hamilton of being the authors of the mon- 
 strous episode of rioting at Mr. Carnegie's workshops 
 in Pennsylvania. The noteworthy observation seems 
 to me to be of quite another sort; it is that this pain- 
 ful, this ridiculous commentary on the career of the 
 most redoubtable of modern anarchists has in it so 
 much of truth, at all events so much of plausibility, 
 that, when given the immense publicity of the penny 
 journal, it is sure to produce a baneful effect on unin- 
 structed minds in propagation of that very worst in our 
 civilisation which it is to be the privilege of the con- 
 temporaneous best to check. For it is not enough to 
 say that the French Eepublic produced Eavachol ; it 
 is not to speak very much of the truth to say that the 
 Eepublic of the United States of North America 
 caused the Homestead riots ; it is not particularly far- 
 
DEMOCRACY. 151 
 
 seeing to fix upon the English Democracy as responsible 
 for the Irish " Plan of Campaign. " The causes of these 
 curious phenomena are not thus hunted to their origin 
 and named. The causes are more remote, and are co- 
 extensive with our time and place. Behind^the French 
 Republic, and the political compact of the United 
 States, and the notions in the minds of the originators 
 of the " Plan of Campaign, " and behind, for instance, 
 the decentralising activity now making itself felt in 
 the Scandinavian peninsula; behind, indeed, every 
 impulse of individual thought the world over, are as 
 causes and we need go no farther in our search the 
 immensely surprising results of mechanical invention 
 in the application of scientific discovery, the entire 
 series of ingenious achievements and devices, the com- 
 bined action of which is towards the unity of the 
 human race, the lessening of distance, the destruction 
 of time, facts which give to any special moment here 
 on this planet a distinction among hitherto recorded 
 eras which is absolutely unique and overwhelmingly 
 impressive, as much in its obvious suggestions as to 
 the future of the progress of civilisation on Planet 
 No. 3 of this astronomic system as in its absorbing 
 interest in the interpretation of the present; facts, 
 moreover, and this is the fascinating paradox, that, 
 in the words of M. de Cassagnac's paper, are indeed 
 the mother of the Ravachols, of anarchy and of revo- 
 
152 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 lution and of every one of those social dangers which 
 render doubtful the happy issue of civilisation; but 
 facts which will in the end themselves be saving, for 
 they carry within themselves as much of peace as of 
 war, as much of balm as of irritant. 
 
 It is really not surprising, however, that it is neces- 
 sary to insist on this paradox ; to point out the obvious 
 ameliorations inherent in the material accomplishments 
 of our extraordinary century. This necessity arises 
 from the baneful influence, in this connection, of the 
 two great conservative and most widely efficient forces 
 of the world, the forces of literature l and of religion. 
 
 1 It is partially, perhaps to a large degree, by literature that 
 fresh thought gets itself expressed. And the writings gener- 
 ally recognized as valuable, to which we have given the name 
 classic, could not at their appearance, in any proper use of 
 language, be called a force conservative. But the large literary 
 impulse for the late four hundred years has been always in obe- 
 dience to some more or less admirable Authority. Men have 
 taken sides ; they have formed " schools ; " they have been fol- 
 lowers of Homer or of Hesiod, " Romanticists," " Idealists," or 
 "Realists;" they have written short guides, which they have 
 called rhetorics, to the " classics ; " in general they have loved 
 the idea of tbe guild, liked uniformity, dealt with the past, and 
 suppressed the new. This may or may not have been wise, it 
 is certain not to be the way of the future. Up to our moment 
 most literature, apart from that of genius, has been conserva- 
 tive. All this the laic time is irremediably changing, and the 
 classical note will one day be as undistinguished as the paro- 
 chial or provincial note is now. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 153 
 
 Eeligion is necessarily a conservative force. And 
 although a far view across the centuries in search of 
 the religious ideals of men reveals as these ideals an 
 immense variety of affections, a host k of allegiances 
 having so little in common that the entire human 
 attempt towards religion must be admitted to have 
 only a relative value, yet the famous historical results 
 of all these impulses, whether they be rude or elabo- 
 rated, whether they be conceptions formed in the 
 Gulf of Benin or on the banks of the Jordan, have for 
 science this bond of union: they are all sincere en- 
 deavours to put order into the mind, and they have 
 had their historical authority just in proportion to 
 their success in ordering the mind, that is, in propor- 
 tion to the plausibility of their appeal. The common 
 lot of thinking beings is sure to appear to them so 
 mysterious, the human condition is so appallingly 
 incomprehensible, that men obey an imperious passion 
 in seeking to solve it, and the emotion with which 
 they cling to the solutions, to their philosophy of 
 things, is a religious emotion, valuable in proportion 
 to its individual quality. But for polities the indi- 
 vidual quality is only a misfortune ; for polities it is 
 highly important that the religious passion should be 
 as much as possible of the same sort among all the 
 members of the community; and the principle of 
 Authority will therefore always be cultivated by wise 
 
154 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 statesmen, whose chief duty it appears to me is to 
 retard our progress to the utmost. As a conservative 
 force, therefore, the present dominant religion of the 
 two Americas and of Europe, Christianity, will always 
 be more than respectfully treated by wise politicians; 
 reciprocal esteem and support are clearly to the advan- 
 tage of both forces; such collusion is in the interest 
 of the peaceful life of communities. 
 
 But those who have the interests of Christianity 
 most at heart, when they see it losing some of its hold 
 to-day, seek to base its authority anew; and in this 
 fresh activity the critic beholds a curious thing. He 
 assists at an essential alteration in the very philosophy 
 of this religion, a change which is one of the most 
 remarkable of contemporary movements. Christianity, 
 however illogical historically its conduct may often 
 have been, ought always to have taught complete re- 
 jection of the world. Its honest feeling about this 
 world has been one of uncompromising pessimism. It 
 has gone out into the world with the cry of John the 
 Baptist: Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is 
 at hand. But its most fascinating paradox has al- 
 ways been that one may be in the world, yet not of it. 
 It has sought the world forever, but only to save it 
 in view of another. To-day what do we see 1 We 
 are beholding a curious and a radical change. We 
 see Christianity entering the world with a passion for 
 
DEMOCRACY. 155 
 
 its amelioration for its own sake, and this implies a 
 sense that the world is for its own sake worthy of at- 
 tention. The Christian passion is really becoming 
 political in a new and striking way. Christianity no 
 longer visages men as doomed and lost. In Christian- 
 ity's view to-day the passengers on this floating island 
 need no longer be trained to the discipline of the life- 
 boat, and taught the use of the patent life-belts, for a 
 prospective shipwreck on the morrow. Quite another 
 idea has entered the officers' minds, and is making 
 itself felt in the ship's discipline. The idea which is 
 in the air, and about which the ship's crew are whis- 
 pering on and off the watch, is merely this, that the 
 voyage is sure to be longer than any one aboard had 
 once supposed. Meanwhile, let the decks be scrubbed, 
 the brass fittings be made to shine, the sails furled 
 more trimly, and under the stars let occasional dance 
 and song beguile the hours. While we voyage let us 
 have discipline, but let us be as happy as we can. 
 Better, any day, than the mermaids of our morbid love, 
 when we welcomed the end, and hated the sea-brine, 
 and cursed our mother the Earth and our father the Sun, 
 is adoration of them both, and the breezy life afloat. 
 
 Such is the nature of the interesting change. But 
 the idea of rejection of the world, which has been 
 the persistent watchword of the idealistic, the uncom- 
 promisingly pessimistic, though in the main the utterly 
 
156 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 unimaginative religion of the West, has resulted in loud 
 and ridiculous talk in the disparagement of our cen- 
 tury the century, as I said, of uniquely impressive 
 achievements as a time of materialism to be lamented, 
 of money-getting to be disparaged, as a moment of low 
 ideals meriting the anathema of the traditional clergy, 
 the pathetic but melodious censure of the fastidious 
 critic of art, and the curious inquiry of poets, anxious 
 for the prestige of their pretty fancies run into bor- 
 rowed moulds of measure, as to whether science and 
 the fresh time are to lessen the value of their academic 
 palms. This absurd conservative cant of religion and 
 of literature has been on the lips even of men of 
 genius. It has resulted in unutterable scorns and in 
 prodigious snobbish assumptions which are ridiculous, 
 and in the relegation, I may add, by much of Euro- 
 pean culture of the community of the North American 
 Republic to an outer darkness of uneducated ideals, 
 to a noisy land full of the distracting hum of a great 
 " material " life, and ignorant of the " things of the 
 spirit. " 
 
 Material ! Things of the spirit ! 
 
 But in what hierarchy, pray, of ideals are these two 
 words to be thus employed, in unwise opposition, to 
 the glory of the one and the abasement of the other ? 
 An effective indication of the essential want of im- 
 agination in the really English mind is the inflexi- 
 
DEMOCRACY. 157 
 
 bility of its literary formulas; its persistent regard for 
 idioms and moulds of thought; its inability to name 
 things accurately, which is the only way to secure 
 freshness and even distinction, such distinction as much 
 of even the least conspicuous of French literature 
 achieves to-day; its assumption that the intensely 
 unusual is in itself unwarrantable license, instead of 
 being, as often, the scientific naming of not much 
 noticed, but after all familiar things. This contrast 
 between " material " and " things of the spirit " is an 
 illustration of this habit of using blurred phraseology. 
 But whereas the conservative religious forces may be 
 said to have an excuse at all events they may be 
 pardoned for propagating so deceptive an error as 
 this contrast preserves, literature has none. Litera- 
 ture, criticism, are bound to be less shackled. They 
 should point out that the material activities of our 
 moment, those activities which we mean when we talk 
 of the progress of thought directed to money-getting, 
 to railroad-making, to application of electricity in 
 torpedo, in flying-machine or theatrophone, to the 
 establishment of journal or of school, in general to the 
 development of all the means of intercommunication, 
 which bring to the uneducated the spurs and oppor- 
 tunities of thought, are the very causes which are 
 changing the lethargy of the Philistine into the 
 troublesome curiosity of our aroused and democratic 
 
158 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 earth. I have no fear that that absorption of us all 
 by the Philistines which Matthew Arnold once an- 
 ticipated with pain will ever come to pass. One feels 
 somewhat sorry that it will not, however, for the 
 reign of the Philistines would be sure to be a reign of 
 comparative peace, of evolution, at least, instead of 
 the revolution that we all have so much reason to 
 dread. No, of that there is no danger or no hope. 
 The social evolution of the world is now moving much 
 too rapidly. Its progress is in another direction. It 
 extinguishes the spark of life in dodoes; and the Phi- 
 listine, more and more left behind, among obstreperous 
 but thinking people, may one day claim as his last 
 distinction the preservation of his somewhat battered, 
 but essentially unchanged, type, appreciable only as 
 a survival of a less interesting time. Yet, as I said, 
 with enough Philistinism tempered by the devout 
 Christianity of " faith, " we might preserve forever 
 the contented and the happy life with all the some- 
 what dull eclat of our admired ancestors. So, if we 
 cannot any longer count on the old faith nor on a 
 Philistinism submitting to be leavened, where is our 
 hope ? What kind of solution is left to us 1 
 
 The answer to this question is the sort of thing 
 with which any " political science " hoping to claim 
 our serious attention, or to deserve its name, is bound 
 to deal; but upon which Laveleye, perhaps in his 
 
DEMOCRACY. 159 
 
 discreet way, at all events to the diminution of the 
 importance of his book, refused to enter. His admi- 
 rable axiom about equality in political rights and in- 
 equality in social conditions indicated, as I said, 
 clearly enough the danger; but there he left us with- 
 out a clue. And yet we see every day about us a 
 greater and greater gulf yawning ominously between 
 present reality and aspiration. We have approxi- 
 mately to-day over the w;estern countries of the earth 
 equality in political rights, but we have apparently 
 more and more inequality in social conditions. The 
 lowest strata of the human community are clearly far 
 better off, from an absolute point of view, than they 
 were in the ages called Middle. But relatively they 
 are not. At all events they think that they are not. 
 The French Revolution has gone, with its loud preten- 
 sions. But it has left behind it a great illusion, and 
 liberte, egalite, fraternite, are hollow mockeries in the 
 ears of the unprivileged, or the less privileged, every- 
 where. M. Max Nordau says, in his Les Mensonyes 
 Conventionnels de la Civilisation, " Equality is a 
 chimera hatched by the savant at his desk, or by 
 dreamers who have never observed with their own 
 eyes nature and humanity. ... It is a fable which 
 has no further place in a rational exegesis, . . . and 
 which no longer figures on any democratic programme 
 save that of a beer-garden." 
 
160 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 Well, all this one will not hesitate to admit, but it 
 is just in this admission that I find the only possible 
 premise of further thought. For the gigantic exertions 
 devoted by men to the search for equality, whether it 
 be in revolt of Spartan helot, or of Koman slave, or of 
 meddlesome bourgeois, or of English colonist, or as to- 
 day is instanced everywhere in the rise of socialism, 
 are always the indications of the effect of those educa- 
 tive awakening laic forces which we find supremely 
 at our moment so widely extending, so impossible to 
 overlook. But just so pervasive is this laic movement 
 in our time that we are bound to note the immensity 
 of its cause ; and when we have noted it, not to forget 
 that this cause cannot henceforward be excluded as 
 it could be at a time when there were no penny-posts, 
 no Atlantic or Pacific cables, no newspapers, no free 
 schools, no railways, no telephones. And these causes 
 of the laic unrest, these powers which are creating a 
 fresh man in a new earth, which, in teaching all men 
 to think and generalise, are making their condition of 
 indigence more sensible to them, are so steadily being 
 multiplied that, instead of having seen the end of a 
 slight and merely impudent insurrection against estab- 
 lished order, we are assisting at what is only the open- 
 ing of a most unpleasant burst of individuality; and 
 this movement will go on unceasingly, with all its 
 troublesome vulgarities, and with increasing roar as 
 
DEMOCRACY. 161 
 
 with the sound of a whirlwind, until the rich man and 
 the scholar, not knowing, with all their coins and 
 learning, how to bribe or crush the laic mob, shall 
 draw up their garments about them, intrench them- 
 selves in their country-houses and cabinets, and watch 
 the vain and light fellows of the new time sowing 
 with salt their fields and gardens. 
 
 And salt they will sow, depend upon it, for they 
 are not Philistines, and are not very religious, unless 
 the inequality which they are learning to resent in 
 social conditions be quickly annihilated. Science is 
 upsetting the world. It has now to reorganise it. It 
 has been experimenting almost beyond human tole- 
 rance. The chief mark of science would seem to be 
 irony, which M. Kenan calls the consolation of the 
 just. Has it been trying to see how far it can go, 
 and will it turn back at the " nick-of-time " ? For 
 now it would seem to be taking away all the props 
 of the social structure with a kind of diabolic serenity, 
 only to watch it tumble, crashing to the ground. It 
 might have left us " respectable, " all of us easy-going 
 Philistines and backbiting Christians, but it willed 
 not. It taught religion how to utilise its piety; it 
 furnished instruments to philanthropy while we ap- 
 plauded : but all along its secret plan apparently was 
 only to draw the attention of the succoured to their 
 woes. It engaged Englishmen in India to model a 
 11 
 
1G2 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 state on well-tried systems of education and on civic 
 discipline, to teach the natives the rules of self-gov- 
 ernment, and it is doing the same in Egypt to-day, and 
 to-morrow it may do the same in Morocco ; but all the 
 time it has concealed the malevolence of its real inten- 
 tion, the creation of an unruly, irreconcilable public 
 opinion, destined one day to deny its parents, like 
 the thankless child of the proverb. It has patted 
 on the back the generous man, enforced by religion; 
 acquiesced in the delusions of a pope when he cele- 
 brates a Columbus as the discoverer of a new world for 
 the Church; and furnished philanthropic arguments 
 to the utterly mercenary founders of the great colonial 
 companies of the world; and always and ever its sole 
 object has been to lead us on to the very brink of de- 
 struction, and meanwhile, when at this brink, to erect 
 the coquettish buildings of a vast fin de siecle fair, 1 
 decked in streamers, where ideas are sold as trinkets, 
 and theories hawked to enticing cry for phenomenal 
 cheap prices. And here we all are, with chuckling 
 science looking on. In truth, science has a pretty 
 wit. 
 
 Ah, yes, but we have not done with science yet. It 
 is science, and science only, that is to find for us the 
 solution to the great question. Science has made 
 America and Australia, in comparison with the stand- 
 
 1 Cf. La Foire aux Idees, of M. Henri de Saussine. 1892. 
 
DEMOCRACY. 163 
 
 ards of older communities, vulgar; it is working a 
 similar change in England. But in the end science is 
 to solve its problem by consistent application of the 
 same series of causes as hitherto have filled us with 
 dismay. The only hope for Democracy is that the 
 inequality of conditions shall be approximately so 
 quickly done away that a feeling of reasonable satisfac- 
 tion shall bring temporary tranquillity to the restless 
 aspiration of the new laic men. Compare what the 
 race has accomplished in the late seventy years with 
 what it had attained in ten thousand years before, and 
 the plausibility of this solution will be irrefutably 
 pressing. But scientific development must advance, 
 not only rapidly, it must go with a prodigious speed. 
 If it does not, it will not order the world. If it does 
 not, our civilisation, which in any case is to be utterly 
 transformed, will be changed by revolution. Science 
 must learn to respond to the myriad awakened, awa- 
 kening wants, almost as soon as they are felt. And 
 that it will do this is the only hope now left to us. 
 
 Yes, our romantic moment, called by the theolo- 
 gians material, by the rhymers prosaic, by the aesthetes 
 vulgar, is but the noisy close of a somewhat too long 
 overture in the great opera of our common progress, a 
 prelude marked in its earlier portions by naive passages 
 of delicious melody, later on by symphonic movements 
 stern and simple, with frequent lyric bursts into a 
 
164 PATRIOTISM AND SCIENCE. 
 
 larger air, and at the close by a superb but often in- 
 harmonious mingling of melody and musical comment, 
 shot by leit-motiv after leit-motiv of the first scenes of 
 the opera to come. But although this overture which 
 we have learned to love we ourselves cannot soon 
 forget, the audience of the next centuries will turn 
 upon it a more scientific ear. They surely will be 
 amused at the illusion held by many of us that our 
 much-admired overture was all. But not even their 
 lot is so wonderfully wider. We have no real cause 
 for jealousy. For when one thinks of Algol, the 
 wandering thought makes nothing of us all. 
 Whether this be consolation is another matter. 
 
 THE END. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE. 
 
 BY ERNEST RENAN. 
 
 One Volume. Svo. 515 pages. Cloth. Price, $2.50. 
 
 "It would be difficult to name a man of literary genius comparable in breadth 
 and depth of learning, or fertility and charm of expression, to M. Ernest Renan. 
 Certainly in all France there is none like him. The fact is just as plain that both 
 in and out of France he has been persistently misunderstood by certain of his 
 readers, and misrepresented by those who have not and will not read him. He 
 has, for instance, been called a man without a religion, and now, as though in 
 answer to this statement, and by way of refuting the commoner charge that levity 
 is the characteristic and habitual frame of mind in which he lives, he has pub- 
 lished a volume entitled 'The Future of Science ' (Boston: Roberts Brothers), 
 wherein he sums up the new faith which with him has replaced ' shattered 
 Catholicism.' . . . 
 
 "It should not be supposed that M. Renan is here seriously attempting to 
 found a new religion, or even to formulate a new system of philosophy. We have 
 read the volume rather as a personal statement of the delights of learning and of 
 productive scholarship, and as such it has a distinct and rare value. Nowhere 
 does it open itself to a profitable criticism that would refuse to challenge the 
 veracity of the author." Philadelphia Press. 
 
 " Although Ernest Renan wrote much of this book many years ago (shortly 
 after he left the Catholic Church) it is to-day an epitome of the most advanced 
 modern thought. In a style so exquisitely simple that we think not of the words 
 nor of the writer but only of the thought, he sums up what science has done for 
 us already. We are brought into full view of the idols it has knocked down. With 
 clear vision we can Iook~back and see the long road up which the human race has 
 toiled ; our eyes, thanks to science, unclouded by superstition, can study it. And 
 how much man's position has altered ! He was not especially created. He was 
 not foreordained to everlasting punishment, nor elected to eternal bliss. And 
 this great change of thought, affecting the foundations of our social, political, 
 and religious being, we owe to science. . . . 
 
 Will science ever clear away the rubbish and show us a broader, fairer land 
 than that which has encouraged the toilers before? Renan's book gives great 
 hope of this. It is written in a tone of courage and cheerfulness that is very in- 
 spiring. He admits the danger of the transition period, the relaxation of moral 
 strength with the stimulus removed. " Chimeras have succeeded in obtaining 
 from the good gorilla an astonishing moral effort; do away with the chimeras and 
 part of the factitious energy they aroused will disappear." But when between the 
 lines of this book we can detect, as we do, a spirit devout, tender, upright, cheer- 
 ful, and serene, it seems that the future state of pure rationalism which science 
 aims to bring about would not be incompatible with human goodness and happi- 
 ness." Chicago Tribune. 
 
 Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, by the pub- 
 lishers. 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. 
 
Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
 
 LAOCOON. An Essay upon the Limits of Painting 
 and Poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points 
 in the History of Ancient Art. By GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM 
 LESSING. Translated by ELLEN FROTHINGHAM. i6mo. 
 Price $1.50. 
 
 In reference to this work, we can give our readers no better proof of its merit 
 tban by quoting the words of an English critic uttered many years ago : " The 
 author of the ' Laocoon' was perhaps the greatest critic of modem times. The 
 object of this celebrated work is to show that the isolation of the several fine art! 
 from each other is essential to their perfection, and that their common aim is the 
 production of beauty. The peculiar province of poetry is proved to be entirely dis- 
 tinct both from that of morality and of philosophy ; being limited, strictly speaking, 
 to the exhibition of ideal actions. These views, in which Lessing differed widely 
 from Klopstock, who made moral beauty, and also from Wieland, who considered 
 nature and truth, as the great aim of poetry, but in which he agreed with Aristotle, 
 and was closely followed in their assthetical theories by Goethe, Schiller, and Hum- 
 boldt, were enforced with great argumentative power, extraordinary purity and 
 correctness of taste, and with rich and pertinent illustrations from the art and 
 literature of Greece." 
 
 From the Boston Transcript. 
 
 It is a matter for real congratulation that Messrs. Roberts Brothers have given 
 us the " Laocoon" of Lessing in a form accessible to readers ignorant of German. 
 Miss Frothingham has evidently done her work of translation as a labor of love. 
 Her rendering is at once accurate, and in pure, flowing English ; an achievement 
 very difficult to accomplish where the whole grammatical structure of two languages 
 differs so widely. It is also a feature of great value toward the general usefulness 
 of the book that she has appended translations of the many passages from Latin 
 and Greek authors through which Lessing illustrates his argument. 
 
 The growing interest m our country in questions of art and criticism ought to 
 secure for this work a wide class of readers. No thoughtful person ever torgets 
 the outburst of enthusiasm its first reading awakened in him. Even Goethe said 
 of it that in the confused period of his own youth it cleared up the whole heavens 
 to him and made his path plain before him. As an oifset to such books as those 
 of Ruskin, marvellously rich and suggestive, but full of subjective caprice and dog- 
 matism, it teaches invaluable lessons of method. Lessing was a legislator in the 
 domain of criticism. His insight was so nearly unerring, and his knowledge so 
 vast and accurate, that his verdicts stand like those of a Mansfield or Marshall in 
 the courts of law. 
 
 . . . The book must be read and re-read. It created an epoch in art criticism 
 when it first appeared, and its lessons are as fresh and weighty to-day as ever. On 
 evsry page great principles are developed which help one to an ever deeper appre- 
 ciation of the works of the great masters in art and literature. 
 
 Sold everywhere by all booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, by 
 the Publishers^ 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, BOSTON. 
 
MR. HAMERTOWS WORKS. 
 
 FRENCH AND ENGLISH: A COMPARISON. Square i2mo. 
 
 Price $2.00. 
 
 " Mr. Hamerton's comparison of the two nations follows a very methodical order. H 
 compares them, step by step, in reference to education, patriotism, politics, religion, virtues, 
 customs, and society. The chapters on the virtues which are philosophically classified 
 under the heads of truth, justice, purity, temperance, thrift, cleanliness, and courage 
 abound in suggestive observations." Academy. 
 
 " A most interesting and instructive work. Mr. Hamerton has lived long in France ; and 
 he is not only a close observer, but a thinker. . . . Like everything that comes from his pen, 
 this work is distinguished by a literary style of remarkable clearness and grace, while in sub- 
 stance it is equally distinguished by the sound basis of its criticisms in experience and their 
 general impartiality." The Scotsman. 
 
 " As its title indicates, it is in the nature of a comparison ; but while its plan accommodates 
 itself to this indication, it makes no attempt to do so stiffly. On the contrary, its treatment 
 is delightfully free and easy. The scope of the work may be gathered from the fact that the 
 comparison of the two peoples refers to their education, patriotism, politics, religion, virtues, 
 custom, society, success, and variety, this last implying their diversity as peoples, that is, 
 the degrees in which portions of them vary from the common type. But this enumeration 
 utterly fails to give any adequate idea of the intimate knowledge, the multiplicity of details, 
 the shret 'd observation of a multitude of matters, and the kindly criticism of a thousand 
 points, which have contributed to make this a most readable book. The subject of the volume 
 is intrinsically interesting, but it is rendered additionally so by the graceful and easy method of 
 its presentation There is everywhere evidence of the author's extensive knowledge of litera- 
 ture, and his close observation of men, institutions, and manners. At the same time, the 
 topics which come within his range are of the highest importance, and such as are now attracting 
 the widest attention. There is not a dull statement nor an uninstructive observation in the 
 book, and in it Mr. Hamerton has made a valuable addition to the volumes on kindred 
 subjects with which he has already delighted readers." Exchange. 
 
 PARIS. In Old and Present Times. Profusely illustrated with 
 
 woodcut engravings and 12 superb full-page etchings. 4to. $6.50, Library 
 Edition with all the woodcuts. 8vo. $3.00. 
 
 " It is neither a history of, nor a guide-book to, the gay and giddy French capital, although 
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 brimful of information about the famous buildings, parks, squares, and places of Paris, which 
 those who have seen them, as well as those who have not, will be glad to have described by 
 pen and pencil in so attractive and convenient a manner. . . . He invites his readers to 
 accompany him in a lazy boat-ride around the city ; and during the progress of this journey, 
 he points out the different historic buildings to be seen from the water, tells the story con- 
 nected with them, explains their architectural details, and secures the excellent engravings 
 which beautify his book. . . . He traces with historic accuracy the erection, decoration, decay, 
 and restoration of those magnificent temples. The parks and gardens and the streets are 
 treated in separate chapters, particular attention being paid to landscape effects, drainage, 
 paving, etc. The book is written in a graceful and spirited style ; it is handsomely bound 
 and printed, copiously and artistically illustrated, and cannot fail to be a useful and instructive, 
 as well as ornamental, addition to the library." Saturday Evening Gazette. 
 
 "Paris is so rich in historical association, so full of important buildings, so carefully 
 planned and arranged, so brilliantly decorated, and so perfectly cared for and kept up in 
 short, is so clearly the nearest approach yet made to the idea, city, that one is never weary of 
 reading about it. Mr. Hamerton knows his Paris well, her history and her aspect, without 
 being so narrow in his exclusive devotion as the pure Paris-lover gets to be ; and he is a very 
 observant and sagacious judge of architectural effects, even if a little too catholic. The book 
 is in nearly all respects just what that fortunate person needs who means to reside in Paris a 
 while, with leisure to study it ; it can hardly fail to give him generally sound notions of what 
 the famous city has that is most admirable in its external aspects." N. Y. Evening Post. 
 
MR. HAMERTOWS WORKS. 
 
 MODERN FRENCHMEN. Five Biographies : Victor Jacque 
 
 mont, Traveller and Naturalist ; Henri Perrevve, Ecclesiastic and Orator ; Frangoii 
 Rude, Sculptor ; Jean Jacques Ampere, Historian, Archaeologist, and Traveller, 
 Henri Regnault, Painter and Patriot. By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON. Uni 
 form with " The Intellectual Life," &c. Square i2mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " Philip Gilbert Hamerton has the faculty (not common to all authors) of making every 
 thing he touches interesting. Best known as a writer on art, his works upon that subject havi 
 come to be recognized as standards. His novels and essays are always full of meat, and hi 
 works generally are characterized by a fairness and impartiality which give them peculi?. 
 value. His latest work, 'Modern Frenchmen,' is made up of five biographies." Boston 
 Transcript. 
 
 HUMAN INTERCOURSE. Square i2mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " He has the art of presenting to our minds a hundred paths into which every subject opens 
 ... In writing about ' Human Intercourse,' Mr. Hamerton has the always significant facts c 
 human nature to deal with, those eternally interesting creatures, men and women. . 
 Occasionally, too, there are sentences that suggest by their felicity the rhythm of poetry. Bette 
 than all, in this, as in every one of Mr. Hamerton's works, we feel that we are dealing wit] 
 a man who, besides his grace, his wit, or his keen observation, is always on the side of simpl 
 truth and purity of living, and possesses a high-minded faith in the power of the Best, and ; 
 determination to aid in its final victory." Philadelphia Press. 
 
 LANDSCAPE. Square i2mo. Price $2.00. 
 
 " Mr. Hamerton in sending to his publishers, Messrs. Roberts Brothers, a complete set c 
 proofs for the library edition, says; ' I have done all in my power to make "Landscape" ; 
 readable book. It is not mere letter-press to illustrations, or anything of the kind, but a bcol 
 which, I hope, anybody who takes any interest in landscape would be glad to possess.' . . 
 The subject is treated from all sides which have any contact with art or sentiment, from thi 
 side of our illusions ; our love for nature ; the power of nature over us ; nature as subjective 
 verbal description, ' word-painting ; ' nature as reflected by Homer, as the type of Greel 
 ' 1 or Latin, Ariosto or Medieval ; then as studied by Wordswortl 
 
 _ Jr English and French ; from its relation to the various graphic arts 
 
 its characteristics in Great Britain and in France, and from the geography ol beauty and arl 
 
 oks, rivulets, and rivers in l" 
 
 nature-impression ; by Virgil or Latin, Ariosto or 
 and Lamartine, as types of English and French ; 
 
 its characteristics in Great Britain and in France, . .. 
 
 Mountains are weighed in the art balances ; lakes, brooks, rivulets, and rivers in their degree 
 of magnitude. Then man's work on rivers and their use in art are considered ; then trees 
 under their various aspects ; then the effect of agriculture on landscape, of figures and animals 
 and of architecture. ' The two immensities,' sea and sky. conclude." The Nation. 
 
 Mr. Hamerton's Works (not including " Etchers and Etching,' 
 "Imagination in Landscape Painting," "Paris," and "A Summei 
 Voyage on the Saone ") may be had in uniform binding. 14 vols 
 Square I2mo. Cloth, price $28.00; half calf, price $56.00. A 
 cheaper edition 14 vols., i6mo, cloth, Oxford style, $17.50; cloth, 
 imitation half calf, $21.00. 
 For sale by all booksellers. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of adver* 
 
 tised price, by 
 
 ROBERTS BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 Boston^ 
 
14 DAY USE 
 
 TO DESK FROM WHICH BORR<"<